Greenland

Ever since it was announced as Trump’s wet dream, Greenland has become one of the most Googled countries in the world. Maybe Donald saw a map in which it looked larger than Africa and thought, why not a golf course with hotels?

In fact, it is about three times the size of Texas or equal to Denmark, Belgium and Norway, put together. Greenland is the least densely populated country in the world but that could change with the U.S. claim of Lebenstraum. (living space).

At the rate we are warming the biosphere, chunks of Greenland might soon be seen floating down the Hudson River. But why wait for that since the administration has designated it as essential for our security. This is a shorthand message to China and Russia. You take yours and we’ll take ours.

400,000 years ago, give or take a week, an asteroid cratered NW Greenland and the forested country became a tundra in a blink of a muskoxen. The change was not incremental; it was sudden. Scientists know this because leaves of willow and spruce have been found under the ice.

Forget about plant life, gold and platinum are calling. Think of all the toilet seats. Of course, grabbing Greenland might mean diverting the Caribbean fleet from its mission of vengeance against bad actors, as opposed to good dictators.

On our way to Greenland, we might as well annex Labrador. You don’t hear much about Labrador these days. Google it and you get eleven pages on Labrador retrievers and two articles about the country.  In fact, it isn’t a country. It isn’t even a province. Labrador is part of the Canadian province known as Newfoundland-Labrador. Labrador is twice the size of the island but has only 8% of the population. Most folks live in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.    

Labrador could fit inside Nevada but might also be deemed essential to our security. The climate varies from polar to sub-arctic, not a choice spot for beach volleyball or even a frozen yogurt store though the views are spectacular. It is probably a great place for an immigrant-detention program and a certain destination if you are a polar bear. There are currently 28,000 people living there and 100,000 moose.

Moose are the most dangerous animal in North America. Why? Because they are taller than cars, drawn to headlights and if you should hit one expect 1,100 pounds to fall through your windshield. I would also expect word travels fast among the moose population that another human predator is loose.

Indeed, we have become world-class predators. Cartographers are working through the night redrawing maps.

 

From There To Here

While groping in the dark, you think of yourself as an extra or maybe a second banana. You don't know this is your movie.

There’s a war going on. There are blackouts and your father is an air-raid warden. Whispers behind closed doors. Meetings every other Tuesday in the next room with vehemence leaking through the wall. Morris, the tailor, is cursing. Tomorrow, he will return to silence with pins in his mouth. Pamphlets are left. Next year you will be running from building to building, slipping those truths under doors.

Money is hardly spent. Your mother has street-smarts; she knows the price of cottage cheese. She walks half a mile to get a bargain of calf's liver from the butcher. You remember the sawdust on the floor and fly paper hanging with a rose blooming in blood on his apron. She's elated when the grocer forgets to charge her for the lemons. 

Suddenly there’s a new radio-phonograph console. It has speakers with an Art-Deco design you memorize listening to Roosevelt’s Fireside chats and Glen Miller's orchestra.

Your family, so you think, is like no other. Father works very long hours, nights and weekends. He is largely absent yet always present as the man you would be. Your mother has a mouth not like yours. She yells a lot, curses the gods for God knows what. You grow as silent as Gary Cooper. You gulp, ill-equipped for the combat needed to survive this world. You orphan yourself as you must. 

You are Clark Kent growing another self. You could leap tall tales in a single bound. You have a secret life as the Green Hornet or that masked man on a white horse. Aw shucks. You know what evil lurked.

You scour apartment house basements. It is your time for small anarchies. You steal broomsticks for stickball bats. You collect baseball drawings by an illustrator named Pap. His caricatures are only in the New York Sun, a dying rag. You make your way into stacks of discarded newspapers looking for his sketches. You knew the smell of cellars. You study college football teams. Every week, you pick the winners. You don’t know what is important from what is more important.

You send your predictions to a paper and become their headline on the back page. But you tell no one. It is the Daily Worker and that earns you a file with the F.B.I.  Is it your breadcrumbs that lead two agents to our door? You see your father block their way. When they want names, his silence is his spine.

The chalked sidewalk is teeming with life, and the street is your Mississippi, rafting between cars and manhole covers, rounding the bases. You are a member of the tribe called Children. Rules are passed along by the big kids and suddenly you are one of them. 

How did get from there to here? One day you are Mickey Rooney and the next, Gregory Peck. Now you are an aged Jeremy Irons.

The camera is still running. Credits are not rolling quite yet. You are the star of your own movie, yet just part of a multiplex. 

You look back at fragments that stuck, the same way we used to enter the movie house in the middle, heedless of beginnings, and later say, this is where we came in.

 

                                          

The Ethos of the Boy Scouts

We know we've gone astray as a nation when we can't even live up to the oath of the Boy Scouts Handbook.Their ethical code mandates kindness, honesty and caring for one another. 

