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!
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