Auto-Immune

Somebody once told me I was my own worst enemy. He was right. I now find myself with two auto-immune diseases, as if one weren’t enough though neither appears to be an existential threat. I seem to be doing combat with myself, genes attacking their cousins. My money is on my body to win. The system is rigged.

I suppose my fate is predetermined by some sort of genetic code, maybe triggered by political aggravation. I need to tamp it down. It’s un-hinged, raging like a deranged President.

Dear Immune System: I know it must be hard living with me all these years but can’t we talk? Have I offended you? Did you know you a have reputation of being fickl You are a wild stallion, a marauder (I’ve never used that word before. See what you’ve done.)

There’s no need to enervate my muscles, stiffen my shoulders and inflame my connective tissue. True, maybe I’ve neglected you but I really do feel emotionally attached and you have an unlisted number.

All I can do now is suppress you. Muffle your pugnacity. Cut you off at the pass. I’ve let loose my terrible swift sword of Steroids. Please, no nuclear option. All I ask is a just peace with honor. A velvet regime change. I’d settle for peaceful coexistence as long as you know your place on the outskirts of my bodily precincts.  

Relax. Have a piece of fruit. Deep breaths. Can you feel my warm milk of kindness running through every vein? Yes, I see your lids are getting heavy. Just sit back and listen the music. I read somewhere that Wittgenstein’s brother lost an arm in World War I. He was a piano virtuoso and Ravel composed a concerto for left-hand alone. I offer this as proof of something but I forget what. 

Go on, have your fun with me. I'm starting to laugh at you, you, irascible old fool with nothing better to do with your haploids and double helix.

Tribalization

I was a member once. We, in the tribe, spent most of our waking hours together. We seemed to know exactly what to do though nothing was in writing. It was my eight years, plus or minus, called Childhood. Mysteriously, the rules of behavior were passed down….. marbles, chalk games, potsie, hop scotch, jump rope, mumblypeg, stick ball, curb games, stoop ball, ring-a-levio, kick the can, et al. All, a credit to an enduring oral tradition though I’m not at all sure that tradition has survived suburban backyards. My tribe existed on the streets and sidewalks of New York, borough of Queens. I have no doubt the same language with the same rule books were played out in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

As we grew older we left the tribe as unceremoniously as we entered it. We got the word…….individuate! We became one-of-kind, or so we thought. Aren’t I unique! After all who but I inhales Peggy’s muse, worshiped Paul Robeson, have rooted for the Dodgers for the past 79 years, played basketball in college, hate goat cheese, love crazy asymmetric splotched shirts, adore all things pumpkin, and despise Donald Trump more than goat cheese.

Which brings us to this new tribalization of America. Today we have those of us who watch MSNBC or CNN and that other tribe who get their received wisdom from FOX News. The chasm is measurable in light years. Our vocabulary has diverged. Consider their refrain of Deep State, fake news,  witch hunt, pro-life, and the hundreds of juvenile terms of derogation issuing from the malevolent clown prince of obfuscation.

With our two tents are we no less tribal than Afghanistan with its 350 factions? No. I want to argue that there is but one tribe…that den of dunces, mesmerized workers, greedy money-counters and spineless politicians who chant on cue for proto-fascist acts. Those of us abhorred by his daily antics are a widely diverse group ranging from Bloomberg to Bernie, from George Will to Rachel Maddow with dozens of stops in between. Our voices are a cacophony, not a choir. Motley not monolithic. Centrists may not show up for Warren nor will the Progressives abide Biden. Opposition to Trump is not tribal; it is the surmise of common sense, of enlightened deliberation as well as daily outrage. He has exhausted my store of adjectives and managed, whether inadvertently or by design, to scar our landscape and blunt our critical thinking. He has retribalized millions with a potion of deceit and incivility which can only be issued by a person of pathological self-absorption.

Mumblypeg, also known at Territory, was played with pocket knives. We actually carried such things in our non-violent tribe. We tossed the blade into the ground creating angles to thwart our opponent. All very fuzzy in my head. There was a strip of land about the size of two doors lengthwise just outside my apartment building. It is where my memory takes me now. That hunk of earth was a mere 25 yards from Kew Forest School which little Donald attended for a few years.

Metaphorically, he has taken those knives and slashed the fabric of our nation disfiguring our democratic tapestry and all our notions of decency and honesty. Whether that suppurating wound is reparable depends on his removal from office.

Not of This Tide

Rudyard (may I call you Rudy?) Kipling was a most celebrated writer around a hundred years ago. He was esteemed by Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Freud, William James and his brother Hank. William J. compared him to Shakespeare. Even Edward Said, fierce opponent of colonialism, admired his work along with Salman Rushdie. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-speaking author. The next was W.B. Yeats sixteen years later.

Kipling was honored in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."

