We Are All The Catcher In The Rye Now

 

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” 

 Holden Caufield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye

 

Are we telling a story or are we careening downhill hellbent on sailing off a cliff?  Is the death march to destruction a kind of nihilistic event lacking coherence?

I really don’t know anymore.

Stories have plots and characters, heroes, and villains.  Our current story has one, incoherent sociopath who defies all logic.  He is the villain without conscience.  He is the priest who worships himself and chaos.

His chief acolyte bleeds from his eyes and has flies in his hair.  What a spectacle!  What a great, villainous sidekick to evil incarnate.

The plot, however, makes no sense.

These evil-doers don’t measure up.  They are not smart enough to be coherent.  The garage-sale Mussolini and his stuffed shirt fly-boy cannot even get on the same page.

Seduced by the dark side?  That denotes consideration and movement.  No, they are a discordant cacophony of emptiness.  They know no other dance except the single-dimension danse macabre.  They strut and preen and bluster through the hall to peals of laughter and pungent ridicule.  They have their impotent, flaccid henchmen, stiff-arming their allegiance to their own hollow-king.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.  These are men without a country; these are rebels without a cause trapped in their own befouled gene pool.  Separate them.  Challenge them.  They fall down.  They cannot hold up.  They are afraid of their own shadows.  They think strength in numbers will save them.  A white hood will keep their identities safe.  Their masculinity needs a prop:  a long gun or a big knife.  Like their leader, size is everything.

History has seen these self-serving crybabies before.  It never ends well for them.  They are the waste kings on the dump of a larger, better, and more worthy story, a tale of hope and human achievement.  They are the hollow-king’s hollow men.

Take your shiny boots and unearned military medals and go home.  Practice your salute and your cowardice from the safety of your secret gardens.  Your time has come to get off the stage.  Your day, so short and murderous, is done.

We have lost so much—hundreds of thousands of dead; millions infected; millions, going back through history, enslaved, maltreated, brutalized, and killed.  American innocence is dead.

But it is not too late to seek a better world, Tennyson reminds us.  “We are not now that strength which in old days / Mov’d earth and heaven, that which we are, we are: / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Let us gather in a field of rye at the edge of a cliff, a silent army of the righteous, to profess our faith in the future, to dream our dreams of love and redemption, and to save ourselves from the fall.  We hold in our hands a flock of white birds.  Release them to the promise of the sky to consort with the angels.  Believe. 

 

Existential Dread

 

With the late night-early morning announcement of the president’s COVID-19 status, we face many questions.

1.  What other members of the administration are positive and showing symptoms?

We hear that individuals who traveled with the president are positive; others are negative, including family members.  We also know, as of this morning, that Joe Biden tested negative.  The important word from now on is transparency.  We know a number of people are sick among the president’s advisors.  That fact, in and of itself, is alarming.  We need to know all the facts as we face uncertainty about who is running the country.

2.  Is this Trump’s way of getting out of the remaining debates after his poor performance last Tuesday?  Or, is this a way for the president to drop out of a race he knows he is losing?

Anything is possible when the administration is not forthcoming about the extent of this crisis.  But here is the thing:  Trump has locked himself into a losing strategy should the remaining debates take place.  If he comes out and observes the rules agreed upon by both candidates, he looks soft and cowed.  If he comes out with another shrill, hysterical performance where he allows no one to speak, the moderator or Joe Biden, he will lose votes.  His only way out of this mess he created is to get out of the debates altogether.

He is losing the race according to most polls of likely voters.  But I do not think he is ready to throw in the towel yet.  His ego won’t let him.  His plan has been in place for a long time now:  call the results into question and scream that the election was “rigged.”  He wants to foment chaos and violence so he can argue he should remain in power to control the uprisings that will ensue and to ensure his autocracy.

3.  Will he emerge after a short period of time and say COVID-19 is not a threat and more of a hoax?

He has proclaimed this from the start.  It might work to his advantage to declare himself sick only to rise again after a few days, a sort of “Jesus moment.”  He is, reportedly, showing symptoms of the disease.  If he is sick, and his condition worsens, that will disrupt his preferred narrative.  Because he has been so reckless with his rallies, and he rarely wears a mask in public, it would seem true to the nature of the virus and its spread that he would eventually become sick.  Science, something the president has held up for ridicule and scorn, is clear that this is a deadly disease easily spread from human to human.  Again, transparency is key, and if the administration is not forthcoming, then we must rely on journalists to get the story and keep us informed.

