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There Might Be Monsters

Your Miss O’ continues to be astonished at the near-universal appeal of lawlessness on the American Right. Today in America, the enjoyment, perpetuation, and forgiveness (or acceptance) of lawlessness applies only TO the Right, FROM the Right, BY the Right. This week, for example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that in his office of President of the United States, Donald J. Trump illegally withheld congressionally allocated funds for Ukraine’s defense, for which act he has been impeached. Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst said in an interview, “The point is moot.”

Is it?

No, it is not. It’s exactly the point, Sen. Ernst.

This week, too, Miss O’ read in the American wing of the British Guardian, which does a much better job of covering the real issues in the United States than the U.S.-based journals—for in the U.S., most papers relegate actual news, such as the complete exoneration of Hillary Rodham Clinton after years of probes (see also, rape culture hashtag me too) by the U.S. Justice Department, to Op-Ed features, despite years of Sec. Clinton being front page false-accusations fodder—that the state of Missouri has put forth a bill wherein librarians (yes, librarians) can be jailed for lending certain books to people under the age of 15. Reading further, the bill extends to the stocking of any questionable book (such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) within reach of readers under the age of 15. As to who determines the age-appropriateness of classic literature, or any reading material for that matter, I think I found the Grand Wizard.

The Monster at the End of This Book

The other week my cousin Kerry posted a photo on Instagram of herself and her grandsons as she read them the Little Golden Book classic, The Monster at the End of This Book, featuring Sesame Street’s “lovable, furry old” Grover. Not having reliable rabbit-ear antenna access to Public Television in the early 1970s, Miss O’s mom mostly missed Sesame Street and so would probably not have bought books featuring those characters, and so I had never heard of this book, Kerry’s favorite. My sweet cousin sent me a copy this week, and this very short book is nothing short of amazing in its timeliness.

As Grover implores young readers NOT to open the book, or turn one more page—tying the pages with ropes, building huge brick walls, shouting warnings of “MONSTER!”—Grover comes to realize that he, Grover, is the monster at the end of the book. On the last page he says, in small font that mirrors his shame, “Oh, I am so embarrassed.”

I had tears in my eyes. On the surface, Grover is a comical lure, a safe monster who in his warnings is of course BEGGING children to turn the next page, the way playful relatives will say to shy children, “Don’t you dare hug me,” to get them to grin and run to embrace them.

But, as only Sesame Street can, the writer, Jon Stone, and illustrator, Michael Smollin, created a book about a very, very grown-up theme: the evils of censorship.

The monster puppet that is screaming warnings NOT TO READ THIS BOOK because of  a monster is itself the monster.

Monsters of America

The Missouri censors who are trying to stop the reading of books are the ones afraid of the ideas in those books (and, in fact, creating a demand for just those books, thank the karma gods).

The racist monster man screaming and railing against the dangers of other races is himself the cause of the racial division in question, asked and answered.

The American Christians who scream about religious intolerance are the ones who are intolerant of religions, including their own, if you look at the actual teachings of Jesus.

The American Right screamers about the lawbreakers of the Left are themselves the actual lawbreakers.

The monster is the person who is guided only by fear. The monster is the person who would direct their fear onto the innocent. The monster is the person who would kill anything or anyone they fear, and ask for a trophy.

The monster is the person who cannot admit of error. (“It was a perfect phone call.”)

So who is the MONSTER at the END of DEMOCRACY? Turns out, it’s the biggest whiners, who rail from the Right. Will they ever learn?

So one suspects that what you WON’T be hearing from the Right anytime soon: “Oh, I am so embarrassed.”

How refreshing would it be to hear those words, spoken with humility?

“Oh, I am so embarrassed,” Trump supporters should be able to say, as a rightly impeached Donald J. Trump lawyers-up with the team that defended admitted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

“Oh, I am so embarrassed,” Republican senators, representatives, and officials and American media should say, seeing the living hell they have put the brilliant and capable and caring and genuinely patriotic Hillary Clinton through.

“Oh, I am so embarrassed,” the American Christians should say, seeing the likes of Rev. Franklin Graham and Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr., (and pick a Catholic Bishop) forsaking the teachings of Christ for the sake of Trump.

“Oh, I am so embarrassed,” Republican descendants of WWII veterans should say, seeing their fellow Republican Americans donning apparel with swastikas to march in the Main Streets of the United States.

The Right’s monster at the end of every Republican American Apocalypse story…is looking them right in the mirror, every single morning.

The Right will scream at you that there is a monster at the end of this blog, too, the MONSTER all the RIGHT WING people are WARNING you about!!!!!

What the Right is incapable of doing is the right thing—growing up—because that would entail feeling healthy SHAME. So they yell. And scapegoat. And shoot things. And blame YOU. In the name of Christ.

And let’s be honest here: when, to the American Right, this book-loving feminist, non-racist New Yorker, humorous bon vivant, Constitution-wielding patriot, language arts and theater educator, would-be artist, and daughter of a union meat cutter from Iowa, who is Miss O’, represents the worst thing that could ever happen in America, you know there’s a monster out there. And it ain’t Miss O’.

Oh, I am so embarrassed.

Dispatches from NYC: Bad Change

January 19, 2019, New York City

It’s January in New York and there has been no snow. There is hardly snow anymore—hasn’t been for years now. When I first moved here, the snow started in December and there was snowpack until March. Walls of the stuff along Queens Boulevard; icy slush puddles of it at every Midtown intersection; banks of it along sidewalks on every side street. Arctic temperatures through it all. Now, in 2019, it rarely dips into the 20s let alone teens, and snow is limited to one storm that melts the next day. In the past few years we might have one or two nights in the single digits; no single-digit days, though. I like battling the winter elements and I miss this, since I moved to New York City to get away from the mildness of Virginia, in both weather elements and, by extension, intellectual life. Climate change of every kind.

Last night, another fairly mild winter night, being around 40 degrees, I walked down 7^th Avenue after work with a friend whom I’ll call Betts. We walked under masses of scaffolding, nearly every other block; we passed loads of 20-somethings on their phones, sidestepped trash, passed somber slow people, and all the while Betts discoursed on his latest obsession, famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Betts has, in essence, created a Stella Adler character to tell these theater stories, including a way of enunciating and inflecting every word to become this woman, a New York Jew who made herself into an almost British grand dame,  an invented woman who made a living teaching other actors to make truth in their art. “And do you know WHY you failed?” Betts says at one point, as Stella. “NO ONE would use his OWN HANDKERCHIEF to wipe a counter!”

As Betts spoke about truth in art, about his sorrow that Stella, the creator of Brando, had not been his acting teacher, I told him that just the other week I’d had the first serious discussion about art I’d had in years. I’d just read a piece by critic-at-large Louis Menand in The New Yorker, the title of which I couldn’t recall (but it’s called “Faking It: Literary hoaxes and the ethics of authorship”), in which Menand explores the current hot-button issue in art, which amounts to a directive, not only for writers of nonfiction but also of fiction and drama: No one may write about something that he or she has not actually lived or experienced. The. End.

