Jack and Others

Jack was my father, and he had sterling qualities. He was a very good listener, for one thing, which may have been the result of interviewing anybody who did anything interesting in Madison Wisconsin from 1945-1974. He was a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal, which meant that he got up every morning, ate breakfast, and then retired to the green sofa that my mother hated and could not throw away.

 

(It wasn’t broken, to answer your question, and who could throw away a sofa?)

 

Jack was born in 1909 and went through the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 30’s. The experience never left him, I used to think, and was fused with the loneliness and grimness of living on a North Dakota farm through brutal winters. Even though the family lived in Minneapolis, Jack’s father travelled frequently, since he had real estate dealing in North Dakota and Montana. Jack told me once that the sound of a train whistle even decades later stabbed him in the heart. He had stood on too many railway platforms, seeing a black train take away, once again, his father.

 

He was a big man who took surprising small steps and spoke in a soft voice. He invited you to spill your beans, and he was wise enough often just to listen, for the most part. But it was at breakfast, when all of us were waking up and figuring out how we were going to get through the day, that another side of Jack turned up.

 

He held forth. He pontificated. He was untroubled by nuance or doubt. 

 

And he was horrified by what was happening in the country, since the 1960’s in America, which is when and where I sat with my father in those years, were definitely a time of turbulence. A staunch Republican, he believed in Richard Nixon until the end. He rejected all of the dogma of the Christian faith and the Lutheran Church, but he unflinchingly adopted its moral code and spiritual values. And he expected his sons to do so as well. Anything else would have been unthinkable.

 

At the breakfast table, he carried on about the liberal press, and the bias he felt they espoused. He also had strong views about the sexual revolution which was going on at the time.

 

From his point of view, it wasn’t.

 

Men were men, also known as animals, who for the most part would fuck anyone they could. He did not, and yes, I have just asked myself, quietly, “are you really sure.”

 

Yes, I am. He was one of the most honest men I’ve met, and he was also a man of his word. He did what he said.

 

Unfortunately, he couldn’t understand people who didn’t.

 

He knew that the average guy would screw when he could. But women, thank God, had the stronger moral code. Women were either saints or sluts, but sainthood was their preferred cloak. 

 

There was no sexual revolution going on—it was just weak people who had been given permission to behave badly. The animals were acting up in the barnyard.

 

Maybe that’s what got ahold of me—but I was speechless, and if I can dredge it up, the video will show it. I stammered out that the book was appalling, and beyond that, there wasn’t much else I could say.

 

Or maybe it was what I did say, at the very end. Our family—or at least part of it—has been in the states since before the revolution. Some member of the family has fought in every war since (presumably) King Philip’s War. We have a stake in this game, and we don’t ask much, in this family. Nobody has to go to Harvard or cure cancer or make much more than a buck.

 

But we do have to be good people.

 

Jack would have been horrified by Jeffrey Epstein—not so for what he did, but for his openness, his reveling in it. He would have been appalled that anybody found it funny, or something to celebrate. And he would have found it incomprehensible that any woman could pose naked or near naked and be completely fine with it. Shame was an inevitable part of “illicit” sex. Silence was a necessary part of licit sex (which occurred—duh!—only between married couples).

 

A female reporter told my mother, once, years after my father had died, that he was the only man that every woman felt comfortable being alone with late at night in the newsroom. My mother was completely unsurprised, but also dismayed—she couldn’t believe it was that bad. Was her own husband that much of a rarity? And what kind of marriages did all her friends have?

So I sputtered and groped for words, there, on the stage of the Poet’s Passage. Thankfully, not a lot of people were there. And Lady, the muse and proprietress of the Passage, has a forgiving nature.

 

But it was a warning sign. I’m not in good shape. I’m fatigued and stressed and not able, somehow, to let go. To relax, and to say that the nation will be all right, that we have had crises before and survived them. That God is on our side and will not forsake us.

 

That may have been why, the next night, YouTube took matters into its own hands and didn’t show me Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell, or any of the purveyors of outrage that I normally see. I have no idea whose finger was on the remote, and what buttons had to be skipped, ignored and ultimately pressed. But there I was, and there Matthias Goerne, singing Schubert. 

 

And it was odd, since I had not been listening recently to either Schubert or Goerne. In fact, I’ve been listening to Palestrina, who lived in the last three quarters of the 16^th century, and Gordon Lightfoot, who died a couple of years ago (and whose mind I cannot read).

