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.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
HOW NOT TO RUN A COUNTRY
HOW NOT TO RUN A COUNTRY
March 29, 2017:
Blame everybody, anybody else for the huge mistakes you make
Lie, lie, lie, and lie some more. You know it won't cost you anything because your followers, who are desperate, uneducated, ignorant, don't know enough not to believe you.
Make promises you know you can't keep.
Act on instinct. Indulge your own paranoid fantasies.
Don't take advice from people who know subjects way better than you do.
Advance pollution, people won't notice for a while.
Follow the lead of Calvin Coolidge, author of that famous remark, "The business of America is business."
In line with that, deregulate everything.
Don't just ignore history. Make sure you don't know it, either.
Don't trouble yourself with the complexities of situations. Let ideology be your guide.
Never think about your responsibilities. Think only about your power.
Belittle science. It's just a bunch of pointyheads with "theories."
Divide the country into ethnic groups, religious groups, ideological groups, racial groups. Demonize all groups you don't happen to belong to.
Persuade yourself that it's all about you. Everything is about you. Call yourself a winner, on all occasions, no matter what the evidence.
Does that about sum it up? Lorraine and I, and most of our friends, wake up to new horrors in the New York Times every day and breakfast gets more and more depressing. Each new Congressman who makes news turns out to be dumber than the last, less well-informed, more deeply locked into right-wing fantasy life. If you write history or even just know it, you can't help but think of the long-term damage being done every day. Today was the day to roll back all the efforts Obama instituted to control climate change. Climate change? Will they finally believe in it when the Atlantic Ocean starts climbing up lower Broadway into mid-Manhattan? When the Seychelles disappear entirely? When all the reefs have finally died? Inconvenient truths indeed. Greenland is melting faster and faster every year. When all its ice is gone, sea level in all the world's oceans will be twenty-two feet higher. When Lt. Edward Parry stood on the shores of Melville Island in 1820 and stared out over the Arctic Ocean he saw ten solid feet of ice everywhere he looked, and it was August. In some places the ice stood forty feet thick. That's a four story building. Now? Sea ice in the Arctic gets thinner and thinner every winter--it's now down to about three feet--and summers are largely free of it. This is not a theory. This is evidence, and there's endless amounts of evidence. ExxonMobil has been studying the effects of man-made climate change for many years now, which has not stopped them from steadfastly fighting against programs to do anything about it. One of many examples of the fundamental dishonesty of the business system, which has always been about profits above all, no matter what the human cost.
So what will future historians make of people like Paul Ryan, or Pence Climate-Change-Is-Only-a-Theory, or Trump the Unlearned, or all the other enablers for whom truth itself is, well, inconvenient? These people are profoundly irresponsible, and history will call them that, and future historians will spend a lot of time analyzing what on earth went wrong with America. Because America is unlikely still to exist. Backward looking, anti-intellectual, living too long off its reputation, which is now in steep decline, banking on the kind of military power that is becoming increasingly useless in its many wars, failing to educate its children, its citizens, riven with internal contradictions--all this is now expressed in its leadership, which aimed for the bottom, for a "Southern strategy" and a hate-the-immigrant strategy, or anything else, no matter how divisive, that would bring them to power. Where they now reside, clueless, inept, mistaken, and totally out of touch with reality. As Trump himself might way in one of his inane tweets, "So sad."
March 29, 2017:
Blame everybody, anybody else for the huge mistakes you make
Lie, lie, lie, and lie some more. You know it won't cost you anything because your followers, who are desperate, uneducated, ignorant, don't know enough not to believe you.
Make promises you know you can't keep.
Act on instinct. Indulge your own paranoid fantasies.
Don't take advice from people who know subjects way better than you do.
Advance pollution, people won't notice for a while.
Follow the lead of Calvin Coolidge, author of that famous remark, "The business of America is business."
In line with that, deregulate everything.
Don't just ignore history. Make sure you don't know it, either.
Don't trouble yourself with the complexities of situations. Let ideology be your guide.
Never think about your responsibilities. Think only about your power.
Belittle science. It's just a bunch of pointyheads with "theories."
Divide the country into ethnic groups, religious groups, ideological groups, racial groups. Demonize all groups you don't happen to belong to.
Persuade yourself that it's all about you. Everything is about you. Call yourself a winner, on all occasions, no matter what the evidence.
Does that about sum it up? Lorraine and I, and most of our friends, wake up to new horrors in the New York Times every day and breakfast gets more and more depressing. Each new Congressman who makes news turns out to be dumber than the last, less well-informed, more deeply locked into right-wing fantasy life. If you write history or even just know it, you can't help but think of the long-term damage being done every day. Today was the day to roll back all the efforts Obama instituted to control climate change. Climate change? Will they finally believe in it when the Atlantic Ocean starts climbing up lower Broadway into mid-Manhattan? When the Seychelles disappear entirely? When all the reefs have finally died? Inconvenient truths indeed. Greenland is melting faster and faster every year. When all its ice is gone, sea level in all the world's oceans will be twenty-two feet higher. When Lt. Edward Parry stood on the shores of Melville Island in 1820 and stared out over the Arctic Ocean he saw ten solid feet of ice everywhere he looked, and it was August. In some places the ice stood forty feet thick. That's a four story building. Now? Sea ice in the Arctic gets thinner and thinner every winter--it's now down to about three feet--and summers are largely free of it. This is not a theory. This is evidence, and there's endless amounts of evidence. ExxonMobil has been studying the effects of man-made climate change for many years now, which has not stopped them from steadfastly fighting against programs to do anything about it. One of many examples of the fundamental dishonesty of the business system, which has always been about profits above all, no matter what the human cost.
So what will future historians make of people like Paul Ryan, or Pence Climate-Change-Is-Only-a-Theory, or Trump the Unlearned, or all the other enablers for whom truth itself is, well, inconvenient? These people are profoundly irresponsible, and history will call them that, and future historians will spend a lot of time analyzing what on earth went wrong with America. Because America is unlikely still to exist. Backward looking, anti-intellectual, living too long off its reputation, which is now in steep decline, banking on the kind of military power that is becoming increasingly useless in its many wars, failing to educate its children, its citizens, riven with internal contradictions--all this is now expressed in its leadership, which aimed for the bottom, for a "Southern strategy" and a hate-the-immigrant strategy, or anything else, no matter how divisive, that would bring them to power. Where they now reside, clueless, inept, mistaken, and totally out of touch with reality. As Trump himself might way in one of his inane tweets, "So sad."
Sunday, February 12, 2017
TRUTH
February 12, 2017: TRUTH
"We hold these truths to be self-evident...."
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, isn't it pretty to think so.
This morning on George Stephanopolus's show, I heard some government spokesman yelling about voter fraud, and how prevalent it is, and how millions of voters last November voted twice or more, with busloads of Massachusetts voters being driven to New Hampshire to cast votes, obviously for Hilary Clinton. When asked to provide evidence he replied, with the same loud determination, that he knew it was true, everybody knew it was true. George wasn't buying it. Neither did I. But you can bet many of the people who voted for Trump will. Because, you know, the media lies, the media is corrupt, facts are not facts, there are alternative facts. And those of us who are educated, who understand basic things like the necessity of evidence to prove a case, in law and in life, sigh in despair. Because there is no evidence for these claims at all. This never happened.
