By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
A dear friend of mine recently checked in on my mental state — not because of my 45th birthday, which occurred in the past week — but because he described my demeanor of late, and that of Reader Publisher Ben Olson, in an evocative way:
“You guys remind me of ambulance drivers in World War I.”
I laughed, of course, but it was the kind of laugh a World War I ambulance driver might laugh. It also brought to mind a similar observation from another old friend, who bumped into Ben and me in the alley next to the newspaper office two weeks ago while we were commiserating about this and that; and, amid the customary salutations and back-slapping of vintage pals, said:
“You guys seem a little down.”
I can’t speak for Ben, but I’ll admit my own guilt. For sure, I do feel down and a lot like someone who has ended up driving an ambulance during World War I.
The occupation is freighted with history. Ernest Hemingway was famous for his time driving an ambulance during World War I, and believe it or not, there’s an entire honor roll of WWI ambulance drivers, helpfully listed on Wikipedia. They include: composer Maurice Ravel; filmmaker Jean Cocteau; writers e e cummings, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Archibald MacLeish, Somerset Maugham, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and many others of various artistic and cultural stripes.
The same or allied job has been filled by brighter luminaries than we in other times and places.
When my friend made that statement, I thought about Walt Whitman serving as a nurse during the U.S. Civil War. I also thought about Friedrich Nietzsche driving an ambulance during the Franco-Prussian War a few years later.
In no way am I placing Ben and myself in this kind of company, but there’s a reason my friend said what he said and I’m pretty darn sure there are a lot of people out there who are feeling the same way as they try to keep it together while trying to do good, or at least do no harm.
And it seems like even more people are actively trying to do harm right now, which is a problem.
The number of interactions I’ve had in the past few weeks — I won’t call them all “conversations,” though some of them were — telling me to stop calling fascists fascists, authoritarians authoritarians, and comparing National-Socialist behaviors and beliefs to National Socialism because it’s somehow hurting fascist/authoritarian/National-Socialist people’s feelings is alarming.
I thought we all agreed a few decades ago that fascism, authoritarianism and National Socialism were bad, and that we agreed a few centuries ago that people in the United States had a right to speak freely. I guess I was wrong, in some people’s minds, but I still can’t fathom how a president can marshal the executive power of the federal government to militarize the police and turn the police into the military and literally declare “war” on cities in their own country based on partisan principles (and wanting to harm their “opponent”), then muse aloud about becoming a “dictator” and not be a fascist/authoritarian/National Socialist. Fun bonus: Doing all that while lionizing free speech in order to silence free speech.
I asked that question of my MAGA-supporting friends on Facebook not long ago, and got a few responses — most of which boiled down to “whatabout?” I just don’t see the “whatabout,” and am as baffled as I was before I embarked on that (in retrospect ill-advised) thought experiment.
Yeah, I’m feeling down about all this. I’m not driving an ambulance in a world war, but I do feel like there are too many people trying to run whatever ambulances we have left off the road.
I’ll offer the most basic form of my question in this forum: Can someone make it make sense?
