Proper Respect

Trump voters ask me to respect their choice. I can’t. It’s not a respectable choice. This is a democracy. I respect their right to make that choice. If you want to vote for him, I will not lock your door or chain you to the bed or hide your car keys. In a country where Republicans are disenfranchising their opposition wherever they can by pushing “voter I.D. laws,” I will respect your right to make up your mind and cast your vote. Nor would I support any trickery that would try to prevent you. But I cannot respect your choice.

Donald Trump is a demagogue. Mike Pence criticized President Obama for calling him this. He said that name calling has no place in our democracy. (Someone ought to introduce Mike Pence to his running mate.) But it is not name calling to call Donald Trump a Demagogue. “Crooked Hillary” is name calling, “Lying Ted,” “Lazy Jeb.” These are examples of name calling. If I called Donald Trump the bloated host of the hirsute, Day-Glo alien attached to his scalp, that would be name calling. “Demagogue” is a descriptive term—wholly accurate: “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.” It is a negative term because it labels a negative thing, like “murderer” and “rapist.”

Donald Trump is a demagogue. And that’s about the nicest thing I could say about him. To choose to vote for him is a mistake. It may be one made out of a sincere and heart-felt desire to make America Great. But it won’t do that. You don’t make a shirt clean or a country great by dragging it through the mud.

What Is the Number?

There are many ways to kill yourself.
But if they didn’t have guns, many people who would wouldn’t.
They wouldn’t try or they wouldn’t succeed. They’d get help.
The moment of panic would pass.
Many would be alive today.

 Guns don’t kill people, people do. Yes.
But they do it so much more easily with guns.
So much more efficiently
So much more successfully.
Just aim at head or heart and pull.
It’s no wonder it’s the tool of choice.
 
You may think it protects you.
And maybe it does.
Maybe there will be a time when you personally for your own preservation will find yourself lucky
     you have a gun.
It’s not likely. Chances are better it will kill you
Or it will kill your spouse or one of your children
Or one of your neighbors or friends.
This is well attested, but no one can be sure.

Keep it, if you think it’s worth the risk.
Life is a gamble.
But please
To honor those who will die
Ask yourself this:
Where is your price point?
How many souls is your comfort worth?
On the off chance that sometime in the uncertain future you will be among the very few this thing
   has rescued, how many other lives equal yours?

 

Fixing the Door

For many months

if you did not open the screen door just right,

pulling up on the handle to keep the wheel that would no longer turn above the track and holding the tension

until it was all the way open or all the way closed,

the whole thing would crash on the deck.

Every fifth time, it crashed anyway.

You’d curse.

Everyone cursed that fucking door.

 

Today, you took the door deliberately off its track.

You opened the package with the two metal wheels (which you’d bought months ago),

and, drilling one hole and putting in one screw,

you fixed it.

 

It was as easy as you knew it would be,

which is why you took so long to do it. All day

the family has been going in and out of that door to sun,

to visit the garden,

to cool themselves in the pool.

The door works perfectly.

No one has noticed.

First Contact Speech

My friends—I call you friends, though I do not know you, though I understand that many of you wish bad things for me and my people, though if I knew each of you as a person, some I would laugh with and share a bowl and some I would greet through gritted teeth, I call you friends. –I call you friends as a sign of my good will, not because we are friends but because I hope your people and my people can live in peace. I call you friends to make us friends. If your tongue has a better word, I do not know it.

                My friends, you say you bring me God. God is already here. You know this already. You tell us God is everywhere. God is here. You say that this is true. You therefore bring us knowledge of God, God who is everywhere, God who has always been here. We thank you. We will hear your knowledge of God. And we will give you our knowledge of God. We will exchange our knowledge with your knowledge like fire of two colors, like a flame doubles when divided.

                My friends, you say your knowledge of God is true knowledge and our knowledge of God is not-true knowledge. You wish to take our knowledge which is coal away from us and give us yours which is gold. It may be our knowledge is coal and yours is gold. Gold is a useless ornament on a cold night. It is rare, hard to find, requires much labor to become a bauble that burns falsely in flashes. It gives light only when light is not needed, when the sun burns. Its light has no heat, and this is good, because when it burns no heat is needed. Coal is everywhere. It is easy to find. It gives heat to all, requiring no skill or wealth. I am glad our knowledge is coal. Perhaps you come from a place where there is no coal. I am glad your knowledge is gold. When we do not freeze, when we are well fed and watered and well pleased with our lives, we may admire this gold and ask of it what ornament it may add to our wisdom.

                We have received already one lump of gold. And it is this: you call God God. This is gold. We call God many names. This is coal. But God has no name. God is beyond naming. This is an ornament to our knowledge.

Before I will receive any more of your gold, please take from me an equal weight of coal in even exchange for this gold.

My friends, you call God "he" and "him." Your eyes see the world as "he" and "him" and "she" and "her." In all persons and all animals and all plants, you see the two of your tongue and so your tongue does not permit a one or a many that is a one or a many but for being a not-two. You must be patient. This is hard to say in the words of your tongue. You see the outside of things. And on this outside you see person as high and all other things as low. We do not see this. If person is the highest of all things, then you say God is a person, forgetting that this saying is a picture. When you see persons, you see man and not-man and you say that man is higher. We do not see this. You forget that this saying is a picture that says more of what you do not know than what you do know. So you say God is a man-person. You look around and you see the world in numbers. You say I am not my wife. You say I am not my children. I am not my people. I am not the earth, the stars, the sky. You say the rivers do not flow through me on their way to the sky. We do not see this. You say God is one. You say God is one-male-person. This is not gold. This is not coal. This is that which is not. This is a stone lifted to smash a bone then tossed aside forever. This is a stone when it is not a stone. What I give you is coal.

You must be patient, my friends. If your tongue has better words to say this, I do not know them. I do not believe it does. This is hard to say in your tongue.

               

Fencing as You Go

To some degree your words are defined by your use of them, defined, that is, as you use them. Your interlocutors have then to navigate what you say by reference to their knowledge of the language and their intuition of the present situation. (This is not fully recognized in any research I have read on the subject, but it seems to be implicit in the work of Austin.) Wittgenstein informs us that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Yes, but that means that the words' meanings are being made every time they are used. Add to this the imperfect presence of any speaker’s meaning to himself at the point of the utterance and you see the inherent and practical imprecision of every saying. And this is only the beginning of the complications, but it is as far as I will go at the moment. The deeper we investigate the complexities of the utterance, the worse it gets for what we like to call “communication.” Language affords all sorts of tricks that allow us to think we’re being rational when we are actually saying nothing at all—and to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness.