Modeling Doom

YOU CAN'T WALK OUTSIDE on a hot summer afternoon, feel the heat, walk back inside, and proclaim for all the world to hear that climate change is a reality, and that you just proved it. It just doesn't work that way. Maybe the temperature would still be one hundred degrees or more if homo sapien sapiens had never injected a single ounce of industrial carbon into the atmosphere. You can't manufacture another Earth out of thin air, an identical Earth inhabited only by pre industrial people, and compare the two duplicate worlds, ours and theirs, in terms of atmoshperic composition, heat retention, and climate change. But you can use computer simulations, construct models, and make those exact comparisons, in cyber space, if not rock solid reality. That is what climate scientists, and probably many other kinds of scientists have done, often enough to convince themselves that climate change cuased by human activity and not mother nature is indeed a proven, stark reality. They haven't convinced all of us lay folks, and many are beyond convincing, aka conservatives, but the scientific community is united, dead set certain that human made climate change is here, and getting more extreme, fast. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, where I live, we had a run of several years in which the weather for the Fourth of July was picture perfect for the holiday. Clear, sunny, puffy cumulus clouds, soft breeze but no wind, perfect for throwing firecrackers at each other and having good, rousing bottle rocket fights. I liked to insert a firecacker into the spaces between strips of bark on a large tree, and set it off. It never fazed the forty foot tall forty foot canopy deciduous tree with a trunk eight feet around, but it was fun trying. I like to think that I knew in advance that no harm would come to the tree. I remember being in Minnesota in August, 1966, when the temperature was one hundred degrees. I was eleven years old, and confused and surprised by the heat being so hot so far up north. I was in Minneapolis one year in the nineteen sixties the day or two after Independence Day, and I was somewhat surprised that for several days after the holiday, you could still hear fireworks exploding all over the city, slowed down a bit, but not stopped. I loved firewroks when I was a kid. Now as an old man, I despise them with a passion beyond expression, mostly because they injure people and terrify animals. My last bottle rocket fight eventuated when I was 22, old enough to know better,so, I hung in there as a kid as a young adult. In that last botttle rocket fight,I took one just above my left eye. It made a circular indented scar the shape of a bottle rocket butt in my left eyebrow, which I can still see. I'm lucky I can still see out of that eye. The formerly usually warm sunny days of Independence Day have morphed into usually blistering hot days of climate change. Anybody my age or a decade or two older or younger knows damned good and well that the "climate", which means long term weather patterns, has changed. Its that obvious. It used to snow where I live, but no more. October used to be a cold month. Now its a summer month. Spring used to begin at the very end of March, not late February. We oldsters don't need computer models to know that climate change is real. We have lived it, and still are. Progressive oldsters know that humans are causing it, because we believe in science. Old conservatives pretend that it would be happening anyway. I can think of no way to prove them wrong, of proving a negative. Climate scientists, all of them, know that we are causing climate change. They are preaching to the choir, so to speak, because thsoe who refuse to see reality beasuse it contradicts their political beliefs are not going to change their politics, or their attendant comfortable illusions, no matter how many computer models or hot summer days in March you show them.

Talking Climate Change, Again...and Again

CLIMATE CHANGE may be the most often written about topic on this essay website. It certainly is the most important, here, there, or anywhere. It goes directly to our survial,like nuclear bombs, and human environmental pollution, which are closely related.That,and Donald Trump. Essays concerning Trump keep piling up here, like cat feces in a neglected litter box. This website came into existence on Occupy Wall Street day, September 17, 2011, quite by chance, before Trump made his dramatic golden escalator descent into politics and political crime in June, 2015. But ever since he descended on golden moving stairs into historical ingnominy, Trump has been impossible to ignore. And it'll be awhile, unless god and good fortune intervene, until we can enjoy the fresh air and supremely pleasant liberation from forced attention giving to Don the Con-vict. After that, the historains weill take over, as to an extent, they already have, getting an early start on a sordid subject. More than a quarter million books have been writen about Napoleon Bonaparte,and Abraham Lincoln is a close second. Jesus of Nazerath must be in there, someplace, although the New Testament is a hard act to follow. Who knows how many books will be wrtten about Trump before the day is done? New books are still coming out about Lincoln and Washington and all the other big names, and the pattern is, the more recent the publication date, the better the book. Our modern historians are standing on the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton said he was doing in science. Historical knowledge and writing keep improving because research keeps chugging along. You'd be amazed at how much new information, often recently discovered primary source material and documents, is "unearthed", uncloseted, in the dim recesses of ancient libraries, attics, and basements, among othr places, daily, and yearly. We're still not finished with Jesus, Napoleon, and Lincoln, despite the vast trove of extant material, available to all who like to spend a romantic, cloistered few weeks among the dusty stacks. All well and good. But here, on this website tucked away in a remote corner of a nearly infinite internet on a small planet in a remote galaxy in a universe of trillions of galaxies, let it be said, whether or not anyone is listening, that climate change on planet Earth was the driving, seminal, most mentioned topic of short essays. Again, the assertion is that this is because it is the most important subject of discussion in the world. What, if anything, trumps it? (oops, sorry). We preserve our human cultural heritage. The Library of Congress has something like forty million books and objects, or is it now one hundred million? It keeps growing. Thomas Jefferson's much expanded book collection, which numbered a paltry few thousand when Jefferson donated it to America, could conceivably reach about a billion books and other objects before this century ends. Thank goodness for digital information presrvation. Otherwise we'd have to build acomplex of skyscrapers and underground warehouses to store it all. (Hell, we'd do it.) I once had a personal library of several thousand books. When my father died, I inherited several thoousand more.I was overwhelmed, and understood that computers would soon make books obsolete,(which they have not). I gave them all away, to a friend with a book store. He was overwhelmed. Spread the wealth. I can write as many essays on climate change on the internet as I pretty please, and, lord willing, will.

Trump, Wrapping Himself In the Flag On The Fourth

OF COURSE IT was going to happen, predictable, like the tides, or the daily flow of flowing presidential lies. Donald Trump is wrappng himself in Old Glory, using the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the "Declaration of Indepence as an opportunity to spruce up his image, bury the Epstein files out back like a dog bone,or pile of country garbage. The extent to which the tactic works depends primarily uppn the power of advertising, and the gullibility of the American people,whose intelligence nobody ever went broke underestimating. MAGA sycophants, naturally, are already on board, with Trump, the flag, and God, in that order, positioned lovingly upon the gold stained alter of their hearts, brainwashed minds, and tortured, twisted souls. Trump's carvinal in the Capitol is already a drop dead bust,with no atendance other than a MAGA ball cap or two riding atop empty skulls. He probably should've added Taylor Swift to the agenda, but she is busy, gettting married on the Garden, and, in any event, she, like most of America, despises Trump. Fifty years ago, when I was twenty one, my father took me to New York City, where we were joined by twenty million other tourists to watch the tall sailing ships cruise into the harbor, and up and down the Hudson River. The crowds were so thick that we couldn't get anywhere near the river, and we had to stand on a street corner in midtown Manahtten and strain across holf of the island to see even that much. The important thing, we knew they were there, we caught a glimpse of them, I took a few pictures on old fashioned Kodak film, and I still remember it all, fondly. As we approach the end of our days, what, other than memory, do we really have left? Friends and family, if we'relucky, but don't count of. Familial estrangements and seperations iare the norm in America, the land of the lonely atomized individual. (See: "Bowling Alone", by Robert Putnam). Otherwise, the 1976 4th weekend was a bust for me.The Kansas City Royals were in town,and hey beat my beloved Yankees three out of four games at the stadium. The final game of the series my father, a Royals fan, didn't even bother to attend. He preferred to remain in our hotel room at forty second and twelfth,a "Holiday Inn", and drink whiskey. I was in the city on another Independence Day, 1983. The friend I was visiting, who had a place in Mt. Kisco, got tickets to the Red Sox Yankees game on the fourth. We had box seats right behind the visitors dugout, and my friend was wrapped entirely in an American flag. We appeared on the big "Jumbotron" movie screen scorebaord in center field several times, and I was proud. I, little I, on the big screen at Yankee Stadium,on the exact day of America's two hundreth birthday, if only for a moment. On a happier note, Don Baylor hit a two run homer, Dave Righetti pitehed a no hitter for the Bronx Bombers, and the Yankees won, four zip. I was in hog heaven. The entire crowd of forty five thousand stayed at their seats, standing and screaming wildly for an hour, after the game was over. I missed my train home, and my family, hungry and late for dinner on my account, was mad. Oh well, It was worth it...Obviously I am pissed, depressed and disappointed that our grand national celebration is being presided over by a sexual offender and general criminal reprobate. For sour comfort, we can recall that the centennial in 1876 was bummed out by the arrival in Washington D.C. on that very day, of the news that George Armstrong Custer and his 7th cavalry has been wiped out by Sitting Bull and a huge alliance of Sioux,et all tribes, at the battle of the "Little Big Horn'. My hope is that the tri centennial in 2076 will escape the corruption of military disaster or a criminal president presiding over it. My comfort is that, lacking great good luck or excessive life extension,I won't be around to find out.

