Of Trump and Tea Towels

It happens every year, so why I am always so surprised by it? The Christmas “tree” is up on the plaza where I sit on benches and chat with the homeless. The tree is a metal cone some 25 feet high—this year it has footlong strings of light which are supposed to be icicles. 

 

Only in Puerto Rico could they be considered, or even imagined, to be icicles.

 

Well, we’re going to be merry, goddammit, even if it kills us. Or sends us to the poorhouse, since the consumerism seems excessive even for an American of the 21^st century. We are supposed to buy, and a little trip to Marshalls—a store that sells everything that you want (while in the store) but don’t need and won’t like (after a week or two). All of the merchandise is beautiful and cheap—but also exhausting.

 

I think of Little Women, that dear book written by that dear Louisa May Alcott, and please note that repetition of the tired word “dear.” I use it because Alcott, like William Morris, was a wonderfully neurotic, high-thinking, eccentric who had a considerably crazy life, though framed in Victorian conventionality.

 

Morris got tea-towelled, which meant that even though he was a socialist and believed in free marriage (or at least put up with his wife bonking Dante Gabriel Rosetti), his decorative work was charming (another word like “dear”) and could be put onto tea towels. Alcott got tea-towelled too, which meant that even though she was an intellectual, hung out with Emerson and Thoreau, created and lived in communes which attempted to be free-thinking and Utopian-seeking, nursed the sick in the Civil War, and wrote “lurid” works which pleased her more (and earned her some very-needed cash)…well, all she’s known for is dear Little Women. 

 

Here's a tea towel—which is the best we could do with William Morris’s life:

 

Fortunately, these tea towels come from the Radical Tea Towel company, who put Morris’s own words at the bottom of the towel, as ballast for the charm. I know nothing about the Radical Tea Towel company on purpose, since I really prefer to imagine them, not to know about them. In my imagination, they’re a group of oddballs who would make any character out of Alice in Wonderlandseem like an accountant. 

 

And here’s what Dante Gabriel Rosetti thought of Jane Morris, and it’s enough to send even me into a jealous panic—God knows what Morris thought. No man should paint another man’s wife….

 

 

 

Well, well—what a trivial mind I have on this Tuesday morning. I am worried about tea towels and Louisa May Alcott when I should be worried about Donald Trump, and his imminent invasion of Venezuela. 

Why are we invading Venezuela?

 

It’s both a stupid question and a necessary one. We’re invading Venezuela (as far as I can see) because Trump got slapped down, posthumously, by Jeffrey Epstein. There’s a big group of Trump supporters who bought into the theory that a small group of very rich men were preying on very young women (teenagers chronologically and pre-pubescent biologically). They got obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, who was utterly despicable. They didn’t drop the bone after the election, which Trump thought they’d do, since they have a more permanent value system than he does. So he promised them that he would release the Epstein files in all their luridness (ah, if only dear Louisa you-know-who were here to write about it)…and did they forget about it, as they were supposed to do?

 

Nah—so the clamor got so bad (and the drip-drip of lurid emails grew so constant) that nobody could talk of anything else. Eventually, the shut-down (which was all about preventing the release of the files, since it allowed the Speaker of the House not to swear in a congresswoman from Arizona, who would be the final vote for a resolution for the release of the files) ended. The SNAP benefits were reinstated, so that the poor (about 12.5% of us) could eat again. So Trump saw the writing on the wall (neon is hard to miss), and came out and said that he was all for releasing the files, which had previously not existed and then had become a “Democratic hoax.”

 

The Republicans, who had shut down the government to avoid dealing with the issue, instantly caved and voted nearly unanimously to force the release of the files. (The one congressman voting against the release of the files was a guy from Louisiana who everybody agreed was nuts—even his constituents, who are nuts as well, and therefore have to be represented). 

 

Trump, by the way, is all over the files, as the FBI agents who worked 24 hour shifts to scrub the files (that didn’t exist) to the tune of over 800,000$ in five days last spring can attest. So now we’re a couple of weeks away from getting the files, which will be heavily redacted, to say the least. 

