Wrecking Ball

    So hold tight to your anger

    Yeah, hold tight to your anger

    Hold tight to your anger

    And don’t fall to your fears

—Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball”

The Boss is more than just a good man in a desperate time, the conscience of his country, he’s a prophet. Anyone listening to his decades of music knows this. He’s a working-man’s-blues singer, songs about earnest men and women left behind by the turning wheel of progress, people trying to understand what happened and how to get back to the world they used to know.

They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks. Foreman says, These jobs are going, boys, and they aint coming back. (“My Hometown.”)

“My Hometown” hit the airwaves in 1984. Ronald Reagan, every conservative's hero, was presiding over his shining city on the hill. But the sun wasn’t shining down in the hollows of the heartland Bruce sang about. He understood the discontent of those struggling to keep up with changes that blindsided them.

He released “Wrecking Ball” a quarter century later. By then, the people he wrote about had gathered up their sodden bewilderment and pressed it into hard stones of anger. 

“Wrecking Ball” is nominally about tearing down an iconic football stadium, but it’s a metaphor for how change can leave hope mortally wounded.

When your best hopes and desires are scattered to the wind. And hard times come, and hard times go…just to come again.

That’s the time “to hold tight to your anger, and don’t fall to your fears.”

Forty years ago, Bruce knew how many people would feel today, those who felt they’d gotten a raw deal. First they would be disheartened, then they would get mad.

It was that anger that elected Trump.

Ironic, isn't it, that so many well-meaning politicians didn’t understand Bruce’s warning. Or if they understood, didn’t talk to voters in a way that respected their anger. From a political standpoint, they seem not to have respected the agency of voters either. They must have thought them more pitiful than dangerous. It shouldn’t have taken much imagination to realize that a narcissistic populist could exploit that anger and turn those disaffected folks—disaffected, to be sure, about more than just economic conditions—into a mob hell bent on destruction of the system they were convinced had mistreated them.

“They” are the ones who were closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks in “My Hometown.” The disembodied “they,” the man, the governing elite, the bête noire of all populist rants. 

It shouldn’t have been a big surprise that voters grabbed their torches and pitchforks and stormed the castle. Bruce warned us. We should have listened.

And we should listen to what he is saying now.

Fiddling With Our Future

Like so many of us, I am worried about the future of our country. All my life we have been the strongest nation militarily, the most exciting and productive economically and, in so many ways, the best place to live the life you choose for yourself, in the arts or in commerce. I’ll admit that my view is skewed somewhat because I am a white male born just after the end of WW II. That country—the one that beat the Great Depression and the global enemies of freedom—and I grew up together. The opportunities for me were boundless. I now better understand that this wasn’t true for many people of color and for many of any skin color who were economically and educationally disadvantaged. But for many of us, the sky was the limit. We soared, and we took the country with us on our giddy flight.

On the day our new president was elected, our nation's prospects looked bright. The economy was purring along and participation in its opportunities was broader than ever.

My, how that outlook has changed in just a few short months. We are almost certainly headed into economic headwinds that we have generated ourselves. What will be our place in the world in four years? Are we heading toward late-stage ancient Rome, with Nero in charge? 

What qualities make a nation most likely to succeed economically? (I understand that GDP is not necessarily the ultimate measure of value, but without a robust economy none of the other things we value have the breathing room to flourish.)

Here is what Chat GPT told me, which is a decent summary of what I have read repeatedly over the years. Read them and think about what is happening in America today and form your own conclusion about whether we are heading, perhaps dramatically, in the wrong direction.

“Key factors contributing to a strong economy include:

1 Stable Government and Policies: Consistent regulations and political stability encourage investment and growth.

2 Skilled Workforce: Education and training boost productivity and innovation.

3 Infrastructure: Efficient transportation, communication, and energy systems support commerce.

4 Technological Advancement: Innovation drives efficiency, competitiveness, and economic expansion.

5 Access to Capital: Strong financial institutions enable businesses to invest and grow.

6 Trade Opportunities: Open markets and international trade increase economic activity.

7 Natural Resources: Availability of resources can fuel industry and exports.

8 Entrepreneurship: A culture that supports new businesses fosters job creation and innovation.

9 Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Effective management of interest rates, taxes, and government spending stabilizes the economy.

