“The chick came into my room to catalog my footage. I told her I’d send my stuff out for coding. She told me that was her job ’cause she knew how he liked things numbered. I told her any asshole could number the shit. She said maybe so, but she thought she should do it. I told her what the fuck was so complicated about sending the shit out for coding. She said there was nothing complicated about it, she just had to assign the right numbers to the rolls. I told her any asshole could do that. She said maybe so, but she’d still better do it herself. I said shit, woman, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, and she said she knew who she was talking to and she was just trying to get stuff out for coding. I said get the fuck out of my room. She said she would if I’d give her the footage and she would catalog it in her room. I said get the fuck out of my room. She said she would if I would please give her the footage and she would catalog it in her room. I said get the fuck out now. She said she would if I would please give her the … I gave her my foot karate chopped right in her fucking fat stomach and told her who the fuck did she think she was fucking with ’cause I was the best fucking goddamn black cameraman in this country and I’d walk all over her before I’d give her my footage to code.”
—Kathleen Collins, “Documentary Style”

“The most expensive drink comes in at a whopping $100. The ghastly Benjamin, which sounds like a 10-year-old’s idea of what rich people like, is a martini with three types of vodka, raw oysters, and caviar.”
—“Trump’s D.C. Hotel Is Now Charging $24 for Its Cheapest Cocktail”

“’Now fog it slightly when he comes back in the evening and keep it dim while they sit on the bed. Now, how about a nice blue gel when he tells her it’s over. Good. Now go for a little fog while she tries not to cry. Good. Now take it up on him a little while he watches her coldly, then up on her when she asks him to stay. Nice. Now down a bit while it settles between them and keep it down while he watches her, just watches her, then fade him to black and leave her in the shadow while she looks for the feelings that lit up the room.’”
—Kathleen Collins, “Exteriors”

“I grew up knowing that my great-grandfather smuggled guns into the Bialystok ghetto for the resistance, which staged an armed uprising there in August 1943. As an adult, researching a book about collaboration and resistance, using my own family history, I found out why my great-grandfather had been in a position to arm the resistance: he was one of the leaders of the Bialystok Judenrat, the Nazi-appointed Jewish council that ran the ghetto.

“My great-grandfather’s story was at once an extreme and a typical example. Criminal regimes function in part by forcing the maximum number of subjects to participate in the atrocities. For nearly a century, individuals in various parts of the Western world have struggled with the question of how, and how much, we should engage politically and personally with governments that we find morally abhorrent.

“With the election of Donald Trump—a candidate who has lied his way into power, openly embraced racist discourse and violence, toyed with the idea of jailing his opponents, boasted of his assaults on women and his avoidance of taxes, and denigrated the traditional checks and balances of government—this question has confronted us as urgently as ever. After I wrote a piece about surviving autocracy, a great many people have asked me about one of my proposed rules: “Do not compromise.” What constitutes compromise? How is it possible to avoid it? Why should one not compromise?

“When I wrote about my great-grandfather in a book many years ago, I included the requisite discussion of Hannah Arendt’s opinion on the Jewish councils in Nazi-occupied Europe, which she called “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story” of the Holocaust. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem she asserted that without Jewish cooperation Germany would have been unable to round up and kill as many Jews as it did. I quoted equally from the most comprehensive response to Arendt’s characterization of the Judenrat, Isaiah Trunk’s book Judenrat, in which he described the councils as complicated and contradictory organizations, ones that had functioned differently in different ghettos, and ultimately concluded that they had no effect on the final scope of the catastrophe.

“When my grandmother—the Judenrat leader’s daughter—read the manuscript of my book, she demanded that I remove the Arendt quote. I told her I could not: as controversial as Arendt’s view was (and continues to be, forty years after her death), one cannot write about the Jewish councils and not acknowledge it. But I sincerely assured my grandmother that I viewed her father, who had been a local politician before the war, as a deeply moral man who did only what he thought was best for his people. My grandmother refused to understand; she and I did not speak for a few years after the book came out.

“My grandmother spent the second half of the twentieth century in Moscow, far away from the Holocaust historiography wars, but she and I spontaneously reproduced a debate about collaboration and resistance that has been playing out for decades: on one side of this debate are those who argue for doing good as long as good can be done, even in constrained circumstances; on the other are those who see any compromise as collaboration. Our current situation has so far brought forth mostly the pro-compromise side of the argument, which sounds seductively like the voice of reason.

