Not Saving Democracy Today

Yesterday was a day when it all fell apart. I had written a post, gone to Walmart to buy cardstock and ice cream, and then come home. A wave of fatigue hit, and I slept for an hour. Then the fatigue turned to weakness and exhaustion, which was especially bad when I stood. It was annoying, because I was also peeing like crazy.

 

It was time for the alcoholic discount, which basically means I can do anything I like (barring illegal activity) as long as I go to bed sober. I can waste a day; I can’t waste a life.

 

So I spent the afternoon rereading Travels with Charley and discovered that though I had read the book several times thirty or forty years ago, I still knew whole passages virtually verbatim. I knew about the drunk / hungover vet that Steinbeck took Charley to see, but had forgotten that it was in Spokane. I remember about the young man living with his father—the kid wanted to be a hair stylist (this was North Dakota, perhaps), the father was scornful. Steinbeck was in the middle, as we all were, in a sense. Without saying a word to suggest it, the picture of a young, confused, homosexual-but-doesn’t-know-it-yet (or does he?) boy who wants the intimacy of women emerged plainly. For me, at least, now. Back then, did I pick that up?

 

I’ve probably watched Downton Abbey as much as I’ve read Travels, but really, I remember nothing of the series. Is it that I was drunk at the time? That I was older?

 

I have another theory, that conveniently excuses the fact that I’m an old drunk. There’s surprisingly little research on this topic, but neurologically, it seems that reading books activates different parts of your brain than reading the same text on screen. That, at least, is what I remembered from when I was anguishing over the fact that I couldn’t proofread a book I had written on the computer. I had to go off and print the damn thing, filled with grammatical / syntactical errors and all. Why couldn’t I just do it at the computer?

 

I can’t find the article, of course, but I have lived the experience, and yesterday was no exception. Except for the fact that I was trotting off every ten minutes to stand fainting and breathless over the toilet, it was a delightful afternoon. Here I am, sober, and back in the fight. And here’s what I did find, that backs up (sort of) my conclusion:

 

“There’s not much [neuroscientific research] on the reading of actual texts,” Mangen says. However, existing research does offer some clues. In a 2009 study, the marketing research company Millward Brown found the brain processes physical and digital materials differently. Participants viewed advertisements on a screen and on a printed card while undergoing an fMRI scan. Print materials were more likely to activate the the medial prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, both involved in processing emotions. Reading print also generated more activity in the parietal cortex, which processes visual and spatial cues.

 

Reading a book, of course, is utterly different from reading at a computer. But what about reading on my iPad? I can take it, open the Kindle application, sprawl on the couch, drink some coffee—and the experience would be just the same as if it were a book, not some electronic device Steve Jobs dreamed that we all needed. They’re basically the same size—if anything, the iPad is lighter and easier to manipulate.

 

Not so, and if I have the patience to do anything—like sit down at regular times during my week to scramble / unscramble my thoughts onto a screen that may someday be a book—it’s probably because of reading books. They slowed me down, and they allowed me to do that most wonderful thing—mull.

 

To mull (the word, by the way, comes from the Latin verb “to chew,” and cropped up for the first time in the 19^th century) is just another word for woolgathering (another wonderful word). I learned it from my mother, who taught it to me over breakfast at her house in the woods. She and I needed to titrate the level of caffeine to nutrients before any speech was possible—and so I watched her, as I drank my coffee and she ate her yogurt and granola. She would peer into the middle distance of her woods, and enter a meditative state that even I could feel, groggy and often hungover. The French would call it une rêverie, but it was a working dream, if that’s possible. It made the rest of her day possible, and on those rare occasions when the rêverie was impossible, we all felt it.

 

I do it still, for twenty minutes or so, after the cat has been taken care of and some minimal grooming gets done. Then I go off to my meeting, and I can face the day. Are any kids woolgathering, these days? Or are they too busy with their phones?