I told Betts that a playwright friend whom I’ll call Parker (Lola Parker Jones, who dropped the “Lola” when she figured out years ago that theaters are more likely to read your script and decide to produce it when they think you are a man; she says this remains true for her today: when they contact “him” and find out it’s a “her,” she can hear, following their initial enthusiasm, a hesitation, Hashtag Me Too) had a play recently produced at an esteemed NYC arts space, only to find that actors kept quitting over her reference to Islam in part of her fantastical play. She could just as easily have invented a religion, say Panoply, or something, but there wasn’t anything she said about misogyny inherent in Islam that was particularly controversial—no more so than discussing misogyny in Christianity should be controversial, and she herself was raised Catholic. The problem for the (nearly all non-Middle Eastern/nontraditional) cast was that they themselves were not Islamic, and therefore in those scenes felt they had no business pretending to be Islamic—this would amount to sacrilege for Muslims, they said, and just plain offensive to an audience. One by one, they quit, were replaced by others who quit, but finally Parker had a cast—though quite frankly, when I saw it, no one beyond the Arab actress in the lead seemed totally committed. It was a miserable experience for Parker. “When did this happen?” she asked me, and our friend Jessica, when we went to dinner after the final performance. “When did it become wrong to write from your imagination?” At this point I had not read the Menand piece, but as soon as I had, I sent it to Parker.

Desert City

On the walk to the snowless Village, I recounted this to Betts; as we paused in the dusk of a noisy 14^th Street I said, “Can you imagine Stella Adler trying to teach actors today?” Betts sighed, glancing over at the collection of knit hat-covered heads bent over phone screens. Betts told me about Miss Adler’s work with Marlon Brando. When preparing for A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando decided on a certain pair of work boots to find Stanley Kowalski’s character—a working class Polish-American alpha male from New Orleans who had exactly zero in common with the sensitive, almost effeminate Native American Midwesterner Brando—and when Stella asked, “And how will you use these boots, Marlon?” Brando, feeling the boots and weight of the work Stanley did in those boots, slumped, and began walking with what would become the famous Stanley Kowalski slouch. A legend was born. And it got me thinking: As per this new fascism, er, fashion, in art in America today, Brando would be out. And presumably in 2019 Lin-Manuel Miranda would have to shelve Hamilton, as he himself was not a founding father or an Englishman, and, obvs (as the kids say), the “rap” angle would have to go. (But I don’t think the art world or the literary world cares much about musicals, and I suspect it’s because musicals are always and ever works of an imaginative mind. No one watches Anchors Aweigh! or Meet Me in St. Louis and asks, “But did that REALLY happen?” At my office, a few days before this walk and soon after reading the Menand piece, a group of fellow editors and I began chatting and then debating this very subject. I asked Mort, who is Jewish, “So should non-Jews play Jews?” Mort smiled his wry smile and said, “If they didn’t, you’d never be able to produce Fiddler on the Roof in Wisconsin.”)

It seems to me we live in deeply warped and troubling times: on the one hand, we seem to be demanding facts from our artists while expecting lies and hyperbole from our politicians; on the other hand, no one is supposed to be imaginative. And we have no public intellectuals to rally around. When I feel starved for intelligent and challenging discourse out loud, I Google “James Baldwin” and watch all the videos I can find—there was and is no one like him. Oh, what he would have done with Trump. Oh!

Greenwich Village, as Betts and I strolled in around 5 PM, was all but deserted, only a half dozen people at most wandering along any stretch of block. “Remember when this place used to be mobbed on Friday night?” Betts said, astonished at the bleakness. He pointed to one of Bloomberg’s friend’s luxury condo buildings, the one that replaced St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, where AIDS patients sought treatment, and where many died, and where poet Dylan Thomas died after drinking a dozen whiskeys at The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. Listen to the silence: Other than Monster and the Duplex, there are no real clubs anymore; little to no live music (and what there is will cost $50 in cover and drinks, for an hour-fifteen, and time to go because there’s another set, here’s your coat), no hot spots, no dives (Cafe Riviera is closed now; every block has an empty space for (unaffordable) rent). All the art in New York, for that matter, feels “precious,” carefully curated, expensive, and timed-entry. Does anyone really care about new art? Even Parker’s play was only controversial among the newly arrived white young actors from hinterland college theater programs; the critics didn’t even come.

A certain laziness of mind, of spirit, I’ve said a thousand times, can be traced to Reagan, to the 1980s, where everyone began exercising to death, and added phones/screens to their lives, and where is the wild joy in that? We are so bored. We are so boring.

Bad Metaphor, with Pit Bull

Back around 1988 or so, I was teaching in a rural school district and a friend since high school came down to hold my hand while I tried to finish grading exams and finish averaging all the grades for the first semester of my life as a high school English teacher. On a visit to my crummy little apartment above a beauty shop in a downtown—and I use that term “downtown” denotatively only, this being a little Southern town—my old high school friend, whom I’ll call Keith (painter and founder of a college band called Bad Ego), brought me a sculpture—and I use that term denotatively only—he’d made. He was very excited to give it to me.

It was the laziness of it that struck me, even more than the ugliness: a 18″ x 48″ quarter ply board on a 2″ x 4″ frame, which he’d found at a construction site where he’d worked for about a month, half spray-painted blue, onto which he’d glued a Xerox of a pit bull from an encyclopedia page where he’d looked up something else. He drilled a couple of holes and shoved through some leftover copper pipe he picked up out of a dumpster on a job. I’m all for repurposing, but he held the pipe in place with brown plastic packing tape; the pipe fell a lot. Keith was wildly proud of this “art.” He was pumped to give it to me. I could only laugh. I hurt his feelings. Below is my collage interpretation of it, understanding that I sound like a judgmental dick:

I left Keith’s “sculpture” behind when I moved away, a few years later, it being the last item, for which I literally had no room after four trips up and back in my pick-up truck to my new home; and Keith was devastated. Seriously never forgave me. And quite frankly, though I found his “sculpture” revolting, I still remember it all too vividly despite my rejection of it. Like trying to deny truth. The piece, as I see it now, was a metaphor for our friendship: it was something we never worked on, something we were lazy about, and which was often ugly. Similarly, he threw ugly things at me in terms of my intellect—I was not properly in thrall to his Marxism, I was a fool to think democratic government could ever matter, for example—and I sent the ugliness back at him in a letter that I knew would mean a permanent rift, us being too lazy to talk about it like adults, years later.

This is laziness built on boredom, on not listening, not engaging, not looking up and out and inward. Whatevs. Maybe Stella Adler could have coached us out of it.

Greenwich Village in New York City is apparently dead, for chrissakes. So what hope is there? New York City in 2019: Dinner at Elephant and Castle and strolling the aisles of Bigelow’s Pharmacy as the high points? Stella Adler would be bored stiff. Brando would never have come here. I don’t know how to energize this place anymore, or myself in it. It’s my latest challenge.

Where is art? What is truth? They’re as rare as snow in winter in New York City. Who’d have thought?

LO’H

Walk on the Wild Side

We all have our usual routes—the ones we drive from home to work, or home to subway to work, or to the supermarket and drugstore. We all have our routines, from waking up to an alarm to go to the toilet and then make coffee or tea or diet Pepsi to get going in the morning, so we can get to work. We all have, that is to say, a basic expectation of how the ordinary day will, you know, hum along. And then New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will, say, without actual warning despite there being, probably, years of planning and scheduling, begin the months-long process of tearing up your ordinary neighborhood streets and walkways to dig deep to remove and replace water mains and sewage pipes laid, by the looks of it, at the time of the Holy Roman Empire. And you can’t complain, and shouldn’t, because water (as the kids phrase it now), so sure, you go without water from 8 AM to 4 PM a day or so, or more, here and there, over the long summer that is remarkably not that hot, and you have to figure out other ways to get to the subway, say, but that’s okay.

