Look to “Letters From An American”

 

When I began this blog it very quickly found its way into political matters.  Maybe it was the path of least resistance or the topic that most “needed” my opinion.  It led to my first book, Waiting for Someone To Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and the Decline of Sense.  Although I had to explain the mysterious title (Eugene Ionesco once wrote “as the world is incomprehensible to me, I am waiting for someone to explain it”), the subtitle, chosen during the reign of Trump, is self explanatory.

Over the years, my writing interests changed and, in fact, I became downright cynical trying to write about our increasingly fractious body politic and as divisive voices swelled I mostly withdrew from the conversation.  Also, writing in the COVID era became oppressive.  All the theatre and live music we loved disappeared, and these acrid politics leaked into public health, one exacerbating the other. 

Still there are topics I just cannot ignore and although I know little about Afghanistan, I know who to turn to and that is Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who set out, in a way like I did, to write a “journal.”  There are vast differences, though.  She approaches each topic in a scholarly fashion, documenting her opinions, and is extremely disciplined, writing each day on Substack in the form of an email to her subscribers.  It’s free unless you want to post comments.  I’ve come to rely on her analyses as a source of the facts behind the events. 

Richardson’ posting about August 26 (see the entire entry by subscribing with your email address) is a fully understandable discussion, to the point, of the quagmire called Afghanistan.  Here is the essence of her argument as she puts it:

I confess to being knocked off-keel by the Republican reaction to the Kabul bombing.

The roots of the U.S. withdrawal from its 20 years in Afghanistan were planted in February 2020, when the Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban agreeing to release 5000 imprisoned Taliban fighters and to leave the country by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban did not kill any more Americans. The negotiations did not include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the time Biden took office, the U.S. had withdrawn all but 2500 troops from the country.

That left Biden with the option either to go back on Trump’s agreement or to follow through. To ignore the agreement would mean the Taliban would again begin attacking U.S. service people and the U.S. would both have to pour in significant numbers of troops and sustain casualties. And Biden himself wanted out of what had become a meandering, expensive, unpopular war. Letters From An American © 2021 Heather Cox Richardson

The devil is in the details so best that it be read in its entirety.

Meanwhile, I fear that the self righteous Republicans, who only recently were criticizing Biden for not withdrawing from Afghanistan sooner, will gleefully use this as a fulcrum to “steal” the Midterm elections.  On the surface it is a blunder of major proportions, not to mention the cost to innocent lives and more of our troops.  But as all things historical, retrospect with a political motive is a different lens than clearly seeing events as they unfold.  No doubt they (especially the Trumpublicans) will make hay while the sun is shining on their hypocritical countenance.  As usual, nothing tells it as succinctly and dramatically as a political cartoon, this one from the Palm Beach Post August 27.

 

“Freedom” for the Few at the Expense of All

 “(They) care little for our freedom, they care little for our aspirations and little for our happiness. No more! We can’t let it happen going forward,” Governor Ron DeSantis said recently at the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in Utah.  This is how he characterized “Faucism.” He boasted about Florida’s efforts to reject mask mandates, vaccine passports, and allow schools to reopen without masks.  He did not boast about Florida’s highest COVID infection and positivity rates in the nation.

 

DeSantis is commonly referred to as #DeathSantis on Twitter as he climbs over the bodies of Floridian citizens and the overwhelmed state’s health care systems in his blind ambition to be the Republican candidate for President in 2024.  He, along with other populist, Trump Mini-Me Governors, have taken the position that some basic precautions, such as returning to wearing masks, violate the “freedom” of their citizens to make a choice, not to mention getting the vaccination itself.

This absurdity has even embraced the distorted logic that we, the responsible vaccinated, are to blame for “disrespecting” the unvaccinated.

Can it be more than three months that I wrote a guest column on this very topic for our local Palm Beach Post?  And it didn’t change the world?

 

I’m no longer merely disrespecting “leaders” such as DeathSantis, but I am furious at him and other acolytes of the Trumpian vision, a transactional world where plutocrats can tap into populist sentiment and use it for their own benefit and not for the greater good.

