Notebooks 2020

Last night’s dream, a long, tangled embrace, me and the leader of the free world. We continued on, wrapped in each other’s arms, although people began to wander through the office.

In the next scene, beneath a Central Park bridge over pedestrian walkway, he offered me a job: bridgetender, or something low level like that.

I said, “No, thanks. That won’t be necessary,” surprised at the gesture, but just grateful for our moments of what felt like compassion and human caring.

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Later in the morning, I saw this in The Atlantic: The Very Ordinary Indifference to the Common Good, by Brooke Harrington. The following is an excerpt (italics added):

President Donald Trump is supposedly a billionaire, but the $750 that he paid in income taxes in the first year of his term doesn’t begin to cover his fair share of society’s expenses—much less the cost of government lawyers defending his personal and political interests or the health-care bills from the coronavirus outbreak within his own White House. But what The New York Times revealed in its recent reporting on Trump’s tax returns was not just one man’s refusal of his fiscal obligations. Those returns, along with Trump’s whole approach to governing, are a concrete manifestation of a broader and more troubling phenomenon: an elite insurgency in which wealthy, well-connected people around the world stiff the societies that gave them success. Observing Trump’s open defiance of the law and rejection of accountability, many critics have attributed the pattern to the quirks of Trump’s individual psychology. But they have missed the larger picture: This president is an entirely ordinary member of a global elite whose members believe that rules are for chumps.

I have spent more than a dozen years studying the planet’s wealthiest people and the experts who create offshore trusts, foundations, and other entities on their behalf. The clearest window into this world remains the 2016 disclosure of more than 40 years’ worth of data from a law firm, based in Panama City, that helped clients stash wealth outside their home country. That story, known as the Panama Papers, exposed a sprawling web of tax evasion, money laundering, and other financial misdeeds by the global elite. Also exposed was a brazen contempt for the law by many officials—including heads of state and ministers of justice and finance—who were empowered to uphold it.

Trump’s name came up more than 3,500 times in the documents; although he was not implicated in any wrongdoing, many of his customers, business partners, and other associates were. The Panama Papers, still the largest data leak in history, sketched a picture of elites in revolt: a growing refusal of obligation to the societies that had allowed them to become wealthy and powerful. That point was underscored 19 months later by the Paradise Papers, another offshore leak involving prominent figures as varied as Queen Elizabeth II and Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross. Both leaks showed that the offshore economy had produced something dangerous to the rest of us: a noblesse without the oblige. They also showed that the phenomenon was global.

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So,

He doesn’t care about you farmer in wheat field, he doesn’t care about you mother with child, he doesn’t care about you, assembly line worker, he doesn’t care about you everyday people.

But’s who going to stop him? So far, nobody can, and that, friends, is the plan.

Turn everything around,  blame others for what you yourself do (just like his lawyer Roy Cohn did).

Because you have money, those who envy, respect,  what they should reject.

I know you say  you grow uneasy  when you are alone.

After fifteen minutes, you give yourself an electric shock just to make something happen.

The Beats were not all saints and that was the point, or could have been, depending on your point of view, if you were there or weren’t you might have nostalgia, but now it’s up to Melody to blow the whistle, the cork, or the joint, her green coat of paint is like ice, oh, the mighty were moaned, even tough guys who say, “I don’t like thinking about it, just wanna ride, baby,” shit, shoot it, would rather pretend that my world has friends, Frankie, mute witness to boardwalk silence on brick-walled streets, child of man, don’t read anything into this, whose love knows no end, even though there was never any proof, couldn’t hit it, because the staircase leads up, or so say the gatekeepers, who needs ‘em, maybe that is a myth, like a toothache, who can escape but deathbed idiots, and soap deliverers say the A-Bomb made it safe to be me, but it matters to you, the multitudes, the nausea, in a parking lot next to the hall of mirrors where the Girl Scouts will find you while the karma train pulls into the station, like in the movie, I don’t need no doctor, like cleaning a fish tank, treason is for saps, no lyrics need apply, there’s no end to it, wreck of existence stupidity.

Notebook Nov. 2017-Feb. 2018 (excerpt edited for Tumblr, 9/1/2020)

“…the minute you let other people start to define you, you are giving away your power.”—pg. 78 All These Wonders.

(Of course, other people are always evaluating, discriminating and judging. That’s what we humans do.)

