No need for an alarm clock. Lola wakes me up at 4:30 sharp, even after the clocks have changed. We take our first morning walk. The rains have arrived in Oregon, after going AWOL for four months. There’s been a bear in the canyon. It’s come into our yard twice for apples. She seems to prefer the Granny Smiths to the Macintoshes. So, we walk cautiously, not wanting to intrude on her fall feasting.
We’re two days after the Midterm elections and I spent most of our walk trying to get a grip on what just happened. Despite the victories of Tuesday night, it didn’t feel like a new day had dawned on the Republic. I’m not even sure if this still is a Republic or ever qualified as one.
The elections were certainly a rebuke of the most corrupt and preposterous world leader since the bunga-bunga days of Silvio Berlusconi. Believe me, I have no illusions about the Democrats, but we must take our victories where we can, hold the ground and move on. As my old mentor Dave Brower always warned, “When they win, it’s forever; when we win, it’s a stay of execution, requiring eternal vigilance to maintain.” But it’s not every day–or even every decade in this country, which, need I remind you, is not France–some of the worst people in the world take it on the chin and some of them, like AIPAC and Elon Musk, directly in the balls. And that’s something to celebrate for a few hours, at least. Victories, and the knowledge that we can take on and defeat entrenched power, can build movements. The challenge is to sustain and grow them and that work begins, like, right now…
After all, Trump is still standing. Stephen Miller is still wielding the malicious levers of power. Hegseth is still shooting people and snuff films. The aircraft carriers remain in the Persian Gulf, poised to strike Iran again. The arms keep flowing to Israel. And Trump’s principal adversaries in DC, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, haven’t shown they’ve got the spine, stamina or aptitude to restrain them.
Lola and finished our two-mile circuit without any ursine interruptions, though we were scolded by the Great Horned Owl, who raises the alarm at every pre-dawn intrusion in the canyon.
I feed Lola. Check the phone for texts and voicemails. Put the kettle on. Find the MacBook and crank it up and listen to it whine as the avalanche of emails pours down. I scrub the dishes from the night before. Toss the empty wine bottles into the recycling bin. Pull two filets of Chinook salmon (dip-netted out of the Columbia River by tribal fishermen from Celilo Village) from the freezer to thaw.
I search for the remote under a pile of papers and magazines and flip on CNN to check the headlines, before immediately clicking it off, recalling my vow, made at least once a week, to never watch cable news again. I’ve taken similar vows about reading the New York Times, the Guardian, Haaretz and the Washington Post. But you can’t avoid them. They seek you out, relentlessly track you down, enter your mind, like it or not, like some cyber-Nosferatu, sucking your soul out before you’ve had the chance to fuel yourself with the day’s first bitter cup of Arabica. I think of Eliot’s line about J. Alfred measuring his days with “coffee spoons.” Mine, I fear, will be measured in email downloads. Ain’t it funny how time slips away during the Trump wormhole and then slips back again, pretty much the same, only darker.