The actual truth in this case? What is actually happening and has been happening for years now is that people on the right have been taking over state legislatures and gerrymandering election districts to ensure that they are way more likely to win political control over both state and Federal legislatures, and in the process attack voting rights to make it as difficult as possible for minorities to vote. It's a clever strategy, well-organized in its execution, and it has worked. With the connivance of the Supreme Court decision that it was no longer necessary for the Federal Gov't to oversee voting procedures in the South, which has spent the 150 years since the Civil War making sure blacks never got to vote. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ...."
And what is this about? White power. This country belongs to white people, and by God they're going to keep it that way. Voter fraud? This is the actual voter fraud. All the rest is demagoguery. Fake news. In short, lies.
The lies, the amateur foreign policy mistakes, the outright stupidity of the current administration come so fast and are so dangerous that I find myself reeling, reluctant to read the news it is so disheartening. I find it hard to work. Hard to pay attention. And "alternative facts"--as if there really were such things. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. Yet the right denies it; worst of all, it denies the biggest and most frightening truth of our time, that the ice caps are melting, storms are becoming more frequent and more violent because of the amount of moisture in the air, glaciers are retreating all over the world, in Antarctica the Larsen Ice Shelf is breaking up, Greenland is melting far faster than anyone anticipated, and folks, we are in deep shit. Not just America. The whole world. Yet alone in the civilized world the American right denies that global warming is speeding up and is busy now deregulating the fossil fuel burners. Because global warming is only a "theory."
When in fact, in fact, in fact, it is supported by mountains of scientific evidence, 97% of the world's climate scientists accept it, and every year the world's average temperature breaks the record set the previous year. This is the true Armageddon. The true Apocalypse. Close to 50% of the world's population lives on seacoasts. Here in the Hamptons, everyone wants a water view--preferably as close to the water as possible.
It is truth itself that I mourn for. A President denies photographic evidence, as plain as day, that shows incontrovertibly that his inauguration crowd was way smaller than President Obama's. He says that when he began to speak it stopped raining, when in fact it started. Alas. We mourn. The search for truth is one of the sacred tasks of humankind. It is enshrined in the legal system, it is what scientists live for, it is the project of all our lives, to find the truth. Even if it is hard to face. It often is. What human beings are doing to our planet, the only one we have, is definitely a hard truth. But when the official leader of our country tells us that global warming is a Chinese plot, then we know. We are in deep shit. Our only option is to resist, to organize, to make every possible effort to take our country back from the brink of chaos and ignorance.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident...."
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, isn't it pretty to think so.
This morning on George Stephanopolus's show, I heard some government spokesman yelling about voter fraud, and how prevalent it is, and how millions of voters last November voted twice or more, with busloads of Massachusetts voters being driven to New Hampshire to cast votes, obviously for Hilary Clinton. When asked to provide evidence he replied, with the same loud determination, that he knew it was true, everybody knew it was true. George wasn't buying it. Neither did I. But you can bet many of the people who voted for Trump will. Because, you know, the media lies, the media is corrupt, facts are not facts, there are alternative facts. And those of us who are educated, who understand basic things like the necessity of evidence to prove a case, in law and in life, sigh in despair. Because there is no evidence for these claims at all. This never happened.
The actual truth in this case? What is actually happening and has been happening for years now is that people on the right have been taking over state legislatures and gerrymandering election districts to ensure that they are way more likely to win political control over both state and Federal legislatures, and in the process attack voting rights to make it as difficult as possible for minorities to vote. It's a clever strategy, well-organized in its execution, and it has worked. With the connivance of the Supreme Court decision that it was no longer necessary for the Federal Gov't to oversee voting procedures in the South, which has spent the 150 years since the Civil War making sure blacks never got to vote. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ...."
And what is this about? White power. This country belongs to white people, and by God they're going to keep it that way. Voter fraud? This is the actual voter fraud. All the rest is demagoguery. Fake news. In short, lies.
The lies, the amateur foreign policy mistakes, the outright stupidity of the current administration come so fast and are so dangerous that I find myself reeling, reluctant to read the news it is so disheartening. I find it hard to work. Hard to pay attention. And "alternative facts"--as if there really were such things. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. Yet the right denies it; worst of all, it denies the biggest and most frightening truth of our time, that the ice caps are melting, storms are becoming more frequent and more violent because of the amount of moisture in the air, glaciers are retreating all over the world, in Antarctica the Larsen Ice Shelf is breaking up, Greenland is melting far faster than anyone anticipated, and folks, we are in deep shit. Not just America. The whole world. Yet alone in the civilized world the American right denies that global warming is speeding up and is busy now deregulating the fossil fuel burners. Because global warming is only a "theory."
When in fact, in fact, in fact, it is supported by mountains of scientific evidence, 97% of the world's climate scientists accept it, and every year the world's average temperature breaks the record set the previous year. This is the true Armageddon. The true Apocalypse. Close to 50% of the world's population lives on seacoasts. Here in the Hamptons, everyone wants a water view--preferably as close to the water as possible.
It is truth itself that I mourn for. A President denies photographic evidence, as plain as day, that shows incontrovertibly that his inauguration crowd was way smaller than President Obama's. He says that when he began to speak it stopped raining, when in fact it started. Alas. We mourn. The search for truth is one of the sacred tasks of humankind. It is enshrined in the legal system, it is what scientists live for, it is the project of all our lives, to find the truth. Even if it is hard to face. It often is. What human beings are doing to our planet, the only one we have, is definitely a hard truth. But when the official leader of our country tells us that global warming is a Chinese plot, then we know. We are in deep shit. Our only option is to resist, to organize, to make every possible effort to take our country back from the brink of chaos and ignorance.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
MANAGING THE PAST
January 1, 2017; MANAGING THE PAST
A new year, and we're supposed to look forward, but it's hard to do when you are constantly wrestling with your past. I'll be leaving a whole lot of words behind me, essays, books, feature articles, book reviews, hundreds of those, two whole books still looking for publishers (one a memoir, talk about wrestling with the past), and now a book of poems, self-published because I never wanted a career as a poet, and I'll be giving a reading at the end of January, and it will be out of the past. Words words words. Occasionally I read some of the things I've written and pronounce them good, or not so good, and I think, does this make a whole? Is there a definitive person behind them? Was this a good way to lead a life?
Well I can't stop. I look at the 5,000 books in my personal library, I reread old notebooks, I remember all the ideas I've had that could have been books or magazine pieces, and the same itch is there, the need to know, to tell stories about the present or the past, or to voice opinions about politics, about human beings, about experience and its consequences. I once ran down Mt. Rainier. Served as a quality control inspector for a hotel chain in South America. Scuba dove to 85 feet in Belize. Kayaked in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Interviewed adults who had been sexually abused, by their own parents, as children. Stood for a day beside a concierge in a fancy hotel and watched him work. Spent eleven days in a mental hospital. Had lunch with Robert Lehman in his private dining room. The list is long. A full life, one would say, a rich life, but not atypical for a free-lance writer.
