Dear Commons Community,

We learned over the weekend that Sean Connery died at his home in the Bahamas at the age of 90.  He had been suffering from dementia for several years.  For those of us growing up in the 1960s, we could not wait for the latest James Bond movie to be released each summer. He was the first Bond and for most of us the best.

Here is a description of his life and career, courtesy of BBC News.

His acting career spanned seven decades and he won an Oscar in 1988 for his role in The Untouchables.

Sir Sean’s other films included The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Rock.

Jason Connery said his father “had many of his family, who could be in the Bahamas, around him” when he died overnight in Nassau. Much of the Bond film Thunderball had been filmed there.

He said: “We are all working at understanding this huge event as it only happened so recently, even though my dad has been unwell for some time.

“A sad day for all who knew and loved my dad and a sad loss for all people around the world who enjoyed the wonderful gift he had as an actor.”

His publicist Nancy Seltzer said: “There will be a private ceremony followed by a memorial yet to be planned once the virus has ended.”

He leaves his wife Micheline and sons Jason and Stephane.  

Daniel Craig, the current James Bond, said Sir Sean was “one of the true greats of cinema”.

“Sir Sean Connery will be remembered as Bond and so much more,” he said.

“He defined an era and a style. The wit and charm he portrayed on screen could be measured in megawatts; he helped create the modern blockbuster.

“He will continue to influence actors and film-makers alike for years to come. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones.”

In reference to Sir Sean’s love of golf, he added: “Wherever he is, I hope there is a golf course.”

Dame Shirley Bassey, who sang the themes to three Bond films including Goldfinger, paid tribute saying: “I’m incredibly saddened to hear of Sean’s passing.

“My thoughts are with his family. He was a wonderful person, a true gentleman and we will be forever connected by Bond.”

Sir Sean, from Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, had his first major film appearance in 1957 British gangster film No Road Back.

He first played James Bond in Dr No in 1962 and went on to appear in five other official films – and the unofficial Never Say Never Again in 1983.

He was largely regarded as being the best actor to have played 007 in the long-running franchise, often being named as such in polls.

Connery made the character of James Bond his own, blending ruthlessness with sardonic wit. Many critics didn’t like it and some of the reviews were scathing. But the public did not agree.

The action scenes, sex and exotic locations were a winning formula.

In truth, his Bond is now a museum piece; the portrayal of women impossibly dated. The action scenes are still thrilling, but the sex too often bordered on the non-consensual.

Thankfully, its been a while since 007 slapped a woman on the backside and forced a kiss. But Connery’s performance was of its time, enjoyed by millions of both sexes and gave the silver screen a 20th Century icon.

He was knighted by the Queen at Holyrood Palace in 2000. In August, he celebrated his 90th birthday.

Bond producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said they were “devastated by the news” of his death.

They said: “He was and shall always be remembered as the original James Bond whose indelible entrance into cinema history began when he announced those unforgettable words ‘the name’s Bond… James Bond’.

“He revolutionized the world with his gritty and witty portrayal of the sexy and charismatic secret agent. He is undoubtedly largely responsible for the success of the film series and we shall be forever grateful to him.”

Star Wars director George Lucas, who also created the Indiana Jones character, said Sir Sean “left an indelible mark in cinematic history”.

“He will always hold a special place in my heart as Indy’s dad. With an air of intelligent authority and sly sense of comedic mischief, only someone like Sean Connery could render Indiana Jones immediately into boyish regret or relief through a stern fatherly chiding or rejoiceful hug.

“I’m thankful for having had the good fortune to have known and worked with him. My thoughts are with his family.”

Just the seven as 007 – Connery’s Bond movies

• Dr No (1962)
• From Russia with Love (1963)
• Goldfinger (1964)
• Thunderball (1965)
• You Only Live Twice (1967)
• Diamonds are Forever (1971)
• Never Say Never Again (1983)

Sir Sean was a long-time supporter of Scottish independence, saying in interviews in the run-up to the 2014 referendum that he might return from his Bahamas home to live in Scotland if it voted to break away from the rest of the UK.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “I was heartbroken to learn this morning of the passing of Sir Sean Connery. Our nation today mourns one of her best loved sons.

“Sean was born into a working class Edinburgh family and through talent and sheer hard work, became an international film icon and one of the world’s most accomplished actors. Sean will be remembered best as James Bond – the classic 007 – but his roles were many and varied.

