Late but welcome, fall has arrived. I always note that there’s a week’s load of laundry a couple times a year that contains both shorts and at least one flannel shirt, and I guess it’s this week. It was 70 and muggy when I got up Tuesday morning, currently struggling to reach 50. Dinner last night was adjusted from chicken on the grill to BLTs. Can’t deny it: It feels great.
Check with me in another month, when the whining begins.
So. The week began at a gallop and has slowed to a forward canter. Coming back from my creative-writing class at Wayne State, on surface streets to avoid the freeway parking lot, I listened to “All Things Considered,” and wondered after a spell if it might be wiser for me to just quit paying attention to the news altogether. In an interview with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, he said (paraphrasing), “President Trump doesn’t read, and doesn’t know what ‘insurrection’ means.” The reporter, with her Bias Alert going WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP, said, “I think the president would disagree with you on that.” Gee, thanks, I feel so much better now. We wouldn’t want to let an American governor get away with speaking the truth, would we?
But I can’t stop, because that’s how I’m made. Before that, I heard the last few moments of an interview with Beth Macy, who has a book out this week. She was on “Fresh Air,” and had an op-ed in the NYT Sunday, and has this piece in the Atlantic today. Title: “What Happened to Ohio?” and yeah, it’s a gift link. It’s about Urbana, where Alan started his newspaper career and from which Macy hails. Turns out it’s not the place she grew up:
I was most shocked by what I gleaned from people I’d known the longest. My childhood friend Joy, a Black lay minister who had conducted my Mom’s celebration of life, revealed that she didn’t believe George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin. My niece’s husband, a type 1 diabetic, turned down not one but two life-saving transplants because the donors had taken COVID vaccines. When I spoke with my sister Cookie about my oldest son, Max, who was about to marry his husband, she used the Old Testament scripture from Leviticus to condemn homosexuality.
A friend asked recently what it felt like to spend time in a place I had once loved but no longer connected with, and I had to admit that my predominant emotion was pain. Often, I’d leave two or three days before my rental was up, eager to return home to my husband, my dog, and my largely privileged circle of friends who don’t espouse beliefs that repulse me.
Sigh. When does this shit end? Do we ever get out of it? I’m skeptical.
Deborah said on October 8, 2025 at 9:36 am
Painful but there will always be people like that, there always have been. Because everyone has a platform now we hear about a lot more of it. I have been shocked by how many people there are like that in our country for sure and we are finding out, the whole world.
I have been reading about who Carl Schmitt is and what he did and wrote about and boy howdy, scary, scary stuff. Really frightning that people like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and their ilk, study him and promote his ideas. Creepy.
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Jeff Gill said on October 8, 2025 at 10:12 am
I admit to oscillation between the definite reality that conspiracy stuff has always been well rooted in the body politic (as a minister, I long have suspected I get told more stuff than many hear casually, and the bizarre & implausible plots were stuffed in my hand back in the 80’s on mimeographed documents received in the mail, before the same stories were forwarded to me with a truly staggering CC list of addresses), and the equally true statement that the Ohio I moved to in 1989 is not the Ohio I live in now. Lots of once 50/50 settings in non-political spaces, groups & associations like churches & service clubs, are now 70/30 or even 80/20 MAGA. That’s a shift.
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alex said on October 8, 2025 at 11:11 am
I should just give in to the temptation and subscribe to the Atlantic, but I’m already buried in an avalanche of things, including the New Yorker, multiple newspapers and multiple Substacks that I don’t have enough time for, and I wish I could just take a break from all of it.
That was one powerful story and it mirrors a lot of what I see here in Indiana. My partner is one of the few in his family with a college education and the only one who isn’t MAGA. Needless to say, we haven’t been spending much time with any of them anymore.
I had friends in college who got through with Pell grants and work-study jobs and they had been the best and brightest in their high schools despite growing up with modest means. It’s definitely a different world now, and all the worse for it. In my partner’s family I’ve seen promising kids start college but then give up and drop out.
Enough of the major bummage. Here’s something light and amusing and should be near and dear to the heart of our proprietress:
https://wapo.st/4gXrrqa
Gift link.
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Suzanne said on October 8, 2025 at 11:19 am
I used to consider myself a conservative but when the Tea Party types took over, when they excused Gingrich’s non-family values life style and blatent lies (and Limbaugh’s), clearly embraced reports of the salacious details of Bill Clinton’s blowjob, and started going down the conspiracy rabbit hole, I realized I didn’t belong anymore. What the Washington political class missed is that people in these forgotten rust belt towns embraced the things I listed. They really truly believe that there is a Dem pedophile ring, that babies are being stolen and sacrificed, and all that other insane garbage. Through Trump, the GOP extremists saw an opening to power and latched on while the Dems and the more moderate Republicans laughed it off thinking that no sane person would really believe that conspiracy junk. But red state voters absolutely do believe it and will vote to eradicate the perceived evil even if it means eradicating themselves. They are doing God’s will so if it doesn’t work out here, there is a spot in heaven for them. They win either way.
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FDChief said on October 8, 2025 at 11:26 am
My suspicion is that We the People have always been “like this”; credulous, gullible, vicious, and more than a bit craven.
We believe this nasty ignorant trash because we want to, it satisfies our need to be smug about our shitty little lives – at least we’re not THOSE people!
The big difference is that MAGA encourages us to proudly fly our “shitty person” freak flag. Paleo-lefty blogger Driftglass calls it “the tribe that rubs shit in their hair”; it’s tying yourself to your group because you stand together for things that revolt and disgust the Others, those nasty liberals and egalitarians and feminists who for so long told them their prejudice and ignorance and credulity and cravenness were Bad and Wrong.
Well! Those days are gone; Trump is king and our MAGA faith – hate, violence, cruelty – is God.
And, no. There’s no going back, any more than there was going back to Weimar in 1939 Berlin other than the road that the T-34s took down Unter den Linden and the 8th Air Force took over the Reichskanzlerei
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