What's it all about, Alfie? In a way, it's a stupid question. Nobody really knows what it's all about. To a degree it was all choices I made, from another angle it had little to do with choice. So many things just happen to a person, they appear as roadblocks or disasters you could not have foreseen, could not have prevented. Or wonderful strokes of luck. You don't get what you want, you get what you need. You try to sort it out, decide what you're responsible for, what you're not. Either way, guilt is built into the equation.
I walk around the house sometimes scanning the bookshelves and wondering what's inside all those books. I'll pick one off a shelf, take it to bed with me to read after the TV gets shut off, read it over a period of a week or two, sometimes longer. I still want to know, I'm curious about all kinds of things. Maybe forty years ago I wrote a piece for the old Psychology Today, now vanished, called "Selves," about the slipperiness of that concept, the difficulty of pinning down what's going on inside our hearts and minds and what that means about who we are. The longest piece that magazine ever ran. But here's the thing--I still have some of the books I read for that piece. I may need them again someday.
You wind up with doubt, or, if your heart is particularly flexible, with what Keats called "negative capability," which is the ability to hold two opposed concepts in your mind at the same time without feeling the need to decide between them. You keep your options open. You accept the fact that mostly you don't know whether you're doing the wrong thing or the right with your life, and what the consequences will be. You tell yourself, you tell other people, you always wanted to live in the real world. But you can't promise that you reached that point, because the real world is a very complicated and unpredictable place, and you may be wrong. So your life could be like the lives of some scholars, who spend their lives chasing a subject, a dream, an insight down a blind alley. A waste.
That takes courage. You hope you have it when you need it.
A new year, and we're supposed to look forward, but it's hard to do when you are constantly wrestling with your past. I'll be leaving a whole lot of words behind me, essays, books, feature articles, book reviews, hundreds of those, two whole books still looking for publishers (one a memoir, talk about wrestling with the past), and now a book of poems, self-published because I never wanted a career as a poet, and I'll be giving a reading at the end of January, and it will be out of the past. Words words words. Occasionally I read some of the things I've written and pronounce them good, or not so good, and I think, does this make a whole? Is there a definitive person behind them? Was this a good way to lead a life?
Well I can't stop. I look at the 5,000 books in my personal library, I reread old notebooks, I remember all the ideas I've had that could have been books or magazine pieces, and the same itch is there, the need to know, to tell stories about the present or the past, or to voice opinions about politics, about human beings, about experience and its consequences. I once ran down Mt. Rainier. Served as a quality control inspector for a hotel chain in South America. Scuba dove to 85 feet in Belize. Kayaked in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Interviewed adults who had been sexually abused, by their own parents, as children. Stood for a day beside a concierge in a fancy hotel and watched him work. Spent eleven days in a mental hospital. Had lunch with Robert Lehman in his private dining room. The list is long. A full life, one would say, a rich life, but not atypical for a free-lance writer.
What's it all about, Alfie? In a way, it's a stupid question. Nobody really knows what it's all about. To a degree it was all choices I made, from another angle it had little to do with choice. So many things just happen to a person, they appear as roadblocks or disasters you could not have foreseen, could not have prevented. Or wonderful strokes of luck. You don't get what you want, you get what you need. You try to sort it out, decide what you're responsible for, what you're not. Either way, guilt is built into the equation.
I walk around the house sometimes scanning the bookshelves and wondering what's inside all those books. I'll pick one off a shelf, take it to bed with me to read after the TV gets shut off, read it over a period of a week or two, sometimes longer. I still want to know, I'm curious about all kinds of things. Maybe forty years ago I wrote a piece for the old Psychology Today, now vanished, called "Selves," about the slipperiness of that concept, the difficulty of pinning down what's going on inside our hearts and minds and what that means about who we are. The longest piece that magazine ever ran. But here's the thing--I still have some of the books I read for that piece. I may need them again someday.
You wind up with doubt, or, if your heart is particularly flexible, with what Keats called "negative capability," which is the ability to hold two opposed concepts in your mind at the same time without feeling the need to decide between them. You keep your options open. You accept the fact that mostly you don't know whether you're doing the wrong thing or the right with your life, and what the consequences will be. You tell yourself, you tell other people, you always wanted to live in the real world. But you can't promise that you reached that point, because the real world is a very complicated and unpredictable place, and you may be wrong. So your life could be like the lives of some scholars, who spend their lives chasing a subject, a dream, an insight down a blind alley. A waste.
That takes courage. You hope you have it when you need it.
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
REALITY POLICE: November 29, 2016
REALITY POLICE: November 29, 2016
The story continued....
This is basically a story from the annals of writing, and for all those who think being a writer is a really cool way to live. I had told my editor that I would do what I did, spend some time in a mental hospital as a patient and report on the experience in the book that was to come out of my investigation, and he thought that meant I would do it more than once, in different parts of the country. But once was enough. I did indeed go to different areas of the country to visit mental hospitals, talk to psychiatrists about the systems they ran, check out what was at the time the take people out of mental hospitals and put them into community mental health centers, and otherwise do the thorough job that needed to be done on a subject that was then, and remains, almost universally ignored. I even went to Esalen, in California, new age mecca, to speak with a psychologist there about new ideas in mental health care. That was interesting; you walked onto the grounds and scattered around were people doing yoga in the nude. But at bottom it was what I should have expected--at a remove from the gritty intractable reality of the lives of the mad. I drove across country in an old Ford Econoline van with the engine mounted between the van's two front seats. I slept in the back. Research on the cheap. America on the cheap. A story for another time.
And on the way I stopped in Kansas for a few days, camping in a state park near Topeka populated mostly by mosquitoes. I have nothing good to say about Kansas. There Topeka State Hospital had set up a series of interviews for me, among them one with a Dr. Rinsley, who ran their children's unit. He was a queer bird, fixated on his theory about childhood schizophrenia; he had, in fact, diagnosed every child who entered his unit as being schizophrenic,regardless of their symptoms, and it was his opinion that his job was to take each child apart and rebuild him or her in a healthier manner. To put it another way, he was playing God with every child on his unit. At one point during the interview, I remember, he looked at me and said, you've looked into the abyss, haven't you. Well what do you say to that? Deny it, and you seem shallow. Affirm it, and you'd have to explain. In fact, as I said in the first part of the story, I was quite sane, and always had been. As it says over the entrance to the oracle's cave at Delphi, know thyself. And I did.
Anyway, I went on, finished the research, wrote the book, it was published, the publisher did its job and got me on various TV shows, I testified before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Birch Bayh about drugs in institutions, the nightly news showed a clip, I thought I would make some money from this book. I was a hero to mental patients for exposing the evils and insufficiencies of a system designed, like most institutions, not to serve its clients, but itself. But I neglected to foresee the obvious--that mental patients can't afford, for the most part, to buy books. As for the reading public generally, the whole subject is a downer. They don't want to know about it. The publisher printed 7,000 copies, sold 3,500. Lesson No. 1. When it went into bookstores as a remainder, at $0.49 a copy, I was too broke to buy more than one.
