The Obscenity

Here is the obscenity of last night’s offensive harangue from Trump. It was not the repulsive rhetoric punctuated with falsehoods, deceptions and shameless self-promotion. It was not in the verbal attack on Joe Biden who has served the nation for 47 years but who the pusillanimous Trump accused of wanting to destroy America. I would remark of his violent assault on Biden as an example of the kettle calling the pot black but Trump denies the reality of the color. The obscenity of last evening was not in Trump’s denigration of John McCain who suffered imprisonment as a POW, though Trump’s attack on McCain was obscene and immoral; the obscenity of last night was not reflective of Trump’s absence from the funeral of John Lewis, though certainly it was to be expected given Trump’s animus against anyone who disagrees with him. The obscenity of last night was not embedded in his praise of the kind neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, nor in his refusal to say the names of the too-many Black men and women who have been murdered by the police in the recent pasts. As of this writing Trump (oh, how I detest even writing his name!) has still not addressed the shooting of Jacob Blake though he has energetically condemned the protest demonstrations addressing it and then used the opportunity accompanying the violence to enjoy a theatrical photo opportunity flashing a Bible (!) before an historic house of worship. His performance required tear gassing peaceful protestors. Last night’s obscenity resides not in his collusion with the Russians to steal the 2016 election and the voter suppression he and his sycophantic party are orchestrating in their attempt to steal the 2020 election. Nor is the obscenity in the almost daily report of corruption and violations of the US Constitution committed by Trump and his henchmen. Oh, each of these incidents and more are evidence of the venality of this president and his gang of cowards and thieves. 

            But the real obscenity of last night’s event existed in the blatant and ignorant violation of all of the directions of the CDC and scientific experts and government advisors who have urged the populace to an adherence to social distancing guidelines and the wearing of masks. No one’s freedom under any circumstance should be allowed to endanger mine! Last night Trump and his party closely packed over a thousand mostly unmasked people onto the White House lawn to hear his speech. And what is obscene about this crowding is that it is evidence that this president ignored the upwards of 180,000 people who have died from the virus and the upwards of 5 million who have been infected with it. He ignored the recent closing of colleges and universities that he has urged, even demanded to reopen, and he has disregarded the threat to the children and teachers and administrators and support workers that reopening the public schools will inflict. The public schools will not be able to contain the spread of the virus. In the orchestration of last evening’s fiasco Trump spat in the faces of those who daily put themselves in danger by caring for the sick, who must go to their essential jobs, and of those who attempt to stay healthy despite the chaos in which the White House has fostered and with which it has been embroiled. The obscenity of last night’s fiasco lay in the absolute denial of social responsibility and leadership and the self-aggrandizement and deceptions perpetrated by a man who truly doesn’t care for the United States or the people who live here. 

Parable

A parable is a story that answers a question or illustrates a moral or lesson. In a ‘true’ parable detail for detail parallels the situation that has inspired the parable in the first place. I think of the parable of the prodigal son that parallels the willingness of God to accept even the profligate and sinner who has now returned. Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper is a parable concerning the necessity of preparing for the future before one turns to pleasure and play. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parable that depicts the danger of a creeping fascism and the corruption of ideals that often accompanies and characterizes totalitarianism.

 So I’ve been thinking of Snow White. In Grimm’s tale when she asks the Queen’s mirror tells her that she is the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, and she is happy. Then she has a child, a baby girl, whose beauty exceeds even that of her mother, and so when the Queen next seeks confirmation of her unsurpassed (and unsurpassable) beauty the mirror announces that though the Queen is beautiful in fact, her daughter, Snow White, is more beautiful. Jealous beyond comprehension the Queen sets out to rid herself of her daughter by hiring a huntsman to take her out to the forest and kill her and to bring back her inner organs that she will cook up with salt and eat. But the huntsman sympathizes with Snow White’s pleas and lets her go without harm, though he believes she will die alone in the dark forest anyway.  In Snow White’s escape through the forest she discovers the home of the seven dwarfs where, discovering it absent she lies down for a rest. 

