Everyone Loves A Good Story

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land / Hard Working man and brave / He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor" / So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

Poor working people, they followed him around / Sung and shouted gay;/ Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air/ And they lay Jesus Christ in his grave.  Woody Guthrie

Take a tale of subversion with a universal chord and flip it to a hierarchical system in an edifice of opulence and awe and the next thing you know....

I’ve got an idea, said Pope Julius circa 350 A.D., let’s turn this pagan Saturnalia and solstice festival into Jesus’ birthday. I think it has legs. It will quell the unrest and absorb their old ways. The peasants want their holiday, and we’ll declare it a holy-day. It’s a win-win. We can keep the gift-giving, candles and merry-making and sanctify the whole thing. God knows.

Fifteen hundred years later Charles Dickens provided a more secular twist with merry and jolly and Ho, Ho, Ho. Most of all, he went back to the ancient roots of the dying of the light as in Scrooge and the notion of renewal and good will, which aligns the human experience with the winter solstice.

What’s lost in all this myth-making is that it only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. For the other half of our planet the days are longer and brighter. Hold those candles till June 21^st.

Along the way we have Handel’s Messiah, Hallmark cards, Hark the Herald Angels Sing and other hymns, harvested and hacked spruce and Douglas fir (about 35 million in this country, alone), Irving Berlin, funky ornaments, record sales and lots of hallelujahs.

Who’s complaining? Not I. It also comes with an occasional cease fire. Warriors turn into normal human beings for a day or two and then return to their bellicose state.

The darkening days and then a lengthening suggest a sort of backdoor monotheism as a shared human experience. Could it be that one god is in cahoots with the other gods?

Bottom line: We bring in the light to hasten the turning toward the sun and metaphorically toward human possibility. If Jesus is born new, so too, can we be. And you too, Tiny Tim.

I-Thou

 That word, Thou, traveled a long way in my head from another four-letter word with three of the same letters, namely Thug. But enough about his nothingness.

Martin Buber’s 1923 book, I and Thou, sums up what has vanished during these times that try men's souls. The I / Thou relationship elaborated by Buber describes a meeting of intimacy of subject with subject. That word, Thou, takes on a sacred meaning not necessarily in a theological sense, at least in my mind, but in reference to what is in the process of fully tending to the other, the soulfulness of human beings. The Other could be someone close or even a brief encounter with a stranger. It could even be a work of art, a tree or the still-life of a breakfast table … which we relate to in the full presence of our being.

When two people are met there is a third entity born, they have a thing. An alignment, a tacit knowing between them beyond words, a human bond however transient or enduring it may be. When it's there you know it and when it is violated you know that too as when a thug lives on flattery and fealty. When he distances, with insults and ridicule, any who do not bend to his will. 

Let it begin with me, as the song goes. This is what I see as a consciousness with which to go forward. To a certain extent we really are the world, not as it is but as we can repair and remake it. 

If we lived in Gaza or Kiev, daily life would insinuate itself as a matter of survival. By virtue of the cosmic crapshoot which landed us a continent away with an ocean between,

we have only to deal with this assault on decency and dissent. No small thing but not quite existential. 

Life gives us moments, as the poet says, and from these moments we make a life. Many such moments are lost to us in the shadow of perceived walls. More I-Thou ways of being can be perforations of light to get us through the next four years. 

 

1688

If I said to you, 1688, would you immediately think of:

1- The number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour by a new McDonald's in Beijing?
2- The number of lies a certain candidate has told in his political career.

3- The price of Smirnoff's Vodka at Costco marked down from $20?

Let's not always see the same hands. For all I know, they're all true but I'm thinking of the year when the Dutch invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.

One of the first defectors from James to Willliam was John Churchill, great grandfather of Winston. The Churchills have always had a nose for the next best thing.

The Brits don't like to talk about it; in fact, they spin the whole takeover as The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by some but not all. Europe has always been noted for disgruntled monarchs eager to have the multitudes give their lives to settle family squabbles

William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain. No, he did not bring orange juice. He invigorated the parliamentary system, initiated new finances (stock market), made innovations in horticulture, science, the arts and philosophy. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy,

now hanging by a thread.

A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of corporate interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America. This was worse than the trade which brough Babe Ruth from Boston to the Yankees.

Among the club of West European imperialists (Spain, Portugal, France and England), Holland did the least nibbling at the Americas. Their time came and went yet it was not without a trace.

There are currently five million Americans at least partially descended from the Netherlands. They bequeathed to us some heavy hitters including five presidents, Van Buren, the two Roosevelts and the two Bushes. Also of Dutch descent were Walt Whitman, Thomas Edison, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Walter Cronkite, Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep. And let us not forget Old Dutch Cleanser.

We have also kept some of their place names like Brooklyn (Breukelen), Coney Island, Harlem, Staten Island, Schenectady and give my regards to Broadway (Breedeweg).

Look how much more you know now than you did five minutes ago. No need to thank me, just pass a slice of Dutch apple pie and a Heineken.

Words, Those Squishy Things

Yes, I do love words, and I couldn’t have said that without them. I love their sound, their layers of meaning and the long journey they’ve undertaken to get here. One has to admire their elasticity, how they can stretch, bend and bounce. There is nothing more organic, rising into usage from someone’s mouth into the common tongue if it has the legs for it.

I just read an article about a sports team described as exceedingly mediocre. That was worth a sudden smile. Give me an oxymoron and I’m happy. One of my favorites is Dark White. but the most famous is probably from the Bard whose Juliet parted with such sweet sorrow.

This got me thinking about possible names for an ice cream flavor, Transcendental Fudge or Existential Sludge or MAGA Mud. Get Ben and Jerry on line one.

Words of endearment have a life of their own, uttered from some undisclosed location. Peggy and I had so many I can't remember any time we called each other by our given names.

I had names for my three daughters when they were mere tater tots. They are my aviary having each taken flight. Shari, my first-born, was Peanut Annie. Now, the strokes in her paintings move with a kinetic grace, a quiet ferocity.

Janice, my tiny one, now sixty-two, was Chester Apple. As a deaf person she knows the walls of this world and how to climb them. She orchestrates her life through fathoms of silence with fingers like a Dudamel butterfly.

