General Essays

Pontifications, pomposity and other pretentiousness

The Temple of Air

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One of my favorite books is The Temple of Air, a collection of interwoven short stories by the Chicago writer, Patricia Ann McNair.  The book continues to have an impact on me because of its profoundly rich and deep sense of place.  I’m finding that as I grow older my relationship to places, whether it’s where I come from, where I am, or where I might be going, is for some reason becoming more and more important to me. The stories in The Temple of Air all take place in the fictional and isolated small town of New Hope, Illinois, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the town I grew up in, Union Grove, Wisconsin

But it’s not the greatness of the book or Ms. McNair’s evocative prose or the nuanced and substantive characters she draws that has me thinking about her book tonight, although that’s where these things normally end up. Instead it is quite literally that last word in her title.

Air.

This is where things get a little bit weird, and where I’m going to reveal what a real flake I am.  But I swear, this is true and real, even though I know I can’t adequately describe it, and I have no idea what if anything it means.

About a year ago, I had triple bypass heart surgery.  Although I was 99% blocked in one artery, and about 90% in a couple of others, it’d be disingenuous to call it a near-death experience. But while it may not have been in the room with me, I think it’s safe to say that death was in the neighborhood, and was on his way, in his big, blue 1969 Impala, stuck at a light with his left turn signal on, waiting for the arrow to turn green.  He was close enough for me to feel his presence more acutely than at any other time in my life.  Fortunately, everything went well, and now the old ticker is just plugging along, and having missed his exit, ol’ death is back on the outbound interstate.

But here’s the weird part, and I swear it’s true.  Ever since the operation, I’ve had brief moments, about two or three times a month, where I feel the air in a way I’ve never felt it before. Usually it happens when I step outside. I feel its coldness or warmth, I smell it, I taste it, just like everybody does, just like I always have, only stronger and deeper. It becomes overpowering.

But it’s more than that. It’s very strange. When these moments occur, they establish a connection to something and sometime in my past.  Most of the time I can’t name when or where it is, but I get the sense that it’s connecting me to some point in the past, usually in my childhood, unlocking  a  brief moment where the air felt exactly like it does at that precise time in the present. Usually the flashbacks triggered in these moments are vague and shapeless, and impossible to make out the connection, but I feel it, and I know it’s just beyond my grasp.  A couple of times, they’ve been vivid enough to present to me, like a movie playing in my head, complete scenes.

The most vivid of these flashbacks occurred just a couple of days ago, on a warm March day when I stepped outside to let the dogs out.

Suddenly I saw myself, six or seven years old, on the front porch of our house in Union Grove, on a warm spring day. And I more than just saw myself, I saw the world, through my young child eyes and body, and everything felt different, except for the air, the air felt the same, it was my portal into the past. And I walked through the screen door into the living room of my childhood down the hallway into the bedroom my brother Don and I shared.  Don wasn’t there, our bunk beds along the near wall were empty. The plastic model of the Japanese Zero plane that Don had assembled hung from the light shade, suspended by a thread tied to its front and back that was looped over the shade. It was late afternoon, the pre-dusk shadows advancing across the room.  My little bones ached, so I lay down on the bottom bunk and stared at the mattress springs of the top bunk above me.

And then I was back, fifty years later, in the present.

The title and final story in The Temple of Air is about an adolescent girl who is painfully neglected by her divorced and hopelessly shallow parents, and how she is finally able, for at least a brief moment, to literally rise above her circumstance.  I was lucky enough to have no such hardships.  My childhood was nothing if not idyllic. It never occurred to me that there were other people who suffered tremendous pain and anguish. I took my good fortune for granted, and thought no more about it than I thought about the air I breathed.

Tonight I’m thinking that when my last story is told, when air is no longer available to me, I’ll kneel before  the aggregate of all the air I ever breathed in, and I’ll rise above but not too high, tethered to this world like a model airplane suspended from a ceiling light.

 

Problem Child

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The Republican establishment is beside itself, trying desperately to figure out a way to deny Donald Trump the presidential nomination. Truly mystified, they ask themselves, “How did this happen?”

Are you kidding me?  Even the Republicans can’t be that stupid.

Donald Trump is the love child of the Republican Party and the toxic wack-a-doodles known as the tea party. Having given up what was left of their virtue in return for easy votes, the extremism and radical rhetoric spawned by their unholy union has taken the form of the orange-headed fascist mutant. It’s disingenuous for the Republican leadership to come out now and blast Trump for being too extreme, for inciting violence and hatred, when their entire agenda for the past seven and a half years has been to obstruct and destroy the elected president rather than govern. Even in this past week, as they decry Trump’s unfitness to govern, Mitch McConnell announced that he will not allow a vote on President Obama’s nominee for the supreme court, despite there being no historical precedent for denying a vote in an election year, despite polls showing that by a two to one margin the public thinks a vote should occur, and despite the responsibility spelled out by the constitution of the Legislative branch to advise and consent.  But, hey, not doing his job is nothing new for McConnell.  This is, after all, the same man who said, in 2010, that his “top priority was to make sure Barack Obama is a one term president.” Given his failure in this regard, one has to wonder why he still has a job.

