Assessing The Body Politic

“Sir, you are drunk.”

“And you, Bessie, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly.”

This was an alleged exchange between Winston Churchill and Bessie Braddock, a member of Parliament. It popped in my head relative to the Biden-Trump debacle. Will Joe be soberly robust the next day?

Apparently, he was and the day after that while Donald remains thoroughly ugly.

It also calls into question how does any president function in real time. Does he require oratorical skills? Must he confront a delusional adversary spewing insults? Are decisions made alone or rather in a room of advisors with expertise on the matter at hand?

Joe Biden is clearly over the hill. So am I and just about everyone I know but we all have our moral compass, our principles, our sense of civility and a measure of empathy.  

 Yes, I agree with you. A younger, more vigorous candidate could have refuted Trump more decisively. And yes, the Democratic Party should have been grooming four or five surrogates to gain national recognition along the way. Certainly, they are out there. But it is too late. Get over it.

Half-intoxicated Sir Winston led the U.K. through its finest hour. Obese and with lungs dealing with as many as ten cigars a day he led the way. During his lifetime one estimation has him imbibing 42,000 bottles of champagne. Perhaps he was in a stupor while rallying the troops from his underground bunker. Yet the bluebirds came over the white cliffs of Dover.

Biden has done a masterful job rivaled only by LBJ in his domestic accomplishments. He shows no fatigue on the world stage. The only question that matters is his electability.

Yet it is not Biden to be judged. It is us as a body politic whom history will assess. Are the American people enfeebled or enlightened? Can we discern deceit from honesty, vulgarity from decency, vengeance from justice and know the difference between a self-serving man’s lust for power and one striving to bind our wounds?

 

Thursday Debate

Whether this will be a debate is debatable. Trump can’t complete a thought and Biden has trouble completing a sentence. The TV audience is likely to reach seventy million but that’s just a fraction of the eyes on the last Super Bowl. That, alone, speaks volumes.  

Neither a sport nor a disputation of the red / blue divide, this promises to be a spectacle of political theater. I’ll be ready to cringe if the President meanders off into rhetorical fog.

At the same time, I’ll be anticipating Trump to employ his nine-year-old vocabulary of limp curses as he rants incoherently. One wonders what dose of vulgarity and malice it would take to dissuade a MAGA mind.

As always, The Democrats have a large tent with many constituencies. It would be nothing less than tragic if they will not all support the President in November. He has done a remarkable job pushing through an economic program which benefits the disadvantaged. It is ironic that the aggrieved do not see it. And ironic, too, that we do not have a youthful, vigorous candidate to convey the message. 

The phenomenon we are witnessing is an amorphous discontent being manipulated by a semi-deranged miscreant. His megalomania seems to obscure the emptiness of any remedy for his follower’s grievances. Those who know better salivate over his proposed anti-regulation and tax giveaway. History will judge them harshly for abetting his climate denialism and for their complicity in installing a man who promises to end democracy.

All these words fall on deaf ears in this theater of the absurd. The demotic force of social media has replaced thoughtful, investigative journalism. We have created a massive class of the ill-informed.

How many minds will be moved by the force of either man's case, I expect it to be minimal. Instead we’ll be looking for lapses, incoherence and gotchas.

 

My Pharmacy

While on the exciting subject of pharmacy, more specifically Norm’s Pharmacy, I want to say it is still there bearing my name. I used to tell some of the young sales reps that my mother was a visionary and named me after the store.

For anyone in my vast readership, including North Korean hackers or scam artists sweating it out in a boiler room in Belarus, I welcome you to visit this historical monument. We might sit down for a beer. You can pick up the tab since you already have my credit cards.

The store is located in the upper middle class or lower upper-class town of Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. It was so named because Edgar Rice Burroughs once lived there when his creation Tarzan swung from trees with a banana in his mouth. As he presciently said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there.

I had the pharmacy for seventeen years till it became clear that the mail-person carried more prescriptions than I had filled that day. One day the phone rang:

Hi Shirley.

How did you know it was me?

I only have two customers and the other one just hung up.

At that point, twenty-seven years ago, I sold this goldmine to a Russian family who were actually from Odessa. But they spoke only Russian and thought in Russian, damning Gorbachev and admiring Putin because Gorby was weak and wore shirts while Vlad was strong and bare-chested. Sigh.

Why would anyone buy my store, I thought, except for money-laundering? As in all money matters I was wrong. They tripled the business attracting the community of Russian emigres.  The transition from communism to Medicaid was seamless.

I hung around for a while until it became a Russian store. Spasibo and Dasvidaniya didn’t get me very far. Yet they kept my name. Maybe they thought someone would straggle in thinking it was Norm’s Restaurant.

