non-fiction

Queer Theorem, Shambolic Health Care Zombies, and Cecil B DeMille’s Riding Crop

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from Cecil B DeMille’s Male and Female, featuring Gloria Swanson

I spend much of my waking time reading. Unfortunately, during the school year, a considerable amount of that reading time is spent correcting the inexact writing of adolescents or revisiting worn out texts that I now find tedious, like To Kill a Mockingbird.  However, this spring break I managed not to bring work home with me, so for the last seven days, I’ve been binging on recreational reading.

A shallow person who prefers style to substance, I’m always on the lookout for cool turns-of-phrase or apt imagistic analogies, so rather than sharing any profound truths I ran across this week, I thought share a few stylistic winners.

Early in the week, I read an essay by Samantha Hunt called “Queer Theorem” appearing in the spring 2017 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly. In researching her novel on Nikola Tesla, Hunt discovered  that her subject was quite eccentric. For example, he housed “a large population of New York City’s pigeons in his hotel rooms” despite suffering from “a terrible germ phobia.” In addition, Tesla had fears of “pearl earrings and human hair.” These irrationalities of the scientist who “invented radio” and “our modern AC electrical system” lead Hunt to wonder about the possibility of the existence of “Queer Science.”

Here’s my favorite sentence, one that ends with a delicious inversion of clichés:[1]

Queer physics, queer healing, queer chemistry, and all of it conducted by starving scientists and mad artists.

 

[1] All of the italics are mine and used to highlight the phrases that send me.

Andrew Sullivan, whom I was hooked on for years, had disappeared into silence for too long but recently has resurfaced with a weekly column in New York Magazine. Here’s his description of the debut of the Republican replacement for Obamacare:

In Washington this week, as this shambolic health-care plan staggered, zombielike, into the House, there was a palpable sense that political gravity may, for the first time, be operational around Trump. If he somehow muscles this legislation through, he will be stuck with an avalanche of angry.

What a killer image. How apt.

illustration by WLM3

Staying on politics, perhaps my favorite prose stylist is James Wolcott who in his February Vanity Fair column offers a piece called Trump: The Movie, Coming Soon to a Theater Near You (if Theaters Still Exist).” Here he suggests various directors who might be able to do the subject justice. Here he is harkening back to the beginning of film:

To do Trumpzilla justice, the film should be blustery, spectacular, gold-garish, and neo-pagan, a Circus Maximus Cecil B. DeMille might have whipped up with his riding crop after a fever dream.

Wolcott’s got rhythm, music, and imagination, mixes high and low with aplomb.

Illustration by WLM3

Interestingly enough, Wolcott’s name came up rather unflatteringly in Dennis Perrin’s Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O’ Donoghue, a biography I finished Tuesday. O’Donoghue was perhaps the most influential member of the original National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Perrin calls Wolcott “squeamish” when he describes O’Donoghue as “a master of hip how-do-you-make-a-dead-baby float humor,” which sounds less squeamish to me than matter-of-fact.

Anyway, I thought I’d offer this O’Donoghue bit of bad taste that network censors axed from Weekend Update:

And in Detroit, a handicapped eight-year-old schoolgirl was attacked by a supposedly tame lion while television cameras rolled. The child, a deaf mute, suffered only minor scratches from the lion but, according to doctors, she did break three fingers screaming for help.”

[cue cymbal  crash]

O’Donoghue in center between Aykroyd and Belushi

My last entry comes from Haruki Murakami’s Infinite-Jest-jumbo-sized novel IQ84, which, of course, has been translated from Japanese, and I inherently distrust translations as far as style goes. Nevertheless, this description of a character’s first memory did arrest me for a moment:

The vivid ten-second scene was seared into the wall of his consciousness, his earliest memory in life. Nothing before or after it. It stood out alone, like the steeple of a town visited by a flood, thrusting up above the muddy water.

