Revisiting de Tocqueville

Well, nobody could say that the weekend lacked interest.

 

I’m a sixty-eighty year-old man living in Puerto Rico, but I tune in a lot to the news. My friends and sponsor in AA don’t think much of it—they accuse me of surveying the prairie each morning, looking for the deepest rabbit hole I can dwell in for the day. I answer them by telling them that I am—what’s the phrase?—"actively engaged with my time.” By which I mean that I pay attention when…

 

…an American senator from California, Alex Padilla, is arrested in a secure government facility. He had passed through security—metal detectors and all. He had been escorted by federal employees into a room, where he was awaiting a meeting with the Armed Forces concerning their training and preparation for deployment on the streets of Los Angeles. That meeting was aborted when Kristi Noem, the Director of National Security, showed up for a press conference. The Feds asked Padilla if he would like to attend the press conference. He said sure, and was chill enough to sit in the back, absorbing the misinformation until Noem announced that the National Guard, which Trump had ordered into Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor California and the mayor of Los Angeles, was there to “liberate the city” from the socialist and radical governments of the mayor and the governor.

 

A sitting president had decided to topple the lawfully elected governor of the most populous state in the country as well as the mayor of the second most populated city in the United States.

 

It didn’t sit well with Padilla, who rose to his feet, walked quickly to the front of the stage (Noem called it a “lunge”) and identified himself as a US Senator. Given that he had presented ID, had been previously vouched as having business in the building, and had been escorted to the press conference by federal employees—well, there couldn’t have been much doubt about who he was.

 

He was physically stopped, pushed out of the room by several FBI agents, taken into the hallway where he was forced to his knees, then forced onto his abdomen. He was then handcuffed and led out of the building.

 

That was Thursday of last week, but I was still paying attention even before my morning coffee, when on Saturday morning the news came out that the former Speaker of the House of the Minnesota State House of Representatives had been killed, along with her husband. The Speaker of the House was responsible for the Minnesota Miracle, which showed that common sense and common decency could prevail even in the most divisive of times. The Minnesota Miracle (capitalizing it makes it feel like a baseball team) was going on at the same time that Scott Walker was completely destroying whatever vestige of the Wisconsin Idea was left in the state. All of the work that old Bob LaFollette and the Progressives had done a century ago was out the window, and Minnesota swooped in and grabbed our miracle. 

 

Putting grievances aside, I can tell you that the killer struck in the night, and was apparently acting alone (hhhmmm…). He was dressed as a policeman and was driving a police car. In the car were the usual AK-47’s, or whatever they are, and a manifesto. It contained the names (mostly still undisclosed) of seventy elected state officials. Among them were the two senators from Minnesota and the governor of the state, Tim Walz.

 

Tim Walz, you may remember, was the loveable former High School teacher who had been a senator and then became governor of Minnesota.  He was the diametric opposite of Donald Trump, made all of us old white men feel good about ourselves, and was absolutely going to be the next Vice President of the United States, serving under Madam President Kamala Harris. 

 

Anybody could see that, of course.  

 

The details are still unclear, but the usual suspect was apprehended. He was a Trump voter, he had been weaponized or radicalized, and after visiting the houses of two more state legislators in the very wee hours (neither lawmaker was at home at 2:30 in the morning) had gone to his final victim, another legislator. The couple was shot, but are expected to survive. It was at their house that the police (the real police) found the fake police, the killer. They had a shootout, the gunman fled, and the rest of the weekend was pretty grim, for Minnesota State Legislators. One of them (who had been on the target list) spent the weekend holed up in her basement, grateful for the cop car that was parked outside in her driveway.

 

 

So I was indeed actively engaging with my times (my gaze firmly directly forward to the future, ignoring any rabbit holes in the foreground) when Governor Walz had finished declaring the obvious. He did it in his loveliest High School fashion. This material was definitely going to be on the final exam, and you’d have to be a fool not to realize it. So I was checking off “Political Assassinations in America” from my list, when it was time to get going. There were going to be over two thousand demonstrations against Trump and his insane military parade throughout the country. One of them was two blocks away from me and really guys—what excuse did I have not to go to it? 

