R.I.P. 2025

 In  some of the lists of Notable Deaths of 2025 published in various newspapers and other outlets on the Internet, I'm just starting to see some names of people I know little or nothing about.  That proportion will undoubtedly grow for however many more of these I will view in the future.  But for now, the lists are still dominated by names I know very well, and people I may even have encountered in my life.

For example, I once was walking into the West Village in Manhattan with two young women, both writers at the Village Voice, from the West 4th Street subway station down towards Bleeker Street, when on a patch of grass between buildings we saw someone with a cardboard box that was filled with kittens.  We paused a moment, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple beside us stop to look.  I didn't recognize the man but the woman was definitely Diane Keaton, just months after her breakout performance in Annie Hall.  I glanced at my companions, who were so engrossed in their New York conversation that they didn't notice anything.  When I looked back, Diane and her companion were hurrying across the street, and around the next corner.  

I've seen her other movies with Woody Allen (she was even funnier in Love and Death) and many of her later films, and read with admiration her book, Then Again.  Once her death was announced, we watched again her 2003 movie with Jack Nicholson, Something's Gotta Give. It may be her best performance in a very good movie. In Annie Hall days she was a kind of model for some young women and a heartthrob for a certain kind of young man (we were born the same year) but for me she also became somebody I paid attention to over the years, because she was so uniquely herself, sensitive, smart and adventurous.  She was probably also high maintenance but I'll bet she was a fascinating friend.

There were other people who died this year I especially admired.  I've already written at length about Bill Moyers, who died last summer.  Months later I realize more acutely that we now have no one like him, and it seems unlikely we ever will.  Rachel Maddow is carving out her own importance in more ways than one, but there's nobody with Moyers' breadth and depth, his abilities as an interviewer and his incisive writing.  I wouldn't like to imagine my life and who I would be without all those years of Moyers.

In her long life, Jane Goodall did so much for what's been called the more than human world--a true inspiration for young people passionate about saving the variety, the beauty and the viability of the planet. When Native American stories and writers burst into TV and film in the 1990s, actor Graham Greene was always there, bringing incisive life to this important moment.  

Robert Redford was a fine actor, a great movie star (some say the last) with a vibrant intelligence both contemporary and classic.  He not only made All the President's Men; he made it happen. I guess my secret favorite of his films is The Electric Horseman, though Three Days of the Condor is maybe his most perfect film.  Though I expect the one closest to his secret self was Jerimiah Johnson.

The Princess Bride, as directed by Rob Reiner, is on a lot of favorite movies lists as well as mine, but the William Goldman book is already a great template. Reiner found another great writer in Aaron Sorkin for the other of his movies on my list of favorite, The American President.  That movie probably birthed The West Wing television series as well.  

In their public lives these were all good people, and forces for good that continue to sustain those of us who were around when they were active, and can serve as inspiration for the young.

When last December I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists--it led to a couple of months reading all his work, both books I'd read before and those I hadn't, which then resulted in two essays posted on another blog.  This December I've already embarked on a reading (and viewing project), exploring the life, thoughts and works of playwright Tom Stoppard.  It's going to take awhile.  I've started by re-reading the beginning of Hermione Lee's fine biography, and stopping at the points where a play appears, and then reading that play.

All I can say now is that from the first moment I heard about his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- I knew he was a playwright after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time.  I came to admire other playwrights of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard. 

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: that ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams, with further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy.  These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts.  Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook.  And the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience. 

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories.  Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Besides, it appears he was also left-handed and right-eared, with even less digital tech than I have.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer.  Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information.  He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write."  That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion."  I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event."  That event is the production, the performance.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few productions: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.) 

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil,  the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and  his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard had previously written the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.)  Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End.  I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

There are one or two of his other television plays on YouTube, and a few of his radio plays, including Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon.  For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and delicate dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time.  But all his plays had laughs.  The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."  

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town.  What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays.  I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one. 

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust.  The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.   Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself.  He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88.  "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..."  He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone.  He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment.  A lot of people are missing him.  He's not coming back.  Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future. 

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words.  The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

R.I.P. Clayton Davis (1947-2025)

In terms of years of acquaintance rather than age, I lost my oldest friend this passing year. I first remember Clayton Davis from our fourth grade at Sacred Heart School, when after Christmas we suddenly had a teacher who for the first time wasn’t a nun, but a tall blond young woman named Miss White. 

 For awhile we and some other classmates escorted her on her walk home after school—the girls walking with her while the bedazzled and confused boys shambled behind, until the point where Miss White sent us back. Once on our return walk I recall I accompanied Clayton to his house, and I met his mother and the first group of what would eventually be his nine siblings. They would be a part of my life for a long time.

 His family moved away but Clayton and I became reacquainted at Greensburg Central Catholic High School. We were in the same year and we had most of the same classes. We shared the jubilation of the Pittsburgh Pirates winning the 1960 World Series with what has been called the greatest game ever. 

 That first fall we both volunteered for the local John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, and were rewarded a few years later by being named “ushers” so we could attend the only speech President Kennedy made in Pittsburgh—in the fall of 1962, just a week or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 On November 22, 1963 we heard at the same time the news of Kennedy being shot in Dallas, and then of his death. We walked together after school as we usually did that year—I lived just across the weedy fields and Clayton walked to his former home, now his grandmother’s, to await a ride back to his new home in the country. Mostly that year it was the two of us, talking about school and the endless iteration of who was the “toughest” girl in each class.