 

I learned a couple of new words that Steinbeck obviously assumed I knew—“tarn,” which is a small mountain lake, and “sough,” the sound of wind through trees. I remembered a different time, that we imagined would never end. I thought of how unconnected we were, and how hard and wonderful it was, at various times.

 

Steinbeck was lonely, which is part of the journey. He couldn’t call, of course, because calls and telegrams at that time meant that someone had died (telegram) or that somebody was near death in the hospital (that was a call). Phone calls cost FIVE DOLLARS to call New York for three minutes. A local call was a dime. (Hamburgers were 50 cents at Mc

Donalds...)

 

So Steinbeck wrote letters to his friends and his wife , as he said, to spread the loneliness around. He had been bored, but he may have been something else, as he parked his van by the side of a tarn (we all know that word, don’t we?) and her the sough through the trees.

 

In fact, the sough by the tarn must have been especially (brace yourself) “impactful*” because it was surely in the dark, alone, in nature. He was probably out walking Charley, whose bladder is just as bad as mine. How many people have spent the night alone, in a cabin or tent, in the woods? How many people know that deer, when they are moving slowly, calmly, often pause and snort? It was a primeval sound, I thought, when I first heard it. And even though the sound may be exactly the same, emerging from my cell phone under fluorescent lights, the experience wouldn’t.

 

Very few people know what darkness is, nowadays.

 

Very few people have heard true silence.

 

And very few of us, still, have had the experience so familiar to our ancestors—being alone, unprotected, in total darkness while hearing… an animal? 

 

A MAN?

 

A MAN WITH A GUN????

 

For many more millennia than cell phones have been around, men and women have cowered in the darkness, assailed (hopefully) by nothing more terrible than their imaginations (and that was quite enough). They lived with fear as much as boredom. They learned courage, perhaps, from the terror, and the relief of seeing it drain away into the dawn.

 

I should be courageous, too—since I have passed the night and entered the day alive. I’ll also know fear, of course, and might well feel it if I were in Los Angeles. There, 300 National Guard soldiers remain from their early deployment in June (it’s now September), during which time the legal system has been grinding ever so slowly. But now we have a decision from a judge who happens to be the younger brother of a Supreme Court justice, now retired.

 

The judge, Charles Breyer, swatted Trump down in the first two paragraphs of the 52-page ruling. He said that Trump was trying to create a police state, and that the whole damn thing was illegal. It was a wonderful, wonderful victory indeed for all of us who would read, comprehend, and obey a court order.

 

Will Trump?

 

If he’s smart, he will, I think, but who am I to say? No one—and I can tell you that because I now know a lot about The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. I’ve never read the book, but it’s clear that I have to. The very fact that I am uncomfortable with power, and am horrified by the apparently clinical and value-free appraisal of what it is, how to get it, and how to keep it…well, I should read it. I could join quite a diverse company: Tony Blair (no surprise) and a rap singer called 50 Cent. 50 Cent attributed his phenomenal success to Machiavelli, since the world of rap music is apparently even more fraught than 16^th century Florence.

 

Who knew?

 

So now I have a book to bind, and a music clip to listen to that is not Palestrina, something that would be utterly familiar and pleasing to Machiavelli’s ears . (And the Missa Papae Marcelli is glorious.) And I will probably know the answer to the question: can Trump be Trump and still hang on to power? Does he have the cunning wit and the self-discipline, to make a strategic retreat? Or will he send even MORE troops in, just because?

 

Whatever—I may never know. I was terrified when I heard the abrupt snort of deer ripping the silence in the pitch-dark woods. I didn’t know what it was.

 

Today, I know it’s Trump, and I’m just as scared.     

 

Far more, actually. 

(*The word "impact" is a noun, not a verb or an adjective.)

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Tuesday Morning Thoughts

Well, the big question is whether democracy is like virginity. Once you’ve lost it, can you ever really get it back again?

 

Or do you have to lose it to know that you had it?