 

I was glad I did—I saw four or five friends, walked in a circle on the street, held a sign that said “Ningún Ser Humano es Ilegal” (hah! That’ll stick it to Trump), and shouted “LUCHA SI, ENTREGA NO!” I have heard “Fight Yes Surrender No” for over thirty years in Puerto Rico, as countless protest have drifted past my house. But last Saturday, it was my day to shine.

 

There were five million of us on our various streets, sidewalks, and public spaces last Saturday. We were protesting in Minneapolis, even though the No King’s Day organizers had cancelled the March. Nobody was in the mood to cower at home in the basement, so here’s how that went.

 

         

 

There was also no official parade in Washington, DC, since Trump had decided to pair his 79^thbirthday with the Army’s 250’s birthday. It was going to have Macron of France and Kim Jong-Un of Korea in conniptions, it was going to be so big. He was expecting a quarter of a million to show up, and who could compete with that? So people would have to go to Philly instead, but screw that. Here’s what the DC non-protest looked like….

 

 

I was protesting at the same time as my brother and sister-in-law were protesting in New York City, and if the official estimate off 200, 000 people at the rally doesn’t tally with Jeanne’s number of 250, 000… well, what a problem to have. 

 

The protests were great—they had the energy Trump would have wanted at his parade. But the parade was sparsely attended, the stands were half-empty, the squeaking of the tanks as they rolled listlessly by was a mockery.  

 

 

I came home and felt, for the first time almost sorry for Trump. I used to say that I would despise the man if there was any “man” there to despise. He has no inherent values or virtues. He’s a wearisome, predictable collection of grievances and hates. His one interest is himself and feathering his nest. He can do that now, and his fortune has grown by millions if not billions since he left office. 

 

He's on top of the world.

 

At his parade, though, he was an old, tired man. The tanks rolled by. The MC for the affair laid out the number of troops in each war, the casualties, the guns and weapons used. It was as leaden as the skies—which refused to open up and rain. Even that fizzled, and there Trump was, slowly dozing off—completely alone among all the people who could only fear him.

 

One couldn’t and the most heart-breaking scene starts around minute four in the video below. The MC is droning on about World War I, the dignitaries are struggling to appear awake, Trump has given up the battle. 

 

But Melania, his wife, looks over at him and surveys him coldly. There’s no affection. She’s looking at him critically, clinically. Is she thinking that he is 79 years old, demented, petty, vindictive, and ultimately a monster of selfishness? However much money he has, he will always be a poor man.

 

Is she wondering how many more years she will have to endure this sham of a marriage? How many times will she have to appear on stage, feigning interest in a husband she can’t stand? How much more pretense will be required of her?

 

The protests were great. The parade was a flop. The narrative was that the tide had turned, the momentum had changed, a new day in our glorious democracy had dawned.

 

Wrong—Trump was still president.

 

 

Two Archbishops

It’s been a day dealing with the Archbishops of Canterbury, and I can’t say it’s improved my mood any.

 

The first archbishop was Anselmo, who bears the twin burdens of being both dead and a cat. The non-cat version of Anselm drifted into my life less than a year ago, when I found myself waking up in a different bed and a different bedroom. It was cool (air conditioning! Wow!) and it was dark, and there was no Smith. (Smith was / is an ancient orange cat who reliably got me out of bed and out the door by yowling for food at the crack of dawn.)

 

After thirty years of waking up in sweat and tropical sunlight, a cool, dark bedroom was utterly delightful. Too delightful to get up and get sober, by which I mean go to my AA meeting. I soon learned, however, that the cool, pleasant dark becomes a hellish, windowless cave, about 9 o’clock.

 

That’s when Anselmo popped in, since I had been reading about him—Cristopher de Hamal devotes the first chapter in Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm. Anselm was born around 1033, became a monk, then an abbot, and finally the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. He was also a theologian, and he cooked up the least convincing argument that I have ever heard for the existence of God. Here it is, straight from AI and a Google search:

 

 

Fortunately, my Anselmo has lost any taste he had for theology. Either that, or he figures I’m a lost cause. His job, at any rate, was to get me out of bed and into the world, and he used cajolery, flattery, and at times pure reason to get the job done. It often came down to a simple question: Yes, there is absolutely no reason to get out of bed, but staying in bed is worse. Now, what are you going to do?

