Dead Canaries Everywhere

It’s Yom Kippur and I’m supposed to be reflecting on all of my wrongdoings from the past year. And I am doing that, I guess, in my own way — but I am also finding it more complicated right now than in years gone by to disentangle the personal agency that defines those wrongdoings from the sense of broader responsibility I have to my family and friends and neighborhood and city and country in this golden age of American authoritarianism. I am preoccupied with not just the same questions I always ask myself about whether I have been the person I want to be in my relationships but also with new questions that feel altogether more consequential, questions that probe my ethical and moral being and ask if I have behaved and am behaving in alignment with it.

Case in point: This is the first thing I’ve written since a hangdog ode to Pabst Blue Ribbon back in April. That makes me feel exceedingly guilty, both because it means that I’ve been derelict in doing the things that I personally enjoy and because it suggests that I have been shirking the duty I believe I have to make my voice heard about everything happening to our country.

And so, so much has happened in the past few months: the National Guard occupying DC, ICE agents refusing to identify themselves before kidnapping people off the street and disappearing them into an intentionally murky prison-deportation system, the White House weaponizing the DOJ against any public officials willing to stand against the regime, our Secretary of War forcing a one-in-a-lifetime convening of high-ranking military figures to do nothing more than vent on stage about the same meaningless culture war issues that we’ve been hearing about for the better part of a decade, the murder of Charlie Kirk and the subsequent censorship of Jimmy Kimmel and the handful of others who attempted to document all of the hateful and vitriolic comments Kirk made over the years, the president telling a gathering of European heads of state that their countries were all going to hell. All of that without even mentioning the should-be Hail Mary appeal Ghislaine Maxwell is making to the Supreme Court, federal threats of using American cities as “training grounds” for the military, or Trump joking that infamously corrupt Turkish President Erdogan “knows about rigged elections better than anybody.” As journalist and author Garret M. Graff wrote in his Doomsday Scenario newsletter in August, “one of the hardest things to do in the modern moment is keep up with the daily slog of scandals and corruption unfolding in this administration,” even if they’re happening in broad daylight. It’s the GOP’s documented flood-the-zone strategy taken to the absolute extreme.

All of this, of course, made possible by a garishly obedient Republican-led Congress and an eye-wateringly compliant Supreme Court. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson neatly put it while publicly scolding her conservative colleagues in an interview two months ago, “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

It’s Yom Kippur and the gravest wrongdoing that I am pinning on myself is continuing to live my life in the face of all of this chaos and oppression and harm. I believe joy is a radical act of protest‌, but I do not feel comfortable choosing to exist in a state of cheerfulness while those around me struggle and suffer. I hope I never do.