Invasions

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, the opening salvo of WWII which ended up killing 85 million people. Putin invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022. 

Over the past nine months The United States has invaded itself. We are no longer the country I once knew, having traded golden knick-knacks for the Golden Rule. We used to be the land upon which God shed his grace and crowned thy good with brotherhood. Grace and brotherhood have been replaced with avarice and vengeance.

Louis the 14^th said: L’etat c’est moi, I am the state. This is the most succinct statement proclaiming the absolute right of kings. We are well on our way in our descent to monarchical rule.

Invasions are seldom contributions to mankind. However, there are exceptions. Almost one thousand years ago a French contingent from Normandy crossed the channel and defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. It might be regarded as a food fight in which French toast bested English muffins, and the result was eggs benedict. Besides their French cooking and new-fangled weaponry, they introduced their Latinate-Romance language, forever softening the English tongue. And the Norman Conquest bequeathed me my name.

To stretch a point, another instance of a good invasion was the introduction of cowpox to treat smallpox. Edward Jenner is credited with this first vaccine. The word itself is derived from the Latin, vacca, meaning cow. In fact, the notion first came from West Africa where the disease was managed by allowing small amounts of live virus to colonize healthy people and stimulate the immune system to create antibodies. Indeed, smallpox is the first human disease to have been completely eradicated.

Thanks to vaccines, we have virtually eliminated polio, mumps, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, chickenpox, rubella, and hepatitis. Dictators tend to disparage science because it is based on independent thought and critical thinking. Evidence-based inquiry is deemed a threat while junk science and conspiracy theories are encouraged.

It is therefore not coincidental that our new regime has aligned itself with the anti-vaccine movement. Ultimately, the death toll from this senseless alliance can rival the aforementioned wars.

Rounds and Squares and Flakes

Consider the snowflake, each unique as a QR code, given all the possibilities for crystalline formations. Better yet, let’s talk about cornflakes, equally un-replicable. If a cornflake were an island, as it is in a bowl of milk, it would show one deep harbor after another. No perpendiculars. You have to admire it for that. It’s as jagged as the right-hand margin of a contemporary poem, asserting its sui generis voice.

I am gazing into my bowl looking for the meaning of life. It’s as likely here as in the cottage cheese ceiling or the book I just found on my shelf,  written by some guru in a loincloth and scrupulously unread. Some flakes resist sogginess almost successfully, others succumb to milk from cows or almonds.

Where are you going with all this? I don’t know but I’ll think of something.

Truth be told I left cornflakes behind along with Wheaties many bananas ago.  Now, I’m a Catalina Crunch and blueberry sort of guy. But those old orange, rectangular boxes deserve a special place in my thrill-a-minute-life. Wheaties were probably my first newspaper as I spooned and read about their designated heroes. For a street urchin as I was, the athletes on the box became my brief idols. There was a certain magic in those words. I was becoming knowledgeable about something my parents knew not. These days the only thing I read on the box is the carbohydrate and fiber content. 

To stretch a point, American history took an unfortunate turn when, in 1937, Ronald Reagan became a celebrity at least in Iowa when he won the Breakfast of Champions award for best broadcaster of baseball games sponsored by…you guessed it, Wheaties. From there it was a short step into the Oval Office. Presumably, he was gobbling Wheaties in Hollywood, and as Governor of California and then, and then. Of such stuff B-movies are made. Is this a great country or what?

Now it’s time to talk about how cereal boxes are stored in the pantry. My stepdaughter used to alternate her three cereals, flakes, rounds and squares on consecutive days of the week. If it’s Wednesday it must be Cheerios. This became Christie’s way of ordering through the small anarchies of life.

Friend Fred arranged all his cans alphabetically. As he tells it this was done in case he wakes up suddenly blind, he could grab the tuna fish and know it isn’t salmon. I call it the Artie Shaw Syndrome. The clarinet playing band leader and leader also of obsessive compulsives, insisted all pillowcases face the same direction. Eight marriages later he wrote about it. 

Fred can’t play Begin the Beguine but has other endearing qualities. He was miffed when his daughter and son scrambled his pantry as a prank. They even switched the Hi-Lo Flakes with Bran Buds. 

He was confronted with the chaos of life. But he recovered in time to email them that he was sitting at his desk with his will and an eraser. Humor is the best revenge. As for the turmoil of existence I have no urgent need to tidy it up. Earth is round, borders square and life is irregularly flaky.