 

And do you value it more, having found out how fugitive and fleeting it is?

 

Questions for a Tuesday morning after a Labor Day weekend…and of course, questions I can’t answer. I could, with a heavy heart, look toward Germany. The Germans bought into their myth, as we have bought into ours. They were the great civilizing nation: they brought us Beethoven and Bach, Thomas Mann and 
Goethe.

 

In the days of my American Exceptionalism youth, Germany’s descent into madness was both inexplicable and unforgiveable. You don’t erect concentration camps like Auschwitz, and the work of every German was to get up and do something about it. All the time. Until the concentration camp is shut down, the prisoners are sent to rest on the French Riviera, and the government apologizes fulsomely.

 

Wonderful—and what am I doing about Alligator Alcatraz?

 

It was exactly what I feared. There’s not much left of Trump, beyond the bitterness and the hate. There’s certainly no plan or even a guiding set of principles. At this point, Trump is nothing but a pawn for the very rich, and they’re not fools. They have moved with breathtaking speed, and they have won.

 

Tuesday morning after Labor Day, and what are we worried about? That Trump will send in the troops to Chicago, just as he has sent them into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The troops are there because the cities are “awash” with violence, in theory, but we all know what crime is. Crime, to a Republican mind, is anything that will lead to the removal of poor and black / brown people from sight.

 

I have gone to New York a couple of times a year for most of my adult life. My brother and sister live there, on the upper West Side of Manhattan—I remember New York in the 80’s and 90’s. The city now is Disneyland compared to then.

 

What’s wrong with New York, and with the entire country, is income inequality—though that may be only the symptom, not the disease. Two years ago, I witnessed the most chilling scene on the corner of 110^th Street and Broadway. Because of its scale, that part of New York has amazing supermarkets and stores. Westside Market is one of them, and the amount and quality of the merchandise is astonishing. The store’s customer base is huge, since you can put a lot of high-powered doctors, lawyers, and musicians in those high-rise apartment buildings. So it’s not surprising that the store sells ten different types of smoke salmon, nor is it any wonder that I want to try them all, and that I can’t. The high-powered doctors and lawyers have considerably more purchasing power than I do.

 

But wait—maybe it’s not the time or place to get too sorry for myself, because outside of the store, directly on the sidewalk, five feet directly in front the store, a man is kneeling.

 

Yeah—he’s kneeling, but it’s more than that. His hands are clasped together in prayer, his eyes are cast upwards, and the only word that comes to mind is “supplication.”

 

He’s an older, black man. His possessions are scattered all around him. He kneels motionless for ten minutes while I watch him.

 

I am the only one watching, as people swerve automatically past him to get into the store. The man is an obstacle, nothing more—they’re busy with their lives, and I get that. Whatever is wrong with the life of this man—well, it’s not their problem. They have kids to raise and briefs to submit. They’re just trying to get to the supermarket, for God’s sake.

 

A person stops, coming out of the supermarket, and gives the man a sandwich and a Coke. The man pays no attention.

 

I get this, too. If you come at me with a problem, let it at least be about something practical. I can buy a sandwich; I could even take you home and give you a bed for the night. But I cannot, I absolutely cannot, give you what I think you need. I can’t listen to your problems, or share in your pain. I can fill your stomach but not your heart.

 

I “pay” for this by feeling guilty. I pay for this by buying sandwiches when I should be providing something that demands too much from me: real compassion. I operate, still, with the vestiges of a moral system. But can that moral system exist in this world? Can I cozen the weak and hearten the defeated and still raise the kids and write the briefs? 

 

The people hurry into the store, and I can tell you why: they’re New Yorkers, and they do everything in a hurry. But isn’t there something else? We are great at not seeing, and a man kneeling on a street corner would be invisible, of course. But a man kneeling in front of Westside Market is impossible to ignore. The fact that I have to veer, and look away (or even buy him a sandwich) tells me that I’m uncomfortable.

