Thursday, July 17, 2025

Wholly in the Hole

Well, let’s see…

 

There’s the rule of law, the United States Constitution, due process, the concept of a civilian armed forces, bombing a foreign country without provocation, the separation of powers, birthright citizenship and the threat to remove US citizenship from Trump’s perceived enemies and imprison them in a concentration camp in the Everglades….

 

And then there’s sex!

 

Well, I had it wrong, all these years. I was focusing on the stupid stuff and ignoring the big, crucial issue, which is that children everywhere in the world are in imminent danger of being seized and sold into sexual slavery and torture at the hands of a very small, very rich gang of people…OK, let’s called them moguls.

 

Yup, this is what caused millions of index fingers to press the lever down over Trump’s name in the voting booth. They said it was about his handling of the economy, though the tariff idea didn’t excite them. They said it was about Mexican gang members giving Fentanyl to Sunday school children, instead of migrants picking lettuce, which is what they do. They said it was about cutting fraud in big government, as the unheralded flash floods swept away hundreds of Christian girls in Texas. 

 

They knew all along that Trump was a fraud. 

 

I have sat on two park benches with two Trump supporters. True, they were both alcoholics, but well into recovery. But the alcoholism was about the only thing they shared. Victor was a millionaire living in Puerto Rico to take advantage of the tax breaks. He was a man of insight, and I listened carefully to what he had to say in meetings. He was so insightful, in fact, that I considered asking him to be my sponsor. In AA, that’s a big deal.

 

SJ was a mother of teenage / young adult children. She had lived as the submissive wife in a Pentecostal sect—her husband had been the leader. She was living with her father, on Social Security and Medicare / Medicaid, working as a day care teacher / attendant. She completely dismissed Project 2025 as something Trump would never do—even though she also said Trump was a liar.

 

Oh, Victor also said that as well.

 

They knew he was a fraud, they knew he was a liar.

 

But that wasn’t important.

 

He hated the same people they hated—that was the important point.

 

He hated the elites, which is whom they hated. The second point? They hated the elites because he had told them to hate the elites. 

 

The elites—who are they?

 

ME!

 

It’s true, or possibly true. Granted, I don’t feel “elite,” by which I mean I spend a fair amount of time wondering which is more important today—getting my cat’s sinuses repaired or my air conditioning healed. Or the other way around. I don’t know, just as I don’t know how to pay for both, or possibly even one.

 

“Elite,” in short, doesn’t take the bus past the Salvation Army on his way to an AA meeting every morning. Elite doesn’t have holes in his tennis shoes and wet feet (also smelly socks, for which I apologized in The Poet’s Passage). Elite doesn’t wonder when the bus system in Puerto Rico will finally start charging fares.

 

By definition, I am not elite.

 

But wait!

 

I sit in a calm, poetic space and bind books according to traditional practices. The books have subdued, subtle covers, and I listen to Orlando di Lasso (a Renaissance composer) as I make my books.

 

OK—so now it’s looking bad. It’s looking as if I’ve been elite all these years without knowing it. I thought I was just lucky, and wasn’t grateful enough to appreciate it.

 

Wrong again.

 

And I was wrong about the Trump supporters, too. I thought they were good people who had been lied to. Scott Tucker and Laura Ingraham give me hives, of course, but I get why people listen to them.

 

But Scott and Laura had nothing to do with shaping the opinions of the Trump supporters, any more than the cheerleaders are actually moving the ball over the goal post (or whatever it is). 

 

I could do the Asimov quote that crops up on Facebook from time to time. Hey, let’s do it!

 



 

Oh.

 

Is that all?

 

Nah—I don’t think so. I think anti-intellectualism is only part of it. I think the American psyche—if there is such a thing—has a big chip on its shoulder. If the Pacific Ocean hadn’t gotten in the way, dammit, there’s no telling how far the American West would have expanded, so desperate were we to get away from our neighbors. We’ve never been able to live with one another—half of the early colonists moved to Canada rather than join their rag-tailed compatriots in the Revolutionary War.

 

Wait—that’s not it either.

 

I think it’s more about a way of looking at life, and that way of looking at life has nothing to do with riches or experience or education. For all his billions, there’s no poorer man than Donald Trump. When his “friends” pick up Trump’s calls, it’s fear, not love, that motivates them. I may take the bus, but little kids stroll past me at the Passage and ask, “what are you doing?”

