Baking the Cake

 

It’s a multilayered apocalyptic confection, suitable for a world addicted to dystopian hedonism.   Irreconcilable political ideologies, the plutocracy and the new class of “influencers,” have found the perfect recipe for destroying democracy.  And yet we go on, one step in front of the other, as if life can continue like this.  I’ve avoided these issues in my blog, but not in my mind, so time for a polemic catharsis.

To borrow from Dickens, the human race, like Joseph Marley, now wears the chain it forged in these times, having “made it link by link, and yard by yard; [and] girded it on of [our] own free will, and of [our] own free will [wear] it.”  I am now mixing metaphors (chains and cake), flailing for understanding.

We have embraced the kleptocratic emperor who wears no clothes, so transparent in his horrific iniquity and ignorance, but so in sync with popular culture, bolstered by social media.  We have become vassals to the very technology we now can no longer live without (somehow we managed before the ubiquity of the smart phone).  An agnotological oven has baked the cake and forged the chains.

It’s become a topsy-turvy world where an indoctrinated post-truth minority has turned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on its ear.  The archaic Electoral College was almost toppled by its vulnerability to manipulation in the last election and state Republican bodies are now arranging for the members of the College to become their marionettes. 

The ideals of the Democratic Republic are under siege.  The Supreme Court was the first to topple.  The imagined rights of individuals hijacked those that the social compact of the Constitution was supposed to ensure.  One only has to consider the endless jousting over vaccines and mask mandates in a pandemic that has killed one million in the U.S.  Or the “rights” of military-style weapon owners transcending the right of society to live safely.  Only a morally bankrupt society would tolerate more guns than there are citizens.

The previous administration laid the long-term groundwork for January 6, and its execution on that fateful day using mob psychology.  Sedition, an act of a third world country was perpetrated in front of our own eyes, and yet here we are more than a year later still waiting for justice to prevail. 

The pandemic hastened supply side issues, labor shortages, the flooding of the financial markets with liquidity, and now, the consequence, inflation.  This will be borne on the backs of those who can least afford it with increases in transportation, housing, and food outweighing other inflation measures.  Not discussed much is the elephant in the room: as the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the current National Debt of $30 Trillion will have to be financed at higher interest rates, a self-fulfilling prophesy (in the absence of higher taxes on the rapidly growing uber-wealthy class) of either default or still higher inflation in the future so debt can be retired with depreciated dollars.  One only has to look at the US Debt Clock which is a real time pulse of our economy and debt.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine assaults our senses daily, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness without risking a nuclear war.  It is far beyond my understanding to discuss this horror in any kind of detail.  Finger pointing can be found for whatever position one wants to take.  Putin very quickly referred to slaughtered Ukrainians as “fake news.”  Doesn’t this resonate?  We have forged the chains of gaslighting over years of social media.  Four years of the prior administration made “fake news” the centerpiece of how to manage its citizens where truth/lies are fungible according to one’s own belief and feelings.  In fact, feelings are as valid as scientific evidence. 

How all this will end is anyone’s guess; nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, including a civil war or a nuclear war between East and West.  Civil war is “easier” to imagine than the latter, but the April 30 Wall Street Journal carries an opinion article by Peggy Noonan, Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine which goes to that very place.  She makes a persuasive argument:  “It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.”

Indeed, we have forged the chains, link by link. By weakening democracy here we have emboldened Putin’s actions with heretofore unimaginable consequences.

 

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan

A Ground Hog Day New Year

Happy New Year. One feels apologetic after addressing someone with that greeting, now needing to qualify it, saying this New Year has to be better than the last.  In the spirit of self analysis, or criticism, I once again look at my writings over the past years.  I’ve always said that writing this blog is not an act of self promotion, there is no advertising, no dialogue invitation (other than my email address if one wants to write me).  It is an exercise in accountability and remembrance.  I’ve joked with friends that it provides an alternative memory bank, particularly when it comes to books, cultural events, and travel destinations, the details of which are too easily forgotten as time inextricably moves on.  

