KNOW YOUR MONSTERS

When we're all too tired and too distracted to make sense of the unacceptable

“Ship of State” by Mark Bryan, available for purchase at https://artofmarkbryan.com/shop/ship-of-state/

On Trump’s Inauguration Day, snow was coming down hard in Houston. Winters here are typically bipolar, 70 degrees one day and 40 degrees the next. It rarely snows.

Local news put the weather on blast. “Once in a generation snowstorm,” the forecasters forecasted, leaping back and forth in front of their digital green screens and madly circling upper-level highs and lows, polar vortices, arctic blasts. Few events galvanize a local broadcast journalist like bad news with fatal implications. “Two people were found dead in the aftermath of our winter storm,” a Channel 2 reporter announced with just the faintest gleam in his eye. “Multiple major collisions have been tracked across Harris County.”

John and I were holed up inside the house. My daughter, who works at a hotel, had no choice but to spend the night there for fear of spinning out on the dreaded “black ice” (another forecaster favorite), and my son, as a public servant and Precinct 5 deputy, pulled two sixteen-hour shifts. The house was strangely cold and empty without them, my brain creating a snowstorm of its own as I fretted over their safety.

Earlier in the day, my kids’ dad parked a generator in the backyard. John was brewing coffee in the kitchen when two beefy guys in bib overalls hauled the thing back there. His initial thought, however brief, was that Trump had already sent goon squads to round up liberals.

Hey, we were all on edge that day. Well, some of us, at least.

But as it turned out, there was real reason for concern. The last time Houston had a winter weather system of this magnitude was in 2021. Two-hundred-and-twenty-three people died. Texans went without power, heat, and in many cases, food, for an entire week. They melted snow for drinking water and tried to warm up in their cars.

Texas is a deregulated, natural-gas-dependent nightmare. Because electricity relies on natural gas production and natural gas production relies on electricity, in a never-ending Libertarian ouroboros, when one system breaks, the whole system breaks. Predictably, the equipment froze in 2021, and so did half the state’s natural gas supply.

Heads rolled, as they tend to do from on high. All three members of the Public Utility Commission, six members of ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas—and somebody ought to put the word “reliability” in scare quotes), plus the CEO, either resigned or were fired. But nothing materially changed. Texas’s infrastructure is an origami swan of fragility, cronyism, and dysfunction. If the power lines froze, which is what the generator guys were worried about, we were screwed.

We didn’t choose this, of course. And there’s no real way to redress what’s being done to us as a state or as a nation. The new CEO of ERCOT has a base salary of just under a million dollars. With performance-based incentives, he will make two million. When the next cold weather front blows in, he is free to go to China on a “business junket” just like the previous CEO did, while we freeze to death in our houses.

Welcome to the new normal.

The increasingly frequent “weather systems” that are now shaping Houston.

Climate change is driving Houston’s “hundred-year floods,” which are fast becoming an annual event. We didn’t ask for climate change. What we asked for was convenient, affordable transportation—public or private. We didn’t ask for a system that favors the rich at the expense of the poor, but here we are.

While John and I were rattling around inside our own Snowmageddon, John was suffering from a pulled muscle in his back. I’d gone to the ER with him the week before, hoping he hadn’t broken something. The man could barely walk. He was practically reeling from the Prednisone, the muscle relaxants, the acetaminophen with codeine. I had to tie his shoes, put on his coat, haul the water. He was miserable.

While we sat quietly at the kitchen table that snowy day, I thought: Is this what it’s come to? Thanks to the greed of private equity firms and rapacious developers, we had to flee New York because of the cataclysmic rent, and now we were waiting to see if we might freeze to death in Houston. John couldn’t go to an orthopedist for his back because we don’t have insurance, nor are we likely to get the kind of jobs that offer us insurance, given that our resumes are heavy on the arts and thin on business.

You will recall that the United States is the only developed nation in the world that refuses any form of universal healthcare for its citizens, except Medicaid, and only in certain states and at certain income levels.

We are all of us, collectively, the frog in the pot, slowly boiling to death—only so gradually, it’s hard not to mistake that heat for the ordinary vexations of living.

What is happening to us—all of us—isn’t mere vexation. It is the predictable and wholly avoidable fallout from decisions made by corporations, private equity firms, and technology entities. It is the natural result of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that reversed campaign finance restrictions and enabled those very corporations to spend unlimited millions on elections.

No longer are we a consumer-driven economy, but a shareholder-driven one. That’s why customer service sucks. Not only are corporations trying to outsource it to cheaper English-as-a-second-language countries, they are relegating all the pesky inconvenience of customer service to AI.

Ah, yes. AI. Behold our executioner.

Just to drive home how lethal AI is in the wrong hands, let me share a small anecdote with you. Yesterday, a friend I know on socials—a deeply intelligent friend, mind you, one who is wise to the ways of the world—was asked by another friend to help him recover his Facebook login information. These requests were coming from Facebook Messenger. To confirm that he was who he represented himself to be, she asked him to videocall, which he did. The connection was poor and a little glitchy, but it was him, and she was satisfied.

Minutes later, Facebook notified her that a login attempt was being made on her account, not his. He explained that this was a necessary part of the process, but she wasn’t comfortable and (smartly) aborted the mission.

It turns out, this scam is not only shockingly easy to perpetuate, it is becoming increasingly common. With the press of a few buttons, you can transfer anybody’s face to your own face and wear it like a mask.

Just imagine the implications for an administration like Trump’s where his authoritarian followers receive a video call “from the boss” and start pressing buttons of their own.

We didn’t ask for that.

All we ever wanted from our country was a fair shake.

One of the sacred cows of capitalism is Gordon Gekko’s famous credo, “Greed is good.” There’s a feeding frenzy at the government trough right now that’s so terrifying, I’m not sure we’ll ever regain our footing in democracy.

But amid all this chaos, the cruel and ham-handed deportations, the mass firings, the wildly unqualified candidates for essential posts, this I will say: You have you.

You have your loved ones, your integrity, and your imagination. You are the universe momentarily expressed as you.

No matter what happens in this fun house of nonsense and illusion, whether it snows or floods, whether Houston or the world itself collapses of its own hubris, for the time that you are here, you are a constant.

John is fine now, by the way.

I’m hoping that we will be, too.