Bob Arthur, veteran of the social justice wars, old Freedom Rider, inveterate advocate for blackness, women, peace, equal distribution of wealth, and climate change, had just begun to feel himself after the humiliating defeat of Madame at the polls, when he had to watch the cavalcade of whiteness come to the capital for the Trump Inauguration.
After years promoting racial diversity, gender fluidity, and the rise of the black man to his proper place atop the human pyramid, here he was awash in whiteness, a horrific retro-finish Fifties Leave It To Beaver episode; and then came the Inaugural Address with the words 'Drill, Baby, Drill' loud and clear. In one fell swoop, all of Bob's caretaker justice, love for the environment and hatred for the capitalist dragoons stealing from the planet, gone in a flash.
Leaky pipelines would crisscross the nation. Vast new oilfields and earth crust fracking derricks would appear from the Gulf to the Canadian border. High-emission gas-powered cars would belch carbon into the atmosphere, and electric cars would go unsold on dealer lots. The Earth would warm more quickly than ever, turning the planet into a charred wasteland. It was a vision of Hell.
The Trumpers were coming into town in their Escalades and Suburbans, heedless of the existential crisis, indifferent to the perils of a warming climate, a tinseled, sequined, ship of fools. All the images of his youth in Fifties Babylon, Long Island - mothers in the kitchen, dads in fedoras, Kinder, Küche, Kirche and all the self-assured complacency came flooding back. Time had stopped, sense and sensibility gone, the country victim of a bullying crowd.
Of course all this was just the product of a febrile mind and a wildly hysterical man who had put all his eggs in one basket, who was immured within an impossibly fantastical world, and who felt that the cycle of history had actually stopped turning. The progressive utopia was a sure, inevitable, verdant end; not something impermanent and fungible. The wheel of fortune had landed on a jackpot of victorious environmental favors.
All night long, in one inaugural party after another, lights blazed, Escalades idled, and décolleté, strapless, backless-gowned blonde beauties danced the night away in overheated ballrooms in a deliberate show of excess, a big fat fuck you to every responsible American who had worked hard to tame the nation's energy appetite to save the planet.
Everywhere Bob looked there was a revelry unseen in the four years of the Biden Administration, a dour, morose, worried period summarily tossed aside. Gone were the rainbow coalition, the community of good works, the determined, missionary men and women of The Movement.
Unused to glee and good times, Bob went inside and huddled with his inner circle in Scientists For Peace, a catch-all non-profit whose final be-all and end-all was climate change, the last and greatest of social challenges.
The group felt they had been making headway - E-car mandates, no more XL pipeline, a curb on off-shore drilling and gas exploration, and a general willingness to turn down of the heat - and so were all the more upset by the horde of climate naysayers marching into town. On Day One as promised the Trump imprimatur was stamped on one executive order after another undoing all Biden's airy notions. The United States would finally realize the goal of energy independence, no longer tied to foreign oil, and freeing Europe from the energy fascism of Russia. Geopolitics would be the first consideration of energy policy, and the United States would no longer be the country of fairy tale environmentalism.
'Oh, God', moaned Bob as reality set in. It was really happening. Madame, a proud black woman was not getting inaugurated today, and the vision of a multi-colored, harmonious, bonded America of black people and riotous gender diversity was gone.
He loosened his collar, an instinctive, foreboding gesture to the warming climate, shook his head, and moped down K Street. What's a mother to do?, the old advertising tag line, popped into his head. What indeed as the rug had been pulled out from under him. His whole life of social reform swept away in a gully-washer of conservative idiocy.
'Buck up, Bobby', said his wife, herself a social justice warrior from way back, veteran of Woodstock, the Women's Movement, MeToo, and the Feminist Caucus, who was as dismayed as her husband at the Trump victory but who was a closet realist, a go with the flow ex-hippy who knew that what comes around, goes around in a let it be world. It was time to hang up the spurs, move to Florida and break out the chaise lounge.
When Bob barged into the house, steaming with anger, apoplectic about the Trump turn of events, and saw his wife sitting before the fire sipping a pina colada without a seeming care in the world, the day and all its miseries was complete.
Actually all of Friendship Village, the solidly progressive neighborhood of Bethesda, was no different. Wives were propping up their feet, getting buzzed, and happy as larks that the years of emotional penury were finally over. Excess was back again. Having more than one drink, topping off the tank, tossing masks and social distancing out the window, delighting in hot days and warm winters...Ahhh, sheer delight.
Women, keepers of the hearth, have always known what's what, when the screw was turning and when it was time to fold 'em; and so it was with his wife and her book group. A collective sigh of relief when Trump was elected - a silent one knowing the rabidness of their husbands' beliefs, but a smiling release nonetheless. Marriage had been put on hold for years because of their husbands' political fury, and they had gone along with it, played the part of equally committed spouse, marched along side, but biding their time until the phase had ended; and with Donald Trump it surely had.
Bob, on the other had, was disconsolate, let down, betrayed. How could she? he spluttered as he stormed up the stairs, the drumbeat of the inaugural marching bands still in his head. He looked at the pictures of King, Abernathy, and Jackson crossing the Pettis bridge, and smiled. Ahh, those were the days, he thought; but the howls of a group of MAGA hat wearing goons roaring up and down Wisconsin Avenue broke the reverie, and again, 'What's a mother to do?'
He turned the thermostat down - his wife had deliberately jacked it up - and wandered from room to room, looking at his peacenik, women's march, gay pride, Black Lives Matter memorabilia. No, he shouted to no one in particular. No, I will never give up, never; but the shock was simply too much for a man of his age and increasing mental infirmity, and only the glue factory was in his future. Out to pasture for a few years, then headed for home.
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