     I know, I know, there is certainly a misogynist aspect to Snow White’s residence in the forest: the dwarves offer her a home if she will care for their domicile and cook and clean for them. But when the Queen subsequently asks the mirror who is the fairest of them all, the mirror tells her that though she is fair her daughter Snow White is fairer. The Queen, appalled that Snow White remains alive, sets out to eliminate her, but Snow White is twice saved until finally she is poisoned by the apple. Placed in a glass coffin she is retrieved by a prince who vows to maintain the glass coffin and keeps it before him at all times. But carrying the coffin out of the forest the prince’s servants drop it and the poisoned apple piece lodged in Snow White’s throat is freed and she awakens. The prince asks her to marry him and Snow White agrees. But back in her palace and thinking Snow White is dead, the wicked Queen goes confidently to the mirror only to discover that her daughter’s beauty still surpasses her own. The Queen is incensed and invited to Snow White’s wedding she is made to dance in iron boots that have been heated red hot. The Queen falls down dead.

     I suppose a perfect parable would correspond perfectly to the situation upon which it is meant to comment but, well, nobody’s perfect. I’m thinking about Snow White following Trump’s unhinged tweet storm following President Obama’s speech last evening at the Democratic National Convention excoriating Trump and his administration for their incompetence, their corruption and their venality. Not only did the mirror say the would-be king wasn’t the fairest one of all but the speech of the one who was most fair gave evidence of that beauty even while depicting the ugliness that Trump could not hide. 

     May he have to dance in red hot boots until he can dance no more. 

 

It's My birthday, Too!

For a number of years I have posted to my blog for my birthday though last year I neglected to do so. I don’t recall the reason for the negligence but when I look back to the postings for the entire 2019 I note that there were no postings from January through October, and so I guess the year did not inspire my attention. Or it depressed me too much to want to address anything about it or me. We did celebrate the birthday that years with my brother and his wife at their home in Connecticut eating roasted corn on the cob from the local Farmer’s market and followed by birthday cupcakes: I ate two and too many. And finished my seventy-second year.

     This year has been difficult. Trump and his sycophants polluted the air with their lies and their vicious discourse and heinous policies. Not only did we (for a fourth year) suffer under a government by tweets from a narcissistically disordered bully who remains ignorant of history and appears seemingly functionally illiterate supported by a Republican party that has abandoned governing from an insistence on justice and equal protection under the law; but that gallops towards a fascism that threatens the very basis of the United States constitution.  Okay, enough of that.

     Then this year there occurred the pandemic: the current iteration of plague. For the past six months we have restructured our lives under the dark clouds of COVID-19 and its deadly mismanagement by the Trump administration. I haven’t engaged in social activity since the second week of March; have abandoned travel plans, eliminated the option to dine in restaurants or imbibe at a local pub; avoided coffee houses and given up my gym membership. I who had spent uncounted joy-filled hours in movie houses have not visited one in six months. I have tickets for an already rescheduled concert that I don’t think will actually occur. I worked for almost fifty years in the schools but what will schools become as the pandemic rages? Who knows when this will end, but regardless of its finish the world will never be the same again. I published in July an article in Prospects addressing what curriculum might offer to the present situation. I entitled the article “After This, Nothing Happened,” quoting Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation who faced the decimation of the Crow subjectivity with the loss of the buffalo but who maintained a radical hope that the Crow would have a future though he could not know of what that future might consist. I cannot imagine the future here but I maintain hope that there will be one for the sake of our children.

