One story

Brian Cook, the founder of MGOBLOG (here’s a story from way back in 2008 on what the blog did and does) published an essay yesterday that you should read.

I’ve known Brian a little for nearly 20 years because of our shared unhealthy level of interest in Michigan football, so this story resonates for me more than it might otherwise, which is unfortunate because it shouldn’t take that sort of connection to shake people, including me, out of a level of complacency that still very much exists in liberal and progressive and centrist and non-fascist conservative circles, despite the fact that in Donald Trump’s America the frog is no longer slowly boiling in that pot of water, but rather being thrown straight into a blast furnace right in front of our eyes every day.

I was at the border, returning home after a weekend in Canada. They asked me to get out of the car, so I did. They asked me to put my hands on it, so I did. They asked me to put my hands behind my back, so I did.

In between these things I’d managed to whip my head around, briefly. Enough to encompass a scene. A man waiting with handcuffs. Two other men flanking him holding assault rifles. Four more armed officers. I watched my son, nine, watch me get handcuffed. My daughter, still six, was caterwauling about some lip balm.

They led me away. I had no idea what was happening. I do know what happens when I undergo high stress loads: I shut down. I duly did so. I did not speak unless spoken to for some hours after this happened.

The fact that I hadn’t done anything to warrant the treatment I received was actually worse. Without any crime to attach the treatment to, it felt like the range of possibilities that now confronted me was unconstrained.

The border patrol officers were uniformly professional. They professionally searched me, professionally told me to keep the money that was in my wallet, and professionally sat me down in this inexplicable cell. One had the grace to tell me that the reason this was happening is that the passport I had handed the border patrol agent at the beginning of this process had a name on it that was “similar” to someone with a warrant out.

This helped my mental state, but only to an extent. First there was a flood of relief. I had not done the thing. Someone else had done the thing.

Shortly after, gears started turning. I’ve made this passage more or less annually for 25 years. In addition to my passport—a government-issued document that uniquely identifies you—I’d given the border patrol officers my children’s birth certificates, which have been run in concert with mine the last several times I’ve made this border crossing. Everything about this border crossing was documented, routine, and peppered with green flags. Few hardened criminals make the same border crossing with the same elementary-aged children for five straight years, you know?

They released me from the cell and allowed me to walk to the holding pen with my arms behind my back, no cuffs. I saw my kids, and my partner, and had the largest kind of mixed emotions. I was not going to the gulag; hooray! But also my son looked like someone had died and my daughter was in a snit that looked a lot like a six-year old trying to deal with emotions six-year olds are not equipped to deal with.

I was assigned an agent, who told me that I was “obviously” not the person who had a warrant out, and that they’d process me. Then she asked me an ominous question. She asked where I was born. She already knew that. It’s on my passport.

I was born in Daharan, Saudi Arabia. This has been a weird little fun fact for most of my life. My dad was working for an oil company; my mom told me stories about the compound she lived in with all the other Western families, and how strange it was to live in a country where she was not allowed to drive. She would occasionally say the two or three Arabic phrases she still remembered.

One time I was flying home from Germany and my passport got flagged at the gate. I talked to a security officer who asked me if I spoke Arabic. I said no; he then said something in Arabic that I responded to with polite incomprehension. I still wonder what he said. The occasional odd question from a border patrol or customs official was about the only impact my place of birth had on my life.

I suppose that’s still true. When I told the officer where I had been born, and that I was born a US citizen, I did not get thrown in a detention cell again. An hour after I was arrested they let us go.

During those moments, though, I wondered what was about to happen to me for the crime of talking shit about Donald Trump on Twitter. This is now a country that is deporting its own citizens. It is threatening to use the Espionage Act on media members. US citizen grandmothers are being cuffed and held for eight hours. Iranian grandmothers who have been in this country for 47 years are narrowly avoiding deportation. The executive branch of the government is openly contemptuous of the rule of law.

I didn’t quite think I was about to be sent to a country I hadn’t been in since I was a year old, but the thought did flit through my mind. The people in charge consider the law to be a cudgel to be used against their enemies, and I’m a publicly declared enemy. In my mind the official story was less plausible than the idea Elon Musk had flagged Twitter users who despised Trump and that the executive branch had gone in for some light harassment of them, perhaps in anticipation of further, more serious action in the future.

Paranoid? Maybe, but these people are open fascists. It’s hard to think otherwise when you’re in the holding pen and the television is on Fox News and there’s pictures of Kirsti Noem and Trump glaring back at you. The idea that I should be held at gunpoint in front of my kids because there is someone else with a warrant out who has a “similar name” is so far beyond plausible that it defies belief.

As we were leaving, there was a sudden commotion. Armed men jogged past me. One of the border patrol officers said to another that there were “a lot of these today,” and I wondered if some other 40-something father had crossed the border after saying something true about Donald Trump on the wrong social media site.

I blew up at my mom the next day. She’s a Republican, and she called, and as I was describing what had happened to me and my kids the day before I lost all ability to regulate. I yelled at her; blamed her; questioned how she could possibly support the wanton cruelty that the administration is delivering to hairdressers and construction workers and delivery drivers and farm workers who happen to be browner than Stephen Miller would like. I didn’t get an answer. I didn’t really expect one.

A month or so later there was a family event, so I went to it. I assumed that my mom had reported out our phone call to her siblings, and from there to the rest of the family. I expected questions. I got them.

They were about Bryce Underwood.

Bryce Underwood is probably going to be the University of Michigan’s college football team’s starting quarterback when the season starts, a week from today.

Part of the reason Brian got those questions, no doubt, is because that’s how people deal. But part of the reason is that all those people spend more time thinking about Michigan football than the destruction of liberal democracy in this country, which is happening right now, every day.

Am I one of those people? I don’t know . . . it’s close. I know almost all of you have your Michigan football, whatever it might be, as well, and that’s good. You have to stay sane, and thinking about Donald Trump all the time is not a way to stay that.

But we’re in trouble and I really don’t know what to do about it.

So I sure hope Bryce Underwood is ready for what comes next.