On Freedom (and truth)

I talked to my brother last week. We don’t talk that often, but we stay in touch via text and the occasional phone call. This phone call was about plans for my mom’s next visit here, but we ended up briefly discussing the election. “It doesn’t matter who’s president,” my brother said. “They’re all the same. Two wings on the same bird. That’s why we have the eagle as the national symbol.” 

My gosh, right? I restrained the urge to call him an idiot, because he’s not an idiot. He is a smart person who, like the rest of us, occasionally says idiotic things. This was one of the most idiotic things I’d ever heard. 

I could tell by his tone that this was his final word on the subject, so I just told him that I think he’s wrong and then changed the subject back to the original reason for his call. I’m sure that he hung up shaking his head and thinking that his sister is an idiot. It would not be the first time. 

*****

“‘Everything is shit.’ Cynicism about the system slips into nihilism that serves the system.” 

This is Timothy Snyder, in On Freedom. I wrote very briefly about this book in an earlier post, but I have a lot more to say about it. Snyder has the perfect word for my brother’s attitude, which many people share. The word is “notalitarianism.” While “totalitarianism claims to have the one truth that unites everything,” Snyder explains, “notalitarianism denies any truth or values…Notalitarianism is seductively snide. Believing in nothing is presented as intelligence.” Exactly. Every “it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same, voting is the opiate of the masses” cynic I’ve ever met is convinced that they are just too smart to fall for anyone’s propaganda. These are the same people who use the word “sheeple,” who say things like “Open your eyes,” and “Are you awake yet?” 

*****

Snyder understands that a reasonable standard of living is a prerequisite of freedom. People can’t be free if they don’t have a decent roof over their heads, nor any way to provide for their basic needs, nor any way to take care of themselves when they get sick. But that doesn’t mean that money necessarily confers freedom - it can only make it possible to eliminate the conditions that obstruct freedom. I thought about this as I watched “Black Doves” on Netflix, with its inconceivably rich villains who live in bunkers and spend all of their money and time and energy escaping justice, avoiding assassins, and protecting their ill-gotten wealth. I thought about it when I read yet another story about the crazy dude who spends $2 million a year and pretty much all of his time trying to live forever. Snyder argues, correctly, that immortality is the last thing a person should want, because it makes life meaningless: “Forever is the wrong time scale. Freedom requires a sense of time that extends into the future, through one life and into the next generation or two…” The world is full of rich people who are nowhere near free. 

Maybe because they completely lack any understanding of freedom, many of these same rich people reject the very idea that people have a God-given right to a decent life, and that freedom is impossible without food and shelter and education and healthcare. They oppose social safety nets and welfare state programs because they claim to want to break the cycle of “dependency,” as if any one of us was not dependent on the entire rest of the human race. They perpetuate the lies of trickle-down economics, the unfettered free market (Timothy Snyder points out that only humans, not markets, can be free), deregulation, tax cuts – and our economic system grows more and more unfair, and the inequality becomes worse and more unsustainable all the time. 

*****

Solidarity, as Snyder points out, is the key to real freedom, because a fair and just and decent and more equal economic system benefits all of us and makes us all equally free. Redistribution is good. But with such a vast divide between the very rich, who are growing more and more powerful; and the rest of us, solidarity becomes less and less possible. If you are a middle-class person - even upper middle class - then you have no solidarity with Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy or Mark Zuckerberg or any other greedy grasping billionaire, no matter what they tell you. Your solidarity is - or should be - with the people who pick up your trash, and harvest your produce, and generally do the work that makes life possible for the rest of us.

I don’t know, really, why this isn’t obvious, but it isn’t to a lot of people, who think that their natural alliance is with the rich and powerful. This is an aspirational delusion - if I align myself with the oligarchs, then they’ll see me as one of them, as part of their club, and then I’ll actually be part of their club. It’s shocking to me that working and middle class people still vote for and support deregulation and so-called “free market” policies that only benefit the richest and that have only ever benefited the richest. Snyder puts it best: “The notion that freedom is state inaction makes sense only for the tiny minority who can protect their families without a representative government.” Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be just fine no matter what happens, and they don’t care at all about the rest of us. 