These factors interact to create an environment conducive to sustained economic growth.”

Henry's Lament

There once was a man named Henry who worried that his world was getting smaller. He liked people and was outgoing and had no trouble making friends. His trouble was keeping them. 

He had two kinds of lost friends. The ones who fell by the wayside in the natural order of things, moving, changing jobs. He kept up with some of them by email or text, but not often. He was an in-person kind of guy.

The other lost friends were the ones he meant to lose, the ones he stopped seeing because of some difficulty. Almost always the difficulty was a disagreement that he couldn’t accept. And almost always those disagreements went deeper than politics or personality. They came from what, if he was honest, he would have to call disrespect.

The disrespect might be directed toward him, although he was moderately tolerant of that, preferring to ignore it rather than to let it bloom into a friendship killer. Or it might be directed toward someone he loved, in which case he was less tolerant, feeling it his duty to stand up for his loved ones.

Henry had made many friends over the years. When he worked in commerce, they were so easy to come by that he took for granted that they, or others like them, would always be there. Once out of commerce, he still picked up friends easily in the neighborhood, sometimes someone he met in a park or at a lecture, sometimes a new acquaintance from a dinner party. 

Every time he moved, though, which wasn’t that often but often enough to take a toll, he had to start over. That got harder as time went on. No longer needing to be near work or good schools for children, he explored living in beautiful, uncrowded places. But there, by dint of sheer reduced numbers, opportunities to casually meet interesting people dwindled. Maybe because of that, or maybe for some other reason he could not name, his interest in doing the emotional work to make and keep good friends diminished. With so many people to get to know in his crowded life before, it had been easy to stumble upon fascinating people. Now he had to look for them, and he found he didn’t particularly want to. He didn’t know whether that meant he didn’t want new friends or he was just lazy.

He had been writing for a while. Novels, mostly. Some had almost been published. An agent might love one, tell him it was brilliant, but then a publisher, also proclaiming love for his insights, would say they weren’t sure what his audience would be. Not big enough to make money on, was what they meant. And maybe they were right. His stories were about men and their sons, the love and struggles between them that shaped them both in ways they barely understood. That’s why he wrote them. To understand himself, his own father, his own sons. He didn’t know if he was succeeding in that, but he at least understood his characters. He loved them like his family, like close friends.

Writing is a solitary thing. If he were a literary darling, he would have book signings and events to feed his need for buzz. He wouldn’t mind the admiration, but that wasn’t the main thing. All he really needed was a place to go where he could be with interesting people, where in the constant exchange of egos he could avoid loneliness.

He remembered his mother, a widow for thirty-five years, saying to him over the phone from thousands of miles away, late in her life, his age now, that she was just so lonely. He hadn’t known what to do to help her, and now he wasn't sure what to do to help himself.

Unnatural Disaster

Fires are raging through our neighborhoods, our lives, our democracy. They have come on suddenly, violently, unexpectedly, leaving us shocked and dazed. But there is hope.

When fire ravaged Pacific Palisades and Altadena in LA, as a former neighbor, I wondered how they would recover. The scorched landscapes—not uninhabited prairies or mountainsides, but people’s homes and lives—looked unimaginably lost.

Yet, more quickly than I imagined, the rebuilding has begun, Nothing can make up for the terrible losses, but, as in a remote corner of nature after a burn, green shoots of new life are emerging. It won’t be too long before vibrant communities thrive there again. They won’t be the same as before. Many of the people won’t be the same, but there will be community life once again, mothers, fathers and children, shopping for groceries,  playing soccer.

The fire that has burned through our national government has been just as sudden and swift. It has left so many injured, distraught and confused, wandering bewildered over the political landscape, scraping through the ashes looking for pieces of the things they, and we, all of us, have lost. Many are wondering how they can go on, whether their homeland will ever be the same, whether they will ever again feel welcome, and safe, here.