 

They hurry, the New Yorkers, and they’re uncomfortable, as I am, with someone whose needs are so much greater than mine, whose life is so much more difficult, who haven’t received the gifts that I’ve received, and often not appreciated. But sadly, not all the New Yorkers are operating on even that minimal scale. Nor is much of America, at this point.

 

We have always equated poverty with laziness, bad living, stupid choices. And we have always been tempted to say, “fuck you” to the people who make a demand (or so we think) of our compassion. Nobody stuck a gun to my head and made me drink a bottle of scotch every day. Nobody compelledyou to go out and put the needle in your arm. And nobody has to feel bad because I fucked up my life.

 

Oh come on, it’s worse than that.

 

Poverty is a sin in America, and what is sin? It’s something to despise, to avoid, to shun. Your job is to get off the sidewalk, shower and shave, get a job, and run your life the way I’m running mine.

 

Fuck you, man-kneeling-in-front-of-Westside Market!

 

The “cleanup” that Trump is promising has nothing to do with crime and only partially to do with racism. It doesn’t even have to do with eliminating “trash,” human or otherwise.

 

Trump offers a universe where your opponents are sick and evil. Not just that, but a universe where feeling sad for a man kneeling in front of a store deserves your scorn, not your pity. Trump has not only allowed people to be mean and selfish, he has applauded them for doing so. Here’s the Christmas message for me, from my president:

 

Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to              obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing," Trump declared on Truth Social. 

"Also, to the 37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden. I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky "souls" but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL! We had the Greatest Election in the History of our Country, a bright light is now shining over the U.S.A. and, in 26 days, we will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS!" he added.

 

He was down with this, and I am down with this. We can be enemies, and we can hate each other. You can tear down the homeless encampments under the bridges and over the steam vents. You can send me to Alligator Alcatraz, though it would be a horrifying waste of money.

 

You can say that I’m just as bad as you, and mea culpa—I’ll feel bad about this, too. I hate what you are doing, and I hate the way you think.

 

But I’m not sure that I hate you the same way.

 

I don’t have to—I’m not working off any guilt.

 

The man kneeling in front of Westside Market wasn’t just kneeling. He was raising the middle finger to all of us, rushing into the store to get our smoked salmon. Buying him sandwiches. Assuaging our guilt. He was saying, really, that my life is not OK if your life is not.

 

He was claiming his right to exist. On his knees. In front of a supermarket. You have your kids to raise and your legal briefs to write. And if all I have done is to make you mutter, look the other way, and rush faster into the supermarket…well, so be it.

 

And we hate it.

 

So the troops are marching into Chicago, and they’ll be there for 29 days, since anything over 30 days means you have to pay benefits like overtime and health insurance. They’ll bulldoze the encampments and move the homeless somewhere else. The city will be no safer, though it might be cleaner.

 

And you won’t have to look at the horrifying sight of a man kneeling in front of a food store in one of the richest neighborhoods in the richest country on earth.

 

And you won’t have to look at yourself, rushing into the store to buy food that will not only sustain you but delight you. You won’t have to confront the inequity of having been given so much—a good education, great parents, material goods and possessions. 

 

You won’t have to veer out of the path of the praying figure.

 

You can just send him to Hell.

 

After all, the president did….  

 

 

 

    

Notes on Childhood

Simply put, however badly I am doing my adulthood, my childhood was worse.

 

For months, several years ago, I considered doing a book about Nicholas Coleman Pickard, my grandmother’s grandmother. I had been wading through the family history, trying to find out who everybody else was. In the process, I found a clue to who I am.

 

Consider: my grandmother was born in 1883. Queen Victoria died in 1901: my grandmother would have been eighteen when Her Supreme Majesty (a little nod to my husband, who takes this all very seriously) died. But the Victorian Age—however you define it—lingered in the United States, and all of the colonies much longer. 

