Hiatus

It's been a few weeks since I posted. I'm doing some more serious writing instead of blogging, and I may be on this kick for a few more weeks. It's been so long since I wrote anything creative that I don't want to stop. Come back every so often to check on me. I promise to return.

The decline of civility in American discourse

I don’t usually feel my age, and that’s partly because of the experiences I have shared with like-minded people, events that gave me a general sense of hope and optimism. One of those great experiences happened during the sixties, when I taught effervescent baby boomers in Madison. The experience showed me how a whole civilization could become more tolerant and inclusive.

How different the smell of revolution is today! The spirit of change we feel three days before a malodorous presidential election gives me a sense of unease. It reminds me of Thoreau’s wondering why we always level downward to our dullest perception, and praise that as common sense. He goes on to say, “The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.”

This weekend I am overcome with a strange sense of powerlessness as I look uneasily across the border. Rather than a contest between two sparring political parties, I see two monolithic factions threatening to bring a cleaver down on the democratic apparatus, each so enraged as to suggest that the candidate of the other party should be in jail.

This has happened in a country I left almost fifty years ago, when the United States still saw itself as the bright city on a hill, shining like a beacon to the world. Three hundred years into the experiment, its form of government could still serve as a model for other countries. But what wafts up from the south now is an inescapable odor of rotting principles, reeking of gunpowder and horse manure.

It is not easy to enjoy these interesting times because they affect the nose too strongly.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apology to my faithful reader(s?): Please excuse the olfactory unpleasantness. I could have used more pleasant imagery, but it would have clashed with the subject matter.

The new normal

Almost sixty years ago, my younger brother surprised everybody by showing up in his army uniform at our family home. He was stationed at the Pentagon at the time, and we had not seen him for months. My mother’s father, who happened to be at the house, wondered how Jerry had materialized when he was supposed to be in Washington. I don’t know, he said. When I was in service, it meant service.

Zaidy had been pressed into the service of the Czar more than half a century before that, and he had a hard time understanding how Jerry could take advantage of a couple of days off to hitch-hike halfway across the country and join the family briefly. A stint in the Russian army had not allowed such freedom.

We tend to define as normal whatever we knew when we were young. That may represent even a life that seems exotic to most other people. A Mormon in Utah will find an air of strangeness in the everyday life of a Hasid in Brooklyn, and vice versa, but those environments will not seem at all odd to children growing up there.

On a smaller scale, the life of my immediate family would have seemed off kilter to most of my elementary school classmates, just as the details of their lives intrigued and mystified me. And life in the homes of my cousins was an object of wonder to me.

Yet, I grew up believing that the word normal meant the same thing to me as to most other people. It took years for me to understand that everybody has a different sense of what the word means.

I was so certain that I understood normalcy that for years I would cut articles about strange events from the newspaper and collect them in what I called my lunacy file. The articles could be reports about anything: bank robbers who had asked police officers to help push their getaway car or a woman whose delivery of a baby was the first sign that she was pregnant.

My file eventually became thick. But then the Internet came along, telling the world about the most extraordinary events, coincidences, accidents. Even serious journalism seemed dedicated to attracting attention to itself. To make that happen, every news item had to be as unusual as possible.

There is no point to a lunacy file today. As the biggest news of 2016 has demonstrated, lunacy has become the new normal. Most amazingly, it is no longer normal even to read a newspaper.

==================================================================

Then there’s this, from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera:

Chico: Hey, wait, wait. What does this say here, this thing here?

Groucho: Oh, that? Oh, that’s the usual clause that’s in every contract. That just says, uh, it says, uh, if any of the parties participating in this contract are shown not to be in their right mind, the entire agreement is automatically nullified.

Chico: Well, I don’t know…

Groucho: It’s all right. That’s, that’s in every contract. That’s, that’s what they call a sanity clause.

Chico: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Santy Claus.