(No. 49, a ±06 minute read)
Which affords lots of time to wonder, how did we get here, and where are we going?
The news waits for no one, that is both truism and cliche. The presidential debate lived in its own news cycle and it is now over, supplanted by a new story already fading into the rear view. Today is the second day that I am living in that fading story — sitting, waiting for something to happen in beautiful, quiet K‘a‘a‘awa where, mostly, very little happens. Certainly nothing that is of interest to the national media.
I have been out here in the past to make pictures of king tides lapping at Kamehameha Highway, the two lane road that makes a belt around the northern coast of O‘ahu. I have been out this way to take in the beauty of the Ko‘olau range as it meets the Pacific. And I have been out here to camp, swim, surf, and generally avail myself of the wonder of being from Honolulu with such natural majesty as this so close.
But today I am here alongside the New York Times, CNN, ABC, the AP, local television news crews, and the HPD to stare at the home of an erstwhile, unsuccessful presidential assassin. I’m on the payroll of the New York Post, following the long-ago footsteps of one of the greatest photojournalists to work a shutter and frame an image — Weegee the Famous. I wish I could say that there was subject matter to merit making a picture to rival any Weegee might have made, especially “The Critic,” one I share with my students every year to talk about empathy, ethics, and point of view in photography.
But I can only make pictures of absence as described by an empty, incredibly ordinary house, typical of the area — listing, older, lovingly maintained as best as is allowed by the circumstances of the area’s termites, consuming salt air, and regular flooding. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, lived here, until this weekend, with his partner. From here on out, and for quite a while, he will live in federal custody answering to an inmate number.
And his partner and neighbors will be living with questions that may be unanswerable; should we have noticed something? Why on earth? What were you thinking? “Could we have prevented this?” That is what an HPD sergeant told me he was asking himself today and since Routh was fired on by the secret service, not so well hidden in his malign assassin’s hunting blind. Or as a neighbor, and neighborly friend of Routh’s put it, “Ryan, what the fuck were you thinking?”
Routh has now created a pattern of two: non-specific political allegiances, with easy access to a rifle modified for civilian sale from its military origins, and willing to risk everything to take a shot at Donald Trump, a figure that the New York Times recently described as the “most polarizing man on earth.” I don’t believe that is a misattribution of his role in today’s social and political landscape.
Which begs the question of last week’s debate. How can one debate someone whose only apparent goal is to polarize, provoke, outrage. What good or useful thing can come of that? Vice President Kamala Harris merely had to look stable to “win” the debate. Who benefits? There was no discourse that might describe or influence a national policy, find a way out of national convulsion. Little constructive transpired on that ABC News stage last week.
It is easy, and dangerous, to discount Trump and his debate performance — to look for something responsible and mature in his discourse, find it lacking, and retreat from the carnival into a smug sense that Harris “won,” and then to believe that clear-headed adults will prevail. To believe so would misunderstand the terms of engagement and the strength of the agents of chaos so disillusioned with, or cynical towards, the system of governance we live within that any tangle with agents of that system can be spun as merely another unfair shake.
Another rigged event in a so-called democracy that is dishonoring the labor of vast numbers of Americans, preventing them an ability to maintain a roof overhead, or keeping their pantry full, aging with dignity; while a whole host of rich people, eggheads, or inside players get so impossibly ahead they seem to be running a different rat race entirely.
In adjudicating the debate between Trump and Harris I see a perilous danger: failing to understand that there are legitimate concerns that aren’t bigotry, mayhem-making, or queer-baiting driving some people to consider voting into office Donald Trump and what little he might appear to stand for, again. The motivators driving his support are genuine failures of governance, rampant corporate capture of large swaths of our economy, and real understandings of systemic failure and instability. And none of these conditions are fictions.
These next weeks are going to be awful. J.D. Vance will continue to sell out his Haitian immigrant constituents for rewards of race-baited political expediency. Trump will Trump; his sexism, racism, instincts for self-preservation, and opportunism will not abate. And the Democratic Party and Harris will either figure out how to communicate that they will govern for citizens, not corporate interests, concerned as citizens must be about rent costs, skyrocketing home insurance premiums, the price of groceries in the face of unprecedented profits being made in their sale, and all the other ways this country and its people have become so baldfacedly a mine corporate capitalism can strip for every last nickel — or she and her party won’t.
Global warming, A.I., the digital communication revolution, a global pandemic; these are profoundly destabilizing realities and these are trying times for many on the best of days. It’s important to remember that in trying times human history has shown us that things can go very sideways, and then often very badly.
For some Americans facing these trying times Trump’s debate performance was just all right by them. They have come to believe that neither they, nor Trump will ever get a fair shake in our broken system. Our national politics has to figure out the why of this sentiment and how to address these people’s often very legitimate concerns.
And the answer will not be, cannot be, more of the same policies that favor corporate profits and power over our a citizenry’s well-being or the well-being of the ecosystems that support us all. If it is, the sort of political violence we have seen directed at Trump will become commonplace and widespread. Our nation has previously known this circumstance and it isn’t ground I, for one, want to retread.
So let the news cycles run, I don’t think I am alone in desiring not to revisit the domestic political violence of America’s past. It’s time we all look past the bile that assuages impotent anger, and sells clicks, and look toward what it is we want this place to look like in January, and for the next hundred Januaries. There is a great deal at stake, for all Americans.