 

And so my mother was raised by a Victorian, and in a Victorian house. Or at least, something close. And then she was raising me, in the late 50’s and 60’s. Which meant:

 

Rules: lots of rules. I got up at exactly the same time and ate the same meal and said the same things and went to school on foot, which was perfectly safe, although I now know that it wasn’t. But because we didn’t know it wasn’t safe, it was—and if you can understand that, then you understand the 50’s. The classroom had the damn flag of the United States (we’re coming to that) and we said allegiance to it. The little desks were magical affairs: the seat was joined to the desk, which opened up so that you could store all your books, papers and school supplies in there. And whatever else you might want to stick in there, because I had found these neat leaves on the way to school and I thought I could use them if I had a science report. To stick on the cover. Which needs to look really good, since the report is going to be pretty “C” material. Why? Because I will have spent all my time making the cover (much more fun), and not doing the report, and if you can understand that…

 

…then you understand me.

 

So there are leaves in there, and also the orange that my mother put into the lunch sack a couple of weeks ago because I really need Vitamin C. Or because my mother needed someone to eat the damn orange, since she had bought it and now she has it and nobody else is eating the orange so here it is. In my sack. And not just an orange, but a MORAL OBLIGATION! Because oranges are not cheap—not in the midwestern United States in the year 1965. No, they actually are making a transition from being the rarity of my grandmother’s day (her one Christmas gift—HER ONLY CHRISTMAS GIFT-- was often just a simple orange, which she would peel reverentially and then section carefully, and then offer to her dear brothers and sisters the pieces. They would say no, of course, but how dear, how sweet of your blessed grandmother to think of them BEFORE HERSELF. She didn’t expect thirty brightly and expertly wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree! She didn’t wonder if this year you would actually get a BIKE, and not some stupid underwear. OHHH, YOUR GRANDMOTHER…..

 

The problem being that I hate oranges. Actually, I don’t—they taste good on my mouth. But I don’t like peeling oranges and I don’t know why. I just don’t. My hands get sticky and it’s too much work….

 

TOO MUCH WORK! WHEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAITED AN ENTIRE YEAR…..

 

So I can’t throw the orange away, because that would be like spitting in my grandmother’s face—and I really love my grandmother—and now the orange has assumed the moral weight of the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and every other sacred text ever written or indeed ever to be written by man.

 

And giving it away?

 

HAH!

 

So of course I put the orange away in my desk, as something that I will definitely eat when I have achieved the moral purity and devoutness of soul which the orange demands. Which means I am waiting for nirvana and did I mention that the orange appeared two weeks ago? Or maybe more, because I really don’t remember when I put the orange in the desk. But it is sort of odd that every time I open my desk, people start saying, “Phew, what stinks around here?”

 

Well, well—guess some other people haven’t achieved nirvana either! Picky, picky! Always have to have their noses—quite literally—in other people’s business!

 

Though it is odd that I actually haven’t seen that orange. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be an orange at all.

 

Though I certainly can smell something.

 

Anyway, I probably can’t see the orange because in addition to the leaves, there are some other things as well. Newspapers, since some kids have started to wrap their books in newspapers, and is that cool or is that nerdy? Not sure, but one day when I was verging toward the “cool” end of the judgment, I grabbed some newspapers, just in case. When inspiration comes, you know….

 

So there’s that and several other lunches as well, because the peanut butter sandwich that I negotiated for as an unrelenting part of my lunch in place of the damned fried eggs my mother wanted to give me for breakfast ….well, I’m tired of peanut butter sandwiches. And I’m still fighting the issue of those damned eggs. Why did I have to eat them every damn morning? Who set that rule? Why not sugared doughnuts, which is what Sven’s mother gives him, sometimes.

 

SVEN’S MOTHER IS SWEDISH.

