History of My Reading: Florida Fantasies

 

West Palm Beach--1970s postcard

When I abandoned my Cambridge apartment in late 1975 and arrived in my hometown of Greensburg, PA, I immediately regretted it. I felt I’d made a terrible mistake.

I quickly made a panicked call to Linda, the young woman I’d been seeing who lived on the floor above in my Cambridge building (discounting for her possible regret over youthful folly, I’ve disguised her name.) She assured me I could return, and that settled me for awhile.

But it turned out I wasn’t back for long, at least at that point. First came a car trip with Linda from the desultory north in February, down the gradually warming East Coast to Florida, where I’d never been. We stopped first in West Palm Beach to stay with her relatives, an older couple who had a ranch house in a slightly scrubby wooded area off Forest Hill Blvd.

Her direct relative was Jane, who had lived in Los Angeles in the thirties and forties, working in Hollywood and later, during the latter part of World War II, at one of the many aircraft plants that transformed southern California. Hers made bombers.

I’ve forgotten what she did in Hollywood—maybe the costume department-- but she worked on the 1935 classic “The Informer,” and knew John Garfield, Al Jolson and other stars. Carole Lombard was as “wild off-screen as on.” She recalled that the vibe between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was so intense when they met while making To Have and Have Not that people all over the studio lot found a reason to visit the set and watch them together.

Eventually Jane met a young sailor there in Los Angeles and married him. When I met him, Jim was a movie model of an old salt: deep, very tanned wrinkles, thin to the point of seeming frail. He had the slightly haunted demeanor of someone who’d struggled with drink. But he was charming and funny, with a soft southern accent and courtesies. They lived in Florida mostly because he had a good job cooking on board ship for a wealthy shipbuilder.

Jane took a shine to me, and over shrimp at our farewell dinner at Frederick’s French Onion Soup restaurant in Palm Beach, she decided that my real name was John—John Severini. She noted that in every restaurant we ate—sometimes in the company of other of her friends-- the servers presented me with the bill. Before we left Jane gave me some old movie stills from her collection, because she felt I was someone who would appreciate them.

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in Palm Beach

Palm Beach was the older and far richer city, settled by millionaires in the 19^th century. It received new prominence in the early 1960s when President Kennedy used a family home there. Palm Beach is also the location of the now infamous Mar-a-Lago. There are fewer than 10,000 full-time residents even now.

Contrast that with West Palm, the poorer relation across the Intercoastal Waterway, with a population of 124,000. It was only 23,000 when we visited in 1976.

Even then, the divide between the rich and the rest was keenly felt. Everyone I met in West Palm didn’t really want to be there.

The only other memory I have of West Palm is a sunburn and its remedy. When I complained of the burn, Linda took me outside the house into some small nearby trees in sandy ground, and pointed out a number of plants growing among them. They were aloe plants. She removed some sticky substance, I rubbed it on and the mild burn was soon all but gone. This was years before aloe became so widespread in over the counter products.

From West Palm we drove down to Key West, the final leg being the strangest and straightest highway in America (US Highway 1), much of it over water. We pitched Linda’s tent at a fairly crowded and often raucous campground of mostly young travelers, but at least near enough to decent sanitary facilities.

1976 postcard

Key West is essentially an island at the southernmost tip of the East Coast, a famous 90 miles from Cuba (a figure often repeated during the Cuban Missile Crisis). Because of this location and remoteness, its first and furtive residents were reputed to be smugglers, pirates and bootleggers as well as those engaged in fishing and other legal pursuits, such as harvesting sponge, sea turtles and conch, the mollusk that remains a Key West identifier.

Eventually its weather and the fishing put it on the map. In 1946, President Harry Truman established his Little White House there. Over the years it was devastated several times by hurricanes.

Key West also became known for a tolerance that extended to interracial relationships and homosexuals not as welcome elsewhere in the US. By the 1930s it was attracting artists and particularly writers. Poet Elizabeth Bishop and most famously, fictionist Ernest Hemingway established residences there, as did dramatist Tennessee Williams a decade or so later.

Robert Frost & W. Stevens in Key West

Others in this period made extended visits, sometimes annually. Wallace Stevens is a notable example. The eminently respectable poet who walked to his office every day as a vice-president in one of the major insurance companies in Hartford, Connecticut, and grappled with metaphysical questions in his poems, had a number of drunken episodes in Key West that have entered historical gossip. As a regular visitor Stevens graciously welcomed Robert Frost on his first trip, but after a few too many at a cocktail party, argued incoherently with him at dinner, somewhat scandalizing his fellow New England poet.

