Sorry, Of Course

I suppose I should tell you, of course, that I stand firmly against political violence. 

 

I decry it. 

 

I denounce it. 

 

I stand proudly with my fellow Americans of all political beliefs and religious affiliations. One of the hallmarks of our great nation is that we all of us, above all, cherish our beloved freedoms and the right to disagree—vigorously but never violently!—with the (insane / stupid / are you shitting me?) opposing views of our brothers and sisters.

 

Of course.

 

So I’m sorry that Charlie Kirk is dead. I knew nothing about him, never having seen him and his charming wife-now-widow. He was a commentator or an influencer or someone with, apparently, no credentials who got enormous influence by being someone who could…well, influence people. He could and he did and now he’s dead.

 

And it’s lousy that he’s dead for several reasons. It’s lousy because his wife has had her whole life blown up, his children have lost their father, his friends have lost a dear companion on their trudge through this life. That is awful, and I can tell you because I have lost a father and a mother and a young man who was nearly a son. You wake up every morning to the realization that ______ is no longer there, and the knife stabs you again, and you’re wincing but there’s no blood on the floor. So you get up and go the bathroom and feed the cat and then go outside, where you will exhaust every ounce of energy putting on an act. You smile, you greet people, you attempt jokes. It’s written in that social contract—the one they never gave you and you never got to read. And that you still have to fulfill. So Charlie’s wife, a former Miss Arizona, will get a pass, or maybe a note from her doctor excusing her from work (that is, normal life) for the next couple of weeks. Then, we’ll all expect her to buckle down, put on her happy face, and “carry on with her life.”

 

As if she has a life to carry.

 

For me, that’s what grief was, and now the sardonic tone has left me. Shit—now, even the title of this post is pissing me off. Because there is nothing funny at all when someone with one anonymous bullet directly to the carotid shoots your life down. Because that’s what grief is. Your life has been murdered.

 

There’s no life to “carry on,” and that’s the problem. It’s not that there’s no Charlie coming home from work (do influencers punch clocks? or do they even come home, and if so, where are they coming from?).

 

It’s that there’s no you.

 

Not only has Charlie been killed and your life has been killed, but now it’s you that’s been killed! The single bullet to the carotid took out more lives than anybody could have known, because now Charlie’s wife, whose name I think is Erika (and I’ll stop being snarky about her Miss Arizona title) is not Erika. In fact, Erika is just as dead as Charlie, and now she has the problem of getting out of bed every morning and being brave for her kids and dealing with hordes of reporters, some of whom are trampling the rose bushes to ask her, solemnly, how she is “coping.”

 

There’s no “she” there.

 

“Dunno—ask me in a year….”

 

That’s what I’d say, because this last time around, I learned a thing or two. I gave myself a year to mourn my marriage—a year in which I was not carrying on but just faking it. Faking the smiles until, at odd moments, they became real. Faking the sobriety, because even though I didn’t drink any booze, I had withdrawn from everyone and was living as a hermit. Faking caring, because some people needed me to care. Not much, but still….

 

I was fine with faking it because I knew that it would come to an end. It did—a month ago marked the end of My Year of Faking Tiredfully. (Made up word—deal with it). And I was damned glad it was over, and grateful, because I didn’t do it well. I didn’t do it well because it can’t be done well. Nobody does it well.

 

“Well” is getting through it. 

 

There must be a better way, and probably spiritually evolved people do it. They take long walks on the beach and colonic massages and messages from the Dalai Lamma. They grow. They become insightful. They do not spend an entire day obsessing over a bus driver who didn’t stop for you just because—can you believe this shit?-- you were 0.0000000000000000000000003 microns away from the bus stop.

 

OK—half a block.

 

The point is that, having endured a humanitarian crisis worse than any since Auschwitz, I didn’t buy the bottle of scotch in the plastic green bottle that CVS used to sell. I didn’t even kick the cat. Erika will look at the reporter standing on her rose bushes and mumble some response, and a panel of three “experts” on multiple news outlets around the world will parse the words for the precise meaning and significance of what Erika said.

 

Erika, of course, is dead.