Doing the Big Jobs First

EVERYONE COULD make a list of the world's most pressing problems. Everyone's list would be long, unless lazy people stopped work early, or got depressed at the overwhelming undertaking, and chose to adandon the task of solving the world's problems, in favor of sneaking off to the local pub, for a brew. Mine would be perhaps the shortest list of all, the only decision being deciding what exactly to name it. Some options are: environmental degradation...ecosystem decline or collapse...climate change... Racism, disease, war, hatred; all these human made scourages take a back seat to the Big C, climate change. All other world problems, I maintain, are subordinate to this. Ecosystem decline/climate change threatens all life on Earth, even more so than the thousands of atomic bombs laying around in ready for use warm storage. Species of plants and animals are going extinct at a faster rate than ever before, even including the several mass die offs which have occurred over the eons due to natural forces suxh as meteorites,and natural climate cahnge (climate change occurs naturally, as well as occurring due to human activity).On this essay website more essays have been published on climate change than any other topic, with the possible exception of you know who. You know who will be gone mercifully soon, although not soon enough. Climate change will continue until the sun goes nova, one way or another, natural or human made. Natural climate change is good, just like torandoes and hail storms are to a degree good, because they're natural. We want the wind to blow, and, well, strong straight line or rotating winds are, as we say, part of the bargain. We all want rain to end drought without flooding, but not when we have a picnic, outdoor concert, or ball game on our busy ego driven schedules. If and when the Yellowstone caldera erupts, which could be any time between this morning and a few thousand years in our future, life on Earth will have to start over, if it can. We know that Yellowstone will erupt some day or other,and that oceanic life, insects, and bacteria will be confronted with the awe inspring but daunting task of reintroducing natural evolution by natural selection to the planet, which will begin another cycle of life on Earth, another of the several which have already occurred. Vladimir Lenin, who was so important that his body is entombed in glass in Moscow for public viewing and the lines are always long, asked the reasonable question: "What Is To Be Done" in a pamphlet. We all wish we knew. How can we the human species have our cake and eat it too? How can we continue to enjoy our inreasingly high standard of living, our cars and big houses and poison spewing jet travel, and somehow raise two billion people out of desperate poverty? The answer, maybe, is, a little bit of everything, an all strategies approach. Population, leveling off. Standard of leving,kept within a reasonable range for everyone. Nobody super wealthy, nobody super poor. China and Japan are teaching us efficiency within high population density. In Germany, nothing is wasted, not a scrap of paper lies on the ground. Expansion of human habitat into outer space, on other planets,on space faring star base habitats might help. In the background lurks the question: "God/the universe either intends that we exist, or allows it, reluctantly, or so it seems. But are we intended to ruin planet Earth, heaven foribd, or are we intended to survive long, and to spread our species across the galaxy? As we say: heaven only knows.

Trump, Going Ever I.D. Lower

SEVERAL TIMES on this website we have announced that Donald Trump has once again gone low, gone lower than ever before, and that surely, surely he could go no lower. Each time, we were wrong. Now it becomes necessary to reconfigure the paradigm, with the possibility emerging that, like a black hole, there is simply no depth to which The Felon cannot and will not descend. In a bipartisan vote, Congress has passed the "Twenty First Century Road to Housing" bill, which would go are, if not quite far enough, to alleviate one of our nation's most presssing and chronic concerns; a shortage of housing, and an acute shortage of affordable housing. Trump, slithering along in themid as usual, refuses to sign into law this urgently needed piece of legislation until Congress passes the so called, misnamed "Save America Act", which would make voting difficult for most, andall but impossible for the poor, by requiring that every voter present not only a single piece of identification, usually a driver's license, but also, a whole host of others, more esoteric documents, such as birth certificates and passports, and "Real ID.s". Knowing full well the most people do not possess these documents, and would have to go to some trouble to obtain them. The obvious object is to make it more difficult to vote in a country in which often far fewer than half of the population, less than half of all eligible votrs, votes. The more difficult it is to vote, the fewer people vote, and a huge perentage of the effectively disenfranchised are the lower middle class and poor. Maybe it shouldn't be this way. Maybe the poor should step right up, overcome all obstacles, bite the proverbial bullet, and cast ballots. But, alas,they for the most part are too busy simply trying to survive by working long hours at exploitation wages to engage in massive amounts of bureaucratic paper work. The mmore diffficult it is to vote, the fewer voters, and the more likely Republicans are to win elections. The more inclusive and expansive the democracy, the more the teeming masses of Madison's "lesser sort" get to the ballot box, the more likely democrats, liberals and democratic socialists are to win elections. Republicans also advocate for fewer voting places, and fewer ballot boxes, for the same reason. This is actually in keeping with our founder's intentions if not ours, who designed not a democracy, but a democratic republic, in which the poor uneducated masses, Madison's "lesser sort" would be represented in noble, enlightened fashion by Madison's "better sort", the wealthy land owning elite,usually (always) men of fair complexion such as himself. We now see how that turned out. So did Madsion, by the way, who regretted our oligarchical constitution within five years of helping write it. His regret was that he had not helped create a democracy, but rather, an oligarchy of the wealthy elite, and it soon became evident to him that the elite had no intention of governing for the poor, as they had promised. Trump and his fellow Republican prevaricators insist that the American electoral system is rife with fraud and abuse, that illegal immigrants with brown skin are streaming across the Rio Grande, infliltrating America's fair cities, stealing elections for Democrats by voting in them, then, perhaps, slinking back across the border to resume their lives of poverty. The possibility of illegally cast votes for Republican candidates somehow gets lost in the shuffle. Trump is perfectly happy and willing to allow America's critical housing shortage to linger and cause more suffering for the sake of an imaginary problem which exists only in the deep dark recesses of his conspicuously tortured, mentally ill "mind". With the current congressional composition, overriding his veto is nearly impossible. What is not impossible is voting Trump and his gang of quasi fascists out of power, come November.

Becoming Educated

I CAN THINK of two formally well educated people who support Trump, and there must be many more, somewhere. One has a masters degree in geology, the other, in creative writing, from Columbia. This initself does not disparove the well worn thesis that Trump suooprters are poorly educared, indeed most of them are, studies reveal. It merely proves that there are exceptions to generalities, exceptions which prove the rule. All across America's fruited plain,on the campuses of major universities, even occasionally in libraries,Trump supporters abound, young Republicans clubs flourish, but like Trump supporters generally, are vastly outnumbered by America's morally decent sane. One of my Trump supporter former friends told me that he knows damned good and well that climate change is a hoax, because he is a geologist. Credentials count. The other Trumper friend, who is not a scientist, assures me that climate change is caused by fluctuations in the sun's output, that the Earth is holow, and that it harbors intelligent life in its interior.No input from the actual solar scientist community was sought.Why bother with expertise, when truth can be so easily be gleaned from locals with advanced degrees,in whatever? My two friends are clearly engaged in a war on expertise, science, and common sense. Gravity, it seems derives not from mass, but from empty space beneath a planetary surface. The climate change denier does not explain how you can add a trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere without it absorbing any extra solar radiation heat. The proponent of solar fluctuations has not yet articulated precisely how the alleged solar fluctuation phenomenon has excaped, somehow, the attention of the world's solar astronomers and scientists generally. They probably don't think they should have to. How, for example, can we account for the Earth's gravitational attraction, sans the necessary mass? Ask a Trump supporter engaged in magical pseudo science. If he could do it he'd do it bending over backwards,twisting and turning like a fourth grader during an excruciating math exam. Carl Sagan pointed out in one of his books,"The Dragons of Eden", that there is no shrotage of intelligence, but that there is a shortage of basic science education in American life. Such shortages, however, have never been known to impede the human imagination, the human ego, or the flow of hot carbon dioxide from the oral orifices of the overly exuberant inadequately educated. But if only the well educated spoke, and if the poorly educated failed to express their nonsensical opinions and beliefs, how would we measure and know who needs to learn what, and from whom? An American political leader, a Republican Senator from the great state of Oklahoma, recently warned us that wind is a finite resource, and that wind turbines are using it up at an alarming rate. As we like to say, you can't make this stuff up. When we the halfway decently educated finish splitting our ribs, rolling our eyes, and venting our expressions of disgust,it is our mandate to make a game plan for how to address this. Those who are the problem are not going to solve the problem. Head Start, charter schools, more money for public schools and teacher pay, better teacher training, adult education, free college, are all good ideas. Perhaps less texting, pronography, and endless avalanches of selfies would assist. Escape entertainment is always an easy target of choice. The object of education is to inspire in us all a love of learning based upon a fascination with the world. Let us teach our children, allow our children to nurture their innate curiosity, and stop stifling it through rote, cookie cutter, punitive forced fact mind stuffing. People have the inherent right to use their talents however they find most rewarding. We exist to fulfill our own dreams and aspirations, not to jump through hoops held firmly in place by petty pedantic pedagogues.

Trump, Having It All

WE NOW KNOW, because the true representative of Christ on Earth, (Trump, not the Pope) told us, that Donald J.Trump, aka Joshua ben Joseph, has perfect morals. Like, totally terrific. He told us so just yesterday. Coupled with his assertion that he is the most intelligent person who ever lived, and we have the world's greatest genius and moral entity, if not narcissist, all rolled into one big rotund mound of adipose. Not since Leonardo Da Vinci has such a magnificant talent graced the face of the Earth. Look for the great one to complete the cirlce of attained wisdom by becoming a Bodi satva without even bothering to look for it by roaming far and wide with disciples in tow, or to wait for it while sitting beneath a bodi tree, like Gautama Siddhartha. Although his majestic lordship has not made any proclamations concerning his world class athletic or musical ability, just wait, you can see it coming. Trump could sit down at a Steinway and play Mozart without missing a note or beat. He would doutbless contend well from the pitching mound against, or strike out Susuki Ichiro, looking, probably by throwing a screw ball. Move over Babe Ruth, move over Vladimir Horowitz, take a hike Einstein. Genius, athleticism, and morality, we learn, concentrate themselves in mounds of fat, perhaps for purposes of nourishment. You might think that genius and righteousness would prefer to insinuate themselves into at least a minimal amount of muscle tissue and grey matter encased in a cranium, but that turns out to not be the case with the world's most nearly perfect human. Trump has already been a successful television star. He has not yet discovered, or exploited, his greatest talent of all, although he has unwittingly implemented it to a degree. It is comedy. He could easily do stand up, and instantly join the ranks of Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks, Jay Lenno, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Benny, Burns - His monologue would be drier than the driest martini, and he wouldn't even know he was joking, that indeed, he is the joke. At length you begin to wonder about Donald Trump's upbringing. Richie Rich, bow tie and knee britches, smugly sneering out the tinted limo window at all the other,less privileged, less talented kids on the way to the most exclusive private school on snob hill. Never mind his poor grades, third from the bottom at Wharton. He didn't want to show up the other students. Exactly how in hell or psychosis anybody can possibly turn out to be such a thorough mess is a subject that can and probably does fill psychology and psychiatry texts. We know that he was rasied by and doting mother and a cold, distant father, always a lethal combination. Was it simultaneously too much and too little love? When Trump slunk into office agaisnt the wiches of a clear majority of voters, books started rolling off the press about him, as authors by the drove began taking advantage of best seller opportunities, and whipped out Trump monographs by the bushel. Somewhat curious in my extreme post election depression, seeking understanding to assuage grief, I read probably fifteen or twenty of them before I noticed myself sliding into a sort of catatonic, neurotic state. Patterns emerged. Most evident was that nobody who wrote about Trump liked him. No hagiography emerged from the collective opus. Laura Trump, a psychologist with a doctorate, reaffirms all of our worst fears and assumptions about her uncle; that he is a deeply troubled mental health patient, for whom extensive psychotherapy would be prescribed, but probably insufficient. For some of our worst cases there is no recourse except institutional care, mind altering medication, sedation, and a room full of toys with which the inmates are free to play, just as much as they want.

