"How about We Just Give Trump a Chance?"

As for “giving Trump a chance,” there are as far as I can see only two possible justifications for doing so. The first is that he has personally earned a chance. I think that whatever your stance on the man’s policies or positions, someone who spent the last eight years trying, without a shred of evidence, to undermine the legitimacy of his predecessor by claiming he was a Muslim from Africa, has not personally earned the chance. Personally he’s earned scorn and derision and the constant whining of Trump and his supporters about how “unfairly” he’s been treated deserves nothing better than maniacal laughter. Despite his claim of “great surety” that no politician in history has been treated worse or more unfairly, in fact no one is seriously denying the legitimacy of his victory. He hasn’t been treated worse than he himself treated President Obama.

The second reason to “give him a chance” is that it would be for the good of the country. That claim has a little more weight. Even Obama himself—a man infinitely more gracious, patriotic, and civil minded than the current president, said we should wish Trump success. It sounds good. One should, if possible, set aside the well-earned scorn Trump has worked so hard for and wish him well if not doing so is harmful to the country. However hard it may be to swallow the anger and let this man off the hook for his myriad sins against pretty much everything an American should hold dear, we should let him off the hook indeed if that serves the greater good.

But what does it actually mean to do so? Does it mean sitting back quietly while he tries to implement policies that go against one’s values? Does it mean staying silent when he delegitimizes the press (and therefore the Constitution)? Should we shush ourselves when he insults the world’s billion Muslims? Does it mean giving him no opposition when he tries to funnel more and more of the nation’s wealth away from the poor and middle class up to his billionaire cronies? If that’s what it means to “give him a chance,” then no. No American should for one moment let him off the hook. We could forgive or at least ignore for now the lying, divisive, bullying, ignorant, hate-filled rise to the presidency if doing so would be good for the country. But—and this is not exactly surprising—the perverse values of the disgusting campaign that led this disgusting lard ass to the job are the same values that guide his presidency. If he ever deserved a chance, he’s already warn that deserving out. He wore it out the moment he first tried to ban all Muslims from the country. And he’s shown again and again since how little he deserves a chance and how dangerous it would be act in any way other than in the strictest opposition.

Memory

It turns out that Plato was almost right when (was it in the Timeaus?) he had Socrates condemn writing for the inevitable ruin of memory it boded. But the problem is not that it made remembering unnecessary. The problem was that it made forgetting impossible. We’ve been collectively accumulating memories, and at an ever increasing rate, since that first stylus scored that first clay tablet. Now, every day, more memories are uploaded to Youtube than an individual could view in a lifetime. We're overburdened by memory. By Shakespeare's time it had become the goal of writers and the nobility to become immortalized in print. We turned away from the world when we turned to the tablet. Many great things have come from writing. But in the end, we will die because of writing. Global Warming is likely to do it. So far we've escaped nuclear holocaust, but that threat is still out there. These things could never have happened without writing. True, writing could save us from a world-ending asteroid. That would be good. But it's more likely to be the first step in a chain many thousands of years long that will terminate us. How much better it would have been if we had not figured out writing until we were ready for it. But then again, how without writing could we ever have become ready for it? And now we are in the territory of tragedy.

Beyond Dualisms

Words like “skepticism” pose such obvious problems. Skeptics are always so sure of themselves. They have to be. How could you be a skeptic if you doubted your skepticism? There’s then no point in deconstructing them. Nor can you fall back on the old saw—the logical impasse of contradiction—to take them apart. You must be able to know something if you know your ignorance. And if you can know that why can’t you know other things?

Because you can’t. And this is why….

And then the skeptic like Finnegan goes back to the riverrun and starts over.

Only in time is time overcome. Fortunately, we are only in time. So if I have one belief left, I suppose it is this, and it is as much a religious as a philosophical (which is to say logical conclusion) belief, which is to say something I understand intuitively as true as well as logically as valid, insofar as it can be logically validated: set aside all conclusions. I suppose it’s a mildly Hegelian position. Setting aside all that math or the scientific method can attain (I don’t want to get into the absurdity of an earth that is other than metaphorically flat), in areas that actually matter, where science and math are of negligible service, come to whatever conclusions you will, and then set them aside. Don’t fail to arrive at these conclusions, which we could just as easily call propositions because we are at the place where language’s fundamental dualism betrays us (that statement too will have to be taken in, then set aside).

This matters most where most is at stake. Starting with God, God who is absolute otherness and absolute presence. Unattainable, incomprehensible, but also here, and inescapable, the radiance of love. It’s all true and therefore all not-true. And the biggest sin is to think you have it. And the other biggest sin is to proclaim that you don’t. Did I say Hegelian-ish? Also Hinduish. Sufish. Part of all mysticisms, secular or religious, but only where mysticism marries the dull quotidian, where secular and religious don’t signify different realms.

Sign Language

My students tell me all poems are open
for interpretation.
I tell them I do not dispute that statement,
adding just that this not only doesn’t define,
it doesn’t even distinguish
poems from any other deployment
of words. Not from these
You’re now reading (did you really
think this was a poem?) but neither
from the most carefully crafted contracts
or laws, nor from your mother’s
hello, your uncle’s be careful, or your fumbling
attempt to go out with a girl
or to lure her to bed.

Signs are signs
even when they stand high above the parking lot
of the store
that was never built.

Fixing the Rose

He knows the beauty of the rose
Painfully intense as it can be
Is not enough.
And so he fixes it
on canvas sacrificing
nearly every part of it
to give it what it lacks:
permanence.
It gets to stay.
It gets to be what it appears to be--
As though the lack of permanence were not what made it
Beautiful
to begin with.


And so the painting calms the rose
But does not fix it.

Let's begin.

On Childhood

It's not that we lost something in childhood that drives us back in search, but that we were waiting for something that never came.