“He was a global legend but, first and foremost, a patriotic and proud Scot – his towering presence at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 showed his love for the country of his birth. Sean was a lifelong advocate of an independent Scotland and those of us who share that belief owe him a great debt of gratitude.”  

Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, who was close friends with Sir Sean, described him as “the world’s greatest Scot, the last of the real Hollywood stars, the definitive Bond”.

He said: “Sean Connery was all of these things but much more. He was also a staunch patriot, a deep thinker and outstanding human being.”

He added: “‘Scotland Forever’ wasn’t just tattooed on his forearm but was imprinted on his soul.”

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Cindy and John McCain

Dear Commons Community,

Cindy McCain, the widow of 2008 Republican presidential candidate and longtime Arizona Sen. John McCain, said yesterday that one specific incident was “the final straw” for her with President Donald Trump. 

McCain, who has since endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, told “60 Minutes” it was Trump’s disrespect for those who had served in the military. 

“For me, the final straw was the, you know, ‘They’re losers and suckers,’” she said, referring to an Atlantic report that Trump had used the epithets to describe fallen soldiers. The report was later confirmed by other news agencies.

McCain said:   “You know, I’m the mother of two veterans and a wife of a veteran, and my father was a veteran. They were not losers and suckers by any chance. It angered me a great deal. It angered me. And so I thought, I can either sit here and be angry or I can do something.”

McCain also spoke about her late husband’s friendship with Biden in a video shown during the Democratic National Convention in August. She formally endorsed Biden about a month later. 

May God bless you, Mrs. McCain!

Tony

Anthony Fauci

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump suggested yesterday he would fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a touchstone of scientific wisdom during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the election.

Trump made the comments to a crowd of supporters in Florida late Sunday, the latest campaign stop in his frantic final push before Election Day. As Trump spoke about the coronavirus and derided his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, the crowd began chanting “Fire Fauci!”, a notion the president seemed to be on board with:

Despite Trump’s ongoing insistence that America is ready to return to normal, Fauci has long warned that the country is headed in the wrong direction. In an interview last week, Fauci painted a grim picture for the nation after more than 99,000 Americans tested positive for the virus in a 24-hour period.

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Fauci told The Washington Post. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

Fauci also praised Biden for taking the pandemic “seriously from a public health perspective.”

The remarks prompted anger and frustration from the Trump administration. White House spokesman Judd Deere told The New York Times that Fauci’s comments were “unacceptable” and broke “all norms.”

“[Fauci made] his political leanings known by praising the president’s opponent, exactly what the American people have come to expect from the Swamp,” Deere said.

CNN reported in July:  “Under federal law, Trump doesn’t have the power to directly fire Fauci, a career civil servant, and remove him from government. And while Trump could try ordering his political appointees to dismiss the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci could appeal — a time-consuming process.”

On Sunday, Trump also suggested that states that have begun to reinstate lockdown measures amid a surging wave of infections would simply end those safety measures the day after the election.

“I just left a state that locked down. I left two of ‘em, and they’re not happy right now,” Trump said. “You know what’s going to happen to them, on Nov. 4, the day after, they’re gonna say ‘alright, we’re going to open up.’”

As of Sunday night, more than 9.2 million Americans have contracted COVID-19 and more than 230,000 have died from the virus.

Trump is envious of Fauci because he is everything a leader should be.  He is honest, humble, and wise.  Trump is a liar, a braggart, and as the conservative George Will described him “a bloviating ignoramus.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the past three months, I have read three books on Donald Trump:  Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, Bob Woodward’s Rage, and Michael Cohen’s Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.  I posted about the Cohen book a month ago.  Below is another review, courtesy of The Guardian,  with a slightly different take on it.

In my view, Disloyal was an interesting read and I wish Cohen well!

Tony

Instead, Cohen went down a hubristic path. It would take him to glory: helping Trump to beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election and then to a job as the president’s personal attorney. And to doom and disaster: a bitter public feud with the White House’s Tweeter-in-Chief and to a stint in jail after he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and to other crimes.

Disloyal is Cohen’s kiss-and-tell account of the decade he spent at Trump’s side. It is an exhilarating and lurid story – part survivor’s memoir, part revenge tragedy. His verdict on the president is brutal. It is, for the most part, convincing. Trump, according to Cohen, is a cheat, liar, fraud, bully, racist and predator. And a gargantuan conman who has succeeded in duping millions of Americans.

