Subject: ‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America | Books | The Guardian
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‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election
America | Books | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/18/none-of-the-old-rules-apply-dave-eggers-travels-through-post-election-america

‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election
AmericaFrom dazed election night revellers in Washington DC to a gay Trump
voter in Detroit to kids in Kentucky ... The US writer gauges the mood of a
divided nation
Dave Eggers <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/daveeggers>• Friday 18
November 2016 10.00 EST

The word surreal is overused and often wrongly used, but in the case of the
Washington Post Election Night Live party, the word was apt. First of all,
it was a disco. There was a DJ playing a frenetic mix of contemporary Top
40 and pointedly apropos songs such as Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best
Shot” (“You’re a real tough cookie with a long history … ” ). Behind the DJ
there were dozens of screens showing various television networks’ coverage
of the election. The screens were so bright and so huge, and the colours so
primary and vivid, that the experience was like being trapped inside an
enormous jar of jelly beans.

Women dressed like Vegas showgirls made their way through the crowd with
towering tiered hats adorned with chocolates from one of the evening’s
sponsors. The chocolates, round and the size of strawberries, were offered
in pairs, enclosed in loose plastic sacks – a bizarre but perhaps
intentionally lewd optic? The bartenders were setting out Campari
Americanos by the dozens. The food was by chefs José Andrés
<http://www.joseandres.com/> and the brothers Voltaggio. The Washington
Post has a right to celebrate – the paper is thriving and its political
coverage extraordinary – but this felt like Rome before the fall.

At some point early on, the music was turned down for 20 minutes so Karen
Attiah of the Post could moderate a live conversation between the current
German ambassador, Peter Wittig, and former Mexican ambassador Arturo
Sarukhan. The talk was serious and enlightening, but the ambassadors seemed
baffled by the nightclub atmosphere, and besides, few people were
listening. The party was about the party.

And everyone expected Hillary Clinton
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/hillary-clinton> to win. The attendees
were largely Washington insiders – lobbyists, staffers, legislative aides,
pundits and producers. Most were liberal and most were confident. The
night’s only potential for suspense centred around whether or not Clinton
would take some of the toss-up states, like Florida and North Carolina.
When she was declared the winner – which was expected before the party’s
scheduled end-time of 10 o’clock – there would be talk of who would be
appointed what, with a not-insignificant portion of the partygoers in line
for positions in the new administration.

Thus the mood was ebullient at seven o’clock, when the event started, and
was electric by eight. Kentucky and Indiana were announced for Donald Trump
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump> and that news was met
with a shrug. More scantily clad women walked through the rooms serving
hors d’oeuvres, and soon there were at least three showgirls wearing hats
of towering testicle-chocolates. Young Washingtonians swayed to the music.
Drinks were set under chairs and spilled. A young girl in a beautiful party
dress walked through the drunken partygoers looking for her parents.

Then nine o’clock came around and the party began to turn. Most of the
states thus far had gone for Trump. None of these victories was unexpected,
but the reddening of the national map was disheartening, and the margins in
those states were often greater than expected. He took Texas, North Dakota,
Kansas, Mississippi. Not a problem for the crowd, but by 9.30, people were
panicking. Trump was leading in Florida and North Carolina. Nate Silver
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/nate-silver>, the statistics shaman
who had been roundly criticised for overestimating Trump’s chances, now
posted that a Trump victory was likely. Ohio was in the bag, Pennsylvania
was trending toward him, and it looked like he could win Wisconsin and
Michigan. A hundred guests turned their attention from the big screens to
their little screens. They paced and made calls. The party emptied and we
all spilled into the streets. Beyond the Washington Post building and
beyond DC, the country had been swamped by a white tsunami few saw coming.
Election night at The Washington Post. Photograph: The Washington
Post/Getty Images

For a few hours, the city had the feeling of a disaster movie. People
scurried this way and that. Some wandered around dazed. Following the
returns, we travelled from restaurant to bar to home, and the Somali and
Ethiopian cabbies were stunned, worried less about Trump than about the
prospect of Rudy Giuliani <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/rudygiuliani>
serving in the cabinet in any capacity. We all talked about where we will
move: Belize; New Zealand; Canada. We no longer knew our own country. In
Columbia Heights, when the election was settled, a young woman biking up
the hill stopped, threw her bike into the middle of the road, sat on a kerb
and began weeping. “No no no no,” she wailed.
------------------------------