Of course. 

 

But they won’t know that, just as the guys waiting with me at the bus stop didn’t know that, or the cat. They didn’t know that I was dead, just like Erika is now dead.

 

I was dead for a year, because I am the child of the child of a Victorian lady, Ruth Herrick Myers. And the Victorians, bless them, gave everybody a year to wear black—severe black. Jet black. At the ninth month, a charcoal grey handkerchief could appear. A bit later, perhaps a tear-stained purple flower in the button hole. Navy blues, primeval-forest greens might creep in a week later. A careful choice of wardrobe could make your grief disappear so gradually that nobody could see that there was any transition. You were there, you were not there, and now you’re back.

 

They made no exception to the one-year rule, and that was, of course, to Victoria herself.

 

Or it may have been that Her Supreme Majesty (one picks up little habits in a 42-year marriage, such as how to address Her Supreme Majesty—not “Vicky”, NEVER!) just did whatever the F she wanted. She could, she did, she did not scare the horses.

 

Anyway, I was fine with faking it for a year because I also knew that nobody does it right. Nobody grows and changes and becomes spiritually evolved and realizes their true inner worth and activates the telos. “Telos” being some Greek term meaning, I think, what-you’re-supposed-to-be-doing-with-your-life. Nobody does it well because there’s nobody around to do it.

 

That bullet took you out, as well as your husband.

 

So that’s why it’s lousy for Erika-I-forgive-you-for-being-Miss-Arizona this morning. She thought she was going to wake up today, kiss her husband goodbye on his way out the door to go influence, and then make a second cup of coffee and raise the children.

 

It’s a lousy morning for Erika, what with the reporter stomping on the rose, and the blogger she’ll never know being snarky in Puerto Rico.

 

Well, she’ll be comforted with JD Vance, and that may not be snarky. Apparently, according to The New York Times, the two men were close. I hope they are, since today is September 11—and Vance was supposed to be in New York, and if Vance chose to cancel that engagement in order to be with a friend in need, I’m all for it. And I’ll try not to entertain the thought that there may be more political hay-making going on than passing-the-white-handkerchief-to-the-widow. I’m snarky, so I won’t dismiss the thought. But I won’t entertain it.

 

A vice president speaking to dignitaries about people he didn’t know 24 years after an event isn’t all that important. Not compared to the raw grief of dear friend. But it is important, because 2,996 people died that day.

 

2,996 people died.

 

And those were just the ones we could count.      

 

           

Not Funny

I was going to be funny, today, because I have to be, on occasion. My life is too important to be serious all the time, as I once told someone at some point. And it made sense at the time. Does it now? I have no idea.

 

I was going to be funny, because what else can I do when the nation goes careening the wrong way down a one-way street, with nothing but semis roaring towards it?

 

Nobody under 30 will have any memory of who Bill Clinton is, or who Monica Lewinsky is, or what a blue dress with a white stain is in terms of American Democracy. But for those of us on Social Security, we remember it well.

 

I was trying to be high-minded about it all. When the news first appeared in the 1990’s that Bill Clinton, whom my mother correctly described as a hound-dog, had had a “relationship” with a young intern, I thought, “yuck,” and tried to forget it. 

 

It was impossible to ignore, and the congressional Republicans made damn sure of it. Morals mattered! Character counts! Can it be said that Republican shirked their moral duty, scorned the very values upon which our republic was founded, and turned their back on the most basic and sacred laws governing our society?

 

They did not!

 

The stench was sickening, the moral rot was putrifying, the sight was one no mortal could have beheld unmoved!

 

So Bill Clinton had gotten a blow job and his ejaculate had landed on the blue dress that Ms. Lewinsky was wearing. Lewinsky had mailed the dress to her mother, as I recall, and would I forget a detail like that? I had wasted a morning, in the 1990’s, writing an imaginary letter from Monica to Mom. How to convey the message that the dress—under NO circumstances—could be washed? Oh, and that it had to be kept somewhere private, which I seem to remember was under the bed. Anyway, there the dress was, and the greatest nation on earth waited and waited for what it might reveal to us. They took a buccal swab on Clinton, they matched it with the DNA from the white stain on the blue dress, and we all waited for 24 hours or so. 

