Further to the previous post: even more acts have consciously uncoupled from the Kennedy Center, which Center was perfectly fine until Donald Trump smeared Trump all over it.
The situation reminds me of this post of Hamilton Nolan’s How Things Work from earlier this month titled “If He Builds It, Tear It Down,” providing a prescient bit of advice on how to digest these news items.
As soon as Republicans leave the White House, the next president should tear it down.
Nolan is writing about the ballroom that Trump commanded to be built on top of what used to the the East Wing of the White House, but it applies universally to all such fuckery.
It should be noted that Trump’s pathological obsession with slapping his name on stuff and/or turning DC into a gilt-bomb of Mar-a-Lagocity has nothing to do with the animating forces of his current administration–to wit, Stephen Miller’s genocidal bigotry, Russell Vought’s monomanical intent to murder all non-military aspects of the federal government, and Marco Rubio’s ultimate goal of withdrawing America from any international entanglement outside of the Western Hemisphere. Building ballrooms and statue gardens and curating armrests is what Trump is spending his time on, when not leading dear-leader sessions or slurringly rambling at the press corps. It’s what he cares about, and it’s what distracts him from any care or concern over the actions of his administration.
All the evil shit, like disappearing citizens and blowing up innocent fishermen? That’s his day job. Picking out gold leaf is what he does for love.
This would be a bit charming, were not evil twisted men manipulating him into committing atrocity after atrocity. (And were he not deeply evil himself.)
Fortunately:
The pendulum is going to swing hard, motherfuckers. Hard enough to smash those walls into dust.
Subscribe to Hamilton Nolan! He’s a top-notch writer, and he occasionally allows himself to share exhortations with the reader, which I find apt and useful. You won’t regret it.
That Trump insists on refashioning institutions in his own image is largelynotpermitted is besides the point–refashion he will, as surely as Andrew Cuomo slapped his dad’s name on the Tappan Zee bridge. And even when he names something after himself on a legitimate basis, it is an act that bespeaks cringe and not confidence.
Obviously the political will to oppose this bloated namifying, if it exists at all, should be expended on more dire tendrils of Trump’s fascism (disappearing our neighbors, codifying racism and bigotry, conducting illegal wars, etc.). And yet.
Over the holidays, musician Chuck Redd, who has hosted a Kennedy Center Christmas Eve concert called Jazz Jam since 2006, canceled this year’s show on five days’ notice. The reason given was Trump’s decision to (awkwardly) rename The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts after himself.
Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people.
And the Trump-installed president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, issued a statement in the form of a letter to Rudd.
If you are not familiar with Richard Grenell, he is a longtime consultant/GOP functionary who found his true calling when he realized that lickspittling Donald Trump was the road to success. Since then, he has been ambassador to Germany and Director of National Intelligence, and, early in the second Trump administration, integral in securing the release of the Tate brothers from Romania, where they had been held on charges of sex trafficking and rape. Grenell is truly the utility infielder of Trump sycophants.
Grenell’s “letter” to Rudd is a brief couple hundred words of character assassination with a nod to “certain elements of the left” and a threat to sue. And in case you were wondering, the Trump-led Kennedy Center is doing just great:
Our innovative KC Speakeasy—an intimate rooftop after-hours venue featuring live jazz—has consistently sold out, attracting diverse audiences and revitalizing the genre in exciting ways.
The most interesting aspect of the legal threat is its arbitrariness. The grounds for such action cited are Rudd’s “dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with [Rudd’s] last-minute cancelation,” which seem to be two valid claims forced to share a studio apartment against their will, and the amount of damages sought–“$1 million”–is entirely unsupported, although a nice round number.
Further, and I speak from experience, customarily when performing artists agree to perform at a venue on a future date, this exotic legal mechanism known as a “contract” is employed, which sets forth the terms of agreement on things like, time, place, compensation and–I’m not kidding–what happens if one side or the other cancels the show.
In any event, while consisting of more words than Trump would ever read in one sitting, the letter remains a limp attempt to look busy for Boss Trump, and an even limper swing at bullying Rudd and artists like Rudd who would just rather not.
Trump toadies claim that these are “political” acts. I think that is only vaguely true. If Rudd or any future artists cancel with stated motivations of opposition to policies (and there are a lot of rancid policies to choose from), then sure! Political act. However, opposition to Trump pathologically insisting that the entirety of American society must be Trump-branded isn’t a political decision, it’s a personal decision. Rudd (et alia) aren’t opposing anything Trump has done other than make it about Trump. They are refusing to bend the knee to the self-proclaimed emperor.
