In pre-pandemic days, I said those words, or heard them, most often when traveling. Now, I say and hear them (or read them) every day, while social distancing at home with my wife and son. Like Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five, I am “unstuck in time.” Surely, many days have passed, but no, it’s been only one or two. A week seems a month, a month a season. Last week? No. Yesterday.
I know I’m not alone. “March was the shittiest year ever,” goes the meme.
Whereas once we lamented “Where does the time go?” meaning it’s racing too fast, now we move through denser space, longer minutes filled with yesterdays for which we pine, and tomorrows we either fear, or fixate on with rapacious longing. Or both. Routines — job, school, shopping, socializing — are disrupted, crippled, or gone. In this strange, new “now,” we fill space with worry and/or desperate hope, visiting a conjured future and/or hazy yesterdays, all out of our control. Unstuck in time. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” Too true, Bill.
Jane Mayer’s latest — on Republican and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — is exhaustive, both in its scope and mendacity of the career politician, whose legacy is guaranteed to inextricably intertwined with that of President Donald Trump. Through nearly 12,000 words, the main takeaway is that McConnell might just be the most duplicitous politician in modern American politics.
At The Atlantic, long-time Republican Peter Wehner writes what many of us hope is true: That the coronavirus crisis has shown how incapable a leader Trump is, and this crisis will end Trump’s presidency. Granted, a lot of us knew how incapable Trump was before the pandemic. He is a despicable, morally bereft “human being.” And even if Wehner’s prediction turns out to be correct, a national emergency is too great a cataclysm to make it feel worth celebrating right now. Right now, a lot of us are locked inside our homes, self-quarantining, entertaining our kids while protecting ourselves and others. An end to Trump’s presidency is an optimistic outcome; let’s just hope enough of us survive, and our economy endures, to enjoy it. Nothing seems cheery now, here indoors among the stockpiled cereal, canned beans, and coffee, during this isolated, anxious time when so many of us are wondering if our jobs will continue, reading too many coronavirus articles and tweets and updates, and wondering which of our elderly family members the virus will kill. Right now, we can definitely use something to feel hopeful about. The full pantries no longer provide much sense of relief. With the spreading pandemic creeping closer to each of us, it no longer seems like we have much time to wait for Trump’s reign to end. And yet, locked inside our homes, it also seems that time is all we have, one hour ticking slowly by after another. But back to Wehner.
Most of us know Trump’s moral and presidential failings, his lying, cheating, racism, misogyny, and unfortunate ability to get away with behavior that would have ruined other presidents, let alone small-town mayors. Wehner makes a strong case, though: How Trump ignored early warnings about COVID-19. How Trump circulated misinformation, blocked testing efforts, disbanded the NSC pandemic unit, kept shaking people’s hands despite warnings, and how he is clearly incapable of comforting or protecting the public in anyway. Now that we’re in crisis, Wehner believes that Trump can no longer hide his errors and presidential limitations, and it will cost him the election. “Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced,” writes Wehner. “But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.”
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
We will see. But I am grateful for Wehner’s gift of hope. What I want more than anything, is for my family, my friends, my neighbors, and people around the world, including you reading this, to survive, so that we can emerge from this and not only thrive, but can, as Dan Rather recently put it, “follow a path of renewal and improvement of how we structure our society, its economy, its health, its social obligations, and its politics.”
You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.
With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.
“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”
I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem. Read more…
It’s hard to be hopeful right now, but one Republican believes that the coronavirus crisis has already revealed Trump as a person incapable of leadership, and that the American people will demand a person who is.
Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | March 2020 | 15 minutes (3,519 words)
Lidia Yuknavitch’s disquieting new collection of short stories, Verge, is often bleak, yet also exquisitely hopeful. Her characters, largely women, are on the edge of death, humiliation, relocation, mercy, self-harm — as well as a new kinship with themselves.
In “The Pull,” two sisters flee their war-torn country. When their raft falters far from a safe shore, the sisters know their strong swimmer bodies are the only way to save both themselves and the “family of strangers” onboard with them. The young girl in “The Organ Runner” is transporting black-market human organs when she’s confronted with saving the life of a “donor,” who is a former bully. The woman in search of “the most perfect wound” in “A Woman Signifying” carefully, gloriously, burns her face on the radiator. These stories are taut and precise; at times like fairy tales in their measured yet majestic scope. They are hard punches and sweetheart hugs, somehow as one.
Yuknavitch often wiggles into those dark spaces so many of us prefer to avoid. Take her memoir The Chronology of Water, which opens with the stillbirth of her daughter and carries us, with unflinching intimacy, through physical and sexual abuse as well as drug and alcohol addiction. The Small Backs of Children delves into the brutal aftermath of war. And The Book of Joan depicts a decimated Earth with a pod of now-sexless humans living in a hodgepodge space station and carving stories into their own skin.
And yet there is beauty. Dazzling beauty. This Yuknavitch never lets us forget.
Her self-generated motto is “make art in the face of fuck” — meaning the harder the world becomes, the more we need to create art of any sort. And the upside of a lot of fuck these days is that we’re graced with more of Yuknavitch’s.
