On Moral Proximity

Well, it was pure indulgence, but it was also a time to re-evaluate the idea of moral proximity. You remember—if an old lady falls in front of me in the supermarket this afternoon—I know what I gotta do and I’ll do it, automatically. But if an old lady falls in an outdoor market in China….

 

….puejjj! (…as we say down here…)

 

I’m off the hook.

 

That’s moral proximity—you’re only stuck doing, well, what you can do.

 

This works brilliantly with falling (or maybe even fallen) ladies—but what about falling (or fallen) democracies? Yesterday, a casual news story revealed that a tattoo artist had been arrested and convicted for THIRTY YEARS—all for moving a box of political / cultural pamphlets in his salon. 

 

Of course, I have to be outraged by this. 

 

Things are falling apart spectacularly, as you probably don’t know, since I am imagining this as a document that will rest undisturbed for decades or centuries while the United States sloughs off its tyranny like a really bad night drinking. Nobody has a moment here to pause and take stock (much less read a blog) and I am totally down with that.

 

Greetings to my next, and perhaps only reader! It doesn’t matter to me that you’re a graduate student, totally not interested in a family of writers that ran around Southwestern Wisconsin in the mid twentieth century. I salute you, and commiserate with you, since the 22d century can’t be easy.

 

Anyway, we’ve been busy back here in 2026 worrying about pressing issues. Birthright citizenship has been retained, says the Supreme Court. Mail-in ballots can be counted after the election if postmarked before the election. Trump can now fire heads of Independent Agencies but cannot fire Lisa Cook, who is a governor of the Federal Reserve Board. No explanation needed, since absolutely none is possible.

 

All of this is vitally important, as important as a war with Iran that clearly never ended. The Iranians won, and won generously. They now have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, lifting of sanctions, return of monies frozen for decades, the end of independent nuclear inspectors. They are waiting for our oil reserves to wear out—and they are very close to doing so. Once that is used up, the price of gasoline will soar. 

 

It is a criminal war started by a malignant narcissist who is also an arrogant fool and who is also clearly demented. 

 

We think it’s all normal, but it isn’t, of course. 

 

It’s not normal to have a president that does more damage to the White House than a gang of meth heads ever could. The East Wing is gone, and the “ball room” is iffy—they have no approval to do anything. Two weeks ago, the entire front lawn of the White House was taken up with an enormous and hideous “cage fight” for the visitors sitting under a 600-ton “claw.” During the event, a “champion” shouted out that Michelle Obama is a man.

 

Nor is it normal to have a reflecting pool turn into an algae-infested slimy mess.

 

Wait—it’s July in Washington, D.C., and the temperatures have been hitting the mid-nineties. So yes, every president has had to deal with a conceptually breath-taking reflecting pool. The reality is different, as it so often is.

 

But what’s not normal is that the President would obsess over it, to the point of imagining that “vandals” had “slashed” a 250-then-300-and-finally-350-foot “gash” down the center of the pool. Nor that he would arrest an Olympian canoeist for touching the water, along with a bunch of other tourists who came by to see (and sadly smell) the pool. The ducks are dying, by the way.

 

But that’s all in the past, because the big event is the Great American State Fair, and here, only a video can capture the lunacy:

 The fact that over 100 million tax-payer dollars has gone into this debacle means nothing, since we are not—most of us—sleeping in the streets, which is what over three million people are doing in Caracas, which had 7.2 and 7.5 Richter Scale earthquakes in under 40 seconds almost a week ago. The death toll is already over 1500, and reports are that over 50,00 people are “missing.” Dozens of multiple-story towers “pancaked” in a way rarely seen before, and the situation couldn’t be more grim.

 

What a relief, then, to discover that the moral universe is somewhat intact, since the Supreme Court also refused to do anything about the E. Jean Carroll case, since what could they do? So yeah, Trump is a rapist and he owes one of his victims 5 million and over 80 million bucks for one rape and multiple defamations. 

 

I am responsible for this, as you know, since it’s my job, dammit, to keep the White House intact, stock the Great American State Fair with prize potatoes from Maine and strawberries from California, wrest the olive branch from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards and open the Strait of Hormuz, rebuild Venezuela, and drain the Reflecting Pool.

