May 17, 2018: MONEY MONEY MONEY
Christ threw the money changers out of the temple, and while I'm not a religious person and don't buy the myths, I can certainly understand the impulse. Right now we're caught--we being the American people--in a giant cage, forced to watch as businessmen take their natural rapacity and apply it, unrestrained by regulations, to American resources, to the media they own, to sports, to just about anything they can find that will make them money, and damn the consequences. A ripe example is in front of us now. My son is a reporter for a newspaper in Pennsylvania that actually makes money. It is owned by a hedge fund whose headquarters are in New York but whose home office is in Denver. This hedge fund has been systematically stripping staff from every newspaper it owns, most of them local, in order to increase their profits, which they plow back into a failing pharmaceutical company they also own. The Denver Post is its most recent, and most visible victim. The tragedy is that newspapers are essential to a democracy. Jefferson said that faced with a choice, he would rather have newspapers than government. Unless the public is informed, it is essentially helpless. You can't keep them informed without reporters. Th hatred of the media fostered by Trump and his fellow oligarchs is designed to keep us uninformed. Trump lives by lies. It is a newspaper, the Washington Post, that keeps track of them. More than 3,000, according to the Post, since his inauguration. The hedge fund that owns the paper my son works for will drain it dry and walk away. Newspapers were once run by families, like the Ochs family in New York, that saw reporting as not just a way to make money but as a community resource, a way of serving the public. But families die out, the tradition dies out with them, the papers are sold.Businessmen who think the truth is irrelevant take them over.
It's an old old story in this country. Streetcars, for example. We once had a viable system of streetcars, running on tracks for the most part with overhead wires supplying power. We had such a line in my home town, Westfield, New Jersey, and when my mother was as young as twelve she used to take it to Jersey City, by herself, fifteen or twenty miles away, to take piano lessons with one of her aunts. What happened to streetcars? They were an efficient and cheap way to get around; why did they fail? They didn't. Alfred P. Sloan, head of General Motors, maker of automobiles and the mogul behind planned obsolesence--the idea that the best way to sell new cars was to make sure the old ones went out of style or out of use--used his companies' profits to buy up the streetcar companies and shut them down.
We must not, as a people, forget these things as we watch businessmen, who hate the regulations that have forced them to pay at least token attention to the public interest, now take over the very agencies they once conspired against and tear regulations to shreds. Dump mine waste in rivers and poison the waters? Of course. Why not? Dump carbon dioxide and particulates into the atmostphere? What the hell. It's cheaper. "The business of America is business," said Calvin Coolidge most of a century ago. Trump gives special consideration to a Chinese telephone company, eliminating a tariff on its behalf. Shortly thereafter, the Chinese invest half a billion into one of his enterprises. He, personally, will reap millions out of this deal. Huge tax breaks for the rich, and only the rich. Coolidge presided over the last great decade of unbridled greed in America, the 1920s, the decade that led directly to the Great Depression and 20% of the population unemployed. That in turn led to the beginning of serious regulation of business in the country under Franklin Roosevelt; it led to the Food and Drug Administration, the FCC, the FAA, and countless other government agencies whose purpose was to control the carelessness and criminality of businessmen, and now women.
People, we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that America is a special place, a version of utopia, innocent at heart. It is not. Slavery was at the heart of America at its founding--the first slaves came ashore in Virginia in 1609--and racism still thrives here. Greed was here, too, and still is, in abundance. It was greed that wiped out the Indians, greed for land, hatred for their otherness. William Bradford complained soon after the Pilgrims settled Plymouth that colonists were leaving the community to move west for better land. Indian land. Most of the English colonies in North America were founded by wealthy aristocrats who instructed the colonists not to settle and farm and build towns, but to look first for gold. American history is a cesspool, a nightmare of moral corruption, and our current president is a symbol of it. Early on, if you paid any attention at all, you could easily see what he was, a con artist, a sociopath, with no civic conscience whatsoever, nor any civic understanding. Any number of his own staff have branded him an idiot. It isn't just that he has faults. It's that he's empty of any semblance of the civic virtue necessary to serve a nation. He's all about himself. Trapped in our cage, we can only pay the price of the ignorance, the naivete, the outright stupidity that put him and his kind in office.
And more than half of us don't bother to vote.
