The Tall Tails We Tell

   When I lived in San Francisco, I did so in the company of two of the best cats to ever grace the planet, and I say that absolutely free of bias.
   Their names, Dash and Comma, were a writer's joke, one to which I'm pretty sure Dash never took kindly. Then again, she didn't take kindly to much of anything. She was a classic cat: aloof, diffident, haughty-seeming, anti-social. I was her sole human, and she took to me fiercely. But the world at large to her seemed suspicious, a sentiment she expressed by spending the bulk of her time staring daggers.
   Comma, by contrast, was practically a dog: he loved everything and everyone, no matter their size, shape, scent or social status. Comma would greet me at the door, sit in my lap when I read on the sofa, curl up under the covers with me when it was time to drift off to sleep. We had long conversations--my end was long on multi-syllabic flights of fancy, his on meows--and generally comported ourselves as the best of friends.

   Dash came to me in the late eighties via a roommate. He brought her home as a kitten and promptly named her Asha, after a goddess. I just tried to find information online about this goddess, and came up blank. Maybe my roommate only thought Asha was a goddess; it was the pre-internet days. Anyway, in late-eighties San Francisco, anyone could believe anything about anything, and often did.
   A year later, the roommate moved out. He offered me the opportunity to keep Asha; if I didn't, he said, he'd find a place for her with friends. Given that I was home a lot as a freelance writer and he was out at a job all day, I'd rather bonded with Asha. After all, I was the guy who fed her, which definitely elevated me in her discerning estimation.
   So I agreed to keep her on. I promptly renamed her Dash, and we became fast friends--as fast friends as Dash would let anyone become, especially someone who'd changed her name from that of a goddess (?) to that of a punctuation mark, and an underused punctuation mark at that.

   Five years later, I accepted an office job. Thus, I left Dash alone all day and sometimes into the night. A friend--who, with his roommate, had two cats--suggested I get a pal for Dash, and I agreed.
   One day I went down to Animal Care and Control, where animals not snapped up by potential guardians will be euthanized, and searched the cages. Presently, I came across a skinny little year-old thing with large pointy ears and soulful, not to say sad, brown eyes. He had a cold; he sneezed a lot, which was, I'm sorry, adorable.
   I took him to a play room outfitted with a carpeted climbing structure and a bench. I placed him  him on the opposite side of the room, and sat on the bench. He walked over and hopped up. Next, I placed him at the top of the climbing structure, and again sat down. He scrambled down, walked over, hopped up, and sat next to me.
   This suggested that he'd been socialized by humans; I thought him a great fit. Anyway, his coloring was almost exactly like Dash's; it was like I was getting a matched set, and what self-respecting gay man doesn't appreciate the occasional matched set?

   I learned from a vet that it'd be best to introduce Comma slowly into the household--which, let's face it, was Dash's household; to her, I was merely a convenient feeding station. I kept Comma in the kitchen for a couple of days, the door closed. Dash sniffed under the door, hissed, and basically behaved as would any five-year-old who suddenly had a younger brother.
   On the third day, I picked up Comma and walked into the living room. Dash stared daggers. I lowered Comma to the floor, and Dash slowly approached. There was some diffident hissing and whatnot, but in the main Dash began to practice a sort of resigned acceptance. Comma loved Dash; Dash tolerated Comma. To me they were both adorable, blessed with distinct personalities and enough fur that extraneous bits of it became fixtures on my jackets and slacks and sofa and desk.
   The cats and I--and a rotating cast of boyfriends--spent eight delightful years together. Then, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Dash, aged eleven, fell ill. After a few heart-breaking and tear-stained days, my then-partner and I decided to put her down.
   I maintain that humans place fewer conditions on animals than on other humans. The love we feel for our animals is pure, strong, deep. Losing a beloved animal tears a hole in time and space and even in the soul, not to overstate the case. It was with a great deal of grief that Comma, my partner and I bid Dash adieu.

   After waiting a decent period, my partner and I decided to find Comma another pal. At a different Animal Care and Control site, we discovered a tortoise-shell kitten, a tiny handful of fur. We brought her home and named her Ellipsis. (God bless that partner's forbearance, never mind Ellipsis'.)
   We didn't wait long to introduce her to Comma, who--and you saw this coming, didn't you?--loved her. You know those calendars with photos of cats sleeping curled up together, or licking each other's fur, or gamboling happily? Yeah. That. Our household was a constant Hallmark cat card; the level of cute was so pronounced that I feared we'd wind up in, if not as, a Disney movie.
   Alas, even Disney movies have their dark spots. Although Comma and Ellipsis got on famously and loved living together, my partner and I, in due course, did not. After four years together we dissolved our relationship. He took Ellipsis; I kept Comma.
   I wound up spending seven more blissful years with that genius of a cat. I'm in the habit of occasionally offering guidance and solace to people who request it. When someone arrived at my apartment, Comma would greet them like some kind of fur-ball receptionist and lead them to the big, green, comfortable chair. He'd then hop up on the sofa next to me and go to sleep. In this way, he'd model admirable calm in the face of life's vicissitudes; this notion was not entirely lost on the folks I was attempting to assist.

