Keepers of the Earth: Genesis of the Novel

My interest in Native-American culture, not only North American but also South American, goes back a long way. I locate the germ of my idea for my latest novel Keepers of the Earth, in which my fictional character Running Wolf leads a band of Salish Indians into seclusion, from reading in the early 1970s Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber. Ishi emerged from hiding in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on August 29, 1911, the sole survivor of his family. Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, University of California anthropologists, worked with Ishi to record his culture and language. I was so fascinated with Ishi that I read all I could find about him and watched several documentaries about him. Only after I finished writing my novel, did I realize that I had drawn Ishi from the recesses of my memory bank.

The subject of influences is a major part of the study of authors and comparative literature. The question of whether any work of literature is entirely original is a valid one. We are receptors of influences because we are sentient beings. Years ago, as a college student, I read T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I have reread it many times since. In his essay, Eliot argues that a writer inevitably imbibes history. Consequently, the writer’s sense of history is essential to the art he creates. A historical sense is what makes art transcend the purely personal. The artist has fused his personal experience with a knowledge of the past. In this sense a piece of art cannot be termed strictly original. I have heard that some writers avoid reading any novels similar to the one they are working on at the time because they do not want to be unconsciously influenced by another author’s treatment of the subject. They want their novel to be an unadulterated product of their personal creativity.

Keepers of the Earth is not my first work that centers on indigenous American culture. In 1992 the Illinois composer Fred Hubbell asked me to write the lyrics for his choral piece “Sinnissippi Saga.” I wrote a series of poems centering around the Sauk, Fox, and Potawatomi tribes who occupied that part of the Mississippi Valley. Parts of my poems were used in the score and were performed in Rockford, Illinois, that year. The phrase “keepers of the earth” is repeated in an Indian chant used in the production. I must have stored the phrase in the back of my brain because I knew it was the right title for my novel about the Salish of Montana. My study of Native-American dance chants also remained in my subconscious. Short repeated lines and the slight variation of lines otherwise having the same cadence typify these songs. And in Keepers of the Earth, I created new Native-American chants that accompany the singing and dancing that were part of major events in the life of the Salish.

Native-American characters also appear in my other novels. In The Pluperfect Phantom, Nuscotomeg or Mad Sturgeon arises from the past to subdue the ghost of the serial killer plaguing characters in the present. The old storyteller, Uncle Johnny in The Wheels of Being, recounts Indian legends to two children. I first developed my research into the Incan civilization of South America in my collection of narrative poetry, Land of the Four Quarters, which depicts the Spanish conquest and colonization of Peru and Ecuador. At my husband’s suggestion, I transformed the material into three novels, Voice of Stone, Conquistadora, and Daughter of the Conquest.

I have always been overcome with sadness and shame whenever I have read the history of the European extermination of the native populations and the destruction of their traditions. In writing Keepers of the Earth, I wanted to answer the question: What if a small band of Salish in northwest Montana retreated from the encroachments of white society and managed to maintain their traditional way of life for sixty years in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains?

Jane Smiley, in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, writes: “When I was writing The Greenlanders, it was obvious to me that all novels were historical novels, patiently reconstructing some time period or another, recent or distant.” The evolution of my writing synthesizes what I have gleaned from history. My narrative combines fictional and historical characters. The historical fiction, which relates what could be called alternative history, envisions a series of events that might have happened and carries a relevance for today. Almost all the Salish characters are imagined. Some of the historical characters who enter the novel are Father Pierre De Smet and other Jesuit missionaries. Actual historical events, such as the Hellgate Treaty of 1855, are included. The natural disasters occurring today seem to be the earth’s rebellion against colonial exploitation of the environment, its resources, and its people.

Colonialism and its aftereffects continue to influence the course of contemporary events. The message that all people must unite to save the environment underscores my narrative. Native-American spirituality can tell us how to do this and how we can all start acting less divisively. Walls and fences do not build good neighbors. They establish separation. Divide and conquer have been the watchwords for too long. Language has been a tool of colonial destruction, for the colonists systematically worked to eradicate indigenous languages, and in doing so, destroyed the cultures of the peoples they conquered. This is also the story I tell in Keepers of the Earth.