On another occasion, Stevens worked himself into an inebriated rage and challenged Ernest Hemingway to a fight, drunkenly swung and missed, then landed a blow that broke his hand. Though Stevens was larger, Hemingway was younger and more skilled. He knocked Stevens into a mud puddle. (Both participants corroborated the basics of this story.)

Beyond indulging in bad behavior away from prying eyes, Key West also inspired Stevens’ poetry, notably the long poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” (not meant ironically, except maybe privately) that literary writer Jay Parini ranked second on his list of the ten best American poems. Both effects—inspiration and inebriation-- recurred among a later generation of writers who began appearing in Key West in the early 1970s.

Guy De Valdene, Tom McGuane with
Richard Brautigan in foreground:
Key West early 1970s

Though Tennessee Williams was still around, Truman Capote visited often, and other writers such as Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America) and playwright James Kirkwood (1976 Pulitzer Prize winner for A Chorus Line) were on the scene at times, the core group was comprised of fishing writer and memoirist Guy De Valedene, novelist Tom McGuane and his close friend from college days at Michigan State, poet and fictionist Jim Harrison. They were there for the fishing (as Hemingway had been) and magical waters as well as the spicy anarchy of the Key West scene.

“It was an island totally devoid of rules of behavior,” Harrison recalled in his memoir Off To The Side, “a tropical island fueled by sunlight, dope, and booze, as far from Kansas as you could ever get in America.”

These three writers were also close friends with an itinerant local musician, Jimmy Buffett. Together they were so embedded in the Key West life that both Buffett and McGuane met future wives at the Chartroom Bar.  McGuane’s choice was Buffett’s sister.

By the time I visited in 1976, I’d read just one slim volume of Harrison’s poems, and McGuane’s 1973 eye-opening novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, a National Book Award nominee set in Key West. (I’ve always remembered—or maybe misremembered—that in its pages someone observes that the great American law is that it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.) I didn’t know of their ongoing connection to Key West. But I was aware of Jimmy Buffett as the reigning spirit of the place.

Jimmy Buffett is his Key West  bar band days

He was just becoming nationally known: his breakout album “Havana Daydreamin’ had just come out weeks before, but its first single was on the radio, and I loved it. “Woman Going Crazy on Caroline Street” had such resonant lines as “she listens to the jukebox for her answers,” and “she slides her dapper legs from beneath the table/as if to reveal some kind of treat” (“dapper legs” is classic) and that haunting chorus: “There’s a woman going crazy on Caroline Street/ stopping every man that she does meet/saying if you be gentle, if you be sweet/I’ll show you my place on Caroline Street.”

We didn’t see any of these notables (and likely wouldn’t have known it if we had) but by 1976 the era was already fading. Tourism was starting to swamp the place (its population then was under 8,000; now it’s 23,000) and we heard complaints about invasions from New York. I saw some of that once when I peeked into the compound surrounding the only chain hotel in the small central area, between the Coast Guard dock and Duval Street: there were hundreds of pale northerners intent on rapid tanning, packed into the area around the pool as densely as a Manhattan subway, or a Coney Island beach.

There was so much marijuana being smuggled in, Harrison recalled, that it was virtually free, but in the late 70s the cocaine trade invaded, with cartels and serious violence. The innocence was gone, the writers were getting older (and better known), and so that scene faded.

Jim Harrison & McGuane, some years later

McGuane retreated to Montana, his highest fame behind him but with enduring new writing, while Harrison would create a body of work over the next several decades that to me seems likely to grow in recognition, a major American writer of his generation. And Jimmy Buffett soon became internationally famous, acquiring a perennially loyal following and almost mythic dimensions below the flavor of the week radar, and becoming a billionaire along the way, as well as—to the astonishment of his old literary buddies—a best-selling author, topping both fiction and nonfiction lists.

Meanwhile, cocaine was already such a big problem that Florida had set up an “Operation Conch” that yielded more than 20 arrests. But while we were in Key West, the big news was that a former City Attorney who’d been busted for delivering cocaine was exonerated, when a snitch finally admitted he lied. He’d also been the source for other arrests. Of the City Attorney, a state law enforcement spokesperson deadpanned, “He was set up. He was framed.” Where was Hemingway when we needed him?

There were probably scattered photos on barroom walls of the 1970s writers but the conspicuous monuments belonged to Hemingway. His spacious house on Whitehead Street was a registered national historic landmark, and at the time, number 18 on the list of 48 Sites To See in Key West.