Actually, it’s more than that they don’t care. They absolutely want to restore early Industrial Revolution pre-Progressive Era conditions. They want a tiny handful of people to have all the power and all the money, and they want the rest of us to work 80 hours a week for as little as they can get away with paying us. And they’re not going to give us anything in return, other than the bare subsistence minimum. At least the early 20th century robber barons had a tiny bit of conscience. They used some of their ill-gotten wealth to build parks and universities and hospitals. Andrew Carnegie was a rapacious capitalist but at least he left us some nice museums and libraries and concert halls. The new ruling class billionaires want the noblesse but not the oblige. They want the Gilded Age without any of the gilding. 

*****

It’s all pretty bleak, really. It’s December 20, and I should be in a holiday mood. Maybe tomorrow - my son comes home this weekend, and it’s also cookie weekend. I hate making cookies, but I like eating them, and I like watching the people I love eat them. But the only thing I’m thinking about now is that we are once again on the brink of a government shutdown and I once again have no idea if I’ll be working beyond today. I was going to take most of next week off anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is that a bunch of billionaire cartoon villains are running the country, and half of my fellow Americans voted for them. Oh, I know that Trump voters think that they didn’t vote for Elon Musk but they did. And if the government does shut down, Elon and his assistant Donald Trump and all of their little Republican henchmen in the House of Representatives will look right at the TV cameras and blame the Democrats, and people will believe them even though all you have to do is look at Mike Johnson’s smarmy little insincere smile to know that he doesn’t believe the words that are coming out of his own mouth. I’ll turn it over to Dr. Snyder once again: “Let the liars lie and the truth perish…Let the world end with a smirk.” 

*****

I love quoting “The Princess Bride.” What’s more fun than shaking your head at a kid who tells  you “I’m starving,” and saying “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” What’s more fun than showing up at an event and writing “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” on the little name labels, right below the word “HELLO.” But my favorite Princess Bride quote is this: “I’ll tell you the truth. It’s up to you to live with it.” Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richarson and Sherilynn Ifill and Robert Reich and Eddie Glaude Jr and lots of others are out here telling the truth. And we might have to live with it but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it. We can’t stop the liars from lying, but we don’t have to let the truth perish. 

Christmas time in the city

It’s December 15 now. 10 in the morning, 35 degrees, gray and still and peaceful. It looks like snow. It feels like Christmas. 

We rode the Metro downtown last night, Red Line from Glenmont to Judiciary Square, which is a much better Metro stop than Gallery Place if you’re going to the Capitals game, as we were. That’s an insider tip from me to you. The Metro runs mostly above ground until Union Station, and the neighborhoods around the stations are lively hubs of apartment buildings and restaurants and bars and stores. Catholic University and Gallaudet University are along the route. Every time I take the Red Line to Judiciary, I think about selling my house after I retire, and then moving to a cute little city apartment right on the Red Line. Maybe I will. Anything can happen. 

We got on the train about about 5:30 last night, so it was already dark and quite cold. The sky was clear, and Christmas lights and Christmas trees sparkled in apartment windows. It’s the first time this year that I felt really Christmassy. We couldn’t get a seat at our beloved Irish Channel, so we had a quick dinner at the noodle and sushi place next door, and that was an excellent decision. The tiny restaurant with its decor of vintage album covers and twinkle lights was full of lovely young people on their way out for the evening, some on their way to the Capitals game, and the food was delicious. The Capitals won - again - and we ran for the train at Judiciary, crossing the platform after the station manager directed us to the wrong side. I guess we looked like Shady Grove people. The trains were single tracking after a terrible pedestrian strike at Gallery Place and that might have been the last train out of Judiciary before the real delays began. 

According to Metro, the woman who was struck was a “trespasser.” I’m not sure what that means - was she hiding out in a tunnel? She survived but is badly injured. I hope she’ll be OK. I hope the train operators will be OK. How dreadful for a train operator to hit someone, even if it wasn’t their fault. 