Thursday, May 17, 2018
Saturday, February 10, 2018
WEIRDNESS
WEIRDNESS February 10, 2018
Deep in Venezuela, at a village called El Dorado, my wife and I ran into a film crew from the BBC who were about to climb, and film, among the tepuis to the south, those mysterious mesas rising from the jungle floor some 3,000 feet and forming little ecosystems of their own. After an evening in the local cabana with the film crew drinking Jamaican rum, my wife mentioned she only knew one person in London, a jazz photographer named--well, forget the name. Ah, said the producer, I used to date his secretary.
A few years ago my wife and I were in the village of Shrub Oak in upper Westchester County in New York where my daughter now lives and I used to live with my first wife. The house we lived in then was quite old and very beautiful, and I was curious about how it had fared since I left, so we drove over to the churchyard that it backed onto and tried to peer around the vegetation. At that point the owner came out to call his dog and my wife approached him and mentioned my connection and he invited us in to take a look. He hadn't done much to the house except take out the garden, and I told him what I knew about its history and the work I had done on it, and then we parted, but not before exchanging business cards. My name, of course, is Brandt. His name was Abrandt.
My first wife and I went to Nantucket for our honeymoon and stayed at a place called the Cliffside Inn, or something like that. My second wife and her first husband met in Nantucket and worked together at the Cliffside Inn as staff after they got married, but twelve years after we had been there. The Inn has since burned down.
My first wife and I and our children toured southern England in the late 1960s and wound up at a little place called Lynton overlooking the Welsh coast across the Bristol Channel, and it was a lovely place, English rural, and I sat a long time on a boulder just gazing at the water as the light faded in the late afternoon and into the evening. Back in London, we went to the Tate Gallery and found a watercolor of the scene. A little later I bought a copy of Henry James's English Hours, about his travels in England and his visit to the same hotel we stayed at, and how he sat on a boulder in the late afternoon and watched the light fade. At the time, Henry James was my favorite author. I wrote my senior thesis on him in college.
Nowadays the people who teach writing to would-be authors advise them to avoid basing plots on coincidences at all costs. But coincidences are not uncommon. They occur to us all. Schopenhauer thought that life was structured this way, on hidden connections, like the joists under the floor you don't see but walk over constantly, and that when these connections emerge into the open like those above they lend meaning to lives that otherwise seem in the daily welter of things organized only on chance. Dickens defended himself against critics who attacked him for relying on coincidences, knowing how common they are. Yet no one has ever attacked Sophocles for the coincidence Oedipus Rex is based on, when Oedipus, trying to escape the fate the oracle at Delphi foretold, that he would kill his father and marry his mother, heads to Thebes rather than home to Corinth, has an altercation with a man at the crossroads where "three roads meet," kills him, solves the riddle of the Sphinx belaboring Thebes at the time, comes into the city a hero, and marries the Queen, whose husband has recently been killed at a crossroads. He only learns when things turn really sour that he has inadvertently killed his own father and married his mother--all because they had tried to avoid the same prophecy by ordering their son to be exposed to the elements in the mountains. Their son, an infant, soon to be named Oedipus by his adoptive parents. One of the world's greatest plays, is it not? But think of it. Five minutes earlier or later--even thirty seconds--he would never have met his father at the crossroads.
Of course statisticians belittle all this. Citing the Law of Large Numbers, they argue that coincidences, even the strangest, are bound to happen, with millions of people doing billions of things all the time, coincidences are inevitable; it would be impossible that they not happen. Maybe they're right. But the night before I came to Sag Harbor for the first time I dreamt I would be staying in a house where I could not stand up straight because the ceiling would be too low. The next day I walked into the house where I would be staying and could not stand up straight. The house was very old, and the ceiling was only about six feet high. I was six two then, before I got old and began to shrink.
The statisticians can have their say. But there's a quiddity about these events, a feeling that they're intensely personal, that you can't shake. In the end, I prefer that my world remain weird. Because the world is weird, and we do not fully understand it.
Deep in Venezuela, at a village called El Dorado, my wife and I ran into a film crew from the BBC who were about to climb, and film, among the tepuis to the south, those mysterious mesas rising from the jungle floor some 3,000 feet and forming little ecosystems of their own. After an evening in the local cabana with the film crew drinking Jamaican rum, my wife mentioned she only knew one person in London, a jazz photographer named--well, forget the name. Ah, said the producer, I used to date his secretary.
