The Pendulum

I want to fight, really I do. I just don't know how to. I've written a few essays here. I gave money to the ACLU and PBS/NPR. I went to the "No Kings" march. I was glad to see such support from all over the country. I think there are plenty of people out there who don't like what's going on. We can march. There is that. I'll do that. Otherwise, I'm at something of a loss.

The people we need to be fighting, if we want to make a difference, are the courts and Congress. District courts seem up to the challenge, but the Supreme Court is not. It genuinely believes in vast executive authority, it seems. And its most recent decision on nationwide injunctions largely hobbles lower courts until matters of constitutional importance are decided by the Supremes. Lots of damage will be done in the meantime, even if the Supreme Court eventually weighs in to protect individual rights.

It's the job of Congress to stand up to this power grab, but they are not. Half of them are on board with it, and the other half are silent. I can't understand why the opposition isn't screaming "fire." Fear of losing their seats, I suppose. That's an understandable but, in a time of national crisis, pitiful reason.

I'm just going to have to wait this out and see if a majority of my fellow citizens change their minds about what kind of country they want. The midterms will be an indicator.

I'm shocked that we elected this man. I'm shocked that so many still support him. Only time will tell whether this is the country I have always thought it is, or whether we have reverted to something close to the Jim Crow South of my youth. I thought we were past all that. Maybe not. Political pendulums swing, and this is certainly a big swing to the right. I just hope this pendulum is not the one from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," and that the body under the swinging blade is not that of our liberal democracy.

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.

Don't Tread On Me

How many lives have been sacrificed for god and country? And honor, don’t forget honor. When we get worked up about a cause, we go for glory and blood.

I’m beyond most of that now. I never would have joined a religious crusade, and I was happy I had a high draft number when we were slogging through Vietnam. I’ve mostly avoided fights. I did get decked once, but that wasn’t much of a fight. I never saw the punch coming.

I’ve had plenty of what men in business call negotiations, but what are really tests of will, the step right before fist meets face. They can be both stressful and exhilarating, the way minstrels and poets romanticize brothers in arms.

I’ve turned to contemplation, and it’s nice but lacks a clarifying climax, kind of like my early back-seat exploits at drive-in movies. I've known the passion of anger, though, the sudden rush of its energizing tonic. I don’t exactly long for it, but I recall it the way a man sitting on a park bench on a cold clear day with a blanket over his shoulders might remember striding purposefully forward in his shirtsleeves.

I remember that feeling well enough to realize it is stirring in me now. I have been first nudged and now jerked out of my somnambulant bliss by a threat graver than any I remember in my lifetime. This time the threat is not from without, but from within. The face, and the source, of the threat is the president of the United States.

By now I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the harm he has done in mere months, trampling on civil rights, alienating allies, adopting disastrous economic policies. Hardcore MAGA may be happy with his actions (although even they are beginning to have second thoughts about his economic wrecking ball), but most of the rest of us are not.

By viciously demonstrating that it is dangerous to oppose him, he has intimidated many into silence. Too many big law firms, the praetorian guard of the legal system, have not only failed to oppose him, they have capitulated with promises to defend his causes, for free, and to no longer promote reforms like employment diversity that he opposes. 

Opposition is not for the faint-hearted. Not only does the president have all the levers of power, he has his brownshirt MAGA vigilantes. He has shown a willingness to delay obeying, or even ignore, court decisions that restrict his actions. In any event, the glacial speed of the judicial process is no match for his blitzkrieg of lawlessness.

I’m not faint-hearted, not in this moment, at least, but I worry I may be impotent, as pitifully ineffective as an old man facing down a Russian tank in Ukraine, hoping to save his family, willing to give his life for them, when the likelihood is that he will die in vain and what he fears will happen or not will in any event be entirely outside his control.

So how to fight? I’m not sure yet. 

Joining others where I can help, I think, whether marching at protests or raising my voice like this. All I know is that I have to do something, as surely as I would if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night and threatened my family. We’re down to a level of threat and response that is that basic, that compelling. 

We can resist or be subjugated.

How to Make the World a Better Place

Do your best. Do right. Be honest. Be compassionate. Help your neighbors in need.

That’s a decent life. Very Jimmy Stewart.

And if trouble came to town and threatened his family and friends, we all know what Jimmy would do. He’d stand up straight with his hat tipped back, squinting, and ask what he could do for them and whether they wouldn’t like to just move on.

But what if the trouble was bigger than a few men? What if it was all around, almost invisible, jumping out of the shadows in black masks and spiriting people away, people who weren’t expecting it, who didn’t think they’d done anything wrong, who were unprepared and defenseless.