 But on that day I had prearranged to bring my debate partner home so we could work on our case. He was Michael Krempasky. We all knew that the conditions of our lives and futures had just changed dramatically. The three of us would become lifelong friends. 

 In the next few years we would form a kind of comedy group, starting with taped skits in the manner of That Was the Week That Was, Beyond the Fringe, Steve Allen and Stan Freberg, then adding music and performance. The folk music boom dominated our senior year, and we became a Kingston-like trio, complete with matching striped shirts: the Crosscurrents. 

 I started writing songs, and Clayton—a serious musician—began writing as well. Then I went off to college some 800 miles away. One day I sat in the college library writing lyrics on a yellow pad. I sent them off to Clayton, and he wrote the music. The song turned out well and so we did it again, as we would off and on for the next 20 years.

 When I got home on vacations, the Crosscurrents would work out how to do these songs together, along with songs that each of us wrote on our own. We soon discovered the magic of the Beatles together, returning from a double bill of Help! and A Hard Day’s Night to learn and instantly sing the songs in Clayton’s basement. Our own songs changed as well.

 I’m writing about this in some small detail because I know now, as I sort of did then, that communicating through the making of music, through the sharing and shaping and indeed the creating of our songs, made these friendships unique in ways I can’t explain, except to say that there were many intuited levels of what we shared. 

 That was especially true of my relationship with Clayton, particularly as the years went on and he pursued music professionally in a series of groups, often including some of our songs. We would play together informally, and collaborated in a public way as late as the mid-1980s. The three of us had a last hurrah at an open stage in the late 90s or perhaps early 2000s. 

It wasn't all music, of course.  The three of us generally had a good time together.  Clayton had a quick wit, a way with a pun.  Once when we were on an epic road trip in Ohio in Mike's yellow VW bug, Mike felt something on the back of his neck, like an insect bite.  "Is there a red spot there?" he asked.  "No," Clayton said.  "It's a pigment of your imagination."

 Through the years I attended both of Clayton’s weddings, and spent time with his daughter Nora when she was small. He visited me in Boston and Connecticut. He was there for the funerals of each of my parents. After I moved here to California I never returned to western PA without seeing him, though our lives diverged and we talked less.

 More than a year ago, he was found unconscious on his kitchen floor in Pittsburgh, with a stroke or something like it. He was unconscious for weeks in the hospital, so long that the puzzled doctors were losing hope. Then one day his son Ian said something that made him laugh. Slowly he came back to full consciousness.

 He had other episodes and never fully recovered, but eventually he was well enough to leave the rehab facility and live happily with Ian and Ian’s wife Stephanie in Pittsburgh, where Clayton was also reunited with his beloved dog Nelson. His daughter Nora and sister Mary were frequent visitors. In September he faded and then slipped away.

 Mike, who lives in central PA, visited him several times, but I was always 3000 miles away. I tried to communicate with him in the way we used to—through music. I sent him several mixes of songs from our past (including the Brubeck jazz we first listened to early in high school) plus some of our own songs we recorded in one basement or another over the years, and once in a real studio.

 I also wrote to him a few times. I learned he was having memory problems, and it seemed he was clearer on the far past, and sometimes felt he was living in it. So in my last letter I recounted some of the same memories from our early days as I have here—the Kennedy experiences in high school, and fourth grade with Miss White.

 His sister Mary told me she’d read him that letter, and he responded: “Miss White! She was hot!” 

 A more complete obituary appears here. May he rest in peace. He lives on in those he left behind, and in the music.  And I'll keep playing our songs, as long as I can.

Christmas Messages

 

Regardless of religious beliefs, the story of Jesus is a crucial contribution to the cultural mythos. Partly this is because it is so different. According to the story, he is not a king, not a hero who performs great feats of physical strength or cunning, not a warrior in battle who vanquishes enemies. Jesus is born of poor parents in a barn (or a cave) far from home. His birth is witnessed not by princes and priests but by animals.

Jesus goes on to preach that “the greatest of these [virtues] is charity.” His Sermon on the Mount stands as a bold statement of personal and social values, unique in our mythologies.

The Church of my youth was divided (though not as starkly as today) between those who emphasized institutional rules and kept company with power, and those like Dorothy Day who stood with humble workers and “the least of these.” For all the corruption and cruelty within organized Christian churches, there were always those who dedicated their lives to helping and being with the hurt, the needful, the oppressed and otherwise forgotten.

This past year we have seen a new challenge by purported Christians to the core message of Jesus, and we have seen it enacted at a horrific scale. The challenge is the outspoken denial of empathy. Two prominent Evangelicals write and talk about “toxic empathy” and empathy as sin under circumstances that are familiar for the extreme right.

 

The most prominent exponent of empathy as a weakness this year was Elon Musk, who when given the keys to the entire federal government, virtually destroyed the infrastructure and the support that addressed the life and death needs of the world’s poorest people. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 people—most of them children—have died this year directly because of this action, with many more suffering with the consequences. Given Musk's rhetoric, there's a scary likelihood that this was intentional. 

