No Good

 Let us return for a moment to sanity.  In Minneapolis a woman in a car was shot at three times at very close range and killed by an ICE agent standing next to the car.  Federal officials claim the officer was in fear of his life because she was attempting to run him over, and so the killing was justified.

Since pretty much the invention of the automobile, there have been no circumstances in America in which this homicide would be justified.  The driver was unarmed, and both hands were visible.  The officer provided no warning that he was threatening lethal force.  There was no outstanding warrant for the driver.  If the driver was blocking law enforcement, then she could have been ordered to move her vehicle, which she was in the process of doing when she was shot.  And the federal vehicles were unmarked.

A different officer shouted to her to get out of the car.  Even if she heard him (though it was noisy, and it doesn't seem he had properly identified himself), the penalty for fleeing is not death.  There is no police force in the country which would claim that attempting to slowly drive away from masked armed agents justifies lethal force, or even the discharge of a gun.

The claim on behalf of the officer that Renee Good was attempting to run him over is not credible given the copious video evidence.  But even if she were (the federal press release language is "weaponize a car"), the car was barely moving (and the video evidence shows her wheels were turned away from the agent), and all an agent in fear of his life had to do was to take two steps away from the car.  Besides, how could anyone expect to stop a car that close to him by shooting the driver?  

As the driver told the agent, they now had her car license number.  Even if she had successfully fled the scene, they could have arrested her later.  I don't know what the penalty for failing to obey a federal officer's order to get out of a car, or of fleeing the scene, but I'm pretty sure it is not death.

But the officer fired three shots into the car, apparently hitting Renee Good in the face and killing her.  The officer (or another officer) was caught on his own phone saying afterwards, "Fucking bitch."

The normal procedure then would be for federal and state officials to open an investigation into the incident.  Officials would express regret at the loss of life, the public would be assured that the officer would be off the streets pending results of the investigation, and would call for calm.

Instead, the FBI has frozen state law enforcement out of the investigation. Instead, before any investigation had at best gone beyond the beginning of on-site evidence gathering, federal officials from the head of Homeland Security to the Vice-President of the United States asserted as known truth that the officer's gunfire was justified,  and moreover that Renee Good was a radical leftist and a "domestic terrorist." No evidence was offered for either charge.  Being a radical leftist is not against the law (even if it were true, which apparently it is not), let alone a capital offence.  It is a political position in a political democracy.

"Domestic terrorist" is the more potent charge, given what basic rights have been violated in the name of fighting terrorism.  But in more normal times such a charge is accompanied by lots of evidence, of criminal activity or at least intent to engage in a terrorist act.  It is a very serious charge, reduced this time to shameless inflammatory and prejudicial rhetoric.  

There is no overt suggestion that Renee Good might be a terrorist, or even an illegal immigrant fleeing capture (though again, that wouldn't justify lethal force).  She was a a native-born American, a white woman and a mother of three, who lived blocks away.  Her dog was in the back seat.

But even a known domestic terrorist, sitting in a car unarmed, may be subject to arrest.  Not to being executed on the spot.  Not even in the Soviet Union would state agents have committed such an act in broad daylight in a public place.

The public response to this shooting has so far been more than a thousand protest demonstrations across the country. Tens of thousands rallied in Minneapolis. Protesters have already spanned racial and ethnic lines.  Further incidences of federal agents threatening lethal violence, including against protesters, were reported. The Renee Good homicide has provoked anger, which makes for volatile public situations.  It has provoked fear.

The fear is that the masked secret police can kill anyone and federal officials will encourage it.  This is identifiable fascism, and the half dozen other names that apply.   But there is another fear, perhaps even more basic.

The shooter's video--which he shot with his phone held in one hand while he shot Renee Good dead with his gun in his other hand--demonstrates that he was not in danger, that she was not threatening him in any way. Other video evidence so far suggests that his actions were at best reckless and at worst deliberate.  Which would make this what some prominent people have called it: murder.

That video was essentially released by the Vice-President, because he and Chaos in Chief say that it proves their version of events is correct. In other times this video might have been suppressed or altered, or otherwise claimed to be deceptive or doctored, because it clearly does not show what they say it shows.  But now--as in so much else said by this government of Chaos--the evidence is not disproven, it is just misrepresented--and not subtly or at the margins, but completely.  Often the Chaos assertions are wildly opposite to the realities demonstrated in various ways, including pictures and video that everyone can see.

This has been their practice since at least the first Homeland Hitler inauguration, but most importantly concerning the events of and in response to January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol.  There are hours and hours of video of what happened there.  There are witnesses, depositions, and mountains of evidence that convinced scores of juries to convict participants.  And yet, Chaos and his minions assert that it never happened.  And they were doing so before the 2024 election, but apparently enough voters chose to ignore this.

Now it must be clear to everyone that in this administration, the truth is solely what they say it is.  This puts us not only in the realm of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but of  his Animal Farm, and in particular of Kafka.  In a Kafkaesque country, there is no recourse to reality.  Reality is what those in power say it is, at any given moment.  Even when few believe anything this government says.

It is time then to look at the resistance to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, particularly in the 1960s and afterward.  It was led often by writers as well as political figures who insisted, at great personal cost, on rigorously telling the truth.  They told the truth about their own incarcerations, about how officials claimed they were mentally ill and subjected them to drug treatments and horrific conditions.  Some even catalogued the drugs used on them.  They were scrupulous and relentless.  And eventually they prevailed.