If Jimmy were the sheriff, he’d run those bandits out of town. He’d rally the townfolk to help him.

Well, trouble has come to our town, and the sheriff isn’t Jimmy Stewart. Indeed, the sheriff is just the opposite, more like Black Bart.

Now what? People are cracking open their drapes and peering out to see what Bart is going to do. He and his gang are in the saloon getting liquored up, slapping the barmaid on the ass, shooting at the feet of the town lawyer, telling him to dance and laughing as he tries.

There’s no judge to hold Bart back. The judge is a circuit judge, and he’s somewhere else just now, out in the vast territory, god knows where.

Maybe Bart and his gang will raise hell, scare everyone for a bit, get heir sadistic kicks and move on. That’s what everyone peeking out the window between parted curtains is hoping.

Bart doesn’t leave though. Word goes out that he’s running a lawless town and desperados come from all over the territory. There are no rules. Bart and his boys do what they damn well please. They take the women, humiliate the men. Standing up to them seems hopeless. Worse than hopeless, lethal.

But then someone does. 

It’s the blacksmith, a hard man with a kind heart, or the lad not much older than a schoolboy with the reckless courage of the young. They set traps for Bart’s men. They steal their guns in the night. They cut loose their horses. And after each daring act of resistance, they hide in plain sight, going on about their business with the downcast gaze of obedience. Some of them are caught and shot. Some manage to slip out of town, but most stay, not out of fear but out of determination to save their town and their families and neighbors by undermining and routing out the pestilence that has descended upon them.

Did they succeed in taking back their town? Yes, but it took a long time and a lot of suffering. Was it worth it? Bart lies dead in an unmarked grave, or that’s the story that is told, but maybe he just slunk away in the night when he realized the town was stronger than he was, had more guts, had more to live for. The children of the blacksmith and the young lad who were the first resisters go to school in a new building erected on the site of the old saloon from which Bart unleashed his terror. They read about Bart in their school books the way they read about all history, with open and welcomed curiosity, and without fear. 

So what do you think, was it worth it? 

Cheeseheads

The Dutch victory over Spain in the seventeenth century is still a big deal in the Netherlands. Our host in Alkmaar, Netherlands, Leen Spaans, told me that. He’s the town historian, but more than that, he knows everything about what happened in that part of the Netherlands, and all around it, all the way back to the Middle Ages. He and his wife live in a house that has a sign that says it was built in 1623, but really it’s 30 years older than that. He showed Meg and me bricks from the old wall that the town erected in those days to defend itself. The reason the bricks were easy to come by is because the Spanish came with big cannons and patiently bombarded the wall until it crumbled. Later, civic leaders from Alkamar visited an Italian delegation to learn how Italian cities defended themselves. Build a moat to keep the cannons at a distance, the Italians said, and then build walls out of earth instead of bricks; rather than blasting down the bricks, the cannon balls will stick in the mud.

We were in Alkmaar to visit the memorial to Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch heroine who rescued 10,000 children from occupied lands in WW II and who inspired Meg’s novel The Last Train to London. We met the sculptor too, Annet Terberg, who depicted a larger than life Truus with children in her arms and all around her, some consoling others in their grief at being separated from their parents, some with their small bags or stuffed animals, all with faces that showed their pain and courage. That was something that struck me about the children, their faces were true, rendered in bronze as if in flesh, by someone who, like Truus, understood children on their level.

The day we were there was also the opening of the cheese festival, and we saw the orange wheels of gouda and the cheese carriers taking the big rounds to be weighed on huge balance scales. One of them told us about the cheese carriers’ guild. Once a member, you were a member for life, and you could depend on your fellow members to look after you when times got tough. What he described was the best of what unions offer their members, an honest version of what, in the United States at least, ultimately became protectionist schemes with politically corrupt leadership that led to their demise, and a loss for workers.

The cheese traditionally was made in round bowls with wooden lids about the size of a skull cap. In the war—I wasn’t sure which one—the wooden tops were worn on the head for protection, like helmets. The people wearing them were called cheese heads. And here I thought that term only applied to football fans in Wisconsin with foam blocks of cheese for hats. 

What I learned in Alkmaar is what I always seem to learn in Europe. Over the centuries, the people are constantly in strife with their distant neighbors, but always close to their near ones. It is the same today. Even now. Especially now. Again. 

It makes me wonder, as always, why the love and empathy we feel for one another when we are close at hand cannot be extended further. Perhaps it is not the limits of our love and empathy that are the problem, but rather the ambitions for power of our leaders, who for their own gain, not ours, convince us that our distant neighbors are our enemies.