We all have our opinions and our passions.  For nearly 15 years I’ve guardedly worn my heart and mind on my sleeve, and while looking back there are things I regret saying, but for the most part I’m satisfied.  Sometimes, I’ve even been prophetic, and now I’m alarmed by some of the things I write and think, those going to a dark, dark place.  Perhaps that direction is to be expected as I age, and feel its physical and psychological impact. 

However, most of all I fear that the “American Experiment” is beginning to look like the creation of Victor Frankenstein as we slip from democracy, to anacrocy, to oligarchy, destination autocracy.  We have abandoned the concept of “the common good” and are in a civil war, the polarization of just about every major issue.  This has been mostly played out in a grand political charade but incidents such as Charlottesville, and the attack on Congress last January 6 foreshadows where this might go as a hot war.  The proliferation of guns almost ensures some kind of armed conflict, most likely that very kind of guerrilla warfare.

We can’t even see eye to eye about COVID, extremists exploiting the issue as one of individual freedom.  I have written about this and our ex-President; the thought of his being the leader of our country could have been the punch line of a joke not very long ago.  His popular support ironically is not what he’s done for his followers but instead his giving voice to his follower’s hatred of the virtues of where we thought we were moving, into a more tolerant, ethnically diverse, educated society. 

It is bad enough if we only had to be concerned about the Trumpublicans mastery of propaganda and Gaslighting.  The liberal press writes much about the evils of Gerrymandering and I agree.  But, worse than Gerrymandering is the recent attempts to appoint local election officials, or representatives to the out dated, unnecessary, democracy-threatening Electoral College who are “sympathetic” to Trumpublican causes.

This sets up the real possibility that fair elections can be overturned as being illegitimate.  Then we will be a banana republic.  If election fraud does not work there are always guns.  Is it no wonder I am in a dark place?

At least a cultural light was on in this blog for a long time, but with COVID, many of the theatre and the musical performances which we used to attend in the past, and I enthusiastically wrote about, have been discontinued or migrated to Zoom (not the same).

My reading life has been disrupted by the chaos of our times and although I still try to escape in reading, I find myself less motivated to write about what I read.   Similarly, the piano: still working on improving my skills, but writing about it right now is a different matter.  (Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021 was a shock and I will write about Sondheim eventually; what he has meant to me musically and personally).

Travel has been shut down, or dangerous, as the civil war plays out, the unvaccinated, the unmasked, claiming their “freedom” transcends everyone else’s. Thus trips I might have written about are no longer to be experienced.

As a society we’ve politicized everything and consequently progress with managing COVID has been disrupted. Years ago we were able to eliminate most smoking in public places which is clearly a danger to the non-smoker, but that took decades for “freedom-loving” smokers to accept, and the Covid issue is even more volatile and equally consequential. 

They accept the licensing of motor vehicles, but not of guns, again equally dangerous if in the wrong hands, or being military grade. I have written more than 30 entries over the years on the need for sensible control of automatic weapons, and covering incidents such as the recent Kyle Rittenhouse murders as examples of the consequences of no congressional action.  Even since the horror of murders of children at Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT, now almost ten years ago, we’ve done nothing other than recite the hollow words, “thoughts and prayers.”

It’s open shooting season on the soil of our once sacred nation, each and every one of them intolerable, destroying spirit.  I’ve written to our so called elected representatives who answer with form letters or emails extolling “freedom and the sacredness of the 2^nd amendment” as if it was handed down from heaven.

I am getting to my point.  Every year I seem to write less.  The definition of “banging one’s head against the wall” is “to attempt continuously and fruitlessly to accomplish some task or achieve some goal that is or seems ultimately hopeless.”  Yes that is where I am at with “freedom lovers” be they of guns, ignoring science, pursuing conspiracy theories, or undermining the very essence of our laws.

Ah, laws.  Another bête noire.  Here we are at the 1^st anniversary of one of the ugliest days in American history, and our Justice System moves in glacial slow motion.  Of course we must be thorough, but at the expense of never bringing the masterminds who are responsible to Justice? 