   Indeed, cats teach us many valuable lessons; here are some of them, in no particular order:

   1. Sleep a lot between hunts.
   Cats are predators. They hunt--if only, in the case of Dash and Comma, for kibble and the occasional fur brushing. These finely tuned animals know enough not to stint on rest; they sleep between sixteen and eighteen hours per day. Not that we should necessarily emulate the quantity of sleep, but the quality of it? Let me put it this way: naps are good.

   2. Then sleep some more.
   See above.

   3. When angry, arch your back, hiss, and flash your claws.
   This is especially useful when "discussing" your relationship with your partner.

   4. Flatter those who feed you.
   Translated for the workplace: be nice to your boss. If you don't, he may ban you from the snack room.

   5. Have a sense of humor.
   Ha ha. Just kidding. Cats have no sense of humor whatever. That's why they're such perfect pets for poets.
   And actors.
   And--yes, fine--writers.

   6. We are all animals, underneath the fur. 
   Or, in the case of humans, underneath the belief that reality television is the apotheosis of human achievement.

   7. Nothing is forever.

   This last came as no shock to me. I knew Comma's life in those final years would one day end. When he became ill with kidney disease in 2010, there followed six heart-wrenching months of decay, ending in the decision to put him down. No sorrow hath a writer like that of a Comma dropped.
   Since then, I have been cat free. It's nice not to have to scoop poop-crusted litter and lint-roll fur from my clothes. But I miss having cats.
   One day, my current partner and I will bring home a cat, we've decided. Until then, we have a sort of interim local beast--but let's leave that for a future post.





 
 