It’s Monday now. I couldn’t find any updates on the person’s condition this morning. I hope this means that she is recovering.

*****

I might have finished my Christmas shopping. I have a list, of course, because I have a list for everything, but I have not yet checked it twice. On Saturday, I was on my way to Barnes and Noble to get a few additional small gifts, and I was greeted by a horrifying sight.  A huge gaggle of vultures (I don’t know if gaggle is the right word for a gang of vultures but it’s onomatopoeic, because they make me gag) was feasting on the carcass of a deer. Vile. Utterly repulsive. The next day, the carcass was almost picked clean. It’s gone this morning, thankfully. Whatever I pay in tax dollars to Montgomery County and the state of Maryland, it’s worth it because when there’s a rotting carcass in your front yard or on your street, you can call someone, and they’ll come and take it away. 10/10. Would recommend - the efficient local government, that is, not the rotting carcass and definitely not the filthy vultures. 

*****

Still no update on the Metro accident victim. I’m sorry for her and I hope she’ll survive and recover, but I’m more sorry for the driver who hit her. I keep thinking about how traumatic that must be. 

I’m not sorry for that stupid deer, though, because we’re overrun with the silly creatures, and between unleashed pit bulls and deer gangs and acrobatic raccoons hanging on our bird feeders and disgusting vultures, I have just about had it with the wildlife in this neighborhood. I’ve managed to avoid suburban bears and coyotes, but it’s only a matter of time. 

*****

Christmas Eve is one week from today. I did forget one person, and now I have to figure out what to get for that person, and when I’ll have time to shop. Almost all of my other gifts are wrapped now, but it’s cookie time, too. And I have a lot of other things to do this week, too. And so I’m sitting here and writing about it all, because that’s always the best way to get things done. 

*****

It’s December 18, and the countdown has begun, and it’s time to finish this silly thing before it goes (completely) off the rails. Too late, I know. Less than one week from today, the getting ready for Christmas part of this timeline concludes, and the celebrating of Christmas part begins. Anything that isn’t done by about noon on December 24 just isn’t going to be done, and it’ll all be fine. It’s Christmas time in the city, and the suburbs, and the country, where all of the furry creatures should be spending their holidays. Merry Christmas. 

Early in the (December) morning

I'm not sure how I forgot to mention this in my Thanksgiving weekend dispatch but I finally broke my previous all time Wordle streak last weekend. I lost my last streak at 103, and it wasn't even because I lost a game. It was because I had forgotten to play. My new streak is 109, and my win percentage is 99%. I'm going for 200 and I don't even care if mentioning the streak is a jinx. The Wordle streak is a pretty low priority for me right now given the state of the world. But it's still nice to have.

*****

Like every other parent, I get nostalgic around the holidays. Ten years ago, I was nostalgic for little kid Christmas. Now I'm nostalgic for high school Christmas and December band concerts and winter swim meets on freezing cold days. At least we still have the swim meets. 

I'm writing this on my phone in my car. My youngest son is coming home to pick up his car and I'm waiting for his Metro train to arrive at Glenmont. I used to do a lot of writing in various parking lots at various aquatic centers and ball fields. Nostalgic.

*****

We have had a week of very cold and Christmassy weather, mostly bright and sunny but a few moments of leaden gray looks-like -snow skies. But it didn’t snow, at least not here, at least not yet. And I knew it wouldn’t. It didn’t smell like snow. 

My younger son was home for just a little while yesterday. He left with his car, which he needed for an event not accessible to public transport, and I finished a pretty darn productive work day. I didn’t check that many things off my ever-growing list, but the work that I did do was really good if I say so myself. Later, my older son introduced me to Connections, another NYT word game. I have played and lost twice now, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. 

It’s December 7, the day that continues to live in infamy. It’s also a Saturday in December, which means that I have places to go and things to do. Christmas doesn’t happen by itself, I tell you what. I’m going to go do some shopping. Somebody has to make the Christmas magic for which people later become nostalgic. That somebody is me. 