 

We’re in a freefall, logically and politically speaking, so Trump did what Trump does, which is divert. He’s killed over 80 people in scores of bombings of boats off the coast of Venezuela. He says the boats are filled with drugs, the Venezuelans say the boats are full of fish, and the Geneva Convention…

 

…well, you know what they say.

 

Trump is going to do what he has done all through his political career—manufacture an “emergency” and act illegally. His tariffs are built on emergencies, his seizure of innocent people and subsequent deportation to foreign prison camps, his decision to bomb Iran (six months ago) and his decision to invade Venezuela are based on the same flimsy pretext. And we are all following him, shouting “tsk-tsk” as we scramble to keep up with the limousine speeding Trump off to the bank. 

 

There is always a little money to be made, and Venezuela has more oil than Iran, or anybody else, for that matter. It would be a shame, not to get a little piece of that action.

 

This cannot be, my imagined reader from the 22d century will be saying. A president of the United States cannot really be acting like Nero, providing that fiddle music as Rome burns. 

 

This cannot be, you say, in horror.

 

I hope that there is some reader, in some century, who can say some words to express shock and horror. I hope shock and horror come back to us, somehow.

 

What I fear is indifference—a complacency that seeks nothing more than to shop at Marshalls. I fear ignorance as well—where is Venezuela, and why should I care?

 

I fear the death of truth even more. We’re already changing history (our textbooks now say stuff like, “although some abuses did occur, the majority of our black friends and neighbors lived peaceably with their masters on the majestic cotton plantations that graced the South”). Why bother with seeing reality at all? 

 

Aren’t we already tea-towelling Trump?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The Old Normal

Well, let’s just paste it in here, this little snippet from today’s New York Times:

 

 

Never underestimate how stupid—and I put myself in this class—the intelligent can be. Nor how loud I can snort.

 

Snorting, of course, because any fool could have seen, back in 2015 when this nightmare started, that Donald Trump…

 

Shall we put in New York Times language?

 

…that Donald Trump was not primarily concerned with those who had chosen him to be president.

 

…Or just plain-damn-fool terms?

 

…that Donald Trump never gave a shit about you and never will.

 

Lovely—and while we diddle with language up here in the previously United States of America, what’s going on in El Salvador? (Just a little fart from a tired brain, but shouldn’t I call El Salvador The Savior?)

 

I can tell you what’s going on in El Salvador, because I have only bound the 80-page report from the Human Rights Watch. I haven’t read it, but the custody of the eyes comes hard for me (even worse is custody of the ears, of course).

 

Just binding the thing told me that reading it—which I will do—was going to be tough. The beatings were constant. The food was scant and inedible. They all got severely beaten after Kristi Noem came down for her photo shoot and somebody shouted, “I’m an American CITIZEN!”

 

I will read this and tell you if any of the above is untrue. Just stand on one leg….

 

Human Rights Watch did what responsible organizations do: they plan, decide, organize, travel, investigate, discuss, and write drafts of the report until nobody has the strength to argue anymore. Then they publish a report that will be completely ignored until we’re done with Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Jeffrey Epstein, who wrote that he had met a lot of awful people in his life, but Trump was by far the worst.

 

I guessed that in whatever year I read the two books about Jeffrey Epstein. Was it five years ago? Seven? Was Trump still in power, or not?

 

I read the books, at any rate, and it immediately became clear: Epstein was a completely disgusting human being, and so was Trump. Did he spend hours with VICTIM (as it appears on the released emails) or Virginia Giuffre (as outed by the White House) alone at Epstein’s house? Did they do it (or have it done to her?).

 

Duh

 

I assumed the worst, because I’m a drunk and I have this belief: it’s always worse than you think. There are always bottles hidden around the house and bills that didn’t get paid because…

 

…you know, ya gotta drink, right?