In fact, it’s more than okay, because if you, like me, tend to walk up 40^th Street each and every morning to the subway, and you find you have to walk up 39^th Place instead, you may get the satisfaction of your year by seeing vans from NY1, the local television news affiliate, and even NBC news, parked outside on the corner of 48^th Avenue to interview residents and condo owners of the building there who have begun to get past the mafia-style threats of glorified building super Neal Milano—that tall, Make-America-Great-Again hat-wearing, cigar chomping whack-job who wears his weirdness like a gun out of a holster—and turn the motherfucker in for harassment. “He’s dirt,” my super tells me, “and I hope all his years of crazy come raining down on him and the rest of his life is spent behind bars.” And you wouldn’t have this conversation about the jackass who has placed extraordinarily gaudy and violation-worthy high fencing around the building (a violation because in the event of a fire, the ground floor residents could never get out of their windows and over the fence to safety, and this is why there are regulations like fence height that to the inexperienced might seem arbitrary), the lobby filled with posters of swastikas, portraits of Hitler and Mussolini and Donald Trump (and a token poster of MLK so he can claim “historical themes”), and the crucifix over the front door right between the 10’ tall Uncle Sam statues and the posters on the doors threatening the arrest of anyone who does not live there (including posters along the side of the building,   with guns that say, “Nothing is worth your life,” and the letters of extortion Neal Milano sends demanding $100 for overnight guests and lobby notices sharing the sex lives of everyone there—and exactly where does he have all these cameras set up?*—and the LED light strips surrounding the perimeter that have been blinding the residents of all the surrounding buildings whose units look onto this monster condo, and meanwhile the elevator is broken all the time because that’s the price of protection). And giant American flags everywhere the eye can see.

*(Note: Someone sent around forged NYPD Sexual Predator posters with Neal Milano’s picture on them, photocopied and pasted all up and down 39th Place and 40th Street (I saw them), which is how the story about him broke, and that is a shabby way to retaliate, isn’t it, for his being a Nazi, because those predator allegations are just rumors, like when his wife disappeared one day years ago, and no one ever knew where she went, and they said he probably killed her…like that. Bad form, rumors like that. Like the rumors of the lobby of this current complex, and, okay, those turned out to be true, but you know. You can’t believe everything you hear, can you?)

Neal Milano is the walking proof of the paraphrase that comes from Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here, that when fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. And chomping a big cigar.

You’d laugh except Jesus Christ this is not funny anymore.

In the taking of the circuitous route, whatever the inconvenience, one may see revealed rather startling truths. For example, Donald Trump’s unlikely and circuitous ascension to the highest office in the land has revealed that 35% of Americans are White Supremacists, or Nazis, as we used to call them, and should still call them but splitting hairs has become the number one media circus act. Fully one third of the United States, in fact, would prefer a Nazi Regime to a Constitutional Democracy, so apparently it not only can happen here, it is happening.

That is to say, 65% of us, roughly speaking, do not espouse Nazi feelings, and yet probably, at a guess, 20% of Americans, whatever their actual beliefs, are ignoring the whole sweep of history in the making while the remaining 45% are out protesting and calling their leaders and carrying all the stress of the national nervous breakdown of America in 2017. This is not exactly comforting. Only when it hits the ol’ wallet will the whole gang feel the stirrings of giving a good goddamn, and by then the oceans will begin swallowing us up. Maybe that’s what needs to happen, people say. It’s not my call, clearly, and I can’t tell you what to do, but “going with the flow,” just is not an option unless you think misery at best and annihilation at worst are not okay options, and they are not, unless you are a sociopath.

It’s Your Turn

The water mains here in my Queens neighborhood were, as I say, apparently laid during the time of the the crucifixion. And a couple thousand years later, my district’s number came up for pipe change. Also on the schedule this year were the removal of blighted trees and the trimming of branches around the power lines. Infrastructure maintenance on a schedule is a part of civilized, well-governed society that I personally appreciate, however bourgeois that makes me. (I was living here 13 years ago when the whole section of my borough when black and stayed that way for a month; the power lines underground, when removed, crumbled like dust in the hands of the workers—years of electrical appliance escalation that went untended to—so unless you really want to live like the mole people, having a functioning local, city, state, and federal government is pretty fucking awesome.)

A Total Eclipse of Our Hearts

When Barack Obama became the President of the United States in 2008, there was hope in my heart, in many, many hearts, for signs of societal growth, a reduction of racism, real change. Instead, over the next eight years, the deep-seated Nazi feelings of 35% of Americans, nearly all White, who wanted nothing more than to scapegoat and eliminate all Blacks, all non-Christians, all immigrants, all Hispanics, and all feminists, came out of the broom closet. White Supremacy is, of course, a cancer. It is one of the few things in life of which one can say, “This is totally, unquestionably, wrong.” And now that all of this cancer has been diagnosed for what it is, maybe a treatment can begin. Hearing Nazis say, literally, “The world would be perfect if only YOU weren’t in it” is akin to hearing cancer cells say, “This body would be perfect if only all the cells were cancerous.” Cancer kills the host. White Supremacists are killing the world.

The invasion of American Nazis is made worse because so strong is the belief that White “Men” in power are all that is needed for life, these deluded cretins actually think they are gods who do not need water, food, other people, or a healthy planet. They actually believe they are above the whole story of mortality to say nothing of morality. No one with any sense or morality could follow such men, and yet 35% of Americans do.

This is our national nervous breakdown. As Hurricane Harvey batters Texas, a state of mostly Trump supporters and, sadly, white supremacists, and a state that doesn’t believe in federal aid, we await the first cries of “help us” as Trump promises this HUGE help that will likely never come and it won’t matter to anyone outside the victims on the scene, to be forgotten as the news cycle moves to the latest of the “fired.”

That is, unless you are a moral, kind, loving citizen of the United States, of your state, city, neighborhood, and home; unless you see a larger world, a deeper connection and interdependence, and you don’t blame anything or anyone for weakening your heart and resolve. Once we recognize the breakdown and the reasons for it, we have to find help. We have to be the help.

As anyone with sense knows, you can throw all the Uncle Sam Statues and American flags and Trump campaign hats and swastikas and Confederate statues and crucifixes and North Korean missiles you want into the eye of a hurricane, onto a broken water main, at a melting glacier, at an oil spill, at a tornado, and it will do two things: Jack and Shit.

Until some voice of reason gets into the closed, sick minds of the 35% of Americans and the 20% that consists of apathetic lazy-asses who are determined to let sons of bitches drive the American bus over a cliff of chaos, we have to keep doing a little something. Today after tossing down some terrible news, I headed out to compost my food scraps at the local farmer’s market. I had to walk around the war zone that is Saturday water main construction and had some lovely views of 47^th Avenue, which I really haven’t walked much. That was nice. Then I wrote this. So, little by little. Moment to moment. We’ll get there. Somehow.

In the meantime, however you can, and between acts of responsible citizenship…

Defying (the Center of) Gravity

A few weeks before the 2016 United States presidential election—around the time I realized that at least half my nation was willing to throw in with Trump rather than (according to friends’ posts on Facebook) elect “a card-carrying witch” or “new Lucifer”—I wanted to understand what could possibly make Donald Trump’s transparent lying, ignorance, narcissism, opportunism, corrupt business practices, three marriages, and well-documented misogyny and bigotry attractive to the average American voter. Sure, he was a rich white man—but I couldn’t understand how that could be enough.