 

For months I got out of bed, usually cursing Anselmo and telling him that I’m not an obedient monk but an old man with a touchy bladder. “Fuck you,” I tell Anselmo, and he remarks benevolently that I should really make the bed, when I get back to the bedroom. I can lie down on it immediately once it’s made, but it would be nice to have it made. So I do this, and then put on my shoes, since I’m now on my feet. I won’t be going to the meeting, of course, but it’s nice to have my shoes on, just in case.

 

Anselmo’s job is done twenty minutes later, when I am walking coffee in hand towards the bus station—where I may or may not take the bus. Which I do, of course, since I’m there—and who’s fault is that?

 

On rare occasions I called Anselmo’s bluff—I went back to bed with my shoes on. Not often, but it was worrisome, so Anselmo turned himself into a cat. He’s five years old and a street cat, which means he has a healthy appetite and a sharp eye. If the bladder doesn’t get me on my feet, Anselmo in his cat transmogrification will.

 

So I go off to my meeting, as I did this morning, and then I cast my wits about, looking for something to occupy my mind. How Rowan Williams came into my view I don’t know.

 

I didn’t know much about him except that he was the Archbishop of Canterbury and was generally if genteelly loathed by most of my friends. “Genteelly” because anyone who knows Williams in probably Anglican / Episcopalian, and those people don’t do hate very well. They try to tamp it down.

 

So there was my second archbishop of the day, and that’s when I said, finally, no.

 

No—not to God, since I get down on my knees and pray night and day (this is true, but only for five minutes or so—less time than it takes to make coffee in the Greca. My knees are worse than my bladder…)

 

I said “no” to the Archbishop after I had read that he and Richard Dawkins had had a debate, and all of the comments on the YouTube page said the same thing: how lovely to hear two erudite, charming men go at each other tooth and nail in the soothing atmosphere of the Oxford Union.

 

I said “no” to the archbishop and I said “no” to Dawkins. I will say “no” to you, as well, if you start talking about God. I will say “no” to ANYONE who speaks about God, and if I’m not careful, I’ll say more. I’ll say what you don’t want to hear.

 

I’ll tell you that you’re a blasphemer, a heretic. I say “no” to the Archbishop, and I say “no” to the Pope. Even when he says this, which I entirely agree with:

 

  

 

No—you do not have the right to speak for God.

 

No—you cannot put words into God’s mouth.

 

No—if you have no respect, Archbishop and Pope, for God … well I do. He got me sober, and I’m damn glad, and that’s why I get down on my knees. As a plumber friend of mine said, I need to see what I’m doing. So yeah, I’m grateful that I can get on my knees, and beyond grateful that I can stand up again and hang my head at a reasonable level. God brought me to my knees (damn, here I am talking about him!) and he got me on my feet again. I’m grateful, but I’m still saying…

 

No--God is not love. And shame on you, you should know better. I put my hand on my wallet and identify the nearest exist (which may be behind me, as the flight attendants say) when you talk about God’s love. God is also hate, and perhaps indifference as well. I don’t know what God is, and neither do you. And yes, I yearn for God, and for that love that is vital and always…withheld? Elusive? There in abundance, but I cannot see it? Anyway, I say, as you can imagine…

 

No.

 

You don’t get to talk about God to me. And if you, Pope Leo or Archbishop Williams, have spent your life talking about God then…

 

No, you are not men of God. Or rather, you’re no more a man of God than I am. But Leo? Williams? You’re not theologians and thinkers.

 

No—you’re whores.

 

Whores selling cheap tricks to the spiritually horny.

 

Oh, and by the way?

 

Apologies to the whores.

 

 

 

Lafcadio Hearn

“If it were not for mosquitoes,” Hearn remarked in the accompanying commentary, “we should all become terribly lazy in this climate. We should waste our time snoring upon sofas or lolling in easy chairs, or gossiping about trivial things, or dreaming vain dreams, or longing after things which belong to our neighbors, or feeling dissatisfied with our lot. . . . Idleness is the mother of all vices; and mosquitoes know this as well as anybody, and not being lazy themselves they will not suffer us to be lazy.”