Lauren had to live with Brewster Gazelle. She, in turn, dubbed me Chief Big Toe or Fatheringham. Consigned as she is to the middle of the muddle, she has grown elongated wing spans reaching from porcupine meatballs to Venus in transit.

Those names of endearment were all scrupulously deliberated blurts that somehow stuck, at least in my memory vault.

I must have heard a sort of music or cadence in the syllables of Brewster Gazelle which later morphed to Brewster Gazelleshaft. Maybe I was influenced by the German term Gesellschaft but meaning has little to do with all this. Otherwise, I would have chosen Gemeinshaft. Look it up if you want to impress someone at a cocktail party.

Probably the best string of meaningless words is Fuckingbastardsonofabitch uttered by me only once in my life in a slapping, scratching, punching fight I had with Peter Dalebrook at age 12, I would guess. It was my first and last physical fight and those words flew out of my mouth as my entire repertoire of expletives. I still hear a mellifluous incantation in those sounds though I don’t suppose they would have much success as an ice cream flavor.

The Great Unsaid

There’s a lot of noise out there. My hearing aid makes it even louder. But even without amplification, I hear the noise of exhausted words (some of it, my own), which draws me to the great unsaid.  

I once participated in a Quaker meeting where nothing was said. We shared the silence and felt closer for it.

Theodore Roethke, the poet, wrote how he wanted to make his silences more accurate.

Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson he was an invaluable companion because of his gift for silence.

Henry Fonda portrayed men of few words. I can’t say enough about how I admired that.

Gary Cooper always played Gary Cooper but the way he gulped and said, Yup, spoke volumes to me.

Harpo expressed what Groucho couldn’t. The world was a broken piano and he made a harp of it.

Blessed is the man, said George Eliot, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

I need sunshine and the paving stones of the street without companions or conversation, only the music of my heart for company, said Henry Miller (of all people).

How much better is silence, to sit by myself with this coffee cup, this knife and fork, things in themselves, myself being myself………something invisible to others having shed its attachments.   Virginia Woolf

As happens sometimes, a moment settles and hovers for much more than a moment. John Steinbeck

Lincoln’s ten sentences at Gettysburg followed a notably unremembered two-hour speech.

Silent films lost its wordlessness to talkies with vacuous dialog along with the language of cinema, the artful camera.

Nuts, was the American General’s reply to the German demand to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge in Dec.1944. Short and to the point. 

Vows

I’m getting a jump on my New Year’s resolutions. Interesting how most vows are wishes we want to happen magically. We begin each January with great resolve and generally meet with failure by mid-month. By February it is either consigned to the back burner or, more often, long forgotten. There is nothing heavier than turning over a new leaf.

I wish I smoked so I could stop but I never started, so that's out. Yes, I intend to drink enough water to launch a rubber duck. One doctor told me water is overrated but another says dehydration is the root of all evil. Well, maybe not all evil.

I’ve given much thought to embarking on an exercise program but even that was more exertion than I could handle. Such an idea goes against my staunch belief in creative lassitude. I’ll settle for another year running off at the mouth with occasional leaps of faith.

Unlike most hearty Americans swearing to cut back on carbs and calories and resist junk food, I have taken an oath to gain five or ten pounds. The doctor has me drinking two Ensure each day before I decompose into a clump of dust motes.

My most challenging vow for 2025 and beyond is to cease writing about Donald Trump. Let this be my last mention of his name. I’m not sure I am up to the task since he has colonized my brain and my psyche.  

I see him in my oatmeal, in my burned toast. When I look out the window at the coral tree, once thick with green leaves, I now gaze at skeletal branches over-pruned by a bunch of zealous guys with chainsaws, and there is Donald again. When I am scanned or spammed it’s him. Enough!

Ever-present as he may be, I am resolved not to write his name again, neither his first name or last or his initials or even an objective correlative signifying him.

I’m setting a high bar for myself, I know. If I had a psychiatrist, I’m sure he’d agree. Such a course will prevent my liver from being bilious. It will save my skin from eruptions. It might even extend my life expectancy by a day or two. 

On a positive note, I want to declare my belief in change. We are always in the act of  becoming, acknowledged or not. Let it be in wonderment if not betterment. 

Bring It On

Oh Mama, can this really be the end /

to be stuck down here in Mobile with Memphis blues again?   Bob Dylan

                                                            

I’m girding my loins, prepping for the new regime.

It’s alright Mama, bring it on. The kid who ran with scissors

is cutting out the fat from big government, the waste

like license plates, speed limits and stop signs.

Crime in the streets will be gone if we have fewer streets.

Bring it on, bring it on. Put the axe to silent letters

like the d in Wednesday. In fact, eliminate the whole day;

Six days a week is all we need. We promised

to help the working man and there it is. Drill, baby, drill

not only for oil but for you dentists filling cavities

without that devil, Commie fluoride plot.

And why is two plus two, always four, I ask you?

Depends on who wants to know, the IRS or the bank.

What’s a mandate for? Bring it on.

We’ve brought in the best and brightest to fill the posts:

Falderal, Balderdash, Poppycock, and Hogwash.

As promised, we’ll be getting rid of all side effects

by banishing prescription meds. And remind me,

what’s so bad about a little polio or measles? 

Shucks, worms need love too.

Those were the good old days. We got rid of some elites,

those brainy eggheads, show-offs, know-it-alls.

As Don Corleone never said, Father knows best. Bring me back

to the time when real men didn't flinch from bar room brawls,

no uppity voices and women knew their place.

Can't wait for America to grate again. Bring it on.

 

My Costco Adventure

It is time to share how I got everyone’s attention at Costco and a free ride out of their parking lot. All you have to do is pass out on the floor during the Thanksgiving rush and be careful not to be trampled upon by the mob rushing to pick up their $6.00 pumpkin pie. I’m told the crowd cleared a circle around me. I wouldn’t know. I was unconscious, probably planning my afterlife or, at least, the next four years in a comatose state. My first words when I woke were, Is he gone yet?

The drive in the ambulance parted the red sea of shopping carts. When the paramedic announced that I’m having a myocardial infarct I wondered if this was really to be my day of departure. To give up my life at Costco has an ignominious ring to it. As if an homage to consumerism.