Our fascist government is not yet a year old.  It is not yet deeply entrenched.  Some countervailing institutions still exist, and Americans are used to living in something like a democracy. This incident must be thoroughly and objectively investigated. The truth about Renee Good must be asserted against the lies, over and over.  The truth about this regime must be relentlessly exposed. They may fight harder with their backs against the wall.  But if this battle for truth is not won, the world that is coming with AI will be worse.

Let us return to sanity.  Let us return to at least trying to enact the good.

New World Chaos

What America used to be, to do--the Marshall Plan 1947

"We live in a world, "proclaimed psycho Stephen Miller, the most powerful voice in the Chaos White House, to interviewer Jake Tapper, "in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.  These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time."

The United States has used force, particularly against countries much weaker militarily, from time to time over the past half century.  But no American policy maker would ever have used these words as justification. They are the words of many past despots, conspicuously reflecting the Nazi point of view. Is it just the end of hypocrisy for at least some political leaders, or the end of something else?

By kidnapping the head of state of Venezuela, however evil and illegitimate, the United States blatantly violated the UN Charter and the basis in international law that has limited global violence and kept us from constant chaos and fear.  These laws were enforced by the restraint of the major world powers.  

But there is no other real enforcement mechanism other than the mutual benefits that restraint brings.  For example, in freedom from maintaining a highly militarized society, almost always a dictatorship, and the economic freedoms associated with free trade.  These are apart from the manifold benefits for so many, of living in a relatively peaceful world--and a peacefully and effectively interrelated world.

Such an action is also against United States law, meant to support these international norms.  But a comatose Congress is the supposed enforcement mechanism.

In his Substack column, normally about the Supreme Court, Steve Vladeck concludes: "And so, as has been true in so many other contexts in recent years, a blatantly unlawful use of military force overseas will go un-remedied—because there’s no viable legal pathway to challenge it; and because the one branch of government historically in a position to hold the executive accountable in these cases (you might remember it—Congress) has become completely feckless not just in general, but in pushing back against unlawful unilateral uses of military force, specifically."

But "unilateral force" doesn't fully describe it.  There was no public discussion, no legislative involvement. The "nation" wasn't remotely behind it. Nobody voted for anything remotely like it.  At least three-fourths of Americans as reflected in polls are against it. Instead this is the use of  overwhelming military force by a small group of people, several of whom are clearly unstable. And apparently no way to stop them.

 Since the kidnapping and killing , there have been threats from the Chaos against Columbia, Mexico and Cuba (though Boss Chaos said Cuba's economy will collapse because of the Venezuela oil spigot being turned off, not requiring American bombs.)  But Steven Miller's comment was addressing not the situation in Venezuela (in which, according to one media report, Miller may take a more active role) but Sunday and Monday's increasing drumbeats of threats against Greenland.

Miller points out the mostly undisputed fact that no one is going to attempt a military defense of Greenland once the the United States moves to take it over. But if actual military occupation occurs, the Prime Minister of Denmark said it would be the end of NATO, because all its member nations are required to come to the defense of any member nation attacked militarily.  Denmark is a member nation, and Greenland belongs to Denmark.  Europe isn't going to send forces against the US, so NATO would dissolve.

Founding of NATO

The ramifications of a collapse of NATO would be immense.  After the conflagrations of two world wars, the United States led a new global world order, not only with the United Nations, but by fostering the unification of Europe and its close ties with the US.  Along with the Marshall Plan, that revived the economies of western European nations, and the economic intertwinings that it materially encouraged (leading eventually to the European Common Market and then the European Union), the mutual defense pact of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was essential.

The immediate effect of NATO dissolving would be chaotic.  What would happen to all the US military bases in Europe under NATO command?  Without NATO, would European nations expel American forces?  How would it affect Europe's ongoing fears of Russian aggression?  Inevitably, the presence of nuclear weapons would become a very real and active factor.  

The Chaos administration may rely on other forms of intimidation short of military invasion of Greenland. (One also wonders whether the US military, so far utterly compliant with the dictator in chief, would go so far as to attack a defenseless outpost of a European ally for no military or legal reason.)   But NATO, the United Nations and restraint of at least overt bullying as foreign policy have made the world what it is since World War II.  Which among other things is a world that could work together to address climate distortion, including its effects--even if those efforts so far have been been way too weak.  

So it is no wonder that in examining the economic as well as political future of the world, the Eurasia Group--a top political risk research group headquartered in New York-- has changed its emphasis on China as the greatest risk to the world.  It is the United States of Chaos, as a result of nothing other than its own choices.

"The United States is itself unwinding its own global order," said Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group's president and founder.  "The world's most powerful country is in the throes of a political revolution."

Vladeck writes of the Venezuela action within a larger framework that in addition to other concerns, has guided the United States in the world. He adds later: "But my own view is that the United States crossed a very dangerous line last night—not just legally, but morally...One can only wonder the price we’ll pay in the long term for stooping to that level."

It is the moral basis for restraint, and for the values it represented to the world (self-determination, non-aggression, compassion, rule of law, etc.) that has defined America to the world, and to itself.  What happens when that goes away, and we are just the world's biggest bully?  Two world wars taught our 20th century forebearers the answer.  