So one morning, this white woman of 52 years of age, a New York City resident by way of suburban and rural Virginia, a former English and drama teacher of 15 years and now an editor for 13—a woman of modest means, good education, a white collar job, of parents who came out of the Depression-era Midwest to move from working poor into the middle class—decided to draw on my training as an actor, director, and theater teacher to be Donald Trump for a day.

This was, obviously, an imaginative exercise. Still, I lived it in my body as well as my mind. (Note: No pussies were grabbed in the carrying out of this exercise. –ed.)

First, I grabbed my phone and checked Twitter. Then I walked around my apartment to beckon my servants—butler, personal assistant, chambermaid, cook, and attorneys—or rather, they appeared—and I had to say nothing to any one of them. I was bathed, dressed, and fed (after having my food tasted by the chambermaid, for a friend of mine who used to work catering in the boxes at the U.S. Open told me that Trump always brought his own food, heavily guarded, and allowed no one to be in his suite outside of his own entourage).

As I went through these imaginary ablutions and rituals, I consciously changed my body (even as I stepped into my own corduroys, button-down man’s plaid dress shirt, socks, and boots, my earrings becoming cufflinks, I guess), entering into Trump’s center of gravity (and I located two: his hair and his hands). (NOTE: My own center of gravity is my knees. Everyone’s is different—ideally one wants to lead from the chest, and in acting class we would pull ourselves up and outward by an imaginary string from the sternum—and it’s a telling trait. My own center pegs me as a grounded person. I have a friend who led from her ever-present pocketbook over her shoulder (giving her a steely if insecure authority), another from his shoulders (maintaining or even fueling the illusion of being the athlete he once was), still another from, oddly, the bottom her the heels of her feet, making her quite upright but also loosey-goosey in her gait (and her personality was equally difficult to reconcile). When you rethink your center of gravity, it’s amazing how your walk changes.) I felt myself to be above the world (the hair pulling me up), and really cautious, no, suspicious (the hands pulling me down). The gait was by turns Neanderthal (hands at sides, little swing in the arms) and expansive (when the hands pulled the arms out). Now, I might have the center of gravity wrong—a case could be made for the back of the shoulders, pulling him down, but I think it’s just age and weight creating that stoop; or perhaps it’s his mouth, even his lips. He tips forward at the front of the hair swirl, and his limp arms remind me of Lennie in Of Mice and Men. It occurs to me that when Graydon Carter, then of his Spy magazine, made his “short-fingered vulgarian” comment, he noticed the size of Trump’s hands relative to his large head (for in my Costume Design and Rendering class in college I had to draw the human form in proportion, and learned that the length of the hands is about the same as the height of the head). It is Trump himself, by virtue of his use of the body, who causes this focus on his hand size. And to him, who is a vulgarian, size matters.

So in my body—taller, larger, head and hair the center, up and forward; hands and arms dropping my shoulders into a slight stoop when not in motion—I felt, and how to explain this—avaricious. I was greedy and without satiety. Moving through the world, with the sure knowledge that there was literally nothing I could not get away with—shit my bed, run down a couple of old people with my SUV; sexually assault married women or rape 13-year old girls at a party; bankrupt not only small businesses but also my own, with not only impunity but with the continued loan support of Deutsche Bank; give orders and have them carried out by lawyers to cover my tracks—I have to tell you I became aroused in my very loins. It was weird. I found—and I am truly not making this up—that I wanted sex—really wanted it—and felt that I was almost having it everywhere I was, as if I could climax in my office cubicle as I merely edited manuscript or in the pantry as I made a cup of tea. When you turn your daily grind into doing dangerous deals with international power brokers, the sky’s the limit.

By lunchtime was I drunk with the feeling of power. It’s no wonder Trump doesn’t need alcohol. Who would? And by mid-afternoon I was almost desperate for sex. No wonder he moves on any beautiful woman “like a bitch” and “takes what he wants.” The rush of all this became almost unbearable. And addictive. (A friend of mine tried cocaine once—and only once—and told me, “Lisa, you didn’t know you could feel that good—you cannot imagine how good you feel. But it lasts about a few seconds, and it’s gone. I just couldn’t go there.”) What a thrill ride I was giving myself, even as I moved through the day (like a bitch) typing, chatting with colleagues, microwaving my homemade soup (where’s my taster?), doing my dishes in the pantry sink (where’s my maid?), releasing my files (where’s my attorney?), and commuted through the streets and subways of Manhattan and Queens (you’re fired).

Goddammit, man, I lived the American Dream, and in the process was finally able to define what it has become: Absolute power and mammoth wealth, meaning complete freedom, complete autonomy, in thrall to no one—all MINE. While the rest of America lives for Happy Hour after work, buying scratch-offs and playing Powerball between putting the kids to bed and binge-watching Walking Dead, Donald J. Trump, son of a millionaire, rules the world and has since childhood. (A friend who grew up “on the other side of the Forest Hills tracks” remembers the teenage Donald Trump, a decade older than my friend, knocking over people and property in his red sports car and never having to so much as say he was sorry while his father paid the victims off.) So of course the adult Trump doesn’t have to bother with drink and drugs. He commits acts of sex and violence with the dedication of a Zen master in meditation, and why wouldn’t he?

One day as Trump is heady, and it really was enough—it has to be. Because there was no bottom to what he wanted.

Sweating It Out

The other night I went with my actor friend Ryan to Studio 54 to see Lynn Nottage’s new play, Sweat, which has transitioned to Broadway. The play is set in a Northeast steel town’s local bar, surrounding area, and prison, moving back and forth in time, to discover “what happened” on a pivotal day in the lives of these characters. We see here what for at least a century we have all known as the American Dream: a good steady union job, good benefits, a decent retirement, a trip to Atlantic City every once in a great while, a roof over our heads, our kids in school, and a good bar to hang out in a few nights a week with friends. The play, which Nottage wrote well before the 2016 election, is disturbingly prescient, hitting as it does on the disenfranchisement felt by blue collar white laborers who blame blacks and Hispanic immigrants for “taking” the jobs that are rightfully “ours,” even as their jobs are being outsourced to Mexico and beyond. The end of these union jobs leads to the downfall not only of the town’s economy but to the residents’ sense of identity. Racism, hate crime, opioid addiction, violence—all of it is here, but the decline is on a relatable human scale, in proportion to everyday American life, and stingingly painful in its inevitability.

The distance between the bar in this fictional American town to Trump Tower is probably less than 100 miles, but it may as well be another planet. And yet you know that a lot of the people in that town would have voted for Trump.

Everyone should see this play, especially white (and white collar) American liberals, the wearers of the pussy hats and the marchers in protests. I say this with love, because even without the hat, I’m one of those liberals.

And because of my little Trump exercise a few months back and seeing this play the other night—as well as my working class to middle class upbringing by my college-educated stay-at-home mom, Lynne, and a blue collar union job dad, Bernie—I think I finally get why those poor working class saps would throw in with Trump. It has to do with the way the American Dream morphed in the middle of the century. I also saw it played out on stage in the revival of Miss Saigon last Monday, as the Engineer sings “American Dream” (and what was a powerful moment alone on stage in the light devolved into humping a car and ogling show girls, and even more disturbing to me was the frenzy of applause that greeted the arrival of that car onstage). The Dream became only about money, greed, devouring, “having it all” equating not to a good job and benefits, education for our kids, going to college, and access to culture, but rather to complete autonomy. This imaginary isolationism, the new Nationalism, the desire to need no one, to include no one, to circle our wagons around “real” Americans is what killed that old Dream. What seems so obviously illusory and empty, not to mention hateful and dangerous, to people like me—white, liberal, educated, and urban—is not that at all to Trump voters.

