Rachmaninoff, beer bellies, teenage acne and joy

You can still get to joy, if you know where to start.

Fascism is coming out of the closet in America. In defiance of the Hatch Act, Trump used the White House as the location for the Republican Convention, in effect just another Trump rally, except that this time it consisted in large part of his own family members telling the nation that he is the best leader we've ever had in our history. You don't get much closer to the cult of personality than that. 

Republicans in the Senate are complicit in this illegal act, but they are not entirely to blame for the larger shit show. The reason they show such cowardice in standing up to him is that his lies are working and they are listening to their constituents, as one is supposed to do in what's called a democracy. A significant number, a critical mass of Americans are just fine with his lies and would turn on their "leaders" if they did otherwise.

Top of the list are the Christian nationalists, those who take their cue from the likes of Jerry Falwell, Jr., Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker, the hijackers of Christianity who build their political version of it around white supremacist goals.  And current polls show the lead Biden once had has largely disappeared and there is a real possibility looming that Trump could be reelected in November. 

He can count on the Electoral College to help him in this, as well as widespread gerrymandering (which turns Democratic states like Pennsylvania into Republican States, for example), and he's doing all he can to suppress the votes of African Americans, right down to and including dismantling the post office, so people afraid to go out because of the Corona Virus can't vote by mail. He could very well pull it off. He's already laying the ground to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of an election in which he loses by a small margin, and even the most ardent Democrats are insisting that we have to win by a wide margin to keep that from happening, thus surrendering the battle even before it is fought.

Fortunately, there are ways to keep the faith in the human race. What keeps me from despair, more than anything else, is the world of music: people with the ability to carry you away with their superhuman talent, people like Alexander Malofeev. I've followed him since he was about five years old, and I never tire of watching him perform.  As he grows, he just gets better and better. He has been my favorite concert pianist for some time now.

This morning I did something I have not done in a long while. I listened to him play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, a very familiar piece of music I've been listening to for most of my life now, and never tire of, and as soon as I was done, I went back and listened a second time. All the way through, including that stunning encore. I'm planning to do it a third time before the day is over.

I have a bunch of favorite composers. I go to Mozart for overall brilliance, Bach, when I feel the need for calm and for order in the universe, Liszt and Chopin, when I want to marvel at what human hands can do, Brahms, for drama, and Rachmaninoff for passion. Maybe it was giving in to passion today that made me want to get up close and personal with Alexander. Watching Alexander play Rachmaninoff this morning I realize that I've come to feel a strong personal draw, as if I have a stake in watching him grow and mature, like I might a grandson or a nephew.

Or maybe it's just sentimentality, that too-cute-for-words blonde hair.  He was somebody I wanted to listen to in awe and then hug to pieces when he was small. Now that he's growing, he's like somebody you want to thank the gods for - thank you for giving me a son/grandson/nephew who can dazzle the world with such talent. "That's my boy!"

I don't make a personal connection with all the artists whose performances I follow. Some, like Lang Lang and Yuja Wang and George Harliono, I marvel at and love from a distance. Alexander, probably because I've watched him grow for so long now, I feel a more direct personal connection with.

Here's that Rachmaninoff performance I'm talking about, the Second Piano Concerto in C Minor, Opus 18.

Beautiful music often brings tears to my eyes. This one almost had me sobbing.

And while I was grooving on the fact that this child I've taken to heart is now already 15 years old, I began to notice other things. The paunch on the director, Kristjan Järvi, for example. Järvi, another superb musician, was born in Estonia. He's now an American citizen, but he's obviously kept close ties with his original homeland. He is the founder of that marvelous youth orchestra, the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, backing Alexander up. It consists of young people from around the Baltic - Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Russia.

That's how you fight the fascists. Focus on something bigger than the tragedy taking place as democracy goes into the toilet in America. Focus on braces on the teeth and pimples on the face of Wunderkinder now entering adolescence, and on the belly of a handsome man who gets young people to make beautiful music.

That performance may well be the last one Sasha was able to give while still holding on to the angelic face of a prepubescent boy. Here he is, only a month later, playing another Rachmaninoff piece, this time the "Little Red Riding Hood" Etude, Opus 39, No. 6, sweat pouring down off a still youthful face, but now one giving way to teenage acne. Our little boy is growing up and we're going to be watching him as an adult from now on - even though people routinely remark that he has already played with the maturity of a much older person for some time now.

