A Storm Is Coming

O ne of my sons jumped into my bed last week. “I’m scared daddy. I don’t want to see a tornado.” I asked him why he thought there would be a tornado. He thought the sky had turned green before bed. There had been a little hint of it, maybe. I told him there was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t that kind of green. It was a different shade, a kind you see in these days after midsummer, when the sun is setting just slightly earlier, over a canopy of trees in full summer bloom. I’m sure if the English language had, instead of just four seasons, versions of all 72 of ancient Japan’s micro-seasons, each about five days long, I’d have been able to name it exactly.

My son is in a micro-season of his own early childhood in which he is powerfully attracted to danger and destruction. Just that day and the next, he reiterated his desire to grow up and become a storm-chaser. He has it in his head that he’ll become as calm as his parents are about the weather, but admits that even now it still scares him. He boyishly desired to see a YouTube video about the biggest bombs, and laughed a little maniacally at the narration of the rapidly increased numerical yields and power as the video proceeded up from Hiroshima’s Little Boy to the Tsar bombs. But when the narrator named radiation sickness as one of the results, his mood instantly spoiled, and he winced.

He asked me if there are wars going on, and, of course, I explained that there are. And I added that we are led by a senile fool, given to emotional outbursts, and we’re fighting a maniac who might be suffering from Parkinson’s, and that when the losing side realizes how much credibility they’ve stupidly invested in the conflict, we’ll inevitably proceed to a nuclear standoff. And that this is why I have hundreds of gallons of water in storage in our basement, along with plenty of anti-radiation drugs and enough ammo to systematically shoot all the radiation-poisoned marauders and Cormac McCarthy novel–style pedophiles seeking to kill us and eat us as their rations in those first crucial three weeks after Armageddon. “I have prepared myself for those weeks. And my children, I’ve prepared you for the centuries of warlordism thereafter,” I said, handing him a .50 caliber round that he dexterously racked into the chamber of a rifle twice his weight and three times his length.

Just kidding. Of course, I said that there’s no war to worry about, and we sang “The Wild Rover” to make him forget about it.

My son has been watching the skies more this summer. There was the day the sky turned orange. And there have been other smoky days since then. We’ve seen one brilliant instance of heat-lightning — the phenomenon where you can see frequent flashes in the sky, but the thunderstorm is far enough away that it can’t be easily heard.

A bit of heat-lightning is roughly how the political season is playing out for me. There are flashes of headlines. But the thunder of real conflict seems far off in the distance, something I won’t deal with until after summer vacation.

I definitely get a vague sense of the potential dangers and destruction this whole contest could unleash. More than one candidate has brought up the idea of using U.S. military resources to fight the cartels in Mexico, and none of them mentioned getting the Mexican government’s permission or cooperation. Chris Christie has offered the observation that half of his opponents are “appeasers,” and he added, “If you don’t think Putin is as bad as Hitler, you’re wrong.” In fact, I don’t think that. And I’m going to try not to think that a serious candidate for president thinks that until September.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who has been indicted again this week — meaning that the justice system will, inadvertently or deliberately, insert itself into the political calendar at times chosen by Trump’s foes. I don’t think anybody has considered how destabilizing this dynamic will be — what cross-pressures it will induce in the political ecosystem. Everyone — from Trump to Biden — should be seeking the obvious ways of sparing the country from what’s brewing in the storm clouds here. Alas, they will not.

Like the Tsar bomb, and the occasional EF5 tornados, a republic tearing itself to pieces is among the problems that are too big for daddy to stop before they land on people like my son. So I’m going to take the sage advice offered by Calvin Coolidge and just wait. “If you see ten troubles coming down the road,” he advised, “you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”

God willing, we’ll see some of these creeps in their final political ditch soon enough.