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I would hate for tomorrow to pass and the Rapture to happen, before I got to put into writing my Rapture story.

So I was raised a Christian, a dishwater Baptist. My folks were not churchgoing types but my grandparents were, so as a three- and four-year-old, I spent my Sunday mornings with my Gran Gran, at services. I was a hit, and for a while there, a Ring-Bearer for hire. However, even with all that, and the vacation bible school, the Word didn’t find a place in me to set a hook. (That came later, briefly. Different story.)

So I had a cursory knowledge of the Christian landscape when later, as a voraciously-reading pre-teen, I happened across a pamphlet. The pamphlet was about how in 1982, which was still a couple years away, the planets would align, like in a straight line from Sun to Pluto. This was an exaggeration of an astrological phenomenon that did happen–the planets weren’t in a straight line at all, more like an infield shift.

But the other exaggeration in this particular pamphlet was that the Rapture was going to happen on that day in 1982, and not just the “what clothes should I wear for the Rapture” Rapture, but sincerely apocalyptic shit: the moon would turn to blood and airplanes would fall out of the sky as cartoony angels–your neighbors! your airplane pilot!–sweetly wafted to the heavens, all of which was luridly illustrated, as was the fashion for these sorts of pamphlets. And as if that were not enough, there were bonus pages at the end, featuring a thousand years of war for those unlucky enough not to have asked Jesus Christ into their heart as their own personal savior–a specific and Baroque requirement that also oddly presaged the second Trump presidency. A seriously bummer millennium.

I do not remember how this DIY mimeographed bit of scruffy paranoia found its way into my grubby little hands, or even how if found its way out, but the message of doom hit me hell hard.

As a consequence, I did not sleep very well from 1979 until 1981 or so, when my concerns for my eternal soul (or worse, for being left behind) were subsumed by adolescence.

And then, of course, in 1982 nothing happened. Zilch.

Looking back, I mostly feel embarrassed and dumb for falling for such risible horseshit, but boy did I. And it wasn’t for another decade that I cast those concerns out of the temple of my mind like a bunch of money changers, but I still carry the trauma with me.

Note that the really true believers, the end-of-the-world cultists, never experience the same sort of trauma, because tomorrow’s just another day, a day in which the Lamb of God could possibly call the faithful to his side and the lamentations of the wicked shall bla bla bla whatever.

I wanted to get this Rapture story out before EOD not just in case I’m wrong, but rather so that all the smug fundie weirdos will have something to read on Wednesday morning, before the shock wears off and they go back to being racist and filling the coffers of Campus Crusade or whatever the Charlie Kirk grift is called, and dream nightly of being proven maliciously righteous, of having learned the lesson that there is no lesson to learn.

There have been very many bad things and a handful of good things written about the demise of Charlie Kirk. Read the good ones, and maybe read this one bad one so that you never feel like you have to read Ezra Klein ever again.

I don’t have a lot to add to that particular soup, even though I am blessed with an employer that would not punish me for saying that Charlie was a gutter racist and bigot who made an awful lot of money by pretending to be polite. Others have said similar, at an actual risk.

In the meantime, failure to properly observe Kirk’s death are being met with varying calls for punishment. For example, if you are an NFL team that did not have a moment of Charlie silence, if you criticize the half-masting of the flag for Charlie (which also earns you a tsk-tsking from a retired Jet), or if you refuse to print non-decorated cake flyers for Charlie vigils.

Even social media platforms are not immune to this proscribed decorum, as Rep. Clay Higgins shoots off a sternly worded letter demanding censorship from the platforms, and The Federalist suggests that Bluesky be punished for… existing?

Let it be noted that many of these punishments are being levied not for celebrating Charlie leaving us, but rather for repeating (racist, bigoted) words he actually said or wrote. This is what inspired the Washington Post to fire its only black female columnist.

And even if you have complied with the requisite display of grief, the Attorney General has promised that any anti-Charlie speech in the future will be met with legal threats from the Trump Department of Justice.

This is the first time in my lifetime that Americans have been told that failure to mourn a specific individual is a crime. Further, I can think of no example of this in the American history I was taught in school. I’m not really read up on the Soviet Union or Mao’s People’s Republic of China, but I would not be surprised to read that compulsory demonstrations of this sort of adoration were par for the course.

