El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Year-end Letter December 2020
Moonlight Trail, Agua Caliente (San Diego) County Park, California, Spring 2020 Camping Trip, Anza-Borrego Desert
Love gives
Love takes
It takes a lot of lucky breaks
Lucky strikes
Lucky stars
I don’t know how I got this far
Who knows where it’s coming from
Or where it’s going to
Can I go all the way with you?
John Prine, All the Way With You [click on link to play full song]
We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.
V.S. Naipaul, Grief, essay in The New Yorker, January 6, 2020
There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more original than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
Richard Powers, The Overstory
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
…One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten – one hears of them no more.
James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
Once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme
Séamus Heaney, from The Cure of Troy
A Note on the Quotations Above
For a number of years now I have begun my Year-end letter with several quotes I read during the year that particularly struck me. Since David’s death they have usually been about the nature of love and the impact of losing it. One exception is the excerpt from a Séamus Heaney poem, which I used in my 2019 letter and which I am repeating for 2020. Why? Because with each passing year I am struck with what a rare thing it is to achieve any true justice in this world, so that in those infrequent instances when it occurs, we must savor it, as a most precious treasure. This has become such a fixture in my mind that I think it bears constant repeating. The comforting statement that in the end justice always triumphs is utter nonsense, in my opinion. I was struck that some months ago President-elect Biden quoted the very same passage.
The ephemeral nature of justice and fairness in this world was brought sharply home to me by listening to a riveting podcast – a series called In the Dark. Each season, the podcast is devoted to a different crime in which one or more major elements have gone horribly wrong, through incompetence or malfeasance or both. I listened to Season 2 this year, which was about the case of Curtis Flowers, a 23-year-old black man in a Mississippi Delta town where one summer morning in 1996, four people were shot to death in the local furniture store. Somehow the District Attorney focused on Curtis Flowers, who had no criminal record and only a loose connection to the furniture store. The DA built a case against him with no real evidence and managed to have him convicted. His trial was invalidated and over the course of the years, he had five more trials, all of which resulted in convictions that put him on Death Row, and all of which were overturned as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. What appears to have been his salvation is that the reporters for this podcast methodically – with a fantastic expenditure of time and money – uncovered countless facts that systematically called into question whether Flowers had committed the crime, the shaky nature of the “evidence” against him, and suppressed data pointing to another suspect. Meanwhile for 23 years, he languished in jail, mostly in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison.
The bottom line in all this is the stunning ability of create, out of thin air, a guilty verdict against someone who almost certainly was innocent. Exacerbating the situation was that the DA systematically eliminated black jurors. It becomes obvious in interviews that virtually every white person in the town is totally convinced of Flowers’ guilt and every black person in the town is equally convinced that he is innocent (which is clearly the case). Over and above all this is that justice may or may not out in the end – and when it does, it can take a very long time and meanwhile lives have been terribly damaged. We often describe a situation as “Kafkesque” but the truth is, the “Kafkesque” is reality!
THE YEAR 2020
Many of us would have to say that overall this might be the worst year we have passed through collectively. The pandemic has been an unprecedented experience although those of us old enough to be getting Social Security, a pension, Medicare and the like, have gotten off easy compared to many younger Americans. The combination of pandemic, economic free-fall, long-standing racial issues coming to the fore, having school-age children, and a national political scene that leaves most of us in a state of deep worry and disbelief means a year unlike any other.
And for me personally, the question of health has been front and center since late July 2019 when I was discovered to have a heart condition so serious that I was primed for a fatal heart attack and fortunate it had not already happened. So I am now a person with “coronary arterial disease” and on top of that had some significant other issues resulting in two surgical procedures in 2020 (laser break-up of a bladder stone and a laminectomy to address stenosis and severely pinched nerves in my lower back that has significantly affected walking, hiking, bicycling.
LOOKING BACK – THINKING ABOUT LIFE AND AGING
As I get closer and closer to turning 80 I find myself spending an increasing portion of my time looking back on my life and in some not very systematic way, trying to assess it. This is understandable – statistically most of my life is behind me and it seems to me that one of the pleasures of aging is to sit back and take the long view of where one has been, what one has accomplished, how it has all turned out – what is good about one’s life, where the missed opportunities were, and one’s failures as a human being. In 2020 this became an even more significant aspect of my life, both because of being at home so much more and because of limitations due to some of the health issues I’ve been confronting.
