The Weekly Screed (#1007)

The quality of mercy is not political

by David Benjamin

“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins.”

— Cheyenne proverb

MADISON, Wis. — A funny thing happened on Capitol Hill this week, when Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst apparently teamed up with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York, on a proposal that would tighten the screws on men in the U.S. armed forces who demean, molest, abuse and rape their female colleagues. 

This is odd because Joni belongs to the “she was asking for it” school of sexual-violence orthodoxy, otherwise known as the Republican Party. Solicitude toward rape victims, especially if the girls were drinking, wearing a lacy red push-up bra or acting “flirty” is alien to the outlook of contemporary conservatism. Joni has shown a slavish loyalty to the survivival-of-the-meanest philosophy that was bricked into her Party with the coronation of the Gipper forty years ago. Remember that Joni’s initial claim to political “authenticity” derived from her boast that she loved taking a gelding shears into the pigsty on her family farm and clipping the nuts off pubescent boars. 

So, you wonder, what’s going on here? Beats there a tiny, squishy heart beneath the bodice of Hard-Hearted Hannah?

Joni is aware that a hint of niceness might dismay the hardboiled reactionaries in her Hawkeye base. So, she offered a hasty alibi for taking up common cause with an East Coast liberal. Joni was, she explained, raped in college. This trauma, kept shamefully secret for lo, these many years, has softened her attitude about young women in coeducational settings made vulnerable to the bestial hungers of the strapping linebackers who circle them lustfully and regard undefended nookie as their God-given birthright.  

In this rare instance, Joni is right. The measure she’s co-sponsoring with Sen. Gillibrand is overdue, appropriate, necessary and incongruously compassionate. Ambiguous, however, is Joni’s motivation. For the sake of this law and only this law, Jonis has applied what might be called a necessary suspension of cruelty. It’s okay for her, an otherwise ruthless and Darwinian conservative, to care for her fellow human beings and offer them a helping hand — in blatant defiance of her partisan faith — because she was herself, personally, a victim of the outrage against which she has consented to legislate. 

Consider, for comparison, former vice president Dick Cheney. If ever there were a poster-gargoyle for the GOP philosophy of emptying society’s lifeboats of the poor, the wretched, the helpless and the hungry, and chumming the water for sharks, it was the guy known simply, in his biopic, as “Vice.” However, as Dick’s history reveals, he sacrificed his shot at the presidency out of fatherly fealty to his lesbian daughter, Mary. Despite his Party’s fierce hostility to any minuscule concession to gay, lesbian, transgender and generally queer minorities — to marry, to serve in the armed forces, to pee in their preferred lavatory — Dick stood (alongside Joe Biden) for gay rights even before Barack Obama “evolved.”

Vice, of course, has made it clear that he’s otherwise an orthodox right-wing firebrand in every aspect of American culture. His empathy toward gay folks — because his little girl is one of ‘em — is the unique compromise he has made to walking in his neighbor’s moccasins. In GOP circles, this sort of empathy is heresy. But it’s forgivable, like Joni’s uncharacteristic softheartedness toward campus sluts and eleventh-grade teases, because it’s personal. 

Right-wing icon Irving Kristol has said that a conservative is a “liberal who’s been mugged.” A similar, but more complicated dynamic emerges from the intimate travail of conservatives who stumble inadvertently into hardships that they prefer to reserve for people with whom they rarely or never associate. They are, in a sense, ambushed by empathy.

An absence of mercy, in the human heart, has always struck me as an acquired deficit. I tend to believe that feeling for other people — for total strangers — who are in trouble is an instinct. Cruelty must be cultivated, and the harvest of that seed can be poisonous. When armies, as they must, teach brutality, their veterans too often suffer its crippling hangover — nightmares, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress, divorce, isolation, homelessness, impulsive violence, suicide and… brutality. 

When I was twelve, I started going to movies all by myself, at the Erwin Theater in Tomah, Wisconsin. One of the flicks into which I bumbled, unaware of its sheer ghastliness, was Erwin Leiser’s documentary of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, Mein Kampf. A Catholic school kid in the woodsy Midwest, I knew nary of Jewishness, little about the Third Reich and I felt not a twinge of racial identity. I was a wide-eyed kid. But the images in the movie — of SS soldiers firing bullets into the brains of Jews lined up in front of pits, of humans herded from boxcars, stripped naked and hustled into gas chambers, then shoved dead, white and floppy-limbed into ovens, of piles of corpses twenty feet tall being bulldozed through the mud and crushed beneath the treads like dried stalks and empty cartons — altered my thinking, my feelings, as much as any experience in my life.

Seeing the Holocaust, in footage proudly filmed by its Nazi authors, simplified the theology I was learning at St. Mary’s School. I belonged to a faith that still, in those days, subtly demonized the Jew. After discovering the Final Solution, I tore the membrane of sectarianism. I became less a Catholic and less even a “Christian,” becoming instead just an admirer of a mortal Jesus who befriended unbelievers, scorned the moneychangers and offended the high priests, praised the kindness of strangers, walked among lepers and lunatics, and washed the feet of the village whore. I became, I guess, a humanist. I became what was called, in a memorable episode of “Star Trek,” an “empath.”

