Last night we moseyed down to the Detroit Public Library to see a book-tour event with Barbara McQuade, a former U.S attorney here and frequent MSNOW talking head. It was one of those onstage interviews by a local learned personality (Stephen Henderson, former op-ed editor at the Freep, winner of the Big P), with an audience of maybe 50-60, mostly older people like us.
And it was fine, if almost insanely depressing. She went through a gloss — just a gloss! — of Trump sins, which took most of an hour and covered maybe a third of his crimes. The premise of her book, “The Fix,” is that the Trump administration represents the triumph of organized crime-style governance. I’ve been to many of these types of events, and the last question is always about solutions.
The bigger the problem, the more depressing the solution. When I saw Sam Quinones flog “Dreamland,” his outstanding book about the opiate crisis in Ohio, the Glimmer of Hope was that Portsmouth, the city at the center of the narrative, decimated by the job losses that allowed the problem to grow in the first place, now has a cooperatively owned shoelace factory.
And last night was no different. The solutions are: Community engagement, codification of key reforms, term limits for the Supreme Court, an end to gerrymandering and hey, maybe some of you folks should run for a school board. It was like recommending we defeat Godzilla by releasing mosquitos nearby, so that maybe one might bite him in a vulnerable spot and give him malaria. Maybe.
I was growing more distressed by the minute, so during the Q&A I popped up to ask when we might see a cataclysmic act of political violence, because that’s where all of this seems to be heading. Not the amateurs who talk shit on Signal about doing a drone attack on the UFC fight, or a guy who tries to charge the correspondents’ dinner, but a real attack by people who know what they’re doing. Iranians, maybe. Palestinians. Or Russians, who knows.
She didn’t really have a clear answer, but it was an unclear question. However, I don’t see the light at the end of this tunnel. The growing wealth disparity, and the utter unwillingness to do anything about it, doesn’t portend anything good. McQuade pointed out more than once that the last Gilded Age was followed by the progressive era, but does anyone see that happening here? At least in our lifetimes? You can call for all the “visionary leaders” you want, but until one steps forward, I see more carnage, more outrages, more UFC fights on the lawn.
When what we need is to invest — heavily — in the nation’s human capital and infrastructure. Jobs, good ones. Schools, good ones. Roads, bridges, sewers, all of it.
I’m reading a book on a friend’s recommendation — “Careless People,” about the oughts and teen years at Facebook. The author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, seems almost impossibly naive, and has an irritating way of putting herself in the center of every narrative, although that’s the nature of memoir, I guess. But the biggest — and again, most depressing — takeaway is the utter lack of any redeeming philosophy in Silicon Valley.
Their philosophy, if one exists, is Make Me Richer. Everything seems to underpin that. When the wind blows one way, say toward preserving fair elections, the money they spew into the world goes there. (Zuckerberg contributed to keeping election machinery running smoothly in 2020.) When the wind changes, hey no problem, we’ll contribute to the Trump inauguration and party with the UFC guys. Yes, our data centers are evil, resource-sucking facilities that virtually no one wants in their back yard, but? They make us richer, so they’re good. You say our content is linked to sectarian and political violence? We’re free speech absolutists, because content moderation is hard, and besides, letting anything go online makes us richer. Whee.
This is very ranty, I know, and I apologize. Lately it seems my head is full of bees. Probably I need a vacation, a long one. In the meantime, we have Wednesday. Let’s take it on.
Cheez Whiz said on June 17, 2026 at 10:37 am
Thinking about our problems these days is easily depressing. The scope of them easily and quickly spiral out of comprehension, let alone control. Capitalism, Nationalism, Racism, Greed, Anger, Hate, all running rampant and celebrated. Thing is, this has always been true. Our nature has always been to keep beating them back. We as a society just slacked off on it for several decades, thinking the war was over. We also let the Republican party metasticize into a death cult, which in retrospect was a mistake. Gonna have to do something about that. Like cleaning a house, gotta start somewhere, so pick a room.
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Deborah said on June 17, 2026 at 11:33 am
I read Careless People in the fall and found it disturbing, my husband read it too and was horrified, he never got into Facebook, I did briefly but quit after I realized what a mess Zuckerberg and his ilk are. I tried Threads briefly too, wasn’t impressed, but I’m still hooked on Instagram, I love the art reels.