In 1916 he wrote this very moving poem conflating his son’s death with that of a British sailor during W. W. I. Have you news of my boy, Jack? / Not of this tide. When you think that he'll come back? Not with this wind blowing or this tide. Has anyone else had word of him? / Not with this wind blowing  or this tide. / For what is sunk will hardly swim /

not in this tide.

Rudy’s star has been in the descendant for the past 75 years. He is not of this tide. He got it all wrong. The White Man’s burden is nonsense. Manifest Destiny is bull shit. Along with his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, he was an architect of imperialism. He loved the idea of building up man’s body with a good war. Even his beautiful poem damning war couldn’t help itself in the end by holding your head up high as if the folly of that Great War were not a crime against humanity.

Kipling lived in Vermont for about 18 months where he wrote some of his finest stories and began his novel, Kim. Here’s an example of his account of a railroad magnate, having procured an entire train for his personal use, traveling across the country during a great recession of 1892.

At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries…. swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank and the click-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, the oath of a tramp chased off the rear platform, now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender and now a bearing back of noises as they flew past a waiting train. Now they looked into the great abyss, a trestle purring beneath their tread or up to the rocks that barred out half the stars…..  

He wrote with poetic immediacy, drive and cadence as he suggests an unrest in the heartland. Yet for all that I regard Kipling as the finest last gasp of the 19^th century. He was, for the most part, on the wrong side of history.

Even in his well-known verse, East is East and West is West / and never the twain shall meet..
there are two lines to follow which somehow are seldom noted... But there is neither East nor West / nor borders, breed nor birth / When two strong men stand face to face.

Can we separate the poet from the poem, the writer from his words or any artist from his art? I would like to believe creativity issues forth from the center of the creator but it seems not to be so. Consider Picasso’s womanizing, Eliot’s antisemitism. Rudy Kipling is one of those lost voices well worth a re-hearing. Genius is a gift not to be so easily dismissed. It is one of those conundrums I can live with.  

For anyone whose appetite has been whetted I recommend Christopher Benfey’s 2019 book about Kipling called, If, (Penguin Press). By his account Kipling was a conflicted man with opposing voices moderating his view of war and imperialism. In his Epitaphs of the War, he spoke with regret assuming the words of the dead,

If anyone question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.

In the Middle of the Air

When those in human bondage looked down they saw cotton. When they looked up they saw sweet chariots coming for to carry them home. 

Ezekiel saw the wheel / Way up in the middle of the air / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air

Little wheel run by faith / Big wheel run by the grace of God / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.

Now you never can tell what Ezekiel will do / way in the middle of the air / He lie about me / He lie about you / way in the middle of the air.

They may also have seen Lucifer falling from grace. According to Mormons Lucifer was Jesus’ brother. Not so, say everyone else. After all, only begotten sons generally don’t have brothers. Especially to rival them. Lucifer was no ordinary sort. When he fell he landed with a thud not unlike Humpty-Dumpty who was too much for all the King’s horses and men.

(The closest I could ever imagine is getting stuck in an elevator during a power failure. That’s not on my bucket list. Along with Severe Tire Damage it’s among those experiences I could easily live without.)

Lucifer was one of those pagan figures appropriated by the Christians to suit their fable. He was, in fact, the name for Venus, the morning star which seemed to fall out of sight daily. The New Testament took his beauty, his brightness and worldly brilliance and consigned him to eternal deviltry. How dare his curiosity which can lead to defiance. Lucifer takes the rap for Adam munching on that forbidden apple or pomegranate. Have a piece of fruit, he said, and for that gets a sentence of life plus forever. The lesson is, don’t mess with the Divine.

Icarus was another mythological young man who dared to defy authority. His father, Daedalus, who built the labyrinth that bested the Minotaur, warned his boy not to fly too close to the sun or his feathered wings held together by wax would melt. The accepted lesson seems to be that Icarus displayed hubris and paid the ultimate price. The way I see it the kid showed gumption. Who listens to their father? Fathers are yesterday’s news. The next generation pushes the envelope. How else would we have Saran Wrap or smart phones?

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him…is the name of a great book by Sheldon Kopp. Kill him metaphorically, of course. Listen to authority and then go beyond. Listen to yourself.   

Icarus was out there investigating the middle of the air and then took the plunge. But there is more to the legend. Breughel, the Elder, is attributed as having painted, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.  The scene depicted is the legs of a figure going into the sea while a plowman is tending his field oblivious to the important splash in the green water. Benign neglect? Calloused indifference? There is a Flemish saying, And the farmer continues to plow, describing man’s indifference to human suffering.

In 1938 W.H. Auden took that theme and ran with it. In his poem, Musee des Beaux-Arts, the poet imagines several Breughel paintings showing town-folk ice skating, playing or doing chores and never looking up to the middle of the air. Auden was dismayed at the rise of Nazism of the eve of World War II.  I regard his poem as a cautionary tale of wanton disregard for the peril at hand.

