Wednesday, November 30, 2016

May We Have Good Weather Tomorrow

You can pray for good weather tomorrow, but
Tomorrow’s weather is already set.
The weatherman may be wrong to say it will rain, but
Whether or not it will rain has already been set
By the pressure in the air and the moisture and
That butterfly that so fiercely beat its wings in Columbia
Last February when the open beak of a sparrow appeared out of nowhere.
The only question that remains, the one on which our salvation
Depends, is whether the weather can be changed
By any means at all at any point between now
And the end. Go ahead and pray.

Friday, November 18, 2016

No Tomorrow


Politicians, pundits, priests, professors and other cheerleaders tell us, daily, they “remain optimistic.” Usually this is follows a review of the most dismal statistics—statistics about deaths, wars, political divisions, melting ice caps, rising seas of racism, sexism, homophobia, sealed borders, water shortages, shrinking forests. The forests of the earth cut down for farms to grow the food so an exploding population can feed itself, shrinking the lungs to make more room for the stomach so Mother Earth can glut herself until she cannot breathe. But they “remain optimistic.”

I don’t. In fact I’m pretty depressed about the state of the earth and the chances the human inhabitants will wise up before it’s too late. If I wasn’t before—before the feeble-minded, hate-filled, fear-mongering Tangerine Tornado prevaricated itself into the oval office—I would be now. But I already was. I’m just more angry about it now. This just amplifies it.

Tragedy is the state of sad affairs that should not have to have happened, that should have been avoidable but weren’t. Everything you needed to solve the problem was there. But you could not have known it. The state we are in is truly and technically tragic, though the tragedy is still playing out.
For the earth to survive we need well-meaning people to work very hard, to be willing to sacrifice short term gains for long-term viability. The recent election makes it abundantly clear: we aren’t going to do that.

The threat of global warming is so great that it will take a worldwide effort never quite paralleled in history, the closest parallels being global war. But global war was a response to a much more palpable threat. Global warming still seems abstract. Sure the storms are getting bigger and stronger and more frequent. But there have always been storms, and mendacious people are still able to convince people who don’t want to be scared that this or that global conspiracy is lying to them to bring in a new world order. A stupid old story we gobble up like candy.

The truth is, I don’t think we’ll figure it out in time. In fact, there’s a better than even chance it’s already too late. Not just at the rate we’re crowding the skies of Mother Earth with sun-sucking carbon, but because of what we’ve already done. The process accelerates. There may well already be enough poison in the sky to kill the patient and the people walk around debating or ignoring or fighting over the riches archeologists from some distant star may someday stumble on, figure out, and laugh about. The poison has been ingested and we like Hamlet still babbling when no medicine in the world can do us good babble on the stage but just enough life left to proclaim that we are dead.
There is not half an hour of life. The treacherous instrument is in our hands, unbated and envenomed. The foul practice hath turned itself upon ourselves and here we lie, never to rise again. Our Mother’s poisoned.

I do not remain optimistic. On a planet on which out of ignorance, spite, prejudice, and just plain bone-headedness something like Trump can happen, how could we possibly imagine that the inhabitants have the brains or initiative that are required to fix its problems in time? One day soon these people drop the pretense and fall on their knees and say, “Lord, help us, we have sinned against the Earth.” By then the alarm will have been screaming for hours, while they talked all the louder to drown it out. And as they, “Oh, yeah, I know what the screaming is,” they fall asleep forever.
Well, then, why bother? If you don’t have faith in humanity, and you don’t think we have time, and you can’t expect God to intervene—his track record for saving people from their own stupidity is no cause for hope—why even write this pessimistic piece to bring the dying legions down?

Why, indeed?

Because of course I may be wrong. Because I’m just one person staring from one awkward vantage at a huge and complex problem. Because I acknowledge—eyes open—that this problem is more than any one brain can analyze to certainty, certainly too big for me.  
Pessimism is not an excuse for giving up. It’s a stronger argument to press on than its cousin proclaiming glass half-full. Because under the banner of a well-informed pessimism you see how hard you’d have to fight. Because you have no alternative.

A pessimist is someone driven by a wall of fire to the edge of a cliff. He’s facing a divide he’s almost sure he cannot leap across. If he tries he’ll probably die. But if he doesn’t, he’ll certainly die. He doesn’t give himself the lie that he can make it. He sees it for what it is. And he jumps like there’s no tomorrow.  



Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Passing through the Membrane


When nice stopped meaning precise
or when mean was transformed from low to unkind
when still traded always for up till now
and sophisticated skied into a compliment
we can never quite know. One day
he said “I love you still” and she wondered what she’d done.
But to be safe, she didn’t say.
They broke up the next day.
Years later he told his second wife
that she was kind of sophisticated,
but nice,
if you know what I mean.
A neat tart, she thought,
of some oxymoronic sort
and said so. So he lost
his second wife as well
for being mean.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Presence


“Everything becomes and recurs eternally.” Nietzsche

“An utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable.” Bakhtin

The high whine in my left ear cannot drown
the higher fainter whine in my right.  
I’m growing old. Falling apart as everything does,
little by little, until
the whole structure crumbles. Nonetheless
I can still hear the steady click of the clock like a heartbeat
over the whine. And the alternate rhythm of music still
easily draws me away. Sometimes
I think the best attitude to take to death is
to ignore it. Don’t accept it.
Don’t bother to fear it. Just don’t
pay it any heed. Preparation
is just another form of denial,
another agent of that fell sergeant. And yet,
the moment I sat down and urged
the goddess presence to visit me
like a holy ghost and write whatever comes
I heard the whine in my ear against the music of my life
and thought of death. 

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Late Night Thoughts on This Horrendous Election


No one has ever tried harder to throw an election than Trump did. Barely a day went by when he didn’t say or do or fail to do something which should have disqualified him in the eyes of every American. There’s no need to catalog these gross lapses of basic decency, the stuff we teach to the smallest children who act out even in private. And yet he won. And it’s not because Hillary was such a bad candidate that people felt they had to vote for Trump. Some felt that way, of course. But I still have to maintain that those who said, “I loathe Trump like any decent person but I have to vote for him because Hillary is so evil” can’t be many. The statement itself is so irrational, so contrary to all the evidence, that I however large the number of people who believed this, it cannot account for Trump’s obscene victory.

But something has to. A lot of people right now, two days after the election, are pulling their hair out to understand. Some, like Michael Moore, gave us a scenario long before the election that accounts pretty convincingly for what happened—at least one of his five points does (the one about the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin strategy). But Moore himself was not convinced when he wrote it that Trump was going to win (the week after he penned a way to stop Trump; he also voted for Hillary, which would have been a waste of time if he knew Trump would win). His essay was more of an “if Trump wins, this is how it will happen,” though for marketing purposes (presumably) it’s circulated as “Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win in November.” Moreover, the whole five reasons taken together don’t explain how Americans, some of them by no means stupid in other ways, could cast a vote for this unpredictable, valueless, inexperienced, unqualified, hateful and mendacious clown.

I thought better of Americans generally. I still believe not enough of them are stupid enough for their sheer stupidity to have been what propelled them to do something so stupid. Even very intelligent people do stupid things sometimes. Einstein probably failed to grab his umbrella when it threatened rain. (At least it would not surprise me to hear that he did.)

So you still have to figure out how so many not-stupid people could be so stupid. I don’t like any of the reasons I’m hearing, all the exit poll data, the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary, the complacency of people who didn’t vote because all the polls said she’d win—so what was the point? None of that puts it over the top as far as I can see. The phenomenon was so big and the act of voting so counterintuitive and counterproductive that something else had to be at play.

Something neither logical analysis nor research can uncover. The unaccounted element in Trump’s (stupid—have I said “stupid” enough yet?) victory was the same force that propelled the sales and hysteria of Harry Potter books and Beany Babies. Donald Trump rode the wave of a mindless, hysterical, mimetic fad, the kind that sweeps through every society with pretty predictable regularity, the kind that leaves people with Rubbermaid bins of worthless stuffed animals they bought in a frenzy convinced they were setting themselves up for future riches on the resale market.

I should make it clear I have nothing against Harry Potter books or Beanie Babies. The animals are cute, well made, fun to play with. The books are competently written, fantasy-mysteries fun to read, full of safe themes of love and loyalty and friendship that only the most paranoid fundamentalist could have a problem with. But the toys are not a hundred times better than the other cute stuffed animals that were offered for sale during the frenzy, and the books are not a hundred times better than a lot of other books published for the same audience in the same period. Indeed their greatness did not get noticed by all those publishers to whom they were first offered because it was never their greatness that sold them. Unpredictably, and with a large element of randomness thrown in, they caught the wave when the culture was ready for another bit of collective madness.

The species is wired for this, and the global communications and marketing networks amplify the phenomenon in ways unforeseeable for those things emerged. And as in all such cases, whether confined to a single household or town or spread out throughout the world, the individuals so caught up are convinced that their frenzy is not a frenzy, that they are acting on their own volition and that they “just really like Harry Potter,” or Beanie Babies or any number of other fads you can think up on your own.

The phenomenon if you are interested is well analyzed in the work of Rene Girard in such texts as The Scapegoat and Things Hidden since the Creation of the World and many other books.

So this is my conclusion: Trump is a fad.

I almost typed “fraud” but he’s not so much a fraud. He makes almost no attempt to hide his con. The one insightful thing he said in his 18 month campaign was that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any supporters. (It wasn’t of course his own insight; he was quoting or plagiarizing, but it was still insightful.) In fact he marveled as he said it. He couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense (even to him, who has a very low threshold for sense). But he was right. And that’s the best evidence I can submit for the claim. Fads are not reasonable. Fads catch reasonable people up in irrational acts.

Fads are things that leave you months later, when they have finally passed, a lot lighter in the wallet, trying to figure out what to do with dozens or Rubbermaid buckets full of regret.