Talk with 45*

“Millions of illegal residents of this country voted for Hillary. Otherwise I woulda won the popular vote?”

Oh, and how to you know millions of illegal residents did that.

“Between three and five million.”

But what is your evidence?

“And they all voted for her I didn’t get a single one of those votes.”

How do you know that what you’re saying is true?

“Why would an illegal alien vote for me?”

No, no, I mean, how do you know any illegal votes were cast?

“There are many many many people who are registered in more than one state. Sometime two, sometimes three.”

Are you saying that millions of illegal residents are registered in more than one state?

“You look at the roles. There’s dead people still on them.”

But wait, wait, are illegal residents pretending to be dead people or are they registering themselves illegally?

“Millions of them.”

Because if people are impersonating dead people, there’s just as much chance they’re voting for you as for her. In fact in the one known case of double voting…

“You know the real unemployment rate is over 40%? But under me in just two, three weeks—something like that—it’s come down to under 5%. The people love me. I would’ve won the popular vote if not for the dead people.”

But how do you know? What is your evidence?

“I ‘lost’ the popular vote according to the lying, dishonest press. If they were honest, I’d have won it.”

That’s how you know?

“That’s how I know. You’re not part of the lying, dishonest failing press are you?”

Are you surprised that there are still people in this country who think you have the judgment to be president?

“Of course. I’m like a smart person.”

In that you and a smart person are both people?

“40 maybe 45% before the election, less than 5% now. Hey, you can’t argue with the numbers.”

All His Tuneful Turnings

This life allows so few of its myriad pleasures to each of us.
A child in a grand, expansive amusement park with limited tickets
And only a few hours to use them knows exactly what I mean.
You can only read so many of the books you want to read.
And you know the more you read the longer the list grows,
And that in the end your list of unread books will be
Longer than it has ever been. You can only learn so many things.
You’ll never master the guitar. You’ll never be as fluent in French as you’d like,
Although there you may make progress. And your garden will never be finished.
Nor will your house. Most of the places on earth you want to see you never will.
And those you do manage to visit you will barely skim the surface of.
You’ll never really understand how refrigerators work. Or cars. Or calculus.
You’ll always be amazed that some people can read scores or equations and smirk,
Knowing you could learn to do that too, knowing that you never will.
You’ll never reach your potential in baseball. You'll never know how far you could have run.
And yet, if you are fortunate and persistent and can control your wanderlust a little
You can learn to do one thing well. There is time for that, though you may never
Master it. And you can love someone well and long enough to make her part of you.
Twice as many tickets, double the time.

Seeing As, part II

Part of "seeing" lies in the object. Most of seeing lies in the seer. If you don't learn to see differently, you will always be looking at the same thing, whether that thing is a cat or skyscraper or a star, whether it's a politician or a preacher or a war. Seeing differently is what metaphor allows us to do. All I have to do is call touch "the sight of my fingers" and I open a new world of seeing, a richer knowledge of the world. Learning a second language or a third does the same thing, since all languages are just new sacks of metaphors. Meeting other people accomplishes this as well, the otherer the better. A man among women, a straight among gays a white among non-whites. If you only know your mother tongue, talk to someone whose first tongue was not that. She'll draw from her native sack of metaphors. She cannot quite help it. The poorer her English, the richer you will be. Let the others in or you will atrophy. "Conservative" is a fancy word for fear.

No, You Don’t Have the Right to Think “What You Want”

I’ve been repeatedly told, “you can think what you want, I can think what I want. That’s everyone’s right.” But what does that mean?

It is a reference to a legal fact still current in America in principle. It means the government can’t put you in jail or take your property or in any way punish you for your thoughts. We don’t yet have Orwell’s “Thought Police.” But that’s all it means. People say those words to me to cut off discussion. This makes it useful to them as a wall. Let’s agree to disagree. You and I will never agree anyway. See you later.

People implicitly understand that what they think is who they are. They are comfortably being who they are. The prospect of thinking differently, of being someone else, or some different version of yourself is frightening. Even if it's a better one. People can feel so comfortable in their homes that they would rather stay in them than move even if moving is an upgrade, even if it eliminates everything about your current place that you've been complaining about for years.

