For a few days after the election, Ann and I gave into fear and despair.  Then we began finding ways to cope.

To begin, we watched movies. Five nights in a row.

As we were carefully avoiding the pain of news and commentary, we chanced upon I Know Where I’m Going. We had watched it before – more than once – and we knew it to be especially engaging. Just the escape we wanted. In it, a wealthy and headstrong young English woman (who knows where she is going) tries to travel to the Hebrides Islands, Scotland, to marry an older man, when, held up by bad weather, she falls in love with a World War II naval officer who is on leave. It’s a good love story with fine acting by Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey and excellent, atmospheric cinematography in black and white. 1945.

The next evening, looking for another artful, pain-killing film, we turned to Mrs. Miniver, in which Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson play a “middle class” married couple living on the North Sea during World War II. They endure bombing, death, and material loss. Pidgeon uses the family pleasure boat in the evacuation of Dunkirk. Released in 1942, it was written as propaganda in support of the Allied war effort. The setting, scene, and plot were far away from the here and now, which was what we wanted, but the dramatization of heroic and selfless patriotism made the awfulness of what America had done on November 6 all the more present.

The next film we watched was Darkest Hour. It, too, took us to another place while at the same time shining a bright light on fears for the end of our constitutional government. In May 1940, the fate of World War II hangs on Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman), who must decide whether to negotiate with Adolph Hitler or fight on knowing that it could mean the end of the British Empire. The film closes with Churchill’s famous speech to Parliament: “we shall outlive the menace of tyranny…we shall fight them on the beaches… we shall never surrender.”

We followed up with another  portrayal of selfless patriotism and courage – One of Our Aircraft is Missing. A British bomber crew in World War II bails out over Nazi-held Holland and is saved by local resistance fighters.

The final in our series of grief-busting films, The Eagle Has Landed, was less powerful as escape or otherwise, despite a cast that included Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, and Robert Duvall in a German plot to assassinate Winston Churchill during World War II. It was about time to move on from films and return to thinking about how we had elected a sociopathic, racist, misogynist, delusional felon.

I turned to accumulated periodicals, and the first story that caught my eye was a review of a book about Russian dissidents in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. It followed in detail the development of a civil rights movement through clandestine actions that included underground newspapers and secret communications by brave citizens. They were not revolutionaries; they were “other thinkers,” who wanted to make their country better, not blow up existing institutions. Even that limited goal came with risk of arrest, imprisonment, and execution. I hadn’t read but a few paragraphs when comparison to the “deep state” so feared by MAGA radicals came to mind – obvious differences aside.

We are not yet so authoritarian a government as was the Soviet Union in the period covered by the book. But then, as Florida eliminates social science courses at public universities, and around the country books are being purged from school libraries, and Oklahoma and Texas are making secular education more like Sunday school, and federal employees are going to be fired if they have been vocal about their belief in climate change, and politicians make decisions about women’s health – taking into account such changes as these, it is obvious we are moving in the direction of autocracy and  government thought control. Not so far as Russia with its imprisonment and death of Alexei Navalny for “extremism,” but absent uncompromising, unrelenting opposition – dissidence – our centuries of effort at constitutional democracy will be but a memory.

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IN PASSING. SCENES IN AN UNCONVENTIONAL LIFE