 

So of course Trump was screwing every chance he could get, and Epstein was putting those chances right in the path, or bedroom, of Donald Trump. When I found out that a huge number of people were obsessed with pedophile rings and Epstein, I thought ‘good for them!’ When I heard that they thought God had put Donald Trump (an unlikely savior, or Salvador) in charge of rooting out this mess….

 

Well, it boggled the mind. 

 

It was a classic awful bind for a liberal. If I tell you that I care more about 250 years of democracy being torn asunder, senators in handcuffs in Federal buildings, armed troops slamming into cars and dragging citizen out of them and into (eventually) El Salvador, am I diminishing the pain of a high school (in some cases middle school) girl being raped by a wealthy older guy? 

 

One man’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Whoever said it (Stalin, supposedly, I think) was just telling the truth. It’s easier for the mind to focus on Trump and VICTIM than it is to deal with…

 

…get ready…

 

“You Have Arrived in Hell” (title of the Human Rights Watch report)

 

Javier L.: “I feel I’ve lost everything—the time I didn’t spend with my daughter. We lived in fear, thinking every time they came into the module it was to beat us.” (page 79)

 

They also said the couldn’t sleep properly, because the lights were kept on permanently (page 75)

 

Miguel Z.:“The hardest part was not knowing what was going to happen, what my future would be, not having access to a lawyer… Not being able to speak with our families—without even knowing if they knew we were in El Salvador—we knew nothing. Not being able to talk to our loved ones or basically anyone—that was the worst.” (page 72)

 

Sounds like just the place for Jeffrey Epstein.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Weary Spirit

How the spirit wearies under this all!

 

I shouldn’t complain—I have made a deal with the entity that I call God. I will devote my time and energy to Donald Trump and the current mess for a limited time each day. I try to keep it to half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. I write about it so that I can forget about it. I choose my battles carefully, and yesterday had to force myself out of Washington D.C. and into the Faure Requiem, from the BBC and the Royal Albert Hall.

 

I’m happy to say that England still keeps producing kids, seemingly unchanged for centuries. There they were, in the chamber version of the Faure, which featured boys singing the soprano parts and a kid who nailed the Pie Jesu. This child was unnervingly blond and innocent. This kid was a rock star.

 

So Faure was just what was needed, after I got YouTube to stop pulling me back into the affair of Epstein and Trump. New developments—read, another drip—have occurred. The Senate just released a trove of emails that the Epstein estate has very happily provided. The House has just confirmed the final vote needed to force the release of the Epstein files; the Trump administration is holding a meeting in the Situation Room to try to deal with the situation.

 

One email is particularly troublesome, since it came from Epstein, was addressed to Ghislaine Maxwell, and stated that Trump had spent hours alone in Epstein’s house with one of the most outspoken victims of the sex trafficking scandal, Virginia Giuffre. (The Epstein files redacted the name, but the British press and later the White House provided it, and so do I.)

 

Virginia Giuffre died of suicide six months ago. Her book, Nobody’s Girl, was recently released, and it was so awful that King Charles III had to strip his brother of his “styles, titles, and honors.” His brother went from prince to commoner, got booted out of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Castle and into Sandringham Estate. 

 

Is there an adult in the room?

 

Do I want there to be?

 

The adult, if there is one, would be smacking his lips. Everybody is perfectly in place. We have a demented psychopath in the White House. He did his job, which was to win, let Elon Musk in with the wrecking ball, decimate the entire Federal Government, and pave the way for troops in the streets and the suppression of protest / free speech.

 

Trump did his job.

 

Now he’s gotta go.

 

Fortunately for the moguls who are waiting to run this country, Trump mishandled the Epstein mess. Or perhaps he did the only thing he thought he could do, and that he ever does. He lied and distracted, and it certainly worked for everything else. Nobody woke up this morning thinking about the East Wing of the White House, which is now being used for the fill of a gulf course. Nobody (except me) woke up thinking about Cecot, which is the El Salvador prison that is holding a whole bunch of people from several countries (including possibly the United States) that we rounded up and sent on planes down to El Salvador. Nobody is wondering about the 300 people ICE picked up in Chicago that the judge said had to be released on bond.

