 Image: Laurie Woolever
Today: Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel and Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography Felipe De La Hoz, journalism lecturer at NYU and member of the NY Daily News Editorial Board.
Issue No. 194Corroded Chains
Laurie Woolever Notes On Planning
Felipe De La Hoz
Corroded ChainsThe chain motel I stayed in last week just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, had a vending machine with Cheetos in 20 of the 42 slots, by way of nighttime dining options. I arrived at 7:00 p.m. and went straight to my room and watched regular cable television with commercials. When I turned on the dim overhead light in the bathroom, I spotted a lone hair, not mine, coiled in the bathtub. I wiped out the stranger’s hair with a damp tissue, and then I took a bath, watched more television, and slept well. Unlike the nearly-extinct roadside motels of the 1960s and 70s, there’s nothing charming or romantic about a 2024 hotel chain, but maybe it won’t be long before La Quinta and the Holiday Inn Express are replaced by some even-more-cost-efficient-for-the-benefit-of-shareholders building for housing travelers, and we’ll be nostalgic for all those big cheap faucet fixtures and beige tile. As a kid in the 1980s, I knew that the new singles by Madonna and A-ha and Prince on the radio would someday wind up on the oldies channel. But I couldn’t have anticipated satellite radio, iPods, Spotify. The next new thing always takes me by surprise. I woke up at 7:42 a.m., opened the blackout curtain, and found that the morning sky was still dark. I hadn’t expected that, and was overcome by a sudden, irrational fear. Was the world finally broken? I was reminded of Astoria Borealis, the night between Christmas and New Year in 2018, when an electrical fire at a power substation near my home changed the color of the sky, from black to a horrible blue-green light. For a few deeply weird minutes, no one knew what had happened. The power in my apartment kept browning out. I opened a window. Neighbors called out to each other from their open windows (“Are you seeing this?” “Does anyone know what’s happening?”) until someone from the NYPD took to Twitter with a plausible explanation. It turned out the motel was located on the far western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. By 8:15 a.m., the sun had come up. Maybe I’ve been living in New York for too long.
Breakfast was rough, even by the rock-bottom standard of my low expectations. Three timid and elderly little muffins huddled around an injured danish in the center of a smudged plexiglass box. The coffee was watery, the eggs were powdered, and a half-empty bottle of Menard’s brand ketchup stood in for individual Heinz packets. On the drive from the motel to the airport, I saw a campaign sign affixed to a tractor trailer. It said: “Trump isn’t perfect but he’s better than the alternative.” Today is Election Day. I keep reading advice about managing election anxiety, recalling the overwhelming panic and despair of early November 2016, at least for those of us who had been so naïve as to expect a different result. That the sun continued to rise in those days was only the smallest consolation. On Election Day 2020 I was staying with my aging parents, one who hadn’t been able to walk for years, and the other recovering from spinal surgery. Caretaking was a good distraction from the news. Since then I have achieved once-unthinkable career goals, and I have fallen in love. I’ve visited Rome and Paris and Mexico City, and I’ve eaten tres leches cake at least three times. Still, the purest happiness I’ve felt in the past four years was that Saturday morning when the race was finally called, for not Donald Trump, on the heels of his legal team’s press conference in Pennsylvania at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping shop, between a dildo store and a crematorium.  2020 (YouTube screen grab) and 2024 (Twitter) images of Rudy Giuliani It was a warm day, the windows were open, and I could hear my neighbors happy-shouting and carrying on. Hundreds of people gathered on the car-free Open Street and just, like, smiled at each other, talked about the stress of waiting to know, and the sweet relief of knowing. We couldn’t anticipate January 6, 2021, and we couldn’t imagine the new Groundhog Day of November 5, 2024, with dirtbag Giuliani shamelessly rolling up to his Florida polling place in a car that no longer belongs to him.
FLAMING HYDRAS ON (OTHER) ELECTIONSIf you still are voting and didn't get a chance to see yesterday's Hydra, a number of us got together to offer observations on various downballot contests in today's U.S. elections.  Missvain [CC BY 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Notes On Planning U.S. Border Patrol agents conduct intake of illegal border crossers at the Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (Public domain/Wikimedia) Today we stare down some unknown amount of uncertainty about who will sit atop the federal bureaucracy in a couple of months, and I am thinking about planning, in a way that feels a little more urgent than usual. Who might be able to take care of my cat if some meathead with a badge kicks in my door? What does my life really look like in the absence of New York City, in the grand weight of the idea that I might never come back? I have something of a running joke with friends, in which I like to pile on the reasons that I won’t be wriggling out of whatever crackdown comes. Because I’d be an obvious target for the likes of Stephen Miller: I’m an immigrant, I’m Latino, I’m a liberal coastal elite who is both a journalist and a college lecturer—perhaps the two most hated professions among the cadre of freaks that is MAGA (with the possible exception of librarian). I’m queer, too, with a semi-public profile defined largely by investigating and criticizing the entities that would carry out the very immigration “reforms” envisioned by the Trumpist right. I don’t check every box, but I’ve certainly done my level best A few people who care about me have asked in recent weeks—in the tentative, half-joking way that you use to somewhat defuse the power of a thought—if I was going to be okay, really, if Trump wins. Not in a, Will you be emotionally okay way, but more obliquely asking, Will you be one of the 15 million on Trump’s deportation list? The answer is, nobody knows what’s going to happen if Trump were to make it back to the seat of power. The militant types led by Stephen Miller have spent the past four years hungering for another bite at the authoritarian apple and they are going to try. Will I be a public enemy? Perhaps. Our species wouldn’t have survived without some hard-wired optimism, the expectation or just the hope that things would get better, or at least remain in the ways we understood and could stomach. But maybe we’re too good at optimism, especially when you mix in the swirl of exceptionalism running throughout American society. I can see it in the discomfort of people trying to talk around the possibilities we’re facing, somehow unable to voice them outright because the truth sounds too absurd, too unbelievable, when laid bare. We’ve survived this long in the shadow of Trump and his movement; surely it can’t really get that bad. Not here, not now. And I don’t know. What I know is that these people want unconstrained fascism. They want something that has never really been seen in the United States before, but which is familiar to those of us who’ve faced it elsewhere. There are many, many countries in which the idea of military dictatorship isn’t just possible, it is daily life. Trump has not hidden that he wants to preside over this type of government. He and his supporters want to throw people out of helicopters. They want people to die because they are trans, or on the far left—eventually, maybe, because they are Democrats. They’ll do it if they can. No cosmic rule stops them, no firm hand of fate, only the eternal questions of the exercise of power Strangely, I’m not anxious about it per se; if there’s one thing I learned from my father—forever a pragmatic man—it’s that there’s not much point to worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and may never happen. Yet I do it idly, in the in-between moments as I’m loading up the dishwasher or walking to the train, thinking about the minutiae of my life—what could or would I take in a hurry, if I had to? Who might be willing or able to come with me? Planning is not my forte, but thinking through what happens if a burgeoning fascist government orders troops to come round up people like me seems advisable, sensible, in the same way that starting a 401K does. Where would I even go? My mom is in Colombia, my father in Ecuador, and I’ve never really lived in either. Would I continue to write about U.S. politics from outside, or shift my vision entirely? If I can’t vote, at least I can plan. Hopefully someday I’ll come across these plans again, unused, a distant memory.
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