The ongoing war on immigrants of color (from Mexicans to Africans to Asians) by the federal government is a stain on the nation’s soul. Even apart from the naked racism, the cruelty and brutality is extreme. Mothers have been torn away from sick babies, an attack dog set upon a man who simply stepped outside his own home, and children as young as six years old have been imprisoned alone. There were no circumstances under which a six year old is imprisoned in America, until now.

All of this is being done in defiance of law and basic norms of conduct, with people disappearing into a growing network of for-profit prisons and foreign hell holes, all supported by tax dollars.  And this administration is proud of it--they make videos highlighting their brutality and splash them all over social media.

But they aren't convincing everyone--in fact, they're turning many, many Americans against them. Empathy has not ended. Empathy is a personal and a social virtue, the ground of cooperation, which is the basis of society and anything we care to call humanity.  And even with a cowardly Congress and corrupt Supreme Court, it is being affirmed where people live.

We can see empathy in action in protests and protections and actions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Charlotte, Columbus (Ohio), Oakland (California), Pontiac (Michigan), Pueblo (Colorado), Bentonville (Arkansas), Padukah (Kentucky) and in multiple communities in Minnesota, Colorado, California, and other places overlooked by national reporting.

The protesters against the brutal raids of the Border Patrol and ICE say they are defending their neighbors. “Compassion Melts ICE” is the message on one of the many similar signs.

This ethic does not depend on any pronouncement by anyone who is given transcendent authority by some. It is in vital ways inherent in the nature of social beings, and now (as long ago, on this very American soil) recognized as inherent in the interdependence of life on this planet, including what we do not normally consider as live beings.

The young woman protagonist of Tom Stoppard’s 2013 radio play “Darkside” wrote this:

“The earth is a common.

You can’t save it for yourself but

you can save it for others, and

the others will save it for you.

The other is us, and we are the

other. We are of a kind, we are

natural born to kindness, which

means to act to our kind, as

kin to kin, as kindred, which is

to act kindly. What is the Good?

It is nothing but a contest of kindness.”

What these protests show is that some of the ongoing expansion of what qualifies as "us" has taken root.  They defend their neighbors.

The role of government as an agent of compassion representing the will of the nation goes back most conspicuously to President Lincoln, and in a new way was institutionalized during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who after his ground-breaking first term with the New Deal, accepted renomination in 1936 with these words: “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Indifference is the usual position of a conservative Republican regime, though since FDR, precedent has retained the decency that had been institutionalized. But the current presidency is not indifferent: it is pointedly, actively, aggressively and ferociously cruel, as well as shamelessly corrupt—which also has its costs to compassion, decency and justice.  Instead of ice, we have ICE.

So millions of Americans this Christmas will worry deeply about the help withdrawn that will skyrocket their health care costs in the new year, on top of more expensive everything that results in nearly half of Americans struggling to pay for basic needs: food, shelter, energy, transportation, clothing as well as medical care. 

Health insurance prices are sharply increasing but that’s perhaps just the start. I’ll suggest two things: that despite a record Black Friday, the Christmas shopping season will turn out to have been weak, and retailers and grocers who held back price increases in December will enact them in January.

 Many people are turning their compassion for others as well as their own grievances into political action. Americans in the street are standing up for who they believe we are as a country, and they are saying that empathy, compassion, kindness and charity are part of that.

Though this needs no formal authorization or religious corroboration, it can be seen as an extension of the so-called Golden Rule, as expressed by Jesus. That mythos should mean something, especially this time of year.

Origins: Winter Solstice

 

The Winter Solstice is considered the most celebrated annual event in the history of human cultures around the world.  Ancient structures survive in many of today's countries that seem designed to funnel the solstice sunlight, from the Great Pyramid and the Karnak temples in Egypt to Stonehenge in England, but also in Turkey, Germany, France, Mexico, Wales, India, Zimbabwe, Peru, Easter Island, Cambodia, Japan, Canada, India, Bulgaria, Sweden, Russia, Brazil and the USA, among others.

Most of the traditions still found in the grab bag of modern Christmas observances come from Winter Solstice rituals, including the evergreen tree, holly, candles, the Yule log (and Yuletide itself) as well as stories of the birth of a divine son, usually in a cave or other dark place. Even the red and white outfit of Santa Claus mimics the red and white ritual garments of various cultures, including far northern cultures (think North Pole) for the Solstice. 

Many surviving indigenous cultures still celebrate the Winter Solstice.  In many indigenous and ancient observances the emphasis was on the light and dark, with attention not only to it being the shortest day of the year but the longest night--and so the stars were important.  It was at the same time the beginning of winter, which--for one thing--was the traditional time of story-telling.  In some tribes, the most important stories, such as the creation, could be told only in the winter season. The stars in the winter night sky could also be important in these stories.

For many, the Winter Solstice was the rebirth of light, and so of birth.  But for others the emphasis was more earthy, and not on birth, but on a kind of pregnancy.  For example, in rituals of the Caney Indians of Central America that I participated in a few times in the past, the central figure was a Mother Earth symbol, becoming pregnant and beginning the gestation of the new life that would appear in the spring, especially the plants growing up from the earth. As the days grow slowly longer, the life that appears in the spring grows slowly, unseen, in the dark earth.  It is a celebration of that promise.