 

Since I can do absolutely nothing about any of this, it is my moral duty to obsess about all of this. This will establish me as a good person in the eyes of my father—a saint—who is dead but still very much looking down from Heaven.

 

God, is he looking down!

 

And God am I worrying!

 

Which is why I felt terrible—as indeed any moral person would—about going to that poetry slam last night at the Poet’s Passage.

 

Terrible, just terrible.

 

But I have to worry as well, I tell myself, about a younger generation of poets who are many of them dreaming of the day that they will have their first book of their own poetry in their hands. It’s a cool feeling: you look down and see your hands, and see it holding a book. Then you see your name. Then you realize…

 

…the book will live longer than you will.

 

So I’ve done Whitman, and Cavafy, and Auden, and finally Lord Byron—who were all young men, at some point, holding their first book of poetry in their hands.

So I go off to the Poet’s Passage and bind some of those books, and then I read some of those poems.

 

Moral proximity, you remember. The Passage is two blocks away. So yesterday brought the happy realization that Auden and Byron and a lot of other poets can still pack in the crowds. 

 

There were 150 people at the slam last night, at varying points.

 

Enough to fill up a State Fair!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back from the Brink

What happened?

 

Duhhh…I was terrified, of course. Easy to see it now, and easy to acknowledge it at the time, but very difficult when you are actually in the midst of the terror.

 

Here are the facts as I dimly remember them from the last two weeks.

 

Almost certainly, it started with my visiting a friend in the program that I’m not in. The friend is a lawyer, his specialty is family law, this was a formal visit.

 

I’m getting divorced at 69—not on my bingo card.

 

Holy Week—which is big / not big in Puerto Rico. The words of Miss Jean Brodie—undoubtedly uttered through pursed lips—apply: “For those who like that sort of thing, THAT is the sort of thing they like….” So yes, the Catholics do their best here, though it’s small beer compared to the Philippines or Málaga. They get out the papier mache or Styrofoam cross, dig out the scourges they bought from Condom World all those years ago, and fashion a new crown with all the thorns pointing out (and their tips capped). They walk down the street. The rest of us go to the beach.

 

Except for me, of course, since if there’s a negative emotion around, I have to feel it. So I absorb the misery of those around me, and enjoy the company. But it is a hard week.

 

Made no easier by the news, on Easter Sunday, that the President of the United States…oh, let’s just show it.

 

  

 Oooops, that’s not the one.

 

That’s actually appropriate—sort of—if you don’t mind a blurring / erasure of the line between church and state. But the other (Trump being famously liberal in his posting) post is the one that got everyone’s attention.

 

This was followed, very predictably, by this on Tuesday:

 

 

Today, I’m marveling at the distance that Trump has created for himself. He announces the destruction of a civilization, denies any role in that destruction, expresses insincere sorrow that the world’s oldest civilization is going to be annihilated, puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Iranians, and then blesses them!

 

This post appeared on Tuesday at 8:06 AM. I read it several hours later and then sat on a park bench, smoking a cigar. 

Trump had gone on to say that 8 PM eastern time would be the hour. If a deal had not been secured, all bets were off, and destruction assured.

 

The Iranians had submitted a 10-point plan that looked very naturally towards Iranian interests. They wanted….oh, here it is again.

 

 

In fact, Trump announced jubilantly in a post that a two-week “truce” had been secured, that everybody was on board with the peace plan, but that the remaining “details” were yet to be worked out.

 

He caved, and in the worst possible way. There’s no disguising this—he chickened out (THANK GOD) and the world is safe.

 

This time….

 

For the moment…

 

Until the next time that the rat—errrr, president—is backed into a corner.

 

The president is completely bonkers. His lies were never convincing to anyone with half a brain—now, even a moron can see through them. His impulse control is shot. He clearly has no plan for ANYTHING—not the tariffs, not the immigration policy, not foreign policy. His emotions are wildly out of control. 

