Emergency of Spring

Millions marching costumed as wildflowers emerge on city streets in exodus from the king’s bondage, his masked storm troopers, Middle East / Wing in rubble, he's desecrated the oval, eggs of Easter- yeast rising as an insurrection against depravity in an upheaval against the edicts of war as buildings fall with children huddled, like petal-closed buds, their unlived lives, a procession merging hands across America, of chariots swung low, tendrils, rhizomes, old and new testaments derived from testicles held in oath, phallic spires, erection-resurrection toward a promised place, pass the bitters, bless the wine, good eggs hard boiled go up the hill with Jesus, Moses and Jack and Jill to fetch and pitch nine commands and one for extra innings, take two for C.B. De Mille with his cast of thousands, no time for leavened bread, for corn rye sliced thin with seeds, but seeds, yes seeds for hope and homelands, for miracles, for turning cheek to cheek, think Fred & Ginger, think love against which hate has no answer cause Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for, the equinox is vernal, something to shout about, a havoc of poppies wearing April dresses, odes of them in terraced stanzas strutting their stuff from plots to flower pots to bombed and empty lots; let me hear that trumpet in the daffodil, the sax in the foxglove, what was dormant is now emergent...

 

Ladybug and Distant Carnage

 I'm walking in the park and now I reward myself with a gulp of cold water from a thermos. I have covered the equivalent of about 4 blocks with the help of my walker. This is my half-way point today. I find a bench with a back. No small thing. It's only  springtime but the living is easy.

My trusted walker does more than keep me vertically balanced. It has a pouch. How else could I have lugged this nearly 800-page book by Rebecca West?

I settle into a shady spot on this sunny afternoon half a world away from the atrocities of overhead missiles and drones. No sirens, no blasts. I have been sheltered my entire life from the daily struggle to survive. I can dial my reality. Now images of destruction, now commentary, but all at a distance. The remote in my hand is well-named. I can even mute toxic voices.

The story I’m reading is The Return Of The Soldier; a tale set in the English countryside between the two world wars. The soldier suffers from what was then called shellshock. Lives were squandered in that so-called Great War which was a crime against humanity. Deliberate slaughter is unknown in other species.

It is as if I am reading about myself sequestered in bucolic civility while across the water limbs are lost, children orphaned and telegrams are making widows out of wives. My life is spared, even charmed, by the cosmic crapshoot of geography.

After a few minutes, a ladybug lands on my page. She is a model insect to behold with six black spots enclosing a larger one almost heart-shaped in the middle on a reddish dome. I am transfixed as she struts across the margin. I understand this is a sign of good luck, as if I needed that affirmation. In mid-sentence she opens her wingspan and flies away. My version of shock and awe.

The beauty of this beetle has distracted me. Ladybugs are revered in gardens as a natural predator against aphids and mites. One can eat 5,000 in a lifetime. However, they, in turn, are the prey of birds and some larger insects.

Just when life seems pacified, I’m reminded of these conflicts unseen being played out in the grass, even underground. Should I take back what I said about wars among other species? No. Their cycle of predation is their ecosystem. We have no excuse. We have been gifted with ponder and the capacity to love while at the same time, cursed with anxiety and fear leading to domination.

The father of a 3-year-old alongside my bench, remarked on Rebecca West, which gave me hope yet for civilization. I thought of a book by the poet Ann Lauterbach called On A Stair which she said could also be pronounced Honest Air. I felt reinvigorated walking back. 

Baseball As Poetry

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. Of course I sympathize with their impoverishment and must also take up the challenge in remedial education.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

To turn away from baseball is to reject your ancestry. Rumors have it that early man broke off a branch and swatted away an approaching rock thus giving birth to the rudiments of the game. The wood became a natural extension of an arm and the incoming missile could be the moon or any spherical celestial object. It is the paradigm for our defense against drones. When running, throwing, and catching were no longer necessary for survival they died as essential tools and became an art form or sport.

I can see this was too much of a stretch. It didn’t even convince me. Let me try again.

As if ordained by the gods themselves and brought down from Mt. Olympus, baseball celebrates Euclidean geometry. It turns a square into a diamond punctuated with three pillows, as safe stations, and a metaphoric home. The navigation around the bases is a hero’s journey, Odysseus-like. When home plate is finally achieved it is often accompanied by a cloud of dust to signify the arduous circumstances, with a god-like umpire passing judgement. Perhaps Zeus took pleasure in watching men fail. Sisyphus was not alone in futility. Baseball is so designed to reward a seventy percent failure rate with millions of gold pieces. Add to this, the divine correspondence of nine innings to our allotted decades on earth, with an allowance for extra innings here and there.  