“Caffeine and Kilos”—bumper sticker on an SUV

“DAD make your son a respectful boyfriend.”—billboard

So much of what I do is to undervalue what I do. The teacher said,” Do you know you give your power away?” That was news to me then, but I understand it better now. Why didn’t my therapist tell me that forty years ago? —12/21/17

“Hustle beats talent when talent doesn’t hustle.”—Ira Grossman (guitarist), 12/22/17

“FREE THE NUNS FROM THE CONVENT”—bumper sticker

I do understand why western man claims manifest destiny. And I do understand why we humans feel we must continue to conquer and dominate nature. And, I can also see why our thoughts turn to environmental cataclysm, tribal warfare and militias. It’s always a scramble for resources. So, what’s going to happen when the balance is tipped and human beings are scared and on the run? Your high-performance car will get you there faster—BUT ARE YOU READY?!—12/22/17, in the car in traffic…

Dunning-Kruger Effect (translation): “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” --Shakespeare

“The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity.”—Yeats

Below are ten environmental rollbacks “completed” by the Trump administration. These rollbacks--and eighty more, in various forms--were listed in a New York Times article titled: The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List. (July 15, 2020)

While those who support Trump would claim that he is keeping his promises to them, I would ask: At what price to the people and at what price to the earth?

These ten rollbacks--along with all the other havoc being wreaked on our democracy--are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Come November, Trump must fall.

AND--among many other things--the U.S. needs to rejoin the Paris Agreement.

*****

Air pollution and emissions

Completed

1. Weakened Obama-era fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for passenger cars and light trucks.

E.P.A. and Transportation Department | Read more »

2. Revoked California’s power to set stricter tailpipe emissions standards than the federal government.

E.P.A. |

3. Withdrew the legal justification for an Obama-era rule that limited mercury emissions from coal power plants.

E.P.A. | 

4. Replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have set strict limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, with a new version that would let states set their own rules.

Executive Order; E.P.A. | 

5. Canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions.

E.P.A. | 

6. Revised and partially repealed an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, including intentional venting and flaring from drilling operations.

Interior Department | 

7. Loosened a Clinton-era rule designed to limit toxic emissions from major industrial polluters.

E.P.A. | 

8. Revised a program designed to safeguard communities from increases in pollution from new power plants to make it easier for facilities to avoid emissions regulations.

E.P.A. | 

9. Amended rules that govern how refineries monitor pollution in surrounding communities.

E.P.A. | 

10. Weakened an Obama-era rule meant to reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas.

From the City Lights Bookstore:

We're celebrating Charles Bukowski's 100th birthday this week. He was born on August 16th, 1920 in Andernach, Germany. 

The relationship between City Lights and Charles Bukowski goes back almost 50 years, to 1972, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Buk’s unwieldy classic Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, later split into two volumes: The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and Tales of Ordinary Madness. City Lights subsequently sponsored his notorious beer-swilling reading in San Francisco in September ’72 (watch below!) [to do so, go to the City Lights website!] and the following year reissued his 1969 volume of newspaper columns, Notes of a Dirty Old Man. These volumes spread Bukowski’s garrulous reputation across the world. Did that stop him from making gratuitous digs at Ferlinghetti, from ridiculing everyone from Ginsberg to Corso to McClure? Of course not! Some of these grumblings and rantings, and a great deal else, can be found in our series of posthumous uncollected Bukowski volumes, edited by David Stephen Calonne: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (2008), Absence of the Hero (2010), More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (2011), The Bell Tolls for No One (2015), and The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018).

*****

To celebrate, here are some of the things I copied out a couple of years ago from The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way—Charles Bukowski

“LM: Who do you like?

BUK: “Oh, I like Celine, early Hemingway, Dostoevsky, early Gorki short stories. I like Jeffers, that’s about it.”—pg. 267

“…I kind of liked college…people hated me—that’s where I first got the taste, that being hated is kind of nice.”

“It’s only the next line, this line that’s coming as the typewriter spins, that’s the magic, that’s the roaring, that’s the beauty. It’s the only thing that beats death.”—pg. 287

“…But I know death is at my elbow. But I don’t mind. I never much cared for the game. And when it comes to take me out, I won’t be sad. I’ve had a good strong run. Each line that I write now is just more laughter against the impossible.”—pg. 291

On roads leading away from the interstate, there were shadowed beige rows of hotels with no one in them, weed covered open fields, one tired gas station. 

The cluster of buildings was mostly deserted, but it looked like a place where people might have once stayed overnight, maybe find a restaurant, take the kids to the outdoor pool.

“He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, that in all of us there is a longing to do what’s right, that in all of us there is a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. So many of us lose that sense. It’s taught out of us. We start feeling as if, in fact, that we can’t afford to extend kindness or decency to other people. That we’re better off if we are above other people and looking down on them, and so often that’s encouraged in our culture. But John always saw the best in us. And he never gave up, and never stopped speaking out because he saw the best in us. He believed in us even when we didn’t believe in ourselves.”

