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It’s going to be all right

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I have always found history fascinating, perhaps because I thought I had so little of it personally. My favorite writers growing up were Shelby Foote and Stephen Ambrose, and even in fiction, I preferred novelists like Michener and Uris. I read Bradbury, but I think he was as much a historical writer as the rest in his own way, despite his genre. Throw in a bit of Mickey Spillane and Ellery Queen just for fun, and you’ve got the picture.

Discounting military service, virtually all my adult life has been spent as an archaeologist. In short, you might say I’ve been obsessed with the past. I’ve seen it all come and go: war and peace, wealth and poverty, nations rising and falling, cultures great and profane, cemeteries full of lives cut short, of crises forgotten or remembered, but either way, good for nothing better than allegory now. Through it all, one thing stands out, clear and cold.

It’s going to be all right. Not in the sense of world peace, the brotherhood of man, and all that, but it is going to be all right. In time, no one will remember any of the this. What we’re going through is serious, yes, and will cause a great deal of pain to people who deserve better. The same was true of whatever it was those people in the cemeteries of the world were enduring, those things we either can’t remember or experience only as intellectual abstractions today. The same will be true of whatever traumas and crises future generations will face, if there are any future generations.

Nor will anyone remember all the joy, the love and human companionship we are also experiencing, the intensity of compassion and purpose that fill the struggle against all the adversity I mention above, but that too, will continue beyond us, as it has these millennia.

You know the old joke: an optimist is one who believes this is the best of all possible worlds, and a pessimist is one who’s afraid that’s true.

One way or the other, this is the world we’ve got, and we are the humanity we’ve got. It could be that we have broken the earth as a habitable place for us beyond repair, and it could be the death of us, of our species. If that happens, the earth will continue to spin on its axis and hurl itself around the sun; other living things will thrive, and possibly evolve to wonder about the remains we leave behind.

We’ll be just one more of the billions of species to disappear, just one more bag of remains in the vast cemetery we live on.

It’s going to be all right.

Anti-social media

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I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m actually tired of reading the same political comments over and over. They’re not even arguments any more. Each side just posts, bot-like, a few choice talking points without any consideration of relevance. I’m convinced that these exchanges could be streamlined to save everyone time and eyesight. I’ve narrowed the most popular ones down into an easy-to-use numbering system:

For liberals:
1. I’m a progressive, not a liberal!
2. Fuck you
3. Bernie would have won in a landslide.
4. Hillary lost because Bernie supporters didn’t vote.
5. Hillary actually won.
6. Dump the electoral college.*
7. We need to come together and (insert favorite position).
8. The polls were inaccurate.
9. The polls were accurate, but (see #3)

For conservatives:
1. I’m alt-right, not conservative!
2. You’re an out-of-touch libtard.
3. You have no idea how real America lives.
4. Give Trump a chance.
5. Americans should unite, now that the election is over.
6. Give Trump a chance.
7. Trump has a clear mandate.
8. Trump actually won the popular vote, and probably the Nobel Peace Prize, too.
9. Shut up! I said shut up!

*This point can be switched to the other side in future elections, if there are any.

Trumped up

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So now it appears that Mr. Hyde is hidden, and Dr. Jekyll has come out.  It’s hard to know what to make of that.  Trump has completely reversed his opinion of both Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, both of whom he’s warmly complimented in the last two days.  It is, of course, completely opposite what he has said about them during the campaign, but contradictions have not exactly been unusual for him.  In a way, it’s reminiscent of his meeting with  Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico, during which he was all smiles and conciliation; he seemed cowed by the presence of a head of state.  That didn’t last 24 hours; by that evening, back across the border, he was his old obstreperous self again, apparently to the extent of lying about what was discussed during the meeting.

Many people who supported Trump, and presumably voted for him, are holding out an olive branch, saying that what Trump said during the campaign was just rhetoric, and he’ll calm down now that he’s been elected.  I can’t help feeling that if we don’t fall in line, we will feel the sting of that olive branch, converted into a whip.

I caught the tail end of an interview on the radio with a CEO who supported Trump.  Her take was that, yes, Trump is a jerk, but he has a talent for hiring competent people to actually run his businesses, so his personality is irrelevant.  I’m not sure reducing his unprecedented gall to merely annoying is justifiable, but there is a ray of hope, albeit small and not very satisfying.  If Trump appoints normal Republicans to his administration, and goes off to play golf, his administration will only be a normal Republican disaster, that is, slightly mitigated rather than unmitigated.

The big question for the rest of us is, what next?  The Democratic Party is in disarray at the moment.  I doubt that will last, but we’re between the proverbial rock and a hard place.  Does the party move to the right, to try to accommodate moderate Republicans, or does it move left, and offer its own brand of populism?

I doubt very much that ideology played any part in the election of Donald J. Trump.  We brought, as they say, a knife to a gun fight, and now we’re licking our wounds and arguing about what kind of knife to bring to the next one.

There are almost as many reasons given for his victory as there are pundits, desperately trying to salvage their reputations, after failing miserably to predict almost everything about the election.  There is, however, one factor which I find the most disturbing.  NPR reported on All Things Considered yesterday on a new app-centric polling company called Brigade, which found in results from election day that as much as 40% of registered Democrats crossed over to vote for Trump.