As Cohen tells it, Trump is unlikely to quit if he loses November’s election to Joe Biden. Instead, he expects the president to cheat his way to victory, a tactic that has served him well before. Cohen’s reasoning is plausible: that Trump will do anything to stay in power, knowing full well that once he is out of office, federal and state charges and a possible prison cell await.

The Trump who emerges from these pages has the charm and menace of a mafia mobster. From the 26th floor of Trump Tower, he would summon Cohen to fix messes of his own making. They included women with whom Trump had had affairs, who needed to be bought off, and disgruntled contractors and others whom Trump had stiffed. Trump’s directions were always oblique, Cohen writes, leaving room for deniability.

There are gossipy sketches of the president’s family and flatterers. Jared Kushner is a conceited man-boy, Ivanka a bit more likable, according to Cohen. All of the Trump children were starved of their father’s love as children and are now “forever trapped in a cycle of seeking his approval”. This explains why they tolerate his immigrant-bashing outbursts. Trump’s marriage to Melania, meanwhile, is purely transactional – “just another deal, plain and simple”.

Disloyal is illuminating on the theme of collusion with Russia, in which Cohen played a lead role. For four decades, Trump tried to build a hotel in Moscow. In December 2015, Cohen got in touch with Vladimir Putin’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. While Trump was praising Putin on the campaign stump, Cohen was secretly trying to get Trump Tower Moscow off the ground. Trump knew, of course, as did the Trump kids.

According to Cohen, Trump colluded with the Kremlin, but not in the sophisticated way imagined by some of his critics. His treason, if you can call it that, was of the pedestrian, me-first kind. Trump and Putin were united in their loathing for Clinton, with Trump willing to accept Russian help (hacking, spies, trolls, oligarchs bearing gifts) so long as it benefited him personally.

Cohen is scathing about Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy whose dossier says the Russians have been cultivating Trump for years. One of Steele’s memos alleges Cohen met Russian intermediaries in Prague in summer 2016, something Cohen insists is not true. Trump sucks up to Putin because he loves money and figures – rightly in my view – that the one-time KGB colonel is the world’s richest man, worth a trillion dollars.

Still, Cohen thinks it’s “not entirely impossible” that the notorious dossier pee tape exists. Trump – allegedly – watched two prostitutes perform in his hotel suite while in Russia for the Miss Universe pageant. Cohen wasn’t there. Instead, he describes an outing to a Las Vegas strip club, around the same time, where Trump and his Moscow buddies Emin and Aras Agalarov watched a similar act on stage. They enjoyed it, Cohen tells us.

Why, you wonder, did he spend so long pandering to Trump and his enormous ego? Cohen’s answer: he was made drunk by a cocktail of power, strength, celebrity and complete disregard for the rules. He likens himself to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Or, switching metaphor, to the canary in the coal mine. After all, he points out, Trump managed to seduce and mesmerise half of America too, not to mention its bewitched media class.

It is Americans, more than Russians, who facilitated Trump’s rise to power and who may yet connive to keep him there. Cohen worked closely with David Pecker, then CEO of American Media and publisher of the National Enquirer. Together, they smothered the stories of Trump’s extramarital relationships with the adult actor Stormy Daniels and the Playboy model Karen McDougal. (Cohen ended up paying off Daniels himself, an illegal campaign expense that helped put him in jail.)

Amid the cover-ups, lying and sleaze, Cohen acknowledges that Trump has dark gifts. These include talent, charisma and pure ruthless ambition, plus what he calls an innate ability to tap into voters’ deep prejudices and fears and to exploit them for his own benefit. The president, he says, lives constantly in the present tense, thinking nothing of the consequences of his actions, a sort of shark who survives by continuous motion.

There are a few things Cohen leaves out. We don’t learn anything about his meetings with the special counsel Robert Mueller and his FBI team, after Cohen broke with Trump in the summer of 2018 and came clean. Nor does Cohen say much about Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, who was slipping off to pass polling data and other pieces of information to a career Russian spy.