Trump and, say, the character of Tracy in Sweat, have a lot in common: They like to feel powerful, free, and intoxicated. But take away Trump’s money and he’s a shell; take away Tracy’s union job and she’s nothing. Neither rich Trump nor working class Tracy has one curious bone in their respective bodies. They don’t read books or magazines, don’t want to know anyone outside their circle, have no compassion for others, and feel instantly threatened by change. And Trump’s “security” depends on thuggish tactics, from brutal business practices to legal threats, just as Tracy’s “security” of a union job historically depended on a Mafia to threaten the owners if they didn’t come around. The unions have no more Mob influence (and this is not a point in the play, this is me looking at history), and so the jobs go, and so too the Tracys of the world; and if Trump were to lose his shirt tomorrow, his soul would amount to a pile of watery meringue. No wonder their dominant emotion is fear.

When things don’t go the way Trump or Tracy want, they immediately assign blame to minorities and they act with violence. The difference is that a rich man like Trump will never suffer the consequences of his actions, his complacency, or his narcissism. A working class woman like Tracy will lose everything even as people just like her look to Trump for help. Trump will never notice as Tracy and her people head for addiction, prison, and destitution. (House Speaker Paul Ryan will soon call them “human waste” and treat them as less than the mud on his shoes.) “We’ll bring back jobs,” says the Right, and then they don’t, and then they say to their base, “Why are you lazy?” and the white workers point to immigrants, and the Right goes after immigrants and never bothers to bring back the jobs. Then they blame Obama. And so it goes.

So the Right Wing is about isolation and thuggishness. It’s self-interested and brutal. It’s about fear and scoring off the other guy. And no amount of luxury, no amount of benefits, will assuage that fear, because there are Others everywhere who want to take what they have.

The Left Wing—where unions used to land—is now about liberalism and togetherness. The dominant emotion is outrage. And no amount of gains in health, education, and welfare for all will assuage that outrage, because there’s another battle just around the corner.

I think it’s worth pointing out that nationalism on the Right shouldn’t be confused with self-reliance on the Left. It’s one thing to make yourself well-rounded, educated, and strong—able to grow your own food, build a house, and read books, too—and another to imagine that you really are “doing it all on your own.” Somebody grew the trees you made your house from, someone made the town where your fire station is, someone made your gun, harvested the seeds for your first planting, I could go one endlessly but please tell me you get the point. Henry David Thoreau’s mom washed his clothes, for Pete’s sake. So the very idea that there is a National We and it is self-selected for Perfection in Isolation is in no way connected with the idea of getting back to the Garden, unless your garden is paved in concrete and surrounded by armed guards marching in rhythm and pointing their rifles at your neighbors who don’t look like the American they want in the Garden.

Stopping to Help

A few weeks ago I read a piece in Esquire magazine called, “It’s the Power That Does Something to Me.” Here’s the title snip:

“[Trump] needs to drain the swamp of judges, too,” [a protestor] said. “I don’t care what he does. I’m behind him 100 percent. Put it this way: If he became a dictator, and they said, ‘We want him in forever,’ he’s my man. He’s in. I’ll never vote against him … I love his power … It’s the power that does something to me.”

It’s a deeply distressing article, not biased, just showing the people at the rally for who they are, what they feel, how they see the world and America and Trump. Reading it, I was simply beside myself with helplessness. I knew from my own little exercise up there why these sad, unemployed people were intoxicated by Trump’s power. What I don’t know how to show or tell them is what my (white liberal middle class) teacher/actor/writer self knows, which is that they would feel infinitely more satisfied not by fantasizing about Trump-style lottery wins or launching grenades at anonymous immigrants, but by having their hearts warmed and curiosity sparked by helping others, by listening to music, seeing art in a free museum, reading a good book—that the cumulative effect of loads of good human culture and walks in nature, combined with an actual job—and one poor guy who’s been unemployed said that Trump finally got him a job; that is, he was still unemployed, but now it was “just a matter of time”—would make all the difference.

Just typing that last paragraph makes me feel like a dope, because what liberals just will not understand is that not everyone needs to go to college to enjoy life, and that the liberal attitude is killing America, too. My dad had a great union job, and a hard one, as a meat cutter, and he was a high school dropout, and you have never met a man more content with his lot than Bernie O’Hara, who voted for Obama and Hillary. This nation has come to devalue not only basic manual laborers, but also highly skilled laborers such as meat cutters (just try it), plumbers, and electricians. Not only that, but also post-college degree skilled laborers such as dentists, doctors, and nurses, who are often immigrants now, to say nothing of teachers. Too many liberals seem to think that everyone should major in computer science or art history, and that nothing else in between matters, and the end result is this VOID of imagination and action when it comes to work, civics, culture, and kindness in this country.

I have no idea what to tell any of these people, right, left, or in between. We all know that it’s not possible to talk to or teach Donald Trump anything. But I still think there’s some hope for the average American, liberal or conservative.

Last week on my apparently unstoppable Broadway binge, I saw Come From Away, a musical about the town of Gander, Newfoundland, Canada, population 9,000, and how it took in 38 planes and 7,000 people after the events of 9/11, since the attack meant no flying into U.S. airspace, and Gander had a huge air base mostly unused since WWII. It’s such an unlikely story, but here’s a town—one town—that stopped EVERYTHING it was doing and tended to this emergency. They just DID it. I couldn’t stop sobbing for joy. How does such goodness happen? And who on EARTH imagined it as a musical? It was perfect.

When my old colleague Mrs. Martin would hear kids arguing to the point of coming to blows, she would firmly command, “Stop.” And often they would. “Stop.” I guess if I could do anything, it would be to say to all of America, “Stop.” Just STOP. Stop it. Now: Pull yourself together. Look around. Make an effort. What needs to be accomplished? STOP. No blame, no finger pointing, no lashing out, and no drinking. What needs to be DONE in a constructive way? Look at your community. What’s missing? Jobs? What industries do you want to attract? If you are unemployed or just civic-minded, can you gather people like yourself and begin researching that? Can you write your representatives, call a town hall, and get out there? Is your community lacking cleanliness, sanitation, beauty? Can you rally the troops for a good tidying of the town? Can you please, please be of use to somebody beyond yourself? Could you do that?

Coda

I spent five years, in college and a little beyond, as a smock-wearing cashier at a local department store, a kind of early K-mart. When I graduated and became a teacher, I didn’t see pride in the eyes of many of my co-workers, people who were raising their kids on their salaries there. I saw resentment. People who were secure in themselves, like my supervisor, couldn’t have been prouder, but not so more than a few of the floor people. “Don’t forget where you came from,” they’d remark, darkly. Perhaps they were projecting onto me their own failed dreams, or their real fear of education, seeing it as something that separates us rather than unites and helps us. I see that divide in our nation still, and it will kill us. We’d better work on that.