Okay, enough. The Screaming J’s are playing down at Chico Feo, and the non-literary life is calling me.

1Q84_Murakami

My Open Letter to Teenagers

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Edward Onslow Ford
Applause 1893 (detail of plinth)

Perhaps the least valid complaint coming from you teenagers is that you’re misunderstood.

No, Emerson or Madison or Grayson, lots of us old farts understand you perfectly well, understand that you’re a jambalaya of bubbling hormones and live in a culture of increasing fragmentation.

We understand that you want to break away from the constraints of reading closed heroic couplets and solving quadratic equations. We understand that peer pressure is attempting to crush you into a little container of counter-conformity.

In fact, we understand you better than you understand yourself, because we’re aware of that unconscious fear that you’re repressing: chances are you’re not going to become a ballerina or a pro bowl quarterback; chances are you’re not going to really love your job; not to mention, your looks will fade, your body will thicken, and what faith you have been granted or have summoned will be severely tested.

In other words, ultimately, if you’re lucky, one day you’re going to fall in and out of love, fall in and out of love, perhaps replicate your DNA, and eventually grow old and die.[1]

Your mind refuses to acknowledge your mortality because we’re talking a million years in your perceived future, but the OverYou — the Empire of Your Being, that Universe where unknown to the-lowercase-you armies of white blood cells are attacking a virus and your pituitary gland is spitting out somatotrophins – that OverYou knows life’s story from the inside out, and your adolescent angst is part of the story, as was your birth, as will be the getting old and dying part.

Still, as Richard Wilbur put it in his poem “The Undead,” your pain is real.[2] Perhaps it’s too easy to forget how real. When I was a teenager, my roiling hormonal stew bubbled forth in a severe case of acne; flakes of dandruff trailed from my jive strut like flung confetti. My romantic crushes felt like an earthquake had left me pinned in wreckage.  Everything seemed a matter of life or death.

I did stupid shit — stared into mirrors, cut school, mocked decent people, spent a very un-fun night in the Summerville jail. I would have been so much better off trading in my anger for curiosity, to see everything as art: the unwinding of the formula beneath my #2 lead pencil as poetry and the strict tick-tock of iambs in closed heroic couplets as formulae.

In other words, I would have been so much better off taking a sledgehammer to the claustrophobic acrylic confines of my egocentricity.

This is my advice, teenagers, impossible as it may be. Ditch the loser “lower case you” that you mistakenly perceive as yourself – get over yourself, or better yet, beyond yourself  – and delve into study. Do your homework and while doing so, look for connections. Wonder why all the big beards in the Civil War and the shaved heads in the ‘50s. If a required novel bores you, analyze why that is – is it because Holden’s a whiner or that his slang outdated? Remember it’s the lowercase you Holden doing the talking. Ask yourself what’s going on beneath the surface.[3] At movies, be stingy with your suspension of disbelief, and if the movie succeeds in making you forget about the lowercase you, ask yourself how it managed to bewitch. Not only should you read the footnotes, you should go wander off and get lost in them. Let footnotes lead you astray, not the cool kids beloved of the herd.

Houdini yourself out of Blake’s mind-forged manacles. Find fun in the mundane. In other words, power wash the doors of perception, cleanse them of preconceptions.

If you do so, hypocrisy won’t piss you off nearly as bad, and waiting rooms will become spaces of wonder.

Waiting Room by George Tooker

By the way, you gave find more of my parenting advice: here

[1] Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

(Wallace Stevens, excerpt from “Sunday Morning”)

[2] [. . .]Thinking

Of a thrush cold in the leaves

Who has sung his few summers truly,

Or an old scholar resting his eyes at last,

We cannot be much impressed with vampires,

Colorful though they are;

Nevertheless, their pain is real,

And requires our pity.

(Richard Wilbur, excerpt from “The Undead”)

[3] Hat tip to David Connor Jones

The First Sixty or So Days: A Speed Freaky Presidency

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Too bad Donald Trump’s not bipolar — and I mean that for his own sake and for all of our sakes. No shit!