 

The enduring question is, “what happened?” The “truce” was declared a couple of hours before the 8 PM deadline. I, by this time, had decided to pass the time waiting for the end of the world by binding a book, rather than drinking (which I chose not to do, out of deference to those people in those meetings that they, at least, go to). By the time the book was bound, the news was creeping out that the US top command of the Armed Services may have—they were very cagey in describing this, and they should have been—not refused Trump’s orders, but rather adduced the various complications (military / political / legal / moral) that might ensue if the admittedly bold plans of the dear leader were carried out.

 

Did the last line of defense in our little democracy hold?

 

It was reassuring to be lied to in such a soothing way. Some four-star general got on CNN and assured the world that there was a sane mind left in Washington, and that the situation was normal. In fact, their commander-in-chief is bat-shit crazy, and the books that are going to be written about this fuck-up in American history is going to make the post-Nazi avalanche of memoirs / documentaries / books / movies / etc. look like a snow flurry on an otherwise crisp November day.

 

The president had his finger on the nuclear red button we all imagine is on the Resolute Desk, but then the aide came in with his diet-Coke, and he forgot all about it.

No worries, see?

 

To recap: 

1. Visit to lawyer to end my marriage

2.  2. Awaiting end of world

3.    3.  See below

 

Nobody in MAGA saw this as a Jesus-like figure. Nobody accepted the notion that Trump had posted it (and he admitted he had) thinking he was being portrayed as just a doctor, not the pathway to eternal salvation. Nobody was outraged by the attack on Pope Leo—God knows, I called His Holiness a whore a score of blog posts back, but Trump really went after him. He called him “weak on crime,” which seemed an odd thing to say. Does the pope also have an economic development plan, a scheme to fix our broken healthcare system, and a revision of the penal code?

 

True—the Catholics, who had favored Trump 60 / 40 over Harris in the 2024 election, now put him at a 48% approval rating. 

 

The cumulative effect is staggering. Not, of course, that it would affect many people, because people have tuned out the news. Worse, they have turned people who care deeply about the news into moral lepers, who insist on squandering their time in the filth and decay of current events when they could be looking higher!

 

Their thoughts could be elevated!

 

Their minds purified…

 

Their souls complete! 

 

But no, there was little Marc, sitting on a park bench smoking a cigar because why not? Trump might have blown Iran up, but every other Islamic country would have bombed our military bases in the region the next day. Terrorist attacks on American interests in London and Paris were inevitable, and here in the United States as well. 

 

Americans are not seeing this as the Iranians are seeing this: they know that they are in a Holy War. The crusades that are open wounds to this day in Iran and are just paragraphs in a History textbook for us—well, the term “Great Satan” to describe the US is not metaphorical. It is real, it is evil, and it is upon them. 

 

Of course, this is a Holy War for the evangelical Christians, who have been waiting for this for the last two thousand years, this moment when the struggle between good (us) and evil (them) will at last celebrate its glorious victory on the world stage. The curtain will come crashing down.

 

The rest of us are worrying about the price of gasoline.

 

The monumental disconnect is jarring.

 

I was terrified.

And I still am

 

 

Donald Trump, Christian

Yes, he is, and don’t you dare tell me he’s not.

 

I know you and I like you, you followers of Christ. You’re good people, as are some of the other Christians, the real Christians. The people who are NOT followers of Christ, but Christians. The people who have claimed not just Christ but the 2000 years of baggage that goes with it. The baggage, with its soaring cathedrals and thunderous music, is called Christianity, and we didn’t use to be ashamed of it.

 

Anyway, Trump calls himself a Christian, so he is, punto. This is called, if I dimly remember it, the grace of God—the unmerited love from God.

 

Unmerited being the operative word, for me. Am I worthy of entering heaven, assuming it exists? No, and neither is Trump. We all squeak in, somehow, those of us who call upon him (or Him, to keep King James happy) and are born again in his (His) name.

 

All right, let’s take the gloves off….  

 

I fucking hate you all. That thing hanging around your neck? It’s a crucifix to you, but a Swastika to me. And I think it’s time to grow up and get real.

 

Fuck the broadmindedness. Fuck being “tolerant” of other people’s religious beliefs. Fuck accepting that we can be “nice,” and that we have to respect the rights of others, when they’re wrong.