 

“I’m making a notebook.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Lady told me to do it.”

 

Lady, busy painting houses, raises her hand and waves.

 

“Why?

 

“Because she wanted a notebook.”

 

The parents may have some questions, of course, but they’re more than happy to let their child watch somebody do something as insane as trying to make a book. Some of them even buy the notebooks, and then we’re all happy.

 

We liberals live in this world—a world where you may have to take the bus but you get to make stuff and talk to kids. 

 

I’m now going to say what I’ve been thinking.

 

We embrace life.

 

We don’t fear life, or get angry because somebody else’s is better or easier. We bind books and smile at kids. We’re OK with the prairie, the wide vibrant sky, the fields that stretch into the next state and beyond.

 

We don’t need the rabbit hole (or prairie dog burrows).

 

But if you do…

 

If by any chance you’re a Trump voter stumbling onto a different blog…

 

And if the warm sun and cooling breezes of the open prairie are really too threatening to you….

 

And if you really, really need the musty darkness of the rabbit hole….

 

Then here is John Mark Dougan, the ex-Palm Beach cop who has the 700 CDs on Epstein and friends doing bad shit to poor innocent girls.

 

Enjoy—I guess!

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Down the Hole Gently

The Uber pulled up, which meant that American democracy—or at least what I thought I should do about it—had to wait. Jeanne had to wait as well, since getting a 68-year-old body and three shopping bags and 15 lbs of cat litter into a grey Ford Explorer took all my attention.

 

When I got home, it all looked too crazy even to contemplate.

 

Let me put it all in a list form--rungs on the ladder, perhaps, of this particular rabbit hole. You can see where you sign off.

 

1.    There’s a law enforcement guy named John Mark Dougan, who worked for the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to 2009

2.    During that time, he alleged that the Sheriff’s Office was corrupt, as well as engaging in violent treatment of minorities. He set up a couple of websites to expose the problem and considered himself a whistleblower

3.    Dougan left the PBSO and went to work in a police department in Maine, where he faced charges of sexual harassment (which he denies, claiming to be a victim of the Deep State)

4.    Dougan is a geek who sets up fake websites

 

We good so far?

 

5.    One day in 2010, a fellow PBSO detective named Joseph Recarey called Dougan. Recarey had been the lead investigator in the Epstein case of 2005, and had a trove of 700 or so CDs as well as documents, all of which was highly incriminating against highly influential people behaving badly

6.    Recarey, according to Dougan (who cannot back up the claim), gave him the CDs / documents because he feared they would be destroyed by corrupt people in the PBSO

7.    Recarey died at the age of 50 in 2018. According to the Palm Beach Daily News, he was deeply loved and respected

 

Still hanging in there?

 

8.    Dougan put all the 700 CDs of all the big boys behaving badly onto one drive, and there it was when the FBI raided his home in 2016 

9.     The FBI was investigating Dougan for cybercrimes and computer fraud—Dougan had set up a fake website and had published personal information about his coworkers

10.Dougan said the FBI had seized his hard drive, but that he had retained a copy

11. In 2019, after Epstein had died, the Times of London reported that MI6 (a branch of British intelligence) had learned of salacious material that Dougan had had on his hard drive. This led to Prince Andrew’s subsequent retirement from his official duties as a member of the royalty

 

Right—the air is getting a little thin….

 

12. Dougan made his way to Moscow in 2016, where he became a Russian operative spreading disinformation via 150 fake websites. The New York Times reports that he essentially took over the “Internet Research Agency” or whatever it was called that operated from St. Petersburg during the 2016 campaign 

13.Dougan, realizing that he was sitting on top of a mountain of information that seriously powerful people and institutions did not want him to have, feared for his life. He showed portions of seven tapes / CDs to a journalist named Ron Chapesiuk

14.Dougan also sends another copy of the hard drive to a “friend” in the south of Russia.

 

Lastly, here are the final paragraphs from The Spider, by Barry Levine:

 



 

Right—it’s Epstein’s, not Charlotte’s web….

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Not Down the Rabbit Hole, Maybe

Instead of going there, wherever “there” is or wherever it might take me, let me tell you about this morning instead.