Lesson No. 2. A year later a stranger knocked on the door of my apartment in Ossining, New York, asked me if I was Anthony Brandt, and when I said yes handed me a piece of paper. Dr. Rinsley was suing me and my publisher for invasion of privacy, libel, and other things, asking $3,750,000 in damages. How about that. At the time I was going through a rancorous divorce from my first wife, living on credit cards, still driving that old van around, my father had recently died, my mother was settling into the early stages of Alzheimer's. I remember taking one of those stress tests that showed up in magazines once in a while in those days and scoring at a level where you were supposed to have heart attacks and breakdowns and a host of other ills, but as I said, I'm sane, none of those things happened. What happened instead was that my publishers asked me into their offices and told me that I should get my own lawyer, and they would get theirs. They were abandoning me. As it turned out, they hired a local lawyer in Topeka who had never tried a libel case. Through a friend, I hired the libel lawyer for the Kansas City Star. He carried the case, not the publisher's lawyer.
I had indeed written about Dr. Rinsley. Shortly before I finished the book, I got a call from Kansas that I had to come back. A child had died on Rinsley's unit, thanks to what appeared to be a misdiagnosis that was particularly egregious. She was a little girl, eleven years old, and skin and bones at the time. She died tied down to a crib, alone, being tube fed, choking to death on her food. When she was very young she was diagnosed as having cerebral palsy, one symptom of which was tongue thrust, where the tongue pushes food out of the mouth involuntarily instead of swallowing it. She never really got better, even on medication, and at some point doctors at a state hospital decided she was being uncooperative, and they took custody away from the parents, who were fundamentalist Christians, and who said they were going to take her home and pray for her. After that she wound up on Rinsley's unit. I went back to Kansas, talked to the parents, talked to some other people (including a Holocaust survivor out of Bergen Belsen) about Rinsley and his theories, and added this story to the book. Rinsley had decided in this case that the little girl could swallow her food but was defiant and refused to swallow her food. At the time of her death her parents were allowed to see her only half an hour a week, in a supervised visit. It was a particularly striking example of unregulated psychiatric power to play with people's lives. And I was definitely outspoken about it. "How many more children must die before men like Rinsley are stopped?" Rhetorically, I've always had a tendency to go over the top.
It took nearly eight years to resolve this case, with something the courts laughably call summary judgement. That means that it never went to trial. After depositions, document searches and all the other stuff that goes on, it was clear that I had made only one small mistake of fact in the body of the book, which I had corrected in a footnote, and that everything else was factually true. My lawyer moved for summary judgment and won--that took maybe two years--and Rinsley appealed. The case then went to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Another five or six years. In the end the three-man court ruled unanimously that Rinsley had no case. He was both a public official and a public figure and had to prove actual malice, all the facts were true except for the one, and that had been corrected. He just didn't like being criticized. I still have a copy of the judgment.
And me? I'm still sane, but the whole episode came close to wrecking my career, such as it was. When it was over I owed my lawyer $45,000. It soured me on writing books for a long time, and I turned to magazines to make a living. I can't really complain. I had a great success in magazines, and I still write for them in a small way, made smaller all the time as magazines disappear. But when you talk about the romance of writing, don't talk to me.
I found out later, by the way, that my publisher had never given the book a libel reading. It was a muckraking book, it needed a libel reading, I assumed it would get one. But my editor had decided on his own, without telling me, that he didn't want to limit his authors' abilities to express their views. Maybe I'll forgive him in hell. As for Dr. Rinsley, he's already there. And yes, Dr., I have looked into the abyss. That little girl weighted 29 lbs. when she died on your watch.
The story continued....
This is basically a story from the annals of writing, and for all those who think being a writer is a really cool way to live. I had told my editor that I would do what I did, spend some time in a mental hospital as a patient and report on the experience in the book that was to come out of my investigation, and he thought that meant I would do it more than once, in different parts of the country. But once was enough. I did indeed go to different areas of the country to visit mental hospitals, talk to psychiatrists about the systems they ran, check out what was at the time the take people out of mental hospitals and put them into community mental health centers, and otherwise do the thorough job that needed to be done on a subject that was then, and remains, almost universally ignored. I even went to Esalen, in California, new age mecca, to speak with a psychologist there about new ideas in mental health care. That was interesting; you walked onto the grounds and scattered around were people doing yoga in the nude. But at bottom it was what I should have expected--at a remove from the gritty intractable reality of the lives of the mad. I drove across country in an old Ford Econoline van with the engine mounted between the van's two front seats. I slept in the back. Research on the cheap. America on the cheap. A story for another time.
And on the way I stopped in Kansas for a few days, camping in a state park near Topeka populated mostly by mosquitoes. I have nothing good to say about Kansas. There Topeka State Hospital had set up a series of interviews for me, among them one with a Dr. Rinsley, who ran their children's unit. He was a queer bird, fixated on his theory about childhood schizophrenia; he had, in fact, diagnosed every child who entered his unit as being schizophrenic,regardless of their symptoms, and it was his opinion that his job was to take each child apart and rebuild him or her in a healthier manner. To put it another way, he was playing God with every child on his unit. At one point during the interview, I remember, he looked at me and said, you've looked into the abyss, haven't you. Well what do you say to that? Deny it, and you seem shallow. Affirm it, and you'd have to explain. In fact, as I said in the first part of the story, I was quite sane, and always had been. As it says over the entrance to the oracle's cave at Delphi, know thyself. And I did.
Anyway, I went on, finished the research, wrote the book, it was published, the publisher did its job and got me on various TV shows, I testified before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Birch Bayh about drugs in institutions, the nightly news showed a clip, I thought I would make some money from this book. I was a hero to mental patients for exposing the evils and insufficiencies of a system designed, like most institutions, not to serve its clients, but itself. But I neglected to foresee the obvious--that mental patients can't afford, for the most part, to buy books. As for the reading public generally, the whole subject is a downer. They don't want to know about it. The publisher printed 7,000 copies, sold 3,500. Lesson No. 1. When it went into bookstores as a remainder, at $0.49 a copy, I was too broke to buy more than one.
Lesson No. 2. A year later a stranger knocked on the door of my apartment in Ossining, New York, asked me if I was Anthony Brandt, and when I said yes handed me a piece of paper. Dr. Rinsley was suing me and my publisher for invasion of privacy, libel, and other things, asking $3,750,000 in damages. How about that. At the time I was going through a rancorous divorce from my first wife, living on credit cards, still driving that old van around, my father had recently died, my mother was settling into the early stages of Alzheimer's. I remember taking one of those stress tests that showed up in magazines once in a while in those days and scoring at a level where you were supposed to have heart attacks and breakdowns and a host of other ills, but as I said, I'm sane, none of those things happened. What happened instead was that my publishers asked me into their offices and told me that I should get my own lawyer, and they would get theirs. They were abandoning me. As it turned out, they hired a local lawyer in Topeka who had never tried a libel case. Through a friend, I hired the libel lawyer for the Kansas City Star. He carried the case, not the publisher's lawyer.