     But on this birthday I have decided to address at least what remains in my power to do so. I have grown weary of the quantification of my existence by the technologies now available to do so. I have during the pandemic walked twice a day. I listen to music as I do so but while I walk the iPhone measures the steps and mileage of each effort. And it then reports to me not only today’s effort but then announces how today compares with yesterday and this week with the previous and this month with the past one. And then I become fixated on these numbers such that they begin to control my walking, and what should be pleasant activity becomes onerous. I would learn to saunter. Then there existed the measure of the effort I made on the indoor bicycle: revolutions per minute coupled with effort became quantified into WATTS. I know the measure reported my output of something though I don’t know what exactly. In front of me was the computer monitor that recorded every single second of my effort. And the instructors kept urging me to work harder. Mithridates, I know, well, he died old! When I was a runner I did possess a chronograph that replaced a chronograph and that measured the speed with which I ran, and I measure my runs in mileage, but I didn’t really care what the chronograph said or even the distances I covered: I think that the chronograph was das much a part of the runner’s uniform as were my running shorts and t-shirts. I think they were more significant to me than the information the chronograph reported. And though I ran a specific distance it was the run that mattered and not its quantifiable length. I loved going out more than I did the returning. The pleasure of running was in the effort and not its measure. More: during the pandemic I take my temperature regularly and measure my pulse and oxygen level with the pulse/oximeter. The practice has become compulsive: if I can measure then I should measure. I take my blood pressure and when I don’t like the reported numbers, I take it again though not much changes in 15 minutes. The numbers reporting the Coronavirus appear throughout the day in the newspapers printed and online and I obsessively check them. I look at the poll numbers and pray that this time they are accurate. I am drowning in numbers. 

     I finish my 73^rd year. Another measure but other than the fact that the mileage is fixed and the direction irreversible, I refuse to acknowledge or measure the pace. 

 

In August

The mornings have turned relatively chilly: when I awaken at 6:00am the temperature measures in the 50s and the air is crisp. The birds outside of my window sing their plans for departure as they fortify themselves with food placed in the feeders. Crickets and cicadas sing a very different tune, Terrapin Station/And I know we’ll be there soon” sing the Grateful Dead. In August the chirping of the crickets and cicadas fill the evenings along with the katydids, though honestly I can’t tell the difference in the sounds. In August summer begins its slow close. For almost fifty years as August arrives my anxiety would blossom as body and soul began preparation for the beginning of school, for meetings and classroom presences. Syllabi had to be readied; the ease of summer had to be brought to an end in anticipation of bells and clocks and time constraints. Summer’s books turned into assigned readings. Shorts and t-shirts were folded and stored and shirts and chino slacks were sent out to the dry cleaners for laundering and pressing. 

Even as a child August portended the end of summer. Advertisements for school supplies have already begun to inundate the internet, and sales on children’s attire scream across pages of the newspapers. My mother would begin her shopping for new chino pants and dress shirts in preparation for the first day of school.  Dungarees, shorts or t-shirts were not considered appropriate school dress, and I don’t remember if sneakers were permitted except for gym class. New clothes were important to a new school year, but I can’t imagine now why that was so.Perhaps it was the opinions of our elders. I would anticipate reunion with school mates and the return of schedules and structure. It was a bitter and sweet feeling. 

In retirement my August begins as it has always begun: with the onset of a familiar anxiety and a bit of regret. This response to August is, I know, psychic habit. On the calendar and in the air August triggers a bodily response long ago established by my life in the schools. There occurs a certain contraction accompanied by a frisson that casts off summer and readies for the change of routine and for the quick advent of Fall and for inevitable winter. But now in retirement I remember I am by choice not returning to school in the Fall and my breath eases as my body relaxes. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. I have no need to travel anywhere.  I need prepare for nothing, and the projects I have initiated can continue unabated. The dreams of summer can continue into Fall and Winter.

I recall that the Dog Days of summer refer not to the response of dogs to the weather but to the position of a constellation. I recall that in the month of August I celebrate the passing of another personal year: this year I complete my 73^rd year and enter into my 74^th. Mostly I feel just fine, but as a hypochondriac there must be always something slightly amiss, and I can discover all kinds of issues with which I can trouble my patient doctor. I will spare him for now and maintain a list for some future delivery. I want to get on time to the end of my memoir so that I can begin its sequel. My friend says the first line of the next installment should read “I thought I’d be dead, but I’m not.” I thought to title the sequel, “Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.” The present writing is entitled “Anxious Am I.” About it I remain anxious.