PTSD: Post Trump Stress Disorder

Prepare yourself. Sanity is going to be a challenge.

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I remember the day I heard Spiro Agnew resigned.  I was standing on the forlorn, dusty edge of a cliff, and Evel Knievel was about to attempt to jump his steam-powered rocket cycle over the thousand foot deep Snake River gorge.  Somebody had a transistor radio – remember those? – and called out the news that Agnew had resigned after being caught accepting cash bribes in brown paper bags in his office in the White House.

Now that called for a celebration. I pulled a can of beer out of a gray Danish school bag I carried with me whenever I was on assignment back then.  The Danish schoolbag was a marvelous thing.  It had a zipper around its midsection, so it could be expanded to double its volume.  That day, as I recall, it contained a six pack of warm Coors beer, at least three Reporters Notebooks, and a couple of sorry, bent joints Bill Cardoso had given me to hold for him the night before and forgotten about.

We had no idea at that moment that less than a year later, Richard Nixon would follow Agnew out of office in the same way, resigning in disgrace on August 8, 1974.  But for now, in October of ’73, having Agnew gone was enough.  As news of his resignation spread through the crowd of reporters and photographers who had gathered to witness the great jump of the Snake River Canyon, a cheer went up.  We were all standing around the base of the launch platform at the edge of the gorge.  Knievel’s so-called cycle – it was in fact a missile on two wheels mounted on a rocket engine powered by highly compressed steam – sat atop a tower with a long, slanted launch platform jutting from it in the direction of the river.  All of us in the press were inside of a galvanized chain link fence protecting the area of the launch.  It wasn’t very tall or sturdy, maybe six feet, and had been erected the week before to block access to the site from the paying customers, who were packed together on the other side. 

Many of those paying customers were bikers – Hells Angels and Mongols and other biker gangs who had ridden their hogs to Twin Falls to witness the great event.  Someone in the crowd asked one of the reporters what we were cheering about, and when he answered that Agnew had just resigned, the crowd of bikers started to get ugly.  They loved Agnew.  They loved him for the same reasons the crowd of helmeted, camo-clad maniacs at the Capitol three weeks ago were there for  Trump.  Agnew was the nasty, viperous piece of shit who invented “owning the libs,” and he belonged to the bikers in the same way Trump belongs to the Proud Boys and the Qanon loons and the rest of his MAGA base.

The bikers started grabbing the chain link fence and shaking it and yelling at us.  The situation was rapidly getting out of control.  I thought they were about to tear down the fence and attack us. I could see them hauling out bike chains and brass knuckles.  Just then, Evel Knievel emerged from a makeshift control shack next to the launch platform and began waving to the crowd.  That apparently satisfied the bikers, because they stopped rattling the fence and cheered him.  Evel!  Evel!  Evel!  They were shouting his name and pouring beer on each other and stomping their biker boots in the dust.

Evel Knievel suited up and climbed into his rocket cycle and with an ear-splitting blast of steam, he was launched over the gorge…where at the top of the arc of his flight, he promptly hit the parachute release and dangling from its chute, the rocket drifted down to the floor of the gorge, just missing the river.  It turned out that Evel was okay, but we weren’t.  There went our story.  The Big Jump fizzled out like a dud roman candle. 

I remember the strange mix of shock and elation we felt when we went out for dinner at the Holiday Inn that night in Twin Falls, how weird that we felt a real sense of loss at the departure from the national stage of a figure of dread and repulsion like Agnew.  It was a little bit like how I think we’ll feel now that we won’t have Trump, in the immortal words of Richard Nixon, to kick around anymore. 

Think of what it’s going to be like tomorrow:  A good and decent man and a good and decent woman will move into the White House and begin what will doubtlessly be the long and arduous task of Putting Things Right in America.  Gone will be the daily, sometimes hourly, eruptions of the seriously disordered lunatic who has sat in the highest office of the land for the last four, long years.  The stress part of PTSD will come with the absence of surprise and horror which confronted us daily, not to mention the fear of what was coming next.  This man for four years literally had his finger on the nuclear trigger, and it felt on a day by day basis that he might do it, he might start a nuclear war.  He indicated as much early in his presidency when he warned North Korea that if they made any more threats against the United States, they “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”  “What good are they if you can’t use them,” he reportedly said of nuclear weapons during the 2016 campaign.

I know I don’t have to remind you, but this is what we have been living with for four, very, very long years, folks.  This is why we’re all going to be suffering from PTSD.  I recommend three ibuprofen and a long, hot shower.  It’s going to take us awhile to recover from this man who made Agnew’s bribe gouging seems like a schoolyard bully taking a kid’s lunch money, and Nixon’s prevarications and paranoia seem like he was a rational guy who was maybe having a bad day. 

Donald Trump put them both to shame.  It’s no wonder we’ll be going through Post Trump Stress Disorder.  When it comes to pure unadulterated evil, he has been the real deal.