In high school, in tune with this conversion, I fell in love with a girl named Linda who was more empath than me, who felt everyone else’s pain so deeply that she lived in a gentle cloud of melancholy that was both endearing and heartbreaking. The flip side — my consolation in loving Linda madly — was that, as sensitive as she was to intimations of hurt and anguish, she was similarly receptive to joy. It was easy, and exhilarating, to make her laugh. 

My friendship with Linda, which has never gone away, compels me to regard Joni Ernst’s exceptional spasm of compassion with less than complete scorn. Joni’s concern for women who’ve endured what once she endured validates — somewhat — my conviction that humans are innately, though perhaps tenuously, empathetic. We start out caring, but we can learn — through ideology or indoctrination or through a lifelong series of muggings both real and imaginary — to harden. 

The essence of compassion — no, of humanity — is the power — no, the instinct — to extend the quality of mercy beyond one’s own narrow sphere, to cry, as I did alone in the Erwin, for the death-camp millions, their religion and ethnicity beyond my experience, but their agonies an ache in my heart and their murder a deep-felt guilt that I’ll never shake.

The human imperative is not just enough to walk — but to feel, to hurt, to weep, to rejoice and to laugh — in your neighbor’s moccasins.

The Weekly Screed (#1006)

 Tarzan’s Twin Cities Adventure

by David Benjamin

“In the colonial countries… the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force.” 

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

MADISON, Wis. — Whenever I see that photo of Derek Chauvin  glaring malignantly into the camera and crushing George Floyd beneath his knee, the feature that strikes me is that the cop’s arms are so skinny. Here’s a guy, I think, who never milked a Minnesota cow, drove a rig or unloaded a boxcar. Here’s a white man whose full claim to muscle is institutional authority. Chauvin comes off as supremely cocksure because he knows that the impersonal State has his back. With his steely stare and hand on hip, he’s saying, “Look at me and despair, peasants, as I nonchalantly ride the bull neck of a giant Black buck almost twice my size who, in a fair fight, would pound me senseless. I am untouchable. ”

Of course, I also summon up Tarzan memories. More accurately, I think about Tarzan’s clients, Great White Hunters (GWH) slumming among the Hottentots and foreshadowing Derek Chauvin’s safari into darkest Minneapolis. Those bygone adventurers, protected by the colonial conquerors who knelt on Africa’s neck for more than a century, were outsiders from the faraway white “suburbs” of Belgium, France, Britain and Germany. Without Tarzan’s help, they could never hope to find untold fortune in the elephants’ graveyard, or the gold fields of Kilimanjaro, or the secret jewels of the Juju queen. They, too, had skinny arms and they didn’t know the territory. What they did have was official authority. And guns.

Among all the weird superheroes who’ve come down to us from pulp fiction, comic books and the movies, Tarzan might be the weirdest of all — a white jungle monarch in a Black continent. He had to be white because, in the Jim Crow America where Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his stories, where Hollywood turned Tarzan into a movie franchise, few readers or filmgoers would have tolerated the notion of a Negro protagonist. In the jungles of West Africa where he holds unchallenged sway over chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, various other herbivores and, most significantly, “natives,” Tarzan’s dominion validates Anglo-Saxon heritage as a prerequisite for executive management. 

It’s possibly a sign of social progress that the word “natives” nowadays looks better in quotation marks. I memorized this formulation largely through my exposure to Tarzan at the Erwin Theater. In Hollywood parlance, an African in Africa was a “native.” The term, which I never thought pejorative (I was a little kid), bestowed a a sort of ass-backwards indulgence on the dwellers of the “dark” continent. Plant a Black person anywhere else and society applied less decorous labels.

Tarzan had to be white, because his GWH clients needed a fellow Caucasian as the trusted interlocutor between them and the gibbering, skittish natives. Never mind that Johnny Weismuller’s ape man had an English vocabulary only slightly larger than that of Cheeta the chimp. Had Tarzan been Black — and as articulate as, say, Jane (or Frederick Douglass) — he would have been deemed incredible both by the GWHs in the story and a movie-house crowd conditioned to Black speech by Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit. Had Tarzan been Black, cohabiting out of wedlock in a treehouse with Maureen O’Sullivan, a half-caste son and an intelligent monkey, there would have been crosses burning in front of the Rialto and race riots inside the Bijou.  

Fortunately, when MGM released Tarzan and His Mate in 1934, there was no one in the audience who might challenge the sacred principle of white rule. In film after film, without a peep from moviegoers, Tarzan presided over a repeated scene that cinematically augured the death of George Floyd. 

In your typical Tarzan flick, the explorers — plus Tarzan and Jane (in her peekaboo buckskin bikini) — are the only white faces in a throng of native bearers. Suddenly, the bearers are afraid to go on. They’ve been spooked by fear of the mountain god, or the river elves or the mythic Leopard People, or by some other comical Negroid superstition. The white hunter, thin, professorial and smooth-shaven except for a pencil mustache, decked out in pressed khakis and pith helmet, waxes angry at native initiative. He menaces the quaking, cowering bearers with his rifle.