Democratic Vistas: 1871 versus 2022

The 2022 mid-term elections looked like race horses running neck-to-neck down the track. The political pundits, stop watches in hand, counted the colors red or blue as the racers passed over the finish line. Many commentators viewed the stakes of the contests across the country as the survival of American democracy framed 250 years ago.

All of this made me remember Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas written in 1871 during the Reconstruction period in the aftermath of the horrific Civil War. Whitman had witnessed its terrible toll, tending the dead and dying in hospitals. The choice of the word vistas is not accidental because it implies the long view. Whitman finds democracy in its “embryo condition,” its future dependent on the good character of individuals and a moral consciousness.

How does Whitman view the future of democracy then? Not any better or worse than historians and political scientists view it today. He identifies the same causes for skepticism about its durability that exist in 2022. He states “I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States,” and cites the “crudeness, vice, caprices of the common voter.” Yet in another place, he enjoins the citizen to inform himself and always vote but to “disengage from parties” because they are “savage” and “wolfish.”

Whitman could be describing current conditions in this passage:

The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration, and the judiciary is tainted.

The two ingredients he sees essential to democratic progress are diversity and the full play of freedom that will provide equal opportunity regardless of “unequal rank, intellect, virtue, or station.” Whitman understands that the United States is a study in contradictions. While lamenting the greed of the captains of industry, he acknowledges that the success of the democratic experiment depends on the prosperity of the general population; otherwise, unrest and dissatisfactions will erode its foundation. Inherent in diversity is the tendency to divisiveness and unbridled freedom, corruption, materialism, and self-interest detrimental to the general welfare. The antidotes to these negative effects are education and spirituality unbound to established churches.

Whitman does not hesitate to severely criticize the hypocrisy and mediocrity in American politics and decries the “lack of first-class captains and leaders.” Without an infusion of conscience and spirituality, America is on “the road of the damned.” From my perspective, in the last eight years a large portion of Americans and their elected officials have been willing to turn a blind eye on lies, venality, crass opportunism, and failures to act as public servants. Corruption, nepotism, conflicts of interests, and profiteering form public office have been rife. Is this scene so different from what Walt Whitman views in 1871?

From Whitman’s pessimistic vista, he rescues some hope for the future. He writes that great literature can offset the worse effects of a self-interested, materialistic society. Great literature also needs readers. He implies public education will create that education, and collaterally, a cultured society. Whitman could not foresee that consumerism, the entertainment industry, and the mass media might act as countervailing forces.

My hope also resides in the salutary effect of literature as the art form that expands individual horizons and opens vistas to realize greater brotherhood in an imperfect democracy.

November 21, 2022

I Hate Poetry

“I don’t like poetry.”

“I don’t read poetry.”

I have heard these and similar refrains spoken by my book club members.

I remained mute, respectfully silent, to these bold, proud assertions. Should I defend my passionate love for the beauty of words artistically arranged to illuminate sound and sense, reflecting off each other amorously as in a lover’s tight embrace?

Would I dare to suggest reading a volume such as the Iliad or the Odyssey or a contemporary book of narrative verse such as Darlington’s Fall by Brad Leithauser or the Victorian Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King? Craven timidity prevented me from the mention of the ten books of poetry I had the temerity to write.

Ours is a prosaic society. My suggestion of good poetry books may have resonance in Poland or Russia – the Slavs love poetry. Poetry is widely read and enjoyed in these countries. They can boast of the popularity of Eugene Onegin and Pan Tadeusz. I admit my reticence to defend the value of poetry was cowardly.

Americans have largely ceded the poetic ground to the academics. More people write poetry than read it even though some may confess that in great rushes of emotion, they have written a poem to express powerful feelings.

Should I admit in parody of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous lines: “How do I love you? Let me count the ways” (leaving out the archaic thee) that I really love poetry?

I fancied poetry since elementary school and never outgrew my first love, although most students leave poetry behind after high school. So why does it continue to speak to me?

Because poetry can say in fourteen lines what prose can take four hundred pages to express.

Because it crystallizes ideas in images that at once make me hear, sense, and see their meaning.