The problem is you don’t have a moral right to think whatever you want, and you don’t have a rational right to think whatever you want. The phrase “what you want” references desire. And desiring and thinking are two different operations. Certainly in humans they overlap and confuse each other like two radio signals competing for some part of the band. But this should be seen as a problem.

You have a moral imperative (not a right) to come to the best conclusions, and you have a logical imperative to come to the most accurate conclusions. Morally you must think in terms of the good, logically you must think in terms of the true. Desire shouldn’t enter into it.

If you say “you and I will never agree,” what you mean is that you will never under any circumstances change your thinking. You may justify this offense against morality and reason by saying that it applies equally to both of us--that you will never change your thinking and I will never change my thinking either. But it doesn’t. If the evidence leads to a conclusion that is not the one I currently hold, I have an obligation to change my thinking. And I will do it. I’d be stupid not to. If you can show me where I’m wrong, I will change my mind. If you show me that what I’m eating is poison, I will stop eating it. If you can show me that the conclusion I have reached goes contrary to my values, I’ll change my mind. (I may also have to adjust my values.) If you show me that my moral conclusion conflicts with my logical conclusion, I’ll have a problem. But something will give.

Digging in your heels may be fine for desire. Dig in your heels and keep rooting for the Cleveland Browns if you want to. It is however suicide to thought. And suicide to self.

Knock Knock Knock

She was almost out of wood. The woodman was supposed to come by later. She needed wood for the winter and wood for the cook stove. Grandma was almost sure she’d told him so. She was almost sure he’d said he’d come. But had she really told him, or had she just meant to? She was down almost to whatever was left in the box of kindling she kept out back under the eaves. These were hard days. And the larder was nearly empty as well. The coldest autumn she could remember. She rolled over, pulling the counterpane unconsciously over her head. The woodman would certainly come. The woodman brought his ax down fast, chop, chop, chop. Chop chop chop. The wood was flying, knock knock knock, knock knock knock…

That wasn’t the ax of the woodman flying. It was someone at the door. Someone was knocking at the door, a very strong, firm, masculine knock.

Grandma tried to sit. But she was too tired or too ill. She wasn’t sure. The headache that had sent her to bed early was still faintly there, ready to wake up. And she had to blow her nose. That could mean sick, but it could be from the cold. She swallowed hard.
Knock knock knock.

“Oh, Grandma? Are you there?”

Grandma shook off the clouds of sleep as best she could.

“Is that you, Red?” she called, or tried to call, but her voice was thin and apparently didn’t reach the door.

Knock knock knock.

“Grandma? Are you asleep in your little cabin, in your little bed?”

That wasn’t Red. A friendly male voice. Perhaps it was the woodman.

“Just leave the wood outside,” Grandma croaked.

“Oh, Grandma, open the door. I have a message. A message from Red.”

No, it was not the deep, businesslike voice of the woodman. It was a male voice, higher pitched, but friendly. And it had a message from Red.

“Please, sir, do come in. The door isn’t locked,” Grandma said.

Knock, knock, knock.

All Seeing Is Seeing As

I cannot see myself whole, never as you see me, not even in a mirror. I cannot hear myself as you hear me, not even in a recording. None of my senses report myself to myself as you see it, and not everyone sees it as you do. I cannot get outside myself to look. This same limitation exists between humans and the universe, not just that we can’t see all of it, which is obvious, but that we are part of it, and cannot see it but as ourselves. We cannot get outside it to look at it. And if we did get outside, we would not have eyes.

All that we perceive is an illusion: color, texture, sound—make your list—these are manifestations of memory on the machinery of the body. They seem real to us like the sounds a Geiger counter makes in presence of radiation, sounds that radiation does not make, or the low sounds that elephants make to elephants or whales to whales are sounds we’ve never heard, no matter what they tell you. It’s all a kind of representation, the information we get on elephants and whales and stars and planets and our own elbows and the napes of our necks and the smalls of our backs.

All that exists is energy, stored in matter or released into radiating space. We ourselves are only energy. Our senses translate various energies to forms we can use. This is the creative impulse at the very origin of perception. There’s no way around it, and no need to lament. The failure is also the possibility of everything we can try to know. But we must recognize it. All perception is illusion, translation, and there is no “real” way to see. To say God sees the world as it is is to speak the truth by way of metaphor—and not just because God lacks our physical eyes but because “to be seeable” is not a trait of the universe, not a trait of anything. Not even for God.

