A Man With a Hammer

Sorry, you're the nail.

I am given to understand that our orange fuck in chief desires that National Guard troops be sent to my city in the coming days. Our hillbilly goth V.P. was in town speaking darkly about how there are places in Atlanta you can’t bring your family. I have no idea what exactly is the matter with his family, like maybe they’re made of sugar crystals and will melt if it rains, but I suppose I must grudgingly assume he’s referring to the West End or Capital View or any one of various other west side neighborhoods populated largely by, ironically, families. But they’re mostly Black families so I can understand why a guy of Vance’s mien would be afraid of showing his trembling face there.

I used to play music in a studio at a place called the Metropolitan—a big cluster of warehouses on the west side popular with sculptors and rap musicians. Every week I’d cruise over to Adair Park, and I’ll admit, it’s kind of a dumpy area. There was a decrepit liquor store a block down from the studio where I often stopped to get beer. The place looked like a location scout’s dream:

Int. Liquor store - Night

A man walks through the door and is shot 85 times before gravity takes hold.

Fortunately for those of us who have to live lives, there’s what happens in movies and there’s what happens in reality. I have walked through those terrifying doors probably 140 or more times over the five or so years we played there. I rarely saw another customer, much less a gun-toting gang-banger. In the end it turned out that it was just a sad little liquor store run by a couple of Indian guys who could barely scratch together sufficient clientele to stay in business.

A lot of the west side is like that. There are too many destitute liquor stores and not nearly enough grocery stores. Will the Guard units bringing a Publix?

I expect not. I suspect too that when the troops descend upon the city, the west side will in fact not be one of the locales to which they are actually deployed. More likely they will land in places like the intersection in front of the CNN headquarters downtown. Why? Because that’s where the cameras are. It’s also where the tourists are, so that’s a little bonus. Benighted exurbanites darting into town like hummingbirds will go back home with the idea that without the eternal vigilance of a thin green line standing between them and the violent anarchy of woke Black Democratic Atlanta, they never would have made it to the Hardrock Cafe without getting knifed. Give us our All-American Sliders or give us death, amirite?

Putting aside the tribulations of Tucker and Tammi and their six kids bravely striking out from the Omni Hotel with wild eyed dreams of hiking all the way to World of Coke, the notion that there’s anything going on here that demands the intervention of the Guard is just patently absurd. Aside from a fat-headed old man shitting on the university system for which he was inexplicably granted responsibility, Atlanta’s been pretty quiet these days. The worst thing going on is homeless people sitting bare-assed on the sidewalk—as they’ve been doing as long as I’ve lived here.¹ Unless the Guard is bringing toilet paper, we don’t need ‘em. I’ve seen violence in this city, up close, and this ain’t it.

No, what’s happening right now in Atlanta is merely what we call August. Not that August is all that pleasant: It’s been raining for a month straight. It’s hot and the humidity is like a science experiment. Everything is wet and muddy. Everything outdoors is covered in a thin layer of slime, if not a swarm of creepy-looking mushrooms. Everything is rotting or rusting. The ground is soft and in some parts of the city trees are losing purchase on the mushy soil and doing backflips onto peoples’ roofs.

We have seen the enemy and it is chlorophyllum molybdites. Maybe.

I feel I’m doing everyone a disservice when I say that not every bit of messy weather can be directly attributed to climate change. If you are an intelligent person you already know; if you’re a mouthbreathing hayseed you’re not reading this anyway. That said, I will pointedly note that I can’t remember many occasions when it rained so much that the trees were falling over, but I could well be wrong.

Not that it matters. Climate change is a thing and we’ve actually been in the remediation phase for some while now—prevention is already a distant, wistful memory; most current efforts are aimed at ameliorating effects that are already happening. I don’t want to range too far afield here; you are again, presumably, an intelligent person and I don’t need to sell you on the theory of climate change. It’s a huge problem, and we are simply turning our back on it at the worst possible time. As with many other huge problems.

I have felt for a long while that one of the great difficulties small-d democrats face is that given the size and diversity of the powers that constitute the whole of the United States, the bad actions of one person, even one as reckless and stupid as our orange dictator, will rarely produce the kind of head-snapping crisis that might spur our somnolent populace to decisively and energetically surge back against the foolishness that caused it. Every action produces instead some long-term diminution of our national prospects which will ultimately be painful but which might not look like much in the short term. It’s basically the so-called frog in the pot problem.

It’s conceivable that one of the many negligent actions we’re seeing now—a return to 19th century economics, a return to 19th century weather forecasting, a return to 19th century disease prevention methods, a return to 19th century energy sources even as AI bots gobble down electricity like cartoon supervillains²—could actually produce the sort of sharp shock that would wake people up. Something needs to. Every scholar I read talking about our descent into authoritarianism seems anxious about the lack of public resistance. I’m surprised myself—I really thought that by now I’d have been whacked in the throat by a cop at least once, but the conflict in the street I’d anticipated has not materialized.

And I don’t think I’m the only person surprised by this.

It seems abundantly clear that the objective in these guard deployments is to provoke some kind of violent confrontation, which Trump can use as a pretext for all sorts of draconian moves—I have no doubt that people will be shot and killed as soon as it can be managed with a fig leaf of “quelling violence.” But violence has so far not happened. I’m sure this is the reason he’s now considering expanding his occupations to so many additional cities, and he may well get his wish somewhere as troops descend upon the proud people of New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Atlanta, among others. In the absence of any reaction, these deployments may wind up looking like transparently provocative imbecility, but the more bombs Trump throws, the more likely one is to cause the chaos he so desperately wants and needs.

Or one of the many other suspended shoes may drop. Maybe the cost of energy skyrockets. Maybe we see food shortages. A bursting AI bubble could do a lot to increase the anxiety of the American public. And in the midst of a serious financial or national security or health crisis, with a bunch of incompetents at the wheel—that could well bring people out into the street.

And when they get there, what will they find? Their own constabulary, sympathetic to their anger and charged only with keeping the peace? Or a couple of battalions of soldiers brandishing assault rifles?

1. It’s like a style almost.

2. If supervillainy consisted of generating weird plasticky looking pictures of cats with assault rifles.