tulips & terror
on the cognitive dissonance of flowers amidst fascism
This weekend, my family and I visited the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Woodburn, Oregon, about an hour’s drive from Portland. As we neared the entrance, a brilliant-hued hot air balloon came into view, rising and falling gently as it ferried people, a few at a time, to modest heights, a better vantage from which to see the fields of flowers in their tidy rows: pink, purple, pale yellow, violet, blood red, off-white, and everything in between. From the gravel parking lot, one could make out signage for food stalls hawking sausages on buns, kettle corn, funnel cake, fresh-squeezed lemonade, or, for the more adventurous set, white pizza with dill pickles — in short, carnival fare. The weather was excellent: slightly overcast, with a mercurial sun that appeared every so often from behind the clouds, warming the mostly bare-armed throngs.
The farm was packed with families and young couples, queer folk with flower crowns, young women in white gowns whose prosthetic ears (pointy) suggested fairy cosplay, their boyfriends tasked with photographing them against the dramatic backdrop of tulips in full bloom. And always, that hot-air balloon rising and falling, rising and falling.
As we ambled through the fields, our older kid turning cartwheels a few paces ahead, my mind drifted, then lurched, toward the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of Maryland and father of three, mistakenly deported to El Salvador, where he is being detained at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, the largest prison in Latin America. With a capacity of 40,000, CECOT holds its prisoners in mass cells, incessantly lit, for 23.5 hours a day; these men are permitted no contact with family or attorneys, and they never leave. Indeed, CECOT is less a prison than it is a concentration camp.
Looking at the flowers, I tried to imagine the depthless fear Garcia and his family must be experiencing, not to speak of the other migrants now being held at CECOT, many of whom have not been so much as charged with a crime. Though to be clear, whether or not they’ve been charged with a crime is irrelevant. If any person, regardless of their legal status, can be rendered to a foreign detention center that sits beyond the reach of the U.S. legal system, there is nothing to prevent such acts from targeting U.S. citizens. This is state terror.
Meanwhile, at the tulip farm, families sat at white plastic picnic tables, tucking into platters of tacos, ribs, and greasy funnel cake festooned with strawberries. Elsewhere, visitors mobbed the flower shop, gathering fresh-cut blooms to take home, while others palmed glasses of rosé or pints of beer. It was an image that captured, at once, all that is terrible and commendable about the United States. Here we were, hundreds of us, luxuriating in blissful ignorance while our country plummeted, by the hour, deeper into authoritarianism. And also: here we were, families, white, black, and brown, queer punks, geeky cosplayers, flower enthusiasts, speaking English, Spanish, Urdu, Ukrainian. And everyone—in this display of our flawed, incomplete, yet noble project of pluralism—was having a gay old time, if only because the government wasn’t coming for us, not yet.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, but its premise—the extent to which life, for Germans, went on as normal only paces from the Auschwitz concentration camp where 1.1 million people were murdered—seems relevant here. It is all too easy to rationalize one’s way into business-as-usual while atrocities are being committed by your government. I am as guilty of this as the next person; you had only to witness me scarfing kettle corn at the tulip farm to know this to be true. But this doesn’t mean that we should turn away from beauty, from joy, from looking at flowers, particularly when it’s a communal act.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to avoid paralysis amidst the consolidation of power by an authoritarian regime, and the frustrating reality that, even in the face of burning crises, an effective resistance takes time to build. The good news is that a broad resistance is finding its footing in many respects. Harvard University announced yesterday that it will not comply with the regime’s demands, the Democrats are showing signs of life, Bernie and AOC are drawing record-breaking crowds, the business community is breaking with Trump while influential right-wing ideologues have grown disenchanted with their man, and a loose affiliation of grassroots, pro-democracy movements is sprouting across the nation.