 

But there I was, lying on my couch, listening to Shubert, and remembering a trip I had taken to New York, a decade ago. I wanted to see my brother and sister living there, and had waited until I saw that Goerne was going to be at Carnegie Hall, singing Die Winterreise. So I bought tickets to get to New York and into Carnegie Hall, and my brother John and I went to the concert. 

 

“Why are you going to New York,” asked Näia, Lady’s daughter.

 

“To hear Matthias Goerne,” I told her.

 

“What’s that,” she said.

 

“That’s a German guy,” I said, “who has the voice I want to hear, as I die.”

 

Once again, I didn’t know it was true until the moment I said it.

 

Ahh, but YouTube knew it. 

      

The Tipping Point?

Well, I could tell you that Charlie Kirk was no angel, and I could run over to Facebook and get three or four memes to prove it. He hated everyone except the people who agreed with him, felt that having 45,000 gun deaths a year (including the school kids at their desks) was worth it to protect the Second Amendment, and derided the LGBTQ community. But there are two problems, the first of which is that I don’t know if any of that is true. The second problem is related to the first: I have no idea who Charlie Kirk is.

 

That’s the point—we’re not just separated. We’re living in impregnable fortresses, ideologically speaking, and they’re heavily fortified. All that was clear to me when I spoke to a man of 32 years. He mentioned Charlie Kirk, knew who he was, and mourned his passing. Later, in the conversation, he asked me for clarification of who Epstein was—he only knew that he was some sort of sex offender. Not much more.

 

Once again, the entire country is on edge. We have had nothing but Charlie Kirk stories since he died. Vice president Vance flew to Utah to condole with the wife, take Kirk’s body back to Arizona, and then to do his podcast today. My Facebook page is filled with quotes from Trump about not calling the governor of Minnesota (Tim Walz) after the killing of two Democratic politicians three months ago. Then there’s this:

 

 

Trump was true to form. He went on Fox News on Friday morning to announce that the suspect was in custody. He was asked how we can ever come together as a country, and he responded by saying he didn’t give a damn about the country coming together. He wants, and apparently is planning, the annihilation of the radical left—that’s me!—and only then will he be satisfied.

 

I’m meeting him halfway, since I don’t care about the country either. I’m done with caring about the country, worrying about the country, grieving for the country. You don’t want me?

 

Fine.

 

I vowed never to return to the continental United States until Trump was in prison, and the madness had died down. The United States has not missed me, but I suspect that it might be missing the revenue from a whole bunch of Canadians, Mexicans, foreigners in general who are unwilling to travel to the states. I think that my cousin, a very successful farmer, is wondering who’s going to buy his soybeans. Kennedy Center won’t be hearing Yo-Yo Ma, since he politely gave the middle finger to an invitation last month. Trump has isolated us from the rest of the world, all the better for us to hate (and perhaps kill) each other.

 

I have no idea if the country is at a tipping point, but it seems likely. The conservatives didn’t self-correct when the news came out that the killer was, once again, a straight, cis male, age 22, who grew up in a Mormon family devoted to MAGA. My Facebook page is showing me photos of the killer’s mother wielding what looks like a pretty impressive weapon. This information created a ten-second ceasefire in the verbal hostilities. Then they were back with the revised script, which seems unchanged from the previous one: The New York Times, this morning, had this to say:

 

 

The conservatives didn’t self-correct either when it was suggested—in my Radical Left media, at least—that the Kirk’s killer could have been a Groyper.

 

I’m delighted—I guess—to see that my computer doesn’t know the word “Groyper,” either, and is red-lining it. Groypers are to the RIGHT of 
Charlie Kirk, and targeted him as early as 2019. Tyler Robinson, the self-confessed killer of Charlie Kirk, was apparently a fan of Nick Fuentes, one of the lead Groypers. We radical lefters are entertaining the idea that Kirk was killed by the right, not the left, and there’s some reason to believe that. Kirk was one of the few conservatives that challenged Trump to come clean about the Epstein files. Would it be enough to kill him to silence him? Or do we have to hype the death and blame it all on the trans community (thanks, Don Trump Jr., who clued us in that the trans community was the most dangerous group of domestic terrorists the country had ever seen)?

 

Everything has shifted—or has it? Last Tuesday, I went to the Poet’s Passage to bind the birthday book of Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, I had been totally into the story of the birthday book since I first heard that it was a black leather (of course) hand-bound book. 