All I wanted to do back then was to teach kids, direct plays, have a little place to live, tea to drink, books to read, and to have my health in general. Well, that and worldwide fame just for being. Pretty simple. What Donald Trump and his Trumpers don’t understand, and maybe can’t, is that most of us are pretty happy with just that sort of life—solid basics, good friends, and a little more to shoot for. But in America, we also have to do due diligence. Things fall apart when you aren’t looking. No amount of contentment comes without serious engagement, and that kind of work can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. So does it hurt to be kind to people? Does it? The only thing We, the People, have to fear really is fear itself; that, and mindlessly placing our national trust into Trump’s tiny, fumbling, greedy hands.

I share with the painters the desire

To put a three-dimensional picture

On a one-dimensional surface

 ~ Nikki Giovanni, “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day”

Dream

Dream: Tim Kaine needs two sets of pants, one under the other, in the shape of sweat pants, “does anyone sew?” and I say “I do” and I measure him—a pink oxford button down, gray slacks, and a belt—and I set about cutting the pants, front and back, out of black broadcloth, and I lay the cutouts, one atop another, on the floor—a colorless floor but like the looped industrial carpet that covered the addition on our house that went on when I was nine, thin carpet over concrete, no pad underneath, that sort of stretched out and bubbled over the years, the speckle of browns and tans and blacks developing ridges that could become rough terrain for matchbox cars. Looking at the cutout pants, I realize I don’t know how to make the second set to go underneath, a set in gray, and how to make sure they will both fit. The cutouts just lie there, flashing before me throughout the rest of the dream that involves my parents, a course catalogue for classes that I’m not sure why I’m taking, the order in which I’ve written them down is the order in which I’m taking them by days of the week, and I wonder if this is wise. I wonder if anyone else can sew and Lauren at work (who looks like Darla, a secretary from my old school) says she can do it, and I let her, though realizing I’m disappointing Felice and Richard, who would expect more of my costume training from college…yellows, creams, muted pastel shades…views turn to crowds inside and around the “house where I grew up,” which isn’t quite that, as it isn’t in dreams. One of my former students, Kristen, is teaching two of the classes (I know this by two different head shots of her, in soft-focus pastels, like a graduation shot in the ’70s), and I know I only signed up for one, and my mom tells me that instead I should take this science theory class by James someone, and I see it, upside-down in the catalogue, and sign up, feeling sure I’ve taken on too much. Books clasped to my chest, I begin walking and see Lauren in this floating throng of humans on a hilly street and wonder if she will finish Tim Kaine’s pants.

Mind Train Wreck

This morning, after recalling my dream, I began thinking about Patti Smith’s M Train, and how she dispensed with exposition for the most part, saying at one point that the last time she saw her friend Lou Reed was in a restaurant with “his wife, Laurie,” not explaining that “Laurie” is Laurie Anderson. This is Patti’s life, her mind, and she knows who everyone is. On one level, perhaps she figures you do, too, if you are reading her. One imagines her saying, should you counter that you, the reader, aren’t sure, “Look it up.”

I’m reading show business autobiographies right now, Patti done, and Bruce begun, and now too Noël Coward—this last a used copy (for it’s out of print) of all three of his personal writings, Present Indicative, published in 1937, Future Indefinite, published around 1954 (I think—look it up), and inserted in between these is Past Conditional, written in the 1950s but never published. I read autobiographies, and good biographies, for the pleasure of their company. “There is no Frigate like Book…,” wrote Emily Dickinson, who never traveled far from home. There’s an exhibit of her writings and things right now at the Morgan Library here in New York, and I need to head out there soon. Maybe today.

In addition to books and museums, I also try to use theater for diversion from these most surreal of times, and so went to see a play at Theater Row on 42^nd Street yesterday, a two-hander that had been what Noël Coward would have called “a smash hit,” and my friend Colleen knew someone in the two-hander cast. Speaking for myself, I slept through a good deal of it. Nice set, but neither actor in it could act, and that’s always a problem. What do I mean by not being able to “act”? I mean, while they’ve clearly been trained, and they could speak, and walk, and say things in ways “distinct” to each “character,” still, from the beginning, neither really listened to or was present to the other. Over the course of the play, neither character, as performed here, grew or changed, though the script—an existential thing on what, I guess, amounts to things that unexpected encounters with strangers can teach us, and them, but I don’t really know what that was—intimates that they are better men for having met. As far as directing, I can’t see that there was much of that beyond the physical business, perhaps the blocking, but no character work that would illuminate this play. The only way a playwright gets away with work like this is by having actors such as Bill Nighy and Chiwetel Ejiofor (both of whom I saw in London in Blue Orange by Joe Penhall) play it—because their brilliant minds and actions fill in the gaps, and this play seemed to have many of those gaps. They talked a lot, these two, but didn’t say anything, if you see what I mean, though the goal of each was stated several times, “I am going to tell you the truth.” Okay then. But as Colleen said, “They turned out to be telling the truth the whole time, because they told us that.”

And if you can’t get at actual truth, why go to the theater? Or live in America?

So seeing this sad excuse for a show from England about straight white men meant that we missed the LGBT support protests down by Obama’s landmark-designated Stonewall Park by Christopher Street, but Colleen and I walked downtown in time to see the end, the dozens of barricades probably up for naught, as we made our way to Houston Street only to learn what everyone else outside Film Forum did, which is that the documentary I Am Not Your Negro is sold out forever. What else to do but search out a place to eat, and Colleen found us a Mexican joint “that I swear used to be Italian” on 7^th Avenue, and delicious tacos and a 2-for-1 margarita special took the sting out of being let down, all around. Around us were young people, 20s, probably part of the protest, black, white, gay, straight, transplant New Yorkers with money, all eating Mexican.

If these colors don’t look right to you, you probably voted for Trump. You are probably like the Arizona women that my dad, Bernie, saw interviewed yesterday morning who thought Trump was doing “wonderful” and couldn’t understand why anyone was protesting.

A Heart-stopping Time of Staggering Ignorance

It’s Black History Month, which President Donald Trump “re-Christened” “National African American History Month,” because presidents do that, but this president seemed to think that Frederick Douglass, whose name he’d heard somewhere that day, must be still alive and “is being recognized more and more.” Given the massive size of this historical blunder from Trump,  I feel quite sure that there will be no Official White House screening of I Am Not Your Negro, also because this president chose, as his first movie screening after being inaugurated, Finding Dory. It’s right out of the Onion. I suppose I could Google Trump’s reasons for desiring that kid’s movie, but he doesn’t need reasons. He’s only eight years old, apparently. Too small to fill even Tim Kaine’s pants.

In the meantime, while Uncle Donald and his buddies Sean and Kellyanne jangle more keys of stupidity before a gullible public, congressional Republicans are opening up previously protected parklands, 3.3 million acres of them, out west, to drilling for their oil company friends. (“Why are they protesting?”) And these same Republican minds voted to lift the EPA restrictions on how much coal waste the mining companies could dump into the rivers. There were two diesel pipeline spills into two Iowa rivers the other week. It’s only drinking water. So Trump will have his buddies start placing a pipeline under the pristine water source to the Indians out in the Dakotas. It’s not his drinking water. (“Why are they protesting?”)

