My body knew before the news told us.
Late Sunday night, I felt dizzy and listed to the left when I got up to use the bathroom. It happened a second time, a little worse. In the morning, before yoga, when I bent down to dry my hair, I felt really dizzy.
Hopeful the dizziness would subside as time passed, I went to yoga, and the teacher cautioned me about practicing after hearing my story. I thought I could complete the class, but took a place close to the door, just in case. As soon as I sat down and closed my eyes, I knew I couldn’t stay.
I rolled up my mat and left, drove home a little shakily. At that exact same time, the latest Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity was being put out. As well as the extremely powerful dissents from Kagan, Brown-Jackson, and Sotomayor, who said:
…. the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
“A king above the law” ----what I foolishly never thought they’d decide. That sickening announcement was clearly the last straw for my body and mind. After the Biden debate debacle (I’m still shuddering from it) I just couldn’t take any more.
As Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times:
Its (the Supreme Court) justices have kicked the can so far down the road that it has tumbled into a different galaxy, a different cosmos, one where there’s no moral gravity, where transgressions vanish and worries disappear with the abracadabra of executive privilege.
Could this really have happened, a Supreme Court toppling centuries of what we thought was settled policy? Could Biden have really stumbled so badly in that debate, mouth agape, words struggling to come out, thoughts jumbled, as he faced the greatest liar of all time? I appreciated Heather Cox Richardson’s observation:
It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
So true.
It’s not often that I’m speechless, but right now I hardly know what to say. Maybe I feel like Joe Biden did as he faced Trump that debate night, how Justices Sotomayor, Brown-Jackson and Kagan did as their fellow justices decided on immunity for Trump.
Just dumbstruck.
I find I want to stop the world, stop my head spinning, run into the woods away from news, phone, TV, lie on the ground close to the earth and weep.
Instead, I went to the doctor and got some meds to treat the vertigo, meditated, weeded furiously in my glorious garden, went back to yoga as the vertigo subsided.
But I’m feeling ill again. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk tells us so eloquently in his book of the same name. The score it’s struggling to keep track of in this case is the constant onslaught of harrowing news.
This dilemma is not going away anytime soon.
My friend Erica says I, at age 82 with a husband 83 and many friends of similar age, should be the one commenting on what’s happening, as we get all this aging stuff so much more than she and her 30-something contemporaries do.
Indeed.
I know well from personal experience, my own and my husband’s, how hard it is to face our new limitations, our mortality, our memory lapses, and most of all, to know when it’s time to move on from the work we’ve done for so long. When it’s time to be realistic about what the next years could hold. When our choices to hold on tightly to a past self are hobbling our ability to accept our new, more circumscribed personas.
And, worst of all, when this resistance to what is, affects the lives and well-being of others.
That’s how I got my 96-year-old mother to give up her keys. By getting her to think of the others on the road and how she’d feel if something happened that was her fault. The DMV was unbelievably willing to renew her license, and she insisted she was fine to make short trips to the post office and grocery store. She saw it as losing her independence, her worst fear.
Pride, denial. Selfishness. These words have been applied to Biden, and I believe they are accurate. He’s fought the good fight; he’s been a fine political servant all these years and a strong president. He saved us from Trump and because of that, thinks he can do it again.
I believe he’s wrong.
Which is terrifying.
I imagine an election lost to a would-be tyrant, a man who will capitalize on the immunity decision in ways we cannot imagine, who will accelerate the loss of women’s control over their bodies, who will cannibalize our democracy, and load the courts with even more Aileen Cannons and Samuel Alitos.
And much more.
Joe, think about the rest of us. The country you love and have served so well for 50 years. Make a Lyndon Johnson speech, go out as a hero.
It’s time to give up the keys.
Please.
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I know it’s been a while since I posted a blog. I’ve started so many on different subjects and as I began to get going, it felt like the words I’d written were already old news, things are happening so fast. The vertigo finally gave me my subject--though by the time you read this everything I wrote about may all be old news too.
Fingers crossed.
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(There are so many good articles on this topic--this is an especially good one I just finished: by Ezekiel Emmanuel in The Atlantic)
Read in The Atlantic: https://apple.news/Anjek-fjHQQ6bBy_Q6YabRA)
and here’s another:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/opinion/biden-debate-scotus-immunity.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The picture--saved it for years. Seemed like the right one for this post--:)