Good morning, or morning, anyway. It is November 6th. It is a bright morning in New York City, hot and humid with the fumes from the death of the inhabitable climate, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Because reality is bound and determined to keep serving up heavy-handed symbolism, I have to report that the New York Times did not show up this morning. Not figuratively, like it didn't show up all these months when called to duty to accurately describe the apocalyptic circumstances of the presidential contest, but just literally there was no morning newspaper on the stoop. I thought they might have pushed back the print deadline to try to get an election result into the paper, but if they did, they didn't manage to bring it around.

You had one job, and you didn't accomplish even the least piece of it. Not knowing whether looking at the mobile website counted as crossing the picket line of the striking tech guild, when I picked up my phone this morning after a long night of lying in bed, I let the Washington Post tell me “Trump triumphs.” Concise, accurate. Jeff Bezos has sent a congratulatory tweet, using the platform provided by Elon Musk, the most powerful and influential person in media whose fire hose of overt Nazi propaganda accomplished more this election season than any amount of earnest reporting. The billionaires who didn't want this will make their peace with the billionaires who did, and the rest of it will land on the rest of us. To say nothing of the Gazans, who saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu get a jump on the American election by dismissing accused war criminal Yoav Gallant as his defense minister and replacing him with someone even more enthusiastic about the genocide. Best of luck to the still surviving people of Gaza. Best of luck to the people of Ukraine. Best of luck to anyone who is going to need obstetrical care in the United States. 

In the lead New York Times story, which looks like it wouldn't have made it into the print edition anyway. The topic sentence is, “now America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248 year history.” That would be news to a lot of people who lived through a lot of the history, but it's still a catastrophe, whether it's precedented or not. The fact that we've done mass deportation before doesn't mean that this time around won't achieve new horrors. But rather than trying to keep on measuring the depth of the new wound by seeing how much salt can be packed into it. Let's just go back and look at what Wallace Shawn wrote for the New York Review of Books in October of 2020, the last time that his second Trump term was a possibility. 

The essay was called “Developments Since My Birth,” and in it, Shawn described the post-war optimism about American goodness into which he was born, and, his awakening by stages, to what this country's past and ongoing record in the world and at home really consisted of. 

“Now that I’m seventy-six,  he wrote, “when I remember the way I used to feel—when I think about how important it once seemed to me to tell people the truth about the crimes in which we all were implicated—well, that all seems quaint and sad. It turns out that by the time the American public learned the sorts of things I’d felt they needed to learn, by the time they came to look in the mirror, what they saw there didn’t look so bad to them. And so, yes, an awful lot of people don’t get upset when they hear Trump talk. On the contrary,” Sean continued, “they seem to feel a great sense of relief. Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of this sermon on the mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties, the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable, was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty. All of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn't need to feel bad because they didn't care about other people. Maybe they didn't want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn't want to be gentle or kind.” 

At the end of the essay, Shawn writes, “Over the decades of my life, America’s morale has declined, I’d say. There was a dignity to feeling kind and good. It was enjoyable. On the other hand, the lack of connection between what we felt we were and what we actually were was dangerous and led to the death of a lot of people. Personally, I have nothing to complain about in regard to my country. America has always been good to me, and so it’s really hard for me to believe that Donald Trump’s face is the true face of America. 

“If I look back at my own life, I’d have to say that the sunny faces of the soldiers in postwar Europe, the friendly faces of the boys who lifted me up to sit in their jeeps, seem like better representations of the way I’ve been treated, and so for me those faces really do seem like the face of my country. But for those countless others, in the cities and towns of the USA and in countries far away, to whom America has not been good, the face of America has always and forever been the face of Donald Trump.” Wallace Shawn, 2020.

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Your subscription dollars sustain our podcasting work. So please do subscribe and support us. Take a walk, see the sun, pace yourself. It's going to be four very long years. And I really might need some other sign off since “if all goes well” doesn't seem like it's going to cut it. So if circumstances permit, we will talk again tomorrow.