Learning to live as one who is already dead.

Or: The story of Buttons.

Learning to live as one who is already dead.

If you're paying attention to the news and aren't a fan of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or unrelenting chaos and dismay, you're probably not feeling great. I am not feeling great. Julia is not feeling great. Buttons is feeling great, because he made a bundle when he bought low yesterday after the stock market tanked on the tariff announcements, before it recovered:

A white and orange cat napping on a red couch.
I don't know, he says he's just got "good financial instincts."

But most of us are not Buttons, and never will be. He came to us this summer after following my in-laws' Siamese back to their farmhouse. He was at most twelve weeks old, not yet weaned from his mother, bedraggled, and near death. (We know he wasn't weaned because, right away, he started nursing on Julia's earlobes and has continued to nurse on Julia's earlobes, purring loudly, aggressively stroking her hair with his claws the time entire, the way I used to, when we were younger.) It was a reasonable bet that his mom and littermates had met a violent end, possibly coyote-related. My in-laws were leaving for California the next day, so they asked us to take this tiny, pathetic boy in, at least until a permanent home could be found for him. "We're just fostering him," Julia told me. We already had enough cats (two). "We don't have to keep him," I agreed. These were obviously lies. Trevor and Percy were not pleased, but Buttons stayed. Soon, we discovered that besides being dangerously underweight, he had also contracted feline infectious peritonitis. Until the last few years, FIP has been a death sentence, and even now, in the U.S., you have to get the drugs to treat it through an underground network of volunteers and veterinarians, because the FDA hasn't approved them yet. (We did get them, and it was a lot like a normal drug deal, in that we had to drive to an apartment building in a weird part of town late at night, but different because nobody made us sit down and watch John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness with them for twenty minutes.) Buttons has been through a lot, is my point, and like humans and other creatures, cats can get traumatized. Trevor, for example, has a permanently injured lip that we were told was the result of physical abuse, and he is wary of things like men with deep voices—wary in an unrelaxed, perpetually alert way that suggests he wasn't always like that.

Buttons does not seem traumatized, though. Buttons seems like the opposite of traumatized. Buttons goes everywhere with a fearless curiosity, totally undeterred by any outraged yelling noises we may make or any squirt guns we may squirt. He never seems mad or bothered when we forcibly remove him from the table or counter; he just comes right back with the same intent expression on his small face. He reminds me of an idea that anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote about in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of Japanese culture published in 1946: living as one who is already dead. What could you do to Buttons that could be worse than what he's survived? You and I could probably think of a few things, but I don't think he can. (He is a cat.) And maybe even those things wouldn't be so scary, if you'd already lost your family and found yourself cold and starving in the woods, until help showed up at the eleventh hour, and led you to a place where people fed you high-protein kitten food, purchased black-market medications on your behalf, and gave you unrestricted access to their ears.

The news—which we'll touch on in a moment—is pretty scary, but I am also trying to live as one who is already dead. It means letting yourself be unencumbered by fear and doubt, so that you can give your full attention and energy to the work before you. (I'm not sure you should take it so far that you eliminate all fear and doubt, but I am sure I don't need to worry about that any time soon, and I bet you don't either.) There are people online screaming that we're all doomed, and while I understand the urge, I'd rather be focused on trying to avert or mitigate doom. Even if that turns out not to be possible, I would not want to give Donald Trump or Elon Musk or their friends the satisfaction of knowing they'd upset me. And less selfishly: Despair is contagious. So are hope and courage. I know which of those will serve us better in any situation, and those are what I'm going to promote.

If you haven't been paying attention to the news—and that's okay; it's important not to mainline this stuff right now—here is a sampling of the scary things happening:

• Elon Musk and a team of boys in their early 20s now have control over the computer system used by the Department of the Treasury to make payments.

• They are also trying to shut down the United States Agency for International Development.

• It now looks like vaccine conspiracy theorist and bear-eater RFK Jr. will be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. (Contrary to earlier reports, however, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of the Democrats did not support him.)

• Trump and Musk are planning to dismantle the Department of Education, too.

• For no reason at all, Trump just wasted billions of gallons of water in California, which were being held in reserve in anticipation of a dry summer.

Things are fucked-up; that's indisputable. A lot of this stuff and how they're going about it is just blatantly illegal, and none of it is reasonable. The news media seems content to treat it like pure spectacle, and elected Democrats are not doing much to sound the alarm. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is literally posting "Congress must take action to restore the rule of law" like he doesn't realize he is Congress, and promising that he and the House minority leader "will work together on legislation to stop unlawful meddling in the Treasury"—which is to say, they're going to write a bill that makes it illegal to do illegal things. And then get Donald Trump to sign it, I guess? It's not reassuring.

And yet:

• Trump announced the start of his tariffs on Canada and Mexico yesterday—and then, as noted, backed down basically immediately, getting almost nothing for his trouble.

• Two federal judges have slapped down the big federal spending freeze he attempted to enact by executive order.

• The executive order ending birthright citizenship has not fared well in the courts either.

And there are other cases already filed against Trump and Musk. It makes sense that the courts are where we'll see the clearest resistance right now, because the Democrats in Congress don't have the power to do much that isn't purely symbolic. To be clear, they should still be doing those purely symbolic things and are not, and if you feel like they are next to useless as an opposition party, you are probably correct. And it is not outside the realm of imagination that our deeply compromised judiciary could end up deciding the president is a magical king who can do whatever he wants (although only if he is a Republican), including break the law over and over again. But in the meantime, let's not lose our cool. Not because losing our cool is unwarranted, but again, because especially if the rule of law is dead and gone, we will need to have our wits about us.


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