Obama’s approval rating is currently at a three year high.  Therein lies the main problem for both parties.  For the Republicans, it shows that all of their hate filled vendetta against Obama isn’t working, and people who don’t belong to the tea party are tiring of their antics.  This has been the one same shrill note they’ve been sounding for years now – Obama bad.  They’ve even intentionally sabotaged key legislation and then brazenly blamed Obama for is failure. One example of this:  I heard Ted Cruz, one of the most extreme obstructionists, blame Obama for cutting the military, when the cuts were actually mandated by sequesters that were part of the Cruz engineered government shutdown.

Obama’s approval rating also points to the main problem that Trump presents for the Democrats, and that is he’s not running. If he were, I have no doubt he’d sweep the floor with the puffy haired petulant little brat.  It would be the clear contrast between mature adult and spoiled child.  Obama has weathered seven and half  years of vile hatred and lies with grace, dignity and good humor, while Trump has blown his stack over a couple of soft ball questions lobbed at him from a Fox News reporter, resorting to sophomoric and ugly personal attacks.

The problem for the Democrats is they are running two politically flawed candidates, both of whom will be easy targets for attacks from the right. Fair or not, Hillary Clinton is going to have to fend off attacks against her character, as she’s already been branded as “untrustworthy.” For Bernie Sanders it will be how he’s embraced the term “socialism.”  And trust me, I know, there’s nothing really to fear in the term; that “democratic socialism” really refers to a return to a fairer economic model, where the distribution of wealth isn’t tipped to the top one percent to the degree it is today. That doesn’t matter. Any kind of nuanced discussion always loses out to the Pavlovian fear-inducing emotional responses triggered by the sound bite definitions assigned to such words.  Just as “liberal” has come to mean “weak,” “socialism” is code for “communism” and “untrustworthy” means, well, “untrustworthy.”  These one word character assassinations are extremely effective and easy, especially when relentlessly hammered into our brains.

A friend of mine posted “If voting really mattered, they’d make it illegal” on Facebook yesterday. If ever there were a year to prove that sentiment wrong, this is it. The stakes were high enough with an on-going health care crisis, global unrest, environmental disasters, assaults on individual rights to privacy, and the potential for another economic collapse hanging in the balance.  Throw in the front running candidacy of Trump and his growing fascist following, the racism and misogyny of his rhetoric, and his advocacy for violence and his followers’ willingness to engage, you have the greatest threat to American democracy in my lifetime.

Above all, Trump must be stopped.

So it turns out I agree with Republicans on something.

 

 

 

Political World

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When I started this site, I resolved not to get political.  But since we live in a world that’s becoming more and more political by the day, and the stakes are getting higher even as the politics get stupider and more surreal, I can’t help but react.

And trust me, while I know that the Democrats have some serious issues, the bulk of the idiocy belongs with the Republicans.  The clown car wreck that is their field of candidates this year would be hysterically funny if not so scary.

For the life of me, I can’t understand what makes so many normal and good people support these clowns and believe in the same tired clichés.  Like:

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people:”

This one is getting into semantics, as most murders require a weapon. As weapons go, nothing is as cheap, efficient, or as effective as a gun.  Case in point:  I’m not aware of there ever having been a drive-by stabbing, or a mass strangulation.

On why we don’t need universal background checks: “We just need to enforce the laws that already exist.”

The problem is, if I am murdered by a deranged psychotic who would have been denied a gun purchase had background checks been conducted, good work in arresting and convicting the murderer. The only problem is this is all a bit too late for me, as I‘ll be dead and unable to join in the post-trial cake and ice cream celebration.

“There will always be bad people who do bad things, there’s nothing you can do:”

I heard this from a gun-rights enthusiast immediately after the slaughter of 26 innocent victims, twenty of them children of six or seven years of age, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. This same guy is also a vocal anti-abortion, or “pro-life” advocate that is in favor of criminalizing women and health care workers who participate in abortions.  Apparently, they are pro-life until the child leaves the womb; once they are among us they are on their own.  I’m sorry, but any society that can’t take care of six or seven year old children is a complete and total failure.  Plain and simple. And when the anger and horror we feel when such an incident occurs is overridden by ideological or political talking points, then we are no longer human.

From the only consistency is in our inconsistency department – perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the modern Republican is how easily they give up on supposedly deeply held convictions.  Some examples:

The constitution is sacred and must be protected against knee-jerk activism.