My next thought was whether my socks matched and is this the underwear I wanted to take into my next incarnation. It's a sobering moment to think of yourself in the past tense.

As it turned out the well-meaning man in blue spoke out of turn. There were no scavenger birds circling the wagons. I did not have a heart attack but rather a case of syncope and pericarditis. Nothing to sneeze at but neither a cause to round up a zoom memorial. I have miles of pumpkin to eat before I sleep. Apparently, I have some sort of abnormality on my EKG. which he mistook for heart damage. In fact, it has been there for decades and of no consequence except that I embrace my abnormality. Normalcy is overrated. 

My cardiac event earned me the worst turkey sandwich in the history of sandwiches in the hallway of the emergency area of UCLA Medical Center. My loving friend Adele stayed with me for four hours and we got to witness the passing parade of wounded humanity. All that our flesh is heir to is a humbling experience.

My next stop was to be a (nearly) free night at Kaiser hospital. I would be subject to the nocturnal gasps and retches of a sorry roommate, a demented man, down the corridor, moaning all night at high decibels and the conclave of caregivers gathered at the nurse’s station outside my open door.

By now my symptoms were long gone and I was eager to be sprung. I remembered seeing a movie where the protagonist ripped off his I.V. and made his way down a deserted passageway into midnight traffic, probably to avenge the wrongful death of his client’s pet rock. I hope he wasn't wearing his hospital gown open in the back.

I am now home writing this by the fireplace I don’t have unless I set fire to the drapes. I apologize for scaring my family and friends and particularly my daughter Janice. Thank you all for your loving expressions. Hang onto those goodly thoughts. May they have a long shelf-life.  

Thanks-A-Lot-Day

This is certainly the most benign of holidays and the one I most look forward to. We gather; we feel gratitude, eating and drinking with abandon, as we celebrate the accident of geography that landed us here instead of there, though, at times, elsewhere seems like my true address. There is a sense of grace contained in that word, gratitude and maybe in ourselves. The table is a communal moment, well-observed around the hearth even if there is no hearth. What a concept.

We offer a place at the table to that man who can't stop talking and the other guy whom we'd never let our sister marry. Everyone is to be tolerated for a few hours, numbed as we are after a feast of gluttony followed by hours of sloth. This is one of those moments when we practice William Blake's notion that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. But my guess is that we feel more crapulous than sagacious. 

The hymn we used to sing in school ended with the veiled warning that God forgets not his own. I suppose all the rest not in that tent were to be forgotten. He forgot me and I forgot him. Fair enough. This year it's also fair to wonder what the Almighty was thinking when he bestowed the magma of MAGA upon us or as Oliver Hardy said to Stan Laurel, A fine mess you've gotten us into this time. If He wants to hasten and chasten let him hasten their reign and chasten their misdeeds.  

The idea of asking the Lord's blessing suggests some element of forgiveness. Forgive us our transgression for being uninvited guests to this continent, stealing the land from our indigenous hosts and almost wiping them out.

My mother, in her infinite wisdom, decreed that Thanksgiving was a gentile holiday somehow akin to Christmas. Therefore, it was devoutly unobserved. Maybe she never learned how to cook a turkey or Murray, the chicken-plucker,

didn't know about gobblers. 

My first Thanksgiving was at age 21. I remember driving to Burbank in dense fog so thick I mistakenly mistook the shrubbery on the freeway for the off-ramp. I was a pilgrim making my way to this new world landing on a rock with my Plymouth. 

I must have had a yearning to be part of Americana as depicted by Norman Rockwell. So it was, I untangled my car from the landscape and found my way to a chair at that all-American table of new friends. I had arrived for my place in the tableau of this model family. Within a few months the host couple divorced, and the father of my friend shot himself. So much for normalcy.

Thanksgiving goes on even though an estimated 45 million turkeys will be slaughtered. I'm reminded of the school play in 7th grade when I was cast as John Alden. I wonder if anybody got to play the turkey.  

Cleaving

Say that we have cleaved, and you can’t go wrong. Even the word has been cleaved with each meaning, (separating or coming together) derived from a different source. One meaning derives from an old English word meaning to adhere unwaveringly. The other is of Norse origin, to split apart. The result is one of those Janus two-headed words staring off in opposite directions.

Henry the 8th had it both ways. He first cleaved in marriage and then had some wives cleaved by decapitation if they didn’t produce. He gave new meaning to separation anxiety. As a footnote of history let it be known that Anne of Cleves, Henry's 4th wife, did not live up to her name. She died with her head attached forevermore.

It’s come to this…a bifurcated nation with Us, the Good Guys cheering for the demise of MAGA -Them, each watching for the news as it breaks and each off to our respective cable-planets or app to reinforce what we hold to be self-evident.

If Trump was revealed as a double-agent Russian operative on MSNBC and CNN, on Fox they’d be showing a car chase in Wichita. Conversely if Biden lost his way from the Lincoln bedroom to the Oval Office, it would play on a continuous loop on Fox but MSNBC might ignore it.

In reality, the cleaver that divides us cuts three ways, not two. Arguably, the largest segment is neither blue nor red; it is 38% of eligible voters who chose not to participate at all. The tragedy of America is the inability of most people to make a connection between public policy and their own wellbeing. Why else sit it out? Why else vote for the man and party whose mission is to deny basic human services?  

I do believe that we need to separate the shepherds from the sheep in the MAGA movement. The former deserve our scorn; the misled might be brought to new consciousness.

Seems like everyone I know is strategizing how to cleave together with kindred souls as well as in-dwell with artforms that speak to them. Most of all we need to reaffirm the values which are being trampled upon. Never before in my lifetime have the givens of common sense and decency, compassion, and the core precepts of this country been so under siege. I sense a new enlightenment emerging from the threat of this opposing force. 

New Eyes

In these days of despair, I turn to the enchantment offered by art and loving friendships. Here I am on the couch writing these words yet the wall behind me is filled with paintings, a drawing, two constructions and a ceramic piece on the far table I haven’t really looked at for far too long.

In fact, some pieces have faded from my mind’s eye altogether the way furniture becomes unseen. Ironic that our most cherished works of art take a position at our backs. When I enter the room, I head for sofa seldom taking in what adorns the wall.

