A long time ago, in the primordial soup that was my youth, I played a character in THE BIRDS, authored by Aristophanes and translated from the original Greek by a classmate of mine, Jeff La Count, who had a mastery of ancient languages even in high school. He created a simple and wonderful adaptation of Aristophanes’ play.
The first line of the play, which I spoke as the character of Euelpides, was: here we are, ready and willing to go to the birds – and we can’t even find the way! He and his comrade, Pisthetairos, were looking for “the birds.” If they could find the mythical kingdom of the Birds all rules of life could be overturned. Ultimately finding The Birds, they created a place called Cloud-koo-koo-land, where all the normal rules were abrogated and new ones created, ultimately upending the reign of the Gods.
Interpreted in the 20th Century it could have been a Laurel and Hardy vehicle.
I am thinking of this because we are in the process of finding our way out of our own Cloud-koo-koo-land. Just as we the country responded to the horror of World War I with the party called the Roaring ‘20’s, we responded to 9/11 with the irrational exuberance of the last years. We took all the normal rules of finance and abrogated them with new ones that made no sense and ultimately that brought us down. Cloud-koo-koo-land can’t last forever…
This train of thought was reinforced standing in line for a newspaper while surrounded by the magazines that feed off our addiction to celebrity. There are such a staggering number that in many newsstands it is almost impossible to find a news magazine; they’ve been relegated to the back rows. One “Special Issue” magazine recently was a paean to celebrity beauty, a detailed scrutiny of the evolution of physical charms among male and female celebrities. More than one nose looked rather different between now and then. Standing there, looking at this catalog of physical charms, it crossed my mind that most of these people are practicing the art of being professionally young, a quality that has been ascribed to our nation, another aspect of the Cloud-koo-koo-land we have been inhabiting.
We are a country that has been playing perpetually youthful, as we have been moving into our middle age. Youth and youthfulness are attributes we have ascribed to ourselves; it has been our trademark since our founding. Young, brash, overcoming all odds, rising to the occasion, winning World Wars, first to the moon, leading the world in our productivity and our enthusiasm, populated by youthful, exuberant individuals who can defy age and time.
May be relentless youthfulness is not the best thing we have to offer anymore. Perhaps we gained some wisdom in our youth and can call upon that now as we work to take our place in this new, strange world in which we find ourselves – the world of The Great Recession, insurgencies, wars, travails and troubles.
Perhaps the thing to do now is to acknowledge we’re getting a bit longer in the tooth and that all the energy used to stay professionally young might better be spent in just being professional. We have had a grand party but perhaps now it’s time to do the Twelve Step meeting thing and figure out how to live in sobriety.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 06 06 2016 On feeling as if I lived in Cloudcuckooland…
June 7, 2016I am sitting in a bar where I stopped to wait to hear from brother and his wife, about their progress into Manhattan via Uber. It is slow going out there. I just arrived in Manhattan from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, having flown in on a private jet from Martha’s Vineyard.
It is not a normal occurrence in my life but I do have a friend who belongs to the private jet club and he was coming into New York and offered me a ride with him so that I could be in New York tonight when my brother arrived as opposed to tomorrow morning.
At Teterboro, there were, it seemed, hundreds upon hundreds of private jets lined up waiting for their owners to go somewhere. It was an amazing sight.
We then looked at a plane my friend is thinking of adding to his fleet, a plane capable of making it from New York to Beijing, non-stop. It is another world in which I occasionally waddle but do not live.
Long ago, when I was young, I was in a production of Aristophanes’ “The Birds.” Two con men find their way to Cloudcukooland, where birds talk and rule. It is a political satire first performed in the Fifth Century BCE.
And I thought about it tonight when I was looking at headlines about the current political scene. In one of my letters recently I said that I was appalled that Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. His position as such is causing me to come out of the closet as a liberal, which I am not exactly…
A reader of my “Letter From New York” wrote back with a five page email about why, in the end, he is voting for Trump. I haven’t answered yet. I can’t quite figure out what to say. His position is all based on the fact Trump is an “outsider” and it is time that an “outsider” was elected to shake up the system.
Well, I think it well might be time for an “outsider” to win the election but not this “outsider.” He’s a wacko, a bigot, a looney tunes billionaire who has hijacked the Republican Party and no one in the Republican Party is actually calling him to account for that.
The press is treating him like he is a serious person when in reality he is a serious charlatan. He is a billionaire and has declared bankruptcy more times than Carter has little liver pills, as my best friend from high school, Tom Fudali, used to say.
I am so outraged right now that this poseur, who is stirring up the worst elements of American culture, is riding them to a nomination for President. I am aghast.
Not that I am not aghast at the Democrats, too. Who, riven with discord, are tearing at each other every step of the way to the nomination. In the end, it will probably be Hillary Clinton, a flawed but qualified candidate, who will, until election day, have to deal with the bitter divide stirred by Bernie Sanders, some of whose supporters say they will vote for Trump if they can’t have Bernie.
What?
You would give the country to a flawed AND unqualified candidate out of spite?
No wonder I was thinking today that I am living in Cloudcuckooland.
Republicans, look at your candidate. You are about to officially nominate a racist bigot to head the ticket of the Republican Party, Lincoln’s party, the man who freed slaves.
He is criticizing an American born judge who is presiding over a case against him because he is of Hispanic heritage and encouraging his supporters to denounce the man.
The man, albeit a billionaire [we think], is pandering to the worst instincts in our culture and is absolutely not calling us to be better, to be greater, to actually deal with the very serious issues facing America today. He is calling us back to a past we had thought we had escaped…
But before I go today it is the anniversary of D-Day. Salutations to those men who served our country, waded into death and took back Europe from the Nazis. All honor to them. Thank you.
Tags:Aristophanes, Bernie Sanders, Cloudcuckooland, D-Day, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Martha's Vineyard, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Nazis, Teterboro, The Birds, The Donald, Tom Fudali
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