I started subscribing to Charles P. Pierce at Esquire when that became an option because in my opinion he is doing some of the best political commentary around. He has a gift for putting things in a larger context, anchored by a sense of morality that can be righteously outraged.
One of the bonuses of that subscription is getting a weekly email in which he offers up an extended essay. The one for this week is incredibly powerful. Here’s how it starts:
THIS ISN'T THE 2020 I ANTICIPATED IN DECEMBER. As one decade prepared to lap over into another, I planned to split time between Washington, where the president was being impeached, and Iowa, where the Democratic candidates seeking to pry his hands off the national executive would face their first real contest. I would have some happy holidays—I was a new grandfather—and get right into another campaign, with the third impeachment of a U. S. president as a kind of constitutional lagniappe.
Then I got hit by a car.
I cracked two lumbar vertebrae and got twenty staples in my head and spent Christmas and New Year’s flat on my back. I watched the deliberations of the House Judiciary Committee from my hospital bed, doped to the gills and wondering whether Congressman Louie Gohmert was a hallucinatory event….
Pierce recovered, but it took some time and he cites some moments that in retrospect are telling when dots are connected. I’m going to violate fair use guidelines because the piece is so compelling. Here are some snippets.
What I did not know was that, on January 23, 2020, as I listened to the House managers present the impeachment case in the Senate chamber, this country’s very first diagnosis of a new virus had been made in Washington state. …
...The intelligence community had been warning the president about a potential pandemic for almost a month. On the morning of January 22, as his trial in the Senate opened, the president said, “We have it totally under control . . . . It’s going to be just fine.”
...A week later, on January 29, I was in the press gallery as senators questioned the managers on both sides…..
...The next day, the Senate was debating whether to subpoena witnesses. The president was dismissing the warnings of an impending pandemic from his secretary of health and human services as alarmist….
...On February 5, the president was acquitted, one day after he gave the State of the Union address….
...What I did not know was that there had been a briefing with White House officials on the coronavirus, and that the administration had declined to ask for any emergency funding whatsoever….
...On February 11, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary….
….Meanwhile, the National Security Council prepared a memo on February 14 discussing the logistics for a possible program of quarantine and isolation measures. The meeting to brief the president was later canceled….
Pierce has taken the sense of dislocation and separation, and put it into words. This section is a key summation:
Recently, in trying to get a grip on what the context of the upcoming national election might be, I came upon a psychological phenomenon called “derealization,” a dissociative disorder the symptoms of which include:
• Distorted perception of time, space, and size of things around you.
• Feeling of unreality from the world around you, as if in a dream or trance.
• Feeling as if everything is foggy, fuzzy, or warped.
• Sense of being disconnected from those around you as if you’re trapped in a bubble.
• Thoughts of going crazy or being very ill.
And it struck me that not only did that describe my own general feeling during this time of plague and quarantine, but also it fairly describes the political condition within which the president has succeeded politically, because it also fairly describes the world that he has created around himself his entire life. He creates derealized situations, milks them for every dime, mines them for every possible advantage, and then moves along to his next one, leaving his victims stuck in the fog of disbelief, both of what they have experienced and of how the president keeps getting away with it.
emphasis added
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing. (Pierce provides a link for people who want to see it in a browser.) I also strongly recommend signing up for more Pierce.
Addendum: Pierce has offered up some powerful words. Let me toss in a few of my own. (No subscription required.)
We are in a very strange place right now. One of the things I see in comments at places like New York Times editorials is the increasing number of people who comment that “This is not the America I grew up in” and words to similar effect.
For a long time there has been this idea that calling things political means “That’s just an opinion. It has no connection to the real world.” (My world. My experience. My beliefs.) “My opinion is just as good as yours, and sensible/polite people don’t pay any attention to politics or insist on talking about them.”
It’s like a magic spell. Calling something political means you can ignore it if you don’t like it or agree with it — and we’re sure seeing that with the people out there determined to ignore the pandemic away by calling the threat purely political. They’re turning it into a culture war being fought on beliefs instead of a public health issue that should be fought on science.
There’s a saying that “All politics is personal.” The essence of that is people care about the things that matter to them personally, and they only care to the degree that they think it affects them. If you want to reach them, you have to connect on a personal level.
Well, there are few things more personal than catching a disease that can kill you, or losing friends and loved ones to it. There are few things more personal than finding yourself living in fear of going out, of going to work, of being around other people and not knowing if it could prove fatal. The other side is going personal by making it all about government tyranny telling people what to do, infringing on their rights, and crashing the economy.
And this is where politics DO connect to the real world. They always do. The political beliefs people practice have real consequences, and we are getting a hard lesson in that now. (Some people are about to get a much harder lesson; Covid-19 is moving into Trump country just as they are abandoning the practices that resist it.) Conflating real issues as unimportant as the politics around them is a mistake, as is treating different political opinions as not having consequences in the real world.
If we are suffering from derealization, it’s because we find ourselves in a mass outbreak that has been going on for decades at the behest of the right wing and the interests behind it. The unreality has just gotten real. The death toll for this culture war has already reached 80,000+. Some people suffer from derealization; others embrace it.
Either way, it can prove just as fatal as any virus if taken to extremes.
Saturday, May 16, 2020 · 4:00:33 PM +00:00 · xaxnar
Update: Connecting another dot. If we feel like we are suffering derealization, it’s because we as a nation are experiencing gaslighting by Trump, the GOP, their media, and the Dark Money behind them on a massive scale. They don’t even bother to hide it any more.