The Hearn in question is Lafcadio Hearn, one of those Victorian guys who sticks his head out of obscurity every so often and waves at me. Yesterday, he appeared for no reason at all: I hadn’t been reading anything about him, nor had I even finished a book he had written about his two years in Martinique. But somehow, I was thinking about Hearn.

Hearn was born of a Greek mother and an Irish father. His childhood was marked by departures: first his mother decamped and returned home to Greece (after they had moved to Ireland), then his father married a childhood sweetheart and left him in the care of an aunt. The aunt fell victim to the charms of a fortune hunter and lost her money. Lafcadio at age 17 was sent to live with his aunt’s former maid in London’s East End. A couple of years later, Hearn ended up in Cincinnati: “moneyless on the pavement of an American city to begin life.”

Hearn began writing for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, and soon became one of its most lurid journalists. He also married a black woman, a former slave, which led to his firing at the paper. (Mixed marriages were illegal at the time, and Hearn had managed to annoy a number of prominent citizens.) Hearn divorced his wife and moved to New Orleans, which he embraced. More than embraced, he “invented” New Orleans as an exotic, violent but ever-alluring place. He spent a decade there, and then took off for Japan.

Hearn spent the last fourteen years of his life in Japan: he married a Japanese woman, taught English literature, and fell in love with the culture. He was entranced by Jujitsu, and later wrote:  "What Western brain could have elaborated this strange teaching, never to oppose force by force, but only direct and utilize the power of attack; to overthrow the enemy solely through his own strength, to vanquish him solely by his own efforts? Surely none! The Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles."

He wrote with Victorian doggedness: his writings about Cincinnati and New Orleans were complemented by translations from the French: Hearn remains an important translator of Flaubert and Gautier. He delved into Russian literature as well. But it was really in Japan that he seems to have found a home at last.

He had four children, published a series of articles about Japan in The Atlantic Monthly, and converted to Buddhism. His books were widely read, and remain popular even today. Martin Fackler wrote in The New York Times:

For many Japanese, Mr. Hearn’s appeal lies in the glimpses he offered of an older, more mystical Japan lost during the country’s hectic plunge into Western-style industrialization and nation building. His books are treasured here as a trove of legends and folk tales that otherwise might have vanished because no Japanese had bothered to record them.

 Not being Japanese himself, he saw the Japanese as they could not see themselves. I get the concept because I’m a victim of it myself. I am intelligent, but not smart enough to keep myself from obsessing about a small problem, which a normal person would dismiss.

(Like that bus driver yesterday who came barreling around the curve near the beach I sometimes go to, who saw me struggling to get up from the deeply curved seat of the bus stop, and who went sailing past! Leaving me fuming in the 95-degree heat at midday in the tropics.)

I worry the small problem just a bit, because it feels sort of good—this little jolt of self-pity…though is it? Isn’t there a place for self-empathy? And if we have a word like “self-pity,” and no word like “self-empathy”….well, isn’t that the problem? What’s wrong with saying that life has handed me a couple of lemons, over the years, and God knows I’ve taken them with a glad smile and cheerful heart! Oh, I’ve made a glass of lemonade or two in my life, I can sure tell you that!

(And the worst of it? The bus driver knew I was there! He made eye contact, and the bus slowed infinitesimally. So he COULD have stopped, but he didn’t!)

A normal person, of course, steps right out of the rabbit hole, glances around to see if anyone is looking, dusts himself off, and goes on his way. But that little bit of self-empathy completely blows the roof or rather the floor  off the rabbit hole, and I am now suddenly very, very far down. There’s no light down here, in fact, and no rabbit. Just me and the hole.

(So the bus driver KNEW! YES!  HE KNEW! And would he have stopped for somebody else? Somebody, perhaps, who didn’t have formerly blond hair and currently blue eyes and spoke much better Spanish??? WELL??? WOULD HE?)