The second amendment is feverishly defended against any proposed legislation that might in the broadest imaginable interpretation have the slightest impact on the public’s right to bear arms, yet calls by candidates to ban Muslims and to deny citizen ship to “anchor babies” that clearly violate first and fourteenth amendment rights, go unchallenged and have become key planks in the evolving 2016 Republican platform. Donald Trump has actually spoken out in favor of the state sponsored murder of innocent family members of suspected terrorists.

Big government is not to be trusted and has no business in the private lives of citizens.

A long held fundamental tenet of U.S. conservative political philosophy that is conveniently overlooked when it fits the narrative they want to tell.  Fears of terrorists that are spread and exaggerated are used as excuses for the government, who supposedly can’t be trusted with the simplest administrative duties, to collect private information (see the “Patriot Act”) of private citizens.

The real question should be which should we distrust more, big government or big business? With the legalized purchase of our government, the lines between the two have been blurred to the point that government of, by and for the people doesn’t exist any more.

Fear mongering

I swear, despite all of their tough talk, Republicans have to be the biggest wimps in the world.  I’ve never met a bunch that is so afraid of so many different things.  From having to take a gun with them everywhere they go for fear of an encounter with the menacing hoody wearing black man to violating basic constitutional rights at the sight of a man wearing a turban, there is nothing (except, strangely, guns) they aren’t frightened of.

Misplaced fear

Of course, not all fears are irrational.   For example, what should be feared more:  the gun violence that caused 406,496 American deaths between 2001 to 2013 or the acts of terrorism which caused 3,380 deaths (more than 2,900 of them on the same day, 9/11) over the same time frame? It seems obvious that the one that is more than 100 times larger, the one that killed more than 84 Americans per day in that time frame, should get the bulk of the attention.  Yet, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino tragedy, when the fourteen people killed were still thought to be victims of another random mass shooting, the silence of the Republican presidential candidates was deafening.  Once it was determined that the assassins had ties to ISIS, the reaction became loud and shrill.  Republican leaders only care about victims when they can be used to spread their false narrative,  that people of darker colors and different faiths are to be feared, when actually it’s their own divisive and careless policies that have left so many of us isolated and divided, and armed and dangerous, distrustful and afraid of one another.

There’s a reason they want us to be afraid of each other – it’s the divide and conquer strategy. If we fear and distrust our fellow citizens, it makes it easier for the rich and powerful they serve to grab an even bigger share of the pie.  We the people are right where they want us to be:  fighting each other for the crumbs that fall from their overstuffed mouths.

I’d argue that if we ever sat down and talked with each other, and listened, really listened, we’d realize we’re much more alike than different.  We’re all getting screwed, we’re all working harder and earning less, and we’re all paying more for basic services and falling deeper into debt.  It isn’t the hoody wearing black man or the Muslim or the Mexican we should be wary of, it’s the bankers and corporate officers who have put everything we own and value, our dreams and our future, our health and our families, up for grabs in one last fire sale. They are betting on their ability to keep us divided and hostile to one another until they can grab everything and leave us only the chewed and charred remains of heir gluttony.

We have two choices:  remain stupid and willing victims to their avarice and greed, or recognize what is being done to us and unite in opposition.

Revelations

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Amidst all of the childish name calling and foot stomping that passed for the Republican debate on Saturday night, there were two revelatory moments, both courtesy of the front runner, the one and only “the Donald,” Donald Trump.

The first came in a confrontation with Jeb Bush, for whom Trump appears to have an almost pathological hatred. In the middle of the by now familiar “he’s so weak,” “he’s a loser” rants we’ve all come to know and love, something startlingly coherent came out of Trump’s mouth:  the fact that 9/11 occurred on George W. Bush’s watch, despite the fact that he’d been warned several times by intelligence reports that a strike from Al Qaida was imminent.

Now, outside of the Republican universe, none of this is news.  Everybody knows that, just like everybody knows that 15 minutes could save 15% on your car insurance.  But inside that fantasy world, where prosperity trickles down from the wealthy to the poor, where climate change is just a concoction of corrupt scientists, hearing these facts from the Republican front-runner was outrageous blasphemy.  “But George W. kept us safe,” has been the party line, somehow denying the undeniable fact that dubya was President in 2001.

The audience booed and hissed, and the candidates stumbled over themselves in response. Marco Rubio, perhaps the most deluded of the bunch, said in response that it was all Bill Clinton’s fault for not killing Osama Bin Laden when he had the chance, forgetting that in his eight years in office, Dubya didn’t kill Bin Laden, either, leaving that mission to Barack Obama, who finished it in two years or so.

