Apocalyptic Thoughts on the Left.

Farhad Manjoo is doomsday prepping for a second Trump term.

My first thought was "if coronavirus didn't have you prepping already, you have an epic normalcy bias problem."

Which is more or less confirmed by his celebration of ammo shortages and insistence on consulting others in his Twitter echo chamber.

You can ask my Much Better Half and our bemused basketball team of children: Husband/Dad started enhancing our stockpile in January. 

I don't want to brag, but we survived the Great Toilet Paper Panic without so much as a raised eyebrow.

So...yeah. But it is nice to know that I won't be fighting with an urban power couple for dwindling ammo supplies if, hypothetically, I were to decide to acquire a hypothetical handgun in the next two weeks. Hypothetically speaking.

In utter earnestness: you should have treated spring and early summer of 2020 as an emergency disaster drill. To the extent you can, set up a stockpile, grabbing a few things here and there and setting them aside. If you don't know them, get to know your neighbors. In these times, those bonds have often withered in a way that would have been unthinkable when I grew up. But the reality is, they are a hell of a lot more important than your favorite pundit. 

And, if worse comes to worst, have a bug-out plan.

Regardless, I recommend the Manjoo piece without reservation. Not because I agree with it--for the most part, I can't understand how he came to the conclusions he did, nor how Trump's actions led to Sudden Onset Anxiety About Democratic Norms. 

An ideal time for that would have been the 44th Presidency, but it seems undeclared wars, migrant children in cages, using the Espionage Act against journalists and drone strikes against American teenagers and civilians of color were OK for millions of Americans so long as you had the right party suffix.

Anyway, the Trump Presidency and its worst features did not spring like Athena from the brow of Zeus--it stands atop a lot of rubble piled up by previous Presidents, Republican and Democratic.

No, the Manjoo piece is useful because it shows how the distrustful camps living within the same borders cannot formulate a shared perception of the exact same event. The pre-commitments force interpretations, even when they strain facts past the breaking point.

I've compared America to a divorced couple forced to live under the same roof. Something like The War of the Roses, only without the black comedy and with the looming threat of the ex-spouses resorting to chemical weapons.

Manjoo shows us how far the couple has moved down the road to domestic violence. His fatal flaw is the inability to recognize the log in his own eye. 

With that, I let him have the last word with the best line of the essay:

When you don’t have social trust, when you don’t have a shared view of reality, do you even have a country?