In a campaign full of ingenious imagery, the one that sticks with me is that people just wanted someone who would tip over the table, reset the process to point zero.

We can only hope that Trump is a one-off, and when people see his policies in action, they will be disabused of their illusions, and we can pick it up from there.  Right now, I see neither hope nor despair, just a long wait.

History’s lesson: competing curses must be lifted slowly and one at a time

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Not that many years ago, there were two major curses in baseball, one in Boston and the other in Chicago.

The Boston Red Sox, who had not won a World Series since 1918, were under the Curse of the Bambino, so called because the beginning of their drought came after they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. The Chicago Cubs had a World Series winless streak from 1908. Their curse was sometimes called the Billy Goat Curse, but this only dated to 1945. Either way, these competing curses were fabled in American sports mythology, discussed, dissected, and compared, to the dubious delight of fans.

I used to imagine the ending something like this: The Cubs and the Sox finally break their competing curses partially, and meet each other in the world series. After six games, they are tied, three games apiece. The seventh game is a gem, and ends up tied 3-3 at the end of the ninth.

Just at that moment, a giant fireball descends from the sky, obliterating Earth and all of its inhabitants, the universe being unable to withstand such a momentous eventuality.

Of course, the Sox spoiled that scenario in 2004, sweeping their opponents, the St. Louis Cardinals and not the Cubs, in the World series. Damned Boston, no sense of drama!

And if you live in the United States, and have been even marginally conscious over the last week, you know that the Cubs finally broke their curse as well. It was a great series, and came down to a tie in the ninth, but, since it was Cleveland, who had only a minor drought of 68 years, there was no fireball, and the fateful 10th inning went on to history.

I have to admit that I like that ending better than an apocalyptic fireball.

Hard times for Mr. Softee

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A couple of weeks ago, I saw an obituary for Les Waas, who, among other things, wrote the Mr. Softee jingle (it has lyrics; who knew?).

Of course, that sent me spinning ass over elbows into nostalgia. The Mr. Softee truck, with its Pavlovian jingle, was a staple of summer where I lived. I doubt that truck could make more than five miles a day at the rate it had to stop and minister to neighborhood kids, some of them well over the age of majority. I can just smell it. I can feel again the greasy sweat evaporating as I sit in a shady spot somewhere to eat my cone. It was a snack and air conditioning rolled into one. Actual AC was a thing reserved for theaters, and just the fancy downtown ones at that, where movies could cost as much as seventy-five cents for a single feature. We didn’t often get the benefit of that. Cooling off mostly involved sitting very still and hoping for a breeze.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, all kinds of merchants and craftspeople peddled their wares on neighborhood streets, mostly during the warmer months. Come June, there was the slow-rolling truck of the strawberry man, and his chant “strawBERRY, STRAWberry,” and if it weren’t for the siren song of Mr. Softee, that might well have been the most welcome sound of summer. Not far behind him was the vegetable man, as slow or slower, truck packed with stuff pulled from the ground that morning, scales dangling noisily from a home-made rack. And milk trucks, two or three competing varieties; we “took” Roberts, and thought Borden’s was inferior, and of course the opposite was true of the Borden’s loyalists. You kept a sort-of-insulated box on your porch, and every day you filled out a form telling the milkman what to leave. And he did. Years later, when my mother’s health deteriorated, the Roberts man would actually bring in her order and put it into the fridge for her.

It wasn’t just food, either. The knife sharpener rolled down the street once a week or so, and he would also sharpen your lawn mower blades. I’m talking about reel mowers, powered by whomever was pushing them. Sporadically, some gypsies would come along selling whatever, and kids, myself among them, joined the parade, mowing lawns for a buck a pop; in winter we switched to snow shoveling, same rate. A buck could buy you a coke, a burger, and a new baseball, on the rare occasions we ran completely out of baseballs found in the park, their leather covers half off. Duct tape fixed nearly everything.

People flogging brushes, cosmetics, encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, and god knows what all would regularly come to your door.  The mail came twice a day, six days a week. I still remember the air of shocked disbelief, almost betrayal, when the Post Office announced that Saturday mail would be cut to just one delivery. It is ironic that today, under pressure from Amazon, stuff gets delivered seven days a week, as many times as it takes to get it done, usually by the Post Office.

Well, it’s about this point in this kind of essay where you probably expect me to go on about how much more simple those times were. They weren’t. We were.

The truth is, much of that time was awful. Racism was not only the rule, but was unquestioned; black people were still getting lynched periodically. Police did exactly as they pleased, and politicians routinely stole elections, and everybody knew it, and nobody did anything about it. Anti-Semitism was considered only sensible. Nativism and religious prejudice were everywhere. My family was Catholic, and we were immigrants to boot. I will always remember the morning when I was eight or nine, when a canvasser for the Republican party came to the door, and before my mother could say anything, started on a spiel about how superior the party was, because it had no Jews, Catholics, or foreigners in it. My mother explained, in her thick accent, that we were two out of three. All of that sank in slowly, over a period of years.

My mother asked me one day, when I was in high school, why I was so surly all the time, when I used to be so cheerful. Why, indeed.

The Golden Age of anything, they say, is when you were young. Ignorance didn’t hurt, either.