I had indeed written about Dr. Rinsley. Shortly before I finished the book, I got a call from Kansas that I had to come back. A child had died on Rinsley's unit, thanks to what appeared to be a misdiagnosis that was particularly egregious. She was a little girl, eleven years old, and skin and bones at the time. She died tied down to a crib, alone, being tube fed, choking to death on her food. When she was very young she was diagnosed as having cerebral palsy, one symptom of which was tongue thrust, where the tongue pushes food out of the mouth involuntarily instead of swallowing it. She never really got better, even on medication, and at some point doctors at a state hospital decided she was being uncooperative, and they took custody away from the parents, who were fundamentalist Christians, and who said they were going to take her home and pray for her. After that she wound up on Rinsley's unit. I went back to Kansas, talked to the parents, talked to some other people (including a Holocaust survivor out of Bergen Belsen) about Rinsley and his theories, and added this story to the book. Rinsley had decided in this case that the little girl could swallow her food but was defiant and refused to swallow her food. At the time of her death her parents were allowed to see her only half an hour a week, in a supervised visit. It was a particularly striking example of unregulated psychiatric power to play with people's lives. And I was definitely outspoken about it. "How many more children must die before men like Rinsley are stopped?" Rhetorically, I've always had a tendency to go over the top.
It took nearly eight years to resolve this case, with something the courts laughably call summary judgement. That means that it never went to trial. After depositions, document searches and all the other stuff that goes on, it was clear that I had made only one small mistake of fact in the body of the book, which I had corrected in a footnote, and that everything else was factually true. My lawyer moved for summary judgment and won--that took maybe two years--and Rinsley appealed. The case then went to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Another five or six years. In the end the three-man court ruled unanimously that Rinsley had no case. He was both a public official and a public figure and had to prove actual malice, all the facts were true except for the one, and that had been corrected. He just didn't like being criticized. I still have a copy of the judgment.
And me? I'm still sane, but the whole episode came close to wrecking my career, such as it was. When it was over I owed my lawyer $45,000. It soured me on writing books for a long time, and I turned to magazines to make a living. I can't really complain. I had a great success in magazines, and I still write for them in a small way, made smaller all the time as magazines disappear. But when you talk about the romance of writing, don't talk to me.
I found out later, by the way, that my publisher had never given the book a libel reading. It was a muckraking book, it needed a libel reading, I assumed it would get one. But my editor had decided on his own, without telling me, that he didn't want to limit his authors' abilities to express their views. Maybe I'll forgive him in hell. As for Dr. Rinsley, he's already there. And yes, Dr., I have looked into the abyss. That little girl weighted 29 lbs. when she died on your watch.
Monday, November 28, 2016
ELEVEN DAYS IN THE LOONY BIN
November 28, 2016: ELEVEN DAYS IN THE LOONY BIN
People always look at me a little strangely when I mention that I spent eleven days in the state mental hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. I hasten to explain to them that I was doing research for a book I wrote on the mental health system, that I wasn't a real patient but had faked my way in with the help of a friend, and had barely escaped the locked ward where they keep the violent people but had been sent instead to a ward where they let you out in the morning and left the door open all day. I used to walk over to the store on the grounds in the morning, buy a Times, and do the crossword puzzle on a bench just to get out of the ward. Which turned out, naturally, to be full of unbalanced people.
Adventures in writing. Anything for a story. This came to mind today when I was thinking about my career, all the things I've covered for magazines and the places I've been, and the loony bin was a highlight of sorts, possibly the most dangerous story I did, since they might well have tried to keep me there against my will if I had in their presence actually done something crazy. I was careful not to. Except for not having a job since I was 35 and living by my wits, I'm quite sane.
But I think about that place once in a while. The people. They were a motley bunch, all of them on drugs of one sort or another, mostly thorazine, which I also took--you had to, they gave it to you, you put it in your mouth and swallowed it, and then they looked in your mouth to make sure you had--that were supposed to keep you passive and quiet, and indeed they were not violent in any way. One I remember, a young man who complained that his parents had committed him because he'd taken his stuff out to the garage to lay it out on the floor and arrange it. He was manic depressive, had a portable cassette player he took everywhere with a bunch of tapes, and he would jam a tape in, play it for thirty seconds, then jam another one in and drive the entire ward crazy with the noise. He was restless. He also had his own room, where he brought women in off the female wards at night, paying the attendants off for the privilege. Plus he had access to other drugs, the illegal kind. A resourceful young man, in a manic phase.
Others gave little impression of being insane, but only pathetic. Unable to handle everyday life; they were taken every day to a nearby IBM plant where they put cardboard boxes together, in a program designed to make them useful to society, and thereby to themselves. I remember at lunchtime, which was served on a cafeteria basis, one man would go up to the table and take ten or eleven pieces of bread, and nothing else. Another was catatonic, did not speak, walked around in a trance. I saw him one day drop a turd from under his hospital gown, reach down to the floor, pick it up, and try to put it into his mouth. The whole ward groaned at that, and the attendant rushed over and prevented him from completing this grossness. Yes, there were people there who were quite seriously mad.
I learned a lot in those eleven days. For one, madness is not literary. You do not find characters out of Dostoevsky, say, or Baudelaire, passionate to the point of unreason, in mental hospitals. It is also for the most part not violent. The culture characterizes the insane as killers, but they actually commit less violence, statistically, than the general population. Mostly it is their ineptness that impresses you. They have not mastered the simple art of living. Something going on in their heads prevents them for focusing on the ordinary.
After a week it started to get to me. The ward had a large TV set and it went 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that the place was always full of noise. I don't do noise well. The food, not surprisingly, was execrable. They put me in a therapy group and that was a joke. And being surrounded all day and all night by people who were seriously troubled was difficult. We slept in dormitories at night, on beds that had rubber sheets under the cotton ones. My first night I was given a shot of Thorazine, which made me thirsty, but when I tried to get to the water fountain I could barely walk, had to hold onto the wall to get anywhere. I had it all planned, knew the law, and went through the formalities of leaving, which entailed writing a letter announcing my intention of leaving. They had three days to commit me against my will, but didn't bother. My wife drove out and picked me up--I had checked in with a story about our separation, and hearing her voice over the radio when it was turned off--and drove me home. I lay down in the back seat and cried, not for myself but for all those people who couldn't leave so easily. It was so sad. I'll never forget the really bad cases, patients with tardive dyskinesia, which is a permanent side-effect of taking drugs like Thorazine. It affects the brain in such a way that their tongues, their faces, their limbs move uncontrollably, their tongues in and out of their mouths, their faces in constant distortion, their limbs jerkily, in every direction. Thorazine tames the hallucinations, but it also destroys the life.
I'm told, by the way, by people whose experience of the mental health system is way more recent than mine--the book, Reality Police, came out forty years ago--and have read the book that very little has changed. The mental health system still relies almost exclusively on drugs to control the behavior of the people it serves, and psychiatrists are really no closer to understanding what mental illness is or where it originates. For some people, life is tragic every day.
