Who's in charge here?

I just read an article by Ezra Klein in this week's Sunday NY Times on Artifical Intelligence which makes me feel as if my friend Bill and I have been busy shifting the chairs on the Titanic.

He and I have been fussing over the way we've been duped into thinking we're reading true stories on the internet, only to discover at some point that they are AI generated.  The solution to our complaint, obviously, is to seek legislation requiring YouTube (and other publishers) to state explicitly and openly whenever what they publish is AI generated. Easier said than done, of course, but that's a fight for another day.

This Ezra Klein Times article (Sunday, September 20) points out that a far more dangerous concern is what is known as RSI - "recursive self-improvement."  That is, the ability of artificial intelligence to ignore human input entirely by getting around its limitations - by combining efforts with other AI generators, for example - and generating ever new and improved ways of producing information.

There is no way of preventing a mechanical (non-human) producer of "truth" from producing things that could lead to the taking of human life as a useful shortcut to efficiency or productivity, for example, unless we have some sort of human guardrails, some form of ethical constraint.  If left to its own devices, AI programs have no "reason" to select a moral constraint - or any other constraint.  As non-humans, they have no morality. Just as corporations lacking CEOs with a conscience have no goals other than profit, AI programs, which lack a sense of ethics, have no goal other than a solution to any given problem it is working on. Damn the torpedoes.

A sense of morality can, of course, be programmed in.  But the way the world is currently set up, with nations in competition with each other, no one nation is going to place such constraints on AI for fear that it will allow other nations to soar ahead in their own particular AI development.  And this is true not just for competitions between nations, but for competitions within any given nation as well.

The way that nuclear proliferation got out of control should be a warning that this threat is not merely theoretical.  It's real.  And of a much greater degree of magnitude.

Makes me glad I won't have to live in a world where this could happen.

Unless my doctor's warning that instead of dying within the next couple years from pulmonary fibrosis I could live to 90 and be hit by a bus is unduly pessimistic and I will live to 100.

Hostage Justice

I spend a lot of time these days reliving the past and among other things I have been singing the praises of Japan, a country I came to call home after twenty-four years of residence there. After some initial awkwardness, I quickly came to appreciate its many obvious virtues, starting with a people who are fundamentally other-oriented, nature-loving, and who share my view that life ought to be lived in avoidance of violence and deceit.  Japan has been very good to me; it provided me with an occupation which enabled me to buy a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a husband I love dearly. I am at home with its hot springs, its cuisine, its civility and its mostly modest ways.

On the downside, what I find fault with are largely trivial things.  I often cite the line, "How can Japan know so much about what it beautiful and so little about what is ugly?" which addresses the garishness and tackiness of its cities. But there is one thing about Japan which startled me the first time I heard of it as incongruent with its order, civility and safe streets, and that is the fact that over 99% of police indictments lead to conviction. Defenders of the system will say that is because the police are careful to build an open-and-shut case before they indict; I'm with those who worry it speaks to the extent the police will go to get lawbreakers to confess to their crimes.

Japan has what is called a "hostage justice" system where suspects are held in prolonged physical detention and denied bail to pressure or coerce them into confessing to crimes.  Human Rights Watch attributes the high conviction rate to the fact that Japan prioritizes confessions over due process.  There is an upside to this: if one shows proper contrition, the sentencing may be light because, one assumes, there is a consciousness of a national community in which expulsion or some other kind of excommunication is viewed as unduly harsh. But woe betide those who maintain their innocence.

Listen to a couple testimonies of victims of this Japanese "guilty until proven innocent" approach.

Which brings me to the reason I've brought this topic up in the first place.  A former colleague of mine mentioned on a Facebook page that she had just made a visit to Chiba Prison to visit Chris Payne, an American fighting a wrongful conviction. The Tokyo High Court reversed his guilty conviction when they found that DNA evidence used to convict him had been falsified. Yet, astonishingly, he has remained in solitary confinement for the last four years and nine months. He was moved from Tokyo to Chiba recently for retrial purposes, but apparently due to the court’s scheduling congestion the retrial date is not set to begin until next April, a full eight months from now. In solitary confinement! The injustice is glaring. The conviction was based on a falsified DNA analysis. And while the analyst goes scot free, Chris sits in solitary. Something here stinks to heaven. 

Where are the good guys here? Where is the American Embassy? Chris is from Indiana. Where are his Senators and Congressmen? The U.S. press covered the story initially, but where has it been since?

(I urge you to follow the links here, here and here and get the background to the whole story.) 

My colleague managed to meet with Chris and was distressed to hear of his untreated health conditions and disturbed by the fear she heard in his voice. 

I have no direct personal knowledge of Chris Payne's case, but I do trust what my colleague has posted on her Facebook page and the reports from the press seem credible. There is so much injustice floating about these days that this may not strike you as worth more than passing interest, but I find the case so egregious that I simply had to take the time to call it to your attention.

Help me make this injustice go away.

Some passing thoughts of a May-baby

"Never apologize, never explain."  I heard somebody say that once and took it on as not a half-bad maxim for going through life.  For a while.  Eventually I decided it was not the best rule to live by and there were times when flexibility made a lot more sense than following rigid principles. Nuanced thinking beats ideological commitment.  

I turn 86 in a few weeks. That means I am now closer to 90 years of age than I am to the already-really-old age of 80, and I find that a seriously sobering thought. And I am aware that the corrolary to "never apologize, never explain" also needs to go: that is, "live life without regrets."  Much as I would like to think I played my cards to the best of my ability as I faced one challenge after another, as I look back now I find myself overwhelmed by the realization that if I could live life over again I would do a whole lot of things differently.

Right off the top, if I had known I was going to live twenty-four years of my life in Japan, I would have studied Japanese far more seriously right from the start.  I would have practiced my Czerny finger exercises on the piano, I would have learned to play soccer and spent a whole lot more time getting physical exercise.

I had a friend - her name was Gretchen - who said to me once, when I asked her if she had any regrets in life, "No.  There's nothing I would do over again because I like who I am today and if I had lived life differently I wouldn't be that person."  Then she added, "Of course, I would have spent less time doing some of those things."

I woke up with an ear-worm this morning of a song from the Weimar Republic days.  Don't know why it should show up out of nowhere; it just did.  It's one of my favorite pieces of music.  It begins, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  [English lyrics; Seven language version]  and is a pitch for enjoying things while you can, while they still are there to enjoy.  It has the wonderful line in it, "...denn jeder Frühling hat nur einen Mai (because every springtime has only one month of May)."

One of the best things I ever did was to take my junior year of college in Germany.  I went to Munich, one of the world's best cities, I'm convinced, and got, at the age of twenty, my first taste of the big city, the theaters, the opera and concert halls, museums, all manner of types of people, endless intellectual challenges. At the university I got to take a course in the history of the Third Reich taught by Germans who had lived through it and could give perspective I could not have gotten in my own country.  One thing that has stuck with me was that it gave me a lens through which to understand the dangers of MAGA authoritarianism.  It helped me see our manipulator-in-chief, Donald Trump, as an "out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the fire" solution to the failure of American capitalism and its toxic Ayn Rand-like worship of individual rights at the expense of communal welfare.

Americans, I am convinced, routinely fail to prioritize equity. We have built a national cultural structure in which some of us have been able to become super rich while so many others of us get left behind. We (a critical mass of us) have persuaded ourselves that working collectively for the common welfare is socialist - and we have made that a bad word.  Isn't wealth the sign of God's favor?  Aren't rich people smarter than poor people?  Trump and his opportunistic enablers are the outcome of this folly.

I know that even hinting at a comparison between Trump and Hitler is a good way to make a fool of yourself - Hitler's Germany lacked the institutional strength that America is beginning to show at long last. But the parallels - the scapegoating, trolling, ghosting, blatant lying - are there and they are sobering to consider even in their paler versions.

*     *     *

On Christmas Eve I fell getting out of the car in front of my house and broke my hip.  More precisely, I broke the femur in my left leg. I have mentioned elsewhere that they sent an ambulance (and two fire engines, of course) to haul me off to the hospital where on Christmas Day they put a rod through the marrow in the bone from hip to knee, setting me off on the journey of learning to walk again.  And the challenge of learning how not to burn my supremely dutiful husband out from exhaustion.  He's already totally transformed the house by putting in a chair lift and grab bars everywhere and he hounds me to follow the exercise plan the physical therapists have set out for me. There's a bit of friction there.  He, unlike me, still lives in the future and wants me to repair sooner rather than later. I'm content to go into rest mode and let the body take the time it needs. I am now working on getting up and down the stairs (strong leg up first going up, weak leg down first going down) and am already getting quite efficient at frying eggs and making toast without assistance.  It only took me a week to figure out that I could avoid spilling the tea if I brought the cup, the milk and the teapot to the table separately instead of carrying the full cup on the tray on the walker across the kitchen.

