Round, Round, Get Around, I've Been Around

I’ve been to three circuses, two World’s Fairs, and a rodeo. I’ve lived through thirteen presidents and seven popes. I’ve traveled to thirty-seven of the United States, two provinces of Canada, five countries in Europe and five more in Asia, not counting stop-overs in airports. Hell, I’ve lived in Asia for fourteen years now. I’ve seen the Grand Canyon (north rim!), Niagara Falls (New York side), and several kinds of genuinely giant trees. I’ve seen restaurants that had signs outside saying, “open; gator; coon.” I have seen performances by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Jeff Beck in clubs as small as your basement. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of Japanese movies, and most of the films of Ingmar Bergman, the French New Wave, and the Italian Neo-Realists. I speak three languages (I’m only fluent in one, but I get along okay in the other two). I lived through 1968! I’ve seen a lot.  

Nothing that I have seen or done, however, has prepared me for this tournament of chaos that is masquerading as our government this year.

I’ve experienced a lot, too. I’ve had the flesh-eating bacteria. It was some kind of super-staph infection secondary to a bad flu that I tried to work through, failing miserably. That was a party. I’ve still got the scars! You know that you’re in trouble when you take your shirt off for the doctor, and his eyes go wide, his jaw drops, and he says, “wow” with three exclamation points, like a cartoon character.

Scars, hell, I’ve also had hidradenitis sepurtiva. That’s some horrible stuff. Ugly and smelly. Antibiotic-resistant, I finally had to wait it out with daily squeezing, and swabbing. It was fresh bandages and a very painful cleaning every day for about six weeks. (Thank you to my great amateur nurse, a real angel with the courage of a Marine. She knows who she is.) A couple of those things left scars that look like healed over bullet wounds.

You want scars? I had a burst appendix in my late thirties. Got the whole laparotomy, with the pillar-to-post scar included at no extra charge.

Stress? I’ve had the entire catalog of stress manifestations all of my life (the hidradenitis was the worst of those). Depression? Check.  Anxiety? Check. Headaches; spastic colon; “nervous stomach”; nightmares; sciatica; sleep-walking; shingles; panic attacks; check. You think that you’ve had nightmares? My nightmares could eat your nightmares for lunch.

Yet all of that hard-won experience came in a domestic political setting that seems like Disneyland compared to this new shit. The Sixties and Seventies, God knows, were super-fucked-up, but at least there was a semi-functioning government, and at least some of the officials in that government acted like adults. Now it’s all some kind of lunatic flea-circus run by the fucking fleas.

The Age of Trump has been hard on me. Two times in the last couple of years I have experienced events that almost certainly were cerebral vascular episodes. Strokes, you’d call them. It started both times with tiling in a small area at seven o’clock (direction!) in my field of vision, about half way between the center and the edge. Tiling, like a malfunctioning DVD, little squares (tiles; pixels) of color instead of the program material. The area would grow until it was obscuring almost twenty percent of my vision. I’m not a doctor, but the investigator in me figures it was happening in the brain, not in the eye. First of all, it was bilateral, meaning that when I closed one eye at a time, the effect persisted. It was in both eyes simultaneously. Not only that, but even if I closed both eyes the zone of no information remained. Why didn’t you go to the hospital, Mr. Fred? Oh, congratulations to anyone who would ask that question, because it means that you have better access to health care than I do. I don’t look for ways to spend money at the drop of a hat. I’ve got a few dollars, but not enough to throw away on false-alarms. I figured that if it started to hurt, or if I lost my vision completely, I’d go to the hospital. In the event, both times, it cleared up within a couple of hours and never caused any discomfort whatsoever. Think of the savings! 

I know that I have had one heart attack, but that’s a long story. I sat that one out, too. The issue has been addressed by now. Thank Sweet Baby Jesus in the Manger, high quality doctors and hospitals are very affordable in Thailand, and I am fine, thank you.

