“Love and Kierkegaard in the Age of Trump” By Rachel Howard (fiction, ’09)
An excerpt from “Love and Kierkegaard in the Age of Trump” By Rachel Howard (fiction, ’09) published at The Los Angeles Review of Books:
Love and Kierkegaard in the Age of Trump
I LIVE IN SEMI-RURAL Nevada County, California, and a year ago, in my gym, I overheard a tall, pale, buzz-cut, older-but-still-muscled man — a man I had once witnessed huffing in the direction of the TVs above the treadmills, “I don’t care what color you are, when an officer pulls you over you do whatever he says!” — I heard this man complaining to a friend at the bench press. “Liberal media,” he said, snorting at one of the TVs. “They twist everyone’s words. They make me sick.”
This was the week after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, the week after Donald Trump picked up the narrative the right-wing media had prepared — the narrative the neo-Nazis had baited — by blaming counter-protestors for violence “on both sides.” I suspected I should stick to my StairMaster, but my skin twitched. For months I had watched the gym’s bank of TVs broadcast competing news stations side by side, the cross-captioning of each talking head suggesting parallel black holes, and I could hold the tension no longer. I crossed the gym floor, and stood at this man’s shoulder. I said, “I’m equally troubled by Fox News, if you want to know.” He drew his spike-haired head back in shock. And then this man and I stared, mutually baffled, as the whole gym watched.
That standoff now seems innocent. In the year since a white nationalist killed an innocent woman in Charlottesville, more Americans have moved their turf wars off Facebook and into the streets. In my grocery store parking lot, confederate flags are now popping up alongside the Make America Great Again bumper stickers. A few weeks ago, at the local “Families Belong Together” march protesting the separation of children at the border, “Motorists at the intersection responded by honking their horns, popping wheelies on their motorcycles, flipping the bird, or screaming ‘build the wall’” — so reported the front page of our little local paper.
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