This is my long way around to warn a somnolent American public of the imperative to vote in the presidential election, less than a year away. Too many voters seem uninformed or complacent, busy in the counting house counting all their money or at the table eating bread and honey. Next Nov. 3rd is not the day to caulk the bathtub or become a no-show because our candidate is far less than perfect. 

The Devil Donald with his brimstone of malice and mendacity must be defeated. The state of Grace seems to be unknown to him and one he will never carry. It is the one word which least describes him.

To his band of red-capped rally-goers I say, Question Authority. The man at the podium is a false idol with no chariot to deliver you. He lie about you. He lie about himself.

When the Micro Meets the Macro

There is something in us that looks for correlatives, signs within that correspond to that external world which exists on cable news or right outside the window. It is as if we might align our private life with the events of history on one long continuum.  Historical events we find ourselves in the midst of, have their way with our psyche whether we know it or not. Sometimes we mirror the news, other times we may act out its opposite.

In literary terms the objective correlative can sometimes be regarded as a tired, cheap shot. The patient is dying while outside the bedroom window a leaf is in advanced state of decay. The dark and stormy night references the weather inside the house as much as outside. Yet art of any kind conveys emotion best when revealed indirectly and not told.

When Rudyard Kipling visited Japan on his prolong honeymoon it was Kyoto’s season of cherry trees in bloom. He wrote about walking under this blizzard of petals as well as an azalea tree on the verge of bursting with fruit. All of this was possibly code for his wife’s pregnancy.

Four days ago was the 57^th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. The shooting took place one day before my daughter, Janice’s, first birthday. Like many one-year old babies she was not talking yet. In fact she wasn’t even babbling; she was congenitally deaf. We had suspicions but no confirmation of her hearing loss yet I had witnessed her sleeping through loud noises. One doctor brushed it off, another confirmed our worst fears. While probably not historically accurate I conflate the Kennedy shooting with my daughter’s diagnosis. It felt like an assassination.

April 12, 1945, Thursday afternoon. I was coming home from Hebrew School, about a year in advance of my Bar Mitzvah when the news hit the street: Franklin Roosevelt was dead. People were openly weeping as if giving permission to each other. For me it was his voice now gone. Roosevelt was my President, the only President in my lifetime and he was more than that. His intonations shivered me with a beneficent divinity. I realized he was my God. His death was, for me, the death of my religious belief.

My body is in its Trumpian upheaval. A whistle has been blown. The deconstruction of our Democracy under his malicious imbecility is matched by the precipitous fall of my anatomy. Suddenly arthritis is having its way with me from ankles to shoulders. My joints are inflamed and testifying loudly. Bones are conspiring to overthrow my constitution. I am being impeached.

I can’t blame Donald alone for all this. Like the Fuhrer he needed help. I blame the invertebrates in Congress who have made a Faustian pact to throw a blind eye and deaf ear at the miscreant in order to serve another term. Perhaps only a spontaneous remission can save my architecture and the structure of government conceived by our Founders.

The only good that comes to mind about Trump's presidency is the Golden Age of Comedy it has engendered. However Peggy's love along with her irrepressible spirit and creativity are ample compensation for me. The more I moan the more she flows. So I shall shut up; I'm a lucky guy. 

Messages Unsolicited

It may be mid-day in Mumbai but it’s in the wee hours of the day here when the phone rings. Just one ring is sufficient to rouse me from a hard-earned sleep. One and done. The No-Robo system works that way. All day the damn land-line is tolling. Ask not for whom says the poem. Sorry, John Donne, not for me. When I am asleep I am an island unto myself.

Again with the phone. Now it is ringing in earnest demanding to be answered. After all it could be Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. Or the Nobel Prize Committee looking for that other Norm Levine. But no. It’s some guy telling me it is open enrollment season. I should only have my health. I figure if they really cared about my wellbeing they’d leave me alone. This time it’s 10 A.M. I am picturing the caller in some rented space between a tattoo shop and Thai massage parlor in a low-rent district in Manhattan. Seven o’clock here so I might as well meet the day.

Another barrage of one-ringers over breakfast which I’ve learned to ignore like punctuating fits and starts, some abortive sound and fury signifying nothing.

Now it is ringing again. Some campaign worker in Arizona working the phones for Mark Kelley or the Ditch Mitch office pleading for a few bucks. Too close to call says the volunteer in Maine telling me everything I already know about Susan Collins. The problem is I agree with everyone and I’ve already pledged on line.

Now it is Doctors Without Borders or the A.C.L.U. or Habitat for Humanity or Natural Resources Defense Council or Southern Poverty Law Center. They send me maps, calendars and address labels. Stop already, I’m not worth it.