I believe we will survive, more than that, arise triumphantly. Like those sudden fires in LA, this too will pass The damage has been great, and the suffering is far from over, but we will rebuild.

The national fire has not been fully contained, and there are grave dangers that must be confronted, resisted, defeated, but our easily distracted arsonist-in-chief is off accepting a gilded airplane from foreigners and declaring trade victories and business deals that benefit him and his family. I don’t think he or his lackeys have set aside their blowtorches, but the emergency fire departments are beginning to arrive on the scene, in the forms of the judiciary and, however tentatively so far, members of Congress.

It’s going to be a slog, likely brutal at times, but if we work together we can restore our democracy and the lives of the people who have lost so much in this unnatural disaster. The key is to treat each other the way we would a neighbor whose house has burned down. Take them food, give them shelter, give them solace, give them hope. And in the giving, we will find hope for ourselves. 

God Bless Us, Libertarians Every One

Libertarians famously hate government. Grover Norquist, an outspoken tax-cut zealot, once said, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Occasionally we’ve put a bucket of water in that bathtub, but we’ve never filled it enough to drown much more than a hapless mouse. For all our dislike of taxes and being made to do things we don’t want to do, most of us have come to rely on government to keep us safe and to keep the economy ticking along so we can get on about doing whatever it is we want to do. 

Keeping the economy on an even keel is largely the job of the Federal Reserve Board, a job it handles with elegant dexterity using monetary policy, mainly interest rates. 

Keeping us safe is more complicated. Not only are there foreign foes to worry about, we have plenty of everyday domestic threats. We depend on government to protect us from both. At home, we have transportation safety people who make sure our roads and bridges are safe, environmental quality folks who work to insure we have clean air and water and agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Health and Human Services who keep watch for dangerous pathogens and recommend medical care based on the latest peer-reviewed medical research.

But what if we actually filled up Grover Norquist's bathtub and held our struggling public servants under until they quit thrashing? Who would do their jobs? Who would keep us safe?

Or worse, what if we simply replaced the ones helping us with ones who had other agendas? People with anti-vaccine views who got paid for touting them. People who want to replace reliable public information sources like NPR with opinions without scientific backing, advocated by industries that benefit financially from misinformation and deregulation, of carbon emissions from fossil fuels, for instance. People who are paid not to believe in climate science.

Edward Kennedy, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is telling new parents to “do your own research” on vaccines. Darn, and here I just threw away my test tubes and bunsen burners.

I don’t think the current project to shrink government is going to have significant success. The goal was two trillion dollars, then one trillion. The latest savings announced were $150 billion, but according to watchdog groups that may be many times what was actually saved.

What we have accomplished so far on our way to the bathtub with our would-be drowning victim is little more than to terrorize immigrants, universities and public servants and lie about our progress. “Don’t worry, your horrible government is going under for the third time,” we’re told, when in reality all that is being eliminated is truth about what is actually happening and, if science cuts continue, future progress toward greater health and prosperity.

Trust us, our government says, even as it rounds us up and deports us, even as it fires us and cuts off our healthcare and other benefits, even as it threatens us if we speak out against it.

It’s enough to make one want to retreat to the Neutral Zone, the Rocky Mountain refuge from totalitarianism of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a wild-west knockoff where it was every man and woman for themselves. A place where it was dangerous to trust anyone. Where no one was going to help you, so you had to help yourself.

Dick’s Neutral Zone was populated by misfits worthy of a Star Wars bar scene. Some of them formed a ragtag resistance, but there weren’t enough of them to do more than engage in guerrilla warfare.

Here in our time, there are many of us, but we haven’t yet figured out how best to resist. There are enough of us to succeed, I think, if we work together, and if we do it while we still can, before our agency is stripped away from us by jackbooted thugs, before we become a surveillance state in which our every move and utterance is monitored.

Much as it may seem like the time to retreat to a mountain sanctuary, if we want the government that has served and protected us for 250 years to survive for even a few more, we are going to have to put aside our differences and band together to fight back.