I can name only three of the six pieces without peeking. The largest is an abstract construction by Laddie John Dill of glass, paint and resin which emits an energy field since it was hung almost forty years ago. To one side is a drawing by Daumier of a windy day in Paris, a woman’s dress billowing and two gentlemen holding on to their hats.

The kinetic drive of these two is answered by a deeply shadowed café where a male figure on a stool is playing the bass and two people are deep in conversation in a back booth. The artist, Werner Nienow, has caught and cast a contemplative mood.

On the other side is a non-figurative collage by a street artist in Venice, Italy which spoke to me and still does in ways without words. Above that is another indoor scene of the Rose Café as it used to look when one could sit with morning coffee at a long table for long stretches. This is a watercolor saturated with color. A male figure in the foreground is either reading or writing and three others fill the back space in isolation.

The ceramic piece is a tall, multicolored sculpture which could serve as a vase but that, I think, would debase it. Now, I’m seeing it again as if for the first time. I'm glad it is indescribable, all the more immersive.

I intend to revisit all my walls which vibrate with photos, masks and woodcarvings along with books and artworks. Thank you, Donald, for these new eyes. Now, will you please leave?

 

Tonsils and Other Unwanted

When I was a mere slip of a lad, shortly after Aristotle and Socrates, it was customary to have one relinquish one’s tonsils. I was probably emotionally attached to my tonsil, vestigial as it might have been.

A tonsillectomy was a sort of rite of passage. We were rewarded with an ice cream cone, vanilla, no doubt. This went on well into the sixties until the jig was up. It served no medical purpose other than providing doctors with a new Oldsmobile every year.

The prospect now looms that the Health and Human Welfare Department will be handed over to the least qualified person ever to head a federal agency. If Robert F. Kennedy is confirmed, he would be a public menace.

I don’t know his views about tonsils, but he threatens to dismantle essential safeguards such as the Food & Drug Administration, Center for Disease Control and National Institute of Health.

This is a man who believes that the Covid virus was designed to protect Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, while inflicting harm on the rest of humanity. He has publicly claimed that part of his brain was eaten by parasitic worms which might explain his bizarro behavior.

Whether he had swallowed his tonsils as a youngster is still to be determined but his voice is as raspy as Satchmo’s. Yet he toots his horn, propelled on the seat of his pants, with flights of toxic conspiracies.

With his nonsensical prank dragging a dead bear hundreds of miles into Central Park and other lunatic ideas, Kennedy has disgraced the family name, His nomination is unconscionable. One gets the feeling that Trump appointed him just so he wouldn’t suffer by comparison.

If RFK Jr. should restrict the use of early childhood vaccines the consequences would be dire. Over a century of medical progress could be reversed or, at least, halted and we might expect the return of diphtheria, measles and polio epidemics, to name a few. Soon we would be returned to leeches and back plaster. He might even advocate the hemlock smoothie that Socrates drank.                                                                                          

From A to Z

Trying to avoid the contamination by the new regime, I’m on my stationary bike pedaling to elsewhere. Here I am in Africa admiring the four legged-creatures from antelope to zebra, all herbivorous quadrupeds.

The only thing I know about antelopes is that they rhyme with cantaloupes.  And here’s another thing. The word is an umbrella term for a group which include gazelle, impala, and even wildebeest, also known as gnu. They are all undocumented and live happily munching grass in the savannas except when they are running like hell from cheetahs.  

Detroit looks toward four-legged creatures to sell their cars. Neither the Ford Bronco, Chevy Impala nor Dodge Ram could ever compete with the Ford Mustang. The less said about the Pinto the better….and then there’s the Jaguar. But horsepower is still the unit of measure which is an endearing way of honoring the past.

Creationists may argue that zebras got their stripes from the American flag or that God was watching the refs at a Laker game but everyone knows God is really a baseball fan and was fixated on the Yankee pinstripe uniform.

It has long been noted that zebras are social animals. When they congregate, their stripes form what looks to lions as a huge blob and too much to take on. Another more compelling reason for the stripes is that they evolved over millennia as a protection from the tsetse and horseflies.

(You have to admit this is far more interesting than wringing our hands over what went wrong on election night.)

Horses, which lack horse sense didn’t think of stripes and rely on their tail to shoo the flies.  Zebras, with their striped skin, are deemed less inviting to blood-sucking insects. The flies are attracted to solid surfaces because the light waves emitted resemble the light reflected from pools of water where they breed. From the POV of those insects one might say the system is rigged.

Yet zebras, stripes and all, don’t have what it takes for domestication. Horses were feral once also but opted for a barn and steady meal instead. In exchange they had to pull loads of men with whips.

Zebras should be credited as the first to come up with bar codes. They may all look the same to us but each carries a signature on its hide which singles them out to other zebras. In case you are asked what color zebras are, the answer is black with white stripes.      

Whether antelopes eat cantaloupe has yet to be studied.

All life forms evolve to give them the best chance of survival. Mankind seems to be the exception. Our most fearsome predator is ourselves. Four-legged creatures know better than to make such a mess of their habitat.

 

Mourning After

The page is funereal white. I feel the need to fill it up with squiggles that could be buds or birdies, but first some bile.

Did something just die in America or was it a chronic illness only now revealed? I believe Tuesday’s election was a full-body scan showing a long-festering malignancy exacerbated by a megaphone of nostrums causing massive disorientation.

What seemed like a sudden demise is really a pre-existing condition. Perhaps, even a congenital disorder as a consequence of familial misdeeds never addressed. We have yet to wash the blood off our hands from a rapacious past blighted with human bondage.

The underlying cause is systemic with severe maldistribution of needed nutrients. The body politic had grown increasingly sclerotic with an irregular pulse. Organic deficiencies in the bloodstream have long been ignored. Tendencies toward misplaced loathing are not unexpected.

Our free enterprise system yields winners and losers. It has always been thus. Every benefit won by the working class or middle class has been hard fought and earned. Even with new prosperity for many, a large body of aggrieved workers have been left behind.

The usual inequities have been compounded by a bipartisan push to seek cheap labor overseas which has always been the goal of corporations. Jobs vanished with shuttered factories as manufacturing moved offshore. Trump did nothing to confront the problem during his four years in office. Biden has, at least, brought computer chips back to the U.S. 