I make the point in my article but I will reiterate it.  One of the roles of government is to protect the public health.  It took years of battling over the “rights” of smokers to light up anywhere they wanted until, finally, there was an acceptance of long-standing scientific evidence that second hand smoke kills.  Imagine, public health laws went into effect to ban smoking in public places.  The “freedom lovers” finally learned to comply.  We don’t have the time to wait for them to comply with vaccinations and masking.  Stay at home if you think your freedom transcends the greater good!

It is true that the CDC’s messaging over the pandemic has not been on the mark at times, but all along they warned that unless herd immunity was reached, we ALL would be at risk for the development of a variant that could overwhelm the defenses of even the vaccinated.  Well, we are there.  And where is the CDC’s message on booster shots which seem to be inevitable?  The lack of transparency on the subject is distressing.  Where is the data on the inevitable effectiveness waning of vaccination? It is known that this decline is more substantial among the elderly.

We personally have been impacted by the “freedom” exercised by the lemmings (I wholeheartedly disrespect them) who listen to FOX-made-up truths and friends like DeathSantis.  We had planned a long delayed trip to visit friends and family (all vaccinated) in the northeast.  We made all our bookings in May as things had improved substantially by then.  We felt confident, finally liberated from quarantine prison. But as positivity rates rose to more than 20% here in Florida, and the culture wars over mask wearing and vaccinations raged, out of an abundance of caution we were forced to cancel those plans.

Perhaps younger people gathering in clubs, concerts, etc. don’t care whether they spend some time in the ER, but people our age have just so much time left and for us to be denied our “freedom” because of this culture and disinformation war is an injustice. 

But the truly upsetting statistic is the large number of the US adult population – about 30% who say they’ll never get vaccinated (compare to 8% in Canada, a civilized country).   Maybe deny them admittance to the ERs?  Tough it out!  Go to the Governor’s mansion?

This situation would be bad enough if we were talking about only the Delta variant and our poor response.  But long term the Republicans are positioning themselves as the dystopian party of the minority who can still exercise control.  Republican-dominated legislatures are passing laws to make it more difficult to vote and giving themselves the ability to override state election officials.  They are in fact making it legitimate to “steal the vote.” Until now, it was merely their self-propagated myth.

"Philip Roth," an Encyclopedic Biography by Blake Bailey

 

Cynthia Ozick, a fellow intellectual, a long time friend of Philip Roth, wrote THE review of Blake Bailey’s biography, Philip Roth.  She says that “its nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude.”  I was thinking Dickensian in its cast of characters and encyclopedic magnitude.  If Bailey’s biography is definitive, Ozick’s review of the biography is equally authoritative,

I’ve accumulated some ten pages of notes on Roth’s remarkable life and achievements from this biography, but to what end?  I still have that habit from college days: taking notes.  But looking them over, and having read Ozick’s review, I am tossing all that detail to simply mull about general themes. 

There has been much controversy regarding Roth choosing Bailey to write his biography, the general theme being one misogynist finding another.  This has been fodder for the cancel culture and to me nonsense, completely irrelevant to what Bailey has accomplished.  I addressed that controversy in this entry and although it makes reference to my Kindle edition, I successfully acquired the original clothbound edition, which has always been my preference reading this 2 to 3 pound tome (and taking notes!) mostly in bed in the evening.

From Bailey’s acknowledgements:  “[Roth’s] cooperation was honorable and absolute. He gave me every particle of pertinent information, no matter how intimate, and let me make of it what I would (after telling me, often exhaustedly, what I ought to make of it)….One lovely sun-dappled afternoon I sat on his studio couch, listening to our greatest living novelist empty his bladder [at a nearby bathroom], and reflected that this is as good as it gets for an American literary biographer.”    I think Roth would be pleased by the results, even where Bailey strays from what Roth might have wanted, by the sheer detailed shaping of his life, an ocean into which the reader is totally immersed.