 

We don’t get it right. Norway and Argentina got it right, when they looked at the Jehovah’s Witnesses and said, “no, we’re not going to give you tax-exempt status if you practice shunning (Norway) or prevent people in critical need from receiving their own blood, for God’s sake (Argentina).”

 

Jehovah’s Witnesses can now exchange a civil greeting at any worship service that a “disfellowshipped” has the nerve to attend. No Saturday afternoon shopping sprees, of course, and forget Sunday dinner. But you can greet them, cordially and coolly, if they show up at the Church they’ve been kicked out of. And patients can now store their blood (assuming they can find a hospital that will do it) for future surgeries. Assuming you know when you are going to be hit by a bus, and act thoughtfully and prudently, you’ll be just fine.   

 

In the United States, our beloved Supreme Court has just told Colorado that it can’t rise to the level of Norway or Argentina. Colorado had tried to ban conversion therapy—which is the practice of putting kids with a serious problem (they’re gay and they’re terrified) into camps where they will be told that they’re sick or evil but God loves them anyway.

 

Why do I hate you, you Christians or followers of Christ?

 

You’re killing my people.

 

So no, I do not break bread with you.

 

I do not enter your homes.

 

I greet you politely and despise you privately. 

 

We are enemies, not brothers. I am honest enough to tell you that.

 

Are you honest?

 

You had every chance to call out Donald Trump for what he is, but you all sold out. For different reasons—you sincerely believed that God was using a broken vessel (Trump) to convey his salvation to the world. You had “reservations” but didn’t feel “comfortable” challenging him, or bucking your friends. You prayed, hoping for guidance from a higher power.

 

You are killing my people.

We are enemies.  

Afterword

If all goes well, you are reading this. And sorry, it’s not important who you are. Just that you’re reading this. It will mean that after surviving and writing through 2025, I managed to put together something like a book. It will mean that I did the last lap, and crossed the finish line, however bedraggled. It will mean that I failed, inevitably, because I didn’t do the craftsman-like job of stepping back, looking at the job at hand and what I had to work with, and setting down an organized plan.

 

Oh, and then sticking to it.

 

I had two big advantages—I’m a man with a past. Not the dimly lit halls with the roaming men clad only in bath towels, though that certainly is true.  But another past, certainly, since I really did have a grandmother, and she did remember—and write down—enough to hint at who we are, or might have been. I spent a lot of time in 2025 thinking about Henry Herrick—my ancestor who at 21 had to live in the hysteria of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Worse, he had to go out and round up some of the women whom I had read about in English class, when we had to read The Crucible (or whatever the title of the Arthur Miller play was….) Even more painful would have been to watch his “charges” (or rather victims) spending all their day with their legs  wrists  and head brutally chained together. The women he arrested had to be sitting, probably in filthy straw on the floor in a medieval torture device. Let’s steal from Getty images, and see if they sue me…

 

 

Henry’s perfect, a gift on a platter. Any writer could squeeze juice out of Henry for days. Do a little research—for God’s sake. Call up the Herrick Family Society—or whatever it is—that safeguards and preserves the treasured legacy of our family and our brave and unfettered service to our country! When witches prowled the foul streets of Salem, polluting innocents’ minds, causing fits of demonic possession, sickening animals and destroying crops, unleashing plagues and violent storms….

 

When the devil prowled Salem in that dark decade before the 18^th century…

 

When mothers had to stand by and watch their angelic children writhe in possession. The hate, the fury the demon unleashed in the reverent homes of the good people of Salem…

 

The dark forest-green of the forest…. 

 

Not the sanitized forest green of my book covers, but the forest green of evil Mother Nature herself. The forest green shelters the “Indians,” and Herrick knows perfectly well that they are not “native Americans” or “First Nation peoples” or Winnebago—Ho-Chunk. At the moment, without conversion, they are willing slaves of the devil. And if little David Thoreau is ever going to be able to hike out into the woods by that pond called Walden—well, sure, he could do it, in 1692. 

 

But he’d last about a week.

 

The forest is evil, the Indians are evil, and we are—coincidentally—evil.

 

Save for the grace of our almighty Lord. 