I tell myself that I need to practice mental hygiene—which was a beloved concept to the Victorians and still worth thinking about today—but first just let me say, and then I’ll drop it… I promise, I really do. Anyway, I don’t want to exaggerate, but…

(THIS MAN IS A NAZI!)

The bus thing happened at 11 AM, so it …  it was no big deal to wait a couple minutes, when the next one came by. Thirty years ago, when I first arrived on the island, the buses were much worse, actually.

(Well, the bus driver is clearly Adolf Hitler’s mentor, there’s no doubt about THAT! And what about all the other passengers on the bus, who ALL—TO A MAN—saw me struggling to my feet, and who ALL burst into spasms of hilarity when they saw the look of agony on my aged, lined face! HAH! No better than all those German peasants who built the death camps in their backyard, lived with the smell of burning flesh for half a decade, and then claimed they knew NOTHING about the death of six million Jews!)

Actually, right after Hurricane Maria there were no buses at all for several weeks, since all the fuel on the island was going to the truck drivers and the generators to keep the hospitals running. Remember sitting on the sidewalk outside the club house, when we had no electricity for three months, and how excited you got that first day you saw a bus? Ahh, the halcyon days of my youth, when we used to do Alcoholics (not-so) Anonymous on the sidewalk!

(Speaking of which, do you wanna hear about my life? Because my life has NOT been easy, buster….)

You see how this goes. I am twice as smart as the woman behind me in the supermarket line, but also twice as stupid, at least as far as judging or especially moderating my own behavior. The woman behind me in the supermarket line knows perfectly well that she will spend more time in this line than most people spend in graduate school, but who cares? There’s air conditioning, and some chips she can eat (she’ll pay for them, since she has to give the greasy bag to the cashier, who will throw it away for her) and a very nice lady behind her, who undoubtedly would like to see pictures of her grandchildren. And surprise! She has grandchildren of her own!

(OH PERFECT! The Nazis have stormed the bus stations, overtaking the buses! And now these two little old ladies have fallen into each other’s arms and are showing pictures of their grandchildren to everybody in line! Including the woman in front of me, who should be putting her food items on the conveyor belt AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE TO THE CASHIER! And who should be standing, as I am, with the correct change in hand while staring at the cashier. This will, with any luck, keep her in her place and keep her doing her lot in life. Which is to scan! To scan now, to scan always, to scan when scanning is impossible, when everything  within and everything without you screams to rest, to lay down your burden, to gaze at the innocent faces of grandchildren. BUT SCAN SHE MUST!)

And scan she doesn’t, since the cashier has grandchildren too, and she has photos of them! Surprise! We’re all having a perfectly wonderful time except for the guy with the hair / eye anomalies, and the lousy Spanish accent. In fact, strangers are pouring into the store, drawn in by the waves of love for grandchildren which are positively leaping out of the store and lapping down the street. All are enticed, all have photos, and the petty nonsense of commerce and economy is forgotten.

The little old ladies are now exchanging names (of themselves and their grand-progeny) and phone numbers. I am naming people too.

(The guy with the three cans of Goya gandules? Heinrich Himmler!)

I cannot, in short, take a bus or stand in a supermarket line—that’s how smart I am. I cannot even write a blog post about Lafcadio Hearn, while at the same time making a few pointed references to the president of the United States. In fact, my mind is completely undisciplined, which is why I went off on a tangent up there, for two or three pages. I was thinking about Lafcadio Hearn, and what I was going to say about him, and then thinking about John Toohey Morales, and how a meteorologist I had listened to for years and revered for decades had stopped forecasting and told the audience the truth. If there aren’t planes diving into the eyes of hurricanes and dropping weather balloons in the right spots—well, he can’t tell us where the hurricane is, or what it’s likely to do. So the only thing to do, apparently, is to call up Elon Musk and see if anybody at SpaceX can see anything moving around in the Caribbean.

Yes, this was supposed to be a post about Lafcadio Hearn and Donald Trump. True, there was gonna have to be a bridge about as long as the Seven Mile Bridge that connects Key West to the mainland between the very distant shores of Trump and Hearn.  But a tidy writer, an efficient writer, would have built the bridge several pages ago. He wouldn’t have needed to tell you, as I did in the most exquisite of detail, how I pass my days at the grocery story.

