I refuse

There is a house that was built around the turn of the century – 20^th, that is – just off the corner of 3^rd Street at the end of our block. It has a tall privet hedge guarding its northern flank, and from behind that hedge tonight as I walked our dog Ruby, I heard the voices of small children who, I would guess based on some experience in these matters, were about five or six years old. The voices were high-pitched as all children’s voices are at that age, excited as they played a game in the yard behind the hedge. I could tell they were chasing each other, and I could hear when one of them caught one of the others. There would be an even higher-pitched scream, followed by excited chatter as they set up the next measure in their game.

I have an unusually good memory of those years as a child in my own life, which were spent in Hawaii while my father was away commanding a company in the Korean War, and then at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he attended the Infantry Officer Advanced Course. I was in pre-school at Fort Shafter in Honolulu, followed by kindergarten at Fort Benning. I had a gang of boys my age at Fort Benning. The junior officer housing development where we lived had been freshly-built atop what turned out to be an old mortar range, and we spent a good deal of time out in the fields and woods behind our duplex digging up dud 60 mm mortar rounds and pretending we were mortars, holding them with both hands between our legs, and with a swinging motion, launching them away from us with screams mimicking the flight of a mortar round, followed by imitation explosions. It’s a miracle that none of the duds ever went off. Of course, we concealed the fact of our stash of mortar rounds from our parents, knowing that if we told them, the rounds would be confiscated, and we would be banned from playing in the woods and fields until soldiers with metal detectors had cleared the area.

Much excited squealing and shouting was involved in the pretend battles we fought using wooden rifles and pistols our fathers had cut for us from boards we found in a nearby dump, whittling them smooth and painting them black. We played hide and seek and capture the flag, and in the evenings, just as it got dark, before we had to be home for bedtime, we sat in a circle in the woods and told horror stories.

After my first novel, “Dress Gray” was published in 1979, I received a letter forwarded to me through my publisher Doubleday. The letter began with something like, “You probably don’t remember me, but I was in your gang in Fort Benning in 1954.” I remembered him. How could I not? His name was Paris. He went on to say how much he enjoyed my novel and told me a little about himself since graduating college on the West Coast. At the closing, he said that over the years, he had had nightmares from a horror story I had told the gang about a disembodied hand that walked on its fingers in the night until the hand found little boys and strangled them. His wife didn’t understand why he sometimes awoke bolt upright at night screaming until he finally told her the horror story about the hand. She laughed at the image of the little boys gathered in a circle in the woods in the dark, and he laughed with her. After that night, the nightmares finally stopped, but his memory was still strong.

Tonight, we have news of a nightmare of a different sort. One of the insurrectionists from the January 6 attack on the Capitol has been appointed to a job as counselor to Ed Martin, the newly appointed Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice, who also serves as Director of the Weaponization Working Group, the DOJ office in charge of Trump’s retribution against his enemies. The new DOJ appointee’s name is Jared Lane Wise. He is a former FBI agent (!) who was indicted for his part in the January 6 insurrection and charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol and disrupting the certification of the 2020 election by the Congress. Wise was filmed during the riot confronting Capitol police and shouting at them, “I’m former law enforcement. You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it. . . Shame on you! Shame on you! Yeah, fuck them! Yeah, kill ‘em! Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!”

Wise was in the middle of his trial on charges for his part in the Capitol attack when Trump took office on January 20 and almost immediately pardoned all the insurrectionists…all of them…including Wise. Now Wise is working for the official in the Department of Justice who is in charge of new pardons that Donald Trump will issue, such as his commutation of the 9 year sentence of media mogul Carlos Watson, who was absolved of repaying $37 million to people he had conned into investing in his scam start-up, Ozy Media.

Just today, one of the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by Donald Trump, Edward Kelly, was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy to murder federal employees, including the FBI agents who investigated him for his part in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Last week, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, fired three prosecutors in the office of the Washington D.C. U.S. Attorney who were involved in prosecuting some of the most violent insurrections on January 6, those who were convicted of assaulting police officers…before being pardoned by Donald Trump.

In late June, another January 6 insurrectionist, who was invited to the Oval Office in April by President Trump for his signing of an executive order against so-called sanctuary cities, was elected as president of the National Sheriff’s Association. Chris West, the sheriff of Canadian County, Oklahoma, is an ardent election conspiracy denier and supporter of so-called “Constitutional sheriffs,” now sometimes called “MAGA sheriffs.” West recently shared a meme on Facebook, posting, “AT ONE POINT NOAH WAS SEEN AS A CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIST. BUT THEN THE RAIN CAME AND ALL THE FACT CHECKERS DROWNED.” West commented below his post, “Just call me Noah, because the rain is coming!”

I refuse to accept the celebration of convicted felons as heroes. I refuse to accept a president selling pardons to thieves and scoundrels out of the Oval Office for “donations” to his political campaign funds. I refuse to accept that a plurality of one of our two political parties believes that violence is sometimes necessary in our political life. I refuse to accept a Congress that will soon pass a law that will deny food to hungry children and pregnant women, deny healthcare to the elderly and the needy, and give massive tax cuts to billionaires who have made large political contributions to Republican candidates for office. I refuse to accept an administration that establishes an office to “denaturalize” American citizens because of their political beliefs and activism. I refuse to accept a president who threatens to arrest the Democratic Party’s candidate for Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, because of his political beliefs. “We don’t need a communist in this country,” Trump said of Mamdani after he won the Democratic primary running as a Democratic Socialist. I refuse to accept a political party and an administration that silently countenances the mass shooting of school children and then loosens gun regulations to allow the sale of silencers and trigger mechanisms that transform an AR-15 into an automatic weapon.

I refuse to accept a nation that long celebrated itself as “a country of immigrants,” even erecting the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to welcome them to our shores, has now systemized their persecution, arrest, deportation, beating and even death while in custody.

I refuse to consider that there will come a time in this country when little children will be too afraid to run around the side yard of a house in the evening at dusk, tackling each other and squealing with delight. But that is sadly where we are headed.