The Erasing

Well, they haven’t got around to changing Denali back to McKinley, but the caving to fascism has, in a lot of ways, shot past mere capitulation into actual erasure.

In NYC, there is a monument to Stonewall in Greenwich Village, which was where gay rights really began to kick off, in large part led by Marsha P. Johnson, a drag queen who was “mother” to a lot of gender “nonconformists” in the 1970s. Today, the U.S. Parks Department moved to drop the word “transgender” from its website, which commemorates Stonewall. Now, instead of references to the LGBTQ+ community, the site discusses the “LGB” community. Eradicating the T and Q+ is a slap in the face to Johnson and so many others whose history is bound up in what happened at Stonewall and afterwards.

That’s just the latest erasure. PBS’s website has removed LGBTQ resources. The federally-funded Rubin Observatory has deleted and played down the effect of the woman after whom it is named. The NSA is purging pages that contain “banned words, including ‘privilege,’ ‘bias,’ and ‘inclusion’.” The VA is in “chaos” after being told to adhere to rules regarding “only two unchangeable sexes” and to remove all LGBTQ-related materials from its facilities.

The lives and careers that get wrecked in these purges have already been deemed unimportant. Insignificant. Meaningless. Worthless. And we know that those who experience injustice are traumatized by it. Imagine you spent your entire adult life devoted to the pursuit of…anything – knowledge, mastery of an art, self-realization, self-actualization – or even not in pursuit of anything in particular but just trying to live your life peacefully and without incident. And the government essentially says, “You’re beneath mentioning when we talk about this country. You don’t count.”

The erasure is not just personal. The State Department is planning on purchasing $400 million Tesla vehicles, but has deleted the word “Tesla” from its procurement document – as if that erases the massive conflict of interest. January 6 videos are disappearing from government websites. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (a particular bugbear to the administration) has resigned rather than dismiss charges against Mayor Eric Adams, a notably corrupt ally of Donald Trump, as she is being told to do by the administration – and her resignation is being compared to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.

Now the administration is proposing “to erase” the border between the US and Canada, reflecting what Putin did to Ukraine in 2014 when it “annexed” Crimea in its first steps to invasion.

Trump has used un-eraseable Sharpie markers for decades, in at least one instance attempting to alter the very laws of physics – as if by the act of striking at paper with thick, heavy, dark, indelible inks can magically align reality to what he thinks it ought to be by using Sharpies to sign the 60 (at last count) Executive Orders he’s issued since he took office. Orders that, for example, extort South Africa by withholding aid until white Afrikaners are “prioritized”. Or that demonize the (fewer than 100) trans women in sports. And a host of other dictats that essentially establish the reality that Trump and his backers have wanted for years – the primacy of white males, the second- or third-class citizenship of everyone else.

While Trump is busy erasing everything he doesn’t like, he’s wielding that Sharpie like a landscape gardner wields topiary shears, wrecking the lives and realities and ecosystems of Americans in service to ugly political and personal aesthetics. Which is what fascism does.