I’d had enough; I walked away from the gulag. My mother had said pharmacy was always something I could fall back on. I fell back for fifty-three years. My father, in his day, had presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water. Gone are those days of arcane scribbles and the whiff of alchemy. Life was now deodorized and deconstructed.

It was as if I was toiling on the back forty while a voice read me the Emancipation Proclamation. Free, free at last.  

Death and Life in the Pharmacy

A few years ago I got a call from a pharmacist friend I worked with almost 50 years ago. He said he heard that I had died. I assured him that if I had died it wouldn’t have slipped my mind and I'd know enough to lie down. True, my back went out a few days ago and I’ve been laid low but surely that’s not quite the same.

Come to think of it, when I looked in the mirror this morning, I didn’t see anyone but this was after a hot shower and the glass was foggy. It got me thinking that if I had died this must be my afterlife and it’s not so bad after all.

Pharmacists hang around with other pharmacists possibly because they are so boring nobody else would put up with them. I was happy not to keep many as friends. The profession itself was depressing enough.

There are exceptions, of course. Ed, the bearer of my grim news, is a good man who had always reminded me how one could happily get through the day finding fulfillment relating to patients; advice which saved me from the despair of just counting and pouring for decades to come. 

I found that empathy came naturally to me and was its own reward. However, it is not true that I never dispensed a drug without trying it myself.

I recall that there was another pharmacist with my name. I met him once and regarded him as my generic equivalent. One always thinks of oneself as a brand name. Perhaps it was this Norm Levine who checked out. I’m sorry for his family. To lose one of us is a misfortune. To have lost two would have been carelessness. (Thank you, Oscar Wilde.)  

I take it back about pharmacists. I met my match a dozen years ago in Jack. He not only turned his back on pharmacy but proved it by retiring 15 years before me. I have great respect for his vision and commitment to higher ideals. He was also my doppelgänger. We both graduated from Forest Hills High School, had pharmacies in the San Fernando Valley with pharmacist-fathers who attended Columbia University and both have daughters named Lauren. Sometimes I would call him to find out how I’m feeling.

In any case, I'm sure if I had passed away Jack would have felt a twinge and called me at once. In fact, it was Jack who died a couple of years ago and left a hole in my life. 

 

Seasons Within

The death of spring goes unnoticed yet we celebrate its birth as the vernal equinox. Maybe because the summer solstice, June 20^th this year, is always there to keep the cycle going. 

Spring in the Santa Monica Mountains was a meeting of lugubrious fog and a frolic of wild mustard as if to match the clash of the morning's breaking news and the painted hillside. The fog lifted as we drove through Latigo Canyon like a curtain going up on yellow and orange (blazing star) patches. Van Gogh gone mad with his palette. 

Keats wrote of spring as lustful and summer as a time to dream in creative lassitude, undisturbed in what Yeats might have described as the bee-loud glade. No argument from me though I reserve the right to lust for life as I see fit and a good night’s sleep is one of those inalienable rights I claim, even if it requires a little help from my friends as prescribed. If my new mattress doesn’t grant me six or seven hours of easeful sleep I’ll be ready to try that bee-loud glade. 

The poet wrote of early autumn belonging to Dionysius still swollen with summer and the juice of the vine. By mid-autumn I look for a bit of New Hampshire foliage in the glory of decay from ruddy to rust. See maples and die.

The passage from one to the other is hardly felt here where we barely have seasons at all. September in Southern California defies the calendar. Ho-hum, morning clouds giving way to afternoon sun with lows in the mid-sixties and a high of 73. No relief in sight.

With global warming, however, some plants are lurching ahead of the starter’s pistol. Migratory birds are being denied their habitats and whales are making U-turns. 

To some extent our bodies yearn for their own seasons, their cycles. In these shadowed times it seems to me we need to turn toward the light the same way branches contort to benefit their leaves. Call it an instance of human tropism. We are just another exotic organism in the garden, desperate for a sliver of sun.

Whether this will be our winter of discontent shall be determined on Nov. 5^th.  The vote will be a plebiscite in the turbulence of sense or no-sense for the American people. Are we so parched as to choose toxic water? So blind to the serpent in the garden? So entranced by hollow promises and barbed rhetoric? Are we in the grip of a constitutional eclipse or will we vote aligned with our flowering, in accord with the enlightenment of our Founders?  

 

Fathering

All my male friends had one and most of us are one. Not only have we fathered our children but consider all the fathering we've done in our time as we shepherd others along in this long distance run with our stumbling, bumbling wisdom. Parenting is that unrehearsed piece of theatre called life fraught with missteps, forgotten lines and audience grumbles but also some rave reviews.

Like it or not we are half the team of unprepared sculptors who shape the clay even as we are shaping ourselves. Who knew the clay was so soft and our mark so indelible.

