This week I find myself, not entirely of my own free will, at the Opryland Hotel near Nashville, Tennessee. This is basically a domed city, 9 enclosed acres kept at a constant temperature of 71 degrees. In addition to the guest rooms it has gardens, a water park, numerous restaurants, and a sports bar where yesterday I watched my Golden State Warriors choke away a crucial game to the goddamn Clippers.
Sho nuff a weird place from which to monitor the continued unraveling of America as we know it. Today the POTUS1was on all the channels sitting in the White House with the president of El Salvador, not only defying a court order by refusing to lift a finger to bring back a man wrongfully deported to a Salvadorean gulag, but openly plotting to start sending American citizens there too. And smirking all the while like a schoolboy who knows he’ll never be punished because daddy owns the school.
It’s all quite sickening but how worried can I really be with fake ocean sounds in the background, even though we are more than 500 miles from the ocean? OK, yes, I am kind of afraid to leave the room, although it’s impossible to get meaningfully lost; this place has its own dedicated app to help you find your way around. I just feel sort of existentially disoriented once I am out in the hallway.
Lately I kind of feel that way everywhere in this country. But it beats being in prison in El Salvador, that’s for sure. So I am not complaining.
Nobody knows that he won’t, and some of them hope that he might