 

I woke up as I always do, which is begrudgingly. Not getting up is what I want to do, and would do, if I could get away with it. I would lie in bed all day, happy as a clam, reading books and eating oatmeal cookies. But I can’t do that because….well, I just can’t. I tell myself that I don’t have to get up, be productive, go to my AA meeting to treat my alcoholism (eight years sober and counting, thanks), and then sit at my computer to worry about a nation I left thirty years ago and can’t stop loving…

 

I can absolutely stay in bed.

 

Where I know, from bitter experience, I will be utterly miserable by 10 AM.

 

Then Anselmo the cat yowls in the living room, and the balance changes. I’m not getting up, I’m feeding the cat.

 

So now I’m on my feet but in a couple of minutes I’ll be on my knees. I’ll pray for the usual things (strength, wisdom, and possibly even prudence) and the usual people (that guy who shouted “Fuck YOU,” at me after a meeting), and end with the usual petition, “God, please help the United States of America.”

 

Unsurprisingly, the usual bus driver drove the usual (of course) bus and I sat down, in a different spot. Today, I was sitting next to a Trump supporter and next to him, an exuberant character whose normal demeanor had shifted.

 

“The world has completely fucked up,” she said. She’s a medical interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients in emergency rooms in California and New Mexico. She always had plenty of work, and loved her job. She got paid for helping people who needed help and were grateful—all that and the money was great!

 

The money isn’t great now. In fact, she’s thinking about applying for a job at Burger King.

 

She didn’t go further, and really, she shouldn’t have gone there at all, according to one point of view. The Trump supporter sitting next to me is just as sick as I, and needs the meeting just as much. Any mention of politics is utterly forbidden, and rightly so.

 

Yeah?

 

But what if the world’s on fire?

 

The first AA meeting in Germany took place in 1953, but the question still remains: what would an AA meeting in Nazi Germany have been like? Would all the Nazi drunks have been sitting with the anti-Nazi drunks talking about humility and the dangers of pride (today’s topic) while the trains rolled by the meeting hall on their way to the concentration camps? Would people have averted their eyes as the Jewish drunks strolled into the hall, wearing their yellow Star of David armbands? Would I, a non-Nazi (or a gay man, which I am, in which case it would have been the pink triangle), feel the need to be especially nice to the Nazi? 

 

After all, we’re both drunks.

 

Because I did feel a little sorry for the guy sitting next to me, in today’s meeting in 2025 San Juan. I don’t like him, personally (well, surprise, surprise!) But I pride myself on feeling compassion for his struggle against the demon rum. I know that one, and if the eight years are easy now, they weren’t in the beginning.

 

So I said nothing, and berated myself for complicity half of the way home, and patted myself on the back for my restraint of pen and tongue on the other half of the journey. In short, I was confused, which is my normal state.

 

Then I bought kitty litter because…well, Anselmo does his business, the world on fire or not. He does his business, and my business is to be sure that he can do his business. Or that he doesn’t do his business where he shouldn’t.

 

You know how it is.

 

So the world is on fire and the Trump supporter got off scot-free from a richly merited tongue lashing and I have bought the litter for Anselmo and called the Uber. Then Jeanne, my sister (in-law, technically), called. She was probably at home, in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River.

 

So she knew that…

 

…ICE had raided Riverside Park, where the immigrants go to hang out in the pre-dawn hours before they pick up the food deliveries from Zabars and Westside Market. They pick up all the lox and all the bagels, the freshly squeezed orange juice and the delicious Kalamata olives and the Brie and Zaragoza cheeses. They pick up all this stuff and then they ride to my brother and sister’s house, in addition to a couple hundred thousand more. They go all over the place, and they did it during COVID by the way.  So John and Jeanne, I suspect, were just like many others: they saw (often) the same face at the same time doing something they very much needed and wanted. A stranger comes to your door with the gift of food. You may not know his name or where he comes from, just as you don’t know the clerk at Rite Aid or your Uber driver. But this is different. This is a person coming to your door with a smile and bringing you food. Yeah—you bought it, and the guy is getting paid. But you’ll sit down to the lox and bagels, and that guy (who walked a couple thousand miles to get his job) will be on his bike, delivering…oh, let’s say crab salad and baguettes to your neighbor.

 

“I’m hating this country,” said Jeanne, and I noted the continuous form of the verb. She doesn’t hate this country and neither do I. But she is at times hating her country, and so am I.