This time the phone voice says, Hi, this is Bruce from Microsoft Service Center. You have been hacked by foreigners so you must go to your computer right now or we shall disable your Internet. To which I reply, Two sentences and you’ve lied to me four times. If your name is Bruce, I am Mahatma Gandhi. Secondly you are not from Microsoft; they don’t call people and lastly they never threaten their clients.

Next, I am told, in combative tones, that Social Security is after me or my credit cards are overdue or maybe my sister is stuck in Nairobi and needs money. Good thing I don’t have a sister unless I’d misplaced her at an early age.

Now an online pharmacy is calling because I foolishly left my phone number eleven years ago when shopping for I know not what. By this time I ask the man who is trying hard to disguise his Indian accent if he really wants to spend his life annoying people. Does your mother know what you are doing, I inquire. This always elicits an early click.

(Much can be said about getting rid of a landline. Mobile phones can always be stored in the far end of the house during sleep and set to low volume or vibrate. I might vibrate myself to happiness) 

Email shows a message from my Greek friend, Basil, suggesting a foursome early dinner at a new Mediterranean restaurant next Wednesday. By now I am crusty, cantankerous and curmudgeonly. I don’t like driving after sundown, say I and I also hate goat or feta cheese. I suppose that would mean I’d be stoned to death in Athens or turned into an ox. He says I’d be saved because the gods couldn't ever agree on anything and an ox sent to India would not lead a bad life.

My day was made. 

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.  It’s one of those Janus two-headed ones 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.

It’s come to this…a bifurcated nation with Us, the Good Guys cheering for Trump’s removal and Them, each watching the news as it breaks and each off to our respective cable-planets. If Trump were dragged from the Oval on MSNBC and CNN, on Fox they’d be showing a car chase in Wichita.

Then we cleave the other way with 100,000 coming together to cheer their team on any Saturday afternoon football game. The Super Bowl gets ten times the rating as the Democrat debate with over 110 million watching, betting, munching, cheering, jeering.

Let us cleave. The Democratic convention next July will be held in Milwaukee, about ½ hour flight from Cleveland. I mark that as a good omen. If the country can’t cleave together at least the Party must. We have the bigger tent, by far. We also have the largest electorate who cleave off in a stupor on Election Day; maybe they still can’t get over Saturday’s big game.

Nearly 60 million people play Fantasy Football. Do they cleave?  I wouldn’t know but in my Lyft rides last week I was able to speak that universal language with three of the four drivers. I doubt if they ever heard of Adam Schiff or John Bolton.

Joe is fading, Pete is rising, Elizabeth and Bernie are neck and neck. Newbies are leaping in. It’s almost like a football game with players being carted off in rhetorical stretchers and non-roster faces showing up not on the program.      Where are the household names, the All-Americans by acclamation? The guy with FDR's voice, JFK's vigor and Jimmy Carter's folksy sweater and Bible creds.  

It looks to me that no candidate will reach a majority. We’ll be looking at a brokered convention probably decided by super-delegates who weigh in after the first ballot. My guess it will likely be None of the Above.

Donald has set the bar so low any used-car salesman might be the one. We need somebody who can have a beer with Joe the Plummer, who can look Charlie Lunchbucket in the eye and talk the talk and at the same time speak fluent soybean with Farmer John and health and welfare to the rest of us.

Or do we need a Black Hispanic woman billionaire with magnetic charisma, name recognition, oratorical skills, unintimidated by the Bozo with broad-enough appeal to Never-Trumpers and who doesn’t strike fear in the Heartland? Did I almost describe Oprah Winfrey? Maybe but…I don’t think she’s the one either. Maybe what I want is a composite. What ever happened to Gregory Peck? Call Central Casting.

I am writing all this to find out what I think. I have until July 13^th, 2020 to change my mind but it is becoming clear to me, with a mere 50 weeks to November 3rd, it all comes down to a single issue. We must win the White House or the American experiment in Democracy will cease… to be replaced by four years of tyranny and irreversible destruction to our planet. Nothing else matters for now. Not the form of healthcare nor even income inequality.

Yes, yes, of course I agree with Elizabeth Warren but she is a 

Hail Mary (football talk). Sadly she doesn't connect with enough receivers.

There was a time when no one I knew was to the Left of me. Now there are voices I’m hearing that a Centrist is no better than a Republican. They are wrong. A Biden-like substance would not stand in the way of a progressive Congress, nor would that person appoint judges out of the Federalist Society, nor would he/she block vital climate change measures or sane immigration measures. I don’t care if our candidate takes money from hedge funds. Wall St. Bankers also have grandchildren. Some even have a conscience.

There is no need to score a touchdown to win. A field goal will do; even an extra point. This is the moment for  Americans to cleave as in forming a huddle.