If he were bipolar, his manic jags would be offset by subterranean descents into despair that would inevitably slow him down. He’d retreat into his gold-plated cocoon and contemplate something besides the immediate, something weightier than big deals and the day-to-day. Who knows, maybe he would ponder the cycle of birth and death, the universality of suffering, or the arc of history rather than the latest Nielsen ratings of The Apprentice.

Here’s something we all can agree on, Democrats and Republicans alike, the POTUS needs to chill.

Let’s face it: the first sixty-six days of his presidency have been fraught with way too much hyperactivity, way too much drama. Not to put too fine of a point on it, so far the Trump Administration has been sort of like a quick cut episode of Sesame Street co-directed by John Walters and David Lynch.

The mere number of newsworthy incidents is overwhelming, exhausting. In early February, John Marshall put it best when he wrote about “the third week of [Trump’s] decades long presidency.”

If you think I’m exaggerating, here’s an abbreviated timeline.

20 January 2017

Looking out over the mall during the oath of office, Trump sees people as far as the eye can see. “Wow, this crowd is tremendous,” he thinks, “it’s got to be the biggest inauguration crowd in history.” After the ceremony, checking Twitter for rave revues of the ceremony, he runs across AP’s aerial photographic comparison of crowd sizes of his versus Obama’s 2008 inauguration. He claims subterfuge, the photos were doctored, etc. A tweet storm ensues.

In other news, flanked by lots of older white people, he signs a flurry of retrogressive executive orders.

He lies about the weather.

Looks as if 1017 could use a combover (image source Fortune magazine)

21 January 2017

Sean Spicer, press secretary, debuts as a spineless disseminator of demonstratively false statements, reviving the role of Baghdad Bob for a reluctant Washington press corps.

Speaking of crowds, 4, 000,000 people worldwide, including 500, 000 in DC, march in protest of the President of the United States. Bad!

Meanwhile, Trump travels to CIA headquarters and delivers a brazen political speech in front of a memorial for fallen CIA heroes, which, not surprisingly, fails to endear him to those same folks he had earlier in the campaign called Nazis.

23 January 2017

Makes delusional claim of thousands illegally voting to rob him of the popular vote victory. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, both Democratic and Republican leaders debunk the claim.

24 January 2017

Signs executive orders restarting construction of the Dakota pipeline and mandating that only domestic steel be used in its construction.

25 January 2017

Issues an executive order to begin construction of a wall on the US/ Mexican border. Doesn’t answer my tweet suggesting we create signage for the wall that states, ‘Malos hombres y hombrettes no son bienvenidos.”

27 January 2017

At the Pentagon signs the Bannon/Miller “crafted” executive order[1] suspending the Refugee Admissions Program for seven predominantly Muslim countries with whom he doesn’t do business.

29 January 2017

Authorizes the Yakla raid in Yemen that results in the deaths of Navy Seal Ryan Owens, fourteen members of Al-Qaeda, and “between 16-59 Yemeni or other nationality civilian casualties.”[2] Trump explains away the less than ideal outcome: “[The generals] came to me, they explained what they wanted to do ― the generals ― who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”[3]

30 January 2017

Fires acting Attorney General Sally Yates for not enforcing the “Muslim refugee ban.”

31 January 2017

Nominates Neal Gorsuch to replace Merrick Garland Antonin Scalia. Trump doesn’t make an ass out of himself, and his behavior is declared “Presidential” by Fake News outlet CNN.

1 February 2017

Discusses refugee policy with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbill.[4] It’s not clear who slammed the phone down on whom. At any rate, Un-Fake News site Wikipedia refers to the call as “truncated.”

2 February 2017

At the National Prayer Breakfast facetiously asks attendees to beseech the Lord to help Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sagging ratings of The Apprentice. The joke goes over like a delivery of catered ham sandwiches to a Bar Mitzvah reception.