Here’s another one, from Billionaire-whisperer Bari Weiss.

Not only is the alleged not an act but an omission, but the gravity of the things that didn’t happen give Bari the power to read actors’ minds (and a convenient misremembering of history).

There are a lot of people who do not care about this, as it is a very Fox News concern, and Fox News, while monolithic, averages 2.5 million viewers during prime time, which is not even one percent of the citizenry. Normal people have no idea who Charlie was and why they should care. Not to blame them, as the current information environment, being even ill-informed is a luxury investment in one’s time. In fact, I’m frequently jealous of them.

But that the entirety of the MAGA Cinematic Universe decided that this was the moment to go all in on groupthink, over some minor political activist whose true skill was not convincing anyone but acquiring money and power for himself, speaks of the crushing insecurity and paranoia that the fascists are bathing in.

Normal people would generally agree that there is some sort of sin, perhaps minor, in speaking ill of the dead. However, they would generally agree that failing to speak well of the dead does not even rise to a sin of omission.

And obvious to everyone is the clownish flop sweat of those who demand compliance with proscribed performative mourning protocol, who demand not only to be feared but to be loved.

Here in New York City we are currently undergoing a mayoral election. You’d think, what with the economy and the communal PTSD from the pandemic and the looming autocracy, we would deserve a nice calm election, peopled with candidates, each of whose name and distinguishing characteristics are fuzzy in the memory, each beigely promising to upend the status quo in the service of preserving it. Maybe one has funny hair, or is short.

But no.

Our current electoral landscape is dominated by Zohran Mamdani, who has, by dint of his likeability and social media skills, has become enormously popular amongst the populace in the course of three or four months.

However, the billionaires just hate him. Haaate him. One can conject that the source of this hatred is Mamdani’s self-proclaimed Democratic Socialism, or his various policy proposals (which are very gentle, on the spectrum of socialist policy proposals). I propose that the billionaires hate Mamdani because he does not adhere to the belief that the billionaires are the one constituency of New York City, honest and true. He cannot be bought, and he won’t even tell the billionaires how smart and virtuous they are purely by being billionaires. Accordingly, those who are captured by the billionaires–establishment Democrats and newsrooms, mostly–manifest this hate with ham-fisted foot-dragging and I’m-just-saying dis-endorsements.

There are other candidates in this race. One was a governor, and the other is currently the mayor. One has enormous baggage, as does the other. Both are polling terribly, and yet both are the preferred candidates of the billionaires, although the billionaires have yet to coalesce around one or the other.

That is, but for one billionaire, President Trump, whose shadow has loomed over the election like a much bigger version of his actual shadow. Trump has grumbled at the fact that Mamdani is a communist, and has signaled that he wants to clear the field so that anti-Mamdani candidates don’t split the vote. And while Trump already has a proscribed, groveling relationship with Mayor Adams (running as an independent), Trump’s preferred candidate: Andrew Cuomo (also running as an independent. And to clear the field: an offer to pay off Adams with a Trump Administration gig. Adams has so far refused, but bribery is one of those things Adams has a hard time saying no to.

There is also a candidate running on the Republican line. He likes hats and cats.

Trump doesn’t want Mamdani to be mayor. Trump is using presidential power to try to clear the field of candidates so that the anti-Mamdani vote isn’t split. Trump, purely by habit and by choice, is big-footing all the non-Mamdani candidates. Trump, again purely by habit and by choice, has made the election one between Mamdani and Trump, who is not running but apparently has a lot of time on his hands.

This raises the question: if Trump is so exercised over this matter, why isn’t Trump using his (according to him) unequaled popularity directly? He has claimed a “massive mandate”–if he’s so popular, then why doesn’t he come to New York City and take Cuomo by the arm and go kiss some babies?

Obviously, the idea of Cuomo and Trump on even a brief tour of baby-kissing is the kind of optics that lose elections forever. You and I know this. But does Trump?

All of this is to say: Trump-whisperers wonder if Trump realizes the abysmal depths of his unpopularity, even as he posts on his little social media site about his historically good numbers and universal international respect and being a scratch golfer. Imagining Trump to contemplating his own public-facing odiousness–in a spare moment in between the ritual humiliation of his Dear Leader meetings–just doesn’t pass the smell test.

