JUST BOPPIN' ALONG

Here I am, boppin’ along––no, not boppin’ along, floating along––which is what is when you’re driving an EV, especially when you’re driving an EV on a smooth new road and don’t hear a thing except your Daily Mix made especially for you––as I was saying, listening to my Daily Mix of songs Spotify made just for me because I’m really old and they knew I’d want to hear all the best oldies.  Cat Stevens first singing “Where Do the Children Play” –– a very good question at this moment in time.  Indoors is the answer I guess.  Then comes Carol King singing about how “And it's too late, baby...something inside has died” and, wow, that brings me back to the 70’s too.  aAnd then Paul Simon sang “April Come She Will” all about change – change having been the operant word in those days for our inside worlds and the outside world. At least for all of us who were on the cusp so to speak – just this side of thirty and then just over it.

 

So as I’m floating along the sun burst out of clouds and everything looks lovely and the wind is blowing all the green leaves and the tall yellow spiked grasses and I find it hard to believe that I’m driving along a road in Vermont in an electric car and I’m old, and I’m heading to my red barn of a house.  How in the world did I get here?  Naturally I know the answer but if you were to skip over those intervening years all this would be impossible to imagine.  And boppin’ along there I actually was flying over those years.  Music––like that Proustian nibble of madeleine––it does that.

 

Add to those kind of dreamy thoughts the outside world of the 70’s with the outside world of the 20’s––different century–– instead of my inside world.  Now that can really make you wonder how in the world we got there.  

 

Yikes.

BEFORE THE UNTHINKABLE, NOW THINKABLE

With Andy in the WH Press Room, 2016

THEN/NOW

It isn't really "unthinkable" any more is it?  After all, by November of 2016 Obama was looking at his last few months, and Trump had already been elected President. Looking back, it seems like a time long, long ago.  Andy was with the White House Fellows Program then, and I was on my first trip since Ken––well, you know.  Other family members had met Obama in the Oval several weeks before, and now here I was on my own tour.  Besides the special WH tour––where the only Obama family member I ran into was their dog––Andy took me to the places where members of the government dine and hang out.  As it happened, his apartment was across the street from the site of the Pizzagate incident of a few months earlier: a conspiracy theorist had bought the notion that Democrats were running a pedofile ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant, so he went there with a gun and opened fire. Now that was a sign of things to come.

So–basically a carefree visit to DC, admittedly with misgivings about the incoming administration.  That, I thought, would wear itself out.

Obviously, it didn't.  It's back with a vengeance, as they say.

*

So here we are, again.  But this time there is a plan,  essentially Project 25, with its credo to turn the government upside down, eliminate as much of it as possible, a plan dismissed by many pre-election because it was too out there.  It is indeed out here now for everyone to see, or to experience if  you're unlucky enought to be one of its numerous targets. Its base nature is one of cruelty.  No worries, rich white men. You're good.

So far the courts are holding off a multitude of executive moves, others are stubbornly holding on to their jobs or to their missions.  But a mass movement has yet to coalesce.  It's early days though, a thousand-plus to go.  Which is not to say that after those thousand and so days all will be well. Much will be in ruins.

WHAT TO DO

A protest in Lexington where I lived in until 2011.  April 19th, Patriots Day, was a big deal, beginning in the early morning hours with a reenactment of the Battle on the Green and Paul Revere's and William Dawes famous ride.  Oh, patriotism!

Family members (some visiting from MA) joined a small local protest. 

An anxious audience, mostly white-haired, hears from VT leaders.  
 (Some faces blurred)

Our VT leaders: All good people here.  Absent: Our Gov.

Little actions.  Feels like punching the air.

READING UP

In the absence of finding a way of doing something, taking some sort of useful action, I find myself with the following spate of interests.  Besides becoming an obsessive reader of Heather Cox Richardson's daily newsletter in which she describes happenings in a historical context, and doing deeps reads of a bunch of trusted publications, I find myself most invested in stories that relate, often via fiction, to the present.  Latest is Darkenbloom by German author Eva Menasse (in translation), that tells a wonderfully ironic tale of people in an Austrian border town in the last 1980's whose residents have not come to terms with their past, to say the least. It is a tale based upon actual events.  Then there is the dystopian Prophet Song by Irish writer Paul Lynch, and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, reminding us that the Dutch were not all innocent. A while back I picked up Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada at the airport, a surprising find for an airport bookstore, and another true story. And I am about to read The Crooked Cross by Sally Carson, which sounds as if it might be a gothic American novel but is actually an almost-forgotten 1934 novel about the dawn of the Nazi era in a small German town.  

Why this can-it-happen-here thinking?  For one, they are all darn good stories. Those stories and the present have commonalities.  And I have a certain perspective, I suppose, since my parents were Austrian and German and long ago I met relatives and friends of my parents in both countries when memories were still fresh. Then there is the tale"The Adventures of My Cousin George," my story (i.e., blog post) about his experiences during the war and eventual flight to Australia in its aftermath.