Real people. Love watching them grow. And sweat. And develop bellies. And take your breath away with their almost inhuman talent.

The belly and the pimples remind me that the word "inhuman" is totally inappropriate. These are people who share our space on this planet, people who provide reasons for not losing faith in the human race. Very human people. Just samples of the best of us.

Most of you, probably, will just enjoy the music and not need the pimples and the belly to remind yourselves these geniuses are human. More power to you.

But I sit here in lockdown, watching time go by. Yesterday it was March. Tomorrow it will be September. Little Sasha is entering puberty and will soon be all grown up and time is way way out of my control. It's my way of using melancholy to root out fear and sadness. I find it hard to move from sadness to joy.  But it's not so hard when starting from melancholy.

Tante Friedas Geburtstag

Frieda at Sweet Sixteen

This blog entry will not mean much to most of the people I know, but today is the birthday of one of the five most important women of my childhood and youth, my Aunt Frieda. Other women joined their number over the years, but there is something special about these five, all born in the last decade of the 19th Century. I want to take a minute to bring Tante Frieda front and center, as well as mention the other four, in passing.

I was blessed with not two, but three grandmothers, as well as the sister of one and the sister-in-law of another, whom I credit with helping me know what it is to be loved and nurtured as a child and as a young man and given a sense of self that would see me through some hard times over the years. I’m talking about: Mabel, born in 1892, my paternal grandmother;  Carrie, born in 1896, Mabel’s sister;  Bertha, born in 1895, my maternal grandmother, whom I called Großmutter; Johanne, born in 1890, Bertha’s sister,  who took my mother in and brought her to America in 1923, after her own mother had to give her up in the middle of the Great War, 1914-18, and was known far and wide as Mutti, because that’s what my mother called her and because she fit the stereotype of a woman who baked for the world and made all strangers at her table into family.  And Frieda, born approximately 1890, who became the Lebensgefährtin (life partner) of Otto, the brother of Theo, my grandmother Bertha’s second husband, whom I called Großvater after he married Großmutter and enabled her to reclaim my mother (they lived next door to Mutti and Vati on Riverside Avenue in Torrington, Connecticut, where I was born).

I credit Tante Frieda with anchoring me in Berlin and giving me reason to want to emigrate there. And with the fact that I had to live a life of regret over a “history of things that never happened” when I failed to make that dream come true, partly because she died before I could pull it off, and partly because I got distracted by life in Japan.

Frieda is the only non-blood relative in the nurturing five, but was no less important in my life for all that. In fact, she outlived not only Onkel Otto, but all her other friends and family, and kept me coming back to Berlin for many years, particularly at Christmas time, because I couldn’t stand the idea of her spending that time alone.

Tante Frieda was a chemist, and remained in Berlin all through the war as the city came crashing down around her. Two weeks after it ended, a train trestle collapsed on her husband, killing him and leaving her to make her way alone in the wreckage of the Third Reich. Otto had lost his wife in the war, as well, and after a time they began spending their days together and eventually formed what was known in the day as an “Onkelehe” - an “uncle marriage” - in which two people got together but chose not to marry because if they did they would lose the studio apartments they had been assigned after so many years of waiting to get out from under living in a single room in somebody else’s apartment. Otto would take the bus every day to Frieda’s. She would make lunch, they would hang out, walk in the park, attend concerts and theater performances, and live pretty much as a couple, except that Otto would return to his studio at night. Today, these arrangements are called “life partnerships” and some are recognized the way common-law marriages are.

She was Frieda Müller, he was Otto Schmidt; they bore two of the most common names in the Germany of their day; John Smith meet Mary Jones. Soon after I entered the scene she began calling him “Null Null,” making fun of the fact that “Onkel Otto” - the letters OO - were the symbol of a public toilet. Not everybody’s idea of a good sense of humor, but it was done with great affection and I saw that they were happy together.

I tried for years to get her to talk about the war years. I learned from friends that her job as a chemist meant that she was considered a state official and there was pressure for her to join the Nazi Party. She refused, and as a result was frequently assigned the job of standing guard all night long. One night, when the air raid shelter she was in collapsed, she was forced to crawl through the dust in the dark into the shelter in the building next door. The floors were uneven and she took a bad fall, resulting in the loss of hearing in first one, then both of her ears. She wore a hearing aid in both ears, but found the buzzing so annoying she took them out when she was home alone. And she didn’t have a telephone. And that meant if I showed up unannounced I could drive the entire apartment house nuts until I could get her to realize I was pounding on the door. We took to leaving a broom in the hallway with a flag on the end of it to stick through the mail slot for those occasions. Even then, there were times when she was napping or forgot to leave the door to the hallway open and didn’t see me waving frantically for her attention.

