Like A Virus, Mutating

People and viruses mutate. Our President has devolved since his first term from the man-child with a penchant for nastiness to an egomaniacal miscreant unfettered to our foundational precepts. In a sense, humans are just oversized microorganisms, capable of even greater virulence. Fortunately our species has developed a brain and an ethos, albeit not evenly distributed.

Viruses need to keep mutating to survive the onslaught of modern medicine. This year's influenza virus seems impervious to the vaccine which was based on last year's version. One such colony has found a homeland in my throat, nose and sinuses.

Not all viruses are bad viruses. In fact, some protect us. But in this case I rely on my immune system which is, unfortunately, already compromised. However, I'm awaiting the cavalry of antibodies to drive out the pathogens.

Turning toward our delusional Commander-in-Chief, his muscular view of the world, however compensatory it may be, threatens to ignite a regional if not a global war. He and his circle exhibit a callous indifference to human suffering. All the signs were there in his first administration but he was restrained by wiser and more experienced advisors. They have now been replaced by sycophants. 

It may well be that authoritarianism is not simply imposed on a people but it taps into a latent impulse of a constituency to be herded like sheep, told what to do, where not to stray and when to say Bah.

I expect my flu virus will soon find me inhospitable and move on. Yet in a larger sense we are all infected by this new order that has uncaged the beast within; which legitimizes violence, mocks intellect, villifies dissenters, and defiles the office of the presidency. 

The immune system of our social contract is now under assault  from within. Like an autoimmune disorder, our core values are being overthrown. In terms of virology, an immunosuppressant is called for. I have no prescription to remedy this, except resistance, whatever form that may take.

 

    

Time To Give It Up

After agonizing hours of deliberation, vacillation and a distinct shrug from my vast constituency, I have decided not to run for Governor. We’ve had a family conference including the pet rock and the dog I don’t have plus a random sampling of customers waiting in line at Costco. 

The sense is that the field is already too crowded with an ex-congreswomen, two ex-mayors, an ex-cabinet secretary, ex-controller, a sitting congressman, a billionaire and assorted others totaling nine candidates.

Perhaps the propitious time has passed me by. I peaked too early having served as wardrobe monitor in kindergarten. (I excelled at sorting galoshes). I was elected milk monitor in 1^st grade and designated pencil monitor in 2^nd grade. Let it be noted that I did not embezzle any of those pennies, nor is it true that I got high on wood shavings. In 7^th grade I was chosen to receive the gift left by the 8^th grade upon graduation and in 8^th grade I was the one presenting the token gift thus demonstrating my ability to give and take. One might say I flamed out in early adolescence.

Now that I have dropped out we need seven other Democrats to take one for the team. Give it up. Flip a coin or have a food fight but the field of worthy names must be whittled down to two. 

The Primary is a mere three months away; this is serious stuff. Apparently none of them are polling more than 20%. By splitting the pie into so many slices, the two Republican candidates are quite possibly going to be the only names on the final ballot. That's the way our California primary system works. It is not one from each party but the two highest vote-getters. This could be a tragedy caused by oversized egos. I'm waiting to hear them drop.

It also pains me to watch the field of Democrats attack each other; all fodder for the Repugnants. There is only one issue for this election and for the ones around the country coming up in November, and again in 2028. That is electability. Who can reach the critical mass of voters with electile dysfunction; too busy taking photos of their french toast to realize where their bread is buttered.

Who would vote for anyone from a party who supports a man whose early record reveals that he ran with scissors, didn't play well with others and threw spitballs? The malignancy of Trump which has metastasized into every aspect of his reign cries out for full triage, an urgency to reverse the wreckage of our democracy. A vote for a Republican is a vote for another sycophant. 

An internecine squabble among Democrats ensures a Republican victory.Those who give it up will be celebrated as martyrs. They can join me playing with galoshes and sharpening pencils.

 

Boxes

My first job, age twelve, was delivering hats on the subway from Queens to Manhattan.  The man in the change booth knew the weight of twenty nickels for a buck. I needed only two for a round trip on the F train. Maneuvering three or four big boxes became part of my skill-set.                           

I never saw the feathered flowers Mrs. Danziger had fashioned or the artistry she sculpted from velvet and scraps of ribbon. She lived below us in apt. 2-F. A quarter a box was my pay. Soon I would be rich.

New Yorkers in straw seats wore their subway faces, assured of anonymity, staring into defeat or dreaming of the next stop off the map. I was the kid behind those boxes in that August heat of 1945. One hand gripped the straps while I disappeared, ground up by the overhead fan. In the whoosh and whir we went from Jackson Heights under the East River to a city that buzzed in a long afternoon.

