WE CAN'T SLEEP

Michael Moore says he can’t sleep tonight and neither can I.  

The question is no longer whether Trump has some kind of mental problem.  The most conclusive evidence in this world of video is an old interview with Oprah.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZpMJeynBeg

Compare that with his press conference yesterday (2-16-17) and the answer is perfectly clear.  His wheels aren’t all on the ground.  Now there are no complete sentences, the ideas are simply old obsessions, and the emotional level is certainly pretty much raving and ranting.  So now I’m through with asking that question.  He’s simply not sane.

There is another series of questions.  When an ordinary person slips into this twilight, his family normally gets him to medical care because even if the problem is Alzheimer’s, for which there is no cure, it might rather be a brain tumor, a stroke, hardening of the arteries of the brain, and so on.  Such behavior triggers medical evaluation FOR THE SAKE OF THE PATIENT.  No one seems to be thinking about care for this man in those terms.  So a good question is “why this neglect”?  

There are a number of answers.  One is the political consequences of admitting that a head of state is bonkers.  What if this steady stream of foreign heads of state visiting is not to have a conference with a nutcase, but to see for themselves the state of the man’s mind and also to have a few secret conferences with the people who really are running the country in his name, as has quietly happened in the past with other unsane presidents?  There is no way to communicate over distance that can’t be compromised.  There must be personal conferring in a “safe” room that isn’t bugged.  We assume there is a room like that in the White House.

Trump’s “nuclear” family is problematic.  Their fates are so tied to their father and husband that they must be careful not to trigger retribution in terms of inheritance and keeping the money empire running.  There must be various impulses to ransack the cupboards before the world realizes that any will written now will be challenged when Trump becomes mute and bedridden, any divorce the same, and any existing documents and entitlements must be protected — assuming they are wanted.  

Instead of family, Trump has a circle of protectors and guides like none he has ever had before.  People have told me that a luxury hotel is better than a hospital for observation and care.  The White House residence is basically a luxury hotel.  People are always just outside the door, room service is at hand, medical response can be there in minutes.  However, they are not controlled by Trump.  His physical body belongs to the American people now.  He is a living symbol and extension of the nation.  

Those caretakers watching him are not political and they have to know the reality, though they are undoubtedly discreet about letting outsiders know.  The prevention of public knowledge is probably being accomplished mostly by people aware of the consequences of a president known to be barking mad.  It’s all being recorded somewhere and will be public someday, probably after Trump is dead.

Legal triggers like the 25th Amendment or the reassignment of control to the Vice President are mostly based on the idea of unconsciousness, but consciousness is not an on/off switch.  In cases of dementia the craziness can vary over 24 hours or even ebb and flow over days.  Myself at 78 might stumble over names or, more likely, numbers, though there are days when I’m as much a shining blade of insight as ever.  But laws ARE on/off and must be, in order to be useful.  Impeachment is a matter of criminality, motives, but not everyone is willing to label Trump a traitor.

All these things interfere with sleep when reflecting on Trump, but other things are most troublesome.  One is the rage of the world at change and loss, inevitable as it may be and as innocent as Trump might be.  I mean, he didn’t cause globalization or world contamination or overpopulation or North Korea or mass migrations.  Nor can he control them.  He waves his tiny sword but he has no horse that can carry him into battle.  Both the haters (and I’m a little surprised that he actually feels and names that hate, though it doesn’t seem to affect his thinking except to puzzle him) and the supporters know very well that he has no real control.  But, hey, if God is dead, whom else can we rail at?  Bannon?  The Alt-Right is a creature of talk radio — nothing more.

Trump (and Bannon) represent the Third Party of Greed, though some call them fascists and they themselves endorse that, though they think of themselves as simply entitled by merit.  It’s the American Mind Worm, which calls the acquisition of wealth “progress,” and “freedom,” and “get-out-of-my-way.”  Other cultures have other names for it.  Some say wealth is safety but this is a lie.  Ask Kim Il Sung’s boys.  Senators and representatives far past their sell-by dates and all the in-laws and CEO’s who benefit from the status quo would be happy to stuff Trump’s dead body and prop him up behind that empty desk in the Oval Office, so long as they can go on as they have been.

