Responses to the 2024 Election: An Unscientific Sampling
By Margaret Hawkins
Charles Émile Champmartin, “Théodore Géricault on His Death Bed,” 1824, oil on canvas.
Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Good Works: My despondent friend decided she needed to do something positive to help heal the world since voting hadn’t helped. So she volunteered for hospice work. Immediately, she was assigned a patient. Now she’s helping a woman with Parkinson’s disease through the final stages of life.
Eugéne Delacroix, “Medea About to Kill Her Children,” 1862, oil on canvas, 48 1/4 x 33 1/4”.
Courtesy of the Louvre, Paris.
Art and Dark Humor Combined with Imagined Retaliatory Violence: Five days after the election, a family member emailed me a short story she’d just written. She’d needed to do something cathartic, she said. The story is a fantasy about a series of murders and accidental deaths, starting with Trump’s. Mortal injuries are meted out to J. D. Vance, Mike Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and, in a farcical climax, Elon Musk, whose demise comes at the hand of his prankster transgender daughter who slips him regular doses of estrogen, not to kill him but to teach him a lesson about how it feels to be female. Of course, the hormones pack on the pounds and he dies of a stroke.
Margaret Hawkins, “Escape to a Simpler Life,” 2024, color photograph.
Escape to a Simpler Life: I needed to unplug. So my husband and I packed up our two dogs, an organic turkey and a few bottles of wine and drove, then ferried, to a remote island in northern Wisconsin. We hung out for a few days in the bitter cold with no TV, built fires on the beach, and saw nearly no one except for people at the island’s one grocery store. It was hunting season. We heard gunshots, saw Trump signs. As far as I know everybody except the deer survived.
Otto Dix, “Metropolis,” 1927-28, mixed media on wood.
Utter Entitlement: In a show of performative outrageousness and capricious middle-finger raising, President-elect Trump promised his own version of retaliatory justice. He promptly lined up top picks for his cabinet, a sordid band of billionaires, sex offenders, Fox News provocateurs, and even a professional wrestling executive. He threatened to imprison Liz Cheney. As of this writing, he’s trying to figure out how to buy Greenland and take back the Panama Canal.
Utter Entitlement Lite: After months of promising not to do so, President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, who had been grossly overcharged for drug offenses. A few weeks later, in an apparent effort to balance things, he pardoned 1500 prisoners for their non-violent drug-related crimes. That’s good, but thousands more remain imprisoned. President Biden thereby proved what we already know, that America is not and never was a land of justice for all but a place where, if you were born into money, you‘re set. You will live your life in a bubble of safety and comfort and when something bad happens or if you do something stupid somebody will bail you out. And, as day follows night, if you weren’t fixed at the outset, well, you’re screwed.
William Hogarth, “Marriage A-la-Mode,” 1743, oil on canvas, 23 1/2 x 35 3/4".
Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.
Think of the two most famous former addicts in the country right now, Hunter Biden (crack cocaine) and R.F.K. Jr. (heroin). They align with opposite political parties, but that means nothing considering their similar backgrounds and current circumstances. Both lost parents as children and grew up in the harsh glare of their fathers’ political fame. But each has lived a life of rare opportunity and second, third, and fourth chances. When they became raging drug addicts, they were forgiven and helped back up. The more compassionate among us feel for these damaged men despite their evident flaws. Now picture all the men and women in American prisons who have suffered similar and worse fates and taken similar routes to ease their pain. What’s the difference?
I get it that President Biden is angry. He has much to be angry about. I get that he wants to protect his son from Trump’s vengeance, and rightfully so. But I wish the president would use his vast if waning power more radically and do more in the time he has left to remedy the terrible inequities in this country for people who suffer from the same problems as his son, but who lack his son’s golden ticket.
Icy & Sot, “Anarchy,” 2015, street art, 27 1/2 x 19 3/4". Courtesy of the artists.
Anarchy: When democracy begins to crumble and the justice system proves itself to be unjust, it makes a kind of sense to take the law into your own hands. On December 3, a masked gunman coolly assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan. The act turned out to have been committed by an unstable young man, but it also was a protest against the monstrous greed of the insurance industry. When the very misfortunes policy holders believe themselves to be insured against befall them, they are often denied coverage, leaving them with astronomical bills amid medical catastrophes. The New York Times described public response to the murder as “a torrent of morbid glee.” Luigi Mangione quickly became a folk hero.
Murder, no matter the rationale, results not only in the death of another human being but also in far-reaching waves of incalculable grief. But the same could be said of standard practices in the insurance industry. Since we seem to have returned to the wild west, is it so surprising that not everyone feels unmitigated outrage at Mangione’s crime? This torrent of morbid glee does not bode well for law and order on either side of the political divide.
Hope: Let’s hope we can make it through the inauguration and beyond without more bloodshed.