Hemingway & Pauline 1927

In 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in Paris, the journalist daughter of a wealthy American. For the birth of their first child, Pauline wanted to return to the United States. Key West may have been suggested as a residence by the writer and Hemingway hunting and fishing companion, John Dos Passos. Pauline’s uncle bought them this house, and they moved there early in the 1930s.

Key West was then as much Cuban as American, and Hemingway may have first visited it from Havana. The English speakers were mostly railroaders, fishermen and descendants of New England sailors. Several Native tribes had been the first inhabitants, and in the mid-19th century Key West became a haven for fugitive slaves. By then it was a major salt supplier, and civil war in Cuba brought Cuban tobacco factories. For a few years Key West was the richest and largest settlement in Florida. Key West cigars were still part of the local economy when Hemingway arrived, though the 1930s Great Depression hit hard, as suggested by his novel To Have and Have Not.

My own history with Hemingway began while he was still alive, and I saw his photo spread that accompanied his novel The Old Man and the Sea, first published in the pages of Life Magazine. I even recall reading it there, though it is unlikely since it was 1952 and I was 6 years old. It became an immense best-seller and led directly to his Nobel Prize in 1954. But whenever it was, I’m sure this was the first of his work I read.

I had some later Hemingway binges, including reading his stories lying mostly naked for days in a tiny room in Berkeley, covered in wet baking soda—a hippie remedy for a bad case of poison oak—while eating Oreo cookies and drinking cheap California white wine from the grocery next door. In 1976 my latest binge had been just a few years before in Cambridge, after I read his just published posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. (Though Jim Harrison had Key West and Upper Michigan rivers in common with Hemingway, and was sometimes lamely and lazily compared with him, he professed not to like most of his work. One of the exceptions was that novel.)

I also knew Hemingway’s classic Paris Review interview, with its reverent if also earthy treatment of the writing vocation. Though in college I’d preferred Scott Fitzgerald, he had still been the figure of the writer I’d grown up with.

Hemingway House tour, evidently during Covid

We took the $1 tour of his Key West house, where whatever quiet observation let alone hushed awe I might have applied was mostly shattered by the company of noisy tourists. I couldn’t even concentrate on his writing studio, being distracted by the young blond in shorts and platform shoes walking in front of me, but I did note the writing tablet and pencil on the desk, and the balled up paper on the floor, just the kind of absurd and inauthentic touch that characterizes modern tourism. I also noted that our tour guide had much more to say about Pauline’s decorative choices, which probably was appropriate.

But Hemingway, in his thirties, really did write there. I recently re-read A Farewell To Arms which he finished there, when I was researching the far northern Italian front in World War I for my Severini Saga, because my grandfather had been there. So had Hemingway briefly, though earlier than the actual war events in his novel. He also wrote To Have and Have Not in that Key West house, which I dipped into more recently, but found pretty much unreadable. It’s also much different from the Bogart and Bacall (and John Huston) movie.

When we were there in late February 1976, Key West was coping with water shortages from a recent drought and an economic recession, but was also experiencing a record year for tourism. Some businesses were shuttered while other areas were rebuilding.

2017 photo by Judd McCrain

Presiding over the Duval Street area of bars and restaurants was Sloppy Joe’s, famous as a Hemingway hangout from the 1930s. Among the resident memorabilia was his birth certificate mounted on the wall.

I remember it as akin to an open air market, with shuttered sides open to the sun-white streets in two directions, though it still managed to be dark inside. The jukebox was formidable: everything from the Eagles to Glenn Miller, Harry Belafonte’s calypso period, and of course Jimmy Buffett. In the men’s room I spotted and copied grafitti expressing what could be the Key West ethic: “Where would we be if everybody did what they were told…”

Sloppy Joe’s was still under its original ownership then (Sloppy Joe himself, reputed to be the model for the barkeep in To Have and Have Not, or his family.) Later management began the annual Hemingway Festival, which includes a lookalike contest yielding unappetizing crowds of bulky men with florid white beards.

At nearby El Cacique Restaurant I ate my first plates of Cuban-style black beans and yellow rice, and my first slices of homemade Key Lime pie. I don’t remember that we made it to Crazy Ophelia’s Cafe on Duval, if indeed it was still there, but in 1972 Jimmy Buffett often played at this counterculture haven—it’s where he first sang “Margaritaville,” his signature song, just after writing the final verse on his way to the gig.