Yes, I know, sophisticated people scoff at cereal. A few cups of coffee rev their motor. Call it my arrested development. But my morning bowl has gotten me this far. Every day snaps, crackles and pops, in no particular order.

Odysseus and His Odyssey

The new movie called The Return begins at the end of Odysseus’ twenty-year travail. Ralph Fiennes is washed ashore on Ithaca, haggard looking but ever resourceful and muscular, while Juliette Binoche is no less cunning as she ravels and unravels the fruit of her loom. The scenes of them together are well-worth the ordeal of watching the rest of the film with its gratuitous violence.

Constantine Cavafy's poem Ithaca calls into question, is it the  destination or the journey. The promised land may be illusory. We strive for some ultimate sense of returning home, which ain’t what it used to be. As Thomas Wolfe put it, You Can’t Go Home Again. Yet we all have our Ithaca.

The illusion has been paved over or seen now with new eyes. In baseball one travels around the diamond to reach home plate in a cloud of dust. Is he safe or out? Only the imp-ump-god knows. What’s a Homer for?

Was Odysseus safe? Not until he emptied his quiver of arrows into the eager hearts of Penelope’s suitors. On full display is our hero’s devious ways, hubris here, self-possession there, lust and fidelity in his many turnings. 

Why do we still read the Odyssey today? Maybe to see the soft clay we are made of. Odysseus is a model of Western man, blemished as he is, and his multitudes within; the entire aggregate of men in all their passions and follies. 

In the Odyssey he is alternately punished by Poseidon and saved by Athena. Yet he emerges as man, alone, without providential intervention. He is without a moral compass, a cork on the waves given to expediency without any ideology other than survival. There are no moral imperatives to guide him. No sense of the greater good nor any ethical standards other than looking out for number one.

He returns to Penelope because he needs the feminine principle to make himself whole. Warriors require the other to recover their humanity. Eros is the creative life force. Will the patriarchy ever learn?

Few of us reclaim the throne unless self-actualization can be seen as royalty. I would say it is. And that sense of a life well-lived comes from the journey itself. What greater adventure than this wild span of years full of stumbles, detours, overhead light bulbs, being fully met and with moments of reverence for the all of it.   

A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Oblivion

Aside from Facebook, I have a list of 65 friends to whom I send my blogs. Google, in their infinite reach, tells me how many click on the link I provide.

I’ve been posting about two each week for sixteen years. On average, about 25-40 open and presumably read my ramblings. All of a sudden, starting about two weeks ago, I am being read by over twice the number on my recipient list.

Welcome, I think but who are you? I don’t know whether to be flattered or frightened. Imagine having 65 of your closest friends over and 150 crash the party. Food for thought is soon gone. Some of these strangers may even be wearing masks. 

Is that you, Igor? How’s the weather in Kazakhstan? Or are you stuck in some subterranean boiler room in an abandoned warehouse? Worst case scenario, I’m being scrutinized by recently-released thugs 3 floors under the White House. Maybe ICE is checking to see if my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with an undocumented Kaiser roll.

Or could my new-found set of eyes be an array of Musk-made bots? There are no buts about a bout with a bot. One would think AI has better use of their time than scrutinizing the squiggles of an iconoclast in his 93rd year. Why bother? Soon, I shall wither away from natural causes anyway, unless I find myself first having lunch with a suicide bomber.

True enough, I've been vehement over the forensics leading to the demise of America. I had expected to go out hearing about the land that I love... through the night with a light from above and not a requiem for a country, disappeared. The wars which I thought were won against human bondage and fascism, seem now to have both been lost. 

I will try to ignore that uninvited goon-bot leaning against a lamppost across from my window at midnight, whether he exists or not. Instead, I'll gaze at the apostrophe of a moon, possessed of all the wonder over which it presides. 

After further research, Google tells me I have readers in China and Hong Kong. Next time, I’d better read the fortune cookie for a coded message. It's only fair, if I show them mine, they should show me theirs. I never give up hope that Lao-Tzu will turn up.

Instead, I usually get some version of, Have a nice day. Indeed, I shall, with gratitude for this lucky life, and moments still pulsing from every one of my ninety plus years, from column A and column B, the sweet, the sour and spicy of it all.        

Word of the Year

My vote goes to performative.  Of course, spoken words are different from written words and this is one I’ve never uttered but it keeps popping up in print or from the mouths of talking heads.

