Where Were You When You Learned of Trump’s Assassination Attempt?
I was saying goodbye to a home, to a way of life
I was looking at the carefully preserved black and white photographs. My late mother-in-law was captured seated, holding a splendid bouquet with a handsome young man standing by her side. “He looks like Ray Liotta,” my sister-in-law said. A mysterious figure from a three quarter century old wedding party, he, too, had likely already passed.
The phone buzz indicating an incoming text returned us to modernity:
Well
This is terrifying
Trump shot
My husband has been predicting something like this for a few years — not that he was the only one. It wasn’t the first presidential assassination attempt in American history or the first time a Republican president has been repeatedly, for many years, called Hitler. But it was the first assassination attempt after years of defamation and lawfare and after decades of every institution of our republic being aggressively pulled apart.
The text was a rude intrusion — we were saying goodby to the house, to a home. I’ve been coming there for more than two decades, usually twice a year, sometimes more. My brain stored memories of pool parties and Christmas Day dinners.
One summer we dropped off our dog and drove to Arizona, and the dog took care of the gopher infestation in my in-laws’ ginormous backyard. My father-in-law was very proud of her — and she was extremely proud of herself.
A week ago, we took our new SUV on its maiden voyage to LA, our last trip. We interned my father-in-law and sold the house. And now we came to pick up a few keepsakes.
When I walked into the mid-century house for the first time, I saw a delicate blue-eyed woman with a still beautiful face sitting in an armchair across from the entrance. At Lilian’s funeral service the priest said that she was known by her gentle silence. She had mobility constraints as long as I knew her and she always sat in that chair across from the front door watching her grandchildren play on the living room floor.
When Lillian passed, the grandmother chair became grandfather’s. I sat in it a few times myself, but I felt like an intruder. This time I snapped a picture of it — an empty white chair with blush roses, lonely between the fireplace and a sliding glass door leading into the backyard. I took a few more photographs.
Both Tom and Lillian died in this house. They raised six children there, all of them upstanding citizens. Lillian was an elementary school teacher, and Tom was an aerospace engineer for a defense contractor. Back in his days security clearance meant something real, and the man, as much as he liked to talk aerodynamics, was full of secrets — he took them to the square compartment behind the marble mausoleum wall.
Today, the conditions of employment with the United Sates Secret Service seem evasive, the CIA recruits at Punk festivals and a transvestite stealing women’s panties from airport carousels can be put in charge of nuclear waste disposal. Americans are ill-advised to put their trust into institutions that, by their very nature, function secretively.
I looked at the empty chair and thought about the current occupant of the White House who went MIA in the hours following the shooting of his rival. When he finally surfaced, Joe Biden refused to call it an assassination attempt. On the following day, the sworn-in president of the United States of America was stumbling through a pre-recorded speech with a frozen expression on his face.
At this point, the country is well aware of his senility; the only question is what kind of degenerative condition he may have. Because he’s spotting that robotic facial expression, it’s widely believed to be Parkinson’s.
We bought our new car this year, in part because the autos coming on market are increasingly computerized, which deprives the driver of the responsibilities of the open road, with all the joys and dangers they bring. We certainly didn’t want a car with a built-in spying mechanism. We decided to invest in something approximating an old school ride before they disappear completely. And yet our car could take us to LA more or less on autopilot.
“We are the last generation that will teach its kids to drive,” said my other sister-in-law. “Driving will be fully automated and there will be nothing to impart on them.” That, plus the young people are in no hurry to be independent and to assume the responsibilities of driving.
“Ray Liotta is exactly my age,” said my sister-in-law. Ray Liotta drove a car high as a kite, followed by cop helicopters. Or maybe he imagined it. He did it his way. Ray Liotta, too, is dead.
Some say Trump is a bad person and a bad candidate, and maybe he is. But he is a candidate — a living, breathing, cognitively sound human spirit. His instinctive, masculine reaction to being shot at was to pump his fist and to “fight, fight, fight.”
His opponent, Joe Biden, is on autopilot. An empty chair. A SUV controlled by a hidden hand.
Individuals comprising this nation are atomized and alienated. From now on, a teenager with no social media footprint will be presumed to be a presidential assassin in training. Depending on what poll you look at, it’s far from certain that a living, breathing human being will be in charge of this country in 2025 — or ever. We are a people at a junction.
My husband played “This town is coming like a ghost town” as we were leaving the Valley. The I5 is intimately familiar to us; it’s amazing how little it has changed through my adult life. Some say it’s boring, but I find the I5 charming. If the plush brown hills will ever disappear behind new developments, a computer screen will lead us back. On autopilot.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
The entirety of the circumstances was so exact and specific – if President Trump had had his head only a tenth of a degree different it would have been a fatal shot; if the bullet had completely missed him (if only by an inch) the left would have pretended that nothing happened, at all. This was an issue of millimeters and seconds of angle.
It is terrible that Corey Comperatore was murdered and that David Dutch and James Copenhaver were seriously injured. Prayers for them and their families.
Out at dinner, which is something I rarely do and my son in law got a text…
Food tasted like crap after that
This is a nice, wistful reflection. Very deft tying in your family experiences to the assassination attempt . Given your talent for this kind of writing, I think you should write a book about your life in Ukraine and then your and your family’s experience moving here,
Am I missing something, maybe a Dem deplorable?
You are so weird
Thanks. “Jewish in the USSR” is a crowded memoir category. I recommend Lev Golinkin’s “A Backpack, A Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka”. He, like me, is from Kharkov. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir https://a.co/d/eeFXcri
I don’t recall, probably sitting at home browsing the internet.
I remember where I was when JFK was assassinated. At work. Then they closed work early because the mailgirls were all crying. I went flying.
Guest mixing a bar band in a basement ‘speakeasy’ in MOrristown NJ with no cell service. The club tuned to Faux News for a few
Did anyone catch H Ford Jr. proclaiming Trump ‘repeated the big lie’ just after the close of the RNC?
I’m pointing Ivan Raiklin on him
http://www.nurembergtwo.com
Looking at LI, something I usually do several times a day.
At home in my big chair watching the Trump rally.
I was sitting right here at my computer. I am in the process of writing what will be a small book for my children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren about our fairly complex family history starting from when my dad came here from China alone, 12 years old, and not speaking English just before the Depression and going to date. I decided I had worked on it enough for a while, and turned on the TV news hoping to catch the local weather forecast. Instead, I caught them just breaking into programming saying that President Trump had been shot. Until I saw that he was alive and likely to recover I have to admit that I thought that CW2 was about to start.
FIGHT!
Subotai Bahadur
I was on discord and playing a game, when I got a message
On the grassy knoll.
Ha-ha!
We all are, aren’t we?
On the couch with my gf watching “Jaws” for the first time in more than 20 years. I’d been enjoying it to that point. I though “They told me he’s OK, just hold off going to the news until after the movie, there will be more info by then” and did just that.
Sitting at the kitchen table the next morning reading the news but it is already fading as he wasn’t killed so it will not be a big deal. The left are already back to attacking “Hitler Trump” so nothing has changed. People with dire predictions of civil war etc if Trump had been assassinated are being silly.
If a civil war was going to happen, it would have started long ago.
+1 for The Specials.
It’s a great song.