Because connotation and denotation reverberate in a poem’s compact lines.

Because the compact lines ascend to the rhythm and cadence of music, the art of communication with sound, but poetry synthesizes language and sound into a unified art form.

Because I adhere to the adage that brevity is the soul of wit. Nothing sticks like a well-turned phrase; even better, one that is rhymed.

Because poetry fosters memorization. The decline of memorization in schools parallels the decline in the love of poetry and its appreciation.

Because poetry rises on the tongue like a prayer.

Because in great poetry I discover wisdom.

And last but most importantly, because reading tastes reveal a lot about personality and values. This is also true of a society in general. Poetry requires the reader to pause, think more deeply, and savor language. Mass popular fiction today permits the reader to cruise along, often skimming the surface and missing nuances in the same way that the media allows an audience to view complex issues simplistically. Prose glides; poetry dives.

Let us make America pause and ponder again through reading more poetry; thereby regaining respect for the use of language. Those who dominate the air waves daily abuse and corrupt language in ways that George Orwell warned would produce a brainwashed totalitarian society.

I love poetry because I love the concise, beautiful command of evocative language to express eternal truths of the human condition. In few words, it says so much – more than a million tongues can utter.

My Detoxification Program

A toxic environment can pollute the body and soul. In an effort to cleanse my mind and spirit of the American politics of division and deceit, I embarked on a program of spiritual reading at the beginning of this year. I was exhausted, depressed, and oppressed by the lack of humility, commitment to public service, truth, and intellectual honesty. I was appalled at the outright instances of evil that the media daily reported. I craved role models that contributed to the improvement of society and not to their self-aggrandizement.

The older I get, the more the tapes of my mother’s truisms play in my head. Surround yourself with smarter, brighter, and better people than you are. You will be judged by the company you keep. Birds of a feather flock together. When you lie down with pigs, all you get is dirty. During the last six months, I have found good friends in books to help me rise from the mud.

A lot of dirt had seeped into my psyche through my diet of politics-watching. To replace the toxic material, I determined to cleanse my mind with spiritual reading. I began with Dorothy Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness, which tells how she found a better alternative to political activism through her work in feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, moving from communism to Catholicism.

Next, I sought the biography of Thomas More. Enmeshed in the political machinations of the day, he strove to live a virtuous and contemplative life amidst the intrigues of King Henry VIII’s court. He formulated a vision of a better political milieu in his book Utopia, which I read along with Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More.

I looked for twentieth-century figures able to navigate the rise of Nazism and discovered Simone Weil. Her essays suggest no political solutions to the problems of social injustice, war, suffering, and oppression but afford a mystic’s vision that love is the only cure for affliction. She writes: But the only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation, in other words, subjection of the ego. Further, she writes: Politics to me seem a sinister force. She saw the true madness of mankind as the push to power and contended that the emphasis on rights rather than obligations – man’s duty to respect and love his fellow man – was responsible for the crimes of humanity. She was a philosopher who left the halls of academia to work in a French auto factory.

From Weil, I went on to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who in 1933 spoke against Hitler in a radio broadcast, landed in prison, and was executed just as the war was ending in April 1945. He put into practice Christ’s message and paid for his discipleship with his life.

Mother Teresa is the contemporary exemplar of what it means to serve one’s fellow man no matter how unlovable or disease-infested. Her life’s work was to minister to the poorest of the poor, opening homes for the destitute and dying in India and around the world. Her book Come Be My Light collects extracts from her diary chronicling her own sufferings.

I wished to learn about other women mystics through history, so I read Julian Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love. Carol L. Flinders’ book Enduring Grace gave portraits of seven women mystics, including St. Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila. From reading about these mystics, I delved into Thomas Merton’s poetry. I couldn’t ignore the great Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton and read his Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, amusing myself with a few of his Father Brown detective stories too.

Other books on spirituality await my rereading, such as Mere Christianity and A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. But just picking up a biography that recounts the life of some man or woman who contributed to the improvement of society or the alleviation of the suffering and downtrodden would serve the purpose of healthy spiritual reading.

I’ll end with Simone Weil again because her ideas resonate today. In The Need for Roots, she writes:

A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of democracy.