The omens were there if you looked. A month before the election, I’d driven
from Pittsburgh to the Philadelphia suburbs and saw nothing but Trump/Pence
signs. In three days I covered about 1,200 miles of back roads and highway
– some of the prettiest country you can find on this continent – and saw
not one sign, large or small, in support of Clinton. The only time any
mention of her was made at all was on an enormous billboard bearing her
face with a Pinocchio nose.

I did see Confederate flags. James Carville, the political strategist,
recently quipped that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with
Alabama in between, and there is some truth to that. There are a lot of men
in camouflage jackets. There are a lot of men out of work. When you stop at
gas stations, the magazine sections are overwhelmed by periodicals devoted
to guns, hunting and survival. Then there are the tidy farms and rolling
hills, the equestrian centres with their white fences, the wide swaths of
Amish and Mennonites and Quakers.

I was in rural Pennsylvania to see the United 93 National Memorial in
Shanksville – a monument to the 40 passengers and crew who died in a
windswept field on 9/11. The day I visited was bright and clear. The
surrounding country was alive with autumn colours and, far on distant
ridgelines, white windmills turned slowly. Just off the parking lot, a park
ranger in forest green was standing before a diverse group of middle school
students, admonishing them. “Boys and girls. Boys and girls,” he said.
“You’re standing here where people died. There are still human remains
here. You’re goofing around and laughing, and I shouldn’t have to tell you
to be respectful. They deserve that.” They quieted for a moment before one
of the boys nudged another, and the giggling began again.
Trump supporters rally in Oceanside, California. Photograph: Bill
Wechter/AFP/Getty Images

The memorial is beautifully constructed and devastating in its emotional
punch. Visitors can walk the flightpath of the plane, a gently sloping
route down to the crash site, which is separated from the footpath by a low
wall. “It’s a grave,” another ranger explained. “So we don’t walk there.”
Higher on the hill, there is an indoor visitor centre that recreates every
moment of the day in excruciating detail. There are video loops of the Twin
Towers being destroyed, fragments of the plane, pictures and bios of every
passenger, details about the calls they made from the plane once they knew
they would die. It is shattering.

Leaving the museum, a man in front of me, young and built like a
weightlifter, couldn’t push the door open. I reached over him to help and
he turned to thank me. His face was soaked with tears. I got into my car,
shaken but heartened by the courage of the 40 humans who had realised what
was happening – that they were passengers on a missile headed for the White
House or Capitol building – and had sacrificed their lives to save untold
numbers in Washington DC. The American passengers of United 93 were from 35
different cities in 11 different states, but they died together to save the
capital from incalculable loss of lives and what might have been a
crippling blow to the nation’s psyche.

I left the memorial and turned on to a two-lane road, part of the Lincoln
Highway that runs through the state –part of the first coast-to-coast
highway in the United States. Just beyond a sign advertising home-grown
sweetcorn, there was a residential home, the first house anyone might
encounter when leaving the United Memorial, and on this home, there is a
vast Confederate flag draped over the front porch.

It’s important to note that this was the Lincoln Highway. And that the
civil war ended 160 years ago. And that Pennsylvania was not a state in the
Confederacy. So to see this, an enormous Confederate flag in a Union state,
a mile from a symbol of national tragedy and shared sacrifice, was an
indicator that there was something very unusual in the mood of the country.
Ancient hatreds had resurfaced. Strange alliances had been formed. None of
the old rules applied.
The Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Photograph:
Mark Makela/Reuters
------------------------------

Steven McManus has come out of the closet twice. First as a gay man, then
as a Trump supporter. We were sitting at a coffee shop in Detroit’s Eastern
Market neighbourhood, and McManus was almost vibrating. This was two days
after Trump’s election, and McManus was elated – about the victory, yes,
but more personally, about the fact that after Trump’s election, he’d had
the courage to post a message on social media declaring his support of the
president-elect.