“Pick up the load, Pompey — or else!” he roars, in English, to the biggest, blackest native. Tarzan stands by, looking sympathetic toward Pompey but not intervening (much like the crowd on 38th Street in Minneapolis). Jane clutches Tarzan’s rippling but inert arm and looks anxious (but also delectable).

Eventually, the mutinous native utters an oath in Negroese. He spins on his heel and proceeds to desert the safari. The GHW shouts, “Oh no you don’t, you black devil!” He promptly squeezes his trigger, plugs Pompey neatly in the back and, consequently, brings the rest of the bearers to heel — at least until the attack of the Leopard People (who turn out to be real). White rule, however, has been validated by virtue of superior weaponry and the passivity of moral bystanders. 

Segue back to real life in the present, where the remarkable jury verdict against Derek Chauvin suggests that the code of the Great White Hunter might have finally fallen out of vogue. Perhaps the principle of indispensable pallor — notwithstanding the the shrill chauvinism of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the “America First Caucus” — is in danger. 

Or maybe not. Derek Chauvin’s crime was committed publicly with no intervention by other authority, while a crowd of ambivalent Tarzans and Janes looked on, uncomfortably. The sheer banality of this outrage seems to suggest that Chauvin and his fellow cops haven’t much evolved beyond the condescending racism and visceral fear of the “natives” embodied by the greedy ivory poachers of Tarzan and His Mate.

After all, I suspect, this prosecution was a black swan poised to fly south. And when they make the movie, Brad Pitt will be cast as George Floyd… and he won’t die after all.

The Weekly Screed (#1005)

OWLs, rise up and be heard! (Or not)

by David Benjamin

“Call it peace or call it treason/ Call it love or call it reason/ But I ain’t marchin’ any more.” — Phil Ochs

MADISON, Wis. — At my age, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “movement” is Metamucil. 

However, as I’ve watched the crowds in the streets of Minnesota — milling and hollering, rattling a chain-link cage full of cringing cops, winging (petroleum-based, ecologically destructive) plastic water bottles hither and yon— all because of the tragicomic shooting of Daunte Wright, well, I feel a pang of movement envy.

At a moment that seems to be oversupplied with movements, from BLM to QAnon, from the Proud Boys to the Lincoln Project, I’m left alone and palely loitering. 

But then… the other day, I looked around and realized that I typify a huge demographic of old white liberals (OWLs) who — if we ever took the trouble to organize — have the makings of a kickass national movement. Seriously, we know this protest gag inside-out. We’ve been there and done that to the point where we’re downright blasé when we see outbreaks of fist-shaking, sign-waving, slogan-shouting, brick-flinging, car-burning, cop-baiting and running wild in the streets. 

Actually we’re sort of responsible for a lot of this mishigoss. At this stage, our youthful indiscretions and excesses have given us the sort of perspective that could lend a calming, even unifying tone to the current trend in tribal vituperation. Many of us go all the way back to the granddaddy of all three-word slogans. A half-century before “Black lives matter” and “Lock her up!”, we had “Ban the Bomb,” whose symbol, a B-52 bomber circumscribed by a black ring, later came to be known as the “peace sign.” We were around for other memorable and unfortunate three-word mantras like “Burn, baby, burn,” “Off the pig” and “Eat the rich.”

(“Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”)

We all had copies of The Whole Earth Catalog and most of us learned, from The Anarchist Cookbook how to make a Molotov cocktail that wouldn’t blow up in your hand. Our unholy trinity was “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” We were more or less present at the creation of all three — after which we didn’t manage them all that deftly. Let’s review (with grades).

On sex: We learned eventually that many people before us had done sex, but we applied ourselves to it more indiscriminately and openly — if not skillfully — than our more circumspect forebears. I often suspect that the feminist uprising diverged from the “sexual revolution” as a protest to the carnal incompetence of your typical twenty-something male hippie. Grade: C-minus

On drugs: We were the hedonist cult who migrated illicit drugs from the grainy mythology of reefer madness and Nelson Algren’s bleak junkie underworld to the “recreational” Haight-Ashbury delusion of tune-in, turn-on, drop-out — all of which reverted back to Nelson Algren’s bleak junkie underworld. Grade: F

On rock ’n’ roll, purely by chance and the Grace of Jefferson Airplane, we wailed, danced and rocked on. Nudged toward the blues by Elvis, we embraced — before we knew what we were doing — a “crossover” into multi-racial, rampantly eclectic pop music. Willy-nilly, we bought 45 rpm two-sides by Bo Diddley and Dean Martin, Patti Page and Janis Joplin. We fell in love with Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke not knowing that they were Black voices sneaking onto white radio — and we didn’t care. At a million school dances, rock clubs and stage shows, from the Winter Dance Party to Woodstock, we rode the evolution of rock ’n’ roll from the jungle beat of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters to Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” to the Beatles and Hendrix to Big Pink and the jazz-flavored harmonies of Crosby Stills & Nash. We could probably justify the creation of the OWL movement just as a fan club for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Aretha Franklin and “Alice’s Restaurant.” Grade: A

All this fun and games was possible because we were the most middle-class generation in history. We had Beach Party movies because, before we were born, poorer, tougher folks had the New Deal and the UAW. Our grandparents had survived the Depression. Our dads and uncles had come back alive from World War II and Korea. Every boy in America expected that he would either enter “the service” or find a way to dodge the draft. Every kid in America knew we would all die before age thirty in a rain of H-bombs and nuclear winter. 