She argued for the abolition of all political parties because they are essentially totalitarian. Parties replace critical thinking with groupthink; they exert collective passion on their members; and their goal is to increase their own growth and power to the exclusion of other parties.

As a result, I cannot put complete faith in politics as a force to save the world because politics is only as good as the men and women who serve as our nation’s leaders. Unfortunately, we have had a dearth of principled officials and a plethora of unscrupulous ones – and I dare say, evil men in positions of power. I still retain the faith, along with Václev Havel of the Czech Republic, that politics can be a noble profession. Meanwhile, I have accomplished a cleansing of my beleaguered brain through reading that uplifts, inspires, offers hope, and contributes to my psychic peace.

I’ve written a sonnet that voices my resolve to cease denunciation of those who are evil and begin to praise those who are good.

In Praise of Good Women and Men

Sing of those who deserve to be sung of.

For too long the venal have strode the stage,

The shrill spewers of hate, spurners of love.

A psalmbook of praise opens in this age

For hewers of wood and shapers of clay,

The wordsmiths and dabblers in paint,

Thinkers who dared the beliefs of their day

And in thought and deed strove to be more saint

Than sinner ascending above the base,

The grosser instincts that govern the flesh,

At once the seekers and granters of grace.

In them purpose and will perfectly mesh.

Heroes and heroines I conjure near,

Command scoundrels and fools to disappear.

Web Site at www.mountainofdreamsbooks.com

The Fiction of Writer’s Block

The perennial question that successful authors receive at any session they conduct for aspiring writers is: “How do you deal with writer’s block?” The question assumes that they do occasionally experience the phenomenon.

I contend it does not exist. If it does, it is a figment of the imagination. If it does, there are multiple ways to make it not exist at all. There are means to make it ephemeral at best.

If I wake up and after my morning rituals proceed to my desk to begin my routine of writing (the first task on my daily agenda) to realize the well of ideas has run dry, I go for a walk. I carefully observe every item along the way, cracks in the pavement, birds in the sky, junk cars in the driveway, and the oak tree with the tire swing; up, down, and around I observe. I note the drift of the clouds, the jet overhead—bound for where? Who is aboard? The imagination takes flight as it surely should for the writer’s observant eye and mind. I smell the vegetation, the resin oozing from the pine. I touch the blade of grass and bite, tasting its white end. All senses are engaged, the mind intent on the why and wherefore behind the tennis shoe left on the shoulder of the road. The back story emerges.

Settled in my comfortable chair again, I write, describing everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, and thought on my walk. The details pour out, because so much happened on that walk in the woods, around the neighborhood block, or down that country road. So much happened too that I didn’t see that happened before I arrived on the scene. The past and the future inhabit the shuttered clapboard house I passed.

Next I enter the haunted chamber of memory. I visit the house in which I grew up and search each room, gaze upon each shelf, and fondle my favorite stuffed animal for a moment. In my mother’s china cabinet is an heirloom teapot. I select that object to contemplate longer and then begin to write all that it evokes, everything it means to me, how it touched our family. Maybe I broke the cherished end table lamp and my father glued it together. You can choose anything from your childhood home and construct an elaborate story around it.

Or turn on the news. Write your reaction to the earthquake in Indonesia, famine in the Sudan, or the last school shooting. Write why you hate listening to the news or why you dislike television and why you prefer a good science fiction movie. Write what your life would have been like if you had married your high school sweetheart or the horror it really was because you married the man from Mars.

Responding to prompts is another way to flex your writing muscles. Many books and websites on the craft provide writing prompts. I developed this method in an adult education course I called “Writing Aerobics,” which I taught at a community college. I give the students a seed of an idea—the prompt—for a piece of writing. For instance, I tell them to think of their mother’s favorite bromide such as “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” and write a story or poem around it. I throw out an image such as “the hobbyhorse in the attic” or “the wedding cake on the sidewalk” to use as a jump-start for their imagination.  Playing a piece of instrumental music also provides a good writing exercise. I ask the students to write down everything that comes into their mind and every concrete image the music evokes. New Age, synthetic, or classical are the best kinds of music for this exercise.  I use selections from the Narada collection and David Arkenstone., and South American group Inti Illimani group. The strangeness of the music helps to release imagination.

