Michael Gruber's Blog

It is by now a commonplace that we are in an epistemic crisis in America, the result of the siloing of the news, so that a big chunk of the country lives in an entirely different reality from the one inhabited by The Rachel Maddow Show on one hand and Sean Hannity’s show on the other.  No possible talking-heads-and-host show can change this, and the crisis might very well doom democracy here. The last time the integrity of the nation was so menaced, of course, was back in the 1850s around the issue of slavery. Between those who thought chattel slavery was insanely cruel and those who thought that it was the best thing for an inferior race, there could be no compromise. There could be clarification, though, which is what the Lincoln-Douglas Debates did. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” as Lincoln pointed out in those debates; it seems to me that our situation is frighteningly similar to his. Somehow the contending factions have to be brought together in a typically American way, which is why I think that television journalism should begin to stage serious debates.

By “serious debates” I don’t mean the somewhat silly ritual of competing one-liners we call debates during Presidential campaigns. I mean real debates, Lincoln-Douglas style, about the great issues that divide the nation.  Wouldn’t you like to see Rudy Giuliani defend “Resolved: the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump,” with Chris Krebs opposing?  Ted Cruz v. Elizabeth Warren on the role of government in the US economy? Or a serious debate about reproductive rights, or how to deal with gun violence, or whether climate change is a hoax, or whether masks work to stop the spread of the pandemic, with the most important proponents of differing views defending their positions, using actual evidence?

It will be argued that the current attention span of Americans is too short to support such a program. In response I’d point out that there are 24,000 high schools in the United States and over three thousand colleges, and that nearly every one of them has a debate club. (Both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren were champion college debaters.) There is in fact a lively formal debate culture in the US, which as far as I know has not been tapped by any media program. Beyond that, Americans love competitions, and it’s not essential to be up on the issues. Think of the millions of people who have been riveted by American Idol, Iron Chef, The Great British Baking Show, and Dancing With the Stars, even though they may know little of music, cooking, baking, or ballroom dancing. Americans will watch any fight, and if it’s staged right, it can be great television. That it might help to save the nation is lagniappe.

Will proponents of the major positions, especially those on the right, actually expose themselves in this way? I think they will, and, (remarkably!) the more extreme the more willing. When Deborah Lipstadt trashed the scholarship of the Holocaust denier, Clifford Irving, in her book, he volunteered to defend his theories in open court and under oath. While there’s still Holocaust denial, I think we can say there’s no longer respectable Holocaust denial; Irving largely vanished from decent intellectual society after that trial. But Lipstadt took a risk—the trial could have gone the other way; and liberals have to take a risk too.  

In fact, being open to opposing views seems to me the bedrock of liberalism; and liberals should back such a debate show as the ultimate answer to the canard that liberalism is just another name for cancel culture. We can’t just say that the views of millions of Americans are merely stupid. If we think our fellows citizens are in error, we owe it to the nation to allow the exposure of such errors in open, formal debate. Besides being great television, it would be new! And if libs are also making systematic errors, these should be exposed too.

Obviously, program design is a task.  There would be judges, as in competitive debate, but who would these be? Famous people or obscure ones?  How chosen, how many? Would they hold up scores, as in ice skating, or would the judges offer a brief analysis of the performance, as on American Idol. Would debaters lose points for, e.g. ad hominem arguing, or straw-men, or Irish bulls, or post hoc error? Would there be real-time fact checkers, and would their findings be incorporated in the score?  As we all learned a lot about baking on GBBS, we will all learn something about what constitutes a good argument, another thing the nation could use.

Across the street from our house is a social path that leads down to the shore of Lake Washington.  When I first came here over thirty years ago, it was a narrow bushwhacked cut that led down from the bluff our street sits on. Ordinarily you would have to loop a quarter mile or so north or south to reach the shore path, but here it’s a straight shot, less than a hundred yards. In years past I laid gravel and mulch on it to keep it from getting too muddy in the rains, but now much foot traffic has widened and compacted it so I don’t have to. The path is three feet across now, steep but not treacherous, and dug out a foot and a half below grade. A social path is what planners call a route chosen not by experts but by regular folk seeking a shortcut. Unlike the smashing of windows, is an example of how anarchy generates social benefits.

When the pandemic arrived in Seattle and the gyms closed, I started to walk a mile south on the shore path and back again, a reasonable approximation of the cardio I used to do at the gym, and of course, enormously more satisfying, even with the goddamn mask on.  I wear a mask even though the odds of picking up an effective dose of COVID in the lake’s breeze, under a sunny sky, are extremely small.  The odds are not the point. Posted signs say ‘Mask Up’ and advise social distancing.

Not every person I pass is masked. Old people like me are typically masked as are a good number of the younger walkers. Runners are almost never masked. The city closed Lake Washington Boulevard to vehicular traffic in the early summer, providing a broad boulevard for recreational walking and biking, but there is a breed of runner who chooses to run on the narrow pedestrian pathway, and so I am overtaken from time to time by sweaty folks blowing out air from the depths of their lungs, so close I can smell their scent through my mask. Coming toward me, the maskless seem either defiant or shamefaced, apologetic. The path is a tiny model of America now, with some clinging to “I’m free and can do as I please,” while others are “I’m a member of society and follow the rules.”

Occasionally, I get a nasty look from the maskless  young, and I suspect that there’s an element of resentment against the older generations involved in the refusal to mask up. (Die, Boomer! ) Well, soon enough, nor do I blame them at all. They want our hoarded fortunes released, and while they may like Mom, either they only see her in the hols, or they live in her basement, and would be a lot better off if Covid sent her away. Also, boomers are still in charge; the current Hellscape is on our watch. Still, I wish they would run out in the road.

