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Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how—it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable—radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it—they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water—because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed . . . by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli . . . We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made? 

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To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal—no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. ...  

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

(plural chronoclasms). From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), and κλάστης (klástēs, “a person who breaks something”); from κλάω (kláō, “break”).

 1. The intentional destruction of clocks and other time artifacts
 2. (politics) The desire to crush the prevailing sense of time, due to a conflict regarding the fixation of linear time in a community

Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. 'While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,' she writes, 'it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.' She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our 'time-givers' instead.

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From Newsweek:

As a response to the [Trump Administration's] DEI rollbacks, the People's Union is planning a 24-hour economic blackout all day on February 28, beginning at 12 a.m.

During this time, participants are pledging to not make any purchases either online or in brick-and-mortar stores.

The People's Union is targeting Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy, but the group is also asking boycotters to refrain from spending money on fast food or gas, as well. 

If consumers must make purchases, they are asked to buy only from small, local businesses.

"History has shown us this—our ancestors leveraged economic pressure in 1955 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted far longer than a single day and led to real systemic change," Thompson said. "While the impact of a one-day boycott may be limited, its true power lies in mobilizing a like-minded community. If this initiative sparks a larger movement, its long-term influence could extend far beyond February 28.

• Corporations and banks only care about their bottom lines.
• If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.
• If they don't listen (they won't), we make the next blackout longer (we will).

 ... Come, then, and let us walk 

Since we have reached the park.
It is our garden, 

All black and blossomless this winter night, 

But we bring April with us, you and I; 

We set the whole world on the trail of spring. ...

Look at the lake — 

Do you remember how we watched the swans 

That night in late October while they slept? 

Swans must have stately dreams, I think.

If you are watching the news right now, and you are feeling overwhelmed by all of the constant headlines ... first of all, know that you are not alone. Second of all, know that this is exactly what this Administration is trying to get you to feel ... The first order of business is to self-regulate. What authoritarian regimes try to do is that they often try to what is known as "flood the zone"—to do so much at once that you feel overwhelmed and paralyzed. It's important for you to understand that the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point. They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public, so it is of personal importance for you, and it is also of political importance, to take a breath.

The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

It’s winter now, some months after the phoebes outside have built their nest, raised a family, and moved on. Bitter cold, snow on the ground, blue jays crowding the feeders clownishly while the little birds—chickadees and nuthatches and tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers—wait anxiously for the bullies to leave so they can begin their own meal. You might think you know something about me now from the highly redacted scraps of personal anecdote I started with—but really, I could have written anything, shaped those glimpses however I wanted, and you wouldn’t know. 

You know far more about me from how I’ve been writing here ... You know what books I’ve loved and why I love them. You know I like birds, you know I watch them, you know I live in a place sufficiently rural to have trees and phoebes. You know many of my days resemble one another, and that I have a house, and that I must not be commuting daily to a job—which in turn suggests I have some other way to make an income. You know I have enough free time to look outside and note down what I see, and that I value both actions. 

And beyond those relatively simple facts, you have a sense of my sensibility: my emotional makeup, my responses to the world, my obdurate insistence on revising and revising again. What I notice, what I pay attention to.

The inside covers of the notebooks were used to save a substantial collection of news clippings, an off-beat record of the world through those years of writing the book. There are pressed leaves, wildflowers, feathers of owls and colourful parrots and lorikeets, swans, finches, cockatoos, picked up on walks, hundreds of walks, of walking alone while deep in thought, that in the end, amounted to much of what went into creating this book. The feathers alone form a catalogue of walking through many seasons in different parts of the country.

You will find in these notebooks: broken wings of butterflies, such as the brown forest butterflies found in the summer months when the woods were abundant with their dance; travelling beetles crawling in their hundreds in the leaf litter. This collection was a part of much more. All these objects were studied and, if not intentionally, were thought about as works of scale as were the patterns on a butterfly wing which are composed of millions of scales, grandiose designs developed over aeons of time. All of these collected objects were a reminder of being grounded while facing the realities as we have done in the past, and will do so in the future in dealing with other major concerns which hold no beauty, nor added comfort to our combined humanity.