If all else fails, just start writing anything and everything that pops into your mind—bad, inconsequential, absurd. I guarantee something will catch fire and you will run with your hair all aflame to carry that idea to its magnificent conclusion in an essay, story, or poem. But it doesn’t have to be the Great American Novel. Just keep dreaming; keep imagining.

Explore my books at mountainofdreamsbooks.com

 

New Website Mountain of Dreams Books

Two writers living in the same house? Is that even possible? The answer is yes! Star Meadow, a place in the mountains of northwestern Montana where I and my husband Rod Rogers create our fictional worlds. Surrounded by the Flathead National Forest, I send these blog posts into the world. Please explore our enchanted forest of books to satisfy diverse reading tastes at www.mountainofdreamsbooks.com

Reflections on Year’s End

An older person, I’d rather see time stand still for a while rather than wave a year good-bye. Time always seems to speed faster the older one grows. Seeing that this year has been a tragic one with mourning and weeping around the world, most people are happy to bid it good riddance and eager to welcome in a healthy and prosperous 2021. My habit in the waning days of one year is to reflect on how I have lived my life during that dying year and to consider how I may best live the dawning year if I should be granted more time.

Here in my posts and in my daily activities I’ve striven to speak out against the erosion of democracy and mean-spirited, mendacious politics. I am proud that I have not remained silent in the face of evil. I have meditated on what evil is. I still do not have a good definition and cannot offer one here. The best I can do is to describe it as a failure to see that humanity is one and to acknowledge that truth in word and deed. Lies, insults, selfishness, greed, arrogance, viciousness, and cruelty are manifestations of that failure.  Talk of politics should not be avoided. Everything is politics, because it determines how we live, if our children are well-educated, if our families thrive, and what public services are available to make our communities safer and improve our overall well-being.

If anything, bad politics has served to make the body politic less apathetic and more aware of the importance of civic involvement and voting, which absolutely does make a difference. Bad examples can serve a good purpose. I have been active in the political process. In 2021 I cede the driver’s seat to the younger generation. The Baby Boomers had their chance to make a difference. While continuing to stay informed and to comment as I see fit, I am happy to take a backseat.

In 2020 I completed two books: Grant Me a Cloud, my collected poems 2017-2020 and Stranger in My Own Land, a verse-novel based on the life of Margaret Fuller, nineteenth-century American writer and intellectual. I begin the new year without a writing project in mind. The likelihood that I will not write another book does not bother me. I may have emptied the writing well. Nonetheless, I have a body of work that represents what I have thought and felt, what I have imagined and invented over four decades. The results satisfy me. Unless the irresistible force overtakes me to write a book that must be written, I plan to empty my mind by writing posts for How Public Like a Frog.

At year’s end, many minds turn to thoughts of New Year’s resolutions. Numerous articles appear to argue for or against making resolutions. Ambitious lists of resolutions are published both humorous and edifying.  Many are made and soon broken. Others are kept through sheer persistence. I myself believe in resolutions. To resolve is to make a firm decision, to decide to amend your life in some way. What could be wrong about that? We try and we fail; then we pick ourselves up and try again. We need a plan, a road map for the future, and resolutions give us a direction to follow.

So what are my resolutions for 2021? I resolve not to accomplish anything. I will not lose weight. I will not write the Great American Novel. I will not redecorate the house. I will not increase my bank account. I will not bake ten cheesecakes. I will not be jaded, cynical, and pessimistic.

What about positives? I will welcome each morning as a gift from heaven. I will walk gentle on this earth. I will treat each day as my last. I will try, and often fail, to love my neighbor as myself.

Reactions to Mary L. Trump’s Book: Too Much and Never Enough

In my commentary on Mary Trump’s book, I will concentrate on parts that have not been quoted and commented upon in reviews and in interviews with her. So many of the most salient and memorable points she makes about her uncle are already well-publicized.

