One year of American Doom: Hope, truth and the future

I hope we will have a truthful future. Plus, an excerpt from my forthcoming book.

Feb 13, 2025

A line of police in Baltimore during protests following the police killing of Freddie Gray.

Welcome to week whatever of the second Trump presidency. The question we’re now faced with is whether the Trump administration will abide by rulings from the courts on executive orders or simply ignore them. Many people believe that this fact of life places us squarely within a constitutional crisis; the latter scenario of Trump ignoring court orders would most certainly constitute as such.

I am trying to be hopeful, but I am also a realist. This newsletter is called American Doom, after all. I don’t want to bullshit you because I have too much respect for the people who take the time to read what I write: we are in for some possibly very rough times ahead. I know this because I have seen it before. I can also feel it.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of American Doom, so I’m doing something a little different and providing an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened.

For those of you who are new here, you can go back in time and read my first Doom post from this day last year—it’s a dispatch from a trip I took to South Carolina to report on the Republican presidential primary and Nikki Haley’s chances in it. It was on that trip that I was so struck by the unsettling paradoxes of American life—what we see on TV and movies, on the news, and in our politics compared to what reality actually looks like—that I had the feeling of I can’t take it anymore, and launched American Doom.

Since then, this humble little newsletter has grown substantially. Many of you have arrived here just in the last few months, so I’ll provide some links to what I think are some of the most important stories from this past year.

Amid all the madness of 2024, I also managed to finish my first book. It’s a memoir about my time in journalism, my personal journey of recovery from alcoholism, and a harrowing portrait of the chaotic last decade of American life. Something Terrible will be published soon by the University of Georgia Press. If you decide to become a founding member of American Doom, you’ll get a signed copy of my book. Other subscription options to American Doom are available for as little as $5 a month. Your support makes the independent, confrontational journalism I’m practicing here possible.

The following excerpt from Something Terrible shows some of what it looks like when society descends into lawless chaos. We’re about to enter a new and strange phase of that lawlessness—this time, from the top. The only question that remains is, will the system hold?

***

A decade younger and much less wise. In Baltimore.

It costs approximately $1,000 per man per week to sustain life on the road. And this is not a fancy life. We're talking a diet that consists primarily of gas station chicken and lukewarm Diet Cokes, plus beer and whiskey if you're still in your drinking days, cigarettes, Subway (for health) and rooms at a Drury Inn.

BALTIMORE — The pilot said something about “and in case you weren’t aware,” something is happening in Baltimore so “be safe out there.” Keeping people calm doesn’t jibe with what the pilot would have said if he were speaking the truth: “Alright, folks, we’re making our final descent into Baltimore where the temperature is 62 degrees on a pretty clear night. You might have seen on the news that Baltimore is the latest scene of what increasingly looks like a national uprising against police brutality and questionable police killings — what some might call extrajudicial murders of Black people — and as a result a good portion of certain parts of the city are expected to burn tonight as random gunfire crackles through the air. If you’re white, don’t worry though, because the National Guard will soon be coming to protect the white parts of town and the commercial districts. For you Black folks on today’s flight, your neighborhoods are going to be the site of ugly clashes between police and your fellow citizens. We here in the cockpit hope you enjoy your time in Baltimore or wherever your final destination may take you, and remember: always secure your own tear gas mask before helping the person cowering on the sidewalk next to you.”

The TSA agents hadn’t asked about the strange apparatus I carried with me when I left Chicago but did manage to hassle an Indian man who went through security behind me, double-checking his pants pockets while I waltzed through with a Yugoslavian respirator in a backpack with my computer, police scanner, press pass and a change of clothes. I would need the mask soon. When the plane landed I caught up with a soldier who had been on the flight and was carrying his rucksack through the terminal. I asked him what it felt like to be coming home to a warzone. He said it was weird, which is about all you can expect someone to think when they’ve been off in some foreign desert fighting for their country only to come home and see it on fire. That kind of thing will make you wonder who the enemy is supposed to be and why.

One year of Doom

I got outside into the crisp spring night and lit up a Camel. Driving from Brooklyn, Bill pulled up and I got in the car and we drove toward the city. He had only been in town for a few hours but had already secured a hotel room downtown, not far from where the action was, and had been around enough to have a general sense of where to go. (To be brutally honest it really isn’t that hard to find possible inflection points of unrest in a major city. You just have to find the Black part of town because that’s where all the police are swarming to in order to either quell a riot or, as is often the case, start one themselves.) We cruised around a mostly deserted Baltimore until we came across a man sweeping up outside his convenience store. He and his family were Asian and didn’t speak much English. The neighborhood had been the scene of looting and riots the night before and he was just getting the chance to return to his store and clean up. Among the shattered glass all over the sidewalk were pennies that had scattered when the looters and thieves took the cash register. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.