Friends have begun to call, and tell us they’ve lost their homes. One said he had forgotten his passport, but he had the family dog, and he’d managed to save his child’s beloved stuffed walrus (named “Walrus”). They’d rebuild with that, he told me.

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Looking out the window into the snow and thinking of Los Angeles. 

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"Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.'"

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In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson, on the banks of the Ohio, on my way to Louisville. In passing over the Barrens a few miles beyond Hardensburgh, I observed the Pigeons flying from north-east to south-west, in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before, and feeling an inclination to count the flocks that might pass within the reach of my eye in one hour, I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I travelled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.

Whilst waiting for dinner at YOUNG'S inn at the confluence of Salt river with the Ohio, I saw, at my leisure, immense legions still going by, with a front reaching far beyond the Ohio on the west, and the beech-wood forests directly on the east of me. Not a single bird alighted; for not a nut or acorn was that year to be seen in the neighbourhood. They consequently flew so high, that different trials to reach them with a capital rifle proved ineffectual; nor did the reports disturb them in the least. I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions, when a Hawk chanced to press upon the rear of a flock. At once, like a torrent, and with a noise like thunder, they rushed into a compact mass, pressing upon each other towards the centre. In these almost solid masses, they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.

Every afternoon [the pigeons] came sweeping across the lawn, positively in clouds, and with a swiftness and softness of winged motion, more beautiful than anything of the kind I ever knew. Had I been a musician, such as Mendelssohn, I felt that I could have improvised a music quite peculiar, from the sound they made, which should have indicated all the beauty over which their wings bore them.

BETWEEN the years 1872 and 1875 or 1876, eastern Iowa, for a distance of sixty or more miles west of the Mississippi River, witnessed many intermittent flights of the fast dwindling flocks of the Passenger Pigeon. At that time I was not familiar with the stories of the pigeon flights over Ohio and Kentucky territory east of the Mississippi, related by Wilson and Audubon, or, probably, I should have been impressed with the difference between flights occurring prior to 1845 and those between 1870 and 1880. It will be recalled that Wilson and Audubon described the pigeon flocks as being so vast in extent that they darkened the sky for several successive days. As I read their descriptions, the pigeons literally spread a dark blanket of roaring wings over the earth, interfering with the light from the sun to the extent that a twilight condition prevailed not only all day but for several days in succession.

The rapid destruction of the pigeons between the dates mentioned should, one would think, have warned thoughtful students of wild life of the complete destruction of this edible species at an early date, but if fears existed the publications of the period do not appear to have been utilized for the purpose of arousing public interest and concern therein. So to us in the 70's the flights of pigeons seemed tremendous and were wholly without a warning thought or suggestion that the hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, we saw passing over were but the fast disappearing remnants of the billions that turned day into night much less than fifty years before.

Then he would go out for a walk, wander through the countryside while reciting Sacred scripture to the crows in the fields, the dark murmurations of starlings against the clouds, and as he wandered through the orchards near the river he would think of the miracle of flowing water from the book of Ezekiel: And it shall come to pass, that every living thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither; for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh ... And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine, a passage he had read so often in church, and he would pick a few familiar leaves to make a tisane, then, at length, having made a tour of the village, wondering how all things could so sweetly sing the praises of the Creator and yet also be the mark of His abandonment, he would head back to the presbytery, there to surrender to the gathering night, to dereliction and to hooch.

David French, "It's Time to Admit America Has Changed," The New York Times (gift link), 11/6/2024.

North Brooklin, Maine,
30 March 1973

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,
E. B. White

* 

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty.

Fear seemed to exude from the walls, to dim the mirrors with its clammy breath, to stir shudderingly among the tattered draperies, to impregnate the whole atmosphere as with an essence, a gas, a contagious disease.

The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn't see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs' bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones.

Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition: Being demanded, whether a good Spirit, or bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and most melodious Twang.