 

So ICE raided Riverside Park, and the point wasn’t that John and Jeanne and all the other Upper West Siders didn’t get their baguettes and exotic cheeses. The point is that nobody is safe, even on the upper West Side. Carlos or Jesus or whatever-his name is—they’re just the first ones to go. Upper West Side today, Alligator Alcatraz tomorrow.

 

So I commiserate with Jeanne and tell her about my meeting, and the medical interpreter sitting next to the Trump supporter next to me (the retired leftist) at the meeting this morning. Neither one of us is the least bit surprised that medical emergencies no longer afflict the migrant communities.

 

“Nobody’s going to the emergency room,” said Jeanne. 

 

We’re both completely annoyed, and that’s when I tell her about the rabbit hole that I am trying really, really hard not to get into, or down, or trapped in. Because now I have to tell Jeanne that I too am obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Mea culpa, mea máxima culpa—but the glop of money, power, influence, and sex isn’t just sticky. It’s like a tar pit, and all of us animals—Republican or Democrat—have stumbled onto it, on our way to the watering hole. So of course I have read the book Filthy Rich and seen the Netflix documentary. I’ve also read a book by Barry Levine called The Spider, in which he states that by a curious (read bizarre if not Byzantine) string of events, all of the worst material from the hundreds of hours of illegal videotaping that Epstein made of rich very-old guys screwing poor very-young girls…

 

…all of that material, as I was saying…

 

All those hours of fucking, seen from the hidden camera above….

 

Well, all of that stuff…

 

That very stuff…

 

It ended up—guess where?

 

(Dramatic pause)

 

(Drum roll)

 

…in RUSSIA!!!

 

Then the Uber pulled up.  

 

 

 

   

 

 

Monday, July 14, 2025

A Different View of the Everglades



Is it true, and if it is, is it good?

 

Today’s report is---well, here’s the headline:

 



 

Gee—was it that they all realized that this guy is an evil idiot manipulated by psychopathic billionaires who are bent on destroying democracy? Was it the insane threats of land grabs that made Canada—Canada, of all places—turn its back on us and seek refuge with Europe? Could it have been the “Alligator Alcatraz,” which he built over seven days in the middle of the Everglades, and to which Trump wants to send American citizens?

 

If you need reasons to hate Trump, see me. Trust me, I’ll give them to you in no particular order, but I won’t put Jeffrey Epstein on the top of the list.

 

Not that I can say anything good about either man. Epstein was a rich guy who “needed” to fuck an (ideally) different  barely-pubescent girl three times a day. He hooked up with a woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, who served as his procuress. He also had a big group of men who had money and big sex drives. The question is whether he was extorting / blackmailing his “friends” and whether Donald Trump was truly “best friends” with him for ten years.

 

Epstein eventually was arrested, taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and was found dead there with a rope tied around his neck. He also had a broken hyoid bone, which is more common in strangulations than in hangings. 

 

Epstein was a despicable character, who would have gravitated to Trump in an instant. Of course Trump hung out with Epstein, of course Epstein supplied girls to Trump, of course Trump is guilty of multiple cases of statutory rape.

 

Even to write about Epstein makes you dirty. The story, apparently, has obsessed the far right—the same people who killed the pizzeria owner whom they believed was operating an underage sex ring in the basement of his restaurant. (The building didn’t have a basement, and the only underage girls around were with their parents….) So the far right wants answers… well, cancel that. They want to be told that Epstein was murdered, and they want the names of the people on his “client list.”

 

I’m an openly gay man who thinks of sex maybe three times a day. The far right, however….

 

So Trump had a problem, since he had promised that there were mounds of incriminating material about Epstein and a sizzling client list and that he would release it all.

 

Then Pam Bondi, our Attorney General, came out and said there was no client list (she had said previously that “it’s on my desk”) and Epstein had died by his own hand. As support, she offered a videotape of the door to Epstein’s door. Absolutely no one entered or left all night!

 

Bihhhte—as we say down here. (“Viste” means “see” in Spanish, but “bihhhte is what you hear).

 

Well, the far right didn’t see it. They pointed—with an extraordinary attention to detail—that there was a one-minute gap in the video footage of the door to Epstein’s cell. Could a hit man enter a jail cell, strangle Epstein, tie a couple of bedsheets around his neck and attach the other end to the top bunk bed? All that in one minute? Or did the hit man take his time and then wait with the freshly killed (and currently chilling) victim for five hours or so when somebody arrived with the breakfast tray?