To return to that song, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  for a minute...  It has an illustrious history.  Originally from the 1931 German film Der Kongreß tanzt  - Congress Dances - the song became wildly popular and was translated into many languages.  It  was outlawed by the Nazis and became a form of resistance to the Third Reich.  I love the fact that I was born in May - the merry merry month of May, April showers bring May flowers and all that. And all the folks - I'm thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh, the "master of mindfulness" and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.  All sorts of people have stressed the wisdom of seizing the present moment.  Every springtime has only one month of May!  Don't blow it.  Enjoy it to the fullest.

My leg still pains me; it will be some time before that pain is no more.  Donald Trump's enablers pain me; it will be some time before the pain is no more. But the month of May is almost here, and that's cause for rejoicing.

Both/and - not either/or.  I spoke earlier of living by nuanced flexibility rather than by rigid principles. Flooded as I am these days with memories of the past and sadness over loved ones who have passed on before me, I am working pretty much full time trying to both live every present moment to the fullest and at the same time allowing myself to surrender to the nostalgia of treasured memories.

So this is what it's like to be old!?  Not all that bad.

I'm with Leo these days

I've been thinking about Jesus.  People argue over whether it was Aristotle or St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who said, "Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man."  I'm now more than seven decades removed from my first Sunday School class, and my ears still perk up when the conversation turns to religion.  For some reason I had a brain-fart this morning that made me ask myself, "Did the Gare St. Lazare, Paris' oldest train station, get its name from the same Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead?" It didn't take much digging to learn that Lazarus and Jesus were best buds, and Jesus used Lazarus' digs as a place for him and his twelve disciples to hang out.  (Or maybe Mary and Martha, Lazarus' sisters, were the attraction.) At least one website makes the case the Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead as a way of proving he was the son of God. 

Lazarus

The website provides us with a picture of the dude (on the right), and maybe it's Lazarus' good looks we should be investigating.  

If it were not for all that virgin birthing, raising your friends after death, and walking-on-water shit, I could get my head around identifying as a Christian. My grandmother gifted me as a kid with one of those Bibles that had all the words attributed to Christ himself printed in red, so I became aware early on that if you stuck to the red and ignored the parts where you bash the brains of the kids of your enemies on the rocks, you'll get a pretty cool image of this guy Jesus.  No way I'm going to sell all that I have and hand the cash over to the homeless, but I think his heart is at least pointing in the right direction.

It's not hard to separate the real Christians from those faking it. Big on the agenda of America's Christian Nationalists is making sure the many thousands of folk who are in the U.S. illegally get deported, whether to Mexico or to their countries they were fleeing for fear of persecution.  Which raises the question, did red-letter Christ's "Love Thy Neighbor" pitch deliberately leave out the adjective "American" or did those failing to protect asylum seekers from real risk simply turn their backs and say "Not my problem!?"

Since I'm not a card-carrying Christian, I have no theological obligation to stand by America's asylum seekers.  But I don't get my moral code from the Bible.  I find the Bible morally depraved in large part (It's not just those kids' brains, there's the fact that God is said to have seen the Amalekites as enemies for all time of the Israelis, and thus worthy of being wiped out (1 Samuel 15:2–3, NKJ) to the last toddler.  I prefer a secular code that begins and ends with an injunction against violence and deceit (I know, I know, the devil is in the details).

My beef with Christians began with my awareness that so much that is wrong with American society, the racism and centuries of anti-semitism, the Calvinistic failure to recognize how much their values open the door to greed and self-righteousness, and probably most of all, the homophobia so strong it led author and scholar,  Eric E. Rofes, to title his book on gay suicide, I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves.

I gave up church-bashing, some years ago now when I learned to stop lumping together a group that shares a set of beliefs that are harmful from a similar group whose beliefs are benign, and to put my efforts into seeking common ground. It was my friendship with Jews whose "religion" was less about theocracy than about simply "being Jewish" that led me to understand my upbringing imprinted on me a cultural Christianity that won't let go was no different. Brahms' German Requiem and the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral resonate in my bones and I care not one wit whether the artists whose legacy I share with millions over the years were motivated by a firm belief only adults should be baptised or a simple understanding that they possessed a talent for making beautiful things; we share common ground.

I was taught that prayer only counted when your were talking from the heart with God and in total sincerity - which meant that all the canned prayers were suspect and done so that you could get to be seen to be praying - going through the motions.  That led to the conviction that Catholic (and any other rote) prayer was insincere and to be avoided as not real prayer.  Somewhere along the line, though, I got hooked by the beauty of the Elizabethan English in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer.  I mean really.  What's not to love about the public confession that goes:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.

I mean "no health in us" is a bit over the top, for sure, but the rest of it is a pretty good turn of phrase, don't you think?

On the Catholic front, I had a thing for Pope John XXIII and will treasure forever the opportunity I had to watch him celebrate mass at St. Peter's in Rome on Easter Sunday up close (just to the left of the main altar). I had a thing for the Argentine pope, Jorge Bergoglio, despite his arguably conservative leanings, because I saw him as a warm-hearted grandfather.  And these days I'm quite taken with Leo, the American pope currently on the throne of St. Peter.  He and I speak a similar form of American English, so he's easy to listen to, especially when he takes on Donald Trump for his hostility toward immigrants - which is, I guess, another way of saying I see him as an authentic, not-fake, Christian.  

One nice thing about growing old.  I've lived long enough already to recognize that just because it has taken years to find common ground, it doesn't mean it isn't there...

Old Dogs

 The other day I came across a YouTube video which appeared to have been made by George Will.  I found the message inspiring and immediately forwarded the link to friends.

No sooner did that link make the rounds when the smell of a rat reached the nose of my friend Bill, who for the nth time pointed out to me that I had been suckered.  I'd like to say that I've learned my lesson, but the sheer number of times I've been taken in by these faux reports indicates that that remains to be seen.  Meanwhile, all I can do is hope my friends have a greater capacity for checking for veracity than I do and a greater inclination to do so.  To my chagrin, I have to conclude that my e-mail messages should carry the warning: DO NOT TAKE THIS POST SERIOUSLY UNTIL YOU HAVE VERIFIED THIS INFORMATION.  With that, of course, I need to accept responsibility to be less quick at the draw when it comes to passing on "information."

In my naiveté, I wondered aloud to Bill why anyone would want to milk the progressive left like that. Why make the effort to provide hope and encouragement for your opponents?  Bill wrote back immediately that it must be that YouTube financially rewards those who get the most viewers, and they know that we on the side of resistance to the trump phenomenon are easy pickins.

Which raises a number of questions. I'm a huge fan of YouTube, I've watched hundreds of hours of entertainment videos, piano concertos and the like, and can't imagine life without this great source of information and enrichment coming into my life. I've sung YouTube's praises any number of times. Now it appears even monkeys fall from trees, even YouTube is part of the great American willingness to sell out for big bucks.

That's all I want to say here. Tread softly.  Never mind the big stick; just tread cautiously.  Tomorrow may be another day, hopefully a better one (here you'll pardon me if I talk to myself for a minute).

But keep the lights on.

And this old dog will work harder at learning new tricks.

Diapers

 I hate wearing diapers.

I know from a caretaker’s perspective, whether we’re talking about taking care of babies or incontinent geezers like me, disposable diapers are a godsend. Arguably, a sign of advanced civilization maybe even.

But I challenge you to try and salvage even an ounce of dignity after pissing yourself and having somebody take off the wet and put on the  dry, Especially if this is all happening in one of America’s elder care institutions where they tell you to go ahead and piss your diaper in the night so they don’t have to  come and change you. 

Not much better (OK a little better) is having to Train Percy to point himself into a plastic bottle instead of at the porcelain. My nights recently have been a duel between my chronic cough and a bad case of dry mouth which require me to drink tons of water. Which require me to then pee into a diaper or a bottle (much preferred, as I said. You have more than gotten the picture I’m sure.