I had to face up to the fact that my days of bicycling were finally over – a very big decision. Bicycling has been integral to my life virtually since childhood. But between lack of strength in my legs as a result of the stenosis and my extreme susceptibility to bleeding due to several anti-coagulants I take, I had to accept that a bicycle accident could be fatal. My really good bicycle was stolen in the months after my heart crisis and I was only left with my beloved old Trek 500 from 1983 and my Washington days. I finally let go of it – donated it and all the associated accessories and parts to a youth collective in town that fixes up bicycles and gives them to young people who cannot afford their own. While perhaps not quite as momentous of giving up one’s car, this was a pretty big event in my life.
Even though I can no longer bicycle and backpack, I am grateful for what I can still do – hikes in the mountains (even if not as ambitious as what I could do even a couple of years ago), walks in town, car camping, and a vigorous exercise regimen in our Fitness Center. And that is how one has to reframe one’s vision in old age – remember all the wonderful things one once did and can no longer do, but don’t dwell excessively on them. Instead be lifted up by all that still remains – and even more important than one’s physical condition is having a mind that remains reasonably sharp.
So the bottom line is that until recently, while I knew the years were adding up, I never thought of myself as “old” with all the problems typical of the elderly. That has changed. While I place no artificial limits on what I undertake based strictly on age, all the same, here I am, someone with a variety of conditions, taking a fair number of prescription medications, scheduling medical appointments and tests all the time. It is that shocking realization that aging has caught up with me. Deep down, we all know it will happen eventually, but we don’t know quite when. I didn’t think it would rope me in quite so soon, but there it is!
So I have arrived at the point where I am sufficiently appreciative of the life I have had that I can accept – I think – however much time I have left, be it a short time or a very long time, as long as I can stay reasonably fit, physically and mentally. This new spirit of acceptance is something I am pleased with.
I continue to lose people I know and this year was no exception. In fact, this year I lost two quite close friends who went back many decades for me. There is that sense of one’s “known world” gradually shrinking with such losses.
With each additional year I find my fascination with the human enterprise only increases. I try to understand what it all means, what it is to be human, how to treat others ethically, why people do what they do. This is a source of endless fascination, something one can explore through reading, film, theater and many other avenues. I was so certain of so much when I was young and now I am certain of almost nothing but the seeking keeps me going.
LEGACY PROJECTS RELATING TO DAVID
I completed, or almost completed, three major projects – I call them “legacy projects” relating to David’s accomplishments:
1. A book I created, Remembering David: Photos and Text of, by, and about David Jenness, is now available as an “on demand” publication. It includes photographs of David (some just of him, some with others) over the entire span of his life) but as importantly, it contains extended samples of his writing on many topics – music, art, architecture, politics, family, travel, poetry. For David, the written word was sacred and he loved writing as a way to take full advantage of the richness of the English language. As the creator of the book, I have to place all orders, so if you are interested contact me.
2. A CD of songs and some narration selected from David’s 10-year project, Forgotten Songs from Broadway and Hollywood. This came out in April, produced by the Musical Theater Project and released on its Harbinger label, distributed through Naxos Records. The title is Forgotten Gems from Stage & Screen. It can be purchased from Amazon.com, NaxosDirect or Harbinger .
3. A large semi-circular bench dedicated to David’s memory in the new Piñon-Juniper Woodland section of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. The Woodland was due to open in spring 2020 but has been delayed as a result of the pandemic. The bench will bear two plaques, one with a poem David wrote to me and one a dedication to his memory. It is situated in a spot with a magnificent view and given that David’s remains were cremated, will serve as a form of gravesite. Interestingly, the Botanic Garden has developed a comprehensive database not only of all the plants in the gardens but of features, such as benches, fountains, etc. When the bench is in place, there will be a photograph of it in situ and close-ups of the plaques, so anyone, anywhere in the world, can call it up.
OTHER PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
Each year I continue to work on certain undertakings – this letter, which is a significant investment in time, the wall calendar I create each year based on my photographs (with some travel destination as the theme, for 2021 it being The Galapagos), maintaining on my Web site what is probably the most comprehensive listing of museums and non-commercial galleries in New York City.
At the beginning of the year I had started training and preparation for what appeared to be three very interesting volunteer programs (walking tours of downtown Santa Fe under the auspices of the New Mexico History Museum; tutoring immigrants to prepare them for the citizenship examination; tech support for seniors in their homes) but with COVID-19, that all came to a crashing halt. The Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, where I am a guide each summer, was, not surprisingly, cancelled.