I emerged on Lexington Avenue, proud of how I mastered the Manhattan grid, scooting from one swanky address to another, unseen, as I darted from Bloomingdale's to Bergdorf Goodman or Saks Fifth Avenue.

No longer twelve, I was now going on thirteen that summer when something died in me and something was born. Yahweh, was gone when FDR died. Death everywhere: depraved, bestial acts revealed, mass graves, Hiroshima, burned flesh. Going on thirteen was a secular bar mitzvah. I was initiated in the crush of it all.

I started thinking outside my boxes of divisions I hadn't noticed before. The well-dressed walked through the front door and soared with the uniformed elevator operator announcing women's apparel and notions. Sometimes a great notion. Others, like me, were relegated to the rear entrance and got yanked up with the freight. No spiffy regalia, no notions, no ceiling to protect me.

To think I could disappear in a sweaty subway. To know I had crossed that river. To believe I would not be crushed in the lift was an act of faith. To imagine I could live my life with the perils of indifferent streets. I would make my way with Mrs. Danziger’s creations, her felt and lace, her flight from the shtetl, refugee to these safe shores in her plumed birds, her deliverance.

Hats and words weigh next to nothing. I still carry an invisible box weightlessly. Millinery birds and words on the wing and always that elevator up and the risk of climbing.

Olympics

Blame the Greeks…….or credit them. The coming together of nations is both a giant step for humankind and also one which soon devolves into a divisive competition. Seen from the space station, an astronaut recently commented on how our planet looks. There are no borders; just, arguably, six distinct land masses. What we call a map of the world is just a construct of jagged lines left over from tribal times or by regal decree.

The Olympics foster nationalistic rivalries at the same time as it joins athletes in camaraderie. Who will receive the most gold, silver and bronze? Which country will have their flag raised and anthem sung? Do I care?

There is also something unnatural about the events. It’s the precision, the exactitude, slavishness to the clock, the scale and the rigidity of the straight line. There are no straight lines in Nature. Think trees and rocks. Hopi Indians knew to punch a tiny hole of imperfection in their pots so as not to compete with the gods.

Why punish the body to fit the ideal? I raise my glass to messy humanity. Bring on the Deviationist, the Revisionist! Why does a young person train eight hours a day for years and return home in disgrace having been nosed out by four-one-hundredths of a second? Why must mastery of the body be quantified? Does a wobble or a bobble signify the measure of a person? 

How is it that a nation of gifted and devoted athletes can bring their resources and passion to excel but cannot find the will or concern to serve their homeless and disadvantaged citizens?

I watch and they all look wonderful. I still can’t tell a toe-loop from an axel from a Salchow. They spin, they split, they soar and sometimes they spill. So what? Let it be an exhibition instead. Ice dancing is an art and artists shouldn’t be in competition and be scored. Do we pit Matisse against Picasso or Van Gogh? I hope not. Virginia Wolff declined an O.B.E. reminding the committee that her mother taught her never to accept candy from strangers.

Of all the measurements of speed, endurance and accuracy the least defensible has to be the Biathlon which combines cross-country skiing with rifle shooting. After the spate of massacres we have endured one wonders how the hell this paramilitary exercise is to be prized and honored.

Celebrate them all and skip to the closing ceremony. Melt the medals. The winners are those who made new friendships, who found kindred spirits from distant lands, embraced their rivals; for everything beyond the judge’s hypercritical scrutiny.

After watching for a couple of hours, I can feel the judge from Kazakhstan over my shoulder, taking off points for the way I tie my shoes or whether the toast is burnt. Next event: Tooth Brushing.

This is my slalom down the white page. Sisyphus just passed me on the way up.

 

Footnotes To History

Since we no longer have a president but a quasi-monarch instead, it wouldn’t hurt to resurrect some of our least-known occupants of the White House. I nominate John Tyler, our tenth president,  for this honor, and with good reason. It is better to die virtually unknown than it is to live in infamy as will be the fate of the present occupant.

In spite of his undistinguished legacy of achievements, Tyler holds several records that will never be matched. 

Most astonishing is the fact that he is the only person to have been born in the 18^th century (1790) , and have a grandson in the 21^st century. The offspring, aged 97, passed away last summer, ending a link spanning four centuries.

Tyler was the father of 15 children; one short of a football plus a basketball team. He is the answer to the question: Who is the only president to have married during his presidency?

