Cold Comfort
Apart from the deaths of a several close friends and relatives, the greatest sense of loss I have felt in the past decade was of the absolute certainty that after two terms of a smart, competent, brilliant black President who left behind a thriving economy, any regressive blowback, however distressing, would be limited. I did not believe that 46% of the American electorate could vote for a manifestly incompetent, incoherent, screamingly unqualified buffoon and eke out a win in the E.C. despite losing by 3 million votes. I thought with the profusion of video footage there would be an inevitable dropping of police violence against African-Americans — not a perverse reality-show pride in which the instigator seems to prolong the torture in the sudden hope he’ll go viral. I thought if we went three steps forward, we might fall one step back, two at worst. In my darker moments, I predicted the likelihood of an economic meltdown that could produce a tinderbox needing only a spark like George Floyd to ignite. And in this scenario, it was hard to imagine that the right wing militias wouldn’t turn into StormTrumpers and turn any incipient revolution into a civil war.
I did predict that there would have to be an event no one saw coming to be a catalyst, and that turned out to be Covid. But I never really, really, really thought any of this might happen. I think such prognostication was more of an invocation — if you posited the…