 

Clinton strolled out on the White House lawn and ‘fessed up in a way that satisfied no one, particularly, but that did allow the Republican to save face and keep from making an ass (or bigger asses) of themselves. The impeachment trial was both huge—it was only the second time in our history that a president had been impeached, and the first time around had set a particularly low bar 120 years earlier—and foregone. He wasn’t going to be convicted, but he certainly wasn’t getting off Scot-free. Everybody knew, just by seeing the pictures of Bill / Hilary / Chelsea walking to the helicopter to fly to vacation in Cape Cod, that he was going to pay a helluva price.

 

I was not then what I am now—an elderly, respectable homosexual. I sniggered, and I’m neither proud of it nor ashamed. In fact, I got totally into it, to the point where I considered stealing the book The Book of Virtues, by a guy named William Bennett. Here’s a description of the book from Wikipedia:

 

A former Secretary of Education for the United States, Bennett began developing the book around 1988 at the behest of teachers who pointed out the deficiencies of moral education in their schools.

 

Bennett was being trotted out regularly to express his horror at the Clinton / Lewinsky affair, and I could go along with him, to some extent. Clinton had had sex with an employee. It would have gotten me fired at Walmart, if I had had sex with one of my students. Why should the president be any different?

 

Sooo…do we let the Republicans topple a democratically elected leader, the ruler of the free world? A bunch of sniveling hypocrites?

 

The only way out was humor, and it wasn’t particularly easy, since I had this, sitting in my background.

 

 

The youngest person in the photo is photo is my grandmother, who would later write a brief memoir that got me to start writing again. I knew my grandmother as well as a boy / young man can know an elderly lady. And as well as the aspiring hippie that I was could know the Victorian lady that she never overcame.

 

She may be having the last laugh.

 

Whatever else Donald Trump was, he was certainly the deformed tail-end of the hippie / free love movement. He was the 80’s, with the ambition and the drive and the big hair. “Free love” meant to some of us examining our values, examining how our expectations of men and women and their sexual roles had inhibited us or thwarted us. It was—in theory—about liberation from old, outdated ideas.

 

It was not permission to fuck anybody, without thought of their feelings and examination of our own behavior. 

 

Well, it was for Trump!

 

He bragged that “his Vietnam War” was surviving New York City in the 80’s—very funny, unless you had served, and possibly lost your life, in the war that Trump had avoided. You were sitting in a rice paddy, trying to figure out if the wind or a Viet Cong was moving that bush; Trump was waiting in a 5^th Avenue doctor’s office, getting tested for the clap.

 

Maybe it was inevitable. The sixties and seventies had been a time of high moral purpose—ending war, fighting poverty, overturning centuries-old prejudices and useless moral strictures. The 80’s were the flip side of that. Greed was good, and sex was good, and screw your feelings and qualms. I want to get my rocks off.

 

My grandmother thought it was horrendous.

 

She didn’t want, really, to know what we were up to. “We” because mea culpa, I bought into it too, and even now don’t feel bad about it. I had grown up hearing the words “faggot” and “queer” and I was perfectly happy to throw it all back in their faces, and have as much anonymous and free sex as I could get. I never went to bed with anyone underage, under any coercion, or under the assumption that what we were doing was going to last, was serious. No babies, no hurt feelings.

 

And yeah, I got the clap too. 

 

We all did.

 

So I too was swinging, in just the way Trump was swinging. Not at his level, of course—but the idea was the same.

 

I was going to write, “what saved me was those people, in the photo above,” but was I saved? Was I better than Donald Trump?

 

Assuming I was any better than Trump, having redoubtable Victorian ancestors probably saved the day. It’s easier both to be promiscuous and also abusive if you don’t have anyone looking over your shoulder. The path from the young girl of the photo to the old woman I knew was long, but perfectly graded and smoothed. My mother had sipped the sip of righteousness, and then passed the chalice to me. I could lie gloriously in the gutter, on some nights, but I was looking up at the stars and marveling. I wasn’t bathing in the slime.

