Author, Joan Didion, in her thought provoking book on coping with the death of her husband, referred to her recurring expectation that her husband would walk back in the door, or her inability to throw out his shoes, as “Magical Thinking”.  I took it to mean the way our minds create an impossible reality to help us cope with an actual reality that doesn’t suit our needs in the present.  This is to be distinguished from the new fad of “manifestation” which only requires that you act as if a thing is real and, supposedly, it will “manifest”.

In my mind, what is driving our demented white house resident and his servile cabinet is more a matter of magical thinking. It allows them to describe every action in a way that suits their own reality, but not, in any way, to describe what is really happening.

To shore up his unimaginably cruel immigration policy, for instance, the current white house resident unrealistically promised that only the “worst of the worst” undocumented criminals would be rounded up and sent out of the country.  He also ordered his minions to accomplish this removal at the rate of 3,000 detentions a day.

Of course, this was magical thinking, as no ICE agents ever held a list in their hand with the names of convicted “really bad” undocumented people and specifically targeted those names for capture and deportation.  There is, as with the nefarious, also magical, “Epstein list”, likely no list, allowing ICE to run wild and terrify everyone, to the point of heart attacks, serious injuries and, tragically, one death.

So, no list.  How could they hope to meet (Stephen Miller’s) numerical goal by limiting themselves to convicted, “worst of the worst” undocumented brown-skinned people?  Instead, as we see in every shocking replay scrolling across our phones, they randomly terrorize car wash workers, restaurant workers, people at the market, or shopping, while claiming to simply be fulfilling Trump’s promises.

In the same vein, in order to shore up another of his historic follies, the Big Boon to Billionaires Budget, Trump and his evil elves continue to deny the life-threatening harm being foisted on millions of people who are being thrown off Medicaid, downplay the diminishing services for sick children, and try to lie away the harm done to those who are now suffering and dying from lack of warning, lack of meaningful aid, and lack of anyone to even answer their phone calls, during some of the most catastrophic weather disasters we’ve experienced.  These reality-challenged fools continue to describe a magical budget that will cut “waste, fraud and abuse” without harm to millions of Americans, a budget that will also, at the same time, magically deliver even more tax cuts for the very rich.

How to deliver this all?  Pretend that imposing a work requirement on Medicaid recipients and forcing them to continually reapply for Medicaid coverage is not the same as “kicking them off”.  This is also a lie, however, as data shows that both of these requirements always lead to a great reduction in the Medicaid roles, a reduction that Trump is counting on in the “budget scoring” documents in order to pay for his rich-guy’s tax cuts.  Similar lies justify the crippling cuts to NOAA and FEMA by claiming they are simply getting rid of the fat, and who knows what all those federal employees do, anyway?  Well, now we are finding out the hard way.

And, as usual, Trump pretends to have no idea of these results.  Indeed, the concept of “consequences” does not seem to exist either in his vocabulary or in his brainpan.  Well, duh!  How could he comprehend or predict the consequences of his policies when he, himself, has never been forced to suffer the consequences of his actions.

My favorite magical thinking of the moment, however, is the message tying together the medicaid changes in the budget with the loss of kidnapped immigrants from virtually every service job in America.

We are losing our entire work force of farmworkers?  No problem.  Just listen to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose qualification seems to be that she served as Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the America First Policy Institute and, in Trump’s first disastrous years as president, as his Director of the Office of American Innovation. What a joke.  I guess you could say she is innovative, all right.

Parroting Trump’s magical thinking on how to fill the gaps in the field left by the sweeps that have taken prisoner, or frightened away, all the experienced workers, she proposed that a host of imaginary “able bodied” Medicaid recipients should just be drafted (now that they have a work requirement and, of course, there aren’t jobs for them) to pick our crops!  And, this indentured servitude could also be augmented by automation.  Of which there is none, as machines, apparently, don’t know how to keep fruit from squishing and/or bruising to a nice unappetizing brown.

Additionally, those able-bodied workers are mostly already working, way past retirement age or disabled.  Oh, well, who needs those cherries, apricots, oranges and peaches?

My magical thinking for the day?  I am dreaming of a Trump-free America, and with seeing all those in his ambit who broke the law actually put in jail.  Nuremberg trials anyone?

You Am A Camera

You should take a bow!  Those horrific ICE raid videos we see, documenting the brutality and randomness of hordes of federal goons?  This is all because of you!  You are the camera!  For me, this thought brings several stories to mind:

I Am A Camera was a play by Christopher Isherwood and John Van Druten, which later provided the book for the musical Cabaret.  The play was based on Isherwood’s novel, Goodbye to Berlin, in which he detailed his experience in Berlin in the 1930s, documenting the ascendance and takeover by the Nazi party.  He described the scene through his own eyes, and those of Sally Bowles, a young woman living in his rooming house.  For both, their observations are episodic and non-conclusive, simply telling it like it is, so to speak, like a camera, which does not judge.  Isherwood said, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Unlike Isherwood, however, we are deliberately choosing the subject and, collectively documenting (and sharing) each horrific moment.  As recipients of the information, we continue to judge for ourselves, and boy, are we judging!  Over 60% of those polled about the raids are now negative on them.

Secondly, over my life, I read a lot of sci-fi stories and novellas by Heinlein, Asimov, Orwell, John Brunner, Arthur C. Clarke, and others, in which the growth of technology, and our dependence on it, was set out, long before it was our ubiquitous daily reality.

I remember, particularly, one early story, perhaps in one of the pulp Amazing Stories Magazines, in which everyone in the world had a camera on their shoulder and everyone reported on everyone, every minute of the day.

At the time, it seemed like a negative, a loss of privacy, in which some dreaded uber-master was always watching.  In some tales, it was an emperor/machine, in others, a faceless dictator or collective.  But, lately, with cellphone cameras a uniform part of our constant reality, I have begun thinking of it as a plus.

How else would we have known about every ICE raid, the horrific brutality, the lawlessness, the masked and badge-free anonymity, but for our ubiquitous cellphones?  Instantly, we all witness, nation-wide, the latest outrages, the wild raids, the pregnant woman being wrestled to the curb, the six year old taken prisoner, the beating of the father of three Marines.  How else could our backlash build so quickly?

This is all your doing.  You are the camera.  You are the eye of the beholder.  This ability has turned out to be the democratization of news reporting.  It may become more and more dangerous to document these outrages, but we need to keep it up.  The truth will get out.  And then, we can finally get the bums out.