Or the bus stop.

He would simply have told you the story of the evening, back in the 1990’s, when I sat by myself in a very large and very empty living room while a storm raged outside.  

I was alone in the living room, but I had a radio, and I was listening to the English -language radio station that broadcast at that time. Toohey Morales was taking calls from listeners. Most were from anxious people sitting alone in their living rooms, but one was from the captain of a small ship whose boat had lost its mooring, drifted out into the middle of San Juan harbor, and had grounded itself on some rocks, or a sandbar, or something. 

Toohey Morales had been the model of calm during the storm—nothing he had seen or heard that evening had been anything out of the ordinary. He had all the facts, all the data, and he could soothe and assuage with complete assurance. But the ship captain was something else—an opportunity to collect valuable, raw data from a unique source. Toohey Morales sprang into action and peppered the captain with questions about the wind source, the strength, how large the waves were, what else was happening in the harbor at the time. 

The captain was more than happy to provide the information, and for a pleasant ten minutes, I listened to two intrepid men discussing the waves that were crashing over the deck of the ship grounded and taking in water a quarter of a mile away. I considered the possibility that I could have been on that ship, that the next wave would shatter the bow, that the pumps would fail and the ship would sink.

For that matter, I could be one of the other callers, sitting in a wooden house on a mountain top. I could be the homeless person who had refused shelter in the hallway of our building, preferring to huddle in a recessed doorway down the street rather than accept help from a stranger.

There were many things, I realized, that I took for granted—that I could be sitting safe on dry land in a house with three-feet masonry walls, for example. That the grocery store would open, at some point, and that life would get back to normal. That we would all muddle through, as we scrambled to find ice and D batteries and ate tuna fish spread on Saltine crackers.

I realized how much I had taken for granted, and how lucky I was. But the one thing that never occurred to me was that, one day, John Toohey Morales would not be there. Or that he wouldn’t have all the answers. Cancel that—he never had all the answers. What he did have was all the data that could be had, all the experience that anyone could ask for, and all time and resources to do his job.

Well, he doesn’t now. Apparently, there are weather stations so under-staffed that they operate on banking hours. No one is around to read the barometer or talk to people on the ground—or stranded at sea. Toohey Morales—now at the end of his career—is going out on a distinctly low note. Not for himself but for the profession he loved and the people he served. He once had all the tools at hand to save people’s lives.

Now he doesn’t.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

It Happened Here

The strategy was clear from the outset. 

 

You could see it after Trump had been inaugurated and had settled down in his chair to do the work set out for him by his masters. He had to get through the signing of his executive orders, or rather, the executive orders that had been planned for him.

 

Don’t think that Trump had anything to do with them, or indeed that he knew anything about them. That was made clear by the presence of an aide, who stood next to the desk at which Trump was sitting. He announced the topic of the executive order in the same way that guests are announced at large, formal affairs. Trump nodded at each proclamation, penned his jagged signature on the document, and said a generic comment like, “oh, this is a big one,” at every turn. In the space of an hour, Trump had signed orders to end birthright citizenship, declare a national energy emergency, drop out of the World Health Organization, jettison the Paris Climate Agreement, establish two sexes (male and females, in case you’re wondering), free the insurrectionists of January 6^th, put a pause on the Tik-Tok ban, rescind 78 executive orders sign by Joe Biden, declared another national emergency (this time at the border), and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

 

All but the last are hugely consequential. Any of them—barring that name change—would have been a defining moment in a normal presidency. Meetings would have been held, discussions would have taken place, debate would have swirled. A strategy and perhaps a counter-strategy would have been developed. Plans would have been made, and the announcement perfectly timed (they hoped) for maximal benefit and minimal risk. They would have been prepared for the howls from the opposition which could be expected.

 

There were grown-ups around Donald Trump, the first time around. They did the best they could, and perversely, they did an enormous amount. I loathe John Bolton, but I don’t think he’s a fool. Nor is Bill Barr, or General Milley, or Rex Tillerson. 