Today, the right wing is a fever swamp of conspiracy theories. But, for a while — after Joe McCarthy flamed out — white liberals cornered the paranoia market. Eclipsing the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, we spun the Great American Conspiracy Theory, the one mythic enigma that will never die, thanks to the grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, the ghost of Jack Ruby and the disappearing second gunman.

We had icons before any newscaster had ever uttered the word “iconic.” We knew JFK not as a picture next to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on our Irish grandmother’s kitchen wall, but as an actual guy who lived and died before our eyes. We’ve watched a parade of “icons” as they passed for review, at first with wonder and adulation, more recently with a knowing smirk and a touch of ennui. When we see Lady Gaga today, we think, ah! Madonna. But when we saw Madonna, we thought Ethel Merman, or maybe Martha Raye — or even Eartha Kitt purring “I want to be bad…” We see Juston Bieber and we think Shaun Cassidy. We saw Shaun and we thought Fabian. We saw Fabian and… well, you know who.

We paid homage to “icons” so pervasive and persistent that society hasn’t been able to bury them despite the passage of generations. Foremost among them, of course, are the Duke, Marilyn and Jack Kennedy. Still today, we’re haunted almost palpably by Khrushchev, Guevara and de Gaulle, Sophia Loren, Cassius Clay, Malcolm, Martin and Bobby, James Dean, James Bond, Audrey Hepburn, Walt Disney, Godzilla, Ed Sullivan, Walter Cronkite, Hugh Hefner, George Wallace, Sidney Poitier, Neil Armstrong, Bugs Bunny, Lenny Bruce, Lucy Ricardo, Beaver Cleaver and Annette Funicello, Madame Nhu and Ho Chi Minh…

That’s right. We had Vietnam. 

We had the first war America lost, where all of us lost someone as young and promising, every bit as fierce and impetuous as all the rest of us, someone whose name we can trace, etched in marble on a black wall in Washington that slopes gently downward ’til it’s as deep in the green ground as a grave. 

Because we’ve shared so much, fought so many battles (and lost just about every one), and looked at clouds from both sides ’round, it seems as though old white liberals could slap together a hell of a movement just by making a few calls and gathering at a coffee house in the Village. Our new president, a fellow OWL, has proven that most of us still have our wits about us after all 400 blows.

It’s not competence or even energy that might sideline this movement. It’s more a matter of irony. I look at the throngs in Brooklyn Center, all in a rage and bristling with righteous intensity. And I remember the same scene, the same passion, the same crust of protective ignorance that kept us safe from the crushing grind of advocacy, compromise, attrition, co-optation and, finally, two cents on the dollar. I remember the words of Phil Ochs, who — before I was old enough to follow in his footsteps — said he was finished with marching. I remind myself of what I learned in my brief memberships in the Cub Scouts, 4-H and Junior Achievement. I’ve never been a joiner. 

Finally, decisively, I recall the words of Detective Murtaugh, wearied by a lifetime of trying to dam an endless flow of bad guys and bitter coffee: 

“I’m getting too old for this shit.”

The Weekly Screed (#1004)

 A Slave of Euphemism

by David Benjamin

“Be not the slave of words.” — Thomas Carlyle

MADISON, Wis. — In my Boston days I frequented a cozy and artful movie house on Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Central Square, called the Orson Welles Cinema. One of the best flicks I saw there was a Russian romance, A Slave of Love, released in 1976. Last week, I thought about this film (and the good old Orson Welles) for the first time in decades because of an inexplicable and irritating linguistic assault that has been launched against the word “slave.” 

I couldn’t help wondering how director Nikita Mikhalkov would feel if he saw his film’s Russian title clunkily translated as An Enslaved Person of Love.

This all happened because I tried to read two important articles, in The Atlantic and the New York Times, about America’s legacy of human bondage. In both essays, to my dismay, the authors steadfastly avoided the use of the word “slave.” After a dozen paragraphs or so, I had to stop, stymied and distracted the recently minted euphemism, “enslaved person.” 

Even as I fled this polysyllabic evasion, I understood the authors’ well-meaningness. If one is politically delicate, one does not apply facile four-letter (okay, five-letter) pejoratives to a disadvantaged demographic. Indeed, has there ever been an American caste more downtrodden than the Black slaves of the antebellum South? Let us not continue, with harsh language, to demean these 19th-century folks in the 21st century. Let us honor them with a new — sanitized and synthetic —  designation: “enslaved persons.” Let us thoughtfully mothball the dark and haunting word that has dogged them down the centuries and — in so cleansing our prose — make them all feel better.

Which they might appreciate, I guess, if they weren’t all dead.

My objection to “enslaved persons” is not political. It’s linguistic. Until someone launched against it a posthumous campaign of gratuitous euphemism, “slave” denoted not slur but social status. When we hear it spoken still today, that single syllable brings together in the mind — in crystal linguistic clarity — the slave, the slaver, the slave market and the slaveholder. 

Even more important to language mavens like me, the simplicity, brevity and vast connotation of this wonderfully short word — “slave” — have made it one of the the great metaphors of the English language… well, any language. 