“I lived a lot of my life as a closeted guy,” McManus said, “and the
liberation I felt as a man coming out was similar to how I felt coming out
for Trump. You really truly think you’re the only one who has these
feelings. It’s liberating. I felt it was time to come out again.”

McManus is a thin man in his late 30s, bald and bespectacled, with a
close-cropped beard. He grew up in the part of the Detroit suburbs known as
Downriver. Many of the area’s residents had come from the American south in
the 1940s to work in the auto factories, and the area still retains a
southern feel. His father was a salesman who brokered space on trucking
lines. Looking back on it now, McManus appreciated the fact that his
parents could raise five children on one salesman’s salary. But then came
the Nafta, and the gutting of much of the Detroit auto manufacturing base.
McManus watched as Detroit and Flint hollowed out and caved in.

“Trump was the only candidate talking about the trade imbalance,” McManus
said. “Being a businessman, a successful businessman, he understood why
business decision-makers, at the highest levels of their companies, move
their production overseas.” McManus was angry when auto companies, after
receiving bailouts from the US government in 2009, continued to move
production to Mexico. “In Detroit, we gave America the middle class. But
this is now a false economy. The housing market is decimated, and the
middle class is shrinking. I want someone to shake it up. Let’s move the
whole country forward.”

There is something unusual in the mood of the country. Ancient hatreds have
resurfaced. Strange alliances have formed

McManus is not blind to the rareness of an openly gay man supporting Trump.
“But I don’t have to vote a certain way based on my sexuality. In my mind
we’ve moved beyond having to vote Democrat just because you’re gay.” And
he’s not worried about a reversal of the hard-fought right to marriage gays
just achieved. “We’ve got our rights now,” he said. “It’s settled.” McManus
and his husband got married three years ago in New York, before the supreme
court decision legalised gay marriage nationwide, and it was in his new
place of domestic tranquillity that McManus watched the Republican national
convention. Two moments affected him profoundly. First was the appearance
of Peter Thiel
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel-republican-convention-speech>,
the former CEO of PayPal, who was given a prime speaker’s spot and said
from the stage, “Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be
gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an
American.”

McManus was moved then, but he was even more affected by an unscripted part
of Trump’s speech. “It was shortly after the Orlando massacre, and for the
first time in my life, a Republican candidate for president said things
like, ‘forty-nine wonderful Americans’, or ‘beautiful Americans’ or
whatever he said, ‘were savagely murdered’. And he said, ‘I will protect
gay and lesbian individuals.’ Some people at the convention cheered and
some people didn’t cheer. And then Trump said, off the cuff and off the
teleprompter, he said, ‘For those of you who cheered, I thank you.’ And I
cried. I cried.”

McManus’s husband works for the army, as an IT specialist, and they both
became bothered by Clinton’s email setup. “If my husband had done the same
thing, he’d be fired. And it’s pretty hard to get fired from a government
job.” McManus began to follow Trump more closely, and found that he was
agreeing with most of his positions on trade, immigration and national
security. “I began to realise that I’m more conservative than I thought.”
But he couldn’t reveal this. He lives in Detroit, a liberal city, and works
in the restaurant industry in town, where left-leaning politics dominate.
But after coming out as a Trump supporter, he is finding himself
emboldened. The day after the election, McManus saw his doctor, who is
Muslim, and he mentioned that he’d voted for Trump.

“I just wanted to get it off my chest. I was feeling a little … ” McManus
sits up in his chair, to indicate the new confidence he felt that day. “I
told him, I came out as a Trump supporter today. And he went off for 15
minutes – to the point where I almost walked out. He was impassioned about
how he felt that Trump was disenfranchising Muslim-Americans. But our
present state of terrorism does have a religious undertone to it. Finally I
managed to get something off my chest. I can’t remember who said this to
me, either my husband or my ex, but I said to my doctor, ‘You know, it
wasn’t a group of Catholic nuns that flew planes into the World Trade
Center.’”
Proud to be a Republican … Peter Thiel. Photograph: ddp
USA/REX/Shutterstock
------------------------------

Later that night in Detroit, I ran into Rob Mickey, a professor of
political science. He grew up in Texas, but has spent about 10 years
teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. We were at a party
benefiting an educational nonprofit. Doing something concrete and positive
felt good, and being around kids felt good, but everyone was exhausted – no
one had slept since the election – and 30 seconds into every conversation
it turned to Trump, Clinton, what had gone wrong and what would happen
next. One of the event’s attendees had been living in a central American
cloud forest for years, and there was much talk about following her down
there.

