My wife is fastidious about foods and their ingredients: no preservatives, no sugar, no artificial sweetener, no soda, and nothing whatever sold in a can. All our food is organic, and she insists our milk must be “grass fed.” (Since when was milk fed anything?) However, she’s also very much a novice at the dietician’s bailiwick. A few months ago we were in a store and she was weakening in the face of an alluring danish-like pastry item labeled “apricot”. She said something to the effect that apricots were highly nutritious, and I had to remind her that “orange sherbet and oranges are two entirely different things.”
On the subject of orange things…
My days and weeks in mid-2019 are filled with reading, reading and more reading. It is the drug I use to distract me from what is going on, like, for example, that the U.S. president recently stated that he is supportive of the idea of Russia being allowed to rejoin the G7. (What!?) I am not a scholar, but even common folk like me know that communist ideology – a warmed-over slavery, slavery looking in the mirror and seeing “equality” – has swallowed up all the important instruments of government in China, and totalitarianism and corruption are endemic in Russia. (And those two alone amount to forty percent of the Big Five of the UN Security Council, by the way, those with the veto power; that’s forty percent of all that the world relies on to deal responsibly with the very most grave and emergent of international incidents, including those developments and circumstances which are believed to heighten the risk of global thermonuclear war.) Russia is, despite our wants and fears and resistance to the awareness, lamentably, predeterminately, finally, an Asian country. It’s geographical immensity has produced, through centuries of misfortunate politics and crimes, an ironical anti-cosmopolitan antithesis: Russia is deeply illiberal in the rudiments of its political and cultural history. There have been many noble personages who wrote and spoke their intrepid truths – and suffered persecutions for the telling – Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, for example, but these bringers have not been as deeply appreciated as they needed to have been. Russia’s closed-mindedness is a paradox: its backwardness is precisely as large as it’s physical domain is. (And this is as candid and impolitic as I can be!)
Much as I try to distract myself and avoid excruciating awareness, every week or so I find myself, against my better judgement, succumbing to the temptation of a specific news program, usually on CNN. (And I admit I love Fareed Zakaria GPS.)
Reading isn’t my only diversion. Escapist dalliance is still available to the American free, yes? On a recent weeknight I found myself alone with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, flipping through the TV stations with the remote. I was racing past the stations, barely taking in the terse caption at the bottom of the screen telling what what each show was – and how insipid most cable TV programming is – and this because I was trying, however impossibly, to outrace the barking-Doberman awareness in me that the world had turned very sour in the last several years.
I knew the primary reasons for the sourness: adding fuel to the hostile, xenophobic war-on-terrorism climate, the Arab Spring had spawned a monumental refugee crisis, which participated substantially in bringing about, however tragically, this present reactionary condition, this West Winter. But is it really any consolation to be able to identify with impeccable scientific accuracy that it was a category 4 hurricane that completely destroyed your home and community?
Not so long ago the European Union, which was the greatest and most powerful human rights-championing political federation in modern existence, was twenty-seven strong and – supposedly – growing. Then came the shock of the Brexit referendum in mid-2016, and then the U.S. retreat from democracy late that same year, the retreat even more consternating. We pay a federal man federal dollars so he can tell us the Statue of Liberty has changed her disposition and is now disdainful of poetry. When crises arise, we do not know what to make of them, cannot know when exactly the final unraveling will come, and how that ugliness might play out. This once-hopeful nation of my birth – The United States – has suddenly adopted a twisted, grotesque countenance. Though I’ve never been any sort of flag waver, I am factually an American, so I see an ugliness in the mirror now.
And so… it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning, I shove another spoonful in my mouth and, remote in hand, zoom. What the hell am I doing? I ask myself. I just can’t hear any more distressing news about the protests in Hong Kong. Ben & Jerry’s beats knowing that those Hong Kong democrats are without the support of the United States. Each day, I see that famous image of “One Man” in front of the Chinese tanks hanging portentously in the downstairs dining room in my home. Umbrellas are quite inadequate against some things that fall from the skies, you know! At about channel 110, I am hoping to find something, maybe lovely Fay Wray and King Kong, but I don’t. At last I pause because, being a history buff, here is a show about World War Two. But it’s disappointing: the narration is manipulative of the viewer, weirdly affected, rather triumphalist and not as informative and insightful as it might be. Keep spooning. They’ve gone to a commercial, and there before my incredulous eyes is an ad for a teddy bear for especially large children called “Trumpy Bear.” This toy is unsubtle: it’s got a quaff of adorable blond hair on top and an ostensible and oversize red necktie. And I immediately realized that ninety-nine percent of its purchasers were not self-aware – that they did not know and could not know that they were emotionally deeply needful of this item; the purchase was not optional. Were even the makers themselves aware of the great utility of their handiwork? The product was talisman and security blanket in one thing. Trumpy Bear was huggable, was he not? And he was harmless, yes? And could any person be taken seriously in calling the stuffed brown bear with curious yellow plumage ‘a liar’? A cad? A misanthrope? Every time its light-complexioned owners hugged the bear, they’d be eagerly hugging away all their eyes and ears had seen and heard, all their headache-stymied sensibility had come reluctantly to, all that gray matter had preferred grayer and wished did not matter; and the preferred truth of incontestable hugability inhered perforce and functionally in that supplanting hug. Trumpy Bear was indubitably no racist, no sexist, no dolt, so the claims of racism and sexism could be gladly discounted by the hugger. And doesn’t one have to speak to earn the epithet “dolt”? Trumpy Bear is invariably silent, so the only truth one can apprehend is that which one experiences in the hug itself. The hugger, though she does not realize it, hugs also that personage who was its inspiration – the eponymous hero, the Lord of Detached, Self-Obsessed, Insouciant Gentry. She hugs harmlessness, and that is the hug that convinces about harmlessness. What one wants to believe becomes more true in the subjective-but-incontrovertible embrace.
