Category: Personal

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Forward

The electoral college has confirmed Biden as the new president. With all the carping and challenging and spleen-venting of the outgoing administration, one must pause for a few moments to consider their reaction had this much drama been generated when Hillary lost. It was certainly possible for the electors then to vote in defiance of the outcome announced in the November election. It is so constructed that they could choose to take a stand and since Clinton did win the popular vote, there would have been nothing technically wrong with them saying “No, we’re not letting this one through.”

There have been close elections in the past where this might have happened, but another consideration comes into play, that of maintaining the credibility of our institutions. Nixon opted not to challenge Kennedy in 1960.  Gore let it go in 2000. Better to let things proceed even by such slim margins than risk shattering the balances in our systems.  However one may feel about that, it is not the worst attitude to take.  It leaves things in position for the next election.

The one variable that matters is voter turn-out.

It was recently pointed out to me that it appears votes don’t matter, because look at the polls. Seventy percent of Americans want MediCare-for-All, and have for a while, yet we don’t have it. Why? Well, when the average election only seems to get 50-some percent of people to the polls (and midterms are much lower) it hands the obstructionists the ability to deny a majority—a majority which failed to show up.

But we can rehearse all those arguments later.

The question now is, how do we move forward in this current situation? The Senate is still controlled by the GOP. Even if both Georgia senate seats flip in January in the run-off, the Senate will be 50-50, with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. The House is Democratic, but if something isn’t done to ensure high turn-out in two years that could change.  How does President Biden move us forward?

And to what?

I have been reading a new biography of John Maynard Keynes, the first superstar economist. Interestingly, he never started out to be an economist. He was a mathematician and a political analyst. He did not approach economics as a specialist field but as an underappreciated aspect of the total political and social landscape. One thing struck me: he for years attempted to make economics comprehensible to the average citizen. He pitched his language at accessibility. And the more he did that, the more he was shut out from the corridors of power. He didn’t get “in” until he changed tactics and started sounding like an academic.

He had to appeal to the priesthood.

This is the thing that grates on the sensibilities of people. The attitude that they cannot comprehend the complexities of government, of society, of the minutiae of civilization, of politics.  While there may be some truth in this, it is the attitude that is offensive. Here in my state, we have just seen a provision stripped out by the “elect” who chafed at the notion that the citizenry actual understood what they wanted.  Clean Missouri was an attempt to end gerrymandering.  People understand how destructive it is.  But too many people in the state legislature knew this would eat into their power, so they finally coupled its repeal with another measure that made it easy for voters to undo what they had already voted for.

This kind of thing infuriates people.

We should demand changes in procedure. One thing, it would be worthwhile to stop the practice of adding riders to bills. Riders are often poison pills. Even when they aren’t, if something is a good idea, it should be recognized on its own merits. Adding unrelated measures to bills muddies things up too much and risks the voice of the people being muffled.

I find myself beginning to agree with term limits. I’ve often felt these were antidemocratic, but I’m beginning to think they might cause people to pay more attention instead of just trusting that the officeholder who has been there for umpteen years is doing fine simply because nothing has happened to bother you. Times change, situations change. Representation should change to keep up.

I dislike filibusters, but I see their usefulness at times. We should however require that more than one politician is required to mount one. If an officeholder can’t get two or three colleagues to support it, then perhaps it should not be allowed.

Usually, I believe, fairly innocuous and simple changes will suffice to make things run better.  We have gotten so used to looking for the blockbuster change, the hammer, the bunker-buster, thinking that only Samson in the temple can make things better.  We forget that Samson was blind and that huge changes are often less effective than they purport to be.

Among the other things I would like to see, is prison reform. We should rid ourselves of private prisons. That has become one of the worst ideas we’ve ever embraced. When profit is at stake, justice takes a back-seat.  I would like to see comprehensive drug reform. Drug addiction is an illness, just like alcoholism. We should treat it as such. In places where this is becoming the accepted wisdom, prison populations, crime, and death by overdose have all gone down.  Treatment not punishment.

Of course, we love us some punishment here.  For a self-proclaimed nation of freedom-lovers, we punish like crazy. Punitive measures to address social problems have been with us practically since the beginning. And of course, it’s not universal. People with enough money don’t receive punishment.  So in a way, what we really want is for people to keep their bad behavior hidden, clean up their own messes.  Combined with a toxic love of retribution, this has given us the largest per capita prison population of any so-called free nation in history. And we’re willing to pay for it. Solving the problems that create the conditions that lead to this state of affairs would cost a lot less than we pay for policing and the courts and incarceration.

Of course, that would require us to view communities as entities, whole and diverse, and get over this balkanizing idea that Different People don’t belong. But that might lead to immigration reform that makes sense and a retreat from this persistent evangelizing that sorts people into categories and makes us all vulnerable to manipulation.