I think of all this when the celebrations this time of year seem increasingly distant from the natural world which first inspired them.  That includes many of the remaining religious expressions, which are largely elements of institutions that, deliberately and not, have distanced themselves from these ties to natural cycles, the mysteries of the planet's life.

But mostly we see this in secular observances. Of course, gifts are always symbols of the heartfelt intent of the giver, regardless of what they are. But when we consider gifts we buy, the term "materialism" is often bandied about.  But it's not precisely materialism.  Commercialism maybe--the commodification of everything, and the emphasis on products and constructions that are largely abstractions, symbols of something--if nothing else, of successful advertising and momentary fashion. The real material, the real physical, is of the Earth.  

The material, the realities of our own planet becomes ever more distant each year, except as imagery manipulated by technologies. What we experience is becoming mostly what we see on those tiny phone screens.

As for the stars in our skies, who can see more than a few, if any at all? Smothered by electric lights, blocked by buildings, the night sky that was mightily present to our ancestors has just about disappeared.  And when I searched for photos of evergreens against a starry sky, most of what Google showed me were very enhanced, and many were already generated by A.I.  (I can't vouch for how altered the image above may be, but it purports to be an actual photo taken by Ryan Hutton in Wisconsin on the Winter Solstice.)

In the end nature won't be denied.  Deep cold, wind, rain, snow in unusual proportions and ferocity, that visit us with increasing frequency as partially the effects of climate distortion, will make themselves felt, if not known.  Stay safe, and remember the original: the Winter Solstice.

The Land of the Frazzled, the Home of the Frayed

 The last time I attempted to write something for publication about a younger generation was in the early 1990s, when I wrote a piece for the Pittsburgh City Paper on the supposed youth phenomenon of the time, the Slacker.  I suggested that basically, the so-called Slacker wasn't all that different from the supposed phenomenon of my youth, the hippie.  Both faced a world in which they were expected to fight for jobs they didn't want, doing things they didn't believe in, and therefore forced into a stunted life of quiet desperation.  So, essentially, fuck that.

I mentioned also that the disenchanted youth was a phenomenon beyond those cliches (you wouldn't call Benjamin in The Graduate a hippie), that there were manifestations in the 1950s, 70s and 80s as well.  I quoted Paul Goodman's 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd (which I also had quoted in similar essays I wrote in the mid-1960s, at the end of high school and beginning of college), about a future some young people of the 1950s felt they faced: "During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good."

The de-humanization of the workplace itself is somewhat perennial, but definitely became a widespread oppression in the industrial age.  The delights of working on the factory production line are typically inflated in today's culture.

The Slacker, I wrote in 1993, was responding to a somewhat different but similar set of circumstances as those earlier decades in what I called "the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed."

In fact I'll never forget the dazed look of a beautiful young woman I knew in college who'd just experienced her first forays into the working world, in the early 1970s..  When faced with a smug employer who demanded to know why he should hire her, she said that the first response that came into her head was: "Because I'm smarter than you."

Even since the 1990s however, the country and the context and circumstances of a young person's daily life have changed a great deal.  In many respects, it's a different world.  But last month when I read an opinion piece in the NYT by Jessica Grose titled (by the editors no doubt) "For Gen Z-ers, Work is Now More Depressing Than Unemployment," I did not feel the sense of displacement I usually do in articles about the social media-obsessed, nose buried in phone, AI dependent young, but a sense of kinship.

Within today's "grim" job market, Grose writes, "the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal."  She describes a process in which the "first levels" of job application scrutiny is often done now by AI, including interviews on line. (The Guardian goes into more detail about today's Orwellian hiring process.)

Jobs themselves are often micromanaged and otherwise abusive, as well as poorly paid and with negligible benefits. Electronic surveillance has become the slave-driving boss, as has the speed with which computers perform tasks--instead of being "time-saving" they function as employer expectation-raising for the amount of work and the speed with which it is done: a more intense workplace.  

These and other factors result in poorer mental health so that this essay's title is literally true (very unusual for a NYT opinion piece): An annual study of nearly half a million American workers finds that workers under 25 are as unhappy as the unemployed.  When job satisfaction rose for other age groups, it fell for the young.

Some of this, the surveyors suggested, was because the young had higher expectations.  According to me, you can blame social media, media in general and so on, but really, the young always have higher expectations, and they should.  But the experts also agreed that "the workplace is markedly worse."

There are other elements of what these young people face I've thought about, that Grose doesn't mention in this piece.  I already felt a deep compassion for the generation whose lives will eventually be dominated by the effects of the climate distortion caused by and ignored by a determinative proportion (in power more than numbers) of previous generations.

And I can't even conceive of their debt burden from overpriced college education. Although I had seen up close the craziness of top-heavy administrations and futile business models applied to education, just why it all costs so much is beyond my understanding, and I do wonder if my own ability to go to college was an historical anomaly for someone from my background.

Grose begins and ends by referring to prejudices of older generations. "The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation," she begins. "Gen Z-ers don't even deserve this perfunctory slander."

