The Long and Short Of It

Our illustrious president, at 6 ft. 3 in. is pushing 240 lbs. which is unaccountable since he is a hollow man, but I suppose those Big Macs can add up. His official height, at 6 ft. 3 in. might include the bumper crop on top of his crown and an ego to dwarf the Eiffel Tower which makes up for an an absence of conscience and cognitive function.

Ever since David met Goliath in the great mismatch of pre-history, we've been rooting for underdogs. Or so we say. But when it comes to voting we tend to go big. Lincoln, at six ft. 4 in. was a full foot taller than Stephen A. Douglas who got trampled. Of course Lincoln was also stronger having built the log cabin he was born in. Abe was a gentle Goliath whom the Bible claims was nine feet tall. Michelangelo compensated for the disadvantage by sculpting David to seventeen feet.

William Howard Taft is probably the last obese president we’ll ever see. A wide girth doesn't play well on social media. There is a chair built specially for him at the Riverside Mission Inn which looks more like a couch to accommodate his considerable tush. Taft is said to have gotten stuck once in the White House bathtub. All 354 pounds of himself was almost enough to sink the ship of state.

Height counts; more than weight. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson put aside their prospective careers as power forwards in the NBA to found our country. Both were 6 ft. 3 in. give or take an inch. Madison was also 6 ft. 3 in. when on his horse. He is reported to have had a great outside shot but was too busy writing our Constitution.

Beethoven also had a tiny strike zone at 5 ft. 3 in spite of which, thankfully, he did what he did instead of becoming a baseball player. The result is our ode to joy. You didn’t have to be tall to be great in those days. It is doubtful Napoleon had a Napoleonic complex. He was the average height at 5 ft. 6 in. Genghis Khan was more deserving of that term at a mere 5 ft. 1 in. when he finally got off his high horse.

Andrew Carnegie penny-pinched himself to an even 5 ft. while his labor force worked 7 days/week, 12 hours/day. At the same height, Danny DiVito seems to have ended up hawking submarine sandwiches which, somehow, seems apt.

I was surprised to learn that Stalin was a tiny 5 ft. 6 in. to FDR’s 6 ft. 3 in. I suppose they came in at equal numbers with Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Puny Putin twirls Trump around his finger while giving up 8 inches to our inspirational leader. The same sems to be true of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jun Un. Our potentate seems to be drawn to diminutive despots.

Mickey Rooney, at 5 ft. 2 in, was once asked how he managed to accumulate so many tall show girls. He said that he lied about his height. His first wife was Ava Gardner; between them there were 16 marriages. Judy Garland wasn’t one of them. At 4 ft. 11 in., she almost made Mickey look tall except that her booming voice seem to fill the room.

I pray that the Dems come up with a candidate about 6 ft. tall (no need to slam-dunk) trim, well-spoken but not too eloquent; we don't want to alienate six-grade dropouts, also fluent in Spanish, tech-speak and trash talk should the occasion arise. I want a Progressive with a closet free of skeletons, 2.5 children, who refuses money from AIPAC but welcomes contributions with no strings. Someone for whom no constituency will stay home; a tall order.

Zero

It’s all about zeros. Turn your back and millionaires become billionaires and don’t even talk about trillionaires. Life has increased exponentially and left me still worrying about overdue library books.

A million seconds ago was August 8^th. A billion seconds ago, Bill Clinton said he was feeling our pain. A trillion years back, Neanderthals passed the baton to us Homo sapiens….which eventually led to Elon Musk and Donald Trump thus disproving the progression of our species.

A thousand million gives me a brain ache. It makes my hair hurt. Back in the 1950s my union negotiated a contract which would pay pharmacists $4.00/hour at the end of five years. I thought I’d be rich. At that time, the average pay was $2.00/hour. Now, that’s what I tip the man at the car wash.

Yes, I know, looking back is what old folks famously do, while Gen X, Y and Z look ahead. Who’s got the rosy lens and who sees through a glass darkly? It is too easy to embellish the past; it wasn’t so rosy then but, at least, it offers the illusion of clarity.

I am blind to the future, and the present is nearly opaque. My astigmatism helps me see the world at a slant, which is to say, absurd and askew. Few things compute. Zero which used to signify nothing, now multiplies to the beyond.