For those of you who have not followed this gripping tale from the start, I slipped getting out of the car at home on Christmas Eve, fell flat on my ass and broke my hip. Two fire engines and an ambulance later, I was in Kaiser Hospital, having a rod placed down the marrow of my left tibia from hip to knee and three days after that I was sent to purgatory to recover from the operation. Purgatory left me with such memories as lying on the floor after falling out of the bed in a soaking wet diaper for three hours in the middle of the night because nobody responded to the calls for help. And a face rash from hell due to the application of the wrong medicine that took me to the ER. Anybody want me to testify in Congress on the wretched state of healthcare in America? My calendar is free. 

OK, enough time on the dark side. I got out of that place and ended up in a much better place with much better people and much better care so it’s not entirely a tale of woe. I’m now focused on getting out of here and getting home, which has been transformed from top to bottom, with every square inch covered by a grab bar or a chairlift or some other accommodation to the new reality by my beloved better half.

Taku has earned triple credits toward his sainthood degree in taking care of me. Between him and my “other beloved,” my chosen niece Amy, I have been bathed in love and affection. I wish everybody could enjoy such care and affection (without having to break a hip, I mean).  And it goes beyond that.  

 Also earning credits towards sainthood are my friends, Takashi and Chiha, my friends Sandy and Norm, my friends Arvind and Ashok and Kei Matsuda, all of whom have stopped by.  And my sister and my dearest of old friends, Sally, and my extended family in Argentina and all the other kind souls who have sent best wishes. I’m feeling super grateful. 

Now to get the hell out of here.

Coughing in Warsaw

Part I: All about me.

Polish audiences seem to have a wonderful capacity for holding in a cough.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's 2025 and I am once again in thrall to the performances of some of the world's best pianists at the 2025 Warsaw Chopin Competition.  It's also October and there's lots of flu and colds in the air, apparently.

The contestants come up the stairs, down onto the stage, bow, sit at the keyboard, adjust their chair, get out their handkerchief, wipe their hands and sometimes the keyboard, and stare nervously at it, lift their arms, and begin.

Out comes some of the most beautiful music ever written and the world is effectively shut outside my door.

They play a number of pieces, sometimes, as with preludes, moving from one to the next without delay.  When they do delay, as if to gather strength to move on in another direction, we are suddenly presented with a barrage of coughing. It's clear people need to cough, but have been holding it in until it is socially acceptable to let it out.  After a number of these displays of respectful silences followed by loud hacking, the whole thing becomes quite funny.  And distracting.  I'd almost prefer it if the audience would just let loose when they need to.

Maybe I'm overly focused on coughing.  I have a lung disease and that means I also have a chronic cough and I'm more than a bit pissed that I can't go to public performances anymore for that reason.  Except that actually I can as long as I get seated early enough to calm my breathing.  I don't cough if I don't exert myself.

Part II: All about Western Civilization and racism - and me again

When asked about my race, I check the Caucasian box. Both my parents go all the way back to fade-out as Europeans in origin. And I am profoundly disgusted when I encounter MAGA folk who are white supremacists. I have loyalty to my LGBT brothers and sisters, to my fellow German-Americans, to both Germany and Japan, countries whose cultures I have had the luxury of playing around in and who have offered me great benefits: Germany gave me a year of university education and an introduction to the joys of urban living.  Japan gave me a good living for 24 years and enough money to buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area.  It also gave me a husband I'm terribly fond of.  But I have no loyalty whatsoever - zero - to the Caucasian race.  If two men could make a baby, I'd be more than happy to have a mixed-race Asian-Caucasian baby to love and to raise as much as I love my dogs and cheerfully pick up their poop off the sidewalk when we go on walks. I don't understand why one would give credit to accidents of birth.

At the same time, maybe because I lived those 24 years in Japan and because my first lover was a black American, and my last one, my husband, and the one before were Asians, I am race-conscious and totally committed politically to the notion that racism needs to be eradicated all over the world.

When I first went to Japan, back in the 1970s, I remember watching a TV program where they were teaching Japanese how to applaud. How much was too much, how much was not enough. It was hilarious.  So very Japanese, I thought, in focusing on doing the right thing rather than allowing for spontaneity.  All they succeeded in doing, I thought at the time, was stressing that western music was alien.

That's the thing.  "Western" music - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - do not belong to Germany, or to Europe, or to "Western civilization." They are world composers and belong to us all.  When I still had legs that could go all night long, I used to dance in a kolo folk dance group. I'm not a Yugoslav.

And that takes me to make the observation that now, when the contestants at the Chopinowski competition (to give this a Polish slant) have more Asian names and faces than you can shake a stick at (if you're a white supremacist and into shaking sticks) I feel obliged to mention that not only does the list of contestants contain several Lees from Korea and four Lis from China, but there is also Kevin Chen and Ryan Wang from Canada, Eric Lu and another Wang, William, from the United States. And if that doesn't make my point, you've got to include the Polish speaking Viêt Trung Nguyên from Poland and Yuanfan Yang from Edinburgh.

Part III: Sweet mysteries of life...

How the judges make their decisions continues to baffle me.  I know I'm just showing my limitations here, but when I began listening to the first round all I could hear was perfection. Then I listened to the second round and had to admit I thought the performances as a whole were actually somehow better than they were in the first round.  Obviously the judges were onto something.  But what?  How could I be so out of it?  I had good musical training as a youth, was a church organist for a while and accompanied choruses and ballet lessons.  I wasn't good enough to go on to a career in piano or in music, but I thought I had a well-trained ear. But the judges are miles ahead of me.  This is one serious bunch of musicians, and that probably explains why I'm inclined to use words like "thrill" and "joy" when reacting to the competition.

Part IV: Favorite composers

Following up on my musical limitations, I often say, when asked to identify my favorite composer that I don't like ranking world-class quality talent.  If forced to, I'd put Mozart and Chopin out beyond all the others, but I'd still list Liszt and Rachmaninoff and Bach and Tchaikovsky as gifts from the gods.  As with the Olympics, much of this probably stems from the tendency of countries to claim their heroes as national heroes.  Austria gets Mozart, Germany gets Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn and a whole bunch more, Russia gets Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and many others, and Poland says it will be damned before it lets France take Chopin away from them.  Hence this every-five-year spectacular thing in Warsaw.

Part V: Chopin, in particular    

Sitting for hours in front of the tube (or the computer) listening to 28 contestants display ways to do things with their fingers that are not humanly possible (like watching divers or pole-vaulters in the Olympics), I realize how much, even after all these years, I still have to learn about just what Chopin managed to do in writing over 250 known and numbered pieces of music, in addition to many which got lost or never got numbered. He wrote more than twenty waltzes, more than fifty mazurkas.  Of all his music, it's the nocturnes (all 22 of them) that go most directly to the soul, the etudes that blow my mind, the polonaises that make me want to get up off my chair and pretend to be the King of France, the rondos and scherzos that make me happy to be alive.  And where does that leave the four ballades - utterly beautiful pieces of music - and the impromptus and the two concertos.  And the bolero and the berceuse and the barcarole (music for boats??? - yes, I understand he got the inspiration from Venetian gondoliers).

The excitement isn't over.  They are, as I write, just beginning the third round and the winner won't be announced till the end of the month.  I've chattered on about spin-off thoughts rather than pretend I'm in the running to judge the performances.  You can find those easily; they're on YouTube.

Again, words that I reserve for things like the Warsaw Chopin Competition, if you haven't watched fingers fly in a while, go to YouTube for the thrill of it all.  Joy.  Pure joy.

What's in a word?

The war of words between those who would surrender the quest for an ever more perfect union in favor of autocratic rule in the United States and those committed to the democratic project has reached a fever pitch.  Anger and invective fly back and forth and more and more friends of the Enlightenment worry that the battle may already be lost.  I have largely held off commenting on the fracas out of a suspicion that anybody chiming in at this stage merely adds to the din.

If you're a regular reader of Hepzibah,  you probably know that my academic background is in linguistics, and I identify as a sociolinguist, sociolinguistics being the study of the way language is used as a tool for communication in society. This interest has led me to question in recent times whether or not Donald Trump deserves the label "fascist." 

The left seems quite at home calling Trump a fascist; the right fumes the left's use of the term is dirty pool, little more than an attempt to provoke them into anger.

I'd like to make an argument that this bone of contention should be seen as two separate issues: first off, is he in fact a fascist?  And secondly, even if he is, is the term so loaded that there is nothing to be gained by calling him one?