Of Jobs, Trump, and Existing

JUST AS THE BIBLE is the most important book in the world, the most important and influential book ever widely circulated, Donald J.Trump, whether we like it or not, is either the most important person in the world, because of his power and influence, or he's in the top two or three. I'm an Aaron Judge fan, and I like the Pope, but neither of them, despite Judges's RBI total and status as the Yankee's "Captain" and best hitter in baseball in the tradition of Lou Gehrig and Thurman Munson, rise to the level of the Commander-in-Chief of the world's most powerful nation and military, commanding thirty to fourty thousand nuclear warheads. Or have we discarded some of them through treaty obligations? Suffice to say, a bunch of bombs.I'd sooner have Thurman Munson, even though he is deceased, or certainly the Pope, in charge of all the bombs. Trump might make a good bat boy for the Yankees, if he could shed a few pounds and stay awake long enough to follow the game, and know when to run out on the field and pick up the bat after every Yankee at bat. Not all of us are in the jobs for which we are best suited. I taught in the public schools for years, beacuse it was easier, far easier to get a job there than sending out two hundred ignored applications to colleges and universities. Trump was a horrible businessman, and is a dangerous, inept, corrupt hack politician, but he was a helluve television star. His show "The Apprentice" was so hot that it propelled him to the American presidency. There are many books which I prefer to the Bible, many polticians, all politicians, whom I prefer to Trump. It is worth remembering that heads of state have emerged from even stranger places than billionaire business status and impromptu television celebrity stardom. Abraham lincoln was a railsplitter, which kept him lean and in good shape. U.S. Grant tried anything and everything in private free enterprise before finding his true self in the military. His resume' reads like that of a drifter, and he probably couldn't get a job today. He couldn't pass the drug test, for alcohol, not that there are any. But by God, U,.S Grant was a winner, an implacable force in battle. So what if he was drunk all the time? Whatever he is drinking, Lincoln said, give a bottle of it to every officer in blue uniform. After graduate school, when I discovered that neither columbia nor the University of Mmissouri would have anything to do with me, I decided to swallow my pride, and teach in the public schhools, if they would have me. They would have me, but only as a substitute, until I proved myself. I spent years proving myself in a very high quality public school system in a college town where teaching jobs were in great demand but short supply. I languished as a fill in for so long that I started enjoying it. Shitty pay, but it was fun, since kids love subs, and subbing has the benefit of choice. When the call comes, you can either take it or leave it. You choose your days off. So, who's to say who the most important person in the world really is, or the most influential? Trump's professors at the Wharton School of econoomics, two of whom are still iving, swear that he was the dumbest son of a bitch they ever had in class. Their words, not mine. Grant made do, and got by. The Bible still sells in a world where books generally are neither sold nor read. And, giving credit where due, Trump, no more likely to succeed than Grant or the patchwork endlessly rewritten Christian Bible, managed to make it work, against all odds. In this universe,nothing is likely, including existence itself,and everything is a fluke. The good news is that the old cliche is true; anybody can become anything, even, sometimes, what they want to be.

Friendship Trumping Politics

WE MIGHT ALL be able to agree on this; that friendship is more important than politics. Or maybe the most ardent political animals would disagree, poor tragic souls, addicted to political conflict and adrenaline. We have more friends in high school than at any other time in our lives. Hallways teeming with empathetic teenagers, cloistered together in a petri dish in which connections flourish like bacteria on rotting meat..After high school, we scatter like disturbed minnows. College,the military, work, marriage and kids. We cherish of options and opportunties, and exploit them. We make friends as we age, but we lose others, with most of us moving from place to place,job to job, in a semmi-nomadic society. The average American, according to Robert Putnm in his seminal monograph "Bowling Alone", has one good friend. That's a statistical average; many people have many friends, some, perhaps most Americans have a small inner circle of buds, sisses, and bro's, many people have none. You hear them talking about in on Facebook, and who would lie on Facebook? Then too, we change friends as our personalities subtly change. Americans are not knwon to be tolerant of those who are unlike themselves. All these assertions,or course, are generalities. I once read that no matter you are located on land, you are within ten feet of a rat. Just as I was starting to frreak out and run to the hardware store to stock up on rat traps,(I have never even seen a rat trap, they must be huge), a friend of mine quietened me be assuring me that this, too, was undoubtedly a statistical average. I have noticed that many of us in freedom's land are mch closer to our friends than to our siblings. We all know how that goes. We grow up in the same house with other kids competing for the attention of the parents,the dynamics depending on the number of kids, their age differences, genders, traditional two parent family,single mom,single dad. and on and on. Since grandparesnt and grand children tend to form especially tight bonds,being seperated by a generation, one might speculate than people who were raised by their grand parents have a special treat,inundation of love, scarcity of strict discipline. Whatever the the price and benefits of that may be,they manifest later, and forever. I was an am the second oldest of two children, with a sister nearly three years older than I. We were raised by a single mom. Father was nearby, in the same twon,and was very close to both of us. I have no complaints. When my sister and I were pre teens, we played together happily, although she dominated and bullied me generally. An aunt warned her that I would soon outgrow her, and exact revenge. I outgrew her, but never exacted the revenge I more than deserved. We were estranged through our teen years. Three grades apart, in the same high school building. Yikes. I couldn't wait for her to get out of the house, which she did at twenty two, by joining the military and getting married after graduating from college while living at home. Hell, I lived at home with mom until I was twenty seven,because we got along,it didn't hurt mom to have a "man" around the house, and I had nothing to do except to work on a masters degree, and then a doctorate. What it all comes down to, maybe, is, "whatever works". We humans adjust well,if reluctantly,to change. We thrive in diverse environments. We have no choice, because change is nature. Now, old, I am among the fortunate few in poessession of a sister I adore and get along great with, and a few good friends. To hell with politics. I vote, and that's enough.

Protesting, Redux, MAGA, Dying

ON SEPTEMBER 11,2011, the OCCUPY WALL STREET protests were held in New York City, way downtown, in Battery Park, and elsewhere.If memory serves, there were smaller versions of the protest movement all across America's fruited plain,in communities large and small. Sometimes, with advancing age, you get your protest movements confused and mixed up. I was too young, in my early teens, to do the Viet Nam War, aka "police action" protest thing, although I wanted to, and would have, had my parents let me out of the house for anything other than school, neighborhood pick up baseball, golf, (I was a fair bogey golfer), and frequent visits to the local public library. The purpose of the protest was to express opposition to corporate greed and domination of the American economy, the grotesque economic inequality which has always and contiues to characterize and plague the United States of Avarice, and whatever else we could think of that came to mind. Thus my disappointment at being sidelined under age restrictions for the anti Viet Nam war movement was finally quenched, somewhat. I like to remind people what a precocious little anti-establishmentarian I was (and remain to this day), that I was entirely against the Viet Nam war as a grade schooler, but was afraid to come out of he closet on this issue, what with my parents being so patriotic and conservative and all. Mom and dad were raised Republican, and remwined mired in this evil disease, as far as I know, until their respective dying days. Dad never wavered. Mom moved a bit leftward, maybe, when she indicated that she actually liked Obama. However,she thought he was arrogant. So did a good friend of mine,a fellow left wing "radical" democratic socialist and erstwhile Obama supporter. Evidently my love and admiration for Barrack Hussein Obama (BHO) blinded me to his arrogance, and still does. Like Goethe said "He loves not who does not see the deficiencies of the beloved as virtues". Now, in the glimmeringg, gloaming twilight of my existential existence on this here plane of perceived reality, divine providence or sheer blind ass luck have presented me with the golden opportunity of one last huzzah harrah. The "No Kings" anti-Trump anti fascist (ABTIFA) protest movement-rally is coming soon to a location near you and everyone else, having been there before. Last time out, it was a glowing success in the lower midwestern college town of about a hundred thousand residents where I taught and near which I still live in dignified, (usually), professorial retirement. Most likely it will be once again. The estimated turnout nation wide,if memory serves, was about eight million patriots. We anti-Trumpers would doubtless consider the imminent version a glowing success if those numbers were repeated,a smashing success if they were exceeded. With each passing day oppposition to The Felon (Trump) broadens, widens,and deepens, like the reflecting pool's publicity, as former but now disenchanted MAHAts lose patience, as they pay more at the pump, and watch their paychecks and spending power shrink to the size of Trump's hands. As the Felon's support sags to its current paltry thirty six percent, fallling like a parachutist with lead in his boots,the MAGA movement commences to sun set, with little sound and fury. Conservatives are quietly slithering away, rehearsing the speeches they will recite to their grand childern, about how they never liked the son of a bitch in the first place.