People always look at me a little strangely when I mention that I spent eleven days in the state mental hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. I hasten to explain to them that I was doing research for a book I wrote on the mental health system, that I wasn't a real patient but had faked my way in with the help of a friend, and had barely escaped the locked ward where they keep the violent people but had been sent instead to a ward where they let you out in the morning and left the door open all day. I used to walk over to the store on the grounds in the morning, buy a Times, and do the crossword puzzle on a bench just to get out of the ward. Which turned out, naturally, to be full of unbalanced people.
Adventures in writing. Anything for a story. This came to mind today when I was thinking about my career, all the things I've covered for magazines and the places I've been, and the loony bin was a highlight of sorts, possibly the most dangerous story I did, since they might well have tried to keep me there against my will if I had in their presence actually done something crazy. I was careful not to. Except for not having a job since I was 35 and living by my wits, I'm quite sane.
But I think about that place once in a while. The people. They were a motley bunch, all of them on drugs of one sort or another, mostly thorazine, which I also took--you had to, they gave it to you, you put it in your mouth and swallowed it, and then they looked in your mouth to make sure you had--that were supposed to keep you passive and quiet, and indeed they were not violent in any way. One I remember, a young man who complained that his parents had committed him because he'd taken his stuff out to the garage to lay it out on the floor and arrange it. He was manic depressive, had a portable cassette player he took everywhere with a bunch of tapes, and he would jam a tape in, play it for thirty seconds, then jam another one in and drive the entire ward crazy with the noise. He was restless. He also had his own room, where he brought women in off the female wards at night, paying the attendants off for the privilege. Plus he had access to other drugs, the illegal kind. A resourceful young man, in a manic phase.
Others gave little impression of being insane, but only pathetic. Unable to handle everyday life; they were taken every day to a nearby IBM plant where they put cardboard boxes together, in a program designed to make them useful to society, and thereby to themselves. I remember at lunchtime, which was served on a cafeteria basis, one man would go up to the table and take ten or eleven pieces of bread, and nothing else. Another was catatonic, did not speak, walked around in a trance. I saw him one day drop a turd from under his hospital gown, reach down to the floor, pick it up, and try to put it into his mouth. The whole ward groaned at that, and the attendant rushed over and prevented him from completing this grossness. Yes, there were people there who were quite seriously mad.
I learned a lot in those eleven days. For one, madness is not literary. You do not find characters out of Dostoevsky, say, or Baudelaire, passionate to the point of unreason, in mental hospitals. It is also for the most part not violent. The culture characterizes the insane as killers, but they actually commit less violence, statistically, than the general population. Mostly it is their ineptness that impresses you. They have not mastered the simple art of living. Something going on in their heads prevents them for focusing on the ordinary.
After a week it started to get to me. The ward had a large TV set and it went 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that the place was always full of noise. I don't do noise well. The food, not surprisingly, was execrable. They put me in a therapy group and that was a joke. And being surrounded all day and all night by people who were seriously troubled was difficult. We slept in dormitories at night, on beds that had rubber sheets under the cotton ones. My first night I was given a shot of Thorazine, which made me thirsty, but when I tried to get to the water fountain I could barely walk, had to hold onto the wall to get anywhere. I had it all planned, knew the law, and went through the formalities of leaving, which entailed writing a letter announcing my intention of leaving. They had three days to commit me against my will, but didn't bother. My wife drove out and picked me up--I had checked in with a story about our separation, and hearing her voice over the radio when it was turned off--and drove me home. I lay down in the back seat and cried, not for myself but for all those people who couldn't leave so easily. It was so sad. I'll never forget the really bad cases, patients with tardive dyskinesia, which is a permanent side-effect of taking drugs like Thorazine. It affects the brain in such a way that their tongues, their faces, their limbs move uncontrollably, their tongues in and out of their mouths, their faces in constant distortion, their limbs jerkily, in every direction. Thorazine tames the hallucinations, but it also destroys the life.
I'm told, by the way, by people whose experience of the mental health system is way more recent than mine--the book, Reality Police, came out forty years ago--and have read the book that very little has changed. The mental health system still relies almost exclusively on drugs to control the behavior of the people it serves, and psychiatrists are really no closer to understanding what mental illness is or where it originates. For some people, life is tragic every day.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
BEGINNING ALL OVER AGAIN
NOVEMBER 9, 2016. BEGINNING ALL OVER AGAIN
Trump won, against all expectations, and those who thought he was as bad a candidate as the country has ever seen are upset and baffled. The American people ignored the criminality, the narcississm, the sexism, the racism, the frauds, the abuses, indeed embraced it all, as if it were nothing to them, as apparently it was. In favor of what? Climate change? Coziness with Russia? Reckless foreign policy? Who can understand this?
Those at the bottom, apparently. Not the desperate poor at the very bottom who gave up hoping for anything better a long time ago. Not the disenfranchised, the immigrants, the refugees, blacks, Moslems, the chronically ill, the old, and all the other people stuck in the glue of killing defeat. I'm speaking of the adult whites who have lost not just jobs but futures to globalization, automation, and all the other economic forces that beset us, who are watching their lives drift away on the unfavorable tide of history. These are the people, apparently, who turned to Trump to save them, with his border wall and his promise to deport all illegal immigrants, all eleven million of them, and to keep Moslems out of the country, and to bring back American jobs. And in the processs of making those promises he ignored all the Constitutional protections that individuals enjoy in the United States and all the institutional traditions that have proven as well to protect the orderly processes of government, plus he ignored the impossibility of bringing back what has been lost. There was never any mention of how he was going to do these things, never a program, a plan, a strategy. Jobs have in fact been lost to macro-economic forces that nobody has the power to stop. Some of the Constititional protections he said he would destroy, others he simply acted as if he would ignore--in short laying an authoritarian hand over government as if it belonged to him. But it has never belonged to any President, however strong. There are fundamental checks and balances built in, and traditional ways of working in government as well, that are designed to keep situations, and governments, under control. It remains to be seen whether this system will continue to work.
But given the man's record, I'm quite nervous. Not only does he have no actual policy positions, no programs, only bankruptcies and bad behavior behind him, nobody knows what will happen next. His closest advisors are fools and buffoons like Gingrich and Giuliani. His own wife is an illegal immigrant. And this is the "people's choice."
So if this is what the people preferred, it's time to look at the people. Hillary Clinton called them, half of them anyway, a "basket of deplorables." It's a general rule that people get the governments they deserve. The Founders understood this; when Franklin was asked when he walked out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 what kind of government they were making, he famously replied, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."
If you can keep it.
And Jefferson saw the import of that, he understood that to be a citizen at all required a level of attention and knowledge on the part of the individual that went well beyond the ordinary, that people needed to be informed, and understand how government worked and to an extent how the world itself worked, in order to be responsible citizens. That citizenship came with responsibilities. That a citizen needed to be involved not only in his professional life, his working life, but in the life of the community and the country, that his opinions had to be as versed in the complexities of issues, in the pros and cons of different courses of action, as time would allow. Jefferson was superbly informed himself; he went out of his way to educate his own family, he founded a University to educate his state, Virgihnia.