There have always been several things that I desperately hoped never to see in my life, and in this, at least, I have been lucky. I would hate to be around when unambiguous evidence proves the existence of off-world intelligent life. Just the communications from another race of beings on another world would disturb every aspect of life on earth, especially if there were visuals and additional proofs of authenticity. If aliens actually land on the White House lawn, forget it, the entire world will simultaneously go insane. We’ve dodged that bullet so far. Another real game-changer would be a fool-proof lie detector. What do you mean, you wouldn’t agree to report to a police station every six months for examination? What do you have to hide? Anyone who avoided them would become a suspect. It does not appear that one of those is coming any time soon either. Please, celebrate with me!

There are other things that I never expected to happen in my lifetime, and there we are much less fortunate.

I expected the Soviet Union to endure. I was comfortable with that prospect. As annoying as the Soviets could be, at least they were predictable. They were thinking in terms of the last war, World War II, and the main idea in their minds was never doing that again. The “nuclear peace” of Mutually Assured Destruction was a powerful force for stability in the world. Now we are faced with an autocratic Russia run by unpredictable gangsters. This new crowd of murderous oligarchs is no longer worried about that old war long ago. They are much more willing to push any perceived advantage, and much less concerned about possibly starting the next war. They still have much of the military potential of the Soviets, some of it anyway, and they still have the nuclear missiles, etc. I’m not happy about that.

I also expected civilization to continue to make progress on social issues. I suppose that reasonable people may differ on this issue, but the results are, at best, mixed. Huge areas of the world have gone dark; many countries are now officially “failed states.” Many liberal democracies are on life-support, and others have given in to single-party authoritarianism already. I’m not happy about this part either.

The worst part is that poor, naïve little me expected the United States to remain a semi-chaotic two-party representational democracy in which the two parties could continue to fight tooth-and-nail while also continuing to actually talk together and cooperate, even compromise, when it was good for the country. That ship has sailed. Call it “the American experiment,” some kind of push-and-shove government favoring the rich but finding benefit in improving the lives of ordinary citizens. Yeah, that’s all over now. I didn’t expect that. We’re going to miss it. I am downright unhappy about this development.

Please excuse me, but I’m rather busy these days. I need to line up potential new income streams to replace my Social Security for when they figure out how to steal that from us. I need to brainstorm investments that will better survive the crash of the dollar, which often seems imminent. You don’t want to have too much money in the bank when that happens! I need to make escape plans in the event that I need to leave my current briar-patch of choice. You shouldn’t put too much trust in any good thing lasting these days. There are a number of stable, peaceful, affordable countries, where the weather and the medical care are good, and that are decent about letting in people who can pay their own way. Preferably a country where they speak some English, I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for tackling another new language. Maybe not too much English! Maybe the old man can make a few of the local monetary units teaching them English!

Oh, Fred, you’re such a pessimist! But you will admit it if you are honest. Standing there fifty years ago, in the wreckage of 1968 and looking ahead to the year 2018, it was not the optimists who were seeing things clearly. Very little good has happened, and so much that it terrible. I think that the pessimists won that forecasting contest.  

Who's Driving This Train?

I’m afraid that the answer is: Nobody.

In my first, doomed attempt at higher education, I had a spectacular professor for my first ever Art History class (a survey class). His name doesn’t Google anymore (it never has), so I’ll go ahead and say that his name was Sterling Callison. He was already as old as the hills at the time, and he was a funny, charming man, highly intelligent and thoroughly interesting 100% of the time. He had a theory about the world:

“I have come to believe that the world is secretly run by an unknown group of men working in an underground bunker in Beirut, Lebanon.”

We laughed, and Professor Callison was kidding, but I, at least, wondered if there could actually be any guiding hands running the world in secret. It almost makes sense that there would be, because, well, isn’t the world too big and important an enterprise to be left to chance? This was the mid-1960s, so there was daily chaos around the world and a lot of horrific chaos in recent history, but who is to say that the forces that were planning everything did not prefer chaos to order? After all, don’t people make more demands on their rulers in good times than they do in bad? Why yes, they do. In bad times, people just want the explosions and the gunfire and the starvation and the disease to end. So maybe, I thought, it’s true that there is a secret cabal running things.