Now here I am being nurtured by my youngest daughter in a huge role reversal. Janice looks after me checking to see if I am still vertical and making sure I haven't lost my marbles. She is deaf and I marvel how she orchestrates her world, her hands gracefully in flight.

Now in my ninth inning I am blessed to witness daughter Shari painting her vast inscape as landscape employing the encaustic artform. At the same time Lauren is writing her memoir with a verve and vision tracing her singular journey. Both have windows into their inner lives.

Inept as I am at hunting or fishing with no natural affinity for pipes or power tools, I sympathize with my daughters looking for a Father's Day card that fits. They've done very well over the years finding open books, trees and possibly a baseball. More important than any image are their messages. I have much to learn from each of them.

Note to my daughters: If I've seemed judgmental, protective and a voice of caution just know that it comes with the job description. When I live vicariously through you from time to time that's also part of the package. I love you all and love how you have extended my fingerprints beyond my imagining. Just know that your clay is still soft; we are all evolving. 

Further, Father

 My father had a Dickensian beginning. His mother died when he was three and his destitute father couldn’t cope. If this were a novel there may have been great expectations awaiting but this was real life with no inheritance on the next page.

So it was that my Dad was sent to live with equally impoverished Aunt  Rosie and Uncle Peretz whose profession was a peddler selling shoe laces and socks. I don’t imagine there was very much food on the table. Day-old bread would have been a luxury. I can see them eating a soup made from the top of carrots which were thrown away. I can almost hear my father saying, Please Sir, I want some more. The Dickens, you say.

Wait, I lied. There was a rich Uncle Henry. But where was he? Maybe he hadn’t become rich for another three decades and even then I remember being invited to Aunt Rosie and Peretz for lunch one day when I was about ten years old. I was served pot cheese and sour cream. As I recall I did not plead for some more.

I don’t know how long my father spent in elementary school but I know he never went to high school. He sold newspapers in front of Bushwick Stadium in Brooklyn. At three cents a throw I guess he got to keep a penny.

Along came my mother to tutor him sufficiently to pass a high school equivalency test and then on to college for the required two years to receive his license to practice Pharmacy. He must have been dyslexic; it took an inordinate amount of time for him to read a newspaper article.

Yet his model was compelling enough for me to follow that path into pharmacy. I remember how deliberate he was reading a prescription. In those days the ingredients were often written in Latin in an educated scribble, unintelligible to most as if the doctor and pharmacist were engaged in a clandestine operation. Simply counting and pouring came much later. Prior to 1950 drugstores were gardens of herbs with crude drugs emitting a vapor from their apothecary jars. My father carried that scent on his body, aromatic, organic and intoxicating. A single inhalation could pacify my world.

The mean streets seem not to have left its mark on him except for his compassion for the disadvantaged which came out as a kind of abstract vehemence against greed and injustice. It landed him in left-wing politics. 

In the meantime his father had remarried and accumulated four more children. All of them were raised in an orphanage or some sort of poorhouse. My Grandpa Louis named one his new sons, Samuel, forgetting that he already had a son with that name. Sam, meet your brother, Sam. Even Dickens couldn’t make this stuff up.

My Dad loved his half-brothers, particularly his namesake whom I remember for his beautiful handwriting in the V-mails we used to receive during W.W. II where he served in the Merchant Marine in the North Atlantic.

Here’s my question. How does a boy, discarded by his birth father and raised as a street urchin, turn out to be such a soulful, loving, even-tempered father? I have no memory of him ever raising his voice. He never complained. He seemed at home in this world. Where did that sweet nature come from? I ask you Charles Dickens?   

My father took the hand dealt him and went further, father.

Some Words On The Fly

There he goes or is it one of those floaters

roaming the outskirts of my eye?

He’s my personal fly, a meta-vision,

possibly a preview of my next incarnation.

I can let it loose like a fly on the wall

who has tales to tell if only he could

or that one where the customer calls the waiter over

to complain about the fly in his soup.

I’ll stay with the one on the wall even if

this fly is enjoying his backstroke in tomato bisque.

It’s a short span for either one dodging swatters.

Flies are not fleas but life flees in any case.

Amazing what you find out in the course of writing.

I just looked it up and fleas don’t fly they

don’t even have wings but they jump a lot,

sort of like words, those little black squiggles.

Back to flies, Trump has trouble with his.

I know this from my observation point on the wall

listening to his bumbling blather.

There goes another one.

I might be better off as the fly in the ointment

raising necessary havoc

from where I’m perched here on the ledge

salivating over the fruit bowl

which can use a bit of blemish and bruise

as I’m famous for in Dutch still-life, 

portrayed on a pear or petal as death itself. 

