Après Nous, Le Deluge

“If I Can’t Have You, No One Will”

I have a friend who left the country two days after the election in November. She is a Black American, a longtime educator and activist, and she and her husband decided that no matter the outcome, with two Black sons and a lifetime of service to attempting to heal this country’s racism, they had “given enough” to America for now, and it was time to go.

After the election, I wondered if she would come back. For a brief window, I wondered if she felt she’d made a mistake. Call it my own privilege or just a trauma response after years of my personal PTSD being triggered by this president, but I hoped we’d found a pocket of peace.

What I’d forgotten is that sociopathic narcissists will burn down everything if they are denied.

So here we are, two months and eight days after the election. Five people are dead from the attack on the Capitol, including a Capitol police officer, and another officer suicided this weekend after being on duty during the attack. Six Republican senators and 121 Republican House members still voted against the certification of the electoral college vote after that event.

In the days since, we’ve learned that the seditionists planned to shoot Nancy Pelosi in the head on live television, and hang the Vice President via a gallows they built on the Mall. Representative Clyburn’s unmarked office was invaded, as if the attackers knew exactly where to go. Shit was smeared on the walls of our most symbolic government building. Congresspeople and staffers barricaded themselves behind doors while this white mob beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.

More than ninety people have been arrested, virtually all of them with ties to white supremacist groups or the QAnon cult. Some are ex-military, firefighters, state and local government officials. Questions remain about whether they were aided and abetted by local law enforcement and right-wing members of the House itself.

Make no mistake about it, this mob was minutes from televised mass murder of the entire line of succession.

And the president himself, holed up in the White House, has yet to condemn any of it.

As I write this, further attacks are being planned. The president has been deplatformed off Twitter, as have the most virulent organizers of the Capitol attack, and Parler is gone, but violent “protests” are being planned on Martin Luther King Day and on Inauguration Day, among other dates.

The president may be impeached a second time this week. He may be removed through the 25th Amendment. But regardless, he will continue to burn down the nation and encourage his supporters, both citizens and government enablers, to do the same, because he embodies, and he wants, the ultimate domestic violence.

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The French expression “après moi, le deluge,” roughly translated, means “after me, the flood.” The accurate quote, however, is “après nous, le deluge”— after US, the flood— attributable to King Louis XV of France or his mistress at the time, after Louis suffered a scorching defeat at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757.

A prelude to the French Revolution, the expression was an ultimate forecasting of destruction, with a tinge of nihilism, a smattering of “and who cares.” It means, for all intents and purposes, this:

After we’re finished with you, nothing will be left but ashes.

I’ve thought a lot about this expression in the days since January 6th, as I’ve watched Republican enablers call for “unity” and “healing,” to save their dear leader, while they themselves have refused accountability for their complicity, their encouragement, their sedition, their incitement.

I’ve watched traumatized Democratic leaders debate whether sanctioning him will do anything at all at this late date in his presidency, and plead for the invocation of the 25th Amendment by a Vice-President who seems to think that even his own life is worth less than the protection of his demagogue.

And I’ve thought, also, about the man I left when I was thirty, and how for months after I left him in late 2001, I’d descend out of my apartment at the corner of 13th and U in Washington DC to go to work in the morning, and he’d be sitting there, in his car, watching me leave, watching to see if anyone was with me, right in front of the front door to my row house, staring me down.

“If I can’t have you, no one will.”

Anyone who has lived through domestic violence or other abuse by a narcissist will recognize the moment we are living through. It is the most dangerous time— that window after you decide to leave— when the narcissist has to confront his injury. You become the object of blame for the gaping black pit of need inside his soul. You are the cause of it, he thinks, and if I destroy you, I will destroy the need.

We all know it doesn’t work like that, but that doesn’t stop the violence all the same.

The only thing that ends it is consequence or, if we’re lucky, another person or thing that fills the void.

For a president who has had the ultimate narcissistic supply for years, there is nothing that will ever compare to it.

And so he will continue to destroy us, to burn it all down, until he is done, unless and until he is stopped.

His mob will continue in his wake to do the same, unless and until they are stopped.

I’m not much of a praying person, honestly, but in the last few days I’ve sent up more than a few.

May those with the power to stop this president, his enablers and his army, do whatever it takes to do so, immediately.

If they do not, we are in for years of regurgitated violence, designed to punish a nation that decided, by a big majority, to choose itself over him, to choose democracy over white supremacy, to try to escape him and all he stands for, before it was too late.

He will not stop, they will not stop, unless we stop them, right now.

All of democracy hangs in the balance.

Let’s hope our leaders get it right.