My Week of Abject Terror

Or another day in the US of A

“I’d rather have a root canal.”

That, of course, is our idiomatic shorthand for, “What we’re talking about is so painful, I’d rather have Little Shop’s Dr. Scrivello drill my teeth while menacingly singing that he’s a dentist.”

Of course, root canals are not painful anymore. Often the root is dead, and the endodontist anesthetizes you before he drills.

What’s painful is when you and your dentist decide your tooth isn’t savable and he sticks some needles in the roof of your mouth and does a bone graft to prepare for an implant.

That happened to me this week. And still, it’s one of the happier things I experienced.

My dentist, after all, is a good, kind man. Or at least a good and gentle dentist. 

And, having oral surgery is a real, tangible thing. You can see it and feel it. You don’t have to convince someone who denies that you have a hole in your mouth even though your smile has turned you into a 50-something Alfred E. Neuman.

Watching our democracy slip away is also real and tangible - to me, and millions of other people. But not to everybody.

And that’s terrifying.

The day I had my tooth extracted, I sat on the couch watching CNN and MSNBC and scrolling through various news sites on my phone. I learned that Florida Governor Ron Desantis had removed four members of the Broward County school board - who all just happened to be Democrats who believe in public education - and replaced them with Republicans, who, we can assume, agree with him that public education is a cesspool of teachers and administrators who want to teach students that we should accept all kinds of families and all kinds of people, and that history is full of bad things as well as good things, and that truth is a thing. A tangible thing. Like oral surgery.

This is the second time this month that Desantis has removed elected officials from office - something I did not realize was doable without a criminal conviction. Earlier this month, Desantis suspended Tampa State Attorney Andrew Warren for saying that IF the Florida legislature outlawed abortion, he would decline to prosecute. Let’s note: he is being punished for speech. And he is being punished for speech about a hypothetical. He’s also being punished for saying he would use his prosecutorial discretion, which is part of his job.

Somehow Desantis not only has the power to suspend Warren and the school board members, but he thinks he will suffer no harm in literally blocking democracy.

And he won’t.

This is what makes me want to take a drill to my mouth - without anesthesia.

Because what Desantis is banking on is that millions of Floridians and millions of other Americans are under their own kind of anesthesia and will not be outraged that a governor of a state is overturning the will of the voters in order to install his own “yes” people.

This is autocracy in action. And yet, the people who are my barometer - some of whom I have known most of my life, and whom I see as representative of average American views - are like, “Oh, Carrie, you’re overreacting.”

These are the same people who said at the end of 2016 that Democratic norms and institutions would keep Donald Trump in check… who insisted, when it was clear that Trump had instead perverted Democratic norms, that the 2020 election would take care of it, and that the Secret Service would escort him out of the White House if he claimed the election was stolen. Presumably, these are also the people who watched with a stupor-piercing horror on January 6 and are terrified that the Secret Service deleted texts from that day. I say presumably, because they are not talking to me about the fact that my predictions were correct.

The predictions were correct not because I am some savant, but because I consume an enormous amount of news - even going to primary sources - in order to understand events as completely as possible. And, in doing so, testing the limits of my capacity to endure existential pain.

When it comes to what is happening in this country, I don’t want to be put to sleep. I want to wake everybody up.

So, I come home from the dentist, and see that TV networks and cable channels have become one big Mar-a-Lago channel, as speculation about the files Trump took home turns to bits of concrete information that are more damning by the minute.

We learned that the National Archives, the FBI and the Justice Department have been negotiating with Trump for a year and a half, and that when they got him to agree to give them the documents he was not authorized to have, he only gave them some documents. Which is why FBI agents went in on August 8 to get the rest.

We learned that many of the documents are about intelligence, and many were so classified that only parts of them could be read by any one person. We learned that Trump was holding - and had reboxed and moved - documents that were about intercepted intelligence on foreign countries, and human intelligence of our own - i.e. spies.

And then I read this seemingly innocuous piece in the New York Times with these chilling paragraphs:

“C.I.A. espionage operations inside numerous hostile countries have been compromised in recent years when the governments of those countries have arrested, jailed and even killed the agency’s sources.

Last year, a top-secret memo sent to every C.I.A. station around the world warned about troubling numbers of informants being captured or killed, a stark reminder of how important human source networks are to the basic functions of the spy agency.”

“Last year.” What a strangely haunting phrase.

Changing subjects, I clicked on this Salon series about how Hillsdale College in Michigan seems to be the epicenter of the insinuation of Christian nationalism into non-partisan politics.

And I read this piece from NBC about how a Christian cell phone company took over four school boards in the Fort Worth suburbs, and realize that these two stories are connected. And I go back to the book “Jesus and John Wayne,” which tells me that Christian nationalism isn’t about morality, but about toxic masculinity. And that Trump and Desantis are their apotheosis.

And the Dobbs decision.

And this piece on how the legal minds that created our current Supreme Court are now one of the best-funded PACs in the country.

And people being mad because of student loan forgiveness. 

And the pictures of flooding in Texas and bridges over dry land in China, and bodies showing up in Lake Mead.

And how, if the Justice Department hadn’t investigated Breonna Taylor’s murder, we would never have known that the warrant used to break into her apartment to begin with was based on information the police knew was wrong. We wouldn’t have known because the Kentucky DA said there was nothing to see. Talk about wrongful use of prosecutorial discretion.

And then there’s this viral video of state police in Arkansas bashing someone’s head into the concrete.

So I turn to reporting on local education, and I see that students who have to live with relatives because their families cannot afford to live on their own are being targeted by the Clark County School District, which took the address verification process away from individual schools and centralized it because the superintendent wants control. Which I have been writing about and warning about for two years. Now those children and their families are assumed to be lying about where they live, and must prove otherwise. One administrator, I’m told by two principals, told parents that they should make the family member or friend they live with the guardian of their children.

It was said to ease the bureaucracy of trying to prove your child belongs in the school. But you can see how it falls right in line with steps to fascism. Right?

To distract myself, I have become fascinated by the backgrounds of the endless TV commentariat - the arrays of bookcases, or pictures of heroes, or piles of wood, or beds, that frame our nation’s experts.

I have been bingeing Netflix. But I have to warn you, “Inventing Anna” is not necessarily a series that is going to make you feel better in an existential way.

I am hopeful when I see the White House Twitter feed trolling lawmakers who accepted their own loan forgiveness while arguing that student loan forgiveness will harm the economy.

I am hopeful that women are registering to vote at unprecedented levels.

I worry that will not be enough.

And that terrifies me far more than having to hold an icepack to my face to ease the swelling of a lost tooth. Or even looking like Alfred E. Neuman.