I might mention that at this point in my life—in fact, for most of it—I constitutionally could not maintain a decent relationship with the world unless I played a little guitar or piano every day. So I traveled with my guitar and took every opportunity on every open piano I encountered. And I encountered one at a bar in Key West. I’d been happily playing my blues runs when the owner approached and offered me a job playing there regularly.

He didn’t mention terms but considering that Jimmy Buffett played at a local bar for years for nothing more than free beer and tips, I’d assume they were similar. However I quickly demurred, saying I was just passing through, and got out of there quickly, before he noticed that I could play only variations on the same three and four chord patterns in different keys. Still, it was a memorable occasion (even though it took resurrecting the old notebook to remind me): my one and only job offer as a piano player came in fabled Key West.

1970s Key West

The evening would commence with a gathering down at the Coast Guard dock to watch the sun drop into the ocean, Key West being the only place on the East Coast where this phenomenon occurs. When the orange ball dipped below the horizon and then suddenly disappeared, the crowd would applaud. It was such a well-known custom that food vendors assembled at the entrance, with the occasional street performers. Apparently in later years this has become much more elaborate, and much more for the tourists.

Then we might sample the night life before returning to the campgrounds, which in a notebook I described as our “suntanned tenement.”

On our way back north we stopped for a few hours at Walt Disney World in Orlando, my first and only visit. At that time just the Magic Kingdom area was open, and it was only five years old. But already the Disney convenience/control ethos was evident, beginning with the signs on the highway approaching the park directing visitors to tune to a certain AM radio frequency for instructions, and including the parking lots and sections named after Disney characters.

My recollections begin in the same vein as those from my day at the New York World’s Fair in 1965: blinding heat reflected off concrete, and long lines for everything. The “attractions” we selected were fair to middling (but then, we weren’t the target market), and while Space Mountain added complete darkness to the roller coaster experience, I recall still preferring the coasters at Kennywood in Pittsburgh.

The exception was Pirates of the Caribbean (a replica of the one at Disneyland in California, built at popular demand and opened only in 1973.) It started with another winding slow ride in a boat in inches of water with narrow walls around us, past displays more elaborate but otherwise little different from ordinary carnival haunted houses. But then it suddenly opened up, and we were afloat on a large expanse of dark water, heading towards an apparently full sized pirate ship, with cannonballs splashing and some sort of battle going on. It was an actual magical moment, especially for me as it was unexpected.

But we did not leave sadly, or at least I didn’t. Something about the manipulation and replication, the artificial fantasy of the place bothered me. It was an extension of what was done to the Hemingway house. I imagined that same writing room, complete with the phony crumpled balls of paper on the floor, but with an animatronic Hemingway writing at the desk, turning slowly to smile at us behind the rope border and intoning one of his pithy sayings, like “Good writing is true writing,” and turning back to move his lifeless hand over the page.

Possibly such a display would not have him repeat his most famous line from that Paris Review interview: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”

The one memory I retain about our drive back up the East Coast is located in Georgia. We were on Interstate 85, and I wanted to eat something other than the usual burger, something southern I hadn’t had before. So we stopped at Katherine’s Kitchen for ham and biscuits. But the meal was handed to us in a limp cardboard box by a nervous older woman standing under a handprinted menu, fast-food style. She evidently was trying to go with the flow, which to her meant becoming a cut-rate McDonalds of the South.

President Harry Truman in Key West

My notebooks record disproportionately little of my actual experiences on this trip, along with a lot of the usual bits of ideas for freelance articles I might propose, and stray phrases that might be of things I overheard (“Shalom, y’all”) or seen (The Slice of Life Pizza, the Margaret Truman Launderette) or maybe it was stuff I made up.

But I also recorded observations that suggest I was starting to see the Highway as a place in itself, more or less the same everywhere, with the same food, the same music on the radio, television news, newspapers, and the same faux history and regionalism (I recorded another restaurant advertising southern home cooking that was served on plastic fake pewter.) It was only in going back through these notes and memories that I realized how this trip may have influenced the point of view and subjects of much of my writing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s.

But before all that started I had a long, strange and personally important interlude as a writer and editor at a fledgling alternative weekly in Washington, DC. Be with us next time for: Get Me Rewrite!

No News and No Evidence

 The news?  There is no news.  There are announcement of intentions that are reversed the next day.  There are court cases that never quite get decided or enforced.  There are fires up there, floods and storms down there. There is continuing vicious destruction and harm, cruelty and lawless violence. There is chaos.  Nothing new about that.