 

There was an adult quality about my own dissipation in my youth that I think Trump never had. There was something, I like to think, that would have kept me from writing this, in this way, to this person.

 

  

Raise your hands, all you guys out there who doubted that the letter, bound in the leather binding with so many others, existed.

 

Dammit—raise your hands!

 

I said—RAISE YOUR HANDS!!!

 

What?

 

No one?

 

Guess it wasn’t funny.

 

 

      

Enough

What I should do is go out and take a photo of the damn thing, which is sitting in San Juan harbor, anchored behind a multimillion-dollar yacht.

 

It’s a destroyer, and it’s big, easily a small city block. Trump decided, last week, to bomb a speed boat which he said was carrying drugs to the United States. The attack killed eleven people, which immediately raised a red flag. Apparently, 11 people on a small boat are not only unnecessary, but actually a drawback. Eleven adults, assuming that they are men averaging 200 lbs each, is about a ton of weight. Why put all those people on a small boat when you could put bags of drugs? 

 

Nobody knows who they are, and nobody is precisely sure if the attack occurred in international waters (in which case it would be illegal, maybe) or Venezuelan waters (still illegal, though in a different way). Trump declared that the Venezuelans were “narco-terrorists” and members of a gang, Tren de Aragua. Experts in international law declared that Trump cannot blow up boats on the high seas, even if we suspect them of carrying drugs. We’ve been stopping and confiscating drugs for years in the Caribbean, but it’s usually the Coast Guard, not the US military, operating under what is now called The Department of War (it used to be Defense Department—the distinction is subtle, but important).

 

Venezuela responded a few days later by buzzing a guided-missile destroyer with F-16’s. We have sent ten of our own F-16s (which are called F-35s) to Puerto Rico, and we are ready to go. We also, as I have just found out, have put a 50-million-dollar reward for the head of the Venezuelan government, Nícolas Maduro. 

 

Eleven people were killed in the attack. And yes, these deaths were in vain—as so many of our deaths are. The issue was never keeping drugs off the streets of Miami, but diverting attention from the Epstein files, which a surprising number of people care about. Trump bombed Tehran a couple of months ago, for essentially the same reasons. 

 

Mea culpa—the news went totally over my head last week, until I saw the ship in the harbor. But it’s a message that no matter where you are, or how much you want to stick your head in the sand, Trump is making his influence felt.

 

Nor is it just war games. ICE is now offering a 50,000 $ sign-up fee to anyone willing to work for the agency (starting salary, 100,000$ and absolutely no education / experience required). And arrests of immigrants have soared in Puerto Rico, from 95 in 2024 to 468 in the first six months of 2025. Nor are they working alone; here’s what the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo has to say:  

 

Federal Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents have asked for access to that registry(editor’s note: of names / addresses of undocumented persons who have been issued special drivers’ licenses). In an NPR interview, Rebecca González, HSI’s lead agent in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, stated: “The Puerto Rico government is cooperating with us in anything that we ask them for. And we’re asking for that to move forward with the mission. And we’re waiting.”

 

It's a Monday morning in 2025, and I’m in good shape, generally. I’m not drunk, not hungover; I’m on my feet and going about my day. I probably won’t go off to photograph a boat, even a destroyer, in the San Juan harbor. The official reason is that I have replaced my daily bottle of whiskey for a quart of Espresso Chip ice cream. I buy it for six bucks at Walmart, instead of 9 bucks at the local store, and I carry it home on the bus. Since it’s fiendishly hot here in the tropics, I have to get the stash home quick.

 

The real reason is that I’ve succumbed. We all have, in varying degrees, even those of us who didn’t want to. Simply put, the destruction of our democracy has happened too quickly, and too dramatically for us to react. We have been shocked and awed.

 

Or disgusted. Our courts have ruled that the use of military for police duties in American cities is illegal. Trump is sending troops to Chicago, possibly even as I write this. The Salvadorian torture camp is now empty of US imports, but immigrants are now being sent to four African nations, most of which no one has heard of, and all of which are sketchy, to say the least. 