Trump, Doing Something Good

DONALD TRUMP did something good today, or maybe last night. I saw it on the news in the early morning, when I had begun but hadn't finished drinking coffee. It has nothing to do with the reflecting pool, amazingly, around which a fence has gone up. Trump finally has his wall, a bit of a downgrade from what he had planned. I'm not one of the many milllions of Americans who hate Trump so passionately that no matter what he does, its bad. I'd rather give the man, or anybody, seven times seventy. The problem is my age related short term mmemory. Short term memory, the experts say, begins to diminish after the age of twenty five. My only recourse is to keep watching the news, which is aired twenty four seven,and repeats itself,like history, seemingly endlessly. Like digging through dirt and searching for diamonds at that diamond mine in Arkansas where anybody can take a shot at sudden wealth by getting their hands dirty, good behavior from Trump, benefiting anybody but himself, is, as they say, a diamond in the rough. By seeing on the news something good that Trump did, and then losing it within the folding folds of my shrinking grey matter, I feel as if I had a fourteen caot gem from the Murphreesboro, Arkansas diamond mine, then had it slip through a hole in the pocket of my blue jeans I tried googing it. Google the all wise reminded me that good presidential behavior is in the eyes of the beholder, like, duh. My frustration is copounded by knowing how terribly hard I try to find good behavior on Trump's part, and how seldom my efforts are rewarded. You hear a funny noise in your car, and it keeps getting worse, louder. You take the car to a mechanic, he takes it for a spin, and, as you might have guessed, the nosie is gone. That actually happend to me, and my mechanic said, no problem, it happens everyday. No problem? Easy for you to say. YOu can fix a car in your sleep. I have to drive mine,noise or no noise. What, then, do I do about he funny nose coming from my car which will reappears the moment I get outside radar range of the auto repair shop? You see and hear with your own faculties that Donald J. Trump, Don the Con, did something good, and just when you decide to write an essay in celebration, the ever reapeating news goes to a new news cycle, and Trump's one act of decency gets lost amid a cascade of new news. I'm beginnig to think that I will have to wait, and catch the next act of decency from the convicted criminal president. But when will tht be? When I'm dead? Hell, I'm seventy one years old. The old blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, but not if he starves to death first. I've been waiting for eons for Trump to do something that isn't either crass, stupid, crazy,perfidious,mean, or downright crazy. Now, the acorn may have droppedform the old oak tree, and I,poor I, ever vigilant but not vigilant enough,may have missed my one and only chance to actually witness Donald J.Trump behaving like a respectable human being. The high scool beauty queen walks down the hall, my vocal chords seize up, and there she goes, on down the hall, stopping only to have a word with the next geek, or the football stud. Sometimes, but not often, cheerleaders go out with geeks.I missed my chance. With my luck, Trump will never do anything crazy or stupid again. Life is a trade off. Even more horribly, he will never do or say anything good again. But if that eventuates,it means that Trump will never do anything again, and, well, that has to be a good thing.

Feeling, but Not Being, Guilty

GUILT, my office mate in graduate school once said, is bullshit. This was sometime in the early eighties. It was true then, and its true now. He went west, looking for a teaching career in California, found it, and also found the love of his life, and married her. Before they had a chance to start a family, he was rear ended and killed on the L.A. freeway, among the greatest personal losses of my life. I believe he was thirty seven years old. How much human talent have we lost to premature, needless death? In his honor, I determined to remember and live his admonition concerning guilt, and to a certain extent have succeeded, Despite my tendency to embrace the poisonous emmotion, it, guilt, plagues me the most concerning my beloved cats and dogs. I would wager that in this millions of people empathize. We all love our pets like the children that they essentially are, and no matter how much we do for them, its never enough. When they die, we are consumed with our needless, bullshit guilt. People will try to manipulate the heck out of you by laying a guilt trip on you. To whatever extent we allow ourselves to be affected by this, shame on us. A friend of mine, a cracker with close ties to the black community, told me that what he admired most about the black culture is that brothers don't play head games. If they have a beef, they spit it out, they bring it. "Yo, dude, waddup with this crap you laying on me?" So refreshing, the clearing of the air. So elegant,so intelligent, as T.S. Eliot wrote. To hell with naunce and the subtle, undertoned expection of boot licking apologetic, feigned, falsely perceived offense. Those who accede to attempted emotionanl blackmail are the suckers have chosen to be,and merit nothing more than the heavy guilt trip that they seem to eagerly to accept when the pile of mental manure is proffered them. The people who are the most sensitive to their own emotional needs always seem to be the least sensitive to those of others. Hell, my cat, like all cats, is a shrewd little emotional manipulater, blackmailer. She makes the cutest little plaintive nosises expressing emotional abuse on the planet, in a close emotioanl race to the top with all other felines. She plays me, or tries hard to play me, like a poorly tuned fiddle which she has determend should be upgraded to a Stradivarius. I would tell my therapist, if I had one, that I am immune to such emotional manipulation, but I would be lying, and he or she would know it instantly. Psycological therapy, like ye olde annual primary care physician check up, would do us all a great deal of good, and should perhaps be considered essential, and routine, covered by medical insurance, fat chance of that. A nice relaxing session, on one's back on the proverbial couxh, say, once or twice a year, and our sick society and culture might, if othing else, at least beign the process of the renewal of the mind, th ehealig of the soul, whatever on Earth or in heaven a "soul" is or might be. Stipulated that we have one such, which is a bit of a presumptuous stretch, it, like our minds and our bodies, can be expected to require rejuvination, rewnewal, no less than the other fundamental components of our beings. Throughout human history humans have roamed around paleolithically, looking for food, water, and survival, mired in the fear which aids our survival no less than it does the horses we tamed, partnered with, and exploited. Anyone who has ever look gaxed deeply ino the abyss like eyes of a horse understand one thing; that horses are driven by fear. Anyone who has ever been a human being knows, or at least vaguely senses, that so are we. Fear, with added layers of brain matter as add ons, piled higher and deeper. We advance from savagery by looking up and reaching out to the universe, and even more, by digging deep within ourselves, and somehow, with a supreme act of the will, conquering the fear and revulsion at what we inevitably must find.

Knifing the Cement Pond

TRUMP IS NOW CLAIMING that somebody took a pocket knife, Bowie knife, dinner knife, switchblade, or some other sharp object, and vandalized the national wading pool by gashing a long gash into the concreteon bottom. We know where we got this idea, although we might prefer not to; from deep within his tortured, disabled mind. Here on this website it was suggested that he is off his medication, or that he hasn't been prescribed the proper medication, or any at all. If Prozac isn't used anymore, and i can remember when a prominant psychiatrist asserted that thi mind and behavior altering chemical should be added to community water supplies, then surely there are far more advanced medications available for criminally insane people, which, along with confinement and supervision, would help. Quietly somebody gently pointed out that the entire body of algae filled water is on security camera twenty four seven, and that surveillance "flim footage" shows no such thing. An intriguing if pointless question is whether our delusional chief executive is actually on any medication, which he most certainly is at his advanced age, and precisely what it is. Inquiring minds want to know. We the American people, arguably, have the inalienable right to know, to know the exact stte of their elected leader's health. Full disclosure before purchase, before voting. We should hav nown about Lincoln's impending death by multiple disease, we should have known that Woodrow Wilson was sick in bed for two years while his wife ran the country, and "we" should have knwon that FDR was confined to a wheelchair, but we knew none of it. My parents, both of whom hated the radical socialist Democrat, told me thay had no idea. When I was an undergrad history major, neither American nor European nor Americam,just "history" as a small college, I wrote a paper about the history of fun and games at the White House. With Trump's recent East lawn fun house carnival, a long tradition of wildness on the lawn was extended. The Kennedy's touch football games, which, considering the size of the brother's annd cousins respective families, could go eleven on eleven,with a full roster of of back up, on both sides of the ball. It now seems amazing the JFK had only two children that we know of. Surely there must be more, out there somewhere, breeding and carrying on the Kennedy legacy, only not in name. Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I was informed by my father, who probably thought that I was finally old enough and man enought to know, that I have a half brother by a someone other than my mother. At my "tender" age I was shocked and horrifed, but shouldn't have been, as well as I know the proclivities of my philandering father. Like many men of his World War Two generation, my dad thought of women as mere play things, to use at his disposal. He often reminded me that a married woman is legally the chattle property of the man, which indeed was true, legally, until rather recent times, say, the nineteen seventies. Now, we know full well that our president is a philandering con man and a rape "artist", but about half of us don't seem to care, or care, but are suddenly very forgiving of sin, as evangelical Christians, Trump's support base, are supposed to be but known very well to not be in the slightest, that is, unless the sinner is Trump, or some other conservative Republican, rather than, say, Bill Clinton. Everyone, and I mean everyone, lies about sex. I told my dad that I was bedding every woman in town, just to please him, when in fact I, a prude, was not. Trump lies about everything, even when he has no need to, like all habitual liars. Let's keep our eyes glued to that reflecting pool security camera. Unlike the rest of us, it never lies.

Eschewing A visiting Minister

THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH where I attend as a sporadic but perpetual visiting Uniterian pantheist is having a guest minister today. For that reason, I'll stay home, drink coffee,catch a little boob toob, and accept Father's Day gifts, garden snakes and mice,from my loving kittens. (I call all cats "kittens, affectionately, like retirees calling their middle aged children "kids"). I am told that the guestminister is of the highest quality, and I am sure that he is. I'm guessing that by "high quality" my fellow congregants mean that he is embued with fervant evangelical enthusiasm, preaches an inspiring sermon, and captures his eclesiastical audience, holding them in rapt attention, by reputation and widespread agreement. Of this, I have no doubt. If I were an actual Christian, rather than a Uniterian pantheist agnostic in occasional Presbyterian drag, I'd doubtless be all in. Apparently this man has no permanent pulpit, but serves as a sort of wandering fill in preacher in our local college town of approximately one hundred thousand souls. I don't think Christian votaries adore guest ministers the way school children adore substitute teachers, as if they are plotting and savoring the opportunity to get away with an enhanced amount of sin. I am wondering in general,ifalla crosss America's fruited plain guest minsiters tend to draw more people to church, or fewer. I can see it both ways. Attend church to respect the guest vicar of Christ. Stay away, disappointed that the beloved regular guy won't be leading the flock. To me its six of one half a dozen of the other. With each passing Sunday,my interst in divergent spirituality and religiosity strengthens. On my ecumeical bucket list is an intent to visit an Islamic mosque and Jewish synagogue, both of whch are extant if our thriving college town. college town, moreproperly major university towns, have as as an attraction enormous cultural variety. Our history department faculty has an annual end of the spring semester softball game, professors versus graduate students. Over the years, in my career in both categories, I have played center field and shortstop for both teams I keep thinking about becoming a member an actual member of the Uniterain Church, but would rather self identify as a card carrying pantheist. What the Uniterians have as their primary attraction is their universiality, their embrace of any and all forms of religiosiy, spirituality. They can rightfully claim to cover all bases. I could embark on a long journey to visit a house of worship of all the world's more than four thousad, (or is it eleven thousand) formally organized religions, circle the Earth, and end up right back where I started, on a small roughly round planet, wheeling around the edge of an ordinary galaxy, in what is evidently a nearly infinite number of galaxies in a universe which we now believe to be finite, but unbounded. My usual ride came by to pick me up for church. I told him I hadn't asked for a ride, he told me I had. We refrained from fist fight in in my front yard, a physical altercation I think I would have won. When the time is right, when he's cooled down and gotten his blood pressure under control, perhaps he can accept that I am more than a warm body to be used to occupy a slot in a pew, for appearances. If he gave an actual rat's ass about the salvation of my eternal soul, I might be concered about his distress at my lack of church attendance today. But I am more than a prop to make an mptry pew lok filled up with a warm human body. I am an eternal soul, as he would agree, only, I am one who never falsely claims to have any answers.