We eek our way to an enlightenment we can never reach.

Is anything I’ve just said true? Who can say? These speculations rest of upon the unconfirmable foundation of language’s ability to sort out what I have just said cannot be sorted. The best things we can say bump up against self-contraction, self-deconstruction. If my senses cannot tell me what the universe is really like, how can my language? What is the good of reason? Reason leads me here, as far as I can go, uncertain that I’m anywhere at all. Milton’s Satan flies all over creation but never leaves Hell. Flies and flies and flies and never moves.

There is hope—never assurance, ever only speculation, but there is hope. The hope is this: hat certain experiences work in tandem with this best conclusion that can emerge from logical speculation to bump our being against being beyond illusion. It’s just a guess. The experience of art, the experience of nature, the Romantic intimations that Russell laughed at who should have known better. The experience of math to those who really know it, the experiences of these flawed senses, what Nietzsche himself despite his atheism experienced in music, whispers that beyond the illusion is a reality to which we belong. When you hear a succession of notes and you can’t process how they pluck the strings of your being or why mere physical energy would make this possible, you have to choose whether to accept the thing the energy called music is telling you or you have to reject it. And no matter what anyone says, nothing in any discourse or language or discipline can see to tell you which way you should go.

Right Answers and Wrong Answers

You know there are many wrong answers. You are assuming there is only one right answer. Why? You're assuming if there is more than one right answer those right answers cannot contradict each other. Why? You're assuming the right answer is a complete answer, an absolute answer, and all other answers are incomplete, finite answers. But if there are no complete answers but only partial answers then the competition may be fierce and the winner to some degree arbitrary, if there has to be a winner, which there doesn't.

On the Idea of Prophecy

First I don’t want to suggest I believe anyone can predict the future. At least I see no reason to assert that this is possible. There may be time at some other time to explore this question. But that's not my task right now. I'm not here interested in whether there is such a thing as prophecy or even such a things as God. I am interested in the idea of prophecy and the idea of God.

I think the question of prophecy is worth thinking about regardless of whether you believe in it. According to people who believe in prophecy (and it may be useful to remind ourselves that “predicting the future” was not the principle task of Old Testament prophets) certain people are privileged to foretell future events because God, who exists outside of time and therefore knows the future, tells them what’s going to happen. God, who has already "seen" the future, runs back down the path to give report. God does this in order to affect the present. The problem then is obvious: the future must be predetermined. (An insuperable paradox.) Everything is fixed and you can’t change it. Even if God doesn’t reveal the future, God knows the future and therefore our actions are not free and therefore we are not responsible for them.

The complications that emerge from this claim are legion on both sides and have been amply discussed for centuries because it’s such a wonderful puzzle and people like to ferret around in puzzles. You can work this problem out on both sides and wander down arteries and capillaries and rivers and tributaries and along branches and twigs for hours and hours thinking through the implications.

I don’t want to talk about those things. The problem as I see it that hasn’t been explored (as far as I know) is the problem of language. The way we have to talk about the past and the future and time in general, the way we have to envision God’s being outside of time as though time is an egg God could manipulate with his hands and see from every angle. This is homocentric thinking. We see the world as though the world were made for us to see it (the roses have the look of roses that are looked at). The physical and superphysical universe. But the truth is we literally don’t know what it means for God to “see” the future. We do know that there is no “future” for God. But we don’t know what that means or how that could be. So we place our eyes in God’s head and our way of being into Being itself. The fundamental problem that makes all the entertaining speculation about time possible is our inability to come up with the terms that would be necessary to actually explore the problem. There’s nothing that can be done about this. We can’t see what we can’t see. There are things we can’t imagine not because of the limits of our imagination but because of the limits of our bodies, our senses, our information inputs, and therefore of our language.

