The Aftermath People

The killers of democracy don’t get to declare that it’s dead.

I was at the pool when Donald Trump became a convicted felon. I was excited: it was nice to be back at the pool after a series of Biblical plagues shut it down.

In 2020, the plague was covid. In 2021, it was still covid, until the pool reopened in late summer, and then it was Canadian wildfires that produced smoke so toxic I swam laps underwater for relief. In 2022, the pool was destroyed by a record flood caused by a once-in-a-millennium storm. In 2023, they were still fixing it.

I figured 2024’s plague would be the billions of underground cicadas that emerge in dual broods every two hundred years. I envisioned their bodies filling the pool as the world circled the drain.

But the cicadas didn’t show. Folks think they died in the 2022 flood. Luck these days is when two catastrophes cancel each other out.

I was lying in the sun when the Trump verdict came. I didn’t know it happened because I left my phone at home. I was listening to Guns N’ Roses on my Walkman and reading a Stephen King novel. It could have been 1991. It should have been 1991.

*          *          *

In 1991, I was twelve and spent the summer reading my mom’s SPY magazines by the YMCA pool. I wondered if Donald Trump would be indicted like Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley and the Iran-Contra creeps. It seemed strange that Trump was left out while the rest of the SPY roster went down. He’ll have his turn, I figured. I picked up my Stephen King book and my Walkman and my Sun-In hairspray and let the sun hit me with its ozone-free rays.

In 1991, I did not feel threatened by the fact that Trump, a career mobster, had avoided prosecution. He lived in a golden tower, and I went to middle school. The Jeffrey Epstein case wasn’t public, so I didn’t know I was the same age as the trafficked girls Trump allegedly raped.

Aside from SPY, my childhood knowledge of Trump came through TV shows and movies portraying him as a criminal asshole. Trump’s unpaid taxes were the premise of an entire episode of the 1991 children’s series Eerie, Indiana, which also depicted him as The Devil. Kids were expected to know Trump was evil. All Americans knew, until the American media forgot 25 years later.

In 2024, I do not feel safer now that Trump, a career mobster, has finally been convicted of a felony. He can still be president, his criminal cohort walks free, and his conviction came too late. Eight years too late; 33 years too late; my whole life too late.

Trump was first investigated by the Department of Justice in 1973, and they let him go with a slap on the wrist. His criminal activity grew bolder the longer officials let him do it. Trump committed crimes my entire life, cocooned in impunity, until hatching like a butterfly effect in 2016. Transnational autocratic alliances strengthened during his presidency.

His conviction came a half century into his crime spree: long enough time for him to become a template.

Trump is part of an American criminal elite that does not run from the law, but runs for office in order to become the law. They exonerate themselves by changing the definition of crime. A crime ceases being a crime when they are the ones committing it.

They can do this only because controlled opposition lets them. Controlled opposition issues “strong statements” of condemnation but, in reality, countenances sedition, ignores confessions, and blames the American people for anything going wrong. They tweet that America is in danger like they are passive spectators, instead of the few people with the legal power to investigate state crimes.

Sometimes they take breaks from streamlining elite criminal impunity to fund genocide. It’s how Congress likes to bond across the aisle.

My son was with me when Trump became a convicted felon. He’s the same age I was in 1991, reading those SPY magazines by the pool. I thought of the cyclical cicadas, coming and going into a worsening world, creating a new generation before retreating underground.

My son didn’t have his phone at the pool either, because I’m teaching him how to be free. We heard the news when we got home.

“Is this going to change anything?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. He shrugged and picked up his Stephen King book. He’s reading The Stand to see what the end of the world feels like in fictional form.

*          *          *

Every day, I watch a massacre in Gaza. Every day, I watch liberals play down this massacre, which is funded with their tax dollars, and speak of the looming danger of Project 2025.

Project 2025 is a right-wing plot to turn the US into a fascist state. It is indeed threatening, but much like the Trump mafia project that abets it, it has been building for my entire life and no one seems serious about stopping it. The GOP will not abandon this plan if they lose the election. Elections are afterthoughts when you own the Supreme Court.

