Before I begin, I want to honor and commemorate my incredible Sacramento Chief of Staff, Carol Wallisch, who passed away last Sunday. For fourteen years, she was the calm in every storm, the encouragement when others said “you can’t do that”, and the perfect mentor to me and one of the most talented staffs in the big white building in which we all worked. Rest in peace, Carol. We will miss you.
Dig Two Graves
Confucius wrote, “Before you set out on a journey of revenge, you must dig two graves.” This adage has come true with a vengeance for the current white house desecrator and his minions.
Drawing up an extensive list of all those who have offended his snowflake sensitivities, (mostly by telling the truth), the orange guy ordered his cowardly DOJ to carry out his vendettas. Somewhere along the way, as is the usual case with these little napoleons, he finally went so far, he aroused the lazy attention of the American public, which began, slowly, to turn against him. It seems that, every time the would-be king instructed his minions to generate a phony charge of “mortgage fraud” or a well-named “trumped-up” transgression of “saying two different things to the government”, he lost another 100,000 people.
Add to those victims of malicious prosecution, every journalist or late-night host who has told the truth about him and had their employer threatened with investigation and license cessation. Or been insulted, castigated and barred from white house press conferences. Or forced to face phony investigations by whichever obedient lap-dog happens to be the Attorney General of the moment. Or been the target of late night ramblings and puerile insults. It never stops. Because his fear of disapproval never stops. And, he never seems to realize that he is the basic cause for this growing disapproval. Sad.
Suffering the lowest approval ratings of his two terms and some of the lowest for any president, ever, it seems clear he has dug his own grave in trying to bury others. Indeed, it is this sinking hulk of a frightened leader who will end up buried.
Eum sepeliemus.
Thanks For The Laughs and The Symbolism
This week, the faux king prez at least lightened the mood for a moment when he announced that he was considering renaming Lake Ontario in order to unilaterally dub it “Lake America”. This move will turn out to be just as effective as his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. The mapmakers yawn and everyone else puts it on the ever-growing list of empty threats. What is not funny is his attempt to forbid the Navy from naming one of its new, nuclear-powered, aircraft carriers for one of Pearl Harbor’s finest heroes, Doris Miller, an enlisted mess attendant on the USS West Virginia.
“Dorie”, as he was called by all on board, responded heroically during the bombing of the ship and carried wounded men to safety at his own peril. Then, though untrained in its use, he took hold of one of the anti-aircraft guns that had lost its operator and began shooting at the attacking planes. He was the first black man ever to be awarded the Navy Cross. The cowardly draft-dodger in the White House, of course, wants the ship to be named for him, as well as to erase all traces of heroism and service by any minorities and women in the military.
This pitiful, failing, flailing man shrinks by the hour, while continuing to destroy as much as he can on his way down.
His destruction of the White House is yet another of his increasing list of crimes. To desecration and elimination of the historic East Wing, add his insane decimation of the South Lawn to create a giant helipad, having already destroyed the grass to build the massive “claw”, a 4000 seat arena erected to host his embarrassing and disgusting UFC brawl.
His demolition of the white house, however, provides the perfect symbol for his attempted destruction of the US government, itself, structure by structure, department by department, protection by protection. And all of it to make way for an unregulated nation in which polluters, rapacious data center operators, and corner-cutting builders, food suppliers, and insurers can bump up their bottom lines.
This perfect example of symbolism reminds me of the ways in which filmmakers, novelists, painters and other artists have used the shortcut of a symbol to help us understand a much larger concept.
In Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, Disclosure Day, Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor are running from a government doggedly trying to keep them from revealing a treasure trove of information proving that extraterrestrial life has visited us more than once and has been captured and tortured with experimentation and worse. At one point, after a chase worthy of the Fast and Furious franchise, they end up on a boxcar filled with legless pianos stacked on their sides.
They are frightened out of their wits. Noticing that the vibrations of the train cause the strings of all the pianos to vibrate and hum, Josh takes Emily’s hands and places them on the vibrating strings in order to calm her. In this one motion, we come to realize the comfort of this thrumming as it taps into something very basic in our bodies, the hum of activity that runs through us at every moment, a kind of kinship with anything that seems to be singing.
These shortcuts to understanding take place everywhere we read and listen. I remember reading The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, in college, and the professor pointing out that, although the clock above the sink was broken (and, as they say, accurate only twice a day), Dilsey Gibson, the black cook in the household, always knew what time it was. Or think of Salvadore Dali and his landscape of melted clocks in The Persistence of Memory. We understand so much through symbols.
Or sound cues. I recently went to the Hollywood Bowl to listen to Amanda Gorman read a new poem set to music and to watch Gustavo Dudamel lead the LA Phil in Beethoven’s Ninth (The Ode to Joy). Most of us in the 18,000 person audience were absolutely unable to keep from humming throughout the finale and to feel the building joy. The same way we can’t seem to stop ourselves from joining in to Abba’s Dancing Queen.
We are bound by more than memory. We respond to the symbols, to the vibrations, to the music, to the ideas. The Worst President Ever has no idea about these connections, these impulses, these bonds. He is not one of us. A true alien among the humans. This is how I know he will never succeed in quelling our unity.
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