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?