1933

For $1,933 you could buy three cars that year or one Hoover vacuum cleaner for $19.33. But that wouldn’t be enough to clean up the dust bowl. Or as they say in the United Kingdom, to Hoover the dust. It says a lot about a noun that becomes a verb particularly when the noun is a brand name.

Here in the U.S. we never took up the verb. Maybe because we already had too many Hoovers. Herbert, the out-going president, had a popularity close to zero. He won just six states in the 1932 election. A dozen Hoover vacuums couldn’t suck up the landslide.

The vacuum cleaner was invented by a department store janitor named Spangler in 1908. He passed it on to his cousin, Susan Hoover and the rest is history.

Nor could Hoover, the vacuum, clean up the mess in the wake of J. Edgar Hoover.  By 1933 he was already nine years into his tenure as head of the F.B.I. He had a remarkable nose for sniffing out bootleggers, anarchists, agitators (especially from the left) along with civil rights leaders. But his olfactory sense was clogged when it came to proto-fascists in the decade of the Depression. Hoover reigned for 48 years through the terms of eight presidents. By 1960 the F.B.I had files on 432,000 Americans. In 1950 I attended some Marxist classes filled mostly by FBI agent reporting on each other. It didn’t hurt that he not only procured the negatives of films from all their office parties but kept enough wire-taps and surveillance tapes to scare the bejejus out of everyone in Washington.

1933 was the worst of times and the wurst of times. Breadlines here and sausage (wurst) in Germany. Hitler assumed power that year being mistaken by the German people as the worker’s friend in ways that have resonance today. He posed as the messiah leading them to the Promised Land which turned out to be Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland and he Hoovered the rest of Europe ending up making sausage of civilization.

It was also the year of my birth so I’m taking credit for FDR as well as the chocolate chip cookie, drive-in movies and the board game, Monopoly. But the signs of things to come were also in the tea leaves with King Kong and the song, Stormy Weather.

The lesson from all this is murky. Is there a pendulum swinging from Hitler to FDR, menace to salvation? It seems we proceed on two tracks at once revealing our most loathsome and noblest intent.  Perhaps our dangerous folly at the polls will wake up the slumbering masses. This new Age of Trump is already seeding its own destruction with reckless Tweets and cabinet appointments who have been salivating for many years to bring us back to pre-Roosevelt America.

In the King Kong movie we see the beast climbing the tallest building in NYC, pounding his chest and going on a rampage. Sound familiar? He is brought down by the beauty, Fay Wray. If Beauty and Truth are one our country is littered with smears, fibs and fake news. The Hoover called Truth is always at the ready to Hoover away the debris.

 Truth is always at the ready to vacuum away the debris. 

Us-ness, Them-ness

Those of my generation suckled on Hollywood Westerns saw dozens of them from singing cowboys to cattle rustlers and barroom brawls. From them we learned the language of film, the shorthand of cinema, how a mustache or clean chin could tell us all we needed to know. At least for a while.  

When the scene shifted to the big city the genre became film noir with the sheriff as detective or private investigator. The hero was suddenly grizzly with the baggage of a back story. Wide open spaces morphed into back alleys, hangman trees turned into hung juries and slick lawyers.

Vigilante justice may have galloped off in the sunset but it returned at sunrise. American mythology, even in its faded state, still pits the rugged, ragged doomed individual against the forces of institutions be they railroads conglomerates, banks, crooked politicians or government itself. When the little guy is wronged, framed, abused, or neglected he strikes back in ways which may be abhorrent to our sensibility and humanity; he may even rob banks as they have robbed him. And he is likely to elect a demagogue who can turn a grievance into a vote.