Mikhalkov’s heroine Olga is not the first “slave of love” in our cultural canon. Leda was a slave of Zeus’ love. Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice were slaves of one another’s love. The entire city of Troy was a slave of love to a woman whose heartless allure launched a thousand ships. Othello, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, King Kong, Benjamin Braddock — all slaves of love.

One only need hear Hamlet’s lament, “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”, to entertain second thoughts about cashiering one of the oldest and most suggestive words of tongue or pen.

Really, how many rhymes can you find for “enslaved persons”? 

Would Shakespeare, made attentive to euphemism by the language police of Stratford, have written, “Give me that man/ That is not passion’s enslaved person, and I will wear him/ In my heart’s core.”?

Would Wordsworth have changed, “Physician art thou? — one, all eyes,/ Philosopher! — a fingering slave,/ One that would peep and botanize/ Upon his mother’s grave.”?

Not to mention a certain British anthem that — rousingly — rhymes “waves” with “slaves.” 

Consider the scansion of Lincoln’s famous warning, “A house divided against itself cannot stand: I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free…” 

Ponder what we do to Milton in Samson Agonistes, if we alter these melodious lines: “Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him/ Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.”

Try rephrasing Gauguin’s metaphor and see if it works: “When you read a book, you are the slave of the author’s mind.”

Think of the loss of lyricism if we censor the cri de coeur of Irish Labour leader James Connolly: ““The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of the slave.” Or of Balzac, who called a married woman “a slave whom one must put on a throne.” Or even John Maynard Keynes, who lamented that practical men are too often “slaves of some defunct economist.”

And think of the editing and labeling issues that would following the adoption of “enslaved persons.” A hundred history books refer to the West African seaboards from present-day Sierra Leone to Angola as the Slave Coast. Change that to “Enslaved Persons Coast” and it seems to suggest that these persons own the coast, pay mortgages on their beach houses and do a little surfing on the weekend.

Ambiguity, you see, is the saltpeter of euphemism.

The simple mention of “slave ship” conjures chains, horrors, whippings, filth, disease, rape, death and atrocity. Recast that infernal vessel as an “enslaved persons ship” and suddenly, it’s not so bad. One can almost picture shuffleboard, floor shows, deck chairs and a 24-hour buffet. 

The language we speak, and which a few of us cherish just as it has come down to us, is a legacy with which we dick around at the peril of rendering it colorless and antiseptic. There are words immensely good and worthy of jealous preservation because they evoke, express and fix in our conscience the worst evils we’ve inflicted upon one another. “Torture” is not “enhanced interrogation.” A “lynching” is not a “necktie party.” The “Holocaust” is not a “Final Solution.”

“Slave” is a word of this caliber. Even though we do so out of righteousness or guilt, whitewashing its ugliness with extra syllables and neutral connotation insults the bloodied millions who have borne this label down to us, on their ravaged backs, through centuries of pain. “Slave” is — and should remain — a verbal slap in the face. It is a brand of shame and a symbol of ineffable human fortitude. 

There is no better word for this word than this word. To “fix” it at this late date, to make this unbroken word more palatable to the politically squeamish, can only make it less true.

The Weekly Screed (#1003)

 The poltergeist in the Temple

by David Benjamin

“There is a poor, blind Samson in this land

“Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,

“Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,

“And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,

“Till the vast Temple of our liberties

“A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Warning (1842)

MADISON, Wis. — I came across Longfellow’s prophetic lines in Bernard DeVoto’s quirky history of the American frontier, The Year of Decision: 1846, and found them eerily apropos to our current year of decision. Coincidentally, I’m busy now editing my manuscript of a forthcoming novel, which is a ghost story. In the novel, a town is haunted by the seeming presence of a local hero torn suddenly, unexpectedly — unwillingly — from life, leaving in his wake a cloud of gloom that no one can dispel and from which the ghost himself cannot seem to escape. 

Again, it’s apropos that we seem to be living nowadays a real-life haunting in which the stubborn shadow of a shorn Samson refuses to fade into his appointed oblivion. Our restless spook imagines his improbable reanimation into full manly bloom. As he lingers spectrally, he insinuates himself into public affairs and private fantasies, enters the bodies and consumes the brains — like Jack Finney’s pod people — of Congressfolk and governors. 

The question implicit in every media speculation is whether this spirit of nightmare past is one of those wispy mirages captured with time-lapse cameras in deserted mansions by paranormal researchers. Or is it some awful movie poltergeist who can use cathode tubes to inhale little girls, employ dead trees to devour little boys, and revive colonies of the vengeful dead to suck houses and whole subdivisions into into a mud-soupy grave the size of Lake Huron?

The media prefer the poltergeist theory. At this early stage in our unwonted haunting, I’m noncommittal. But I lean toward the more benign paranormalist option. I’m dubious that ex-prez Donald Trump regenerate his flaccid flesh and bring down the Temple all over again. 

My doubts don’t derive from a belief that his rabid cult of personality will disband and disperse. He exerts a barnacle grip on the grievances of the militantly pissed-off and fiercely paranoid element in American politics. He is their ray of light in the black hole of encroaching Apocalypse and they will not — they dare not lest they be cast out from their number — kneel before a strange god. Trump will always enthrall his fanatic fifth of the electorate. 