The second moment came when Trump raised the issue of Sperry closing its manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and moving its operations to Mexico. Plant closings and their subsequent job losses are never discussed in Republican debates.  To do so would be to challenge the validity of the trickle-down anti-labor economics that remain the heart and soul of their free market faith, despite thirty years now of contrary evidence of the falseness of these theories.

Make no mistake about it – I think Donald Trump is a monster and a fascist, a megalomaniac who cannot be trusted with any power, let alone the presidency of the United States.  But even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then, and it’s inevitable that a blabber mouth like Trump will eventually stumble upon and utter some truth. The question is will his legion of brain dead followers wake up in time to question these and other tenets of their blind right wing faith.

Like the one where everything is Barack Obama’s fault.  How dare he sign those executive orders! That’s no way to govern!  When, in fact, it is the only way to govern, when the radical extreme right that is the Republican controlled senate refuses to do something – anything – to fulfill their constitutional obligation.  For example, in the past couple of weeks. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told Obama to not even bother submitting a budget, because his party will not even read it yet alone vote on it.  In the debates you hear Ted Cruz lamenting the shrinkage of the military, when it‘s actually the sequesters he engineered as a part of the government shutdowns he proposed that have cut military funding.

Now it’s the Supreme Court vacancy left open by Justice Scalia’s passing.  Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who in the past has said his top priority was not to govern or serve his country, but to make sure that Obama was only a one term president, has already said that Obama shouldn’t even bother nominating a replacement for Scalia (per his constitutional duty) because the Republicans will shirk their constitutional duty and not even allow a vote to confirm or deny.  Cruz, McConnell and others have said Obama should pass on nominating until after the election, so the American people can have their say.  But they already did have their say, in 2012, when they elected Obama president.  The constitution is very clear on the responsibilities of both the executive and legislative branches in the process, and when he nominates a candidate, it won’t be Obama who is guilty of not faithfully executing his sworn duty.

It’s high time we recognize the damage that the Republican controlled senate has and continues to enact on our country. Like the spoiled children they are, they continue to throw their political tantrum over Barack Obama being elected president.  It’s been going on for almost eight years now, and the only way to shut them up will be to vote them out of office this November.

And So This is Christmas

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What are we to make of Christmas in the year 2015?

There are those who’d like us to believe that a war of political correctness is being waged against Christmas, with shots being fired every time someone says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

I’d argue that if anyone is fighting a war against Christmas, it’d be the marketing departments of the businesses that trot out the Christmas displays earlier and earlier (this year I saw it occur as early as mid-August). It’d be the luxury car companies that have those obnoxious year-end sales events, the “December to Remember” commercials featuring $50,000 dollar cars with festive red ribbons tied to their tops.

It’d be any company that perpetuates the “black Friday” nonsense and greed-fest that not only cheapens Christmas but also that other sacred holiday, Thanksgiving.

It’d be the weather, and the climate change deniers.  As I write this, I can hear the wind howling outside. Not the wintry wind you’d expect in Wisconsin in late December, but rather the warm wind that you’d normally associate with a late summer or early autumn thunderstorm. It’s pushing 60 degrees out, and it’s been a warm and wet and muddy December so far, the temperature above freezing all month, with an almost steady soft and warm rain, and not a trace of snow to be found.  It’s not the absence of a snowflake on a Starbuck’s cup that threatens Christmas, it’s the absence of real snowflakes falling from the sky. I know, I know, one month of local weather does not make climate change real, but with melting ice caps and snow-less mountain tops becoming common place, the trends are indisputable.

But that’s okay – who needs the North Pole anyway? By now, Santa Claus has probably taken advantage of the shrinking globe and moved his corporate headquarters to a Grand Caymans tax shelter, and outsourced his manufacturing to a Southeast Asia sweat shop.  By now, Rudolph has traded in his red nose for a couple of right wings, and Santa is packing heat with his very own concealed carry. One can’t be too careful these days.

Any supposed war on Christmas would be carried out by be the radical Islamists who carried out the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, and by the radical Christians of the Planned Parenthood attack.  It’d be waged by any terrorist of any creed or color who uses violence to inspire feelings of fear and hatred, and by any corrupt politician or leader who attempts to exploit fear and hatred for personal gain.

It’d be waged by anyone who blames the victims of economic hardship, racial intolerance or sexual violence for their circumstance.

I don’t, in my lifetime, remember a more cynical time than right now. People have never seemed so divided or afraid.  The world feels like a very dangerous place.

Christmas was always about our shared humanity and the ideals that represent the best part of ourselves. These things were always able to rise above the crass commercialization and even the religious icons the holiday was founded on, because Christmas was able to get inside of us, get past our self-interests, and make us look directly into the eyes of another human being and see our own reflection.

It’s the one day of the year we set aside to celebrate being human.  And when I doubt its ability to survive in times like this, I’m reminded of the true story of the Christmas of 1914, one hundred and one years ago, on the front lines of the bloodiest war in human history, World War One.