I wanted to find a way to make some contribution, even as a stay-at-home. I discovered one program that I have put a lot of time into – entering data for the Arolson Archives in Germany, the largest collection of original source documents relating to the Nazi concentration camps. This has been a very sobering but important undertaking, to which I try to contribute 45 minutes of data entry from prisoner records, 6 days a week, reading digitized original documents (not always easy to decipher). The project is called Every Name Counts and I feel I am doing something worthwhile. Also, during the electoral campaign, I volunteered for the Data Entry Team of the local Democratic National Committee, updating voter records in a variety of ways, depending on the task that needed to be done at a particular moment.
GOOD READS
One of my more fascinating reads was Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, his book on psychedelics. The book is many things – a brief history of mind-altering chemicals, almost all derived from plants, a description of personal experiences, uses for those going through mental trauma (severe depression, paranoia, terminal illness) but also an exploration of the effects on those who are high functioning “normals.” Particularly fascinating is the concept of multiple consciousnesses, particularly those which enter once the high walls the ego (the “self”) constructs around us disappear, if only temporarily. One senses the wondrous possibilities of escaping the powerful gravitational force field of the self and traveling into other worlds and dimensions. Pollan focuses particularly on psilocybin and LSD, and I found myself desperately wanting to try psilocybin. By the time I finished the book I came away firmly believing our everyday world is quite one-dimensional and I so would like to enter a multi-dimensional consciousness. Interestingly, a few cities and the state of Oregon have made psilocybin “legal” so perhaps there will be opportunities soon.
There were countless interesting passages in Pollan’s boolk but I will excerpt just one of the many that struck me, about mind-altering substances vis-à-vis those who are dying:
But however it works, and whatever vocabulary we use to explain it, this seems to me the great gift of the psychedelic journey, especially to the dying: its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a heightened sense of purpose and consequence. Depending on one’s orientation, this can be understood either in humanistic or in spiritual terms – for what is the Sacred but a capitalized version of significance? Even for atheists … psychedelics can charge a world from which the gods long ago departed with the pulse of meaning, the immanence with which they once infused it. The sense of a cold and arbitrary universe governed purely by chance is banished. Especially in the absence of faith, these medicines, in the right hands, may offer powerful antidotes to the existential terrors that afflict not only the dying.
To believe that life has any meaning at all is of course a large presumption requiring in some a leap of faith, but surely it is a helpful one, and never more so than at the approach of death. To situate the self in a larger context of meaning, whatever it is – a sense of oneness with nature or universal love – can make extinction of the self somewhat easier to contemplate. Religion has always understood this wager, but why should religion enjoy a monopoly? Bertrand Russell wrote that the best way to overcome one’s fear of death “is to make your interests gradually wider.”
I continued with my project to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one novel in this magnum opus per year – this being my 5th year, I read The Captive (also known as The Prisoner), 500 pages of extended musings on only a few ostensible “events.” What this entire undertaking is about comes down to a few main ideas, in my view. Perhaps most importantly is memory in the human experience. Here is a beautiful quote from the book which I think gets at the idea quite beautifully. The narrator has been at a party and pieces of furniture in the Paris mansion of the hosts bring back a remembrance of another place the hosts lived in 25 years ago:
“There, look at this room, it may perhaps give you an idea of what things were like in Rue Montalivet, twenty-five years ago.” From his smile, a tribute to the defunct drawing-room which he saw with his mind’s eye, I understood that what Brichot [the author’s elderly professor acquaintance], perhaps without realizing it, preferred in the old room, more than the large windows, more than the gay youth of his hosts and their faithful [dog], was that unreal part (which I myself could discern from similarities between la Raspelière and Quai Conti [the hosts’ current seaside and Paris homes, respectively]) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else, the external, actual part, liable to everyone’s control, is but the prolongation, was that part become purely imaginary, of a colour which no longer existed save for my elderly guide, which he was incapable of making me see, that part which has detached itself from the outer world, to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives a surplus value, in which it is assimilated to its normal substance, transforming itself - houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at the suppers which we recall - into that translucent alabaster of our memories, the colour of which we are incapable of displaying, since we alone see it, which enables us to say truthfully to other people, speaking of things past, that they cannot form any idea of them, that they do not resemble anything that they have seen, while we are unable to think of them ourself without a certain emotion, remembering that it is upon the existence of our thoughts that there depends, for a little time still, their survival, the brilliance of the lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of the arbours that will never bloom again.
Incidentally, you will also notice two other characteristics of reading Proust – unimaginably complex sentence structure fitted into sentences that can go on for half a page or more (within paragraphs that some times go for 20 pages at a stretch!).