Because the terms fascist and fascism cover a broad range of notions, whether you can make a solid case that Donald Trump is a fascist depends on how you define the word, so let's start there.

The notion of fascism originates in Italy.  It was first closely associated historically with Mussolini's ruthlessly authoritarian style of governing, but was soon extended to Hitler's national socialism. Its use can be traced back to as early as the 1870s, and was extended in the 20th century to the rule of Franco in Spain.  Since World War II, the term has been expanded over the years and today often functions virtually as a synonym for any absolute dictatorship.  But, I want to focus here not on its history but on how closely trumpism reflects the five features which define it.  Those features are: 

        1. the prioritizing of might over right, and an appreciation of power and violence for their own sake;

        2. the exaltation of race, nation or other collective entity over the rights and desires of an individual;

        3. The appeal to populist illusions rather than to reason and evidence-based objectivity;

        4. economic and social control by physical suppression;

        5. the cult-like blind obedience to a leader, probably the clearest example of which was the Führer-Prinzip - the "leader principle" - in Germany under Adolf Hitler.

These five aspects of fascism apply to virtually all dictatorships to at least some degree. At one extreme, the Japanese Emperor was literally a god, even though his position was essentially symbolic and he was actually dictated to by what most people saw as lesser beings who ran the government. Stalin in Russia was arguably as ruthless as Hitler, and ruthless brutality did not end in 1945.  Ferdinand Marcos was a kleptocratic piker by comparison, but many would nonetheless include him in the lot.  Pol Pot killed more than a million of his own countrymen, as did Mao in China, although Maoists insist with considerable justification that his policies brought about improvement in the lives of the Chinese people overall after centuries of poverty and backwardness. We are left to debate whether that advance was worth the cost of millions of lives and must constantly remind ourselves that the application of these five descriptors of fascism varies in severity and in extent.

When laid out like this, Trump is small potatoes compared to his more bloody predecessors with an authoritarian bent. The reason the left wants to include him in their number probably has less to do with his resemblance to them, and more with the astonishment that any leader could capture the hearts and minds of so many of his countrymen with such fierce devotion. Although I may be placing more stress on the Führer-prinzip than on the other features, even his supporters tend to concede that his pronouncements have less truth value than self-serving utility, and the parallels to Hitler's rise to power during the waning days of the Weimar Republic are impossible to miss.  Those who choose to slap the fascist label on Donald Trump, as I am inclined to do, have to admit they may be doing so because they are shocked at evidence that fascism could, in fact, be happening here, rather than that they have an open-and-shut case for using the label.  

I'm listening to those who argue that the charge is over-the-top because the guardrails have - so far, at least - held and his moves against the DOJ and the late-night satirists Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have all fallen flat.  And because he's not so much interested in Lebensraum (Greenland and Panama notwithstanding).  I'm aware that he's way more hung up on his own ego and that"Make America Great" is not the same thing as "Amerika über alles."  He's not interested in ruling the world; he just wants love and affection - and lots more money.  But I have to ask you, is he a fascist only if he succeeds?  I think he gets points for trying, however clumsily, to replace constitutional democracy with self-serving autocracy.

Whether history will know him as a no-doubt-about-it fascist or as a tried-but-failed fascist is, in the long run, not what matters here. What does matter is the fact that the advent of trumpism has left an indelible mark on America's history.  Future students of American history will now have to add this new "-ism" to its list of other bumps in the road toward "a more perfect union:" racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, anti-semitism and homophobia. (And I beg the indulgence of those who think my use of the metaphor of "bumps in the road" is unduly wishy-washy.)

I have not held back in attaching the fascist label to Trump, first of all because his rallies instantly bring to mind the Nuremberg rallies, with masses of people displaying sometimes insane levels of devotion. But news coverage as well shows his minions going out of their way to sing his praises, way beyond what once were normal levels of social interaction.  What is in the nature of his followers, one has to ask, that makes them behave in such a cult-like fashion?  And what is behind their failure to impose consequences after fact-checking his lies?  His moves against democratic institutions are right out in the open - against the media, against universities, against the justice system.  As are his recent efforts to shut down late-night television comedians who satirize him in ways that get under his skin.

I am aware that if we're ever going to close the gap between left and right, we're going to have to consider more seriously not whether what those of us holding fast to democracy say is true, but whether what we say communicates what we want to communicate.  Communication is measured not by what comes out of one's mouth but by what the listener takes in through their ears. It's a contest between being right and being effective. So having made the case for identifying Trump as a fascist, whether a real one or just a paltry wannabe, the question is still open whether or not highlighting the fascism in trumpism helps us put the country back on the road to democracy.  When most people hear the word fascism, they think of Hitler, not the whole range of tinpot autocrats, so I have to admit it probably doesn't.

But there is another battle going on, and that is how one fights the lies being fed to the public by Trumpist Enablers, including Trump himself and the Fox propaganda network that functions as a propaganda ministry for the Republicans. A liar has an inherent advantage over a truth-teller, because truth tellers are more limited by what they can say, so long as the intended audience is willing to be persuaded by untruth.

That's not the whole story, not the main event when discussing the state of American democracy. Willingness to be duped is not what I consider America's weakest link.  I would reserve that term for America's lack of equity, a problem exacerbated  by the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United": too much money and power in the hands of too few. Until we fix that problem we on the left are going to be held responsible for putting Trump in power in the first place. How many democratic administrations have made even a feeble attempt to address the inequity problem?  Democrats, as much as their Republican counterparts, have been wary of Bernie Sanders and his urging that we pay closer attention to unions and the working class. And afraid of being labeled as socialists.  Those who blame the Democratic Party elites for the rise of Trump have a case. The fact that they're having trouble getting back on their feet is not a mystery to most Americans anymore.

Republicans have long been the power brokers for the wealthy and for corporate control of wealth - the "I got mine!" crowd. They have been quick to dismiss opponents as socialists or communists, words carrying the weight of House on Un-American Activity days and the efforts of J, Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn to root out enemies of the people, another term that Trump has brought back to life. Since those days there has been no way to even begin proposing a better way to distribute the national wealth without getting tarred with one of those labels, socialist or communist.  Republicans have tied their fate to a 21st century pied-piper and become an unabashed trumpist party of single-issue voters, whether that issue is the price of lettuce, the goals of Christian nationalism, or turning the clock back on the rights of women and gay people.

Self-interest is not the worst thing in the world unless it comes at the expense of others, as it does with Trump's Enablers, many of whom have no interest in ethical government and have climbed aboard the Trump bandwagon not because they believe it is just but because it happens to be in the lead.

In the end, I throw in my lot with those favoring democracy, which I understand the way Winston Churchill did when he made that memorable statement in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1947: "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."   Its weakness lies in the fact that it doesn't care whether people are their best selves or their worst selves; the people have to be careful what they ask for because in a working democracy they get what they ask for.  Hitler, Trump, Orbán, Marcos, Erdoğan and many other anti-democratic leaders were, at least initially, democratically elected.

For reasons I've never adequately explained, even to myself, while I'm very light in the faith department, I do have faith in the human race.  I believe, in the long run, given enough time to think things through, people will come to their senses.  And if they put bums in office, they can and will ultimately throw them out again.

I have a sign on my wall which reads "My kids have paws."  I've lived longer than both my mother and my father did and I don't have kids whom I want to watch get their diplomas.  I just hope I live long enough to see my country throw this fascist bum out.

Remembering German grandmothers

A friend of mine, now approaching his 80s, just lost a friend of fifty years who was 88. I sent him that standard but woefully inadequate ¨Sorry for your loss¨ message. When death comes lofty language is easily mistaken for insincerity, so experience teaches us to settle for silence, and hope that those suffering loss will understand that this is a time when less equals more.

This friend of mine responded with a wonderful history of his fifty years of relationship with the deceased, essentially turning the death into an opportunity to count his blessings.  Now that I have reached an age where death is routine, I have a keen respect for such skill.  It becomes evident that there is more than ¨sorry for your loss¨that one can say.  

One can of course retreat to the reminder that grief is invariably a reflection of love and affection.  At least that has been my experience - that the greater the love the greater the grief. But that doesn't guarantee that grief will be any easier to process.

