Like so many people he’s been talking with lately, Codger is alarmed by the state of the nation and asks, “What should we do?”
The answers have ranged from wearing a pin with the Walt Whitman line, “Resist Much, Obey Little,” which seems too little, to not paying this year’s income tax, which seems too much, considering the opposition’s capacity for revenge.
But Codger was shocked when a usually mild and reasonable friend came up with something not only as vindictive and mean as the administration’s assaults on democracy, but also as ultimately self-destructive. The friend suggested: “Carry a tube of Super-Glu to fill in the plug-ins at each and every Tesla charging station you go out of your way to happen upon.”
Whoa! You want to take it out on Tesla?
Codger’s initial reaction was reeling confusion. O.K., that fancy electric car is an easy symbol of the immigrant oligarch Elon Musk, who is operating as a non-elected hatchet man under the aegis of a president gone rogue. Shutting down one of that Nazi-nik’s symbolic sources of power looks like a safely risky anonymous adolescent fantasy.
Hoo-boy. Let’s also scratch something on a Tesla’s frunk (the company’s cutesy name for the car’s front trunk). Keying a Space X rocket sounds even better, but way more trouble.
After a calming walk on Nostrand Parkway with Cur III (yes, in only three months Tess has earned it), Codger wondered if such aggression was simply too antithetical to the search for common ground that Crone has been urging so relentlessly lately.
What was the point of gluing or scratching only to make angry people angrier? And how would it help those whose lives have already been disrupted, whose medical research has been abandoned, whose privacy has been betrayed, whose benefits and schooling withdrawn by a government that doesn’t seem to have a plan beyond attacking its most vulnerable, poor people, immigrants, trans people, students?
Codger re-read the Substack column that had turned him on to turning on Tesla. His friend, the YA novelist and family therapist Chris Crutcher, had written: “This current assault on DEI, on truth in education … is traitorous to freedom … and all proponents, whether through ignorance or intent, bear the shame of that treachery.”
Codger recalled that the rogue president actually said that traitors should be hanged, so maybe defacing their cars or clogging their charging stations is the least that patriots could do. And if the Big Bully was above the law, weren’t those who followed his dictates in a protected, pre-pardon state?
Whoa, Codger. You’re starting to sound like those security-cleared insurrectionists who scare you.
So he called a friend who owns a Tesla.
There was a long silence after Codger read him Crutcher’s column. Then his friend said something like, “That hurts. When I bought the car about four years ago for $60,000, I felt good about it, patriotic, a champion of the environment. I got some nasty looks from conservative neighbors.”
He was a frunking liberal!
As Codger and his Tesla-owning friend kept talking, Codger’s fantasy of gluing and keying drained away. Who would he be hurting? And how had such a situation come about? How could his two usually reasonable, freedom-loving friends have been maneuvered into opposition on any issue involving what seems like a coup against democracy?
Take it out on a Tesla?
“You know, I love the way the car rides,” said Codger’s friend, “but it’s not convenient. You have to stop to charge, of course, and if something goes wrong you need Tesla repair, which is expensive and hard to find. There’s no room for a spare tire, so a blow-out is a disaster.”
Disasters come in all sizes these days and they are mostly coming out of the outlaw firehose called Trumpism. The dismantling of the legal, Social Security, educational, health, economic and national security systems seems only the beginning of widespread catastrophes, including a recession, for which Trump has indicated his approval.
Ironically (a word that seems to have lost meaning), a recession is predicted to hurt Trump’s working-class and minority constituency more than those Democrats in all their passivity and presumed portfolios.
Reading Julie Lane’s fine recent Reporter series on the aftermath of COVID, Codger felt grateful for having been a citizen of the Republic of Shelter Island when Chief Read, Supervisor Siller, Superintendent Doelger and many volunteers guided it through the pandemic, even as hundreds of thousands of off-Island Americans died through Trumpist incompetence.
Will being on the Island this time be protection against the coming disasters? It’s possible, Codger thinks, only if the people of the Free and Democratic Republic stand together to make a safe common ground for themselves and their curs, as well as their Teslas and their power stations.
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