It’s busy times in the business of restricting women’s rights, too. The president and congress are talking more abortion limitations and defunding Planned Parenthood. Oh, and restricting the rights of citizens and people with passports and green cards when traveling, like banning Muslims and diplomats who have ever traveled to Iran. And while expressing ignorance of race and raping our public lands and threatening our water supply and the House Republicans giving back gun rights to the severely mentally ill in the form of denying their information to the SS Administration for the purpose of background checks—in only two weeks all this hell broke loose—the Republicans feel good. They feel strong. And the good women of Arizona, as interviewed, have no idea what all the “liberal” fuss is about. This makes even the most determined-to-unify among us what to split off from this butt-ignorant third of the nation, but they live either by the Grand Canyon or have the best farmland, so we are beholden.

The New Yorker paints a rather bleak picture, and I’d like to think it’s a wake-up call.

Dream Lover

It’s hard to get up in the morning. It’s hard to sleep through the night, so mostly I don’t. I’ve gained so much weight—yesterday morning I was sure I was living in a fat suit—that I don’t even know myself (where’s Conway to provide an alternative take on my image?). I guess I’m letting the terrorists win—and by “terrorists” I mean white Americans in the mold of Trump and of Timothy McVeigh. And American men in general: There’s no one scarier as far as I can see than a white American male in possession of a presidency or a firearm. In fact, 1500 American women a year are killed by their intimate American male partner (often white), as opposed to the (on average) 2 Americans by so-called jihadists, and to the 30,000 Americans who will be killed by guns, and mass killing victims mostly done in from the triggers of guns owned by white American men. But a white guy on my Facebook wall went on a tear while I took a break yesterday, going into minutia to do with a post about the repeal of the law on background checks, and mercifully a friend in the Justice Dept. corrected his views, and all I could do when I read this was lament that this dude cared more about inconvenience to a few mislabeled gun nuts, er, sorry, citizens, than for the 30,000 deaths per year by guns, the mass shootings done by the mentally ill white guys like him (meaning white and male, as far a I know not mentally ill, but hard to say). Where is our sense, where is our empathy as a nation? What are we teaching the kids? White male makes right?

Why I Get Up at All

First, I have to use the toilet. Second, I want coffee. Third, I have to get on with it because it’s only going to get worse, and I’ve had it pretty good up to now. I also enjoy listening to the birds. And seeing stuff grow out in nature. And around town. And then I get to write about it.

Today my mind feels like Nikki Giovanni’s “cotton candy on rainy day” which is to say, “the unrealized dream of an idea unborn,” but I have to go with it. And drink tea. And today, obviously,  I have to finish sewing Tim Kaine’s pants.

Time and Tidal Basin Wait for No Man

Two days after Christmas, I took Amtrak from Virginia to New York. The train stops at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to change engines; in this direction the switch is from diesel to electric. All my life, D.C. was a presence, only around 20 miles away, and it was just a fact of life. I was proud of it, even after Nixon. In the 13 years I’ve lived in New York, I have always passed the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and all the buildings in between, with such a deep heart and appreciation for the fact of democracy emerging and being sustained throughout all the genocides and chaos, through the transitions, the changes, the figuring it out. When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, I had a feeling that something truly astonishing had happened: Americans had finally grown the fuck up.

Needless to say, I was more profoundly wrong than I knew. Eight years of representatives’ racist behaviors, countless black deaths, deliberate obstruction, loathesome primaries, and yet another questionable election day later, the ascension of President-elect Donald Trump effectively ends American democracy as we have known it (which is not a histrionic thing to say, given his promises to turn the nation to oligarchy, co-ruling with Putin, apparently). What Trump’s election has meant is that sitting in that train in D.C., even passing through and past the monuments, was for the first time an embarrassment to me, sickening even. I wanted away from that awful place. I’ve never felt like that before. Americans are terrible people. That’s how I felt.

So what is it that has made Americans become even more terrible than I thought possible? I realized it’s because we have no standards anymore. We have bars, of course: An impossibly high one for liberals, and another set at “abyss” for conservatives. But what we no longer have is something my friend Tom recalls as “protocol.” Trump rolled all that over into a ditch from his first tweet after the election: bashing his opponent, the Electoral College, the citizens who voted for him, and the current president. Trump takes no prisoners, makes no distinctions between the people he will be sworn to serve and the oligarchs to whom he owes money. From his model, too, we have also eschewed the practice of basic etiquette. Politeness, by the way, is not insincerity; it’s discipline. And by the way, what the Republicans call “political correctness” is what we used to call “human decency.”

So what happened?

Next Station Stop

Back on the train: From Virginia into Union Station, I’d had both train seats to myself, but I knew it was about to fill up. Soon a bag was slung into the aisle seat beside me, and a slender, older white bald man in casual clothes, glasses, with two small backpacks, began arranging himself. A sideways glance revealed a rather large, clear droplet hanging from the tip of his nose. I instantly thought of Remains of the Day, where Anthony Hopkins’s butler father narrowly misses dropping such a drop into his master’s teacup. One should feel foolish to be grossed out by such a simple human thing, but I admit that I was. Then the man bent over to his backpack on the floor, gray with various zippers and compartments, and fiddled around for such a long time, slowly, clumsily, that I wondered if he were drunk. When he emerged with this phone, I glanced sideways again to see that the droplet still clung. I gripped by book, my brother Mike’s gift of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run, and focused on “Italians.” (My other book was from my mom, Lynne: Trump Revealed, by journalists from the Washington Post, but I felt I’d, um, save that one for not-in-public reading, and with a scotch.) Mercifully, I caught a peripheral view of him using a tissue to wipe his nose, and then I took advantage of this moment to get up to use the restroom. It took him some time to get up, but he seemed very nice, if slightly incoherent. When I returned, there he was, bent over again, rifling through what looked like a near-empty pack, for what went on to be minutes. An older black lady, sitting across the aisle by herself, politely tapped the empty seat, for me to sit, and I said, “You’re a doll,” but I needed all my stuff. Finally, I tapped him on the shoulder, and he got up, and I went ahead and resumed my seat to read my book.

Christmas Read 1. My joy.

Christmas Read 2. Dammit anyway.

Now you might be wondering why I’m taking you through all this minutia. Before I tell you, you might know that this stranger then, without asking, but sort of apologizing, reached across me to plug in his phone, which took a long time, and I offered to change seats with him twice as he did this, but he insisted the cord would reach fine, which wasn’t my concern exactly. Then he proceeded to talk into his phone, using the microphone feature, to contact first the friend he was visiting; then a relative (wife? child?) to say he was on the train; and third was something to do with an appointment. Then he began to read his own book, which he had to rifle around for, of course. When his phone rang, he answered it, and spoke to what turned out to be a neurologist. In clear but rather careful speech he spoke to me directly for the first time, saying, “That was my neurologist. I must be driving you crazy, but I have Parkinson’s disease, and I needed to set up my next appointment.”

I knew something was wrong, but etiquette and discipline have taught me that one simply puts up with the quirks of others, for we have our own. (For instance, I ruffled one of those awful plastic bags as I ate a ham sandwich and peeled Clementines—and who knows what he had to hear and smell that was annoying to him.) Grown-ups take the long view. One hopes the annoying party might have the kindness to explain said quirks, and this man did. And his explanation was devastating, and humbling. Considering everything—poor motor skills, weakness, and at times unclear speech—his independent trip was a marvel to me.

He asked me about my book, and we began talking about music. He loved Dylan, and hates Trump, which was a relief, so I asked if he’d heard Patti Smith singing at the Nobel ceremony, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” He had not, so I told him to watch it when he got a chance. He used the microphone (what a great thing) to look it up. I saw that under Patti Smith’s name was also the book, Just Kids, her memoir of her early days in New York City ca. 1970, and of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. He had not read it, so he made a note of it. He missed a lot of the 1970s counter-culture stuff, he explained, because he was in, and training for, the Olympics.