Still not persuaded? Let me put it this way.

Can you hear it? The crack of the bat. The thwack of ball into mitt. The smell of green grass and hot dogs.  Baseball is so pastoral, so American, so deliberate and so inconsequential. Games will be won and lost, setting fans in anguish or jubilation, yet nothing will be really changed. Trump is still with us, the polar ice continues to melt and atrocities continue.

But here’s what changes: From opening day tomorrow to sometime in late October, a human drama will unfold without script. It is neither rigged nor predictable. An alternative narrative is enacted in real time, which makes more sense than this one we gnash our teeth over listening to cable news. The game of baseball offers the illusion, at least, of order, strategy and control. Every stance and swing will be scrutinized and the mountain of verifiable stats may not amount to a hill of beans for the uninitiated but to us the fan(atics) it is its own universe, a ritualized life and death, only to live again the next day regardless.

The game allows men of all sizes and shapes, beer bellies, hulks and shrimps, cerebral and instinctual. It attracts physically endowed jocks and bespectacled nerds. Harvard graduates are now general managers of several teams, trying to outwit their counterparts with new data, yet the core of the sport is an unquantifiable human element. What is more mysterious than a sudden slump or streak, not unlike a poet's writer's block? Even the dimensions of the playing field are inscrutable, with the precision of an infield contrasted with haphazard measurements of the outfield.

Baseball is our answer to the impermanence of life. It defines our seasons. There is an intimacy between pitcher and catcher in a shared fluency of silent gestures. Players are widely positioned spatially with anticipation coiled in their legs to dart at the instant of contact between ball and bat. And all this time the poet watches in the stands with time to ponder how life, itself, is simulated on the field.

Finally I am left with the nagging realization that I am really trying to understand why it is that I still care. The Bible says to put away childish things so I put away the Bible. At my age there is no messianic urge to convert the heathens. Rationalization is as hopeless as hitting a 100 mph fastball.

The 93rd Anniversary of Myself

Don’t make a fuss. It’s only a number. Furthermore, if mindless men in red states prevail, we will suddenly become nine months older than we thought we were. Happy fetus.

I have no memory of my day of birth. (It was 2 days after Philip Roth's and 9 days after Ruth Bader Ginsberg). I expect I was very busy that day taking my first breath and missing my umbilical time as a fish-like substance. Reports had reached me that Hitler was on the rise and I was to fear nothing but fear itself. The thought of eating apple sauce out of a Dust Bowl was not appealing at all.

Birthdays are a floating number. I contain each of my ninety-three years, some a bit more than others. The chronology doesn’t always behave. At age nineteen I was thirty-two and at forty-eight I was finally nineteen. My preference now is to be of no age which is to say, every age.

Here's what I have come to know. The best times are those outside of time when hours fly by unrecorded. Creativity and loving defy all measures of the calendar or clock. 

Being born on the equinox has endowed me with an even temperament. I hear Jung shaking his head that I must be repressing my shadow side. If my animus against all Trump-like substances isn't enough, maybe I am harboring some deviltry myself. It is true that I hate feta cheese and I've been known not to squeeze the tube of toothpaste from the bottom. 

In astrological terms I'm told I was born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries to which I say gurgle and bah.

As for infirmities, I can't think of anything more boring to talk about. So, I won't. I never realized how many body parts I have. Such a mechanism.

Did I ever tell you about the time I… Yes, you did, now be quiet. When all my stories have been told and shamelessly embellished it may be time to look out the window and marvel at this bush I have scrupulously overlooked now bursting with clusters of rhododendrons or that stump on my favorite tree, the result of overzealous pruning. The coral tree will soon be lit by red candles which I shall not blow out.

If I am running out of breath, I'm not yet running out of breadth. The imaginary candles I am blowing out on my imaginary cake do not signify the snuffing out of enlightenment. 

As a blogger I babble along with the proverbial brook though now and then I feel more aligned with the hush of it all. I have already told the world what to do and did they listen? No, they did not. Celebration feels unseemly as long as new wastelands are being created every day by unconscionable acts.

I have now lived almost as long as Poe, Keats and Plath combined, proving there is no divine plan in the allotment of years. My footprint barely registers but perhaps it’s okay not to succeed as long as one does it with an open heart. Born as I was on the first day of spring, I'd like to think I sprouted with the wildflowers.

Peggy died about 4 1/2 years ago. During my widowhood I have been blessed with a circle of loving friends. In her 100th year Peggy told me to go for it; and so I have. One woman, Adele, has become my late in life love. To be fully met in a caring and sharing relationship has added a needed dimension and joy to my daily life. My feet are on the ground but always at the ready for buoyancy.

