Shout

There is a scale to the Trump project that is beyond the ability of most people to grasp. It’s like trying to imagine the vastness of the universe. There’s a point at which an astronomer’s enumeration of stars, systems and galaxies becomes white noise, obscuring distinctions and explanations.

The best popularizers of science understand that, before science is for anything, it’s for helping us understand our place in the universe. They know how to be vivid and succinct, to cut through the noise and get to the heart-stopping point. Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions” and “pale blue dot” did more than a thousand lectures on the nature of gamma-ray bursts ever could to help people understand what the vastness of the universe *means* for humanity. And his passionate belief in the urgency of that meaning made people listen to his message.

The events of the last few days: the intrusion into the payment systems at the heart of the federal government, the Stalinist purge of the FBI, Department of Justice and other agencies, the usurpation of congressional power of appropriations by the Executive, the erasure of data and information at an array of agencies, including the CDC, NIH, NLB and others, the gutting of the FAA and ATSB, the freezing out of tens of thousands of government workers from their own computers, the firing of Inspectors General, the blatant extortion of publicly traded corporations, the doxxing of fired federal employees, the mad king insanity of emptying reservoirs into Central Valley farmland… it’s starting to sound like an endless drone, isn’t it? It’s unfathomably vast.

An event like this — and it should be seen as a single event by those entrusted with stopping it — is entirely, comically unsusceptible to the prods and pokes of by-the-book government. No amount of well-intentioned insistence on proper procedure will slow the dismantling of the government by the enemies of procedure, government, and the well-intentioned.

The Senators, Congresspeople and journalists in place now may not have asked for the awesome responsibility that’s been imposed on them by this moment, but it’s theirs nonetheless, and we should hope with our whole hearts that they will rise to the challenge.

Many of them already are. AOC is speaking in ways that cut through the drone of Washington to the heart of the perilous matter. But that’s an instinct that many of her colleagues, as creatures of carefulness, moderation, laws and institutions, lack. An instinct for drama. For vivid language that makes painfully clear the life-and-death stakes of the moment.

The battle can only be fought on the field where it’s happening, and this is a battle for the attention of a population too exhausted to spend it on the precisely enumerated powers of the Secretary of Health and Human Sevices.

This battle is happening so far from the well of the Senate, in places so foreign to the makers of laws, that no laws exist to govern it. The founders were extraordinarily prescient, but even they didn’t envision an unelected, foreign-born robber baron attempting to steal millions from the US Treasury and fire a million people from the federal workforce.

We need to let our country’s defenders know we want them to act big, in attention-grabbingly clear and dramatic gestures of righteous passion. Words that would, in saner times, never cross their lips need to be spoken now, loudly and often. Fascist. Dictator. Liar. Racist. Thief. Enemy. Collapse.

What’s happening is so big many of us lack the facility to fully grasp it. Many of us instinctively retreat from news at a time like this, and assume that, if events were of sufficient enormity to warrant full-page, front-page, screaming from the rooftops warnings, surely those warnings would come. If circumstances were so dire as to justify dispensing with norms and protocols and traditions surely those things would be ignored. Surely.

It’s no exaggeration to say our survival — as a democracy or even beyond that — depends on rewarding that entirely reasonable faith.