What we have witnessed, tragically, is a population overthrowing the very forces which offer their best hope. Rage has left them deaf to the menace of his words and blind to his misdirection.  

A new social contract is desperately needed which ensures the health, education and welfare of everyone. Instead, the MAGA program would scrap or weaken the very institutions providing access to the wealth of this affluent nation.

While on life support, we can still live our lives of compassion, creativity and love with even a deeper appreciation for the fragility of those values just rejected. We shall write the psalm needed to see us through this wasteland. Or better yet, live it, forged out of a new dawn with an incandescence to see us through this dark passage within sight of beginning sprouts and the feel of wings.

 

Harp in the Carnage

For every bomb dropped, particle of noxious air belched,

for every last syllable of loathing overheard,

moral violence spewed, every barbed lie,

choke hold, groping, ignorant oath, every

truth denied, every shrug in the midst of indecency,

 

Is there an answer in the stanza,

a poem that can override the filibuster?”

Will the bell in the fuchsia

toll for the mesmerized?

Is there enough nectar in the hibiscus,

enough dew to quench parched minds?

Is that a camellia blooming on the

blood-stained bandage,

a harp in the carnage of a smashed piano?

Can the trumpet in the foxglove be heard?

 

In the pharmacy poison foxglove

becomes digitalis. What can kill also heals.

The leaf that stops the heart

contains the alkaloid that slows

and strengthens it.

Counting My Chickens

John Maynard Keynes put it this way: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest men will do the wickedest things for the greatest good of everyone. But enough about Trump.

When greed and arrogance are valorized and smarts are vilified, I need a remedy. So, I stroll in the garden I don’t have and pick up the cello I don’t play. Yet the coleus leaves are bent as if toward music and leaves are falling into goldfish.

Having taken refuge inside Keats’ odes and urn I emerge rhyming with every word and empowered like a heroic couplet.    

I am insinuated with sky. Today’s dome was particularly vast, saturated with a blue not-seen-before. It was furrowed with cloud formations like rows in a vineyard or a wrinkled brow having just discovered a cure for loathing.    

Breath held becomes breath released sufficient to refresh the foul air. Gusty winds enter windows to vent the miasma. Spring bulbs stir in anticipation.

Thanks, will be given. No food-fights over white and dark meat. Our Founding Fathers are my fantasy guests seeking forgiveness for the sin of an Electoral College.

This page was written as I watched my Dodgers come from behind to win the World Series. The losers did not call for a recount of the score nor did they threaten the umpires or overthrow the stadium. May life follow baseball. 

In the Fall of ‘41

Often, I am eight. returning to that time of two awakenings. Franklin Roosevelt’s intonation came from the radio speaker. His voice was God’s voice and spoke of infamy at Pearl Harbor. The war rearranged faces. Emotions were suddenly made public. I felt the barrier dissolve between adults and myself. It was my portal into a world beyond my small one.

Two months before December 7^th I had another initiation which sounds frivolous. The World Series was the World Serious to me. The Dodgers were playing the Yankees as they are today. A Yankee player struck out to end the game, but the game did not end. Without going into details, what seemed like victory turned into defeat. Baseball is a lesson in failure but failing gracefully. There would disappointment but tomorrow's a new ballgame. I learned it that day and never forgot.

Memories are moments that cling, momentous or puny; it doesn’t matter. The declaration of war by Germany four days after that December Sunday prompted Churchill to dance the jig. He knew our entry into the European theater would save England. For me, it would set into motion a cluster of childhood tableaus.

There would be air raid drills and blackouts, rationing and war bonds. Refugees entered my class. The Four Freedom posters by Norman Rockwell appeared on our school room walls. I rejoiced with Allied victories and wept with Roosevelt’s death.

As for baseball, there were historic feats performed that summer of 1941 which will never be equaled. But I was too young to take note. It wasn’t until that day in October that I was ready to take on the world. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a tragic event but there would a reckoning.  

 

The Taste of the Lie

The taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue

                     Yehudi Amichai, Israeli poet

I’m sure Homer felt the same way. Of course, there probably was no Homer. He/she was likely a scribe or select group of scribes setting down on paper the agreed-upon lie (myths) which came from a chorus of troubadours or mad poets singing of tall tales and legends from a millennium back in time. These were the lies that spoke truths.

Those in ancient times who lent their ears knew they were receiving wisdom through metaphor, not to be taken literally. I expect that other gatherings also knew the stories were parables of a shared ethos. And so it was that the tribe called Hebrews cohered.

In an oral culture, my guess is that information was passed along in broad terms with an accepted disregard for precise detail. Each happening was embellished and gods were introduced to be the embodiment of events or behaviors otherwise unaccountable. Small truths became big truths at the end of the telephone tree.

Could it be that the liar in our midst is a man of prehistory? His private delusions, which are all self-serving fabrications, are received not literally but as some sort of ventriloquism of the aggrieved followers' complaints and vague aspirations.

Just as a pre-literate society had no concept of literal truth so too is today’s post-literate herd of sheep heedless of fact-based actuality. We are witness to a congregation of the lost. He grunts, they grunt. He mocks, they mock, and it is multiplied by the megaphone of social media. When they chant his curses of an imagined threat, they don’t realize they are vilifying projections from his own psyche. His words are swords, barbed on his tongue, bitter on our ears.         

The line from Amichai’s poem comes out of the mouth of a ten-year-old boy. I went to another synagogue, he says, enjoying the taste of his lie. It is the precursor of a budding imagination, with a fragrance of the faraway. When his father dies, in the poem, he return's the lie, I've gone to another life.

When the sociopath speaks, he is either incapable of perceiving reality or deliberately distorting it to aggrandize himself. If he had written the Greek tragedies, they would have all been about Zeus, not Achilles or Odysseus, and certainly not about Penelope.

Last Thoughts On the All Of It

If I were you, I wouldn’t bother reading this. Seriously, who wants to waste their precious time with another article about the election? Not me or rather, not I. In fact, I’m on a twelve-step program trying to withdraw, but I’m only up to step three or four. It’s so hard.