I'm taking comfort in the words of A.K. Ramanujan, You can count all the oranges on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange. Who knows what juice still remains under the rind?

Notes on Near-Spring

 March is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. For much of the world the lion hasn’t left. It is still a time of carnivores. Now, there is an urgency for spring to snuff out winter’s lease.

Spring is a season of commotion.  Are we on the brink or on the verge? A rapture of buds birthing not quite replacing the rupture and the rubble. To do honor to the fruit and flower we regard, with wonder, its full arc, including its spasm of farewell. The old rot and the new ripe.

Too bad our man at the helm has given the narcissus bulb such a bad name. (Amaryllis and daffodils are in that family.) He seems blinded by his own reflection in the mirror of the pond, covered as it is with slime.

For the rest of us, seasons signify becoming. When I write, my joy is in staying inside the poem or paragraph; not to finish but to luxuriate in the process before it becomes a mere product. Not even to stay but to meander, to hitch a ride on the bus to elsewhere. 

I'm an unmoored vessel sifting through my cargo for new seeds. The mystery is not in the still-life of succulents, but in the cycle of the speckled banana. 

I’m reminded of the way Peggy would write a poem. She could be struggling with some metaphysical concept and along might come a dog or a dog walker with an orange cap. That dog or that cap would enter into her poem, incongruently, which gave the poem an inclusiveness as if to say nothing is apart from anything else and that includes the outer with the inner, the head mingling with the heart. The poem, like all poems, is about the writing of the poem, the futile attempt to say the unsayable and the ecstasy of failing. Wisdom is in the unanswered questions punctuated by an exuberance of exclamation points.

We are creatures in motion even in our sleep. I have an idea and sleep on it. Something happens. I wake up imperceptibly changed, maybe a bit more luscious, like fruit.

Spring is a time to align ourselves with the rhythm of the peach and the melon. Because of bogus ripeness from sulfur dioxide the peach got bitten before its flesh was ready. With the melon I waited too long and had to hurry my devouring. A loving relationship has to do with discovering each other’s rhythms and disequilibrium, the struts and stumbles.

In the film, Woman In the Dunes, a man is seen collecting bugs which live in the shifting dunes. He is later trapped, like one of his specimens, in this habitat along with a woman who has made of it a home. The static world is always in motion like a movable sculpture, while the two of them find their own choreography living a shape-shifting life.  

Oscars Everywhere

These are the months when hyperbolic adjectives are dragged out to adorn movie titles. It seems as if every new film is the greatest, best, most compelling, not-to-be-missed, if-you-see-no-other of the year, the decade, of all-time. All are Oscar-worthy which got me thinking about that name, Oscar, and all the Oscars I have known. The name derives from classic Irish, "friend of deer."

Sixty years ago my first job as a pharmacist was with Thrifty Drugs in Beverly Hills. I was newly licensed and thrust suddenly into a galaxy of Hollywood stars. Cary Grant called up one day to make sure his wife, Betsy Drake’s uppers and downers, were put on a separate bill from his. Robert Cummings stayed young buying vitamins I couldn’t talk him out of. My favorite customer was Oscar Levant. In his lugubrious voice he would phone for early refills on his favorite sedative, Paraldehyde, which fell out of favor decades ago. I’d hate to think I contributed to his delinquency.

He really didn’t need my help plunging from wunderkind piano virtuoso, composer, radio star of Information Please, actor, author, and wit to mental patient stung by his own acerbic tongue as if he quipped himself to death. He was one of the most quotable entertainers in town, e.g. In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare occasions loathsome but at my best unapproachably great.

Oscar Levant never won an Oscar but Oscar Homolka, the Viennese-born character actor, got a nomination for his supporting role in I Remember Mama…a movie I’d sooner forget. Oscar Peterson was another Oscar I saw several times when he performed at Birdland back in the early 50s. His fingers moved on the keyboard effortlessly yet so dazzlingly I was carried away with the cigarette smoke.

Oscar Hammerstein II was possibly the most famous Oscar of them all in my lifetime. His grandfather, Oscar the first, born 1850, made a fortune in cigars but also built eleven theaters mostly in what came to be known as Times Square. Oscar, the younger, won two Oscars for best song. He wrote hundreds too numerous to mention collaborating first with Jerome Kern in Showboat and later with Richard Rodgers. Hammerstein also mentored Stephen Sondheim who has taken musical theater far beyond Oscar’s reach.

Oscar, he of Academy Award fame, owes its origins to the stuff legends are made of. There are at least four claims to the naming from Bette Davis to Walt Disney to Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, to Margaret Herrick, librarian of the Motion Picture Arts and Science. She is said to have looked at it back in 1931 and thought it bore a resemblance to her uncle, Oscar.