 

They restrained him, perhaps, by giving him one big toy to play with. He could impose the travel ban on seven or ten Muslim countries, for example. We all went to the airport, and lawyers were volunteering to represent illegally detained immigrants. We all knew, we thought, what we were doing.

 

The masters hadn’t yet taken hold, back in 2017. Trump hadn’t declined enough, mentally, for him to become the easy mark for the ideologues like Steve Bannon and Steve Miller. The bonds holding the religious bigots, the totalitarian right, and the kleptocrats hadn’t had time to cement. Trump may or may not have ever had convictions, but he could adhere to positions. He was still trying—however feebly—to play the game in those first years.

 

Now, all the bets are off, and two things matter to Trump: revenge and money. Trump’s handlers have moved in and are preparing the executive orders. They feed Trump his daily hates—transgendered youths, sanctuary cities, elite universities. They no longer fear the courts—why should they? The Supreme Court told Trump to get ONE immigrant (Kilmar Abrego Garcia) back from El Salvador. That was April 10—six weeks ago. Nothing has been done, and nothing will be done. 

 

Fascism has come to America, and all the brown-shirts had to do was flood the zone. The horrific has become routine, almost boring. Canada, for example, used to be on perfectly good terms with us, and now look what’s happened! They had to haul poor King Charles in, to murmur politely about but never address directly the elephant in the room. The elephant being the guy with the three shades of face paint and the slicked-back orange hair.

 

It isn’t death by a thousand cuts but rather a thousand slashes. And the effect is just what they desired: we (or rather, I) have become numb. It’s exactly like living with an active drunk—always primed for the worst, and secretly hoping and praying to yourself: “just bring it on—get it over with—I can’t stand living with this a moment longer.”

 

Even worse might be if Trump is taken down, but for the wrong reasons. The tariffs haven’t hit yet but soon will. Sixty percent of the stuff Walmart sells is made in China, and there’s no way that either Walmart or its suppliers could absorb a 30% tariff. The only thing to do is to raise prices, which is no problem for Trump’s billionaires, who can give him lots of money but only one vote. But most of the people who voted for Trump are shopping, today, at Walmart. I know, because I shop there myself.

 

So he could go because of the high prices, but in theory he could also go because of the corruption. The first term was child’s play—Trump was shaking down foreign dignitaries at his hotel down the road from the White House. True—the “dignitaries” were more than happy with the arrangement, and all Trump had to do was lap up the profits. But it could be argued that….well, where were they supposed to stay? At the Motel 6 off the Beltway?

 

There’s no pretense whatsoever this time around. Trump’s entry into cryptocurrency is a prime example: he announced his coin on January 17 and Melania joined in two days later. So now $Trump and $Melania have raised millions if not billions a scheme that is variously described as “pull the rug,” or “pump and dump.” Just to stir the pot (and stick it in the eye of us liberals), Trump gave a dinner a week or so ago to the top 220 investors of his coin. The price, if not the value, of $Trump jumped 50% in the day following the announcement (how often do you get to buy your way into the White House?) No one was surprised that following the dinner, Trump pardoned one of the guests—a reality TV show host and his wife, who had been convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion. Trump felt perfectly OK doing so, since he had gotten away with pardoning another criminal, a guy named Paul Walzack. Walzack had committed Medicare fraud by stealing over 10 million dollars from the paychecks of the doctors and nurses who worked for him. Fortunately, his mother kicked in a million dollars to attend a dinner in April at the White House. 

 

It's appalling, it’s Trump. 

 

So?

 

So what are we going to do about him?

 

My only answer is…whatever we can. As an American citizen living in Puerto Rico, I can’t vote for president. I also don’t have a senator or a member of the House of Representatives to represent me. But I can speak English—now the language of our oppressors—and so I call or write letters. And I can read, which is a civic duty.

 

Duty!

 

What a lovely old word, like “obligation” and “prudence / temperance / forbearance” and even “charity.” These Victorian concepts which seem as dusty as your grandmother’s antimacassar (the lace doily put over the backs of chairs to keep the hair grease from the upholstery) are strangely reassuring.