I have long had the habit of finding refuge in sports. It seemed fixed in time, impervious to the turmoil of the real world. Aside from a few changes in rules to align with fan’s sensibility it carried the aura of permanence. The sports section was a universe apart from the world of finance and politics. Not so now and probably never was the case. Teams, once family-owned, are now corporate toys.

The recent shenanigans with the ownership of the Dodgers are a case in point. Mark Walter, the team owner, has been cited by the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Federal District Court for infractions. His nefarious acts are under investigation. It calls to mind the close ties between corporate misdeeds and the government which has always been the untold story in sports franchises. The baseball term caught stealing takes on a broader meaning as billionaire malfeasance is uncovered. 

The hollow man on the throne has a nose for money. He smells those zeros. It has now become obligatory for the captains of industry to fork up a few hundred million bucks to gain his favor when his DOJ is probing one's corporate empire. The money flows at the speed of a click in this zero-sum game. The king is in the counting house counting all his money and the mogul may or may not get his honey.

All this is almost enough to shed my infantile obsession with sports, but not quite.

A few weeks ago, the story concerned Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA (world soccer organization), cozying up to Trump and nearly ousted by European members. At the heart of organized sports is money (I almost said crime).

Winning and losing on the field is just a micro version of the winners and losers in the scheme of billionaires. It’s all about buying and selling and adding zeros.

 

 

Remembrance

Five years ago today, Peggy died. I'd rather celebrate her on her birthday, not her death-day. Yet here it is and I cannot let this day go without a small remembrance. She said Yes to life in all its offerings. Even in her dying she made of a dirge, a rhapsody. 

 Andalusian Epistemology

Don’t go away. This is not about

anything Andalusian or epistemology.

It is just the punchline of a joke

Peggy and I used to share.

And now I can’t remember the joke.

We used to say those words for the sound of it,

for the polysyllabic stumbling of it all,

for the numbing pretentiousness.

It became a private expression which loses

everything in translation.

I want to ask her to remind me

where it came from

and where the choreography

of our dailiness has gone.

Two, she said, is a sacred number.

Her radiance still lights my way

through this long-night city.

 

Beckett and Brooks

Here I am, Beckett’s character saying, I can’t go on…………I’ll go on. That line from his novel, The Unnamable, was written soon after the end of WWII with all its inhumanity on display. Caught between despair and persistence, was the existential belief that we must make our life meaningful even in a world of the absurd.

Today, we bear witness to nothing less than the systematic overthrow of our founding precepts. Every day, another outrage aimed to subvert our Constitution. I would like to ask one question to the man in the Oval: Why did we enter the war against fascism?

I try to convince myself that writing itself strikes a note of affirmation for the choir of which I am a member. It is an act of resistance and a shout against my own impulse towards futility.

It also makes me think of the line, I got it. I got it. I don’t got it, from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety. I live in that space between what I can carry and what I can't, between what is actual and what I profess. 

I live a privileged life with a closet of clothes, eating when hungry and unafraid of being blown to smithereens. Survival is not an issue.

Yet I pontificate on my keyboard. I get it but I don’t get it. The accident of geography which has deposited me safely flanked by two oceans from a far different reality, has altered my consciousness. It has kept me well-fed and well-clothed but ill-prepared to meet the enormity of daily struggles endured by billions of others.

When I take on the very real perils of climate change and it becomes my weather, my next breath, I fall into inaction and despair... but I go on. 

Pass the Prosecco as the talk goes to the disfigurement of our country literally and ethically. Beckett, with all his melancholia, leaned toward going forward in spite of the pull otherwise. Mel Brooks' character declares he's got it, he's got it, then doesn't. It's too heavy and he lets go. 

As William Bendix proclaimed in Life of Riley, It's a revolting development. Of course, that wasn't a call for revolution, but an incipient revolt may be just what is now taking place. I call it a true populism as opposed to the pseudo populist movement of MAGA.

An aggrieved class is always present under capitalism. Trump told them they were heard and he herded them like sheep, with enough wool to pull over their eyes.

Democrats have a tent full of felines who cannot be herded. Some scratch and their curiosity can be a killer, while others purr. Some cats are hep; others are the donor class who have been declawed. They make good pets. Most people aren't allergic to them as they are to alley cats.