With apologies to Oscar Wilde, Oscar de la Renta, Oskar Werner and  Oscar Robertson, I have almost depleted my store of Oscars. Not a bad gallery of dignitaries. The name has never ranked high among boy’s names; it is now 175^th in popularity with about 1500 new Oscars in maternity wards each year. One version of its genesis derives from the French word for Golden City which would be apt for the 8.5 lb. trophy.

Finally a nod to Oscar Mayer Weiners whose jingle was once suggested to replace the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem.  It works for me.

Dreadful Times

Bombs dropping. Carnage in the streets. People fleeing. Dictators violating international law. A country is divided. A sense of dread across the world. Then as now.

This could be the present or the future but I am describing the past. It is late summer, 1940. Hitler has unleashed the blitzkrieg over England. Poland has fallen in the east and Belgium and France are occupied by the Nazis.

The U.S. is receiving refugees and the first peacetime draft is underway. Roosevelt has started to aid England with the Lend Lease program but the tenor of our country is half isolationist.

In a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights by the East River there lived W.C. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. This Bohemian-like enclave was the brain-child of George Davis, the flamboyant raconteur editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In a single issue of that magazine Davis published Collette, Elizabeth Bishop, Katharine Anne Porter and Stephen Spender.

Over the next 18 months this address was, arguably, the hub of American literati living a communal style fueled by the urgency of war. This moment in history is so well-captured by Sherill Tippins in her 2005 book The February House.

All-night parties included Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, William Saroyan, Kurt Weil and Lotte Lenya, the three children of Thomas Mann, Salvadore Dali and Richard Wright who later moved in.

Carson McCullers was the toast of the town having just published The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at age 23. Britten was working on his operetta, Paul Bunyan and Gypsy Rose Lee started her first novel, G-String Murders. It was a hive of creative minds.

Rent was $75/month shared equally by the residents. The Depression was still being felt for some while Gypsy Rose Lee earned $4,000/week from Mike Todd’s extravaganza at the World’s Fair.

At the same time, the British emigres, Auden, Britten and Isherwood were being denounced as cowards by their homeland. Britten made his way back to England in 1942 but Auden remained and became an American citizen. He was struggling with his loss of faith, which I take to mean faith in the human race. The book includes conversations between Auden and the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr.

I was alive through all this but my experience as a child was the sense of a struggle between the forces of good and evil and we were the good guys. By age ten (1943) I never doubted our victory over fascism. After all, I was buying war bonds, collecting tin foil and even knitting squares for blankets. Two of my closest friends were German refugees. With those clandestine meetings on the other side of my bedroom wall, I went to sleep driving Nazis from Stalingrad.

Auden and others were also conflicted with the role of an artist / writer in dreaded times as is the case today. In his original poem “1939” the last line rings true for me. We must love one another or die. He later changed it to read, love one another and die. In the final version he omitted the line altogether. It still has resonance 87 years later. Without love we die inside. 

Two Moroccan Films

Casablanca. Say that word and the Bogart / Bergman movie comes to mind even though it was shot in the Warner Bros studio in Burbank.

My two favorite films seen recently were shot in Casablanca and directed by the Moroccan born Maryam Touzani. Adam (2019) and The Blue Caftan (2022) are everything American filmmakers seem unable to achieve. Without deafening noise, explosions or sci-fi confections, each touches the souls of their characters. Nor is there any psychological probing on display.

It is through unspoken gestures that the camera, alone, reveals moments of a life-changing dimension. In Adam we see a widow’s face carrying the weight of the world, slowly melt as she rediscovers joy in her eyes while her body moves to the rhythms of Moroccan music.

In another scene we witness her reawakening while kneading dough. Her hands take on a sensuality. In its sweep, the camera transports us as we align with Touzani’s close-ups and a spirited humanity emerges.

The power of these films is in its simplicity. In the Blue Caftan, the complex heroic character of the husband is revealed wordlessly, only through the language of cinema. 

At the same time, each of these films is quietly subversive as one challenges the conventions of the male domination which consign women into a circumscribed life. In the surprising final scene of the other, the potency of love overwhelms a societal taboo.

American story-telling is most-often accompanied with bombast appropriate for a pre-adolescent brain. The operative word is power. Violence is obligatory as befits a nation out to police the planet, accompanied by high decibels as if to wake our numbed senses whose attention must be wrested from their smartphones.  