Poetry Monday: January First

  

                                Tomorrow, 

we shall have to think up signs,

 sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan

 on the double page

 of day and paper.

 Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,

once more,

 the reality of this world.

 Octavio Paz 

"January First"

R.I.P. 2025

 In  some of the lists of Notable Deaths of 2025 published in various newspapers and other outlets on the Internet, I'm just starting to see some names of people I know little or nothing about.  That proportion will undoubtedly grow for however many more of these I will view in the future.  But for now, the lists are still dominated by names I know very well, and people I may even have encountered in my life.

For example, I once was walking into the West Village in Manhattan with two young women, both writers at the Village Voice, from the West 4th Street subway station down towards Bleeker Street, when on a patch of grass between buildings we saw someone with a cardboard box that was filled with kittens.  We paused a moment, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple beside us stop to look.  I didn't recognize the man but the woman was definitely Diane Keaton, just months after her breakout performance in Annie Hall.  I glanced at my companions, who were so engrossed in their New York conversation that they didn't notice anything.  When I looked back, Diane and her companion were hurrying across the street, and around the next corner.  

I've seen her other movies with Woody Allen (she was even funnier in Love and Death) and many of her later films, and read with admiration her book, Then Again.  Once her death was announced, we watched again her 2003 movie with Jack Nicholson, Something's Gotta Give. It may be her best performance in a very good movie. In Annie Hall days she was a kind of model for some young women and a heartthrob for a certain kind of young man (we were born the same year) but for me she also became somebody I paid attention to over the years, because she was so uniquely herself, sensitive, smart and adventurous.  She was probably also high maintenance but I'll bet she was a fascinating friend.

There were other people who died this year I especially admired.  I've already written at length about Bill Moyers, who died last summer.  Months later I realize more acutely that we now have no one like him, and it seems unlikely we ever will.  Rachel Maddow is carving out her own importance in more ways than one, but there's nobody with Moyers' breadth and depth, his abilities as an interviewer and his incisive writing.  I wouldn't like to imagine my life and who I would be without all those years of Moyers.

In her long life, Jane Goodall did so much for what's been called the more than human world--a true inspiration for young people passionate about saving the variety, the beauty and the viability of the planet. When Native American stories and writers burst into TV and film in the 1990s, actor Graham Greene was always there, bringing incisive life to this important moment.  

Robert Redford was a fine actor, a great movie star (some say the last) with a vibrant intelligence both contemporary and classic.  He not only made All the President's Men; he made it happen. I guess my secret favorite of his films is The Electric Horseman, though Three Days of the Condor is maybe his most perfect film.  Though I expect the one closest to his secret self was Jerimiah Johnson.

The Princess Bride, as directed by Rob Reiner, is on a lot of favorite movies lists as well as mine, but the William Goldman book is already a great template. Reiner found another great writer in Aaron Sorkin for the other of his movies on my list of favorite, The American President.  That movie probably birthed The West Wing television series as well.  

In their public lives these were all good people, and forces for good that continue to sustain those of us who were around when they were active, and can serve as inspiration for the young.

When last December I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists--it led to a couple of months reading all his work, both books I'd read before and those I hadn't, which then resulted in two essays posted on another blog.  This December I've already embarked on a reading (and viewing project), exploring the life, thoughts and works of playwright Tom Stoppard.  It's going to take awhile.  I've started by re-reading the beginning of Hermione Lee's fine biography, and stopping at the points where a play appears, and then reading that play.

Tom Stoppard died in November.  From his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- to now, I followed his career and his work longer and more consistently than I have of any other playwright. (One bit of evidence: most of my copies of his plays are first edition paperbacks.) 

From the first I knew he was a writer after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time.  I came to admire other dramatists of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard. 

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: that ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams, with further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy.  These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts.  Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook.  And the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience. 

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.

Especially in those early years, he seemed to be reading what I was reading or had read.  We had similar literary tastes.  That we would seldom have agreed on political questions in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and we might not agree on some larger subjects, not only didn't bother me, it didn't occur to me.  These were beside the point.  Besides, by the time his work overtly took sides, in favor of free expression in Eastern Europe, we were on the same page.

 From the first also, there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories, that were sometimes overlooked--even by the playwright.  Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Besides, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared Cancerian night owl, with even less digital tech than I have.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer.  Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information.  He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write."  That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion."  I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event."  That event is the production, the performance.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few productions: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.) 

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil,  the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and  his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard had previously written the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.)  Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End.  I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

There are one or two of his other television plays on YouTube, and a few of his radio plays, including Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (It also concerns the struggle to define the good.)  For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time.  But all his plays had laughs.  The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."  

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town.  What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays.  I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one. 

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust.  The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.   Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself.  He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88.  "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..."  He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone.  He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment.  A lot of people are missing him.  He's not coming back.  Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future. 

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words.  The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams.  In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy.  To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime. 

 Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son.  Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?"  Herzen replies:

 "No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?...   Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question." 

R.I.P. Clayton Davis (1947-2025)

In terms of years of acquaintance rather than age, I lost my oldest friend this passing year. I first remember Clayton Davis from our fourth grade at Sacred Heart School, when after Christmas we suddenly had a teacher who for the first time wasn’t a nun, but a tall blond young woman named Miss White. 