Get On the Love Train

    These are the times that try men's souls (and women's, and children's, and pets', and plants', and those of just about every other sentient form of life on the planet), and we would do well, in the face of global rage and tyranny ascendant, to examine how to cope with whatever the hell it is that's going on.
   Let's start with a simple premise, one with which you may or may not agree. It is a spiritual axiom that there are but two true emotions: love and--no, not hate, but rather, fear.
   There are only love and fear.
   Fear engenders so-called "negative" characteristics: intolerance, impatience, cruelty, unfair judgment, criticism, and so on. It also generates troubling emotions: rage, despair, disgust, hatred. From love, on the other hand, arise such life-affirming characteristics as kindness, comity, cooperation, compassion, and empathy, and such uplifting emotions as  joy, a sense of well-being, and so on.
   For most of us, fear arises quickly, but love--practicing love, engaging in loving action--requires cultivation.
   Fear, of course, is a built-in human (and animal) survival mechanism. If we hadn't had a natural fear of tigers in the days when we lived in caves, we'd all have been eaten, and the human race would have died out. In the same way, if I'm crossing the street and see a truck bearing down on me, fear will cause me to flee. If I get out of the way in time, I'll go on living. Indeed, it is not just a fearful act, but also a loving one, to jump out of the way of the truck: if I go on living, the people who love and depend on me will still have me in their lives, and the truck driver won't live with a human life on his/her conscience, never mind suffering the consequences of human laws that might put him/her behind bars, away from loved ones, for years.
   It is said that fear contracts, while love expands. Fear results in tribalism, a desire to see ourselves and our beliefs mirrored in those around us, and a suspicion of those who are unlike us. Love, on the other hand, inspires in us the capacity to see beyond the tribal perimeter, to become curious even about those things which challenge our valued perceptions and cherished beliefs. To cultivate genuine curiosity is a loving act: feeling interest in things and people beyond our personal world is the beginning point of human sophistication, of humanism itself. Seeing past the tribe, coming to see the entire human race as one's broad-based family--that's seeing with the eyes of love.
   There is a powerful rage arising across the globe at the moment. It is manifesting in populist and nativist political movements: Donald Trump's rise to power in America (and with it, the rise of the nationalist right), the Brexit vote in England, right-wing National Front party president Marine LePen's presence in France, the May election of right-wing Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the ongoing attempts of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to systematically silence his country's remaining free press. Behind rage there is always fear; the fears driving this Zeitgeist shift have to do with elements both pragmatic (economic) and existential (refugee crises, the looming effects of climate change). We as a race are aware, even if we don't consciously admit it, that, just as democracy in America is fragile and subject to decay, so our days on the planet may be numbered, the very existence of the human race itself in doubt.
   This is a hell of a thing to contemplate. The greatest fear most of us experience is that of our own mortality. The fact of one day perishing is more than most of us can bear. As biological organisms, we are hard-wired to live, so to think about one day not living goes against our deepest instincts. It is arguable that most of the human race's greatest achievements arise from a life-affirming reaction against mortality: first food and shelter, then clothing for warmth, then the safety of the tribe, then better food and prettier shelter and nicer clothes, and pretty soon you have, for example, Trump Tower, alas.
   The second greatest fear, for many of us, is of physical pain; the third, the death and/or pain of those we love and/or depend on. All three of these fears are so powerful, especially if left unexamined in our lives, that they can unconsciously drive everything we do, from flipping off the guy trying to edge into our lane to smashing the laptop which boots up wrong.
   The first step to overcoming fear, then, is to look at the deepest ones we harbor--death, pain, losing loved ones or seeing them in agony--and accept that they are likely one day to occur. That's a fact of life. We will die. We will hurt. Those we love will hurt and die.
   But acceptance doesn't mean approval or acquiescence; it just means seeing things as they are, without mental rationalizations, and accepting the truth of them. Then we can begin to shift ourselves and/or our circumstances to better fit life's unfolding reality, rather than hiding from it or trying to hammer it into some image we have of how it should be.
   The next step is to have compassion for ourselves and our foibles--including our fears. Practicing compassion doesn't mean condoning aberrant acts; it means practicing love in the face of those acts. If we can love ourselves even when we do something wrong, we're on the road to loving others when they cross lines. Enlightened spiritual masters feel the same compassion for a murderer or a rapist that they do for someone who uses a handicapped-parking placard when they're not really handicapped. All aberrant acts arise from fear, and the enlightened soul feels deep compassion for anyone living in fear's dark cave.
   After that, we begin to cultivate love for ourselves, which presently becomes love for others--including those beyond our immediate "tribe" (family, friendship circle, social media "friends" and followers, etc.). I would suggest that love is a constant, like air; like and dislike, on the other hand, are inconstant, like weather. It is in confusing love with like/dislike that we are perhaps most deluded. We'll say, "Oh, I love Frank; he's really funny," and then turn around and say, "I hate Mike; what an asshole." That second statement is a delusion; we don't "hate" Mike, but, rather, we fear him. Remember? There's only love and fear; fear generates hate, not vice versa. Anyway, if we don't fear Mike, but rather feel disturbed by him, it means we dislike him, not that we hate him.
   To begin to distinguish between love and like/dislike, it's useful to examine the ways in which we think. The mind is a wonderful tool, but it is prone to delusion. We think we know more than we do, or we think that something we know is incontrovertibly true when it turns out, later, to be proved entirely false. One useful way to examine our thinking is in the practice of meditation. In sitting (or walking) quietly, and attending to the chatter of the mind, we begin to see the pattern of our thoughts. We do this not as actors compelled by thoughts, but as observers of them. If there is an "I" who can observe "my" thoughts, then "I" must not be my thoughts. Once that distinction becomes clear, we begin to practice pausing when heightened thoughts cross our minds, really examining whether the thoughts are true, and then proceeding accordingly.
   Like and dislike are narratives of the mind, whereas love is a constant of what, for want of better term, we can call the heart. The mind confuses like and dislike for love; the heart, on the other hand, knows. Think of some being, human or animal, that you really love. You notice the feeling in your body, the smile on your face? Now, let me ask you: do you always like that being? We love our pets, but we may not like them when they scratch the furniture or poop in the salad. We love our parents, but we may not always like how they act or what they say. Same with our kids, partners, friends, colleagues. Trouble arises when, in a moment of dislike, we confuse it for hate. We discover a new way of relating to others when we cultivate the idea that we always love them, but occasionally may not like something they say or do.
   This same paradigm can be applied to the idea of hope. What if, rather than indulging in the idea of hopelessness, we instead accept hope, like love, as the constant, and make optimism and pessimism the variables? When things look darkest, in our own lives and/or across the land, we tend to feel "hopeless." But what if, instead, we tried to cultivate hope as ever-present, and acknowledged instead that we felt momentarily pessimistic? What if, in other times--when we get a promotion, a good night's sleep, a filling meal, a kind word from a friend--we agreed that we feel optimistic? Optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin, and the coin is marked "delusion"; they are tricks of the mind. The constant is hope, and any constant, as we've seen, has to be cultivated--which means made conscious, and then practiced.
   In the same way, a sort of grounded realism, resistant to whipsawing mental narratives or emotional states, can be cultivated as a psychologically healthy approach to life. Cynicism and idealism come and go; similar to like/dislike and optimism/pessimism, they are tricks of the mind, weather states that arise and pass away. It is easy to be cynical, to give up hope in humanity and in life; but a cynic is just a disappointed idealist, and idealism, although a fine motivating factor, is a delusion if it denies reality. Better, in the end, to develop a taste for grounded realism, based on factual evidence and reasonable deduction.
   The next time you feel cynical about the state of the nation, remember love. The next time you fear the outcome of an election, remember love. The next time you don't like someone, remember love. The next time you feel pessimistic about the human race, remember love. Love is as hard-wired into us as fear is, but it takes some work to feel and to find and to believe in and to practice it. But better to believe in love, and to search for it, than give in to despair, don't you think?
   Just ask the guy lurking high up in Trump Tower, the guy whose campaign for the highest office in the land spread fear like wildfire. It got him what he seemed to want; he won. But did he really win?