I told Mickey about McManus, and to him, the story of the gay Trump
supporter was both surprising and unsurprising. Everything about 2016 was
upside down. Parts of Michigan who had voted twice for Obama had turned to
Trump. Rob and his wife Jenny had gone canvassing for Clinton on the Sunday
before the election, and the reception they received was not warm.

“I would say it was hostile,” he said.

They had gone to Milan, Michigan, an overwhelmingly white town 50 miles
southwest of Detroit. “It’s spelled like the Italian town, but pronounced
MY-lan,” Rob pointed out. The Clinton campaign had given Rob and Jenny a
list of names and addresses of white working-class residents who had
registered as Democrats but were labelled sporadic voters. Milan had voted
for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and winning towns such as Milan was key to
delivering a Clinton victory in Michigan.

The homes they visited were run-down, with “No Soliciting” placards on
every door. They saw no Clinton signs on anyone’s lawn. There were Trump
signs scattered around town, but most of the residents they met were
disgusted by the entire election. “One woman said, ‘I don’t want to have
nothing to do with that,’” Mickey recalled. “Another said, ‘I hate them
both, including that guy of yours.’ When I pointed out that our candidate
was a woman, she said, ‘Whatever’ and slammed the door.”

The liberation I felt as a man coming out was similar to how I felt coming
out for Trump

One house with a Bernie Sanders sign on the lawn looked promising. Mickey
knocked on the door. A white man with a US ARMY shirt answered. He was
missing an arm. Mickey introduced himself as a Clinton canvasser, and told
the man he had supported Sanders, too, during the primary. “That’s great,”
the man said, and closed the door.

“The people we met that day were straight out of central casting, if you
were making a movie about the disaffected white working class,” Mickey
said. “Between 55 and 65, without college degrees. You could see that Lena
Dunham and Katy Perry were not going to do anything to form a bridge to
these people. If I hadn’t read any polls, and I was basing it just on the
people I met, I would have thought, boy, Clinton’s going to get wiped out.”

It was different in 2008. Knowing that Michigan was securely in Obama’s
column and Ohio was on the bubble, Rob and Jenny went to Toledo to knock on
doors in trailer parks and housing projects. Foreclosure signs were common.
When they introduced themselves as canvassers for Obama, the residents, all
of them white, were welcoming and chatty. “The interactions were long,”
Mickey said. “The people were worried and they wanted to talk.” Ohio’s 18
electoral votes went to Obama in 2008 and 2012.

“This campaign wore a lot of people down,” Mickey said. “The state was
bombarded by pro-Clinton ads, but she failed to offer any sustained and
coherent economic message. She said, ‘I’m not crazy’ and ‘I’m not a sexist
racist pig’, but for working class whites that’s not enough. I would say
that of the people who slammed their doors on me, most of them didn’t vote
for either candidate.”
[image: A Hillary Clinton supporter applauds her televised concession
speech.]
A Hillary Clinton supporter applauds her televised concession speech.
Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

In fact, an unprecedented number of Michigan voters cast ballots without
choosing either Clinton or Trump. This kind of voting happens every
election – where voters make their preferences known down-ballot but don’t
mark anyone for president – but never in such numbers. In 2012, there were
50,000 Michigan voters who declined to choose any presidential candidate.
In 2016, there were 110,000.

Clinton lost Michigan by 13,107 votes.
------------------------------

The week after the election, the business of the United States went on.
Schools and banks were open. The stock market plummeted and rose to a new
high. Commuters commuted, and I was headed from Detroit to Kentucky. All of
this was travel planned months before, and none of it had anything to do
with the election, but it felt like I was making my way, intentionally,
into the heart of Trump country.