Not very flattering given our mission in the ecosystem

to feed on aphids, clean up decay and pollinate.

Where have all my floaters gone? 

Could be impaled on that jagged 

right-hand margin of a poem.

War and Peace

Wolves, while circling the campfire figured their chance of survival would increase with a career move, trading their howl and fangs for a doggie door. That big bad wolf who made a meal of Red Riding Hood is now a man’s best friend fetching Frisbees, Yet, after all these years they still haven’t domesticated us.

We humans have yet to model a peaceable kingdom. By some estimates there are up to a dozen wars going on right now. An uncivil civil war right here looms as a possibility if Trump loses in November and challenges the outcome.

On June 6th we commemorated the second front landing at Normandy Beach which we call D-Day. Nobody is quite sure what that letter signifies. Eisenhower said the landing had a departure date, hence D-Day. The French regard it as Disembarkation Day. In any case it was probably delayed longer than necessary given the imperative of ending Nazi atrocities. We hesitated long enough for Russia to turn the tide and lose ten million lives.

One wonders which side Donald Trump would have been rooting for. He probably would have said there are good people on both sides and those 2,500 Americans killed in combat that day were losers.

In my view, wars of the past two centuries were largely fought over the acquisition of colonies. Carnage was a result of monarchial family squabbles in 1914 by European countries, naked aggression by Germany and Japan, and misadventures by the United States, from Chile to Vietnam to Iraq, to extend our own spheres of influence.. And now the new Czar of Russia is looking to restore those good old days of the USSR. At the  same time, we are living in the decline of the American century and that is not a bad thing as nations move toward parity.

I still hold to the belief that war is a failure of diplomacy in a general sense. With the current trend toward authoritarian rule, we are likely to see more conflict since dictators never met a territorial dispute, they hesitated sending other men to die for.

(Even WWII might have been avoided if you look at the root causes which gave rise to Hitler I'm thinking of Versailles which weighted Germany with reparations and set the conditions for a monstrous dictator. Contrast this with post-war Germany in 1945 which allowed for allied occupation and assured a rebuilding.)

Male domination gets extended to global hegemony. There is, of course, a countervailing force of our better selves. One wishes we might celebrate peace the way we memorialize war. 

One day we may also give up our howl and fangs, sit around the campfire and learn to share this orb of cosmic dust while passing it along as a livable habitat.

 

 

 

 

Lost and Found

 The problem with childhood is that we only get one and so much of it goes unnoted. We’re too busy living it, as it should be. If we eat our vegetables and avoid having lunch with a suicide bomber, we might keep our child alive till we are ready for that horizontal goodbye. That’s what longevity is for: to rewrite what might have been.

What’s the big idea?

Why, you want to make something out of it?

 I wonder what that was all about? Tough talk for ten-year-olds. I have no big ideas so I need to make something out of the small ones. I seem to have a vivid memory of things that never quite happened. Of course, they could have happened to somebody.

Let’s say I disappeared when I was six at the 1939 World’s Fair in the plaza between the Trylon and Perisphere. Holding tight onto my father’s overcoat I looked up and saw it wasn’t my father. So it was, my new family set another chair at their table. Maybe some other kid claimed my designated piece of overcoat and entered my old family. A fair exchange.

On an August Sunday at Rockaway Beach my new parents rented an orange and black umbrella and we found a patch of sand. After digging halfway to China, I ran into the ocean heedless of the drift and riptide. I emerged, stumbling over other’s sandcastles searching futilely for that distinct umbrella among a sea of orange and black umbrellas. Finally, I found myself at the lifeguard station in Far Rockaway, only to be returned to my original family.

It's not a bad thing to vanish every now and then. You get lost, you get found or better yet you find yourself. The muscle of imagination needs the stretch; it’s all part of becoming. As far as I can tell I’m still a work-in-progress looking for both that orange-black umbrella and those threads of a coat.

From my distant perch above I am now my own father wearing a coat of many colors. The umbrellas have dropped me into the commotion of a field wild with ranunculus. Orange, as autumn leaves yet black containing pianistic colors of eighty-eight hues from havoc to hush.

Transition

How water is ice, is steam.

Trees, the wood, now paper, now ember

and all the stops between.

Gerunding, she wrote, giving birth to a word,

how everything is rotting or ripening,

morphing, dying, and living again.

Awesome he said having found a dollar bill

on the sidewalk, doing violence to awe,

once reserved for rapture or reverence

and in its travels became awful,

as in shock and awe,

then loved and degraded to death.

 

In my dream an old friend, long deceased, 

carelessly dropped the lid 

from his Styrofoam cup

defacing the zen garden.

I ran to pick it up. Was I not my friend

restoring the equipoise,

correcting my own trespass,

evolving in this place of rapture

and is that not awesome?