Since I broke my hip this summer I’ve been talking to people who’ve suffered similar and worse things that changed their lives, temporarily or forever. And I’ve noticed that most people can’t remember the exact moment when everything went to hell.
I do not remember falling. I remember the moments after — two hours, actually — when I tried and failed and finally managed to grab my phone and dial 911. I remember them sliding a sheet under me and picking me up and dumping me into an ambulance. At the hospital, I remember them shooting me up with fentanyl, then morphine, then Dilaudid, and none of it easing my pain.
As I recovered, I remember bullshitting myself day after day, telling myself that I was better off than I knew I was. That I’d get over it.
The first guy I quizzed about his similar situation is a carpenter, who built the beautiful bookcases in my basement. Turns out he had suffered an injury on the job right around when I did. While carrying wood he fell and fractured three ribs and displaced a couple of others. Hurt like a bastard, he said.
But here’s the thing: Like me, he did not remember falling. He remembered carrying the wood; he remembered lying in unbearable pain, but he did not remember the moment of disaster.
I suppose we should thank our brains (though how do you thank a brain?) for making it impossible to remember the moment when unimaginable pain immobilized us.
Another fellow sufferer told me about not remembering the car wreck that killed his young wife, but spared their baby daughter, in a car seat, ejected onto a freeway without a scratch.
So, praise God for small favors, I guess. This brings us up, or down, to last Tuesday — Election Day. I sketched out this column on Monday night before the election. As I wrote, I did not know what would happen on Nov. 5 — Guy Fawkes Day. But I knew some of it.
On Nov. 5, 1605, radical Catholics tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament, assassinating the king and his supporters. The Gunpowder Plot was foiled by an anonymous letter to a Catholic member of Parliament, warning him not to go to work that day.
Damn whistleblowers.
On Nov. 5, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States.
And on Nov. 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted, in defiance of the law, and was fined $100. ($20,000 today.) What a bitch.
Well, this week, Tuesday did not answer some important questions, among them: Are we a country of racists or not?
Do we really think that public schools and universities are “the enemy”?
Can we pin down, or remember, the moment when this disaster began?
Will we never be able to recall it, or have we thrust it out of our memories?
Was it the early 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy cost thousands of U.S. citizens their jobs, on phony accusations of being communists?
Was it Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas?
Or Nov. 24 that year, when Dallas Police crony Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald to death in a Dallas police station? On live TV!
Or was it June 17, 1972, when Dick Nixon’s “plumbers” were busted at the Watergate hotel; or Aug. 8, 1974, when Nixon resigned; or was it sometime between those two events?
Was it during the Vietnam War?
Or was it in November 1986, when the Iran-Contra scandal became public knowledge, involving U.S. munitions swaps for U.S. citizens held in Iran, with a lot of cocaine thrown into the deal?
Or was it when Ronald Reagan lied his ass off about it on TV, and half of the United States shrugged and gave him a pass, because they liked old Ronnie? Such a sweet old guy.
Was it sometime between 1995 and 1999, when the smarmy Newt Gingrich, as speaker of the House, instructed his Republican ducklings to use the same few words over and over, day after day, to dominate the news coverage, and they tugged their forelocks and did it?
And NBC and CBS and ABC followed along. Because An Important Man said it.
Was it on Sept. 11, 2001, or later that week, when President George W. Bush, who didn’t know there were such things as Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, demanded a “Crusade” against all of them? (Poor word choice, George.)
Was it Nov. 8, 2016, when the United States elected Donald Trump president?
Or Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s neo-Fascist true believers stormed the U.S. Capitol, killing policemen, shitting in the halls of Congress?
Or was it Tuesday, when this demented nation elected that vulgar man again?
When, exactly, did our country change so much that we allowed a sociopath to suck us all into his mouth, and spit us out into the River Styx?