As a person who has made art in the past and intends to make art in the future, I say that the assertion that there is a “duty to perform” on behalf of a “public artist” is fucking horseshit, and any outlet that repeats such assertion without a modifier is not very good at their job. There are no obligations or duties intrinsic to the act of making art, and to claim otherwise is to tell on one’s self. The outrage of the toadies is aimed at the refusal of others to toadie, no matter what “duties” they claim.
To insist that an artist must perform for you is unabashed, late stage fascism. Only dictators insist that an artist must appear and entertain the dictator and his court, and only the most fragile dictators, afraid of what the future may hold for them, will threaten an artist with penalty for failing to do so.
And toadies notwithstanding, slapping his name on shit will not convince people that Trump is any less shitty as a president (or a person!), and will keep us all busy re-renaming things once he has shuffled off this mortal coil.
What is at stake here is not our compliance, but rather their own self-regard. Trump can seize all the power, Trump can impose his moldy will on the institutions of the government, but Trump and his stans will never get what they truly want: respect and adulation. No matter how hard they wishcast a Trump Reich, they will never be beloved. The great artists of the world will never perform at their whim, let alone treat them as anything but sad soulless uncouth motherfuckers.
Just finished office hours and when I tell you every single student started their meeting by saying how excited they are about Zohran. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them so hopeful. One student said “I needed a win.”
I don’t know if it’s a win I needed as much as a sense that actual normal Americans are ready to fight. Because the slow motion, full-society gaslighting that is Donald Trump is making off with increasingly large bits of everyone’s sanity, with each passing, atrocity-filled week.
But back to Zohran Mamdani, and the qualities that made him Mayor-elect: simply, he’s a charismatic guy who made a point of campaigning for something and not against something, to represent a constituency that he actually cheerleads.
Eric Adams’ New York was a grim hopeless place in which the poorest of us had to make sacrifices for the comfort for the richest of us. (For that matter, Andrew Cuomo’s NYC was a placed he was raised in 50 years ago and avoided ever since. And Curis Sliwa’s still has “muggers” on the subway.) Mamdani’s New York is not a storybook or a fairy tale. It is the New York that all but the billionaires actually live in, and Mamdani is one of us, gleefully.
And underlying his charismatic embrace of Gotham, is an innate competence, as Frank Rich describes:
A smart, focused guy who listens to others and welcomes tough questions; who is transparent and consistent on the core political convictions that guide him; who is not an ideologue or a glib Pez dispenser of consultantspeak; and, no less important, who knows what he doesn’t know.
The significance of mayoral win is not just the W on the board. It’s the restoration of certain qualities of public figures that have been consigned to the Trumpheap of history: honesty, wisdom and hubris.
Whether “my team” wins or loses–I don’t think in such terms. In fact I think that (along with all the other ways that our society is broken) thinking of governance as some sort of tribal warfare is profoundly bad for society, a bloody zero-sum game that no one ever wins.
I think the election of Mamdani is good for me, as I like Mamdani, but good for every normal person in this city, who is animated by anything other than spite and greed. It’s good for his legion of volunteers, it’s good for his reluctant voters, and it will good for all those who embraced the bigotry of Cuomo.
You have been afforded the opportunity to be sick of hearing the name Zohran Mamdani. He is running for mayor, so if you live here, you have seen his signage, maybe received a door-knock. He is good at social media, so you may have shared/liked/followed. Also the establishment hates him, so you also may have seen a take or two–or even stories framed as news coverage–about the dangers of Mamdani becoming mayor of the largest city in America.
You may even have heard his name, mispronounced, on the lips of the man whose joyless demand that he be given Gracie Mansion as his birthright was interrupted by losing the primary to Mamdani. But whatever: fuck Andrew Cuomo, that soulless evil piece of drizzling shit.
Me, I voted for Mamdani this morning, and am very excited by his candidacy, not only for the future of the city I live in, but for the effect that having an elected official like Mamdani would have on the vibe, nation-wide. Here’s why:
Zohran Mamdani is running on the premise that if New York can be better, it can also be better for everyone in New York. The wealthy are taken care of in this city, and they always have been. But for decades, under Republican and Democrat administrations, the sole benefit for anyone other than the wealthy has intentionally been the satisfaction that at least the wealthy are taken care of. Public housing is a shambling mound of neglect, our school system has to fight for scraps from billionaire-led charter schools, and our infrastructure crumbles as edifices to the wealthy are built. This is not the worst city to be poor in, but it is a bad city to be poor in.