3 February 2017

Judge James Robart of the Ninth Circuit Court blocks Trump’s “Muslim Ban” order. Trump rails against judiciary. Supreme Court nominee Gorsusch calls the outburst “troubling.”

9 February 2017

Federal appeals panel unanimously rejects Trump appeal to reinstate the travel ban from those seven predominately countries with whom he doesn’t do business. Although the ban’s hasty implementation had been predicated on national security, the Administration decides to take a couple of extra weeks to get the damned thing right.

11 February 2017

Plays golf at the Winter, Southern Every Weekend White House (aka Mar-a-Lago) with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe where they discuss (in descending order) the “future of the world, the future of the region, the future of Japan, and the future of the United States.”

During a luncheon in the public dining area of the resort, Trump learns that North Korea has test-launched a missile.

According to Fake-News source CNN:

As Mar-a-Lago’s wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning[5] in the background, Trump and Abe’s evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.

13 February 2017

Absent-minded “Lock-Her-Up” cheerleader General Michael Flynn resigns after forgetting to mention that he did after all have contact with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislvak even though he had VP Mike Pence swear up and down to the American people that he hadn’t. Later it would also come out that the absent-minded general also forgot to mention he had registered as a foreign agent for Turkey.

15 February 2017

Reince Priebus asks FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to put the kibosh the story that Trump associates have “been in regular communication with Russian agents.”

16 February 2017

In marathon news conference Trump brands the media as “the enemy,” disavows any contact of his people with Russian agents, and declares that the official colors of the American flag are red, white, and tangerine. Repeatedly uses the term “fake news.”[6]

18 February 2017

Holds a “campaign style” rube rally in Melbourne, Florida, to raise his testosterone levels.

28 February 2017

Buzz Feed releases British intelligence agent Christopher Steele’s dossier on Trump, which contains titillating tidbits like Trump paid a prostitute to urinate on a bed Obama and Michelle had slept in, but also claims that Trump’s associates had “regular contact with Russian agents.”

Trump gives his first state of the union address, a speech lauded as “presidential” by Washington Post Fake News critic Chris Cilllizza.

In that speech, Trump suggests that dead Navy Seal Ryan Owens is “happy” because bringing his widow out during the address got Trump the longest ovation of the evening.

1 March 2017

DOJ confirms that Attorney General Jeff Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign.

What, me worry?

2 March 2017

White House confirms that powerful don-in-law[7] Jared Kushner also met with – guess who — Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

4 March 2017

Unsupervised at the Every Weekend White House, Trump accuses “sick” President Obama of wiretapping his campaign.

8 March 2017

Paul Ryan, who has been dreaming off punishing poor people since drinking out of a keg at U of Miami, Ohio, begins drafting a replacement bill for Obamacare.

10 March 2017

Trump intimate Roger Stone admits he’s had contact with nefarious Russian hacker Grucifer 2.0.

13 March 2017

White House asks for delay in providing evidence for claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. 

14 March 2017

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Deven Nunes reports no evidence of Trump Tower wiretapping.

15 March 2017

Rube rally in Nashville to raise testosterone levels.

16 March 2017

Baghdad Bob sound-alike Sean Spicer accuses the British Spy agency of colluding with Obama to spy on Trump.

British upper lips not all that stiff upon hearing the accusation. 

17 March 2017

Trump celebrates St. Paddy’s day by refusing to shake German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hand.

18 March 2018

Golf at the Every Weekend White House.

20 March 2017

At House Intelligence Committee Hearing FBI Director Comey debunks Obama wiretap accusation; NSA Adm. Mike Rogers debunks charge that US asked British intelligence to spy on Trump. Comey spills the beans that indeed there is a criminal investigation of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to undermine the US election.

Sean Spicer says the Committee Hearing has established there has been no coordination between the Russians and the Trump campaign. Stands by wiretapping allegation.