Reflecting (Cleaning the Cement Pond)

UPON REFLECTION, if I were, heaven forbid, president, and I wished to distract the public's attention away from a trifling matter such as a proclivity on my part for raping children, I would either start a war with a foreign country of choice while proclaimng myself a champion of American virtues and values, announce that the national cement pond badly needs a good scrubbing which has been delayed far too long, or both. If the rape rap lingered annoyingly long, I might even try to extend my war of distraction well beyond the mere few days needed to bomb the fabricated enemy of convenience into oblivious submission. I might sound the alarm that the black serpentine Viet Nam War Memorial monument has been gathering dust, and needs a good wipe down. The old hidden ball trick. Chat up the baserunner, how's the wife and kids, ask him to step off the base for just a second, (or minute as we like to say), so you can kick the dust off of it, and tag him out. Hope that he doesn't cold cock you on his embarrassed way back to the dugout. All perfectly legal, if a tad less than honorable. There is no crying in baseball... I'm so confused I can't even remember or figure out where we currently stand in the matter of the infamous, notorious Epstein Files. Either Trump is metaphorically trying to lure the hand of justice off first base, or justice is trying to lure Trump's famously small hands off base. Either metaphor suffices nicely. Another "No Kings" national holiday protest celebration is imminent,if memory serves, though I forget the exact date. (I'll find out in time to attend.) In the shower, where I and everyone else sings great, between renditions of "Sweet Caroline" and "Hey Jude" (I love Paul's scat singing), I ponder profoundly which is the better group chant: "Epstein!", "Epstein files!", or "Release 'em NOW!". A friend of mine gave birth, fathered a scion, about thirty five years ago. The kid grew up, made it big. When he reached an age of responsibility, whatever that happens to be in any given fammily unit,'long 'bout fourth grade or so (in my case it happened when I was about twenty five, in graduate school), he was rewarded with a cute puppy for good grades, good conduct, penmanship, keyboard skills, the whole ball of wax. Daddy properly delegated the responsibility for naming the little cutie to his demonstrably highly responsible kid. The kid narrowed down the choices to two: "Spot", and "Black Spot". Decisions, decisions. In the ensuing convoluted much overwrought narrative, the nme which came out of nowhere and made the final cut was "Maya", as in Angilou, or native Guatemalans. From this I learned a valuable lesson; a rose by any name. Whether we the people, wearing our "Morons Are Governing America" bright red ball caps and ANTIFA T shirts, carry homemade neatly printed signs which read "Epstein" or "Epstein Files", or "Release 'em Now!", in the fullness of time, all will come out in the reflecting pool scrub boarded wash. Good citizens are even now dumping metric tons of hydrogen peroxide into the big rectangular cement pood which, if memory serves, is about..what..two feet deep? (I walked around it, long ao.) We, or whomever, might have to dig or swim a bit deeper to finally get to the bottom of Trump's pedophilia, a nose dive into a sordid cess pool of muck and sludge, which no Republican dares do. Somebody, however, always seems to show up to shine a light to scatter the cockroaches. Voltaire was right. "All comes out even when the day is done, and more even still when all the days are done".

Forgiving

MY FLEDGLING CAREER as a Presbyterian church visitor rests on tenuous grounds.This, aside from my lifelong aversion ot the Christian religion, owing to what I perceive to be its irrational, lunatic barbarity. I took a quick peek at the official Presbyterian handbook, or whatever thay call it. The rules of the game, so to speak. Clearly, all church officials, clergy and assistant clergy, are called upon to provide a welcoming environment for all congregants. Warm and affectionate clerical behavior always, as I read it. Accordingly, one of my best friends, in and out of church, is on the clerical staff, with the formal title of "liturgist". Not only do he and I attend the same church, we patronize the same senior center, dining there daily. We have known each other about ten years. He seems to have a man crush on me, respects and admires me, for whatever weird reason, and has often bought lunch for me around town. (I need to return the favor). My complaint about him is that he, as a church leader, isn't provinding a warm and friendly atmosphere, not for me. Rather, he treats me with a certain dismissive coldness. Upon further reflection, I think I may know why, just guessing. I suspect that he wants more from me as a friend, emotionally, than I have ever given him. Ironic, since I am an immensely emotional person, kind, and loving. (so said my mother). Ask my cats. Ask my mother, who art in heaven. Ask anyone who knows me well. "Poor fellow who is all head", said Goethe. Who could disagree? I am called upon from within, impelled by my essential being, by my dead parents and by my upbringing, to take the high road, to turn cheek and proceed to inundate this fellow with love, kindness, and friendship. All too soon, when I lay upon my death bed, I want to examine my life, and to be able to honestly say to myself: "I took the high road". I was noble in spirit, magnanimous and generous in all matters. Writing about your emotional difficulties is a good first step in coming to terms with them. Whoever might read this essay is serving as my therapist, if unwittingly. The teachings of christ, like all true wisdom, are universal. If I don't forgive my alleged trespassers and transgressors seven times seventy times, for starters, I have not succeeded. I must find a way to forgive the juvenile deliquents who broke in to my house the other day. The police and the judicial system can take care of the rest. The person ia am hardest on, the person I find it the most difficult to forgive, as you might have guessed, is myself. (That might sound familiar to most people.) Yes, we of good intentions tend to be hardest on ourselves. My addcition to quoting Goethe is beyond medical help. "Since everyone errs,since even the greatest people among us have made mistakes, we have no grounds upon which to regard our own mistakes as inexcusable". If I didn't know better, I might almost think that even the great wise man Joshua ben Joseph made a mistake or two, and then forgave himself,if only to set an example. I feed stray cats, who come to my house because they lack and need a food source. Soon they start to become cat picky, and I've got skinny stray cats turning down Purina because they want Temptations. Their tastes change daily, they are moving targets. Feline beggers become choosers. You can scarcely imagine how much that pisses the heck me off. OK, fine. I can be just a Pee Oh'd as my little heart desires, but I have better damn well keep trying my best to feed my super particular picky chhoosy beggar stray cats, or, I aint being the best version of me available. Less than my best don't cut it. All I can do is my best, forgive everyone, including myself, for everything, and, for heaven's sake, pay attention in church.

Appropriately Supporting Trump

I MAY HAVE MENTIONED this before, and if so, I apologize, with the caveat that it bears repeating. Redundancy at times has its virtues. It is this: that the people who support Trump do so apropriately,that they should support Trump. I have often argued, as have others, that since the Republican party and the conservative movement generally has no shortage of proven, effective politians whose political ideologies are fundamentally in harmony with Trump's political agenda, sans the craziness, hatred,and incohenrence, why don't they change course, and back a candidate without the skeletons in the closet, the baggage, all the nonsensical insanity so evident in Trump's speech, character, and resume? The only and obvious answer is that Trump wins elections, that to give credit where due, that he is a winner, hard a pill though that may be to swallow for Democrats, decent people, and a few recalitrant Republicans like Liz Cheney and her ilk, rare Republicans of principle and high character. Those who support Trump remind me of Trump, I tell them. They never seem flattered to hear this. They know that he is a reprobate and moron, but he is their reprobate and moron. In 1920 H. L. Mencken predicted that under the current American political system the time will inevitably come when we the American people elect someone who in effect is a complete moron to the nation's highest office. Mencken was one hundred years ahead of his time. The time has come, the moron in effect is in office. Its like two of Trump's former professors at the Wharton school of business at the University of Pennsylvania, both of whom are still living and in their mid nineties agreed: that Trump is the dumbest son of a bitch they ever had in class. Often candidates are elected out of anger and desperation. FDR is the prime example.soetimes they are elcted because an entanglement of more than two people running for president makes it unaboidable that the winner of the election will have gotten only a plurality and not a majority of the vote. So it was with Abraham Lincoln, who won in 1860 against not one but three other candidates, representing regional interests. Thomas Jefferson won the eletion of 1899 with a somewhat similar entanglement of presidential candidates. The two party system usually guarantees a clean, straightforward contest between two choices, sans ambiguity. When pro temp third parties emerge, complexities result. I remember the election of 1964, when JBL landslided Barry Goldwater, man to mano, the momentum of the JFK legacy carrying him to victory. The nation wanted a continuation of Kennedy, and Johnson accommodoted by telling Congress "let us continue", and pushing forward the "great society", through Congress and through resistance in the eletorate, probably more effectively, ironically, than Kennedy ever could have. The moment he was murdered kennedy became more beloved than he ever was in life, as is always the case with dead people, and LBJ, whom the Kennedy's despised and called "Old Cornpone"(as if these Boston mackeral snappers had the slightest idea what "cornpone" actually is), astutely took that football and ran with it. Whatever is inside of you must come out, a friend of mine once wisely said, crude metaphor aside. Trump may be seen by history, and can be seen now, as a purgative which isneesssary to the purging of the American body politic. Our anger, frustration,an resentment at our failed systems lay within us, awaiting release. Along comes Trump with a bottle of that horrible tasting green liquid people are forced to drink before having a colonoscopy, we drink the ostensible hemlock, and off we to to our gut purge feeling empty, but somehow, cleansed. Soon enough we are back at the dinner table, filling back up. Let us polish off our bottle of bowel cleanser. Drain the gut, the swamp, the reflecting pool inside ourselves. We'll feel much better tomorrow.