Well, I'm already on record objecting to the over-generalizing and slander of the Baby Boom generation by some younger writers, and the New York Times.  So when Grose ends "Whatever is going to happen for Gen Z-ers as we all live through the A.I. revolution, I hope that their elders approach them with more compassion than disdain," I join in that hope.  For I have no disdain for them, and a lot of compassion, but more than that, I have what I had for my own generation of young and the ones that followed: anger and disdain for the society that persists in exploitation, that does not affirm their hopes and ideals but that grinds them down for their own selfish ends.  

How Little Are The Little Stories?

 

The biggest and most outrageous actions of the Chaos regime and their enormous consequences are often almost too big to wrap your brain around, too huge and extreme to feel anything beyond a now habitual anger and fear.  Followed by numbness, until the next announcement, the next news revelation, the next Court decision.

But individual consequences can still be understood and felt, like the individual victims of the immigration Gestapo.  The high school boy kidnapped on his lunch break.  The scholarship college student and long-time resident on her way home to visit family at Thanksgiving, suddenly deported  in chains over a removal order she knew nothing about, and once again the victim of legalistic sleight of hand to avoid a court order to keep her in the country.

Or the Washington state man lured out of his house on false pretenses, immediately set upon by an attack dog and seriously injured, by the unidentified ICE Gestapo.

Too bad we don't have news media that can put a name and a face to one of the estimated 600,000 people in faraway lands, most of them children, who died for lack of promised US food and medicine aid, much of it locked unused in warehouses.

But it is heartening to me that people across America are defending their neighbors, and agitating against the Chaos Gestapo reign of terror against mostly people of color.

The Chaos racism is definitely out in the open now.  An Axios report begins: "President Trump's Cabinet applauded him this week after he described Somali immigrants as "garbage" who "contribute nothing.' He unapologetically condemned an entire community, with no fear of political backlash."

Yet there is something more to learn, at least about the depth of this current hatred and the Orwellian impunity of relentlessly applying it, in a small and even petty act that gets lost in the chaos of larger outrages.  It's difficult to think of anything more petty--and more telling--than this little story about National Parks.  NPR reports that for 2026 the Chaos administration has stricken two days off the usual calendar of days when admission to National Parks is free.  Those two days are Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth.

But they have added one new day: you can now get into a National Park for free on King Chaos's birthday.

Fighting Crime With Crime

 One of the Chaos administration's Big Lies is Crime.  Combatting crime is the stated rationale for the war on immigrants, the war on American cities they don't like, and the war crimes committed in the open sea ostensibly to fight criminal drug traffic.

And yet..Chaos continues to pardon actual convicted criminals.  Last week it was David Gentile, convicted of criminal fraud to the tune of over a billion dollars, defrauding over 10,000 investors, depriving many middle class victims of their life savings. The conviction, said the US prosecutor, is “a warning to would-be fraudsters that seeking to get rich by taking advantage of investors gets you only a one-way ticket to jail.” 

But fraudsters have now received another message, just in time for the Christmas fraud season.

This was mere days after an even more notorious pardon: a former president of the Honduras who was convicted of taking bribes from a drug kingpin to enable him to export cocaine to the United States, with thousands if not millions of victims and ruined lives as a result.

Federal prosecutors called it a "sprawling conspiracy", causing "unfathomable destruction."  It took years and more than 1,000 witnesses, but Juan Carlos Hernandez was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

The Chaos pardon came out of the blue.  Neither Hernandez or his attorneys had publicly requested it.  He did have an appeal scheduled for December.

So Chaos pardons a convicted purveyor of drugs in the United States, while ordering the military to shoot up small boats and even go back again to be sure to kill everyone aboard, without providing evidence let alone a prosecution or trial, off the coast of a country that is not known to export dangerous drugs to the United States.

One of the investigators on the Hernandez case called the pardon "lunacy."  It is that, and worse.  It dishonors the victims, and makes a mockery of such painstaking efforts to counter the international drug trade.  Now the deterrence of the law is weakened if not destroyed.

And why?  It wasn't immediately known what corrupt purpose these pardons may serve, particularly Gentile.  But the first and most pathetic reason is that these convictions happened during President Biden's administration, and Chaos is obsessed with trying to undo literally everything Biden did.  He cannot face what he obviously feels as the humiliation of Biden winning the 2020 election against him.  He is a terribly sick man, and this country and the world are paying a terrible price for his presidency.

It may well go beyond Biden--Chaos has been frantic to put his personal brand on the White House and every institution in Washington he can.  He certainly continues to try to undo everything President Obama did, but his targets of destruction go back to nearly every presidency before his.  He won't be happy until his face is not only on Mount Rushmore, but it is the only face there.  

Origins: Thanks (and Franks) Giving

[Above: painting of Pueblo Green Corn Ceremony circa 1930 by Opwa Pi (Red Cloud)

The first ceremonial Thanksgivings in North America occurred before history was written on this continent.  Such individual ceremonies were part of daily lives for most if not all Indigenous hunters and gatherers, such as giving thanks to the animal that gave its life to the hunter, or a constant consciousness of sacredness in gathering and crafts like basket-weaving.

It is certain that even in historical times, group ceremonies of thanks among Native tribes included giving thanks for the harvest.  Tribes in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwest in particular celebrated Green Corn Ceremonies or festivals (and many still do.)  