 

Nope.

 

We’re wondering what Trump and Virginia were up to in the hours they spent alone together in Epstein’s house.

 

Chess?

 

The spirit wearies. The magnitude of the crimes of Donald J. Trump—and we worried about the pedophilia? It was cool to send Abrego García and the Venezuelan makeup artist Andry José Hernández and hundreds of other illegally detained immigrants to a place that the Human Rights Watch called “hell?” It was all right to put troops on the street to fire bullets at the foreign and domestic media, handcuff and detain US senators and mayors, take revenge on his enemies like Robert Mueller and James Comey?

 

The onslaught of assaults on the laws and the norms of our country has been horrendous. Everyone is overwhelmed, myself included. And I have, if I may say, the additional burden of ancestors who came to this country willingly (thank God), created the first democracy in modern times, adopted ideals that were in large part honorable. My people fought for this country and died for this country.

 

True, Henry Herrick was there, hanging his witches in Salem one year and apologizing the next. Nothing about Herrick is particularly instructive, morally speaking, since his defense (he had fallen victim to the Devil) was the same as the charge against the plaintiffs (they had fallen victim to the Devil). I might call it a bit self-serving; a more balanced viewer might detect blatant hypocrisy.

 

The devil had run through Salem Town in 1670. The devil may be running through Washington DC, and it may be that we / they have all fallen victim to it. At some point, we are all going to have to answer the question: what were we doing when the great American Experiment (Adventures in Democracy was the title of my High School history textbook) got blown away by a corrupt, stupid, demented and very cruel man?

 

What were we doing when Trump came down the escalator in 2015?

 

What have we been doing for the last decade?

 

How did we let this happen?

 

If there are any questions in any mind of any descendant I may have—those are the ones I flinch at being asked. Because I won’t get the easy way out, which is to pretend that basically Trump was fine the first term around, but nuts and demented the second time around. Shoot—if we’d only known.

 

We knew, and we voted.

 

I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to bind a copy of the report that the Human Rights Commission just issued about Cecot—that prison we sent our prisoners to and then forgot about.

 

I’ll put it up on the website I want to have, along with the other documents that may well disappear, if Trump’s extends his authoritarian reach. I’ll talk about it to a bunch of poets in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

And I’ll leave you with this:  

 

  

 

 

   

Not a Mission Statement

“Just write a mission statement,” said Paul. Or words to that effect—something that would clue in a visitor to what my (our) website is going to be about. Something that would explain, or maybe even convince, people that it’s better to buy a handmade book than a commercial book. 

 

I nodded my head sagely, as best I could, and didn’t tell him the truth: I never read mission statements, I remove mission statements from any document I have the pleasure of editing, and I will do anything short of lying in the bus lane to prevent you from writing a mission statement.

 

I hate mission statements.

 

I hate them because they suggest that I am acting clearly and purposefully. They suggest that I have a mission, and I should have, I agree. It would be great to have a mission, or to pretend that the mission that I acquired is somehow the real mission.

 

I stumbled into bookbinding just as I stumbled into writing. Officially, I am a bookbinder because of Tyler (my nephew), who got it into his head to get married. This meant that I had to buy a gift long either on expense or sentiment.

 

Surprise—I chose sentiment!

 

So I found myself the perfect thing: a family history my grandmother had written at the end of her life. It needed updating, surely, which meant that a respectable 40- page document became 120 pages. Then I had to hand it in (as it were) and somehow a three-ring binder didn’t feel appropriate. So I bought some William Morris paper and decided to make a book.

 

Anyone can make a book.

 

This story is true, and it’s true that anyone can make a book.

 

It’s true as well that making the book started me off on a long journey into bookbinding. I watched hours of bookbinding videos on YouTube every day for several years. I made journals every chance I got, and once considered bringing sections of paper to the beach and binding them there.