Think Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Now think this year’s Hell or High Water in which two brothers, not the sort you’d want your sister to marry, go on a spree of bank hold-ups in wide open Texas pursued by Jeff Bridges and his Indian sidekick in an update of the Lone Ranger and Tonto.  This may sound like the sort of movie you’d do your best to ignore but you’d be wrong. It may be the best of the year. It is not only the most class-conscious, anti-bank film I’ve seen in recent memory, adding a new dimension to the genre, but it also peels a layer off the Trump voter in flyover America. The brothers are shooting their way out of a gone culture just as their president-elect has shot from the hip a fusillade of blurts and bluster.

There is a telling scene in a restaurant in which the two Texas Rangers prepare to give their order to an aging waitress. She’s quick to tell them there ain’t no menu. This place only serves one thing. Eat it or leave. Contrast this with the scene in Five Easy Pieces (1970) where Jack Nicholson steals the movie with his antics ordering a chicken salad sandwich, no butter, no mayo, no lettuce, and hold the chicken. 

They had choices then and individuality. Today, options have been pinched and the little guy has been swallowed. The towns are a wasteland where the Last Picture Show closed decades ago and the Last Train to Yuma left the station without them. Now their job is on a Slow Boat to China. In this setting of desperation and moral ambiguity they can excuse, even admire, Trump for what ever he gets away with. The only fault is being caught.

So enraged are the dispossessed that they can champion a billionaire 

poseur who spouts hollow ways out. His outrageous rhetoric is mistaken for their rage. When Trump boasts about not paying taxes, they cheer. When he gets no endorsements, that counts as another plus. When he is caught with odious behavior toward women that reinforces their manhood. It has become a twisted and shadowy world since Gary Cooper faced his mythical shoot-out at High Noon.

We could spend the next four years gnashing our teeth, mourning the loss of a lifetime of progress or hurling a litany of adjectives at Trump and his constituency or we, the Us-ness, could spend some time getting to the task at hand empathizing or at least connecting with the Them-ness. Even though there are almost three million more of us urban-urbane coastal folks, it is imperative that we get to know those Thems. Whether Trump is seen more nakedly and deposed or he just returns to his golf course and casinos there will be others to speak for those who lost their pension, their home equity or have been otherwise left behind in this globalized world.

The movie ends on a peaceful yet uneasy note where the hunter and hunted acknowledge each other’s deeds with few words and no bullets. An existential stand-off. The scruffy face is shaven. He gets away with his crime just as Wall St. got away with theirs.  Perhaps it could be summed up with, I got mine.  Small victory but ain’t this the American way?

Good News, Bad News

First the bad news. Yesterday I woke in the recovery room after two hours of general anesthesia and Donald Trump was still president-elect. I had hoped four years had past

Last week in consultation with a specialist I was advised to immediately have a biopsy on my pancreas. It’s the only one I’ve got and we’ve grown close over time. Those two words¸ biopsy and pancreas in the same sentence can generate dread. Enough to consider (God forbid) calling dial-a-prayer. The line at the Suicide Prevention Center has been busy ever since the election.

Monday I left for the hospital driving under the influence. Not of drug or drink but with Peggy’s enormous love and spirit and her creative burst. If she were an Olympic athlete they would test her urine for Performance–Enhancing-Drugs. Life itself is her performance always enhanced and whatever drugs she carries are self-generated with the energy of Adrenalin, euphoria of endorphins and allure of pheromones. I took the spell with me to seduce whatever deities still hang out on Mt. Olympus. It is really about obsessing less with worry and dwelling more with one’s inner resources. Joy and woe both engrave the face. Might as well do our best with the sculpture.

All these affirmations helped during my 2 ½ hour wait in pre-op. I also drifted off to one of my favorite places in the world located outside of Brantome, France, http://www.moulinabbaye.com/en/

A small inn and restaurant with windmill, a meandering stream and willow trees.  And why not have a dish of pumpkin-peach ice cream along with wee drap of their finest aperitif to challenge my pancreas?

The procedure is called an endoscopic ultra sound. Fluid is drawn out of the larger of two cysts which has doubled in size since my last cat-Scan. And the good news is ...


