Convicted felon Donald Trump

Surprise Lillies, BK, “The Bear” and Kamala

by
By Sarah Kendzior

I was twenty miles outside of Normal when I heard the news.

We were at a Burger King in central Illinois. In the corner of the Burger King was a large, inflatable bear. He was decked out in a red, white, and blue ensemble with a bow tie and a top hat. He held a faded American flag in one hand and a sign saying GOD BLESS AMERICA in the other.

A crown rested on his head. It was upside down.

That is what I was looking at when I heard that Joe Biden was leaving the presidential race.

 

The bear grinned blankly. A pile of new crowns lay on the windowsill, displacing the gold standard. The new crowns said “FIERY” to advertise the new menu, which consists of Burger King putting hot spices in everything, even Sprite. Why not? There’s no way it will be the worst or weirdest decision of the year.

2024 is a good time to get away with things. And get away from things, too.

I ordered the same meal I’ve been getting since 1984: the Original Chicken Sandwich with no mayo. This is the greatest sandwich of all time. The struggle to match the glory of this sandwich is what The Bear should have been about. Now I’m not saying to go get yourself pregnant, but I will say that eating the Burger King Original Chicken while with child was the most spectacular culinary experience of my life.

This is probably not what you wanted to read about, but bear with me; inflatable inverted crown Burger King bear with me.

It takes time to dissect a week that feels like a decade-long fever dream.

I’m glad the sandwich that I discovered when I was five tastes the same. I’m glad to be rid of a politician who had been serving as Senator for a decade by the time I was five, because his horrid political instincts stayed the same too. I long to be rid of the other candidate, a career criminal who should have been serving time since I was five, because he got worse, and the world got worse with him.

We left Burger King and hit the highway. NORMAL, a sign declared, beckoning us to the offramp to Normal, Illinois. I was tempted to visit so I could tell people what Normal feels like. I unwrapped my sandwich and thought about the election.

One down, one to go, I thought, and took a bite.

*          *          *

You may think this is not very respectful of Joe Biden. But Joe Biden has not been very respectful to the Palestinians whose slaughter he funded; or the covid victims whose plight he minimized (including, now, himself); or the Americans he betrayed when he countenanced sedition; or the Black Americans who suffered under the racist laws he passed for decades before repositioning himself behind Barack Obama and hoping everyone would forget.

I’m tired of being told to rehabilitate evil acts when politically expedient. I’d rather the bad men leave and let us enjoy what is left of our lives in the wreckage they created.

I had long reconciled myself to finding the best in a bad situation, with that situation being America. But something is changing.

There is a new energy, one that took me a minute to recognize: the Future. It had been a while since I’d seen it. The Future was in absentia and now it has returned, grinning like a ghost.

Am I really seeing it? Or is it another fake-out future, like those Halloween pop-up shops that appear in the fall and make you forget the empty room rotting the rest of the year? The classic American haunt: a tease, then abandonment.

Kamala Harris is not the future, but the energy surrounding her is. This is the raw energy of possibility, of certain doom being stripped away and discarded dreams returning.

One week before Biden dropped out, a photo of Trump emerging from an assassination attempt was deemed so “iconic” that his win was proclaimed certain. Now people have either forgotten it happened or are waiting to get their questions about the Secret Service, the shooter, and Trump’s minor injury answered.

Suddenly, Trump seems like the D-grade mobster he always was, only now everyone can see the obvious. Suddenly, Kamala Harris’s offbeat behavior feels like a balm. If you’ve got two weirdos, and one is a raving sociopath, and the other is a kooky lady who laughs a lot, the kooky lady comes off as endearing instead of “not fit for leadership”, which was the old narrative of Harris. Trump is hateful; Harris is human.

Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee. I’m reserving judgment on what that means until she has policy plans, a list of administrative hires — and, most importantly, a commitment to make right what the Biden administration did wrong.

There is no shame in humility. There is nothing wrong with distancing yourself from one of the most unpopular presidents in US history, particularly when he earned the title through mass death and mass murder.

There is no shame in apologies, but actions speak louder than words, and action is desperately needed. Harris has an opportunity to end some of Biden’s most destructive policies, including his support of Israel’s genocide of children.

If you think this is unlikely, particularly from a presidential nominee who took as much AIPAC money as Harris, you are probably right, but look at last week:

An assassin targeted Trump. Biden got covid again. The biggest cyber breakdown in history took down the world, and the world came back. The GOP convention happened, and no one cared, even with the fascist chants and the fake ear bandages, because there was too much else going on. Biden dropped out. Harris dropped in.

I don’t know what is going to happen next, and for once it feels good.

