by Barry Goldman
One day many years ago my wife got stuck in the shower. She doesn’t 
know exactly how it happened, but that’s the gist. She finished taking a shower, pushed on the door to get out, and it wouldn’t open. She jiggled the door, and she banged on the door, and she pushed on the door, and she wiggled the door, and the door would not open.
So she stopped and thought about it. She couldn’t climb over the door. She couldn’t go around the door, and she couldn’t go through the door. She was standing in the shower naked and wet, and she couldn’t get out. Now what?
So she started over. She jiggled and shook and banged. No result. Could she dismantle the door? She didn’t have any tools. She had a washcloth, a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, nothing she could use to dismantle a shower door. Could she get help? She could yell, but it’s not likely anyone would hear her. She could call someone if she had a phone, but she didn’t have a phone. She was in the shower.
Okay, this is getting serious. She pushed the door some more. She shook the door. She banged on the door. This is not amusing anymore. Pretty soon she’s going to have to take some serious measures. But what would those be?
She could launch herself at the door and try to smash through it. Maybe that would work. It’s not generally a good idea to crash through a glass door naked, but if it’s necessary it’s necessary. Even then, they probably make those doors so they’re not easy to break. Susan only goes about 100 pounds. It’s not clear she could bust through a glass shower door even if she tried.
Okay, now she’s getting cold. She could warm up by turning the shower back on, but then what? She is beginning to run out of options. Pretty soon the situation is going to turn desperate. And when it turns desperate, then what?
Well, now we know the end of the story. The door opened, she got out, she met me, and we lived happily ever after. But at the time she didn’t know that. At the time she was wet and naked and stuck in the shower, and she didn’t have any way to get out. And she couldn’t think of anything to do about it.
Since the beginning of the second Trump presidency, the whole world is in a similar situation. Like Susan, we keep saying, “I’m going to give this five more minutes and if it doesn’t turn around in five minutes I’m going to take some goddam STEPS.”
As Lear thundered:
I will do such things—What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!
So far we haven’t seen much in the terrors of the earth department from the Democratic Party leadership. Mostly, they seem to be standing around with their thumb in their ass. But maybe they are just experiencing a temporary period of confusion before they find their footing. I’m thinking of Daniel Boone. He is supposed to have said:
I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.
In their trenchant book Surviving Autocracy about the first Trump presidency, M. Gessen talks about the paralysis that results from the continuous loop: this can’t possibly be happening; this is happening; this can’t possibly be happening. Of course, this time it’s all far worse. The whole world is poleaxed.
There is the problem of normalcy bias. That’s the one that keeps people from leaving their houses when a hurricane or a wildfire is approaching. We don’t believe it. We think the future will be like the past. All these years we’ve managed to muddle through. Experience seems to tell us we’ll muddle through again. Maybe we will, but there is also a selection bias problem here. We are getting our advice only from folks who survived the last hurricane. The people who died are not part of the conversation.
This is related to the problem of sanewashing. Journalists and others try to treat Trump’s rambling gibberish as though it were the reasoned discourse of a world leader. This is the President of the United States talking. Presidents of the United States don’t babble incoherently. (This can’t possibly be happening. Therefore, what is happening cannot possibly be this.)
In any case, we don’t want to look like an idiot. We will look like an idiot if we overreact, and we will look like an idiot if we keep thinking things will work out and we fail to act. The period of indecision is acutely unnerving.
I had a similar experience in a very different context recently. I participated in a law enforcement shoot/don’t shoot simulation training. First, my instructor talked about when a police officer may use deadly force – essentially when there is an imminent threat of great bodily harm. Then he stood me in front of a large screen with a pistol in my hand, and various scenarios unfolded. I failed to shoot a guy who pulled a gun on me. Then I did shoot a guy who was just pretending to pull a gun on me. Then I waited too long and failed to shoot a guy who was running at me with a knife. It was all fascinating and exciting. The last scenario, though, was disturbing. It went like this.
This guy had just been fired from his job. He was sitting in his truck outside the building and refusing to leave. The employer called the cops. I am the responding officer. The boss is standing next to the guy’s truck talking to him when I arrive. Suddenly the boss yells, “He’s got a gun!” and runs into the building. The guy in the truck starts screaming, “They took everything from me. My life is over.” I can see through the rear window he is holding a pistol to his temple.
What should I do? I get some distance between me and the guy and get behind a chair. I yell, “Put the gun down” Nothing. He gets out of the car, still holding the gun to his head. I yell, “Put the gun down.” He starts walking slowly toward the building, still holding the pistol to his temple.
I’m trying to think. But there’s no time to think. I want to keep the guy from killing himself, but I’m not going to run over to him. He’s got a gun. I don’t want to get out from behind my chair. I’m not going to shoot him to prevent him from shooting himself. He walks into the building. I hear three shots.
Three shots?! I wasn’t even thinking about danger to others. I was thinking about the danger he posed to himself and to me. But that’s not the point. The point is I want to isolate that moment when I needed to do something, I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t think of any way to figure out what to do. Like Susan in the shower, and the whole world with this raging malignancy in the White House.
Freud said the purpose of psychoanalysis was to turn “hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.” If only Freud would come and do that for all of us now. At this point, ordinary unhappiness seems like an impossible fantasy.
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