 

The book I made for Tyler (which I earnestly hope got tossed in the move from Brooklyn to New Jersey) was bound using the Japanese stab binding. This meant that I attacked the text block (the book without the covers) with an electric drill. I drilled four holes and laced strong thread through and between them.

 

It’s utterly simple and if you are Japanese (or even just coordinated), it can look beautiful. I glanced at the work I had done, and decided that the William Morris paper was definitely the way to go. Here’s what the book didn’t look like:

 

 

The wedding was a great success, the marriage has been even better. My part was done, and there was no reason ever to bind a book again. But each morning in that dark period when the Covid-19 pandemic was just ending and my mourning the suicide of a dear friend was still enduring, I got up and made a journal.

 

I didn’t understand what I was doing until I saw a Netflix series about the tsunami that hit Japan and knocked out the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Several men were “missing” for several weeks, and each day the widow (sorry for the spoiler) got up and made origami cranes. She acknowledged other people, she ate to keep alive, she rested when she could no longer go on.

 

I sat in my living room and watched her do it. I knew that the actor playing the widow was in real life a perfectly normal woman. It was only I (making terrible journals that slowly got better) and the crazy Japanese woman on the Netflix series who made cranes who were nuts. We had woken up each morning with an impossible life to get through for the day. She made cranes; I made journals.

 

Mission—stay alive (and sober, Marc?) for another day.

 

I couldn’t tell anyone what I was really doing, of course, which is why it helped that Tyler does exist and did get married. But when people drifted by and gaped at what I was doing in the Poet’s Passage, I told them the incidental truth, not the working truth.

 

I had stopped mourning my friend / son and had gone on to mourning my marriage and my country. I had to get Donald Trump out of my head and back where he belongs, which is NOT the oval office. The disease had shifted, the cure remained the same.

 

So my mission is to get through the day, honestly.

 

That said, I’m ready to talk about books.

 

See you tomorrow!     

 

 

 

  

Stumbling through the door again!

So much has happened that I can’t really write about it. I could, of course, if I had processed it all, but I couldn’t. I know that I went to a meeting last Friday, and an old timer asked me, inexplicably, how I was doing. I gave the usual formulaic answer, and she pressed me.

 

“I think I might be on the verge of a relapse,” I told her.

 

It was a strange thing to be saying, since I hadn’t been (consciously) thinking any such thing. But there it was, a true thing coming out of a false man.

 

I did the meeting and left to go to Marshalls—a store that sells for reduced prices things I absolutely don’t need, but can convince myself I do. So I bought two rolls of garish Christmas paper to cover notebooks (even garish people need notebooks, after all) and went home to ponder it all.

 

Jeanne called.

 

She wanted to know what she had done, since I wasn’t answering my phone much and was pleading being in the wrong place at the wrong time when I did pick up. So I told her that I had just been to a meeting and just declared my impending lapse in sobriety.

 

So we talked about that, and then agreed on next steps. The obvious one was to call my shrink, to see if the antidepressants that I take when times are good will keep working (at a higher dose) when times are rough.

 

Then it was time to go to the Poet’s Passage, where I thought it might be an idea to clue Lady in about my possible future slip.

 

“Fight it,” she said.

 

There was craziness inside and outside of my head. The craziness on the streets came from ICE, which crashed a car driven by an American citizen. The agents dragged her out of the car, handcuffed her, and then held her for several hours before releasing her. The video is below—if no one has bothered to take it down.

 

It was jarring to realize that even now, I don’t have much control. I go to meetings every day; I pray as much as my knees allow; I peer at a picture taken of myself on the day I went into rehab for the (hopefully) last time. I am the model alcoholic, in some senses, but really I’m a guy who got lucky by just skating by. Other people work a lot harder than I do; they suffer relapses that I am spared.

