Vicki Marks hated Donald Trump with a passion, and so did her friends, neighbors, and colleagues. It was a friendly cabal of hate - nods on streetcorners, stories over the picket fence, knowing smiles, and bus rides to rallies.
It felt good to hate, and never before in her lifelong progressivism had it felt so good. This time around it was a soul-cleansing release. After scouring the pots for so many years, rasping away at conservative backwardness and ignorance, now she could be as mad, foul-tempered, unrestrained like never before. There was evil in the White House and nothing but exorcism would do.
Each one of her venting moments with Margot down the street or Beatrice in the office or Henrietta at the gym was satisfying in a way simple political commitment was not. There was a fire in her belly like never before. Her life had new meaning, a clear and present purpose, a clear line of fire, an unquenchable desire.
She was a glutton for news about Trump and flipped channels between CNN and MSNBC every morning over coffee, watched the news on the monitors at the gym, surfed the dark web for information about Trump's insider trading, collusion, corruption, and moral failure. She fueled her hatred from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to bed. Even her dreams were feverish with hatred.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, hatred was happy time, an emotional orgasm for a crackly, older single woman who had been too picky to settle for second best, and a first best man had never come her way - not in the coffee houses of the East Village, not in her 9th Street non-profit, not on the barricades, and not in holding pens. Politics is not simply a matter of preference or logical conclusion, it is the heart and soul of a person, and enhances or deforms as if it were a magic potion or vile poison.
Vicki's hate was oxymoronic - it both rotted and corroded her insides and twisted and deformed every aspect of her outer self but gave her unlimited joy. She might be as unappealing as a Wicked Sister, but she was bursting with joy every time she sallied forth with one of her untethered, bitter attacks on those who strayed from the progressive canon.
The more bile that built up, the more venom that filled her viperous sacs, the more hate she felt, the happier she was. Such hate was not a perverse obsession but the emotional force behind her sense of identity, self-esteem, and worth.
Today was No Kings rally day on the National Mall, the biggest, most exuberant anti-Trump jamboree in the nation. It would be featured on national television, covered widely in the press. Thousands of women like herself would join hands and lock arms in solidarity and in mutual hatred for the incarnation of the devil.
She couldn't wait, got up early, fed her cats who were surprised at getting fed before sunup, took her morning run under the streetlights, and waited on the stoop for the bus to come by. This was to be her day, a day like no other, a halcyon day.
It felt so good to be with her sisters on this sparkling clear May day that she wanted to kiss them, hold them tight, go off with them and be happy forever. They shouted, waved banners, chanted in a chorus of powerful women's voices, so much so that they almost forgot the object of their calumny, the beast in the White House. The thousand voices ringing out from the Capitol to the Washington Monument was life-affirming, joyous, and spiritual.
There was nothing like it. Hate had become a raison d'etre, an expression of personhood, existential worth, and faith. Vicki, tired but fulfilled after hours on the Mall and pub-crawling with her sisters up and down K Street, she went home.
Few if any of these women could articulate exactly why they hated the President so much. His policies and programs were classically conservative - closed borders, small government, private sector, strong military, traditional social values, patriotism, and individualism - and while he demonstrated a particular and unusual resolve in implementing them, he was well within Constitutional limits. It was his opponents who resorted to fictitious claims, frivolous, unfounded lawsuits, left field impeachment attempts, and baseless information.
Most of Vicki's friends when asked gave that 'Are you kidding?' look and railed on about racism, misogyny, homophobia, and mindless crony capitalism. They refused to be pinned down because no pinning down was necessary. The man's villainy was obvious, uncontested, there for all to see.
Vicki's house seemed particularly empty this time around, perhaps because of the unbridled joy of such a large gathering, an epiphanic moment of solidarity and pure happiness; but there was a shadow of a doubt that fleetingly darkened her mood. She was alone with her cats. The plants needed watering.
She shook off these morbid thoughts, rattled uncharacteristically around the kitchen, emptied the refrigerator and ate leftovers, put her head in her hands, and cried.
'What am I doing?' she shouted, embarrassed, chagrined, and angry at herself for letting such pedestrian emotions overtake her. She needed no man, no towheaded children, no backyard barbecues, not church dinners to make her happy. She was as fulfilled as any woman could be.
She looked at the calendar and saw every day filled with appointments, events, conferences, and seminars. Every day was metro, boulot, dodo - yes, with more purpose and meaning than her neighbors who hopped on the N6 and spent laborious days at meaningless jobs; but somehow missing something, something she sensed was important but couldn't put her finger on.
For the first time in months, she felt the bilious hatred for Donald Trump slip away. She tried to conjure up images of him as a destroyer, a child killer, a Gestapo thug, a tyrant; but the old vaudevillian shtick was falling flat. Thank God tomorrow was the climate conference.
Life went on like this, desultory, passionless, and increasingly morbidly without respite or recourse. The die had been cast years ago and there was no wiggle room now. A leopard cannot change its spots. Too many sunken costs, too much water under the dam.
Furthermore, hate had become her personal zeitgeist. It was as hardwired as any exogenous factor could be. It was part of her persona. How could it be dwindling away like this? How could her very lifeblood be trickling from her veins?
'Is it too late?', she wondered, but could not finish the question. Too late for what had never had to be asked; but too late for something other than this! A cat jumped on her lap but she threw it off into the corner, screeching and climbing up the curtains. 'So this is what it feels like', she thought; but there was still time to regain her footing, to rekindle the old fires, become a social justice warrior in the avant garde, the first phalanx.
Yet, the next morning the funk had not disappeared and she had to face the day without that marvelously joyous hatred that greeted her as soon as she opened her eyes.
'I couldn't have wasted my life', she said to herself, but that niggling doubt was there. If after years of fighting the good fight for civil rights, gay rights, the climate, redistribution of wealth, diversity, and equity, conservatism was now the ethos of the land, the zeitgeist, the meme, what were her struggles worth?
Very little of course. Epictetus had been right all along. Take what comes, let it be, what goes around comes around. La Dolce Vita is not so bad after all; but these a posteriori thoughts didn't do Vicki much good. 'You made your bed, solie in it' her mother used to say, and that was as pithy a nostrum as there ever was.
Which didn't do Vicki any good whatsoever. 'I'm stuck'. she said; and like many old spinsters before her, fixed herself a lovely cup of tea.
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