I was raised in a German family, largely by a German grandmother named Bertha who mistook me for a prince.  Everybody should be so lucky.  Her affection gave me the confidence all children should be granted to go out into the world unafraid and prepared for the slings and arrows and the hostility we all have to face.  I have been the beneficiary of not just a mother's love, but the love of aunts and grandmothers - plural - as well.  I got more than a fair allotment; in addition to my grandmother - meine Großmutter,  I got to establish a close relationship with Großmutter's sister-in-law, my great aunt Frieda, when I established a second home in Berlin. Frieda and her life-partner went through life as the German equivalent of John Smith and Mary Jones.  He was Otto Schmidt and she was Frieda Müller.  Special people despite their "ordinary" names.

I'm going on about Tante Frieda because today is her birthday.  She died back in the early 1980s at the age of 94, so you can't say she didn't live a full life.  How happy it was is another question.  She lived through the Second World War in Berlin, forced to work through the night and the bombing because her work as a pharmacist made her too valuable to be given time off.  Because she refused to join the Nazi party she had to work nights, as well, as a guard in a bomb shelter, and crawling from one bombed-out shelter to the next in the pitch black one night she fell and suffered from a loss of hearing as a result. 

She looked back on those days with remarkable equanimity. The one and only time I saw her vulnerable was when we were having coffee at a cafe on the top floor of the KaDeWe Department store in downtown West Berlin and had to endure the roar of Russian planes flying by close enough that you could see the pilots.  Soviet/Western Power hostility had been ongoing since the Soviet Blockade of West Berlin had resulted in the Berlin Airlift in 1948-9 and the Russians were protesting the latest quarrel - if I remember right, it was the decision of the Bundestag to hold a session in Berlin. 

"Take me out of here," she said, and as we finished our Kaffee und Kuchen at home I got her to talk about her war experiences for the first time ever. My admiration for her powers of endurance, already high, went through the roof.

I googled "Frieda Müller" Sachsenwaldstraße - her address - just now on the wildly improbable chance something about her might show up.  What did come up was another "Mary Jones," Gertrud this time instead of Frieda, living in the same Steglitz district of Berlin, a woman born around the same time as Tante Frieda, who was deported to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt in 1943 before being transferred to Auschwitz and murdered a year later. An unknown grandmother worth remembering for a far more earnest reason.

Gertrud's name appears on a "stumbling block" (Stolperstein) - one of those more than 100,000 brass plates now memorializing the victims of the Nazis that have been placed around the country to mark the residences of the victims carried away in the Holocaust. 

I'm reminded of Jesus and the thieves on a cross in Monty Python's Life of Brian singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," that wonderful satire of the the pollyanna "Today shalt Thou be with me in Paradise" insistence on avoiding the harsh realities of life - death, for example. But I have to admit there are multiple ways of processing grief and remembering the good parts while downplaying the not-so-good parts. That's the mood I'm in today, thinking back on my grandmother's practice of sneaking a shot of Liebfraumilch - we kept it a secret from my mother - when I would come home from school and celebrate a good test result.  And on the insistence that the grandmothers of the Holocaust, like Gertrud, not be forgotten. And on the good fortune Tante Frieda, one of the cheeriest people I have ever known, experienced of making it through the war more-or-less in one piece.

I don't want to "sum things up" by pretending we can will ourselves to focus on the bright side of things. And I don't want to downplay the difference between the two grandmothers who loomed large in in my personal life and the unknown victim of the Holocaust who died in the most grotesque of circumstances when I was only four years old.

But I also don't want to miss a chance to celebrate the richness of lives lived to the fullest while remembering our commitment to never letting the authoritarians ever ready to take advantage of our limitations to keep us from that goal.

Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda.

James Talarico

Earlier today I posted a blog on George Takei, who has taken up the fight against homophobia and racism very late in life.  I took interest because I'm always looking for a way to get engaged in the struggle against injustice now that the U.S. seems to have taken a giant step backwards. I no longer have the mobility to get out into the street and bang pots and pans which, all things being equal, I would probably find the most satisfying. And I worry about losing friends when I go at them for their very understandable decision to prioritize their own mental health by tuning out on the news.  I don't have a lot of money to send to political candidates, and every time I do I feel like a heel for not sending it instead to Doctors Without Borders, the Southern Poverty Law Center or Planned Parenthood - to name but three really worthy causes.

The very least I can do, I think, is to stay focused on people I hope have at least half a chance of taking down the billionaire oligarchs we are now at the mercy of, and encourage others to throw their support behind them.  That's what I'm trying to do here, by calling attention to, of all things - and can you believe it? - a Christian pastor.  His name is James Talarico, and he's from Texas.

I'm a huge Pete Buttigieg fan.  What's not to love?  A gay man who, when he talks, tends to say all the things I'd like to say, only he says them better. I love it that he's not only smart as they come, but appears to be a great husband and father, as well as an effective politician. I wish him success in running the race to the top political offices in the land, including, let's hope, even the presidency.  "Slow and steady," I want to urge him; "Don't burn out too fast."

Now I've found another guy - not a gay man this time, but, of all mind-blowing things, a Christian pastor - who I am inclined to want to put out there as a second Pete Buttigieg, somebody very smart and very articulate who inspires trust and models humility, dignity and decency.  The complete antithesis of what comes to mind with the word politician.

James Talarico is still young.  He was born just a year and three days before I turned fifty.  I know; at 85 everybody looks young, but although I don't apologize for being what the world sees as a geezer, I also don't want to make the mistake of being an ageist. I trust my body into the hands of doctors and dentists in their thirties; I can do the same for politicians, if I try.

Because I came to know that homophobia, especially in America, tends to find its primary support in organized religion, especially in clerical hierarchy-centered Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, I have spent many years of my life bashing religion.  It has taken me a lot of time to listen to my own advice and see Christians in a more nuanced way. But just as I have been able to reduce the complexity of ethical systems to a simple commitment to avoid violence and deceit, I'm with James Talarico in being able to see true and good Christianity as a commitment to the commandments to love one's God and one's neighbors. I remain a non-theist, but I admire nobody more than I do Christians who dedicate their lives to putting these two principles into practice.

I became a fan of Gavin Newsom the day I heard him speak in a church in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco when he was still mayor. He earned my everlasting gratitude for the work he did in making same-sex marriage a reality, a move which launched what would eventually become national policy.  I also connect with Kamala Harris on a personal level because of a shared local identity - I know the schools she went to as a child.  And when Bernie Sanders speaks, I am happy that the last time somebody asked me where my political affiliations lay, I responded "with the Democratic Socialists." I also feel good (usually with some reservations here and there) about Kentucky's Governor Andy Beshear, New Jersey's Cory Booker, Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, Connecticut's Chris Murphy and Georgia's Jon Ossoff. I think if the Democratic Party ever finds a way to circle the wagons on an agreed-upon agenda, we may rescue the country yet. And there are more. There's Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro and JB Pritzker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others standing in the wings just off stage.

But as these guys jostle for positions in the executive or legislative branches of government on the Democratic ticket in the next presidential election, let's not lose sight of others with leadership qualities who may take some time yet to make themselves better known and gain the right kind of experience to be the kind of leaders we've been missing.

Like Pete Buttigieg and James Talarico.  I know you know Pete Buttigieg.  But if you are not familiar with James Talarico, have a look at this:

Otto, hast Du Worte?

 The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, not long after I had settled into my job at Keio University in Japan. I had lived through the Cold War in Germany and had many friends and family members for whom this event was a dream come true they were never convinced could happen in their lifetimes. It was a clear indication that the Cold War was over and Germany could now hope to look forward to becoming a normal European democracy. I sat in my living room watching the crowds pour out of East Berlin, tears streaming down my face.  If only Achim were still alive.  If only Tante Frieda were still alive.  The gods are cruel, I thought, for not allowing them and countless others of their fellow Germans to live long enough to experience this longed for event and renewal of faith in the human race's chances of building a better collectivity on the European continent.

I remember an article in Der Spiegel about a survey in which Germans were asked whether the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis was a defeat or a victory for Germany.  The overwhelming response showed a majority of Germans, even those who had at one point in their lives shown support for Adolf Hitler, were now convinced that the Holocaust and the tragic killing of millions upon millions of soldiers and civilians was a national shame it would take decades to recover from, but that Hitler's defeat was an essential step toward what would now be Germany's pursuit of democracy.

Anybody who has followed the German political scene since the defeat of Hitler is aware of how well Germany, often referred to as a Wirtschaftswunder - Economic Miracle has served as a model modern egalitarian state.