4.  Does the president’s illness threaten our national security and our financial stability?

Yes, and this is the most immediate threat.  A president who is in quarantine or the hospital and showing symptoms of a disease that can be fatal to patients in his demographic makes our country weak and vulnerable at the moment.  This is another reason for transparency and a clear signal of who’s in charge.  The Constitution allows for a temporary transfer of power, but Trump has to let go of the reins and allow Mike Pence to assume his responsibilities.  It is unclear if he is predisposed to do this.

The financial impact is clear even in the early morning hours when this story broke.  Stock market futures declined almost immediately.  In the economy, everything is connected.  If this is handled correctly, with clear leadership and factual accounting, that will keep investors on an even keel, but Trump, even as he crows about his economic prowess, has not been a failure with the resulting unemployment and near-depression level decline.  So as we move through this crisis, we can only hope that the market settles down.

5.  Could Trump use this to postpone the election?

The president has said the election should be postponed until “people can vote safely.”  There is no evidence that voting is dangerous as long as we maintain social distancing and wear a mask.  Based on these previous comments, he wants to postpone the election and stay in power.  This is something Rudy Giuliani tried to do as the mayor of New York after 9-11.  Constitutionally, he cannot postpone the election, but that does not mean he won’t try.

Democracy is not a point of perfection.  It is always a work in progress.  Living in a democratic society requires diligence and constant vigilance to maintain the freedoms so often taken for granted.  We are going through a period of intense growth and consequential challenges while also facing a referendum on the mistakes made in the past.  It is our American reckoning for atrocities like slavery, violent racism, war, and destruction of our environment.  We have elected a pathological liar who obfuscates and assigns blame for his atrocious missteps and incompetence.  He is, by all measures, the worst president in American history, and we are left on the very brink of the precipice.

 

Fighting The Wind

 

I awoke from troubled sleep thinking of Miniver Cheevy and Don Quixote.  In all of this “Make America Great Again” nonsense, America seems fixated on a past that never existed.  There was no perfect America.  America, and democracy, have always faced challenges and difficulties.  It takes work to be free.  We have, indeed, lost something along the way, but no cheap slogan will heal our divisions now.  No stuffed shirt, with a fake tan, and bird’s nest hair will fix what is broken.

“Miniver Cheevy” is a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson from his classic The Town Down The River.  In it, Cheevy spends all his time dreaming of the knights of old.  He despairs his current situation, weeping he was ever born.  He lives fully in this dreamscape past, which only exists in his mind:  “When swords were bright and steeds were prancing,” as Robinson characterizes it.  He clings to the “vision of the warrior bold,” even while he timidly approaches his real life, one far less colorful and exciting.  He does not want to put the effort in to change; he just wants everything to be as it was, but what it was consisted of a fantasy.  A Neverland.

He also traps himself in thought.  He mulls over in his brain the dearth of heroism, the “gold he sought,” and his misery without it.  He is the classic negative version of the man of thought, a person who spends so much time dreaming that real life in the present leaves him in the dust.  The poem ends with a taut summation:

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, / Scratched his head and kept on thinking; / Miniver coughed, and called it fate, / And kept on drinking.

Don Quixote also dreams of a past that never existed.  He longs for chivalry and the knight hero who vanquishes his enemies.  Cervantes was genius enough to devise a new genre in literature, the novel.  But his true gift to the canon is Don Quixote himself, a classic character, so much a part of literature and culture that his name has become a touchstone.  Quixote is a fool, a dreamer, an anachronism.  He refuses to see the world as it is, and instead, constructs a world of fantasy and imagination.  Of course, everyone is familiar with the classic phrase “tilting at windmills.”  In Quixote’s mind, those windmills must be challenged.  Quixote’s idealism must be protected and nurtured, even though it is misplaced in time and truth.

Don Quixote ends his life with an epiphany—his magical world does not, could not, exist.  We learn that a life of make-believe is no life at all.  This makes Cervantes’ work not a comedy, but a tragedy.  Quixote is both a sad figure, broken and disappointed by the end, and a painfully comic figure, a misguided nincompoop exposed by his fallacies and the wit of his sidekick, Sancho Panza.  The windmills are unvanquished, as enemies often are in real life.  We must live with our disappointments, our dreams, our Sturm und Drang of daily life.  The struggle continues.

Why was I dreaming of these two characters from literature?  It is easy to romanticize the past.  “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” another poet, William Wordsworth, wrote.  We look around us and see the dark clouds on the horizon, the coming eclipse at noon.  We fear the shadowlands, the islands of our desperation.  Why can’t the world be the way we want it?  Why are we so afflicted?  We see ourselves as the biblical figure of Job, a righteous man tortured by Satan until he curses God for his misfortune.  Like Miniver Cheevy, Job rues the day he was born into this valley of tears.

