Samain Thanksgiving Moon
He sits, early in the morning, while it is still dark outside, with his head in his hands. Orion, his longtime friend hangs in the sky visible to the southwest, Scorpio and Cassiopeia and the Drinking Gourd out there, too. A crescent Thanksgiving Moon, waxing toward its Super Moon event on November 25th, was visible last night.
If only the world could be quiet, serene, beautiful like the 5 am dark sky here on Shadow Mountain. No pussy grabbing. No complaints about raping 13 year old girls. No encouragement of political violence. No cynical comments about the validity of our electoral process.
Perhaps he could just slip away, go to some Trump Island in the the general area of Antarctica or maybe a luxury masted sailing ship forever circling the diminishing sea ice of the North Pole. Like Frankenstein’s creation. I would make a comparison between Trump and Frankenstein’s monster, but the monster was Frankenstein.
In this case Trumpism is the monster, a living candidacy patched together from a body of populist resentment, the brain of a nativist bigot, the nervous system of fearful white males and the legs of second-amendment worshipping other-phobic citizens. The arms, though, the arms are Trump’s, dangling like the tentacles of a squid, ready to grab, squeeze, embrace. Force. Trump is Frankenstein to this political moment in the Republican Party. The GOP provided the lightning that brought this monster to life and has paraded it with pride through this mockery of a campaign.
These are the most perilous political times in which I have lived. There are milita’s preparing an armed response to a potential Hillary gun-grabbing presidency. Our to this point normative peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election is under threat. This is a core feature of our democracy. The stakes on one issue, strangely absent from the campaign, are ultimate, the very survival of the human race may hang in the balance: climate change. The timer counting down the years in which we can still soften the blow of advancing global warming nears its alarm.
Race relations are in a visibly violent phase. Police kill black folks with so steady a drumbeat that it has become like Trump’s long string of insults to America, dulling our capacity for outrage. Misogyny is at its peak in the Donald, powerful at the same time as our first serious female candidate.
The Forever War has captured our youth, our money, our tolerance. We bomb and shoot and strike with drones, again dulling our capacity for outrage by desensitization.
I am not a man given to despair. Hamlet, that most existential of Shakespeare’s plays, offers a choice in the often quoted to be or not to be soliloquy. Do we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? I know my answer.
Rabbi Tarfon is credited with this quote: “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it” (Avot 2:21). wiki This is a wonderful thought because it drives directly against despair, relieving us of the expectation of finishing our political work, yet not letting us set it aside either.
So, when confronted with the potential momentary success of hate-filled, other-despising politics, those of us committed to a diverse, egalitarian world must not pull back, must not flee to Canada, must not despair. We are not, as Rabbi Tarfon said, at liberty to desist.
If the Donald wins, I’m not leaving for Canada. That would just leave the country to him and his kind. Not acceptable. But I will build a transparent dome around our house. The dome will have a semi-permeable membrane for its skin. Only healthy, clean, non-stupid ideas will be able to come onto our property whether delivered by newspaper, internet, or television. I haven’t figured out what to do when we leave our dome home, a work in progress.
Since 9/11 our politics have become polarized, mean, unbending. The Donald has only ridden that cresting wave; he did not create it. Like any demagogue he has an instinctive feel for the anguish of ordinary citizens and an ability to say things that seem to give it voice. As a representative democracy, we rely on politicians for taking the pulse of their constituents. Yes, that’s true.
Brother Mark wanted to know if there were images of my new knee. This is a generic image that shows the components of a common knee prosthesis. Total knee replacement is an increasingly good procedure and all of the anecdotal data I’ve come across has been positive. To be able to walk easily, get in and out of the car without pain, exercise, hike with Ruth and Gabe, sleep with less pain medication, and build up my endurance will be wonderful. December 1st.
Racism. Is complicated. Very complicated. And, yes, I believe all white Americans are part of its grip on our culture. I’m going to try to boil down a very thorny subject into a few words, see if I can convince you that you are part of the problem if you’re white and live in the U.S.
Slaves did not vote, but if counted as full persons for population purposes they would have given slave states and the whites who did vote greater representation in the U.S. House. This would have unbalanced power between the North and the South.
They also had an unearned advantage in their social status as at least higher than that of the slave, the three-fifths of a person enslaved. This unearned social status gave low income whites, often share-croppers, a psychological and social boost which had nothing to do with their personal merit. They were better, at least, than those who toiled without compensation and freedom. That unearned and undeserved lift in personal status persists in the minds and hearts of all white Americans.