A woman architect friend came over yesterday afternoon and we decided to try to come up with a creative way to resist. By creative I mean we’re trying to come up with an art project that we can use both for our own distraction and to get the message out in some way.
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David C said on June 17, 2026 at 12:36 pm
Maybe I’m crazy, but things are feeling more hopeful, to me. The burger munching surrender monkey is going down the tubes. He’s giving Iran $300 billion in war reparations. Losers pay reparations. He’s made an even bigger goddamned fool of himself at G7. I think that’s going to tumble for at least enough for MAGAs make enough stay home make the election bloodbath even worse.
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Deborah said on June 17, 2026 at 1:08 pm
I’ve seen some clips of Trump at the G7 and he looks terrible. Why does he sit all hunched over like that, looks like he’s perched on a toilet. Does he think it makes him look manly? He’s so embarrassing.
Yesterday was exhausting, we had two different sets of company, one in the afternoon and the other at night. Also, yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far in Santa Fe and today will top that at 90º. This is not good, it’s just a matter of time before they have to ban any yard watering, all of our hard work will be for naught even though what we’ve been planting is drought resistant. With low, low humidity and high winds day after day it’s ominous. Of course I’d rather not have high humidity.
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Jeff Gill said on June 17, 2026 at 2:52 pm
For the usual reasons, I keep looking at 1926, the death of Madge Oberholtzer the year before and the trial at year’s end of D.C. Stephenson. As I was just telling someone this morning at the end of a history program I was doing for America 250 (it’s still active on a state level, even if the national effort was consumed whole by Trump’s Freedom 250 org), who asked me if I was doing more programs about the Ku Klux Klan control of our county and the state in the 1920s, “no one wants more about that subject.” Not for spoken programs, not for writing projects; even my more progressive oriented outlets are interested.
But my point, which I told my friend — who has some good connections with LWV & other activist groups hereabouts, hoping she can get me a venue or two — is that if a third to half of all adult males in this county, or in much of Indiana for that matter, were dues paying Klan members in 1924, the collapse through 1925 which saw most of the state and chapter structures implode during 1926 meant there was no Klan meeting to go to, or Klan rally held at the fairgrounds or down Main Street, but had they changed their minds? Did they come to their senses when they read just how horrible and depraved their leader was, and what he did with their trust and their money? Sure, most of them disavowed him in one form or another, but the hate for Catholics and central Europeans and Jews and yes, black people however defined, that never got disavowed or repented of. It stayed around. It still does.
So I read about the political fallout in Indiana & Ohio of a century ago, trying to discern both how this could happen to MAGA, and also how the collapse of the movement can be encouraged in such a way as to change minds, which is the thing we didn’t get done in 1926. And is unlikely to occur in 2026, even with all the community engagement I can muster (and that’s quite a bit, but I’m not expecting much from it, just more mosquitos, I suppose).
https://www.famous-trials.com/stephenson/86-dyingdeclaration
Edit: and yes, the Klan still had some heft in late 1926 as it was dwindling . . . https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b39318/
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Julie Robinson said on June 17, 2026 at 2:52 pm
We’ve got that humidity waiting for you here, Deborah. It’s that time of year when you only go out as needed and I can swim in the morning because the pool is already warmed up. But I looked out and saw a zebra longwing swallowtail on the zinnias, and when I went out for a photo saw three monarchs and a white sulfur, and my heart almost burst with joy.
Last week I read Paper Girl by the same author as Dopesick, Beth Macy. She revisits the area where she grew up in rural Ohio, after noticing how much her family members’ politics have changed. She got out through education and scholarships, and she realizes that kids like her no longer have the same chances because what the scholarships cover is now a small fraction of tuition. It’s a sobering read, and she doesn’t offer much hope for her hometown. Looking her up, I see she’s running for Congress as a Democrat.
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Sherri said on June 17, 2026 at 4:54 pm
Timothy Egan wrote a good book about Madge Oberholtzer and DC Stephenson and the Klan in the Midwest: A Fever in the Heartland.
I also recommend Egan’s book about the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time.
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Icarus said on June 17, 2026 at 5:44 pm
We are headed to Grosse Pointe this weekend, and then hitting Chicago on the way back. I look forward to the visit (sort of) but dread the driving and the packing. When do those self-driving cars get here?
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