Acceptance Speech

By our illustrious president’s standards there were a few winners and lots of losers at the Academy Awards ceremony last night. 80% went home empty. Sad. All those crumbled papers with great speeches we’ll never hear. I wonder what Meryl and Denzel had to say. I would imagine all the nominees prepared something just in case. I’ll always remember Bob Hope’s quip when he was Master of Ceremonies back in the day, Welcome to Oscar night or as we call it in our house, Passover.  

Nobody wants to have their name called and get up stammering, revealing their true inarticulate self, or even forgetting to mention people who will never forgive him/her for the snub. With this in mind I decided to write my brief acceptance speech which I have now recovered from the trash bin.

I first want to thank Peggy without whom I would be living in a cardboard box by the off-ramp reading back issues of National Geographic stolen from my dentist’s office and eating my scant meals of freebie samplers at Costco. I want to throw a kiss to my daughters, Janice, Lauren and Shari who were raised in spite of me to be brilliant, creative and gifted Renaissance women. Now you should get to bed (even though you are all pushing sixty.  A big shout-out to my extended progeny all of whom have wisdom by listening carefully to my advice and doing exactly the opposite. I also want to mention my 3^rd grade teacher who cast me as the turkey in our Thanksgiving pageant which launched my career on the stage. I should also give credit to that lady who let me in front of her on line at the checkstand with my head of lettuce and then there was the time I had thirteen items in the 12-items-or-less line and also the guy who held the door open for me in the elevator, I then bumped into and he apologized and to the librarian who waived my overdue penalty. Special thanks are also due to the meter-maid who alerted me, at 8:56, one Monday morning, that I’d better move my car or be ticketed. I might also mention my mother and father, long gone, who allowed me to go to the Saturday afternoon movies where I spent the next five hours with my older brother even though my feet didn’t reach the floor and I was in fear of being sat upon when a large man inched his way across my row in the dark theater feeling his way and I saved my life from being crushed by rattling my Good and Plenty. And I’d be remiss not to take this occasion to salute the Boys Scouts of America who threw me out because I refused to tie the right knots thus demonstrating that I was not suitable material to fight wars in defense of our flag.  Yes, I know, I must wrap this up but, you see, I don’t expect to be here again in this borrowed tux staring out at Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or is that Audrey Hepburn... and Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman and there’s Bogey…of all the gin joints, in all the towns in all the world I walked into this….

Speaking of Borders

What is a map but the delusion of safety….from poem, Maps, by Yesenia Montilla

Borders come and go. And that’s not a bad thing. Migrations have been happening since we left Africa. However in more recent times wars are what changes the cartographer’s ink.

We are a nation of immigrants. Some came shackled in chains, others came looking for change and were barely tolerated or ignored by an estimated 50 million native Americans already living in North America for centuries.

The prosperity or poverty of our continent can be seen in terms of European imperialism. America was an extension of the British Empire on the rise while Mexico was a function of a waning Spanish Empire. French and British enlightenment seeded us followed by migrations from Northern and central Europe and later the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. To their detriment, the church in Mexico also played a large role allowing permanent residence only to Catholics until 1860.

Much has been said how America is stained by the genocide of indigenous people and slavery. And rightly so. There is a third leg to the stool which usually gets a short chapter in history books but is yet another blight  and one which embodies the other two, conquest and bondage. It is our first foreign invasion which involved a sea blockade, amphibious landing and occupation of a capital. Namely, the Mexican War.

The map of the U.S. in 1836 was far different from the one of 1848. Our western edge was the Mississippi with states to the east and territories o the far side. As a result of the war we lost almost 20,000 men either through battle or disease. Many of our troops were illiterate immigrants right off the boat. Several hundred Irish even deserted and fought with the Mexicans (St. Patrick’s Battalion).

Mexico had the will but neither the treasury nor military might to defend their northern territory. What we called Manifest Destiny was to Mexico manifestly disastrous. President Polk’s administration has as their destination the Pacific coast and all the land west of Ole Man River.

The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the war not only crippled Mexico but also extended slavery leading ultimately to the Civil War. Mexico lost half its land as we grabbed over 525,000 sq. miles comprising California, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Texas, Utah, Nevada and parts of Oklahoma and Colorado. Another 300,000 sq. mils was added at the same time as Great Britain ceded the Oregon and Washington territories and parts of Montana and Idaho.