But there’s more.  Trump fooled us all.  We thought his dementia and mania were just bluffs, mere strategies that would be dropped as soon as he won the election.  Few people played enough of a “long game” to realize how powerful gerrymandering and Big Data algorithms could be.  Those who did pay attention have been fussing for a few years — we felt it here on the rez when the voting district was redrawn to cross the Rocky Mountains so that the Democratic skew of tribes could be diluted.  

But the power of Big Data as accumulated by Facebook et al wasn’t even in our consciousness, even after we read the book about porn preferences in which nothing was as we assumed. (“A Billion Wicked Thoughts”)  We didn’t know — but the Russians did — how powerful a rumor could be.  It was a Russian who figured out how to make a dog salivate to a bell.

Now that we realize that elections are only marketing opportunities, we are most angry of all at ourselves, that we can be fooled so easily.  Slowly, sheepishly, we look at all the little Trumps and Trumpettes who dominate our local lives because it’s too much work to fight them and because, as so many claim,  “the system is broken” and the only thing to do is walk away.  Where to?

I finished writing this post at 2AM.  My last thought before finally drifting off to sleep was that someone among Trump’s handlers wanted the world to see what he has become.  Otherwise he would have been coaxed tactfully away from the microphone and back to private rooms.  I think those letting him rave on were the many dedicated bureaucrats who actually run the executive branch and who are opposed to chaos.

CULTURE SHIFT

Cultures only shift if they are in extreme pain, or if some demographic grows enough to have influence or another one shrinks so that it no longer has influence, or if the larger economic picture shifts dramatically.   An example of the first might be the eruptions over racial inequality, the second might be the swelling number of old people while the youngest are shrinking and displaced, and the third might be the invention of frakking resulting in the sudden abundance of oil and gas.  I'm keeping this 3-item sequence in order in the next paragraph.

The price to be paid -- eventually -- doesn’t come due for decades.  (1) contempt for government and distrust of cops; (2) dominance of pharma and insurance;  and (3) contamination of an already constricted water supply.  Also coming due now is the cost of supporting plutocracy and corporate plundering in Central America decades ago.  It is coinciding with the rot of our own public schools which is part of the willingness of parents to “protect” (indulge) their own children at the expense of everyone else’s.  They do not believe in a tide that raises all boats: they think they can win by stoving a hole in the boats of others.

Normally I live a pleasant bubble of a hermit life, but recently I’ve had visitors -- not many, but enlightening.  They were all women who had raised children alone either because the men they originally married turned out to be impossible to live with or they just deserted anyway -- maybe with dangerous habits.  I didn’t inquire very deeply -- I’m just picking up on their comments, which are these days a common part of a general contempt for men -- except their own sons.

Gender shifting has concerned a religious denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association specifically, which serves the demographic of educated, generally well-employed, progressive people who try to take social action.  They are open to the culture in an unguarded way.  This means that when the pill arrived on the scene, then feminism, and a wave of divorces followed, there was a general reconfiguration.  The terms of engagement were no longer the harnessing of men to families.  Now the women had to go to work.  And because the standard of living is now far far more expensive than it was in the Fifties, even when the husband remains, the whole family must work or someone must make very high salaries, which are mostly found in institutional management positions.  This kind of job changes people.  What was intended to be a meritocracy, based on skill, becomes an oligarchy, based on wealth and status.  Very hard to leave.