When I wrote my 100^th entry in this blog I posted a playful entry “How is my driving?”  Now that I;m posting my 726^th entry, I no longer ask that question.  A better one would be, “why am I driving?” I am struck by my first entry from last year ironically beginning “Could we have a worse start to a year that follows the worst year in memory?”  Talk about déjà vous.  I include that entry below as the same themes reverberate:

Saturday, January 9, 2021

The Revoltingly Horrid Year Continues….

 

Could we have a worse start to a year that follows the worst year in memory?

 

A quote President unquote, whose name I cannot even speak, continues behaving like an unhinged mobster boss.  His attempts to coerce the Georgia Secretary of State to throw their lawful election is just one more manifestation of his never-ending quest not to be labeled a loser, which he is and has always been.  His behavior then was criminal, impeachable.

 

But wait, that has been forgotten now as this deranged man stood safely behind a bullet proof shield and urged his slavish rabble to storm Congress just as it was ratifying the Electoral College Vote to name Joseph Biden the next President.  He yelled, Stop the Steal!  He promised he’ll be there with them every step along the way.  He didn’t clarify that he meant that metaphorically, as neither he nor his followers know the meaning of the word.  Instead he retired to the security of his White House Media Room with family members and sycophants to enjoy the siege of his insurrectionists in what we would consider a coup attempt if we were watching a 3rd world government.  It was like a Super Bowl party to them as they watched his minions do his dirty work.

 

Criminal, inciting sedition.  This by a sitting President.  Unthinkable.  Punishable, impeachable,

 

So his job of demolishing the last vestiges of democracy and decency is complete.  He is a deluded anarchist and by pandering to that base he has created a populist persona with a dedicated following, ready to die for him.  It could have been a greater loss of life during the siege had those pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails been detonated.  Perhaps the deep rumble of explosions and their accompanying terrifying bright lights was what he was waiting for.

 

We’ve all seen this coming and with every despicable act we (and many elected representatives) have given him more and more latitude.  After all it has been reasoned, he doesn’t understand the consequences.  He doesn’t understand how government really works….

 

How easily the behavior of one tragically flawed person can obfuscate so many serious issues which are tossed by the wayside, the pandemic and distribution of the vaccines, the climate, racial issues, gun control, voter suppression, and a national debt from which the nation might not recover.  Meanwhile Bitcoins and the stock market rage on while the nation burns, and we wake up each morning, fearing the next disaster du jour.

 

Good riddance to our Mobster President who, unfortunately, will still be part of the cancer that erodes our society from within, no matter the degree of his exile.  Mar a Lago may be his Elba.

 

 

 

 

The Rittenhouse Decision and Its Implications

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial had me reeling and consequently I dashed off a Letter to the Editor of my local Palm Beach Post newspaper, one that had to be limited to 200 words.  I sent it to Bruce Rettman, my longest tenured friend from our college years.  I’ve written about our friendship in this space before.  The first such time I included another terrific essay he wrote.

When I sent my piece to him, he responded with something he wrote, not necessarily for publication, but he just wanted to “let it out,” his own reaction to the Rittenhouse decision.  While space made me focus on one aspect, our society’s increasing permissiveness for carrying military style weapons, his is broader, making him ask why he should even stay in this country, the title of his piece, appropriately, I Would Leave.

I thought it was excellent and he agreed to allow me to publish it here.  And as my letter to the Post was restricted in length, I take this opportunity to add back what I had to cut out to make the paper’s length restrictions: 

The absence of sensible gun control laws led directly to the jury’s decision.  They could reach no other verdict in a society which not only allows for the possession of military style weapons but increasingly promotes “Stand Your Ground” laws, either explicit or implied.  Our society and its leaders have actively advanced the 2^nd amendment to an absurd degree.  In this respect our judicial system has been rendered as ineffective as another branch of government, Congress.  Gerrymandering and the effort of Republican states to appoint electors to the Electoral College who might be amenable to not certifying future election results also have frightening implications for The Republic’s future. 