I found the two Moroccan movies on Kanopy, a free streaming site offered by local libraries. Touzani's latest film, Calle Malaga, will soon be available on streaming.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Youth, Enlightenment and the Whole Damn Thing

Is it true that history seems to be the subject young Americans find most irrelevant as if anything that happened before the internet is prehistory? Not so, my daughter says.

Am I wrong to think that a generation is being brought up thinking that Blacks were happily jamming in cotton fields and indigenous people all ran casinos while Aristotle was in Lincoln's cabinet and Joan of Arc married Noah? 

In fact, Gen Z and Millennials do care, in broad terms, about getting the chronicle right, so I'm told. I am heartened to be corrected. 

With this in mind, I spin the great wheel, and it lands on 1688. No, that wasn't the number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour of the newest McDonald's or the combined I.Q. of any 20 red state senators.                           

1688 is the year Holland invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.

The Brits call the whole takeover The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by most. William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain, but oranges were not one of them. They were introduced a century before. 

Under his reign, the stock market was established. He made innovations in horticulture, encouraged scientific inquiry (optics and astronomy), philosophy and the Arts. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy.

It is a fact that the rate of illiteracy is much higher in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. This has been true since the Protestant Reformation which took hold in Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Bible reading was encouraged, while Portugal, Spain and Italy discouraged literacy under the grip of the Vatican.  

A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of business interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch, under duress, traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America.

It was John Locke, the 17th century British philosopher, whose ideas about a social contract directly found their way into our Declaration of Independence. What evolved into our unique Democracy has always been dependent on some measure of participation. These days we are witness to its fragility due, in part, to a misinformed public, all the more ironic in this age of so-called connectivity. The slumbering masses are distributed among all age groups but there was a surge to the right among first time voters in 2024.

I must learn not to paint with such a broad brush, however if history and civics were valued now as they were in decades past, our electorate would hold candidates to a higher standard and understand that legislation affects their well-being. It just might dawn on low-information voters that their health care and Social Security are more important than conspiracy theories or empty panaceas directed against an imagined enemy. 

Perhaps a massive reawakening is happening. The significant turnout under harsh weather in Minneapolis, including young people, is proof enough that I have wrongly consigned a generation to a shared dunce cap. They have shown up to register the defense of the 1st amendment guaranteeing their right to assemblage and dissent. 

The dictatorship we fought against in 1776, again in WWII and now in our midst must be defeated at the polls in November. The dissolution of our Democracy would be a betrayal of our Founders.

  

Masked

Five years ago they mocked the masked,

those of us covered and vaxxed 

from Covid and its variants,

while doubters shouted, 

It's a hoax and damn the woke,

their final blurt.

Now, with brains below zero,

ICE beats, drags and shoots

from behind their masks,

with eyes crazed, virulent

as mutant microbes let loose

like pardoned thugs.

 

 

Car Talk

My first memory of a car, indeed my very earliest memory, was the time, at age 3 or 4, I was looking out of a window at a car below on fire. I hung on to this image until recently when it dawned on me that I had a picture book of a little red fire engine and I probably fantasized that it extinguished the flames of a car on the street. The book was real and the car was real, but the scene owes its life to the spark it ignited in my imagination.  

Again, my first drive in a car is an enduring memory, possibly because it also never happened. I was six years old at the 1939 World’s Fair. The big attraction was the Futurama exhibit by General Motors. I could have sworn we got into a car, and it drove itself around a series of what we now know as highways and cloverleaf looking down at the City of Tomorrow. No traffic. No horns or road rage. The vehicles were driverless and set apart at reasonable intervals from each other. Yet when I now Google the experience, it seems to be a model of a city we were looking down upon from a revolving chair.

Growing up in the 1930's and 40's, my third parent was the movies where I got to see the real world. I learned that most men wore tuxedos and there were three kinds of cars. Bank robbers always drove black sedans as in, Follow that car and step on it. Young people drove convertibles and parked on lover's lane. Then there were taxi cabs where babies were born.

Driving in reality could not live up to that early encounter at the World's Fair. Cars have never gotten much love from me. I couldn’t tell a Studebaker from a De Soto and I marveled how my friends identified the make from the grillwork alone, when I blindfolded them. I missed the art of their evolution and distinct designs. Just as I didn't bother knowing the names of trees. My loss, of course. I've since taken remedial action, at least with trees.

As a kid in NYC, cars were that hulk intruding on our stickball game in the street. With a subway stop around the corner, my family didn’t own a car until I was in college. To me, it was a horizontal elevator wheeling me from A to B. I learned to add water to the radiator and oil to whatever it is one adds oil to… but I didn’t know a gasket from a flywheel.