So what is stopping him? Why will he not come on down and debate Mamdami, and use his unmeasureable charisma to effect his singular will upon the outcome of this particular election?

Maybe the answer is that Trump is not as consumed with blustery omnipotence as he strains to appear in moments of comfort, that Trump is deliberately avoiding the risk of being humiliated without possibility of a plausible denial.

In order to be a coward, you have to know what to be scared of.

Going back to work after an absence is one of the harder situations to navigate, when your dad dies.

Everyone means well. But of course not all of your coworkers know the reason that you have not been around the office. You do a fair amount of WFH, and it would be reasonable to assume that you were telecommuting, or maybe even had a little vacation. And it’s not like you were ever good at small talk. How was your weekend? You hadn’t even really thought about it. How was your weekend? Pretty much like all the other weekends, is always on the tip of your tongue, before you remember manners and blurt, Fine, yours? The coworkers mean well. They are the very picture of collegial office mates. They sign the cards for special occasions, and they laugh at the sardonic asides of the boss, in the weekly meetings. Out loud! Ha hahaha! In any event, they mean nothing but well.

The first time someone asked, after you came back, was in the kitchen part of the office where you just wanted some coffee, you looked at them and paused and then said: Really bad! And the walk back to your office, you regretted it. Why did you do that? Their weekend was most likely perfectly fine. Surely their parents had some sort of beach house they went to. What did that poor co-worker, the one with tastefully wealthy parents, do to deserve a response that would upset the equilibrium of their office day?

Waiting for the elevator was the second time. How was your weekend?

How exactly is a life measured, you answered. It is an accumulation of decisions made, or a list of things that happened that the liver had no control over? Who gets to decide these things? Is there a final authority, or, worse yet, is there a final authority accessible only to some people but not everyone? Assuming that the measure of a life, from birth to the other thing, is not subjective, not a matter of debate or consideration, what if this objective measure is known but not by you? Is it determined by the space it took up, or the space left empty at the end?

By then the elevator had arrived, you got in together, rode it down to the lobby.

Well, have a good one, you said.

You too, Brent, see you tomorrow!

You were going to work from home the next day, but you didn’t want to be rude about it.

Work marched on. Largely you kept your thoughts to yourself, unless someone asked how you were doing. Or anything, really.

A coworker ducked their head into your office. Hey Brent, do you know where to find files of a client we represented back in the 2000s?

I do, you said. Sometimes I wake up, and I have to correct myself, because I had a nagging feeling that there’s something I need to do for him. But there’s not, really.

One coworker suggested that you take these concerns to Chat-GPT. You responded, The dumbest thoughts just pop out of my head. I’m staring at the bookcase, and I think of the little projects that he was in the middle of, and I say to myself, ‘I guess I never will actually reread ‘Underworld’ by Don DeLillo, will I?’

Once no one even asked you anything. You were alone in your office. You said, to no one, I still worry about what it’s going to be like, how bad it’s going to be, when it happens. Which it did. And I’m still worried about it.

And then you went back to work.

A month ago I was called for jury duty. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for many years, and I’ve been called four times, enough times to know what to expect.

The last time I was called, I was empaneled for a criminal case as an alternate juror, and the case went to verdict. It was a multi-charge case with a sexual assault charge at the heart of it, but it was not as open-and-shut as one would imagine since all of the witnesses either did not seem that they knew what happened, or (hello NYPD!) were obviously lying, and not trying too hard to conceal the fact.

And if that were not enough of a bummer, my fellow jurors were an unpleasant bunch. Not all of them of course, but a goodly portion of them were possessed with that character flaw that impels them to ensure that any person in their vicinity is as miserable as they are.

So I was not looking forward to the experience.

And yet I’m fine with jury duty in principle. I realize that it is an imposition on one’s life (professional or otherwise) in which one is compelled to be someplace mostly unpleasant, with strangers, where one has to take one’s belt off every time one reenters the courthouse. It is not fun.

But it is an obligation upon this particular structure of law in which we participate, and as such I lean into it every time I am called. And every time I mention that I have jury duty, my friends and colleagues first respond to me like I told them that I had to rainbow-bridge a beloved pet, and then give me their top five ways to get out of jury duty. Well and good.

I lean into jury duty because should I ever have to face a jury of my peers, I would hope these peers are more like me, and not like people steaming with resentment at having to be on a jury.