Time: 1970s Place: Somerville, MA Subject: ice cream

Painting houses New England summer clapboards fire engine red, semi-gloss white trim, purple gingerbread details, lean ladders, buckets, sunburn flowing long hair crazy, smiling, free.

Paid by the week, having fun, then piling into R.C.’s ‘67 canary yellow Chev wagon, to Steve’s --early American ice cream pioneer-- in Davis Square, Somerville, yes, working class summer-ville --next to Cambridge, sacred destination of youth-- where there might be a line going down the street to get in, if so, we would join it, waiting to be soon inside, a cool place of mismatched people, purple tables and orange chairs, upright piano, handmade choices: flavors and “mix-ins” --like M&M’s, Heath Bars (crunched) and cookies-- and other ingredients I can’t recall, choices, so many choices, and these would be, with spatula wielding server people, folded, blended, placed in cups, then topped with impossible emotionally satisfying things, like uncommonly good hot fudge, or maybe save your soul-type whipped cream.

“Unlike 20th-century authoritarianism, this 21st-century, postmodern influence campaign does not require the creation of a total police state. Nor does it require complete control of information, or mass arrests. It can be carried out, instead, with a few media outlets and a few carefully targeted arrests.”

--excerpt from The Atlantic: Trump is Putting On a Show in Portland, by Anne Applebaum, July 23, 2020

You must put an end to what you do not understand-- and all you pretend to understand is loyalty and the art of creating chaos.

You must repeat your dead Rose Garden genocide, refusing to hear the cries, of those who stand against you, casting them as violent extremists in your attempt to generate good ratings and the necessary political capital to “win” again-- forget the body count-- while those in denial re-tweet your phony display of self-righteous fervor while you subvert the Constitution, declare law and order, without any adherence to the rule of law yourself.

They are not our sons born of freedom and free enterprise! They are others, not like us militants, troublemakers!

Captured and interrogated, they can be bludgeoned into admitting anything, because you are on the right side of the battle for power and control.

Protect the money! The final solution: demoralize demonize and destabilize, outperform them with your rallying cry: This country is one big candy store.

Today, the demolition crew driving yellow bulldozers and backhoes was at work destroying an aging temple of escapism, a sacred palace along the highway, where I had my baptism in laughter, bliss, beauty and horror.

I was the wide-eyed young innocent, lost in rows of plush red seats, cool air around me carrying the sweet aroma  of buttered popcorn.

Armed with Milk Duds, or Jordan Almonds, and feasting on black and white or Technicolor scenes, I could wander, and breath, in this chilled land of dreams.

Stop them, I thought, they’re taking away part of me.

What ever happened to the expression "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?

It  feels indulgent, this morning air- so silky, so wet, so still.

I imagine  myself as another person. I live in  a different town. And I do different things. Then, I look in the mirror.

Describing his perspective as an outsider, or someone who people viewed as being “out of step”, writer, reporter and jazz critic Nat Hentoff said that “When you are out of step, you don’t have to worry about being in step. And, as a result, you have a pretty alert eye and ear for what political correctness, as we now call it, can do to make people so diminished inside their own selves and their own principles--if they have any.”

COVID-19 is re-configuring life on Earth. Because this global threat to the continuation of human life on our planet is an agent of change. And change can save the planet…if we heed what COVID-19 is telling us.

COVID-19—disrupter that it is—is dramatically re-focusing our attention. Now almost everything seems to be in sharper focus. There are a multitude of issues in the spotlight.  Issues of race and economic inequality, environmental destruction, climate-related crises, animal extinctions, food system imbalances, poor governance, lack of individual responsibility, and civil unrest.

Along with death and human suffering, the virus is bringing about a widespread re-evaluation of the very foundations the world’s civilizations were built on. The conclusion: our foundations need work.

While the economy crumbles, it is too easy to dismiss these issues and insist that we must get back to business as usual. But that doesn’t seem to be the point.  We are at an historic interval, and it is a good time to question our assumptions. It is also a time to reflect on our most basic attitudes, values, and beliefs—and think about how we can change the course of civilization. Before it is too late.

“This holiday extols our way of life.This is absolutely an emphasis of the exact American values which are under question, and are under question because they are not holding up to reality. The curtain’s been pulled back. And people feel like a lot of this is not working anymore.”

--Daryl R. Van Tongeren, co-author of ”The Courage to Suffer: A New Clinical Framework for Life’s Greatest Crises”, Associated Press, July 4, 2020 (online), In Troubled Times: Independence Day in the land of confusion, by Ted Anthony.

*****

“Being an American is like having a relationship...If all you can do is accept the good parts of the relationship and can’t deal with the hard stuff, I question the sincerity of your relationship. We need to look at the warts, dark spots and all.”