“Following Trump’s first on-the-record meeting with journalists after the election, The New York Times editorial board was most struck by “how thinly thought through many of the president-elect’s stances actually are.” Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that this lack of expertise creates an opportunity for good people with knowledge to influence Trump: “They need to dive in now and try to pull him toward the center.” Fellow columnist Frank Bruni went so far as to suggest a radical sort of cooperation based on Trump’s apparently bottomless need for adoration: “Is our best hope for the best Trump to be so fantastically adulatory when he’s reasonable that he’s motivated to stay on that course, lest the adulation wane?”

“Trump is not only vain and incompetent but also, many people have suggested, uninterested in the daily business of governing. In any case, the transition has fallen far behind schedule. Normally, at this time in the cycle, the president-elect’s picks for top posts would already be in the agencies they plan to run, getting carefully prepared briefings from senior staff and taking stock. This is apparently not happening. When Trump haphazardly met the leader of Japan last week at Trump’s own offices in New York, his transition team had yet to even contact the State Department .

“Could it be that as long as Trump is not looking, good things could be done, or continue to be done? The State Department could continue to support human-rights groups abroad, until or even after he fills top diplomatic posts with cronies, environmental regulations could somehow continue to be enforced—those that cannot easily be cancelled by executive order—, the National Endowment for the Humanities could continue to fund scholarship at home. Perhaps Trump and his family will be too busy pillaging the country to pay attention to the national bureaucracy.

“Perhaps. But what happens when he does start to pay attention and restrictions of the sort that his character and his views suggest are imposed? He has promised to put an end to civil-service tenure and start firing. Then a sister argument will kick in: “If I don’t do this job, someone else will.” In one version of this argument, the imaginary someone would be worse—or there would be no one at all, since Trump has also promised to institute a federal hiring freeze. In another, the someone would be no better or worse, but the job would still get done.

“That was the argument my other grandmother used when she became a censor for the Soviet government. Her argument was by no means a moral cop-out. On the contrary, it was a moral choice. She had been trained to be a history teacher, but she decided that she could not engage in the act of active lying, especially to children. She did not want to use her charm, beauty, and kindness to make children think the way Stalin wanted them to think. So she became a censor. Her job was to open personal mail that arrived from abroad, read it, and block it if it contained banned material, such as a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls or Western natural-science magazines that an émigré kept sending his scientist brother.

“After three years, my grandmother was rewarded for her aptitude for languages and promoted. In her new job, she read dispatches filed by foreign correspondents accredited to work in Moscow and deleted words, lines, or entire stories that Stalin did not want to be published (whenever she was in doubt, she called the question in to Stalin’s secretary). My grandmother thought of this job as impersonal—she worked behind a curtain, and the correspondents never saw her—and mechanical: she followed clear rules. In over ten years on the job, she never made a mistake—or else she would not have survived. But it had real consequences: Western newspaper readers generally did not realize that foreign correspondents were prevented from writing about Soviet food shortages, some of the arrests, and the general state of fear in which the country lived.

“My family supplies other examples of this slippery slope of collaboration. Take my own. In 2012, I was working as the editor-in-chief of a popular science magazine called Vokrug Sveta when Vladimir Putin, who fancies himself an explorer and a nature conservationist, took a liking to the publication. His administration launched a kind of friendly takeover of the magazine, one that the publisher could not refuse. I found myself in meetings with the Russian Geographic Society, of which Putin was the hands-on chairman. They wanted me to publish stories about their activities, most of which, as far as I could tell, were bogus. In exchange, they promised to help the magazine: at one point every school in Russia was ordered to buy a subscription (like many Kremlin orders, this one ended in naught). I felt a slow rot setting in at a magazine I loved, but I kept telling myself that I could still do a good job—and keep many fine journalists gainfully employed. Then I was asked to send a reporter to accompany Putin on his hang-gliding adventure with a migrating flock of endangered Siberian cranes. I refused—not on principle but because I was afraid that the reporter would see and describe something that would get the magazine in trouble. The publisher fired me, but then Putin called me in for a meeting and offered me my job back—legally, it wasn’t his to offer, but for practical purposes it was.

“In comparison to the Putin regime’s major abuses of power and suppression of the opposition, the story of the cranes and my firing does not deserve a mention. All that happened as a result of the hang-gliding trip (from what I know) was that two or three of the cranes were badly injured for the sake of the president’s publicity stunt, and I lost my job. But I also lost a bit of my soul and the sense of moral agency I had earned over decades of acting like my best journalist self. When Putin offered me my job back after the trip, I hesitated to say no: I loved that job, and I thought I could still edit a good magazine and keep some fine journalists employed. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen the next time I was asked to cover a Putin photo op or a fake story produced by his Geographic Society, which siphoned money off like every other part his mafia state. Fortunately for me, my closest friend said, “Have you lost your mind?,” by which she meant my sense of right and wrong.