The treaty also guaranteed citizenship to Mexicans who had lived in those territories we had gobbled up. In addition it was the beginning of the end for the Indians. We assumed responsibility for their extinction r removal.

It could have been otherwise. The war with Mexico was presided over by Pres. Polk who was elected in 1844 by a mere 30,000 vote plurality.. New York Democrats swung the election by upsetting Henry Clay.

The war with our southern neighbors was vehemently denounced by northern abolitionists such as Henry Thoreau whose essay of Civil Disobedience came out of his protest and brief incarceration over the issue. In addition Lincoln and John Q. Adams spoke out against the invasion on the floor of Congress. They both questioned the legitimacy of the conflict and excoriated Polk for his lies and duplicity in provoking and inflating a small border skirmish into a full-fledged war and land-grab.

This was probably the first of many such pretenses. Think Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam and those imagined weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Anything to rally the troops.

There are no monuments in Washington to this national shame. Generals Zacc Taylor and Winfield Scott are not bronzed for pigeons to shit upon. Our cross border aggression could be considered the genesis of our immigration problem with Mexico. In a sense they are reclaiming their own stolen land assured them 170 years ago.

If Truth Be Told

I asked a man in prison once how he had happened to be there. He said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.   Mother Jones

By latest count fifty-one members of Congress will call it quits in November, most of them Republican. They have done the indefensible, allowing a man to subvert our democracy. As in Nazi Germany they have un-caged the beast. If we’re lucky they will get book deals and tell all. A book, said Kafka, is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within. And for these guys there is much ice to be axed. Lies have a way of clotting one’s blood-flow that feeds the mind and the heart.

If they are not still on the take they may even start squealing in their waning days. Free from their puppeteers the ring of truth can occasionally be heard. It didn’t take John Boehner very long to spill the beans. After he left as Speaker of the House he was asked how he dealt with all the sniping within his own Republican party. He replied that garbage men soon learn to put up with the smell of garbage.

John McCain, in his decline, speaks like a maverick … now and then. At least in his rhetoric he calls for a more bi-partisan approach which is tantamount to heresy in today’s polarized climate. Jeff Flake, his colleague, having announced his own departure went so far as to write a check for his own Party’s opponent in the Alabama race.

Truth-telling is something we’ve grown not to expect from Republicans, particularly what emanates from the executive branch. In-your-face, frontal lying has become the norm. Donald’s truth is to be found in the diametrical opposite of what he says. When he proclaimed that he won by a landslide it meant that he lost by a landslide but got elected by the fluke of a senseless, antiquated Electoral College. When he now claims that he would have confronted the Florida shooter the truth is that he ran away from such an armed man in an incident years ago.

On a good day we may get anything from mere spinning or obfuscation to laying the blame for everything on Obama. I’d love to be a fly in his confessional booth.

A man like our inspirational leader who lies to himself begins to believe his own lies. He is then unable to recognize truth either in himself or anyone else. So said Dostoevsky. 

Trump would do well to read Crime and Punishment or at least listen to the Mikado (Mueller) whose object so sublime / I shall achieve in time / is to have the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime. We’re not in Titipu or Oz any more, Toto, we’re back in Kansas…and Washington. Truth will out.

Daily Miracle

It happens every morning between 10 AM and 11 AM. A white paper comes flying out of the printer like some gull swooping. Peggy has written her daily poem. From out of the newspaper, scraps of a dream (up so floating), a memory (many spells down), a word or idea out of our breakfast conversation, or something seen from the window and lifted: a garbage truck, dog-walker or nesting dove. She transforms the base material of life, alchemically, to poetry. My constant amaze!

Robert Graves describes poetry as a visitation by the muse; what he calls the White Goddess from the moon rather than the Apollonian Sun God. He suggests a kind of trance. One with an inner-critic present to hone the craft. It is not willed but received. Not rhetoric however elevated but words and images allowed to mingle, merge and be reordered. There is a suspension of time. One writes as if in another dimension.

I’m not so sure I subscribe to the Graves construct. I see it more as a deep focus with both hemispheres of the brain in some sort of improvised tango. As for sources of inspiration I leave that as a happy mystery. Just as Peggy brings together disparate images in her poems so too does she call upon widely different voices resounding in her head. I can’t think of two poets further apart than the corporate insurance man from Connecticut and the revolutionary from Spain. Wallace Stevens say hello to Garcia Lorca. She regards both as mentors.