   


 

Swamp Gas

   During the run-up to the presidential election, Donald J. Trump claimed that he was free from outside political or financial influence because he used his own money to fund his campaign. The claim resonated with working- and middle-class voters disgusted by perceived corruption in politics, and Trump's supporters hailed him as an outsider--if not one of them, a fantasy version of them.
   Trump further promised an administration primed to "drain the swamp"--to rid Washington of lobbyist and dark-money corruption. His supporters voted for him because they believed him to be perfectly positioned to clean up governmental fiscal misconduct.
   Ah, how quickly die the dreams of the dispossessed. Recent reports reveal that Trump's transition team is staffed with lobbyists, and his future administration is likely to be peopled with Wall Street-street friendly types, prompting Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to excoriate him Tuesday.
   "What we are now beginning to see is what I feared," Sanders said on a call with reporters, "and that is that what Mr. Trump was saying to get votes turns out not what he intends to do as president of the United States."
   Massachussets Senator Elizabeth Warren echoed Sanders' sentiments in a speech the same day, at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council conference, in Washington, D. C.: "[Voters] do not want corporate executives to be the ones who are calling the shots in Washington. What Donald Trump is doing is that he's putting together a team that is full of lobbyists--the kind of people he actually ran against.
   The Washington Post noted yesterday, of Trump's transition team, that "the prominence of established Washington figures and wealthy donors comes as a jarring contrast to Trump's unequivocal rhetoric on the campaign trail when he decried inside-the-Beltway denizens as 'corrupt.'"
   Today, Politico reports that the Trump administration likely will restore Wall Street power in a way not seen in generations. Candidates for Treasury Secretary include Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimond. The odious Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, is as former Goldman Sachs man. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross may wind up in Trump's Commerce Department.
   Politico reporter Ben White's piece quotes Manhattan College Wall Street historian Charles Geisst as saying, "You would have to go back to the 1920 to see so much Wall Street influence coming to Washington. Geisst calls it "the most dramatic turnaround one could imagine."
   Although Trump crowed on the trail about funding his campaign, he eventually received donations from several conservative figures, the Post reported. They included Las Vegas billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson ($11.2M); former World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. president and CEO Linda McMahon ($6M); billionaire hedge fund co-CEO Robert Mercer ($3.4M); and Arkansas poultry executive Ronald Cameron ($2.9M). At least three hundred and thirty other supporters contributed a hundred thousand dollars or more to Trump's campaign, to the Republican National Committee, and/or to pro-Trump super-PACs.
   Key staffers on Trump's transition team, according to the Post, include hedge fund co-CEO Rebekah Mercer, daughter of Robert; Mnuchin; former Goldman Sachs banker and current co-manager of an investment firm Anthony Scaramucci; and Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and founder of PayPal. Oklahoma oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, a policy advisor to Trump's campaign, is being considered for a Cabinet position.

   The Post also noted that "[t]he transition team, which is scrambling to make 4,000 political appointments in less than three months, has welcomed lobbyists' involvement and expertise, according to people familiar with the operation." Those offering advice include J. Steven Hart, Chairman and CEO of William and Jensen, a prominent lobbying firm; energy lobbyist Michael McKenna, who is overseeing Energy Department planning; and, Ray Washburne, a Dallas financier overseeing Commerce Department planning .

   During the campaign, Trump brilliantly flattered his disenfranchised supporters into believing he understood their anger, even as he stoked their fears. He simultaneously pit them against the press and the media, aka the Fourth Estate, watchdog of the people in a democracy, and against the government that, at its best, is meant to take care of them and the infrastructure around them. These Machiavellian divide-and-conquer actions created in Trump's supporters an absolute reliance on him (Quoth Trump: "I alone can fix it").
   The early signals emerging from the transition seem a huge middle finger up to those same supporters. It'll be interesting to see the length of the leash they give him. They're a raucous bunch. Then again, they're a powerless bunch, too. They may be just another subset of Americans in history who have voted against their own financial self-interest in the hopes of finally catching a break under the broken umbrella of the so-called American Dream.

Day of the Jackal

   After last week's post-election malaise, anxiety once again arises about the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Yes, the devil we know is better than the devil we don't, but the devil we have is so unknown, even to himself, that he might as well exist in negative space. The campaign revealed Trump to be a man of tyrannical tendencies, and although recently he risibly walked back some of his most egregious campaign promises, only the terminally deluded would hope for sanity from a plainly unbalanced man.
  Since the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has counted no less than three hundred incidents of election-related hate crimes and violence. The captain of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Puerta Vallarta had to calm passengers after a man in a “camo cap” told an African-American woman that he was “glad" he kept his guns, causing the woman to cry. Vandals spray-painted a swastika, an anti-gay slur, and “Heil Trump” on the side of an Episcopal church in Indiana. In its most recent annual report, the FBI marked a "sharp spike" in hate crimes; those against Muslims rose sixty-seven percent between 2014 an 2015.
   Astonishingly, not to say hypocritically, Trump himself seems surprised by the violence. In a "60 Minutes" interview with correspondent Leslie Stahl, broadcast Sunday, he urged his supporters to “stop” their violent actions. It is a measure of the man’s incapacity for self-reflection—or reflection of any kind—that he should be startled by the savagery some of his supporters have shown. If you spend a year encouraging violence at large rallies, and then win the contest, how can it seem odd that your victory would embolden the more barbaric, and mentally disturbed, amongst your legions? It is to his dubious credit that Trump tried to put the kibosh on the brutality, but more than being too little too late, it’s so not of a piece with his pre-election rhetoric that the volte face actually gives the philistines cover to keep doing what they’re doing.