I was a boy scout once. I left in disgrace failing to make the requisite knots. We had to demonstrate our dexterity with square knots and clove hitch, bowline and nooses. I could say it was the noose that got to me but actually it was all of them. I think a part of my brain is missing or tied up in knots. Let’s just say I never learned the ropes.

I’m not sure if I departed as a Tenderfoot or if I even attained that low rank. I remember wearing the uniform and marching. Left, right, left right. Another abhorrent activity. It reeked of soldiering. When we weren’t marching, mindlessly, we played boy/men games such as alley-oop. And other character-building nonsense.

The one prank which revealed the reckless nature of our troop was the Hidden Rope Trick. Three or four scouts would gather on each side of Lefferts Blvd as if pulling on a rope that wasn’t there. The purpose was to fool the cars. In fact, cars did screech to a halt endangering the drivers and those behind. Great fun for the brainless.

These memories returned to me recently when reading about the removal of a statue depicting the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell. He was not only an imperialist and racist but also an admirer of Adolph Hitler and Mussolini. Why am I not surprised?

The one thing I came away with is the scout’s motto, Be Prepared. In fact, Baden-Powell came up with these two words in honor of his own initials, B.P.

When B-P founded the organization 116 years ago, fitness was all the rage. Teddy Roosevelt was a model of the slight, bespectacled kid becoming the intrepid wild-game hunter and exercise freak. When shot by a would-be assassin he merely paused and continued his speech. How else could he charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba? 

I’ll stay home reading the manual about helping old people cross the street. And now I’m one of them.

I don’t suspect even Baden-Powell prepared for the ignominious removal of his statue in Poole Quay, U.K. before he would be dumped into the ocean. I wonder if they used one of his damnable knots to hoist it down.

How ironic that a proto-fascist like B-P prescribed a simple ethos which we have now discarded as we put the noose around the neck of Democracy.

A Faustian Pact

Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus is an intimidating, needlessly over-written version of the Faust myth. It was so cerebral, my hair hurt. That was my surmise after the first 25 chapters. Am I allowed to change my mind? 

Having now plowed through the next 23 chapters I regard it as the most erudite and challenging novel in recent memory, with particular relevance for our times. Worth the inferiority complex, the word awesome is not a hyperbole. 

The pact made with the devil traces the rise and fall of a brilliant pianist and composer of classical music. Mann conflates his fate with high German culture and its descent into the abomination of Nazism. 

I don’t pretend to understand either Germanic mythology which Wagner’s music drew upon nor the atonal scale of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, both of which are central to the book along with Neitzsche and the Appolonian vs Dionysian split.

 Yet in spite of all that was lost on me, I still emerge from the verbiage with an admiration for the profound ideas and the linguistic leaps taken in support of his central thesis. The book itself becomes a rather atonal narrative with non-linear tangents and digressions, both in the future and past.

For generations to come, books, essays, plays, movies and operas will grapple with the same question. What went wrong? How could we collectively have lost our grip on our heritage, however flawed? Never before has a nation sunk so far and so fast as we have during the past twelve months.

We might look to Germany for answers. The reparations imposed on them along with runaway inflation and a worldwide Depression created a chaos ripe for the promise of a new order with full employment. Enter: Hitler.

Those preconditions did not exist here, but Trump invented them. First came the dumbing down. Social media excels in fabricating news and providing legs to monstrous lies. He channeled the grievances of those left behind, blamed Democrats for everything from the high price of eggs to busted shoelaces. and created a movement seduced by his clownish degeneracy and hollow promises.  

Just as Jews became the scapegoat for Germany's ills, our regime has targeted immigrants with heartless detention. Hitler had his axis with Italy and Japan and we seem to be moving in that direction letting China and Russia dominate their regions as we have our way in the Caribbean and North Atlantic. 

 Have we sealed a Faustian Pact selling our own soul and precepts for an extended empire while the nation slumbers?

Last One Standing

Aliens have arrived and here I am, last of our species. I’m present to greet the spaceship hoping, at least, for someone to have lunch with. After the usual small talk about our respective planets and what went wrong with ours, I ask what took them so long. The pilot apologizes because they’ve been monitoring our decline and fall for many moons, alarmed at our recent descent into planetary suicide but he says they just didn’t make the lights.

The three-eyed android who more resembles an androgynous Greek statue with marbleized flesh, speaks remarkedly perfect English. It had been a while since I’d spoken at all and find myself fluent, at first, only in gibberish till I regain use of my tongue.

He then observes a stash of what we used to call technology, inquiring how all the gadgetry works. I dread the moment and plead total ignorance. Fearful of raising his hackles I try to explain that we earthlings used a lot of things but most of us had no idea how anything worked. His hackles did indeed rise. I worry that some form of inter-galactic enhanced interrogation was coming, in which I might find myself impaled on one of his hackles.

He seems to accept my ignorance since, after all, we had convincingly demonstrated our collective stupidity by electing an infantile despot to lead our nation. The visitors further regret their delayed arrival, having now to deal with such a poor specimen as me to enlighten them on our human progress. 