As students sixty years ago Bruce and I recited John Masefield’s On Growing Old, never imagining it would happen to us.  Now we come together in that unimaginable future, and find ourselves in a nation we no longer recognize, one slouching towards autocracy.

I Would Leave 

by Bruce Rettman

If I were younger, I would leave the United States of America and make my life in another country.  The trial in Kenosha gives us yet another example of our broken, barbaric society giving legitimacy and permission to a person, in this case an adolescent, to carry a military assault weapon on the street and to use it to commit murder.  Our judicial system has constructed laws that put such action in the category of reasonable behavior so that a jury must return a verdict of not guilty.  A murderer is free to kill again.

I would leave.  What kind of society elects Donald Trump as its president and on his behalf attacks the capitol threatening the lives of legislators and bringing death and destruction to the building that stands as a symbol of our democracy?  What kind of country elects representatives who become leaders of one of its major political parties and defend such action?  We are a society in violent decline plagued by the prejudices that have haunted our history.  We have shown ourselves unequal to resolving our national crimes.

I would leave, but where would I go?  I would go to a society that does not allow its citizens to bear arms and does not have an armed police force.  I would go to a society that offers universal health care.  I would go to a society that advocates the end of the use of fossil fuel and not only takes climate change seriously but does what it can to save the planet from the ravages of our wanton destruction.  I doubt we will act to save ourselves, and I have little faith the USA will do what decent people should do.  We would rather fund what has brought us to prominence.  The USA will continue to fund a military that fights to protect wealth.

What decent person does not advocate for free education? Who would support a system that creates elite colleges and preparatory schools attended for the most part by people of substantial means?  I would look for a society that housed and fed the poor and the elderly and did not complain that such action constitutes entitlements that burden the rest of us.  I would look for a society that offered child care so that the very young and their parents could live healthy lives.  I would look for a society that guaranteed food and shelter for all of its citizens. 

The USA is over.  I know without a reasonable doubt that the United States is not, as most all of its elected leaders feel required to repeat, the greatest country in the world. Rather, it is a country of savage cruelty, at home and abroad, that is responsible for the suffering of people around the globe.  We are a military state and have been at war incessantly, war without end.  I would look for a society at peace with itself and the world. 

I would leave the USA.

My November 25 letter in the Palm Beach Post:

 

 

Our Short-Term National Memory

To illustrate the topic of this entry, only about a month ago the worry was the end of the financial world as Congress was playing political brinkmanship with the National Debt ceiling.  After circling the wagon train, preparing for the worst, hark, the sound of the cavalry bugles at the last minute, Congress agreeing to raise debt levels, extending the issue “all the way” to December 3.  Meanwhile, the financial markets resumed its steady march to the heavens, particularly as the Federal Reserve is between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to raise rates. Clearly, the Treasury cannot afford to pay more interest on the steadily mounting debt.  Short term memory: everyone has conveniently forgotten December 3.  Soon it will be headline material again, a hot potato political issue.

Meanwhile, the Trumpublicans are pleased about the recent elections, demonstrating that their lord and master showman’s prestidigitatorial gas lighting can still opiate the American mind.  Simple formula, tar all Democratic candidates as “socialists” or associate them with the big bad wolf (Critical Race Theory, something most Trumpublicans cannot explain), and equate any reasonable COVID policy with a “loss of freedom.” Nice little sound bites for somnambulistic sheep.  However, no doubt their obedience has been nurtured by the intransigence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The most serious reminder of our short-term national memory, however, is the upcoming (only two more months) one year anniversary of the most serious domestic attack on our native soil since the Civil War, the January 6^th insurrection.

We all watched it.  Our elected representatives experienced it.  We have the evidence how it was masterminded, what the end game plan was, and several Senators and Congress people who decried it during the immediate following days, now have all conveniently whitewashed it and have allowed the architects of that horrible day, unfettered by consequences, to do it again, perhaps now more “legally” given voting law changes in Republican states, redistricting, appointments of State Election Commissioners who will do what they are told as well as conservative judges at the local levels of Government.

Imagine if this attack was orchestrated by the Duchey of Grand Fenwick – we’d be bombing the hell out of them.

