Life Under the Spooky, Shrouded, Trumpian Sun

Because I’ve had the joy of living deep in the woods almost my whole life, I may be more attuned than some to the way the natural world looks. I’ve long maintained that if you dropped me into the eastern woods and told me to guess the day of the year from the color of the leaves I could get within a week—I love the procession from the neon green of early spring to the leathery deep green of late summer, just before the swamp maples start to turn red.

So it throws me off when things get weird. This past week we’ve been living through some of the haziest skies I can remember—the smoke from the Canadian wildfires seems to have settled in, and it is filtering the sunlight so that everything looks wrong. It’s as if the sun has grown a little dim, its rays a little washed out and pallid; shadows seem to have a fuzzy edge.

I don’t like it one bit, but it’s probably an apt accompaniment to the feeling that I’m living in a slightly different country than the one I’m used to—America’s broad outlines are familiar, but the MAGA smoke is shifting its contours in disturbing ways. It feels constantly off.

By this I don’t mean the ongoing general idiocy—we’ve had years of right-wing dumbness, so it almost bounces off my brain when I read, say, that GOP lawmakers have sent another big letter off to the Canadians demanding that they stop the smoke or face “real consequences.” I mean: Canada’s boreal forest is heating up, drying out, and catching fire, and the reason that it’s hot and dry is, above all, the clouds of carbon dioxide that Americans have poured into the air—and which the GOP is doing its level best to increase. The fires are happening in mostly vast roadless tracts—there’s not much way to prevent, or even fight, most of the fires. Their main actual victims are the Indigenous inhabitants of the far north who have done literally nothing to cause the chaos. But as I say: this is just par for the right-wing course.

What’s unnerving to me is the change in fundamental American dispositions. Let me cite three of many.

1. Science. I’ve always thought of Ben Franklin as the most American of the founding fathers, partly because he was funny and didn’t take himself too seriously, and partly because he was an honest-to-God scientist. I mean: the stove, the bifocals, the whole electricity thing. And swim fins. He set the template for America’s practical curiosity about things, a curiosity that has manifested in centuries of scientific and engineering prowess, until just about now. The news that RFK Jr. has pulled the plug on the next generation of vaccines which may have offered our best route to dealing with cancer; the news that the federal government has pulled the funding for the scientist widely regarded as the world’s greatest mathematician; the news that we are going to literally destroy a satellite measuring carbon concentrations—it makes me nearly weep with frustration. Each of these cases have histories that go thousands of scientists deep, and each potentially would open up a thousand new lines of inquiry. And we’re going to actively discourage that exploration and understanding: This is something that’s never happened before in this country.
2. Fairness. America has been, obviously, an unfair country from the jump. But in my lifetime we’ve at least felt the need to try and correct some small measure of that unfairness. Those days are over. From the ongoing destruction of the Voting Rights Act to the forced rejiggering of college admissions so that they can once more favor the already blessed, there is no longer any pretense being made; the supposed campaign against DEI has turned into—as it should have been clear it would—a campaign against Black, brown, and poor Americans. Yesterday came the news that the Environmental Protection Agency is “clawing back” $7 billion in grants to help low- and moderate-income Americans put solar panels on the roof. The Solar for All program. For example:

   Indigenized Energy, a nonprofit group led by Native Americans, completed the country’s first two Solar for All projects in October 2024. The group installed residential solar and battery storage systems for members of the Chippewa Cree Tribe in Box Elder, Montana and the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Porcupine and Pine Ridge, South Dakota.“One in five households on reservations lack access to electricity, and this program was an opportunity to close that gap,” said Cody Two Bears, the chief executive of Indigenized Energy. “But those were just two kickoff projects to show what was coming for the next five years.”

Again, I find my frustration rising almost to the limit—these kind of things fall under the category of “the least we could possibly do,” and now we’re not going to do them. Hopefully the courts will intervene to spare at least some of the projects, but the meanness can’t be erased.

3. Servility. America has always been refreshingly democratic; that was the whole point of breaking with the king. And now we have a country filled with—to use an insult that should come back into vogue—lickspittles. Watching the head of the most valuable company on Earth, Apple, scrape and truckle before the president yesterday, presenting him with literal 24 karat gold statue should make any actual American ashamed. We were not a people who cowered—but now apparently we are. I understand the impulse—it’s scary to find oneself in the administration’s sights, and perhaps I’ll cower too when the time comes. But for now: resist. The next big chance is, of course, Sun Day on September 21—and given the depth of the Trumpian antipathy to solar and windpower, it’s more important than ever. Some of the resistance will be gentle and beautiful: Here’s a picture of some volunteers making felt suns this week for a giant upstate New York art project. But sometimes the most effective resistance looks exactly like that.

Under this spooky shrouded sun it’s hard to imagine what real sunlight looks like. But our job is do what we can to clear the American air, so those who come after us can breathe freely again.