Remarkably, I come away from reading this psychological explanation of The Donald’s development with more sympathy and less condemnation of the man. I do not sense any venom in Mary’s voice. She is very analytical and clinical in her account of what she observed and experienced. Both parents failed to discipline, and most lamentably, failed to really love Donald as a child. His mother threw up her hands at his bad behavior. Mary describes him as always talking back to his mother and never doing what he was told to do. As a Social Security representative, I assisted parents applying for disability benefits for their children who had a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder. According to Mary’s description, Donald could very well have had the same condition. His father sent him to military school because he did not want to deal with Donald’s behavioral problems. Building his real estate empire occupied his entire father’s time. Mary writes that nobody sent their sons to NYMA for a better education, but rather the family considered it a “reform school.’

Mary explains the dynamics in a large family. Reared in a family with four children, I have raised the question to friends many times over the last five years whether they did not find it odd that we never heard from Donald’s siblings about what it was like growing up with Donald or that we never saw them with him at events. My siblings and I constantly have shared memories, have criticized each other’s shortcomings, praised our admirable qualities and laughed and cried together. I certainly noticed the siblings’ absence even if Mary writes at the beginning of her book, “The media failed to notice that not one member of Donald’s family apart from his children, his son-in-law, and his current wife said a word in support of him during the entire campaign. Her Aunt Maryanne did share with Mary that Donald was utterly unqualified for the office he sought, but her aunt confessed later that she had voted for Donald out of a sense of family loyalty. And that’s exactly what a lot of Republicans did out of party loyalty.

Mary is probably correct when she speculates that her uncle “may have a long undiagnosed learning disability that for decades has interfered with his ability to process information.” His aversion to reading and his inability to speak or write coherently give additional credence to this supposition.  She cautions he has a complex of mental and emotional disorders that only can be assessed accurately with a battery of examinations, which, of course, he will not submit to. Even the untrained observer can tell that Donald is somehow emotionally and mentally disturbed. Mary identifies the source of his psychological disorders as mainly arising from Donald’s father, and in fact, all the siblings experienced damage from their relationships with Fred Trump, Sr.

I found particularly sad and shocking her description of the family’s behavior when Mary’s own father, Fred Trump’s first-born son, died at age forty-two. She was age sixteen and at boarding school when she was told to call her grandparents. When she did, they were too cowardly to tell her that her father had already died and instead told her to call her mother who broke the news to her. No family member had gone to the hospital where Fred Jr. had been taken in an ambulance. While he was in the hospital dying, Donald and his sister Elizabeth went to the movies. Mary’s account of the aftermath of her grandfather’s funeral is no less demonstrative of an emotionally crippled family. Mary took her widowed grandmother home after the funeral. None of her children accompanied her back to her house to stay with her. She was left alone to grieve the loss of her husband of sixty-three years. At her grandfather’s funeral, Mary writes that when it was Donald’s turn to eulogize his father, it “devolved into a paean to his own greatness.” Her aunt Maryanne told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.

Interesting and perceptive is her statement that “Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” By institutionalized, she means that he has been living in a bubble, insulated from the consequences of his bad behavior or with no incentives to improve his character. He has been trained to never accept responsibility or admit a mistake. She writes: “Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under has changed dramatically. It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count. It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work.”

Incisively, she blames the media for failing to ask pointed questions. Throughout his campaign and continuing to the present, the media has allowed him to get away with murder. I am still angry that Donald’s bluster and nonsense eclipsed media coverage for John Kasich, a respectable and knowledgeable Republican candidate for the presidency. As a New Yorker, Mary knew about Donald’s bankruptcies, showmanship, and ignorance. She was astounded that the rest of the country did not. His lunacies and outrageous statements got more press than the exposure of his misdeeds and unfitness for leadership. She has good reason to believe that if she had spoken out early, even in 2015, her words would have fallen on deaf ears. Along with her I was also traumatized “when 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of” what she calls “my malignantly dysfunctional family.”