 For awhile we and some other classmates escorted her on her walk home after school—the girls walking with her while the bedazzled and confused boys shambled behind, until the point where Miss White sent us back. Once on our return walk I recall I accompanied Clayton to his house, and I met his mother and the first group of what would eventually be his nine siblings. They would be a part of my life for a long time.

 His family moved away but Clayton and I became reacquainted at Greensburg Central Catholic High School. We were in the same year and we had most of the same classes. We shared the jubilation of the Pittsburgh Pirates winning the 1960 World Series with what has been called the greatest game ever. 

 That first fall we both volunteered for the local John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, and were rewarded a few years later by being named “ushers” so we could attend the only speech President Kennedy made in Pittsburgh—in the fall of 1962, just a week or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 On November 22, 1963 we heard at the same time the news of Kennedy being shot in Dallas, and then of his death. We walked together after school as we usually did that year—I lived just across the weedy fields and Clayton walked to his former home, now his grandmother’s, to await a ride back to his new home in the country. Mostly that year it was the two of us, talking about school and the endless iteration of who was the “toughest” girl in each class.

 But on that day I had prearranged to bring my debate partner home so we could work on our case. He was Michael Krempasky. We all knew that the conditions of our lives and futures had just changed dramatically. The three of us would become lifelong friends. 

 In the next few years we would form a kind of comedy group, starting with taped skits in the manner of That Was the Week That Was, Beyond the Fringe, Steve Allen and Stan Freberg, then adding music and performance. The folk music boom dominated our senior year, and we became a Kingston-like trio, complete with matching striped shirts: the Crosscurrents. 

 I started writing songs, and Clayton—a serious musician—began writing as well. Then I went off to college some 800 miles away. One day I sat in the college library writing lyrics on a yellow pad. I sent them off to Clayton, and he wrote the music. The song turned out well and so we did it again, as we would off and on for the next 20 years.

 When I got home on vacations, the Crosscurrents would work out how to do these songs together, along with songs that each of us wrote on our own. We soon discovered the magic of the Beatles together, returning from seeing their movie Help!--possibly a few times in a row--to learn and instantly sing the songs in Clayton’s basement. Our own songs changed as well.

 I’m writing about this in some small detail because I know now, as I sort of did then, that communicating through the making of music, through the sharing and shaping and indeed the creating of our songs, made these friendships unique in ways I can’t explain, except to say that there were many intuited levels of what we shared. 

 That was especially true of my relationship with Clayton, particularly as the years went on and he pursued music professionally in a series of groups, often including some of our songs. We would play together informally, and collaborated in a public way as late as the mid-1980s. The three of us had a last hurrah at an open stage in the early 2000s. 

It wasn't all music, of course.  The three of us generally had a good time together.  Clayton had a quick wit, a way with a pun.  Once when we were on an epic road trip in Ohio in Mike's yellow VW bug, Mike felt something on the back of his neck, like an insect bite.  "Is there a red spot there?" he asked.  "No," Clayton said.  "It's a pigment of your imagination."

 Through the years I attended both of Clayton’s weddings, and spent time with his daughter Nora when she was small. He visited me in Boston and Connecticut. He was there for the funerals of each of my parents. After I moved here to California I never returned to western PA without seeing him, though our lives diverged and we talked less. One of our last phone conversations was just after the death of his first wife, Joyce. 

 More than a year ago, he was found unconscious on his kitchen floor in Pittsburgh, with a stroke or something like it. He was unconscious for weeks in the hospital, so long that the puzzled doctors were losing hope. Then one day his son Ian said something that made him laugh. Slowly he came back to full consciousness.

 He had other episodes and never fully recovered, but eventually he was well enough to leave the rehab facility and live happily with Ian and Ian’s wife Stephanie in Pittsburgh, where Clayton was also reunited with his beloved dog Nelson. His daughter Nora and sister Mary were frequent visitors. In September he faded and then slipped away.

 Mike, who lives in central PA, visited him several times, but I was always 3000 miles away. I tried to communicate with him in the way we used to—through music. I sent him several mixes of songs from our past (including the Brubeck jazz we first listened to early in high school) plus some of our own songs we recorded in one basement or another over the years, and once in a real studio.

 I also wrote to him a few times. I learned he was having memory problems, and it seemed he was clearer on the far past, and sometimes felt he was living in it. So in my last letter I recounted some of the same memories from our early days as I have here—the Kennedy experiences in high school, and fourth grade with Miss White.

 His sister Mary told me she’d read him that letter, and he responded: “Miss White! She was hot!” 

 A more complete obituary appears here. May he rest in peace. He lives on in those he left behind, and in the music.  And I'll keep playing our songs, as long as I can.

Christmas Messages

 

Regardless of religious beliefs, the story of Jesus is a crucial contribution to the cultural mythos. Partly this is because it is so different. According to the story, he is not a king, not a hero who performs great feats of physical strength or cunning, not a warrior in battle who vanquishes enemies. Jesus is born of poor parents in a barn (or a cave) far from home. His birth is witnessed not by princes and priests but by animals.

