Down and out semi poet who is down and out in the Low Country of South Carolina after living in Atlanta which is not to be confused with the south, the old south or the new south. Atlanta was a global metropolis with all the pluses and minuses that comes with that. The low country, low because it is low, 8 feet above sea level, is not Podunk but once you get to Podunk, turn left. I try to chronicle a small part of all that through my daily haiku for you.
daily dawns – summer, winter, spring, and fall — I’m a fool to rise at all!
Daily dawns another day; I must up, to make my way. Though I dress and drink and eat, Move my fingers and my feet, Learn a little, here and there, Weep and laugh and sweat and swear, Hear a song, or watch a stage, Leave some words upon a page, Claim a foe, or hail a friend— Bed awaits me at the end.
Though I go in pride and strength, I’ll come back to bed at length. Though I walk in blinded woe, Back to bed I’m bound to go. High my heart, or bowed my head, All my days but lead to bed. Up, and out, and on; and then Ever back to bed again, Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall— I’m a fool to rise at all!
Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom by Dorothy Parker as published in Enough Rope (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926).
This from the woman who famously would yell What Fresh Hell is This? anytime the phone rang.
Try that at work some day, I betcha!
High my heart, or bowed my head.
All my days but lead to bed.
I just wish I wouldn’t start thinking about it an hour after I get to work.
I mean, if I went right home and went to bed when I wanted to, I would miss my after dinner nap.
I start looking forward to that as soon as I get up each day.
Readers of this blog will know that I bemoan that I started this haiku nonsense to recognize word play and use of words and not as an avenue to point out the shortcomings of the man currently in the high office of president.
While that is a short and easy avenue to take, I do want to return to my roots and recognize the word play in the NYT Opinion piece, If You Love America, Cringe for Itby Bret Stephens.
Mr. Stephens is a NYT contributor who takes part in a weekly piece called the conversation where he takes the conservative view of things in a conversation with another writer, Frank Bruni, who takes the liberal view side and they converse and write up their conversation as a column.
For today, Mr. Stephens did not need a liberal view to counter to write If You Love America, Cringe for It.
His feelings did not need a conversation with a liberal to show themselves and he did with marvelous word choices when he wrote:
To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe — morally, aesthetically, intellectually, politically. If the administration were a play or film script, it would be neither farce nor tragedy but instead a kind of absurdist travesty, “Waiting for Godot” meets “Pulp Fiction” meets “Dumb and Dumber.”
Lets take that paragraph apart.
That first sentence first.
To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe.
(Remember the scene in the movie Amadeus when the Emperor wants Mozart to write an Opera in German and his Director of the State Theater say … But not German, I beg your Majesty! Italian is the proper language for opera. All educated people agree on that. Too which the Emperor replies, ‘ahaaa’.)
Once again that first line, To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe and I admit that would eliminate most of his followers. I mean, define sentient?
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says, “capable of sensing or feeling : conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling.”
So to exist as an American capable of sensing or feeling, conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, certainly excludes anyone who supports this guy.
Then live in a perpetual cringe.
Yes! That so perfectly describes life since George W. Bush described the 2016 Inaugural Screech as That’s Some Weird Shit!
I have lived in a perpetual state of cringe since then and let me tell you, its taking a toll!
What might he do next?
What might he NOT do next?
What might he say next?
What might he NOT say next?
CRINGE!
Then the wonderful word choice, like battleships majestically steaming through a harbor.
Morally!
Aesthetically!
Intellectually!
Politically!
BOOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Sadly it is …
Morally!
Cringe!
Aesthetically!
Cringe!
Intellectually!
Cringe!
Politically!
Cringe!
Mr. Stephens then states: For 10 years, I’ve watched my former political party work overtime not to cringe; to pretend that the Vesuvius of verbal infamies erupting daily from Trump’s mouth is either unimportant, or hilarious, or calculating and shrewd.
Republicans turned their tolerance for the president’s mental goo into a shot-drinking contest — the more you drank, the manlier you were supposed to be.
John McCain and Mitt Romney refused to play, to their everlasting credit; other Republicans, less admirably, did so only after Trump had ended their political futures.
To be sure, Mr. Stephens is a Republican and he brings in the other party writing:
But for 10 years, too, I’ve also watched the president’s opponents fail to appreciate the necessity of cringing — by understanding their role in Trump’s rise.
The Democrats and their media enablers who, until June of 2024, insisted Joe Biden was fit for a second term (surely knowing, somewhere in the dim recesses of their minds, that this could only help Trump) are complicit.
So are the progressives who, on one cultural issue after another, shoved the Democratic Party so far to the left that it became the very caricature of what MAGA-world said it was.
Not sure I can hold with that entirely but here is the problem.
We cannot afford the luxury of pointing out who is more to blame for where we are now.
We are all in this together.
Its the Americans capable of sensing or feeling, conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling against those folks who are out searching for the whoever vandalized the reflecting pool in Washington and don’t let anyone tell you different.
No time to point fingers.
No time to try for the high ground between members of the Americans capable of sense.
As Mr. Lincoln said, We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility.
When I’m in my more optimistic moments, I think we’ll look back at last year as the high-water mark of Trumpism, when the combination of arrogance after Trump’s victory and the inherent authoritarianism of the Trumpist project led to a unique period of state violence and legal corruption.
And now, my optimistic self says, the justice system is reasserting itself. The combination of personal courage, legal persistence and judicial independence is preserving due process and the American system of justice.