   But Trump may have bigger things on his mind, such as--well, that he will soon be the President of the United States, and he and his team evidently have little idea about what that entails.
   The New York Times reported today that staff shakeups have stalled Trump's already messy transition. It is hardly encouraging that Trump's team expressed surprise, last week, that President Obama's staff would not remain in White House after Jan. 20. (Note to novices: the incoming president entirely staffs the White House, and appoints roughly four thousand federal posts.) Reports suggest that the group has no clue about what it means to run the federal government--and they have roughly sixty-five days to figure it out. In a Washington Post opinion piece today, former State Department counselor and avowed "Never-Trumper" Eliot Cohen wrote, "The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty," adding, "By all accounts, [Trump's] ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless."
   Little wonder, then, that in post-election photos last week, Trump himself appeared miserable and frightened.  

   Early cabinet appointments certainly give pause. Trump and his people are culling from a group of career clowns: names floated for key positions include those of Sarah Palin, who was too bored to finish her term as governor of Alaska; John Bolton, a United Nations-hating extremist from the George W. Bush administration; and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump confidant and loose cannon. And there’s little doubt that between the coal and oil lobbies, any hope for a continuing if slow turn on climate change is now foregone.
   Trump appointed Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus as his chief of staff, a sop to establishment Republicans (and perhaps to potentially jittery stock markets). By way of ballast, he made the odious Stephen K. Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor. In August, Bannon, who appears physically if not temperamentally Falstaffian, left his post as executive chairman at Breitbart.com, the extreme-right website he ran after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, to serve as chief executive officer of the Trump campaign. Conflict of interest questions sprout like mushrooms: does Bannon still have editorial ties to Breitbart—thereby making it, in the future, the press organ of the White House? Does he own stock in the company? Likely we shall never know; like Trump, he’s secretive about his finances.
   Whatever else it does, Bannon's appointment makes what was once fringe—conspiracy theories, blatant racism, ethnonationalism, fact-free nativism—mainstream, and in the highest office in the land. If there is a hope that Trump’s reportedly conflict-intensive management style--he pits  underlings against each other to stir conflict and spark ideas--will benefit the country at large, well, it seems a slim-to-none one. Per Cohen, in the Post, "They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes—because there will be mistakes—will be exceptional."

   Yet more worrying are reports that Trump spoke by phone Monday with with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The two leaders talked about opening up a Russian-U.S. dialogue, a notion that is anathema to intelligence experts and politicians across the spectrum. (Trade and diplomatic relations between the countries have degenerated in the wake of Russia's recent annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Syrian civil war.) Talking Points Memo reported in the summer that Trump, reeling from debt and blackballed by U.S. banks, relies on money from oligarchs close to Putin, and that Russian money flowed to Trump's campaign. It is no surprise, then, that Trump praised Putin during the campaign as a "great leader."
   And that's not all. Paul Manafort stepped aside as Trump's campaign manager last summer in the wake of news reports revealing his consulting ties to Russian politicians (he supported a pro-Putin candidate). The Russian government maintained contact with the Trump campaign "entourage," according to Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei A. Ryabkov. In July, U.S. intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that Russian intelligence had hacked computer servers of the Democratic National Committee. It was hardly mysterious, if nonetheless galling, that caches of emails from that hack wound up dribbled into the public sphere by Wikileaks in the weeks leading up to the election.

   One continues to puzzle, perhaps uselessly, over the question of how people could have voted for Trump.
   Hillary Clinton is an able and sober politician, and might have made a fine president. But she was the wrong candidate for the moment: too much corruption “baggage,” too wonky, not inspiring enough. During the primaries, Bernie Sanders had the Zeitgeist momentum on the left. If he’d won the nomination, he might have been able to upend Trump by offering sensible policies to working Americans aching for a sane choice. The air went out of the balloon after Clinton clinched the nomination; Trump had energy behind him. 

   There are other complicated and complicating factors in this election (I'm looking at you, FBI director James Comey), but none of them eclipse, or fully explain, the phenomenon of Trump himself: a serial sexual predator, failed businessman and reality television star; a self-aggrandizer with no evident capacity for empathy; a smoke-and-mirrors con man; and on and on and on. That we have reached a point in American politics at which a candidate for the land’s highest office not only wasn’t sunk by any one of the racist, demagogic things Trump said, but indeed was not sunk by any of them, is bewildering in the extreme.

   It is of little comfort that Trump didn’t win the popular vote, and that the election was so close. (Is anyone surprised that the dependably peevish Trump recently complained, on his beloved Twitter, about losing the popular vote?) He won, and will govern, and even he doesn’t know what that really means.
   It is as if we, as a people, have called a bird-watcher to fix the clogged toilet when an experienced plumber would have been best for the job. Or, to flip the script, it’s as if someone who'd spent his life in a relatively low-paying public service job, who had never worked in the business sector, was suddenly appointed CEO of the world’s largest multi-billion-dollar corporation—and had two months not just to learn the business, but to learn about business itself.
   Trump is experientially unqualified and temperamentally unfit to serve as President, and yet here he is, and here, alas, are we. 

Roll of a Lifetime

   What with all that testosterone overriding their brains' common-sense centers, American males have carved out a special place in the annals of self-destructive buffoonery. 

   No, this is not a piece about Donald Trump.

   But it is about something equally odious--quite literally so: the practice of "rolling coal." 