I loved hanging out with her. She had an active mind and a curiosity about the world that made her a great storyteller and conversationalist. I would bring my friends Ed and Bonnie and Bob and Merrill over with me and Kaffee und Kuchen made those occasions feel as if we were celebrating birthdays. 

Some years after my time in the army ended* and I was going back only for a few weeks at a time, we went to an afternoon concert and ended up at the cafe at the top of the KaDeWe Department Store, just off the Kudamm in downtown Berlin. The West German government had decided to drive home the point that West Berlin belonged to the Federal Republic and arranged for a meeting of the Bundestag to be held in Berlin. The East Germans protested loudly and the Russians decided to fly their planes at eye level just over the tops of the buildings in the city. You could actually see the pilots and the roar was almost beyond endurance.

It was the only time I ever saw Tante Frieda throw in the towel. “I’ve got to go home. Too many war memories,” she said. And finally, she opened up about the war experiences and I got to hear some real horror stories of bodies in the street and death in all directions. The next day, though, she was back, her normal affable self again, making each day count. 

Another memory that sticks with me is the memory of the Bohnenkönig game she made us all play. My friend Achim and his wife Margit would have us over for Christmas dinner, and Tante Frieda insisted on bringing over a large plate of Berliner, a kind of jelly donut, except that in one of them she would place a coffee bean instead. We had to eat them all, one after another, until one of us found the bean and was crowned the “Bean King.” Nobody had the heart to tell her this was pure torture, especially after a hefty holiday meal. Those were the days when I was still able to endure great discomfort to avoid risking making a loved one feel bad. I’m no longer up to that sort of self-sacrifice.

Every year when August 30th comes around, I mark the day.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Tante Frieda!

*P.S. Aug. 30, in the afternoon - Decided to fact check - apologies for not doing this sooner. Found that this buzzing of the city by Russian planes took place in April 1965, i.e., while I was still there in the army and not in later years. Faulty memory. No other facts were harmed by this error that I can discern: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19650407.2.12&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

America's Shame

My friend Jason has given me permission to pass on to you his observations on the glaring contrast between the way the Scandinavian countries have approached the current Covid-19 pandemic and the way the United States of America has done it. He is justifiably proud of the way Denmark has comported itself. Denmark is the land of his roots. The United States has been his place of residence since his college days. He does not feel comfortable calling it home.

I have gone back and forth with Jason over the years over his critical view of what I call, following the normal conventions, "America," and what he prefers to flip off as "South-Central North America." He sees the place as pretty much a joke. A lost cause. I've complained that he has done it a disservice by allowing it to be represented by the reprobates, rather than by those who, like me, continue to hold out hope the dream that is America can be kept alive. Other than that, our views on what is going on here are pretty much in sync.

It's a glass half-full, half-empty story. Twice now in recent years, first with W and now with Trump, the Republicans have managed to rip the presidency out of the hands of the majority of voters. I say America is the dream; Jason says America is the people who call the shots. I have to admit I am not on the firmest of ground in this argument. It's all well and good to insist that America never was and never will be a democracy, that democracy is the word we've chosen to use for the aspiration - the dream - and not an accurate description of our form of governing ourselves. What are we to do with the fact that the pundits are warning us that Trump's White-Supremacist Enablers, the Republican Party, who are masters at voter suppression and gerrymandering, knowing they can count on the Electoral College System to work in their favor, could win a second term?  If they do, few doubt that the already largely successful process of dismantling our democratic institutions would only quicken and, as with the global climate crisis, we may already have passed the point of no return.

It's a stark, seriously depressing picture.

As I say, I still hold out hope. I'm hoping I will look like a fool when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are installed in the White House and the big money/Christian nationalist gang is sent packing next January. Look like a fool who cried the sky is falling and called it terribly wrong. I can't remember ever wanting so badly to be wrong.

But there it is. America on the precipice, and tipping over.

The Corona-virus is bad enough as a disease we have yet to get control over. It is even worse as the symbol of a country stupid enough to have surrendered not only a once passionate love of democracy but a dedication to integrity and commitment to truth, as well.