As a sort of gloss on the above passage and a reflection on memory, I read the following, which I think particularly apt:
What we, or at any rate, what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable…. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
William Maxwell, So Long See You Tomorrow, 1996
The above quote appeared in an extended review of a large retrospective exhibit at the Met Breuer on Gerhard Richter, the great German painter (he calls himself a picture-maker), perhaps the major artist most associated with memory as explored in his visual work.
LISTENING AND VIEWING
While not a new development for me in The Year of the Plague (which may well become “The Years”) since I was already listening to podcasts and streaming films and multi-year series, these activities certainly came into their own this year.
I listen to a number of podcasts, most typically while working out at our Fitness Center or preparing breakfast or washing up or making recipes in the kitchen. If you are open to the idea of podcasts, or already have found some of your own, let me recommend the two I enjoy the most, because of the quality of informed discussion and the amount I learn from them. The first is the New York Times Book Review podcast (which does not require a subscription to the New York Times) – a weekly interview with the author or critic of two recent books, followed by a discussion of the Times’ book review journalists on what they are currently reading and why they like or do not like the books.
The second superb podcast is In Our Time, from the BBC – each episode is on a single topic, usually of some cultural figure or historic period or scientific discovery. The moderator asks magnificently intelligent questions and his informed panelists are up to the task of providing deep, well-considered responses. Episodes have been devoted to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a novel which is more and more seen as one of the pivotal works of Western fiction), the French 19th century author George Sand, the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (a critical encounter between Germanic tribes and the until then invincible Roman military) and the 19th century Roman Catholic English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as well as topics such as pheromones and hybrids. Very highly recommended.
With so much of the year spent in relative isolation, evenings, after a day alone often spent reading, has provided a break through streaming services – there has been an abundance of excellent series in addition, of course, to a wealth of cultural offerings from major institutions world-wide. What is particularly delightful about streaming is the opportunity to watch series from other countries such as Deadwind (Finland), Borgen (Denmark), In My Skin (Wales) A French Village / Un Village Français (France), Babylon Berlin (Germany) and Normal People (Ireland), not to mention compelling British procedurals. The choices of good material seem almost limitless these days.
TRAVEL
As was the case for most of us, this was a year of very limited travel for me. I got in one “real” trip before the complete shutdown and one camping trip. I went to Sarasota, Florida for 2 weeks in late February and just hung out there, exploring the immediate area. It was one part of Florida I did not know and I had heard that it was culturally quite lively which was true (excellent repertory theater, museums, music and dance, botanic garden). Nearby were some very attractive natural areas. All the same, for various reasons, Florida is not a favorite place of mine and these days, it seems unable to handle the degree of overcrowding it is experiencing – traffic, pollution, and the effects of climate change. Not a place that will draw me back.
The year included two camping trips – my traditional extended spring trip with a good friend, which we got in just before everything went belly-up, to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in southern California, and in late October, a brief but spectacular trip to southern New Mexico in the Sacramento Mountains. With all my recent health issues I am thrilled to still be camping, sleeping on the ground looking up at the starry sky.
Alligator, Myaka River State Park, Florida Escarpment, Sacramento Mtns., Oliver Lee State Park
With most travel shut down I have not even thought ahead to 2021 as none of us has any idea what is in store. This is quite a change from a life filled with exciting travel year after year. – planning, anticipation and the actual experience itself!
THINKING ABOUT RACE
This has been the year when race as a fundamental defining issue in America fully surfaced nationwide and beyond into many global corners.
Before going further, I want to share one brilliant insight that relates to The South (i.e., the southern states of the U.S.). For me The South conjures an image of unimaginable brutality and violence lurking a millimeter below a sugar-coated surface – violence that can erupt at any moment for the slightest reason should one veer slightly outside the narrow boundaries of acceptable conversation and behavior. In that light, I found a whole new perspective in the following short interchange, many years ago, between two well-known literary figures, Ralph Ellison (black) and Irving Howe (white). It appeared in a reprinted New Yorker profile of Toni Morrison:
Ralph Ellison said something nice about living in the South, and Irving Howe said, “Why would you want to live in such an evil place?” Because all he was thinking about was rednecks. And Ralph Ellison said, “Black people live there.”
This is a brilliant insight and also revealed how incapable I was, as a white person, of ever seeing that The South was not just violent whites but had a whole world of black people and culture who represented something entirely different.
