The walls in a crevice of anger

May 18, 2025

Sloop on Elliot Bay, Seattle, July 2016

Wednesday was a good day not to write

When I talked myself into The Daily Rhubarb 27 months ago it was with a platter of stories and what I hoped would be a symbiotic balance between journalism and explorations of the natural world. Like many of you my body is a vessel for a frequently broken heart that needs birdsong, reasons for hope, and breathing room for curiosity and humor. It requires patience, love, and an awareness that I’m an ambassador, of sorts, for the good people who shaped and nurtured me.

That said, the purposeful deconstruction of civil society—and the barely suppressed glee with which it is being ripped apart—weighs on me. More so than ever, and more than I could have imagined even a couple years ago. At times that weight is overwhelming.

Wednesday was supposed to be writing day. But I was too upset—too angry—to write. My brain was a balled fist. Maybe it was sheer number of events that delivered painful news. Maybe it was the order in which they arrived. I do know it wasn’t any one thing. I had to stop for a few days.

Principally, it was least two things.

The first is the escalating genocide in Gaza that’s been shunted to the periphery by other events and a perilous numbness. The word “genocide” is triggering. I understand that and also understand it will offend some people who will not read further than the above sentence. But the shoe fits by the evidence and reasons Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard laid out last December, and which the widely respected human rights organization reiterated a couple weeks ago.

American policy enabled this nightmare. Our revulsion to what is happening in Gaza (and the West Bank) should be bipartisan. The Biden administration’s mildly expressed “concern” about the bombing and starving of Palestinians in Gaza did nothing to interrupt the U.S. shipments of devastating bombs and other weaponry. If anything, the Trump regime has been even more supportive of the Israeli blitz, with Trump adding the obscene goal of using the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to clear the way for a new, luxury real estate enclave—a “Riviera of the Middle East” along its Mediterranean shoreline. In Vietnam the perverse declaration of our moral dysfunction was that “we had to burn the village to save it.” Here was a new twist on village burning—now to clear beach front lots for the jet set. Airsick bags for the rest of us.

Perhaps it’s natural to hope the distance involved somehow dilutes our complicity. But that’s illusory, witness the number of conscientious men and women who resigned from the Biden Administration in protest. A year ago I shared the story of Hala Rharrit, a young, highly-dedicated U.S. State Department official, fluent in Arabic, who resigned her post in protest of the “devastating” evidence of Palestinian children being killed or badly injured in Israeli attacks using U.S. supplied weapons. “It’s insane,” she said, about the continuing shipments of U.S. arms in support of the Israeli attacks.

Joe Biden was either purposefully blind to this reality or indifferent to it— choosing instead to continue sending billions of dollars in weaponry and material without conditions. As such he was also giving cover to the pernicious branding of opponents of the Gaza siege as anti-American and, especially, anti-semitic when, in reality, millions of Jews in the U.S. and around the globe (including a sizable minority of Jews in Israel) oppose the rampage and the war crimes associated with it. This blowback—associating criticism of the Gaza war crimes with anti-semitism—clearly affected how U.S. mainstream media cover the Gaza atrocities. Even at the supposedly left-leaning MSNBC at least two of the journalists who gave time and voice to the atrocities in Gaza were removed. (Joy Reed was dismissed outright, and Medhi Hassan chose to leave the network rather than accept a dramatic cut in his air time.)

It does not end there. Through his indifference, Joe Biden cocked the door open for the Trump Administration’s aggressive repression of dissent. Through his unconditional support for the Israeli siege, Biden associated American policy with tolerance for Israeli human rights violations. When Trump took over, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, invoked a section of rarely-used law that allows the deportation of people with visas if the secretary of state has a “reasonable” ground to conclude their presence would cause “serious adverse consequences” for the nation’s foreign policy.

I’ve written about the cases of Mahmoud Kahlil and Rumeysa Ozturk—both foreign exchange students legally residing in the U.S.; both entitled to the same rights to which all U.S. citizens are accorded, including First Amendment protections for speech. Both were abducted by ICE agents in March and flown to Louisiana and imprisoned without due process. The person who took responsibility for revoking their visas (and “hundreds” of others) and incarcerating them without due process is Rubio, the former Florida senator. Rubio mocked Trump as a “con artist” in 2016. But now he does the president’s bidding—“every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

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As a journalist, Medhi Hassan’s fate troubles me deeply, in part because he’s extraordinarily talented and brave; in part because he’s Muslim, something I suspect influenced MSNBC’s decision to curtail his air time and/or force his resignation. I can’t prove it was a signal to placate those who chafed at his hard questions and coverage of the Gaza genocide, but it sure had that look to it.

As a person with a plethora of sisters, I would gladly make room for one more: Hala Rharrit. We cannot be whom we aspire to be, as Americans, if there’s not room in our government for the Hala Rharrits of the world. When we lose people like her and replace them with the likes of Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, something has gone very, very wrong.

What tipped me over the edge, though, was item 2.

It is what happened in mid-week, with the President of the United States slobbering (there’s no other word for it) praise on the Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud, the “de facto” ruler of Saudi Arabia. I honestly don’t want to ruin your day, but the details matter. The evidence from intelligence agencies, including the CIA, is that Bin Salman ordered the brutal assassination and dismembering of former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. This happened inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi (a Saudi national) had gone to finalize paperwork for his marriage to a Turkish woman, Hanan Elatr. She was waiting outside the consulate while her fiancé was savagely murdered.

The deeper you get into this story, the more disgusting it gets, and it is not my purpose to disgust you. But part of what’s going on here (besides Trump’s well-documented preference for ruthless authoritarian leaders) is Trump’s years-long complicity in Bin Salmon’s efforts to “greenwash” the revulsion his murder of Khashoggi (and other human rights violations) caused. It forced Trump and many other well known American politicians and athletes (golfers) to choose between money and morality. Dozens chose the money. The famous golfer, Phil Mickelson, explained why. You can read “Lefty’s” cold-blooded rationalization here if you wish though I should warn it may make you wretch.

When I read and then viewed Trump’s verbal valentine to Bin Salman it pegged my rage meter. I’m usually good at holding my balance, but I realized I’d slipped into a crevice of anger. It’s not a place where I can write, let alone breathe easily.

The globe still spins on its axis, the sun rises earlier each day, this time of year. Warblers return from the tropics, balsamroot and lupine bloom just down the way in what remains of the steep (and therefore undisturbed) soils of the Spokane River gorge. With a camera, I’ve been spending time with the magpies, large and charismatic birds that prefer to make their nests in the gorge’s hawthorn trees. They’re among the smartest of animals, keenly aware of what goes on around them, even though they lack access to the internet.

My daughter bought me a book—Leah Sottile’s Blazing Eye Sees All about the history feeding into …”The Fever Dream of the American New Age,” about Americans with grandiose and delusional tendencies who are especially susceptible to false prophets and dangerous charlatans. I was reading it in a tire store Thursday morning, in a comfortable chair with good lighting, immersed in the aroma of new rubber and the zoop-zoop-zoop of pneumatic wrenches.

Blazing Eye is a quality read. I’d already been reading and listening to Canadian writer Naomi Klein’s new work, with fellow writer, Astra Taylor, about what they call the “rise of end times facism.” The stories are related, at least in the sense that there is a movement among the world’s wealthiest to isolate and protect themselves (think of it as gated communities on steroids) from the rest of us and from the chaos, deprivation, and destruction that the hoarding of wealth inflicts upon ordinary people and the global environment. It avoids the hard and morally necessary work to actually be in community with humanity.

I tend to shun conspiracy theories. My experience is they attract people whose self-righteousness and self-promotion take precedence over their homework. But Klein is a serious scholar and her prescient 2007 book The Shock Doctrine describes the same disorienting tactics being used by Elon Musk and his “DOGE” unit and, before that, the blueprints of the Project 2025 team whose coxswain, Russell Vought, is now head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. The damage they’re doing is, as yet, incalculable. But this caliber of mayhem invites moral rebuttals, one of which was poignantly delivered by Microsoft founder Bill Gates— whose foundation has emphasized efforts to address malnutrition and gruesome diseases (i.e. malaria, HIV/Aids) including campaigns that deliver billions of dollars of his fortune to aid vulnerable populations in Africa.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Gates sharply criticized Musk and his DOGE project for feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development—and its programs to fight poverty and disease—“into the wood chipper.”

“He (Musk) could go on to be a great philanthropist,” Gates said. To which he added: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

In a recent and long interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk awkwardly floated his assessment that America and other democracies have an empathy problem.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.” To which he added: “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

I see. Compassion is “a bug” in human nature, and a “suicidal” glitch at that. I’m tempted to circulate this to the devout Christians in my contacts file who voted for Trump but I suspect this would only encourage them. They will hiss at my provocation. They will still drive to church in cars with MAGA bumper stickers.

As I’ve thought about this, I realize there’s a modern Bible story unfolding in the mists of the present—just in the persons of Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Mohammed Bin Salman and Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

It isn’t just that Abrego Garcia was snatched and shipped off to El Salvador despite an immigration judge’s order that he not be sent there because of the persuasive evidence his life would be in danger. Government lawyers have admitted this “mistake” in court filings. Nor is it just that the president and his agencies who’ve been ordered by the Supreme Court to “facilitate” Abrego-Garcia’s return have done nothing of the sort, even though the president recently admitted to an ABC reporter that he could arrange Abrego-Garcia’s return with a phone call.

It’s also that Abrego-Garcia cannot speak for himself. And he cannot speak for himself at a time when he is being purposefully vilified by Trump & Co. This because they need him to be a caricature villain in order to justify not lifting a finger on his behalf, despite the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision that they do so. When she appeared before Congress last week, Department Homeland Security director Kristi Noem defiantly proclaimed Abrego Garcia is a “terrorist” who would be immediately deported from the U.S. if ever he were to return.

There is zero evidence that Abrego-Garcia is a terrorist. Zero. Noem just made it up, knowing it is a lie but a lie that would play well to the MAGA base. For Abrego Garcia and his family it is life and death. For Trump and Noem it is just a show.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud is a terrorist. How else would you describe someone whom the CIA concludes is responsible for brutally murdering and dismembering a journalist?

And, yet, Bin Salman, in the words of the President of the United States is “a great guy.”

“I like you too much,” Trump said to the smiling dictator last week. “Oh what I do for the crown prince.”

It begs a plague of locusts.

—tjc