Just some thoughts. But for now, we have a new president.  Let’s see what we can do to make the next four years constructive rather than keep indulging the blame game.

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Sifting Babel

Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy by basically one vote per district across the country. Contrary to the popular myth that grew up around JFK, he was not even close to a landslide, and had Nixon challenged the outcome in court, which many of his advisors were urging him to do, history might have been different. Nixon demurred. He said he refused to be the cause of a constitutional crisis, took his loss, and congratulated Kennedy. Despite who he was and what he later did, he had a line he would not cross.  For the good of the country.

Nixon’s later administration set the conditions which eventually brought us to this year.

Nixon was still part of a culture that embraced common goals between adversaries. Simply put, both Democrats and Republicans believed in the same basic principles, they simply differed on the appropriate paths forward. Oh, certainly there were disconnects, but there had been a core of ideas and aims held as givens.

That no longer seems to be the case.  For large portions of the electorate, it would appear there are wildly different outcomes desired. The possibility for working across the aisle, compromise, and envisioning a common future has fractured. The exaggerations fueling the animosity are becoming more pronounced, to the point where at times it seems two completely separate languages are being spoken, languages which share vocabularies and even syntactical and conceptual similarities, which are becoming more and more unintelligible to each other. What the two sides mean by things like Progress, Patriotism, Tolerance, Law, and Rights require interpreters.

I have been wondering for years now just what some people want to see happen. What do they want their country to look like if they win?

With the era of Trump, I think I know what those who support him, even now, want. Partially anyway.  If I’m even close to correct, I can definitively say it is nothing I want. More than that, it is not something they’re likely to get even if they somehow get their way politically.

When one works through the rage, the foul language, the insults, the chants and slogans, it sounds like the goal is an American Empire that acts entirely by decree. But decree that is almost entirely directed outward, at the rest of the world. The Mexican border wall is exemplary of this. Keep the world out. Keep what is American in, at least in terms of ideology, wealth, and community. Tariffs go hand in hand with this.  Certainly much of this has to do with jobs.

Following upon this is some vague desire that the economy be one which supports a large middle class that is somehow self-sustaining. One based on high wages and low prices and rests upon the dominance of American manufacturing, which should be mostly if not entirely contained within the borders of the country. It should be robust enough that some version of the single-income household can re-emerge so the culture itself ceases to be whipsawed by questions of equity fueled by low wages which require segments of society to seek work when that same culture wishes them to labor inside the home.

And all of this is to be achieved without regulations or unions or systemic wealth redistribution.

There are pundits and ideologues aplenty telling us all this can be done, but for liberal influences which privilege multiculturalism, globalization, and a variety of individual empowerment programs that seek to hamper industry, destroy the family, and deny American Exceptionalism. Charts, graphs, power-points, and pedigreed lectures reinforce the belief that we have lost our way because some of us are at heart anti-American.

The possibility of achieving this utopia of nationalist privilege is unquestioned in this instance. Facts, theories, projections, and basic reason notwithstanding, the aesthetic triumphs because accepting anything else is terrifying.

The possibility of sitting down with those so frightened is small, because fear impedes the ability to reason, which is itself terrifying to those trying to reverse damages seen as suicidal in their unchecked eventualities.

The point, though, is that we are confronting less a set of principles than an aesthetic movement. I have suggested for years that a certain element of rightwing malcontent is not doing this for sound economic or political reasons so much as it hates what the country looks like. Momentum has been gained because opportunists have fed them on their own bile for a long time. So much so and so effectively that now some of them are all but apologizing for what they did because they didn’t think it would go this far. The manipulations are not, therefore, theoretical—the Kochs and the Murdochs have admitted it—and were done for simple greed and power.

The simple reality is that people make poor decisions when they’re afraid and buy all kinds of stuff along the way. Keeping the pipelines open has been the primary aim of these people. Pipelines? The ones the money flows through.

Wartime economies run hotter than peacetime economies. We have been operating on such a footing since Vietnam. Well, since WWII really, and that military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about is anxious to maintain the flow of capital.

It is an absurdity to suggest that someone, anyone—say, Jeff Bezos—“earns” seventy billion dollars in five months. It only goes to him because that is how the system is set up. This is hydraulic capitalism and it has nothing at all to do with “deserves” or “earn” or “make” or, really, fairness. But by keeping enough people frightened of the world more or less constantly, the political and social will to change it simply never coalesces.

And now add to that this aesthetic element fed to people about what America “ought” to be, and the confusion multiplies.

But wait. Such a machine cannot operate as well as it does without a certain truth to its claims.

