Woe Is Me!

I ignore the article in the New York Times (or was it on CNN?) that summarizes the report on the deleterious (read deadly!) health risks of even one or two glasses of nightly wine as I imbibe a first glass of French sauvignon blanc right now! Whiskey is already known to be dangerous: but I admit that my last night’s sharing of single malt scotch was pure pleasure! I’m seventy-five years old and already doomed. Next thing they’ll try to take from me will be ice cream! Fat chance of that.
            So, sipping my wine I move to the never-ending revelations of George Santos’s remarkable deceptions that have earned him the kudos from the Republicans (who really have no shame) and abhorrence from his constituents and democratic (small ‘d’) colleagues who are, well, mostly Democrats and retired out-of-power Republicans. Unless they’ve become high-paid lobbyists.
            Then there is the continuing report of the gallery owner who sprayed a homeless woman with cold water from a hose who was sitting in front of his establishment. Apparently now he has been charged with misdemeanor battery “for an alleged intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness.”

            And then there is the news out of Florida that the state’s Department of Education rejected an A.P. African American Studies class because the course is not “historically accurate” and violates State law. Not historically accurate?? This in the state where the Rosewood massacre occurred and in which a white mob killed black people and destroyed the town. It is remarkable to me how far White people will go to protect their obscene acts and confirm their privilege. I wonder if reports of the massacre will be included in the ’right historical record’ written by white racists. DeSantis, who wants to be President (of a white nation, I suppose) has already signed a law restricting how racism can be talked about in schools, which means it won’t be raised as an issue. 

            These are just the most obvious newsworthy articles today. I know that this seems a chauvinistically limited survey: I know there are issues about Ukraine, New Zealand, Cbina, the Taliban . . . oh the list goes on and on. But now Florida becomes another State I will try to avoid. There have been others—see my memoir Anxious Am I? in which what I had hoped might be the definitive list of states I will not visit was offered. But if the internet has made the world smaller, then the most recent news out of Florida has shrunk the world. Ignorance is not not knowing; ignorance is willfully not learning. Ignorance is willfully remaining stupid.

            There appeared an article in a recent New York Review of Books by Anne Enright entitled, “Eyes That Bite.” The article described her experience in rereading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a book she had read when she was only an early adolescent. In the article Enright admits that she has no memory of the book at all, nor can she recall what has happened to her reading life since then. She says, “I try to remember what it was like knowing nothing, how powerful that was, and it seems like a lost idyll.” My on-line New Oxford American dictionary defines idyll thus: “an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene, typically an idealized or unsustainable one.” I believe that what she describes is a period of innocence when perhaps the contexts of her reading were unrealized, not known. Reading was a pleasurable activity in itself and did not speak of or to the world. Not knowing was a period of innocence, but it could not be sustained except by deliberate ignorance. But then there would be nothing innocent in not knowing.

 And last evening late I learned that David Crosby has died. He was 81 years old. Slowly and inevitably the people I grew up with are dying. At some point someone will say that of me.