* * *

Okay, I’m done. Just let me add that in two months time, the Trump Presidency has is already embroiled in a scandal that makes Teapot Dome look like a parking infraction.

I say, let’s get the POTUS a scrip for some downers.

 

[1] The shoddiness of the document brings to mind my least favorite teacher comment ever on my writing: “Obviously a rush job and not a particularly clever one at that.” George Geckle, PhD. Ouch!

[2] Wikipedia (the lazy bloggers go-to info source)

[3] Note they, not we.

[4] Not to be confused with the PG Wodehouse character of the same name.

[5] I’m dying to know what he was crooning. “Feelings?” “I Gotta Be Me?” “Horst-Wessel-Lied?”

[6] By the way, I slipped some real fake news in that paragraph. Can you find it?

[7] Not a typo

The Herculean Task of Amassing and Cataloging Trump’s Character Flaws

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Identifying and classifying the myriad character flaws of Donald J Trump would be a labor worthy of that grand old-fashioned adjective Herculean.

Where would you begin? Would you merely just start randomly listing his flaws as they came to mind?

Mendacity, impulsivity, avarice, hypersensitivity, vengefulness, tastelessness . . .

Already I’m exhausted, but if the catalogue were to reach its epic end, then you would need to classify the flaws; otherwise, the list would be merely be a reams-long enumeration of pejorative words, a document as interesting to read as a newspaper’s legal notices.

We do have, thanks to Dante Alighieri, a time-honored classification system of human frailties based on the 7 Deadly sins. Perhaps one might do less with more by adapting Dante’s system and plug selections from the Himalayan heap of Trump’s character flaws into Dante’s hierarchies rather than creating an exhaustive (and exhausting) list.

Dante’s system, of course, is not itself ideal. For example, most of us have committed multiple sins throughout our lives. Is your place in the Inferno determined by a predominance of one sin over another? Do you designate Rush Limbaugh as predominately gluttonous or avaricious?

Here, we also run across another problem pointed out by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: sins tend to overlap and feed off each other:

From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

No, Dante won’t do.

Perhaps it would be more fruitful to contemplate how a person who brags about “grabbing pussies” (lust) and gorges on so much fast food that his ass has reached Kardashian proportions (gluttony), who is too lazy (sloth) to oversee a smooth transition into the most powerful office in the world and leaves it to Paul Ryan to come up with a health care plan rather than come up with his own, who is so greedy (avarice) that he stiffs contractors and would rather violate the emolument clause than divest from his financial empire, how a person who is constantly raging (anger) at perceived enemies, who so envies (covetousness) the crowd size of his predecessor’s Inauguration that he squanders his first week of his presidency making a fool out of himself for engaging in easily refuted lying, how a person whose overweening pride (hubris) makes Milton’s Satan and Macbeth and Lear seem like the Dalai Lama in comparison, how a person like Donald Trump could ever be elected President of the United States of America.

trump-fat-2jpg

And so what have I left out? His tastelessness. His residency in Trump Tower out Liberaces Liberace in its rococo extravagance. Imagine spending a weekend locked in Trump’s glittering bordello (see top picture) without flinging yourself out one of its windows?

Liberace’s relatively understated master bedroom

Anyway, as the speaker in Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” puts it, “I’m no hero. That’s understood,” so I leave it to someone else to take on the task of providing us with a comprehensive list of Trump’s character flaws.

 

Tales of Bad Parenting

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As my regular readers know, I possess an incredibly delicate, depression-prone sensibility. I find large “family friendly” crowds especially nerve-wracking, particularly if those families come from “all walks of life.” I can handle “non-family friendly” gatherings just fine. Heavy metal rock concerts, ecstasy-fueled raves, St. Patrick Day’s pub-crawls, and violent protests don’t bother me a whit; however, a day trip to somewhere like Six Flags hurls me headlong into Sylvia-Plath-like pits of deep despair.