The civil war, you might say, shows the inherent goodness of the north and the hostile debasement of southerners. You might say that if you don’t factor in the unearned economic and social advantages even northerners gained from the enslaved. You might say that if the wreck of reconstruction hadn’t resulted in Jim Crow laws throughout the south. You might say that if you hadn’t grown up near Elwood, Indiana which had a sign at its city limits, No Niggers In Town After Sundown. This was taken down only after the civil rights act in 1964.
How have all these terrible realities managed to remain in place? Because those with power rarely give it up willingly. We white Americans, through our avoidance of these issues, have capitulated to the structures already in place. Why? Because those structures: biased employment choices, biased voting requirements, lack of affordable housing, lack of available health care, still unequal education, are on the fringe of our lives, happening to someone else, some other African-American self. And to fix them would cost us in taxes, in our unearned advantage in employment, in our ability to control local and state and national elections.
The election is over. At least for Kate and me. We got our ballots in the mail on Tuesday. Yes, in the mail. We opened them and yesterday sat down together to vote. At our beetle kill pine kitchen table. The ballot spread out before us, front and back. The front had Hillary Clinton, Michael Bennet (Senate) and Jared Polis (House of Representatives) in a row, making it easy to vote for these Democrats.
On the back of the ballot were several matters up for public decision, most amending the constitution, a couple with only statutory weight. These are placed on the ballot if they get enough signatures in a pre-election petition process. This is referendum politics and I don’t like it. It sounds like direct democracy, but in fact it is too often a place where large organizations run stealth campaigns, hammering the process with lots of money.
In effect the polling place became our kitchen table. It was better than a voting booth because we could discuss our votes, look up information on candidates or ballot issues. Today we’ll drop our ballots off at a ballot collection box at the Evergreen library.
I suppose it’s similar to coming to political consciousness during the Vietnam War, or, later, during the Watergate mess. Being young when the impeachment of Bill Clinton was the big news. Or, when 9/11 happened. These were big moments in our recent history, each one with a totalizing grip on the news when they occurred. A child of those years could be forgiven a cynical attitude toward public life, just as Ruth, if she develops one, could be.
Sexual aggression and its effects. #PussysGrabBack is a hashtag encouraging women to vote and to vote against the would be pussy grabber in chief. The Access Hollywood video tape with its lewd, rude, casually mentioned and approved sexual assault language has caused an outpouring of actual stories from women in all walks of life and of all ages.
The Greyhound was not then the dismal transportation method it has become today, but an affordable way of moving long distances. And I traveled long distances, going from Alexandria, Indiana, 60 miles east of Indianapolis, to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. All of my father’s side of the family lived in or near Oklahoma, so this was a way for me to get to know them. And never, on any of those trips, did anything untoward ever happen to me.
A Sunday, downtown was empty of workers and there were no tourists on the streets. I had stopped by a doorway to stand in the shade while I took snapshots of buildings. A man came back, noticed me squatting down changing the film in my camera. He said something, I don’t recall what and I replied because I was a courteous boy from the Midwest. He squatted down, pretending to be interested in my camera.
When I reached the intersection of Broadway and Central in Northeast Minneapolis, I noticed a Ford pickup, black with large tires that made it ride high. The driver gunned the engine, came up suddenly on cars in the lane beside me. Jerk, I thought. Then, he did it again. Very aggressive driving.
Ruth wanted to see the Queen of Katwe, the story of a poor Uganda country girl who became a chess champion. So we did. It was a good movie, not great; but, its almost all black cast reminded me of Luke Cage, which also has an almost all black cast. I have been and am suspicious of the idea of appropriation* as bad, but these two media pieces have made rethink it.
Having said that I found myself intrigued with both Luke Cage and Queen of Katwe because they had almost all black casts. The voice of the characters, the setting, the narrative drive had an integrity, a cohesiveness different from a white dominated movie or television program. The vulnerabilities, tensions, outright conflicts reflect immersion in Uganda and Harlem. They help open up a world, a way of being, a certain thrownness, as Heidegger put it, that is well outside my white, male, middle class, small town Midwest USA experience.
However. The notion of silos, common in critique of bureaucracies, corporate or governmental or academic, seems to me to apply here, too. Silos are self contained domains, segments of a differentiated work place. The easiest place to see silos is in academe where biology and physics occupy different departments, often different buildings, and usually do not communicate. The internal culture of the military makes it secretive while congress wants transparency, the EPA is a separate agency of quasi-cabinet rank, so it is separate from the department of Agriculture where many matters of critical environmental concern receive attention. The critique is that while the silos differentiate and protect, the world is not so divided. Biology and physics operate within each organism. In the world as it is, Federal Superfund sites, under the administration of the EPA, interact directly with farms and municipalities. There was no bureaucratic barrier between the toxic waste pouring from the Gold King Mine and the waters of the Animas River.