   Rolling coal, also known as "pollution porn," involves altering the emissions capacities of diesel trucks so that, when triggered, the vehicles can burp thick clouds of malodorous black smoke from exhaust pipes or modified smoke stacks. Some of its practitioners see it as a declaration of freedom (from what, they decline to say), although it is equally arguable that the practice, reduced to its essence, resolves itself to mere dude-bro douchebaggery.   

   The phenomenon has been around for years, and it has attracted media attention. Inevitably, there is even a coal-rolling reality television show, called "Diesel Brothers." (Send your accolades to the Discovery Channel for broadcasting it.)
   Now, no less august a journal than the New York Times, once again firmly placed in the apres-garde, has caught up with the practice. One must therefore, it is supposed, pay attention, even if, at this point, the Times is nothing more than a liberal, Hillary-centric, elite, fading, crooked, rigged and un-presidential fish-wrap, believe me.

    With not atypical hyperbole, the Times calls coal rolling "a new menace on America's roads." To the casual observer, however, it appears more like Dennis the Menace on America's roads. Few coal rollers will win prizes for maturity. They mock "political correctness," liberal politics, and environmental awareness, typical barn-door targets for the sociopolitically submental and the emotionally puerile.
   The Times reports that one Illinois state legislator, who proposed a $5,000 fine for altered vehicles, received a missive from a diesel-truck owner who is named, not unironically, Corey ("Sky"?) Blue. It read, "Your bill will not stop us! Why don't you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country. I will continue to roll coal any time I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars." 

   The "stupid eco-cars" to which Mr. Blue (stupidly) referred included hybrids such as Priuses, which, their advocates say, reduce fossil fuel use and drive "clean," thus preserving the environment. These vehicles raise the wrath of coal-rollers like nothing else this side of, well, Hillary Clinton. The Times reports that an oft-spotted bumper sticker on the altered diesel trucks reads, "Prius Repellent." (The presence of such a sticker suggests that where there is smoke, there is ire--but not, alas, wit.) 

   Nearly half a century ago, the American environmental movement put forth the eminently sensible notion that to pollute the Earth's ecosystems is to one day kill our chances of living on it. 

   The movement has long been in conflict with the coal and oil industries, a tension that extends to today. To fossil fuel aficionados, environmentalists are dopey tree-hugging hippie dingbats. To environmentalists, fossil fuel people are capitalist pigs intent on the destruction of The World As We Know It. Neither side is entirely right, of course--nor entirely wrong. 

    The dudes who “roll coal” seem to think they are taking the fight to the streets. It would be one thing if their smoke-blasting vehicles were confined to the truck-pull competitions whence they originated. There, they would be just another curious (cretinous?) American eccentricity. (As it happens, the Times reports that even many truck-pull amateurs see coal-rollers as imbeciles. "I hate those guys," one says. "I used to do it, smoke out friends, but I grew out of it.") 

   Instead, coal rollers drive on the country's roadways, sometimes targeting pedestrians or bicyclists or even police with billows of choking smoke—literally a breathtaking act of aggression. Others back up to parked Priuses and "smoke" them. (Per the Times, police departments are struggling to contain the threat.)

   The hostility of the rolling-coal “protests” masks a deeper truth: they’re self-defeating. The belching black smoke pollutes the very air those “protesters”—and the rest of us--breathe. The coal rollers appear untroubled by concerns for the health of the children they do or may one day have. (The Times quoted a Utah physician as saying that even short-term exposure to diesel smoke increases the probability of heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.) 

   These “protesters” then, appear to work against their own self interest. 

   Yet there is a more fundamental disconnection at work. You know that phrase, “I love to be out in nature”? We know what it means: someone enjoys trees, trails, hills, the sea, etc. What’s missing from the sentiment, however, is the recognition that we humans are  “nature.”

   We live as biological organisms dependent on the biosphere around us. We rely on food for nutrition, water for hydration, and oxygen--produced by photosynthesis in trees--for the breath of life. If you deny yourself food, water, sleep, and clean air to breathe for a week, you're sure to think, act and feel in a way radically different than when you're well rested and fed.  

   That being true, it is plainly in our self-interest as biological organisms to care for the planet which sustains us. To do otherwise is madness. That this notion to some seems radical, even heretical, astonishes even as it does not, alas, wholly surprise.

   But then, there is a certain fatalism alive in the land regarding humanity's prospects. Said one truck-pull fan, quoted by the Times, "The air sucks anyway. Smoke is pretty. I like seeing it." Some young people are convinced that Earth is so terminally blighted that they're looking to artificial intelligence, virtual reality and space colonies to further the human race. Who knows--they may be right.

   So what the hell--let the dumb boys roll coal. They will suffer; their children will suffer; all of us will suffer. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll all work out, and the human race will continue in space.

   But don’t bet that the coal-rollers’ progeny will have a shot at getting there. Space travel will be solely available only to the very wealthy—perhaps including the heirs of those who made a killing off of coal, if not also off of coal rollers.

Rolling coal, revealed.

Rolling coal douche-baggery.