Jesus goes on to preach that “the greatest of these [virtues] is charity.” His Sermon on the Mount stands as a bold statement of personal and social values, unique in our mythologies.

The Church of my youth was divided (though not as starkly as today) between those who emphasized institutional rules and kept company with power, and those like Dorothy Day who stood with humble workers and “the least of these.” For all the corruption and cruelty within organized Christian churches, there were always those who dedicated their lives to helping and being with the hurt, the needful, the oppressed and otherwise forgotten.

This past year we have seen a new challenge by purported Christians to the core message of Jesus, and we have seen it enacted at a horrific scale. The challenge is the outspoken denial of empathy. Two prominent Evangelicals write and talk about “toxic empathy” and empathy as sin under circumstances that are familiar for the extreme right.

 

The most prominent exponent of empathy as a weakness this year was Elon Musk, who when given the keys to the entire federal government, virtually destroyed the infrastructure and the support that addressed the life and death needs of the world’s poorest people. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 people—most of them children—have died this year directly because of this action, with many more suffering with the consequences. Given Musk's rhetoric, there's a scary likelihood that this was intentional. 

The ongoing war on immigrants of color (from Mexicans to Africans to Asians) by the federal government is a stain on the nation’s soul. Even apart from the naked racism, the cruelty and brutality is extreme. Mothers have been torn away from sick babies, an attack dog set upon a man who simply stepped outside his own home, and children as young as six years old have been imprisoned alone. There were no circumstances under which a six year old is imprisoned in America, until now.

All of this is being done in defiance of law and basic norms of conduct, with people disappearing into a growing network of for-profit prisons and foreign hell holes, all supported by tax dollars.  And this administration is proud of it--they make videos highlighting their brutality and splash them all over social media.

But they aren't convincing everyone--in fact, they're turning many, many Americans against them. Empathy has not ended. Empathy is a personal and a social virtue, the ground of cooperation, which is the basis of society and anything we care to call humanity.  And even with a cowardly Congress and corrupt Supreme Court, it is being affirmed where people live.

We can see empathy in action in protests and protections and actions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Charlotte, Columbus (Ohio), Oakland (California), Pontiac (Michigan), Pueblo (Colorado), Bentonville (Arkansas), Padukah (Kentucky) and in multiple communities in Minnesota, Colorado, California, and other places overlooked by national reporting.

The protesters against the brutal raids of the Border Patrol and ICE say they are defending their neighbors. “Compassion Melts ICE” is the message on one of the many similar signs.

This ethic does not depend on any pronouncement by anyone who is given transcendent authority by some. It is in vital ways inherent in the nature of social beings, and now (as long ago, on this very American soil) recognized as inherent in the interdependence of life on this planet, including what we do not normally consider as live beings.

The young woman protagonist of Tom Stoppard’s 2013 radio play “Darkside” wrote this:

“The earth is a common.

You can’t save it for yourself but

you can save it for others, and

the others will save it for you.

The other is us, and we are the

other. We are of a kind, we are

natural born to kindness, which

means to act to our kind, as

kin to kin, as kindred, which is

to act kindly. What is the Good?

It is nothing but a contest of kindness.”

What these protests show is that some of the ongoing expansion of what qualifies as "us" has taken root.  They defend their neighbors.

The role of government as an agent of compassion representing the will of the nation goes back most conspicuously to President Lincoln, and in a new way was institutionalized during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who after his ground-breaking first term with the New Deal, accepted renomination in 1936 with these words: “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Indifference is the usual position of a conservative Republican regime, though since FDR, precedent has retained the decency that had been institutionalized. But the current presidency is not indifferent: it is pointedly, actively, aggressively and ferociously cruel, as well as shamelessly corrupt—which also has its costs to compassion, decency and justice.  Instead of ice, we have ICE.

So millions of Americans this Christmas will worry deeply about the help withdrawn that will skyrocket their health care costs in the new year, on top of more expensive everything that results in nearly half of Americans struggling to pay for basic needs: food, shelter, energy, transportation, clothing as well as medical care. 

Health insurance prices are sharply increasing but that’s perhaps just the start. I’ll suggest two things: that despite a record Black Friday, the Christmas shopping season will turn out to have been weak, and retailers and grocers who held back price increases in December will enact them in January.

 Many people are turning their compassion for others as well as their own grievances into political action. Americans in the street are standing up for who they believe we are as a country, and they are saying that empathy, compassion, kindness and charity are part of that.

Though this needs no formal authorization or religious corroboration, it can be seen as an extension of the so-called Golden Rule, as expressed by Jesus. That mythos should mean something, especially this time of year.

Origins: Winter Solstice

 

The Winter Solstice is considered the most celebrated annual event in the history of human cultures around the world.  Ancient structures survive in many of today's countries that seem designed to funnel the solstice sunlight, from the Great Pyramid and the Karnak temples in Egypt to Stonehenge in England, but also in Turkey, Germany, France, Mexico, Wales, India, Zimbabwe, Peru, Easter Island, Cambodia, Japan, Canada, India, Bulgaria, Sweden, Russia, Brazil and the USA, among others.

Most of the traditions still found in the grab bag of modern Christmas observances come from Winter Solstice rituals, including the evergreen tree, holly, candles, the Yule log (and Yuletide itself) as well as stories of the birth of a divine son, usually in a cave or other dark place. Even the red and white outfit of Santa Claus mimics the red and white ritual garments of various cultures, including far northern cultures (think North Pole) for the Solstice. 