One day while driving in the slow lane, a driver in lane two suddenly decided he needed the off-ramp and cut in front of me. To avoid a collision, I swerved up the embankment into the landscaping. Better to go up the greenery than down into it. This was to be my ten minutes of fame, as a helicopter flew overhead, I was the morning’s Sig Alert.  

A few years ago, I backed up in a parking lot and nicked another car. In the course of an amicable interchange, the two of us became lunch buddies. There must be better ways to make new friends besides running into one another.

My present car is the color of duct tape. If it weren’t for the license plate, I’d never be able to find it in a parking lot. When a marine layer of on-shore flow rolls in, my old Toyota vanishes altogether. It has a pre-existing condition of being a salvage car and I’ve already added a few scratches to its pedigree. Past cars I’ve owned were named Burgess, Consuelo, Trevor and Fred. This one remains nameless, though it might answer to Foggy. 

I have another powerful memory of that World’s Fair. I was walking along holding on tight to my father’s coat when I looked up and saw it wasn’t my father. I was lost in the crush of human sardines in the enormous plaza. If this were Dickensian times I might have ended up in a workhouse begging for more gruel or rescued by some real estate magnate and sent to a private school full of little Donald Trumps. But, alas, my real father plucked me from such a fate.

Any freeway in L.A. after 2 P.M. is a ribbon of chrome, devoutly to be avoided. On their exodus home from daily bondage, the red sea does not part. 

If driverless, electric cars take over I would be returned to the Futurama as promised by General Motors. I might sit in the back catching up on my sleep or contemplate the meaning of life in a godless world.

Greenland

Ever since it was announced as Trump’s wet dream, Greenland has become one of the most Googled countries in the world. Maybe Donald saw a map in which it looked larger than Africa and thought, why not a golf course with hotels?

In fact, it is about three times the size of Texas or equal to Denmark, Belgium and Norway, put together. Greenland is the least densely populated country in the world but that could change with the U.S. claim of Lebenstraum. (living space).

At the rate we are warming the biosphere, chunks of Greenland might soon be seen floating down the Hudson River. But why wait for that since the administration has designated it as essential for our security. This is a shorthand message to China and Russia. You take yours and we’ll take ours.

400,000 years ago, give or take a week, an asteroid cratered NW Greenland and the forested country became a tundra in a blink of a muskoxen. The change was not incremental; it was sudden. Scientists know this because leaves of willow and spruce have been found under the ice.

Forget about plant life, gold and platinum are calling. Think of all the toilet seats. Of course, grabbing Greenland might mean diverting the Caribbean fleet from its mission of vengeance against bad actors, as opposed to good dictators.

On our way to Greenland, we might as well annex Labrador. You don’t hear much about Labrador these days. Google it and you get eleven pages on Labrador retrievers and two articles about the country.  In fact, it isn’t a country. It isn’t even a province. Labrador is part of the Canadian province known as Newfoundland-Labrador. Labrador is twice the size of the island but has only 8% of the population. Most folks live in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.    

Labrador could fit inside Nevada but might also be deemed essential to our security. The climate varies from polar to sub-arctic, not a choice spot for beach volleyball or even a frozen yogurt store though the views are spectacular. It is probably a great place for an immigrant-detention program and a certain destination if you are a polar bear. There are currently 28,000 people living there and 100,000 moose.

Moose are the most dangerous animal in North America. Why? Because they are taller than cars, drawn to headlights and if you should hit one expect 1,100 pounds to fall through your windshield. I would also expect word travels fast among the moose population that another human predator is loose.

Indeed, we have become world-class predators. Cartographers are working through the night redrawing maps.

 

From There To Here

While groping in the dark, you think of yourself as an extra or maybe a second banana. You don't know this is your movie.

There’s a war going on. There are blackouts and your father is an air-raid warden. Whispers behind closed doors. Meetings every other Tuesday in the next room with vehemence leaking through the wall. Morris, the tailor, is cursing. Tomorrow, he will return to silence with pins in his mouth. Pamphlets are left. Next year you will be running from building to building, slipping those truths under doors.

Money is hardly spent. Your mother has street-smarts; she knows the price of cottage cheese. She walks half a mile to get a bargain of calf's liver from the butcher. You remember the sawdust on the floor and fly paper hanging with a rose blooming in blood on his apron. She's elated when the grocer forgets to charge her for the lemons. 

Suddenly there’s a new radio-phonograph console. It has speakers with an Art-Deco design you memorize listening to Roosevelt’s Fireside chats and Glen Miller's orchestra.

Your family, so you think, is like no other. Father works very long hours, nights and weekends. He is largely absent yet always present as the man you would be. Your mother has a mouth not like yours. She yells a lot, curses the gods for God knows what. You grow as silent as Gary Cooper. You gulp, ill-equipped for the combat needed to survive this world. You orphan yourself as you must. 