I assume, moreover, that he will lose few, if any, of the loyal Republicans who’ve been conditioned to regard Democrats as Satanist pedophiles who sauté toddlers in olive oil after impaling them on kebab spears and roasting them over a spit. Republicans have become more yellow-dog than Huey Long voters, and Donald Trump is the yellowest dog in the history of the GOP.

But here’s the rub. Trump’s ambitions to once more shake the pillars of our Commonweal seem mortally at odds with his feet-on-the-desk, shuffle-the-buck, let-Jared-do-it work ethic. He wants to cement and expand his hostile takeover of the GOP, but he will not roll up his sleeves and buckle down to the nitty-gritty details of doing the scutwork himself. 

Of course, he’ll always have hungry pups tagging at his heels, eager for his fickle affections and sniffing his every dungheap, hopeful for a Milkbone. But who are these guys? “His White House was without doubt the most incompetent in modern times,” wrote Paul Waldman in the Washington Post. “It leaked like a sieve, it could barely issue a news release that wasn’t full of typos, and he went through four chiefs of staff and seven communications directors.”

Expecting this bunkhouse of waterboys, grifters and below-average offspring to rope and tame the Republican Party, an outfit more fragmented and fratricidal than it ever was under Tricky Dick, is a roundup without a corral. We’re not talking about merely herding cats. The GOP has become a milling remuda of snakes, weasels, scorpions, tick-tocking crocodiles and Betsy DeVos. 

Remember that the commander-in-exile of this unruly crew has, in his career, mothballed a dozen casinos, alienated every bank in America, torched enterprises that range from Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka and the Tour de Trump to Trump University, Trump Wine and the New Jersey Generals. He has queered two marriages (and counting), defaulted on a hundred loans, stiffed a thousand contractors and become the first ex-president — within two months of leaving office — to face criminal indictments in at least four state and federal jurisdictions. 

So, can we really trust that this smirkingly selfish, impulse-driven, easily distracted, small-minded, Big Mac-addicted, 280-character septuagenarian couch booger has the focus and fortitude to brush aside Mitch McConnell, yank Rand Paul through the TV screen and suck down the GOP like a poltergeist swallowing a swimming pool? 

And if this is the Plan, here’s the Republican quiz question: How’s he gonna pay for it? 

Yeah, I know. He keeps saying he’s richer than God. If so, why, every time he issues a “statement,” does he wedge in a grabber that asks people — regular paycheck-to-paycheck slobs with mortgages, truck payments, child support and tithes pledged to the Tabernacle of White Jesus — for five bucks? 

Really? When has Warren Buffett ever touched his barber for a loan? When have you ever heard of Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Scrooge McDuck or Mark Zuckerberg hitting up the hoi polloi for a handout? 

Real-life rich guys do not beg.

This is why I’m not holding my breath. I suppose the wispy mirage of Trump might suddenly rise up Samsonlike and roar out orangely onto the campaign trail — Melania in tow — to fight (and spend?) for the election of brother Republicans Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Loyal Lindsay, Castratin’ Joanie and Mann-Act Matt. 

Maybe? Yeah, but I think we’re safe. 

He’s better off, and less annoying to all of us, doing what he’s doing — holing up at Mar-a-Lago, waddling and cheating his way from fairway to green, suffering the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that a little too much flesh is heir to, feeling sorry for himself, plotting revenge against a sea of troublemakers, shredding evidence, signing counterfeit promissory notes to gullible lawyers, and waging battle against his extradition to the Southern District of New York. 

 He’s not going away, but he’s not coming back. 

However, just in case, turn off the TV before it goes all fuzzy and starts whispering to your daughter. 

Weekly Screed #1002

 Pandemic notes 6.0: The Chernobylization of Covid-19

by David Benjamin

“This… ‘mutant swarm,’ this ‘quasi species,’ had always held within it the potential to kill, and it had killed. Now, all over the world, the virus had gone through roughly the same number of passages through humans. All over the world, the virus was adapting to humans, achieving maximum efficiency. And all over the world, the virus was turning lethal.”

— John  M. Barry, The Great Influenza

MADISON, Wis. — Perhaps the most significant development, for people trying to cope with the long-term effects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, is the breathtaking inequality of vaccine distribution globally. Today, the rich nations of the developed West, the U.S.A. foremost among them, are awash in the vaccine doses being pumped out by the giants of Big Pharma. 

According to a New York Times article by Selam Gebrekidan and Matt Apuzzo, wealthy and middle-income Western nations jumped the line for vaccine acquisition, monopolizing 90 percent of the supply and shoving struggling nations in Asia, Africa and South America out — into the cold, where they “will have to wait years.”

Greg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist, was quoted: “It was like a run on toilet paper. Everybody was like, ‘Get out of my way. I’m gonna get that last package of Charmin.’ We just ran for the doses.”

President Joe Biden articulated an “America First” attitude toward vaccine distribution: “We’re going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first. But we’re then going to try and help the rest of the world.”

In other words, “The line starts back there, Uganda. Cool your heels, Bangladesh.”