At Detroit airport it was impossible not to feel the tragedy of Tuesday as
having realigned our relationships with each other. Because the voting had
split so dramatically along racial lines, how could an African-American or
Latino pass a white person on the street, or at baggage claim, and not
wonder, “Which side are you on?”

The emergence of safety pins to symbolise support for Clinton (and equality
and inclusion) was inevitable – it fulfilled a need, particularly on the
part of white Americans, to signal where they stand. Otherwise all
iconography is subject to misinterpretation. At the airport, I found an
older white man staring at me. His eyes narrowed to slits. I was baffled
until I realised he was looking at my baseball hat, which bore the logo and
name of a Costa Rican beer called Imperial. Was this man a Clinton
supporter who suspected me of being a white nationalist? Was the word
Imperial sending a Ku Klux Klan/Third Reich signal to him?

Anyway, I was in the wrong terminal. I was in danger of missing a flight to
Louisville, so I left and poked my head into a Hertz bus and asked the
driver if he would be stopping near Delta anytime soon. He paused for a
moment.

“Yeah, I’ll take you,” he said.

His name was Carl. He was a lanky African-American man in his 60s, and we
rode alone, just me and him in this enormous bus, for a time. He asked how
I was doing. I told him I was terrible. I *was* feeling terrible, but I
also wanted him to know which side I was on. He laughed.
A traveller in Detroit airport. Photograph: Jim Young/REUTERS

“Yeah, I was surprised on Tuesday, too,” he said. “But I almost feel sorry
for Trump. I don’t think he thought he’d actually win. You see him sitting
next to Obama at the Oval Office? He looked like a child.”
------------------------------

In Louisville, three days after the election, I sat with 32 students at
Fern Creek high school. This was supposed to be a regular classroom visit
by someone passing through, but the atmosphere was different now. The
students at Fern Creek are from 28 countries. They speak 41 languages.
There are refugees from Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of
Congo. We sat in an oval and ate samosas. Nepalese samosas, I was told.
Three of the students in the class were from Nepal, and had a particular
recipe. The food was extraordinary.

I told these students, three girls still learning English, that I’d always
wanted to go to Nepal, and asked them to write down some places they’d
recommend. They wrote “Jhapa, Damak (Refugee camp).” They were from Bhutan
and had grown up in a UNHCR camp in eastern Nepal. A young man to my left
had come from Iraq two years earlier.

Their teachers, Joseph Franzen and Brent Peters, guided the conversation
through topics of creativity, social justice and empathy. The students were
without exception thoughtful, attentive and respectful of each other’s
opinions. Every time a student finished a statement, the rest of the class
snapped, Beat-style, in appreciation. We didn’t talk politics. For the time
being, the students had had enough of politics. The day after the election,
they’d had a charged discussion about the results, and, still feeling raw,
they had written about the discussion the next day.

“The thing I didn’t say yesterday was that Muslims scare me. The thing with
Isis is out of control and I don’t trust them at all and I don’t get why
Mexicans can’t take the test to become legal? Are they lazy?”

“The election didn’t really bother me even with the outcome, I didn’t
support Trump. The main reason I cared about Clinton winning was ’cause I
didn’t want my family to be affected. My mom is gay and married to a woman.”

“As a Muslim female in high school it’s hard to deal with this and let it
sink in. But I know Trump doesn’t have full power of his actions. So I feel
like even if he’s president, everything will be the same.”

Our only hope will be that the 100 million or so young people in American
schools behave better than the president

“I was downright disappointed in the country. Because Trump won, racism,
sexism, misogyny and xenophobia won. It goes to show what our country
values now. Either this is what we value, or this is what the majority is
OK with.”

“I feel like everything said yesterday doesn’t even matter anymore. We as
American citizens can’t change what’s been decided. Not everybody gets what
they want. That’s what life is. Trump will be our new president and we
can’t change that. WE need to make America great again, NOT Trump. That’s
our job as people.”