This is as much a treatise on the art of writing, at least at the level that Roth wrote, as it is the details of his life.  His commitment to writing, except for brief interludes, primarily because of health, was absolute.  In his Connecticut home that meant from morning to late afternoon in his separate studio, with a brief break for lunch, usually with someone staying with him at the time, his wife, his friend, or his current lover.  Like Updike, who he generally admired although also greatly in competition with, he could compartmentalize his writing routine, leading to 31 novels.  I wonder whether he (Updike) worked with as much angst as did Roth.  While both novelists saw themselves as the leading writers of their generation, I see (in my mind) Roth with his shoulder to the plow, compared to Updike seemingly effortlessly toiling in the fields of fiction.  This is not to distract from the accomplishments of either, both capturing the American experience in their writing from different perspectives.  Yet, neither writer won the Nobel Prize; disgraceful. This had more to do with the politics of the Prize than it did with their work.

This biography spoke directly to me because of place.  Most of his adult life Roth lived on the Upper West Side of NYC and in Warren CT.  As fame and fortune mounted, he would buy up adjacent apartments and renovate his CT house to include a separate writing studio.  Roth’s roots eventually ran deep in Connecticut and the Upper West Side and I understand why, and can even feel it having lived in both places.

He was only nine years older than I am so the historical bookmarks of his life are indelibly imprinted in me as well.  As Bailey writes about Roth, there is a sensory recollection of the times we shared.  Even without this personal factor, anyone who reads this biography will be struck by its intimacy.  This is more than the story of a life well lived and of an extraordinary man, but one gets to know him like a good friend, accepting his foibles as well as reveling in his accomplishments.  It’s as if Bailey has positioned him as a protagonist in a novel, one with whom we deeply empathize.

His first wife, Maggie, tricked him into marriage through a fake pregnancy test.  She was a troubled woman who had two kids.  Roth was good to them.  His second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote a scathing memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.  Roth wanted a “corrective biography.”  He got that and more from Bailey.

He was a man who gathered friends, lovers, disciples, ex-lovers who became friends or enemies, a man of enormous magnetism.  They, and the mind of the writer, through his alter ego fictional character Nathan Zuckerman, were fair game in Roth’s fiction.  In his copy of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” he noted “Family as the maker of character.  Family as the primary, shaping influence.  Unending relevance of childhood.”  Bailey opines, “For him it was consummately so, and hard to say where one parent ended and the other began in the formation of his own character.”  He brought this into his literature and into his relationships, even sometimes acting as an ersatz grandparent to the children of ex-girlfriends

Roth was a man of titanic intellect and he did not suffer fools.  Yet he was a man of great generosity, serving as a mentor to other writers, a teacher, a supporter of Czech dissidents, and as a savior to friends (frequently ex lovers).  It was not unusual for Roth to open up his wallet, sometimes anonymously, to help friends, or people who helped him, with education or even living expenses.  Several were there at the end.  He sometimes expected friends who he considered his intellectual equal to be readers of first drafts of his writings.

His political leanings were decidedly liberal, although sometimes libertarian.  He cried when FDR died.  He lampooned Richard Nixon (even being mentioned in the Watergate tapes, Nixon saying to Haldeman: “Roth, of course, is a Jew.”)  Reagan did not escape his political ire, “a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap-opera grandmother…and with the intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical….American–style philistinism run amuck.”  He privately thought George W. Bush was the reincarnation of “the devil.”  He didn’t live long enough to suffer and comment on the entire Trump Presidency, but a New Yorker article quotes him saying that Trump was “ignorant of government, of history, science, philosophy, or, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English.“  Bailey comments that he liked to say “I’m eagerly awaiting my White House tweet.“

I’ve written before of his decision to stop writing, and his interview on that subject only scratches the surface of his thoughts on the matter.  

Blake Bailey’s work is an important achievement.  Is it biased?  Perhaps, but is admiration a biased position?  Bailey introduced me to nuances in his fiction as well as works I have still not read.  Roth was concerned about the decline of the American novel and rightfully so.  Who can ever take his place? 

The sheer size of Blake Bailey’s work, more than 800 pages with almost 90 pages of footnotes (much of it from primary sources) and index, makes it a veritable encyclopedia of Philip Roth.  It is a labor of love and faultless scholarship.

