Big talk

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

One of the unexpected benefits of living through what may be the wholesale collapse of the United States’ civil, political and economic life is that conversations are seldom dull anymore and people want to talk about big things while they still can.

In the past week I reconnected with a high-school friend who lives out of state and is on the cusp of finishing her Ph.D. When I asked her the normal-catching-up question about how her program was going, she told me that DOGE cuts had axed her final-year funding and now she’d need to rush her dissertation in order to get her diploma in December — about six months before she’d planned. 

Like me, she’s in her mid-40s, married, owns a home and has two kids. Getting cut off like that in grad school is a big deal no matter your age or family situation, but in a case like the one she’s facing, it’s a repudiation of the American dream.

I’m more than confident she’ll finish strong; meanwhile, her doctorate addresses educational needs served by programs that might not even exist by then, depending on the whims of whoever is actually in charge of this slapdash dismantling of, well, everything.

After that, I took a call from a college pal, and his first question out the gate was, “How’s your mental health doing?” I told him I didn’t have that kind of time — “Fair to middling,” I said — then we spent 40 minutes talking about everything from police brutality in Pocatello to whether and when we won’t be able to watch international films anymore. 

At this point, I’m half expecting a drunk-dial asking with whom I’d most like to share an El Salvadorean prison cell with. After all, as President Donald Trump told that nation’s president, Nayib Bukele, during an unscripted hot-mic conversation in the Oval Office on April 14 that “the homegrowns are next” on the list to be disappeared. 

He was talking about “criminals,” but who knows how Trump’s definition of “criminals” will mutate over the course of his next burst of pre-dawn, sitting-on-the-toilet Truth Social posts? As has been well established over the past few months, the degree to which anyone or anything fits the gleichschaltung of the administration’s “priorities” is the test by which legal standing may now be judged.

It requires no imagination to envision where that kind of thinking leads. I mean, to not imagine where that kind of thinking leads is to be punched in the face by history and deserve the black eyes.

That’s really what’s been boiling my brain over the past dozen or so years since Trump started clotting the arteries of our body politic in earnest — and especially in the past three or so torturous months: 

How blatant does this have to get? When do the empty heads whose stock “words of wisdom” amount to the cliche about history repeating and doom and all that realize history is actually repeating and the doom is nigh? That the doom has befallen us?

Many people have caught on to this state of affairs, but others’ platitudinous minds will remain as vacant as ever, following Trump’s executive order of March 27 “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” which is an act of artistic and intellectual vandalism with echoes of “degenerate art,” book culling and state-enforced “truth-speak” so loud that anyone with ears to hear will find them bleeding.

Of all the blasphemies, brutalities, grotesqueries, hypocrisies, idiocies and mendacities being rained down on us in this historical moment, Trump’s “truth and sanity” nonsense is the falsest, most insane and most dangerous, because it will enable all the the rest of the terrible stuff that we’ll be talking about for as long as we’re allowed to talk about it.