 

Well! That answers that, since we are Norwegian, and the Norwegians hate the swedes (lower case mistaken but now intentional) because the swedes stole all of our iron and then forged steel and then became a bigshot in the neighborhood and conquered Norway and held us in hideous subjection for years until dear Queen Maud—who was, by the way, the daughter of her Supreme Majesty—married Olaf or Knut or somebody and let us be independent as well as loyal subjects to Her Majesty.

 

SO! WE’LL HEAR NO MORE ABOUT THE SWEDES!

 

Anyway, that explains the other lunches with the peanut butter sandwiches and the leaves and the newspaper and the orange, which is in there, obviously, but not. In fact, there’s a whole lot of stuff in my desk, not just the ghost or the divine essence of the orange past or…

 

…it really does kind of stink, doesn’t it?

 

Oh, and the teacher, Miss Steensland (who I like because she is—guess what!—Norwegian) has smelled it too. And now she is telling the class how proud, how very proud, she is of this class, because we are the neatest class she has ever taught (and she started back in the days of dear Queen Maud). Nor does she mean “neat” in the sense of “cool.” No, she means orderly, well-arranged, tidy, clean, spotless, immaculate, without stain or blemish and…do I need to get the thesaurus? So that’s why we are about to have…

 

DESK INSPECTION!

 

Oh fuck, I say, even though I can’t say it because I didn’t know the word because I am eight. But I’m saying it now, still cowering at the thought of Miss Steensland (who will undoubtedly tell Queen Maud, who very likely will include it in one of the many, many letters that she writes to her dear mother, HER SUPREME MAJESTY)

 

So the blood is pounding in my ear and my mouth is dry and my palms are sweaty but wait. I’ve played this rodeo before so I quickly arrange all the books—which have shredded leaves all over them and in them (don’t know how that happened)—in one organized pile. Then I find the one largest and emptiest dead lunch bag, and put all the other dead lunches into that bag. So now I just have one “lunch,” which I will toss after lunch break is over. I probably won’t eat anything at all today, which is a little upsetting, but I won’t upset Miss Steensland and the Queen and Her Supreme Majesty. Who is very, very happy because Mindy Peckham has presented her with just the cleanest desk, and all of her colored pencils are arranged in order by their place in the color spectrum. So that when Mindy is consulting her color chart, which she has carefully taped to the inside of the desk drawer (such a nice touch), all she has to do….

 

OH, Miss Steensland is so happy!

 

So she moves away from Mindy and now is only two desks away from me, and so I squeeze the damn lunches together as hard as I can and that’s when I hear something plop and…

 

…it’s the damn orange!

 

Yes, now seriously shrunken. It looks, I observe, strangely like a walnut, though blacker and a lot smellier. Really putrid, in fact.

 

Whew, does it stink!

 

Of course, it could also be a shrunken pygmy brain….

 

So I’m thinking about that, and then I realize that Miss Steensland is standing over me. 

 

“And what do you have, Marc?”

 

So I remember salvation, which appears here in the form of a hole, an inch in diameter, which is cut into the metal bottom of every desk in the entire world, including mine. So I grab the shrunken orange / walnut / pygmy brain and I stick it in the hole and put the bag of dead lunches (and some newspaper and leaves that really did get shredded, somehow) over the orange and I slam my fist down.

 

Hoping it will fall, I will catch it, and put it in my crotch.

 

It doesn’t fall.

 

It gets stuck in the hole.

 

Which Miss Steensland can see and so can all of the class, because she has summoned them all over to look with horror at what a messy desk I have.

 

And now, I have not only failed in my obligation of the Holy Orange, more sacred than all the prayers and mediatations that have been offered up to Christ, Buddha, Om, Mohammed and the Great Spirit. Now, I have descended to the temporal level, the everyday level, and I have killed any joy that Miss Steensland might have had in her decades-long teaching career. Not to mention…

 

DEAR QUEEN MAUD AND HER SUPREME MAJESTY!