Tough Choices

—What’s that?
—That’s a plate of healthy food, a balanced meal. It’s not as fresh as it was, but it’s still quite tasty.
—And what’s that?
—That’s a pile of shit. Which do you want?
—I’m thinking.
—The plate of food will provide a healthy percentage of the vitamins and protein you need to get through the day. It’s a good solid meal.
—And the shit?
—It’s just a plate of shit. It smells worse by the hour.
—And what’s the orange fibrous stuff growing on it?
—No idea. Have you decided?
—Still thinking.
—Take your time.
—Is there a price difference?
—Same price.
—Really?
—Well one is a good sound meal and will keep you going for quite a while. The other will make you sick. In the long run, the pile of shit will be much more costly. But to get them, it’s the same price. I assume you’ve made up your mind.
—This is really hard. This is actual shit? I mean it’s not a metaphor. It’s something I could use in my garden.
—Well, it’s human shit. And there are some known contaminants. Likely to spread diseases. You certainly wouldn’t be able to eat anything that might grow from it. It’s a substantial risk even for flowers.
—I see.
—Look, I’d really like to move this along. I mean if you would just buy the healthy food, I could just toss this shit out. I don’t see why you’re having so much trouble deciding.
—It’s a hard decision. I mean, as you said, the healthy food has been out a while. It would have tasted better earlier.
—On the other hand it is edible and healthy. This shit is just shit.
—Well, you have point. All the same, I think I’ll have the shit.
—You’ll have the shit?
—I assume it’s good shit.
—No. No, it’s not. It’s not even good shit. It’s shitty shit.
—All the same I’ll have it.
—You’ll have it?
—Yes.
—For God’s sake, why?
—What?
—I’m sorry. I’m just confused. You could have had healthy food.
—That’s true. And I’m sure it’s tasty and nutritious. I even like almost everything on that plate. Not everything of course. It’s a pretty full plate. But most of it looks very good.
—It is. It’s among the best food we’ve ever served.
—Still, I prefer the shit. I mean I don’t know shit. But I don’t ever remember ordering shit before. It will be new. Whereas I’ve had vegetables and steak before. And really, I’m not in the mood for broccoli right now. I’m sure you understand.
—Not completely.
—Are you sure those are the only two options?
—We’ve taken the other options off the table.
—Well, that was a mistake. I’ll take the shit.
—The shit?
—Don’t be so judgmental. It’s my choice. My money’s good. I’ll take the shit. Who knows, maybe after a while, it won’t stink quite so bad.

Something September 1968

A girl whose name I do not recall—
nor anything else about her
except that she sat behind me
in first grade
at Fairgrounds school—
handed her paper over my shoulder
to be passed forward with my paper
and presented to Miss (or Mrs.) Craven.

I don’t remember anything about my teacher either
except her name and her dark hair.
And I don’t trust my memory of her hair.
But of this I am sure:
the girl had written on her paper the date.
Let’s say September 12.
It was followed by the numbers 1-9-6-8.

This was new to me.
Coming, as they did, after the September and the 12,
I inferred—very reasonably—that they were part of the date.

I wanted to use this new number thing myself.
And so the next day, let’s call it September 13, I wrote
“September 13 1969.”
The girl must have peeked over my shoulder.
“That’s wrong,” she said
or may have said, “it’s 1968.”
“No,” I, now the authority, proudly replied,
“yesterday was 1968, so today is 1969.”
“Mrs. Craven," she called out, as though she wanted to show off
or to embarrass me,
"isn’t this the year 1968?”

I remember that sentence very well.

“Oh,” I said to myself.

Miss or Mrs. Craven affirmed the statement
and the girl probably said something profound like
“See, I told you so,” with a tone that suggested,
“You and I will never get married.
I would never marry anyone so stupid he didn’t even know what year it was.”
And that hurt. But
I had new knowledge to compensate me for my pain.
(At this point I’m making everything up from such faint
and fading ghosts of memory you should not allow yourself
any strictly historical assent to any of it.)

Everything made sense. I knew she was right
even before the teacher confirmed it.
Whereas before that moment the redundancy
of changing both the 12 and 1968 every day
had not bothered nor even occurred to me, now
in a Joycean epiphany I saw
how useless that would be,
how I should already have been more curious
or been less certain in my inference.

How elegant and proper this numbering of the year was.