 

It's like an itch—once you start scratching, you can’t stop.

 

I am so done with it—the American people. We have been enormously blessed, and this is the best we can do? Two weeks ago nobody could pay attention to the fact that Trump had strong-armed a bill that indeed was landmark, but for all the wrong reasons. We were worrying about Diddy Something-or-other and his sex “freak-offs.”

 

Trump poured the concrete floor.

 

Pam Bondi and Kash Patel (the FBI director) have dramatic meeting with Suzie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff. 

 

Trump puts up the cinder block walls.

 

Laura Loomer, an ardent far-right conspiracy theorist and dear friend of you-know-who, may be withdrawing her support…

 

The zinc ceiling is on.

 

Trump steps in to congratulate Pam Bondi, and takes her to the FIFA World Cup (whatever that is).

 

The cots are installed and the chain-link divisions between cell blocks are put in.

 

Flash floods kill 120 people in Texas, with another 160 people still missing. Bound to happen, since climate change is here whether we acknowledge it or not. Also, of course, is the fact that we fired a lot of weather forecasters who, even if they had issued a warning, wouldn’t have had much effect. The residents of the county didn’t want to spend the money to put in an alarm system. They did have, however, the money to send their girls to a Christian summer camp, where many deaths occurred. The girls may be dead but they’re in heaven, so that’s OK.

 

Trump moves the first group of “detainees” into Alligator Alcatraz.

 

Tired of reading? Take a look at this:

 



 

 It took eight days to build this monstrosity.

 

No it’s not a monstrosity.

 

It’s a concentration camp.

 

There’s no other word for it. It’s the American Exceptionalism at work again—the refusal to believe that things are not as bad as they seem. The worried talking heads on mainstream news channels ask, breathlessly, if we are in a constitutional crisis. They discuss this earnestly.

 

The constitutional crisis was two months ago. We’re in a full-throated fascist state.

 

And we’re worrying about Jeffrey Epstein?

 

          

Friday, July 11, 2025

Travels Without Charley

Well, I thought the question would be whether we had got the wrong man all those decades in the twentieth century.

 

The wrong man being Hemingway, I suppose. Have I read anything by the guy? Yes—in high school, where Mrs. Dowling passed out copies of To Whom the Bell Tolls, to her students. The books were cheap, glued-together paperbacks (called, with Trumpian hyperbole, “perfect” bindings). I read the book pretty much at the bus stop, which may be why it didn’t make much of an impression on me. I know—the guy was the “best” author of the 20th century. He had thrown out the long, stylized sentences of the Victorians. He had tapped into the American speech as well as he had pierced its psyche. He was the dude.

 

So I skimmed the novel, since it seemed to invite it. The wonder, of course, is that he wrote it at all—it must have been such an effort, to maintain the myth of Hemingway. It takes a lot of time, being a drunk, and there were all those bullfights to get to as well. 

 

For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s longest novel—over four hundred pages. It read, as I remember it, somewhat like an extended web of telegrams. I read the novel and passed the test on it. Whether the novel itself had even passed the test with me….well, you can guess.

 

There were two camps, as it were, in the 20th century. The heavy weights read Hemingway and scorned his principal rival: John Steinbeck. One of the heavy weights, Flannery O’Connor, in fact claimed never to have read Steinbeck at all, though I seem to remember reading that she scoffed at Steinbeck’s award of the Nobel Prize in 1962.

 

I read Hemingway enough to know (I believe) what he was about. I googled him, and discovered that AI felt the same way. Here’s the verdict:

 

  



 

Hemingway was all man, or so the story went. And like many he-men, he took all the air out of the room. He couldn’t even die like the rest of us—decently in our beds, or in a hospital, surrounded by loved ones. He killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun in the foyer of his home. The death was described as an accident, though it was widely assumed it wasn’t. Hemingway was an expert on guns, according to The New York Times, which casts doubt on the accident theory. Hemingway’s own father had killed himself with an old Civil War pistol, which all but confirms the suicide theory. 

 

Steinbeck apparently admired Hemingway’s writing, and though the two met (only once, apparently) the evening didn’t go particularly well. The two have been paired, though, and may be for as long as anyone remembers 20th-century American fiction.

 

How many great men have spent their creative lives in someone else’s shadow?