Why our Justice Department cannot swiftly act on this matter defies understanding.  Are our political system and the American psyche so poisoned?  Even our 4^th Estate seems to have left the scene of the crime.  The montage of headlines the day after this egregious breach of democracy was filled with outrage.  Where is it now? 

 

That Infamous Day 20 Years Later

I’m hardly able to write about that day as its memory is still raw.  Also now with hindsight there is the realization it hastened what had already been underway:  economic and political forces tearing away our society from within.  Today we are left with things spiraling out of control and now we are even unable to come together to fight a virus that has claimed the lives of three hundred times the number of people who died on 9/11, almost as many American lives who died in all wars since the American Revolution.   We have a vaccine and the ability to impose mask mandates, yet corrosive politics and culture wars have weakened American resolve and unity, an attribute that was in full bloom during WW II and briefly, oh so briefly, after that fateful day of 9/11.

As I am so disheartened by the reality of what is and what might have been, not to mention, where we are going as a nation, I prefer to borrow and edit some of my prior writings about this day and its consequences, including a small portion of my book Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense.

World Trade Center Bicentennial 1976

Although it seems like yesterday, we all (of a certain age) remember where we were at that moment.  The only comparable instant in my life is remembering where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky.  We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers.  To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity.  Did this really happen here?  My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC.  They lost 685 employees on that fateful day.  Jonathan decided to take another job.  Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes?  Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day.  One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”  May we never forget:

“9/11/2001

By Chris Hagelstein

Terrorist troops and bodies strewn

in Twin Tower screams, destruction loomed.

News stations on a journalistic mission

under our Flag's lost transmission:

America's Death.

 

Judgement of Religious Decree

driving Boeing bombs with air fuel

circulating vultures from above the sea,

smashing their prey

on this plain sun-filled day.

 

Television digital debris rained on video,

Looping the same sequence of carnage.

The surgery of media controlled the flow

but the State of Blood remained unknown.

 

Prayers beneath each citizen’s eyes

were blessed wells now, for those who died.

No ceremony or speech could render a conclusion:

Those wired images played seemed like an illusion.

 

An Eye of some god was seeing us All

for each one's Blindness, was another’s Call,

and in the skies above Manhattan, masked in smoke

exhumed old gods of hatred and hope.

 

If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life,

It could not compete with what witnessed, I:

Buildings falling and heroes crushed:

As day burned to night

and life --- to dust.

 

Still, yet, in my hearts dismay,

Born here, I stand, no less bleeding

than those who survived this day:

For America is my body and my sea

executed on the stage of history.”

His poem is a first-hand emotional account of the horror and the hope.  This is how we all felt and I remember our country briefly coming together.  Unfortunately, Trump “remembers” it divisively, saying,” Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering….It was on television. I saw it.”

I give President Bush credit for going to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. less than a week after the tragedy to deliver a speech "Islam is Peace" to the American people and to reassure Muslim Americans.  It is the easy path to foment racial hatred after such an event as Trump did and still does, but Bush had a different message: “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.“

By the time President Obama was elected the economy was already deteriorating and political divisiveness, such as the rise of the Tea Party, was beginning to build to a crescendo and that’s about the time I innocently started my writing, more for personal reasons, but it quickly morphed into a mission to present the observations and views from the grassroots.  I’ve written it for 14 years now, albeit with decreasing frequency.

Since 9/11 I’ve deliberately avoided films, documentaries, non-fiction and fictional works about that day.  It and its consequences are just too terrible to relive.  But nonetheless, it was unavoidable that my reading would lead me to that day, this happenstance out of the blue.  And it was from an unexpected source, my favorite writer, John Updike.  What I didn’t know, but found out later, that he was visiting family in Brooklyn Heights, and watched the event unfold from there.  Typical Updike, his real life experience became conflated with his fiction in his last short story collection, My Father’s Tears.  

So it was with some trepidation when I realized that his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.”  The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety.  Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day.  One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to be a source of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegaard, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.”  And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.”  How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God?