Crossing the Big Fat Line
As soon as I heard about the new program for passports, I ran to confirm that my papers were in order. It was either that or take the risk of seeing Donald Trump’s portrait staring up from my little blue booklet.
To put it plainly, I’d rather die. I don’t want to see a new arch in Washington. I don’t want a Garden of American Heroes. I don’t want buildings re-named in his honor. And I don’t want to invest in federal Trump Accounts. Even if they were the very best investment in the history of money, the name alone would be a powerful disincentive. Palliative care would be vastly more appealing.
And I especially don’t want Donald Trump on my person. The idea of carrying his picture in my travel pouch, of foregrounding his place in the American firmament and associating my citizenship with his snarling face (the one now featured in the Dear Leader portfolio), is more than anyone should be forced to bear. I know that there will be a choice in the matter, but given the way this administration operates, I fear that there would be a screw-up at headquarters and, regardless of which box I checked on the form, I would get the Trump Passport despite myself. Fortunately, my documents are good for another decade, time enough to drain the swamp.
After all, how much Trump can any of us stand? Even if he were the best President ever, there is a point at which omnipresence becomes intolerable. I know that from my enemies and my friends. Like many of you, I need refractory time where I renew myself without intrusion. Trump’s insatiable need to be at the center of things infringes on my semi-Constitutional right to privacy. I like to choose the voices I hear, the people I see, the lives I attend to. I can stand to pass by a dumpster in a parking lot, but hell if I want to make it my home.
What Trump wants is to project his life into mine, to colonize my thoughts, to mess with my head so that I am always thinking about Trump and his mob. I have lately started to scrutinize the Times to count the articles in my feed that focus on Trump. Prepare to be horrified, but the number is unconscionable. On any given day, it’s about the first eight items. This is the way sociopath autocrats operate, insisting on the spot in the center of the stage.
And it includes all domains of my life and yours. Just this week, Trump called on Jews to observe what seems to be a “Sabbath of Gratitude.” I consider myself a Sabbath-loving Jew. I like the experience of our grandchildren at our table. I love the music, the uplift and the joy. I love the taste of our caramelized onion galettes and that new orzo grain salad with Persian cucumbers. And despite the complexities of our current politics, I also love my country and its offer of opportunity.
What I don’t like is our president telling me that I have to be more grateful. Does that mean that I haven’t been grateful enough, or maybe that I have been secretly disloyal? Do I owe someone (Trump?) a show of prostration? Is he saying that I am a potential fifth columnist and can’t be trusted to do my duty? It takes very little to go from mild irritation to a paranoid fantasy of Orwellian fascism. This is the same president, after all, who invited Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House so that he could be savaged for failing to say thank-you.
Any which way, I won’t have any of it. Trump crossed the line when he stood near the White House theatrically brandishing a copy of the Bible, which he managed to display upside down. Some religious people may be reassured by this fakery, but I’ll keep packing in my orzo salad. I’ll feel grateful when I want to, irritated when I want to, and make my own choices in faith and politics. And if I travel overseas, I’ll be using the Fitzerman Passport, the one with my face in the little blue booklet.