 

The book was compiled (it’s not a written document) in 2003 by Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s coconspirator who was found guilty of sex trafficking with Epstein. A PDF file of the book was online, all 238 pages of it. Unfortunately, the book itself has not been photographed, to my knowledge. Too bad, because I would love to see it. And it would be no problem, I think, to determine if the book had been altered. If anybody had written, six months ago, the letter from Donald Trump to Epstein and then tried to insert it…well, it would be clear.

 

There are, in fact, ways to insert (although usually to re-insert) pages into a book. You open the book as wide as possible (and if it’s a well-bound book, that should be pretty open) to get as close to the glued spine as possible. Then you “slip-in” the page by gluing a ¼ strip of the left-hand margin of the page to be inserted. Press the book for an hour and it should be fine. The tipped-in page will not have the signature holes that you would expect in the rest of the book, assuming that the book had been sewn and then glued.

 

The real question in my mind is how Maxwell submitted the manuscript to the binder. I didn’t see any blank pages in the 238 that I bound last Tuesday, but I was so greatly horrified by the whole thing that I may not have seen them. Since a book is bound from the back to the front, I got all of the seediest stuff first. Whole pages of Jeffrey Epstein surrounded by pubescent schoolgirls with blacked out faces passed through my hands and needle. The charming letters and photos of Epstein’s boyhood friends and teachers (found at the beginning of the book) made no impression whatsoever. In fact, only Mein Kamph and Protocols of the Elders of Zion are more depraved.

 

Maxwell must have gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to produce this book. There were all the letters to get. There was the order in which to put them. And finally, there was the bookbinder, whom I now know is Herbert Weitz, since the notice / advertisement for the firm appears in the middle of the book. Here is Weitz and Coleman, busy tooting their horn:

 

 

Artificial intelligence tells me that the company is no longer in business. Weitz, one of the partners, is still alive and active. An email that I sent to weitzcoleman.com was returned to me.

 

I think someone should talk to Weitz, and I’d be happy to step up to the plate and be flown to New York (you can put me up at the Plaza). I’d ask him whether Maxwell had pasted all the letters together, since the letter Trump allegedly wrote was (presumably) blank on the other side. In the book, it’s preceded and followed by other letters / text. If Maxwell didn’t have the glue-pot ready, she might just have copied and printed everything she received. That would make the most sense, since presumably people had sent post cards, actual birthday cards, and regular letters on standard 8.5 x 11-inch paper. 

 

I’d ask Weitz as well why he chose to bind this manuscript into two if not three separate volumes of the finest calf and Moroccan skins. Was this at Maxwell’s request? If so why? The only reason I can think of is to segregate the childhood / boyhood / young adult Jeffrey from the later Jeffrey. The first volume is perfectly respectable and would be a delight to show Epstein’s mother, the next time she dropped in to Palm Beach. The last volume would send her to an early grave.

 

There’s the terrible idea, immediately dismissed, that there is a certain cost in selling and binding the 238 pages into separate volumes. One book might cost 150 bucks—three would get you 450$. But no bookbinder, I am very sure, would ever stoop to such chicanery.

 

So there I was, last Tuesday night, at the poetry slam in front of a mercifully sparse audience, utterly unable to say a word. It takes a lot to rob me of speech, but there it was.

 

Then Jack turned up.     

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

Sorry, Of Course

I suppose I should tell you, of course, that I stand firmly against political violence. 

 

I decry it. 

 

I denounce it. 

 

I stand proudly with my fellow Americans of all political beliefs and religious affiliations. One of the hallmarks of our great nation is that we all of us, above all, cherish our beloved freedoms and the right to disagree—vigorously but never violently!—with the (insane / stupid / are you shitting me?) opposing views of our brothers and sisters.

 

Of course.

 

So I’m sorry that Charlie Kirk is dead. I knew nothing about him, never having seen him and his charming wife-now-widow. He was a commentator or an influencer or someone with, apparently, no credentials who got enormous influence by being someone who could…well, influence people. He could and he did and now he’s dead.

