Notes from the underground

And a glitchy postpartum brain

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, and for reasons I don’t understand, I’ve been blessed with new paid subscribers while I’ve been on maternity leave. Welcome, thank you, I’m glad you’re here. Did I think it would be effortless to return to the page after having my third child? Of course I did. My toxic trait is thinking difficult things will be easy. I live in a permanent state of being humbled by things like deadlines, colic and snowstorms.

While I was falling powerfully and hopelessly in love with the latest baby, I’ve been paying close attention to the world I brought her into. Fifteen months ago, there was a lot of talk in my circles about “masks coming off,” about our collective shock at the brazenness with which our representatives, celebrities and heroes could orchestrate, and then defend, a genocide. Now, I’m almost longing for the naiveté that allowed us to believe in and even wear those masks. I suppose that’s the difference between reading Fanon in a wealthy New England university and recognizing ourselves in his work.

The tenor is different in 2025. I’m constantly surprised by the wealthy liberal American propensity for eating cake. What I used to believe was stupidity or ignorance is quickly revealing itself to be a form of intellectual and moral laziness that reminds me deeply of Pakistan. In theory, I knew that people align with their own class interests, but the clarity of seeing it in action has been…special. The faintest glimmer of true solidarity with the oppressed is replaced instantly with nostalgia for the veneer of respectability that covered other murderous neoliberal agendas. If George Bush was portrayed as an affectionate goofball on late night shows after the first election of Donald Trump, today we have Biden’s genocide being swept under a rug of lovable geriatric gaffes. Silly red vs blue face value “politics” have always been par for the course, but I remain stunned by the breadth of the course itself.

Partner all this hubris with the liberal condescension for the humanity of red state voters, and you have the perfect conditions for a revolution that isn’t. I am as appalled and disgusted by our new administration as the next person, but may I never fall into the trap of denying anyone their humanity based on who they voted for or why. Liberation for all means liberation for all, and as uncomfortable as I am with the neighbor with a MAGA hat, in the end the manmade climate crisis, famine, economic collapse or war will come for us both. The time for mutual aid is now, the time to read and learn is now, the time for recognizing our common humanity and shared desires is now, the time to wake up was yesterday…and probably also now.

I am reading Arendt these days, and remembering the terror that gripped me when I first read her. I would imagine the fascist regime closing in around her, the spurned lover-turned-Nazi she still wrote to, the long days waiting for an American visa, and feel suffocated by grief. Reading history, especially in biographical form, is frustrating because we know how it ends, and there is nothing we can do to change it. Get out! I wanted to say to so many Hannahs, but of course I couldn’t. Of course I don’t, now that the walls of a new fascism close around us, and neither do I go anywhere, because there is nowhere to go, but also because I like my life too much to try. Both facts shame me.