There’s Handel and Bach, Beethoven and Haydn, Mozart and Salieri. There’s poor Trollope, having to cope with Dickens. Chagall and Picasso.

 

In many cases, I like the underdog, and if I could barely read Hemingway, I was more interested in Steinbeck. He could be funny, for one thing, and even if Tortilla Flat isn’t the greatest literature, does it have to be? I remember stories from the book, although perhaps it was Cannery Row. I remember the old lady, sitting in the Catholic Church, broke and hungry. The crops had failed that year, and she had been desperate enough to sell her last bag of beans in order to buy a gold candlestick, an offering (though perhaps a bribe) to the Virgin Mary. Even so, the crops had failed, the kitchen was bare, and all she had was her bitterness in the dark, musty church. She looks up at that wretched Virgin and thinks…

 

“…my Dolores didn’t know who it was, either.”

 

Steinbeck’s recipe for an avaricious bank? Buy a fresh fish and put it in your safe deposit box. Leave town for a couple of months, and when you get back, they’ll still be talking about it.

 

This was a guy a high student had to read, and fortunately Travels with Charley had come out just as I was entering ninth grade. Steinbeck, like Hemingway, had been ill, but he chose to leave his wife and home behind for three months, while he traveled across the United States in the vehicle below.

 

 


 

Rocinante, by the way, was Don Quixote’s horse.

 

Steinbeck was off trying to find out what in the hell had happened to his country, and though it’s easy to write him off as naïve, he wasn’t. Today, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are history. But imagine the horror of seeing what we had created. We’re no closer to peace than we ever were, but we sure have perfected killing.

 

That scared him. Then there was the racial issue, and Steinbeck is there watching as the Little Rock Nine tried to walk into school. They were nine little black kids, and they got into the school, all right. But it took the National Guard to get them into it.

 

I remember all this, and I remember Steinbeck’s description of his farewell to his wife, Elaine. Neither of them wanted to be the one left standing, watching the tail lights recede in the distance. So they had driven their vehicles to another location. They kissed hurriedly and gunned their car / truck to their respective locations.

 

Steinbeck knew what he was doing, as did his wife, to some extent. He was 58-years old, and he had had a medical scare. His doctor had given him the sermon: cut out the cigarettes, the booze, the salt, the cholesterol. Settle down and die.

 

Steinbeck opted to go on the road, to see the country he had lived in all his life. He took his dog along, a standard French poodle named Charley. They hit the road. 

 

And they met a stranger, who told them that nobody was talking. Folks were getting together, drinking their morning coffee together in the same spots they always had, laughing and joking. But nobody was talking about anything controversial, by which he meant important. Instead, the illusion of goodwill was more important than speaking honestly, and figuring out where that led to.

 

I read this now, and I remember reading it half a century ago. I thought then—how terrible, yes, truly terrible that we’ve let the national discourse sink so low. Now, of course, I think ‘what the fuck?’

 

I mean, how bad was it, in the early sixties? Haight Ashbury was still just a couple of streets nobody knew about in San Francisco. The war in Vietnam was just a gleam in President Johnson’s eye. Nobody had stormed the capital, nobody was taking Mexican farm laborers out of their lettuce fields and sending them to El Salvador, with no due process. Nobody had systematically defanged the government, so that the grift and corruption could spread like toad stools after a rain. Nobody had arrested the mayor of Newarkhandcuffed a senator from California, killed the ex-speaker of the house in Minnesota, or set fire to the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, hours after he had celebrated Passover.

 

Even better, nobody could have imagined that any of the shit in the last paragraph would happen. That’s because it’s America, and it can’t happen here.

 

I mean, by definition….

 

Even the term “American Exceptionalism,” is an example of…well, exceptionalism. I bind books in a store owned in part by a Frenchman. He sees his country relatively clearly—the Parisians are rude and unfriendly, he admits. He’s proud of the cultural achievements, admires the heritage and history, is proud to call it home. But he knows that France is one country among many—better by far than most, but not necessarily the winner in every contest. There’s no need to invent “French Exceptionalism” because the French have not told the world what we have.

 

Which is…

 

…we got it right, guys. We figured out democracy and human rights and protection of minorities and my God, what a country we are! We’ll be happy to send old Jimmy Carter out to monitor your elections, since we do them so well.

 

Shit, Jimmy Carter finally died.