There are variations on the themes. This Chaos administration is now routinely referred to as authoritarian.  But what is not said often enough is that it is the most racist regime in a western country since Nazi Germany.  

That racism is now being extended from brown people to Asians, specifically Chinese.  Here in far northern California, in a history that the Chaos regime is actively demanding be suppressed, the racism of the past, first visited on Native American peoples, was extended to Chinese workers.  When they were no longer needed (and even when they were), almost every person of Chinese birth or extraction was herded onto boats and sent away.  This may well be part of why this section of California is conspicuous for its few Asians.

Democrats failed to nip this resurgent if veiled racism in the bud during the presidential campaign.  They allowed Chaos to make his wild charges without substantive questioning.  Laughing at him clearly wasn't enough.

He said then--and continues to say today--that immigrants are vicious criminals, that other countries opened their prisons and sent their worst here, especially murderers, rapists and violent thieves.  Nobody angrily called him on this.  Nobody demanded the evidence: what countries?  What prisons? What criminals?  Where are the convictions, the statistics, the studies, the reports, the court cases, the names that would justify such outrageous charges?

So when it is finally revealed that the Chaos cabal knew that most of the immigrants it sent to the El Salvador concentration camp had no criminal record, nobody notices.  It's not really news.

Now they add that those wily Asians are spies, instruments of a foreign power. Again without even examples, let alone evidence.

If Chaos had been questioned then, there would at least be a record now, an honorable assertion of what's behind the rule of law, which is evidence.  In today's algorithmic based discourse, doing that once would likely not be enough, but matching the drumbeat of hysterical racism with pointed questioning and demand for real evidence would at least be an honorable fight.  

For most of my adult life this would have routinely happened.  Maybe it did happen more than I know and wasn't widely reported.  If so, that's a failure worth isolating and naming as well.  

Our Country of Ruins

 

The voice that most eloquently and succinctly summarizes the current Age of Boss Chaos comes not from a political leader, nor a religious spokesperson or an esteemed academic, but from an elder rock and roll performer and composer, known for years as the Boss.  The remarks that Bruce Springsteen has been making on his European tour, as transcribed for this Guardian article, have been included in his latest EP release.

From the Guardian article:

In what amounts to one of the most sustained attacks on Trump and American lawmakers from a cultural figure, he made the speeches on stage in Manchester, as he opened his Land of Hope and Dreams tour with the E Street Band.

Introducing the song that gives the tour its name, he said: “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”

Later, introducing House of a Thousand Guitars, he said: “The last check, the last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people, you and me. It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.”

He then delivered a longer speech ahead of the song My City of Ruins, saying:

There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.

In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.

In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.

They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society.

They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.

They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centres and prisons. This is all happening now.

A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.

The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray."

Something To Declare

 

They have never had a war big enough

 to slow that pulse in the earth under

 our path near that old river.

 Even as a swallow swims through the air

 a certain day skips and returns, hungry for

the feel and lift of the time passed by.

 That was the place where I lived awhile

 dragging a wing, and the spin of the world

 started its tilt into where it is now.

 They say that history is going on somewhere.

 They say it won’t stop. I have held

 one picture still for a long time and waited.

 This is only a little report floated

 into the slow current so the wind will know

 which way to come if it wants to find me. 

 --William Stafford

Futurology

I cannot break free from these iron stars. 

I want the raspberry paw-pads of the fox,

 but here are only claws, the Crab, the Scorpion,

 great shining signs that slide across the sky.

 I want the wisdom ignorant of wars

 and the soft key that opens all the locks.

 I want the touch of fur, the slant of sun

 deep in a golden, slotted, changing eye. 

 O let there be no signs! Let fall the bars,

 and walls be moss-grown, scattered rocks.

 Let all the evil we have done be done

 and minds lie still as sunlit meadows lie.

 --Ursula K. LeGuin

Good People

 From the kindness of my parents

I suppose it was that I held
that belief about suffering

imagining that if only
it could come to the attention
of any person with normal
feelings certainly anyone
literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend
pain when it went on before them
and would do something about it
whenever they saw it happen
in the time of pain the present
they would try to stop the bleeding
for example with their hands

but it escapes their attention
or there may be reasons for it
the victims under the blankets
the meat counters the maimed children
the animals the animals
staring from the end of the world

--W.S. Merwin

"the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children..."