Instead of explaining their plan to prevent Project 2025, Democrats use it as an excuse to change the subject. They tell me to stop talking about Gaza because beheaded Palestinian babies make Biden look bad.

“You need to shut up,” they threaten, “or Biden will lose, and then you’ll lose your reproductive rights!”

“Well, joke’s on you,” I reply, “because I already lost my reproductive rights!”

This comeback always sounds better in my head. The bodily autonomy store called -- they’re running out of you!

I haven’t had legal bodily autonomy since 2022. It’s not a loss you get used to. I wake every morning keenly aware of it, and keenly aware that the Democratic Party traded my uterus for fundraisers after the Republican Party raped my rights.

I am told I must vote to get my freedom back. This should be easy: my representative, Cori Bush, is a strong supporter of the right to bodily autonomy. But the Democrats are trying to get rid of her. So are the Republicans. They tried to oust her in a 2022 primary with the same tactics they are using now. Every two years, my home is spammed with propaganda from fake PACs with names like “Progressives for Missouri” that are secretly funded by hard-right Zionist fanatics.

Now the plot is in the open. AIPAC has given Wesley Bell, Bush’s new Democratic primary opponent, nearly one million dollars.

I am sticking with Cori Bush because I would like my representative to represent my country, and not a foreign country. This doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. But then again, neither did the right to my own body, and they stole that too.

*          *          *

I live in the land of the Aftermath People. My dark-money, gerrymandered state of Missouri enforces many of the terrible policies the Republicans promise nationwide for 2025. My vote is meaningless in a presidential election, and a foreign country’s henchmen are trying to oust my congresswoman.

But when people tell me democracy is dead or dying, I shake my head and laugh. When you are an Aftermath Person, you learn what democracy means. The sky fell on us Aftermath People a little earlier, with the result that we can see a world beyond it, and claim it as our own.

Most Americans lost representative democracy long ago. But representative democracy is different than actual democracy. Actual democracy cannot be stolen, only surrendered. It cannot be granted, only insisted upon. Actual democracy is what its etymology reflects: the power of the people.

I rarely hear “democracy is dying” from Aftermath People. I hear fury and disgust with the system, but not surrender, because we cannot afford that.

I hear “democracy is dying” the most from representatives trying to get my money. This is ironic on multiple levels. Congress is rife with seditionists. If representatives define democracy by who sits in Congress, perhaps they should do something about the insurrectionists sitting next to them.

“Vote or democracy dies” is the siren song of people who want to kill democracy. They want to reduce democracy to one day of voting, instead of embracing the qualities that preserve it: creativity, compassion, resilience, refusal.

When autocratic rule rises, you refuse. You do the right thing whether the powerful like it or not.

Aftermath People have to always think in terms of survival, and what powers the will to survive is moral clarity. You learn new ways to stand your ground. Never live your life on your enemies’ terms. Never emphasize the villains over the victims.

That’s why the Trump verdict doesn’t matter much yet: the real victims, the American people, are no freer than they were before.

*          *          *

I’ve been writing about Trump for nine years, and about autocracy for over twenty. It’s frustrating to see people catch on when it’s too late. If they’re in Congress, I don’t think they’re really just catching on. They’re pretending to so that no one will accuse them of not stopping mafia state rule when they had the chance.

They need to pretend that the threat is new so that their betrayal won’t seem so profound. As I said in my books years ago, they feign shock to avoid accountability.

I have tuned out of national politics like it’s a soap opera, but I refuse to tune out of national life. I love this country too much to lie about it.

People keep asking me where we’re going. I’m going to the pool, because it’s plague-free for the first time in years. I’m going to listen to my Walkman like it’s 1991, because Trump is still a criminal like in 1991. There’s a New World Order, like in 1991, and I refuse to join it. I’d rather Bartleby my way through life than waste words on that white whale.

My son asked me if Trump’s conviction will change things. I don’t think it will. But the courage of your convictions might.

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The Trump stand at the local flea market. They had this out a week before the verdict.

Don’t be like this flea market bald eagle in a cage…

…Be like these two bald eagles in a tree! (Photographed from my kayak in St. Louis County.)