Lonely Roads and Lacking Integrity.

I don’t tell this story very often, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve mentioned it here. It’s not one I enjoy telling, but I’ll do so when I feel it’s necessary.

It’s July 2, 2019. My family and I have made a three-day trip to Wisconsin to visit House on the Rock for the first time and left with our minds irrevocably rearranged. During our trip we also tour the Cave of the Mounds, spend a joyous afternoon at a Madison football pub watching the USWNT triumph in a harrowing Women’s World Cup knockout match against the England Lionesses, and decide to hit a series of ice cream parlors and dairy farms to compare their flavors.

On a two-lane stretch of road between two dairy farms, under a clear blue sky, our car catches up to a white pick-up truck. On the back of the cabin window I spot a scattering of different decals. Some of them may have been for bands I’d never heard of, others may have been innocuous decorative images. It’s hard for me to recall, exactly, because at least two of the decals on the back were unmistakable symbols of the Nazi Party.

My memory of the exact details of what happened next has grown hazy over time. I know that some point after I recognized the kind of man I’d driven up behind, he seemed to recognize the kind of family who was in the car behind him. I know that at some point I passed him on the left, and held my breath as he stuck his hand out of the driver-side window and proceeded to show us his middle finger until long after we’d swerved back into the right lane. I put some distance between us and kept glancing in the rearview mirror until he turned off another rural road, wondering if at some point he might make a calculation about how little traffic was on the highway right then and how angry he was to see us existing in his field of vision. I drew up several hasty plans in my head, both offensive and defensive, to respond to different scenarios I could imagine might happen if he caught back up to us.

And I did my best not to betray to my mixed-race, seven year-old son how terrified I had been throughout however few minutes the incident had actually taken.

I need to say something about JD Vance.

Since Donald Trump first sought the presidency in 2016, he’s displayed a demonic talent for making men and women who once seemed to have some modicum of principles abandon them entirely out of either hunger for unfettered power or fear of the bloodthirst he commands within his following. We’ve watched as he has time and again leveled vicious rhetorical attacks against his opponents in primaries and for those opponents to wither and wilt in response.

He went after Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi in an ad comparing her appearance unfavorably to his own wife Melania’s, and months after Trump had refused to apologize for it, Cruz was endorsing him to serve his own ambition. Nikki Haley spent longer than many suffering his barbs and firing back her own statements about how unfit for the presidency he remained, and then acted as if nothing she’d said was sincere when the possibility existed for her to become his running mate. These and other moments have all been bellwethers in exactly how little integrity remains in the core of the GOP, and yet none of these quite achieve the sheer depths of depravity to which JD Vance has sunk in his pursuit of power.

For over a week the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio has been under siege, victims of a haggard old myth that Vance chose to exhume and point in their direction. Schools and hospitals have been locked down and evacuated after dozens of bomb threats — all hoaxes, thankfully, thus far — and state troopers have been mobilized to provide any sense of security at all.

JD Vance has admitted on the air that the claims he and his running mate have made are utter fabrications, but that he is unwilling to apologize or correct the record even to bring some relief to a town within the state FOR WHICH HE IS A SITTING SENATOR. And in the meantime, the Proud Boys march in the streets of Springfield. The Ku Klux Klan distributes leaflets that spread hate and drive recruitment.

It is one thing to capitulate to Trump’s nastiness and decide to suffer every cruelty he flings your way from his stubby fingers or pulsating maw, when the worst things your family might suffer are being the subject of a crudely cobbled internet meme or a alliterative nickname.

Vance is married to a South Asian woman and has had three children with her. The forces he has chosen to unleash upon Springfield are those that would, if they encountered his family on a lonely road, make a calculation about what they could get away with, and then act upon that calculation, without remorse. There might even be a public declaration that they’d do it again.

There is lack of integrity.

There is lack of character.

Somehow, below that, there is JD Vance, a man who complains about women who don’t have children but who makes alliances with men who would murder his own.