A few years ago my wife and I were in the village of Shrub Oak in upper Westchester County in New York where my daughter now lives and I used to live with my first wife. The house we lived in then was quite old and very beautiful, and I was curious about how it had fared since I left, so we drove over to the churchyard that it backed onto and tried to peer around the vegetation. At that point the owner came out to call his dog and my wife approached him and mentioned my connection and he invited us in to take a look. He hadn't done much to the house except take out the garden, and I told him what I knew about its history and the work I had done on it, and then we parted, but not before exchanging business cards. My name, of course, is Brandt. His name was Abrandt.
My first wife and I went to Nantucket for our honeymoon and stayed at a place called the Cliffside Inn, or something like that. My second wife and her first husband met in Nantucket and worked together at the Cliffside Inn as staff after they got married, but twelve years after we had been there. The Inn has since burned down.
My first wife and I and our children toured southern England in the late 1960s and wound up at a little place called Lynton overlooking the Welsh coast across the Bristol Channel, and it was a lovely place, English rural, and I sat a long time on a boulder just gazing at the water as the light faded in the late afternoon and into the evening. Back in London, we went to the Tate Gallery and found a watercolor of the scene. A little later I bought a copy of Henry James's English Hours, about his travels in England and his visit to the same hotel we stayed at, and how he sat on a boulder in the late afternoon and watched the light fade. At the time, Henry James was my favorite author. I wrote my senior thesis on him in college.
Nowadays the people who teach writing to would-be authors advise them to avoid basing plots on coincidences at all costs. But coincidences are not uncommon. They occur to us all. Schopenhauer thought that life was structured this way, on hidden connections, like the joists under the floor you don't see but walk over constantly, and that when these connections emerge into the open like those above they lend meaning to lives that otherwise seem in the daily welter of things organized only on chance. Dickens defended himself against critics who attacked him for relying on coincidences, knowing how common they are. Yet no one has ever attacked Sophocles for the coincidence Oedipus Rex is based on, when Oedipus, trying to escape the fate the oracle at Delphi foretold, that he would kill his father and marry his mother, heads to Thebes rather than home to Corinth, has an altercation with a man at the crossroads where "three roads meet," kills him, solves the riddle of the Sphinx belaboring Thebes at the time, comes into the city a hero, and marries the Queen, whose husband has recently been killed at a crossroads. He only learns when things turn really sour that he has inadvertently killed his own father and married his mother--all because they had tried to avoid the same prophecy by ordering their son to be exposed to the elements in the mountains. Their son, an infant, soon to be named Oedipus by his adoptive parents. One of the world's greatest plays, is it not? But think of it. Five minutes earlier or later--even thirty seconds--he would never have met his father at the crossroads.
Of course statisticians belittle all this. Citing the Law of Large Numbers, they argue that coincidences, even the strangest, are bound to happen, with millions of people doing billions of things all the time, coincidences are inevitable; it would be impossible that they not happen. Maybe they're right. But the night before I came to Sag Harbor for the first time I dreamt I would be staying in a house where I could not stand up straight because the ceiling would be too low. The next day I walked into the house where I would be staying and could not stand up straight. The house was very old, and the ceiling was only about six feet high. I was six two then, before I got old and began to shrink.
The statisticians can have their say. But there's a quiddity about these events, a feeling that they're intensely personal, that you can't shake. In the end, I prefer that my world remain weird. Because the world is weird, and we do not fully understand it.
Monday, January 1, 2018
NEW YEAR, NEW SUBJECTS
January 1, 2018: NEW YEAR, NEW MAN
Politics? People much more knowledgeable than me are covering the ground very well. I recommend anything my friend Lucian Truscott IV writes on the subject.