“In Bialystok ghetto, my great-grandfather’s responsibility in the Judenrat was to ensure that the ghetto was supplied with food. He ran the trucks that brought food in and took garbage out, he ran the canteen and supervised the community gardens that a group of young socialists planted. He also discouraged the young socialists from trying to organize a resistance movement: it would be of no use and would only jeopardize the ghetto’s inhabitants. It took him almost two years to change his mind about the resistance efforts, as he slowly lost hope that the Judenrat, by generally following the rules and keeping the ghetto inhabitants in line, would be able to save at least some of them.

“As in other ghettos, the Judenrat was ultimately given the task of compiling the lists of Jews to be “liquidated.” The Bialystok Judenrat accepted the job, and there is every indication that my great-grandfather took part in the process. The arguments in defense of producing the list, in Bialystok and elsewhere, were pragmatic: the killing was going to occur anyway; by cooperating, the Judenrat could try to reduce the number of people the Nazis were planning to kill (in Bialystok, this worked, though in the end the ghetto, like all other ghettos, was “liquidated”); by compiling the lists, the Judenrat could prevent random killing, instead choosing to sacrifice those who were already near death from disease or starvation. These were strong arguments. There is always a strong argument.

“But what if the Jews had refused to cooperate? Was Arendt right that fewer people might have died? Was Trunk right that Judenrat activities had no effect on the final outcome? Or would mass murder of Jews have occurred earlier if Jews had refused to manage their own existence in the ghetto? We cannot know for certain, any more than we can know now whether a scorched-earth strategy or the strategy of compromise would more effectively mitigate Trumpism. But that does not mean that a choice—the right choice—is impossible. It only means that we are asking the wrong question.

“The difficulty stems from the realist tradition in politics. In contrast to what is sometimes called idealism, the realist position holds that the political world is governed not by morality but by clear and calculable interests. Alliances and conflicts turn into transactions with predictable outcomes. The realist reasoning is applied most clearly and most often to international relations, but it has seeped into all political life, turning virtually every conversation into a discussion of possible outcomes.

“Realism is predicated on predictability: it assumes that parties have clear interests and will act rationally to achieve them. This is rarely true anywhere, and it is patently untrue in the case of Trump. He ran a campaign unlike any in memory, has won an election unlike any in memory, and has so far appointed a cabinet unlike any in memory: racists, Islamophobes, and homophobes, many of whom have no experience relevant to their new jobs. Patterns of behavior characteristic of former presidents will not help predict Trump’s behavior. As for his own patterns, inconsistency and unreliability are among his chief characteristics.

“Of course, it is not entirely impossible that, if Bill Gates follows Frank Bruni’s advice and starts wining and dining Trump, the president-elect will be so flattered that he will take some good policy proposals to heart—but it seems exceedingly unlikely. It is not impossible that if the Times and the political establishment follow Friedman’s advice and shower Trump with praise whenever he is so much as civil, he will respond positively—though one suspects that one or more of his wives have tried this age-old trick of training a man like one trains a puppy and have failed, despite being better positioned to exert influence than is the Times. Perhaps, if hundreds of federal employees stand firm and do their jobs exactly as they should be done in the face of breaking norms—and assuming they don’t get fired—Trumpism will fail. Or perhaps it will fail if they refuse to do their jobs. We cannot know.

“Similarly, we cannot know whether Western sanctions have kept Vladimir Putin from invading more neighboring countries or shedding more blood in Ukraine—or, on the contrary, have caused him to be more stubbornly brutal and militaristic than he would otherwise have been. In other words, we cannot know whether economic punishment of the Russian government has been, in the realist sense of the word, “effective.” What we do know is that sanctions were the correct response from a moral standpoint—even if it is a response we have applied inconsistently elsewhere—simply because it is right to refuse to do business with a dictator and his cronies.

“We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right. What separates Americans in 2016 from Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s is a little bit of historical time but a whole lot of historical knowledge. We know what my great-grandfather did not know: that the people who wanted to keep the people fed ended up compiling lists of their neighbors to be killed. That they had a rationale for doing so. And also, that one of the greatest thinkers of their age judged their actions as harshly as they could be judged.