In essence, Western leaders from Biden to Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel have created, outside their NATO inoculation bubble a sort of Covid-19 Chernobyl, a swath of poorer countries where fear and contamination will reign over the lives of ordinary folks ’til the middle of this decade. In these toxic zones, the coronavirus will thrive unfettered, free to inhabit its human hosts, reproduce willy-nilly and morph a thousand variations on itself. Some of these no-man’s-land mutations might not stay put. They could migrate to the vaccinated regions. They might even prove innovative enough to defeat the known vaccines and re-infect the smug Charmin-hoarders of the bourgeoisie. 

In sum, there remains a lingering threat that, if leaders of nations rich and sort of rich, as well as their public-health guardians, are not fiercely vigilant, we could still face a resurgence of this chameleon disease. 

When I find myself waxing optimistic about the apparently waning pandemic, I flip through a book I read when the plague was young, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History by John M. Barry. For some reason, I love disease books, and Barry’s chronicle of the flu pandemic of 1918 is one of the best ever. Perhaps most instructive for the current plateau in the SARS-CoV-2 plague is what happened in September 1918. 

At that moment, the worst of that ghastly pandemic appeared to have passed. The first wave originated early in 1918 among U.S. Army troops preparing for carnage in World War I. It spread worldwide when these doughboys were shipped to Europe to fight. The flu became so rampant, among soldiers on both sides of the war, that battles had to be postponed. Influenza actually answered the question: What if they gave a war and everybody called in sick?

However, that first wave was not really a killer. Thousands died, of course, but most survived. It wasn’t ’til the early fall of 1918 when a mutant version came ashore with infected sailors debarking in ports “from Boston to Bombay.” The new strain, swift and merciless, spread from there, catching complacent civic leaders and public health officials flatfooted and hapless.

In 1918, the official response to the pandemic was in many instances more Trumpian than Donald Trump’s callous campaign of Covid denial. President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with the war, never acknowledged the existence of the pandemic. Moreover, he exacerbated it by sending American soldiers off to a war that was virtually over. Overloaded onto pestilent troop ships, thousands of doughboys died before laying eyes on Europe. 

Perhaps the poster boy for obliviousness in the face of a murderous plague was Wilmer Krusen, director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Charities. When sailors started showing up dead in Philadelphia hospitals, Krusen — in terms that would echo down the century to the White House in 2020 — declared that the victims had not died of the pandemic influenza, but merely, “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” “Strenuous flu,” anyone?

Not only did Krusen, a cock-eyed optimist if ever there was, dismiss the September resurgence of a virus that had mutated from dangerous to deadly, he actively made it worse. His big coup was the approval of a September 28 war bond parade in Philly at the moment the virus was spreading alarm throughout the medical community. Prescient doctors hinted to Krusen that the moment might not be auspicious for a vast public gathering of unmasked people. 

Krusen shrugged off the warnings and greenlit the parade — “two miles of bands, flags, Boy Scouts, women’s auxiliaries, marines, sailors and soldiers.” It was sailors and soldiers who had vectored the influenza into every nation of the world. Many of them, as they marched to Wilmer Krusen’s orders, were already sick. Everybody in Philly came to the big parade. Thousands fell ill within days afterward, hundreds of them dying with shocking swiftness. 

While the disease swept more and more Philadelphians into the overcrowded graveyard, Krusen whistled on. By October 5, the death count hit 254, which prompted Krusen’s public-health spokespeople to say, “The peak of the influenza epidemic had been reached,” until the next day, when the total spiked to 289. Next day, the newspapers said, “Believing that the peak of the epidemic has passed, health officials are confident.”

Next day? The death toll cracked 300. A few days later, after 428 flu fatalities, Krusen seized the moment and said, “Don’t get frightened or panic-stricken over exaggerated reports.” Shortly thereafter, the influenza exaggerated its daily toll to more than 800. Philly stayed panic-stricken for months.

In a new century, with a new pandemic, our contemporary Wilmer Krusens were well-meaning ditherers named Dr. Robert Redfield, the now disgraced director of the Center for Disease Control under Trump, and Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response chief, who sat cringing and dumbfounded in the White House press briefing room as her boss rambled on about injecting bleach into human arteries as a remedy for Covid-19. Birx told ABC News interviewer Terry Moran, “Frankly, I didn’t know how to handle that episode.” 

Frankly, neither Birx nor Redfield knew how to handle Covid-19 from the moment almost 400 days — and 530,000 deaths — ago, when Trump stood beside them and declared that the disease had affected a few people from China and it would “disappear, like a miracle.”

The news that nobody in the so-called Third World will have access to vaccine this year, or next year either — because rich countries are hogging the serum —  guarantees that SARS-CoV-2 will not, probably never, disappear like a miracle. And if America, Canada, Europe, China, Russia, etc., continue to screw up vaccine distribution, we could be looking at Willy Krusen’s Philly all over again, all over the world.

The Weekly Screed (#1001)

Guns and bigots. Bigots and guns

by David Benjamin

“There are tons of guns floating around Georgia, and not much harder to procure than a bowl of goldfish.”