It seems likely that the most famous "first" Thanksgiving in Patuexet (Plymouth), Massachusetts in 1621 (or 1623)  was at least partly inspired by such an event among local Native groups such as the Wampanoags who attended--and reportedly outnumbered the Pilgrim colonists.  Like traditional Green Corn ceremonies, it lasted three days, beginning on June 30.  This cooperative venture was not repeated.  The next harvest was bad, and eventually the Pilgrim fathers slaughtered the same tribal peoples, setting a horrific but often followed precedent.

Other religious ceremonies of thanks to the Christian God had already been held among colonists in Newfoundland (1578), Jamestown, La Florida and a colony in Maine.  The first national day of thanks was declared in 1789 by President George Washington, in gratitude for the Constitution.  It was held that year on November 26.  Other Presidents declared national Thanksgiving days, one year at a time and on various dates, though some Presidents didn't at all. 

Beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a 36 year campaign in favor of an annual and official Thanksgiving Day.  Today's tradition was established by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863, just weeks before he gave his historic Gettysburg Address. In part he wanted the nation to give thanks but also pray for healing after the Civil War.  He'd already declared a day for thanksgiving that August, but then made Thanksgiving an annual holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

But the calendar is a tricky thing: sometimes the last Thursday of the month is the fourth, and sometimes (roughly two time out of seven) it is the fifth Thursday of the month.  In 1939 it was  the fifth, and retailers begged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that year's Thanksgiving for the fourth Thursday, the next-to-last, because they were afraid of a foreshortened Christmas shopping season.  He agreed.

National pandemonium ensued, which only got worse in 1940 when FDR again designated the next-to-last Thursday, which that year was the third.  Republicans in particular derided him, and called it Franksgiving.  Some 16 states declared their own Thanksgiving day to be celebrated on the last Thursday, so there was no longer a national day of thanks.  In 1941, Congress passed a resolution assigning the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which FDR signed into law. (Retailers had not shown any appreciable change in sales with the earlier date.) 

 Some states continued to designate the last Thursday, and celebrations were muted during World War II, but by the end of the war, almost all of the nation celebrated on the new Franksgiving of the fourth Thursday. The last holdout was Texas, which did not change its law from the last to the fourth Thursday until 1956. (Then of course there's Canada, which holds its Thanksgiving the second Monday of October.)

Though it is unlikely that the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving included pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and even today's breeds of turkey, most of the day's food traditions do seem to come from New England.  Recipes for most of the traditional meal are in the first cookbook published in America, in Connecticut in 1796. 

The Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York has been an annual event since 1930.  Coming near the end of the collegiate football season, Thanksgiving has been a tradition for rivalry games. (Hence the Great Turkey Heist at Knox College I participated in, oh long ago.)  The Detroit Lions began scheduling a game on Thanksgiving also in the 1930s. 

It all began with gratitude for nature's sustaining gifts.  But beginning with those first ideologues in New England and Virginia, Americans relationship to nature has been more hostile than grateful. Settlers and their descendants have been busy ruining the land and waters and now even the air for centuries, and we are close to finishing the job. Maybe we can at least acknowledge this with a little grace as we're saying grace, and try to do better.

  The natural world is the source of all life, including our big and dubious brains. The rest of nature would be grateful if we'd start using them wisely. "It is an error to say that we have 'conquered nature,'" FDR said in 1935, in the midst of an ecological crisis called the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression caused largely by wanton exploitation and destruction of land, forests and waters.  "We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Lots of other things are associated with family gatherings on Thanksgiving these days.  Those retailers have largely absorbed the holiday, with their extended pre-Christmas sales. Dispersal of families has meant travel has gone far beyond over the river and through the woods, and now involves the added tension of the busiest air travel time of the year. Thanksgiving also begins the holiday season when people measure themselves against a Norman Rockwell ideal, and find there are angry words, sulks, disappointment, bewilderments and tears as well as the occasional radiant smiles and gratitude.

Whether gratitude is part of the mix anymore is perhaps a matter of personal choice.  This year we may be thankful that things are not worse than they are, which may well itself become a Thanksgiving tradition.  

A New Death of Freedom--and Maybe A New Birth

 

On this date in 1863, November 19, President Abraham Lincoln stood before the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Soldier's National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and spoke the words that are now known as the Gettysburg Address, easily the most famous and best remembered speech in American history.

It remains one of the three most important document in our history, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Lincoln historian Douglas Wilson (who was also my American lit teacher at Knox College) asserts that it is in this speech that Lincoln reinterprets the first sentences of the Declaration, and quotes Garry Wills as writing that these were "the words that remade America."  

 Those words are principally the first and last sentences: The first: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  

And the last, speaking of the Union soldiers killed at Gettysburg and elsewhere in the Civil War: "...that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 

 We hear these words now when that nation is in peril, when a new death of freedom is being visited on this country by its own federal government.  It started with the vilification of the founding principle that Lincoln renewed from the Declaration, through the attacks on its corollaries of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Those attacks went far beyond technical disputes over this or that program within government, schools and other institutions.  It became a program of harassment, financial punishment and extortion, with a racist agenda.