We’re talking Mariana Trench, Dante’s Malebolgia, i.e., super subterranean levels of depression.

Imagine my horror, then, when one Saturday twenty years ago around noon, my 8th grade son Harrison asked if I would take him and his 6th grade brother Ned to the Coastal Carolina Fair.

“It’s the very last day,” he added.

Mental montage:

 

We were driving on Ashley Avenue in the small beach community where we live.[1] I looked over at my wife Judy whose expression was one that you might encounter if you had just informed someone that she was being sequestered for jury duty for a Gambino brother trial in Newark.

These words came out of my mouth: “You boys ever hear of Playboy magazine?”

They answered in the affirmative.

“Well, what if instead of taking you to the fair, I bought you a copy of Playboy magazine instead?

“You’re kidding, “ Harrison said, the glee in his voice approaching bicycle-under-the X-mas-tree levels.

“I’m absolutely serious,” I said. “By the time we return home, get ready, battle the bumper-to-bumper traffic, find a godforsaken place to park, trudge the five miles to the entrance, we’ll all be exhausted.”

“You’re sure you’re not kidding?”

“Watch me.”

What he left unsaid, but it registered loud and clear: “You’re the greatest dad in the world!”

So we pulled into Bert’s Market, and I found the magazine rack and secured the current issue of Playboy, which featured the German figure skater Katrina Witt.[2] The transaction was made, the product sheathed in a brown paper bag.

Once we returned home, the boys scampered into the room and slammed the door.

The next day, while they were out skateboarding, I slinked into the room with the intention of checking out the issue myself, but they had hidden it, as if it were contraband.

Finally, I had to ask them outright if they minded if I took a look at it. I promised to give it back.

[1] Let me hasten to add that despite the tale that is to follow, our two sons have managed to graduate from college (one has a masters in linguistics, the other makes 30K more than his old man who has 31 years of teaching the same gig). In other words, they no longer live with us.

[2] People often ask why both boys majored in German. It just occurred to me that this event might have played a role.

 

Othello, the Musical Study Aid

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othello_micromosaic

Look, boys and girls.  I know you’ve given up reading Shakespeare in its unvarnished King James glory.  I’ve seen clandestine copies of No Fear Shakespeare with its facing page of soulless translation next to “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”  Most of you don’t even go that far but instead check out  Sparknotes or CliffsNotes or Shmoop.  Let’s face it, no matter how faux hip they try to make the summaries sound, they’re still tedious.

Well, I have something better. Here’s a sneak peak of my summary of Othello.  The cool thing is it’s a song.  You just click the arrow below and in under two minutes you get all you need to know about the play.

Check out this free preview:

Sung to the tune of “Volare” or you can click below and hear it sung in the author’s gorgeous coastal South Carolina baritone.

 

Othello, woe, woe

Lascivious Mo-or.

 

He strangled Desdemona

For sleeping with another fell-a.

 

That dark-hearted Dago[1]

Whose name was Iago

He poisoned the pliant Moor’s ear.

He told him his sweetie

Had been indiscrete

With someone he once held so dear.

 

Othello, woe woe

Lascivious, Mo-or.

 

The climax comes in Act III

Thanks to a mislaid hanky.

Susceptible to a deadly sin,

The green-eyed monster does the Moor in.

 

He stabs the circumcised dog thus,

Ending the entire ruckus.

 

A corpse-strewn bed, not okay,

So villainous Iago dragged away

 

To face some badass torture

For creating such a tragic rupture

 

Othello, woe, woe,

Lascivious Mo-or . . .

 

 

 

[1] To my Italian friends: sorry, but Iago has very few rhymes.

Wesley’s Inferno, Canto 1

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wesley-canto-1

 

 

In the second month of my 64th year,

I awakened in an all but abandoned

strip shopping center

 

where a scrawny hound

limped up and growled

mouth-foaming, rabid.