*****

December 8. Christmas is two weeks and a few days away. It’s Sunday and I might go to church but I might not. I have a lot to do. 

Christmas party season is underway. I went to a party last night and have two more to attend this week. I don’t love parties but I don’t hate them either. I like being around people and I like music and lights and party food. But the whole thing is also exhausting and I am always so happy to come home and decompress. It’s quite an effort to be a party person. It takes some recovery time. 

I’m getting the hang of Connections, too. It’s a sneaky and deceptive little game, but I now have a win streak: 1 of 1. My win percentage is still an abysmal 33% but I intend to improve that. 

*****

Every December, I have an anxiety dream in which I realize at 9 PM on Christmas Eve that I forgot to do any Christmas prep or shopping. The dream varies a little bit. Sometimes the panicked wake-up happens on Christmas morning. Sometimes it happens on the morning of Christmas Eve, leaving me with one day to shop, clean, decorate, and cook. I bet I could do that if I had to but I don’t plan to have to. I did some more shopping this weekend, and I bought a ham and some baking ingredients. The house is decorated inside and out. We even bought a tree yesterday, but that tree is going to remain unornamented until later this week. Maybe early next week. I might need to get my niece over here to help. If you need a Christmas tree decorated, you can’t ask for a better assistant than an 8-year-old girl with very strong opinions on Christmas decorating. She probably won’t even need me. In a year or two I can probably get her to make the cookies too. 

Meanwhile, my Connections streak is up to two now. I solved today’s puzzle without any errors, a perfect score. My win percentage is now all the way up to 50%. I have a lot to do during the holidays so I’m up with the sun. Connections is going to get up a little earlier in the morning if it wants to trick me. 

Free

In 2023, I watched “Navalny” with my family, just before it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. “Navalny” is the story of the near-deadly poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the independent investigation that proved Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement. As we now know, Navalny recovered from the poisoning in a hospital and rehab facility in Germany and then returned home to Russia knowing that he faced certain arrest and imprisonment. 

Patriot, Navalny’s memoir, picks up where “Navalny” left off. Navalny returns home to Russia, is promptly arrested, and spends the remaining years of his life in prison, battling escalating and ever more absurd criminal charges designed to justify his ongoing imprisonment. 

The book tells two different stories. In the first roughly half of Patriot, Navalny writes about his life as a free person - his childhood in an Army family, his education, his initial support of Boris Yeltsin and his eventual disillusionment with the post-Soviet regime in Russia, his marriage to Yulia, his early career as an anti-Putin dissident during the early years of the 21st century, and his first conviction. In the second half, he writes about his life in prison. 

Just as the criminal charges against Navalny accumulated, his prison conditions worsened. In the early days of his imprisonment, he is held in a normal Russian prison - terrible, but not unbearable. Navalny writes about the prison routine - exercise, meals, showers, reading, and work - and although he is lonely and isolated and sometimes fearful, he makes the best of his situation. As an inmate in a normal prison, he’s entitled to occasional visits, and is allowed to receive food parcels and other items. He accumulates so many books that he has a hard time moving them when he’s transferred to another prison. He spends his days reading and writing and maintaining his health as best he can. He finds ways to be happy. There is a particularly moving passage in which Navalny washes the dirty walls of a new cell, and then sits on his bed enjoying the results of his work, content for a moment. He’s surrounded by walls, but at least they’re clean and bright, and that is enough for that moment. 

*****

Alexei Navalny knew he was going to die in prison, and he jokes about how his eventual death will boost sales of the book that he’s writing a few words at a time, whenever he can get his hands on pen and paper. “The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?" He had to have been afraid, many times over, but he persisted in telling the truth. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom. I read On Tyranny right after the election, just as its first rule, Do Not Obey in Advance, was gaining traction in the social media discourse. Sadly, lots of powerful people have been obeying in advance. Maybe Joe and Mika and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos need to read Dr. Snyder’s books. 

