Bill McKibben in The Guardian:
But [Trump]’s definitely costing us one precious thing, and that’s time. It rolls past every day as we stand necessarily transfixed by his transgressions, and since it can’t be rolled back there are victims who – whatever the future holds – are paying an unrefundable price.
„Necessarily transfixed“. I think of insects being transfixed when they stand impaled with pins in a display case. Deer may stand transfixed in a car’s headlights. To be transfixed is to be rendered motionless, either from emotions such as terror, awe, astonishment, or from impalment with a sharp object.
There is not a time when I’ve been rendered anything like motionless by Trump or another politician. Why do so many Americans use terms like this to describe their perception of themselves? What is their understanding of who wields power in the US? What is their understanding of their relationship to the state? Where does this understanding come from?
And „necessarily transfixed“? You are by necessity rendered motionless? There is no other course of action? I’m mildly curious about the philosophy behind this, but only mildly. There’s just too much other interesting stuff to read about. The people who interest me are the partisans in the woods of Lithuania, the leaflet writers in the Deutscher Widerstand museum in Berlin, the prisoners who rebelled at Nordhausen, students in ’68 who threw Molotovs at tanks rolling into Prague, men and women tortured by the Arrowcross in Budapest and those who shot at the Soviets in ’56, the communist civilians who took back Montenegro from the Axis in 1941. I picture myself asking a partner in Dubrovnik why he’s stopped shooting at an invading Montenegran. „I don’t know, man, I find myself necessarily transfixed by his transgressions“ seems like an unlikely response.