That was the day French and German soldiers both laid down their weapons and left their trenches, some of which were only forty yards apart, to celebrate Christmas together.  They played football and exchanged food and tobacco. They told stories about their wives and children and their homes. They talked about what Christmas meant to them, and for a day, the gunfire fell silent.

Christmas was tough enough to survive the horror of those trenches, and when my sons make it home tonight and walk through my front door, we’ll all be together, and Christmas will be Christmas, undefeated and invincible, again.

A Night to Remember

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There was an extraordinary moment during last night’s Republican debate when the front runner, Donald Trump, advocated the murder of innocent family members of suspected terrorists.  As my jaw hit the floor, I waited for the response from the other candidates and the moderator. Only Jeb Bush responded, saying it was crazy while Trump made silly faces mocking him, and a bit later, Rand Paul spoke up about how such a plan would violate the Geneva Convention, to which Trump responded, “so they can kill us, but we can’t kill them?”  Nothing from the moderators, and nothing else from the other candidates in what was an excruciatingly long fear fantasy about how this country is on the verge of collapse due to radicalized Jihadists or Muslim extremism.

In all the talk about terrorism, not a word was mentioned about the radical Christians who killed three people and injured nine more, including five police officers, in the Planned Parenthood attack. Not a word on all the mass shootings we’ve endured over the past few years.  Somehow, people getting shot in elementary schools and movie theatres doesn’t register a blip on the radar screen. The candidates that are owned by the NRA always point to the constitutional rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.  These arguments lose their validity when the same politicians advocate unconstitutional activities like torture or the murder of innocent people.

It’s clear that in the Republican view of things, we are to be fearful of foreigners, whether they are Muslims or Mexicans.  What they seem to miss is that by all the tough guy rhetoric, they are in fact empowering ISIS, that they are making the point that ISIS wants Muslims to believe, that the United States hates them and wants to stamp them out.  How is a law abiding Muslim citizen supposed to react when one of the candidates threatens to kill him with no regard for innocence or guilt?  Radicalization begets radicalization, and Trump’s comments were reckless and insanely extreme.

CNN can go take a flying leap, too. It wasn’t only the moderators who ignored these outrageous remarks, I watched the post-debate coverage in vain waiting for someone to mention them.  But no, they were too busy doing their post-game analysis – and by post game, I’m referring to how the entire night was presented.  It was just like an NFL football game, as the pre-debate show focused on strategies and who was winning or losing, offense and defense, and who had what strengths and weaknesses.  The scene got even more surreal when the debate opened with a woman singing the national anthem. Then the post-game show, with the highlights and lowlights, who had the best sound bites. “Jeb Bush was more aggressive, Ted Cruz was rude, “, etc. etc.  Never mind that the front runner advocated the state sponsored murder of innocent civilians.

I’m also fed up with the Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to run and hide. Their next debate is Saturday, the 19th, the Saturday before Christmas, traditionally one of the lowest viewed nights of the year.  There’s been nothing coming out of the Clinton or Sanders camps, while the whole nation tuned in last night to hear all the Re-Pubes relentlessly attack Obama and Clinton.  As usual, they are quiet and unresponsive (“feckless,” as Chris Christie called them), unwilling to engage in the muddy brawl that the Republicans understand modern day politics to be.  As usual, they stand by doing nothing while the right slices them open.  President Trump doesn’t sound as nearly unlikely as it should, and if it becomes a reality, the Democrats need only to blame themselves – again.

When I was growing up, one of the questions was, how did an advanced and powerful country like Germany fall into the hands of Hitler?  It could never happen here, we were assured, we have too many checks and balances.  Yet here we are, less than a year away from our next presidential election, with an unapologetic fascist and indisputable egomaniac who spews outrageous hatred, as the frontrunner of the Republican Party.

We need to wake up while we still can.

If Witch Hunts and Bullying are Wrong, I Don’t Want to be Right

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This week, the U.S. House of Representatives, that wonderfully absurd and inept collection of lunatics and extremists, outdid itself on two fronts.