Many surviving indigenous cultures still celebrate the Winter Solstice.  In many indigenous and ancient observances the emphasis was on the light and dark, with attention not only to it being the shortest day of the year but the longest night--and so the stars were important.  It was at the same time the beginning of winter, which--for one thing--was the traditional time of story-telling.  In some tribes, the most important stories, such as the creation, could be told only in the winter season. The stars in the winter night sky could also be important in these stories.

For many, the Winter Solstice was the rebirth of light, and so of birth.  But for others the emphasis was more earthy, and not on birth, but on a kind of pregnancy.  For example, in rituals of the Caney Indians of Central America that I participated in a few times in the past, the central figure was a Mother Earth symbol, becoming pregnant and beginning the gestation of the new life that would appear in the spring, especially the plants growing up from the earth. As the days grow slowly longer, the life that appears in the spring grows slowly, unseen, in the dark earth.  It is a celebration of that promise.

I think of all this when the celebrations this time of year seem increasingly distant from the natural world which first inspired them.  That includes many of the remaining religious expressions, which are largely elements of institutions that, deliberately and not, have distanced themselves from these ties to natural cycles, the mysteries of the planet's life.

But mostly we see this in secular observances. Of course, gifts are always symbols of the heartfelt intent of the giver, regardless of what they are. But when we consider gifts we buy, the term "materialism" is often bandied about.  But it's not precisely materialism.  Commercialism maybe--the commodification of everything, and the emphasis on products and constructions that are largely abstractions, symbols of something--if nothing else, of successful advertising and momentary fashion. The real material, the real physical, is of the Earth.  

The material, the realities of our own planet becomes ever more distant each year, except as imagery manipulated by technologies. What we experience is becoming mostly what we see on those tiny phone screens.

As for the stars in our skies, who can see more than a few, if any at all? Smothered by electric lights, blocked by buildings, the night sky that was mightily present to our ancestors has just about disappeared.  And when I searched for photos of evergreens against a starry sky, most of what Google showed me were very enhanced, and many were already generated by A.I.  (I can't vouch for how altered the image above may be, but it purports to be an actual photo taken by Ryan Hutton in Wisconsin on the Winter Solstice.)

In the end nature won't be denied.  Deep cold, wind, rain, snow in unusual proportions and ferocity, that visit us with increasing frequency as partially the effects of climate distortion, will make themselves felt, if not known.  Stay safe, and remember the original: the Winter Solstice.

The Land of the Frazzled, the Home of the Frayed

 The last time I attempted to write something for publication about a younger generation was in the early 1990s, when I wrote a piece for the Pittsburgh City Paper on the supposed youth phenomenon of the time, the Slacker.  I suggested that basically, the so-called Slacker wasn't all that different from the supposed phenomenon of my youth, the hippie.  Both faced a world in which they were expected to fight for jobs they didn't want, doing things they didn't believe in, and therefore forced into a stunted life of quiet desperation.  So, essentially, fuck that.

I mentioned also that the disenchanted youth was a phenomenon beyond those cliches (you wouldn't call Benjamin in The Graduate a hippie), that there were manifestations in the 1950s, 70s and 80s as well.  I quoted Paul Goodman's 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd (which I also had quoted in similar essays I wrote in the mid-1960s, at the end of high school and beginning of college), about a future some young people of the 1950s felt they faced: "During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good."

The de-humanization of the workplace itself is somewhat perennial, but definitely became a widespread oppression in the industrial age.  The delights of working on the factory production line are typically inflated in today's culture.

The Slacker, I wrote in 1993, was responding to a somewhat different but similar set of circumstances as those earlier decades in what I called "the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed."  A clear culprit was and remains what I elsewhere and earlier called The Speed of Life.  Technology does not only enable, it demands, and these days it demands relentless speed and total accessibility.

Similarly, the egotistical brutality of the workplace has been around forever, and those new to it are apt to get the brunt of it, and feel it more acutely. In fact I'll never forget the dazed look of a beautiful young woman I knew in college who'd just experienced her first forays into the working world, in the early 1970s.  When faced with a smug employer who demanded to know why he should hire her, she said that the first response that came into her head was: "Because I'm smarter than you."

Even since the 1990s however, the country and the context and circumstances of a young person's daily life have changed a great deal.  In many respects, it's a different world.  But last month when I read an opinion piece in the NYT by Jessica Grose titled (by the editors no doubt) "For Gen Z-ers, Work is Now More Depressing Than Unemployment," I did not feel the sense of displacement I usually do in articles about the social media-obsessed, nose buried in phone, AI dependent young, but a sense of kinship.

Within today's "grim" job market, Grose writes, "the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal."  She describes a process in which the "first levels" of job application scrutiny is often done now by AI, including interviews on line. (The Guardian goes into more detail about today's Orwellian hiring process.)

Jobs themselves are often micromanaged and otherwise abusive, as well as poorly paid and with negligible benefits. Electronic surveillance has become the slave-driving boss, as has the speed with which computers perform tasks--instead of being "time-saving" they function as employer expectation-raising for the amount of work and the speed with which it is done: a more intense workplace.  

