I 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.
Letter From Claverack 04 21 2017 The past fights the future…
April 21, 2017Apple blossoms dressed the trees in the orchards as I drove along 9H earlier today, the first, best sign of spring I’ve seen though, once having noticed them, I was aware that small buds of green were appearing on other trees. The ones outside my windows don’t seem to be sporting them and I’m sure they will come eventually, which is how this spring has seemed – eventually we will get there – just not yet.
It has been a quiet sort of day. Earlier I spent some time at OMI, an art center near me that I have known about but had not visited and that was my loss. The two-hundred-acre campus is dotted with sculptures, the main building with art exhibits. Today quite beautiful children were painting, running around in young life’s exuberance, bringing smiles to all the adults. I offered up a thought for good lives for them; the future does feel cloudy right now.
It’s not just that this is a gray day. Generally, I am an upbeat sort of person [or at least I think of myself as that] and today I’ve not been. The state of the world has been weighing on me, both close to home and far from here.
Close to home, I am burdened because a friend sent me suicidal texts and I was incredibly concerned and finally asked the police to do a “welfare check.” They did. He then texted me he wanted nothing more to do with me. Truthfully, I did the right thing and, at this moment, it hasn’t turned out well. For me and, I expect, not for him as he is in deep trouble and won’t admit it.
Candles to be lit; prayers to be said and to continue, as best we can.
Paris is continuing as best it can after a policeman was shot yesterday and two badly wounded by a terrorist who was killed as he was fleeing. IS claims responsibility and France is having elections on Sunday. The far-right candidate, Marie Le Pen, is threatening to remove France from the EU so that it can control its own borders.
She has a chance of winning.
The far right is making its might felt all over the place.
And that is so worrying to me.
For a brief, shining moment in my life it seemed we might actually be headed toward a global society and it has not happened. It was around the time the Berlin Wall went down, a moment I will forever remember. Driving down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, headed west, my bestest friend, Tory Abel, called me on my car phone and said: do you know what’s going on? As I was listening to classical music, I didn’t. The wall was falling.
There are all kinds of suppositions about why that magic moment did not result in a better world.
Right now, I am reading a book about “the weekend” in British homes in the 1930’s and one of the revelatory bits was about a British Lord who became a Muslim because he saw Islam as the bulwark against women getting the vote and having shorter skirts and working.
He would probably have a lot in common with IS.
Change is hard. And changing centuries of tradition is hard and people will fight it. IS is fighting it.
When all of this works itself out, I won’t be here. It will take more than a lifetime.
And that is history in the making. It takes lifetimes to work itself out.
If you are not aware of it, Chechnya is conducting a campaign against gays. It is putting us in camps, not unlike the Nazis; there are tales of torture and death. Can this be happening in the 21st Century? Apparently so. The reports are horrific.
The President of Chechnya has declared he will eliminate the gay community by the beginning of Ramadan on May 26th.
Putin has declared there is no evidence this is happening and that is Putin’s view of the world: no horrible thing is happening. There is no sarin gas is Syria, there is no campaign against gays in Chechnya, there is no fill in the blank.
Tags:Chechnya, Chechnya campaign against gays, Far right, Los Angeles, Marie Le Pen, Nazis, OMI, Paris, Putin, Syria, technology, Tory Abel
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