Another Week: Number 72

I have amnesia. My country has constipation.

My amnesia is deliberate and defensive. On Saturday, Chris, my mail carrier, came to my door and expressed his condolences over Amy in person, although he also sent a card months ago. I couldn’t talk about it. I had to stick to the Campanula Portenschlagiana he was delivering.

Like someone in a standard amnesia story, I’m piecing my identity together bit by bit. I try to recall clues about who I might be. I create new routines. On Friday night, I even watched a Cubs game, both as a live connection to the present and as a souvenir of my past.

Mostly, though, my live connection to the present has been listening to MSNBC and CNN via TuneIn, and for weeks now, that has meant moment-by-moment coverage of Donald Trump’s cover-up trial.

MSNBC’s mid-morning lineup has become nearly unlistenable, so I have turned more often to CNN, but they might even be worse. CNN has Trump Trial theme music that evokes the Second Coming. Their analysts spit out a high quantity of words whether they’re the right words or not. Partisans are invited in to spew propaganda because the appearance of balance is more important than insight. The same clichés are repeated every few minutes as though they’re sudden revelations. Anderson Cooper asks people questions that they just answered seconds ago. The emphasis is on inflection and stress for its own sake — as if they’re straining at … something.

I have spent countless hours listening to this coverage, just as I have over the last nine years with the January 6th hearings, two impeachments, the Mueller investigation, and all the rest. Many people would regard this as a colossal and pointless waste of time — but I care about the future of my country, and it’s been hijacked by a triviality.

It reminds me of a reflex Kurt Vonnegut once described:

One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you.

Think of all the electricity and aspirin and time and money and human potential and progress that has been wasted in the past nine years over something completely ridiculous: Trump.

Families are at a standoff. Congress is clogged. The Supreme Court grunts and sweats.

It’s not stuck dental floss. We’re constipated. Our national digestive system has been cramped and kinked by a rotten egg that Stormy Daniels once described on Twitter as “the orange turd.”

Six years ago, Donald Trump flew over my house in a helicopter en route to a groundbreaking ceremony in nearby Mount Pleasant where he and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker used golden shovels to inaugurate what Trump touted as the “eighth wonder of the world,”  a Foxconn plant that never materialized except for a green glass globe — constipation on an industrial scale.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden visited here and proclaimed that things are finally moving again. Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, joined him to announce a $3.3 billion data center on Foxconn’s former land that will create 2,000 jobs.

This November, we have our one chance to finally put this whole stressful, humiliating era behind us for good and get back to normality and regularity.

Imagine going five, six, or even seven days without once hearing about Trump. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful relief?