I’m back on my b.s. (post-election edition)

When I taught in the high schools, we sometimes read Persepolis, a graphic novel about a young woman’s coming-of-age in pre-and-post-Revolution Iran. In our learning about the Iranian Revolution, we’d talk about this element of authoritarianism: putting stupid creep loyalists in serious roles.

Well. Feast your eyes on Matt Gaetz, Elon Musk, Hegeswith . . . The whole world over, men do authoritarianism the same way. Muslim, Christian, Jew. White, Brown, Black. Men do authoritarianism in the same way, so it’s easy to spot and incredibly difficult to stop once it’s taken hold. All the cancer metaphors are apt. I say this as a cancer patient.

America, you got cancer. And it’s bad. And it’s metastatic. Stage iv. A fascist neoplasm gone wild inside the body of a nation. We’ve had it for a long time, but we didn’t check it in time, didn’t try to treat it in time. Cancer does what cancer does — be it a literal or metaphorical cancer — it spreads and i’s sole and singular goal is to destroy.

Cancer doesn’t care that once it kills its host, it kills itself. Take, for example, the conservative approach to climate change. Take, for example, the countless conversations I’ve had in cafes, classrooms, around dinner tables where reasonable people (be they child, adult, elder) have asked in wild wonder, Don’t they get it? Don’t they see? We only have this one planet, this one fragile ecosystem, and when they kill it they kill them and theirs, too?

Fascism, cancer, they are indifferent to the suffering they make, and the ruin they bring.

In the days after the election, a few former students reached out to me. Some of them had been sixteen, ten years earlier, and I was their English teacher on the day after Trump’s first election. I was living in a blue dot on a big mountain in Arizona. Most everyone at my school leaned left. None of us wanted Trump. And my teenagers were, correctly, scared.

Some of those teenagers, now young adults, reached out to me after the election. What are your thoughts, Gruber? All I could say, and still, is take care of yourself, and take care of your people. I couldn’t suggest a plan of action beyond that, or insight beyond that, or wisdom beyond this — go gentle on yourself and your loved ones. Go gentle on all who feel vulnerable and frightened right now.

I had words for Trump’s first election. I even had words for The Pandemic. And words for telling my kids I had cancer. In the days immediately after America elected its first fascist, and still, I have no words. No directions. No advice.

Because here’s the thing — we’ve never done this before. You and me, I mean. Us. We’ve never been the ages we are right now, in the personal situations we are in right now, and we’ve never been this age, in these circumstances, facing down the fact that an authoritarian will occupy the Oval Office.

We’ve never done this before in our lives. We’re all new to this. As a Buddhist, I take comfort in Buddha’s teachings, like this one, you are a yellow leaf, and you have no provisions.

A few months back, I disavowed blogging, online writing. Monday, I deleted my Facebook account. After a lifetime of writing, a lot of that online, I’ve shared a lot with a lot of strangers. That’s a scary thought to me these days.

Sometimes I’ve shared myself correctly — I’m very proud of my two memoirs, my plays. Sometimes I’ve shared myself incorrectly — too much emoting, too much anger, fear, navel gazing.

I write in various genres. Primarily, I write essays for the page, and plays for the stage. My online writing gets clunky because essays and plays require different literary gestures and moves than say, well, this.

All that said, why am I here now doing something I swore off?

Because I do have thoughts about what is happening in our country. Because I have been to my own kind of hell and back, and I think I know some things about how to go on, how to heal, how to think. And as I used to tell my teenage students, “knowledge isn’t just for having — it’s for using.”

These are very serious times. I want to use my knowledge. My writing voice is the best way I know how right now. And maybe what I know can help you, or make you laugh, or make you see another way. Maybe. That’s my hope.

So that’s what I’m doing back on these streets.

I don’t want to post on Facebook, but I also don’t want to be silent. So I do what I know. I write. Hopefully, you read.