You are Clark Kent growing another self. You could leap tall tales in a single bound. You have a secret life as the Green Hornet or that masked man on a white horse. Aw shucks. You know what evil lurked.

You scour apartment house basements. It is your time for small anarchies. You steal broomsticks for stickball bats. You collect baseball drawings by an illustrator named Pap. His caricatures are only in the New York Sun, a dying rag. You make your way into stacks of discarded newspapers looking for his sketches. You knew the smell of cellars. You study college football teams. Every week, you pick the winners. You don’t know what is important from what is more important.

You send your predictions to a paper and become their headline on the back page. But you tell no one. It is the Daily Worker and that earns you a file with the F.B.I.  Is it your breadcrumbs that lead two agents to our door? You see your father block their way. When they want names, his silence is his spine.

The chalked sidewalk is teeming with life, and the street is your Mississippi, rafting between cars and manhole covers, rounding the bases. You are a member of the tribe called Children. Rules are passed along by the big kids and suddenly you are one of them. 

How did get from there to here? One day you are Mickey Rooney and the next, Gregory Peck. Now you are an aged Jeremy Irons.

The camera is still running. Credits are not rolling quite yet. You are the star of your own movie, yet just part of a multiplex. 

You look back at fragments that stuck, the same way we used to enter the movie house in the middle, heedless of beginnings, and later say, this is where we came in.

 

                                          

The Ethos of the Boy Scouts

We know we've gone astray as a nation when we can't even live up to the oath of the Boy Scouts Handbook.Their ethical code mandates kindness, honesty and caring for one another. 

I was a boy scout once. I left in disgrace failing to make the requisite knots. We had to demonstrate our dexterity with square knots and clove hitch, bowline and nooses. I could say it was the noose that got to me but actually it was all of them. I think a part of my brain is missing or tied up in knots. Let’s just say I never learned the ropes.

I’m not sure if I departed as a Tenderfoot or if I even attained that low rank. I remember wearing the uniform and marching. Left, right, left right. Another abhorrent activity. It reeked of soldiering. When we weren’t marching, mindlessly, we played boy/men games such as alley-oop. And other character-building nonsense.

The one prank which revealed the reckless nature of our troop was the Hidden Rope Trick. Three or four scouts would gather on each side of Lefferts Blvd as if pulling on a rope that wasn’t there. The purpose was to fool the cars. In fact, cars did screech to a halt endangering the drivers and those behind. Great fun for the brainless.

These memories returned to me recently when reading about the removal of a statue depicting the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell. He was not only an imperialist and racist but also an admirer of Adolph Hitler and Mussolini. Why am I not surprised?

The one thing I came away with is the scout’s motto, Be Prepared. In fact, Baden-Powell came up with these two words in honor of his own initials, B.P.

When B-P founded the organization 116 years ago, fitness was all the rage. Teddy Roosevelt was a model of the slight, bespectacled kid becoming the intrepid wild-game hunter and exercise freak. When shot by a would-be assassin he merely paused and continued his speech. How else could he charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba? 

I’ll stay home reading the manual about helping old people cross the street. And now I’m one of them.

I don’t suspect even Baden-Powell prepared for the ignominious removal of his statue in Poole Quay, U.K. before he would be dumped into the ocean. I wonder if they used one of his damnable knots to hoist it down.

How ironic that a proto-fascist like B-P prescribed a simple ethos which we have now discarded as we put the noose around the neck of Democracy.

A Faustian Pact

Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus is an intimidating, needlessly over-written version of the Faust myth. It was so cerebral, my hair hurt. That was my surmise after the first 25 chapters. Am I allowed to change my mind? 

Having now plowed through the next 23 chapters I regard it as the most erudite and challenging novel in recent memory, with particular relevance for our times. Worth the inferiority complex, the word awesome is not a hyperbole. 

The pact made with the devil traces the rise and fall of a brilliant pianist and composer of classical music. Mann conflates his fate with high German culture and its descent into the abomination of Nazism. 

I don’t pretend to understand either Germanic mythology which Wagner’s music drew upon nor the atonal scale of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, both of which are central to the book along with Neitzsche and the Appolonian vs Dionysian split.

 Yet in spite of all that was lost on me, I still emerge from the verbiage with an admiration for the profound ideas and the linguistic leaps taken in support of his central thesis. The book itself becomes a rather atonal narrative with non-linear tangents and digressions, both in the future and past.