On a smaller scale, I have spent the years from Reagan onward believing that there was an organizational structure hidden in our government the purpose of which was to provide continuity to matters of United States policy and protect us from excesses of individuality. Maybe it was too great a challenge to run the entire world but certainly the government of any one nation could be managed by a large, secret bureaucracy from beyond the vagaries of democratic elections. I have quite the dramatic flair, so I usually referred to it as the “shadow government” or the “permanent” something or other. I’ve mentioned it in numerous blog posts. How could the future of the country be allowed to float willy-nilly down so unpredictable a stream as the American culture in general or the electoral process in particular? It only made sense to me that there should be a powerful group that was not affected by elections that could guide the country forward.

Of course, I’m such a pessimist that I was sure that this group was krypto-fascist and anti-democratic. Even that was somehow comforting. A Capitalist, consumerist society requires a citizenry with jobs and spending money to prop it up. My thinking was that they would always need a prosperous middle class and a large working class to keep the wheels turning. Their need to keep us buying things would protect us from the worst abuses and force the system to maintain our relative prosperity. They needed the taxes that we paid, too. There were so many of us that the taxes really added up.

I can see now that this was an effort on my part to find a force for order in the world where none actually exists. The idea that the entire world just stumbles forward decade by decade with no hand, steady or otherwise, on the ship’s wheel is extremely disturbing. But after the events of the past year, I am afraid that that is the truth of the matter. No one is in charge; no one guides human society; there are no forces of order, benevolent or otherwise, to save us. There is nothing standing between us and the rampant greed and pride and hubris of individual humans who haven’t got a single thought about anything but their own wealth and power.

The best metaphor for our human condition is the astronomical situation of the earth itself: it is spinning wildly off into the distance at a dangerous rate of speed with no thought to our safety.

The election of Donald Trump makes it clear that there is no behind-the-scenes authority that can control our elected officials. Honestly, I was surprised that Trump lived to attend his inauguration. But here we are, one year after his election. His program of destroying the Federal government is moving along rapidly and successfully. The State Department, the DOJ, Energy, the EPA, Education, the Department of the Interior, Health and Human Services, all of these are already in such a depleted condition that it will take years to rehabilitate them. Many talented long-term civil servants have left for jobs in the private sector, and many uniquely talented appointees have been summarily dismissed without a care as to whether there was anyone to replace them. In State, especially, it appears that the plan is to simply empty the building and let it all go undone. So no, I no longer think that there is anyone behind the scenes striving to keep the country on an even keel.

It appears that chaos is, indeed, the goal. Our elected politicians seem to be leading a charge away from order and security. The people in charge are going in this direction all over the world. Maybe the human population has reached some kind of critical mass. Perhaps there are enough of us now that there is no longer a need for a semi-prosperous consumer class. We all need some things, and we will all find ways to buy some other things that we want. The rake-off from this huge till is enough already to make a few thousand families vastly wealthy. So no, the powerful no longer need us to do anything but struggle to remain alive, which humans can be expected to do on their own.

If the major money, the Davos-Bilderberg Axis, and the biggest corporations, are all expecting to profit from disorder, they’ll certainly get all of the help that they need from willing stooges, and at bargain prices, too. All of the political parties appear to be complicit in an effort to cause every molecule of American culture to bounce with violent energy, while democracy is being dismantled and people’s security is being destroyed.  It’s not only the Republicans, it’s all of our elected politicians, and increasingly the forces for negativity include almost all of their appointees. All of them are controlled through a complex web of financial interaction by the real money, whatever you chose to call them. Ordinary citizens, simple members of American society, join in the effort by concentrating their attentions on distractions real or imagined that may or may not have anything to do with politics, except the politics of dividing people into opposing classes by race, age, religion, region, education, sex, or just any old damn thing at all.