But let me get back to the time when I watched the news of Berliners tearing down the Wall and fighting back tears. The next day I met colleagues from the foreign language department where I worked and ran into a brick wall.  When I shared my enthusiasm for the "Mauerfall" - the "fall of the wall," one of my French teacher colleagues took the wind out of my sails with the comment, "Not everybody is as excited as you to see Germany united, considering their history up to 1945." 

I didn't know where to begin. This was a "Treppenwitz" situation - you know, where you think of what you should have said only after you've gone down the stairs after losing an argument (Treppenwitz = "l'esprit de l'escalier" = "staircase wit").  I didn't know whether I should feel anger or surprise.  Does this guy really believe that after all these years (it was now 1989) of recognition of the evils of the Nazi years that there were still Germans yearning to go back to them?  And to make things worse, this guy was Japanese.  He had picked up the anti-German prejudice from retrograde French friends and colleagues, no doubt.  Did he have no knowledge of the wider world and of historical developments?  He wasn't a stupid man.  How could he be so ignorant?

That was over thirty years ago.  Then, just the other day, to America's profound humiliation we saw a repeat of that ignorance of history as President Trump insulted both the morality and the intelligence of the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, in the Oval Office.  Merz was trying to get Trump to realize how important America was in ending World War II and urging him to come once again to Europe's aid by stopping the war in Ukraine.  When Merz brought up June 6 as a great day to be celebrated, Trump's response was to wonder out loud: "not a great day for you?"

It's at times like this that I hear the voice of my Tante Frieda, who at moments of astonishment and outrage used to turn to her life partner, Otto, and say, "Otto, hast Du Worte?" - (Otto, do you have words?")

Remember Executive Order 9066 and Nuanced Thinking

Living in a Japanese-American household (we even have a dog named Sachiko), I couldn't fail to mark the anniversary last week of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.  Compared with the battle between truth and accuracy and manipulation of and by the media, Executive Order 9066 may feel like a  back burner item.  But it shouldn't. It's part of the same story.

On February 19, 1942, following the failure to distinguish Japanese immigrants to the United States from Japanese loyal to the Japanese Emperor and in support of the bombing of Pearl Harbor two months earlier, Roosevelt determined that Japanese ethnicity was sufficient reason to rip ordinary Japanese-Americans from their homes and ship them - 120,000 of them - to ten internment camps away from the West Coast: Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, and Jerome and Rowher in Arkansas.

Nearly 72,000 of these were American citizens and we now know that all but a tiny slice of that population were indistinguishable from other immigrants to the U.S., saw it as their only home, and had no reason to work against its best interests. It was a crude political action, based on the racist belief that ethnicity and culture are indistinguishable from political loyalty. Throwing them out of their homes and seizing their property cost the Japanese-American community a net income loss of $2.7 billion dollars, calculated in 1983 dollars.

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center has produced a superb memorial on this, the 83rd anniversary of this black mark on American democracy, which you can view here.

I say this insult to the civil rights of American citizens is tied to modern-day events because it's obvious the same lack of nuanced thinking and behavior is currently front-and-center. One of the participants in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center presentation argues Executive Order 9066 was not an exception to the American Way but part of its legacy. Genocide of the American native population, slavery and segregation, police brutality based on race, and Islamophobia, she argues, are merely earlier examples. Today we have a president who creates conspiracy theories such as spreading the cruel and hateful untruth that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Ukraine, and not Putin, started the war there, that Zelensky is a dictator with only 4% of his population behind him, when the actual number is something like 57%.

Rather than make the common distinction between right and left wing (or red states and blue states) I think it makes sense to see an important distinction between closed and open-minded thinking and coming down in favor of open-mindedness because it matches the scientific method which defines truth as what we know as of the present moment and always subject to change as new information becomes available.

It's a small world, and we are not alone in our folly.  If you watched the German election last Sunday, you saw that the battle between progressives and authoritarians in Germany is quite similar. The two centrist parties, the center right Union Parties under Friedrich Merz and the center left Democratic Socialists under Olaf Scholz, will form a coalition, probably with the Green Party (the only other more-or-less centrist party left) because all of the German parties are united, despite vast differences, in refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party despite the latter's rapid growth into the second largest political party in the country. The reason is their nationalistic anti-immigrant policy and desire to downplay the Hitler legacy.  Meanwhile, by the way, our Vice President goes to Germany, ignores the Chancellor and meets with and throws his support behind the head of the AfD Party.  The new American ethic of might makes right has blurred American eyes. It apparently takes too much work, too much thinking, to separate the person from their ideas and the person's rational thoughts from their irrational ones. Where will this all lead?

It's no easy job spot and reject jingoism and insist on a nuanced acceptance of a national legacy with all its scars and warts. The immature parts of us want to root for the home team, "my country right or wrong." My main concern these days is the fact that we in the U.S. have surrendered to the oligarchs. We have allowed the likes of of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and their ilk to "flood the zone" with mis- and disinformation, and have decided to follow a leader who openly and unabashedly shows total disregard for objectivity in reporting facts. Or, to put it in plain language, to distinguish between good guys and bad guys.  In the 1940s it was Japanese = traitor; today it's Muslim = terrorist; black man = thug; authoritarian (non-, even anti-democratic) leader = admirable strongman.

Where is the ability to draw a line between decency and integrity on the one hand and self-serving tribalism on the other? Where did that distinction go? How do we get it back?

Rest in Peace, Sweet Bounce

Bounce (left) & Miki (right)

 Bounce died tonight.

 I took her in earlier today because she had not eaten in  three days, left her at the clinic and waited nervously all day for the doctor to call me with a diagnosis.

 At about six o'clock tonight she called to tell me they had found a large tumor in her belly and the black in her stool was no doubt blood from that tumor. The doctor didn't hold back. I went in on her advice, called Taku on Facetime so we could both sit with Bounce for an hour, and be together, the three of us, when the doctor came in and put her to sleep. The reason for the speed was the possibility that pain and discomfort of hemorrhaging could come at any moment. I wanted her to die at home but decided not to risk it.

I thought the news of Trump's election was the worst news I could imagine. Today's event pushes that horror down to Number Two. I'm writing this still in shock and agony.

My heart goes out to Taku. Last time he went to Japan to visit his mother, a year and a half ago, Miki died. This time it was Bounce. I wish the gods had the decency not to play with irony like that. Their cruelty can be unspeakable. 

Taku and his mother were on the Shinkansen on their way to Kyoto but we were able to connect via Facetime, so he and I could spend some time with Bounce before she went and participate in the procedure of sedating her to sleep before stopping her heart. It was a time of silent screaming for both of us.

The gods would no doubt argue we should not forget that they gave us fourteen years with these creatures, who seemed to be put on earth for the purpose of drawing out every ounce of love we had in us to give. I've remarked before that I didn't know I had so much affection in me.

I can't put into words what these two little girls meant to me. I don't even want to try; any attempt would be at best a not-even-close approximation. At least we got to shower Bounce with affection for a year and a half of bonus time. And shower we did. Spoiled her rotten. Got up in the night to let her out, picked up after her accidents without a hint of complaint. Taku cooked her chicken and rice meals that we might have served at the table, but went to Bounce once she turned her nose up at canned dog food. Kibble has long been completely out of the question.

I used to ask myself all the time how is it possible to love a little four-legged creature this much.  And what on earth did we do in a previous life to deserve not just one, but two such objects of affection?

That was back in the day when I expected the world to make sense.

Now I simply celebrate the fact that life can be so good to me.

Through a Glass Darkly

The unthinkable has happened. The citizens of the United States of America, faced with the option of continuing to slog their way toward a more perfect democracy, chose to throw it away instead. They put a proven narcissistic liar back in charge of the country. Instead of struggle, they chose chaos.

It's not the first time in recent memory this has happened. Weimar is not ancient history. There are many still alive who can remind us of democracy's greatest weakness - that it can use the power of the voting booth to enable its own destruction.

If people in the 1930s had not merely skimmed Mein Kampf but taken it to heart, they would have seen the death and destruction of millions of scapegoats that was to come.  And anybody in 2024 who fact-checked the "eating the dogs and cats" story about the legal-immigrant Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, can see the parallel in scapegoating.  

Many supporters of the newly-reelected president insist we have guardrails that prevent such evil from taking root here. Only a conviction that one must never submit to despair keeps me going this morning as I worry about the ability of Ukraine to stand up to invasion, the possibility of wholesale deportation of millions of parents of American children, and the likely appointment of two more justices to the Supreme Court inclined to protect the Leader rather than the rule of law.