For generations to come, books, essays, plays, movies and operas will grapple with the same question. What went wrong? How could we collectively have lost our grip on our heritage, however flawed? Never before has a nation sunk so far and so fast as we have during the past twelve months.

We might look to Germany for answers. The reparations imposed on them along with runaway inflation and a worldwide Depression created a chaos ripe for the promise of a new order with full employment. Enter: Hitler.

Those preconditions did not exist here, but Trump invented them. First came the dumbing down. Social media excels in fabricating news and providing legs to monstrous lies. He channeled the grievances of those left behind, blamed Democrats for everything from the high price of eggs to busted shoelaces. and created a movement seduced by his clownish degeneracy and hollow promises.  

Just as Jews became the scapegoat for Germany's ills, our regime has targeted immigrants with heartless detention. Hitler had his axis with Italy and Japan and we seem to be moving in that direction letting China and Russia dominate their regions as we have our way in the Caribbean and North Atlantic. 

 Have we sealed a Faustian Pact selling our own soul and precepts for an extended empire while the nation slumbers?

Last One Standing

Aliens have arrived and here I am, last of our species. I’m present to greet the spaceship hoping, at least, for someone to have lunch with. After the usual small talk about our respective planets and what went wrong with ours, I ask what took them so long. The pilot apologizes because they’ve been monitoring our decline and fall for many moons, alarmed at our recent descent into planetary suicide but he says they just didn’t make the lights.

The three-eyed android who more resembles an androgynous Greek statue with marbleized flesh, speaks remarkedly perfect English. It had been a while since I’d spoken at all and find myself fluent, at first, only in gibberish till I regain use of my tongue.

He then observes a stash of what we used to call technology, inquiring how all the gadgetry works. I dread the moment and plead total ignorance. Fearful of raising his hackles I try to explain that we earthlings used a lot of things but most of us had no idea how anything worked. His hackles did indeed rise. I worry that some form of inter-galactic enhanced interrogation was coming, in which I might find myself impaled on one of his hackles.

He seems to accept my ignorance since, after all, we had convincingly demonstrated our collective stupidity by electing an infantile despot to lead our nation. The visitors further regret their delayed arrival, having now to deal with such a poor specimen as me to enlighten them on our human progress. 

I could only assure them that there used to live among us some who could explain how the loom with its punch cards led to player pianos and eventually to programming the computer. When I brought up AI, they threatened to make a U-turn. I told them there were a few of us undaunted by hot wires or hard drives who could fiddle with links and algorithms along with blue teeth, white noise and black holes. If one of those had survived, they could build it all over again from a handful of dust. However, I was not the guy.

All I have to offer is the paper clip, coat hanger and orange juice squeezer none of which he had ever seen before. We agree to call it a start and besides it will take a lot more than things to get it right next time.

On The Verge

So begins another year in the dead of winter. It seems to me my birthday would have been a better fit since it falls on the vernal equinox in March when buds rather than champagne corks are popping open.

(Spring has worked well for me though I never got around to thanking my parents for their visionary family planning.)

On the other hand, whatever happens in the spring has been gestating all winter as we gain 1-2 minutes of light each day and 3 minutes by mid-January. By February, it reaches one hour.

In human terms, up to 40,000 cells slough off every minute when we are young; much less so as we ripen into the beautiful creatures we come to be. For better or worse, new cells replenish us, imperceptibly. We are so new, over a lifetime, it's amazing we're recognizable. In fact, we are probably the only ones who think we haven't changed a bit. 

All of which brings me to think how we are constantly on the verge, regardless of the calendar. It's not a bad place to be, unstuck and in some sort of transit, toothbrush at the ready.

Fortified with more light than yesterday and a new set of cells, just maybe we can come to a new aha, hear something in a Brahms piano concerto or Charlie Parker solo or a tenderness from Chet Baker or a Jane Hirshfield poem we had missed before. Then we can take that riff and that phrase so the radiance on our face will melt the mask off an I.C.E agent such that he will see himself in his prey, and he too will be on the verge.

Kindness, I submit, is contagious. Small acts, along with intention, can overwhelm the haters and deniers._____________________

Now I must pause and see whether I agree with the above. I do not. I wish it were so and I suppose it can't hurt. 

However can playing well with others overcome the man-child who runs with scissors? How can his supporters be reached when they deem ignorance and arrogance a virtue? I ask you.

Public demonstrations may move the needle an inch or two even as they entrench his core. After today's outrageous act in Venezuela, it may dawn on some Independents that running with scissors does not serve their interests. It smells of Putin. Panama beware. And Greenland too may be on the verge.

The new year brings with it a new muscular foreign policy which  renders the emperor even more naked than before. Will he finally be seen?