Globalization has impacted our economy, in some ways negatively. When you are losing your business it is difficult to look at the so-called bigger picture. And both political parties have for a long time served the same masters at the expense of the middle and working class. And the poor? Individual politicians have cared, here and there and from time to time, but the poor have been disenfranchised as a matter of course and thus do not vote, at least not in sufficient numbers to be heard. This is the unfortunate legacy of those days when both parties shared broader goals and only argued over the details of how to Get There. It is easy to understand, if we care to, how someone like Trump can come along and persuade a lot of people to vote for him when he poses as their champion against a common enemy—Washington. We cannot forget that many who voted for Trump in 2016 would have readily voted for Sanders, who is about as opposite as one can get from Trump, but who represented the same possibility—overturning the D.C. applecart.

The utility of that possibility was and is debatable and we will discover in what ways in the coming months and years, but both were lightning rods for a basic frustration.

What we have now is a roiling mass of inarticulate dissatisfaction that has grown into a social movement, and social movements are often aesthetic as much (if not more so) as political.

Aesthetic?  Look at the targets. LGBTQ rights; separation of religion; the rage over immigration; the dichotomy between demanding one set of social conformities be put into place while others be rejected, often with extreme prejudice. And, as always in this country, issues of race. Any one of these can be demonstrated to be strawman issues, but appearances—ah, appearances, and what they say about who we want to be.  Or at least be seen as. Absent the concrete aspects arising from analysis and an understanding of the components of social dynamics, the aesthetics become the binding commonalities of what amount to tribal affiliations and roll onward as if all the rest needed for cogent response to civic policy were already part and parcel of the call to action.

Unfortunately, this makes it all the more difficult to address, because it is very like ( a perversion really, but still) of matters of taste.

For my part, I reject the basic aims of this mass of inappropriately-named conservative ends. They are illusory for one thing. Hollywood codifications of far more complex phenomena. For another, we long ago passed the point of comfortable isolation. We no longer live in a world where we can ignore each other. Globalization may have been poorly handled (although I defy anyone to explain how something that dynamic can ever be “handled”) but it is inevitable. We all live on a single planet, and we have run out of room to run away from the effects we have on each other. We can’t behave like lone gunmen anymore.  Too many people will get hurt, killed, and our own legacy will be one of ignominy and ruin. We here cannot close the borders, either physically or culturally, and hope to survive, and if we keep trying the world will abandon us and we will not be part of a better future.

We have for a long time been reversing the shambles of Babel, but recently it seems some of us are trying to reinstate the fear of that idea, when everyone was utterly alone and terrified because no one could speak to each other.

Community

Reality vs Not

The image of Trump that says all one needs to know about him came during the so-called Million MAGA March, when his SUV drove through the crowds that had assembled in D.C. on his behalf. We see him pressed against the window, hand raised, grinning, and scooting on by to their cheers. He did not stop. They came for him but he did not stop. He knew they were coming, so something could have been prepared for him to at least give a short speech. But he did not stop. He hurried through, grinning at them. Where was he going that he could not stop to give something back to his supporters?

He was going to golf.

Jokes have been made about a lot of presidents and their golf, but in this case it long ago ceased to be funny. He may or may not have spent more time on the golf course than any other president, but his personal jaunts have cost the taxpayer more than any other.

And the fact that this makes no difference to his supporters speaks to the more cultish aspects surrounding him.

Disclaimer: I have never found anything appealing or even mildly amusing about Donald Trump. He struck me as a fraud back in the Seventies and his string of mismanaged endeavors since has done nothing to convince me otherwise. The best I can figure, he’s one of those people who has financial support because he owes too much to too many and letting him go to live in a trailer park would be too costly. I tried to read his book, The Art of the Deal back when it came out and found it a kind of secular version of an occult magic text based on illusion and bad psychology. I didn’t finish it.

So when it appeared he was going to have a shot at being elected president, I, along with many others, thought, well this is the end of the Republican Party. They’ve put a shyster in the running.

A shyster who has managed to pull the same trick politically as he did financially—too much rides on him to just let him sink, too many careers, too much political capital.  Not because he’s such a great politician but because he has managed to make too many people dependent on him in unhealthy and frankly undemocrtatic ways.

I have been told to look at his accomplishments. To be fair, there are a few that aren’t all that bad.

But it doesn’t matter. Consider Nixon. It can be unapologetically argued that he did quite a lot that was good for the country. The EPA for one. And one might be excused for arguing that had he been left alone, even better things might have emerged. And while that may be true, it is also true that he subverted the institutions he swore an oath to uphold, created a shadow government, bypassed Congress, and committed crimes.

Nothing excuses that.

We do not here rely on cults of personality and because we have tried to be a nation of laws it is implausible to excuse someone who did so much damage on the basis of a few “good” things he may have done.

Because for one thing those good things were not and could never be all of one person’s making.