 

Suddenly, a screech —  an owl?

The hound turned around,

so I stepped away leaden-legged, slowly

 

away, inching straight ahead

with great effort, like in a nightmare,

petrified with dread.

 

Looking up, I noticed the car,

a cab, parked in the shadow

of a dumpster. “Sir! –“

 

“Shhhh, chill, thyself,” the driver said, “whoa.”

“Let me introduce myself.

I’m pretty sure you know

 

“The name Catullus. I’m here to help,

to be your guide,

but sushssssssssh, you whelp,

 

“you’ll awaken the dead

with that loud mouth.

C’mon, man, don’t be scared,

 

“Hop in. We’ll head south,

tour the hellscape,

the land of the uncouth.”

 

Click here for Canto 2.

 

poemsofcaiusvale01catuiala

The Physiognomy of Trump’s Inner Circle

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looking_wrong_way_900x506

Over her lifetime, my mother, bless her soul, accumulated an abundance of spurious wisdom based on a combination of unscientific observation and intuition. Sometimes she’d have forebodings and forbid me from doing rather pedestrian things like riding my bike home from the gas station where a flat tire had been patched. “No, I just have this awful, awful feeling,” she’d say. “Something’s bad’s going to happen if you ride that bike.” In other words, I was doomed to be flattened by an 18-wheeler or smack into a tree and spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. So we’d cram the bike in the back seat and drive on home.

Undoubtedly, her sense of doom has contributed to my rather pessimistic view of the world. You know, irrational thoughts like thinking your team’s going to lose the Super Bowl even though they’ve racked up in the third quarter an insurmountable lead the likes of which has never been overcome in a half-century of Super Bowls.

Sometimes, though, I think Mama did hit the mark with her unscientific conclusions — for example, her contention that time etches people’s ultimate personalities onto their faces by their habitually assuming certain telltale expressions, e.g., the angry, scowling malcontent’s mouth carving a perpetual frown, the bland sweet matron’s pleasant expression blanking away wrinkles —  the equivalent of the warning I received as a young child that my “face was going to stick like that” if I kept making grotesque faces.

[Warning: Neck-breaking Segue]

Just for the hell of it let’s take my mother’s theory and apply it to President Trump’s closest advisors.

Ladies, first. Kellyanne Conway.

Okay, I know I’m pulling a Trump here, criticizing a woman’s looks, but I’m not saying Kellyanne’s unattractive, just that she looks mean.  She’s a brittle-looking 49 to me, and no doubt being the target of so much ridicule will only harden her more, turning sinister those ersatz smiles aimed at the cameras of MSNBC.  Perhaps once she possessed a “sunny disposition” but something has soured it.  Working for Trump can’t be good for your soul.

To me she looks like she could be the illegitimate daughter of Phyllis Diller, though without Diller’s self-deprecating wit – a commodity that seems to be lacking across the board among Trump and his staff.

phyllis-conway

I’d cast Kellyanne as the wicked stepmother in the Snow Whites of New Jersey.

As far as looks go, I think Steve Bannon comes off as the coolest.  I like the way his abundant whipped-back hair sometimes falls in his eyes.  He’d, make a great character in a Tennessee Williams play, the rugged terrain of his face blotted with gin-blossoms, his eyes puffy, his spinal fluid pumping white supremacy.

 

CLEVELAND, OH - JULY 20: Stephen K. Bannon looks at his computer to see who will be the next caller he will talk to while hosting Brietbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot at Quicken Loans Arena on July 20, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

Banner’s the absolute opposite of Mitt Romney – disheveled, disorganized, paunchy, atheistic, hungover.*  Sure, he’s evil, but if I had to have 10 beers with one of these dark apostles, he’s be the one I’d choose.

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Would definitely choose him over Steven Miller.  I don’t know a thing about Steven Miller, who supposedly works hand on hand with Bannon, but certainly he and Nosterafu share a common ancestor.  His vulture-like demeanor precludes the possibility of empathy.

