This beautiful and poignant painting is by the late Tom Freeman. I’ve used it several times, since I write so much about World War II, including the two Arroyo Grande sailors lost when Arizona blew up on Sunday, December 7. 1941. I loved teaching United States History, and this ship is so evocative of one of the sharpest turning points in our past.
Monday’s turning point—the Inauguration—is so sharp that it could, metaphorically at least, break our necks.
This might well be our last weekend as a free people. We might have thought this so on December 8, when vast Japanese fleets and air armadas were rumored off San Francisco, when Germany, who declared war the next day, seemed so invincible. It took us nearly four years to make ourselves free again.
I wonder if we’ve lost the will to be free—it’s hard work, true— in 2025. Now we want to be the tough guys the Japanese thought themselves to be in 1941. They wanted a free hand in China. We want Greenland and the Canal and maybe even Canada. We are ambitious, aren’t we? And both the Japanese and the Germans, two nations in the grip of racism, wanted to punish anyone whom they considered their inferiors. Now we want to be the punishers.
My fears about us, today, were heightened by brief glimpses—about all I could take–of this week’s Senate confirmation hearings. They included an alcoholic misogynist who will preside over Defense, a Wall Street player who believes in the magic of tariffs—someone needs to explain the Great Depression to this man— and in the wisdom of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, a state attorney general, a 2020 election denier, who thinks Justice has been “weaponized,” and, today featured the DHS-Secretary designate, who dragged her hunting dog into a gravel pit and shot her dead.
What I saw was appalling. All of them were evasive when they weren’t being hyperbolic. All of them lied about the policies they would enforce or choose not to enforce, just as three Supreme Court nominees lied. All of them had kissed the generous rear (wisely, from the great distance that separates D.C. from Mar-a-Lago) of the man who’d nominated them. They were beholden to him, afraid of him. He was the audience they were playing to.
Of course, they were all Republicans. But these are all Republicans, too. From “Truth Social” Wednesday, as quoted by NPR:
“As of today, the incoming Trump Administration has hired over 1,000 people for The United States Government,” Trump’s post reads. “They are outstanding in every way, and you will see the fruits of their labor over the coming years. We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and it will happen very quickly!
“In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General(?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper, or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, more commonly known as TDS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”and his Psycho daughter, Liz.
These people—not to mention scores of Democrats, are among the Enemy Within. The Democrats might find themselves in prison if Trump, the man Scots refer to as the “Cheetoh-Faced Shitgibbon”—can move fast enough before the midterms.
That’s what he wants to do, with his seventh-grade command of his emotions, his language, his nation’s history (he did not know who won World War I; a speech he gave on Gettysburg reads like seventh-grade crib notes) and of his curious middle school/Mean Girls definition of “treason,” the crime he asserts that was committed by Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Gen. Mark Milley.
The Americans who voted for the Shitgibbon, who will, of course, pay a terrible price, given his designs on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, on the prices they’ll pay, inflated by his tariffs, on the fecklessness of industrialists, enriched by the Trumpian tax cuts and freed to visit on their employees the kind of cruelty depicted by Upton Sinclair, even by Charles Dickens.
The testifiers remind me of the ghastly Edgar Allan Poe story, “Hop-Frog; Or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs.” A despotic ruler throws a costume party. His high-born guests, like the president-elect’s oligarchs and nominees, think themselves so far above the common folk that they make fun of them. They are especially merciless toward the king’s court jester.
But it’s the court jester who proposes the costume party. All agree that it’s a splendid idea.
The jester also provides the costumes—the orangutan costumes—tight-fitting and doused in alcohol. Once the party’s underway, he sets his tormenters alight.
This is easily one of Poe’s most dismal stories, and as you may have noted, he is not one of our more cheerful writers. I don’t advocate this fate for the potential Cabinet officers who are testifying this week. But if they are someday consumed by fire, the agent that starts it will be, of course, hairspray.
Their boss, disappointed, will turn on them, as he has on nearly everyone else who has served him.
Or, if Justice and the FBI and his other Cabinet officers survive Trump, there is still a chance, a slight one, given recent history, of their jail time sometime after 2028.
As for the rest of us, I’m reminded of the late cartoonist/satirist Walt Kelly, who created a swamp inherited by a variety of creatures, including Pogo the Possum. Kelly was one of the few—others were CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and The Crucible’s Arthur Miller—to finally come around and confront Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. This might be the wisest remark Pogo ever uttered.
It fits seventy years after the Army-McCarthy hearings that finally brought Joseph McCarthy down.
McCarthy’s chief counsel, of course, was Roy Cohn, one of President-elect Trump’s mentors.
The turning point came in a confrontation between United States Army counsel Joseph Welch and Sen. McCarthy. It was an indelible moment, captured live on television, then in its infancy.
I do not know if we can find another Joseph Welch. But, in just my family’s humble past, we found a sailor and a soldier who gave their lives for us, in December 1941 and January 1945, respectively. We have Irish immigrants who worked in Pennsylvania oilfields, homesteaded on the Minnesota prairie, grew oranges in Southern California. We have a woman—my paternal grandmother—who was one of the first delegates to a national political convention, in Madison Square Garden in 1924. We have a woman—my maternal grandmother—who grew up in a rough gold-mining town and learned to cook from Chinese immigrants. My paternal grandfather was so devoted to education on the Ozark Plateau that they dismissed classes in Texas County, Missouri, on the day of his funeral in 1933. My maternal grandfather was a cop in a tough oil-town, Taft, who once laid out three roughnecks, cold as tinned sardines, in an alleyway after they’d jumped him. He helped a lost little boy, terrified, find his way home. We have a railroad engineer who drove the Great Northern Empire Builder until the day he died at the controls. We have an Irish immigrant nun who devoted her life to orphans in the Albany orphanage that was once the home of Hamilton’s Schuyler sisters.
And, of course, we have my folks, in the photos just above, who taught me many things, including the deep love I have for my country, including and despite its faults. They made me, without knowing it, a history teacher.
There’s just the faintest chance that in this immense reach for power that begins Monday, Donald John Trump will soon find himself outnumbered by people of character. Nearly all of them, including my family members, are dead now. They are ghosts. Maybe Trump, if he’s lucky, will suffer a Dickensian fate, like Scrooge’s redemption.
Or maybe, finally, in the depth of his cruelty, Poe will catch up with him instead.
A Work in Progress 