Nixon damaged our democracy. Trump has possibly broken it.

I don’t care what he might have done that in the next several years we might find laudable. Those things could have been done by anyone and he could not have done them alone in any case.  We have to ask, at what cost?

Suggestions of a sharp intellect behind the clownish veneer are frivolous.  The result of four years of this administration are in the streets. Discord, distrust, confusion, and distortions of right and wrong.

We could go down a list of the campaign promises he failed to deliver on, but why bother? The Trump Cult will excuse them in any of a dozen ways.

The frightening thing is, without the COVID pandemic we might have re-elected him, because he has managed to call so much into question that we are second-guessing ourselves about who we are. But 200,000 deaths from a mishandled public health emergency are impossible to ignore. His claim that they had no playbook for this has been shown to be false. Obama’s people left a detailed playbook behind. His people were smart, they knew what might happen, and they fulfilled their civic duty by trying to prepare the country.  Trump did nothing but shut down clinics that gathered data because he wanted the numbers to be different, which he stated, up front, in public.

I have been challenged to see positives in this.  Sorry.  Even in the broad policy strokes that in some wayu I might agree with, the management of them was so hamfisted and sophomoric that it has made things worse.

Trump has made the world a more dangerous place.

I am not exaggerating.

One might argue that pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords was questionable, but that was largely symbolic.  But pulling out of the WHO was criminal.

For a long time it has been clear that the GOP has become the party of wishful thinking, of appearances, of denial. The moderates are mostly gone, the base isn’t interested in rights so much as privileges, and too many people just want the country to look a certain way and to hell with social responsibility, demographic reality, and evolution of technical change. These are people who want people in church praying to Jesus and no one else, women to stay home and be mothers, men to be straight (and white), and business to lead the way. They want America to be at the forefront of everything but refuse to fund education or support labor in any meaningful way. They think Trump exemplifies their vision of America. A draft-deferred, womanizing, tax evading, subliterate conman who knows one thing—appearances are all that matter.

This is not Trump’s problem.  It is ours.  We bought into that image, enough of us that he actually made it into the White House. Like George W. Bush said almost 20 years ago, “I don’t do nuance.” But the world is nothing but nuance and those who refuse to deal with that will always make a mess.

Messes are costly.  We have one now.  And this obdurate refusal to concede the election, even when every reliable institution says it is legitimate, is the final evidence we need to see that this mess, one of our own making, is all Trump was ever going to provide.

Enough. It is time for him to go and it is time for his supporters to sit down and shut up about it. If I may remind them of their reaction four years ago, “He lost, get over it.”  And finally, “Fuck your Feelings.”

Fine legacy, that. I hope they’re proud.  Oh, wait. They are.

And that’s our problem.

Art

Some Thoughts and A Photograph or Two

I’ve been on vacation this week. I intended to use the time to do a lot of cleaning up. It’s not like there are many places to go lately. And I have a basement in dire need of cleaning.

Well, I did some cleaning—more than I probably expected to—and took care of a couple of necessary chores and generally slept more than I usually do. I wish I had gotten more done, but I’m not beating myself up about it.

Oh, here’s a picture:

Something nice, pleasant. I’m not sure all of this post will be, so I’m offering “refreshment” along the way.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. I listened to some of the Barrett hearings and I heard pretty much what I expected to hear. She ducked questions adroitly, presented a façade of judicial competence (knowing all the right terms, etc), and did nothing to outrage the “wrong” people, namely the Republicans who are going to rubber-stamp her appointment. For better or worse, she’s it.

But it occurred to me that Congress really ought to stop asking technical questions. It’s unlikely a nominee will get this far and be unable to spar over legalistic questions. I think a more fundamental set of questions ought to be asked.  Do you believe the Earth is round? How old is the universe? Do you believe miracles are more efficacious than science? Is climate change real? Do you believe there are innately inferior groups of human beings? Do you believe there is evidence supporting evolution?  I would like to hear answers to those kinds of questions. We aren’t going to get the kind of answers on which to base a valid judgment on someone’s suitability to be appointed in the legal realm. One reason is, we test assumptions all the time in courts, that what a trial is. So asking someone how they’ll rule on this or that is kind of ridiculous.

But seeing how someone responds to questions about the world and reality, now, that would be more telling.  It’s possible a Flat-Earther might make a perfectly fine jurist, but the odds are that someone who is that disconnected from the real world has some serious disconnects that would render their judgments…well, a bit questionable, simply because they do not on a very fundamental level share a common perception and understanding of the world in which we live.

Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t accept anthropogenic climate change. Either because of political biases or because she doesn’t pay attention to what’s happening on the planet or she believes it doesn’t matter because the Rapture is coming soon so why waste time understanding something that will disappear with everything else in short order. I’m being a bit facetious, but only a bit.