I could only assure them that there used to live among us some who could explain how the loom with its punch cards led to player pianos and eventually to programming the computer. When I brought up AI, they threatened to make a U-turn. I told them there were a few of us undaunted by hot wires or hard drives who could fiddle with links and algorithms along with blue teeth, white noise and black holes. If one of those had survived, they could build it all over again from a handful of dust. However, I was not the guy.

All I have to offer is the paper clip, coat hanger and orange juice squeezer none of which he had ever seen before. We agree to call it a start and besides it will take a lot more than things to get it right next time.

On The Verge

So begins another year in the dead of winter. It seems to me my birthday would have been a better fit since it falls on the vernal equinox in March when buds rather than champagne corks are popping open.

(Spring has worked well for me though I never got around to thanking my parents for their visionary family planning.)

On the other hand, whatever happens in the spring has been gestating all winter as we gain 1-2 minutes of light each day and 3 minutes by mid-January. By February, it reaches one hour.

In human terms, up to 40,000 cells slough off every minute when we are young; much less so as we ripen into the beautiful creatures we come to be. For better or worse, new cells replenish us, imperceptibly. We are so new, over a lifetime, it's amazing we're recognizable. In fact, we are probably the only ones who think we haven't changed a bit. 

All of which brings me to think how we are constantly on the verge, regardless of the calendar. It's not a bad place to be, unstuck and in some sort of transit, toothbrush at the ready.

Fortified with more light than yesterday and a new set of cells, just maybe we can come to a new aha, hear something in a Brahms piano concerto or Charlie Parker solo or a tenderness from Chet Baker or a Jane Hirshfield poem we had missed before. Then we can take that riff and that phrase so the radiance on our face will melt the mask off an I.C.E agent such that he will see himself in his prey, and he too will be on the verge.

Kindness, I submit, is contagious. Small acts, along with intention, can overwhelm the haters and deniers._____________________

Now I must pause and see whether I agree with the above. I do not. I wish it were so and I suppose it can't hurt. 

However can playing well with others overcome the man-child who runs with scissors? How can his supporters be reached when they deem ignorance and arrogance a virtue? I ask you.

Public demonstrations may move the needle an inch or two even as they entrench his core. After today's outrageous act in Venezuela, it may dawn on some Independents that running with scissors does not serve their interests. It smells of Putin. Panama beware. And Greenland too may be on the verge.

The new year brings with it a new muscular foreign policy which  renders the emperor even more naked than before. Will he finally be seen?  

Spinning 2025

Little wheel spin and spin, / Big wheel go round and round.

           Buffy St. Marie

I'm not going to contaminate this pristine page by listing all the crimes and indecencies committed by our executive, nor shall I dwell on the unconscionable indifference to human life in Ukraine and Gaza and the high seas. Sadly, 2025 will also be remembered as the year of two devastating fires. 

Instead, I am looking for good news. It does seem that the calendar has moved very slowly. The best news is that the year is just about over. My main takeaway is to take it away. I’m ready to gather these past twelve months in a Hefty bag and dump them in the non-recyclable bin.

Here's something to note: the grasshopper sparrow is making a comeback, and let us not forget, the Galapagos tortoise isn’t extinct after all. In fact, science has discovered 70 new species this past year even as 3,000 are now on the endangered list……along with objective truth which has taken a big hit along with compassion. Our planet is twice as green as it was two decades ago. New greenery has been planted the size of the Amazon Rainforest largely due to efforts in China and India. However, my three-year-old orchid finally committed suicide.

Then there is eggplant parmigiana, everything bagels and my discovery of a new flavor ice cream called Black Cherry Root Beer Float and, of course, all things pumpkin. Furthermore, I can report that the dog I don't have didn't die. 

On good days I can shed my walker and manage with a quad cane. Give me a top hat and I’m indistinguishable from Fred Astaire except I can’t sing or dance and Ginger is nowhere in sight. 

I find that the sight of me with a walker brings out kindness in others, such as holding a door open. In a strange way, I feel we are helping each other. I've seen faces change. Their moment of caring is a gift I have given them; an opportunity for both of us to tap into our well of humanity in that brief interchange.  

The Janus Head New Year's Day prescribes a farewell and then a hello. At this age I’m eager for more hellos. More days of wonder and ponder. I hope not to leave this realm with such a contemptible man at the helm. Somewhere along the way, his supporters have become a congregation of the lost.

Time is what I’ve grown to treasure, to halt the hours, to in-dwell and cherish the surround of love I have come to know. The country is scarred but I still try to meet each day with reverence and gratitude.

I can't come to the phone right now. I’m communing with the last leaf on the coral tree outside the window clinging to a memory of summer. The two of us.

As Robert Bly put it in his poem, Wanting To Steal Time,………….Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, / I want to tie the two arms together, / And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.