Of Transgender Mice and Stupid Men

Creation is an act of rebellion

“You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.” —Fran Lebowitz

“$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of… $8 million for making mice transgender. This is real!” —Donald Trump

We had bedbugs more than a decade ago. They woke us up at night. We couldn’t sleep. We could feel them crawling on our skin even when they weren’t there. It was a nightmare. They were both invisible and omnipresent. They became, in our minds, deft intruders, stealing into the bedsheets under cover of night, outsmarting us and biting us at every turn. They did real psychological, interpersonal, and financial damage.

And eventually they were gone.

In the end they were not all that smart, they followed predictable patterns. They didn’t hide their nests very well. Most of the terror they wrought was imagined. Their presence in our heads was far greater than their presence in our bed. But they were in fact predictable, dumb, and mortal.

You can extrapolate this mental anguish to today’s American politics. Donald Trump and his daddy, Elon Musk, are as bedbugs in the sheets. The current paralysis of the Left derives from a fear that they are creeping into our very beds. They aren’t. Donald Trump is quite dumb and quite mortal. Yes there are ‘smart’ people who are enabling him but their power rests almost entirely on Trump’s cult of personality.

This current figment of omnipresence is a mirage. Trump can only destroy because he and people like him collectively posses no single shred of creativity. They feast on the hard work of others and call it their own, and more often than not their hateful bites are painful and inflammatory. But destroying things that others have spent long years creating only takes you so far. Progress means research creativity and creation. It means actual, not performative, intelligence. For example, understanding the difference between “transgender mice” and transgenic mice. Those of us in the creative fields can fight back by continuing to create and inspire and lead. Creation is an act of rebellion in these times of destruction. We lose by letting them feast on our imagination. Once the destroyer class is revealed for what they are; predictable, dumb, mortal—it will be up to us to rebuild.

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I want to add that the physical damage T and company are doing is very real. The rest of the world is going to have serious doubts about ever signing a contract with us again which will have real political and economic effects on our country for decades to come. Why would they? T is tearing up contracts that he himself put forward and signed, and others that have been in place for decades. We had a deal to protect Ukraine in exchange for giving up their trove of nuclear weapons. They probably feel pretty stupid about that now. There is also a real possibility that T will not step down at the end of his term, or run for a third term, the GOP has already floated a bill to allow this. At that point we will truly be an ex-Democracy. Totalitarian countries can languish for decades as their brightest creators leave for other lands. In advance of WWII many European scientists and artists were Jewish. Thousands fled for places like the U.S., famously giving us the scientific edge needed to end the war. If the U.S. continues down the anti-Semitic path it’s flirting with, we’ll lose thousands of Jewish Americans to other places. LGBTQ folks are obviously going to leave if draconian laws are passed curtailing their freedoms further. Gay marriage, also known as ‘marriage,’ is very much in the crosshairs of the Republican Party. Black America, the cornerstone of pure American creativity, will, as usual, bear much of the brunt of a White Nationalist upheaval. The DEI witch-hunt is largely a reversal of the progress made in the Civil Rights era, one of the most important societal advances the U.S. has ever made. And if this regime outlaws abortion outright?

So no, the hurt and damage is not merely psychological, but it can be greatly reduced if we stay involved and keep making things and keep planting seeds of creativity for future generations to harvest. Building bridges is a lot harder than tearing them down, but investing in infrastructure and creating connections always, always, pays dividends. So does googling, “did we spend $8 million on making mice transgender” before getting up on stage and making a fool of yourself.