Swimming In Two Pools

I KNEW A LADY on Facebook who had two swimming pools; a large one, and a small one. "I got a great big pool in my back yard. I got another great big pool right beside it": (Randy Newman:"Its Money That Matters"). Each day, she posted a picture of both of them on Facebook, side by side.The picture never changed.The small one, she explained, was actually a jacuzzi, The lady never posted a picture of herself that was less than thirty years old; she had been an attractive young adult, and I estimated her age in real space time to be close to mine, perhaps in her sixties. Nice looking, she was doubtless a nice looking late middle aged woman, a bit too concerned about her aging, distinguished looks. Wisely, she chose not to show her entire house, but just enough of it to convey an impression of fashionable, upper middle class affluence. Affluence signaling, as I saw it, without the inconvenience and risk of alerting thieves in the Tampa, Florida area where she lived and Facebook riff raff of the precise location of what to her was undoubtedly her greatest source of pride, probably courtesy of a husband with a lucrative professional career of some sort. She never mentiond him either, except indirectly, vaguely. Mafia type, maybe... I have a nice house too, but no pool, and I don't take pictures of it, pictures of myself, or pictures of anything else for that matter, for many reasons, for any reason, mainly photographic laziness. For me, a cell phone is a cell phone, not a camera, and I know what I and my material possessions and cats look like, and give not a fig whether anyone else does. It must be frustrating, wanting so badly to show the world your wealth, stymied only by an awareness that showing off comes with the risk of putting your pride and joy in jeopardy of attracting unwanted and perhaps harmful guests. I can remember a time,fifty years ago and more, when people who had money and material wealth were admired for their "success" and presumed social superiority. Admiration turned to resentment as a series of mid to late twentieth century recessions rubbbed millions of wage stagnated lower middle and working class Americans the wrong way.The shrinking middle class bifurcated, upper, and lower. Wages of the middle and working classes for fifty years have not kept pace with prices and corporate profits is a barnyard full of chickens coming home to roost.The expanding wealthy class,the expanding poor class, and our shrinking middle class helps explain our current political polarization. Without an economic center, the political center cannot hold. The free market is not the solution to every economic problem. The free market untainted by government intervention is not the solution to all economic problems, as Adam Smith is allegedy, wrongly, thought to have believed. Actually Smth said that all government action on behalf of the poor is desirable, but that no government action on behalf of the wealthy is. Those who cite Smith's seminal 1776 work "The Wealth of Nations" as the "Bible" of capitalistic economics are not inclined to mention this. In today's America, the middle class continues its fifty year shrink, and both extreme ends so the economic spectrum are expanding, somewhat alarmingly. At some point, to salvage what is left of free market capitalism, this trend will have to abate, and then reverse itself. The more money distributed among the more previously poor, marginal consumers, by whatever means, the more consumers of goods and services there are to produce the more manufactured wealth, by demanding a greater supply of it. Workers are also consumers, and there are more of them than there are wealthy or middle class purchasers of good sand services. One only needs so many television sets, cell phones, cars, and refrigerators. We can either give unto the poor with improved wages, or with governemnt transfer payment subsidies, to make real consumers out of them. Both ways work, work for good wages being the preferable means. It is the base of the economic pyramid that is the largest part, and which supports the entire structure, bottom to top. All that human beings build is built from the ground up, or, as Abraham Lincoln said, labor is prior to capital, and must be given the first consideration. A pyramid shaped society is what we want, with a long, flattened pyramid, where top and bottom are within reach of each other. After all, we all prefer swimming in a pool large enough to be more than a mere jacuzzi.

Reading

FORTY YEARS AGO a well intentioned friend of mine dug deep into his affluent pockets and rented a vacant building in the college town district for the then exorbitant sum of five hundred dollar a month. It was an old funky edifice in an appropriately funky, quirky college town party district. His intention was to establish a reading room within a local and national culture in which most Americans already had a place to read, and in which the average American reads one book or fewer after graduating high school. He outfited the old building with used furniture and book cases, filled them with books, and brought in as many interesting books and magazines as he could obtain, place them invitingly on tables next to comfortable chairs. He anticipated that some people would bring in their own reading mateiral,and perhaps, upon completing it, donate it to the cause...Only, nobody, other than an occasional straggler or two, bothered to showed up. No customers for the free service, perhaps not surprisingly. Local intellectuals and students, it began to appear, were already well provided with reading material and places to read, textbooks in libraries and private homes, He named his baby "Citizens and Philosophers", did no advertising, erected no signs to capture attention. My friend, it soon seemed, lacked not only business acuman, but possessed of surfeit of wishful thinking, if not presumption. Cutting his losses, He closed up shop, if memory serves, after two months. A mutual friend, a Republican capitalistic type, laughed at him, at how he could possibly even think about opening a business without intending to make a profit from it. At the time my idealistic pseudo entrepenuer friend said that he got the reading room's name from a quote: "The failure of our educational system is the failure to make of us citizens and philosophers." I thought that the quote was beautiful, but never managed to find attribution for it. Even today, Even the great God of Google doesn't seem to know. Maybe nobody said it. Maybe my friend was as imaginative in his literary attributions or lack thereof as he seems to have been in his business universe. It may be true, and doubtless is, that we could do better in instilling civic virtues. Todays' public school curriculum has tended in recent years more toward pragmatic electronic device training, and business training, and less towards the humanities and science. High school students are still probably playing "Solitaire" on their laptops and I phones in class. Or most likely they have moved on to Snap chat and Facebook, and who knows what else. We use our electronic devices to make imaginary connections and friendships in cyber space, as we used to call it, while our connections to other non bot entities in real blood and bone space time dwindle into faceless anonymity. We send text messages to people who are in the same house we are. We are all aware of this, and whereas some people consider it a problem, most people don't seem to concern themselves with it, or even care, a little. I'm an old man who, ike much of the American population, prefers the company of dogs and cats to people. The real consequences of our current socioogical dysfunction will be felt long after I am dead. The average American has one good friend, and the average American is lucky to have that many friends at the end of his or her life. We could use a few Citizens and Philosophers reading rooms all across America's fruited plain. But probably not before we start reading again, and not before we start talking to each other again, instead of to our machines.

Bequeathing

ELON MUSK, it is extrapolated, will have become the world's first trillionaire by the end of this working day. Rumor has it that he plans to celebrate by putting his dirty, work stained overalls in his washing machine, or taking them to a laundromat, leaving them in the dryer for one of his people to tend to, and repairing to a local pub to stand a few select friends to a round of stout. They're all wealthy, quite. The ultra wealthy tend not to hang out with the unwashed masses,the "hoi polloi". I once mentioned to my father that poor people seem to be more generous than wealthy people, that statistics indicate this, and he agreed "How do you think they got wealthy", he asked, rhetorically. Never lose a friend over a ten dollar bill, he told me. I'm not aware of any charitable foundations underwritten by Musk or for that matter his friend Trump, Surely such things exist. At some point in the eighteen eighties J.D. Rockefeller beame the world's first billionaire. During that time his personal income, from Standard Oil, was estimated to be around one million dollars a day. He was somewhat more generous, and funded education, just as Andrew Carnegie paid for libraries. So did Cornelius Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford, whose eponymous universities bear witness to their philanthropic proclivities. In our present day,, philanthropically, Bill Gates ranks among the best, he having already given away almst all of his formerly vast fortune to various worthy causes. Warren Buffett, who insists tha the has neither the desire nor the intention to establish a legacy in his own name, will bequeath a paltry million dollars or so, maybe less, to each of his children, and donate the rest to charity. Gates and Buffett have teamed up for this purpos, forming the "Bill and Melinda Gates Foudation." My older sister, who has no human children, loves cats and though not especially wealthy is wealthier than I, upper middle class, says that sh eplans to leave her money to the Cornell University School of vetrinary medicine, where ground breaking research is being done, probalby in honor of her beloved bygone pets. (I might suggest another arrangement, but why bother? My house is paid for, I also have no children, I have food on the table, and my cats eat better than I. Sis says that she would love to enjoy the standard of iving of my cats. I decide some years ago to tak eout o reverse mortgage on my house, so I don't have to keep paying the mortgage and can still keep the title in my name. A friend pointed out that this is a complete ripoff. I beg to differ. It would be, if I had children. A recent study revealed that we baby boomers prefer spending our money now, on travel, frivolity, and what not, rather than leaving it to our children. The Gen Exxers, millennials, or whatever generation the scions of baby boomers are, will, it seems, have to get by largely on their own. Wealth and inheritance taxes, so despised by all Americans with any money to speak of, are not currently on the table, but will probably get there within the fairly near future. Goethe said that "We are indeed immortal, made so by the effects of our actions". The atoms which comprise our bodies and brains once circulated through the bloodstream of Julius Caesar. We have existed, in various forms, repeaedly to the point of infinity. Our only true inheritance, ourselves, was forged in the fiery furnaces of dying stars billions of years ago. We, as Carl Sagan said, are star stuff. We have lived as long as the universe has lived, and will die only when the cosmos dies. But it too, we now believe, will be reincarnated, God, for whatever reason, made it hard if not impossible to get rid of anything and everything, including us.