“Armed with that knowledge, or burdened with that legacy, we have a slight chance of making better choices. As Trump torpedoes into the presidency, we need to shift from realist to moral reasoning. That would mean, at minimum, thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future. It is also a good idea to have a trusted friend capable of reminding you when you are about to lose your sense of right and wrong.”
—Masha Gessen

“They had met three months earlier, when the city was not yet openly at war. It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life. One moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”

“Saeed was grateful for Nadia’s presence, for the way in which she altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not necessarily filling them with words but making them less bleak in their muteness. And he was grateful, too, for her effect on his father, whose politeness, when he recalled he was in the company of a young woman, would jar him from what otherwise were interminable reveries and would bring his attention back for a while to the here and now.”

“But Saeed’s father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared if he said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down and threaten him with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life appears only for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in reality, one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.”

“…when we migrate we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
—Moshin Hamid

“in the rush to be radically empathetic, and reckon with another’s disaffection, a different kind of normalization occurs: We validate an identity politics that is often rooted in denying other people’s right to the same….Sooner rather than later, the drama that currently hangs over every second will melt into air, and some semblance of normal life will return. Most of us will move forward; some will feel left behind. Eventually, the passions of this week might seem overheated. Our laws can be unwritten and then rewritten. Politicians come and go. This week is now a part of our history, a paragraph or a few pages that someone in the future will read as a string of actions. But the legacy of this moment—how we will be judged—remains to be written.”
—Hua Hsu

Oceans of ink have been spilled during this interminable election urging us to “try to understand” Donald Trump supporters. Journey to the Heart of Trumpland stories became their own genre during the campaign – one in which Trump rallies were mostly covered in reverent tones.

Even as election day neared, we were being told by pundits that the important work, that of learning to take Trump supporters’ concerns seriously, would come afterward. We must not forget them, we were cautioned, in a way we were not told we must always keep Mitt Romney or Al Gore supporters in our hearts.

I suspect we will not see a glut of similarly themed think pieces about Hillary Clinton voters this week, stories about how we really need to listen to pro-Hillary folks, feel their pain, make sure their needs are met before the next election.

A journalist’s pitch of “I Spent a Weekend With a Bunch of Hillary Supporters and It Turns Out They Love Their Children and Make a Good Blueberry Pie” was never going to be met with “Great! Give me 1,500 words.”

We were to understand that “real America” is found at a Trump rally. Those rallies were somehow more authentically American than, say, a Black Lives Matter protest, a college classroom, a gay pride parade, or even a state fair. A man shouting “Jew-S-A!” was to be taken as some kind of white working-class sphinx, asking us to solve the riddle of his true feelings.

That man’s life just had to be given enough context, apparently, and then his anti-Semitism and the raging sexism of the man shouting “Trump that bitch!” next to him, would become benign. Assign their anger a source – and never question the legitimacy of that emotion. Tell us one of these guys is behind on his car payments and the other loves curly fries and everything becomes alright.

Sadly, these things would not “humanize” a man to me any more than his chanting of “Jew-S-A!” would.

I do know that humans do awful things. I’ve read my history. Right now, it feels as if I’m rereading one of the more unfortunate bits. Well done, America. I can report that we in Canada are feeling a little Austria, 1933, right now.

Serving up oodles of think pieces and man-on-the-street interviews and rally safaris that illuminate the lives of the prejudiced without visiting the lives that these “racial attitudes” may affect goes beyond hack journalism and into irresponsible.

There has been a lot of that. Calling someone “working class” over and over while you click your camera clicks like rosary beads is not an Angelic Salutation that absolves your subjects of their sins.

That these people are adults who are accountable for their choices was largely taken as an unduly harsh sentiment in this election. But there is no parent’s note for bigotry. No teacher would accept “Little Timmy can’t help but hate Mexicans today because he had a dentist appointment.”

The media did very little to challenge the narrative that Donald Trump – a trust-fund baby turned real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star turned fraudulent-university huckster turned politician – is the working class’s hero. And that he is a hero that the people had a right to turn to and to not be criticized for doing so.

It was taken as given, but I kept reading it, that Trump supporters were a demographic compelled, by forces entirely beyond their control, to hate and fear Hispanics and Muslims.

To report that story convincingly you have to ignore the fact that Mr. Trump’s voters are relatively affluent. They have a median household income of $72,000 (U.S.), a full $10,000 above the average.

You also have to sweep a lot of lower-income, lower-skilled minorities (it’s striking how people of colour seldom get the romanticized label “working class” bestowed upon them) under the rug. The plights of these people are much less likely to be poignantly illuminated in the press than those of my fellow white folks.