Ultimately, Disloyal is an artful work of self-reinvention. It is (ghost?) written in rollicking style and confected to give the impression Cohen is humbly repentant and ashamed. Maybe he is and his moral awakening is for real. Cohen, though, doesn’t dwell much on why he stopped being Trump’s “gangster lawyer”. Perhaps we should merely be thankful that he is now ringer of the nation’s alarm bell and deliverer of cold truth to a complicit Republican party.

Dear Commons Community,

In a show of how stressed the country is, retailers and department stores are making security plans to deal with potential unrest on Election Day.  Major chains like Macys and Norstram have already started boarding up their windows.  In Beverly Hills, the police said they would take a “proactive approach” and close Rodeo Drive, the renowned strip of luxury retailers, on Tuesday and Wednesday, citing the likelihood of increased “protest activity.” The police, working with private security companies, said they would also be on “full alert” throughout Beverly Hills starting on Halloween and continuing into election week.  As reported by the New York Times. 

“The nation is on edge as the bitter presidential contest finally nears an end, the latest flashpoint in a bruising year that has included the pandemic and widespread protests over social justice. Anxiety has been mounting for months that the election’s outcome could lead to civil unrest, no matter who wins. In the retail industry, many companies are not simply concerned about possible mayhem — they are planning for it.

In a show of just how volatile the situation seems to the industry, 120 representatives from 60 retail brands attended a video conference this week hosted by the National Retail Federation, which involved training for store employees on how to de-escalate tensions among customers, including those related to the election. The trade group also hired security consultants who have prepped retailers about which locations around the country are likely to be the most volatile when the polls close.

“I am 50-plus years old, and I didn’t think I would live to see this,” said Shane Fernett, who owns a contracting business in Colorado Springs and has been stocking up on plywood to board up his retail customers. “You read about this in third-world countries, not America.”

For the retail industry, 2020 has been filled with bankruptcies, store closures and plummeting sales as tens of millions of Americans struggled with job losses because of the pandemic. Protests over police violence against Black citizens sent millions of people into the streets, demonstrations that in some cases devolved into the looting and burning of stores in a number of cities. Worries about unrest around the election have been fanned by President Trump, who has declined to say whether he would agree to a peaceful transfer of power if his Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr., is victorious.

Protests flared again this week after Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man with mental health issues who was carrying a knife, was killed by the police in Philadelphia. That set off looting and clashes with the police in parts of the city. Citing the civil unrest in Philadelphia, Walmart said on Thursday that it was removing all of its firearms and ammunition from its sales floors across the country. On Friday, Walmart said it was returning guns to the sales floor, after determining that the incidents of unrest “have remained geographically isolated.”

This year, businesses have already sustained at least $1 billion in insured losses from looting and vandalism largely set off by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May, according to

It is on target to be the most costly period of civil unrest in history, likely surpassing damages during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and many of the civil rights protests of the late 1960s.

The situation in 2020 has drawn comparisons to protests in the 1960s, but Derek Hyra, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, said recent unrest had been more geographically widespread, affecting a wider swath of businesses.

“Most of the rioting and burning in the 1960s happened within the geography of low-income Black spaces,” Mr. Hyra said. “In the 2020 unrest, more of it happened in downtown and affluent areas.

“It’s not just urban America,” he added. “The protests have been in the suburbs, they’ve been in rural areas.”

Protecting properties from potential damage is not a simple decision. Retailers can risk alienating their customers by erecting plywood, particularly if the anticipated unrest does not materialize.

“You are sending a message when you do that,” Stephanie Martz, general counsel of the National Retail Federation, said. “You don’t want to necessarily engage in this kind of grim forecasting.”

Some companies aren’t taking chances — the iconic Macy’s location in Manhattan’s Herald Square was boarded up on Friday. But other large businesses are keeping their plans vague.

Target, with about 1,900 stores, said in a statement, “Like many businesses, we’re taking precautionary steps to ensure safety at our stores, including giving our store leaders guidance on how to take care of their teams.”

Before Trump, America use to be a beacon of democracy to the world.  Not now!

Tony

Family of Walter Wallace Jr.

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press reported this morning that the family of Walter Wallace Jr. does not want the officers, who have not yet been publicly identified, to be charged with murder because they were improperly trained and didn’t have the right equipment to do their job.  As reported:

“The footage from body-worn cameras that was taken as police responded to a call about Walter Wallace Jr. shows him emerging from a house with a knife as relatives shout at officers about his mental health condition, a lawyer for the man’s family said Thursday.