My point is, I would prefer to know how these nominees see the world. A big question would be Do you believe men and women are equal as human beings or do you believe they have distinct rôles that require them to be treated differently? Never mind what the law says, what do you believe?

Another picture:

 

Over 20 million people have cast ballots already. It would gratify me greatly if this proved to be a record turnout. I am still convinced that turnout is essential.

We’re going to go to the polls on November 3rd. I feel it is important. I want to see what there is to see. I doubt we’ll have any armed partisans at our polling place, but you never know. I’m seeing this nonsense in Idaho and elsewhere, with these dystopically-inclined post adolescent conspiracy addicts threatening vigilantism should things not go the way they want. It is my belief—just a belief, mind you, but not based on nothing—that less will come of all that bluster than promised or feared. I don’t think much of people who isolate in the hills, come to town expecting Thunderdome, posing in Starbucks like a bad movie promotion, and rejecting anything that might take their Moment away, liked facts and ethics and community well-being. They have been imbibing a brew of Fifties-era SF movies, Mad Max, Bircher pseudo-science, and Talk Radio Newspeak for too long. They do not, I feel, understand the world, but they’ve figured out how to make that ignorance a virtue. They thrive on disappointment and I suspect they will continue to so thrive.

Something more pleasant again:

 

On a personal note, I intend—I always intend—to get a bit more disciplined about certain things. The writing, for one. I’ve done little enough in the last few months. This past week, I did almost none. Yesterday I went back to work on a novella I’ve been teasing at, and today, obviously, I’m doing this.

But I also need to get on the self-promotion schtick for my photographs. They’ve been available for purchase for almost two years now and I’ve sold—nothing. I don’t know if it’s because they just aren’t very good or because no one thinks I’m serious about this. I plan to buy a new scanner sometime in the next few months and start transferring my old negatives into digital files. I have five decades of images to go through and it would not be a pleasant thought to see them all just go in the rubbish when I die.

No, that’s not an issue. Not at present, anyway. I’ve been dealing more and more with my parents on that topic, but I am fine. Again—I Am Fine. I went to the gym this morning and even impressed myself.

But, as they say, I have less life ahead of me than behind. I would like to see some of my visual work out there, adorning walls, and so forth. Yes, you will have to buy it. But I need to find some avenues for getting it in front of people.

Which brings me to a statement of being. I am fine. Physically, mentally. Emotionally? Hey, we all have things we need to work on, and the world right now isn’t exactly a cuddly place (but then when is it ever?), but I have some optimism. I intend to be here for a while. I have things to do.

So, I ask you all, whoever you may be, to share with me a few moments of possibility. That things will get better. As long as we don’t give up. I know, that sounds a bit cliché and a touch Pollyanna-ish, but it also happens to be true. Years ago I learned in the fiction business that those who guaranteed will fail are those who give up and go away. Chance may be fickle, but you can’t benefit from it if you aren’t there. It’s not much, but sometimes it’s all you need.

It’s the follow-through that really matters, and for that you really have Be There.

Anyway, enough babbling. One last pleasant image to go out on. Be well.

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One More…

So it’s October 12th.  Always, for me, my birthday. Columbus Day? I wholeheartedly approve removing that as cause for celebration.  People migrate, invade, infiltrate, spread. Why make a big deal out of something so common it happened before we figured out how to write? I never thought we needed to make heroes out of those people. We’re here now, time to make heroes out of people who make things better.

In any case, I am now, to my dismay and bemusement, 66.  I mean, seriously? I’m eligible for social security.

So, a picture:

 

Look at that. Does that look 66 to you? (Don’t answer that.)

In the past, I’ve indulged myself with state-of-the-me posts—here’s where I am, where I’ve been, what I plan—but today, I’m doing some major housecleaning, puttering, and trying to figure out where and how to go. All in all, I have no complaints. I take vitamins, an antacid, and that’s about it. I’m still exercising, still working, and still trying to be creative.

About that. The one thing I can say is, I lack the enthusiasm I enjoyed a few years ago. I no longer chomp at the bit to get cracking on new projects. I’m getting a bit worn down.

I’m not happy about that. I have things I still want to do. Some of them will have to wait till we deal with the current health crisis.  And the current political one.

It is actually difficult to write science fiction lately. Not because, as one might think, the times are more skiffy than what I might make up, but because it has gotten harder to muster the optimism required. Maybe if I wrote horror, it would be different. But I never liked horror. Just look around at the state of the world and you might understand why. The vicarious thrill of experiencing this kind of dread, fear, and uncertainty eludes me.

But personally, inside the walls of my head, my home, my gestalt? I’m fine. And that gives me pause, believe me.

I’m just a bit tired.