WHAT NEXT

I read somewhere recently that one thing leaders fear––the writer was speaking of autocratic leaders, but this probably applies more widely––is events.  

I don't know what is next.  Do you?

The last scene from "Planet of the Apes," 1968

I WANT TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE...

 

 

I was going to say

 

something about the infamous Signal meeting (Emojis! Reacting to bombings with emojis!  And name calling the editor of The Atlantic “scum,”  Just like high school!  Like the words of Logan Roy addressing his offspring in “Succession,” these are not serious people.)

 

And something about Free Speech (ICE arrests a Fulbright Scholar at Tufts for co-writing an article about Palestinians!  And so on.)

 

And attacking diversity, and law firms, medical research, eliminating international aid, attacking everything that doesn’t praise what the administration likes, having imperialistic visions...and OMG, there’s so much more.

 

but then I came across this:

 

The Nissitissit

 

K. Norland, 5/13

 

 

Some years ago I was fly fishing the Nissitissitt River* at the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  It was early summer, a soft and delicate day, the freshness of spring not yet lost, but a feeling of the languor of warmth to come.  The fishing was good by my standards.  Two small trout had been tricked by fur and feathers wrapped on a little hook to believe a small insect was careless enough to be their lunch. In the best fly fisher tradition I gently slipped the hook out of their jaws, an action made easier by having pinched down the barb on the hooks.  It has been years since I kept and ate a trout.  Indeed, I am not clear about why I fish.  I do know why I am in the water.  I love to wade streams through meadows and brushy places and the deep woods.  I like what I see. Very much.  Small sand bars where currents are slow, rocks and moving green grass in faster flow, and water roiling and boiling over stony rapids, around large rocks.  The stones show texture and color, and they glint when wet with the cold clear water  I have had dreams where I am a trout in this water enjoying the feel of the current as I hold station against the flow, looking at sand and rocks and gently waving long green grass underwater; sometimes with trees arching overhead.  Happy dreams these; I am pleased to be a fish in my next life.

 

In this life I am expensively protected from the wet cold by waterproof chest high waders.  I wear a vest with fishing gear and carry a long flexible rod balanced to a carefully tapered floating fly line attached to a nearly invisible leader, at whose yet further tapered end is a small creation of fur and feathers: an imitation insect designed to touch gently down on the moving stream and be carried to a waiting hungry fish. Deceived by such a perfectly cast creation the fish will strike, be hooked, and then expertly played by the angler, then he will tire until he is released from the barbless hook or quickly killed for later eating.  Unfortunately for me, the fish usually ignores my offering and may smack it with his tail to show what I take as contempt.

 

No matter.  I enjoy the day, the air, the water.  But on this day I would see something I had never seen before – the disconcerting sight of a large trout, the largest trout I had ever seen in this river.  In deep fast moving water it looked for all the world as if it was broken nearly in half, upright with its head facing downstream but with the center of the left side of its body missing.  The rear of the body and the tail were bent at right angles to the head and white flesh showed in the gap.  With no sign of blood or entrails, the fish seemed in control of itself for the brief time it took to sweep by.  I thought it must have been attacked by a predator not far upstream and would soon lose its apparent control and whatever life was left.  It was an unsettling experience, and I wondered a little uneasily about how big the predator might have been.  There was a sizable piece of fish to be accounted for.

 

It took an hour or more of very pleasant and tranquil downstream wading and casting for me to forget about the trout, and as noon approached, the increasing warmth of the day made me reflective and pleasantly fatigued.  This stretch of river was not deep and there was a low grassy bank at water’s edge with a few pleasantly spaced small bushes and trees.  I lay down on the bank, my booted feet nearly touching a shallow rapids, and I half dozed, half daydreamed in the long grass until some instinct alerted me to a presence.  I slowly rose on an elbow, and upstream, over the top of the grass, I saw movement in the water, something coming down towards me.  It disappeared behind the trunk of a tree, and then behind the streamside grass, but reaching the rapids it arose and I was surprised to see a slim creature at least three feet or more tall, apparently sitting on hind legs, in profile, with a keen gaze; staring not at me but directly downstream.  I did not move, nor did the animal, for what seemed a very long time.  I was struck by the intensity of the creature’s gaze and elegance of form.  Then it was back in the water, eyes and tip of nose showing briefly as it swam through the pool below.  It was an otter, the first and only wild otter I have ever seen.  I would never be sure of is mission but I choose to believe it was the predator who maimed the trout I saw earlier.