 

And it’s lousy that he’s dead for several reasons. It’s lousy because his wife has had her whole life blown up, his children have lost their father, his friends have lost a dear companion on their trudge through this life. That is awful, and I can tell you because I have lost a father and a mother and a young man who was nearly a son. You wake up every morning to the realization that ______ is no longer there, and the knife stabs you again, and you’re wincing but there’s no blood on the floor. So you get up and go the bathroom and feed the cat and then go outside, where you will exhaust every ounce of energy putting on an act. You smile, you greet people, you attempt jokes. It’s written in that social contract—the one they never gave you and you never got to read. And that you still have to fulfill. So Charlie’s wife, a former Miss Arizona, will get a pass, or maybe a note from her doctor excusing her from work (that is, normal life) for the next couple of weeks. Then, we’ll all expect her to buckle down, put on her happy face, and “carry on with her life.”

 

As if she has a life to carry.

 

For me, that’s what grief was, and now the sardonic tone has left me. Shit—now, even the title of this post is pissing me off. Because there is nothing funny at all when someone with one anonymous bullet directly to the carotid shoots your life down. Because that’s what grief is. Your life has been murdered.

 

There’s no life to “carry on,” and that’s the problem. It’s not that there’s no Charlie coming home from work (do influencers punch clocks? or do they even come home, and if so, where are they coming from?).

 

It’s that there’s no you.

 

Not only has Charlie been killed and your life has been killed, but now it’s you that’s been killed! The single bullet to the carotid took out more lives than anybody could have known, because now Charlie’s wife, whose name I think is Erika (and I’ll stop being snarky about her Miss Arizona title) is not Erika. In fact, Erika is just as dead as Charlie, and now she has the problem of getting out of bed every morning and being brave for her kids and dealing with hordes of reporters, some of whom are trampling the rose bushes to ask her, solemnly, how she is “coping.”

 

There’s no “she” there.

 

“Dunno—ask me in a year….”

 

That’s what I’d say, because this last time around, I learned a thing or two. I gave myself a year to mourn my marriage—a year in which I was not carrying on but just faking it. Faking the smiles until, at odd moments, they became real. Faking the sobriety, because even though I didn’t drink any booze, I had withdrawn from everyone and was living as a hermit. Faking caring, because some people needed me to care. Not much, but still….

 

I was fine with faking it because I knew that it would come to an end. It did—a month ago marked the end of My Year of Faking Tiredfully. (Made up word—deal with it). And I was damned glad it was over, and grateful, because I didn’t do it well. I didn’t do it well because it can’t be done well. Nobody does it well.

 

“Well” is getting through it. 

 

There must be a better way, and probably spiritually evolved people do it. They take long walks on the beach and colonic massages and messages from the Dalai Lamma. They grow. They become insightful. They do not spend an entire day obsessing over a bus driver who didn’t stop for you just because—can you believe this shit?-- you were 0.0000000000000000000000003 microns away from the bus stop.

 

OK—half a block.

 

The point is that, having endured a humanitarian crisis worse than any since Auschwitz, I didn’t buy the bottle of scotch in the plastic green bottle that CVS used to sell. I didn’t even kick the cat. Erika will look at the reporter standing on her rose bushes and mumble some response, and a panel of three “experts” on multiple news outlets around the world will parse the words for the precise meaning and significance of what Erika said.

 

Erika, of course, is dead.

Of course. 

 

But they won’t know that, just as the guys waiting with me at the bus stop didn’t know that, or the cat. They didn’t know that I was dead, just like Erika is now dead.

 

I was dead for a year, because I am the child of the child of a Victorian lady, Ruth Herrick Myers. And the Victorians, bless them, gave everybody a year to wear black—severe black. Jet black. At the ninth month, a charcoal grey handkerchief could appear. A bit later, perhaps a tear-stained purple flower in the button hole. Navy blues, primeval-forest greens might creep in a week later. A careful choice of wardrobe could make your grief disappear so gradually that nobody could see that there was any transition. You were there, you were not there, and now you’re back.

 

They made no exception to the one-year rule, and that was, of course, to Victoria herself.

 

Or it may have been that Her Supreme Majesty (one picks up little habits in a 42-year marriage, such as how to address Her Supreme Majesty—not “Vicky”, NEVER!) just did whatever the F she wanted. She could, she did, she did not scare the horses.

 

Anyway, I was fine with faking it for a year because I also knew that nobody does it right. Nobody grows and changes and becomes spiritually evolved and realizes their true inner worth and activates the telos. “Telos” being some Greek term meaning, I think, what-you’re-supposed-to-be-doing-with-your-life. Nobody does it well because there’s nobody around to do it.