Mr. Blandings Takes a Fall

 

In a split second I thought of a quote from Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You, a very funny paragraph about aging:

 What is it about falling? "He died of a fall." "The poor thing never recovered after his fall." "He broke his hip in a fall and was never the same." "Death came relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard." How fucking far do these people fall? Off of buildings? Over spuming cataracts? Down manholes? Is it farther to the ground than it used to be? In years gone by I'd fall on the ice, hop back up, and never think a thought. Now it's a death sentence.

 That moment took place as I landed on the brick pavement in the portico of our relatively new home which we moved into during the pandemic.  Since then we’ve had a number of major projects on the outside of the house – ones rivaling Mr. Blandings’ that involved a workman breaking our main water line, resulting in a monster geyser and a frantic search for the water meter and shut off (buried under a bush!).  That in itself is another story.

 Later on during that work they broke a sprinkler pipe, something I didn’t discover until I saw the tell tale mix of sand and dirt that was blasted onto the sidewalk stones of our home.  It required an irrigation specialist to repair.  He turned the system back on to automatic after testing it.  So, all is well, right?

 No, as we have brand new plantings all along our backyard and it is supposed to run 4 days a week until the new plantings take.  After a couple of days, the system had not gone on, and this is after a few days of no water while the system was turned off.  I made a mental note to manually operate it early the next morning, even though it was scheduled to operate the following evening.  The plantings were starved for water.

 So as the sun began to rise, I was out there in my pajamas to turn on the first zone.  Good timing I thought as the new plantings are in the third zone and by that time I could be dressed and ready for my morning walk while the sun is still low in the sky.  I donned my shorts and got dressed for the walk, all except for my socks and sneakers, as I would still have to go out and turn on the second zone and the timer is several feet from the portico on the side of the house and I didn’t want to track dirt back into the house.  Therefore, I wore flip flops which I could leave at the front door.

 As I went outside to turn on the second zone, still in a sleepy state, I saw an animal approaching me quickly along the side of the house, me wearing shorts and open face slippers.  I thought it was a water rat as we live on a small lake.  I tried to sidestep back to the portico but my right flip flop got caught by a partially underground sprinkler head, and down I went.  This was the first fall in my life since childhood or maybe when I played tennis as a young adult.

 There I am in mid air, remembering the danger of falling at my age and in particular as my Doc said I have the early signs of osteoporosis; wanted to put me on Boniva which I refused.  As I went down I think I saw a squirrel out of the corner of my eye, not a rat, but as soon as I hit the ground, landing on my right shoulder, hip, and knee, I suddenly felt something moving under my tee shirt.  Again, visions of a rat danced in my shocked brain. While on the ground, stunned, I grabbed at my tee shirt and was holding some sort of living creature.  I managed to get up on my feet holding this thing underneath my shirt and by that time I surmised it has a harmless gecko, so once unsteadily standing I pulled the bottom of my shirt out of the way and dropped it on the ground, indeed a gecko.  How it got there during a few moments on the ground is unknowable, but there I was bruised and wobbly, “attacked” by a squirrel and a gecko. 

 My right knee was scrapped and bleeding, as was my right elbow and a couple of toes that were scraped on the brick because of my open toe slippers.  My right shoulder was in some pain, as the brunt of the fall was absorbed by the upper portion of that arm which is still muscular and that, I think, saved me from breaking anything or dislocating my knee cap.  That also mitigated the impact on my right hip.

 I went inside to wash off my wounds and test how steady I was walking.  Not great, I thought, cancel the walk that day.  But I went outside, again in my flip flops, to check the sprinkler heads along the side of my house and there I was accosted by a snapping turtle.  Not my day.  At least no alligators and fortunately no death notice that “he died relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard." 

It’s All Happening at the Zoo

  

“I do believe it, I do believe it’s true”…Paul Simon

 According to the daily New York Times coronavirus report, “without humans around, Sri Lanka’s zoo animals enjoy a pandemic baby boom.”  The director general of Sri Lanka’s Department of National Zoological Gardens, Ishini Wickremesinghe, said “animals are actually having a less-stress and relaxed time with no people around.”  Wisely, the zoo was closed during the entire Covid pandemic, no rushed reopening.