    

   

Walk This Way

   The smallish town where I reside widened the sidewalks of its shopping-district boulevard a few years ago, and boy, are they roomy.
   You'd think, then, that these new, wide walkways would be easy to navigate. You'd also think that Americans would be immune to the dubious charms of a dangerous buffoon such as Donald Trump, but here we are.
   My partner and I were moseying around downtown the other day when we came upon a sidewalk roadblock. Two women stood still and cheerfully chatted. A man standing next to them toyed with his smart-phone, a thickly padded baby stroller resting in front of him. The three of them took up the entire sidewalk, forcing the rest of us to eddy around them like river water around mossy boulders.
   Being a man of great charm, I muttered muted imprecations as we passed, although, courageously, not loud enough to be heard. "It's called a sidewalk," I grumbled, "not a sidestand."
   My partner and I spent the next ten minutes riffing on possible correctives: sidewalk on and off ramps, slow lanes and fast lanes, pull-off areas for the phone-consumed, police foot patrols to slap tickets on walking texters. "Maybe," I mused, "people who block sidewalks with double-wide baby strollers should be sentenced to watching an unending loop of 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'"
   This is not the first time I've noticed--and groused about--those who stroll cluelessly. Indeed, it is my long-held theory that people walk the way they drive, and each falls into one of three basic categories.
   There are the determined walkers, who stride purposefully toward a focused goal. On the highway, these are the fast-lane folks who just want to get there.
   Then there are the sidewalk drifters, who sort of shamble about, veering hither and thither with no apparent objective. On the road, these people change lanes without signaling--shortly after traveling six miles with their signal blinking to no purpose.
   Finally, there are those walkers who simply stop in the middle of the pathway, attentive only to their own own internal Global Positioning System, which, as it happens, does not exist. On the road, these are the people whose car you find inexplicably stopped perpendicular to the roadway as they attempt a fifteen-point turn.
   When driving, we all agree to follow the laws governing the road. When walking, we implicitly agree to follow the more misty principle of the social contract, which suggests that, in a public space, it is our duty to be aware of those about us. Public space is shared space, and sharing with others--as most of us learned in kindergarten--requires cognizance of them.
   This idea is at the root of common courtesy, itself a seemingly archaic notion in this season of degraded political and cultural American discourse (hello, Twitter trolls). Indeed, so devolved has our communication become that the very idea of common courtesy now seems a radical one. Civility rests on the idea that each human being possesses inherent dignity and deserves basic respect; civilization itself, then, rests on our ability to mute otherwise unchecked passions (hello, road ragers) for the common good.
   There is, of course, no one way to walk on a sidewalk; varying approaches will arise from varying cultural mores. Fifty years ago, the San Francisco Peninsula was largely Caucasian; now, happily, it is a dynamic mix of people from India, the Middle East, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and the Asian/Pacific Islands, as well as of Americans who see their roots stretching back to Africa.
   People from varied cultures will naturally employ differing ways of walking (and driving). The social contract, then, has to expand to meet everyone's needs and customs. Only someone who ultimately stands foursquare against cultural diversity in their neighborhood promotes the threadbare idea that their way--and their culture's way--is right, while all other ways are wrong. This is tribalism at its least enlightened.
   At its finest, inhabiting the public space, including strolling on sidewalks and driving on roads, is like a sort of improvisational dance. Any dance benefits from partners' awareness of one another. This requires attention and anticipation. Yes, many of us wish to freestyle--I'm looking at you, the group blocking the rest of us as you saunter four abreast--but in the end, we all benefit by noticing, respecting, and perhaps even occasionally deferring to our improv partners, don't you think?
   Now, about the cleanliness of the sidewalks--ah, but let's leave that for another time, shall we?

   

 
 
 

Dreamed Team

   Here is a riddle for you delectation, contemplation, computation:

   Q: When is a sports team not a sports team?
   A: When it's a sports team!