Tyler’s first wife died on a ship in the Potomac when a new cannon went off killing her and a prominent orator. Who do you suppose married the daughter of that speaker? You betcha. She gave birth to his last 8 children.

Perhaps fathering babies distracted him from bending the country toward justice and equality. In fact, he was disowned by his own Whig Party. However he gave new meaning to the notion of a more perfect union.

Tyler took office in 1841 when William Henry Harrison died one month after taking the oath as our newly elected President. The campaign slogan of the day was: Tippecanoe and Tyler Too. Harrison was a national hero for having killed the Indian chief Tecumseh in the War of 1812. It seems that genocide was a popular pastime in the 19th century.

Tecumseh was a brilliant orator, himself, who fought, in vain, to unite the Native American tribes in resistance to U.S. expansion. Another footnote to history is the fact that Gen. Wm. T. Sherman, whose decisive march through Atlanta ending the Civil War, was given Tecumseh as his middle name.   

History is a continuum and all this is part of our national fabric. Ten of our first twelve presidents, including Tyler, were slaveholders; the exceptions being the two Adams. Our tapestry is woven with many ignoble threads. History ignored, invites the peril we now endure. 

Names

I have always had a knack for remembering names. I can recite all our presidents in order, everybody in my elementary school class including all the teachers I’ve ever had, plus the entire roster of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers. Hold down the applause; it is just a quirk from my formative years. We don't get to choose what fluff has stuck to the marrow.

However, nomenclature is not my strong suit. I don’t know the names of trees or birds, a birch from a beech or a swallow from a sparrow. Nor can I repeat lines from Shakespeare. I have squandered my faculty. 

Now I am beginning to drop names; not in the sense of impressing anyone, but I’m losing my access to caption certain faces. Yesterday I lost David Foster Wallace and Angela Lansbury. They return to me in 5-10 minutes, but that lapse is disquieting.

Aging is a bumpy road; that one never taken before. Some days I’m an intrepid traveler heading into an imagined safe unknown. Giggling over the all of it and grateful for having been fully met. 

Other times, I feel my architecture withering, long out of warranty and beyond its shelf life. Now I wonder if I’m losing a marble or two, and what potholes are around the corner? No severe tire damage yet.

Can I blame it all on Trump? Only if I regarded him as an inspirational leader. Instead, I’ve been witness to a certifiably failed human being. It’s a rare moment in history when such mindlessness is on full display.

This is my own journey, rounding third on the way home. It can take years; baseball has no clock. We arrive where we started, weary but wiser or, at least, experienced having circled the bases with stories to be told.  

Perhaps I am a knight-errant like that man from La Mancha tilting windmills, lost in time. Are Spencer Tracy and Greer Garson still dead? Why can't I vote for Gregory Peck as President? 

Settle down, Norm, the doctor will be in to see you in a few minutes. What's his name again?

Surviving Donald

I'm writing this from inside my bubble where I live with my closest friends and family striving for enhanced normalcy. We daily supply oxygen for each other which keeps us from going numb.

During this seismic reign of terror tectonic plates have shifted. Uttering his name has me gagging so much I require three Heimlich maneuvers to expel the syllables. It feels as if we, along with seventy-five million others, have been locked inside the trunk of car as it is going over a cliff in slo-mo.

Universities have been pillaged. Laboratories, shuttered. Language, degraded. Civility, mocked. Founding documents, scraped.

Yet outside the window I'm blessed with many non-deciduous trees. Green leaves are clinging with the same tenacity my circle of friends hold to a belief that the mind of spring will return us to saner times.

Here I am at the breakfast table enjoying the yellow-orange tulips bursting their incandescence as the dry bulbs are quenched by Handel’s Water Music.

The table is filled with glass and bowl, cup and plate, grains and berries with boxes in a spectrum of colors. Rembrandt might find a pattern in the jumble the way Rauschenberg would see it as collage or Pollack might give it a splatter with a yellow streak. It was all invisible to me until just now. Thank you for that, Donald.

In my Trump-free state I am listening to a Julian Barnes book being read via Audible from the library, but interest is waning over Flaubert's Parrot. 

I should also know the names of birds. Then I could report which one it was that just chased away a crow four times its size. I suppose the natural state of Nature is strife. The hummingbird is constantly darting away from predators. Does the cut worm forgive the plow? Adversity drives adaptation. The bough struggles for a sliver of sun, not unlike us in the bubble, listening hard for that sweet sound of grace.

At the same time, I bow to those at the barricades. Resistance is exhausting but so is it exhilarating and sometimes, as now, necessary. They are my proxy as I write. This page is written on my perch not far from the fray.