 

But no time to think of that, because guess what! Miss Steensland has had to do the one thing that in HER ENTIRE LIFE AS A TEACHER she has never had to do. And there is now the maintenance man, standing over me, and he is watching me empty my desk of the books and the pencils and all the stuff that should be there (including that color chart that we all made and that dear Mindy…). And now he is lifting the damn desk, with its newspapers and leaves and dead lunches and most especially the more-and-more odiferous orange. There is no hope for the desk--“you’ll  never get the stink out of the wood,”--the maintenance guy tells Miss Steensland. So he’s taking it straight out to the dumpster.

 

Oh, and they give me a new desk!

 

Can you imagine!

 

A perfectly good new desk to a terrible boy who destroyed his old desk and the lives of his teachers, ancestors, Queen Maud and Her Supreme Majesty.

 

That was my childhood.

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

  

 

On Killers and Covers

I asked him what it was like to be nineteen, since I was curious and very far from nineteen. I was nineteen in 1975, and that was half a century ago. And he was an engaging 19-year-old who had come to ask me why I was binding a book at a poetry slam.

 

“It sucks, man,” said Pedro (I had learned his name by then).

 

OK—that part hadn’t changed much. It sucked for me, too, but for entirely different reasons. My life, I imagined at age 19, was in ruins. I didn’t know that that was the usual state of things: my life would be in ruins for as long as I let it be in ruins, or for as long as it kept bothering me. The first step in having a “perfect” life turned out to be in not caring whether you were doing it right, whether it was working, whether it made any sense. 

 

But I was interested in Pedro, since he doesn’t have now, apparently, what I had and took for granted.

 

The day after I posed the question to Pedro, a transgendered person poked his automatic weapon through an open window in a church in Minneapolis. The killer’s name was Robin Westman, and she had apparently attended the school attached to Annunciation Catholic Church. Here’s the yearbook photo from when Robin was Robert.

 

 

The Robert Westman became Robin Westman, but there must have been a lot of changes beyond the sex reassignment. Robin killed herself after shooting the kids (and injuring 17 others), so we can’t ask her—what happened? We can’t satisfy our need to explain what is, at first glance, the inexplicable.

 

There might be no explanation, or it might be that we can’t bear to look at what we’ve become. Because it wasn’t Robert Westman or Robin Westman or anybody else that killed the kids and maimed the aged. It was the United States pulling the trigger. It was what we had become that killed us, or will kill us in the uncertain days to come.

 

We might as well celebrate it, since we don’t want to do anything about it. The solution is simple, and we all know it. The solution is to get the guns off the streets, and out of the hands of Robin. But apparently the only thing in the constitution that has any worth is the skewed reading of the Second Amendment, with its supposed assurance that any American at any moment has the right to grab an unbelievably powerful gun and shoot children.

 

We could prevent this.

 

We choose not to.

 

We like to kill kids.

 

If we could accept it, we might be able to change it. Instead, we look at the killer and find the clues to our liking that will explain why the (inevitably) quiet, polite kid went bad.

 

I say—get the guns off the street.

 

The Trump people say—see? Transgendered! Antisemitic posts in a journal! Calls for the death of Trump!

 

Wonderful—but why was the journal written (apparently) in English but using Cyrillic letters? Is there any meaning to it? Did he want to hide his thoughts from anyone stumbling onto his journal?

 

Our need to find “meaning” in this massacre is the problem. Pedro, the nineteen-year-old I spoke to at the poetry slam, grew up in a world where a shotgun poking through a church window was, if not normal or expected, certainly imaginable. I would have been going up to the gun nozzle, puzzled at what it was, and if anyone sticking the thing through a window needed help. Pedro would have been barricading the door and diving under desks.

 

Pedro was interested in books, and we talked for a bit about book covers. His favorite—or at least one of his favorites—was well known to me. Here it is:

 

 

The cover has entered into the collective conscience, apparently. It’s arresting, certainly, and I have used it for the cover of the slipcase that I put books into. In fact, I hate book covers, because they’re a symbol, to me, of how warped our culture has become.