The video also shows Wallace became incapacitated after the first shot of 14 that two officers fired at him, said lawyer Shaka Johnson, describing footage he said police showed him and other members of Wallace’s family before a plan to release it and 911 calls publicly.

“I understand he had a knife, but that does not give you carte blanche to execute a man, quite frankly,” Johnson told reporters at a news conference outside Philadelphia City Hall. “What other than death did you intend when you shoot a man — each officer — seven times apiece?”

The video shows “instant panic” from officers whose training taught them only how to open fire, he said, noting he saw no viable attempt from officers to deescalate the situation.

“What you will not see is a man with a knife lunging at anyone that would qualify as a reason to assassinate him,” Johnson said.

The mayor’s office said in a news release late Thursday that the body cam footage and the 911 audio would be released publicly by the end of next week.

Police also faced rebuke from Philadelphia leaders as the anguished city bemoaned the department’s response to a year of extraordinary, and sometimes violent, civil unrest.

The City Council, joining leaders of other cities, voted to block police from using tear gas, rubber bullets or pepper spray on peaceful protesters after hearing hours of testimony from people injured or traumatized by them, including a group hit with tear gas as they were corralled near a highway overpass.

“It was undisciplined, it was indiscriminate and it hurt a lot of people,” said Council Member Helen Gym, who introduced the bill.

The moves follow days of protests, store break-ins and ATM thefts after the death of Wallace, a Black man, that led the mayor to lock down the city Wednesday night with an overnight curfew.

The family had called Monday for both medical services and police, but only the latter arrived, lawyer Shaka Johnson said. Less than 30 seconds into the encounter, Wallace was dead, felled by a blast of 14 bullets, he said.

Police have said the two officers fired after Wallace ignored orders to drop a knife. Wallace’s mother and wife were outside, shouting to police about his mental health problems, Johnson said.

In a news conference Wednesday, Outlaw lamented the lack of a behavioral health unit in a department she joined only this year.

She pledged to address that need and also told the council that she supports the goal of their bill, which she said aligns with current police policy. Mayor Jim Kenney also supports the ban in principle but wants to review it before signing it into law, a spokesman said.

The city had a strong record of accommodating protesters in recent years, until the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the city May 30, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Chaos and violent clashes ensued and broke out anew this week after Wallace’s death in a predominantly Black section of west Philadelphia.

“The unjustified shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. this week has our city both raging and grieving, but also extraordinarily purposeful about taking action,” Gym said.

Raging and grieving indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in her New York Times column this morning laments all we have lost in America during the four years of Trump’s presidency due to coronavirus death and devastation, children not in school, the likelihood of Roe v. Wade being overturned, mass unemployment, and immigrant children who have no parents.  She then focuses on the time and energy that our country has wasted on our “narcissistic philistine” of  a president  who thinks about nothing but himself and has no appreciation for American values and culture.  Every moment thinking about Trump was a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else.

She concludes that America has been living in a perpetual state of emergency under Trump that isn’t healthy or sustainable. “Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art and bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable. If people no longer had to throw themselves in front of the bulldozer of this presidency, there would be more energy for progress and for pleasure. Trump has blocked out the sun. Only when he’s gone will we see how much we’ve been missing.”

Below is the entire column.  Read it and hope that the nightmare of this president will be over soon!

Tony

New York Times

Four Wasted Years Thinking About Donald Trump

By Michelle Goldberg

Oct. 29, 2020

It’s very hard to catalog all the things we’ve lost under the presidency of Donald Trump.

As I write this, over 225,000 Americans have lost their lives to Covid-19. Many of our children have lost months of school. Soon a huge part of the country will lose Thanksgiving.

Because of the Trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy, 545 children may be lost to their parents forever. America has lost its status as a leading democracy. We lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so we’re probably going to lose Roe v. Wade. More people have lost their jobs under Trump than under any president since at least World War II.

Compared with all this, mourning the cultural casualties of the Trump years might be frivolous.

But when I think back, from my obviously privileged position, on the texture of daily life during the past four years, all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss. Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him.

Early on, some thought the catastrophe of Trump’s election could be a catalyst for aesthetic glory. “In times of artistic alienation, distress is often repaid to us in the form of great work, much of it galvanizing or clarifying or (believe it or not) empowering,” wrote New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz.

