EAST MONTPELIER – One of the advantages of a three-day weekend is that we get an extra day just to talk. It doesn’t matter what else we may be doing, there’s just more time to chat and share points of view on what’s happening around us. Thanks to the wild cascade of news created by the Trump administration, there’s little problem of finding a subject. It’s a blessing to me that Bea usually sees more sides of an issue than I do, and she’s typically done more reading about it than I have.
This weekend just past, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s, birthday, was perfect. We had only two social events: the Saturday morning Kaffeeklatsch at Capitol Grounds and the performance of a delightful sort-of-Shakespearean farce that evening at the local theater. I have two reclining chairs in the living room again, and it’s the perfect time of year to sit in there with the light streaming in from behind. Kiki pretty much lives in my lap these days, so the three of us just sat while the two of us commented on the news flooding in on my cell phone or her laptop.
If a playwright were to try to recreate what’s been in the news in the past few weeks, the result would be a farce-fantasy. People leaving the theater afterward would be saying. “Boy, it’s hard to imagine all that happening here!” Yes, it is. But it is.
Minneapolis appears to be the biggest story, if only because it seems to be at a fever pitch, involves thousands of people, and presents thousands of videographic episodes. It also represents the perfection of the president’s expressed ambition: to punish liberal enclaves that contain hundreds of juicy opportunities to arrest and harass vulnerable populations of immigrants. Bea has family there who cannot be among the demonstrators, so she has a particular interest in the developing situation.
The whole mess is complicated by confusion over the authority of the bullyboys to detain, arrest or confine suspected candidates for transportation. It appears they have little, if any, and have abused it occasionally, notably with regard to children. But as the murder of Renee Good illustrates all too clearly, the presence of weapons creates a background of threatening violence. Still, I really enjoy the video of a 35-ish Mediterranean-looking woman who responds to a large, armored goon grabbing at her by whacking him repeatedly and hollering, “Beat it! Beat it!” Which he does.
The whole mess is fraught with the threat of the president declaring the existence of an emergency as a pretext for sending in troops. Speaking of which, the pretext for sending in ICE in the first place was the alleged presence of thousands of undocumented Somali immigrants who were committing violent crimes and bilking the government of billions of dollars. There are exponentially many more undocumented immigrants in Houston or Miami than in Minnesota, but those states and their governors are friendly to the administration.
If I were one of the goons, I’d a damn sight rather be in Texas or Florida right now. Minnesota is really cold, and the locals make noise to keep interlopers awake at night. In addition, someone has apparently been reading the contract that a goon signs and sharing the fine print with the lads who signed it. The word is, that $50,000 signing bonus is paid out in $10,000 annual increments; and if you quit before five years’ service, you have to pay back the money you’ve received to date. True or not, that’s got to make even a bullyboy become a bit thoughtful, especially if his toes are icy cold all day and his boss, Tom Homan, got his $50,000 non-taxable, in a paper bag.
So we pass the quiet parts of the day, tossing the conversation back and forth like a volleyball. Occasionally we agree that there’s no point in commenting on the fitness of the president for office. Those of us who deplore his presence couldn’t possibly think any less of him than we do (for us the Epstein files will be simply evidence for what we already believe); those who defend him are beyond convincing otherwise.
There are brighter spots in the conversation. We’re looking forward to a trip down the Rhine in the break between Bea’s last class and commencement; maybe a trip to visit friends in Nova Scotia in May; a tour of the Yorkshire Dales in September (all this from a guy who no longer dares buy green bananas). But then one of our devices pings, and we read that Himself has told the Norwegian prime minister he wants to take over Greenland because he’s failed to win a Nobel Peace prize. Also that he’s storing in Qatar the proceeds from the sale of hijacked oil. This stuff never gets old.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