 

Has anybody ever written about what it's like to live with alcoholism? We do the confessional / coming-to-Jesus memoirs really well, but no one had ever written a book that would tell me that, eight years after my last drink, I would find myself in Costco, alone in the vast wine section. I had no desire to drink, and no idea why I was there; nor could I say why it felt so good, oddly, to be surrounded by a poison that nearly killed me. But I was there, and I was able to get myself out of…there. 

 

Which is the story of my sobriety.

 

So I haven’t relapsed, though I have told you the story that I heard in my meeting this morning. Because it wasn’t me in the wine section, it was actually Brad, a guy in my group. He came in a year ago to his first AA meeting, and got around to tell us the story of how he got to us only today.

 

He was suicidal, his wife was out of town, but he got to a phone (somehow) and got to an English speaker (after four tries). So Brad ended up on our doorstep on the day Trump ended up winning his way back to the White House. Since no one could talk about politics, we ended up welcoming Brad into his new world instead. He’s still here, and he’s the guy who got stuck in Costco, not me.

 

A distinction without a difference. Today was both an anniversary for Brad and a new day for another guy, who was coming into the rooms for the first time. Things are turning, turning, until they come round just right, I think, though it may be only because the Democrats have swept every race they could enter last night. But anyway, Brad got through the door, the new guy got through the door, and there’s even a chance that the country will squeak by and get through the door as well.

 

Some of us will find ourselves standing blankly in the wine section of Costco, of course. There are a lot of doors, as any drunk can tell you, and not all of them lead to rooms that have the exit plainly marked. 

 

But there is a way out, even if I don’t know it, or if I can’t see it. I ended up in the rooms—Brad did as well. He got back to the rooms today after visiting the war zone in Costco yesterday.

 

He got out safe.

 

We can, too.

 

 

    

Blown Away, or Not

What’s ominous is that it’s a perfectly beautiful day, and nobody in Puerto Rico is noticing it, apparently. But it may be that we’re thinking of Jamaica, all of us who went through Hurricane Maria on 20 Sep 2017. The Jamaicans are waiting for a category five hurricane named Melissa to tear through their island.

 

“Tear through” may not be the best description: it implies something moving fast, and this hurricane has crawled at 2 mph for days now. This gave Jamaica plenty of time to prepare, and they would have used it well, had they been able to. But they had two problems: they couldn’t imagine the enormity of what was about to hit them, and they didn’t have much at hand to combat the storm.

 

It was agonizing to watch, last night, a young black Jamaican walking through a fishing village on an island. Melissa, a rough beast come round at last, was only 100 miles or so away, but the water was already ankle-deep in the streets. Most people had left, and those who didn’t were there to “protect their property.” 

 

The island will be obliterated and anybody left on it will be dead. 

 

That didn’t stop the fishermen from going down to the sea and shoveling sand into whatever bags they could make or borrow. One man had piled a single row of sandbags in front of his gate: the row was perhaps 9 inches tall. The storm surge is expected to be well over 15 feet.

 

There were people with more resources lining up to buy sheets of plywood. They were wasting their money, and they probably knew it. The 9 AM update on Melissa has the storm at 180 miles per hour with barometric pressure at 896 mb. A plywood panel will last all of 10 minutes. Then, it’ll stop being protection and become a weapon. You don’t want to be hit by a sheet of plywood traveling over 100 mph.

 

I didn’t buy plywood panels, I bought shower curtains. I would have bought a tarp, if I could have, but the shower curtains at least covered the large pieces of furniture. Several large windows blew out during Hurricane Maria and the wind was howling through our apartment: I retrieved the curtains the next day on the street, a couple of blocks from our apartment.

 

The statement “I bought the curtains” is true, but doesn’t quite describe the process. I am generally aware of storms several days before anyone else, since I’m a news junkie. By the time everyone else is perking their heads up, I am well into focused panic. By the time anyone thinks they should really drift out and pick up a gallon of water or two, I will have filled the bathtub, the washing machine, the 50 slowly-decaying plastic containers that once held kitty litter. I will have memorized the coordinates of the storm and will be counting down the precise number of hours, minutes, or even seconds until the next weather update.