Some UU fellowships and sub-groups became centers for hooking-up, on the one hand an escape from the suppression and falsifying of sexual identities and on the other hand a disregard for those left behind.  We used to snicker at one of these groups, named for Michael Servetus, a crusty old monotheist who was burned at the stake with his books tied around his waist.  In the last decade or so ministers have been declaring that they are no more “special” than their parishioners and should live on the same terms.  This provoked the one-man-opposition of the “Emerson Avenger” who devotes his energy to naming and blaming UU ministers for their bad behavior.  The REAL behavior he’s after is not sexual: he was mocked and rejected by a UU minister because of a vision he had.  His vendetta is a displacement.  The behavior on both sides WAS and IS bad.  It's just that one sorehead is not going to make a difference unless the culture shifts.

Moral turpitude has always been a problem among all clergy, the same as it has always been among all those with privilege and power.  Why any such status is defined as entitlement to abuse the vulnerable and generally behave badly -- often concerning money -- is a mystery to me.  In my young days it was assumed that greater privilege meant greater obligation, but that has dissipated [sic] to such a degree that a few years after I left seminary there was a wave of “formation” classes and counseling, to discourage those who came into the vocation with the idea that it was an easy job.  

By that time I’d moved on, partly out of disillusion.  I had belonged to a small female ministers’ group.  One member (a “good” Christian) moaned constantly about how hard it was to get laid now that she was serving a church.  “Getting laid” is evidently where our belief in mystical magic went after God died.  It was a culture shift.  Orgasm as epiphany.  Very incarnate.

"Bronze Inside and Out" by Mary Scriver

My recent visitors came partly for information and partly out of the belief that because I had had a book published and seem to be living on some secret resource in an idyllic small town, I knew something that an older woman could use.  They were disillusioned.  My secret resource is social security.  My book profits are nonexistent.  My prestige here in Montana had nothing to do with ministry, but everything to do with Bob Scriver.  They assume that because he was worth millions when he died, that his life must have been happy.  They do not want to hear about his heart attack, his stroke, his many days of being bedridden, his problematic wives, his dead children.  Much less do they want to know what vengeful art profiteers have done.

Simple Simon

The biggest danger in a culture shift is for those who go one believing, like Simple Simon, that the old rules still apply.  (It is now politically incorrect to tell the story of a retarded hired man who was paid “in kind” by his farm employers, and always took his profits home to his family in ways that destroyed the pay, because he always did what worked last time:  leading a bag of flour home on the end of a string, carrying a puppy home in a bucket of cold water.)  The US is acting as though it were a powerful nation, but not only has it lost its power, but also the nature of power on the planet is quite, quite different than it was when we were fighting world wars.  It’s not just a culture shift, it’s a global planetary shift in ecology (changing seas and air, eliminated species) and economy (machines and the internet).

Deserted bookstore

I came back to Valier believing that I could write for a living or at least willing to risk the attempt.  The stories I know are dramatic, I have the skills, and I believed I had a message.  But as I told my visitors about what I’ve watched disappear in the last fifteen years -- the system of advances for writers; machinery for producing, storing and distributing the paper objects we call books; businesses based on quality rather than sensation-of-the-moment; local bookstores -- I could see that they never knew those things existed in the first place.  They looked around my shelves and shelves of books and simply didn’t believe me.  I must be doing something wrong.  Maybe I’m lying.  To them, books are a mysterious natural phenomenon, not something that responds to supply and demand.

On the other hand, the late-to-seminary UU minister is gradually realizing that being old and female means something like being adjunct faculty at a university: always marginalized, a person assigned to take up the slack in small groups away from the action -- at a bargain price.  The other women, who were distantly related to Bob Scriver -- their great-grandfathers were brothers -- are looking at the forces that have controlled their lives because of economic recessions and the resulting decisions by their forebears to go West, trusting that they would join a boom of some kind on the Canadian prairies.  My ancestors were like that, too.  So were Bob’s.  We converge.

George Hawley Macfie's home in Quebec.

Today is not our grandparents’ world.  It’s not even the world of twenty years ago.  It is a world willing to kill, greedy for privilege, determined to control what cannot be controlled.  But a new culture shift is moving slowly under our feet, sending children walking north.