Benign, according to the doctor’s preliminary finding. He made this 

determination from the low viscosity of the fluid within. The full pathology report may take 7-10 days. A friend suggested a second opinion from another pathologist if there is any uncertainty in the final diagnosis. At this point I am borrowing from Donald Trump’s playbook. If I don’t like the result the election is rigged; if I do the buck stops here.

In the baseball game of life I stepped to the plate over 83 years ago and 
I’m still running out a home run rounding 3^rd base on my way home. It looks to be up-hill from here and that can take years.

Finding My Perch

I just read that if someone today viewed our planet from 60 million light years away he would see dinosaurs. If the viewer were a mere two weeks away he might still have seen our reptilian brain at work. I’m trying to find the right distance to cope with this triumph of dunces and yet close enough to find the common thread.

Almost every sore or cyst, busted shoelace or book I read or movie I watch has become for me a metaphor for Trumpian malevolence or its antidote. The T.V. series, Designated Survivor, strikes me as a model for depicting a deliberate, rational and compassionate president, in other words an anti-Trump. Novels written ten years ago seem to be prescient, in a symbolic way, describing our current descent into a dystopian society.

Even at this advanced age I cannot remember traveling so far, so fast and 

being deposited in a country unrecognizable in terms of incivility and retrograde policy. America has become sharply tribal with different vocabularies and values. I understand this year’s Thanksgiving table has been torn asunder by the great divide. Yet we shall find a way through this misalliance, even transform it into a teachable moment.

I think back to the union songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, the 

unshakeable solidarity among workers, minorities and those living a marginal life. It all slipped away starting with hard-hat support for our Viet Nam misadventure, the so-called Reagan-Democrats followed by two decades of trade pacts and globalization. As Democrats inched to the Center, Republicans drifted further to the right. Today we have three tents: The God and Guns Party, Democrat-Paleo Republican Centrists, and Socialist-Green Party.

We have much to learn from the aggrieved and they from us. The 

unemployed and under-employed must be heard and their issues addressed not by empty promises, slogans or stoking hatreds but by real job creation. Common decency and empathy need not be a price to be paid but a precept to be cherished above all else.

Our pledge says, one nation indivisible. Right now we are less a nation than a confederation of states clinging to an 18^th century anachronism…

and sharply divisible. Our task is to come together, perhaps not altogether, but at least sufficiently so the popular vote aligns more closely with the geographical. The sandwich of America is two great coastal, crusty breads filled with a vast salad and grains of the heartland. Without the one it would fall apart and without the other it would not be worth the bite.   

This shall be my perch, at some mid-point with a listening ear trying to keep the creativity alive with the ferocity of love.

Painting By Numbers

Once again we have painted the American flag, red, white and blue and white wins by a wide margin. White as in absence. No-shows are half the electorate while the reds and blues fight it out at 25% each.

White is our symbol of innocence, virginity. In this most historical and hysterical of elections fifty percent of the people couldn’t be bothered or had a mind they couldn’t make up. Or maybe they were too busy caulking their bathtubs on Tuesday. In political terms white is the word for duh.

In Asian cultures white symbolizes death or mourning. Inscrutable as

they are the Chinese got it right. White is the absence of color but not of light. In fact it contains a spectrum of every wavelength of light. If voting were mandatory nobody knows who these non-voters would be. They could stretch from urbane cynics to know-nothings. More’s the pity.

Hillary is approaching a three million vote plurality in the popular vote. The problem is one of distribution. All we need to do is move 120,000 Blues of the 2 ½ million vote margin in California to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. We can spare them. Now let’s see a show of hands ready to relocate.

How to explain ourselves to the rest of the world? The Electoral College is the last vestige of the 18^th century. It is a form of voter suppression, an indefensible hurdle to representative democracy. It is now theoretically possible for a candidate to win the presidency while winning just 11 of the 50 states. Or for a third party to garner twenty million votes and not a single electoral one. (Think Ross Perot). This will be the fifth time in history that the presidency was awarded to the loser of the popular vote.