 

That bullet took you out, as well as your husband.

 

So that’s why it’s lousy for Erika-I-forgive-you-for-being-Miss-Arizona this morning. She thought she was going to wake up today, kiss her husband goodbye on his way out the door to go influence, and then make a second cup of coffee and raise the children.

 

It’s a lousy morning for Erika, what with the reporter stomping on the rose, and the blogger she’ll never know being snarky in Puerto Rico.

 

Well, she’ll be comforted with JD Vance, and that may not be snarky. Apparently, according to The New York Times, the two men were close. I hope they are, since today is September 11—and Vance was supposed to be in New York, and if Vance chose to cancel that engagement in order to be with a friend in need, I’m all for it. And I’ll try not to entertain the thought that there may be more political hay-making going on than passing-the-white-handkerchief-to-the-widow. I’m snarky, so I won’t dismiss the thought. But I won’t entertain it.

 

A vice president speaking to dignitaries about people he didn’t know 24 years after an event isn’t all that important. Not compared to the raw grief of dear friend. But it is important, because 2,996 people died that day.

 

2,996 people died.

 

And those were just the ones we could count.      

 

           

Not Funny

I was going to be funny, today, because I have to be, on occasion. My life is too important to be serious all the time, as I once told someone at some point. And it made sense at the time. Does it now? I have no idea.

 

I was going to be funny, because what else can I do when the nation goes careening the wrong way down a one-way street, with nothing but semis roaring towards it?

 

Nobody under 30 will have any memory of who Bill Clinton is, or who Monica Lewinsky is, or what a blue dress with a white stain is in terms of American Democracy. But for those of us on Social Security, we remember it well.

 

I was trying to be high-minded about it all. When the news first appeared in the 1990’s that Bill Clinton, whom my mother correctly described as a hound-dog, had had a “relationship” with a young intern, I thought, “yuck,” and tried to forget it. 

 

It was impossible to ignore, and the congressional Republicans made damn sure of it. Morals mattered! Character counts! Can it be said that Republican shirked their moral duty, scorned the very values upon which our republic was founded, and turned their back on the most basic and sacred laws governing our society?

 

They did not!

 

The stench was sickening, the moral rot was putrifying, the sight was one no mortal could have beheld unmoved!

 

So Bill Clinton had gotten a blow job and his ejaculate had landed on the blue dress that Ms. Lewinsky was wearing. Lewinsky had mailed the dress to her mother, as I recall, and would I forget a detail like that? I had wasted a morning, in the 1990’s, writing an imaginary letter from Monica to Mom. How to convey the message that the dress—under NO circumstances—could be washed? Oh, and that it had to be kept somewhere private, which I seem to remember was under the bed. Anyway, there the dress was, and the greatest nation on earth waited and waited for what it might reveal to us. They took a buccal swab on Clinton, they matched it with the DNA from the white stain on the blue dress, and we all waited for 24 hours or so. 

 

Clinton strolled out on the White House lawn and ‘fessed up in a way that satisfied no one, particularly, but that did allow the Republican to save face and keep from making an ass (or bigger asses) of themselves. The impeachment trial was both huge—it was only the second time in our history that a president had been impeached, and the first time around had set a particularly low bar 120 years earlier—and foregone. He wasn’t going to be convicted, but he certainly wasn’t getting off Scot-free. Everybody knew, just by seeing the pictures of Bill / Hilary / Chelsea walking to the helicopter to fly to vacation in Cape Cod, that he was going to pay a helluva price.

 

I was not then what I am now—an elderly, respectable homosexual. I sniggered, and I’m neither proud of it nor ashamed. In fact, I got totally into it, to the point where I considered stealing the book The Book of Virtues, by a guy named William Bennett. Here’s a description of the book from Wikipedia:

 

A former Secretary of Education for the United States, Bennett began developing the book around 1988 at the behest of teachers who pointed out the deficiencies of moral education in their schools.

 

Bennett was being trotted out regularly to express his horror at the Clinton / Lewinsky affair, and I could go along with him, to some extent. Clinton had had sex with an employee. It would have gotten me fired at Walmart, if I had had sex with one of my students. Why should the president be any different?

 

Sooo…do we let the Republicans topple a democratically elected leader, the ruler of the free world? A bunch of sniveling hypocrites?

 

The only way out was humor, and it wasn’t particularly easy, since I had this, sitting in my background.