Now you see how great it is be polite, and patient, and kind to strangers? In our mutual tolerance of each other’s quirks, we fell into a fabulous conversation. It turns out he was in the 1976 and 1980 Olympics (the latter boycotted “by that peanut farmer”), track and field. I asked, “Did you know Benita Fitzgerald?” “Oh, yeah! She’s great!” “She went to my high school, and her father was my guidance counselor. He just died a few years back—the dearest man.” “What do you know,” he said. So I asked, “Who are you?” And he had me Google “February 6, 1978, Sports Illustrated.” And there he was, on the cover:

“I had just gotten the world record in the mile,” he explained. WOW. “How long did you hold it?” I asked. A year, he said. And I don’t know what made me ask this, but given that after Muhammad Ali’s death it finally came out that his Parkinson’s was indeed related to his boxing days (it had previously been denied, I assume to prevent boxers from getting scared out of making money for white guys), I did ask, “Do you think your Parkinson’s is related to your being an athlete?”

He didn’t hesitate to answer. “It’s funny you ask that,” he said. “I have a lot of friends who are runners, guys a lot better than I was, all over the world. They all have Parkinson’s.” This revelation led to him telling about his therapies, including for speech. His really was quite clear, but he had to work hard on it. It’s understandable that he wants his grandchildren to become doctors rather than athletes. After all, what is most important? It’s hard, deciding on our standards, because we all have dreams, too.

Just Kids

Somehow we wound our talk back around to Patti Smith. My traveling companion Googled images for Just Kids, and said of the cover photo, “Are those her parents?” And I said, “No, that’s Patti and Robert,” and he said, “No way,” and then we saw the image of Patti Smith that was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of Horses, her debut album. What extraordinary people they became.

Here, two confessions to you, not quite explained to my new friend Dick Buerkle (say Berk-lee) back there on the train: First, when I first saw the album cover of Patti Smith’s Horses around 1982 in Books, Strings, and Things in Blacksburg, VA (there not being any record stores where I grew up), I was fascinated by and terrified of her androgyny, just as I was of David Bowie, and also afraid of the rawness and inventiveness of the music. Second, when I read Just Kids, I found the story fascinating and the writing to be that of an earnest adolescent who hasn’t mastered the language, despite the fact that the book had won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In both cases, coming from a deeply literary background and from a musical base that included composers like Gershwin and Kern, I wondered what had happened to standards. It’s like any old noise, or any stringing of words, or any way of dressing has nothing to measure up to—as if all of it were “okay” and anyone could horn in, and there were no protocols anymore. I find a lot of new art unnerving. But really, whose problem is that? Maybe it is Miss O’ who needs to learn something.

And here I want to point out that I see a profound difference between an artist breaking with protocol or standards in ART for the fuck of it, and a political leader breaking with protocol or standards in GOVERNANCE for the fuck of it. The artist is trying to discover herself, and that risk is appropriate, since no one else suffers, and it might be a flash in the pan. The political leader who does this is risking a nation’s welfare for generations to come. If you don’t understand that difference—and it took me a long time to appreciate artists properly, as well as leaders—or if you think Trump is “just another leader” and are okay with that, I will tell you this: I am going to break with etiquette and tell you I think you are a despicable human being. You need to grow the fuck up. Get some goddamned standards.

Standards

To get a world record in the mile, officials time the runners. That is, the humans participating and the humans running have to believe in time as a concept, agree to subject themselves to Kipling’s “unforgiving minute,” and abide by the time called. No one says, as Trump might, “Yeah, well I feel like I have the world record, so I do.” Seeing that Sports Illustrated cover up there caused me to think: In the post-truth world, will there be such a thing as world records, or winning times, or winners of games, ever again? People used to trust in physics, science, and fact-based news. Maybe sports is our last holdout for truth.  I do think Reality TV made a fake news world, and Trump led the charge. Now he’s the president, the man who doesn’t want anyone to know the real reality behind-the-scenes of his taxes, his show, his administration. C’mon, people: Trump’s about to run the American mile, and not in our shoes. Who’s measuring him? By what standards?

As I said, meeting Dick Buerkle reminded me of Muhammad Ali’s death from complications due to Parkinson’s, and also of all those NFL players who are dying from their chosen sport—nearly all because they weren’t fully aware of the risks they were taking. Maybe they would have done it anyway, their sports, and maybe they’d say it was worth the risk, but they will never know. It’s why we need standards, and need constant updates and cross checks. Standards save lives.

Just as knowledge of basic etiquette makes you comfortable anywhere,  so too do standards and protocols matter in every single facet of life, in every business, in every job, in every culture. Fact-based knowledge matters. Developing good standards based on knowledge, in order to protect the people and serve our general welfare, is something all of us adult humans need to care about, follow, review, and teach to the young. By contrast, we rely on artists to expand and test those society standards, and let’s face it: most of us probably know great art when we encounter it, even if we don’t understand it, or realize we know it. My first tip-off is my emotional response: almost always, it is extreme discomfort. Bruce Springsteen, for example, scared the shit out of me when I first heard “Adam Raised a Cain.” So I listened again. And again. I fell in love with that man. Go me.

So as I’m reading about artists’ lives, I’m reminded that the year 2016 brought us all too many deaths. It became almost farcical, there are the end, but at least Betty White is still with us. As is Patti Smith, who turned 70. And 2016 brought too many reprehensible and potentially fatal political and social upheavals to count. Donald Trump for four years, if not for life, tops the list. Whatever our different tastes and ideas, if we are sentient, we collectively felt these agonies, didn’t we? We are still in this together, right? (Not if the ebullient posts of conservatives are any measure. At least I have my friends.)

The deaths of David Bowie and Prince, former outliers, were universally mourned (except by humans living under cultural rocks), and Bob Dylan’s award of the Nobel Prize for Literature was universally hailed (I mean, in all the mags and op-eds I read)—as was Patti Smith’s singing for that most esteemed of human ceremonies. It’s funny that Dylan and Prince and Bowie and Smith, these rebels, these terrors, are now considered the singers of standards, really. They are mainstream. And they should be. Standards need to be tested, and they need to force us to make room for the new, sure: But acceptance comes, based on quality, and on service, and on real accomplishment and contribution to the culture. They grow us, these rebels in art. And they grow, too, personally; and into the stuff of legend for us. It’s awesome.

As we talked about music, I told Dick a story from my friend Cathy, a colleague and neighbor, who grew up in New York, and who once went with a friend to see punk rocker Patti Smith at the old CBGB club downtown, back before she was big a name. The two sat on an aisle, and Cathy’s friend put her feet up on the seat in front of her just as rebel artist Patti Smith made her entrance through the audience. Patti leaned down to Cathy’s friend and snarled, “Put your feet down.”

Dick asked me, “Was she serious?” Dead serious, I said. “I like her even more now,” Dick said, and I agreed. Patti Smith had standards.

Looking at the cover of Horses, there in miniature on Dick’s phone, I had to admit that I wished I could have been that cool. I always wanted to be that cool. “You’re pretty cool,” Dick said. Yeah, but not Patti-Smith-on-the-cover-of-Horses cool.

I mean, I have standards.

We all should. Let’s work on that.

See you in the Resistance.