Nihilism, Optimism, and the Noble Cause

All photos by R.A. Frumkin.

On the day before the January 5 runoff election, I was standing in downtown Atlanta near the Centennial Olympic Park, watching then-president-elect Joe Biden speak to a stadium-sized fleet of cars whose drivers had climbed onto their roofs and were clapping and cheering and waving American flags. Because of COVID-19, the rally was invite-only, meaning those of us not important enough to be invited were separated from the fleet of cars by a metal fence, which was being monitored by people in OSSOFF WARNOCK 2020 t-shirts. On my side of the fence, a man with a receding hairline and a mask that read DON’T DRINK THE BLEACH was peddling an impressive collection of buttons depicting Donald Trump in all manner of humiliating situations: he had T-rex arms, he was being devoured by the blue Twitter bird, he had horns growing out of his combover. The man stood still for a moment and observed, along with me, the upper half of a giant screen rising from a platform several hundred feet ahead of us. On the screen, Biden was wearing his trademark black aviators and was flanked by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two Georgia Senate candidates for whom he was campaigning.

It had been two months since Trump was voted out of office, since friends and family and I, along with much of the country, had been able to get our first good night’s sleep in four years. I was feeling light, breathing easier, but I knew that was naïve. There was, after all, still a lot of work to be done, and many ways in which to be horrified and disappointed by the American imperialist machine. And then there was the messy relief-calculus of who actually deserved to feel relieved, and why, and for how long. What was the appropriate way to react to the deposing of a dictator whose rise to power had been a symptom, not a cause, of a capitalist and white-supremacist superstructure built on a foundation of systematic genocide? Were we at risk now of pretending everything was fine, of sweeping the badness under the rug?

“Honestly, I’m glad Trump was president,” a prison and police abolitionist told me while Biden boomed on. Her hair was styled in thick twists and she was selling JUSTICE FOR GEORGIA t-shirts to raise money for the grieving families of Black boys and men who’d been murdered by the police. “We couldn’t ignore all the white supremacy in the country when he was president. People discovered who the real Nazis and bigots are. White people started waking up and realizing they had to do something about it.”

I bought a shirt from her and she thanked me, and I crossed the street in the direction of Olympic Park, which was closed due to COVID-19. The only thing that wasn’t closed, it seemed, was the giant ferris wheel which gave riders an aerial view of the city. The event must have looked absurd from above: a collection of parked cars pointed at a screen on which the papery face of Joe Biden was projected, his brows furrowed in concern, the movement of his mouth slightly out of sync with the words echoing from the massive speakers affixed to the stage. Those of us outside the fence must have looked even stranger from above, car-less hangers-on hoping to catch a glimpse of history between the stiff shoulders of the event’s security detail.

It struck me how aloof and inaccessible the whole event was, not unlike the Democrats themselves. COVID-19 precautions seemed to have become an excuse for selectivity, and in moments like these it was easy to understand why the right’s populism was appealing to so many. Two days later, the same day Ossoff and Warnock were declared the winners of their hard-fought races, there would be an attempted coup at the US Capitol: Trumpers wearing MAGA hats and hunting goggles and American flags fashioned into capes would flood the chambers of Congress. A man in a Trump beanie would pose carrying Nancy Pelosi’s lectern like he’d just purchased it on the cheap at a garage sale. A woman enraptured by “the storm” (a QAnon conspiracy theory that the siege on the Capitol would trigger the mass execution of Trump’s foes), would be shot in the neck by a police officer. A tattooed man in a buffalo headdress, referring to himself as the “Q Shaman,” would stalk the marble halls. Footage would be posted to Twitter of police officers opening barricades to allow the rioters in, and Missouri senator Josh Hawley would offer the rioters a clenched fist in solidarity. The mood would be anarchic but not in a productive way—threatening, emphasizing that our country was no longer divided between left and right but among micro-factions of the left and right, socialists and liberals and capitalists and conspiracy theorists positioned at virtually every rank of power and influence. There would be no celebrating Ossoff and Warnock’s victories. There’d just be history to live through—hours and days and months of history—with no non-history in sight.

I had realized I wanted top surgery five months before the runoffs, and had been binding ever since. Assigned female at birth and finding myself on the masculine side of nonbinary, I’d been excited for Biden to restore the dignity of the LGBTQ+ community; this was one thing to look forward to, at least, even if the rest of the future was ominously uncertain. I was wearing a binder while listening to Biden condemn conservative malarkey on that cold day in Atlanta, and I felt in that moment that by flattening my chest I could become mannish and invulnerable, moving through the world unquestioned and undisturbed, a foot soldier in the quest for liberation. Biden said he wanted to be a president for everyone—a president even for the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Q Shamans of the world—but I knew better than to buy into ideas of unity. I dreamed of being a dutiful cog in the anti-fascist machine, enabled in my movement by a body whose familiarity would feel somehow new. The idea thrilled me in the way true self-discovery might thrill anyone, and it had nothing to do with the Democrats and their propriety—the blind eyes they were turning to the chaos of the American political situation.

The Secret Service informed us that we needed to move onto the sidewalk, because the rally would be over soon and then there would be a number of SUVs traveling up the street, two of which would be carrying Ossoff and Warnock and one of which would be carrying Biden. We crowded onto a corner of the sidewalk, our