When I look at a piece of Kleenex, I not only see a pristine, fluffy white tissue, so perfect in dimension, so sublime in texture and virginal, instead I see rectilinear Pennsylvania. As I hold it in my two hands, I am gripping Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and blowing into the red, rural middle. This has to stop.

What would Wordsworth do in times like this? Wander lonely as a cloud? I’d much rather be a swinger of branches in Frost’s birches. In his poem, the boy climbs to the top knowing to descend to the ground. There is no place better. So it is, I am earthbound, wondering how we have come to the brink.

Here’s my theory: We suffer from electile dysfunction. We go limp in November. Maybe his red tie arouses. MAGA’s appeal is directed to the glands rather than our brains. Their mendacity is a perverse aphrodisiac. Their repeated lies are a siren-song. If this were Masterpiece Theater we’d be witnessing Downstairs voting for Upstairs. The underserved identify with the privileged.

Americans are world-class consumers. We acquire and we think like consumers which is to say we really don’t think much at all. We vote the same way we buy a car. Not for its carbon footprint, or safety or economy so much as the cluster of images attached to the commercial. When new pharmaceuticals are advertised on T.V., we are seduced by the accompanying montage of family picnics or robust bodies even as the adverse side effects are being recited. The substance gets lost.

Ironically, we grow cynical at the same time. We know, on some level, we are being conned, but we have grown to accept that as being the way things are. Decisions are made by skimming the surface. Woe is we.

 

 

What Daddies Do

Yes, it's true. I've made a mess of this jigsaw puzzle world. Pieces are missing and other frayed by neglect or broken by breaking news.

I was raised with cross ventilation and now the air is noxious. I am shouting on the rooftop into a miasma. The planet is febrile. Beyond the reach of alcohol rub. My father repaired my world and now I must do the same for my three daughters. This is what Daddies do.

I won’t let the orange tide be pulled by a lunatic moon. Your sandcastles will endure. Once erected they are untouchable.

I shall don my pharmacist smock and descend to a subterranean laboratory with its smoking cauldron. Add a feather of dove, eye of newt, pluck wild berries, some rough-hewn bark and the root of aromatic abracadabra.

I’m remembering how my father healed my universe. Tapping a crystalline power on one side of the torsion scale, adding a grain or scruple on the other. He achieved an equipoise yet he also allowed himself to grind fascists into dust in his mortar and pestle. Vehemence and gentility in equal measure. May I bequeath that to you.

If this was a torn page of history, I would use my glue stick. If a table fell apart, I’d get my toolkit, even read the damn manual since these are no ordinary times. If that doesn’t work, I’ll find a bridge to Portugal or Costa Rica and I will lay me down.

There is something you have beyond the reach of polls and poles. That space, that room of your own, your orchard or riverfront of your own composition. There you will meet yourself and form a circle of like minds and hearts.

 

Donald, Doyle and Penny Dreadfulls

It is a stretch, I know, to find the thread between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Donald J Trump but I’d like to give it a go. Arguably, Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes and Donald’s invention of himself are both characters on the spectrum. One is a benign obsessive compulsive sleuth and the other a malignant sociopath.

 Sherlock Holmes was a fit for the late Victorian age. Trump is less of a man than a scourge who sensed a vacuum created by an age of dislocation and festering grievance. The sleuth with the deerstalker hat was a noble outlier; the Donald is a megalomaniac who offers a satchel full of fibs and empty promises. 

Penny Dreadfuls were read by an estimated one million Londoners each week. They were illustrated sensationalist rags with stories of cheap thrills, piracy, murders and science fiction, aimed at young men. They ripped off versions of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Dickens and Doyle.

Holmes’ exploits were fodder just as Trump and the National Enquirer used each other to fabricate his exploits while vilifying his enemies. For eight years they had Barack and Michelle divorcing with as much credibility as a JFK citing or alien landing. The Dreadfuls were the social media, the Tic-Toks and Tweets of the day. Both were the creation of fevered minds. At least the 19^th century version presented itself as fiction while Donald seems unable to distinguish fact from fable.

The British Empire was at its peak. Think globalization. Big bucks were being made by a few people. The air was foul. Science seemed out of control with epochal technology. The bucolic countryside was fast disappearing with a growing divide between rural and urban consciousness. There were 200,000 prostitutes in London. Homelessness, filth and indenture coexisted alongside a genteel civility. People knew their place. Social mobility was virtually unknown. Rigidity and rectitude were giving way to randomness and relativity. Society was held together by a veneer of respectability, class fixity along with a sense of order and resolve. Every disruption had its resolution.

Enter Sherlock Holmes. He brought rationality and logic. He deduced. He rooted evil out and restored civility. He was their defense against a random universe. He never died because he never lived. Arthur Conan Doyle’s invention rested on the shoulders of Edgar Allen Poe’s inventions and upon Sherlock’s shoulder came Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade…the genre is still digging.  Detectives detect. They mostly act on their own as benevolent vigilantes offering the illusion of justice.

The new sheriff with the technicolor hair who rode into America’s heartland, on the last train from Yuma, is Donald Trump, that old robber-baron, land-grabber, in disguise. He and he alone nails the most-wanted posters to the wall. He leads the posse, locates the hanging tree and prepares the noose. He is the faux-detective offering simplistic words with a ten-year old’s vocabulary to complex problems.

Yet both Doyle and Donald appear at pivotal moments, albeit 125 years apart. Brits also encountered immigrants from their jewel, India. Holmes pandered to Londoner’s xenophobia with a distrust of foreigners. Many Indians ended up in Newgate Prison on the barest suspicion. Gay behavior was criminalized just as many red states would have it today. It would be decades before women were fully enfranchised in England. Their first voting rights act in 1918 was restricted to propertied women over thirty. 1895 Britain and red-state U.S. bear some resemblance in their racism and misogyny.

The name Sherlock suggests razor sharp certainty. I suppose he would be repulsed by the fuzzy mind of Donald. The man from Baker Street could surmise a man’s entire profile by a glance at his hands and the smell of his tobacco. Our guy from the high tower smelled angst and fear and inflamed it into irrational rage. There is a toxicity afoot surrounding Trump, something like the yellow fog that fell on London Town back in the day. Moriarity is in our midst. 