Gaslighting had its run and now feels sort of stale. I expect performative to have the same fate. On the other hand, as long as Trump reigns, the word fits.

When Donald first appeared on the political stage, he had already gained his chops on reality T.V. Since then, we have witnessed the transformation of politics into show business; lethal show biz at that. Now, only about a third of the country is laughing. Call it theater of audacity and mendacity. Call it performative.

He knows how to get his name on the marque. Bless him, as on Fox News, ridicule him or curse him as we do in my circle of friends, but it isn’t possible to ignore him.

Whether his antics, part ignorance and part arrogance, can be dismissed as a mere performance is no longer relevant. He may be playing the court jester but he is also the man on the throne. And each reckless and mindless edict has historic consequences wrecking countless lives.     

When he staged an illegal political photo op at Arlington cemetery that was performative but relatively harmless. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and now the Defense Dept. is also designed partially as performance. When he set up a camera crew to show him kissing the flag or the Bible that was also performance art, but his behavior goes much further than that. 

His announcement which threatened Greenland's sovereignty is both spectacle and a blatant violation of law. The destruction of a vessel and crew in international waters because it might be heading here and it might be carrying drug smugglers is also performative, but deadly. 

With a wink toward his MAGA minions he parades weaponry and paves over roses. To borrow from G&S Pinafore, He is the monarch of the realm / born to overwhelm / And ply his power as the office grants / And so do his children and his sycophants.

Historians will describe him as a narcissistic misogynist with arrested development, void of empathy and any discernible ethos, They will have to add performative to that list of adjectives. 

Truth Be Told

The answer is Montenegro or Bobby Riggs or Gloria Graham. These days lunch could not be complete without looking up some piece of trivia on our smart phone. It leaves no question unanswered except, perhaps, for the meaning of life, what are we doing here and what just went wrong with our country. If we can’t deal with the overwhelming questions at least we placate our brains with the small stuff.

As was recently pointed out by Ken Jennings, the M.C. of the quiz show Jeopardy, facts are more than trivia. In fact, trivia is more than trivial. The word goes back seven centuries when it referred to three essentials of a liberal arts education, rhetoric, logic and grammar. A massive dose of each is achingly needed in our citadels of power.

In this age of mendacity, conspiracy and gullibility, facts have been relegated to versions of truth on one channel, twisted on another and ignored by most. Objective truth went out with landlines and dictionaries. However a lie does not become true by repetition. 

I doubt if any of our ancestors had as much knowledge crammed into their grey matter as we do. Our heads are stuffed with gigabytes (whatever that means) of facts. Too bad knowledge doesn’t translate into wisdom. 

Was it Plato or Yogi Berra who said, knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad. Actually, it was Miles Kington who deserves attribution. He also said that a pessimist sees a glass as half empty. An optimist is the guy who drinks what’s there’s and orders another. I know all this because I just looked it up…but at least I waited till I came home.

The fact of the matter is that while, botanically speaking, tomatoes are seeded plants and therefore fruits, the Supreme Court, in 1893, ruled that they shall be designated as a vegetable and taxed accordingly as a veggie import.

Knowledge has a shelf life. Wisdom is more like what we know but cannot quite articulate. Wisdom is likely to be an interrogation. Why and how rather than who or when. Possibly what happened when we didn’t notice. The ineffable. An instance of congruence in the discord. A pattern seen from a distant perch.

Knowledge has its place. It is one step ahead of info, data and nomenclature. If they opened me up, out would come pouring a compendium of pharmaceutical terms, a dictionary of words and an encyclopedia of political events, a smattering of history & geography, a gaggle of ballplayers, movies, actors, big-band leaders and a libretto or two from Gilbert and Sullivan. The stuff that might get me on Jeopardy.     

It may be that wisdom comes in two sizes. The great wisdom said to be found at the foot of the Himalayas or the fleeting variety at the bottom of your oatmeal bowl. When the Zen novice arrives at the monastery seeking answers he is told to wash his bowl. The floating world is that which eludes Google over lunch but may be accessible to the dishwasher in his reverie. 

In simplicity and silence, one learns to listen for the wisdom which lies within, sort of like knowing what it takes not to add tomato (or ketchup) to the fruit salad.

Just a couple of decades ago we might have gathered for lunch and have a conversation over Chinese chicken salad without needing to know what country in Europe has the second tallest men (Montenegro). We might have left the table just wondering. Where has all the wonder gone?