I walk a mile out and back every day. I choose this route because there are seven benches in this mile, so if my body throws a rod I can sit and recover. When I was younger I sought novelty and traveled. Now, I like to focus on a tiny portion of the world. It doesn’t even have to be ‘interesting’ in the conventional sense;  in fact, it’s okay if it’s dull to the casual eye, like this mile through a neglected park.

The park is surely suffering from the pandemic too. The city is strapped, of course, and park maintenance is easy to cut. At worst, it is unlikely to kill anyone.  They send in a mower on occasion but not the weed-whackers and pruners. As a result the verges of the path are entering the first phases of the local climax succession.  Brome grasses usually trimmed to a few inches now grow to shoulder height. Trees, like the cherries and willows along the lake shore send up suckers and turn into hedges. The decorative plantings get smothered by weeds.

Then there are the blackberries. The Himalayan Blackberry is what the Northwest has instead of kudzu. Rubus armeniacus is a plant of epic invasiveness. It can throw a cane twenty feet into the air, in a parabola that can cross a roadway. When the tip hits the ground, it can burrow in, root itself, and move cross country underground. And, of course, it produces copious fruit, and so can spread even farther using the digestive tracts of animals. Yet it has a peculiar stinginess with its fruits. On any cluster of a dozen or so berries, only one or two will ripen at any one time, and even when they look black and bulging, they are not really ripe yet.  Bite into one and you immediately spit it out. This must be part of its fiendish plan to cover every square inch of real estate with itself.  Ripeness, when they melt in the mouth and deliver that sweet fruity taste, exists for at most half a day, after which they become stiff, inedible raisins. Why so mean, Rubus? And what’s with the thorns? If you wanted to deliver fruit to animals, why is your every inch covered with recurved thorns? That break off and burrow into the skin?  Yet another mystery of creation, like mosquitos and cancer.

As I began my walks, the blackberries became obvious. They hung down from the trees and got in your face. The runners left the strips of soil east of the path and began to cross the path itself.  In the Before Times the appropriate response would have been a stiff note to the Parks Department. But now, instead, I started carrying a Felco 4 pruner and cutting back the blackberry myself.  As everyone knows, the is a hopeless task. Given sunlight and water, blackberry canes can grow a foot a day; you can’t eliminate blackberries by pruning them. They have to be grubbed out by the roots, a semi-industrial operation requiring heavy machinery. But I wasn’t interested to getting rid of the berry. I was just interested in keeping it off my miles of path. Which I did.

It turns out that even the Plant from Hell can’t defeat an animal, if that animal puts in an hour or so each day. Along my mile, the browned, spiked cuttings I have kicked under the overhanging foliage form an almost continuous windrow under the berries, like rustic fencing for pixies. If I miss a day, there are canes falling from the sky and running out over the asphalt of the path. (I didn’t venture out during the week of the Big Smoke, but the berry didn’t like the smoke either, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I resumed.) My theory is that blackberries have a sort of consciousness. The plants are all connected, their roots intermingled and communicating via a vast array of chemical signals. By trimming every frond that ventures west, I’m conditioning the mega-plant to send more energy in other directions. Along certain stretches of the path, this seems to be working. The majority of the canes are moving toward where they don’t get cut; there are fewer canes trying to invade the path. The goal is to bring the blackberry into the discipline of a hedge. I get that this is impossible, like social democracy in America, but it engages me to try.

I’ve found that this assiduous pursuit of a hopeless task makes for a paradoxical happiness. This is not an original insight: Camus wrote a whole book about it. I don’t think about the absurdity much. It’s probably more absurd to lift weights in a gym or pump pedals on a bike that goes nowhere; at least my exercise regime is useful to others. Another advantage is invisibility. When we were kids we used to argue about what superpower was best—super strength, flying, x-ray vision, etc.—and I always went for invisibility, the only superpower that’s achievable in real life. There are a number of ways to be invisible in America, but being an old guy stooping over a horticultural task is a pretty good one. Perhaps one person in a thousand notices and understands what I am doing, and thanks me. The others drift by in the narcissistic bubble of the Americans, many sharing their thoughts at top volume into the air. 

People think of anarchy as fires and broken glass. But this is anarchy too, picking up a government function, unasked and unsupervised. I’ve noticed that some person or persons unknown is picking up trash, or at least the strewn trash doesn’t seem to be getting much worse, so maybe others are quietly, invisibly maintaining this public space.  Trivially speaking, it’s something to do instead of golf. More profoundly, it could be a key to reorganizing society as the fiscal crisis of the state kicks in for real.

When I think about the current wreckage of everything, and worry that it might get worse, I reflect on the day I was born, eighty years ago today. On October 1, 1940, Adolf Hitler, always a contender for History’s Worst Man, was the master of Europe. From the Channel to Poland, from Norway to North Africa, every European nation was either a province of the Reich, a conquest, an ally, or a friendly neutral. His only conceivable rival—Soviet Russia—was tied up in a mutual non-aggression pact. Only Britain held out as a combatant and the smart money, including the US ambassador to the UK, thought she could not last much longer.  Hitler had announced a that his regime would last a thousand years and there was no reason to believe otherwise. The blitz was on—no one imagined then that a nation could survive when thousands of tons of explosives were falling from the sky on its major cities almost every night. No one had imagined it, just as no one imagined what has happened to our country. Everyone in 1940 thought things could only get worse; there were waves of suicides. 

One of the advantages of old age is that you remember when things were even worse than they are today, from which this wisdom is derived: lighten up! Camus, who had actually lived through the Hell on Earth that many now fear may afflict our country, said, “The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.”  Why doubt him?