Here is what Jason had to say recently in a letter to a friend:

This pandemic has been going on long enough that some things [have] become obvious through simple observation. Top of the list is that the United States politicians have failed miserably in preventing the spread and saving lives. They are closing in on a quarter of a million deaths . . . just because the politicians want to be able to say the economy is robust so everybody should function normally. It is the ultimate in selfish "re-election" strategies and the people in North America are just too damned stupid to do anything about it and stuck in a ridiculous 18th-century system that was never designed to deal with 21st-century problems. 

The best example, mentioned by many, is Sweden. They have just over ten million people. They did practically nothing at the beginning beyond a mild "oh stay home if you don't feel well." Almost six thousand people have died in Sweden – about 576 people for every million in population. 

Neighboring countries Norway and Denmark together have about eleven million people, so slightly more than Sweden. They both took immediate, drastic measures very early on including strict quarantine rules, virtually shutting both countries down for an extended period. Together, with a combined population greater than Sweden, Norway and Denmark have had fewer than 900 deaths, fewer than 80 deaths per million people. 

The only difference is the measures the governments took at the beginning. Norway and Denmark listened to their epidemiology specialists, ramped up for ample testing and tracking and imposed stringent quarantine measures. Sweden did not. 

Of course, the US no longer qualifies to even be listed amongst the humane countries of the world. There is simply nothing to compare them to. In Denmark, about 95% of the population gives the government very high approval ratings for handling the virus crisis. Not even a majority approves of what the US government has done. 

In late July and August, Denmark began to slowly "re-open" with shitloads of guidelines, continued abundant testing and tracking and extensive special guidelines for schools (which open in August). There was another "outbreak" of the virus. Health and government officials were on it in two days. They quickly realized the spike in cases was coming from specific places – a slaughter house in Jylland was one of them. Immediate isolation. Immediate tracking. Immediate testing of everybody who had been in contact with the new cases. 

The numbers dropped spectacularly within three weeks. They are now so low they are looking at a "managed crisis." The spread rate in Denmark is at .8, meaning an infected person does not spread it to another person but would have to be in contact with several people before the virus spreads. That is very close to the point where the virus stops spreading at all. 

 

Yesterday, Denmark's National Health Minister credited the government's measures in the virus crises and also the people of Denmark, crediting them with listening and taking the advice of the health professionals. There are currently only two people in the whole country in critical care – because an entire population listened and took the necessary measures. 

It is sad to watch, but at this point there probably is no solution here in the US. The government does next-to-nothing, the population is off on some up-your-ass no-mask protest and more people died of Covid-19 in the US yesterday than have died in all of Norway and Denmark since the virus was first identified. 

In my humble opinion, they should be dusting off the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg for the trial of US politicians for 21st-century crimes against humanity.

There is a case to be made that it is unfair to cast the United States in such a bad light when its record of fighting the Corona virus is by far not the worst in the world. Many countries have more cases in proportion to their population: Belgium is way worse, at 8.6 per 10,000, and so is the UK at almost 7 per 10,000 compared to the U.S's 4.8.  And when you look at the case fatality rate (as Trump likes to do) the U.S. is pretty low, at 3.3%, which puts us in 24th place among countries with over 50,000 reported cases. Then there's the problem of how countries are ranked. Since the disease hits older people harder than younger people, comparing the U.S. unfavorably with Uganda, for example, where the average age is 15.9, gives skewed data.

So the U.S., while not exactly a model in handling the pandemic, is not the most incompetent of nations, and "crimes against humanity," pace Jason, is rhetorical excess.

And then there is the argument that it is unfair to compare manageable countries like Norway and Denmark, with populations smaller than many American cities, with increasingly unmanageable behemoth countries like India, Brazil and the United States, which probably could do a lot better if they chose to become more effective police states like China. But given these trade-offs, there's still much to find fault with in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we still haven't fully faced up to our history of slavery, segregation and genocide and made sincere efforts to put things right by addressing the resultant racial gap. 

To say nothing of our astonishing ability to forget, and I don't mean simply slavery and segregation, but even much more recent history. I called Jason on his rhetorical excess. But he's only being excessive if it's our way of dealing with the pandemic he's talking about. If he's looking at the bigger picture (and I think he is), it's a different story. The recent remaking of George W. Bush into a good guy since he looks so much better than Donald Trump is a perfect example.  W can't hold a candle next to Trump when it comes to lying, but Trump never lied us into a war, and all the smoochy-smooch by Barack and Michelle Obama won't wash that away. On that front, I'm with Jason.

