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I want to say: When it comes to the Trump administration, it never ends, does it? But of course, it does end. In fact, these days, Trump and crew seem to have a knack for endings. You could even say that, in the age of You Know Who, death is preparing to become this country's middle name. After all, we now know that the one government agency that actually provided life-saving help globally, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, has essentially been shut down. Or rather, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 83% (and yes, that is not a misprint) of its programs have now been terminated and the rest moved to the State Department.
We're talking about global programs to combat everything from AIDS to starvation. As the Associated Press recently reported, "Even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare got the termination notices, such as emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water serving sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan." And don't just think this is some distant thing that won't affect Americans.
As Apporva Mandavilli of the New York Times recently pointed out,
"Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders. The Trump administration's pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to threatening viruses and bacteria. That includes Americans."
After all, the Covid pandemic didn't start anywhere near the U.S. but that didn't mean it didn't devastate this country. In fact, in the end -- if I can even use that phrase -- Donald Trump may prove to be the president of death (and not just because he appointed a vaccine-doubter to run the Department of Health). But let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon introduce you to the man who is preparing to ensure that so many of the rest of us may not go gentle into some future night. Tom
Trump Rages to Snuff Out Democracy's Candle
Will We Rage Against the Dying of Its Light?
Allow me to stipulate that I do not wish to die. In fact, had anyone consulted me about the construction of the universe, I would have made my views on the subject quite clear: mortality is a terrible idea. I'm opposed to it in general. (In wiser moments, I know that this is silly and that all life feeds on life. There is no life without the death of other beings, indeed, no planets without the death of stars.)
Nonetheless, I'm also opposed to mortality on a personal level. I get too much pleasure out of being alive to want to give it up. And I'm curious enough that I don't want to die before I learn how it all comes out (or, for that matter, ends). I don't want to leave the theater when the movie's only partway over -- or even after the credits have rolled. In fact, my antipathy to death is so extreme that I think it's fair to say I'm a coward. That's probably why, in hopes of combatting that cowardice, I've occasionally done silly things like running around in a war zone, trying to stop a U.S. intervention. As Aristotle once wrote, we become brave by doing brave things.
Remember That You Are Dust
I wrote this on Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the season of Lent. The Ash Wednesday service includes a ceremonial act meant to remind each of us of our mortality. A priest "imposes," or places, a smudge of ash on each congregant's forehead, saying, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." That action and those words reflect the brevity and contingency of human life, while echoing Christianity's Jewish roots in the understanding that human life must have both a beginning and an end. Psalm 103 puts the sentiment this way:
"As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more."
You don't need to believe in a compassionate divinity to feel the loneliness of that windswept field, that place that remembers us no more.
I've been ruminating on my fear of dying lately, as I contemplate the courage of the people of Ukraine, many of whom would, as the saying goes, rather die on their feet than live on their knees. It's an expression I first heard in Nicaragua during the Contra war of the 1980s -- mejor morir de pie que vivir en rodillas -although it's an open question who said it first. In the twentieth century, it was proclaimed by both Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, and the Republican heroine of the Spanish civil war, Dolores Iba'rruri, also known as "La Pasionaria." I wish I could discern in my own breast that passionate preference for a dignified death over a life of suppression or slavery, yet I find that I can't make myself feel that way. When I think about death -- dignified or otherwise -- my mind strays again to that empty windswept field and I am afraid.
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