Larry and Arthur

On the eve of No Kings, two old men and a college boy ask, "How much is enough?" The first in a series by new writers.

“Larry and Arthur,” by Finn McNany, launches a series of reported stories on the direct and indirect trickle-down effects of the Trumpocene in the small towns of the Upper Valley, a region of New Hampshire, tilting right, and Vermont, strongly liberal, divided by the Connecticut River.

The writers were students in a creative nonfiction course I taught at Dartmouth College in spring, 2025, called “The Reporters.” The syllabus included this statement: “Students of all politics, or none, are welcome, with the caveat that our project isn’t polemic but reportage, subject to fact-checking.”

The students carried notebooks and asked questions, they read the daily news as reported by others and studied official documents. But we weren’t attempting journalism in the conventional sense, because we took as a premise that journalism in the conventional sense had not been adequate to the challenge of accounting for what it feels like to some people, including this group of young people, to be alive right now. So consider it slant rhyme to the news. It’s not “breaking,” it’s about things that feel to some already broken, and how people keep living anyway.

It is in no way comprehensive or even representative. A better way to understand these young writers’ endeavor is to consider what they read, watched, looked at, and listened to; I’ve posted the first four weeks of the syllabus—or, an essay in syllabus form—starting here. You’ll see that we began not with a newspaper but a poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich, which includes these words:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

I imagined students would be drawn to variations of the news. I thought the work might be explicitly or circumstantially radical, in the sense of seeing what power tells us not to see. Some of it is; and some of it looks inward, or studies the moment at a more oblique angle. Some students consider themselves “political”; some never had; some still don’t. With my students, I learned as we went, especially about some of what it can feel like to have lived half your life with Trump as president or planning his return. Just the way things are.

Which is why we’re launching the series with a story about the way things were. Or, at least, how they seemed to be in places dedicated to establishment power, such as the Ivy campuses where Larry and Arthur studied, and where the author of this piece, a first-year student named Finn McNany, studies now. Finn and I talked about some of it what it meant to begin a series about “now” with a story about two old white Ivy League men by a young white Ivy League man. Consider it the point of departure, from a college, Dartmouth, with a long history of reproducing power for white men, most of them, like these old fellows, Protestants, a good many of them, like these men, generations deep in Ivy privilege.

And then, too, a new point of arrival, since such campuses have in this second Trump administration become frontlines in a contest over the order of power, not a “debate” about higher education but what can fairly be called a federal attack on its current form, “challenging the way we use language,” I wrote in our syllabus, “and what happens in classrooms and who gets to be there.”

Men such as Larry and Arthur have always been here, in the Ivy League, but what’s interesting about these particular men is that in their eighties they still are. That’s where Finn found them. He took as his departure point Trump’s targeting of public library funding. Finn decided to investigate in our local public library, only to discover that the destruction of old orders is fast and slow at the same time. The threatened library, according to the librarians with whom he spoke, is for now still just the library. Full of books, none of them yet banned.

One day he got to talking to an old activist, who found one on the shelves she wanted him to read: Going After Cacciato, Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s magical realist anti-war novel, about a grunt in Vietnam who goes AWOL, who rejects the war by walking away from it. That’s one option. She also had some people with whom she wanted Finn to talk: the senior citizens who every Friday gather on a street corner at the edge of campus to protest. That’s another option.

Protest what? “We have these concerns,” these two old men tell the young man, who writes of his own questions “I pressed because I’m desperate.” For options, yes, and for context; for history; to know what he has been given and what he might return. How much is enough.

Larry and Arthur

By Finn McNany

We agreed, over email, to meet on the corner. The same corner we had met on at the demonstration.

The demonstration was a protest, organized by the Upper Valley Democrats of New Hampshire and held on the intersection of Main Street in the college town of Hanover. It’s the intersection where Dartmouth College meets the outside world. 

The sky was grey on the day of the demonstration, and raindrops fell occasionally. There were around 60 people, split evenly among the four corners. Most of the protestors had white hair. Some had grey. 

Larry has white hair. Arthur has grey. Larry held a sign that said, “We are all Mohsen Mahdawi now,” the Palestinian Columbia University student who was detained by immigration officers—plain-clothed, armed, masked individuals. Arthur held an LGBTQ+ flag. I met Larry when I walked up to him and asked why he was protesting.

He looked dumbfounded. “Do you know who’s in office?” 

He said that they were taking people off the streets with no judicial process. “They could take me or you or anyone.” I didn’t know if I believed that. I knew federal agents were seizing undocumented people, that teams had snatched up international students in New York City and near Boston, and that Mahdawi had been shuffled into a black SUV when he reported for what he thought was a citizenship interview. But would they really take me? A white citizen with no particular political record? For what?

I asked Larry how long he had been protesting. “I could say eighty-five years,” he started, “and I’ll be eighty-six next month.” He was convinced I’d been pulling his leg with my first question…

Continued at CALLING ALL SYLLABLES, a new Substack I’ve created for this series. Read here. Subscribe. Seriously — it’s going to be good, and who couldn’t use some of that right now?