But, hey. October 12th, 2020.  I am sixty-six years old. I’ll still be tomorrow. And so on, till I’m not, but even then, I will going forward always be at least 66.

If anyone cares to do something to make it better, well, find one of my books and read me. Or go my photography gallery (links available on this site) and pick out something you might like on your wall. Such things are sustaining. And it makes me feel like I’ve done a thing or two worth your time.

Meanwhile, I have a future to work on.

Thank you for your kind thoughts.

Community

Dangerous Games

One of the difficulties of living in an open society is the unspoken requirement to be tolerant of stupidity. Giving others respect for opinions and beliefs that run counter to civility, reason, or the consideration of shared rights can nurture the false impression that such beliefs and opinions are valid and acceptable, not only to hold but to act upon.  While certainly one can entertain any idea, to go beyond contemplation and moving toward instantiating certain notions as if they were somehow justified across community lines is a different thing altogether.

The people involved in the kidnapping plot of Governor Whitmer of Michigan have too long accepted that their notions of legitimate action, based on opinions and beliefs which have gone unchallenged for them for long enough to constitute a functional break with reality, are exemplars of the downside of tolerance. Because it has become unacceptable for too long to simply call certain ideas out for the nonsense they are—because one is “entitled” to one’s opinion—we have seen grow pockets of cultish beliefs incommensurable with the very open society that says we should tolerate the widest possible range of opinion, hypotheses, personal choice, and credos.

This is the paradox at the heart of what we wish to see as our endeavor. This country. This planet.

But right there, the paradox emerges. Do we want to see the same things?

Broadly speaking, these little gatherings of white pseudo-militia groups embrace a Libertarian æsthetic. Not so much the philosophy. They may have a member or two who know a bit more about their stated philosophy and preferred political stance, but I suspect for the most part these folks have matriculated from the Hollywood school of American Myth. Combined with what appears to be a constrained ability to interact with people who are not just like them, they have mixed a cocktail of old westerns, McCarthy-era Red Baiting, and hate-filled commentary from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones to come up with something which “feels” like True American Virtue.

This has always been around, though. What is different now is that we have an administration which, for a variety of reasons, seems to be encouraging them. What began as cheerleading during the campaign to garner votes from the pool of chronically disaffected heirs of an American Dream that was never real or available to them the way they had become convinced it was is now a dangerous game of electoral chicken. Combined with his continual and too-often arbitrary interference with institutions and systems that until now worked well enough to afford us the space and luxury of indulging fancies and arguing over the furnishings as if they were the real substance of our republic, we have a situation now where too many people believe they have leave to act on their niche paranoias and dreams of a new revolution. It has now risen to the level of significant threat and it is time to recognized that, fun as this may all be for those who dislike liberal democracy and the actualities of genuine tolerance and inclusion, we live in a period balanced on a knife-edge and for no other reason than the refusal to recognize hate when it stands before us.

I have listened to the spinmasters of his campaign try to cast all this in a different light and the one consistent aspect of all their rhetoric is a persistent refusal to address what he has said and what has happened.  That for a huge portion of this country little or none of this has touched them directly, the fact is what happens on the surface and why can be used to make or break law, custom, and the connections that keep us whole. How many people in any organization does it take to wreck things? Very few.  Actual Nazis in Germany in the 1930s numbered in the minority, vastly dwarfed by the majority who were not, and yet that group, that slice, came to speak for and represent the whole of Germany and take it into a darkness we here believe couldn’t take us.  We see the Proud Boys and their like and we hear what the president says and while we may feel some comfort that “most of us” do not approve or would accept that in our communities, the reality is we are witnessing an erosion of our civic virtue and our national well-being.

He speaks nonsense. His followers seem to believe it. It would be an indictment on our past and legacy if somehow the majority of us who realize this cannot meet it as it should be met and he is re-elected. Our institutions and principles will not have failed us—we will have failed them.

We have to attend not to what we might lose but to what we are losing. We have to reclaim the authentic dream,  We have to become ourselves and remembering that while tolerating the freedom to think what we want, we are not obligated to accord stupidity, ignorance, and lies equal time at the podium.

This is not a game.

 

Art

Detritus

Things pile up.

In 27-some years of living in my house, debris accumulates. Not dust, that can be swept up, wiped away—redistributed—but Stuff. Books, papers, nick-knacks, unquantifiable objets-d’art. A long list of “do you know what this is, where we got it, do we want/need/feel impotent to discard it?”

In my case, books, music, movies. Media. I am an art packrat. A “pack-art” or an art rat or some such. My shelves are full, the stacks are growing, and I find myself unwilling to part with any of it, because it all means something. I have a three foot shelf of books about the Napoleonic Age I am loathe to be rid of because they are research for a trilogy I have written but not sold and on the off-chance I need to do further work on that trilogy, I do not want to lose the books. (I have another, seven foot shelf, of books about the Civil War and Reconstruction Era for a novel which never got out of the note stage, but which I very much want to write, so I’m hanging on to the books.) I have piles of books I want to read, but have no idea when I’ll get to them, and some of them will be rather beside-the-point if I don’t get to them soon.