But we still need to do more. It is incumbent upon those of us with any kind of public platform to express loudly and clearly that, as Timothy Snyder argues, the Trump Administration has predicated its campaign of state terror on a permanent state of exception, an obliteration of the rule of law that will not be limited to the disappearance of noncitizens. Yes, this is me, Gabriel, asking you, my famous friends, to stick your necks out, to make your fans and colleagues aware that you will not be silent so long as the rule of law is suspended. At the same time, we would do well to lean into person-to-person organizing in an effort to bring “soft” supporters of the regime to our side. The history of civil resistance suggests that this is best achieved not by argumentative arm-wrestling, but by first establishing what we have in common with those whom we conceive of as our ideological opponents. Perhaps that shared bond is loyalty to family, or a commitment to personal liberty, or the belief that one man shouldn’t be able to single-handedly empty out your 401(k) just because he doesn’t understand how trade deficits work.
In Woodburn, the afternoon light began to wane, and our children grew irritable. We plied them with lemonade, piled into the car, and headed back to Portland. The next evening, while cleaning the kitchen, I listened to a conversation between my political science crush Erica Chenoweth and the scholar Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die. I highly recommend that you check it out in its entirety, but in the meantime, here are a few things I took away from it:
We are unquestionably living under competitive autocracy, and it is very bad.
Nevertheless, American democracy, for a whole host of reasons, will be difficult to truly dismantle.
The suggestion that the resistance to Trump 1.0 was ineffective is an easily disprovable myth; we should build on its success.
While marches and rallies aren’t everything, several recent academic papers show that the scale of mass gatherings is correlative to future electoral success. (So keep showing up if marching is your thing!)
Negative coalitions — i.e. against Musk and Trump — are an essential part of any resistance, even if they do not immediately provide a satisfying and coherent alternative to the status quo. (“Rather than asking ‘Do we all share the same worldview?’ Adrienne Maree Brown urges us to ask: ‘Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.’”)1
Chenowith also mentioned the organization Choose Democracy, which is a great resource if you’re still trying, as I am, to find your place in the pro-democratic resistance. Aside from the methods this group proposes for getting involved, I’m committed to using music as a mode of advocacy. We need new protest songs, and I’m thinking about writing some, ideally tunes that are easily learned and disseminated. Meanwhile, I’d like to find a way to make organizing a part of my creative & performance practice. I don’t yet know precisely what that means, but I think that Book of Travelers may have been a starting point. Anything we do to remind one another of the irreducible complexity and contradiction of every life will help to build solidarity.
Speaking of Book of Travelers: when Hitler came to power in 1933, my grandmother began begging her father to leave the country. My great-grandfather, like so many others, failed to take the threat of the Third Reich seriously until it was nearly too late. Just after Kristallnacht, he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he spent a harrowing two weeks before my great-grandmother was able to secure his release; not long after, the family sailed to Havana aboard the S.S. Orinoco, one of the last ships to cross the Atlantic before the ill-fated journey of the St. Louis. I mention this as a reminder to myself. I have an innate allergy to resignation, but I recognize the danger of delusion and naivety. Still, while the regime’s capture of the Justice Department is complete, there are, as I’ve outlined above, significant vulnerabilities in its attempts to consolidate power. Now is the time to use all of our resources to apply maximum pressure to those points of weakness in our efforts to bring about the regime’s collapse. If you have found creative ways of resisting the descent into authoritarianism, I encourage you to detail them in the comments.
Last but not least, next week I’ll be at Northwestern University to give a duo recital with my father, at UNC Chapel Hill with the great Johnny Gandelsman, and then in New York City with Caroline Shaw for the final concert(s) of the Hexagons tour. (The initial date sold out a while ago; we’ve added a late show for which tickets are available here.) Thank you as always for reading. If you have the capacity to become a paying subscriber, I’d be most grateful; these posts don’t write themselves!
Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor, “The rise of end times fascism,” The Guardian 13 April 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk
Two Ls in "Kristallnacht."
Lovely writing, Gabe! You must see “Zone of Interest” as it powerfully brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil”….what we’re seeing today as our democracy hangs on by a thread.