If you’re a subscriber to the New York Times, they will show you an image of every paper they have printed, starting 175 years ago and on to 2002. The headlines for the day I was born are about an RAF raid on Berlin, and a speech by the governor of New York arguing that FDR should have a third term because of the International crisis and the rise of fascism.   Also noted on that page were the increasingly warm relations between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. An intelligent observer would be justified in thinking that this pact represented the final failure of democracy—what power could confront this dual citadel of darkness?

The front page also reports that the investigation of Frank (“I am the Law”) Hague, boss of Jersey City, NJ,  for stuffing ballot boxes, is stymied by a fire that burned up all the election records, the fire apparently set by the clerk in charge. I mention this one to remind us that the corruption of American elections is not a new thing.

October 1, 1940, a Tuesday, is the beginning of Rosh Hashona, marking 5701 years since the Creation of the World. Today Albert Einstein becomes an American citizen. He had already written his letter to President Roosevelt warning of the possibility that the Nazis had a program to build a bomb of enormous power and that the US should start an atomic bomb program too. There is a half-page ad introducing homogenized milk. A drawing of an aproned mom giving same to her kids accompanies the text explaining how to pronounce the new word and describing the process. The mom and kids are white, as is every other model in an ad and every person in every photo. In the world of the New York Times, on October 1, 1940, there are no people who are not white. The other people are not part of the record of history.

On October 1, 1940, the Times reports that the German military government of Warsaw has decreed that all Polish citizens must henceforth ride in the back of streetcars, reserving the front for German personnel. They got this idea—humiliation by transportation—from us.

Ten years later my family was living in the Deep South and I was able to experience the unbearable creepiness of Jim Crow—creepy even for a white kid. What it was like for a black kid, I never knew, because I never had a chance to meet one. Unlike my peers, I had not been imbued with the art of not paying attention to what was going on and the whole business was batshit crazy to me. In 1950, It seemed like lasting forever but it did not; in my lifetime it vanished like a bad dream. The wisdom here is that anything can be changed given enough people with enough determination and discipline; and, of course, the willingness to be jailed or die.  Also, radical change takes time to permeate. The Times has an ad this day for Gone With the Wind, still at the Astor after more than a year, but closing in two weeks. (It opened again, however, and you can enjoy its racist nonsense anytime you like on a home screen.)

Also on the front page on October 1, 1940, the House Un-American Activities Committee is investigating Nazis in German-American organizations.  After the war, the committee will investigate communists, or people who might have been communists, or people who might have just not liked fascists, a little too prematurely,  Martin Dies, the committee chairman would be ably assisted in his fight against domestic communism by one Senator in particular, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

It is difficult at this remove to summon the qualms this fellow provoked during the decade of his influence, as the chief symbol of the great Red Scare of the 1950s. I was not personally affected but I had a pal whose dad had been fired from his job as a school teacher because of suspect activities in the 1930s, and was reduced to menial work—no one would give a professional job to a ‘communist,’ meaning someone who would not implicate others while under investigation.  I first witnessed actual want in that household, and the air of hopeless desperation that lay thick on it. Many people believed that McCarthy was another Hitler, presaging a turn toward fascism. Others thought him the savior of America.

But McCarthy blew up, exposed in public hearings and by journalists, and his power vanished like Jim Crow did, another awakening from nightmare. Today the main reminder of his fearful apex is the most famous protégé of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief of staff, who is now the President of the United States.  

Another thing learned over years: troubles pass away and often the worst does not happen. Sound banal? Yeah, all this shit seems banal to me too. That’s why the word banal was invented, so we could ignore the deep wisdom that every generation learns, and which is nearly impossible to convey to the next. 

On October 1, 1940, the Times reports, General George Caitlin Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, announces the new commanders of the army he was building. The US army, which had numbered around 150,000 just a few tears ago, was growing into a modern force of 1.1 million, a spectacular achievement. I sometimes like to think of what George C. Marshall—a man of supreme decency, competence, and courage—would have to say about some of the characters hanging around national security in the current administration. Of the generals he named, some are familiar and had good wars. Others were canned for incompetence when they had to lead troops in combat. That was another thing about the era of my birth: people who fucked up got fired, they were ruined. Now, we don’t want to play the blame game. Why the hell not? 

But then there’s Frank Hague, and there’s the naked, outright, corruption, double-dealing and trading money for influence that characterized American politics at that time. Plus the outright n-hollering, the lynching, the naked unashamed racism. Another banality: some things about the past were better than they are at present, and some were far worse. Reactionaries who moon over the past and radicals who reject it categorically seem both of them wrong to me. I say that as someone who has lived virtually all of his life in the past.

In societies where the future is expected to be much like the present and the past, the old are a precious cultural resource, especially in non-literate people.  But with us, everyone understands that the present is nothing like the past and the future will be nothing like the present, and that therefore the experience of the old is useless. And it is true that the old find it hard to surf the relentless torrent of innovation. For example, I find myself absolutely cut off from popular culture. I haven’t known who the leading popular singers are for fifty years. I watch movies and I can’t understand what’s going on or why anyone would want to watch that movie. My use of information technology is primitive; I have no brand. I used to write for Wired; now I can hardly read it.This is, of course, common. I recall that Freud, who died in 1939, never saw a movie, and that my mother never quite got the Beatles, although she was encyclopedic on swing and Latin dances. 

But here’s a curious thing. Somehow we’re back in the 1930’s again. History is repeating itself, as Marx famously predicted, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The day I was born, the tragedy was in full spate, with fascism flooding Europe, and strong everywhere, including here, as the Times reports. So to the present farce.