 

 

My Deaf Daughter

Sixty years ago, my daughter Janice was almost two. This was about the time we got the diagnosis that she was profoundly deaf. There had been clues earlier but my wife and I dismissed them as if we were deaf to her needs, even when I dropped a bag full of coins on a wood floor and Janice didn’t stir.

We made a decision which was controversial then as it is today. Our choice was to follow the course of the John Tracy Clinic which was to go with oralism as her first language, rather than sign language.

The third option was called a total approach which sounds wiser, but we bought into the idea that, given the two modalities, deaf children would be more inclined to use their hands and less likely to speak intelligibly.

The program at the Tracy Clinic was a four-year commitment. Under the guidance of a tutor, Janice learned how to lipread and speak, one word at a time. Her first word was not denotative but an action verb which literally demonstrated the power of speech. The word was open and her world opened.  

Our task was to create situations which encouraged her to open doors, boxes, bottles, books, fists et al. We had her put her fingers to our mouths to feel the breath of that word.

I'm reminded of the kindness people show in a special needs setting. There is an inherent goodness in caregivers, and, to some extent, everyone shows their best self. Being a nonagenarian, I experience some of the same deferential treatment. Even if I don't need any help, I enjoy the human interchange.

By age six Janice had about a hundred-word vocabulary she could speak and read many more words on the lips. When she entered public school, she quickly learned sign language. Today she has a very large command of the language both receptively and expressively.

Did we do the right thing? I believe we did, however the argument for early signing also has merit. Some would argue that by forbidding her to use her hands in those formative years we denied her the expression of her feelings and other abstract ideas.

In the deaf community, oralism is frowned upon, yet Janice can function to a great extent in the hearing world because of her early skills. I marvel at her hard-won independence and how she navigates her life having never heard her own voice. I also love watching her orchestrating a manual ballet as she communicates with her deaf friends on her video phone. She has felt the walls of this world and learned how to climb them.

 

 

Straight, Square and Smooth

By the 6^th grade the person I would never become was made clear to me. I was in shop class with the assignment to create a breadboard from a slab of wood. If we lived in a true meritocracy I would still be there, that old man in the back row shaving a hunk of wood for the 80^th year.

Straight, square and smooth the teacher demanded. What’s wrong with a bump here and there, my inner voice yelled back. I discovered two things in that class. First, that I was basically inept and secondly that I have a thing for irregularity. Maybe being ept is overrated.

Think of the beauty of a deckled edge. Let the border rise and fall and damn the perpendicular. It’s life’s grooves and edges, the sputters and stumbles, the jagged right-hand margin of a poem that lends its character. I wouldn’t give them up any more than the moon could relinquish its craters. 

You can have your Wyoming and Colorado, ruler sharp, I’ll take loosey-goosey Michigan or Florida which looks as if it might break away at any moment. Do people still have breadboards? Most loaves are pre-sliced and for baguettes, I just rip and chew. My breadboard looked like it conformed to teeth-marks.

Nature has no straight lines. Antoni Gaudi said it first and his wavy architecture replicates an organic flow as if on the way to the next best thing.

There I was with my diminishing rectangle of wood that refused its next incarnation as something straight, square and smooth. I admired its grit, dips and uprisings. It was to be my road map, prefiguring a contrarian nature and a nose for connective threads, however coarse.

Of those three Ss, I must admit some allowance for smoothness as in skin (my favorite organ) or cobblestones and then there are smoothies but graveled with berries, of course. At this point of my life, it’s safe to say I will never accept that 6^th grade mandate. One man's failure is another man's ept.

Turning

Since the vernal equinox happens on my birthday in March, I have to give the fall equinox its due. It happens here like a rumor, as silently as that needless “n” in autumn. You’d never know summer is done with temperatures reaching into the nineties for the next week.

To get into the mind of the season I need to imagine the cycle turning in a change of palette from greens to rust, burnt sienna and yellows. Where are those migrations overhead, flannel pajamas, itchy sweaters, russet pears, chestnuts of childhood?

Of course we do get oranged in advance of Halloween. Pumpkins show up in ice cream, soup, pasta, pudding, pie, even beer. I could die happily buried inside Trader Joe's.  

Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have harvests or swollen gourds except for those trucked in. However, there are seasons we carry within. We flower and we fold. Each of us has all the facets, a rhythm or impulse to bend toward the light and then retreat inward. 

Another falling is the tossing away of election junk mail into the wastepaper basket. Half the country has been falling for the ill-tempered lunacies of Donald Trump. May he slough off the body politic a month from now in some massive descent. 

The Roman poet Virgil wrote, See Naples and Die. If he had lived in New Hampshire he'd have said, see maples, and die.

I’ve been to New England to watch the spectacle of ruddy sycamores and maple leaves dying in all their glory. From a distance they looked like a wildfire. It was operatic. Golden groves of trees majestic in their last gasp death-bed scene. Divas, all of them. Fall is a season of life and death.

If I were a tree I too would be in my foliage or beyond. Some of my favorite hair has fallen. My limbs are getting brittle. Even names carved long ago into my brain are fast fading. I am weathered and wind-bent in my bough. Exaltations of larks no longer nest in my branches.

Autumn is portentous of winter’s finality; the last act, 4th quarter. But it also carries the hope and expectation of one more go round. The curtain comes down, the curtain goes up again. Why not? Another opening, another show.

With luck we’ll soon have an incontinent sky to wet us. Umbrellas will open like black narcissus. I want to be caught in a downpour. Drench me. Let me be pelted and puddled. Parched earth will be heard slurping. I can feel it already in my arthritic bones.

The planet’s lease shall be renewed.

 

Earliest Memory

I can still hear those sirens and smell the smoke. I was between three and four years old watching a car ablaze from my third story window. I saw the red truck with a big hose and the flames. I’ll never forget it. Too bad it never happened.

For about eight decades I regarded this scene as my earliest memory. Then it occurred to me that I had a picture book about fire engines. Those images flew off the page and torched the parked car three stories below.

Better yet, I can mark that moment as when I felt the power of books sufficient to spark my imagination. A year or two later I learned how those squiggles on the page called words could ignite my inscape and make the world luminous.

Returning to that window I do remember a new apartment building going up across the street. There was a derrick, mounds of earth and bricks were stacked up.