So the day arrived and in short order I was Juror Number 3. It was a civil case (car crash) and there were six of us jurors, and two alternates waiting to replace us should we fall on the field of litigation. They made us go to lunch and come back to tell us when we were to return the next day, which I assumed would make everyone all pissy. But the belly-aching was minimal and everyone was downright convivial, as we were told to return at 9 a.m. sharp.

The good-naturedness was confusing.

The next morning, we all showed up on time (!!). A nice court officer led us to our special juror room, and onboarded us–fill this out, follow these rules, sit tight and don’t leave the room until I tell you.

The last time I served, this is where the alarms went off, as my fellow jurors broke out into cliques, which cliques were each devoted to a different flavor of shit-talk. The facilities were dingy, why did we have to be here so early, this better not fucking take all week, etc.

But last month, my fellow jurors dad-joked the court officer, and after she left, silently, pleasantly occupied themselves. The Williamsburg art professional knitted, the East New York grandmother journaled, the harried Kensington freelancer freelanced. And others hit their phones, but when the audio accidentally played, they quickly and apologetically muted or closed tab.

A lot of what seems to have afflicted us in the past decade or so is the diminishment of any societal obligation. We haven’t just opted out of civic engagement, we’ve forgotten it altogether. Of course we face the headwinds of a federal power structure that prizes greed and hatred as virtues, and a half-century dearth of public works, which were replaced by sports stadiums and shrunken public spaces in which sitting is physically discouraged.

Not to get nostalgic, but civics was once a more vigorous component of public education, and I think that it used to temper selfishness and generally promote being cool to each other. We aren’t being cool to each other, and we haven’t for some time.

So we sat there, waiting to perform our duties, and the court officer came and told us it was showtime. We lined up in order, snaked our way to the courtroom, and got sworn in. Whereupon we were jovially informed that the parties settled and we would be released.

We joked with the judge and we joked with the two attorneys. We were led out of the court and stood around, happily, waiting to receive our Affidavits of Service, and then disappeared into the cityscape of downtown Brooklyn in separate directions, like the end of Ocean’s Eleven.

I do not know what made it so pleasant after decades of experiences that were nothing but shitty and demoralizing. I had expected a repeat of past experiences: angry sad people no more willing to be a good citizen than they were to be a good neighbor, a drag that illustrated the slow degradation of all things, civil society eroding, brick by brick, exacerbated by the growing miasma of a world in which one constantly feels like not just prey but grist for the mill. Why care about jury duty in a world that wants you to die, but not quickly–the longer for your essences to be extracted and converted into another couple dollars for the billionaires.

An accident of the passing of the years? Or is it the unintended consequences of turning all the fascism dials up to eleven and breaking off the handles?

Ultimately, for the first time, I kind of miss jury duty.

Finally proper framing from The New York Times:

Yes, that is above-the-fold, and it is not normalizing or sanewashing Trump, as has so often the case with headline writers and social media managers of The Times.

The story about this millionaire fellow named Paul Walczak who had been withholding Social Security, Medicare and Federal taxes from the paychecks of the employees of his family’s nursing home business, but not actually paying them to the government, and instead further enriching himself with the money. He was charged and tried, and he pleaded guilty in November of 2024, and sentenced to eighteen months and restitution two weeks ago, which was after Trump took office.

So his millionaire mom, Elizabeth Fago, bought him a pardon.

Trump has always been pardon-crazy, as pardoning is the one act other than Executive Orders that Trump can do unilaterally, without consent or oversight from the other arms of government. Like waving a a gilded magic wand.

But Trump also is greedy, and quickly realized that criminals would pay for pardons, and that such transactions would be difficult to prove in a court of law, which, to Trump, made them legal.

Team Trump knew that Mom was fishing for a pardon of her criminal son, Mom got invited to a million-dollar-a-plate Mar-a-Lago dinner party, Mom ponied up.

And The NYT did not soft pedal the story. Pullquotes!

It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier.

That $4.4 million in restitution? That was going to the government. Hence, Trump’s PAC makes a million dollars, and ends up costing the government four times that.

It’s heinous, like all of this is heinous, but NYT for once is getting chippy about it:

A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.

The pardon, however, indicated otherwise.