On Tyranny is very short - just a list of rules for dealing with the imposition of tyranny, with short explanations for each. On Freedom is a full-length book that examines the notion of freedom through the idea of kӧrper vs. lieb: the former is the German word for the physical body, and the latter means something like the soul, or the whole person. On Freedom is about the difference between what Snyder calls “negative freedom” or freedom from and “positive freedom,” which is freedom to - to live and learn and love and travel and be human and fully alive; to be a person and not just a body. 

This doesn’t mean that the body is not important. We’re all bodies with bodily needs and we all have to engage with the physical world. Alexei Navalny writes beautifully about the life of the body, even in prison - the joy of a shower and clean clothes, the pleasure of bread and butter and instant coffee with milk on Sundays during his early imprisonment when he was still allowed such luxuries. But just as a person can be limited and imprisoned by an unhealthy body, a healthy person can also be imprisoned by fear of the physical consequences of standing up to a tyrant. You could be beaten, thrown in jail, tortured, or even killed. Or you could just lose your job and then be forced to live in poverty and discomfort. No one wants this to happen to them. I’m sure that Alexei Navalny didn’t want any of what happened to him. But what kind of life do you have if you limit your speech and your actions and even your thoughts to appease a tyrant’s whims? You might be physically free in the most limited sense, but you’re not truly free unless you know what the truth is and you’re not afraid to speak it and live by it. 

*****

Alexei Navalny never stopped telling the truth, no matter how many times Putin and his henchmen threw him in jail or moved him to ever more harsh and restrictive facilities. He decided not to be afraid of anything, and that is his advice to all of us: Don’t be afraid of anything. In daily life, of course, I’m afraid of everything; or rather, I worry about everything. Thankfully, courage (as no one knows better than I) is not the same as fearlessness. Courage is doing what you have to do even when you’re afraid - especially when you’re afraid. I’ll never be fearless but I hope to be courageous. And I’ll never be as courageous as Alexei Navalny but I hope and intend to be courageous enough for any moment that demands it. I don’t want to lose my job or go to prison or suffer any of the other consequences of speaking out in times of injustice and tyranny. But I want to live like a free person more than I want to avoid suffering. 

My favorite holiday

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, making today, I suppose, Thanksgiving Eve. But to me, it is Potato Day. I’m serious about Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. I make them from scratch, and I make a lot of them. It’s a day-before endeavor, not a day-of thing. Thankfully, mashed potatoes lend themselves very well to advance preparation. What you want to do is make your mashed potatoes, spread them out in a baking dish, cover with aluminum foil, and refrigerate overnight. Then warm the dish up in the oven the next day. Perfect. 

If you’re cooking the entire Thanksgiving dinner, as I do, it’s definitely advisable to do some of the hard part in advance so you can do things other than cook on the day itself, like take a walk and watch movies and avoid the news and have your first glass of wine right around 3 PM. So today, I’ll peel carrots, tear up bread and chop onions and celery for stuffing (almost as important as the potatoes), and make ten pounds’ worth of mashed potatoes. Oh, and I’ll bark orders all day long. That is my favorite part. 

*****

My husband called me from work about 20 minutes after I wrote this. “I told you that the chimney sweep is coming, right?” Well chim chiminy chim chiminy chim chim cherroo no you absolutely did not, and why would you schedule a chimney sweep to come here on the day before gosh-darn Thanksgiving? Not only was the chimney sweep coming, but he was on his way when I was up to my neck in potatoes. Thankfully, the whole thing took less than half an hour, and the chimney sweep people were competent and capable and left no mess behind. But still. 

Today is Thanksgiving. The turkey has been in the oven since about 9:15 AM, and should be ready at about 3. The starting times for everything else are staggered and ideally everything should be ready at about the same time, but I fly by the seat of my pants on Thanksgiving and a lot is left to chance. It’ll all be fine. 

*****

Every holiday, I peruse the internet for new recipe ideas. I’ve made the same menu for Thanksgiving and Christmas, with slight variations, for decades now, and I think that people will get bored and that I should try something new. But then I get overwhelmed with indecision and I end up doing the same thing I always do, and everyone loves it. 