I see hope in the street protests and movements like Black Lives Matter, if we can get Americans to make the distinction between the earnest protesters and the thugs and looters who can be counted on to piss in the melting pot.

Vote, damn it. Vote.

It won't fix what's wrong with America, since what's wrong with America are the critical masses of white supremacists and democrats who, instead of providing a counter force to the rapacious Republicans, throw their weight behind big money, as well. Biden/Harris won't fix that.

But for now, it's all we've got. Something to stop the hemorrhaging until the doctor comes.

 

A Meditation on the Exquisite

 My friend Bill and I got into a nice exchange the other day over the word “exquisite.”

I had posted a link to a couple of YouTube videos of particularly moving violin pieces, one of Fritz Kreisler playing “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and one of a Hungarian violinist playing the theme from Schindler’s List in a synagogue in Budapest. I had described both performances as “exquisite.”

Bill wrote back, “If this rendering of the theme from Schindler’s List doesn’t generate tears, one had better check for humanness.”

I agreed, of course, but that begged the question of whether “exquisite” meant “something that can bring you to tears.” I’d like to think the word functions as an extender of the word “beautiful” and should be used sparingly. Not for kitsch and sentimentality, but for things that touch the soul. Tears often come, but they are not required to give the word its meaning.

I wrote Bill back:

I keep thinking of the time when Taku was fishing for compliments about a meal he had prepared.

The conversation went something like this.

T: You don't like it!

A: Yes, I like it. You just didn't give me time to say so!

T: But you don't think it's very good.

A: Yes, I do! It's delicious!

T: But it's not exquisite!

I was still learning that there were going to be times when I was not going to win an argument.

I then went back to listen to that Schindler’s List piece once more, for the nth time, and concluded that it fit the bill. The music and the performance both are exquisite.

This time, when the YouTube video came to an end, I let it roll over to the next video. YouTube has people with marvelous sensibilities who know how to provide their viewers with suggestions, based on what they have just watched. In this case, it was another performance of the theme Schindler’s List, this one by the Netherlands Orchestra, and I noticed for the first time that it was written by John Williams. “I’ll be damned,” I thought. Hollywood. He’s a great composer, but he wrote it for Hollywood. Not a place you associate with exquisite, at all, but with popular culture and the world of the mundane.

Turns out this second Schindler’s List performance is loaded with emotional heavy stuff. First, there’s the music itself. Then there’s the fact that the violinist was dressed in red and the rest of the orchestra was in black and white. If you remember the movie, this will ring a bell. 

And mostly, as if the memory of the Holocaust, which is inevitably called up by this music, were not enough to tug the heart strings, the woman playing the cor anglais, the oboe-like instrument, has a moving story of overcoming a neurological disease and the fear she would never be able to live her dream of playing in an orchestra. You can get the story if you read the commentary.

But YouTube doesn’t stop there. It then links to a piece by another composer for Hollywood, the Italian Ennio Morricone, who died recently, by the way, who could turn out the schmalz/exquisite music (depending on the hardness of your heart) with the best of them. Maybe he was the best of them, actually. He composed (and conducted as well) this next piece, the theme from The Mission, a third piece which, despite its association with Hollywood, I would also apply the label exquisite to. And that begs the question, “Why am I assuming if it’s Hollywood, it’s schlock?” 

I’ll leave it there. It’s not for me to tell anybody how to draw the line between “emotional” and “exquisite,” or between things that are kitschy, trite and obvious and things that are soulful. That, I think, is something only life experience can draw out in you. Some will claim it’s a class issue, the leisure classes having the financial means to acquire “acquired tastes,” and the rest of the population having to make do with bread and circus entertainment, to which the word “exquisite” rarely gets applied.

Like many a working class kid who grew up in America when people could still be what we used to call “upwardly mobile,” I outgrew the working class tastes of my parents. “Outgrew,” of course, being the word you use if you’re in the snob class, not if you are in the class of folk my mother belonged to, with her fondness for movie magazines and soap operas. Or my father, who once built a house with his own hands, down to the plumbing and wiring, and could take a motor apart and put it back together, and who despaired at having a son who despised him for hunting deer and got bored as hell having to sit with him in a dumb rowboat on a dumb lake when he went fishing. I’m pretty sure my father never once in his life uttered the word “exquisite.”