 

Congress has checked out, the Supreme Court (most of it) is licking its chops in delight silently and at a distance, the press is bending over backwards to pretend that “Mr. Trump” (The New York Times preserves this convention) has some plausible reason to act in what it calls “extrajudicial” fashion.

 

There are protests. There is resistance. But there is something I’ve never felt before, at least in myself. I am so thoroughly repulsed by the Trump administration that I feel an outsider in my own country. In fact, I wonder if it is my country, and if it is, whether I like anyone in it or anything about it. Trump’s disapproval rating is now up to 59%: it should be 95%.

 

I’m repulsed by my country, but I’m also repulsed by myself. I have made calls, I have written letters, I have protested whenever possible.

 

And I have made no difference whatsoever. 

 

Nor does the drop of water wash away granite. A mote of dust doesn’t make a house dirty. Time, I tell myself, takes time. In the meantime, I will go off to the store to buy my new fix. I will go to the Poet’s Passage and bind a couple of books. I will not save the American Experiment (the title of my 7^th grade history text) today. Still less tomorrow.

 

Who knows—maybe I will film the destroyer. But if I do, it won’t be because I think anything I write, or think, is of any importance. I’ll do it for myself, since the one fate I want to avoid (in addition to not dying of active alcoholism) is bitterness.

 

Ah, bitterness! It’s the oldest whore on the block, along with her sister, ingratitude. I succumb too often, and I’m angry at my compatriots, who have checked out or who don’t care.

 

In Alcoholics Anonymous, we go on and on about the dangers of resentment—it is, supposedly, the number one offender on the road to relapse. But resentments of actual people don’t get to me. It’s groups, institutions, and ideas that I resent.

 

I hated it when the teacher left the room when I was in grade school. I knew that the boys (always the boys!) would start making jokes, begin flying paper airplanes, and (given enough time) burn down the school. I waited for the click of teacherly heels returning to her classroom.

 

I’m resentful, and well on the way to bitterness. I can live in a world of bigots and bigotry. But what do I do about a country that either embraces it or shrugs its shoulder at it?

 

I’ve had enough, and I’m sick about it.

 

The problem is that they haven’t.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

Nah...

This is what I’m dealing with, this morning:

 

 

It’s The New York Times, and it’s an essay by someone called Oren Cass, and it would be easy to dismiss him as just a plain damn fool, in the words of my youth. But he’s young—barely out of his 20’s, by the look of his photo. He is, and I quote, “the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative economic think tank, and writes the newsletter Understanding America.”

 

I’m tempted to ask whether, in addition to understanding America, Mr. Cass understands Donald Trump—but really (and horribly) if you understand America, you understand Trump.

 

I think we think too much. Cass says, essentially, that we’ve now seen how very effectively Trump destroys things. He’s happy, presumably, that the government has been essentially hobbled. All of our agencies have been gutted, the Education Department no longer exists, the CDC is in turmoil with directors resigning left and right, and the Justice Department has become Trump’s enforcer. Mr. Cass thinks, he hopes, that the rebuilding of the government will begin soon, under the careful and seasoned hand of Donald Trump. That’s what we think will happen. That’s what should happen?  But will it?

 

Has it ever been about anything more than grift and sex? A normal politician has an agenda, which would involve a strategy or a plan. But Trump has no interest in structures, rules, or laws. That’s not where the money is: it’s in the chaos, which can be used to stoke fear. And fear is very much what Trump wants.

 

I think it’s about sex and about money because yesterday, ten victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell spoke out on Capitol Hill. They spoke out while Trump was doing his show in the Oval Office, this time with the president of….let’s see, Poland!

 

Or they tried to speak out, but they were drowned out (in the media) by Trump, who had nothing to say about Poland but plenty to say about this “Democratic hoax.” If Trump wants to change the topic, he should stop talking about it. But as for Mr. Cass, and all the other “intellectuals” who know about everything except real life—well, why don’t we summarize it?  