 

It’s a duty now, perhaps, to go back and read an author who I read at just the right moment in my life. And Sinclair Lewis certainly qualifies, since no one ever accused Lewis of holding back, of being overly-deferential.

 

He was a drunk, like me, and he died a drunk, though it was officially cardiac arrest that got him. And like a lot of drunks (and like me), he generally didn’t have a good word to say about anybody. He pissed people off, professionally.

 

I read him first when I was in Norway, spending six weeks on my parents’ boat in the Norwegian fjords. I was in my early teens, a time when any normal person feels disenfranchised and terminally unique. But it was also the mid-1960’s, when society itself felt unmoored. Richard Nixon was getting drunk and talking to the oil portraits of Lincoln and Stonewall Jackson hanging in the White House. Richard Daley was siccing the police on antiwar protestors in Chicago. Everybody was living in sin and smoking dope.

 

There is some music you should really hear first in adolescence—Tchaikovsky comes immediately to mind. But there are some books that you can only read, seemingly, in adolescence—and here, Ayn Rand is at the head of the pack. Sinclair Lewis qualifies as well, and it doesn’t hurt that Lewis is a guy who goes after the big themes. He doesn’t paint miniatures with a single-hair brush that he dips gently in pallid colors. Lewis is out there painting billboards next to the highway—or rather, he’s splashing neon colors all over the billboard, and some of the highway as well.

 

He has themes, he wrestles with them, they succumb and fall. Main Street is about small town life, Babbit is about boosterism, Arrowsmith about an idealist doctor, and Elmer Gantry is about religious hypocrisy.  People hated him or reviled him, but there were also some heavy-hitting defenders. Mencken came out and said, “If there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.”

 

He pissed people off, perhaps, but he also won praise. Not only did he win the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926, but he also won the Nobel Prize four years later in 1930. He was the first American to win the Nobel, and may have been the first to refuse to accept the Pulitzer Prize. 

 

Why say no to the Pulitzer?

 

Lewis’s response tells you everything about what may be a very principled but perhaps prickly guy. He said no to the Pulitzer because it was to be given to “the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” 

 

Right—that’s an ouch.

 

In case you need more explanation, he goes on to say, in the very next sentence: “This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

 

So he left the award (and the 1000 bucks) on the Pulitzers’ table. He did collect, however, the Nobel prize, which brings with it a green-gold medal, a diploma, and (currently) some eleven million Swedish Krona, which is over one million USD. Even to have walked away from a thousand dollars was something, in 1926. To have walked away from a million at the start of the depression.

 

Winning the Nobel can be the heavy hand that strangles a career. Lewis had to get through another couple of decades before his death at age 65 in 1951. He was well known in literary circles, and was invited to give a course in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He loved the town, apparently, until he didn’t (he left after only giving five classes, and having taught everything, he said, that he knew).

 

He returned to Minnesota, spent time in Massachusetts, and died in Rome in 1951. 

 

Almost 75 years later, Lewis occupies a certain place in American Literature. Maybe William Schirer said it best:

 

It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to ... Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner ... Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together.

 

It’s a curious thing, how often books that have the greatest impact on their times come not from the top drawer but steaming directly off the author’s desk. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is another example—Lincoln didn’t cite Stowe’s literary prowess, but rather called her (according to legend) “the little lady that has started this great war.”

 

Nothing Lewis wrote had the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but he may have been the first to see what the United States increasingly appears to be. No one was less surprised than Lewis when the plans for a movie based on the book fell through. He wrote this in The New York Times:

 

The preparation of the film script was turned over to the well-known playwright, Mr. Sidney Howard, who prepared a script which I thought was admirable. Most of the casting was already completed. Lionel Barrymore had been engaged to play the leading rôle of Doremus Jessup. Sets had been finished and shooting was to begin Monday.

 

Unusually, the producers of the movie came clean: they told Lewis’s agent that the movie was shelved permanently “in fear of international policies and the threat of boycott abroad.”

 

“I wrote It Can’t Happen Here,” Lewis said, “but I begin to think it certainly can.”

 

I begin to think it actually has.

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

 

The Nation's Biggest Blowhard

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