But optimism is no cause for complacency. Federal prosecutors in Illinois may be chastened, but Todd Blanche, the man who announced the bogus prosecution of the Broadview Six in the first place, is Trump’s nominee to replace Pam Bondi as the attorney general of the United States.
If he is confirmed, expect more vindictive prosecutions. Expect more prosecutorial misconduct. And expect more federal judges (and more American citizens) to say, along with Judge Perry in Illinois, that their trust is broken.
Why? Because the Trump administration is the nation’s chief threat to the rule of law.
According to the ever faithful Wikipedia, “The attorney general’s duties and responsibilities as the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government include overseeing the United States Department of Justice, enforcing federal laws, and providing both formal and informal legal advice and opinions to the president of the United States, the cabinet, and the heads of executive departments and agencies.”
Let’s put those thoughts togther shall we?
The Trump administration is the nation’s chief threat to the rule of law.
The Attorney General is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government.
As bizarre as it is that those two statements really exist in to the current world, I am as confounded to the point of disbelief and despair that there is a significant portion of the nation’s population that does not see any problem between the two statements.
Somewhere those founding fathers, Jim Madison and Al Hamilton and all those guys are sitting around a pool sipping beer and saying to one another, ‘… something went wrong here.”
I would say to them, our trust is broken guys, and it’s not on you.
inevitable, immutable law, every thing he touches … dies
It was back in 2018, in his book, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever (New York: Free Press, 2018), Rick Wilson wrote:
I can’t tell you everything the next two years hold, but I can tell you a few things I’ve learned on the road this year.
First, Trump inspires the worst in some people and the best in most people.
For every scumbag alt-Reich stain on the Republic, for every pipe-bomber or synagogue-shooter, he’s inspired 10,000 more people willing to be the Americans we should be: connecting, talking, knocking on doors, volunteering, and lifting people a little higher.
He’s inspired people from vastly different ideological backgrounds to try to fumble our way toward an understanding that the United States still deserves saving, and so we’ll fight out the ideological policy battles later.
The second thing I know is now approaching the status of an immutable, proven, and inevitable law: Everything Trump Touches Dies.
I didn’t really question the concept when I first heard this back in 2018.
Eight years later, the views of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC on life support really brought it home.
It IS 100% true!
Everything Trump Touches Dies.
And I still feel, the United States still deserves saving.
my father paints the summer, caught summer always an imagined time
A smoky rain riddles the ocean plains, Rings on the beaches’ stones, stomps in the swales, Batters the panes Of the shore hotel, and the hoped-for summer chills and fails. The summer people sigh, “Is this July?”
They talk by the lobby fire but no one hears For the thrum of rain. In the dim and sounding halls, Din at the ears, Dark at the eyes well in the head, and the ping-pong balls Scatter their hollow knocks Like crazy clocks.
But up in his room by artificial light My father paints the summer, and his brush Tricks into sight The prosperous sleep, the girdling stir and clear steep hush Of a summer never seen, A granted green.
Summer, luxuriant Sahara, the orchard spray Gales in the Eden trees, the knight again Can cast away His burning mail, Rome is at Anzio: but the rain For the ping-pong’s optative bop Will never stop.
Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.
My Father Paints the Summer by Richard Purdy Wilbur in The Poems of Richard Wilbur (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1947).
About Mr. Wilbur, Wikipedia says, “Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) was an American poet and literary translator, and one of the foremost poets of the World War II generation. Wilbur’s work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was acclaimed in his youth as the heir to Robert Frost, translated the verse dramas of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine into rhymed English, collaborated with Leonard Bernstein as the lyricist for the opera Candide, and in his old age acted, particularly through his role in the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, as a mentor to the younger poets of the New Formalist movement. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.”
About the photo, if I think about my Dad, I cannot but think of my Dad at what we called ‘The Cottage.”
In the Spring of 1964, when I was 4 years, my Dad but a piece of property on the shore of Lake Michigan, a straight drive out M-45 to the lake from Grand Rapids where we lived.
It became our summer place and our place for summer time and it is where my Dad painted the summer.
In a letter written home from Europe during World War 2, my Dad told the woman who would become my Mom that “He liked to live in the whole house” which I took to mean that in his home, there would be nothing for show, no rooms reserved for company, he would live in the WHOLE house.
You could not have described life at our cottage any better.
My Dad lived in the whole place.
Every inch of property, cottage and beach was set aside to be used and used pretty much for anyone’s personal enjoyment.
I have never been any where else in the world that I experienced such freedom to live, explore, read, think or do anything that came to mind.
There was a lot of trust involved here and for the most part, we repaid that trust and just LIVED the heck out of this place.
Look at the photo.
A large, ungainly structure covered with windows for viewing the lake, chairs for sitting, towels drying, toys scattered all over for playing, a grill for cooking, sails for the sailboat propped up against the stairs and thousands of footprints of the 100s of people that made up our summers at the lake.
All in a place provided by my Dad.
My father painted the summer with a big thick brush and broad strokes.
The year after my Dad died, Mom sold the place.
She said, and understand the entire time we had the cottage it was the Hotel Lorraine and everyone was welcome, she said, “It was my place to be with Dad.”
Caught Summer is always an imagined time.
Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind.
There must be prime
In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find
Riding the palest days
Its perfect blaze.
Forgive but I have to repeat that line again where Mr. Wilbur writes, Caught Summer is always an imagined time.
Was it real?
Could it have been that way?
Caught Summer is always an imagined time.
I am here to tell you, it was all too real and when I think about it, I think of my Dad and I say thank you for the gift of all those summers you painted for us.