Bill Gates of Elon Musk

5/12: Boss Chaos administration halts federal research for babies with heart defects, and infant death prevention.

Infinitive

 We make too much history.

 With or without us

 there will be the silence

 and the rocks and the far shining.

 But what we need to be

 is, oh, the small talk of swallows

 in evening over

 dull waters under willows. 

To be we need to know the river

 holds the salmon and the ocean

 holds the whales as lightly

 as the body holds the soul

 in the present tense, in the present tense.

--Ursula K. Le Guin

"What is happening in the world is terrible and irreversible, and that history is probably a doomed enterprise.  But in the meantime it is important to live in the world as completely as we can."

--W. S. Merwin (in 1986)

Photo by kani polet

Reign of Chaos: Act II Preview

Soviet Russia in the 1990s

This has happened to me more than once recently:  I'm coming out of an involving dream, not yet awake but becoming aware that what I've just experienced was in a dream, not reality, with a sense of relief.  Then I am jolted awake by the sudden awareness of what reality looks like these days, more dangerous and unreal than a nightmare.  And that's what it feels like: a waking nightmare.

"Every day since January 20 has felt like utter chaos," begins a summation signed by the New York Times Editorial Board. On April 29, Democratic members of the US Senate held the floor potentially through the night for a discussion backgrounded by the logo "100 Days of Chaos."

One way I look at this reign of Chaos emerges from my days as a theatre columnist and erstwhile membership in the Dramatists Guild: I see it as a three-act play.  The first act--comprised of the first 100 days--is coming to a close.  Alas there is probably no intermission before the Second Act begins, and it is a much longer one--it won't end until November 2026. However the congressional elections turn out--whether they are truly elections at all--will set the stage for Act III, the final act of this drama.

The three act structure is also employed in movies and more loosely in television, so Act I can be seen as a version of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (with a Justice Department oozing  injustice, a Health department degrading health, and now a Civil Rights division zealously attacking civil rights) crossed with a satire of The Godfather as directed by Stanley Kubrick in full Doctor Strangelove mode, but including scenes of real tragedy that foreshadow conflicts in future Acts.

Creating the characters would have challenged even Kubrick: an Attorney General named Pam and a director of Homeland Security called Kristi, both seemingly qualified mostly by their appeal to the roving eye of Boss Chaos, along with their clinging loyalty and vicious robotic tongues.  

Not long ago a hint that a Cabinet aspirant had once inhaled some cannabis fumes would cause a scandal, but here we have a Health Secretary who was (or is) an admitted heroin addict, and a Secretary of Defense who was (or is) a notorious fall-down drunk and sexual predator.  An Education Secretary qualified by her years of organizing fake violence for sweaty World Wrestling entertainment leads a list of those running powerful government bureaucracies with none of the usual qualifications or experience. They alone are living definitions of tragi-comedy.  Just for a moment stage in your head a Kubrick-directed cabinet meeting, headed by Boss Chaos who proclaims, "I run the country and the world."  

Kubrick could also deliver not only the degradation and stupidity but the tragic edge--for instance the updated Gestapo that may or may not be ICE.  But he might need Don DeLillo to write the character (and make up the absurd name) of Elon Musk.  

But enough about Act I.  We've all seen it as it rushed by in--what was that word the Times and the Senate Dems used?   Oh yeah: Chaos.  Also it presented lawlessness, racism, open corruption, institutionalized cruelty and callousness, and more destruction to nearly every institution, principle and facet of America than any enemy nation could have dreamed of wreaking, and none could ever accomplish.  We see a federal government being run as a cartoon criminal enterprise. 

If tragic history is repeated as farce, does the opposite apply? Does this tragic farce become utter tragedy?  That's one of the questions to be answered in Act II.

So maybe now's the time for that novel concept, a spoiler alert. No one knows what horrors and insanity await, but here are some possible plot points and dramatic questions for Act II...

Soviet Russia

Act II will inevitably be characterized by consequences of actions taken in Act I.  The tariffs are already wrecking the economy at the level of business planning, which is resulting in shrinking inventories and orders as well as the beginning of layoffs. 

 In summer the tourist industry will feel the effects of both fewer foreign tourists and less travel by Americans.  By fall one of the plotlines will likely be panic over the Christmas shopping season, with fewer imports, empty shelves and higher prices.  By the first of the year if not before, the economy could well be in deepening recession.  

Chaos will have spread to other countries, and politics in the US will be feverish.  Some time in the Second Act, perhaps sooner rather than later, the Supreme Court will have to deal head-on with the refusal of Boss Chaos to obey court orders, including its own.