You may have noticed that, the story goes, white people are on drugs because they have no jobs, but black people have no jobs because they are on drugs.

To maintain the inevitability of the Trump-voters-in-these-sad-times existence, you have to forget that the working class built unions in times of need, and they ran soup kitchens in times of desperation. When called upon, the workers of America have been known to fight Nazis without up and joining them. They have proved time and time again that they are entirely capable of facing uncertainty without being overtaken by a burning desire to elect a clueless buffoon.

The closing of a tire plant doesn’t automatically make you vote for a volatile, vindictive dollar-store demagogue who has had his eye on his own bottom line from the instant he launched his campaign and whose only truly consistent position throughout that campaign has been that he will in any number of shifting ways make minorities suffer.

No matter how tempting it might be to normalize these people and their “controversial racial attitudes” in the years ahead and, in doing so, go some way toward making the world we’re now all forced to live in feel just that tiny bit more normal, more sane, let’s not do that.

First of all, stop calling the crap we’re seeing “economic anxiety.”

Next thing you know, we’ll be reading about “white rumbly tummies” and “The White Stomach Butterflies That Brought Hitler to Power.”

You may not be able to change the minds of these “anxious” people with facts. Truths like “Your plastic orange president-elect reflexively spits out lies like some kind of remarkably duplicitous Pez dispenser” will get you nowhere. Pleas to their sense of compassion, and duty to the larger community, will likely be met with an overcompressed JPEG plastered with a conspiracy theory and some invented statistics; you will make no headway with logic or science with Trump supporters.

These people are political anti-vaxxers, sure, but I’d like some sizable portion of the world to keep asking: “How did a country that acknowledged racism as a problem, one that they would strive to overcome, decide that this tax-evading, lady-grabbing hate monger was the answer?”

Please don’t tell me that lots of Trump supporters voted on issues other than race. Studies show that – while the belief that women are nasty was a strong indicator of support – attitudes toward race, the belief that black people are more violent than whites, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya etc. were the key predictors of whether someone planned to vote for Donald Trump.

Besides, “I don’t support the rampaging of that Tyrannosaurus rex, but it’s not enough to sway my vote against that Tyrannosaurus rex continuing its rampage with all the authority of the United States President behind it” still gets you struck off the Christmas-card list, buddy.

What you have done, America, is elect a man to the highest office in the land who has failed to demonstrate even a Schoolhouse Rock! level of understanding of how government works. You have given staggering power, much of it nuclear power that he has mused about using, to a clearly psychologically unstable braggart who pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to jail his former opponent – all other exhaustive attempts at prosecuting her having failed.

When pressed on the legality of this junta-style gem of a promise, Mr. Trump’s surrogates whined, “You’re taking it literally.” It’s okay, calm down people, it’s just a locker-room dictatorship.

Mr. Trump claimed that America did not have the world’s respect. Oh, you had it, America, but then you set your democracy to work facilitating the continuation of a ridiculous man’s late-life vanity project.

“You better make sure we win, or there will be no more Trump rallies. To hell with that!” Mr. Trump called out at one of his white-(supremacist)-tie affairs.

He spoke frequently as if the adulation of the crowd was the end game. No one seems to have told him that, either way, the stadium events would stop. No one said, “You don’t just stay on tour if you win, Mr. Trump. You’re running to become President of the United States, not Billy Joel.”

In the last six months, I think I’ve read exactly as many news stories mocking college-educated millennials living in their parents’ basements who want to make more than minimum wage as I’ve read stories oozing sympathy for middle-aged white guys who dropped out of high school and who are making close to $100,000 of my Canadian dollars a year.

I have heard a lot about how deeply saddened straight, white, cisgender men are about everyone now being so “politically correct.” That joke they make about Chinese drivers used to kill at parties, I guess.

Grownups are having conniptions over young people using the word “triggered.” I’m being told that this word is why Mr. Trump won the election. Hey, guys, “triggered” is just another generation’s “bummed-out.” You may be the ones being oversensitive here, and I’m not sure why the one lexical delicacy we’re all expected to adhere to these days is that no one is allowed to call racists “racists.”

You know what? If I had to pick a “snowflake” generation here, it might be the older white folks who seem to have had a screaming meltdown about the loss of their cultural right to say the N-word in public and have everyone chortle along with them.

What we just witnessed was a tantrum, one that will cost everyone dearly. And if you are black or Hispanic or Muslim or trans or gay or a woman, the answer is: Yes, they do hate you that much. America just bit off its nose to spite your face.
—Tabatha Southey