 

The Epstein / Maxwell survivors were drowned out as well by the flyover that Trump had arranged—ostensibly to honor a Polish pilot who died in an airshow. Forget the fact that the Poles, in fact, have a very honorable history of supporting the resistance efforts in World War II. The Poles had a wartime government in London; they also fought alongside the Allies in the Polish Armed Forces, which might have been a plausible justification for a flyover. At any rate, the victims of Epstein had to stop and gaze heavenward, no doubt suppressing cusswords at the same time.

 

Getting back to Mr. Cass, who was perhaps too young to have endured the first Trump administration—why don’t we stop the abstruse journeys into what we hope is the subtle mind of a political genius, and focus on the much-more-likely?

 

1.    Trump is a moron about anything related to the world or the nation

2.    Trump is a genius at sowing chaos

3.    Trump loves to fuck (or did)

4.    Trump loves to “make deals,” and thinks he’s good at it

5.    The Russians, as part of a decades-long strategy, identified a group of people who might be useful to them. 

6.    Trump was one of those guys

7.    The Russians also look for dirt, and while it can be financial, it’s often the oldest story in history—men away from home behaving badly

8.    The dirt the Russians have on Trump could be either financial or personal, or it could be both. In addition, the Russians may not have told Trump what they have over him, but are simply letting him sweat

9.    They had the dirt, now they had to get him to play. It wasn’t hard to convince Trump to get involved in politics, to run for president. It was how Putin got rich, and have I mentioned that the only gods in Trump’s pantry are sex and money?

10. The first administration was marred by having adults in the room. True, some of them were crooked as hell (Bill Barr springs to mind) but they were adults. Pam Bondi? Pete Hegseth? C’mon…

11.Trump lost the 2020 election, and no adult could ever go work for him again. That was perfect for Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who could then install J. D. Vance (who has done nothing professionally except be Thiel’s lapdog), institute a theocracy / oligarchy, gut the government and strip it of its regulatory power.

12.Trump has been happy to go along, and anyone who needs sneakers, cryptocurrency, watches, or Naugahyde bibles has a wonderful variety of Trump merch

13.Trump is now senile—which Thiel and Musk certainly knew months before the election. They got him elected, they’ll use him to destroy the government, and then they’ll throw him under the bus. 

14.The American people have been lied to, yes—but let’s not pretend we’re not culpable. We all saw January 6^th, and the Trump administration has been nothing but transparent. For a dishonest man, Trump has been remarkably consistent with following through on plans. Project 2025 was executed perfectly. We’re all set to go. Democracy is out, Trump is in. And for the people who want to hate, that’s just fine.

15.Democracy is over, and it didn’t even last 250 years

 

Mr. Cass must have a clever, sophisticated worldview, but does Trump? We’ve never gotten him right, because we’ve never been able to see him as he is. He’s a fraud, he’s a moron, and he’s not dangerous. Until, of course, we let him have his way. Every politician has recognized this, and every Republican has caved. And now, as Susan Collins (Republican senator from Maine) says, we’re all living in fear.

 

With good reason. One of her colleagues got “arrested” and put into handcuffs. The governor of Virginia had his house torched while he was sleeping in it. Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota are shot by assassins posing as cops. The military is “patrolling” the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. 

 

The Epstein victims say that they are creating a list, and I think that’s great. I’d like to compile a list, too. And I’d like to start it today, and finish it by tomorrow, at 5 PM. I’d like a list of every American who voted for Trump, who supported Trump, who relished all the pettiness and the retribution.

 

I’d like a list of all the persons who support President Trump—right now. Yes or no—are you in or out?

 

I’m not giving myself the option of saying, ‘well, I just didn’t know! I was utterly shocked and horrified when the true nature of Donald Trump’s crimes was revealed.”

 

Nah.

 

The Germans knew nothing about the death camps?

 

Nah, burning flesh stinks.

 

Alligator Alcatraz was an aberration?

 

Nah, it was all over the news.

 

We knew he was a crook, we knew he was dishonest, but we really thought that God had chosen this imperfect vessel to usher in the glorious days of his Second Coming?

 

Nah.

 

Wasn’t God, it was Putin.