 

I do all this knowing that it is pointless: only the fact that I live in a house with three-foot thick walls abutting the next house with three-foot walls will keep me safe. In that, I am enormously fortunate: I don’t live in a plywood shack next to the sea. My livelihood is not a wooden boat tied with weathered rope to a flimsy pier. I am in much better position than any of the fishermen in that village, and I could just as easily sit home, close the windows, and let the storm roar. But no, I will be out buying shower curtains at the dollar store. 

 

Melissa went through not one but two periods of rapid intensification, which meant that a tropical storm on Thursday afternoon became a category 3 hurricane by Friday morning. Rapid intensification used to be rare—it’s now almost predictable. Nor is it just that the storms are stronger: they are also popping up in weird places. The western part of Alaska recently had a typhoon, which almost by definition cannot happen: typhoons are in the Pacific, yes, but on the other side. They hit China and Indonesia. They don’t hit Alaska, causing apparently severe damage and forced evacuations.

 

Nobody can deny that climate change is here, so we’ve decided not to talk about it. Six months ago, a landslide in the Swiss alps took out an entire village. It was less a landslide than the collapse of half a mountainside. Sad for the Swiss, of course, but of no importance to the rest of us.

 

It will be our turn next, perhaps, and everyone in Puerto Rico knows that Melissa could be sitting 100 miles south of Ponce (our largest town on the Caribbean Sea) instead of Kingston. But we’re lucky: the worst that can happen today is that our PTSD will switch back on.

 

The people in Jamaica are lucky, too, in that the pilots flying into the storm to determine intensity and take meteorological measurements are in their planes flying into the monster. They’re not being paid, of course, because of the government shutdown. In fact, they probably won’t be paid, since Trump is balking at back pay. They won’t be thanked, either.

 

Still, they’re up there, or at least I presume they are, since several news reporters on a couple of legitimate sites mentioned that there are a lot of AI generated fake videos out there. So the black dude walking through his fishing village may not exist at all. Too bad, because I wanted to send him some money, as most people would. That’s the problem: who is real, and how do you best help them?

 

So I think there’s a storm, and I think that Jamaica is in worse trouble than they can imagine. If all of this is real, the storm is going to do to Jamaica today what it took the Israelis half a year to do to Gaza.

 

Alaska got no attention and no help from the federal government. In the past, the US was there for little islands / nations like Haiti and Martinique after their storms: no one expects that now. 

 

Instead, a US destroyer is headed towards Venezuela, as Trump visits Asia this week. Trump has made seven strikes on fishing boats, killing over a score of people. Dead bodies have been washing up on Trinidad’s beaches. (The two countries used to be joined, geologically, and are even now only less than 500 miles apart.)

 

The East Wing of the White House has been demolished, and my hysterical laughter, for which even now I have no explanation, is gone. Instead, raw fury has taken over, followed by lethargy.

 

I’m glad there are other places in the world: other countries who still keep something of what they are or were. My country is gone, though only a handful of us know about it. My illusion is gone as well, and I’m grateful, though saddened.

 

I’m going to end my life with the destruction of my country as I knew it. I know that there will be something after it, but no one knows what, nor will I be here to see it. I have memories, of course.

 

That doesn’t feel, somehow, like a good thing. 

 

  

 

 

 

     

How God Works

I should get back to Luther, I suppose, if only to have a bit of discipline in my writing, if not my life. But another man’s madness (and Luther was just a bit off, if I may say, as well as being a horrible anti-Semite) holds little interest for me, since my own madness is closer to hand. And I’m busy trying to shake this annoying atheist—Britt Hartley—from my brain.

 

She’s annoying because she’s right, of course. She got me involved in a Mormon woman who apparently fell into full religious psychosis and killed her family. The rationale was completely nutso. Anybody could see that, but there was a little problem…

 

…it was also in The Book of Mormon.

