EAST MONTPELIER – A few months ago I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker. In it, a king stands on his raised veranda with an aide, looking down on an obviously angry crowd armed with pitchforks and torches. Nonplussed, he turns to his courtier, who advises something like this: “You don’t have to put anyone down, sire. You just have to convince the torch people that the pitchfork people are trying to take their torches.”
In the political condition in which the United States currently finds itself, that cartoon was (as we used to say in grammar school) about as funny as a rubber crutch. Because it’s true. The architects, authors, and advance-persons of the system creating for our president a gilded, entitled image of himself have succeeded far better than many of us who’ve been around a while thought they could.
Even here in Vermont, where it’s been fairly easy for many of us to feel we’re living in a bubble, in a blip beneath the radar, we’re beginning to feel it. Chicago and Portland, Ore., may get all the media attention, but we’re now attracting the notice of the expanding crowd of masked, black-clad, largely anonymous goons with a clearly vague grasp of Constitutional law and a lively sense of mission: that mission being to rid the country of non- or not quite white people who’re probably violent members of some Latin American terrorist group stealing American jobs.
I give scant credence to most of what comes in here on the internet, but this story came in today and I can’t find any way to fact-check it yet. Apparently, a woman of color in St. Albans was overheard by a patriotic citizen speaking with an accent. The patriot informed the authorities of this suspicious behavior, and the woman was “detained” (that word has grown ugly horns) for questioning. I don’t know how long the detainment lasted, or what went down, but eventually she was released.
A film worth seeing if you ever get a chance is “Das Leben der Anderen” (“The Lives of Others”). It won many awards when it was released in 2006. Set in Communist East Germany, it follows the efforts of the Stasi, the secret police, to record and transcribe everything that is spoken in the apartment of a journeyman playwright, a suspected enemy of the state. It’s a great plot, but to me the most memorable feature of the film is its recreation of the universal suspicion that pervades East German society. The government has so thoroughly managed to plant the fear of spies (in our current American parlance, “the enemy within”) that offering an opinion to anyone else, even a supposedly trusted friend, is dangerous and possibly lethal.
The effect is ominous, threatening, and draped in gray and black.
There’s no doubt that we here in the so-called united states are operating on the fringes of that mutual and universal suspicion. Reading the various responses to the Facebook post about the woman detained in St. Albans is quite an eye-opener. Most respondents (this is, after all, Vermont) are offended and outraged at her treatment. A few suggest it was only a mild inconvenience, and she was soon on her merry way.
So it’s come to Vermont, with an apparent focus on the northern part of the state, where Canada disgorges felons and undocumented migrants into the brave little state whose Republican governor has so far politely declined to hold tea parties and all-you-can-eat buffets for the brutish chaps and women in the unmarked black vehicles.
It’s nothing new. Even before the American Revolution, we were at each other’s throats in legislative debate. The November 2025 issue of The Atlantic describes our founders’ travails in breaking with our motherland. Patriots and Loyalists were irreconcilable. As the revolutionary spirit grew, Loyalists with valuable property and land fled for their lives to the Eastern Townships of Quebec. To this day, the Anglican Church and the English language are common throughout the townships.
We deplore the black vehicles that cruise Chicago (San Francisco would have been next but for the intervention of “some friends of mine” who dissuaded the president from sending them). We’ve been at this sort of thing forever, almost all of our country’s life. The British burned the White House; now our own president is tearing it down. Important bureaus of our government are commanded by political hacks. We’ve been conditioned to dislike and distrust each other. Every day we’re thrown another bone to fight over, to distract us from demanding information that inevitably, will change almost everything. The Stasi files, now open, make interesting reading.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