The shepherd tells his flock whom to hate and they say bah on cue. Dems. are a cacophony with an urgency to become a choir.

Going For Broke

By the dawn’s early light, breaking news can break your heart but the heart grows by breaking into chamber music to mend this fractured world.

Breakfast is buttered by a solar spread. Humpty-Dumpty broke into a yellow scramble, then reassembled as omelet, an amulet for the deviled eggs in the Oval.

Today has never happened before with this morning’s minion of ten blueberries multiplied in the bowl while half a toasted bagel breaks into an urgent song to bless the mourning dove on the patio nested in my shoe. A hummingbird flaps a psalm, unheard, sawing  the contaminated air with random grace as light through yonder shadows breaks.

Strange how bro and ken spell split, not as pea soup or bananas  but split as in fracked. Today we break anew going for broke, driven by sun and wind. 

If the bough breaks in the big tent of my party, the cradle of Democracy will fall; let it bend instead, brokered, hemispheres joined, brothers as kindred spirits in a peaceable kingdom against the agreed-upon foe.

 

 

 

 

Better Answer The Phone

It could be Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes with your retirement plan.

Or it might be the governor calling the warden to commute the sentence as Lefty is walking that last crooked mile to the chair. After all, he's clean as a choir boy. The reporters at the saloon won't see the lights dim since the switch in the big house will stay untouched this time around.

It might even be your doctor with the news that your scan showed your prostate cancer has not metastasized into your bones. What happened to the prostate, stayed in the prostate.  Though it revealed severe degeneracy. One cultivates their degeneracy over the years; I call it a life, lived.

That sort of cancer is famously slow growing. So slow I suppose one dies from it posthumously. In fact, over 50% of men in their nineties have prostate cancer. Some of us just don't want to be left out. 

We're told we will die of something else, but we're not given a multiple choice. For my part I'd like to get a phone call informing me that I'm already dead and this is my afterlife. Pass the key lime pie. 

Travelers

With all the attention the movie version of The Odyssey has been receiving my thoughts have turned to another intrepid traveler, Barry Lopez.

Homer’s Odysseus met with every possible temptation, threat and struggle to return home. On one level it is a triumph over what we now call PTSD. Ten years recovery, after ten years as a warrior.

It could also be read as a testosterone-driven adventure for young adults. But it is better understood as an allegory with his ordeals representing a series of psychological states of mind. Each challenge is met with ingenuity, courage, expediency and reason, asserting himself against the fury of the gods. Ultimately, there is a yearning, above all else, for the feminine principle in order to gain his full humanity. 

Barry Lopez died six years ago. His genius ranged from great writing to geology, anthropology and photography, with a fearless exploration of harsh ecosystems, from equatorial deserts to polar tundras. He lived with arctic wolves and survived forty feet waves around Antarctica, as well as witnessing the wonder of one hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

Unlike Odysseus he wasn't seduced by lotus or sirens. He didn't need Circe to lure him into the untamed and unknown. His quest was for the felt experience and the people who live on the margins of survival. He walked into an old-growth rainforest to feel the sense of being lost. At the same time he tested himself enduring spatial closeness. 

His brilliance as a writer cannot be overstated. He was able to transport readers to confront their elemental selves and discover their own inner wilderness. His body of work erases categories. He was an essayist, author of eight works of fiction and winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. His final book, Horizons reads like a memoir as he recounts six of his previous excursions into nether regions.

Above all else he was a humanitarian with a voice both urgent and lyrical. He wrote of the perils facing our planet even as he delivered affirmations with a reverence for life. I heard echoes of Thoreau and Loren Eiseley, as he noted that undisturbed land not only heals but brings a state of transcendence, releasing us to appreciate the wonder of otherness. He warned that violence to the earth, as in mining or drilling, begets violence to ourselves.

Lopez showed us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez was. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists was a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our xenophobia, he pled for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

It isn't my intention to conflate the lives of Odysseus and Lopez. One was, arguably, the prototype of modern man in an epic poem and the other a real life national treasure. The former made his way to his imagined home after vanquishing all manner of foe while our contemporary polymath found his home among inhospitable locations on the map.   

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.