And Mamdani’s proposals to address this–which are as much FDR liberalism as they are socialist–offer solutions more than the unserious band-aids of tax credits, or reduced-fares. Mamdani gets it that the comfort of the wealthy does not rise to the level of societal problem when the middle class and lower suffer.
Can it happen? I don’t know. But what if we fucking tried?
As Mamdani eloquently (always) put it yesterday:
UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 5: Vito MarcantonioThere are many who dismiss our vision for New York as impossible. To them, I say we need look only to our past for proof of how we can shape the future.Tomorrow is Election Day. And this is the final Until It's Done of our campaign.
“Are we brave enough to believe in a city that benefits us all?”
Damn, but he is good. And I don’t mean to pretend that Mamdani has never had media training, and, if he has, that he has not benefited from it. But so many candidates (and elected officials) communicate in such a contrived manner as to appear in a constant state of disingenuity–weird polish that never traverses the Uncanny Valley. Mamdani appears to believe what he says when he is saying it.
There is also the effect that Mamdani has had so far, as a straw man. The forces aligned to stop Zohran Mamdani at any cost include not just usual suspects like Mayor Adams, the NYPD, Trump and Trump toadies like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and pathetic nobody Bill Ackman, but also Andrew Cuomo and the entire centrist wing of the Democratic Party. At first glance, a very big tent. However, at second glance, the secret revealed is that these unlikely bedfellows are not unlikely at all, but united in what they fear. Putting a name on what they fear will be an interesting task.
But for now, we wait and see what happens. (One thing that’s happened: Results are not even in, and Establishment Dems are already publicly wringing their hands.)
Hopefully, the chance that you are tired of hearing the name of Zohran Mamdani will continue.
They are literally all over the house, on shelves, stacks, tables. Our apartment is basically a little less than fifty percent comprised by my books. They may well be load-bearing.
This is something that has brought me great joy. The look of them, the smell of them. They have accompanied me on this long journey, always a few (“few”) more with each passing year.
We even have a storage unit, which was not primarily for the books, but once the storage unit was a possibility, some books found their way over. To make room for more books, of course. And no trip to store more stuff in the storage unit is complete without popping open a box of two of books and grabbing a handful to bring back, to be stacked, in the bedroom, or the bathroom, or in the entry way.
Mutely these books have stood witness through a whole lot of eating dinner and watching TV and sleeping and reading the other books. Beneath their silent gaze, I have grown from a young man, to a man who is not really young at all, no matter how he dresses. Through years and years of good decisions and bad decisions and all the decisions in between.
These books are my friends, of course, but now that I have attained the age in which one scans the obituaries with a keener interest than before, I am realizing that as I am childless, someday–hopefully someday so far in the distance that the urine on the president’s tombstone will itself be old enough to have little urine children of its own–all these books will be somebody else’s problem.
This concerns me, but only a little, as when such time as the books are somebody else’s problem, they will be beyond my (earthly) control.
But what does concern me, what stopped me in my tracks when the realization came crashing down on my bad haircut, is this: No matter how young or old I am, there will never be enough time to read all the books I want to read. If I were to retire tomorrow, and devote my waking moments solely to reading, when all is said and done the books in the “To Read” pile will be no smaller than when I started. This was true 25 years ago, and it will be true 25 years from now.
This assertion is based purely on the books written and published to date, and not books to be written/to be published. Woe betide anyone who dares thumb through this week’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, or opens a Tuesday email from Bookshop. How long would it take to read all the books you want to read published in a single year? In a single week?
Sometimes it seems, as literacy withers and dies, that the whole bunch of us who read books are outnumbered by the other whole bunch of us who write books. Surely this can’t be true, or at least is only true in incremental part.
It doesn’t make me feel lost, or bereft, only a little sad.
Which, in this national environment of spiraling shittiness, wondering which of our neighbors secretly voted for someone who is (feebly) deadset on killing all who dare not kneel before him, is a cute little distraction from all the other bad things.
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 goodthings 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.
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.
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.
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.
Odd selection of magazines in the jury room.
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.