Tellingly, she comments: “Large minorities of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.” I am astounded too at anyone who can still vote for The Donald after the ample evidence to his severely flawed character and unfitness for leadership over the last four years. At the end of the book she writes on the botching of the Covid-19 response: “The deafening silence in response to such a blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life or the consequence for one’s actions, on the other hand, fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.” I share her despair and wish that she had expanded on where the problem really lies, for I see part of it in a broken Republican Party that has lost its way and its principles and that continues to cater to the least admirable segment of our population and the darkest elements of human nature. He could not have reached the top where he struts without corrupt, venal sycophants preying upon his need for love, adulation, and constant compliments. Hence, Pence the lapdog and Putin pulling his strings. Plus a Senate majority defending the indefensible. The problem lies in ourselves. We’re the permissive parents.

If anything, reading Mary’s book has allowed me to feel a little compassion for this deeply unhappy and flawed man who has always covered up his insecurities and inadequacies with false bravura. With scowl and down-turned mouth, flab, painted face, and ridiculous do; he is to be pitied. He’s sired five children he does not really love any more than his own father loved his five offspring. For Donald and his father, children are but appendages to feed an ego.

Some perceived that Marianne Williamson running for President was a joke, but I looked at her as a necessary antidote to hatred and fear and a counterpoint to Donald Trump. As a student and teacher of A Course in Miracles, Williamson knows that The Donald’s attacks and insults are cries for love. In an attempt to conquer hatred for this pitiful man, I wrote this poem in November of 2017, and despite writing it, every day that The Donald occupies the White House, I struggle to suppress that emotion. My hope surfaces in that the Honorable John Lewis, representative from Georgia, succeeded admirably to love unstintingly. Our children need role models like him in abundance.

Go in Peace

Because I have not learned the lessons well

Of A Course in Miracles, The Donald came

To test my mastery of what forgiveness is.

In attack of him I haven’t learned I attack

Myself and I haven’t seen that if I forgive

His mistakes that I will heal and grant him

The love his insults, boasts, and lies all seek.

Can I grant him peace and freedom from fear

That I also seek by forgiving him for what

He knows not what he does as I grant myself

The same forgiveness for what I know not?

 

This is the great lesson of the Great Teacher

While yet earthbound seems impossible

Of achievement even as prayers ascend

To grant us peace, O Lord, in troubled times,

In this vale of tears where constantly it seems

Dog eats dog and brother still kills brother,

Ignorant, we war on ourselves and receive

What we give, whether pain and fear or gifts

Of love and peace, which their giving extends.

Give away then whatever the wish is to gain.

I have not earned a passing grade but wish

To go in peace with my neighbor without end.

 

 

 

 

Back to the Future

It is Back to the Future this last week of May 2020. I could be watching the race riots in Detroit and other American cities in the sixties. The issues, the anger, the frustration, and inequalities are the same. What is not the same is a White House occupant and a Republican Party incapable of moral leadership. A severely mentally and emotionally handicapped person was voted into office–astoundingly–because a significant amount of my fellow Americans thought him fit for office, thus enabling an Electoral College win. This is the “Administration of Chaos,” that the capable Jeb Bush forecast. It is an administration marked by resignations and firings–a record turnover that no private business could sustain before going bankrupt–a place where no reasonable person would want to work–a toxic environment.

A leader unites; this man elevated to the top leadership position does nothing but divide and cut deeper into existing divisions. While the country burns and 100,000 Americans die, he golfs and eats himself into a frenzy. He looks every bit an unhappy man with downturned mouth, scowls, and dull eyes. If he had one iota of the self-reflection of a Richard Nixon or of a Lyndon Johnson, he would resign or refuse to accept his party’s nomination; then retire to play golf without interruption. However, inmates of a federal prison probably don’t have access to a golf course, although a portable putting green may be allowed in their cells. I don’t know. In any event, it looks like the nation has almost eight more months of chaos and his omnipresence in the news because there are no competent cabinet members to unite, invoke the 25th Amendment, and intervene on behalf of the common good.

There are none because he has surrounded himself with an unfit, corrupt, and sycophantic staff. I doubt he is loved, admired, or respected by these sycophants. In Russian terms, the boss is a “useful idiot.” They are leeches sucking as much power and money they can out of the body politic until they scuttle off somewhere else when the host is dead. Tyrants–autocrats–dictators–are not loved. They are users and manipulators. In turn, others use and manipulate them. It is a symbiosis of evil that only lasts for a while. They don’t build anything. They suck everything dry until exhausted themselves. Then the system they fed upon collapses. The sanitation crew enters to clean up the carnage and make way for healthy growth and interdependence. The word carnage, which he used in his execrable January 2017 inauguration speech, struck a perfect keynote; it offered, lamentably, a battle cry instead of a paean to peace and progress for the next four years.