The first thing is—and this is the central wisdom of age—things end. As he said himself, someday it will go away, it’s like a miracle. On October 1, 1940, practically no one on earth could imagine an end to fascist domination. It might really have lasted a thousand years, because—and it may be hard to understand this—lots of people really loved fascism. It was thrilling in its performance (those uniforms, those parades!) and successful in its wars. It kindled intense patriotism and absolved people of the painfulness of making decisions. It fought anomie.  It had a powerful intellectual backing from some of the brightest people of the age. Best of all, it designated an Other who could be abused with impunity and upon whom one could blame all the troubles of life. What’s not to like? And almost all the powerful people defended it, and after all, monarchy used to be a thing and it lasted more than a thousand years, and slavery, ditto, and that lasted four hundred. Henceforth, this was how things were to be, world without end.

But as we know, that tragedy had a happy ending. By my fifth birthday, fascism had vanished utterly as an expansive force or a threat to the world. Throughout the vast realm that Hitler had controlled it was difficult to find anyone who had supported him. 

What will become of the current farce remains, of course, an open question. People on both sides of the divide now suffer from an excess of scenarios. One set of scenarios leads to something like Lebanon or Yugoslavia, a riven nation, with artillery falling on pleasant urban precincts. Another set leads to Argentina, Chile, or El Salvador—the deep night of full-on repression, imprisoning of the opposition, disappearances, torture prisons, the crushing of all dissent. We might actually get to experience the horrors our foreign policies imposed on other nations. We will finally get to see how we would have behaved in Casablanca. Or we might form an authoritarian axis with Russia and China and keep that going for generations, Orwell’s “boot in the face, forever.” Authoritarian oligarchies are very stable. Rome lasted 700 years, Venice a thousand. There are scenarios where Trump and his family end up hanging naked from lampposts, and there are others in which he retires into his own show on Fox, where people call him “sir” all the time. Still others laud him as the far-seeing founder of a white empire. No one can tell which will be our fate, and that’s what makes for our constant, wasting agita.

I was born in the second administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and there is a fair chance that I will die in the second administration of the present guy. Thus the arc of American history over one lifetime!  It’s hard to convey now how disgraced the rightists were after the war, how solid the liberal establishment seemed, and how impossible the current situation still seems to me. But I admit to a prejudice for political happy endings, despite what I’ve lived though, the assassinations and the stupid wars. It happened that I was a kid in the infantry when the Cuban missile crisis hit. They cancelled all leaves, and they started to scrub the peacetime marking off planes at the airbase nearby. According to unofficial sources, we were going in the third wave, right after the Marines and airborne. We dodged that one, and the 60s riots didn’t destroy the country, and George Wallace didn’t become president and Nixon didn’t prevail. Yes the country is ruined; but like the man said, there’s a lot of ruin in a country. 

So I have to believe that the world I won’t live to see will eventually right itself, that the conditions that allowed two entirely different universes of fact to exist simultaneously will be resolved, that the kids I see around here, my granddaughter’s generation, will be called to heroism, like my parents’ generation was, and bring about the necessary, agonizing revolutions. This is not to ignore the possibility that things may become very bleak before that. When I was born, people were learning that they still could live their lives even though planes were dropping tons of high explosive on their cities every night, even though before that everyone had been sure that this would reduce any population to abject surrender.  Again, and yet again, the harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.

I am a city boy, born and bred, and I have never lived on a farm. I don’t know any farmers and know nothing concrete about farming, except that everything I eat starts out on a farm, and that farmers buy everything retail, sell everything wholesale, and pay freight both ways. Farming is practiced in rural America, where if they are not farming they are mining, or extracting, or making things in factories, or doing other rural stuff. I am pretty ignorant about all that too. What I do know about the rural comes from movies, fiction, and country music. The tone of all these is largely one of complaint: these people work hard, harder than what the city people do, and are largely unappreciated by them, although urban life is made possible by that labor.  Oftentimes I detect also a certain contempt for those who live softer, more secure lives. I don’t know whether actual rural folks feel like that.

I’ve been thinking about farmers lately because my country is now ruled by people largely elected by farmers, or at least rural communities dominated by farming and extractive industry.  The famous map that rightists are always exhibiting, the sea of red that shows Trump winning all but 200 or so US counties in 2016, demonstrates this, and also the rural advantage built into the US Constitution.  Most people were from farming communities back in 1789, and the Framers reflected that majority; and even back them, there was a sense that farmers got a raw deal, and were taken advantage of by those who knew how to grow money instead of wheat. A 1787 rebellion in rural Massachusetts was one of the scary events that led to the adoption of the Constitution. The first rebellion under the Constitution was also by rural people, these protesting the federal tax on whiskey. 

Nor has the tradition of rebellion in the hinterland ever vanished. One reason banking reform in the Great Depression was so urgent was that farmers were appearing armed at foreclosure auctions and threatening people who bid on the indebted properties. Rural dudes armed with machine guns were robbing banks.  And despite all the New Deal programs and subsidies, rural America is still pissed off, it seems. 

Oddly, at least to me, the ire seems to be directed against Washington and government bureaucrats and people who live in big coastal cities, and not against the corporate interests who most affect their lives. This was not always the case. Rural people were radicalized from the 1890s through the 1930s—they saw the banks, the railroads and Wall Street as their natural opponents. Now they’re all Republicans.  This confuses me.  Do they think that the party that has historically represented business and banking has developed a soft spot for family farmers and industrial workers?  Or maybe it’s the social issues. Abortion and unfamiliar sexual activity are more bad than economic survival or a better deal for rural America are good?  

