A Delayed Flight in Madison

I am sitting in an airport in Madison, Wisconsin, waiting on a flight. Last night I had an amazing conversation with Rev. Alex Gee at The Center for Black Excellence, beautiful building that sits on the edge of the Black community on the south side of Madison, like a watchtower, as gentrification marches. We talked about my latest book, America, U.S.A., with a wonderful cross section of folks from Madison. It was a much-needed respite from the craziness of our days.

But right now, I am waiting in a small airport (in the shadow of the chaos of O’Hare and its massive delays). I sit in a corner, watching people watching pre-game football shows and highlights of last night’s baseball games. Some pace impatiently, laugh with friends, and drink beer as if it is not too early to drink beer. The flight has been delayed four times, and I have been here since 5:15am—reading, watching, and thinking.

Flight delays are not unusual—especially when the weather is bad. Bad communication by the airlines about the delays isn’t unusual, either. We are captured consumers in airports. It’s like bad food on a cruise ship. You have to deal with the hand that’s dealt to you.

But for some reason this experience, in this moment, got me thinking. Some might even say catastrophizing. Or, maybe, it’s this damn plane. It just feels like everything is coming apart at the seams. And Americans try to act like it is not when we know that it is. The man sitting at the bar across the room laughs with his friends but his foot shakes nervously on the barstool. He’s waiting, too.

When I think about our politics—Trump banning MSNOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House Press corp, the 28,000 stock and securities trades he has made in a 17-month period, the price of gas and diesel, the war with Iran, the trade war with Canada, and all the other shit this administration has done and is doing—I cannot help but believe that there is a concerted effort to destroy the country as we know it. That there are people among us who believe the only way to save America from the galloping herd of barbarians within its gates, is to destroy it.

I have read about the defenders of the so-called “dark enlightenment.” These are people who hold the view, among other things, that the values of humanism and aspirations for greater equality are the root causes of the decline of Western civilization. They are the bastard offspring of Friedrich Nietzsche. They long for strong men and autocratic control to restore order over the democratic mob. Some are tech bros who have more faith in algorithms than in men and women. And they are allied with a wide-ranging group of others who are equally skeptical of any pretense to embrace a world where all are accorded equal standing and dignity. All obsessed with the will to power.

Reading Laura K. Field’s book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right, will give you a sense of the intellectual scaffolding of what we are experiencing and the scale and depth of those who have, in effect, seized the federal government to destroy it. In other words, what we are seeing is not just the absurdity of Donald Trump. The sense of being overwhelmed by the chaos is the point. These people, with their dangerous ideas, are setting off bombs across the supporting beams of our democracy all at once with the goal of bringing down the country in a controlled fashion.

So many Americans are letting this happen openly, or they are too busy living their lives to care. For me, the problem is not only the active efforts by anti-democratic forces in the country. It is the silence in the face of those efforts that scares the living daylights out of me—the complicity of people with those who despise them or, at best, view them as cattle chewing cud. As if, they no longer want the responsibility of freedom, or as if their hatreds are so intense they care about nothing else.

I shudder to think about what is happening in silence, about the scale of what these people are doing behind the blackout curtain.

Well, I have been sitting in this corner for hours now. Delayed flights from Chicago arrive. People march through the terminal. A bit haggard. Shoulders slumped. Body language murmurs relief. The bar no longer bustles with laughter. One lone man sits with a beer and talks on his phone. I write a bit. I look up. He’s gone too. Only a glass remains.

My flight is delayed again. I can’t help but think about the little things that are not working, how hard life has become for so many Americans, and how something cracks daily. Hints of a controlled demolition.

It is noon. The airport is quiet like it was when I first arrived some six hours ago. I need to walk a bit. Get out of my head. Find something to distract myself for the next three hours. Sounds like their plan.