I worry about the possibility of installing a man who denies the effectiveness of vaccines to head our healthcare institutions, about the ongoing influence of Christian nationalists who insist non-Christians have no place at the American table, about the opponents of presidential policy who are being labeled scum and vermin.

Waiting for the results of the election was like waiting for the results of a biopsy. 

I went through that before being diagnosed with a fatal disease. I know that may have something to do with the fact that I see this election through a dark lens.

But I know, also, that I can't predict the future.

Things may turn out all right.

Ajax and his friends

Taku and I have tickets to a play that my niece is in this Friday. It appears to be all about a homeless guy in Oakland who thinks he’s Ajax - the ancient Greek warrior, not the bathroom cleaner.

Time for a little review of the Trojan War. And that means a bit of theology.

It all began with the wedding of Peleus, the King of Phtheia, and his wife Thetis. They are the parents of Achilles, of vulnerable heel fame.  Well, not the wedding, exactly, but with Eris, the goddess of discord, who didn’t get an invitation to the wedding. Eris was a spiteful goddess and spread mischief by showing up anyway bearing a golden apple as a wedding present. The apple bore the inscription, “For the fairest in the land” and that set off a bitch-fight among three other goddesses. One of these was Hera, the jealous (with good reason) chief wife of Zeus, who also happened to be his sister, and goddess of women, marriage and the family and protector of women in childbirth. A second was Athena, who was in her mother’s womb when Zeus swallowed her whole, making it necessary for Athena to pop out of Zeus’ forehead at some point, which she did geared up for battle (at least in artistic depictions) in helmet and spear. The third goddess was Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, the goddess of love, war and prostitutes.

To settle the question of which of these, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite, was most worthy of the “fairest beauty" title, they turned to a shepherd named Paris. Well, turns out he was actually a prince of Troy who apparently liked animals and being outside in the fresh air. (Or who was raised by shepherds and was doing what comes naturally, depending on which version of the story you read) All three goddesses offered Paris a bribe. Hera wanted to give him power, Athena, wisdom, and Aphrodite, love. Paris chose love and gave the prize to Aphrodite.

In gratitude, Hera made Helen, the real most beautiful woman in the land, fall in love with Paris. Hera either didn’t think this through very carefully, or didn’t have a very high sense of responsibility, because when Paris left Sparta to return home to Troy, Queen Helen was determined to follow him, to the chagrin of her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta.

There are other versions of this tale, and virtually all of the details are contested, but I’m trying to get back to Ajax, so this version will do, while I try to figure out where Ajax fits in.  Ajax was the son of King Telemon and nephew of Telemon’s brother, Peleus, whose marriage ceremony got this whole ball rolling when Eris messed everything up by creating such discord among the goddesses. That means Ajax is also Achilles’ cousin.

I've never read the Iliad but I understand that Ajax comes across as a superman, or at least as a guy with strength that goes on and on. Hence the name of the toilet cleanser, I think.

But the real story, I think, lies in the Latin phrase I chose to run under my picture in my high school yearbook, something the 15th Century cleric Thomas à Kempis is remembered for observing: Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit, Man proposes, God disposes. I was clearly indoctrinated into the belief that our every move is dictated by a deity. Maybe that’s why I get such a kick out of reading about how the gods mess with us. It absolves us of responsibility. Like making Helen fall in love with Paris so that the Greeks and Trojans slug it out for ten years. In the end, when Achilles gets it in the heel, Ajax claims his armor, but then Athena gives it to Odysseus instead because she likes the way he talks. And that pisses Ajax off so bad that he flies into a rage and wants to go after Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Athena channels his rage into killing livestock under the delusion that he is getting his revenge. And when he awakes out of his hallucination he is so ashamed that he kills himself.

Homo proponit, sed deus disponit.

I dip into Greek mythology from time to time and always have a great romp.  It’s lovely to get back to the days when I first discovered Edith Hamilton and was faced with the need to try to explain why the theology I was raised in could arguably be seen to be making more sense than Greek or Chinese theology, say. When somebody first suggested that “virgin birth” was just another way of saying “parthenogenesis.”

Looking forward to Friday night and a story about a man who thinks he’s Ajax.

After some Chinese food.

 

Katty and the Mooch

After listening to the debate I'm now caught up in the commentary on the debate. It's a good exercise because it reminds me that I am just as susceptible as anybody to the temptation to believe what I want to believe and to choose sources of information to listen to that confim those beliefs.

I am an ardent supporter of Kamala Harris, not just, but largely, because I am convinced the reelection of the populist Liar-in-Chief would likely choke the last bit of oxygen out of our idealistic efforts to bring America ever closer to becoming a real functioning democracy.  I worry I'm just another Chicken Little crying "The sky is falling...the sky is falling," but I am persuaded that a Trump victory would provide evidence that Henny Penny, aka Chicken Little, was not an alarmist but a soothsayer.

Of all the commentary I've heard so far, the most insightful, in my opinion is the one I heard just now on Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci's podcast, The Rest is Politics.

I hope you can find the time to have a listen. If you don't, let me lay out three points they make, two I agree with and one I don't. The one I don't agree with is made by Katty. She wants Kamala to accept Trump's challenge to do the next debate on Fox with moderators of Trump's choosing. Katty thinks Kamala is a strong enough debater to go against what would be 3 to 1 odds, and it would reveal to the audience that she is an underdog with great chops. I have no idea, of course, whether Katty is right about this. On what feels like a common-sense level, I think it sounds like challenging a guillotine by putting your head under the blade and saying, "Go ahead. Give it your best shot!"

Now for the two points I agree with: One is that Kamala needs to take a crash course in economics, and particularly the American economic situation, and then demonstrate her knowledge in frequent and regular appearances before crowds on the campaign trail.

The other is Scaramucci's point that Trump is playing by the playbook of one of the most sinister characters in American political history: Roy Cohn.  Cohn was the lawyer supporting the work of Joseph McCarthy.  He figures large in the red scare and the lavender scare of the 1950s, essentially witch-hunts against communists and homosexuals, real or rumored. Cohn later became Trump Senior's lawyer and Fred Trump passed him on to his son. Roy Cohn's advice to Trump, his playbook, was:

1. Never apologize, never admit you were wrong;
2. Never admit defeat; continue to insist you won, even when you haven't;
3. Follow your instincts.

It's evident to all the world that Trump has internalized Cohn's playbook and followed it his entire political career.

This playbook fits, hand-in-glove, with the current populist movement that denies truth and insists things are whatever you claim they are, a fascist practice of putting power over truth and the will of an individual strongman over the rule of law.

What is missing in this podcast discussion is a serious discussion of how to negotiate one's way in a world of such overpowering deception. Does one continue to bang on with counter-argument when one makes the claim that argument is ineffective?  Does one counter with lies and hope the gullible can be persuaded to believe your lies and not the other guy's?

I'm still waiting to hear serious discussion on this topic.

If you've got suggestions on how to deal with liars please send them my way.

In the past I have listened over and over again to friends and others who say, "Why bother to engage; the MAGA folk are not going to listen to rational argument."  My own response is to assume that that's not true, or at least act as if it's not true and plough ahead with facts and corrections anyway, recognizing that in the absence of certainty, it's always better to err on the side of honesty and integrity.

But is that the best possible approach?  I really don't know.

Soaking up the DNC Infomercial

Count me among those who would vote for a box of rocks before supporting Donald Trump's attempt to get back into the White House. I gave up listing the reasons why I loathe this guy years ago when it dawned on me that nobody would get as far as he has gotten without a good number of enablers. Since then I've tired of the many well-intentioned folk who work full-time generating outrage over his latest show of ignorance, cruelty or insensitivity. Stop beating a dead horse, I want to say. Put your energy where it can do some good. Forget the meanness, get out of the dark side, focus on the decency and integrity that still exists all around us.

