Faking sobriety
April 3, 2026
Another way to leave (2017)
Why unvarnished truths are so hard to reckon with
Funny story. My (2022) book Beautiful Wounds is about geology and heartbreak. The geology part was easier.
The heartbreak involved a broken marriage and having to leave the home where we were still raising children. It was not a good time. There were hours alone when I thought, creatively, about vanishing—about notes I would leave for my children; about places beyond cellular service I’d wandered into—windswept places beyond withering stands of black locust trees where one might mercifully perish and not be readily discovered.
Part of what kept me here were daily tides of curiosity. There were things I didn’t yet know that, even in a state of emotional disorientation, I felt a craving to better understand. It’s such a weird state to be in: feeling unbearably sad and exhausted, but curious enough to lift myself to learn more about the minuscule time capsules in zircons, the improbable journeys of glacial erratics, and the diets of badgers (marmots) and dragonflies (mosquitos).
On a day when I was trying to avoid farming the misery I cued up an on-line lecture by Nick Zentner, the Central Washington University professor, well-known for his Nick on the Rocks public television series. Nick was talking about the Gingko petrified forest near Vantage, WA, along the Columbia River. The state park that protects and displays the petrified wood is the legacy of a professor, George Beck, who’d taught geology at what is now CWU from 1925 to 1959. I was laying flat on the carpet of my office when I happened to roll over just as Nick was displaying an article and photo of professor Beck.
Nick said it was the last photo and article written about Beck before he’d passed. At first, I thought I might be dreaming. Because there, on the screen, was my by-line, from 1979. I had only the vaguest memory of the story because it was one of so many I’d written that year and into the following spring. I was often working two or three stories a day, everything from high school football games, to car wrecks and fires, to the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. No wonder I couldn’t remember my feature story on George Beck. But to see it, in black and white, was oddly reaffirming: that I had done something worthwhile even if I’d completely forgotten about it.
My orientation as a reporter was inspired by the expositive journalism of the Watergate era which itself was rooted in the “muckraking” investigative reporting of the early 1900s. That said, I’m also aware I’m here to photograph and write about creatures and places that are naturally inspiring. And I do this with hope that coupling the rigor of inquiry with the aesthetics of photography is a reflection of how many of us endure, confront and celebrate life on Earth.
In the past year and a half I’ve had the unwelcome sense that these intertwined ambitions are increasingly at odds with each other. I was reminded of it in an amusing way last Saturday, walking into the latest “No Kings” protest at C.A. Clark park in north Spokane. Within the first couple minutes I encountered two of my readers. The first flatly informed me she tries not to read what I write because it’s hard to digest along with all the other disturbing news. But keep up with the nature photography she said, with an encouraging smile. The second earnestly thanked me for writing pieces like this one.
Praise (2020)
When I launched into the Rhubarb Skies project twelve years ago the stated purpose was to host “an independent and gently skewed experiment in regional journalism and story-telling.”
That was a different time though. What few could imagine then was the tsunami shit-show of Trumpism—the rise of a cultural/political movement gorging on social and cultural grievances that Trump dispensed like corn dogs at a county fair.
It started with the manufactured lie that President Barack “Hussein” Obama, possessed a fake birth certificate—that he was not really an American born in Hawaii. In his double-dog-whistle of racial and Muslim bigotry, Trump always adds inflection to “Hussein” in order to mark Obama as a Muslim even though the ex-president is a Christian. The fact-checkers won’t count it as a lie. But the disgusting insinuation has the same effect.
Trump performed his despicable “Barack Hussein Obama” trick again in his prime time speech Wednesday night, as he tried to blame Obama for the war he (Trump) initiated with massive bombing strikes a month ago. In his national address on the Iran war, Trump also repeated the lie that the Iran nuclear deal negotiated on Obama’s watch in 2015 accelerated the Iranian effort to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
As I reported a few days ago, the truth is just the opposite.
Iran’s compliance with the 2015 agreement—known as the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”— was closely monitored by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA was created in the 1950s—advanced by the U.S. and its allies through the United Nations—as a means to market nuclear power technology around the globe but with vigilant inspections to ensure the technology (which relies upon enriched uranium in reactor fuel assemblies) is not being surreptitiously used to develop nuclear weapons. Iran honored the terms of the accord until Trump, in May of 2018, announced the U.S.’s withdrawal from the compact. It was Trump’s unilateral decision to abandon the agreement that provoked Iran to change course. Thus, mister “art of the deal” pulled the plug on an accord that was working; one he replaced with an illegitimate, undeclared war that, by some estimates, has already cost $25 billion and already resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries.
I could offer more details on this debacle and the lies behind it, but that’s not my main purpose today.
Trump is a liar, convicted felon, sexual predator, and a racist who cheats at golf. People should notice that George Conway—who was happily married to Trump’s lead spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, when Trump was first elected—is now divorced and running for a Congressional seat as a Democrat. Since June of 2017—after he declined a job offer from Trump to head up the Justice Department’s civil division—Conway has repeatedly and vehemently warned that Trump is a dangerously “malignant narcissist.” The psychologist Mary Trump—Trump’s niece—has for several years been warning that her uncle is a dangerous sociopath. He can be both.