Surviving A Deflating Trump

FIRST, Trump said that the current inflation is a very, very good thing, like, totally terrific. After all, everything is more valuable than it used to be, and how can that not be a good thing? We can all get rich, quick. To his intellectual rescue came some underpaid caregiver, who gently but surely informed the addlepated president that inflation is actually not a very good thing, not at all, and in fact is, like, bad, specially for poor and middle class people, because that means that prices for consumer goods is going up, and that therefore everybody, including the poor,is paying more for everything. Into the fray and to the rescue self inserts Mary Trump, the president's niece, with a doctorate in abnormal psychology, who knows her uncle well, all too well, probably better than she might like to. She confirms our worst suspicions, that of her uncle's narcissistic personality disorder,among his many other mental health maladies. From what she knows, he's been this way his entire life, but with advancing age, left untreated, its getting worse, much worse. Help is available; psychotherapy, oral medication, perhaps a frontal lobotomy or two. A sick person, however, must want and seek help before others can step in, and they must be ready, able, and willing to help themselves. Donald Trump's recent allegation that he is a genius clearly indicates mental illness, the diagnoses being delusions of grandeur, criminal insanity, rampant narcissism, you name it, take your pick. Aside from the fact that true geniuses rarely if ever call themselves "geniuses", Trump, as is evident to everyone even remotely discerning, is clearly not one. Arguably, the word "genius" is meaningless. Compared to slugs and rocks, we are all brilliant. As Goethe said: "When one respects nothing, it is no trick to be brilliant." A couple of times a year Trump's personal physician dutifully pronounces the presidential sex addict and offfender fit as a fiddle, physically, for a man his age. (It might damage the good doctor professionally to do otherwise.). American presidents, like cats, almost always conceal their weaknesses and illnesses. Most people never even knew that FDR was confined to a wheelchair. He was shown on video "walking", bouncing along with a security man on either side, propping him up. Woodrow Wilson lay in bed for two years after having a debiitating stroke. His wife carried on as a behind the scenes first de facto woman president, smooth as silk. Had Lincoln not been shot, he would likely have been dead soon anyway, long before he was due to leave office, his body ravaged by a strange growth related disease. Eisenhower had heart attacks only a few folks knew about. JFK, of course, who really was a near genius, was afflicted by Addison's disease, another weird and rare ailment. We the people really have no need to know the details of Trump's various physical disfunctions. His mental and emotional disabiities are proudly on display, front and center. The problem with Trump, which is everybody's problem, is that not only is he getting noticeably worse, he also has a while longer to be president, and that, in the event of his inability to continue to "serve", his constitutionally mandated replacement is utterly, entirely, unacceptably intolerable. But somehow the ancient Romans survived Nero. Great Britain survived King George III. The Russians made it trhough Ivan the Terrible, even while the troubled tsar clipped the wings of pigeons and tossed them off of the tops of tall buildings. My prescient sister tried to comfort me by assuring me that this too shall pass, that America will survive Trump. I agree, but the question I was and still am afraid to ask is: "In what condition?"

Trump, Disrupting (Finding A True Home)

IN 1969 TEXAS played Arkansas in a December football game in what was then termed "the game of the century". Since then, there have been several such game of the century college football games. More will come.Entering this final week of the season the teams were both undefeated, and were ranked number one and two in the nation. The entier nation watched on televiion. Texas scored a late touchdown and won the game, 15-14. As an avd fourteen year old Arkansas fan I was seriously depressed, aside from the fact that I didn't get to watch the game because at the time I was marching down Main Street in a small town playing my trumpet with my high school band in a Christmas parade, a place where I didn't want to be. At the last moment president Richard M. Nixon decided that he wanted to attend the game in person. The college twon of Fayetteville, Arkansas lacked an airport large enoough to accommodate Air Force One, so Nixon landed iin Little rock and flew in to Fayeteville on a helicopter which landed next to the football stadium, inconveniently for the University, conveniently for Nixon, who cared not a whit about inconveniencing other people. I was excited nonetheless, and all and all I thought the situation was pretty cool, my Razorbacks hitting the big time. I resented missing the game, that is, until I found out the final score. Turns out teh band and parade spared me an even more broken heart, but at the time, I didn't see it that way. My father,a graduate fo he Arkansas law school and avid Razorback fan, didn't think Nixon's behavior was so damned cool. he was angry that Nixon,without prior preparation, had used his power and prestige to not only disrupt local air traffic, ground traffic, the local police and stadiumsecurity, but worst of all, had forced several dozen regular fans out of their usual fifty yard line seats and up into the closely packed quarters of the press box, where thay had to stand behind members of the media, packed together. History never repeats itsef, but it rhymes. Flash forward to 2026. Without adequate planning, into Madison Square Garden strolls Trump like a troll, who just had to watch the Knicks-Spurs game in person. People in position of power, inconveniently ruining the plans for the common people, the little people, the millionaires who should have been there. In a nation wher "all men are created equal", let the big boys stand in line to buy a ticket, like everyone else. I'm pretty sure that my father is turning over in his cremains. He initially attended the University of Missouri law school, but hated it and flunkded out,spending more of his time writing songs and playing keyboard in a college jazz band than hitting the law books. But he transferred to the U.of A. law school, and there he found his true home. He remained closely tied to the school his entire life, and gave money and donated a valuable law library to it. When he died in 1986, I knew what I had to do. I scattered his ashes all over the front lawn of the University of Arkansa law school, where he said he spent the best days of his life. I plead no contest to improperly disposing of ashes, human remains, from an urn. I hope the statute of limitations has run out on that crime. I did my doctoral work at Arkansas, partly because Columbia and Missouri University turned down my application, partly because I inherited my father's love of Arkansas and our beloved Razorbacks. I spent my entire career teaching at Arkansas. Many of us spend a lifetime searching for our true homes, and, if we are fortunate, lord willing and the creek don't rise, we find it, even if it takes a lifetime. Things worked out well for me. People like Trump and Nixon, tragically, deservedly, never seem to find a true home, anywhere.

Becoming Tired

I AM BECOMING Tired of it all; the bitterness, the hatred, the ceaseless acrimony. I refer to the current state of American politics. I for one am willing to set aside my long standing hatred of Trump, and to take a new look,even though there is most certainly a vanishingly small chance that I will find anything new and different, different than the usual pathetic, hateful,snarling liar in chief. I do not expect this new approach to be popular among my fellow anti-Trumpers. Somehow, I'll survive. A good place to start is with the policies of the Trump administration, both foreign and domestic. C Van Woodward, a preeminent historian of the American south (I forget whether the old south or the new, post Civil War south), who began one of his monographs with the sentence "five times during the American experience the celebrated art of compromise has held the union together", paraphrased. When I was in graduate school at a major university, in the doctoral program, eminent historian C. Van Woodward was invited and accepted the invitation to be the guest speaker at te annual end of the year history-fest, or whatever they called it. One of the professors had a big pot luck party in his home, and I recall one of my fellow grad students, going a bit overboard, going from pot to pot,heaping an amount of food on a plate that no three hundred pound athlete nor anyone else could possibly comsume, and handing it to the esteemed scholar.The food eas excellent, and although I had already stuffed myself full of it, I was envious, and would gladly have acepted and devoured the entire plateful. I was not only a lowly graduate student teaching basic freshman history courses to earn my stipend as a doctoral student, I was also an ardent tennis player and exercise enthusiast, in my late twenties, still in possession of a metabolism and appetite worthy of a high school or college athlete... C.Van Woodward was unequal to the task. Although a large man of ample girth who was obviously no stranger to a large plate of food, he seemed overwhelmed, and barely took a bite... Five times...the celebrated art of compromise... His reference was to compromises made at the constitutional convention of 1787, the compromise of 1877 by which the federal occupation of the defeated south was lifted, the Missouri compromise, and so forth. The word "compromise" is apparently lacking not only from our modern political vocabulary and discourse, but also from the American political process itself, at a fundamental level. We now live in an allor nothing world and political climate, or so it seems to this humble observer of contemporary American politics. While all this was happening Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and then as now, the nation was divided, between Reaganites and his opponents, among whom I numbered. Arguably the United States has always been a divided nation, in one way or another; whether or not to separate from Great Britain, whether to join the union or the confederacy, whether to legislate probition, whether to repeal it. The list is long. My strongest memory of a divided nation was the Viet Nam war, when I was a child. When I was twelve years old, in 1967, I had doubts about it, about whether it would ever end, whether the United States could possibly extract from it anything resembling "victory". In January, 1968, when the massive Tet offensive failed miserably and the American military slaughtered the attacking North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, although I had not yet turned thirteen, I saw, or thought I saw, the "handwriting on the wall". The failure of the Tet offensive seemd to deter the North not one iota. The Viet Nam war, essentially dating back to the French acquisition of it, who had colonized the Asian country in 1862, and were trying to keep their hard won "possession" trying to keep the colony for which it had sacrificed much to aquire and retain. World War Two spelled the end of the French owned Viet Nam, and of most of their overseas colonial empire. Overseas empires of major western powers are in decline. National self determination is the trend. And so powerful nations, their international influence waning, are forced to look inward, upon themselves. So it is with the American empire, forced to once again look inward at itself, despite its apparent reluctance to do so. Nietsche said it best: "If thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee." Maybe a bit of fatigue would benefit us all.

Militarizing Religion

THE PENTAGON, I am informed, maintains a list of organized religions which it recognizes as organized religions, an impressive achievement for a five sided edifice. But, I digress. It, the Pentagon, the human beings within the building, most likely a select few people of high military rank, has determined that no fewer than one hundred and eighty of them will be removed from the list. The criteria by which those cast off will be eliminated was not immediately announced; it may be that when a recognized religion dwindles in numbers of votaries below a certain point, it is booted off the list. A military machine, maintaininng a list of religions, and classifying them according to its recognition and approval. Somehow, there is something ironic in that. Ironic, in that, as far as I know, every religion on Earth not only condemns human violence generally and individually, but also, of the organized sort engaged in by military establishments. Might one assume,that according to Christian theology, in order for mankind to live in accordance with the teachings of Christ, that all military institutions, including armies and navies, should not and would not exist if all nations and their citizens fully embraced the teachings of Christ? Arguably, yes. By what reasoning does any military organization involve itself in any religion at all, or acknowledge any? Well, the reasoning is that when most people enter into military service, they bring with thm their religiosity, and do not, and cannot "check it" at the door. But perhaps it would be better if they did or were required to. One possibility would be to establish as official military doctrine that the military is a secular institution, with no formal acknowledgment of any particular religion, or religion in general, but that all military personnel are free to practice their respective religions, off base, and out of uniform? The answer, it would see, is that religiosity is very real, inherent in the human heart, mind, and soul, whether or not one serves in the military, and, again, that nobody suddenly ceases to ambrace or practice one's religion by merely checking it at the door upon entering into military service. Requiring such personal denial of religious faith would further run the risk of demoralizing, in more ways than one, mmilitary service members. In our modern times many people, usually well educated intellectuals, disparage all religion, tending to consider it anachronistic. I am among them. But those of us who share this attitude would do well to remind ourselves that religiosity is a phennomenon fundamental to the human mind, but that it also serves as a solid, firm pillar upon which we support and nurture one of our most fundamental inclinations; to regard ourselves, our lives, and our creator with wonder, reverence, and awe. There may indeed come a time when not only is there no religion in any military institution, and there are no religions, and no military institutions, including huge, well organized militaries, land, sea, and space, permanently in place, ever prepared to engage in organized violence, for reasons which are always justified by those who choose to make war. We appear to be far from perpared to take this culturally evolutionary step foreard. And since we humans remain addicted to our petty, barbaric violence in highly organized form, perhaps we soften the situation a bit by embuing it with the highest form of spiritual nobility at our disposal, our philosophies and our religions.