 

 

The youngest person in the photo is photo is my grandmother, who would later write a brief memoir that got me to start writing again. I knew my grandmother as well as a boy / young man can know an elderly lady. And as well as the aspiring hippie that I was could know the Victorian lady that she never overcame.

 

She may be having the last laugh.

 

Whatever else Donald Trump was, he was certainly the deformed tail-end of the hippie / free love movement. He was the 80’s, with the ambition and the drive and the big hair. “Free love” meant to some of us examining our values, examining how our expectations of men and women and their sexual roles had inhibited us or thwarted us. It was—in theory—about liberation from old, outdated ideas.

 

It was not permission to fuck anybody, without thought of their feelings and examination of our own behavior. 

 

Well, it was for Trump!

 

He bragged that “his Vietnam War” was surviving New York City in the 80’s—very funny, unless you had served, and possibly lost your life, in the war that Trump had avoided. You were sitting in a rice paddy, trying to figure out if the wind or a Viet Cong was moving that bush; Trump was waiting in a 5^th Avenue doctor’s office, getting tested for the clap.

 

Maybe it was inevitable. The sixties and seventies had been a time of high moral purpose—ending war, fighting poverty, overturning centuries-old prejudices and useless moral strictures. The 80’s were the flip side of that. Greed was good, and sex was good, and screw your feelings and qualms. I want to get my rocks off.

 

My grandmother thought it was horrendous.

 

She didn’t want, really, to know what we were up to. “We” because mea culpa, I bought into it too, and even now don’t feel bad about it. I had grown up hearing the words “faggot” and “queer” and I was perfectly happy to throw it all back in their faces, and have as much anonymous and free sex as I could get. I never went to bed with anyone underage, under any coercion, or under the assumption that what we were doing was going to last, was serious. No babies, no hurt feelings.

 

And yeah, I got the clap too. 

 

We all did.

 

So I too was swinging, in just the way Trump was swinging. Not at his level, of course—but the idea was the same.

 

I was going to write, “what saved me was those people, in the photo above,” but was I saved? Was I better than Donald Trump?

 

Assuming I was any better than Trump, having redoubtable Victorian ancestors probably saved the day. It’s easier both to be promiscuous and also abusive if you don’t have anyone looking over your shoulder. The path from the young girl of the photo to the old woman I knew was long, but perfectly graded and smoothed. My mother had sipped the sip of righteousness, and then passed the chalice to me. I could lie gloriously in the gutter, on some nights, but I was looking up at the stars and marveling. I wasn’t bathing in the slime.

 

There was an adult quality about my own dissipation in my youth that I think Trump never had. There was something, I like to think, that would have kept me from writing this, in this way, to this person.

 

  

Raise your hands, all you guys out there who doubted that the letter, bound in the leather binding with so many others, existed.

 

Dammit—raise your hands!

 

I said—RAISE YOUR HANDS!!!

 

What?

 

No one?

 

Guess it wasn’t funny.

 

 

      

Enough

What I should do is go out and take a photo of the damn thing, which is sitting in San Juan harbor, anchored behind a multimillion-dollar yacht.

 

It’s a destroyer, and it’s big, easily a small city block. Trump decided, last week, to bomb a speed boat which he said was carrying drugs to the United States. The attack killed eleven people, which immediately raised a red flag. Apparently, 11 people on a small boat are not only unnecessary, but actually a drawback. Eleven adults, assuming that they are men averaging 200 lbs each, is about a ton of weight. Why put all those people on a small boat when you could put bags of drugs? 

 

Nobody knows who they are, and nobody is precisely sure if the attack occurred in international waters (in which case it would be illegal, maybe) or Venezuelan waters (still illegal, though in a different way). Trump declared that the Venezuelans were “narco-terrorists” and members of a gang, Tren de Aragua. Experts in international law declared that Trump cannot blow up boats on the high seas, even if we suspect them of carrying drugs. We’ve been stopping and confiscating drugs for years in the Caribbean, but it’s usually the Coast Guard, not the US military, operating under what is now called The Department of War (it used to be Defense Department—the distinction is subtle, but important).

 

Venezuela responded a few days later by buzzing a guided-missile destroyer with F-16’s. We have sent ten of our own F-16s (which are called F-35s) to Puerto Rico, and we are ready to go. We also, as I have just found out, have put a 50-million-dollar reward for the head of the Venezuelan government, Nícolas Maduro. 