I’ve been there now and then for brief glimpses. To write as Peggy does every day is to live metaphorically on that plane. To breathe that rarefied air yet with her feet on the ground. It is not only a way of seeing and saying; it’s a way of being, how she lives each day. Her antennae are on alert at the ready for a divine reception. She writes with urgency of the immediate. She halts the clock, notices, listens, finds connectivity and re-frames the picture with leaps of language. The world is met and reconfigured, not wrestled into submission but released as what happens when falling in love.

Her emotional inner life (inscape) is profoundly engaged with the geopolitical landscape to compose its own rhythms and unexpected couplings. It is as if images enter by the back door or even through the walls.

In the hum of murmations / every bend adjusts astonished air. / Clouds contort, these mindless wheels / in the world without allegiance / Horses, round-rumped, dare me / to look away.

In the past five years Peggy has had about 140 poems accepted for publication in literary magazines. Her work appears in six continents (none in Antarctica, so far). Approaching her 97th birthday she is still in her prime…and that’s not the only reason I married her.

What continues cannot stay the past. / Each moment you and I must leave the static, / arrive at all the free wind / brings unlike the last. / Only spacious spirit reaches each to each / in a longing on and on.

Winter Olympics Seen

I watch these Winter Games, off and on, and it never fails to raise my hackles… wherever hackles might be. Two years from now I’ll feel the same way about the Summer Games. There is 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. It’s enough that we hang our pictures level and have to look at rectilinear cereal boxes and boring buildings.  

Why punish the body to fit the ideal?  I want to scream, bring on the Deviationist, the Revisionist! Why does a young person train 12 hours a day for years and return home in disgrace having been nosed out by four-one-hundreds of a second? Why must we quantify mastery of the body? Is life and death a matter of calibration? Does a wobble or a bobble signify the measure of a person?  I raise my glass to messy humanity. And how is it 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? They are artists with abs and pecs. Artists shouldn’t be in competition and be scored. Did we give a numerical rating to Nureyev, Ulanova or Baryshnikov? I hope not. Virginia Wolff declined an O.B.E. reminding the committee that 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 para-military exercise is to be prized and honored.

The spirit of camaraderie at the opening soon gives way to Nationalism for flag and anthem. The map of the world is itself a construct of dividing lines, some perpendicular, mostly jagged but all artificial. Athletes train and even live in one country and compete for another. In fact, each event is its own universe.

Celebrate them all and skip to the closing ceremony. Melt the medals. The winners are those who made new friendships, who found kindred spirits in distant lands, embraced their rivals; for everything beyond the judges hyper-critical scrutiny.

After a couple of hours I can feel the Bulgarian judge over my shoulder scoring the way I tie my shoes or cut the morning melon into lop-sided quadrants. Next event: Tooth Brushing.

I’m done now with five minute eggs. In protest I’m going to make them scrambled and probably burn the toast just because.

That was my slalom down the white page. Here’s comes my wobble-bobble……….

So why do I watch? Fair question. Possibly because the whole enterprise is of no consequence and I have a penchant for such matters. I’m a sucker for the tension. It stirs my reptilian brain. I love rooting for Norway (named after me) or Lichtenstein (we went there for lunch and their museum of stamps). I get juiced by the back-stories. By the craziness of the decimal points. It could be that friendly competition is a far better way to sublimate aggression than a shooting war.....but a food fight would do just as well. Those arctic winds and what obstacles we humans put in our way to test our threshold of punishment.... which includes watching the spectacle.

Ill-Wind and the Gust

I can think of a dozen reasons, off the top of my head, why to despise and fear that man in the oval room. But what is on the top of His head is the least loathsome thing about him. Yet a funny thing happened, last week, on his way to the gentle breezes of Mar-a-Lago. A mischievous gust of wind swept away his cover-up to reveal his bald-face lies.

My mother, in her infinite wisdom, could read the mysteries of air. She could tell the ill-wind that caused my whooping cough, mumps and even scarlet fever from that benevolent, reinvigorating fresh air which swept away the forces of malevolence.