The first is the saga of the Speaker of the House: A few weeks ago, the House “Freedom Caucus,” forty of the wackiest wackos representing the farthest right of the right wing, forced John {“Weeping Willow”) Boehner out as the Speaker of the House.  After meeting with the Pope, “Cry me a River”Boehner announced his resignation.  This may finally be evidence of the infallibility of the Pope. Maybe he really does have a connection with God. The presumed successor, Kevin McCarthy (not to be confused with the star of the 1956 sci-fi classic film, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but rather the House of 2015 horror feature, “Night of the Brain Dead”) bowed out after hints of scandal,, but not before admitting that the House Benghazi committee is politically motivated to hurt democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, I know, it’s shocking.  Everybody knows that, just like everybody knows fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent on your car insurance. But more on Benghazi later. Desperate for a new speaker to abuse and manipulate, the GOP turned to Wisconsin Representative and confirmed idiot Paul “Ayn Rand” Ryan (who would win an IQ battle with Wisconsin Governor and former presidential candidate Scott “All in all you’re just another brick in my wall between the U.S. and Canada” Walker by a single digit … say, nine to eight). Ryan said he’d take the job if 1) the Freedom Caucus would support him and 2) so long as he can maintain time with his family as a priority. This stand was lauded by peers and pundits from both sides of the aisle as heroic and noble. But then a look at his voting record revealed hypocrisy, not heroism, as he voted against the Family Leave Act.  The fact that in 2014 the House was scheduled to work a whopping 113 days (about 112 more than necessary for their output) doesn’t help, either, as it doesn’t seem that difficult to balance work with family when you’re off 252 out of 365 days.

As for the “freedom caucus,” we’ll see how much they are in line the next time they decide to try and shut the government down over whatever silly and manufactured issue is the next to tie their undies in knots.

Then there was yesterday’s Benghazi hearing, where Clinton was put on stand for nearly eleven hours. Everybody was shocked and surprised that Clinton made mincemeat out of the amateurish attempts to catch her in a “gotcha” moment and that that no new information was revealed in this, the eighth Benghazi committee conducting the 13th public hearing. Twenty nine  ARB findings and countless “I take full responsibility” statements by Clinton weren’t enough for the Republicans – they had to get to the bottom of this, and find out what things went wrong, and who was responsible. Twenty million of the taxpayers’ dollars later, the end result is twenty nine ARB findings and Clinton’s acceptance of responsibility.  But that’s okay – the Republicans can try again.  They’re nothing if not persistent – this is the same body that has voted more than fifty times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. After all, with that demanding 113 days work schedule, what else are they going to do?  Vote on the bi-partisan immigration reform bill that passed the senate in 2013?  Come on, get real – there’s only so much you can’t do.

One thing it turns out they can do is give Hillary a not really needed so much boost in the polls, The hearings turned into an all-day campaign ad for Clinton, who was calm, cool, and armed with facts, the Kryptonite to the super powers of lies and innuendos that work so well for the Republicans in the fantasy world of Fox News but in the real world, well, not so super.  It was fascinating watching Jim Jordan and Martha Roby get more exhausted and frustrated as the day wore on, until they both cracked and looked really bad.  All while Clinton, who the marathon session and the relentless questioning was deigned to exhaust and frustrate and crack, kept her cool, slowly and patiently reciting fact after fact in great detail, taking up the inquisitors’ allotted time.

So what do we take away from this?  I think one thing is that this charade of making everything a political game has got to stop.  One term that was heard over and over in the hearing was “Arb,” or ARB, which stands for Accountability Review Board.  The ARB process was put in place after the Beirut disaster in 1983, when 241 marines were killed in an attack on their barracks.  It’s been used countless times since, in a bi-partisan and non-political fashion, to document lessons learned and best demonstrated practices to prevent these tragedies from re-occurring, After Benghazi, an ARB came up with 29 recommendations, 25  of which were implemented immediately.  The eight committees and $20 million spent have added no value, not even as an anti-Hillary political attack, as it’s transparency resulted in a backfire that has actually strengthened Clinton’s candidacy.

Here’s the bottom line about the current state of politics in the USA:  The political right has been taken over by extremists to the point that the entire Republican party has shifted so far that candidates like Donald Trump and Ben Carson have a real chance at winning the nomination.  Meanwhile, the divide between left and right has become so wide that virtually everyone has already decided where they stand, and nothing will change their outlook.  I have no question that there are those on the right who feel as passionately that Hillary revealed herself to be a monster as I believe she showed remarkable skill, restraint, and resolve. It’s all pure emotion, and logic and reason aren’t part of the equation. This is how Jeb Bush can literally, in one minute, blame Clinton for Benghazi, saying “the Secretary of State is responsible,” and the next be completely befuddled when it’s suggested that by that same logic, brother  George W. was responsible for 9/11. Everybody has already made up their mind.

Yet that doesn’t stop billions and billions of dollars being funneled into our political campaigns. All told, there are approximately twenty three people out across this great nation of ours who are undecided, who don’t know where they stand  A majority of these are people who recently fell and hit their heads on a rock, or Sasquatches, or some other mythical creature. These undecided voters are the people who all the money is being spent on, who will eventually choose our next president.

Heaven help us.

Clarity

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This morning, while walking laps around the gym to cool down after my workout at the cardiac center, it occurred to me that I felt great.