 

That’s why we gotta kill ‘em, see?

 

This was Christmas morning—this gift of an ancestor like this—but did little Marc bone up on the history, dig into his family ancestry, sort out properly who was who, and then engage in a calm exposition of the facts?

 

Did he deliver the goods for the reader?

 

I come from writers, but there is craft in writing—if it’s something other than a tweet. 

 

Have I practiced that craft?

 

(…funny how much work those three little dots—technically called ‘points of ellipsis’—have to do before that word ‘funny’ that appeared 18 words ago at the start of the sentence (though really this is a fragment or more likely a run-on sentence,) since I have to tell you that my shoelaces are untied. I know this because after I wrote “did he deliver the goods” and “have I practiced that craft,” there was a strange silence in this always quiet room, and I had to look downward…

 

…you know…

 

…at my shoes.

 

Funny about that.

 

Couldn’t look at my laptop in the eye, or the screen.

 

Of course I didn’t do the work of “developing” Henry Herrick.

 

And I screwed up on the second gift under the tree, this time from the crazy Pickards—my rich uncles from the other side of the family. Did I do my homework on the guy who had lost his son in the Civil War, gone into enemy territory to retrieve him, brought him home to his Quacker wife?

 

That Quacker wife that had every virtue, damn her, but softness. I have two pictures of her, and I can see why my grandmother loved her grandmother. But I am a man, not an American-Victorian child. I know things my grandmother did not.

 

God bless them—the Christians produced a miracle in the 19^th century by effortlessly building both the fierce abolitionists of the North and the savage slaveholders of the South with utterly glorious, crystalline, theological palaces. Palaces that could hold two utterly opposing points of view on the central moral issue of the 19^th century.

 

For the South, it was something now called the “theological defense of slavery,” and it did have logic on its side. Slavery is Biblical, and it’s no big deal. The idea of individual freedom for everybody was unthinkable in Biblical times. 

 

You know, like being gay in the 1950’s….

 

But Evangelical Christianity also brought us Wilberforce—the great British figure who spent 20 fighting to free the slaves who were harvesting the sugar on the next islands over. Every breath of his struggle was fueled by his Christian beliefs, and if he got the job done before anyone else (The British got rid of slavery in the 1840’s, the US in the 1860’s, and the Spanish still later), we have Jesus and his death on the cross to thank for it.

 

Anyway, any decent writer could have a field day with poor old Nicholas Coleman Pickard, but did I? Have I researched the Civil War, which is so monumental a deal that even Ken Burns couldn’t bear the idea of doing a documentary on it? True, it may be where angels fear to tread, but that’s my business, dammit. Find out what you could about the man, write a letter to the Historical Society of Lena, Illinois, who actually reached out to me.

 

A couple years ago…

 

Did I bother to follow up?

 

I’m an awful kid, the very worst of the worst, and it is Christmas morning and I have ruined the two glorious gifts of Henry Herrick and Nicholas Coleman Pickard. I have ruined them and abused them and neglected them and never once did I do the decent thing.

 

The reasonable thing.

 

Did I try to understand them? Get to know them? Learn at least something of their live and their times—so that I could deliver them unsullied to my harried readers.

 

Of course not. I made my great-great grandmother into a virago, and my great-great grandfather into a combination Hamlet / Sartre existential crisis-goer.

 

You know what a Hamlet / Sartre existential crisis-goer is, right?

 

I haven’t done my work, and the four-hundred bound-but uncovered manuscript that I am lugging around shows it. I have absolutely nothing to show for it except this, which I have been hauling around for days. This is the book that should have been a masterpiece—that couldn’t help but be a masterpiece. 

 

Didn’t do his job, Little Marc.

 

Well here it is, and I am going to tackle it logically.

 

Manfully…

 

With Christian fortitude and a strength ever-growing in the goodness and grace of our Lord….

Today is 13 March 2026.

 

I will read everything I wrote in the month of January, 2025, next Monday, 16 March 2026.

 

I will read everything I wrote in February, 2025, on Tuesday, 17 March 2026.

 

In 12 days, I’ll be done with the damn thing.

 

I’ll get back to you.