I had not been much of a Kamala Harris fan before it became clear that Biden was likely to lose to Trump in the November election and it was time for drastic measures. I was all set to send my widow's mite to whoever the Democratic Party would pick to replace him. Kamala has managed to bring in half a billion dollars in what, one month? since she took over, so I'm feeling like a tightwad, but my inbox fills with a hundred requests for cash every day, so I want some indication that my contribution will be more than a good luck token, divided fifty ways. I'm real cynical about the American way of running elections, and the fact that in the U.S. it's the rich who call all the shots. I am also tempted to simply jump on the bandwagon to eliminate the Electoral College but have to admit I don't have a tight grasp on the difference between FPTP (first past the post) arguments, which support it, and the PR (proportional representation) arguments, which are agin it. At least I'm less ambivalent about the fight to get big money out of politics. I lost all respect for the Supreme Court way before they threw out Roe v. Wade, back when they gave us Citizen United, giving legal weight to the notion that rich people are more important in America than poor people.

All of this as a way of saying that until a week ago I was pretty cynical about national politics and followed it only casually. I am not particularly knowledgeable, and have been more anti-Trump than pro-anybody in particular.

But then came the Democratic Convention. At the risk of exposing my belly to the wolves, I am going to admit that I have become an enthusiastic supporter of the Harris/Walz ticket. More than a little. I'm ready to beat the drum. I am too old to travel to Nevada or Arizona to knock on doors, and remain grouchy about the belief that my ability to contribute to political campaigns can make a dent, but I am now ready at least to bore the socks off of anybody in a crowd who might want to hear what I think about American politics. I'm happy to share my views about the choice between somebody way more than decent and somebody way less so. Between somebody who will support the Ukrainian effort to push the Russian invaders out of their country and somebody who thinks the Russians should be able to "do whatever the hell they want." Between somebody who believes a person's right to determine what they do with their body and somebody who believes the government has a duty to punish doctors who aid women in distress who have been raped by a parent or sibling or who have learned they are carrying a nonviable fetus.

Richard Reich has a clear explanation for what a party convention is these days. Originally it was a conference to bring attention to the many candidates vying for the job and make a case for each. It was  an actual contest, not unlike a beauty or talent contest. In recent times, and especially this year, it has evolved into a giant "infomercial," an occasion for "selling" the candidate chosen by insiders to the public. When leading democrats were able to convince Biden that the signs were clear that he couldn't win in November, he was persuaded to step aside. The fact that he did so is evidence that he has the strength of character to put country ahead of party and self. Gainsayers are trying to cast shade on this, claiming he was "pushed." But Biden himself has never even hinted that that was the case. On the contrary, he still holds the leadership of the Democratic Party. I think he is rightly celebrated by the party as a hero, and not a victim here.

The party then had to face a second important decision: who to replace him with. Biden's choice was Kamala Harris. This made sense because technically that would have her do what she was elected to do: step in if Biden could no longer do the job. It also made sense pragmatically; given how close the polls show the election is likely to be, for Democrats to scrabble over a successor would surely have not been in their best interest.

Republicans have lost the decency and integrity they once had, exchanged their souls for power and wealth to a proto-fascist Pied Piper with little to no regard for truth or traditional American values. He appeals to the unfortunately large number of Americans who are convinced we need to tear down government and start over.  Democrats, in contrast, tend to  believe it is in the nature of democracy to tinker endlessly at the machine, replacing worn parts and discarding dysfunctional ones. Traditional Republicans are still to be found, but they occupy back seats and no longer have a voice in what goes on. The mainstream of the party are not remotely conservative any more, but rather ideological enablers of a self-serving power structure which has put their political organization on a path dangerously close to the path taken by the Germans in the last days of the Weimar Republic. My father was a proud Republican. For him Republican stood for standing on your own two feet, accepting personal responsibility, for honesty, integrity and for putting in a good day's work. I can only imagine what he'd say if he saw his party now in the hands of Christian nationalists and oligarchs whose hold on power depends on misinformation, swallows outright brazen lies by their leader, voter suppression, gerrymandering and minority control in all three branches of a government maintained and manipulated by fear and anger.

The contrast between the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention couldn't have been more stark and the split today between the mindsets of the two parties couldn't be more extreme. The RNC coasted along on fear and anger, the DNC on a sense of possibility. The purpose of the infomercial was to convince Americans they not only could but should allow themselves to shake off the long period of dread and bring out of the closet the concept of joy. Trump was upset by Harris's laugh. I doubt he was aware of what he was accomplishing by this attempt to detract; his remarks only served to underline the sense of relief - to the point of euphoria - that extended right to the top of the ticket. Democrats love her contagious laugh.

I don't know who deserves the credit for putting on this fantastic show. They pulled out all the stops. Partied from start to finish. Music, dance, hand-clapping and joyous speechifying. I remember how I used to cringe at the hokiness of a political convention. This time I looked at the candidates from Wisconsin wearing hats shaped like cheddar cheese and saw it not as dumb but as playful. The drawn-out roll calls where each state got to give a shout-out to its best-known native sons and daughters didn't come across as chauvinistic but as a well-deserved display of pride. And the accompaniment by a DJ and by rapper Lil Jon to help it along didn't hurt. The cumulative effect, when it was over, was to feel a sense of national unity and comfort in diversity.

Several highlights still remain in my mind: Adam Kinzinger telling Republicans that they needed to vote with Democrats until their party could be regained; Michelle Obama getting back at Trump for his insensitivity in calling the jobs illegal aliens are commonly limited to "black jobs" with one of the best come-back slap-downs of all time. "Who's going to tell him," she asked, "that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those 'black' jobs?"

Then there was the rapturous welcome the crowd gave to President Biden; Barack Obama showed he could keep up with his wife in slapping the Donald down. "There's the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes," he said, mimicking Trump's habit of moving his hands in an out as if playing an accordion to show size. By now the audience is familiar with all the talk about Trump's small hands and the allegation that it signals a small penis. At least that's what late-night comedians have made of the habit, and nobody missed the reference. Remember, we're talking not about a "may the best man win" contest but a Hollywood style entertainment program where foul language and sex references are now very much part of the scene.

Elizabeth Warren said of Trump and Vance, "I wouldn't trust those guys to move my couch." Melania Trump's aide, Stephanie Grisham, came out for Harris because, she said, Trump has "no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth." Vice President Pence's one-time aide, Olivia Troye, told her fellow Republicans, "You're not voting for a Democrat. You're voting for democracy....You're not betraying our party. You're standing up for our country."

The primary purpose of the infomercial was to stress the character of the new and unfamiliar party leaders, and here's where the script writers more than earned their pay. Kamala's speech was a textbook model for public speaking, perfectly constructed, and perfectly delivered. In contrast to her black-suit-no-pearls self-presentation, her husband, Doug Emhoff came across as warm and fuzzy, a husband and father to make anyone proud. I resonated personally with his description of their family as a blend of cultures and traditions. He goes with her to church; she makes a mean brisket dinner on Passover, he tells us.

But the pièce de résistance, the four-handkerchief moment of the final session was when Tim Walz got up to speak and began by telling the audience that his wife and daughter and son were his whole life. Gus, his seventeen-year-old son rose to his feet, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he could be heard to shout out, "That's my Dad!"

The moment turned out to be a Rorschach Test. Anybody who loves love could spot it as a spontaneous expression of affection for a father by a boy with learning limitations. A handful of loveless creatures like the stone-faced, stone-hearted and unloveable Ann Coulter made fun of the kid. When condemnation came down on them like the wrath of God, they withdrew their statements. It was too late; their character has been revealed and will be part of their legacy. One guy - I don't want to take the time to look up his name - made some remark about the kid not being manly. "Remember, Republicans," he was saying, "real men don't cry."

Sorry, jerk. People who are overcome with emotion and affection sometimes do. How many of us, if presented with a father telling the world he loves you in front of a combined television and live audience of 30 million people, plus those who watched it on YouTube and cable, that you are his whole world, would not cry, I ask you. I think it would take an Ann Coulter heart not to.

The show's over. I can now get back to Netflix and Amazon Prime binge-watching. Maybe do some postcard writing for Kamala and Tim Walz.

And you'll have to forgive me if my chauvinism shows through now and again. If you are not familiar with San Francisco Bay Area geography you may not know that Berkeley and Oakland are, in effect, a single East Bay entity, so when she tells the world she was born in Oakland, I get to grin from ear to ear. I live in Berkeley, six blocks from the Oakland line and spend more time in Oakland than I do in Berkeley, to shop, to see a doctor, to go out to eat, to visit friends. Kamala was born in Oakland and lived in the flats in Berkeley and started school at Thousand Oaks, just north of Solano Avenue in Berkeley. I was there not too long ago to attend a performance by the son of the woman who used to clean my house. Very local. Very familiar. Very much home folk.

The kind of thing that makes me smile.