My father’s gone now, and as I approach with alarming speed the age at which he died, I’m beginning to miss him more and more. He did live long enough, fortunately, for us to find some sort of reconciliation after years of having no points of contact. And I know that if he had lived longer, that process would have continued.

But it was not to be. As I become increasingly aware of just how limited our time with loved ones is, and as my inclination to eschew religious faith and throw all my weight into making this life as meaningful as I possibly can only increases, I find one way to do that is to focus more intently on things that are true and beautiful. Beauty is elusive and temporary, and what gives life its meaning is partly finding something outside yourself to dedicate yourself to, like the health and welfare of children and other vulnerable creatures, human and non-human.  And by caring for friends and strangers alike. And by learning to embrace death, that mysterious faceless figure we picture as Father Time, carrying a scythe, who will one day come and take it all away, but in the meantime frames the here and now. 

There is beauty in a sunset or a Grecian urn. But exquisite beauty, whether it comes to you through the eyes or the ears, as in music, is likely to be tied to sadness and loss. One can cry for negative reasons, because one has failed at something, or because one is feeling spiritual or physical pain. And one can cry for the best of reasons, because one is touched by what is rare, hard to achieve, temporary. And exquisitely beautiful.

Photo credit

Loving your delinquent children

My love affair with San Francisco began in the early 60s when I was studying Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey. We would drive up on weekends to do Russian things, like visit the Znanie Bookstore on Geary Boulevard, and the tea shops on Clement for borscht and piroshki. That part of town, which has since become Chinatown West, used to be populated by lots of Russian expats. Except for the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Cathedral on 26th Avenue and Geary and a few other churches, the Russian flavor is gone now, but the memories remain.

It was love at first sight. When I went to Munich to study and first discovered the delights of the big city, after growing up in rural New England, there was no keeping me down on the farm. While going on one day about never wanting to leave Munich, an American friend suggested to me that I ought to get to know San Francisco, that America too had such things to offer if I wanted to start my life over as a big-city kid, but do it in my own country. 

Half a century later I wrote her to thank her and tell her I had taken her up on her suggestion. As soon as I got out of the army in the summer of 1965, I headed straight for San Francisco, got an apartment near Golden Gate Park with a friend, where I spent most weekends on a bicycle, living for almost a year before my savings ran out and I needed to get a job and begin my adult life in earnest. I came at a very heady time, stayed with friends in the Haight/Ashbury before it blossomed as the home of the hippies, marched down Market Street every year protesting the Vietnam War. There was a time when I thought the ideal job would be to drive a cab, and I took pride in getting to know the whole city. I once boasted I could find my way around blind-folded.

Because of those roots I put down in my 20s, I never seriously identified with another place after that. Berlin had captured my heart, and I lived many years in Tokyo and might have settled there, actually. But San Francisco kept calling me home. The people who lived there who had become my chosen family more than anything else, of course. But the physical location, as well. After half a century you build up associations with so many streets and buildings that unless you work at it, it’s easy to give into the temptation of living entirely in the past in your head.

Not every place has that kind of effect on people. But Paris does. Venice does. “See Naples and die,” Goethe once said. And then there’s Tony Bennett’s kitschy little tune that manages to move even the hardest of hearts: "I left my heart in San Francisco."

The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gray

The glory that was Rome is of another day

I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan

I'm going home to my city by the Bay…

Then there's that other great San Francisco song, the one made popular by Jeanette MacDonald in the 1936 film she made with Clark Gable, titled San Francisco.*  More sentimental than kitschy:

It only takes a tiny corner of 

This great big world to make a place you love

My home up on the hill

I find I love you still

I've been away but now I'm back to tell you:

San Francisco

Open your golden gate

You let no stranger wait outside your door

San Francisco

Welcome me home again

I'm coming home

To go roamin' no more.

Go see a movie sometime at the Castro Theater. They begin with a mini-concert on the Wurlitzer Organ before the film starts and as the organ console sinks below the stage before the film starts, they always play this song and there’s no shortage of teary eyes and wild applause. Did I say sentimental? You ain’t seen sentimental until you’ve seen a theater full of gay queens showing their affection for the city that even today, at least by my generation, gets called the “gay Mecca.”