The abolition of the Electoral College requires a constitutional

amendment. It’s time we graduated from this college but it ain’t going to happen. There is another path which is also a longshot. It involves each state to pledge their electors to vote according to the National will rather than their State preference. So far eleven Blue states have signed on to this. Notably the Reds, unblushingly, have not.   

In Dec. 1940 there was a professional football game between the Chicago

Bears and the Washington Redskins. In an amazing upset the Bears won 73-0. They used a new offense called the T-formation for which Washington had no defense. I thought of this Tuesday night trying to grapple with what had just happened.

Hillary ran her campaign by the book. But the book was an outdated playbook no longer relevant. Trump created his own, instinctively. It was one of daily outrage and inanity. We Blues spent the entire contest attacking his character instead of addressing the rage of his constituency. His Reds paid no mind to his temperament. We won the talking points. He won the day.

Numbers count but only on the electoral scoreboard.

It's Our Movie

Like it or not and I don’t

but we are part of it, bit players in this epic.

What started out as Three Stooges

rolled into one man, nasty-funny,

became, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

In the meantime Henry Fonda, as Tom Joad

ate grapes of wrath from a dustbowl

ending with his I’ll be there prayer overheard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2JR3FmvVAw

by Citizen Charles Foster Kane who built a paper

empire selling yellow journalism, promising

a Wonderful Life which turned out to be empty

as the Maltese Falcon till it flamed out

with his Rosebud sledding to hell and high water

but more than Twelve Angry Men are mad as hell

and aren’t going to take it anymore. They’re done

Singin in the Rain and listening to 76 Trombones,

wondering where Joe DiMaggio has gone.

They looked out the Rear Window into the noir,

saw that Americans are Strangers on a Train headed

East of Eden. Atticus Finch is nowhere in sight.

We are a nation in Vertigo, on a Voyage

of the Damned when who should come but the Wiz,

the Godfather who promises a rose garden

with an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Could this be The Day the Earth Stood Still?

The Third Man has slithered in on a zither

with a smirk from out of the sewer.

                                                                                         

Penal Servitude

Let me get this straight.

The curtain goes up on a limp Bill Clinton after one of his Liaisons Dangereuses. He is pondering how his childhood, with a stepfather who abused his mother, somehow accounts for our most libidinous president since his model, JFK. Neither can keep his pecker in his pants but Bill gets caught in his own Bay of Pigs. Hillary sort of forgives him his zipper. Instead she lashes out at the bimbos, knowing where her future bread is buttered.

Enter Congressman Weiner who is well-named and possibly well-endowed for all I know. He becomes a pathological exhibitionist more interested in being erected than elected. His wife, Huma, puts up with his virtual penis, not wanting to hit below the belt.

In this comic opera Huma is Hillary’s confidant. The two Good Wives could sing a duet. They thought a good man was hard to find but a hard man is even gooder until one day….. they un-envied the respective penises.

Enter Donald, the diva, stage right, who is fluent in Locker Room speak. Was he a sexual predator or are we to believe that he never said what he is said to have said? His habit of stiffing contractors may have extended further than that. He brings the House down with his aria of bragadocios in a falsetto voice. He is Don Juan in the gutter, three marriages of Figaro, taking cues from Wagner's Die Meistersinger. When Little Marco the Rubio questions his size Donald almost unzips. His phallic Tower is proof it’s not just another Babel even though he lives in a bubble. Any mud you can throw he can throw further.

Now Comey, the Lord High Executioner, in an orgy of dysfunction finds a little list of songs and snatches, of emails hacked and hatches of plots. All ejaculated from Weiner’s famous weiner. Hillary seethes. Donald blusters. Bill takes cover in his Foundation.

As the curtain goes down a chorus of 200 million aroused voices is heard, the cacophony of America, the grabbers, the groped, the gullible and misbegotten. Our fate lies with the genitalia of the former Congressman still stuck in his erogenous zone. Let us gird our loins.