“I think Trump and Hillary are both crazy and I’m kind of eager to see how
trump runs this b---h.”

And so we see how differently we express ourselves on paper. The students,
sitting in their oval with the smell of Nepalese samosas filling the room,
were unfailingly kind to each other. But on paper, other selves were
unleashed. Despite the many international students, the school’s population
is mostly American-born, 48% white and 38% black, and it was easy to see
how Trump could bring dormant grievances to the fore, could give licence to
reactionary theories and kneejerk assumptions. The students had witnessed
eight years of exquisite presidential self-control and dignity, and now
there would be a 70-year-old man in the White House whose feelings were
easily hurt, who called people names, and who tweeted his complaints at all
hours, with rampant misspellings and exclamation marks. Our only hope will
be that the 100 million or so young people in American schools behave
better than the president. A president who has not read a book since he was
last required to. Think of it.

After the class, a tall African-American student named Devin approached me.
He’d introduced himself before the class, and had asked some very
sophisticated questions about using imagery to convey meaning in his
poetry. He was a wide receiver on the school’s football team, he said, but
he was also a writer. He handed me a loose-leaf piece of paper, and on it
was a prose-poem he wanted me to look at.

We sat on top of my house, laying back, looking at the stars, the stars
shining, waving back at us. They told us hello. Time froze. I turned my
head to look at you. Still fixated on the stars, you paid me no mind. I
studied you. This was the true face of beauty. Your royal blue eyes, the
brown polka dots on your face. Your smile making the moon envious because
it could not compare in light. I reached out to grab your hand. You turned
your eyes to look at me. Our hands intersected and we both smiled. I told
you you were were beautiful.

Below the piece, Devin wrote, in red ink, “Do I have something here? Should
I continue?”
Anti-Trump Protesters march through Los Angeles on 12 November. Photograph:
UPI / Barcroft Images
------------------------------

That night in Louisville there was another benefit event, this one for an
organisation called Teach Kentucky, which recruits high-achieving college
graduates to come to the state to teach in the public schools. Joe Franzen
and Brent Peters are among Teach Kentucky’s recruits, and if they are any
indication of the quality of humans the organisation is attracting, the
programme is a runaway success.

At the event, Franzen and Peters spoke about their craft, and about making
sure their students felt they had a place at the table. There was much talk
about their classrooms as families, of meals shared by all, of mutual
respect. It was very calm and heartening, but there was also a moment where
the audience was encouraged to let out a primal scream (my idea, I admit
it), and 200 people did that, screamed, exorcising our election-week
demons. Later on, Jim James – Louisville resident and leader of the rock
band My Morning Jacket – performed a medley of songs, from Leonard Cohen
<https://www.theguardian.com/music/leonard-cohen>to “All You Need Is Love”
and “Blowin in the Wind”. And then everyone got drunk.

There was good bourbon. It was called brown water by the locals, and after
stomachs were full, we all vacillated between despair and measured hope.
But the questions loomed over the night like the shadow of a Nazi zeppelin.
Would he really try to build a wall? Would he really try to exclude all
Muslims? Would he actually appoint a white nationalist as his chief of
staff? And did 42% of American women really vote for a man who threatened
to overturn Roe v Wade and who bragged about grabbing them by the pussy?
Did the white working class really elect a man whose most famous
catchphrase was “You’re fired”? Like a teenager with poor self-esteem, the
American people had chosen the flashy and abusive boyfriend over the
steady, boring one. *We’ve had enough decency for one decade*, the
electorate decided. *Give us chaos.*
------------------------------

It is not easy to get a ticket to Smithsonian National Museum
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/30/smithsonian-african-american-museum-slavery-prince>
of African American History and Culture. This is the newest museum on the
National Mall in Washington, DC, and its design, by the Ghanaian-British
architect David Adjaye, is so successful, at once immediately iconic and
bold but also somehow blending into the low-slung surrounding architecture,
that it has become the most talked-about building in the United States.