Trump bulldozed his way into the political scene at a crucial juncture when several anti-democratic initiatives were ready for him to exploit.
•Because of the nation-wide demographic shift toward people of color, America’s party of white people, the Republicans, purposefully sought ways to undermine democracy to retain power. Gerrymandering—the anti-democratic process of reshaping Congressional districts for political advantage—is but one method. There’s more and you can find them in the scholarly books Tyranny of the Minority (2023) and White Rural Rage, the Threat to American Democracy (2024)
•With the birth of the Federalist Society in 1981, a network of anti-regulation, anti-abortion conservatives pursued the long-term goal of securing a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court. With a powerful assist from former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell the organization was able to sandbag Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, denying Garland even a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That set the stage for Trump’s appointment of Federalist Society favorites Neil Gorsuch, Brett Cavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The trio became part of the conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade (2022). The same majority served up the astonishing 2024 opinion in Trump v. United States that bestowed immunity on Trump (and future presidents) for “official acts” that would otherwise be subject to criminal prosecution.
•During his first run for the presidency in 2016, Trump assured voters his knowledge and participation as a donor in the seedy world of politics made him uniquely qualified to work the system on their behalf. “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” He also told this lie: “It’s nice. I don’t need anybody’s money. I’m using my own money…I’m not using donors.. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”
•Fast forward to his second campaign when three major news organizations reported on a meeting Trump hosted at Mar-a-Lago for oil company executives. Trump had the casual audacity to request a bribe: that in exchange for $1 billion to his 2024 campaign, he would work all the more to de-regulate the fossil fuel industry, including withdrawing (again) from the Paris Climate Accords
No surprise that the nation’s energy policy is now “drill baby drill” and, via Trump, rests on baseless charges that all green energy is a “scam” and that off-shore wind turbines are killing whales. In doing so, Trump has accelerated what many climate scientists warn is an existential crisis for the biosphere as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels continue to rise.
Keller Memorial Park in Ralston, WA
For all our flaws as a nation, we’ve at least had the good sense to invest in federal institutions where science and jurisprudence were nourished. That is no longer the case after the recent Trumpian purges at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The hollowing out of the Justice Department is beyond astonishing. It is a symbol of national shame that a growing number of federal judges revoke what the courts dryly refer to as “the presumption of regularity” that the government’s lawyers will be truthful before the tribunal.
The slide into the Trumpian abyss started with the manufactured lie that President Barack “Hussein” Obama, possessed a fake birth certificate—that he was not really an American born in Hawaii. In his double-dog-whistle of racial and Muslim bigotry, Trump always adds inflection to “Hussein” in order to mark Obama as a Muslim even though the ex-president is a Christian. The fact-checkers won’t count it as a lie. But the disgusting insinuation has the same effect. The weight of it is that, under Trump, the federal government has been seriously corrupted, so much so that millions of Americans are justifiably worried or outright expecting that Trump will again foment an insurrection if Congressional elections this fall don’t result in the Republicans retaining control of Congress.
As a writer (and a parent) I don’t know how to look away from this. I get that there are important local and regional issues that deserve more of my attention. But its more likely than not that this year’s elections in the U.S. will not only determine the fate of western democracy, but the fate of the biosphere. Not to completely ruin your day but the Permian extinction was real, and the runaway carbon dioxide expelled by the volcanic eruptions that caused it accelerated at a much slower rate than we humans have fomented since we started burning coal and fueling our cars with gasoline.
I was telling a friend, just yesterday, that we journalists are trained to afford elected officials and official spokespersons the benefit of the doubts; to report what they’re communicating even if we suspect, or know for sure, that it’s untrue. It’s our own version of “the presumption of regularity” that the Justice Department’s lawyers no longer enjoy.
To be sure, there’s a tide in independent journalism to be more assertive in the face of the “flood the zone with shit” strategy that Trump pursues virtually around the clock. Coupled with that is the clear effort to intimidate, or simply facilitate the corporate swallowing of entities like CBS News and, now, CNN, to install editors and even line reporters who are less critical of Trump’s corruptions.
There are several brave journalists who have broken out of this mold—not because they’re partisan but because they realize the “he said/she said” formula that gives equal weight to facts and bullshit is more clearly a disservice to the truth. Aside from corporate pressure what holds many journalists back, I believe, is a longing for the old rules in which we could cover politics as though it is a refereed sporting event, a struggle for power, to be sure, but with each side pushing competing ideas and willing to accept the will of the voters.
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Steve Bannon realized this formula was breakable and more easily so if the hammer was wielded by a sociopath like Trump. Bannon and Trump scorn democracy and only have use for it as a bridge to authoritarian repression. Their heroes are plainly not our heroes: not Madison, Jefferson, or Lincoln, but Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Yet we have pundits and reporters still writing and talking as though this too shall pass naturally, and that it’s still okay to report on politics, the arts, the economy and our boundless cultural quirks as if life in America is a festive softball game, even as one side is using AR-15s instead of wooden bats. At times I think they’re simply delusional, voluntarily numbed and faking sobriety.
The plague of Trumpism happened so swiftly, and so chaotically, that it’s no small wonder most of us feel the need to tune it out, to check our pulse, take deep breaths, and laugh at something, for however long it takes.
I get it. But we still have to clean thus up.
—tjc