We spoke over Skype about different ways of communicating, the end of the hero, and how women can harness their anger. Read more…
For Riverside native and author Susan Straight, citrus and camaraderie were once the ties that bound people in the part of southern California called the Inland Empire. This area includes the many cities east of greater Los Angeles, and west of Palm Springs, in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. New arrivals used to plant lemons, tangerines, and oranges in their yards, as well as figs, persimmons, avocados, and loquats, and they shared their bounty with friends and neighbors. For California’s public broadcasting service KCET, Straight writes an evocative essay that mixes regional history with personal history, and celebrates the way these imported fruits have shaped the social fabric and local economy. She has an 80 year old apricot tree growing on her property. Even though this arid region isn’t known for its timber, Straight calls its planted gardens “non-native woods” and sees them as paradise, because they helped provide many people what was truly a piece of the good life. “The groves are nearly gone now,” Straight writes, “housing tracts named for what they’ve erased.” But locals don’t give up these traditions.
Eliza Tibbets started the first two seedling navel orange trees. A statue of her was recently unveiled in downtown Riverside, and it seems a fitting time to remind ourselves of the woman who transformed California’s landscape, not just with daring but with generosity. (I still drive past the Parent Navel Orange Trees, at the corner of Arlington and Magnolia Avenues, every week.)
She was married three times, an abolitionist (her third husband, Mr. Tibbets, campaigned as a “Radical Republican” who tried integration in Virginia), a suffragist who tried to vote in 1871, a spiritualist who led séances in Riverside when she got here. But in 1873, she sent to Washington’s new Bureau of Agriculture for the first two seedling trees of a new variety of seedless oranges from Bahia, Brazil, and planted them in her yard in Riverside. She kept them alive with dishwater, shared the fruit and more cuttings, and changed the economy and the very look of Southern California. (Neither she, born in Cincinnati, or the seedlings, were natives.)
By 1886, entire towns like Rialto, Bloomington, Corona and Redlands were laid out around groves of Washington navel orange trees. Packing houses for Sunkist Growers and other cooperatives were built, the Santa Fe Railroad took boxcars full of fruit all over the nation, and oranges were shipped around the world. By 1895, Riverside had the highest per capita income in America, thanks to the citrus industry.
The faces of Southern California changed with citrus, too. Chinese laborers, Italians and Mexicans and Japanese and African-American southerners, Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma and Texas and Colorado — all picked and packed and trucked oranges. I grew up with their kids.
In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones.
Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes. Crying makes us human. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother.
***
Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself.
Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. I could see the work and sacrifice the family had made to realize their dream — opening a taco shop. I could feel their hope when I walked in the door, but I could calculate the meager profit from my order against the cost of utilities, salaries, supplies. I could see their dream failing.
I nearly lost it again at Karyn’s Kitchen, a food truck in someone’s yard along the road to my house in Maine. Karyn probably figured she’d snag summer traffic on the way to the beach, but who wants to eat in someone’s yard? I ate there once out of pity — her husband’s “famous” meatloaf, which she served with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and two slices of white bread with a pat of margarine. When I asked her to heat up the cold gravy, she microwaved it until the plastic container melted and handed it to me like that. When I drive by Karyn’s yard now, I can’t stand to look at the empty space where her dream failed.
A woman in a laundromat once yelled at her small son, “No one wants to hear you,” and I got a lump in my throat. Read more…
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 | 8 minutes (1,978 words)
“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough …” On January 3rd, Ukrainian immigrant Ilya Kaminsky quote-tweeted his poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” after it went viral the day Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was assassinated on the order of President Donald Trump. The poem appeared in his long-awaited 2019 poetry collection,Deaf Republic, about a town that responds to the killing of a deaf child by itself going deaf, a parable of the present-day United States, a country that responds to its own demise (and the rest of the world’s) by blocking its ears. His tweet went up in the midst of increasing tensions between the U.S. and Iran and ahead of the death of more than 50 people in a stampede during Suleimani’s funeral procession. It went up months into bushfires ravaging New South Wales that have destroyed millions of hectares and killed roughly half a billion animals. It went up in the wake of a slew of antisemitic attacks across the country. Last Sunday, while thousands in New York marched in solidarity with the Jewish community, the Hollywood awards season kicked off in Los Angeles with the Golden Globes, and the media started gleefully tweeting about couture as though the destruction of the world had politely paused for the occasion. The timing made me think of a friend who recently asked: What if all the people who went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — tens of millions of Americans — protested instead?
“Now’s NOT the time to live happily,” read Kaminsky’s tweet after he extended his thanks for his poetry’s dissemination. He did not squander the moment the way so many of us often do, advising instead that we “write quality journalism & spicy op-eds & protest poems, get out in the street if you’re able. We won’t live happily during another war.”
When Donald Trump was running for President in 2016, he had a problem: many conservatives weren’t convinced that he would be conservative enough. He had changed party affiliations five times, only committing himself –– albeit, loosely –– as a Republican in 2012. He had even supported gay marriage.
“Evangelicals and social conservatives didn’t trust him,” Ruth Marcus, Washington Post editor and columnist told me.
Marcus, whose book Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover details the intricate process whereby Republicans cemented a conservative Supreme Court, points to Trump’s “innovation” –– a public list, unprecedented, of Supreme Court justices he would choose from –– as the key to Trump’s victory.
The point was to “tell social conservatives that notwithstanding their taste for a thrice-married, once-Democratic New Yorker, they could trust him to fill the Supreme Court with reliable conservatives,” Marcus says.
In Supreme Ambition, Marcus, who writes an op-ed column for the Post and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2007 for Commentary, offers a thorough look at how Kavanaugh made it onto the list –– he wasn’t originally there –– through a strong support network, and the messy hearings that ensued after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with allegations of sexual assault. Marcus is particularly critical of Congress’s handling of the situation –– the refusal to pursue leads, the botched FBI investigation, and the political concerns that infected the nomination process. Read more…
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