Admission is free, but there is a six-month wait for passes, and the passes
are timed. If you get a pass, you must enter at the assigned hour or wait
another six months. I had gotten such a timed pass, and it so happened that
the pass was for the day after the election. That morning, I had the choice
between staying in bed, forgoing my one chance at seeing the building in
2016, or rising on three hours’ sleep and keeping the appointment. Like
millions of others, I did not want the day to begin. If I woke up, I would
check the news, and if I checked the news, there would be confirmation of
what I had remembered foggily from the night before – that the people of
America had elected a reality television host as their president. I closed
my eyes, wanting sleep.

Then I remembered the Gazans.

Back in April, I had been in the Gaza Strip and had met a married couple,
Mahmoud and Miriam, journalists and activists who badly wanted to leave
Gaza. I had e-introduced them to an asylum lawyer in San Francisco, but
from 7,000 miles away, she couldn’t do much to help. The impossible thing
was that they actually had a visa. A real visa issued by the American state
department. All they had to do was get out of Gaza. But permissions were
needed from the Israelis or Egyptians, and they were having no luck with
either. Finally, one day in October, an email arrived. Mahmoud and Miriam
were in Brooklyn. They’d bribed an Egyptian guard at the Rafah gate and had
made their way on a 14‑hour journey through Sinai.
National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photograph:
Michael Barnes/Smithsonian Insitution

So on a lark I told them to meet me in DC. Frederick Douglass had said,
after all, that every American should visit the nation’s capital at least
once. And given they would soon be Americans, wouldn’t it be good to do
that duty right away, and do it the day after the first woman had been
elected president? (We had made the plans a week before.)

So they had planned to meet me at this museum celebrating African-American
history in the shadow of the obelisk dedicated to George Washington, great
man and also slaveowner. The morning was clear and cool. A small line had
formed outside the museum before the doors were to open. I looked around,
and didn’t see them. Then I did.

They were aglow. They’d spent their lives in an open-air prison of 141
square miles, and now they were here. They could move about freely, could
decide one day to go to the capital of the United States and be there a few
hours later. No checkpoints, no bribes, no Hamas secret police. I’d seen
Miriam suffer in Gaza because she refused to wear the hijab and favoured
western clothes. In Gaza City, she was yelled at, cursed. “I hope your
parents are proud!” people yelled to her. Now she was herself, uncovered,
dressing as she chose. Her smile was incandescent.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was apologising for what we’d done the day
before. Electing the man who wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the
country. The man who might bring Giuliani into a seat of unspeakable power.
This could mean terrible things for Palestinians. There was already talk of
the end of the two-state solution. Netanyahu, it was assumed, had danced
all night.

“It’s OK,” they said.

They handed me a gift. It was a piece of the Gaza City airport. The airport
had been destroyed by Israel in 2002. The piece they’d brought me was
tiled; it looked like part of the airport bathroom. I thanked them, put the
chunk of concrete in my bag, and we wondered aloud whether the security
check at the museum would object to the entry of a shard of Gazan airport.
We passed through the doors, and I was allowed to keep my bag with me, so
we three, and part of the Gaza City airport, made our way through the
museum’s halls. It was glorious of course, and altogether too much to take
in in one day. We ate in the basement cafeteria, and talked about what was
next. They would need an asylum lawyer, and fast. Ninety days, and then
anything could happen.

“Don’t worry,” Mahmoud said.

The Gazan asylum seekers were telling me not to worry.

But I was worried. Worried enough to change their names in this piece. They
aren’t Mahmoud and Miriam. We are entering an era where uniquely vindictive
men will have uniquely awesome power. Dark forces have already been
unleashed and terrible plans are being made. On 3 December, the Ku Klux
Klan are holding their largest public rally in years, to celebrate Trump’s
victory, which they claim as their own. I also changed Steven McManus’s
name. I worried for him, as well.

You should be worried, too. George W Bush, a man of comparative calm and
measured intellect, started two foreign wars and cratered the world
economy. Trump is far more reckless.

We are speeding toward a dark corridor, my friends. Keep your eyes open,
your hearts stout and be ready for the fight.

   - *The Circle* and *A Hologram for the King*. His latest book, *Heroes
   of the Frontier*, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

Eric D. Schwerin
[email-masked]

Sent from my iPhon