Civilizing, Slowly

ROBERT HEINLEIN intimated that the degree to which a culture, a society, a civilization is civilized is indicated by the level of cleanliness in its public restrooms. According to that standard, America is in deep doo doo, so to speak. One might suggest other standards of measurement. One possibility is to measure the treatment of the infirm, the poor, tne very young, and the very old. Precisely how do we treat the vulnerable, the least among us? How do we treat animals, including those that we raise in factory farms and slaughter wholesale for our own consumption? Many things can be measured in many different ways. In Islamic countries, cats are considered sacred animals. The prophet Muhammed was in danger of being bitten by a deadly poisonous snake. A cat killed the snake, but not before being bitten itself. The cat died, but not before the prophet stroked its back gently, after which all cats were destined to be beautiful for all time. Henceforth all cats would have a special, priveleged place in Islamic society, to this day. Islamic cities, like all big cities, are filled with stray cats, due to human irresponsibility, and human compassion. But in Musli cities they are not ignored and regarded as nuisances, they are cherished and respected, regarded amost as special heavenly angels. They are cared for by the public in general. Anyone who brings harm to a cat on an Islamic street is in serious trouble. In the USA we don't do quite as well, but are evidently doing a bit bettter. There is a growing movement in America to stop murdering cats systematically because nobody wants to care for them. Why not let the live, free and loose on our streets, having been spayed neutered, and vaccinated? If nothing else, give them a chance to live. Let American culture emulate the nobility of Islamic cat life. At my local senior center I pointed all this out, and for my trouble some self righteous Christian nitwit left on my desk a couple of brochures and pamphlets lecturing me on the unique truth of the Christian faith. Wow. Talk about missing the point. I was talking about culture and cats, not religion, for heaven's sake. We in the United States have a long ways to go, but we can get there. We can become more compassionate towards the vulnerable. We should, arguably, begin to build a better society, one in which stray dogs and cats do not have to get their meals from dumpsters. A society in which all citizens feel not only obligated, but eager to render whatever assistance they can to those in need, including animals. We here in proud, arrogant, individualistic America should, it can be argued, not only do a better job of taking care of each other, but a better job of respecting cats, dogs, and all animals. Anyone who thinks that this is an advocacy for a vegetarian lifestyle is quite correct. Hypocriically, when I dine at the senior center, I eat meat, because meat is served. When in Rome. At home, where I make out the menu, I go vegetarian. Today's meat substitutes are of excellent quality. Albert Einstein was asked to make a contribution to a time capsule, to be opened in one hundred years. His contribution was a message to future generations. Paraphrased, it said: "If you people of my future have not become kinder, more compassionate and tolerant than we were, may the devil take you". Seventy years after Einstein's death, we still have a ways to go. Our progress towards becoming civilized has been, and remains, slow and tortured. But we are trying. Humanity is less violent now than it ever has been in history, hard as that seems to believe. We are evolving upward from savagery, lurching towards civilization. The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled that stray dogs and cats have the same legal protections as pets. California has passed a law prohibiting the barbaric and cruel practice of declawing of cats. Maybe there will come a day when all animals receive proper, compassionate treatment, and American public restrooms are all spiffy clean. But for now, they, like all of us, like our culture and society, could still stand a bit of sprucing up.

Apologizing, and Forgiving Ourselves

I SUFFER from two mental illnesses,my twin towers of disability. Guilt, and paranoia. My office mate in grad school pointed out wisely that both of these are complete bullshit. I agreed then, and I agree now. My sister, who shares and emmpathizes with our shared guilt, suggested that either we were born into a Catholic family without knowing it, or that we both, over the course of our lives, have "evolved" into Catholics, again, without being aware of it. This, aside from the fact that Catholics formalize and ritualize the expunging of guilt has nothing to do with whether they, as human beings, actually experience more of it thn anyone else. I wish I had started, years ago, to keep track of the number of times I have apologized to people. I recall hitting tennis balls with a friend of mine who, although a good athlete, was not a tennis player. I mentioned to him that if he ever decided to actually become a tennis player, working on his game on a daily basis, that he could become quite good at the sport. I was trying to hit the ball down the middle of the court, right to him, setting him up for easy shots. I was so determined to serve tennis balls to him on a silver platter, that I realized this was as effective a method of working on my game as trying to hit the ball to every corner of the court, and that his errant, unpredictable shots were good practice for me as well, making me scramble all over the court chasing down his wild shots. I felt obligated to feed him easy shots, and everytime I failed to do this, I softly said to him from across the court "I'm sorry". I must have apologized to him for hitting too tough a shot...what... a hundred times? Within a half hour of hitting tennis balls I had racked up dozens of "I'm sorries". As an experienced college level player, I felt obligated to feed his tennis balls suitable for beginners. Finally, after enduring several dozen apologies, he had had enough. Would you effing stop apologizing every damned time you make a mistake?! Even he, a tennis beginner, understood that when you play tennis, you make mistakes, no matter who you are. I recall years ago watchig a tennis match on television which involved my favorite player of all time, Bjorn Borg. Borg, of course, is considered by many to be one of the best if not the very best, the "G'O.A.T., as we like to say these days. In the middle of a very important match, (it may have even been Wimbledon), the great Borg swung at a tennis ball, and missed it entirely. No contact, like some rank green beginner. He was slicing his racket strings across the ball at a steep angle, barely grazing the ball, putting hard spin on it, as was his style, and he simply cut one too close. Borg acted as if nothing had happened, no problem, and got right back on his game for the next point, a real pro. I learned a valuable lesson. If he, perhaps the greatest to ever swing a racket, is capable of making such a mistake, (the match was on clay, and the ball took a bad bounce), then why, in the name of Billy Jean King, should I fret and fume over a few bad shots off my racket? One of my best tennis buddies had the same habit,incessantly apologizing for no real reason, and every time we played tennis together, even while we were warming up, the number of needless apologies issued between us must have climbed into the thousands. The answer, as it so often does for me, comes from Goethe, who said: "Since everyone makes mistakes, since even the greatest among us have made mistakes, we have no reason to regard our own errors as inexcusable." I have another friend who says that apologies are bullshit. That I don't agree with. A sincere, appropriate apology is, to my thinking, among the noblest forms of human behavior. Well intentioned people seem to always be their own harshest critics. And although there is much to be admired in this, this determination to ceaselessly seek self improvement, what benefit do we gain by endlessly chastising ourselves, reminding ourselves or our shortcomings, while failing to give ourselves due credit for the nobility of soul we exhibit when we offer, in sincerity, a heartfelt apology? As Goethe said: "Only by errors which really irk us do we advance". We are taught by Jesus to forgive people, without hesitation. Surely we should not hesitate to forgive ourselves.

Time, Running Out

IN THE "That's hard to believe" department, the "where did all the time go?" category, it has now been twenty years since Al Gore's seminal movie "An Inonvenient Truth" was released. Its likely that many people who had been undecided, "on the fence" about this crucial issue, left the theatre convinced that climate change is indeed very real. The more the merrier. You go Al Gore. Who knows? Perhaps someday future historians will write that the late twentieth century American Vice President Al Gore founded the first effective climate movement which, after much struggle and resistance, at long last grew strong enough to tip the balance away from climate denial and towards climate action, and that the resulting pro climate movement succeeded in electing enough political leaders who finally, after years of struggle, convinced corporate leaders and the corporate investment community that there is money to be made by fighting climate change, even more money than can be made by causing it and ignoring it. As climate change becomes worse, and more people are impacted directly by it, the percentage of "believers" increases, and public policy, driven by public opinion, begins to become more sane, more receptive to reality. The Trump administration is pursuing policies intended to essentially subsidize the dying coal industry, incredibly, almost as if having joined a death cult, bent on human extinction. Climate deniers must bend over backwards denying obvious scientific reality, They refuse to accept the simple reality that when you burn coal,coal dust end up suspended in the atmosphere, mainly carbon, which traps more heat in the atmosphere than does the normal nitrogen oxygen air mix. Its strange to think of people rejecting simple scientific reality, because the truth is that the environmental beliefs and policies of progressive political thought are urgently needed now. Meanwhile, good old conservative coal and oil, which are slowly but steadily killing us, both have full conservative unwittingly suicidal support. Thus the Republican party and the American conservative movement underpinning it is a sort of unwitting death cult. But hope remains. Slowly, all too slowly but inexorably, climate denial seems to be waning. Let us so hope and pray. We reject the truth, accurately said Goethe, only because we fear that accepting it will destroy us. Rejecting the truth about global warming and climate change will indeed destroy us, and in fact is already causing human misery and death at an increasingly alarming pace. The situation regarding the slow huan resposne to climate change makes it increasingly urgent and necessary to "rub it in" to all necessary faces, most notably conservative visages in denial. We must accept reality before we can begin in earnest to save ourselves from it. There will soon come a time when no amouont of human assisted healing of the sick and angry planet Earth will restore its fragile paper thin ecosystem to health. Surely we can all see, looking at pictures of blue planet Earth taken from outer space, that the Earth is a tiny speck of miraculous matter in an inconceivably large universe, and, whetehr or not the universe if full of life of barren of it, is suffficiently miraculous to go to any length necessary to save. Even if the universe is full of life, the millions of species on tiny blue Earth are surely unique in all the cosmos, and that if we indeed commit suicide by poisoning the Earth to death, we will have commited the greatest of all possible crimes, by destroying what the universe created, and what it obviously fully intends to exist, perhaps, as Carl Sagan said, as a way of knowing and understanding itself.