Bodies Will Swing

What one woman wanted of Trump's return. This was her dream. We're getting there.

Playwright Caridad Svich has recorded a reading of this essay if you’d rather listen.

Bodies will swing, said the desk clerk. Sure Stay, a Best Western subsidiary, a motel I’d rolled into late because I couldn’t drive further. The clerk’s name tag said Janet. I think she was in her seventies, her face etched and falling, her eyes an almost alarmingly bright blue, caged by magenta frames. The wall behind her was deep purple, there was a bright orange metal chair beside her. “They’re all going to hang!” She grinned, hoisting “them” in the air with both hands. The “Deep State”; the traffickers, the diddlers, the traitors, each demanding the article, THE. As if each was an enemy nation. Our enemies, his enemies. “My president’s!” Also, God’s.

Where was the line, the border, between God and Trump?

She shrugged. She was no theologian. She smiled. She was a desk clerk. She wanted to be welcoming.

How had we come to speaking of gallows? I think it was the cold. Outside, a “snap”; brittle. “All the way down to Florida,” Janet had observed. I was headed west, to Asheville, the wake of Helene. “The storm,” she’d said.

I’d nodded. “The aftermath,” I’d said. We were talking about the weather, which made her think of God, which reminded her of retribution.

“One thing,” she said: “God is in control.”

The hard weather, the election—signs that we’re getting a second chance. “To clean up.” Hence what she believed would be, with Trump’s ascendence, a purge.

I asked about her church. She didn’t have one. “Because they lie.” She hated the church’s rules. Who you could hate, who you could not. The fixed laws of man are insult to God’s unknowable mind. She belonged only to the vast church of the weather, a storm church of millions who believe in God’s anger and love but not the steeple or the pews. A growing congregation. Lick a finger and raise it in the air, feel the currents shifting. “We’ll get the truth and the knowledge!” She was excited. “Which we hope will be coming out pretty soon!” We’re fighting, she thought, “narrative war.”

She handed me a check-in form to sign. “No pets, no smoking, that’s it,” she said. There was a stack of newspapers on the counter, the Asheboro Courier-Tribune. They were two days old. I asked if I could buy one. “Complimentary!” she said, sliding one off the pile. I scanned it, waiting for my key. Top story: cabinetry plant in the nearby town of Liberty was closing. The company wanted to consolidate, “to optimize the footprint.” Beneath that, these bright blue eyes, newsprint saturation:

A father and a mother, indicted for murdering their child, referred to as “the girl,” unnamed. The rest of the paper was a police blotter in bullet point form: two men had stolen a trailer with which to carry away loot from break-ins; a man and a woman had stolen a car in which to get high; a man with a machete had interrupted a local family’s Thanksgiving dinner; a man had been arrested for something to do with sex and a child, but there is “no information.” Also, four Asheboro Blue Comets made it to the all-state boys soccer team. Everyone was pictured—mugshots—but for the Comets.

“I love it,” Janet said. She meant the sharp weather outside, not the news. It was two days old, anyway. Nobody reads a paper anymore. She was from up north, Massachusetts, and the cold felt like home. She’d come south to care for her mother, but her mother had died. “She’s with the Lord.” Ninety-eight, they’d lived together the last twenty years, God had given them time. “I’m good,” she said. “Well, I’m really not that good about it. But I can’t get mad at the Lord. Because He does what He wants to do!” She laughed and then she didn’t laugh. “Regardless of how I feel.”

She looked at the counter. “Oh,” she said, “where did you put that paper?” Without thinking I’d pocketed the check-in form.

“I thought it was my receipt.”

Janet grinned. “Silly goose!”

Another guest arrived, checked in, went to her room. Janet leaned over the counter, peer out through the glass door. “We’ll have to hurry up,” she said. Our conversation. “Before Beverly gets here.” Her boss. Beverly, she said, shares some of her views. But she doesn’t like Janet to talk about the weather.

***

I was going to gather my notes from the week in fascism. Our new fascism. Same as, different from, the old. I was going to begin some kind of case for its newness, drawing on the insights of so many who’ve observed its inversions: the way it weaponizes the language of civil rights on behalf of white supremacy, and the language of feminist critique on behalf of masculinist misogyny; the way it has immunized itself to satire by appropriating satire’s structures if not its humor; the way it has deployed “unity” as a sledgehammer to smash communities, to foment suspicion, to paralyze even so many of the good-hearted.

But I’m no theorist. Lately, in my day job, I’ve had to read some theory. Literary, political. I’m grateful for them, the theorists who draw us up out of the panic of the present and into the long conversation.

And yet, I find myself troubled by what seems, sometimes, like theory’s retreat from the moment; its awareness of the difficulty of the term “fact” trotted out as a blanket under which to hide from daily breaking facts of the regime.

I was speaking the other day with the journalist Kathryn Joyce, currently investigative editor at In These Times—one of the many little leftist political magazines that needs your support now, whether you agree with every word or not. Kathryn and I are longtime friends and fellow travelers, sometimes collaborators. We found ourselves talking about political theorists bickering over the question of when to use the f-word, fascism. The gendered aspect of it, the way so many of these men declaring “actually…” are, well, men, deeply learned, and you will know their learning. That’s ok, we agreed. We felt grateful for their work, too. But I found myself blurting, without quite thinking it out: “the theorists have failed us. It’s who-what-where-when-why time.”

Strange words for days when journalism is in free-fall, and when so many—but not all!—journalists are failing the moment, or being failed by their bosses, or being condemned by their own allies. That’s for a future post. I think I meant something like that which might start with the above. Listening?

That word, “listening,” is too often mistaken for a synonym of sympathy. It’s not. I listened to Janet because Janet wanted to talk with me. She opened a conversation; I took out my notebook; I wrote down her words, she added more for me to record. This was not an investigation. Not even a “portrait,” which is why I’ve fractured the image. We made plans to meet the next day at her home, but they were never realized. She was scared, she said, that I was one of them, a traitor, one who would hang. She did not want to get to close to me.

She scared me, too. Which is ridiculous, right? I’m a middle class white man with tenure. She works a precarious job with a bad boss. I have you, my readers. She has only One America News, which broadcasts but does not receive.

Yes, and. Let’s not use our awareness of position as a weapon of inversion against ourselves—deciding for others when it’s safe for them to speak, which is a way of deciding who gets to speak, which is about power, which is also about the illusion of protecting ourselves. As if by precluding the noise of others we can wall off their nightmares. As if we might theorize in the ether. Ether: a word for clear skies, and also for a colorless chemical, “pleasant-smelling,” used sometimes as an anesthetic. It’s intensely flammable.

Janet spoke, I listened, I do not agree. She knew that. I was a guest in the motel; she was an employee; but behind her, she believed, is rising a gallows.

The gallows isn’t a fact. It’s her vision. As I’ve written before here, it’s a vision shared by some of the most powerful people in the new regime. It’s not a fact, but it could, in some form, become one. The who-what-where-when-why has always been about more than the news. Implicit in its formula is a question about the dreams of others, which aren’t always lovely.