Children are the future’s rebellion

Also, are we a Russian satellite now?

Dec 01, 2024

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Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's top spy pick, faces fresh scrutiny over Syria and Russia positions - BBC News — I spy with my little eye at least one Russian spy

I can’t get over Donald Trump nominating Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, and not because I didn’t know it was possible to serve in Trump’s Cabinet without having faced even a single accusation of sexual assault.

You might think me incorrigibly hidebound, but if you get four pages of hits when googling “Is so-and-so a Russian agent?” then you shouldn’t put that person in charge of state secrets. The problem is not, as is popularly sanitized in the news media, that Gabbard is “sympathetic … toward Russia” or is “a favorite of Russia’s state media.” The problem is that she takes Russia’s side against the United States every time, like when she blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Joe Biden because he told the world that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. If she’s not an outright Russian agent, then she’s owed back pay.

Remember Elena Branson, AKA Elena Chernykh, who was charged in 2022 with illegally advocating for Russian interests at the direction of the Kremlin without registering as a foreign agent?1 In her indictment, it was revealed that she was directed to arrange a meeting between Kremlin officials and a Hawaiian member of congress about a military base on Kauai referred to only as “Representative-1.” Who’s that? I haven’t the foggiest, except that nine days later Branson made her only political contribution ever to then-Hawaiian member of congress Gabbard.

Hillary Clinton, who turned out to be right about a lot of things that a lot of people should have listened to, famously said that the Russians were “grooming her to be the third-party candidate.” Clinton was referring to an unnamed candidate from a collection of women running for president and never mentioned Gabbard by name, but Gabbard, acting like a totally normal and innocent person, said that Clinton was talking about her and sued her unsuccessfully for defamation.

“Representative-1”

And this person will soon have Top Secret clearance and access to every secret we’ve ever kept from Mother Russia. We are so f*cked. Sorry. What I meant to say is that after Trump is inaugurated on January 20, we effectively become a Russian satellite state, and it’s Ukraine, not to mention Finland and the Baltic states, who are f*cked.

So forgive me if I don’t have time for Rep. Seth Moulton’s nonsensical comments on trans athletes.2 Neither do we face a situation best addressed by better Democratic messaging, taking Bernie Sanders’ advice, or arguing amongst ourselves about who should lead the DNC. Time would be better spent deciding on the Titanic’s dinner menu for April 15, 1912. The ship’s sunk, fellas.

Let me be clear: If we squint, focus on our knitting, and go about our business, most of us will never notice a difference. Most of us will not see the concentration way-station Texas is eagerly building in anticipation for Dear Leaders’s plans to make immigrants America’s leading export. If Trump’s FCC nominee follows through on his promise to crack down on news outlets for perceived political bias, will the majority of Americans who no longer trust mainstream news outlets even notice much less object? Life will go on simply because there’s too much money in it otherwise.

But the American experiment is about to undergo a stress test. The horse has gone to medical school, and now Trump has plans to circumvent congress and to exploit a pliant judiciary. “A republic, if you can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin. But what if the President doesn’t even want it?

Which brings us to Patti Smith. On the road home from Thanksgiving in rural Georgia, S and I passed the time by giving actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ podcast, Julie Gets Wise, a listen. On her podcast, Louis-Dreyfus interviews women older than she to seek their wisdom. If you need a reliably good-hearted and intelligent conversation in your life, this one is a winner, and none finer in my mind than her talk with Smith, the punk icon.

Smith wears a lot of hats, and at 77 years old is still working every day. Louis-Dreyfus asked her how she stays connected to her imagination, and Smith took the answer in a surprising direction. “Our world is so troubled and there’s so much information,” she said, and dear reader, she is not wrong. Knowing the truth does not set us free. It can sit on our shoulders and cover our eyes, bending our backs in the darkness. The truth is an awful burden lately, and if you’re not careful you can “feel it permeating my consciousness,” as Smith puts it.

“Our world is so troubled and there’s so much information.”

“So I try to burst through that,” she told Louis-Dreyfuys. She writes new stories into the world, reads old ones in books, and looks at art “and see where it takes me.” The truth of the world’s awfulness does not have rights to the domain between her ears. She gets to challenge herself to “think other thoughts.”

Because the joy is our job. “Some people might call it imagination,” said Smith. “Some might call it a sense of humor.” Countering the darkness with a spark is what keeps her in touch with her imagination.

“Yeah,” said Louis-Dreyfus, “gives you a sense of hope.”

“Yeah. Yes. We have to feel that every day, no matter how bad things are,” said Smith. “We feel hope not only for ourselves, but for our children. We wouldn’t want our kids to think we had no hope. What kind of message would that be sending them?”

In the immediate aftermath, OG blogger Ana Marie Cox reminded alcoholics that things had not gotten bad enough to justify a drink. In fact, it’s because things had gotten so dark that they needed to protect their sobriety.

I won’t let the darkness take the things I know how to protect. The darkness may claim some things, but I’m not going to give it anything more. Succumbing to hopelessness won’t make anything better. It will almost certainly make things worse.
But my best reason to hold onto recovery is this: the looming darkness, the end of the world, the worst thing imaginable... it might not last. I might survive it. You might. Other people might depend on us to help them survive it.

For reasons that should be obvious, I’m out of the predictions business, so I’m not saying things will get bad. The Accountability Fairy could alight upon Washington, DC and do what all the King’s men and all the King’s lawyers failed to do and protect us from being Rapunzelled in broad daylight. Stranger things have happened.

What I am saying is that Trump is putting pieces in place where they could do chemical damage to the American experiment. If you take these Nixonian cosplayers at their word and assume that they will at least attempt to do what they took the trouble to write down in Project 2025—which, shocker, Trump is no longer disavowing—and you chart the present course into the months and years ahead, it is, to paraphrase Dessa in the Hamilton Mixtape, a “damage you can never undo” kind of bad, an “open all the cages at the zoo” kind of bad.

And what Patti Smith is saying is that children are the future’s rebellion against the present. Germany survived Hitler, and the grandchildren of Nazis are now some of the most peaceful and pluralistic in the world. Japan survived us nuking them, and somehow we are allies. America, too, survived the Civil War and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. There is something that comes after what is coming next, and it goes without saying, or should, that we need to protect as many children as we can regardless of what list they end up on so as many of them as possible get there.

But first we need to believe that there’s another side to this when we could conceivably argue about Seth Moulton productively. It’s up to us now to screw up our courage, look children in the face, and tell them not to give up hope. And we have to believe it when we say it. We don’t have to tell them that everything is alright, only that everything’s gonna be alright. As Cox wrote, “Other people might depend on us to help them survive it.”

They are going to take a lot from us. I’m not letting them take my hope, so they’re going to have to put up with a lot of joy from me for the next four years. And brother, I’m going to be super annoying about it, too.

Who’s with me?

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.