I have no answers, but I would bet someone does have an idea for how to make this all come out right for rural people. Any such plan must include exposing the center of the country to the new economic realities.  The fossil fuel and extractive industries have to be set on a course to extinction, and the burdens of this transformation can’t be borne by the workers in those industries and their families. Big plant manufacturing isn’t coming back, except via robots. Can we even conceive of how to create a livable, prosperous city where the main ‘employer’ has no actual employees? We’ll have to.

Farmers have to be responsible for the ecological impact of their pesticides and the run-off from their farms and their over-use of aquifers, and these changes can’t be paid for exclusively by farmers. The whole monocultural-industrial form of agriculture doesn’t seem sustainable in the long run. It’s not good for the land, nor for the people who eat the kind of American diet that sort of agriculture makes almost requisite. Big changes have to come, and it’s liberal America who’s going to pay for them, because we got the money. Those 200 counties Trump didn’t win account for a third to a half of national income. Ever notice that the blue states are richer than the red states (except Texas)?  Right now, some woman in a Boston office is paying for the treatment of a Kentucky miner, and this transfer is going have to become even larger. That’s right libs—every day you’re saving the lives of people who hate you. Get used to it.

Obviously, it’s much easier to pander to the folks in the middle of the country, to tell them that yesterday will return (although they were pissed off yesterday too!) and that we can keep cranking out fossil fuels and cheap meat forever. But, the creative destruction at the heart of capitalism doesn’t work if those destroyed are not made whole in a creative way. It would be better if America were an actual democracy, because in a democracy, sooner or later, the nation moves in a way that makes the people better off, and not just materially.

And it’s possible that democracy will come to America one day, after, perhaps, some very dark times. These will fall most heavily on the people in the middle of our country, who have already been battered so much, and who still vote reliably for their own destruction.  L. Cohen wrote a song on the subject with a line in it that I’ve always liked. He wrote of democracy…

      It’s coming to America first.

      The cradle of the best and the worst.

      It’s here they’ve got the range,

And the machinery for change

And it’s here they got he spiritual thirst.

I hope we still have the range and that the machinery still works. I have seen enormous changes in my own lifetime and I have little doubt that even greater ones are coming that I won’t see.  Yet the study of history suggests that there was never a flourishing cosmopolis that did not rest on a flourishing hinterland. If we don’t fix the center, then the delightful coasts will wither and their politics will be be  crushed by the rage of flyover country.

I met Bill Ruckelshaus, who died last week, in 1983, or around then, when he came to rescue the Environmental Protection Agency from the criminals that President Reagan had placed in charge of it. Connoisseurs of ancient scandal will recall that the Administrator of the EPA, Ann Burford Gorsuch (the mom of the current SCOTUS justice) and eleven of the twelve most senior political appointees had all been indicted for various forms of malfeasance and crookery. I happened to be writing speeches for the sole survivor, and when Bill returned to the EPA he asked this person to recommend a speech writer and the guy recommended me.

So, if you know anything about Washington DC you know that the most precious commodity in any federal outfit is face time with the chief, and so his scheduler had to squeeze me in, and the only spare minute to be had was a ride back from Washington National Airport. Bill was about to give the first major speech of his new tenure, and it had to be a good one. As I recall he said what he wanted to say and I told him he couldn’t say it in that way, and then told him what I thought he should say. It’s to Bill’s great credit that he didn’t toss me out of the car. 

Unlike many Washington political appointees, Bill had no problem getting his point across in public.  In fact, Bill was one of the best ex tempore speakers I ever heard, witty, smart and self-effacing, not the usual combo in DC. I once heard him introduced to a convocation of Fortune 500 executives, where the  introducing bigwig presented his golden resumé—head of the FBI, founding administrator of the EPA, Deputy Attorney General, Attorney General (“for three minutes,” as he would say) and on an on. When Bill took the podium and the applause died down, he said, “And . . . I am a notary public.”

But speeches by cabinet officers are not just personal expressions. They’re policy-making devices, marching orders for the troops, priority-setters, and messages to stakeholders. In many government agencies the public affairs office writes the speeches, but Bill wanted a policy guy to do his and so I got the job. I became his regular speechwriter, during his stint at EPA Administrator and for some years thereafter, when he was a corporate CEO. The relationship between a speechwriter and the principal is essentially weird, a combination of intellectual intimacy and, on the writer’s part, extreme self-effacement.  The speechwriter may get more face-time with the boss than all but the most senior aides, but he can never make political use of it to push an agenda. Despite this, everyone wants to be the speechwriter’s best friend, everyone has an idea about what the big kahuna should say. 

Bill understood all this and thought it was amusing. He occasionally accused me of slipping anarcho-syndicalist ideas into the speeches. In fact, I think he enjoyed having a somewhat lefty speechwriter in the midst of the Reagan administration. He was not himself an ideologue. As far as I could tell his political philosophy was based on patriotism and pragmatism. He thought America was the place that the big problems got solved and he thought the agency he led twice was capable of solving one of the biggest—how to run an advanced economy without destroying the basis of human life and health. 

He thought polluting capitalism could be reformed via intelligent regulation and his major effort at EPA was focused on corralling corporate titans into sharing that belief. He thought the future belonged to the clean, that economic development had to be environmentally sustainable.  I imagine he was frustrated by the inability of his fellow Republicans to see it that way, although he was always pointing out that conservation was a conservative invention, that both the National Park system and the EPA itself were Republican creations. He often complained that corporate America was all for the environment until a right-wing government came along, in which case they would lobby like mad to be as filthy as possible. Despite this, he retained an abiding faith in the ability of opposing forces to hammer out deals, and he did so hammer, both on the national level and locally, when he returned to the Puget Sound region.