The phrase "a new birth of freedom" in the Gettysburg Address was generally interpreted as a reference to ending slavery, the central dispute of the Civil War, and a preview of the coming Emancipation Proclamation and subsequent Constitutional amendments.  In the past year it became increasingly clear that the first target of the anti-DEI policies, expanded to attack actual historical knowledge and access to it, was the progress made in equal opportunity for the actual as well as metaphorical descendants of those black slaves of more than a century and a half ago.

The white supremacist agenda extended more openly and violently against the primarily Latino immigrant population, with masked men equipped for combat, lawlessly attacking and disappearing brown people, denying their human as well as legal rights, and incarcerating them under conditions no tried and convicted criminal in America must endure.  And they are hardly ever tried and convicted of anything.   

It still astonishes me that there was no general outrage at the denial of what amounts to our founding principles in those scurrilous attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion.  But on the other hand, there has been meaningful resistance to the tyranny visited upon immigrants and communities in which they live, work and worship.  In Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, now in Charlotte, and most conspicuously and effectively in the War on Chicago, that resistance--in the streets and in the courts--has been impressively effective.  It suggests that the self-government that Lincoln championed is now deep in American culture.  It sparks the hope for a new birth of freedom, and a new definition of governance of the people, by the people and for the people.

Events of recent days seem to have the current federal executive on the defensive, seemingly losing power.  But declarations of victory may well be premature. History suggests that those enjoying power and the wealth they rob from the people do not give it up easily, especially when their backs are against the wall.

Instead the ongoing agenda of a complete dictatorship may well be accelerated.  This recent short and very direct speech by Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, former CIA officer, outlines the plan and the current dangers: the pretext for an attempted invoking of the Insurrection Act,  martial law, the cancellation or control of elections. 

 She suggested that "we are about two weeks away from a bloody incident that spirals out of control," leading to the iron fist falling.  It may be in a matter of days, when protesters gather at the Lincoln Memorial this weekend, to demand that Congress impeach and convict the current President--a direct challenge that may be too much for him to ignore.

In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder writes that "Thomas Jefferson probably never said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."  He adds that an American abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, certainly did.  We may be encouraged by recent court decisions and reversals of political fortunes. But there are still shoes that might drop.  Vigilance may be even more important now.  

The Mess and the Messages

food bank line

Things indeed moved fast, but for many in unexpected ways.  When five Democrats in the US Senate concluded their negotiations with Senate Republican leadership, they (together with the three already on record voting against the government shutdown) provided sufficient votes to pass a resolution reopening the federal government.  In short order King Chaos mumbled his support and the House is expected to comply.  The longest shutdown in history may soon be over.  Just like that.

The compromise did not include a guarantee that certain Obamacare credits will not be cancelled in December, causing millions to lose healthcare coverage and many more to see coverage bills skyrocket-- the very issue that Democrats rallied around to force and maintain the shutdown.  And that sparked immediate cries of outrage.  How could they do it especially so soon after the overwhelming electoral victories on Tuesday, that created a political crisis for Republicans?

Rachel Maddow's commentary was withering, under the banner of "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" (which I admit was my exact first reaction.)  But Rachel, Stephen Colbert and others were incorrect when they said that the Democrats "got nothing" in the deal.  They got more money for SNAP benefits, rehiring and back pay for federal workers fired and threatened during the shutdown, and the promise of a Senate vote on those Obamacare credits in early December.  And they got at least a somewhat functioning federal government again, so that people depending on SNAP get their food and the air traffic system doesn't collapse.

But the difference in analysis was striking.  Rachel and Lawrence O'Donnell, who generally agree on just about everything, did not agree on this at all.  O'Donnell spoke from his experience as a high level staffer in the Senate.  He said that every shutdown ends in a compromise, and that Republicans compromised as well.  That the minority party has never successfully forced its demands to be met in a shutdown.  That Senators are much more independent traditionally than House members, and so no Senate majority or minority leader has determined all that party's votes.  

For as stark as this looked at first, there are wheels within wheels. It may also be that Senate Republicans (Lawrence suggested) ignored King Chaos' solution of ending the filibuster and themselves forced their compromise, as long as it was short of what they knew the King would not countenance--action on Obamacare credits.

Heather Cox Richardson provided other analyses.  She noted stories that said that other Democratic Senators beyond those eight were ready to compromise, and that it seems unlikely that it was mere coincidence that none of the eight were up for reelection next year or even in the next cycle.  They probably represented a larger number.  

After most headlines suggested these Democrats had "caved," and indeed both Senate and House as well as Democratic party leadership were against their compromise, stories began to appear that speculated the Democrats really didn't lose politically on the shutdown or this compromise.  There were nearly identical stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times like that on Tuesday.  They note that the entire country now knows that the shutdown happened over the issue of the Obamacare credits, which the latest polls show are favored by 78% of Americans. It previously was just one outrage among too many.  Some--like HCR--suggest the Senate vote on those credits may turn out to be different from what is expected.  There may even be some pressure from at least some Republicans in the House on this issue.  In a broader sense, the Republicans find themselves on the wrong side of the affordability issue even more sharply.

Other analysts put it this way: The Democrats were united and showed some fight for more than 40 days. That energized resistance, and the resistance energized them.  But they were never going to get those credits restored.  As commentator Tim Miller said, "You can't play chicken with somebody who wants to crash."  And others point out: the bill that the Senate passed funds the government only through January.  There is more to come.