Then there are the sheaves of notes. Story ideas, phone numbers, websites, research comments, scribbles. Some of it goes back 30 years and I can look at the words and wonder just what that was all about.

The music and videos are another matter. I listen to music a lot. I love movies and television shows. But we now have Netflix, which adds to the obvious impossibility of “catching up.” I’m beginning to think about that during retirement, but then there are all the books…

It is my past and I am unwilling to bury it.

A bit of morbid darkness creeps in sometimes, looking at all this. Leaving it all behind for others to pick through, assuming they will. More likely it all just goes out the door. No one in particular will know the history of acquisition behind it all.

Which for the most part doesn’t bother me.

But I am an artist. I don’t mean that in any egoistical sense, only in that I have spent my waking life creating things, ostensibly beautiful things, for the pleasure of others. I have spent almost as long puzzled that no one really gets to see much of it. I am—have been, remain—terrible at self-marketing. I have tens of thousands of photographs going back to my adolescence. Most of it unremarkable, journeyman work, forgettable if not just bad. But there are some good images.

I have nothing in place to secure the future of that body of work.

The writing is different. I’ve managed to get it out there, in front of people, and I am modestly able to claim some kind of imprint on the public. Not much, but it won’t all just vanish.

My music is yet another matter still.

But it is there. All of it. Sitting beneath the surface of a life.

I wonder how other people anticipate the evidence of a life lived. I had every intention of being more or less orderly, with a place and a context for each important object. The filing system of my experience should have been like a gallery, through which one might stroll and see everything. Instead, it’s more or less a mess. A comfortable one, for the most part, but sometimes I see the need to impose order, just so it doesn’t look like it needs throwing out.

Purges can be therapeutic, though, never mind the freeing up of space.  There is the mental drag of always being reminded of what you haven’t done yet.

Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I wonder about the workers tasked with throwing things out of suddenly vacated houses or apartments. Are they aware that they are excavating lives? Not curating, though. That’s what concerns me now.

I had other plans for my ecology.

I think “ecology” is a useful way to look at one’s life, the furnishings, the rituals, the care. Healthy ecologies extend across the entire spectrum of possibility and desire. We assemble them over life. Early on, it’s a matter of adding things in, then arranging them, and finally some weeding becomes necessary.

But there’s some comfort in all that surround. Familiarity, at least. And throwing things out can sometimes feel like self-surgery.

It is true, though, that sentimentality can become a trap. It can feel better than the here and now, especially since it is so malleable. Sentiment (as well as a constantly reshuffled memory) rewrites history for us.  Not only pain, but everything acquires a temporal gloss. Like the speed of light, the closer we approach precision, the harder it becomes, and we can never quite get there. We assume record-keeping, memorabilia, scrapbooks, and the components we build to represent our lives (to us as well as to others) will make it easier.

I’m not sure what that means, though. As the past recedes, faster and faster, dopplering out of reach sometimes, the objects meant to remind become in themselves the thing of which we are reminded. Not the event or the people or the place, but the thing. At which point we have to question if it is worth keeping. If the memento no longer memorializes but, perhaps, just takes up space for something more valuable…

These are certainly personal considerations. But it may be that the same applies to larger matters. How much do we keep as a community? As a city? As a nation? At what point do the things meant to memorialize take on a self-importance that supplants the legitimate memory and thus become blockages, impediments, worse than useless? What might we learn or discover in their absence? What might we become if no longer encumbered by the distorted memorials of a past which may have no real relationship to what we were and certainly not to who we are?

If I finally get rid of that pile of old notes, will it change who I am? Probably not. But it might let me be who I am with a little more clarity.

Something to think about.

 

Art

Say That Again Maybe Better Next Time

This is a mini-rant.

I have no idea how much this influences the times we are living through now, but—allow me to set the stage first—part of my job (day-job) is reading books for possible inclusion in inventory. These are generally self-published. In spite of everything, I have become…an editor.

As a youth, I experienced impatience with what have become known as Grammar Nazis. As with so many elements of good writing, I didn’t care that much as long as meaning was conveyed and the story moved along. Event was my drug of choice, character not so much. The elegance of the prose…well, sure, but it wasn’t necessary.

So I thought.

Years later, having labored at my own fiction, I found myself pitying that young idiot. Event means nothing unless character conveys impact. The elegance of the prose is primarily a property of the kind of writing that allows a reader the full range of experience through a story. Style, substance, character, plot. Take any one away, the text falters. Make them work together and you get something worth reading, perhaps even memorable.