That’s the kind of zinger that has been assiduously avoided in coverage of Trump’s unorthodoxies and boundary-testing of late.

The case of Ms. Fago and Mr. Walczak is the latest example of the president’s willingness to use his clemency powers to reward allies who advance his political causes, and to punish his enemies. But it is the strongest example of Trump pardons being a good or service that is openly for sale, as if out of a vending machine that takes million-dollar bills.

While it would be helpful to characterize “the president’s willingness” as something more direct and less tortuous – “Trump’s pardon-selling” or “Trump’s blatant criminality” – it is getting warmer after a long spell of bothsides cold.

It may be the case that NY’s daily broadsheet is succumbing to pressure to cut the nonsense of downplaying Trump perfidy in order to stave off accusations of liberal bias (even though these accusations are generations old and less unfounded as every year passes). Also it may be the case that the sheer glaringness of the open criming of the Trump Administration leaves no choice. It could even be the case that once the publisher of The Times reads the piece, heads will roll.

But it was genuinely a pleasant surprise to glance at the front page and not want to throw the paper out the window.

As hard as it is to have coherent thoughts concerning anything other than anguish and rage, this is a thing that I have been thinking and I’m willing to put forth:

In a chaotic information environment after a squishily predicted election, in which an electoral victory has been bullied into being reported as a mandate, various sorts of folks opposed to Trump have had various sorts of responses, presumably engineered for future plans, one way or the other. 

The minority leaders of the House and the Senate have pursued the plan of performing the mildest of concerns, gambling that if Trump sets enough things on fire, the Democratic Party will be rewarded with electoral victories, as firemen of last resort.

And others have devised a similarly mild yet ickier response: trying to move with the perceived motion of the Overton Window. For example, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine has been loudly claiming common ground with Trump, and California Gov. Gavin Newson started a series of interviews that demonstrated his willingness to launder the reputation of fascists, or at least tie his own reputation to fascist reputations like an anchor.

These tactics seem to me cynical and slimy, calculated for the sole benefit of winning an election.

Obviously the argument is that once the elections are won, then the inaction and the flirting with the Right will cease and then legislation will be enacted that will address the common good. The problem with that argument is that it won’t happen like that, because it has never happened like that–there will always be another looming election that will demand further concessions.

In any event, those are debates for other people to have. I can only speak for myself, and this is the standard I will hold to my own personal vote, from now until I’m not voting any more: actions to help people, all the people, all of us, I will reward with my vote, and actions designed to “get more votes” can fuck right off on.

If the motherfuckers can run on hate and eke out a win, time after time, then I am forever supporting those who run on diversity, on equality, on inclusion and on love. And if alienating the truly loathsome, evil fellow Americans who want cruelty showered upon other humans because it protects their privileged mediocrity, more the better.

If the tent is so big that there’s room for greed and intolerance and the human qualities classically (and Biblically!) labeled as sin, then I’ll stand outside the tent.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike Eric Adams as a mayor of New York. As a mayor of any city, really. He ran as a Democrat, and governs like a Republican. He says and does silly shit, which is almost charming until you remember that (a) he doesn’t think it’s silly in the least, and (b) he’s the mayor of the largest city in the country. He also thinks that God talks to him–told him he’d be mayor some day–which if true proves that God does indeed have a sense of humor.

All of this is easily explained: Eric Adams is so inflated with self regard that he thinks his copious lies somehow make him cool. There is a picture of a beloved statesman somewhere in his head, a beloved statesman who isn’t good at much other than cutting ribbons and giving repetitive speeches at flag-raising ceremonies for other countries, and he’s just trying to act (poorly) the part.

He’s also a corrupt piece of shit, with bribery and campaign finance violations leading his resume. He is so famously corrupt and surround by toadies as corrupt as himself, that the intrepid HellgateNYC created a single-purpose site called Eric Adams’ Table of Success, breaking down all of the toadies and their various corruptions, both heinous and mundane. His reward for this was a Federal indictment.

And yes, the Trump DOJ magic-wanded the charges against Adams, such that Adams has not been cleared but might be if licks every last piece of crud off of Trump’s boots–a fate so cowardly that it is only exceeded by the extent Adams will go to avoid being asked questions by the people whose jobs it is to do so. (Unless the questions are asked on FOX and Friends.)