One reason why he could bring to the table people who had been fighting each other for years was his personal integrity. He was the classic honest broker, but beyond that he sort of radiated decency. I’m sure a Marxist would have something to say about the social damage done by classic conservatism, but that didn’t seem relevant where he was concerned. He’d famously walked away from one of the most prestigious jobs in Washington rather than do something he thought wrong. Do we still have people like that? 

Sometimes he seemed antique, even in his own time, like a fictional character from a Jimmy Stewart movie, a kind of American ideal. I once asked him if he would ever write his memoirs, but he never did. He did pick a title, though, “Night Thoughts of a Hoosier Gentleman,” which says something about how seriously he took himself. Another time I asked him why he wasn’t in office, suggesting that he would not be out of place in the Senate or the White House, and he said he just couldn’t stand spending most of his time on the phone asking people for money., which is another indication of the kind of person he was, and a partial explanation of why the country is in its current state.

When he was Administrator, he had a reproduction of Holbein’s St. Thomas More, the “man for all seasons” hanging outside his office door. I always thought it was aspirational, the public servant as martyr, at least potentially. It seems to me now that if our nation is to survive in anything like the form we’ve known it, it’s going to need a lot more people like Bill Ruckelshaus. His passing left a big hole in many lives, mine included, and maybe an even bigger one in the national fabric

Recently, I put up four of my unpublished novels on Amazon in Kindle and publish-on-demand paperback versions. The books are out there, and now I am encouraged to market them. Here’s an example of such encouragement, picked at random from many such: 

 “Achieving publishing success is 5% writing a good book and 95% marketing.” If you like to get out there and hustle — “eat, breathe, sleep, and live your book” — this is a fun way to make a living.”

It is not fun to me and I won’t do it, for the same reason that I don’t use the self-checkout machines at the grocery store.  Checking out is not my job and neither is doing book publicity.  I don’t think this is being precious, like, I’m so grand as an “author” that I can’t stoop to marketing, nor is it a horror of engagement with the public, of the kind associated with Pynchon or Salinger. I have happily shown up for readings, including those where two people were the audience, I’ve gladly given interviews, some of which still float wanly on the Internet, and if someone writes to me I always answer. I get that participation of this type comes with the job.

But not this new apparatus of personal branding that social media make possible. I get that things have changed. I’m in the generation of writers caught in that change, with the result that after nearly thirty years of making a good living doing nothing but writing fiction I can’t sell a book.  I admit to confusion, but not regret. I had a terrific career as a writer, and if it’s over, so what?  In this I am brother to pro footballers—lots of money and then you’re done. Fun fact: about as many Americans make a decent living as authors of fiction as play in the NFL, maybe 1200 people. This number may rise if self-publishing takes off, but I believe I will miss that flight.

My last novel came out in 2013.  The publisher, for reasons of his own, decided to release it with no publicity at all. I paid a firm in New York a good deal of money to push the book, with no discernible effect on sales, which were below dismal. With such numbers, no New York publisher would touch my later work, which is why these four book are available only through selfies on Amazon.  

Again, I totally get this, and that this is just the nature of the business now. Beyond that, I have also had to recognize that whatever the merits of my writing, I can’t seem to write books that lots and lots of people want to read, nor do I have enough purely literary inventiveness to attract the attention of literati. I’m a cult author. A small number of people really like my real stuff, which is another reason I think putting a lot of energy into expanding my base is futile. Here I am one with the President.

The other reason is that I’m too old to be comfortable in social media. I can’t care what anonymous people think about me.  I did read Amazon reviews when they were written by staff, but not since. I don’t consult the stats to find where I rank among other books in the genre.  I do hope people enjoy these books. I hope I sell lots of them, but if I don’t, no problem. As I wrote when I released the novels, I felt I was just doing a service for the cult: you like my stuff, I’m glad, here’s some more.  I guess that’s my brand.

Even if Mr Trump gets his justice on board the Court, it is doubtful that the new rightist majority will literally overturn Roe v Wade. One reason for this is that Justice Roberts understands the history of the SCOTUS and knows that the Court cannot get too far ahead of the opinions of the population. This may be called the Dred Scott lesson. In ruling in 1857 that no Negro could be a United States citizen and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the territories that might become new states, it outraged the majority of the American population, so much so that for two generations after the Civil War the Supreme Court was not of much account. Congress and the states took the reins and passed the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, essentially erasing the Scott decision. 

Plessey v Ferguson is the counter-example. In upholding de jure segregation of the races the Court was reflecting what most Americans believed, north and south. The North chose to segregate by custom and practice, but there was no essential disagreement about the status of African-Americans.  Sixty years after that, the majority of Americans thought that southern Jim Crow was a disgrace and made the Cold War more difficult. The Court responded with Brown. 

Right now, polls show that only 18 per cent of Americans want a complete ban on legal abortion, while near seventy per cent want at least some legal abortion. Justice Roberts would be stupid to allow a formal overturn of Roe, and he’s not, plus he has a genuine concern with the reputation of the court. Instead, the abortion right will be hollowed out, so that eventually, American women will retain the right to have an abortion, but will not in practice be able to obtain a legal one, at least not in many states. Of course, once Roe is thus gutted, a Republican Congress may pass a law making almost all abortions illegal nationwide.

Such a law will have approximately the same effect on the number of abortions performed on American women as the prohibition of alcohol had on the number of American drunks. It is almost an iron law of policy that when you move a much-desired activity from some form of social control (abortion clinics, saloons) to the illegal zone, the level of that activity increases rather than decreases. It will prove so with abortion too.