And now I see the downside of haste and the ease of Getting The Book Into Print regardless of its quality. Or qualities.

And then I listen to the speech of our public figures and can’t help but wonder if we are in a state of communicative disarray because they (not all, but some, perhaps many) never learned how to write or speak well.

Once upon a time, Rhetoric was taught as one of the primary Arts.

There are many reasons we should revisit that.  I will say here that Grammar (as it was taught to me in school and probably as it is still taught) is no substitute for a full course on the Reason To Learn To Write Well.

If we cannot speak to each other intelligibly, how can we ever hope to solve problems?

Regarding the books I read for my job, most of them, usually, are written in what I would say is serviceable prose. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, subjects, objects, all those elements are mainly in their proper places and meaning comes across.

But sometimes, where it matters most, a significant handful of hopefuls write in what I can only assume is a manner (mannered), a style they think is “literary.” Convoluted constructions, run-on sentences, what Mark Twain called “second cousin words” instead of the right ones. And attempts at conveying…something…of which the writer has no real understanding and covering that lack by piling on Important Sounding Verbiage.

Primarily, the problem is the writer does not actually have a grasp of what they are trying to convey. Secondarily—and fatally—they haven’t taken the time to find out how to do the craft.

Likewise with so many second-rate pundits and politicians.

We live at a time of unprecedented access to public dissemination. In the past, you couldn’t get your words published unless they could get past an editor. Now we can put out any damn set of sentences we want with no one to tell us we shouldn’t.  Self-publishing has created a glut of bad prose and an entitled generation of self-important blatherers who think their words are worth the same time and attention as someone who has worked hard to learn the craft and—most importantly—understood what is important to say.

And I’m not talking about paper books or even ebooks. Multiple platforms exist to allow access to people for anything they feel moved to say. In the sense of it being a forum, all the social media outlets are functionally publishers and too many people think they’re worth reading by putting something on them.

The result of which is a degradation of public discourse. Hitting Enter has become the sinecure of too many empty minds, vacuous ideas, and poorly reasoned diatribes.

Something about seeing bad prose on a page between the covers of a physical book makes it more obvious.

Years ago I became aware of a subset of wannabe writers who felt they could be writers while eschewing reading. This baffled me no end. To begin with, why would you conceive of the desire to be a writer if you did not already love reading. Of course, the truth is, they do not want to be writers. They have no idea what that would be.  What they want is to be Important. Noticed. They want a stage. They assume the desire is sufficient to the purpose.

Likewise for people who wish to be Thinkers without troubling themselves to learn how to think. But of course, they don’t really want to be Thinkers. They want to tell others what to think. They want to be Important. Noticed.

We have given them a stage. Many stages. And since the price of admission to the show is usually free, well, as they used to say (and may still) you get what you pay for.

Please. Communication is not a trait like hair color, height, or eye color. It has to be learned. You have to work at it.  And just because you learned how to talk does not mean you automatically know how to speak.

Thank you for your time and attention. I’m going to go read some more books now.

blog

Walking

I took a walk this morning, around my neighborhood. You should understand, in some ways I am a very typical urban dweller.  I don’t know my neighbors.  We don’t hang out together, we don’t have each others’ phone numbers, we aren’t pals.  Nothing deliberate, just a product of the car and the phone and the pace of our lives.  When we moved into this neighborhood a quarter-plus-century ago, we would take evening walks and see many older residents sitting on their porches.  Some would wave and smile.  I finally realized that some of them, at least, were indulging a practice from a faded era.

They sat on their porches in the evening specifically to greet passersby and maybe have conversations. As these people disappeared—moved, died—we stopped seeing this.  In the last few years we have had an influx of immigrants—Hispanics, Eastern European, Asian—and again we see this practice.

I don’t know how to engage this way.  I am, in fact, a basically shy and self-conscious person, and I can’t imagine most times anyone wanting to talk to me who doesn’t already know me.  Maybe that’s a symptom of the urban social matrix, too, I don’t know.

But lately there have been even fewer. The streets are emptier.

Not abandoned.  Lawns are tended, sidewalks swept, plants on steps or railings watered. The evidence of human presence is as visible as ever.

The silence is different.  Even though I have rarely indulged speaking to strangers just because they were waiting to be spoken to doesn’t mean I never appreciated their reality.  We would walk by and wave, give a good morning or good evening, smile.  It doesn’t take much to reaffirm our connection as human beings.

I doubt I will change my basic nature when this current situation is ended. I’m just not like that. And I do value the structure of contacts from before. Choosing your friends has, I think, more significance than having people thrust upon you because there are no other avenues for interaction.

But I will appreciate them more, I think.  The sounds, the scents, the frisson of neighbors in the now.

I wish them well.