I’ve done enough whining and moaning on this site about my experiences with Parkinson’s disease and my heart bypass surgery nearly six months ago. Like most people, I easily get lost in self-pity from time to time and wallow in the “poor me” depths that I frequently sink into. These moments are real and demand to be dealt with, else they become all consuming.  But it’s just as important to acknowledge those times, temporary though they might be, when the pain and discomfort subside. It’s these moments, when one’s vision isn’t clouded by disease, that clarity is available. We just need to prod ourselves to look for it.

As I walked my laps, I looked out the big second floor window onto the Kenosha neighborhood below. It’s a modest, older working class neighborhood, with unpretentious two story houses and bungalows, most built in the forties or fifties, the streets lined with mature oak and maple trees.  The leaves on the maples are just beginning to change, small bursts of orange that explode and sparkle against the deep green backdrop of the leaves that haven’t changed yet, reminding them that transformation and death awaits. It was a brilliant morning, the sun shining bright and the sky bright blue splashed with specks of white clouds. Through the plate glass window, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face, and I could see the breeze make the leaves on the trees tremble and shake. It was all perfect, the sun, the sky, the leaves, and the traffic, the cars in the street driven by everyday people living everyday lives, too busy and preoccupied with everyday minutia to be aware of the beauty and wonder that is all around them, and it struck me that that was okay, that there is beauty and wonder in the minutia as well.

My laps complete, I went downstairs and walked outside, where I was greeted by the cool autumn air and the crisp breeze that was blowing out of the north.  I drew a breath of fresh air deep into my lungs and marveled at what a wonderful thing it is to breathe, to taste clean and pure air, to feel my lungs expand and contract. I’m alive, and for a moment I knew, I comprehended, what that meant, and it meant everything. I was grateful for everything that had ever happened in the almost fifty seven years I’ve been on the planet, and everything that happened since the dawn of time, all the random circumstance and chance that brought me to the sidewalk outside of Kenosha Memorial hospital at 9:41 this morning. And I was grateful that my heart still beat beneath my chest, and for the moments yet to occur that I will be fortunate enough to experience.

My oldest brother, Mike, took his own life nearly five years ago. I am warmed by his memory, what a great guy he was, and how important of a part of some of my best moments he was.  At the same time I am haunted by his absence, and by regret for things that I wish I’d done differently. I wish I’d recognized the pain that drove him to suicide, and more than anything, I wish I’d told him what a beautiful and perfect part he was of a world so beautiful and perfect that one is free to breathe in its essence every minute of every day.

Bean There, Done That

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Coming home after my emergency heart bypass surgery, I knew I had to make changes. Specifically, exercise and diet. I started a workout regime in the hospital’s cardiac center that I’ve continued to this day, and I have no intention of ever quitting. I always feel better after working out, and I can feel my strength and stamina improving every day.

Still, without changing my diet, all the exercise in the world wouldn’t be enough, and my heart would be a ticking time bomb.  So it is that I set upon a low fat, low sodium diet.

I became obsessed with labels, silently dividing grams of fat per serving by serving size to arrive at a base number of the grams of fat per the base unit of measure, and then comparing my result to other brands of the same product.  I now eat only fresh or frozen vegetables and never canned to manage my sodium levels. I don’t use table salt any more, using pepper as a low sodium alternative.

But none of this quieted my red blooded, red meat, all-American lust for a cheeseburger. Simply put, I love burgers, always have. But now they are forbidden to me. One day, while I was deep in mourning for my loss, my wife had an inspiration.

“You should try those Boca burgers,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“They’re meatless hamburgers. They substitute vegetables for ground beef, and season them to taste like meat.”

A couple of days later, I opened up our freezer and took out the box with the frozen veggie burgers inside,  “black bean burgers,” to be precise. It turns out they have different flavored veggie burgers, each made with the same core ingredients, and each featuring a highlighted flavor. I was intrigued and open minded as I took one of the frozen rock hard patties out and put it in my George Forman grill.  I was eager to experience the taste of a burger again, even if it was a watered down, synthetic burger.

As it lay sizzling in the little grill, I got down to work on preparing the fixings.  I cut up pieces of tomato and onion and green, leafy lettuce, when it struck me that I was preparing vegetables to put on top of vegetables.  I noted this as potentially ironic, and went forward with getting out the condiments of ketchup, mustard and fat free Hellman’s mayonnaise. I toasted a multi grain hamburger bun and I was ready to go.

I lifted the top of the grill and was greeted by a distantly familiar scent. I was unable to name where or when I’d experienced the odor before but it was there, acrid and bitter. I put the patty on the bun. It was black with chunks of corn and bean visible in it.  Again, it looked familiar, like something, I couldn’t think of what, but something else black and soft with chunks of yellow corn in it. Undaunted, I applied  the toppings and condiments and took a big bite, when it came to me, what the pungent smelling and semi firm dark blob with bright yellow chunks of corn embedded in it reminded me of.

