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Today’s advertiser is Mood Gummies. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.50.
“On the Southern Plains” (1907), Frederic Remington
To begin with, I don’t like the title of this essay. That is, I don’t like having enemies. Rivals, sure. I like the idea of competing with other people — or businesses or institutions or what have you — for the same prize. It makes me work harder. It makes me better. Rivalries improve us all. Think Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Newton and Leibniz, Bugs and Daffy.
Enemies, not so much. My desire to win does not mean I want to see my rivals destroyed. I compete because I want the prize itself, not simply to deny it to others. To designate someone as an enemy suggests that I’ve given up on the very idea of competition. It says I needn’t bother bettering myself; I just need to ensure my opponents fail — and not only fail but fail so badly they never consider competing again.
Of course, sometimes your enemies choose you, which is why we’re here today. Because I am now an enemy — of the state, I guess? Of the president, definitely. He’s bigger and louder than I am, so he gets to decide these things. And if I’m his enemy, I guess he and his movement are mine.
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What makes me an enemy? Oh, man, so many things! For starters, I live in New York City and am a registered Democrat who voted against Donald Trump three times. I take and like public transit. I’m a journalist. I’m a Jew with no great love for Israel nor any great hatred of Palestinians. I prefer my steaks medium-rare. I am not afraid of stairs.
But all that is table stakes in the enemies game. It’s easy. I qualify almost just by waking up and breathing. No, to be a true enemy of the current regime requires that one believe in a certain set of verboten assertions — although, frankly, believe is the wrong word here. In most cases, we are talking about reality, and how the world actually works, so accept is the better term: accept and proclaim. And so here is what I, an enemy of the state, accept and proclaim:
I am an anti-fascist. An authoritarian approach to government, along with the cooptation of big business — which is precisely how Donald Trump is running the United States — is bad for the country, bad for its people, and bad for the world, and I will oppose it however I can, short of outright violence.
I am a globalist. The “hermit kingdom” approach is a recipe for national suicide. American exceptionalism is, with one exception1, a dangerous joke.
I believe in the law, and I believe all people in the United States, from unauthorized migrants to the most powerful elected officials, are both entitled to its protections and required to follow and respect its language and its spirit. No exceptions.
ICE is a tool of fascism and must be disarmed and disbanded, its agents publicly identified and transitioned into less inhumane careers.
Billionaires should be taxed out of existence.
Donald Trump and his family are profiting from the presidency and promoting corruption.
I believe in expertise, professionalism, and nonpartisanship. Most Americans simply wish to do, and succeed in doing, their jobs with little ideological influence or craving for power. This is — or was — the country’s backbone, and the relentless pressure from the uppermost reaches of right-wing organizations and individuals to filter every job, in both the private sector and the public sector, through the lens of extremist politics is crushing what has actually made America great for the past 100 years.
The greatest terrorist threat in the United States is right-wing extremism. (And not trans people!)
I want religion kept all the way out of government, as the First Amendment requires. That’s both because I’ve been a victim of Christian bigotry and because it’s easy to see where religiosity in government leads. Just witness last week’s attack on a Mormon church in Michigan, or the barely disguised hatred Evangelicals have for Catholics. If any branch of Christianity were to assume total power, the infighting would begin, and be bloody. No one ever really wins.
Relatedly, white Christian nationalists are anti-American. If they want to establish a “seven mountains mandate” kingdom here, then they need to proclaim that they are trying to overthrow the Constitution and bring the United States to an end.
The overwhelming majority of Trump administration policies are racist, sexist, and/or designed to benefit the rich, and everything they say to pretend otherwise is the purest, ugliest form of bullshit.
“Our Officers Scouting the Enemy Camp in a Snowstorm” (1894/95), Taguchi Beisaku
In another era, the statements above would be taken for what they are — the milquetoast blathering of a middle-of-the-road liberal. Today, however, they mark me — and perhaps you! — as an enemy of the state, a threat to the thousand-year reich the fascists are attempting to establish. To write them down here, in this public forum, is a little nerve-racking, but then I remember that the administration is incredibly stupid, and will likely overlook this essay and its author entirely. Those illiterates probably won’t even scroll past the Mood Gummies ad.
Still, it irks me to even have to write down these boring-ass statements. Shouldn’t I be devoting my newsletter to some third-rate sci-fi novel I read four years ago, or to the eschatology of anchovies? (Don’t worry, those are coming soon.) Instead, I’m leaning deeply into my role as America’s Worst Political Thinker™ and hoping not too many of you unsubscribe out of spite.
But in this case, I’m fine deploying boredom against the regime, because that’s precisely what they’re using against us. Each day may bring several dozen new offenses against the civilization we cherish, but what unifies them is that they are dull. Their evil is uninspired, cliché. The cruelty and the paternalism are of a style we’re all too familiar with, from history class or at least the slightly more thoughtful historical TV shows we almost watched a whole season of. The rhetoric is flat, the arguments rehashed from talking points even the KKK abandoned decades ago. The ideas and policies they attempt to convey are age-old failures no one believes for a second will work this time around; how, 39 years after the release of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, are we still arguing about tariffs? If you have any memory, if you have any sense whatsoever of this country’s past, the right wing’s plan for our future is not just weird but almost laughably tedious. It’s no wonder they resort to enemies lists and brute force — they know their ideas are and always have been fundamentally unpersuasive. As Groucho Marx once quipped, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farts2.”
The enemy’s lack of creativity, however, is its biggest weakness, and one that the rest of us can exploit with invention, humor, and absurdity. We must not meet the fascists with the same shopworn phrases they’ve successfully shouted down, nor the anger and violence they can so easily turn against us. When they go low, we go off the walls.
Back in January 2001, I followed a group of McSweeney’s-connected writers and friends to Washington, D.C., where they were protesting the inauguration of George W. Bush as president — while wearing sock puppets on their hands, for some reason. At one point on that cold day, as the hundreds of protesters who surrounded us chanted slogans so stock I’ve forgotten them entirely, we all recognized in their repetitions an oddly familiar rhythm. One of our group began to sing, and when we heard the lyrics we all joined in: “Oh Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence, baby. Oh Cecilia, I’m down on my knees, I’m begging you please, to come home.”
For five whole minutes, we belted the Simon & Garfunkel classic into the sad, damp air of our nation’s capital, and while it did not prevent Bush from taking the oath of office, and did not in fact change a damn thing in this miserable timeline, it reminded us, or me, that it is our side that is capable of such silly, unself-conscious joy. Fun is freedom.
Among the many things the enemy cannot understand is that these moments — not the pursuit of power or the slavish kowtowing to a supreme being — are the very point of life. And because the enemy cannot imagine an alternative to the gilded concrete path he has chosen, a path that leads away from what Americans cherish most, he is doomed to fail. 🪨🪨🪨
It’s Good and I Like It: ‘Still Angry,’ by Ida Maria
You need more fun-loving punk-rock Norwegians like Ida Maria in your life, and luckily she’s got a new album out, including this very Trying!-appropriate number about unquenchable fury in the face of modern life. “Fuck your smoothie” is a beautiful line.
1 I do love that the United States was founded on ideals — that alone makes it special. Granted, we’ve mostly failed to live up to those ideals, but I would rather have those ideals baked into our founding documents than live in a place defined instead by geography, ethnicity, or religion.
2 He did not actually say this. Also, although I’ve written many times that I make a lot of fart jokes in Trying!, this is probably actually the very first one. If I ever repeat it, that will be a tragedy.