 

Books are commercial items that must be produced (happy to help there!), targeted for marketing, directed towards an audience, and finally festooned with anything that will get the book off the shelf (hopefully passing through a cash register in the process). The back cover is filled with blurbs from The New York Times or from notable persons. The image on the front cover is curated and captivating. The cover, in short, is all about selling.

 

I want my books to be beautiful, not effective. The cover needs to protect the book and be pleasing to the eye. The spine—which I enclose in sheepskin—should feel soft in your hand. The pages should be thick. There should be—and God knows in my books there will be—a host of imperfections that speak of human hands. True—at some point the book will leave your hands and be put on a shelf with its brothers. I’ll print a bit of brown cardboard stock and attach the author’s name and title to the spine, but that’s about it.

 

Pedro didn’t ask me about cover jackets, and didn’t have to hear my screed / screech against them. A couple of decades ago, cover jackets were all the rage, and collectors paid twice as much for a book in bad condition with a cover jacket than they paid for the same book in excellent condition but without a cover jacket. It made sense, since most collectors don’t read. They just collect.

 

It's a wonderful thing, of course, for the people who read. The people who are interested in the book. The people who (rightly, in my view) detach the cover jacket and pitch it.

 

There were at least three approaches to book covers. For most of the history of books, covers were meant to be functional and beautiful. A marbled page on back and front, a leather spine—that was it. Watch any BBC history documentary filmed in an ancient library—the books are sober and drab. They were beautiful when young and the colors were fresh. They become somber and dignified as time passes.

 

There was a brief moment when hard covers became beautiful, and when some sort of détente was arranged between commerce and art. It was the Victorian age, of course, and here’s a nice example.

 

 

It’s beautiful, it’s functional, and it took a bit more time and effort. Besides the design, it had to be printed on book cloth and put on the boards of the cover. It stayed there as long as it had a cover. It was not some piece of paper that was an advertisement posing as a cover. It might even have been art itself, or suggestive of it. Here’s the 1855 cover:

 

 

Dude—the guy’s NAME doesn’t even appear on the cover. Apparently everybody in 1855—or at least everybody in 1855 who wanted to buy Leaves of Grass—knew that Walt Whitman had written the damn thing. And nobody suggested that the ornamentation on the capital letters was—perhaps—just a bit distracting, if not actually indecipherable. Speaking of which, the “of” doesn’t amount to much either.

 

But I support it, though the Victorian book cover had the same fate occur to it as occurred to the rest of society at large. It became cheap and commercialized, and in the end, we were all buying books that looked like this:

 

 

My God, did Whitman really get to be that old? Did they exhume the body to take a picture of it? I know William Carlos Williams (who wrote the introduction, as if the book weren’t enough) and I have heard of Malcolm Cowley (whose blurb escaped the back cover and moved to the front). The little blurb for The Modern Library is distracting. I would decrease the picture size and put a proper border around it. I would increase the size of the bottom textbox with Whitman and Williams’ names. I would make all sorts of adjustments, but am I a graphic artist or a bookbinder? 

 

I might—and often have—come up with something far worse than the image above.

 

So screw it. I am not my clothes, and the book is not its cover. We just have to be presentable.

 

Pedro had that conversation with me, and then drifted off into the poetry. I met him later in the evening, and he was with his father.

 

A very nice guy.

 

Younger than I am.

 

We spoke, we said farewell, and I left with a nice memory. A father with his son at a poetry slam.

 

Robin Westman had parents too, and they opened the door to the police, who combed the house looking for clues to answer the question. The parents left the house that had sheltered the killer as the police looked for motives.

 

Pedro’s father took him to a poetry slam. Westman’s parents, unbelievably, seemed to have left the house to the police and found themselves sitting on the curb. The neighbors saw them there, looking blankly at the street in front of them.

 

Looking for a parade that never came.