And everyone did love it. We had kind of a perfect Thanksgiving. Morning rain gave way to clouds with tiny little hints of sun, and my sons joined me on my annual turkey-is-in-the-oven walk around the neighborhood. The sun started really breaking through the cloud cover just as we turned the corner back on to our street, and the rest of the day was clear and bright but subdued - very Novemberish. We took the annual photo of the boys and their cousins with their grandmother with a backdrop of November trees and November sunlight and crunchy dead leaves. We hung around outside despite the cold, and watched football and Christmas movies, and ate like there was no tomorrow. I was so full of holiday chill that I took a nap before cleaning up, and that turned out to be a great decision because my husband and sons did 80 percent of the clean-up while I slept on the couch. See, I keep thinking that there must be a way to improve my holiday dinners, and sleeping on the couch is a huge improvement over cleaning up food and washing dishes, so maybe change is good sometimes. 

*****

It’s Saturday now, the last day of November. It’s hard to believe that we’re actually still in the same month that began with the 2024 election. I remember the first Saturday of November, walking from the Metro station to Gallaudet University for a swim meet, and thinking that this was it, the last weekend before we’d elect our first woman President and FINALLY put the Trump era behind us…that seems so long ago. 

Let’s not think about it, OK? Let’s think about Christmas. 

It’s very cold today, at least for here. A high temperature of 35 is cold anywhere, actually, but it’s really cold for Maryland in what is technically still autumn. We’re putting up our Christmas decorations. My son and I went out this morning and bought some extra lights and Command strips. I cleared away some pictures and decorative objects to make room for Christmas things, and I’m about halfway through placing all of the indoor decorations. My husband and sons are outside hanging lights. I took a break to eat the best sandwich that a person can eat: turkey, mashed potato, stuffing, cranberry sauce, white toast, salt and pepper and a little mayo. It was perfection. Thanksgiving dinner is an absolute shit ton of work but that sandwich is worth a day and a half in the kitchen. Later on, I’ll bundle up and walk that sandwich off. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. 

******

That’s nonsense of course, there is absolutely such a thing as bad weather, but my rather ugly puffy jacket kept me warm enough for a brisk walk with my friend and her dog and a big stick. There is a pitbull in the neighborhood who keeps getting loose, and he’s been spotted several times during the last few days, including by my friend and her dog, who had a very unpleasant encounter with this canine menace. I picked up a big stick just in case, but thankfully, we did not need it. 

Other than walking and cooking and cleaning and decorating and Christmas shopping and hanging out with my kids, I haven’t done much this weekend except to avoid the news. My no Trump on weekends policy is in full effect again. I’ve watched movies old and new: The Holdovers (a new holiday favorite), Wicked (a Wednesday night showing with my family - we loved it), Dead Poets Society (my youngest had never seen it), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (one of my favorites of the last few years), Saturday Night (we rented it - it was quite good and I might have more to say about it later) and of course bits and pieces of Elf and Christmas Vacation. The best way to spread Christmas cheer is to not think about Trump for a few days. We haven’t looked at news coverage in any form since Wednesday, and we are just about the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse. 

*****

It was an almost-perfect 5-day weekend. The Capitals are winning left and right, and the kids were home, and the house is decorated for Christmas, except for the tree. It’s too early for the tree. As always, I didn’t mind coming back to work this morning, even though it was freezing cold and dark when I woke up. I pulled out the wool and cashmere this weekend. We’re in for a week of actual winter weather and when high temperatures are expected to remain in the 30s, I dress for warmth. 

Santa Claus works one day a year, but I work every day. As we all know, Santa Claus is actually me and every other woman with a family, and now that we’re done making Thanksgiving happen, it’s time to turn our attention to Christmas. I’m making my lists and I’m checking them twice and then checking them again. My chimney is clean now but there won’t be any obese dudes sliding through it to deliver holiday magic. I’m the magic. It’s me. 

Meanwhile, I didn’t let the specter of the looming Trump presidency ruin our Thanksgiving and I’m not going to let it ruin Christmas either. It was a nice vacation but it’s time to get busy again.