I let the mouthful I was chewing fall loosely out of my mouth and flushed the rest of my first ever black bean burger down the sink.  After drinking about a gallon of water I was finally able to remove the taste from my mouth, and at least soften the memory of the images and odors the black bean burger had planted in my mind.

Afterwards, something unexpected happened – I found that my mind now associates hamburgers with the memory of my encounter with the black bean burger, that the sound of the word “burger” conjures up its image and odor, and I am confident that I’ll be able to give up my addiction to burgers without ever being tempted to eat one again.  They call this technique to fight addiction going “cold turkey.”

Whatever it is, I try not to think too much about it. It’s lunch time, and there are some slices of cold turkey waiting for me.

 

The Night Brigade

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It’s official – I’ve put my second novel, I Don’t Know Why, which I completed a first draft of about a year ago, on the shelf.  I’ve just been unable to generate any enthusiasm about fixing the many things that I know are wrong with it. I’m hoping that by putting some distance between it and me that someday I can revisit it and it’ll feel fresh and alive again.

Recently, I started forming the idea for a new novel, and I’m excited about it. I sketched out a basic outline of the plot and the biographies of several key characters, and I’ve started writing.  I’m about forty pages into it, and I’m having fun watching the characters reveal themselves.  I’m learning new things about them all the time, and my original assumptions about the plot are being challenged.  I found this to be true on both of my previous novels – once I started bringing the characters to life, they demanded changes to the story, and both books turned out to be drastically different than what I’d originally envisioned.

So it is that lately I’ve been getting phone calls waking me up in the middle of the night.  I always move to another room so as not to wake up my wife, hence avoiding an “It’s Jake from State Farm” moment. That would be easier to explain than the truth, that the calls are coming from characters in my book.

For example, I was awakened one early night by Craig Tyler, a nineteen year old kid who is the central character and narrator of the new book. The phone rang at 2:30 in the morning.

“Hello?” I mumbled into the phone.

“Hi, Dave.  It’s Craig Tyler.”

“Who?”

“Craig Tyler.  You know , from your book?”

“Oh, Craig Tyler.  But you’re fictional.”

“Never mind that,” he said. “I’m a little bit concerned about what you wrote tonight.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, don’t you think it’s important that you mention I’m a really strong swimmer?”

“I thought it was obvious.”

“I still think you should mention it.  It just might be distracting to the reader as is.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Dave,” he said.

I wrote in my journal, “Craig is rather neurotic, and worries about things that aren’t really important.”

The next night the phone rang at 3:03.  The voice on the other end wasn’t happy.

“Hello?” I said.

“This is Paul, Paul Tyler? Craig’s brother?  Hello?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, Paul. What can I do for you?”

“Really?  Really, Dave?  A heroin addict? That’s the best you could come up with?”

“Yeah, I thought it was a good idea.  You’re supposed to be a tragic figure.”

“Well, let me ask you, what do you know about heroin?”

“Um, not a lot.”

“You know nothing about it, admit it!”

“Okay, so I don’t know anything.  What’s the big deal? “

“I’m gonna be this big tragic figure, suffering from heroin addiction, and I’ve got to count on your skill to bring me to life and I turns out you don’t know jack shit about heroin.”

“So? I’ll do a little research.”

“You couldn’t have made me addicted to something you know about.  Like, I don’t know, maybe a Cheerios addict?”

“A Cheerios addict,” I said. “Yeah, that would make you real tragic.”

I could hear Paul sigh.  Then he said, “So let me be blunt – you ain’t Eugne O’Neil, and this ain’t no Long Day’s Journey into Night.”

“Long day’s journey – I get it, because the mother in Long Day’s Journey into Night was an addict.”

“That’s right.”

“But she was a morphine addict, not heroin,” I said.

“Oh, well excuse me, that makes all the difference in the world. I’m being sarcastic in case you’re too stupid to tell.”

“Now, Paul, there’s no reason to get nasty …”

“And another thing. That scene you wrote last night?  With me visiting Craig?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’m already dead, aren’t I?”

“You come to Craig in a dream.”

“I come to Craig In a dream.  Big fucking deal.  I’m still dead, so that makes me a ghost.”

“So?”

“So, it’s been done before.  Hello.  Ever hear of a guy named Hamlet? Hello?”

“You know, when I created you, I don’t remember making you so bitter.”

“Bitter.  Fuck you. You’d be bitter, too, if you were a fucking dead heroin addict who had to visit people in their dreams.”

“That’s true,” I said. I wrote in my journal, “Paul is bitter.”  I thanked him for calling and went back to bed.

Now if I could only get a decent night’s sleep, I might be able to do something with that.