 On the other hand, the BBC says “for those who thought that lockdown would leave couples with little else to do than procreate, there was a surprise - not a baby boom but a baby bust. Research shows that the US is facing the biggest slump in births in a century and in parts of Europe the decline is even steeper.”

 The animal population of course doesn’t have to deal with the anxiety wrought by Populist Nationalism throughout the world, or insurrections such as the one on Jan. 6, QAnon insanity, and their sophists, including the ex-President and many of the elected officials in Florida. 

 Is it any wonder that fully vaccinated people in Florida lag places such as Massachusetts by a substantial amount (39% vs. 54%)?  The Sri Lanka animals must be high-fiving it, celebrating that DeSantis is not their Governor, and having some fun while at it.

 The birth pattern makes an interesting dichotomy.  Let the animals inherit the earth.  The human species is proving we don’t deserve it, polluting the environment and choosing mendacity over veracity.

 

 “O-rang-u-tans are skep-ti-cal”

Milestones

This past weekend marked a milestone birthday for my wife, Ann.  It was also another milestone; after 19 months of relative isolation, we were able to see our son Jonathan and his wife Tracie, and two weekends before our other son, Chris and his significant other, Megan, celebrated Mother’s Day with us.  All of this was feasible because of the effectiveness of the vaccination.  If only we could pull together as a nation and truly make COVID a plague of the past.

We drove Chris and Megan up to The Dive Bar for their famous lobster rolls their first full day and afterwards we walked along the Juno Beach boardwalk, enjoying a beautiful sunny Florida day while watching all the fishermen casting their lines.  A lot of swimming and sunbathing ensued by the sun starved Bostonians and on Sunday, we all loved a sumptuous Mother’s Day brunch.  Unfortunately, it was only a long weekend visit and they had to return before Ann’s birthday.

Jon flew in a few days before her big day and finally on Friday, Tracie joined us.  As a treat to our daughter in law, we made reservations for a High Tea Luncheon at Teacups and Treasures, an experience Ann particularly wanted to share with her.  Obediently, as Ann made it an unconditional invitation, Jonathan and I accompanied them although we noted we were the only men in the entire restaurant!

It turned out that half the restaurant was dedicated to little girl birthday parties, one very large group gathered together behind some clever screening.  All were in their most fancy party dresses.  Even their squealing and giggling wasn’t the least annoying.  Luckily we were at the entire other end of the room and had our own little corner to enjoy our incredibly delicious meal.  I never knew having a freshly brewed pot of tea, a delectable soup and scones, small tea sandwiches and delicious miniaturized desserts could be so much fun!  Seeing how delighted Tracie and Ann were made it all the more worthwhile.

The following day --  Ann’s big birthday celebration -- found us driving up the exquisitely manicured entryway to The Breakers Hotel, for their Sunday Brunch, ridiculously priced, all patrons unmasked, even when getting up to the buffet (after all, this is Florida), but it was an experience to mark a very special occasion.

A word about Ann, who I love dearly.  What times we have shared during our long 51 year marriage.  She and I remarked that indeed, life is but a dream, we are hardly aware of the day to day details, only the major memories lingering, and suddenly we are here, now acutely aware of our days.  Our son, Chris after visiting two weeks ago, wrote a moving tribute to her upon his return home, and I take the liberty of quoting part as it is a great character study, capturing Ann:

When I arrived home and began my work-from-home life, I realized there was a sadness, one that had taken root since my departure. I missed my mother. I missed her stories she shared with us, her frenetic energies and breadth of conversation. I missed how she charmed hostesses and waiters and her spontaneous laugh, a laugh that said “I’m here and love it, dammit!” She loved my father through thick and thin and put up with my brother and my own oddities. She kept a flock of life-long girlfriends near her chest, loyal and loving.  Literature transmuted their essence to her: she read everything from Jane Fonda to Jane Austin. She traveled and played and cruised across oceans, still short by fifty countries compared to my brother, she joked.

It was a lovely couple of weeks, seeing our “kids” at long last.  May it be only one such incident on the path to “normal,” if that is still feasible in this country.