   You're welcome.
   One of the things you notice when you move from The Big City to the suburbs is how many people in the auslands wear sports-related merchandise. In the fall, on the San Francisco Peninsula, the merch hails the 49ers (a football team, for those of you who wisely spend time other than following sports franchises); in the winter/spring, the Warriors (basketball); in the summer, the Giants (baseball).
   Not that people in The Big City don't wear sports gear or live and die by gridiron or diamond or court wins and losses. It just seems more evident in the suburbs. Warriors flags flapping from car windows; Giants t-shirts stretched across swelling bellies; 49ers beanies pulled low over winter-chilled scalps--these things advertise a kind of fealty in a way that, at first, seemed odd to me.
   I was not much of a sports fan as a boy. Oh, I watched ABC'S Wild World of Sports every Saturday afternoon, and on long summer days would head out to the driveway or the yard to mimic what I'd seen. I'm a Harlem Globetrotter! I'm a downhill skier! I'm a motorcycle racer! I also read Tennis, the magazine of, well, tennis, because I played the game. But I couldn't throw a baseball accurately to save my life, and I was too small for football and too short for basketball. So I never developed the kind of team loyalty some kids do.
   Anyway, my fealty was more to rock bands than to sports teams. Because I found other like-minded souls--not an enormous challenge in the sixties and seventies--it seemed completely normal. I knew who'd played in what band, what year, and who'd guested on whose record. Only years later did I understand that this attention to musical minutae was mirrored in how others could name the great players of the great teams in the great years that those teams had won the Series or the Superbowl or the League Championships.
   As did many in late adolescence and early adulthood, especially in that era, I went through a period of anti-establishment rage, which dovetailed with coming out as a gay man. When your wider society tells you, explicitly and implicitly, that you don't belong, you tend to reject that society and to create some variation of your own. To me this meant, in part, decrying sports, the purview of "straight" "jocks," those jerks--so the story went--who beat up queers.
   A funny thing happens if you keep on living: perspectives shift. In 1999, when I was forty-two, a friend took me to the now defunct Candlestick Park to see a Giants game. I loved it. My sociopolitical resentments had evidently dissolved just enough that I could enjoy not only the athleticism (to a guy who can't throw accurately, a great double play is mystical), but the cheerful fan fellow-feeling. This last was not novel to me; as rock guy I'd spent plenty of time with tens of thousands of others, in arenas and stadiums, dancing and cheering as music blasted. Still, the experience left an impression.
   The next year, the new, in-town Giants stadium was to open. (It should have been called Willie Mays Park, but the corporate money funding the thing also named it. It opened as Pac Bell Park. It is now known, odiously, as AT&T Park.) My friend and I decided to split season tickets that first year. Our seats were in the nosebleeds, out beyond the third base line--Oakland, across the Bay, appeared a short swim away--and we sat in them on Opening Day, April 11, 2000.
   I never sat in them again. For the roughly forty games I attended that year, often alone, I'd gain entry on the ticket and then scout an empty seat close to the action. I'd sit there until someone showed up, and I'd find another. (Kids, don't try this. Follow the rules. Do what Mom and Dad say. Brush your teeth. And so forth.)
   As most artists (and fans) are, I was obsessive in my pursuit to understand baseball. I did some research. I bugged baseball-versed friends for insights. Plus, I just liked being at the park, so I attended game after game after game.
   As most artists will, I presently funneled my impressions into an article I wrote that summer for the newspaper at which I then worked. In the piece I likened baseballs players to cats, and in my own cats' mortality saw glimpses of my own.
   As most artists do--I'm sorry, but we are terrible people for the rest of you to depend on--after completing and submitting that piece, I entirely dropped baseball. No tickets the next season, no games on TV (I didn't have cable), no sports merch, no nothin'.
   Until, that is, this year.
   I bought a TV this past spring and faithfully began to watch Giants games. I fell in love with the announcers, "Kruke and Kipe." I attended a few games at AT&T park, sometimes alone, sometimes with my partner. (I like baseball; he likes food--he's partial to the park's crab sandwiches.) And I became, again, a Giants fan, which of course led to thinking about the whole idea of sports fandom.
   To love "The San Francisco Giants" (or any other team) is, in essence, to love an idea. Yes, the Giants exist in reality: the organization, the players, the gloves and bats and uniforms. But players' careers last, at best, a decade and a half; they come and go. Managers, too. Same with pitching and hitting coaches. Any fan loves the players on the team in a given season, but a long-term fan loves the idea of the team as much as its earthbound reality.
   In this way, loving a sports team is like loving one's country. A nation, first and foremost, is an idea formulated out of guiding principles. To an idealist, a country at its heart is pure: it stands for something (or many things). When these things--democracy, justice, fairness, equality--manifest in reality, the country achieves greatness. Most of us past the age of twelve understand that humans are complicated creatures, too much so to hew perfectly to any ideal or set of them. And so in a place like America, we have three hundred-plus million people with an idea of what the country stands for and means, and most of us disagree on what that is. (Happily, this is a democracy, so we can disagree freely.)
   Countries, like humans, are subject to the corrosions of time, the whims of Fate, the winds of change. In this lies life's melancholy. The suggestion that we might "Make America Great Again," for example, while perhaps coded to suggest certain racial realities, really is a simple appeal to the idea that America--or any of us citizens--could stand out of time, athwart Fate, changeless. This, of course, is a delusion.
   The same is true with a baseball team. Perhaps that's why, on some deep level, fans hew to teams and fly the colors: it's national pride writ small. Humans are by instinct tribal creatures; we're hard-wired to stay in the group. If we hadn't done so at the dawn of humankind, we'd have been eaten by the tigers in the jungle. In human endeavors, this instinct manifests in ways both great (close-knit communities) and grotesque (rabid nationalism/nativisim). Loving a baseball team, being part of the tribe--here's a safe and easy way to identify with a group, to be for something, to belong to something.
   That a fan belongs to an overarching idea rather than a fixed, longterm reality--therein lies sports' melancholy. The "San Francisco" 49ers now play at a stadium in Santa Clara, nearly an hour south of the city. The "San Francisco" Warriors, the basketball team, has long been "The Golden State Warriors," since they play in Oakland. (A new arena may be built for them along the San Francisco waterfront. Will they again be the "San Francisco Warriors?" Stay tuned.) Only the San Francisco Giants play in San Francisco.
    But who cares? Watching a Crawford-Panik-Belt double play--perfection. A Hunter Pence homer? Sweeeeet. A Madison Bumgarner strike-out? Excellent. And that's enough for this reconstituted Giants fan.
   Summer is coming to an end and the baseball season is waning. Why not, then, simply keep the eyes open and the heart awake to these last few precious games. Win or lose, the playing's the thing--the only thing that really counts, until the stadium lights finally go dark.