But there's going to be a party when the wolf comes home

So the morning after the election there were confirmable reports of Trump supporters harassing students at Wellesley and now there is racist graffiti on the MBTA. I don't care what it's doing there. I don't care if it was written by someone emboldened by Trump's election to express their truest private feelings or someone encouraged by Trump's example to commit a publicly hurtful act and rationalize it as joking or provocation; you can't ironically punch someone in the face. One of the young men involved in the Wellesley incident has since appeared to apologize; I agree it would be nice if neither he nor his compatriot actually spat at black women on campus, but since the Trump campaign was neither race- nor gender-neutral, tooling around Clinton's alma mater with a Trump flag while shouting "Make America Great Again!" was not exactly an innocuous act on its own. I was glad to read of the volunteers cleaning the racist and anti-Semitic graffiti from Mount Tom in Holyoke and Easthampton, but it should never have been there in the first place. I'm sure there are many more incidents I know nothing about: I am spending much less time on social media than most of my friends and I'm still seeing many more photographed swastikas than I normally run into when I'm not doing historical research. So that's my city and my state. I had no illusions that they would be immune to the wave of released and confident bigotry, but it's a sharp reminder: I don't get to pretend, yes, it's happening here, but not really here. I don't get to make it someone else's problem except on the internet. I know those "see something, say something" posters that have decorated our trains and buses for years were designed against terrorism, but they had better be able to accommodate reports of white supremacy. Dammit, Boston. Most years when something politically stupid happens I want the cranky dybbuk of John Adams to haunt the administration responsible, but lately I want to grab him by the ectoplasmic lapels and yell, "Alien and Sedition Acts, John? Really?"

In things that feel like small victories, I found the first box set of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood at a yard sale this afternoon—that's the one containing Red-Headed Woman (1932), James Whale's Waterloo Bridge (1931), and the original uncensored cut of Baby Face (1933). The DVDs are in startlingly good shape for being in a milk crate of mixed media. The yard owner sold it to me for a dollar. This does nothing to make the wider world a better place, but reminds me that our culture has tried to set the clock back on social justice issues before and while its efforts did great damage at the time, they also long-term failed. Also I will enjoy watching these movies and right now that's not negligible.