I’ve no doubt that great work was created over the past four years, but I missed much of it, because I was too busy staring in incredulous horror at my phone. That would be the luxury problem of someone who follows politics for a living, except I wasn’t alone.

The easiest place to quantify the cultural impoverishment of the Trump era is in book publishing. There have been so many books about Trump and the fallout from Trumpism that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada has written a book about all the Trump books. “More political books have sold across all formats during this presidential term than at any point in NPD BookScan history,” said a recent report from the leading data company for U.S. book sales.

I’ve read many of these books and greatly appreciated some of them. But these books, and their blockbuster popularity, made it harder for other work to break through. “Fiction lost out to nonfiction since 2015,” said NPD’s Kristen McLean. The decline in fiction sales began before this presidency, but during the past four years it accelerated. “Trump taking up space in our brain and crowding out our ability to think about anything else is definitely, I think, part of the phenomenon,” she said.

It’s a phenomenon experienced even by some who’ve made literature their lives. The novelist Meg Wolitzer was a co-editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2017.” She described sitting in her apartment after her husband had gone to bed on election night in 2016, story submissions scattered around her. “I saw these stories and I thought, ‘How am I going to return to reading these tomorrow with the great attention and hope that I need to give them?’” she recalled to me. “Is that lost?”

It wasn’t, but she still feels the manic churn of current events fraying her concentration. “Right now it’s all about, ‘How will this end?’” Wolitzer said. “And that is so different from how we read fiction, because it’s about the desire to stay in this world, to be suspended in this world.”

Before Trump, I’d never had the feeling of wanting to fast-forward through the era I was living in, of longing to be in the future, looking back at how it all turned out. The conceit that there’s a gonzo writers room scripting current events is partly about astonishment at how crazy everything seems, but it’s also about a fantasy of narrative coherence — that one day all of this will make sense. When you are living through a baffling, all-encompassing drama, it becomes harder to lose yourself in other, unrelated stories.

I’d have thought that dramatic television would flourish in a time when reality has become so toxic, but instead it feels like Peak TV has, well, peaked. As Vanity’s Fair’s TV critic Sonia Saraiya wrote, “The daily clown show cuts into television’s bandwidth, both figuratively and literally, occupying space in the national conversation, and therefore our brains, that might be instead filled with, among many other things, the heir to ‘The Sopranos.’”

The great shows that have come out over the past four years have largely been riffs on our national calamity, not counterpoints to it. “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a nightmare about sadistic patriarchy. “Succession” is the story of an overbearing right-wing media mogul and his weak-willed children. “Watchmen” was almost a photonegative of Trumpism, in which white nationalism was a guerrilla insurgency rather than a ruling ideology. Like the hit movie “Get Out,” which premiered just days after Trump’s inauguration, it turned on secret racist malice. The 2016 election turned on the same thing.

Of course, it can be thrilling when art and entertainment are politically relevant. But when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia. Since Election Day 2016, writers, artists and critics have wondered what many forms of cultural production — novels, fine art, theater, fashion — mean “in the age of Trump.” It’s a cliché — one I know I’ve used — about the reorientation of almost everything around the monstrous fact of the Trump presidency.

Both the right and the left have rejoinders for those of us who find this cultural climate suffocating. Conservatives love to jeer Democrats for being obsessed with Trump, for letting him live, as many put it, rent-free in our heads. It’s a cruel accusation, like setting someone’s house on fire and then laughing at them for staring at the flames. The outrage Trump sparks leaves less room for many other things — joy, creativity, reflection — but every bit of it is warranted. The problem is the president, not how his victims respond to him.

Some leftists, by contrast, suspect that parts of the Resistance will disengage from politics if and when the object of their loathing is removed from the White House. (Shorthand for this fear is “back to brunch.”) It’s not an unreasonable worry. One reason for the unprecedented progressive mobilization of the past four years is that people used to feeling safe in America — particularly middle-aged, middle-class white women — suddenly didn’t. If Trump is defeated, it might be a challenge for organizers to keep these people mobilized. After four years of “This is not normal!” what happens if a version of political normality returns?

But a perpetual state of emergency isn’t healthy or sustainable. Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable. If people no longer had to throw themselves in front of the bulldozer of this presidency, there would be more energy for progress and for pleasure. Trump has blocked out the sun. Only when he’s gone will we see how much we’ve been missing.