Let’s also note that abortion restrictions apply in practice exclusively to poor women. Any woman with the price of a plane ticket to Canada, Mexico, Europe or the islands need fear nothing from any anti-abortion law whatever. Were this not so, there would be no anti-abortion movement, because the anti-abortion Congressman’s daughter must have an out when knocked up by an unsuitable guy.  Why a large portion of America wants poor women to bear unwanted children is something of a mystery. Maybe they think that those snotty rich college girls screwing everyone will get their comeuppance. (They won’t.) Maybe it’s simple revenge: the liberals took away our Precious (the right to legally abuse black people) and so we’re gong to take away theirs. Maybe they cannot distinguish between an actual huggable cooing baby and a microscopic object, Or maybe there is a genuine religious horror, such that they believe they have the right to impose the religious belief that human life begins at conception upon people who do not believe it.  Whatever the reason, the hopes of those who believe that overturning Roe will reduce American abortions will be terribly disappointed.

Meanwhile, as the clinics shut down, a mass movement will develop to provide abortions to poor women, very like the Underground Railway that formed in reaction to the Fugitive Slave laws in the 1850s. Then as now, the conflict sprang from an irreconcilable difference in definitions. If blacks were mere property, then the slaveowner had every right to go into a free state and seize that piece of it. It was no different from reclaiming a horse or cow. But to many in the North, a human being could not be property, whatever the law said, and the slave-catcher was thus the worst villain. In our time, if you believe any zygote or fetus whatever has the same right to life as a human being, then the abortionist is the worst villain, and if you believe that the zygote or fetus is not a human until quite late in development then you will defend a woman’s right to decline carrying it.

There will be big money devoted to this cause. There will be a national number to call (1-800-BABYNOT) and there will be couriers and cars moving through the night, bringing drugs in and women out. There will be secret abortion sites in homes, and a corps of volunteers. When people are arrested, there will be nullifying juries. No better recruiting ground for the Democratic Party can be imagined than this mass volunteer organization.  Sixty-nine per cent of America is a lot of people and it is absurd to think they will stand for the imposition of a prohibition regime. 

That’s the nice part. The nasty part is that the guys who supply cocaine and heroin and meth will be happy to add another product to their line, and services too.  Everyone in town will know how to get pills, and the person to talk to if you’re too far gone for pills. There will be frank infanticides and dead women in motels. This too will effect the morale of many people who refer to themselves as pro-life.  It will be another American tragedy, like Prohibition and the drug war. Humans will be ground up and babies will not be saved. After a while, the whole thing will fade away, like the Temperance Party and the practice of jailing people for smoking pot or wearing a one-piece bathing suit. 

But the women won’t forget.

Why has America stopped being able to solve problems? Not just wage stagnation, but everything. International statistics are shocking. Despite funding the mightiest military in the world and having the highest GDP, we suck in virtually every measure of well being and civilization:  education, health outcomes, infant mort, happiness and contentment, homicide rates, investment in infrastructure, whatever, it’s the same story.  Why can't we fix the schools? The whole education debate, the flailing, the grasping for some measurable progress, is entirely dispiriting. Our single pathetic effort to bring us a little closer to international best practices in providing health care to everyone in the nation was attacked by a major political party as the work of Satan. 

I believe the reason for this is that a large portion of the nation including some of its most powerful figures does not really want the problems solved.  There are people in this country who, were America to devolve into a giant Guatemala, would not be displeased.  There is a long tradition in America that from time to time a powerful brew of xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoia, jingoism, often with religious overtones, bursts into political prominence. We live in such an era. Rational conservatism has been swamped by an ideology so bizarre and so detached from reality that it borders on the insane. It is a marvel of the current Right that it has been able to combine the most freewheeling feral economic polices with a social agenda bent on bringing back the governmental repression of the fifties. How? Through forcing a set of religion-derived restrictions on the personal liberty of unbelievers, using the bayonets of the state. It would be ludicrous were it not so tragic. 

It feels like a St Joan moment. Our barons are trying to get the dauphin crowned and they just can’t do it, and then in walks the Maid, and everything is accomplished.  Obviously, we don’t require a literal maid, although we have observed in recent years young women on the march and clearly women will bear the brunt of the coming repression and so have a direct interest. That this occurs together with the safe space/hypersensitive syndrome among many women is yet another proof that God has a sense of humor. (Feminism’s task in the coming century will be to figure out how these two irreconcileable views contribute to what we consider political feminism. 

But Joan of Arc, WTF!  It actually happened. A girl of seventeen came out of nowhere and convinced the French barons to give her armor and to let her lead their armies, this in a society that makes our present patriarchy look like Bryn Mawr. And those horrid, brutal men listened to her because they were stuck and they thought they could control her. After she had achieved her simple goal the bubble she had created in the patriarchy collapsed. The lords came back to their senses and were done taking orders from a bitch of the canaille and so got rid of her. To save their pride they said she’d used witchcraft to do her deeds. 

What witchcraft now will save us, I don’t know. Obviously social media will be a major part of it and I’m too old to really get social media. I hope a revolution or a civil war is not necessary, because I’m old and don’t want to spend my golden years crouching in a basement while the bombs rain down. But it may come to that because in America today a majority is being constrained by a minority. That’s why voter suppression, that’s why gerrymandering. Such arrangements are not stable. Either representative government vanishes (see Russia, Turkey) or the majority asserts itself (see South Africa or our Civil War).