I wondered how this girl could be so smart.
How had she come to know of this numbering of years
when no one had ever shown the trick to me?
I felt the same thing yesterday when I read in a treatise on miracles
how miracles did not break with the any idea of the natural
before the age of science.
(Let's say 1580.)
And I have felt it
many times in the decades between
when I have been apprised of simple things I should have known.

But as for first grade,
there’s not a single moment in that whole year I recall
other than this and the one in which
I was told that we would line up for lunch
in alphabetical order
by name,
and being “Alan,”
I was sure I would be first.
And my consternation
when I ended up stuck
in the absolute middle of the line.

Imitate Your Identity

P.T. Barnum was a genius. Around 1835, when white people would pay good money to see other white people in black face pretending to be black people but would not pay a cent to see an actual black person dance, Barnum rubbed burnt cork on the face of William Henry Lane and stuck a black wig on his head. William Henry Lane was already black. And so with the help of Lane, who managed a better imitation of a black man than any white man had yet done, he cleaned up. Barnum’s level of dishonesty and sheer chutzpah was perhaps never exceeded in America until Donald Trump decided to don his orange coif and run for president. It’s a shame, however, that the glory days of the circus are over. He’ll make a shitty president. He’d make a shitty clown. But he might do a damn good job as a barker.

Trump's Follies

I keep hearing the people on the news contorting themselves trying to use Trump’s words to find out what he really believes. They’re trying to do their job. But the task is hopeless. He doesn’t have beliefs. He has interests. What is good for Trump is good; what is bad for Trump is bad. And these things change every day. If a rigged election is good for Trump, the election was rigged. If it’s bad for Trump, it wasn’t rigged. The dangers of this monomania are legion. He’ll be making long term decisions to stoke short term piques. On a hot summer day, he’ll install an air conditioner that can’t be turned off. It’ll run all winter. He’ll install a heater to counteract the air conditioner. And he won’t be able to turn that off either. So next summer he’ll need a bigger air conditioner and next winter a bigger heater.

A Perfect Representation

Wanting to take good notes

he carefully paraphrased each chapter

adding commentary as necessary

until he decided that what really mattered

in the case of this particular book

was the style. He rewrote his notes

in the style of author, took out redundant

or misleading commentary

and kept at it until what he had

was word for word the same as the book.

Progress, he said.

And then he started over. 

Confessions of a Writer

I once heard David Sedaris say

                No one should presume to call himself a writer.

That’s a title others have to give you.

                No one’s ever called me a writer.

I mean no one with the authority to make the call.

Fuck it. I write. I’m a writer.

It’s not a question of whether I’m good at it.

                I’ve also heard many times from many writers

This: be honest.

They always say it as though that’s all good writing is.

Just root out the truth of what you see

                Or think or feel—and word it. The rest is learnable

Technique. Fuck that too.

Let’s be honest. No one knows what combination

Of native verbal talent and learning

And luck and observational and emotional skill

Goes into making someone a writer.

                Or some writer “successful.”

You read this stuff and it sounds just like

                Famous X is having a beer-soaked conversation

With the mirror. And losing it.

                But he’s successful.

Or this other one saying shit so convoluted you swear

                He himself could not have understood it.

And then there’s the dubious philosophy or

                The jingling noises of consonants wracking

Vowels. I don’t get it.

                That’s my first confession.

My second is that I’ve never read Dante

                Though I’ve always meant to.

Or Finnegan’s Wake, which I doubt would repay

                The effort, though I hate the inescapable

Economic metaphor. I doubt my emotions

                Validate anything. And I don’t believe

The intellect is up to the task of figuring out

                The universe. And saying that questions

Are more important than answers

                Is just like Edward Taylor praising God

For murdering his children. And if there were no God

                And all values were contestable

And if life were a game

                Whose stakes are actual death,

And worthless misery, and joy that is only joy

                Because it is blind—well then

That would mean the world would be

                Pretty much like it is.

A world in which Donald Trump

                Could be president.

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.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

How Can a Nation Be Great

A reflection on the Dakota
pipeline standoff.


How can a nation

 

founded on liberty

 

and justice

 

and genocide

 

and slavery

 

ever be great

 

if it does not learn how

 

to reconcile

 

its actions

 

with its principles?