Others argue that the Democrats must maintain their identity also as the party of governance.  The shutdown was starting to inflict real harm.  Lawrence noted that the people affected by losing SNAP benefits were more numerous that those affected by the Obamacare premium credits.  Heather highlighted the grave harm the air traffic mess, slowdown and approaching chaos was causing not just to travelers but to the movement of freight, and therefore to the economy.  

If the Democrats miscalculated, others suggest, it was because the Chaos administration is unique in the degree of its cruelty and its lack of conscience. Chaos refused to negotiate or respond in any way to the healthcare crisis their legislation caused, including the Obamacare credits cut but also slashing Medicaid.

The administration was willing to let people go hungry, go without medical care, while Chaos threw lavish parties on the weekends, and the rest of the Chaos leadership could fly in its private planes and continue to rob the treasury for their own comfort and riches.  "They are pathologically unwilling to help Americans in need," Paul Krugman wrote, and now that should be obvious to everyone.

Maybe, as some like Ezra Klein asserted, King Chaos will take this as another instance of his successful bullying, but the situation continues to be dynamic, and so far this does not appear to be helping much to remedy the Republican political crisis.  Chaos by its nature is unpredictable, and its fomenters may not be able to control it for long.  A lot more is happening than this compromise, and much of that still indicates--as did the elections-- trouble for the administration and Republicans, and a new spirit, a new energy and a new resolve to counter Chaos, and to do better for the country.

Resistance Hits the Ballot Box

 

Tuesday, election day, was an important day.  How important will be determined in the future, but for the moment it has created a political crisis for the Republican party.

Tuesday followed a weekend of polls released.  They weren't different from previous polls except that for the MAGA regime they were worse.  They showed mass disapproval of every policy and major action of the Chaos government, and mass approval of what Republicans were against, like continuing Obamacare credits.  

So were they surprised?  It's possible that in the beginning they bet on the public cheering on any actions against immigrants, including ambushing anybody who looked brown in the Home Depot parking lot, or treating Chicago like Afghanistan, or shooting clergymen in the face, or kidnapping toddlers.  Apparently even Latinos were supposed to be pleased.

They bet on their public cheering the dismantling of the federal workforce, even apparently in Virginia where many of them lived.  They bet on their people cheering Chaos showing the world who's boss with his tariffs, even when it raised their prices, hit farmers hard, threatened small businesses and even their hallowed tech sector.  

They even bet on reviving the old hatred of Obamacare, throwing in Medicaid and other programs because they helped only welfare queens, even when it hit family budgets hard (and the times they were a changing: Obamacare is popular) and took medical care and other services away from especially their small town and rural supporters, directly and by de-funding small rural hospitals and other medical facilities.

Was that the political calculus?  People may believe many digital lies, and whoppers out of the White House, but they have to pay their grocery bills, their medical bills, energy and housing.  When they know that the Chaos regime lies about that, it might make you wonder what else...

The election results showed not only Democrats winning the vast majority of races across the country from governorships and mayors (in Pittsburgh the Democrat won by 87.5%) to state legislators, judges and school boards.  Moreover, the margins of victory, especially in Virginia and New Jersey, were very large, especially when compared with predictions and polling.

Democrats won the first two statewide offices in Georgia since forever.  They strengthened the courts in Pennsylvania, took 13 GOP seats from the Virginia legislature, beat back a voter suppression ballot question in Maine and approved redistricting in California to counter the Texas gerrymanders. 

The analysts were quick to note that Democrats won back Latino voters, and even took a slice of Chaos voters--perhaps 7%, perhaps more.  There may be more demographic surprises in the mix.

As if Wednesday morning wasn't already bad, the Chaos tariffs got eviscerated at the Supreme Court hearing.  Some giddy observers suggested a 9-0 vote making them illegal was not out of the question.  

Together with the gathering consequences of the longest federal shutdown in history, all of this adds up to the Republican political crisis.  All King Chaos could suggest to the Senate was to get rid of the filibuster so they could open up the government, then pass voter suppression laws so Democrats could never win again (the King's actual words.)  Republican Senators had their own reasons for keeping the filibuster, but they were still playing the Chaos game by reflexively rejecting Senate Democrats' offer to reopen the government in exchange for a one year extension of the Obamacare credits.  

The Senate meets Saturday so by the time you read this something else may have happened, and maybe we'll see which way the pieces are going to fall.  Right now GOPers are in crisis, as is the country.  King Chaos is getting weirder in more obvious ways, and maybe nobody knows how to deal with that either. 

Meanwhile the election results have changed the public mood dramatically.  Months of peaceful protests culminating in 7 million participating in No Kings events in or near just about every community in America may well have emboldened people to continue their protests by marking a ballot.  I'm surprised that Republicans weren't prepared for something like this.

On the other hand, maybe there was no political calculus.  This is only ideological ( Psycho Steven Miller and his white supremacists, Russ Vought and his death-dealers by budget) and elaborate distraction as the Chaos cabinet steals the Treasury blind, and King Chaos extorts millions.  Maybe the voters don't matter, just the plutocrats, the tech bros, the billionaires behind the curtain.  In that case, the military options are even more on the table than they were. 

 But time may be running out.  Is this an inflection point?  Time will tell.