I want to wake up one bright morning and not wonder what horrific thing the current occupant of the White House has said, tweeted, or done in the last twenty-four hours. What is the latest lie, insult, or abomination? I’ve lived through twelve United States’ presidencies, but during the present one, a day has not passed when I did not think about what absurdity had just emanated from the White House. As a child of the sixties, the last four years are worse than that period of unrest in which I came of age and lost my innocence, because moral decay and a vacuum of leadership reside at the top. Wasn’t Lyndon Johnson’s mantra, Come now, let us reason together?

In the Time of Pandemic

As pandemic rages and governors issue stay-at-home orders, watching telenovelas on Netflix is one of my pastimes. The 62-episode La Esclava Blanca produced in Colombia absorbed my attention. The white slave is a baby girl, the daughter of rich landowner, who is rescued from a fire set by his avaricious neighbor, intent on acquiring Domingo Quintero’s hacienda. Rescued by slaves, the infant Victoria is raised until she is ten years old in an isolated fort in the jungle, a sanctuary for escaped slaves. The priest saves her from being killed by sending her to a convent in Spain. Impersonating a Spanish noblewoman, she returns to Colombia as an adult to reunite with her Negro family that she has never ceased to love.

Historians have criticized the series as being inaccurate, misrepresenting the horror of slavery, and offering a sugar-coated picture of white benevolence. Any artistic endeavor must be evaluated on its intentions. This is historical fantasy, not an attempt to portray historical events as they actually happened. It is fiction not fact. What fiction seeks to do is to tell a story dramatically. Historical fantasy uses elements that are true to life, but otherwise goes its own way to develop its themes. The backdrop to La Esclava Blanca is the historical fact of the African-slave trade. In Colombia, slavery was not completely abolished until 1851. The series begins in 1821 as Colombia adopts a gradual approach to abolition.

The subtitle of the series is: Porque la sangre tiene la misma color – because blood has the same color. Love knows no color barriers.  Many interracial love relationships develop, which in the time period 1821-1843, would have been improbable outside of a master’s sexual exploitation of his female slaves. The fantasy resides in a world where former slaves intermarry with white people. The series thus creates an imaginary world–an alternative history–in which the ideal of racial harmony is eventually attained on the fictional Santa Marta plantation.

Interlaced in the story is the clear parallel drawn between the white woman’s unliberated position in marriage and her awful subjugation to male domination, so that the white slave of the title refers both to Victoria as the adopted daughter of Negro slaves but also to her and the other white women in the story being enslaved as wives, mothers, and daughters to the men in their lives.

For unadulterated history, watch documentaries that purport to present the historical record. For a gripping, intricately-constructed plot with lots of twists and turns, and multi-dimensional characters; I recommend Spanish telenovelas. Another excellent one I watched is Love in Times of War, produced in Spain, about nurses dispatched to staff a Moroccan hospital during Spain’s war in North Africa in the 1920s. The French also produced a fascinating series, The Bonfire of Destiny, about the 1897 fire in a Paris charity bazaar that killed over 100 people. From that actual disaster, a wonderful tale of how the fire affected the lives of several women unfolds. Two German mini-series worth watching are Charité at War about a Berlin hospital in World War II and Babylon Berlin about Berlin detectives caught up in crime and intrigue during the rise of Nazism in the interwar period.

These telenovelas and miniseries, while providing a form of escape at home in time of pandemic, also show that during other times and places, people experienced horrors and emerged from devastation and destruction although at great cost to lives and fortunes. They underscore that this is not the first or the last time, we must come together to share a cause and to combat a common enemy. Generally, in these times of pandemic, turning to foreign films, whether a series or a full-length movie, is a good choice.  In the past, I’ve found that the dialogue, character development, plotting, and portrayal of the truth of the human condition are deeper and more satisfying in foreign films than the usual Hollywood-produced affair.