I won't give politics up entirely, but my life has changed. We bought a new house, sold the old. Now we live a mile east from our previous house, we back on a wooded preserve, oak trees cover our back yard and part of our front, we don't have a lawn, can't grow a garden, and it completely changed my life. For one thing, a muse has perched on my shoulder, apparently, and I'm writing poems again. Lots of them. In my old age. Who would have thought it? And they're good, too. A total surprise. The interior of our old house was furnished like an old house, with traditional things, a wing chair to read in, an old oak chair, a Morris chair, a library table, a kind of open cabinet for our vinyl records that I made myself, a large Spanish Renaissance style of dining room table, and six bookcases floor to ceiling. Plus a leather couch. We still have the couch, it's a Herman Miller, and the table for our vinyl records, and the Morris chair is now in my office, but everything else is new--and Midcentury Modern. A longtime dream of Lorraine's. Now she has it. My son has the library table, made about 1810. The wing chair went to Junk. So did the dining room table. We still have the bookcases, of course, but I sold and donated 1,000 of the books.
Wild turkeys come to our feeder. We have light in the house, a great deal, with skylights, very large windows, and a kind of spareness.
I'm reading more than I have in years. Borges. American history. "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers." I'm reading more poetry. Ford's The Good Soldier, one of the great novels, last read in college. The metaphysical poets of the 17th century. A book about the role of gold in American history. TV becomes less and less interesting. Soon, the Letters of John Keats, which I have in the great Hyder Rollins edition, two volumes. All of this reminds me that I came out of a tradition, a long one, European and American civilization and its byways. I just bought David Ferry's translation of the Aeneid, which I've never read. David Ferry is the best translator of the classics in our time. These are my sources, my identity. These are the things that were revelations when I first came across them, these are the things that recognized who I was.
It feels like I've come home at last.
When I write this blog in the future, then, these are the kinds of things I'll be writing about. For the few who follow me, be warned. You can only score so many points against Donald Trump. Being so shallow a human being, so little and petty a person, there's only so much you can say about him before you exhaust the subject. He will be known as our worst and most destructive president, doing his best to destroy 80 years of progress, starting with Social Security, moving on to the basic institutions the nation has evolved since the Great Depression, and hugely diminishing our global role. The American dream is dead. It's time to wake up from it. Me, I'm going back to the future.
Politics? People much more knowledgeable than me are covering the ground very well. I recommend anything my friend Lucian Truscott IV writes on the subject.
I won't give politics up entirely, but my life has changed. We bought a new house, sold the old. Now we live a mile east from our previous house, we back on a wooded preserve, oak trees cover our back yard and part of our front, we don't have a lawn, can't grow a garden, and it completely changed my life. For one thing, a muse has perched on my shoulder, apparently, and I'm writing poems again. Lots of them. In my old age. Who would have thought it? And they're good, too. A total surprise. The interior of our old house was furnished like an old house, with traditional things, a wing chair to read in, an old oak chair, a Morris chair, a library table, a kind of open cabinet for our vinyl records that I made myself, a large Spanish Renaissance style of dining room table, and six bookcases floor to ceiling. Plus a leather couch. We still have the couch, it's a Herman Miller, and the table for our vinyl records, and the Morris chair is now in my office, but everything else is new--and Midcentury Modern. A longtime dream of Lorraine's. Now she has it. My son has the library table, made about 1810. The wing chair went to Junk. So did the dining room table. We still have the bookcases, of course, but I sold and donated 1,000 of the books.
Wild turkeys come to our feeder. We have light in the house, a great deal, with skylights, very large windows, and a kind of spareness.
I'm reading more than I have in years. Borges. American history. "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers." I'm reading more poetry. Ford's The Good Soldier, one of the great novels, last read in college. The metaphysical poets of the 17th century. A book about the role of gold in American history. TV becomes less and less interesting. Soon, the Letters of John Keats, which I have in the great Hyder Rollins edition, two volumes. All of this reminds me that I came out of a tradition, a long one, European and American civilization and its byways. I just bought David Ferry's translation of the Aeneid, which I've never read. David Ferry is the best translator of the classics in our time. These are my sources, my identity. These are the things that were revelations when I first came across them, these are the things that recognized who I was.
It feels like I've come home at last.
When I write this blog in the future, then, these are the kinds of things I'll be writing about. For the few who follow me, be warned. You can only score so many points against Donald Trump. Being so shallow a human being, so little and petty a person, there's only so much you can say about him before you exhaust the subject. He will be known as our worst and most destructive president, doing his best to destroy 80 years of progress, starting with Social Security, moving on to the basic institutions the nation has evolved since the Great Depression, and hugely diminishing our global role. The American dream is dead. It's time to wake up from it. Me, I'm going back to the future.
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