These and other factors result in poorer mental health so that this essay's title is literally true (very unusual for a NYT opinion piece): An annual study of nearly half a million American workers finds that workers under 25 are as unhappy as the unemployed.  When job satisfaction rose for other age groups, it fell for the young.

Some of this, the surveyors suggested, was because the young had higher expectations.  According to me, you can blame social media, media in general and so on, but really, the young always have higher expectations, and they should.  But the experts also agreed that "the workplace is markedly worse."

There are other elements of what these young people face I've thought about, that Grose doesn't mention in this piece.  I already felt a deep compassion for the generation whose lives will eventually be dominated by the effects of the climate distortion caused by and ignored by a determinative proportion (in power more than numbers) of previous generations.

And I can't even conceive of their debt burden from overpriced college education. Although I had seen up close the craziness of top-heavy administrations and futile business models applied to education, just why it all costs so much is beyond my understanding, and I do wonder if my own ability to go to college was an historical anomaly for someone from my background.

Grose begins and ends by referring to prejudices of older generations. "The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation," she begins. "Gen Z-ers don't even deserve this perfunctory slander."

Well, I'm already on record objecting to the over-generalizing and slander of the Baby Boom generation by some younger writers, and the New York Times.  So when Grose ends "Whatever is going to happen for Gen Z-ers as we all live through the A.I. revolution, I hope that their elders approach them with more compassion than disdain," I join in that hope.  For I have no disdain for them, and a lot of compassion, but more than that, I have what I had for my own generation of young and the ones that followed: anger and disdain for the society that persists in exploitation, that does not affirm their hopes and ideals but that grinds them down for their own selfish ends.  

How Little Are The Little Stories?

 

The biggest and most outrageous actions of the Chaos regime and their enormous consequences are often almost too big to wrap your brain around, too huge and extreme to feel anything beyond a now habitual anger and fear.  Followed by numbness, until the next announcement, the next news revelation, the next Court decision.

But individual consequences can still be understood and felt, like the individual victims of the immigration Gestapo.  The high school boy kidnapped on his lunch break.  The scholarship college student and long-time resident on her way home to visit family at Thanksgiving, suddenly deported  in chains over a removal order she knew nothing about, and once again the victim of legalistic sleight of hand to avoid a court order to keep her in the country.

Or the Washington state man lured out of his house on false pretenses, immediately set upon by an attack dog and seriously injured, by the unidentified ICE Gestapo.

Too bad we don't have news media that can put a name and a face to one of the estimated 600,000 people in faraway lands, most of them children, who died for lack of promised US food and medicine aid, much of it locked unused in warehouses.

But it is heartening to me that people across America are defending their neighbors, and agitating against the Chaos Gestapo reign of terror against mostly people of color.

The Chaos racism is definitely out in the open now.  An Axios report begins: "President Trump's Cabinet applauded him this week after he described Somali immigrants as "garbage" who "contribute nothing.' He unapologetically condemned an entire community, with no fear of political backlash."

Yet there is something more to learn, at least about the depth of this current hatred and the Orwellian impunity of relentlessly applying it, in a small and even petty act that gets lost in the chaos of larger outrages.  It's difficult to think of anything more petty--and more telling--than this little story about National Parks.  NPR reports that for 2026 the Chaos administration has stricken two days off the usual calendar of days when admission to National Parks is free.  Those two days are Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth.

But they have added one new day: you can now get into a National Park for free on King Chaos's birthday.

Fighting Crime With Crime

 One of the Chaos administration's Big Lies is Crime.  Combatting crime is the stated rationale for the war on immigrants, the war on American cities they don't like, and the war crimes committed in the open sea ostensibly to fight criminal drug traffic.

And yet..Chaos continues to pardon actual convicted criminals.  Last week it was David Gentile, convicted of criminal fraud to the tune of over a billion dollars, defrauding over 10,000 investors, depriving many middle class victims of their life savings. The conviction, said the US prosecutor, is “a warning to would-be fraudsters that seeking to get rich by taking advantage of investors gets you only a one-way ticket to jail.” 

But fraudsters have now received another message, just in time for the Christmas fraud season.

This was mere days after an even more notorious pardon: a former president of the Honduras who was convicted of taking bribes from a drug kingpin to enable him to export cocaine to the United States, with thousands if not millions of victims and ruined lives as a result.

Federal prosecutors called it a "sprawling conspiracy", causing "unfathomable destruction."  It took years and more than 1,000 witnesses, but Juan Carlos Hernandez was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

The Chaos pardon came out of the blue.  Neither Hernandez or his attorneys had publicly requested it.  He did have an appeal scheduled for December.

So Chaos pardons a convicted purveyor of drugs in the United States, while ordering the military to shoot up small boats and even go back again to be sure to kill everyone aboard, without providing evidence let alone a prosecution or trial, off the coast of a country that is not known to export dangerous drugs to the United States.

One of the investigators on the Hernandez case called the pardon "lunacy."  It is that, and worse.  It dishonors the victims, and makes a mockery of such painstaking efforts to counter the international drug trade.  Now the deterrence of the law is weakened if not destroyed.