And now San Francisco, like the rest of this country, has fallen on hard times. Take a deep breath and have a look at this video about the failure of its citizens to keep their heads above water in this time of the twin plagues, the Trump Nightmare and the Covid-19 plague.

What this video makes clear is that good intentions are not enough. We made a terrible mistake in creating a have vs. have-not society which left the have-nots vulnerable to drugs and crime and then jailed them when they fell through the cracks. And then we made a worse mistake by changing that policy so that the mentally ill didn't go to jail anymore without making sure they had homes and hospitals to go to instead - arguing that this is America and we can't remove one's right to fail, and assuming that falling prey to drugs and mental illness is somehow a choice that must be respected - sending them out into the streets instead.

The problems San Francisco faces pre-date these disasters and have causes which are much more deeply-rooted. San Francisco’s social decay is America’ social decay, and while all our attention these days seems to be focused on the November election, my concern is that ridding the country of the corruption at the federal level, the narcissist in the White House and the Senate that has become little more than a rubber-stamp agency for carrying out the wishes of what a friend of mine calls “our corporate owners,” by throwing them all out of office, we will only have stopped the worst of the hemorrhaging that comes from the miscarriage of American democracy. A Democratic band-aid will not do the trick.

There are encouraging signs. Recent social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, the various women’s marches like the one that followed the 2016 installation of Trump in the White House, all suggest that the American dream isn’t dead yet. There are still people working to keep it alive. But as white people, in particular, - and others as well - finally begin to pick up the pace of recognizing just how much weight we’re carrying as a nation that began with slavery and genocide, we are still working against cultural patterns that might just overwhelm us and do us in in the end. 

A recent Rolling Stone article refers to the United States now as a “failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government”…responsible for the death rate of the current pandemic.

Rolling Stone sees the start of America’s demise in its failure to stand down after its victory in the Second World War. Instead, it went on to generate more and more wealth in order to become an imperial power, and as we all know the generation of wealth is always at odds with a fair distribution of wealth. Having made its choice to go with the wealth-makers, thus allowing the little guy to fall through the cracks, the U.S. effectively went down the path to ploughing the American dream under. 

The little guy benefited for a while, got his house and his washing machine and his car. But once the endorsement of wealth acquisition as a primary goal became the thing we assumed people came running from Third World countries to America for, and not because it was an equitable society, we had sown the seeds for our ultimate destruction. 

One of our political parties, the Republicans, made individualism the center of our national ethic and the other party never seriously offered an alternative. Both reflected American me-first values. Superman became the hero children saw as the savior of the world, somebody who could cut through the bureaucracy, the corruption, the ineptitude of collectives and fix things single-handed. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, the Green Arrow, Spiderman, to name just a few of the individual heroes in the tradition of the Lone Ranger, became the source to look to to find what ails America. For the bookish set, to this day, it is the industrial magnates and the grand entrepreneurs held high by the likes of Ayn Rand that symbolize what’s best about America. 

And that means anything smacking of cooperative effort, collective action, unionism or any notion that we as a nation might rise or fall together got dismissed as a Communist notion (which it, of course was). The Europeans found, especially in the Scandinavian models, a middle path and called it Democratic Socialism, but Americans were too conditioned by the Superman mindset to find compromise attractive. We were strong. We were mighty. We were winners. We don’t surrender to bad bad Socialism.

And so here we are, at a time where our biggest challenges are such things as global warming, nuclear proliferation, mass migration from poverty-stricken countries to advanced nations, and a vulnerable global economy and what do we have to meet those challenges with but a “me first, I’ve got mine and screw you” values-system. I’m talking about our actual values, not our hypocritically espoused ones. And me-firstism cannot take us to social equity and social responsibility, and the kind of cooperative efforts that would relieve the tensions that stem from a world divided into haves and have-nots.

Americans are by no means the only bad guys in the world. The Chinese are putting their troublesome minority, the Uighurs, in concentration camps. In Iran, gay people are thrown from rooftops. In Turkey reporters who say the wrong thing go to jail. The irresponsibility at the top in Lebanon which enabled the explosion in Beirut means that three out of four Lebanese will now be dependent on foreign generosity just to put food on the table. Some places have more conspicuous corruption, some are visibly more incompetent. But none of these “What about X” arguments change the fact that America, which once aspired to be a role model for the world, has failed miserably.