In just a moment or so, I conceived something that will never exist in reality… no, not like those wrongly impugned, superbly superb steaks and that equally unfairly disparaged “University”. I conceived Trumpery Bear. It was and remains, alas for all time, in my mind – where the ideas and hopeless hopes of the poorest of the poor reside, where the victim and the modest and the ghosts of Holocaust victims abide. Still, Trumpery Bear was so clever. And it needed no hugs. It deserved no hugs. It was revolting. Trumpery Bear is not brown, but orange; it wears a war medal that reads “Man of the People.” And atop its orange head sits a whitest white mortarboard, sewn on so that it cannot be removed – and thus no one can doubt its exemplary scholarship! And at the very apex of that mortarboard, at that very summit button in the center, there is an opportunity to push that button and make Trumpery Bear share his most eminent wisdom. Push that button and hear the Dear Leader share his wisdom in his own pious, recorded voice: “They’re rapists.” “They’re murderers.” “Liars.” “Fake news.” “Terrible people.” “Lock her up!” “Windmills cause cancer.” “Losers.” “Body-slam him.” “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose a single vote.” Push the button a hundred times and get a hundred such wisdoms. What a bargain for less than fifty dollars!
But, as I’ve stated above, this item does not and never will exist in reality. And I have to wonder if this absolutely certain nonexistence is mostly because Trumpery Bear is not for hugging or because it is not for escaping from reality. Or maybe because a familiar sort of “success” – which gives life to all bears – is for the loud and the bloviating and the self-aggrandizing ambitious; as squeaky wheels get the grease, the loudly barking get the accommodation. Fear and pusillanimity often bark; barking is one of their familiar trademarks. As we are inherently social creatures, the accommodated fear in the fearful put social distance into everyone’s experience. And our feeling, exempt from the taxing burdens of reason, is not easily moved off its throne.
And how many know the English word ‘trumpery’ anyway?
No matter. Trumpery Bear does not exist, and nonexistence is still nonexistence, regardless of the causes.
My wife doesn’t just have culinary preferences contrasting with my own, she is also emotionally different. I recall that November eve of dismay, that rude transition from adulthood to debasement and victimhood, that bewildering night errant which cast its nasty shadow lengthily and grotesquely upon the Great Experiment. My wife and I were in front of the television, and I could not countenance the full weight of what I was seeing, each moment saying, “How is it possible that it’s so close?” It was the incredulous witness of destruction. It was precisely 10:18pm Eastern Time when I said at last, aghast at the words that would presently proceed through my intentionally calm mask, “He’s going to win,” as though the confession might appease the unwelcome apparition and somehow prompt it to recede. We went directly to bed. The next morning I woke her around seven o’clock and told her the fateful news. “Oh, my God,” she said, and began audibly weeping.
Years pass, and some Russian dating scam, of all mocking things, has hacked my blog site, and now literally all my ‘subscribers’ have every female name imaginable. But I don’t worry about it; every effort to write seems futile anyway: what I apparently want most to relate, arrived at in about the fourth or fifth paragraph, is far too catastrophist, far too disconcerting for sensitive readers’ eyes. The unfinished writing is put aside, and I try again a few days or a week later. And more of the same. My pen’s become recalcitrant; I am an artist, flummoxed, benumbed and phobic in the crucible of creating, a soldier on the battlefield shorn of his mettle, a Casanova with ED, a clown incapable of disguising his sadness, a writer who cannot write.
I’ve become proficient at making lemonade. I am alive and reading and maintaining myself physically and financially these days. What can one do? Many nights the remote is in my hand. It’s been nearly three years now, yet it still seems surreal. What have Americans allowed to happen to their nation? Back in the fall of 2001, I would take long evening walks and repeat over and over to myself, trying to allow the head-shaking truth to sink deeper in: “Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and it has been completely destroyed.” I’d been to the top of the World Trade Center twice as a tourist, both times youthful and much smitten with the girl I was ascending with. And I only realized in the wake of the smoke and ashes that my inmost, quixotically elevated feeling in the moment of experience with each of those girls had weirdly mixed with my impressions and the idea of the World Trade Center as a physical thing: it was, in a feeling, non-intellectual part of me, a pristinely hopeful place occupying the heavens. This newer political circumstance I don’t speak to myself. (Does anyone repeat to himself over and over again that his mother was gang raped?) This truth is a compromised ‘truth’, a tragedy-truth, qualitatively more direful than terrorist exploits, for the attacker is not foreign this time. Americans did this; they themselves allowed this to happen. This time, the attacker is not outside, not them – not, as Shakespeare put it, “in our stars.” This time the attacker and denigrator is wholly and perfectly proximal.
Everyone tires, sooner or later. Eventually, “rub”-somnolence arrives to me, and the skin-drapes over my eyes accede to gravity’s inevitable pull. Resigned, I put down the remote and head for the bedroom, where my wife lay sleeping. And at the ebon perimeter of that warmly welcoming chamber, not wanting to wake her, I pause a hemi-second and mutter matter-of-factly concerning my consciousness-weary soul – quite under my breath, as if, absurdly, maybe I too won’t hear: “You know the problem with men? They don’t know how to cry.”