The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, May 31, 2024

Notebook: Getting immersed in local reporting–I was in a mediation hearing for almost four hours on Tuesday, then a meeting with the property appraiser, then in communion with my keyboard to hack it all out–I am often oblivious to the world beyond Flagler, if not beyond State Road 100. So it was a friend who yesterday around 5:15, in his allusively witty way (he assumed I knew), texted me: “Well, that’s the last we’ll have to hear about that trial.”  My immediate response was what trial? I really thought I’d missed something on the local beat. But there really had been only one, and when my synapses finally got it together a moment later, I clicked over to the Times and saw the headline. A few things occurred to me. The first, second, third, fourth and fifth are too vulgar to repeat here, though it’s a bit disingenuous to act so prim when the subject matter is the vilest human being on the American political scene since Sen. Bilbo, Huey Long, George Wallace, Father Coughlin? The list would be too long. The sixth was my hope that New Yorkers would behave. My seventh was that it was a few decades overdue, starting with the days when he brutalized tenants out of properties he wanted condemned in New York, or when he slandered the Central Park Five. My eighth, as I began to think of the special treatment he’ll get when he’s sentenced to probation instead of jail, was that I’ve covered enough court days to have seen innumerable schmucks end up in jail or prison for far less than that man did. My tenth is that this isn’t like Nov. 22, 1963, or even Sept. 11, 2001. We’re not all going to remember where we were when we heard the news. This isn’t an event worth an iota’s memorializing. This is the stuff of repression: if memories are worth repressing, this is one of them (no wonder the mind prefers to repress certain traumas). This is scabrous, grimy, gurgly with the froth of pep tanks and sewers. My eleventh, because I delayed it as much as possible, because I fear it the most, is that January 6 will not be a one-off, and that we may be returning to the more common days of the political violence we knew not so long ago (think the late sixties and early 70s), or worse before that. Of course it’s the right verdict. It’s no less grim for having had to be a verdict. In his latest carnage of a cringe-worthy statement as he was walking out of the courthouse, the goon said “this country has gone to hell.” He’s right. He’s taken us there and is holding us hostage.

—P.T.

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

FlaglerLive News Service, Palm Coast (@flaglerlive) • Instagram photos and videos

Alluding to a [George] Wallace speech in New Hampshire, the woman continued: “You saw those people in that auditorium when he was speaking—you saw their eyes. He made those people feel something real for once in their lives. You can’t help but respond to him. Me—my heart was pounding. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, there were all those people screaming. You almost love him, though you know what a little gremlin he actually is.” He provoked devotion and rage. Many adored him, revering him as a new savior; many others despaired of a future under his rule.

—From Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (2018).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.