— Gail Collins

MADISON, Wis. — Ironically, a pathologically horny gunman in Atlanta has pointed a way out of the voting rights crisis that has shaken once reliably Republican strongholds like Georgia, Arizona, Orange County and Wauwautosa. Currently, in response to the frightening turnout of socialist zealots who allegedly elected Joe Biden and the Indian babe as president and vice president, these once-solid conservative bastions are hastily drafting laws to cull the riffraff from the voting rolls. 

“There’s a better, simpler way to prevent the blacks, browns, yellows, Jews and millennial upstarts from voting for the Wrong People,” according to political guru Billy Bob “Bubba” Buchenwald, whom I got on the phone the day after the shootings that killed eight people at massage spas in the Atlanta area.

I was hoping to elicit a note of regret from a spokesperson — my friend Bubba — who has long been a passionate advocate for unfettered Second Amendment freedoms. I noted that the “Asian spa” gunman had reportedly bought his murder weapons legally. As it turned out, Bubba was not only unchastened by the confessed atrocities of Robert Aaron Long. He was inspired.

“Let’s face it. Passing legislation is a slow, bureaucratic mess,” said Bubba. “We can more efficiently accomplish our mission — of packing state legislatures and the U.S. Congress with white Christian men of Anglo-European loyalties — through the clever use of gun-control measures.”

“Gun control?” I gasped. “But I thought gun control was your worst nightmare. I thought you were terrified of Democrats taking away everyone’s firearms.”

“I’ve evolved,” said Bubba slyly. “Now, I think we should take guns away — from Democrats — while we forcibly arm every living registered Republican.”

“You’re gonna arm all Republicans?”

“Absolutely. For their own safety. They shouldn’t be allowed to leave home without a gun and fifty rounds of ammo. It’s a jungle out there.”

I have to admit that my mind started to boggle. I asked Bubba to elaborate on this breathtaking social innovation.

“It’s so simple I’m embarrassed. I should’ve thought of it before,” he said. “For example, just take a gander at the demographics of the massage parlor massacre.”

“Demographics?”

“Absolutely. Eight people gone, right? Most of them minority types, in a part of Georgia that voted for Biden and the Indian babe. That’s eight Democrat votes that you can scratch off the next election.”

He went on. “And the kid with the gun? He probably didn’t even vote. I bet he spent Election Day getting his ashes hauled at a massage parlor. So your final net score is eight for Us, nothing for Them, one abstention.”

I objected cautiously. “Yes, but you’re not saying that armed reactionaries should wander the streets and barge into stores and offices blasting away at anybody who looks like he or she might be a Democrat?”

Bubba was silent on the phone. 

I said, “Oh my God! You ARE saying that armed reactionaries should wander the streets and barge into stores and offices blasting away at anybody who looks like he or she might be a Democrat.”

“Hey,” said Bubba. “It’s not as though this something new and shocking. Republicans — and Democrats! — have been defending the rights of mass killers to kill the masses since the Klan put an end to Reconstruction. Public carnage has always been one of America’s favorite problem-solvers.”

For some reason, I thought of Marshal Dillon on Saturday night for 635 weeks, starting out every episode by sauntering onto the sunny main street of Dodge and blowing the brains out of a nameless stuntman. 

“Think about it this way,” said Bubba. “I’m part of the shrinking, racist white minority that has held American politics and culture in a death grip for 400 years. But we’re losing hold. We’re outnumbered. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Shooting strangers?”

“Liberal strangers!” replied Bubba. 

His voice softened. He said, “Look, at first, I understand, we’ll make a few mistakes and off a few Kelly Loeffler voters. But after a while, we’ll be able to spot our friends because a) we’ll all be white as snow and b) we’ll all be packing heat. Folks’ll say to each other, ‘Hey, nice skin!’ and ‘Whoa! Where’d you get that beautiful AR-15?’ We’ll be like one big happy family.”

“But won’t murder,” I hinted, “still be against the law.”

“Of course it will. We are the Law and Order party!” said Bubba. “But you have to consider ratios here. Let’s say, for example, that I mosey over to the Mall of Georgia and spray a few hundred rounds. In the process, I manage to cancel thirteen Democrat votes of various races and creeds. Then, like a good citizen, I drop my trusty Kalashnikov and surrender to the cops. I end up on Death Row, where I’ll never get to vote again. But look at the ratio. I lost my lonely little pro-Trump vote but I took away thirteen that would have otherwise gone to Biden, the Indian babe and all the other cancel-culture libtards who hate America.”

“Thirteen to one,” I said.

“You can’t argue with a ratio like that,” said Bubba. “And can you imagine… can you imagine ten thousand Proud Oath-Keeping Conservative Christians, heeled, locked and loaded with Uzis and Mach 10s, convoying over to their neighborhood Black churches on the Sunday morning before Election Day?”

I actually didn’t want to imagine that. But it was clear that Bubba was taking the concept of voter ID to a whole new depth. 

“Bottom line,” said Bubba. “Guns and bigots. Bigots and guns. We go together like… well, fireworks and the Fourth of July.”

“Yes,” I said, “like pepper and saltpeter.”

“Hey, like Othello and Desdemona.”

“Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Bonnie and Clyde!”

“Gettysburg and Chickamauga!”

“Leopold and Lobe!”

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki…”