Yet, this is life.  Good or bad, reality or dream, the past is past.  We are here, now, and only in this moment can we act.  Many people refuse to believe any action in the moment can alter what is to come.  But that is our fate as finite beings, to “rage against the dying of the light.”  We cannot “make America great again.”  Historians will define the nature of epochs.  We see the past as some perfect land, and we cannot help ourselves but want to get back to it.  The past of our dreams does not correspond to history.  And it is irrelevant anyway because it is gone.

I do not want to be Miniver Cheevy or Don Quixote.  There are enough dragons and windmills to go around these days, and they are real.  We must fight in the moment for what is sacred to us, what we want to happen in the now.  If chivalry and honor return, it is because we have made it so.  If we have the future of our choosing, then we have acted in the present tense.  That is all we can do.  To those who are like Job, no one ever said this would be easy.  No life is free from sorrow and angst.

I do not want my life to be caught in the web of the past, afraid to confront the present and what is to come. 

From Edgar Lee Masters and The Spoon River Anthology, come the words of his character, George Gray:  

 I have studied many times / The marble which was chiseled for me— / A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. / In truth it pictures not my destination / But my life… / To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, / But life without meaning is the torture / Of restlessness and vague desire— / It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

This is truth.  The only response to it is to act now.

Bits and Pieces

Photo courtesy of Brittany Hosea-Small / AFP

Enough already for 2020.

This morning, I looked out the kitchen window facing east to see the sun hanging on the horizon, a smoky orange orb floating in the haze of particulate ash diffusing the new dawn light.  It is fire season, but we are being told by climate scientists and state government that this is the new reality.  Climate change is upon us, and as a penance, we will struggle to breathe through the fires year-round as our dried-out trees, brush, and homes continue to burn.

Paradise, California, is in jeopardy again.  Two years on from the last inferno, fire officials are telling residents to be prepared for emergency evacuation.  In California, 250,000 acres have been burned; 64,000 have been evacuated; three people are dead.  Fire rages from the Mexican border to Oregon.  The sky in many places is blood red.  Smoking foundations and chimneys are what’s left of structures throughout the region.  Parks and recreation areas are closed.  Many of the campsites have been abandoned, with picnics still laid out on tables like our own version of Chernobyl.

In addition to climate change, stupidity and lightning helped ignite the flames.  Also, bark beetles have infested and killed thousands of trees.  With so much dry, dead fuel, the inferno is inevitable.  Human idiocy includes a “gender reveal” party where people ignited fireworks in the midst of a picnic area tinderbox, and the conflagration spread quickly over several acres.  That’s something to remember; did they get it on film?  The child will certainly enjoy knowing that at his party, his parents burned thousands of acres of wilderness to celebrate his gender.

Every news broadcast has the weather person show us the view of the smoke from space.  There it is, that tan-white smear covering California like rancid mayonnaise.  The fires impact air travel and flight paths.  CHP closes the major arteries up and down the state.  Meanwhile, people stay in their homes waiting for the signal to evacuate, and when it comes, highways are clogged with people fleeing the inferno.  Wildlife and domestic livestock stampede through the burning woods, embers falling and cascading around them.

Should we rebuild in those burn areas?  Are we tempting fate?  Paradise is burning, and so soon after the last scorching.  The earth has not healed yet, and now, the fires come again.  Is there a way to make forests less susceptible to fire?  Often, burning the dead debris on the ground in a forest allows new seeds to take root.  It can be a good thing, but not when it comes to homes and human habitation.

In the perfect storm of 2020, the pandemic rages on.  Scientists now believe the coronavirus arrived in California as early as December 22, 2019, when hospitals began seeing an uptick in respiratory infections.  The virus also profoundly affects the human brain in some survivors, causing headaches, confusion, and delirium.  As we learn from Bob Woodward’s book, Trump knew the virus was deadly and could be spread by air since January.  He knew, and he lied.  Is this surprising?  Years ago, Trump said that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  He has killed almost 200,000 Americans, and as of this moment, does seem to have gotten away with it:  every night, new revelations, new damning evidence, new felonies and misdemeanors.  The Trump presidency goes on, and now, he is closing the gap with Joe Biden.  Four more years and we won’t be recognizable as America anymore.

There is no dearth of strange news.  Two planes landing at Los Angeles International Airport reported to the tower that they had passed a “guy in a jet pack” flying at 3,000 feet and ten miles from the airport.  The FBI is investigating.  Officials express some disbelief in the sightings given that a jet pack capable of propelling a human being that high would be very expensive and could not be owned by a private individual.

Like everything else over the last six months, we can only say how surreal this all is, scratch our heads, and wait for what tomorrow brings.