Close Enough, Welcome Back Dick Cheney.

On oil wars, environmentalism, and poking your head back out of the sand.

Well, that was a rude awakening now wasn’t it?

I have to admit that I spent most of December paying a lot more attention to gay hockey romances imported from Canada straight to my television than I did to politics and the news. I spent a lot of time thinking about toxic masculinity and queer joy, about how to imagine complexly the ways the world leaves its finger prints on all of us regardless of our circumstances, how worthy I find the project of exploring that, and how wonderful it is to do so through love stories. I spent a lot of time thinking about community, and the bonds we build by experiencing joy together, by experiencing stories together, and how you can tell how much we needed hope, we needed love, we needed the kind of moment that has us all staring at our television sets giddy with anticipation.

And yes, I also spent the month of December reading a truly massive amount of fanfiction, scrolling endlessly for gifsets, and watching every edit sent to me by people with more mastery over video platforms, and just generally giving myself over completely to the fictional Heated Rivalry universe.

So I’m not going to lie, the Venezuela thing took me by surprise.

I’ve spent the last week, the liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s, that week simultaneously dedicated to excess and laziness and indulgence, as well as resolutions and health and wellness, dreading my return to politics a bit. But the thing about putting your head in the sand is that you can’t really breathe that well, and it starts to hurt your neck. As always, my goal for the new year is to somehow find a way to bring the joy and rest and luxury of vacation in small ways in my day to day life so that I can continue to care about the things that are important to me while enjoying this one wild and precious life we get. Today, that looks like writing a little bit about my thoughts on this absolutely insane choice by the Trump regime, and then heading off to make eggplant parmesan and start my annual rewatch of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries with my sister.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history in Latin and South American - a history of violence and imperialism, of ousting democratically elected leaders in favor of authoritarians more aligned with our economic interests, of using our corporations to exploit land and people. I keep thinking about this in the context of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” project, a destructive nostalgia for an imagined simpler time. I think this slogan is most often used to conjure up a domestic project, one where traditional gender roles reigned supreme and where the nuclear family was the core of American politics and culture. It imagines a time when everyone knew their place and no one questioned it, and you were deemed deserving of having wealth and power by the virtue of having it in the first place.

But MAGA also imagines this on a global scale - the idea that might makes right, and that power justifies itself. It is true when Donald Trump uses the levers of the American government to enrich himself and to go after his enemies. It is true when the Republican party holds Democrats to the letter of the law and democratic tradition, while ignoring, exploiting, or outright breaking the rules for their own benefit. And it is true when Donald Trump invades another country, kidnaps a foreign leader, and uses our tax dollars to steal another country’s resources and choose which companies will benefit from that according to his own spurious whims.

This moment feels like the perfect encapsulation of the Trump regime’s authoritarian project. It’s a personal coup for Donald Trump who wants to prove that he can do whatever he wants with the power he’s stolen from the American people. It’s an exercise in blatant corruption as Trump will get to decide which oil companies have access to the Venezuelan oil fields and how they’ll benefit. It undermines the core of American democracy and the separation of powers, as an act of war for which Congress was not alerted, let alone consulted. It feeds the violence of Trump’s immigration record because it has the potential to open the door to more deportations, more kidnappings, more imprisonment. It’s another way that the Trump regime is spending our tax dollars on projects that have no potential to improve our lives or make them more affordable, and it’s also a very expensive distraction from the political problems Trump has here at home.

And all of this for a resource we should be trying to divorce ourselves from anyway! Amongst the many incomprehensible evils of Trump’s actions in Venezuela, the one that keeps rattling around in my head is that our dependence on oil is driving climate change, a catastrophically expensive existential threat looming on our horizon that the Trump regime seems hell bent on exacerbating for spite and personal gain. And Democrats also cannot seem to get anyone in the country to care about climate change! It is consistently top of the list of issues that people think Democrats are too focused on when they should be focused on affordability issues. And changing that narrative, showing people how much more unaffordable life can get as the weather gets more extreme, diseases run rampant, our water gets less drinkable and the air gets less breathable already feels too challenging. And yet Trump, like so many Republicans before him, wants his oil war. And so in pursuit of the thing that’s killing us, we will keep killing.

I did have plans to start out the new year on a more hopeful note, talking about the first phase of my America’s birthday curriculum - Rachel Carson and the mid-century environmentalist movement, but I’m a little bit behind in my reading schedule. But I do think that the successes of that movement, the challenges and complications of it, are going to be an important counterbalance in the new year. I also think that because the MAGA movement finds so much of its imagery and inspiration in an imagined version of the mid-century, looking back to that moment and examining the more complex reality will prove useful.

In the meantime, I do plan to call my Senators and Representative and express my fury about the Trump regime’s actions in Venezuela, because even though they should all know this is wrong, calling Congress isn’t just about getting them to do something, but also about showcasing a critical mass of our power. And I’m going to look up my primary schedule for this year, and start sorting through where I want to put my time and resources when it comes to midterms.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t a great way to start the new year. But I think if there’s one thing I want to take with me into 2026, it’s that even when the news is really bad, there are good things out there - good stories, good friends, good meals, good choices. The world is always going to be big enough for both, and so we are going to have to be too.