As I write this, Harris has been the presumptive nominee for 48 hours. The energy from voters in those 48 hours is more than the rest of the year combined. People are excited. They are making plans. Not wistful daydreams — plans!

One of their plans should be how to combat Project 2025, because the GOP is not going to abandon their autocratic agenda if Harris wins. Another should be how to fend off The Coup: Part Two, because the Biden administration did not punish the key perpetrators of the January 6 plot, thus making a second coup attempt both possible and likely. And because Merrick Garland let Trump run out the clock, Trump was given official immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court.

We are in for hard times. But there is a sense of a burden being lifted, of options emerging. I don’t know how long this feeling will last.

Many Americans have spent the past eight years joining political cults: a common phenomenon in flawed democracies turning into autocracies. Americans must reject cult logic if we want our nation to survive.

This includes not building a political cult around Kamala Harris. A campaign is different than a cult. It is one thing to back a candidate and cheer them on. It is another to submit to a mindset of fear, deference, and servitude; to browbeat fellow voters offering constructive criticism; and to proclaim a politician’s every puzzling move either an Act of God or evidence of a Secret Noble Plan.

Americans created cults around Trump, Mueller, Garland, Pelosi, Garland, Fauci, “Q”, and Biden, among others, to the detriment of our nation’s health and to the benefit of grifters’ wallets.

Savior syndrome is a sign of national decline. The saviors are frequently betrayers of the public — thus the need for a cult of sycophants to cover their crimes — but sometimes they are simply outlets for desperation.

Kamala Harris is not going to save America. No lone individual can with this level of corruption.

But Harris can be pressured to gut out institutional rot and pass humane policies — and yes, I realize these sound like fantasies, but don’t you know what year it is?! Don’t you know what country you’re living in? Everything about America 2024 is fantasy, usually of the nightmare variety. Why not add some good to the mix?

These ideas are not true fantasies, by the way. Americans label them fantasies because it hurts too much to hope. These “fantasies” are, in reality, demands that Americans have made for decades. They are calls for accountability, long unheeded. Americans deserve a president who will listen and care and act. We do not need another bot-brained cult to defend them if they fail.

The only American royalty that counts is the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich. Everything else is just a whopper.

*          *          *

When I got home from Illinois, there were flowers in my backyard. They sprouted while I was gone. Pale-purple and pink petals tilted toward the sun, their elegant stems incongruous in the plain green grass.

The flowers are called “surprise lilies” because they seem to come out of nowhere. They tend to bloom in July or August, but you never know if they will arrive, or when. You only know it will happen fast.

One day, you’ve got nothing, and the next day, your yard is full of flowers.

They won’t last forever, so breathe deep, and enjoy the moment while you can.

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Brenda and Dylan are dead

by

Sarah Kendzior’s Newletter

By Sarah Kendzior | July 16, 2024

A few weeks ago, I drove the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado. This is one of the most dangerous roads in the US, a trek on sheer mountain cliffs without guardrails on a road twisting like a serpent’s tail.

I was in the passenger’s seat taking photos. I didn’t look at them until the white-knuckle ride was over, and we were in Montrose, eating at a diner that greets patrons with a paean to God, country, and fried jalapenos.

My photos are beautiful and terrifying, like America. One stood out.

   

I thought I had captured a singular mountain. But I had photographed two: one through the side mirror looking behind us, and one looming ahead. They weave together in a seamless curve. The shades of blue in the sky — deep in the mirror, pale on the road — are the only giveaway of a breach in time.

The future and the past met, and I almost deleted it.

I keep staring at this photo. It’s a serendipitous shot, but that’s not why. I analyze it like there’s a secret message, a clue to how to process this juncture in my life.

Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis. I should be, because Brenda and Dylan are dead.

*          *          *

R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” is the most Gen X of songs. It is a profound anthem of existential angst, and it is also Brenda and Dylan’s breakup song.

When I woke on July 13 to the news that Shannen Doherty, the actress who played Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210, had died of cancer at age 53, I put on “Losing My Religion” and cried, the way Brenda did when she broke up with Dylan.

Dylan was played by Luke Perry, who died of a stroke at 52 in 2019. I have never gotten over it.

Everyone knows you never get over Dylan McKay.

I’m not being flip. Doherty and Perry were talented actors who died far too young and had friends and families who loved them. Their passing is sad by definition.

But that’s not why my heart aches. Something about Doherty dying hits me hard. There is a chance that I am mourning other things, too, events I cannot yet process in words. Things deemed more important than the premature deaths of stars from my youth.

But tears feel like a sacrifice, and I’ve given more than my share. I save my tears for people who deserve them, like Brenda and Dylan.