For all those reasons, I dislike Eric Adams. However, there is a reason that I really fucking detest Eric Adams. I wrote about it in June of 2022, and I am reprinting it here:

—

ABOUT THAT TWEET

A week and a half ago my old friend Dan Enriquez was murdered on a Q train on the Manhattan Bridge, headed for the Canal Street Station. And since Dan was murdered on public transit, his murder is more of a public matter than a murder of Dan, or me, or you, would have been if it had transpired in a non-public space. And since it was a public matter, Mayor Eric Adams had some things to say, as Mayor Eric Adams does.

I tweeted angrily in connection with this whole situation, and it got mildly viral despite itself, so instead of tweeting further or responding to responses, this is to explain of what I meant, now that I’ve had a week and a funeral to think it over.

I think that @NYCMayor seeing the occasion of my friend's murder as the proper time to remind us how lucky we are to have @NYCMayor as mayor says a lot. https://t.co/ARNAmzcfU7

— Brent Cox (@titivil) May 23, 2022

What happened was, our mayor, who is a regrettable oaf, was speaking to the press the next morning. As he said the boilerplate stuff a mayor says–terrible loss, heart goes out, etc. — he added, “I thank God I’m the mayor right now.” This made me angry. To wit, if you asked Dan how Adams was doing as mayor and whether God should be thanked or not, he wouldn’t answer, because he was murdered on a subway train.

And this is not to say that Adams could have prevented Dan’s murder. A man has been charged with the murder, but nothing like motive is apparent. The Mayor, the Chief of Police and others made a big deal about bail reform after the alleged shooter was arrested (which arrest came after a buffoonish attempt by the Mayor’s crew to get the perp to surrender directly to the Mayor), but this particular fellow had twice posted six-figure bail, so unless bail reform means “no more pre-trial releases,” it would not have saved Dan’s life.

So I’m not angry that the Mayor didn’t do enough, or anything like that. What I resented was that Adams felt that the discussion of Dan’s murder was an excellent time for Adams to talk about how awesome he thinks he is. That, to me, was tap dancing on Dan’s grave. Adams was treating talking about Dan’s murder like he treats everything no matter how somber or inane: another really fun thing a mayor gets to do.

What I really wanted to tweet, to the Mayor particularly, was that he should go fuck himself, forever, or at least until such time as some incompetent public official with a personality disorder absolutely clowns it up while talking about the murder of an old friend of the Mayor.

I am not speaking on behalf of Dan’s family or his partner, and I’m not speaking on behalf of Dan’s friends–he had a shit ton of them. I knew Dan from Williamsburg, and we were part of a big mess of friends that did everything together. Everything nice said about Dan is true. He was generous and curious and stalwart. He was laid to rest on Tuesday. Nothing anyone, including Mayor Eric Adams, can do that will make him less dead.

But I want to be clear that when I’m saying mean things about the Mayor, I’m not saying them on Dan’s behalf–I doubt he’d approve. And I’m not representing myself as the Public Face of the Friends of Dan Enriquez. I’m just a guy who was lucky to know Dan. And Mayor Eric Adams is a guy who needs to learn that the hard part of being mayor is that it is literally never about you.

—

Rereading that, I stand by it.

For what it’s worth, the flunky who tried to orchestrate the shooter’s public surrender to Adams, Bishop Lamor Whitehead, was later convicted of wire fraud, extortion (while invoking connections to Mayor Adams) and other charges, and sentenced to nine years. Donald Trump has yet to pardon Whitehead, but give it time.

Dan is doing whatever fun stuff angels get themselves up to, and Eric Adams has yet to fuck himself to my satisfaction.

Inauguration Day came and went and it was worse then anyone but the most pessimistic (or prescient) predicted. And since then it hasn’t gotten any better. So that brings me to The Model UN Story.

I was in Model United Nations when I was a kid. Model UN, if you are not familiar, is this thing where school kids from all over the region get all dressed up in business clothes and convene in a central location and roleplay the United Nations for a weekend. Each “delegation” from each school is designated an actual UN member to “play” for the weekend. There is a faux-General Assembly, there are break-outs into ersatz special committees, younger kids ferrying messages back and forth as “pages,” etc.