That's the ideal, that's what makes a republic work, makes it viable. An informed citizenry. But we have failed, miserably, to make this happen. Our public educational systems no longer require courses in civics that explain the mechanics of government, how laws are passed and the like. Newspapers, even the best, continue to shrink and shrink and lose readership. Other sources of news have lost their sense of public responsibility, of public mission; and news increasingly passes over into entertainment. One consequence is that the whole public realm weakens, a sense of unity, of being part of one people, dissipates, and what divides us does so more and more strongly, more permanently, and we no longer feel like we have one purpose, one identity. As citizens of a particular place and a particular country.
When that goes, we get what we got yesterday. A demagogue for a President.
Republics, to put it another way, are hard work. To keep them going takes a cerrtain amount of wisdom, and that in turn takes an education, it takes knowledge, and not just in school. It takes keeping up with events and their meamings, it means reading about events and their meanings, not just in the papers but in news magazines and even books. It means developing your curiosity. It means in the end getting involved. Especially at the local level, where it's possible to be unusually effective.
For starters, we would have to go back to teaching civics. To teaching history, political history, diplomatic history, all the old-fashioned kinds of history, which educated people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and most of the modern Presidents as well. This is what Lincoln read, picking up his education when he could. Now srtudents take something called Social Studies, an umbrella term for intellectual volleyball; toss it, teach the classics. When the country was being created it was reading Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot--the Enlightenment philosophers, and their thoughts thread through the Constitution. It was Voltaire who said, "If you believe absurdities, you will commit atrocities." Right now our own citizens believe the most amazing absurdities, because they don't have the knowledge or even just the information to know better. Thus Donald Trump. He is no better just because he's been elected President. He's only more dangerous.
The idea should be not to dumb down, but to smarten up. The whole culture has to bend its efforts to make this happen, or we are permanently lost.
Trump won, against all expectations, and those who thought he was as bad a candidate as the country has ever seen are upset and baffled. The American people ignored the criminality, the narcississm, the sexism, the racism, the frauds, the abuses, indeed embraced it all, as if it were nothing to them, as apparently it was. In favor of what? Climate change? Coziness with Russia? Reckless foreign policy? Who can understand this?
Those at the bottom, apparently. Not the desperate poor at the very bottom who gave up hoping for anything better a long time ago. Not the disenfranchised, the immigrants, the refugees, blacks, Moslems, the chronically ill, the old, and all the other people stuck in the glue of killing defeat. I'm speaking of the adult whites who have lost not just jobs but futures to globalization, automation, and all the other economic forces that beset us, who are watching their lives drift away on the unfavorable tide of history. These are the people, apparently, who turned to Trump to save them, with his border wall and his promise to deport all illegal immigrants, all eleven million of them, and to keep Moslems out of the country, and to bring back American jobs. And in the processs of making those promises he ignored all the Constitutional protections that individuals enjoy in the United States and all the institutional traditions that have proven as well to protect the orderly processes of government, plus he ignored the impossibility of bringing back what has been lost. There was never any mention of how he was going to do these things, never a program, a plan, a strategy. Jobs have in fact been lost to macro-economic forces that nobody has the power to stop. Some of the Constititional protections he said he would destroy, others he simply acted as if he would ignore--in short laying an authoritarian hand over government as if it belonged to him. But it has never belonged to any President, however strong. There are fundamental checks and balances built in, and traditional ways of working in government as well, that are designed to keep situations, and governments, under control. It remains to be seen whether this system will continue to work.
But given the man's record, I'm quite nervous. Not only does he have no actual policy positions, no programs, only bankruptcies and bad behavior behind him, nobody knows what will happen next. His closest advisors are fools and buffoons like Gingrich and Giuliani. His own wife is an illegal immigrant. And this is the "people's choice."
So if this is what the people preferred, it's time to look at the people. Hillary Clinton called them, half of them anyway, a "basket of deplorables." It's a general rule that people get the governments they deserve. The Founders understood this; when Franklin was asked when he walked out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 what kind of government they were making, he famously replied, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."
If you can keep it.
And Jefferson saw the import of that, he understood that to be a citizen at all required a level of attention and knowledge on the part of the individual that went well beyond the ordinary, that people needed to be informed, and understand how government worked and to an extent how the world itself worked, in order to be responsible citizens. That citizenship came with responsibilities. That a citizen needed to be involved not only in his professional life, his working life, but in the life of the community and the country, that his opinions had to be as versed in the complexities of issues, in the pros and cons of different courses of action, as time would allow. Jefferson was superbly informed himself; he went out of his way to educate his own family, he founded a University to educate his state, Virgihnia.
That's the ideal, that's what makes a republic work, makes it viable. An informed citizenry. But we have failed, miserably, to make this happen. Our public educational systems no longer require courses in civics that explain the mechanics of government, how laws are passed and the like. Newspapers, even the best, continue to shrink and shrink and lose readership. Other sources of news have lost their sense of public responsibility, of public mission; and news increasingly passes over into entertainment. One consequence is that the whole public realm weakens, a sense of unity, of being part of one people, dissipates, and what divides us does so more and more strongly, more permanently, and we no longer feel like we have one purpose, one identity. As citizens of a particular place and a particular country.
When that goes, we get what we got yesterday. A demagogue for a President.
Republics, to put it another way, are hard work. To keep them going takes a cerrtain amount of wisdom, and that in turn takes an education, it takes knowledge, and not just in school. It takes keeping up with events and their meamings, it means reading about events and their meanings, not just in the papers but in news magazines and even books. It means developing your curiosity. It means in the end getting involved. Especially at the local level, where it's possible to be unusually effective.
For starters, we would have to go back to teaching civics. To teaching history, political history, diplomatic history, all the old-fashioned kinds of history, which educated people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and most of the modern Presidents as well. This is what Lincoln read, picking up his education when he could. Now srtudents take something called Social Studies, an umbrella term for intellectual volleyball; toss it, teach the classics. When the country was being created it was reading Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot--the Enlightenment philosophers, and their thoughts thread through the Constitution. It was Voltaire who said, "If you believe absurdities, you will commit atrocities." Right now our own citizens believe the most amazing absurdities, because they don't have the knowledge or even just the information to know better. Thus Donald Trump. He is no better just because he's been elected President. He's only more dangerous.
The idea should be not to dumb down, but to smarten up. The whole culture has to bend its efforts to make this happen, or we are permanently lost.
Thursday, September 1, 2016
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL
September 1, 2016: ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL
I've always liked Tip O'Neill's famous dictum--all politics is local--because of the paradox inherent in it. Who doesn't like paradox? No, all politics is clearly not local. World wars are not local, vast global struggles for power and influence are not local, statewide Senate races are not local, and so on. And yet something like the opposite prevails as well. The global so often emerges from the particular, the struggle for power is pretty much the same no matter what level it takes place at, global is local on a grand scale--and so on once more. I remember Graham Robb writing in his wonderful book THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE about a village on one side of a river in rural France that had been at odds for generations with a village on the other side of the river, and how they would periodically gather, each on its own side of the river, and shout oaths and imprecations at each other. In different languages. The universal use of French in France, it turns out, is a recent phenomenon, imposed by French kings in the 17th century. Or there was the rebellion in the Vendee at the time of the French revolution, where this relatively remote province conducted a revolution against the Revolution, based on its loyalty to the Catholic Church and its hatred of government officials imposed from above conscripting local men for the national army. Thousands of people died in this conflict. People were tied to rafts and the rafts were then deliberately sunk. The local definitely went global in that case.