 

The woman, whose name I still don’t know, was convicted by a jury of her peers in Idaho (I think—anyways, it was a place where her peers were likely to be Mormon, and to have read the same book). The jury knew she was nuts and knew she belonged in prison. She had almost literally reenacted the story of Nephi (or someone who didn’t exist except to the Mormons) or the sons of Nephi or the enemies of the sons of Nephi. So they threw her in jail, breathed a sigh of relief, and then went to their temple on Sunday morning to hear the story of…

 

…I know you’re expecting this...

 

…the sons of the tribes of Nephi.

 

It’s easy to laugh at religion, as long as it’s not my own. I freely admit that I think the story of Mohammed flying on a winged horse to the moon and back all in one night is crazy. I will admit (if circumstances permit) that the story of a virgin impregnated by an angel bearing the word of God is…

 

…circumstances don’t permit.

 

Hartley makes the gentle point that, despite what we say, none of us really believe in our religion. I have thought this often, since I sit in rooms where people talk tirelessly about God. Very early in my eight years of sitting in the rooms, I began asking the people talking most passionately about God, ‘well, what are you doing here? If God is central to your life, and if this life is but a tiny sliver of your eternal life with Christ—you shouldn’t be in an AA meeting before you go to work to make a living to buy shit at Marshalls. You should be praying or working with lepers or preaching the second coming in a Burger King parking lot.’

 

I take her inventory—another atheist habit. I call it “engaging in critical thinking” which I refuse to leave at the door. Until they shout FUCK YOU at me.

 

Hartley, being a true critical thinker, doesn’t operate on this personal and petty (though pleasurable) scale. She makes the point that what makes us call a person a religious-crazy is not that the person is saying crazy stuff. They’re just quoting scripture. What makes a religious-crazy crazy is that the other persons who believe-but-not-quite-believe-to-the-point-of-action say that the person is crazy.

 

We need the pots to call the kettle black, in other words.

 

It settles the question of why I really, really want my god to enter my world via the Village vicar, who rides his black Raleigh three-speed out of a BBC historical series and into my cottage, where we discuss the weather and the church fund and walking tours of Ireland next summer, perhaps, but never God. The vicar toddles off to the next cottage, the chaffinch sings in the bough, and morning has broken.

 

I do not want the vicar to tell me about the sinning sons of the tribe of Nephi, or the sinning tribe of the sons of Nephi, or anyone else. The dew is on the rose, the vicar has just left, and I really don’t want to have to get out the AK-45 to go slay the iniquitous this morning.

 

But how do I know that’s not what God wants me to do?

 

It’s a curious thing—suppose a true believer acted according to his beliefs, and committed that most foul of sins, as described in Leviticus: 

 

 

 

It couldn’t be clearer, and the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Did the store manager of Chick-fil-A go running around the restaurant in the parking lot of Plaza del Sol and pay all his workers each day before sunset?

 

Didn’t God make it perfectly clear?

 

You can make the case—weakly—that this is normal behavior. This is what adolescence was all about, for me, which was to stand around and criticize with perfect logic what my parents were doing.

 

They were doing the absolute right thing, despite professing exactly the opposite. They were saving money, perhaps, instead of distributing loaves and fishes to the poor. They were going to work but never considering the lilies of the field.

 

We call this “nuanced thinking,” and we smile tolerantly (after seething a few hours beforehand) at the teenager.

 

Britt comes clean about her own motivations, more than most of us can. She’s really, really trying to find that baby there in the bathwater. So am I, which is why it’s hard for me to admit this.

 

God—that sneaky bastard—is out there and he’s got his eye on me. He’s also smarter than me, which means that he’s not going to get to me through words, or through my thoughts (which are the words I tell myself).

 

God is gonna get me through a sunset, through a smile from a stranger, or through a young guitarist playing Biber. He could get me through the vicar on his Raleigh, if any were about. But at the moment, he’s just got Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber .

 

That’s good enough.