It’s one of my very earliest memories. I was in the far back of the station wagon (there were no seatbelts there in those days) and I was being thrown around the inside of the car–the roof and I were not supposed to come at each other like that–along with the other kids and I didn’t LIKE it and my daddy was in control of the whole world and I didn’t understand why was he doing this and I was mad. Stop it right now!
A brake cable had snapped and wrapped around an axle (did I get that right, Mom?) and suddenly we were doing a 360 at full speed on the freeway and going over an embankment. Mom remembers the gasoline tanker we missed by inches. My oldest sister remembers the petting zoo we fell into at the bottom where we kids were entertained by the animals as we waited for help. The trucker went on to the nearest phone he could find to call the police to tell them a family had just died back there.
But we hadn’t; somehow we went on with our cross-country trip after that. I wonder what the car looked like. I have no idea.
I wondered tonight why those very old images had come to mind and had to stop a moment to puzzle it out.
I had just read Jeff Bezos’ new editorial: the one wherein he claims himself as a fellow journalist to the Post and proceeds to gaslight both his readers and quite possibly himself, but with obvious discrepancies between his story and Lewis’s. Lies from the both of them, but Bezos might even half-believe them. Right after Trump held an actual Nazi-wannabe rally.
It’s like Bezos had just cut that brake cord himself while we the voters and the honorable reporters are trying to control that wheel and guide where our car lands as it careens out of control.
We can still steer this to safety, though. They can’t take that away from us–yet.
Not now, not ever. We can do this. VOTE.