This is where I usually wind up for a big finish that sounds like one of those guys that I remember standing on street corners around Wall Street long ago, either wearing sandwich boards or just waving a Bible in the air, preaching the message: SOON, A CLEANSING!!! Forgive me, but I hardly have the energy anymore, and besides that I’m getting over a mild cold.

I’m also over the desire to try to rouse the rabble to vote, or get involved, or give a shit. It’s too late. Isn’t it so cute, and quaint, that people got excited the other day when the Democrats did surprisingly well in a bunch of local elections? A lovely transgender person in Virginia won a contest with a Republican who had sponsored an anti-transgender bathroom bill. A black African immigrant from Liberia became a small city mayor in Minnesota, or one of those flat, cold states anyway. This is all very nice, but where would it be going? Let’s say that next year and in 2020 all of the elections go to the Democrats and the Republicans become an endangered species, what would that signify? It would only mean that we’d have another Clinton or Obama to supervise the destruction of our rights, our Constitution, our prosperity, and our security (health; retirement; income; etc.), and another Democratic congress to do what their donors tell them to do. We might be about 3.5% (three-point-five-percent) better off with Democrats in charge. That is nowhere near enough to make a difference.

I guess that I managed a pretty good pot of doom there in spite of myself! I’m not surprised. Doom is my business, my only business. 

Donald Trump: The Hitchcock Movie

The Donald and his mom, Mary Trump.

He looks remarkably like her, the shape of the face is the same, the nose, the wide-spaced eyes. And, of course, the hair.

Mary crossed the river before closer hair analogies were possible, but look up later pictures of her and compare them to current pix of the now geriatric Donald, with his spectacular comb-over. Mary's spectacular optical-illusion comb-over was very, very similar. Disturbingly similar.

It all reminds me of a particular movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in which a disturbed young man dressed up as his own mom and brought considerable mischief to his co-actors. What's the dynamic here? Trouble, boys and girls, trouble with a capitol "T." Go ahead and elect him, at your peril. It's your right! Vote your conscience! No one can stop you at this point! But I'll tell you right now, if Donald gets elected, and the dollar is destroyed in the resulting, inevitable catastrophe, causing me to lose the value of my hard earned bank money, such as it is, I'll hold it against you forever, and forever curse your smoldering bones, from a distance.

Mustafa Hamsho, Great Muslim Athlete

Donald Trump reportedly said in the recent past that there were no great Muslim athletes in the world. I could make a list, if I were ambitious, but instead I'll just draw your attention to one of my favorite athletes of all time, Mustafa Hamsho, who happens to be Muslim.

Mr. Trump has more recently said nice things about Muhammad Ali, perhaps America's most prominent Muslim. But I'm certain that to Mr. Trump, Ali will always be Cassius Clay. Same with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, he'll always be Lew Alcindor to lots of people. Lots of people, including Trump and I, were thrilled by those guys in the Clay/Alcindor days, and change is hard for some of them.

Mustafa Hamsho was a hugely entertaining fighter, and he had a great career. He'd have been the champion were it not for Marvin Haggler fighting at the same weight. (As Jean-Paul Sartre said: in football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.)

Outside the ring, Hamsho was a nice guy, very friendly and respectful. Inside the ring, he was a terror. You could say that he was a dirty fighter, or at least that he flirted with tactics that are not entirely legal. He seemed like he couldn't help himself! He'd try to cut you with the laces of his gloves, hit you with forearms and elbows, and boy, you really had to watch out for his head. He used the ropes better than anyone that I ever saw. Sometimes he'd throw the opponent into the ropes and hit him as he bounced off; other times he'd throw his back against the ropes and use the bounce to add power to a punch. He was a caution, he was. I don't remember him being disqualified, though. Such things are part of boxing, and are accepted, within limits.

One thing you'd have to admit is that Mustafa Hamsho was a great Muslim athlete. There are tons of others. The website Muslim Matters includes a list of the top ten Muslim boxers. That would be a drop in the bucket, but okay as a starting point for skeptics.

Oh no, I just got into the Fact-Checking-Trump game! But look for the good. It's steady work.