 

Eleven people were killed in the attack. And yes, these deaths were in vain—as so many of our deaths are. The issue was never keeping drugs off the streets of Miami, but diverting attention from the Epstein files, which a surprising number of people care about. Trump bombed Tehran a couple of months ago, for essentially the same reasons. 

 

Mea culpa—the news went totally over my head last week, until I saw the ship in the harbor. But it’s a message that no matter where you are, or how much you want to stick your head in the sand, Trump is making his influence felt.

 

Nor is it just war games. ICE is now offering a 50,000 $ sign-up fee to anyone willing to work for the agency (starting salary, 100,000$ and absolutely no education / experience required). And arrests of immigrants have soared in Puerto Rico, from 95 in 2024 to 468 in the first six months of 2025. Nor are they working alone; here’s what the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo has to say:  

 

Federal Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents have asked for access to that registry(editor’s note: of names / addresses of undocumented persons who have been issued special drivers’ licenses). In an NPR interview, Rebecca González, HSI’s lead agent in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, stated: “The Puerto Rico government is cooperating with us in anything that we ask them for. And we’re asking for that to move forward with the mission. And we’re waiting.”

 

It's a Monday morning in 2025, and I’m in good shape, generally. I’m not drunk, not hungover; I’m on my feet and going about my day. I probably won’t go off to photograph a boat, even a destroyer, in the San Juan harbor. The official reason is that I have replaced my daily bottle of whiskey for a quart of Espresso Chip ice cream. I buy it for six bucks at Walmart, instead of 9 bucks at the local store, and I carry it home on the bus. Since it’s fiendishly hot here in the tropics, I have to get the stash home quick.

 

The real reason is that I’ve succumbed. We all have, in varying degrees, even those of us who didn’t want to. Simply put, the destruction of our democracy has happened too quickly, and too dramatically for us to react. We have been shocked and awed.

 

Or disgusted. Our courts have ruled that the use of military for police duties in American cities is illegal. Trump is sending troops to Chicago, possibly even as I write this. The Salvadorian torture camp is now empty of US imports, but immigrants are now being sent to four African nations, most of which no one has heard of, and all of which are sketchy, to say the least. 

 

Congress has checked out, the Supreme Court (most of it) is licking its chops in delight silently and at a distance, the press is bending over backwards to pretend that “Mr. Trump” (The New York Times preserves this convention) has some plausible reason to act in what it calls “extrajudicial” fashion.

 

There are protests. There is resistance. But there is something I’ve never felt before, at least in myself. I am so thoroughly repulsed by the Trump administration that I feel an outsider in my own country. In fact, I wonder if it is my country, and if it is, whether I like anyone in it or anything about it. Trump’s disapproval rating is now up to 59%: it should be 95%.

 

I’m repulsed by my country, but I’m also repulsed by myself. I have made calls, I have written letters, I have protested whenever possible.

 

And I have made no difference whatsoever. 

 

Nor does the drop of water wash away granite. A mote of dust doesn’t make a house dirty. Time, I tell myself, takes time. In the meantime, I will go off to the store to buy my new fix. I will go to the Poet’s Passage and bind a couple of books. I will not save the American Experiment (the title of my 7^th grade history text) today. Still less tomorrow.

 

Who knows—maybe I will film the destroyer. But if I do, it won’t be because I think anything I write, or think, is of any importance. I’ll do it for myself, since the one fate I want to avoid (in addition to not dying of active alcoholism) is bitterness.

 

Ah, bitterness! It’s the oldest whore on the block, along with her sister, ingratitude. I succumb too often, and I’m angry at my compatriots, who have checked out or who don’t care.

 

In Alcoholics Anonymous, we go on and on about the dangers of resentment—it is, supposedly, the number one offender on the road to relapse. But resentments of actual people don’t get to me. It’s groups, institutions, and ideas that I resent.

 

I hated it when the teacher left the room when I was in grade school. I knew that the boys (always the boys!) would start making jokes, begin flying paper airplanes, and (given enough time) burn down the school. I waited for the click of teacherly heels returning to her classroom.

 

I’m resentful, and well on the way to bitterness. I can live in a world of bigots and bigotry. But what do I do about a country that either embraces it or shrugs its shoulder at it?

 

I’ve had enough, and I’m sick about it.

 

The problem is that they haven’t.