It must be the case that some of the kids at those Model UN weekends went on to be politicians or government officials or even diplomats, but as most of us there were positively drowning in hormones, mostly we were flirting in the way that young teens (somehow, this was a junior high-aged thing, and not high school-aged) flirted at the time: by passing notes and giggling.

Harmless good fun! Nevertheless: this was in the mid-1980s, so the Cold War was ongoing, and served as, at the IRL United Nations, kind of the organizing principle of the interactions between member states–Eastern Bloc vs. Western Bloc.

It was expected, of course, that in the course of pretending to be your delegation in this pretend General Assembly, you would try to act in the same way as the actual delegation would act in real life. If, say, you were supposed to be Japan, then you’d research the issues actually facing Japan and Japan’s stated positions on matters of the day and conduct yourself Japan-accordingly.

There was a delegation that weekend that was assigned — I forget which nation, but it was a small country that was not really aligned with the Eastern Bloc or the Western Bloc. Let’s call it Fredonia.

So first Fredonia announces that it is aligning itself with the Soviet Union (as it was known at the time), and joining the Eastern Bloc.

And then it was announced that Fredonia was elected to be the new leader of the Eastern Bloc.

By the end of the conference, Fredonia announced that a unified Eastern Bloc had certain demands–money? land?–and the failure to comply with such demands would be interpreted as a declaration of war against the Eastern Bloc and its various nuclear-armed constituent states.

To state the obvious, this was not a reflection of international relations at the time. It was the result of the efforts of a kid who realized that no one was going to say no.

That was ridiculous. By dint of will, Imaginary World Fredonia brought the imaginary planet to the brink of thermonuclear war in the course of two afternoons. The conference ended without any resolution or consequences, but it was all silly and it almost got in the way of our note-passing. But I do remember thinking: Why aren’t the grown-ups doing something about this?

It was a lesson in good faith, and the limits thereof. We were all tasked with playing by the same rules, which were to try to role-play in such a fashion as to honestly reflect the world at the time. And all it took to upend the entire thing was a little bad faith: a willingness to disregard propriety, and a refusal to be cowed by the possibility of consequences.

Good faith only works if everyone does it, and guardrails only work if they are consistently enforced.

The first Trump administration was bad enough, but was constrained from the really heinous shit by the intersection of (reluctant) institutional respect for good faith and (reluctant) enforcement of guardrails. That intersection is four years in the rearview mirror. The failure to anticipate the actions of a second Trump administration are a failure of imagination.

And since we’re on the topic: during the depths of the first Trump Administration, I took the guided tour of the actual United Nations, up on the East River. It is quite a sight to see if you have any love for Mid-Century Modern design at all, but most importantly: it brought me to tears, that representatives of the peoples of the world would come together and at least try to give the common good a global spin, that nations would try to hammer out common principals — like “Peace, equality and dignity on a healthy planet“. And there are legitimately bad people our there that think that’s a bad thing.

Cried my eyes out.

That I do not need The New York Times to confirm for me that the attack on the capitol on 1/6/21 was a violent act of treason planned and fomented by Donald J. Trump and his flunkies and coordinated with right-wing militias does not abdicate The Times from it’s willing assistance in whitewashing the event in the years that followed.

Publishing a couple hundred chin-scratching words on how January 6 could have possibly been memory-holed is a glaring insult to the pantheon of the Barest Minimums.

Myriad factors explain [Trump’s] stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

Actually, considering how factor-rich our crumbling polity currently is, the conversion of the insurrection into yet another moaning grievance actually is just about the least of the factors. It’s not so much a factor as a footnote. In other words, come the fuck on.

The Times (and the other surviving national news organizations) are not the recorders of history: they are the arbiters of history. The framing of the events by the legacy national media of Jan. 6 managed a certain clinical worry, a subtly raised eyebrow, but it paled in comparison to the five-alarm, stop-presses flooding of the field that ensued when the editorial corps discovered that Joe Biden was born in 1942.

Elevating a collective dropping-of-the-ball in the coverage of Jan. 6–and Trump’s fascist reveling in the actions of his own personal brownshirts–to some mystical, unstoppable act by a political genius who it turns out actually is tall, handsome and svelte is a naked act of burying the lede.

The story is not that there’s nothing that could have been done to accurately report and frame the significance of the first armed assault on the seat of our government in our lifetimes. The story is that The New York Times didn’t even fucking try.