white elephants

I married a man I had only known for three months. When my eleven year-old son asked me why, I responded that I was worried about getting deported. I was on a journalist’s visa - a visa that was tied to a newspaper I had only freelanced at once, years before - and I knew that if anyone stirred up the mulch around me, the fact I was unemployed and swinging from job to job like a manic monkey on speed would quickly become apparent.

Back then people did not worry too much about things like deportation. Deportation was something that happened to black and brown people from remote, third world muslim countries, or Mexicans. We did not, as a whole, care about these demographics. When I said I got married for citizenship, people scoffed a little, even when I explained I was involved in a lot of grassroots activism which made an arrest - and consequently, the loss of a visa or green card - much more likely. But I was white. Educated. Deportations did not happen to people like me. Neither did being undocumented, working in a stripclub, being homeless, marrying an addict, yet here we are. Now we are losing our diplomats and our lawyers and our doctors and our scientists, and I think now we might be approaching a certain realization that we should care. We should care very, very much.

I was driving down Jefferson Boulevard today. The chill damp and the forboding gray clouds had finally gone, and whatever passes for spring in LA had arrived: 71 degrees and a cloudless sky, the kind of sky that makes me ache for London. I listened to Thomas Sipp explain soberly why he had left his law firm, Skadden, after they had signed an agreement with Trump. Skadden had been targeted by Trump for its progressive diversity and probono program. Musk had put them in the crosshairs, Trump had pulled the trigger.

So I’m sitting there driving to USC, which recently scrubbed DEI from its website in obeisance to our dictator, and has systematically eradicated the majority of its adjunct faculty because they unionized, and I realized with a sharp acid twist, how it felt to be regular person in Nazi Germany. We make jokes about White Lotus, tut at the price of eggs, fret that we can’t afford French wine, scroll through some posts, wonder how we can make rent, and go through life wondering at what point we will be forced to make the choice between morality, and our own safety. At what point we will decide that we might have to sacrifice ourselves before we send someone else to the gas chambers. After class today I stood and chatted with a writer friend, and I said without joking, ‘at what point do the death camps start? Is it in a month? Six months?’

It’s moving so fast. No one has seen fascism move this fast before. Masha Gessen writes of this in their book, Surviving Autocracy, which will soon be banned. They have never seen fascism move this fast. It took Putin years to get this far.

One of my most neurodivergent traits is my bulldozer-like commitment to truth and justice. If someone is fucking up a script, I’ll tell them they’re fucking up a script. If an exec is an idiot, I’ll tell them they’re an idiot, and if I’m being treated unfairly, I will not shut up about how I’m being treated unfairly. People talk about masking all the time. If this is what I’m like when I’m purportedly ‘masking’, imagine the Chernobyl-like potential I have within me. But my commitment to truth and justice throughout my life has taught me that most people do not have a commitment to truth and justice. Most people actively participate in the white elephant lie of social norms because it soothes them. People do not like being confronted with the truth. People like the extra leg room of the lie. If you are being treated unfairly, you want me on your side. But if you are complicit in the unfairness, you will despise me.

All this is to say, that I have not been living freely for ten years now. I know how bad things can get. I know that visas can get revoked and parents can be separated from their children and it doesn’t matter how educated you are when it comes down to the cruelly uncompromising and illogical letter of the law. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of my situation was going to court and pathetically expecting truth and justice to prevail, being naive enough to think that courts and laws and lawyers were about truth and justice.

None of us can actually believe this now.

I gave up Op-Ed writing because, believe it or not, I did not enjoy being the target of so much online hatred and bullying. I’m still not quite sure of where my position is in this rapidly changing fascist landscape. I am a citizen, but I do not think that means much in this land anymore - meaning I am sure it can and would be taken away from someone who has naturalized.

It would be so easy to just talk about White Lotus. I can’t tell you how many of my friends declare, without shame, that they simply don’t read the news anymore as it’s too depressing.

I was depressed when they took my child away. I was depressed when they handed him over to an abusive addict. I was depressed when they removed from me the ability to work. I was depressed when the work I had treated me badly and my agents did not speak up for me. I was depressed when people refused to pay me. I was depressed when journalism tanked, then TV and film tanked. I was depressed when all of my teaching jobs dried up as university budgets got slashed. I was depressed, I was depressed and it has gone so far now, that I do not think I could ever just get on Bumble and settle into dating until I find the right person and manufacture an existence within this utterly horrific reality we live in.

Where are my dissenters. Where are my people, the ones who will not just keep living life with their head down until this is over. The ones who don’t turn away in horror because I’m too blunt, I’m too honest, it interrupts the daily fantasy. Where oh where.