That revelatory blast of air which parted Donald’s ample hair, like the red sea, has stirred a national debate whether he has had scalp reduction surgery, transplant or a world-class wig. If the former one wonders if something else was reduced in the procedure. No president has worn a wig since James Monroe and the three preceding him. I don’t subscribe to any of the above choices. I think he is wearing his own bumper crop which has been encouraged to grow, willy-nilly, like unfettered capitalism.

The Greeks had a reverence for the winds. Not just any old wind. They named them. A north wind was attributed to Boreas and the west wind to Zephyrus. Favorable flow moved their ships; still air kept them in port which got cursed Agamemnon in so much trouble.

So it was that this zephyr, in one fell swoop, came along to accomplish, metaphorically, what Robert Mueller has been laboring over since last June. It blew away his other-worldly, highly coiffed, nearly-orange, daily-mowed comb-over. As if we didn’t already know it, the gust displayed his vanity and ruffled his peacock crown. It was as if Hitler’s fake mustache had blown away. Of course there is nothing wrong with bald.

We have just one bald president and he ran and won twice against his bald opponent. No one could say Ike’s victory was by a hair. Adlai Stevenson was smeared as being an egg-head but, somehow, Dwight Eisenhower’s head was more round than oval. And out oat head came his cautionary farewell speech warning against abuses by the Military–Industrial Complex. Adlai couldn’t have said it better. But I’ll never forget his quip upon an ordination by Norman Vincent Peale when he said, I find the apostle Peale appalling but the apostle Paul appealing.

Never could such quickness of mind be attributed to Donald. Our current White House resident, with his lame incoherence, seems to have found the perfect balance between arrogance, ignorance and malice. No matter the crop on top, his amber waves of grain are insufficient to distract us from the pseudo-majesty which lies beneath. Would that a godly gust from Olympus grant us a make-over or just whisk him and his miasma away.

February Fourteenth

Love Day. What a concept! To set aside a time to declare our love out loud. Yes, I know it is a promotion from Hallmark, chocolatiers and the flower industry but still... Love is the opposite of death. With all the noxious air expelled from Washington and Fox News, all the insults, abuse, saber-rattling, nonsensical parade, indifference to asylum-seekers and general cynicism…….love, in all its permutations, is the answer no matter the question.

Call me a romantic. The word is well-traveled, even a bit exhausted after such a long and labyrinthine journey. Before it meant junk novels and date flicks it referenced, not quite the Latin language as one would have expected, but the vernacular tongue of those countries adjacent to Rome. The suffix, tic, made it Vulgate (colloquial), a step down from the Latin. Over time it was absorbed into its motherland and languages such as Italian, Spanish, Romanian and French were designated as Romantic.

In the 17^th century the word became a literary term describing tales of chivalry. Unlike liturgical writing or other matters of gravitas which remained stuck in Latin, the stories of knights and damsels in distress were relegated to the more common speech or romantic language.

 A frog he would a-wooing go, mm mm, mm mm

             A frog he would a wooing go,

Whether his mother would let him or no, mm mm, mm mm.

The frog and the mouse they went to France mm mm, mm  mm

             A frog and a mouse they went to France

And this is the end of my romance, mm, mm, mm, mm

By 1800 the Romantic Movement was regarded as an assertion of Individualism as a reaction to the growing Industrialization which had little patience for eccentricities or dissent. Wordsworth described Romantic poetry as a spontaneous expression of emotions recollected in tranquility. He became rich and irrelevant while others died too young, Keats (25), Shelley (30) and Byron (36). The latter two lived defiant, Libertine lives thumbing their several nostrils at the conventions of British society. What may sound like flights of fancy to our ears was revolutionary in its day.

Romantics today are folks you might expect to find smelling the flowers, preparing a Valentine dinner with candlelight and violins…. or writing poetry and blogs.

My funny valentine
Sweet comic valentine
You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet you're my favorite work of art

But don't change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay little valentine stay
Each day is Valentines Day.   *

I’m happy to keep the romantic legacy alive with its roots in the low-born, common tongue, idiosyncratic and openhearted with the imagination given full sway. That allows me to be mad about Peggy, crazy in love.

And I ain’t no fool for love songs

That whisper in my ears.

Still crazy after all these years.

Oh still crazy after all these years  **

·           *     My Funny Valentine, Rogers and Hart, from Babes In Arms,     1937

** Still Crazy After All These Years, Paul Simon, 1975