I was twelve when Beverly Hills, 90210 debuted. I was its target audience, and they hooked me along with my ten-year-old sister. We watched every week with my mom, eating popcorn together on the couch, and those are some of my happiest childhood memories. My father would vanish, proclaiming it trash TV, but he had suspiciously strong opinions on “Kelly versus Brenda” for someone who said he’d never seen an episode.

Everybody watched Beverly Hills, 90210 in the 1990s, even if they thought they were too cool. In the 1990s, you could watch 90210 “ironically”. Not real ironically, but fake “ironically”, like wearing a mask of your own face. Layers and layers of quote marks, to mark all those quotes you memorized, watching it in syndication.

It’s OK to admit you loved Beverly Hills, 90210. Teenage angst has paid off not particularly well, and now we’re old. Not bored — oh how luxurious to be bored — just old.

Read more

Last Chance USA: Biden, Trump, and the Cope That Kills

by

By Sarah Kendzior | July 10, 2024

I am in Last Chance, Colorado, looking at a faded billboard of a hand-painted American flag. Under the flag is a ragged rectangle whitewashing what once was written. You fill in the blanks yourself in a town like Last Chance.

Last Chance is a ghost town. Beyond the flag are empty homes with holes for windows. Next to the flag is an abandoned diner called Dairy King. Dairy King still has a few windowpanes intact. They reflect the golden fields stretching across eastern Colorado, their defiant beauty shimmering in the sun. There is a farmhouse deep in the fields, and it doesn’t have doors or windows either.

We are driving to where the road hits the horizon. There is not a soul to be seen. A mile back, we passed a sign saying Last Chance Community Church. The sign looked fresh, the building seemed intact, but the parking lot was empty that Sunday morning.

Maybe the church was an aspiration. Maybe it was another ghost. Maybe in 2024, those are the same things.

Last Chance was so named because in the first half of the 20th century, it was the final opportunity for travelers on Highway 36 to get provisions before entering or leaving Kansas, the border of which is close by rural Colorado standards — only ninety miles away.

The creation of the interstate hurt Last Chance. Suddenly, there were many chances, on another road, for other people. Then came the tornadoes in 1993, and the wildfires in 2012, and suddenly there were no more chances at all.

There is no sign saying when you enter or exit Last Chance. There are only signs pointing to other places in other directions.

No one tells you when you’re leaving your last chance behind. You know it later, when it’s too late, and others are pretending it’s not. They act like nothing’s changed, like you’re still in a bustling town in its prime, and not a place as vacant as the look in an American president’s eye.

*          *          *

I didn’t watch the debate. I was in rural New Mexico with only enough internet to access Twitter. Judging by the comments, I assumed there was either a sports game or a nuclear war. When I realized what was going on, I turned my phone off.

I still haven’t watched it, because watching Biden and Trump is like staring straight at the sun. Or in Biden’s case, an eclipse: a retina-destroying entity that doesn’t burn you outright but kills your ability to see. “Dark Brandon” was an eclipse all along.

What emerged on the debate stage was not Dark Brandon, but Ghost Biden, one of two candidates in Last Chance, USA. Ghost Biden may still be your preferred pick. This is because the other candidate is a pathological liar who spent his life in organized crime before committing sedition, and then getting immunity when no one — not Congress, not the January 6 committee, not the DOJ, not the very president he tried to overthrow — used the legal means granted to them to contain him in time.

For four years, Trump played his favorite, most predictable game — running out the clock — as officials let our freedom tick away. What does the constitution mean to these politicians, anyway? Just a paper, just a joke. Just “justice”, a concept at which they sneer behind the scenes while striking a pose of solemnity when they beg for your money on camera.

It was unusual for Trump to win a debate. He prefers the thrill of stealing to winning fair and square. What a novel month he had: a felony conviction, a legitimate victory.

Because Trump is widely loathed, beating him should have been easy — in the debate, and in the 2024 election. All Biden had to do was remain marginally coherent and not do something unforgivably sadistic, like abet a genocide of children, but no.

It is telling that bombing the debate instead of bombing the children of Gaza was the dealbreaker for Biden’s backers.

Biden’s cult is so loyal that they had long given up on him fulfilling his 2020 campaign pledges, including enforcing accountability for Trump’s many crimes. Instead, they spent years reciting a long list of why those promises were always impossible, and stressed the importance of voting for Biden again, so he can let down America with less surprise next time.

Read more

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains Trumpism and how the game became “rigged” against America’s middle class

by

Robert Reich takes a deep dive into why so many Americans are supporting a neofascist for president.

Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of several major problems that have worsened over four decades — problems that have undermined the American middle class, and caused a substantial number of people to become angry, anxious, and cynical

Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton