Sh*t To Help You Show Up February 7, 2025

"It happened so slowly, yet kind of overnight."

Feb 07, 2025

Welcome, everyone! There are so many more of you in the last couple of weeks. This post from two weeks ago brought more new subscribers than any newsletter I’ve ever written. And this one from last week got more views than any newsletter I’ve ever written, maybe more than anything I’ve ever written anywhere. What?!?

So, if you’re newly here, I’m so glad you’ve joined us. And if this is all old hat to you, I send you endless hugs and kisses for your faithfulness.

All together there are now nearly 1000 of us. Can we make it over that weird, arbitrary hump together? If you could share this to help, I would be so grateful. Thank you.

In her newsletter, published earlier this week, Courtney Martin suggested that everyone has a “first question”. Essentially one, perhaps unanswerable, question they’re asking their entire lives. If I have a first question, it is really two interlocking ones: What the hell is actually going on here, and can we talk about that honestly, please?

It was those first questions that led me to becoming an African & African-American Studies major in college. I was no Rachel Dolezal, full of delusions about my racial relationship to systems of power. I just loved history, so I signed myself up, the spring of my first year, for a class entitled “The History of Black Protest Thought in America.”

I grew up in Washington, D.C, a majority Black city. I knew all the words to the Negro National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, before I knew a single word of the Stars and Stripes. I went to Sweet Honey in the Rock concerts and MLK marches from the time I was in a brown, corduroy Snuggly on my mother’s chest. Yet, our primary text for that class was filled with names and ideas that I had never once heard of growing up, which was shocking, honestly. It felt like something had been intentionally hidden from me, and more than anything I wanted to know what it was.

In a movie I watched this week, photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller states that while covering WWII, despite all admonishments heaped upon her, she couldn’t look away. She could never look away, her whole life. It wasn’t in her. And I thought, Yes, exactly that.

That movie— the biopic Lee1, starring Kate Winslet— is the first resource I want to share with you this week. As biopics do, it tells the story of Lee Miller’s life (specifically, the years leading up to and through WWII). By extension, it offers a powerful view into the lives of regular people stunned by the world’s slide into fascism.

The movie opens in the years immediately preceding the war, when Miller found herself living in the south of France, surrounded by other hedonists and creatives. She has transitioned by this point from a hugely successful fashion model to a professional photographer, though her work focuses primarily on art and commerce. She is not a journalist, but the news comes for her. It comes for them all.

There is a scene early in the film that reminded me of so many conversations I’ve found myself in over the last 8 or 9 years, where the group is drinking and watching news reels of the celebrations surrounding Hitler’s 48th birthday— the parades, the pomp and circumstance:

Penrose: They’re idiots, but dangerous.

Picasso (yes, that Picasso): They’re all brainwashed!

Miller: Not everyone can believe this. Surely they can see what he is.

Éluard: But they don’t. Look at them. This is not an act.

Picasso: The only response to tyranny is to paint, to create!

Man Ray (yes, that Man Ray): To drink!

Penrose: To write!

Éluard: To dance!

And then one of the couples dances drunkenly as the newsreel of a fascist parade projects upon their bodies and the wall behind them.

The film flashes back and forth between these early memories, viewed as if in real time, and a conversation between an elderly Miller and a young man. Looking through a stack of her war photographs, the young man admits, “I still don’t understand how none of you saw it coming.”

“It happened so slowly,” she responds, pulling on her cigarette, “yet kind of overnight. We woke up one morning and Hitler was the most powerful man in Europe. Even as it was happening it didn’t feel real.”

I’ve been feeling similarly recently, like the onslaught of actions being taken by this administration feel bizarre and almost unreal. We’ve been building towards this moment literally my entire life, and yet now, it all feels like it’s moving so fast.

Miller and Penrose, her lover, eventually leave France for London. Miller gets herself hired as a war photographer for British Vogue documenting the Blitz, though she really wants to go to the European front. Unable to get permission from the British military, she embeds with the American army, where she’s sidelined from press briefings and other activities of the press corps because she’s a woman.

She does finally end up, unexpectedly, on the front lines, however, in the small, French village of Saint-Malo. There she meets up with Life magazine correspondent Davey Scherman, and the two head to Paris, which has been liberated by Allied troops.

Everyone around Miller is jubilant when they arrive in Paris, as if the war, and all of its aftermath, is concluded. But Miller’s friends from her days in Southern France tell her that thousands of people have been disappeared and no one is reporting on it. In response, Miller and Scherman commandeer an army jeep and spend weeks heading east— photographing entire families of Nazis who took cyanide rather than be captured, taking photos in Hitler’s Munich apartment the night he and Eva Braun killed themselves in Berlin, and eventually ending up at the death camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. There they find piles of bodies of Jews and others in train cars and outbuildings, left to rot by the Nazi army.

The pictures Miller took of those concentration camps are now considered some of the most important historical documentation of the Holocaust, but at the time, British Vogue wouldn’t print them. The British government censors said they would be “too upsetting” for people.

They were printed, ultimately, by Vogue in America, but Miller never got over it— the censorship and looking away, and the trauma of witnessing such horror.

Watching it all play out, I couldn’t help but think of the 30,000 person “immigration camp” the Trump administration is establishing in Guantanamo, a military base outside of the U.S. that can only be accessed for documentation of conditions if the military allows it. Who will verify conditions there? If horrors are carried out there in our name, how will we ever know before it’s too late?

Even in the absence of gas chambers and the other horrors of the Nazi death camps, the island of Cuba is subject to increasingly powerful hurricanes due to climate change. If a massive hurricane hits the island, how will a tent city of up to 30,000 vulnerable migrants fare?

It happened so slowly, yet kind of overnight…Even as it was happening it didn’t feel real.

The benefit of studying history, and why authoritarians work so hard to control the story of history being told, is because it offers the student an opportunity to see how recurring challenges that confront societies actually play out. An unwavering eye, of the type that Miller possessed, is not susceptible to the kind of propaganda that suggests this time it will be different. This strong man will take care of you.

Which leads me to the second resource I want to share with you, a NYT Opinion piece by Ezra Klein published earlier this week. Below is a video of it. You can read the full text here (unlocked link so anyone can read it) if audio is not your thing.

Klein argues that the tactics being employed by the Trump administration are intended to portray him as more powerful than he is, more king than president, in the hopes that he can convince us all to allow him to rule as one:

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

But, Klein asserts, there is a tension at the heart of Trump’s strategy. “Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president,” he writes. “He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.”

I’m not going to belabor the point, friends. You’re all smart and I’m sure you see how it all fits together. Like Lee Miller, we have to refuse to look away from what is actually happening right now. And, as Klein urges us, we have to remember that Trump is a president, not a king, and presidents have limited powers. Who enforces those limits? We do. Through our own actions (in our communities, in the streets, in the court of public opinion) and through forcing our legislators to follow and defend the Constitution, which is what we elected them to do.

I’ve been calling my senators and congressperson every single day, trying to do my part to keep things moving on that front. There are apps, like 5 Calls, that provide scripts and phone numbers to help you get started. I just put all of their field office numbers in the contacts in my phone, since the D.C. office lines have been totally overloaded.

I encourage you all to make daily calls, too, even if you’re a Republican or your Member of Congress is a Republican. I don’t expect there are any MAGA folks among us here, so I trust that all of us believe in the basic principles and governmental structures and powers laid out in the Constitution. Defend them with everything you’ve got, friends. Insist your elected representatives in government defend them, too.

There is no one coming to save us. There never was. It’s just us.

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