Consider the evidence for that claim laid out in that Rolling Stone article:

• in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed as many American men and women by the end of April as died on D-Day. By July, as many as died in Normandy.
• By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.
• The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.
• The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs.
• The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
• In the 1950s, the salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees. Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen.
• Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy.
• Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans.
• Legend though it may be, George Washington is credited with never having told a lie. Compare that with the current president: as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055.
• In the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.
• America has gone from being the world’s big brother to being a nation to be pitied. Newspapers around the world refer to living in Canada as “like owning an apartment above a meth lab.”
• Dozens of flights to and from Asia fly in and out of Vancouver every day. Just three hours south by car, in Seattle, that number is either zero or close to it.
• A few weeks ago, on July 30th, the province of British Columbia had five Covid-19 patients. Massachusetts, which has the same population, had 44 times that many.

We’re broken and are in desperate need of fixing.

I continue to argue that the Buddhists are onto something when they say we should be cautious about thinking that our ideas are real, that we're better off keeping some humility and remembering the blind men and the elephant. So I want to say that what I've claimed here as facts are more fears than certainties, and I'm not convinced, actually, that we are done for. Also, I would never argue that America is or even should be an actual democracy; only that it shouldn’t be an oligarchy. What keeps my patriotism going is the respect for the American dream. It’s fine with me that America fails at democracy, so long as I’m convinced the aspiration to the popular conception of democracy, understood as a maximally egalitarian collective with certain basic rights protected, continues to stay alive. What is really scary at the moment is the evidence that Americans are giving up on that aspiration. The two major camps within Trumpist Republicanism are first, the super wealthy, and those persuaded the super wealthy know best, and second, the politically religious: the first group seeking oligarchy/plutocracy, the second, theocracy. 

And let me be clear; I’m not arguing for majority rule. They still had civics classes when I was a teenager and I remember from those days the arguments found in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere that without the means of assuring universal liberties - a Constitution and a Supreme Court to prevent a tyranny of the majority - we would have mob rule. I’m not arguing that what’s wrong with America is that the majority doesn’t get what it wants; I’m arguing that those who get to make the laws are so conspicuously chosen these days by those with the money to buy opinions. 

We look to the Constitution to assure that rights continue to be extended to more and more of the population, and historically we’ve done pretty well since the early days in eliminating racism and sexism inherent in its earliest pre-amendment versions. But we are stuck, at present, in that we have not found ways around keeping out of power those who serve their own interests at the expense of the nation at large, specifically the less powerful. Trump governs by executive power because Congress fails to exercise its authority; McConnell holds up legislation unless it makes the rich richer; the Republican Party has taken us back to a time when the landowner had all the say over the landless, except that today it’s the wealthy over the poor. And even the Supreme Court, in Citizens United, has thrown its support behind the plutocrats. 

What keeps me hopeful are things like the Black Lives Matter movement, and the efforts to finally rid this country of the monuments to the Confederacy, that loathsome disgusting white supremacist nation people in the South left the United States for in order to maintain the right to hold onto their slaves. From the days of Civil Rights on, there have been efforts to extend full rights to the descendants of African slaves, the same rights held without further ado by the descendants of Norway and Poland and other nations we associate with white-skinned people. 

There has been notable progress there, despite the redlining and the backsliding. Gay people, in my lifetime, have gone from being too terrified to admit even to themselves in the wee hours of the morning alone in their rooms that they were gay to being able to marry each other, hold their heads high, and find love and respect coming readily, for the most part, from their neighbors. Even the churches are spending less time these days blaming their gods for their bigotry. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able from the House floor to tell that piece of crap Congressman from Florida, Ted Yoho, that she was somebody’s daughter and deserved not to be called a “bitch.” Things can and do get better in America.

The prodigal son story in the Bible is a metaphor for how a loving parent sometimes has to ignore his or her healthy and socially responsible children and put all their energies into caring for the sick and wayward one.  I feel I have two messed-up children, my beloved child, San Francisco, and my pain-in-the-ass child, the United States.

I don't know where the energy's going to come from to fix them both. I hope I'm right, at least, in thinking that both suffer from the same illness - the failure to keep as our highest social and political priority the welfare of us all.

*Footnote: I posted an earlier version of this blog in which I confused the two tunes. To the sixteen of you who tuned in to that earlier version, my apologies. Careless of me. Thanks to my friend Wild Bill, who caught the error.