And why?  It wasn't immediately known what corrupt purpose these pardons may serve, particularly Gentile.  But the first and most pathetic reason is that these convictions happened during President Biden's administration, and Chaos is obsessed with trying to undo literally everything Biden did.  He cannot face what he obviously feels as the humiliation of Biden winning the 2020 election against him.  He is a terribly sick man, and this country and the world are paying a terrible price for his presidency.

It may well go beyond Biden--Chaos has been frantic to put his personal brand on the White House and every institution in Washington he can.  He certainly continues to try to undo everything President Obama did, but his targets of destruction go back to nearly every presidency before his.  He won't be happy until his face is not only on Mount Rushmore, but it is the only face there.  

Origins: Thanks (and Franks) Giving

[Above: painting of Pueblo Green Corn Ceremony circa 1930 by Opwa Pi (Red Cloud)

The first ceremonial Thanksgivings in North America occurred before history was written on this continent.  Such individual ceremonies were part of daily lives for most if not all Indigenous hunters and gatherers, such as giving thanks to the animal that gave its life to the hunter, or a constant consciousness of sacredness in gathering and crafts like basket-weaving.

It is certain that even in historical times, group ceremonies of thanks among Native tribes included giving thanks for the harvest.  Tribes in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwest in particular celebrated Green Corn Ceremonies or festivals (and many still do.)  

It seems likely that the most famous "first" Thanksgiving in Patuexet (Plymouth), Massachusetts in 1621 (or 1623)  was at least partly inspired by such an event among local Native groups such as the Wampanoags who attended--and reportedly outnumbered the Pilgrim colonists.  Like traditional Green Corn ceremonies, it lasted three days, beginning on June 30.  This cooperative venture was not repeated.  The next harvest was bad, and eventually the Pilgrim fathers slaughtered the same tribal peoples, setting a horrific but often followed precedent.

Other religious ceremonies of thanks to the Christian God had already been held among colonists in Newfoundland (1578), Jamestown, La Florida and a colony in Maine.  The first national day of thanks was declared in 1789 by President George Washington, in gratitude for the Constitution.  It was held that year on November 26.  Other Presidents declared national Thanksgiving days, one year at a time and on various dates, though some Presidents didn't at all. 

Beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a 36 year campaign in favor of an annual and official Thanksgiving Day.  Today's tradition was established by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863, just weeks before he gave his historic Gettysburg Address. In part he wanted the nation to give thanks but also pray for healing after the Civil War.  He'd already declared a day for thanksgiving that August, but then made Thanksgiving an annual holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

But the calendar is a tricky thing: sometimes the last Thursday of the month is the fourth, and sometimes (roughly two time out of seven) it is the fifth Thursday of the month.  In 1939 it was  the fifth, and retailers begged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that year's Thanksgiving for the fourth Thursday, the next-to-last, because they were afraid of a foreshortened Christmas shopping season.  He agreed.

National pandemonium ensued, which only got worse in 1940 when FDR again designated the next-to-last Thursday, which that year was the third.  Republicans in particular derided him, and called it Franksgiving.  Some 16 states declared their own Thanksgiving day to be celebrated on the last Thursday, so there was no longer a national day of thanks.  In 1941, Congress passed a resolution assigning the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which FDR signed into law. (Retailers had not shown any appreciable change in sales with the earlier date.) 

 Some states continued to designate the last Thursday, and celebrations were muted during World War II, but by the end of the war, almost all of the nation celebrated on the new Franksgiving of the fourth Thursday. The last holdout was Texas, which did not change its law from the last to the fourth Thursday until 1956. (Then of course there's Canada, which holds its Thanksgiving the second Monday of October.)

Though it is unlikely that the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving included pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and even today's breeds of turkey, most of the day's food traditions do seem to come from New England.  Recipes for most of the traditional meal are in the first cookbook published in America, in Connecticut in 1796. 

The Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York has been an annual event since 1930.  Coming near the end of the collegiate football season, Thanksgiving has been a tradition for rivalry games. (Hence the Great Turkey Heist at Knox College I participated in, oh long ago.)  The Detroit Lions began scheduling a game on Thanksgiving also in the 1930s. 

It all began with gratitude for nature's sustaining gifts.  But beginning with those first ideologues in New England and Virginia, Americans relationship to nature has been more hostile than grateful. Settlers and their descendants have been busy ruining the land and waters and now even the air for centuries, and we are close to finishing the job. Maybe we can at least acknowledge this with a little grace as we're saying grace, and try to do better.

  The natural world is the source of all life, including our big and dubious brains. The rest of nature would be grateful if we'd start using them wisely. "It is an error to say that we have 'conquered nature,'" FDR said in 1935, in the midst of an ecological crisis called the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression caused largely by wanton exploitation and destruction of land, forests and waters.  "We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Lots of other things are associated with family gatherings on Thanksgiving these days.  Those retailers have largely absorbed the holiday, with their extended pre-Christmas sales. Dispersal of families has meant travel has gone far beyond over the river and through the woods, and now involves the added tension of the busiest air travel time of the year. Thanksgiving also begins the holiday season when people measure themselves against a Norman Rockwell ideal, and find there are angry words, sulks, disappointment, bewilderments and tears as well as the occasional radiant smiles and gratitude.

Whether gratitude is part of the mix anymore is perhaps a matter of personal choice.  This year we may be thankful that things are not worse than they are, which may well itself become a Thanksgiving tradition.