Chicken and dumplings in the middle of the table

A post-election reflection on a scent of what comes next

I stepped into our house and my nose flooded with curry from the salty stew we enjoyed earlier in the week, full of tender beef and bright orange carrots. Curry into which Michael confessed tossing perhaps too much Madras curry powder from a big yellow Sun Brand can we bought at Front Street Market down in Butte a few months back. The little cans were running out too quick. It is a “great on buttery popcorn” blend. So we bought the big can. He used it to its potential. It includes salt, plus he added a skosh, delivering screw-the-diet flavor intensity.

Tonight this scent from a few days prior was cut with chicken stewing in broth, because it is Thursday. Because it is our night for dinner with his mother and his brother and his brother’s “don’t call him husband, though they have been together 26 years,” plus his Aunt Susie. Dinner with our closest local coterie of Trump voters. My in-laws.

These dinners are a weekly affair and the election was over two weeks ago, so this was to be our second bread-breaking together in the wake of the election their side won. As per usual, we drove to East Helena, turned north across from the huge slag pile by the highway, and stepped through a cloud of cigarette smoke in the windowed back porch where Mom lights up and gazes over her yard every 45 minutes or so. On arrival she was wearing her oxygen tubes while she smoked. Which is good. She needs them. She usually takes them off on the porch. She wants to go without them entirely but they are a trade-off for the cigarettes she has declared “like hell” she will ever give up. Not at this point in her life. So, I felt the blip of bewilderment one feels when seeing an old lady smoking with her oxygen tubes on, and suppressed all desires to critique. There is no point in offering unwanted advice. It just provokes resentment. Instead, I gave her a big “Hello, dear!” and walked on past carrying the big steel pot full of hot chicken and dumplings Michael had finished up twenty minutes earlier in our curry-scented kitchen.

Susie was already there. Mom and I poured some bourbon on ice because his family is not fretting the tender state of their souls this month quite so strongly as they do some others. Their dragon had won after all. Soon after the other two boys showed up. My “gay, not gay” brothers-in-law who have run the local jewelry and clock repair shop for close to thirty years. One drank gin with Susie. The other popped an IPA.

It took me awhile after moving back home to Montana to understand how LGBT people could vote for Trump. I still have many questions but also know too many examples of this conundrum to consider it artificial or contrived. Identity simply does not drive politics so efficiently as some stridently insist we must believe. Our recent election made this clear enough, at least for anyone half so awake as they claim.

Dinner was friendly and tasty. The other boys brought locally pickled veggies they picked up at the hardware store down in Dillon. These pickles sat in a naturally purpled antique glass dish alongside the steel pot full of brothy dumplings. Everything was quickly eaten to satiety. Conversation was light, gossipy, and civil in our now usual, hard-won, “no religion or politics allowed” dinner flow. All six of us are getting better at this. It felt a bit less strained than four to six weeks ago. Susie slipped a bit, of course, with some half-baked crack about vaccines and mind control. It was her usual effort at showing some power, insight, and control over a life she steeps daily in a thin tea of media-induced fear. Michael and I just kept quiet. Nothing was said worth rising to.

When and to what all we will necessarily rise will be a real question ahead. Like many places, the High Plains and Rocky Mountain cultures are laced with folk wisdom about keeping your powder dry. About picking your battles. Biden’s ego threw America under the bus this year, though, so it will be some long time before we get back anywhere near where we were. At least not in terms of protection for Trans folk. At least not in terms of protection for those who pick the vegetables we pickle and sell at the local hardware store. At least not for those who still need medical insurance after getting their big diagnosis. At least not for … oh, the list.

But, we lost. Progressives demonized working class Americans for over a decade, as if kicking people hard enough in the balls must eventually make them vote your way, right? Yet, we somehow lost. Justice be damned, we got played by the politics of resentment. So it is a bit unclear yet what new lines can be drawn that are actually worth the ink. I simply cannot see Aunt Susie as a demon, even if crazy statements slip too often from her lips. I may think my don’t-call-them-married brothers-in-law are a touch odd for their survivalist ways. For their fascination with pending social collapse. And, I also know, from a few years back home in my erstwhile purple state, that disagreeable friends and family can still be friends and family over a meal. We prove this every week. And, I know at least one of them quietly refused to vote for the dragon.

Since the election there are, unsurprisingly, many progressive folks on the socials madly tapping their midnight keys, shouting in blazing, all-caps posts about how no good person should ever speak to their thought-criming family members ever again. How we just need to kick balls even harder. Such folks are not my prophets, though. They seem to me more like digital victims who missed the memo two weeks back about how their tactics are not working. About how screaming at people online is a monetized trap designed to make us feel we have done something worthy when we are really just sitting alone, mumbling to ourselves.

My own hopes are that such too-online folk — me, too — could try being less alone. Perhaps by making enough chicken and dumplings to share with someone disagreeable. Perhaps by going off-screen long enough to look our flesh and blood neighbors in the eye and start a verbal conversation. We could try dodging hot topics long enough to first seek common ground (Sports? Movies? Weather? Gardening? Those nice old folks who need some help?) before slicing life into demographic wedges laced with judgment. We could try literally anything more challenging than shouting into our social apps. We could try looking up, stepping out, and acting human again.

My own first and best response to Donald Trump’s re-election has been to recall the rich cultural nugget known as the Litany Against Fear. I want to resist allowing others to ply my mind with twittering speculations. I will verify news and share what is reliably reported. I will break bread with family and friends of all persuasions, particularly the disagreeable. I will remember that the scent and memory of something pleasant can linger for days in the air. I will hold the hand of anyone genuinely hurting, no matter the source of their pain. I will work to use what I have to build up everyone in my community. I will remember that despair is quite literally a propaganda tool of the enemy. I will continue to believe that another, better world is possible, and that no one is more responsible for creating it than me.

Postscript: those who have followed OTGC for a while may recall a past story about a beloved Helena character named Dave. Dave died this past week. He lived his small-town life for art, literature, tea, and a good porter. Then it was done. One could do much worse, eh? If you feel somehow called to help clear up the final affairs of a sparkly-eyed old man who paid more attention to his community than to planning for his inevitable end, please look here.