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Then there’s Reince Preibus.

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I predict he’ll age in warp speed like Abe Lincoln.  Like, I say, working for Trump’s toxic.

*Full disclosure:  *Psychologically it could be that I’m projecting my own self-description on Bannon the way that Trump kept calling Hillary crooked.

Why Paul Ryan Should Read Flannery O’Connor

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

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“As far as I am concerned,” she said and glared at him fiercely, Christ was just another D.P.”

Mrs. May to Father Flynn in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”

 

The most heartbreaking of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories, “The Displaced Person,” seems particularly poignant given the ban on Muslim refugees instated last weekend.[1] Set right after WW2, the story dramatizes the attempted assimilation of a Polish refugee into bigoted backwoods Georgia.

As David Griffith points out in his excellent essay on the story in The Paris Review:

O’Connor takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between 1948 and 1952, permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand European refugees into the United States. President Truman signed the bill with “very great reluctance” for what he saw as its discriminatory policy toward Jews and Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be eligible, one must have entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before December 22, 1945, which, according to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of the remaining Jewish people displaced by the war. Similarly excluded were the many Catholics who’d fled their largely Communist countries after the December 22 deadline.

“The bad points of the bill are numerous,” Truman wrote. “Together they form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice.” He called the decision to enforce the December 1945 deadline “inexplicable, except upon the abhorrent ground of intolerance.”

In the story, O’Connor’s displaced person’s work ethic so far exceeds that of the slothful, under-compensated blacks and whites who work on Mrs. May’s farm that he threatens their livelihoods. Worse than that, he violates Southern taboo of racial purity when tries to contract a marriage between a black field hand and his young Polish cousin languishing in a camp back home.

When an outraged Mrs. May confronts Mr. Guizac about the proposed interracial marriage — “You would bring [that] poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger” — he says quite sensibly, “She no care black [. . .] She in camp three year.”

In the end, xenophobia and bigotry triumph over charity as the displaced person – the one good man to be found in that collection called A Good Man Is Hard to Find – is done away with.

She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze in collusion forever, and she heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone.

* * *

Obviously, refugees rank as some of the planet’s most vulnerable souls, driven from their homelands — from their familiar cultures — into alien worlds of gibberish, incomprehensible mores, and worse.

The refugees turned away this weekend had undergone as much as 48 months of vetting from several agencies and pose virtually no terrorism threat whatsoever. No one from the banned countries has ever committed a terrorist attack on US soil – unlike citizens from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Pakistan, who weren’t included in the ban, people from countries where Trump has business interests.

Imagine the refugees’ heartache after so much suffering, boarding a plane headed for their dreamed of destination, only to be turned away and sent on a long, long flight back to perdition.

Of course, it’s not surprising that the sadist Trump would shatter the hopes of the dispossessed to score political points. After all, as many have pointed out, he’s cruel, hosted a reality TV show in which he lovingly embraced the chance to humiliate people with the words “you’re fired.” No one would expect him to take refugees’ plights to heart.

On the other hand, you might think Paul Ryan, who embraces his Catholicism the way Steve Bannon does his booze, would take Jesus’s words more to heart. But Ryan has come out fully supporting the ban.

I’ll let Jesus – the ultimate Displaced Person – have the last say:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 5:3)
Blessed are those who mourn: for they will be comforted. (5:4)
Blessed are the meek: for they will inherit the earth. (5:5)
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: for they will be filled. (5:6)
Blessed are the merciful: for they will be shown mercy. (5:7)
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they will see God. (5:8)
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they will be called children of God. (5:9)
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (5:10)
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. .5:11-12

Oh, by the way, what was the percentage of evangelists’ votes Trump garnered?

[1] The Trump’s claim that it’s not a ban on Muslims rings hollow when the administration offers exemptions to Christians and Jews.

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