The entire block was to be a series of five story apartments except for one house with chickens in the front yard. Over time we played marbles in the dirt where the chickens were partitioned off. I was introduced, without ceremony, to this tribe called children. It was an aural culture with unwritten rules passed from the ten-year-old elders to us little tots.

There was a rhythm to street games from stoop ball to hopscotch to double Dutch jump rope. We had our own benevolent leaders who knew a small something that allowed the flock to cohere, until one day they outgrew us, and the hierarchy shifted without a peep.

Written words would overthrow the oral, but language of the street still has echoes for me long after it vanished into chalk dust or flew away in the smoke, higher than a pop fly.

Life On Hold

What again? Does your menu never hold still?

 I’m glad my call is important to you but apparently some things are more important.

Every time I call, he's away from his desk. Couldn't he take his desk with him?

No, I don’t know his extension.

I’m sure you’re experiencing a high call volume. Have you considered hiring more staff? 

Please don't tell me your menu has changed while I'm waiting. Should I hit 7 instead of 4 in order to get 1?

I’ll go with jazz for now. By the time you pick up the phone it will have become classical

No, I can’t call back between midnight and three.

I already went to your website. That’s why I’m calling.

I’ve given you the last four numbers of my Social Security and now you want to know my favorite movie? I can only say my least favorite is Texas Chainsaw Massacre...the musical comedy version.

Now, you’re telling me your mailbox is full.

Wait, don’t hang up.

I’ve been waiting so long I’ve read the entire newspaper, the weather report in Asia, the police blotter and the obits. For a minute I thought I spotted my name.

Perhaps I was abandoned as a child and you've opened up the old wound.

The grandchildren have grown up. I’ve got the Neptune Society on the other line.

If you’ve changed your menu again, I’ll have the chef’s salad.

Now I’ve forgotten why I called.

I think it had something to do about paramedics coming over. I couldn’t manage to perform a Heimlich maneuver on myself.

Yes, I know my call will be answered in the order it was received. I am trying to get on your queue in case something happens the day after tomorrow.

 

Time and Time Again

OMG, it's almost two o'clock and I haven't had lunch yet.

In more ways than one we are off the clock. We have been out of time long before Salvatore Dali melted that watch in his 1931 painting. Climatologists have been warning our deaf ears of impending doom for decades. Time and tide are tired of waiting. 

The notion of clocks came as an imposition on the natural rhythm of human existence. Eating, sleeping, and working all yielded to the tyranny of the clock as if to an alarm. Being punctual became a virtue. Pre-literate societies had no such need to punctuate their lives. As kids we were heedless of when movies started as if it was life itself, we were barging in on. Yet I remember that big clock on the wall of all my classes in elementary school, an early lesson in conformity. 

When Big Ben strikes on the hour, all fourteen tons of it, you’d better check your timepiece and hurry up or else. The great London clock came at the height of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. It could be regarded as the symbol of uniformity and authoritarian rule. Everyone knew their place and when tea was served, one lump or two.

Football, basketball and soccer are all played against the clock as well as their opponent. Managing the clock has become the hallmark of a successful team while a baseball game defies it as the great board game moves counterclockwise into eternity.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, measured her life by the gongs of Big Ben. Harold Lloyd hung for his life on the big hand in one of the most enduring images of the silent film era as if to mock time itself. Orson Welles had his licks in a moment of levity during the zither filled Third Man movie when he ridiculed the Swiss for their neutrality and cuckoo clock as their sole contribution to Western Civilization. In fact, everything in that memorable speech was about as accurate as a broken clock.

But Mrs. Dalloway’s noon was altogether different from the other character’s twelve o’clock. Woolf 's use of time was a way of giving voice to the inner lives of her characters. In her masterpiece, time is subjective; for some an occasion for buying flowers or accepting a lunch invitation; for another a time for dying.

The clock gives us the illusion of quantifying our lives just as commodification monetizes it. It provides us with the idea of our existence being a chronicle. World War I shattered this sequential narrative. The myth of progress was laid to rest along with millions of dead bodies to fertilize the fields of Europe. A generation was lost, and survivors were also lost in the stupidity of it all, a life left in fragments and the dread of a world without a godhead to write the fable.

Perhaps time is not of the essence, at least, according to the clock or watch. Both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took their Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway through a single day which recapitulated their entire life. History, both personal and otherwise, cannot be dismissed nor the consequences of our behavior ignored as it determines our future on this orb.

Long out of the workplace and back into the unpartitioned flow, the clock now seems an irrelevant construct except for meeting friends for lunch. I marvel at how hours fly, and days are indistinguishable. My wish is for moments marked by exclamation points.

From Munich to Michigan

I was born March 21, 1933, the same day, in Munich, Hitler made dissent a crime and cemented his dictatorship. Even gossiping or making fun of the Nazi regime was deemed unlawful. That summer over a hundred thousand citizens were arrested and sent to newly constructed concentration camps.

How did this happen? It happened because the three opposition parties could not form a coalition to defeat the dictator.

Today I read that the Muslims of Michigan will not give their vote to Kamala Harris. It is infuriating enough that Cornel West and Jill Stein would put their ego ahead of the public good. But for the Muslims to withhold their support for the Democratic ticket is itself a crime against humanity. 

In Hitler’s Germany the Social Democrats, Communists and Catholic Center Party together had an equal number of votes in their parliament but the Nazis prevailed because of their squabbling.

To see this same splintering unfold here and now, raises my blood pressure and my ire.

I share some of the outrage of the Palestinians but nothing can absolve them of their complicity in abetting the dissolution of democracy and the rise of American Fascism. Do they not realize their protest vote does not register except as a gift to Donald Trump. Will somebody inform them we do not have a parliamentary system here with proportional representation?

As a reward for their misguided act, are they blind to the consequences of their wasted vote in this most pivotal state; that Trump is a bedfellow of Bibi Netanyahu who would be unconstrained to unleash further lethal force against Palestinians? In addition, they are most likely to be deported.

Young pro-Palestinian sympathizers tend to live in an idealistic bubble. They think in absolutes. At some point they will understand it is much harder to live within the system than to throw stones at imperfections. I ask you to throw some water in your face and wake up before November 5^th. We are stuck with a two-party system. None of the above, is not acceptable.