Other possible consequences will have their moments.  The cumulative effects of the blind destruction of federal support and capacity to respond to both routine needs and sudden crisis may well show up, often in lots of individual stories of economic and health hardships and life-changing injustices, or more widely shared stories of disasters and epidemics.

  An international and/or military challenge could dangerously expose the incompetence and inexperience, intemperance and emotional instability of decision-makers--and here we are in real Doctor Strangelove territory with the potential to literally stop the show.  

But in addition to consequences of Act I, there will be new and perhaps bigger actions by Boss Chaos and his minions, furthering their lawless power grabs and dictatorial powers.  Already there are fears that the next step in the Hitler playbook will be taken--after establishing ICE or whatever entity it really is that sends masked bullies to brutalize people as the Chaos Gestapo, that next step is Chaos deploying US Armed Forces within American borders and against American citizens.  Meanwhile the data stolen by the Muskovites might be combined in a massive database (and if their many examples inept inaccuracy as well as ICE's continues, leading to many tragic mistakes) that will weaponize Big Brother and then some.  

Public demonstrations in Act I were widespread and eloquent, as well as peaceful and even playful. They were like big production numbers in a musical.  These almost inevitably will change, especially if they seem not to be having the desired effects (through not only administration intransigence but congressional Republican cowardice), and especially as Chaos continues to escalate.  Resistance could become more disruptive, maybe even massively disruptive, which may result in Chaos unleashing his Gestapo, his paramilitary gangs he saved from prison, and even the US Army doing ostensible "crowd control."  

Resistance on other levels will need to involve combined efforts within institutions of civil society, education, science, the economy and the law.  State and local governments could form alliances, as some already are, and take bolder action.  There are few precedents for how this would look in America, so a certain creativity as well as courage, resolve and leadership will need to emerge.  If it does, Act II could be quite a show.

All of this will culminate as Act II draws to a close with its major dramatic question:  Will Chaos have successfully manipulated the electoral system to deny a fair vote in congressional elections?  Will there even be elections?  

By then we may know the nature of this play.  It certainly has tragic events in it already, but will it be a total tragedy?  Will there be even the possibility of some redemption in Act III?  

Many playwrights have found that the Second Act is the hardest to write.  In this play it may well be the hardest to live through.  And considering what living through the First Act has been like, that's saying something.

But since we're characters in this play, we need to plan ahead.  The First Act was a blitzkreig on reality. But now we've seen it, and we can anticipate what might come next. If we're going to take any part of control in Act II, we need to do that: anticipate and plan what will we do in particular circumstances.  We need to write our own lines, script our own actions, often with fellow spear carriers and members of the chorus.  We aren't going to awaken from this nightmare anytime soon. We're a captive audience as well as contracted actors.  Maybe we can duck out into the lobby once in awhile, or take a break backstage.  We need to do those centering and breathing exercises.  But basically, the only way out is through.  

The Surprising Resistance to the Reign of Chaos (Act I)

 

When the most recent New York Times poll asked respondents to select the word that best described the current administration's reign so far, the winner was "chaotic," chosen by 66%.  

As the end of the first 100 days of Chaos approaches, an avalanche of new polls uniformly reflect majority and supermajority opposition to its policies and actions.  Apart from the historic nature of this disapproval and opposition, a few things jump out at me as significant surprises.

The political professionals on both sides have for years told us that all the American voters care about is their own pocketbook, that they will support anyone and anything that makes the economy and especially their economic situation better.  Only those who are comfortably well off will care about "special interest" issues, which the professionals defined as anything except bread and butter economics.

This was never true.  But the extent to which these polls measure response to other "issues," and the size and frequency of demonstrations against Chaos, how they occur virtually everywhere, and through the eloquence of the signs the demonstrators carry--more eloquent than any politician, shows how untrue it was and, under mortal threats of today, how untrue it is now.  And regarding some issues, frankly how surprisingly untrue.

Certainly people are seriously worried about the economy and the economic consequences of the Chaos tariffs.  Some worry about the economic impact to themselves or family members of the deteriorating Social Security system and the threats to Medicaid, to Head Start and school lunch programs, and many other relatively small deprivations that add up for the people involved.

But some of the most lopsided poll results--with 60, 70 and 80% opposition to Chaos actions and policies--are in other areas, that don't necessarily or directly affect economic circumstances. And the widespread support for some programs suggests it is not their own economic benefit they are considering.  These numbers not only reflect the depth of opposition to Chaos, they contradict the conventional wisdom on what people do and do not care about.