 

Looking at what I have written I see I have not captured what I felt about the experience.  I’m not surprised.  For the few seconds I spent in the company of the otter –oblivious of me so intently absorbed in its world – I saw it in a special way.  I felt I briefly shared that world, but I cannot articulate that sense, even though I can recall it.  After a few attempts I gave up, until I recently recalled reading Sally Carrighar, more years ago than I want to remember.  I’ve always enjoyed nature writing, and have some favorites.  There is a biology professor at the University of Vermont, Berndt Heinrich, that I particularly like to read.  One book especially, Winter World, has given me much pleasure.  He is probably the best example of what I normally choose, but he is no Sally Carrighar, nor is Sally a Berndt Heinrich, even though I believe they would each appreciate the other.  Heinrich is an excellent student of animal behavior, but Carrighar inhabits the world of her subjects in a unique manner.  She becomes the animal in a way no naturalist I’ve read can do.  The feelings of the creature appear as she describes behavior, and this is done seamlessly; observed behavior with imagined, intuited feeling, in a way that to me is intensely real.  There is not much more I can say than that, you’ll have to read her yourself if you want to know.  I will conclude with a small example, In her book One Day on Teton Marsh, Ms. Carrighar has a chapter on the activities of a scud, a kind of fresh water shrimp  She makes you appreciate what it feels like to be a scud.  Along the way you learn a lot about how the scud lives.  And then, after the scud, you can read her chapter about otters.

 

 

*The Nissitissit River is a 10.5-mile-long river in southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts. It is a tributary of the Nashua River, itself a tributary of the Merrimack River, which flows to the Gulf of Maine. This river is part of the Nashua River Watershed.

 

SUCK IT UP, EVERYBODY!

What's left to say?

Quite a lot, actually. 

Michelle Goldberg, in the NYT, 2/25/25 wrote,

In writing about our country’s rapid self-immolation, I try to ration Hannah Arendt references, lest every column be about the ways “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, foreshadows the waking nightmare that is this government. But contemplating Bongino’s ascension,* it’s hard to avoid the famous Arendt quote, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” 

Misha Gessen author of National Book Award winner 2017 “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” that reveals much both politically and culturally about 20th and 21st century Russia (and reminded me of being there in 2012) wrote in 2024,

 ....I was struck most of all by the mood that seemed to accompany [Hungarian PM] Orban’s actions. We all remember it from Trump’s first term, this sense of everything happening all at once and the utter impossibility of focusing on the existentially threatening or of distinguishing it from the trivial — if that distinction even exists. It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition.

Thomas Friedman in a NYT discussion said,

I’ve kind of given up on politics when dealing with Trump because at least until the midterms, there are no levers to pull. The Senate is all in on him. The House is all in on him. The Supreme Court is all in on him. His media ecosystem’s all in on him. I’m now entirely betting on physics, on the hard realities of things.....They say the market is a voting machine and then it’s a weighing machine. And when you weigh the weight of these things, they don’t add up. If this weren’t my country, I’d put my feet up, grab some popcorn and watch the show.  What a show!  But it is my country.  Trump is driving, we’re all in the back seat, and I think he’s heading into a wall.

Hannah Arendt, also the author of The Banality of Evil" in 1963,  wrote,

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds. 

 

 

 

When you fire all the leaders, you lose the knowledge of the experienced.

When you fire all the new people, you lose the future.

When you fire all the lawyers, you unravel the law.

When you shut out the experts, you lose the able.

When you substitute your loyalists, you merely duplicate yourself.

When you end support to those in need, you end hope.

 

*Dan Bongino, conservative podcaster and one time Secret Service agent, has been appointed the Deputy Director of the FBI.  He has said things like Liberals (aka "scumbag commie libs") have been playing at revolutions, and will now get a taste of the real thing.  (Deputy Director of the FBI–seriously!)

 

A poem for our time (thanks to NYT for bringing this to my attention).

 

0my 1dreams2, 3my 4works5, 6must 7wait 8till 9after 10hell 

11by 12Gwendolyn 13Brooks 

14I 15hold 16my 17honey 18and 19I 20store 21my 22bread 

23In 24little 25jars 26and 27cabinets 28of 29my 30will31. 

32I 33label 34clearly35, 36and 37each 38latch 39and 40lid 

41I 42bid43, 44Be 45firm 46till 47I 48return 49from 50hell51. 

52I 53am 54very 55hungry56. 57I 58am 59incomplete60. 

61And 62none 63can 64tell 65when 66I 67may 68dine 69again70. 

71No 72man 73can 74give 75me 76any 77word 78but 79Wait80, 

81The 82puny 83light84. 85I 86keep 87eyes 88pointed 89in90; 

91Hoping 92that93, 94when 95the 96devil 97days 98of 99my 100hurt 

101Drag 102out 103to 104their 105last 106dregs 107and 108I 109resume 

110On 111such 112legs 113as 114are 115left 116me117, 118in 119such 120heart 

121As 122I 123can 124manage125, 126remember 127to 128go 129home130, 

131My 132taste 133will 134not 135have 136turned 137insensitive 

138To 139honey 140and 141bread 142old 143purity 144could 145love. 146.kkkkk