For this reason it has become abundantly clear to me that if we are ever to understand the deep, deep and fundamental impact of race in shaping American history and life, we – white Americans – must finally shut up and listen to Black voices. They have the experience and the insight and can help us, through their voices, begin to see ourselves in a truer light.
I used to ask myself, as did the political author Thomas Frank did some 16 years ago in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas, why do ordinary people vote the right-wing Republican platform when it is against their interests – economically, socially, etc. As I have implied before but am seeing with increasing clarity, it is race that is the underlying reason. As deeper research surfaces, it becomes ever more clear that the U.S. departs from so many other advanced nations on so many progressive issues because race is embedded in every aspect of who we are – gun violence, police brutality, capital punishment, mass incarceration, the role of religion – often fundamental Christianity – in American life, voter suppression, lack of universal health care, poor welfare support, the precarious conditions of most American workers, immigration policy – and on and on. Because many of these do not have an immediate and obvious connection to race, it has taken a long time to see that the roots of so many unique and troubling aspects of American life are, at bottom, connected with race and deep racial animosity. It is so pervasive we don’t even recognize it because it is in the very air we breathe, an invisible element in our day-to-day environment.
We say slavery and Jim Crow were America’s “original sin.” That lets us off much too easy. It is bred into the deepest genetic coding of what it means to be an American. I see increasingly, with each passing year, how race and racial animosity are the very core defining elements of what makes us American. How we ever transition to a better, more inclusive place, is a critical issue and I have no idea how we will do it, because we are only beginning, now, to get an inkling of the dimensions of the whole business.
One, of many, thoughts I have these days relates to my early adulthood when “riots” were tearing apart many American cities – Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark – because of endless injustices against African-Americans, followed by the uprisings following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. It helps to put all this in perspective to realize how much more extensive “race riots” were earlier in the 20th and back in the 19th centuries, when unbelievable violence against Black people was instigated by white mobs with a brutality beyond imagining. While I knew something about this, a podcast I listened to, Black Wall Street 1921, about what is now termed the “Tulsa Race Massacre” was tremendously informative, not only about this horrendous event, but a whole national history post-Civil War that played into this unleashing of unimaginable fury. Black people have had inflicted upon them barbarisms worthy of the most hideous examples of Nazi cruelty. In America, the most stunning examples of utter lawlessness can be laid at the hands of whites.
I still think the most powerful words relating to our terrible “original sin” of slavery were uttered by Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address and remain relevant today if we expand the concept of ”scourge” that he refers to:
Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'
One positive development on the racial front is the extraordinary visibility now being afforded to Black cultural figures – visual artists, architects, literary figures, playwrights, choreographers, dancers, filmmakers. Most of these individuals have been working away without much recognition in the wider art world but now with the Black Lives Matter and other movements, there has been a veritable explosion of awareness of the cultural riches coming from this segment of American life. I see this as a gift to every one of us, one that is giving me an opportunity for immeasurable enrichment and broader awareness.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
While I keep hoping that mankind can marshal our human intelligence in time to prevent catastrophe, increasingly I have reached the conclusion that at best we will have to pass through a long period of unimaginable disasters and difficulties – for the human race and all living creatures – before we get serious. The cost in life and suffering will be beyond comprehension. I’ve come to this conclusion by reading the small stories in various publications pointing out some looming environmental degradation (e.g., the accumulation of micro-particles of plastics on the seafloor) – the piling on of these developments, along with the obvious ones – the wildfires, record temperatures and melting in the Arctic, the collapse of the ice sheet in Greenland, hurricanes and rainfall of increasing ferocity, convinces me that it is already too late. One word keeps flashing in my mind – COLLAPSE.
As much as we learn of remedial efforts to address global environmental problems – climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity and habitat - one becomes aware that the negative trends are far outstripping the positive. I leave it to others to be positive – much as I would like to be, I cannot see it as a realistic stance.
THE POLITICAL CRISIS
Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough….. We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.
Frederick Douglass, Life and Times
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Charles Yancey, 1816
I accept my complete inability to understand how anyone could not see through all that Trump represents in terms of someone embodying all the worst in a human being, in every value most of us have been raised and taught to respect, even if we slip and fall along the way. Obviously numerous pieces have been written about him and his following. Two I can recommend as providing at least some insight, are the following:
New York Review of Books, November 19, 2020 issue
Mark Danner: “The Con He Rode In On”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/19/the-con-he-rode-in-on/
The New Yorker - November 2, 2020 issue
Nicholas Lemann: The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/the-republican-identity-crisis-after-trump
Beyond that, I have little to say about the past four years that hasn’t been said by countless others. It is unclear how much repair can be done to innumerable important Federal agencies whose mission has been perverted, decimated, undercut, destroyed and how many dedicated professionals see any future for themselves. Can international relations and the standing of the U.S. be repaired? Can any aspect of the coming catastrophe of climate change be addressed? Can the pandemic be dealt with effectively? Can anything be done about our hopelessly broken health care “system” (the word used advisedly)? How do we address economic devastation, the parlous state of working people, the vast degree of inequality?