For the conventional wisdom is that people see no value in the federal government, but only a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy.  They disdain universities as playgrounds of the elite.  They see foreign aid as wasteful spending.  They'd rather have a tax cut.

Perhaps it was seeing what destroying the federal government really meant to the services they depended on, or people they knew and people in their community depended on--people who are their neighbors and customers.  But the epic and ignorant slash and burn devastation wreaked by the Muskovites turns out to be deeply unpopular, reflected as well in the hostility against Musk himself.  

But it goes beyond that polarizing figure. It turns out people want Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.  They want Veterans to get the services promised to them.  They want Head Start, Meals on Wheels and school lunch and breakfast support.  They want their food tested and scientists working on preventing and treating diseases.  They want National Park Rangers and environmental protections.  They want the Post Office.  They want libraries.

FDR's right hand man Harry Hopkins famously said during the Great Depression, "People don't eat in the long term.  They eat every day."  These are all everyday services.  But the polls show more.  People want long-term medical and other scientific research to be funded.  They want a clean energy future.  They want a robust Department of Education.  They want friendly relations with allies in the world.  They support Ukraine.

As for all those elitist universities, some 70% oppose federal government interference ( attempt to take total control is more accurate.)   Who knew that 70% cared at all?

Of all the issues the professionals would have selected as having least popular support, right at or near the top would probably be foreign aid.  But a vast majority of those surveyed in every one of these polls that asked the question, oppose the Chaos devastation to foreign aid.

What is remarkable to me about this issue and others is that the words "foreign aid" are a kind of abstraction.  Giving money away to foreigners is the broadest interpretations.  Yet somehow a large proportion of the voting public associates it with providing food and medicine to people in dire circumstances very far away.  And they support doing that.  Did any politician even know that?

Apart from the inflation-fighting he promised to do but never even attempted, Chaos believed he got elected for his anti-immigrant rhetoric.  So the federal government is embarked on a reign of terror, using the Chaos version of the Gestapo to brutalize every brown person and foreigner from non-white "shit-hole countries" they can lay their hands on.  So sure of themselves that they squirm and twist interpretations and outright defy court orders.  

While a lot of voters may have bought the rhetoric about insecure borders, it turns out that most do not want to see immigrants brutalized, let alone people whose status is unclear or taken by mistake.  They oppose Chaos immigration policies and actions, and they strongly support the Constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.

And this may be one of the bigger surprises: they care about and support the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.  True, not enough voters seemed to care enough about them before the election, even as they were warned that electing Chaos would put them in jeopardy.  But the polls (as well as the demonstrations) show they strongly support the rights spelled out in the Constitution grouped under the term "due process of law."  They support them being applied to everyone.  This argues for a fundamental commitment to fairness, and an implied empathy--in those denied equal justice under law, they see themselves. 

Moreover, the protest signs reflect what may go even deeper in this widespread opposition: a pained resistance to cruelty, a consciousness of compassion.

So where are Americans getting these views?  I've heard many voices raised against the decline of civics courses in schools, and the absence of economics classes.  Somehow however something has sunk in.  We could list and speculate on how that information has become knowledge, but I think this is worth noting: that when it comes to current information on violations of due process and inhumane treatment, as well as on these other issues--well, it's not coming from Fox News.  It's certainly there in the much maligned mainstream media. And it evidently is considered credible, trustworthy information. 

Maybe it's out there in social media too, but it seems that the complete domination of the far right echo chamber is not so dominant after all, at least not at the moment.  It's the mainstream media and everyone writing or talking or being interviewed in and on it, that's telling Americans what tariffs really do, and where the economy is really headed--and who is at fault.  All of which is reflected in these polls.

The other intriguing element is that it is still very early in the process for much of this: for instance, the effects of the cuts and the tariffs have yet to be felt.  But people are anticipating those effects.  They see them coming.  They are engaged.  People are focused.  And they are--in the word most respondents selected in an NBC poll--"furious."

In public perception, Chaos has gone from a wearily elected president to a monster in 100 days. Many voters may want change but they do not want chaos; they want humane and efficient and Constitutional stability.  Words like "fascist" and "dictator" have gone from rare and generally derided in public discourse, to commonly spoken in the media and on the street (maybe even Wall Street.)  All this sets the stage for Act II of this improbable and uncomfortably real drama.  More on that anon.