 

The notion that anything going on in 1960 should have caused anyone to clam up is absurd. But it made sense at the time, and sadly, there’s no reason to believe that I, should I live another 50 years and still have enough wit and eyesight to re-read Travels with Charley, won’t be saying the exact same thing.

 

What?

 

All that was going on was murder of political opponents, the political oppression of enemies, the “disappearance” of farm workers, arson in the state houses? Hell, they hadn’t even started raping mothers in the streets in front of their decapitated infants while soldiers stormed the houses and confiscated every coin, bill, or valuable!

 

We have spent most of my life exclaiming that things are the very worst they could be, but I have learned, in these days of Trump, that blooming fascism is just like living with a drunk. It’s always worse than you think, and they never stop surprising you.     

 

 

The last two or three weeks have been no exception. Five million people protested while Trump dozed through his parade. That was an embarrassment, so then we had the distraction of watching Israel attack Iran, which has been building a nuclear weapons program. Given that Iran is ruled by Islamic hardliners who would cheerfully obliterate us infidels, not one wanted that to happen.

 

Israel bombed Iran, and then turned to us for help, since we are the only country that has bombs that can penetrate underground to the depth needed to take out their bunkers. So we bombed them, and waited to see the response.

 

The Iranians sent out some planes and dropped some bombs on a large US military action. Then it all settled down, leaving everyone to wonder: what was that all about? 

 

We don’t know, but that wasn’t the point. All crises are good, for Trump. They divert, they distract, and they keep the liberal and / or the sane outraged. Democracy may die in darkness, but along the way, distraction is vital. So it was providential, perhaps, that a black singer by many names (all of them having “daddy” or “Diddy” or “Combs” as part of them) was being tried for rape and human trafficking.

 

That kept the faithful occupied while the real work could be done: passing a draconian law that would gut the Federal government, throw 17 million people off health care, explode the national debt to unimaginable proportions, give tax breaks to billionaires, and screw the middle and lower classes. It was a spectacularly bad piece of legislation—well, bad if you hadn’t read the bill, horrific if you had.

 

Nobody read the legislation, which was being debated and voted on in the wee hours of the night. Some Republicans spoke out against it: Lisa Murkowski, a “moderate” Republican held out for some special perks that would sweeten the pill for Alaskans. She then tearfully addressed the nation and said that she had to do it. No surprise—Murkowski had come out weeks before and said the obvious: We are all afraid. 

 

It's true, of course, but it’s maddening all the same. Nobody had specifically TOLD Murkowski that standing up to a would-be dictator was part of the job, we just assumed she knew it. She assumed, perhaps, that she would never have to (did somebody say something about American Exceptionalism up there?).

 

We were howling, of course, and my couch is three feet away from the sidewalk, as is my television (there is, I’m happy to say, something in between them). So there was plenty to listen to, for all those people passing by as I listened to Murkowski whine. I was shouting “BITCH!” and “FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”

 

J. D. Vance, the Republican that even they can’t stand, cast the deciding vote. And then, we all went back happily to whatever it was we were doing.

 

Always a mistake, since Trump then sent the National Guard to go “liberate” McArthur park in Los Angeles. They scared the hell out of children playing at a day camp there, and then turned their attention to the blueberry fields of California.

 

And so I watched as tanks rolled down the streets of LA and the helicopters landed in the fertile fields of California. The immigrants were running terrified. There were citizens standing in front of a moving tank—which moved slowly and unrelentingly at two or three miles an hour. Did the driver see the four or five protesters with their hand on the hood of the tank? Or was there even a driver?

 

Steinbeck had to get into his truck and go out to see it, whatever the “it” was that was afflicting the country. The reports that he got—balanced and nuanced as they were—from Walter Cronkite weren’t enough.

 

I am seeing it not from my truck but from my sofa. And I am seeing it as they could not—I am old than either one at the time of their deaths (neither one could have collected Social Security). I’m a gay man, and I know the story of what happened in the last half century or so.

 

Migrants running through fields. Bishops telling their Mexican parishioners that it’s OK to skip mass:stay home and be safe. The unstoppable tank.

 

You never swim in the same river twice; neither can you read the same book again.

The book may not change, but the times have, and so have you. The premise can change, too.

 

Travels with Charley was written with the soothing knowledge that things are bad but will get better. They always do. 

 

I’m not so sure.