I will only dwell on a few conclusions I have reached about our future as I mull things over in the early days following the election. My two major takeaways are:
1. Our democratic form of government has been very seriously harmed and I am not sure when and if it will recover.
2. The admiration for us by the rest of the world no longer exists and will not return. We are seen as hypocrites in our preaching about democracy, we break our commitments, don’t cooperate on the international stage, bully others. The loss of standing in the world’s regard began some time ago, but the last four years was the coup de grace.
Beyond that, I have come to some other understandings at this point.
• The realization that after almost 4 years of unprecedented norm-breaking, corruption, criminality, lying, gratuitous cruelty, incompetence, lack of elementary compassion, laziness, and destruction of Federal agencies, 73,000,000 plus Americans still could vote for Trump forces me to think of H. L. Mencken’s remark, No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
• I am absolutely convinced that were it not for the pandemic, Trump would easily have won re-election despite what we have experienced since the beginning of his first term. A huge percent of the population, despite the reality, believe he was/is highly effective on the economy. For working class people, many of whom do not follow politics intensely, belief in Trump as a successful businessman is far more important than all the competing negatives.
• It has been pointed out for many many decades that most Americans if presented with the protections of the Bill of Rights – but not told they were taken from the Bill of Rights – would not support those protections. We cannot count on most Americans, when push comes to shove, to stand behind our basic liberties.
• Most Americans are fairly conservative by and large – it is only under unusual circumstances that progressive candidates and policies triumph and to expect there will be some new dawn of progressive awakening is illusory.
• The Republican Party is no longer a political party in the traditional sense – it is a cult following of one person where loyalty means saying, with enthusiasm, that the Earth is flat and two plus two equals five. It has no principles, no moral guidelines. To call it “conservative” makes no sense as whatever values it has have no connection to the historical sense of what conservatism means and has stood for – rather it is populist, ethno-nationalist. Power for its politicians is its only goal and the welfare of the country no longer has any priority. It is radical in the way the Jacobins were.
• Trump’s loyal following is mass delusional in the psychological sense so that nothing he does has any impact on how his fan club sees him.
• While a Biden Administration will give us a veneer of rationality, I think the long-term prognosis for the American experiment is not at all good – if what we have just experienced could happen once it can easily happen again and very likely will – the 20th century was “The American Century” – the 21st. definitely not.
• The dignity of the Office of the President has been seriously damaged.
• The demographic “wave” that will ensure growing strength to the Democratic Party is an illusion – we have already seen the diverse Latino population and some Blacks lean to the Trump craziness – Democrats have to completely re-imagine their strategy for how to maintain strength and appeal in the future.
• As a corollary of the previous point, if there is no Trump to run against or have a referendum on next time – Democrats will have to be far more creative and agile to make a good case and to win over the public – the urgency of this re-thinking can not be overemphasized.
• Any hope of bipartisanship is a completely false hope – those calling themselves Republicans only have maintaining power of their so-called party as a goal – the welfare of the country is of a distant secondary concern.
• This means that the major pressing issues – health care reform, inequality, climate change, systemic racism, immigration - are unlikely to be addressed in any meaningful way.
• Many of our governmental institutions and processes are broken (for example, holding of elections and the aftermath) and not likely to be repaired.
• Thus while I am very grateful that Biden-Harris won, a positive outlook for the country in the longer term is unlikely.
AND SO, IN SUM
I hope you know by now that my year-end letter is rarely an overwhelming example of optimism and cheerfulness, to make up a new word. As hard as it is to do, I try – very very hard – to remember that John Lewis, who died earlier this year, personally experienced, through his bravery, his courage, and his absolute commitment to non-violence, so much human ugliness, somehow remained positive that ultimately good would triumph over evil. As I say, I find it hard to do, and yet, he, who experienced so much worse than me, managed to rise above it all. So, somehow, we have to think positively, even with all that is going on around us.
And with that, I close. Yours in the New Year with the hope of some return to what life was “before,”
Ken