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“I sold copying machines”

The banality of Tiny D and Donald

News outlets broadcast the Trumpist riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 live from coast to coast. An hours-long insurrection was underway. Against the U.S. government, against our government, not some remote country in Asia, Africa, or South America. As unsettling as watching that was asking who are these people battling police with their Trump and Confederate flags, Christian nationalist, and even Nazi symbols? Unsettling answer: They walk among us.

The United States of America did not end that day. But reflecting on events in HBO’s postapocalyptic “The Last of Us,” Tom Nichols ponders “Who Would You Be If the World Ended?” In his newsletter for The Atlantic, Nichols drops a lot of spoilers I’ll try to avoid here.

What’s different about the series is how it differs from the Cold War versions of the genre. Mostly lone-wolf “Radioactive Rambos” would “would wander the wasteland, killing mutants and stray Communists” while shooting everything in sight and “saving a girl, or a town, or even the world” along the way.

Nichols observes:

But we live in more ambiguous times. We’re not fighting the Soviet Union. We don’t trust institutions, or one another, as much as we did 40 or 50 years ago. Perhaps we don’t even trust ourselves. We live in a time when lawlessness, whether in the streets or the White House, seems mostly to go unpunished. For decades, we have retreated from our fellow citizens and our social organizations into our own homes, and since COVID began, we’ve learned to virtualize our lives, holding meetings on glowing screens and having our food and other goods dropped at our doors by people we never have to meet.

We also face any number of demagogues who seem almost eager for our institutions to fail so that they can repopulate them in their own image and likeness.

The characters “The Last of Us” protagonists Joel and teenage Ellie encounter are more mundane, or were before a mutant fungus turned most of the population into raging zombies.

Kathleen, the murderous leader of a “brutal, ragtag militia” is “a vicious dictator who is no better (and perhaps worse) than the regime she helped overthrow.” No one in particular before the outbreak of the Cordyceps brain infection, Kathleen “raises the troubling thought that we all live near a Kathleen who is tenuously bound only by the restrictions of law and custom.”

David (about whom the less said the better) leads a band of religiousy survivors. But, Nichols writes, “he’s a fraud: He cares nothing about religion; he cares about being in charge, and he admits that he has struggled all his life with violent impulses. He is another character whom the apocalypse reveals more than it changes.”

The type of villain is not unique to “The Last of Us.” In Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic The Postman (1997), the principal antagonist is General Bethlehem, the brutal leader of an anarchist militia army. And before the world ended?

“I sold copying machines,” Bethlehem tells the Postman. “I was a salesman. The talent to lead men and devise and execute a battle plan were locked away inside me.”

Now he executes people on a whim. All he cares about is expanding his power and taking what he wants.

One does not have to look closely at some of the Jan. 6 defendants to recognize the type.

Just tourists, yes? The Trump insurrection was just like a Carnival Cruise except with kidnapping, executions, mayhem, and a cash bar.

Nichols avoids invoking Jan. 6, but that subtext is barely subtext:

Again, this raises the creepy question of how many Davids walk among us, smiling and toting algebra books, restrained from their hellish impulses only by the daily balm of street lights and neighbors and manicured lawns. We should be grateful for every day that we don’t have to know the answer.

But that’s not exactly right, is it?

Donald Trump, inspirer and leader of the insurrection, still walks free, unaccountable as he’s been his entire life. Lying, eating fast food, and golfing as always.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. Tiny D), a socially awkward and weird bully who can barely manage small talk, is bent on turning Florida into an authoritarian fiefdom where freedom is what he says it is. And he wants to expand to the other 49 states.

MAGA members of Congress ran restaurants and gyms and sandwich shops before joining the Trump cult. Convicted rioters sold real estate and held other mundane jobs in suburbia before battling Capitol Police hand to hand, many after infection with the QAnon mind virus. They walk among us.

Joel and Ellie are themselves no role models. Joel was once a builder. The apocalypse turned him into a brutal killer. Ellie too has a violent streak. She is a child of the apocalypse and knows little else. They are the heroes in “The Last of Us.”

“Who Would You Be If the World Ended?” is something to consider before we get there. It’s not clear that these days are not the early stages.

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