The next day we went to Sandtown, the neighborhood where Freddie Gray had been put in the back of a police van and given a “rough ride.” Police said Gray had had a knife when they approached him on the street to talk. It was a seemingly harmless interaction that happens in cities across the country every day but far too often turns out deadly if the person being stopped by police is Black and in the wrong neighborhood, through no fault of their own. Gray’s neck had snapped inside the van, killing him almost instantly. But like every city that burns in the wake of a police killing, the fire had been smoldering for a while.

We found the intersection — and there is always an intersection — where police and protesters were squaring off. There was the MRAP, the war wagon I’d seen in Ferguson but with a different police department’s logo on it, painted matte black with a helmet-clad sniper poking out of the top. There were the police with batons and shields, helmets and body armor, holding shotguns loaded with rubber bullets and rockets that shoot tear gas canisters. The protesters jawed at the police who stood stone-faced as Bill and the other photographers clicked away. I walked inside an open door of a nearby building to see if I could get upstairs to have a better view of the scene. A man in the building’s stairwell said he had an office on the second floor where he ran a bail bonds business and would let me hang out there. I started to ask about Freddie Gray, who he was, how long he’d been in the neighborhood, and what, exactly, happened the day he was killed. The man couldn’t answer most of my questions but he could fill in one blank about Gray’s life: after a recent arrest, he had bailed Freddie Gray out of jail. I had been in town less than 24 hours and found a sliver of a piece to the puzzle of Gray’s death. I sat on the window sill in the bail bonds office for the next few hours and watched a riot slowly brew, then explode.

Bill and I chased the fighting in Baltimore for hours as the battles spread across the city, ending up on an interstate while we walked with a large group of people chanting and screaming at nearby police. There, we wound up where we always inevitably did: in between the protesters and the police as we did what can only be described as one of the strangest and most exhilarating jobs in the world. By now the police had obtained a new weapon: a mace can that could shoot stinging hot liquid 20 feet through the air. They were blasting protesters with it as Bill snapped away. We had our masks on but they did no good. A cop looked right at Bill, who screamed “PRESS!” but the cop fired anyway, soaking Bill in an orange goo that seeped around the rubber edges of his gas mask and started burning his face. He ripped the mask off and rubbed his eyes. Then, we got separated. I walked with protesters on the interstate for a while longer and then weaved back into the city and managed to find our car. Luckily it hadn’t been burned or destroyed, a reasonable possibility that would have resulted in an awkward conversation at the return lot. “Hi, yes, our 2013 Hyundai Elantra was great, thank you. Unfortunately it did not withstand the Molotov cocktails you might have seen skittering across your TV screen when you turned on the news this morning and is at an intersection I can’t really remember right now. Just look for the bare, blackened chassis of the car. You can get at least a few hundred dollars at the scrap yard for it, I’m sure.”

Molotovs weren’t the only weapon protesters had. Some had used giant water balloon slingshots to hurl rocks and chunks of curb at police. Since I’d last seen Bill getting soaked with mace by the cop, he had taken one of these projectiles in the knee, knocking his legs out from under him and tearing his ACL. I walked up as he poured more water on his face, still red hot to the touch. He got in the passenger side and I got behind the wheel, driving back to our hotel where he took a long shower and I tried to air out our clothes from the tear gas and pepper spray all over them. I had gone through the night unscathed, not a scratch on me. In Ferguson we watched the French cameraman’s face spurt a river of blood and I watched as a man screamed in pain after breaking his leg while running over a concrete wall to get away from police who kept firing tear gas at us anyway while I tried to tape a splint onto his leg. I looked through the back window of a car and had seen a man pressing hard on a bullet wound to his stomach, trying desperately to stop the bleeding and the pain. Now, Bill had a knee that required surgery and a face full of pepper spray that made him want to puke. I had been through all of this and yet had never been injured myself — physically, at least. I felt a strange sense of awe about all this carnage. I felt the weight of the importance of these events, but was struck more by a sense that this was a particularly insane set of circumstances to be in the middle of, rather than simply the latest in a never-ending flow of the chaos of history.

A few days later I flew back to Chicago and continued my investigations of unsolved murders in the city, in nearby Gary and in Ferguson. I wasn’t there for long before a man was killed by police in Cincinnati. Time to go.

One year of American Doom: Hope, truth and the future

I hope we will have a truthful future. Plus, an excerpt from my forthcoming book.

One year of Doom

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