And now here I am, immersed in local politics. I have not run for office since I was asked to run for president of my high school class by various teachers, because they needed somebody to run against a boy they didn't approve of, who was majoring in shop. I lost big time. But I have been appointed, twice now in thirty years, to chair a regulatory board in Sag Harbor, and it's a hot seat right now: the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review. Sag Harbor is a beautiful old village dating from Colonial days, it is full of historic houses in all kinds of architectural styles, and it relies on its appeal to the tourist industry, to retirees, and to second home owners for its economic health. And that appeal is so great that it has attracted way too many overly wealthy people. The average house size in Sag Harbor is about 1500 sq. ft. It's all very charming, and the wealthy people want to own a piece of it. But they're wealthy, wealthy people don't live in small houses, so they want to take these little houses and double or triple their size, thereby destroying the historical value of the house, and, if that happens often enough, ultimately the village. We have a fairly strict zoning code, and it's our job as a regulatory Board to enforce it. And nothing, it would seem, makes a hedge fund manager worth hundreds of millions of dollars angrier than being told he can't do, or get, what he wants.
And the conflict inherent in this situation and makes this job so challenging has gone, if not global, then national. The New York Times has reported on it. Vanity Fair wrote a piece about it just recently in which I'm quoted and my picture appears. Wow. Famous for fifteen seconds. I've been in all the local papers. But what's interesting about it is the degree of local involvement. Letters to the editor. Phone calls from supporters. Stand firm. Hold fast. And we're trying. And I think, this is a classic case--public interest against private property; and the whole village is involved, so are people who live nearby but not in the village. This is democracy at work. And it's clean. Nobody has offered me a bribe, or any of the other four members of my Board. We do our very best to decide cases on their merits alone. This is democracy the way it's supposed to be, don't you think?
But then shit happens. Some people, usually but not always the wealthy, ignore the code and overbuild anyway, willing to pay the paltry fines we're allowed to impose to get what they want. Repeatedly applicants appear before our Board, and no doubt other Boards, and lie to us. "I need an extra bedroom, or two or three, for my grandchildren," they tell us, when in fact they're developers hoping to maximize their profits. One man made that argument before a board at the same time his proposed large house (on a small lot) was listed for sale on a real estate web site. This becomes routine, and as a board member you come to the point where you really don't believe anyone who wants something from you. You turn cynical.
The parallel between the local and the national should be obvious. What other wealthy person presents his case to the public and lies, regularly, repeatedly, and demonstrably? Who else goes ahead and does what the law, the rules, disallow, and figures he can get away with it? Who else is indifferent to public policy, to public values; who only wants to game the system to his own ends? These are rhetorical questions. We all know the answer. And I ask myself two related questions, here in my little upstairs office, crowded with books--can Sag Harbor survive this onslaught of wealth? And can the nation survive Donald Trump?
I've always liked Tip O'Neill's famous dictum--all politics is local--because of the paradox inherent in it. Who doesn't like paradox? No, all politics is clearly not local. World wars are not local, vast global struggles for power and influence are not local, statewide Senate races are not local, and so on. And yet something like the opposite prevails as well. The global so often emerges from the particular, the struggle for power is pretty much the same no matter what level it takes place at, global is local on a grand scale--and so on once more. I remember Graham Robb writing in his wonderful book THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE about a village on one side of a river in rural France that had been at odds for generations with a village on the other side of the river, and how they would periodically gather, each on its own side of the river, and shout oaths and imprecations at each other. In different languages. The universal use of French in France, it turns out, is a recent phenomenon, imposed by French kings in the 17th century. Or there was the rebellion in the Vendee at the time of the French revolution, where this relatively remote province conducted a revolution against the Revolution, based on its loyalty to the Catholic Church and its hatred of government officials imposed from above conscripting local men for the national army. Thousands of people died in this conflict. People were tied to rafts and the rafts were then deliberately sunk. The local definitely went global in that case.
And now here I am, immersed in local politics. I have not run for office since I was asked to run for president of my high school class by various teachers, because they needed somebody to run against a boy they didn't approve of, who was majoring in shop. I lost big time. But I have been appointed, twice now in thirty years, to chair a regulatory board in Sag Harbor, and it's a hot seat right now: the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review. Sag Harbor is a beautiful old village dating from Colonial days, it is full of historic houses in all kinds of architectural styles, and it relies on its appeal to the tourist industry, to retirees, and to second home owners for its economic health. And that appeal is so great that it has attracted way too many overly wealthy people. The average house size in Sag Harbor is about 1500 sq. ft. It's all very charming, and the wealthy people want to own a piece of it. But they're wealthy, wealthy people don't live in small houses, so they want to take these little houses and double or triple their size, thereby destroying the historical value of the house, and, if that happens often enough, ultimately the village. We have a fairly strict zoning code, and it's our job as a regulatory Board to enforce it. And nothing, it would seem, makes a hedge fund manager worth hundreds of millions of dollars angrier than being told he can't do, or get, what he wants.
And the conflict inherent in this situation and makes this job so challenging has gone, if not global, then national. The New York Times has reported on it. Vanity Fair wrote a piece about it just recently in which I'm quoted and my picture appears. Wow. Famous for fifteen seconds. I've been in all the local papers. But what's interesting about it is the degree of local involvement. Letters to the editor. Phone calls from supporters. Stand firm. Hold fast. And we're trying. And I think, this is a classic case--public interest against private property; and the whole village is involved, so are people who live nearby but not in the village. This is democracy at work. And it's clean. Nobody has offered me a bribe, or any of the other four members of my Board. We do our very best to decide cases on their merits alone. This is democracy the way it's supposed to be, don't you think?
But then shit happens. Some people, usually but not always the wealthy, ignore the code and overbuild anyway, willing to pay the paltry fines we're allowed to impose to get what they want. Repeatedly applicants appear before our Board, and no doubt other Boards, and lie to us. "I need an extra bedroom, or two or three, for my grandchildren," they tell us, when in fact they're developers hoping to maximize their profits. One man made that argument before a board at the same time his proposed large house (on a small lot) was listed for sale on a real estate web site. This becomes routine, and as a board member you come to the point where you really don't believe anyone who wants something from you. You turn cynical.
The parallel between the local and the national should be obvious. What other wealthy person presents his case to the public and lies, regularly, repeatedly, and demonstrably? Who else goes ahead and does what the law, the rules, disallow, and figures he can get away with it? Who else is indifferent to public policy, to public values; who only wants to game the system to his own ends? These are rhetorical questions. We all know the answer. And I ask myself two related questions, here in my little upstairs office, crowded with books--can Sag Harbor survive this onslaught of wealth? And can the nation survive Donald Trump?
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