I can’t bring myself to believe that representative government will really vanish, so things will probably work out okay in the end. This recent thing with the stolen migrant children is a sign that we still have the will to say, “Wait, are you crazy!” Some things are still beyond the pale, and we also got to see at least some of our fellow citizens appear on video to say they thought it was a good thing to steal kids from mothers and that they should all be shot anyway, which confirms, if anyone were still in doubt, that an American Belsen would staff up with ease.

 But I also think we will not get out of this without some bad things happening. I’m old enough to remember cities burning and paratroopers and tanks in American streets, and this and worse may happen again. 

Afterward, we’ll sit in the ashes and figure it out. Pragmatism runs deep in the American psyche. It’s our only native philosophy and it’s who we are as a nation. Immigrants come from Mr Trump’s shithole countries and suddenly, miraculously, they’re pragmatists too—trying stuff out, inventing, building things from taco wagons to Google. One day, I hope, pray and believe, we will awaken from the fever dreams of ideology, stand gaping in the ruins, and say, “Let’s fix this shit!” Then we’ll be Americans again.

The consensus among foreign policy wonks is that the President is a fool or nuts and is being played by Putin and Kim. But maybe not so. Mr Trump is naturally drawn to objects of his envy. He certainly did not expect the Constitutional constraints on his power and has worked assiduously to remove them. Kim and Putin are _aspirational_ for him. He has already advanced far toward this goal, discrediting the free press and undermining the Mueller investigation. I know people are thinking, oh, Mueller will save us or 2018 will save us, but this thinking disregards Mr Trump's clear intent. He thinks the way NK and Russia are run is a _better_ way than Constitutional government.

Putin and Kim understand this and realize that they can arrange things so that Mr Trump stays in power indefinitely and they have the ability to make him look good, which is all that ever really counts with this President. They also have the ability to mess with our elections at a level even greater than what occurred in 2016 Trump's new pal, NK, has some of the best hackers in the world, and Russia has already started. Mr Trump may feel he has gotten away with it--a foreign power has delivered him into the Presidency and there is no reason why this help should not continue.

So we see the emergence of a Trump Doctrine, in which the liberal order and the nations that espouse it--America's historic allies in Western Europe, the Americas, and Asia--are abandoned and a new authoritarian axis comprising the USA, Russia, NK, and Israel becomes the basis of American foreign policy. This policy will back suppression of liberty, disrupt liberal societies, and make war on the Muslim world, especially Iran. It will be kleptocratic in its essence, oppressive in its practice, and religious in its presentation.

In America, the FBI will become indistinguishable from the Russian FSB, the free press will be destroyed, elections will no longer matter, corruption will be pervasive, inequality will assume 19th century levels, as will sexual and racial repression. The world will finally come to resemble the one described in the final lines of Orwell's 1984: two totalitarian blocs (in our case the New Axis and China) locked in endless conflict and mankind with the boot in its face, forever. 

OTOH, 1940 was a pretty bad year too, and so were 1948, and 1968. End of the world predictions were rife; and then unexpected things happened and life went on in a different direction than the pundits had direly predicted. You gotta have hope, stupid as that may sound.

About three-quarters of a century ago, I learned to read. The first word I learned to read was 'MILK' an easy one that appeared on the bottle that graced our breakfast table every morning. I had already learned the alphabet song and understood that reading was a thing because I had been read to often, but this was the first time I had put together letters out in the world with a word I knew. I felt quite pleased with myself, as was my mother, and I immediately started on "homogenized," with which she was happy to supply a little help. I was just three.

After that I read comic books in numbers and then library books, mostly trash, I'm afraid, because we were not a literary family. I was one of those kids who was eternally reading and I regarded orders to get out and get some fresh air as a kind of condemnation, like jail. Time spent not reading was a waste of time. This continued throughout my life. It was a kind of torture to be stranded without access to text. In some strange city, bookless, I've walked through rainstorms to find a bookstore or a newsstand. I have never been hooked on smack, but there are commonalities here.

There are probably five thousand books now in my house, stuffed bookcases in almost every room, I live in a city with excellent bookstores and of course there is Amazon. In the past, it was not unusual for me to read ten books a week, plus every word in a short stack of journalism each day, week or month. Thus it was a surprise when I discovered I no longer took pleasure in reading. I have maybe twenty books sitting on various household surfaces that I've never picked up, or started and dropped after a few chapters. I will probably never re-read any of the thousands on the bookshelves. Oddly, I'm not too upset about this.I don't think it's dementia, actually. I read the occasional article on the news feed, and comment, and I try to keep up with what's happening, although I am cancelling some subscriptions now.

I'm still writing, strangely enough. I haven't been very successful in getting published recently, but I find I barely care anymore. It's like Anna Kamieńska says, "My hand craves writing like the woodcutter's hand craves an axe. Only this reminds me that I am alive."  Reading has always been a part of this, sometimes comically, as when I discover I have started to write in the style of the last author I read, but no longer.  I think maybe I read enough books now. I'm baked. 

So what to do now with the time freed up? Not a problem: it turns out that age accelerates time and eliminates the notion of boredom, because one is so damn glad to be alive. A day lasts maybe three hours, which involves twenty minutes of writing and the rest taken up with required chores, meals, TV, (the wonderful-horrible soap opera thriller that is our national life these days) and relationship, and then it's bed time again. Where went all those idle hours in a comfy chair, flicking pages?

So I am kind of looking forward to what comes next. It's said that in the East it's expected that after a lifetime of productive work, an individual will retreat from the world into contemplation of what cannot be put into words. Perhaps the end of reading is an initial phase of this process. So, bye-bye books, nice knowing ya, thanks for the memories, and have a nice life.