Lately it seems that all life has to tell me is that I’m not as smart as I thought I was.
Seething at the Injustice
Special Counsel Jack Smith has moved to dismiss all charges against Donald Trump because you can’t litigate against a sitting president, and Trump will soon be sitting.
Trump has prevailed on every level. His legal delay tactics worked precisely as planned, every step of the way: his lawyers’ specious court motions, his absurd appeals (such as his immunity claim, which the Supreme Court validated); and of course his scurrilous fear mongering and relentless firehose of lies that won him the election and have now rendered him immune to prosecution.
It is so massively unjust for someone who has been so treacherous, so unscrupulous, so dishonorable, so ruthless, so evil — from committing rape, to screwing contractors out of their pay over and over and over again, to attempting to overthrow our elected government, to subverting the bipartisan border bill earlier this year so that he could (successfully) run for president on that issue – for this despicable scumbag to get away with EVERYTHING … outrages my sense of justice (and quite possibly yours too).
But what is “justice”? Everybody getting what they deserve? When has that ever happened?
Maybe the cosmos has a different sense of “right and wrong” than I do. Maybe there’s a larger perspective out there.
Then again, maybe something will break Trump.
The electorate and the Supreme Court have given him more power than a president has ever had. Now let’s just see what he can do with it. (God help us.)
A friend said recently, “If one day he gets his comeuppance, I hope I’m here to see it.”
I think we’ll be here to see it. I pray we’ll be here to see it. (C’mon, Lord God. Thou art good at vengeance. Help us out here.)
Parallel Universes along the Mountain
By now I’ve walked in Mt. Tabor Park at night hundreds of times and never encountered anything that felt threatening. Or actually, come to think of it, there was one New Year’s Eve when I was hiking in the park at about 2:30 a.m. and I heard some guy walking several steps behind me, speaking sharply, intermittently, in an oddly agitated staccato tone to no one in particular. And that did spook me a little until I finally turned around and saw through the shadows that he was holding a cell phone.
But there are nearly always sketchy-looking vehicles with people in them, parked on the side of the road that leads up to the Harrison Street trailhead, which is where I enter the park. Some of these vehicles are older cars; some are rickety vans, and I guess the people inside them are sleeping, getting high, just chillin’ and taking in the night, or maybe doing drug deals. I try to look away when the interior car lights are on. I don’t want to bother anybody. They’re doing their thing; I’m doing mine. (For context, I should perhaps mention that once, in broad daylight, a guy standing by one of those cars asked me if I wanted to buy some meth. That was unsettling.)
On a recent night walk, I strolled by an old beat-up black van. No lights were on in the cab; I presume whoever occupied the van was in the back, and the “music” emanating from it was bleak, tuneless, repetitive, eerie, and harsh. For the seconds it took me to walk out of range, I was immersed in that ecosystem of hostile noise. And I wondered, what was it really like to “kick back” to sounds like that? I assumed that whoever was in the van was probably enjoying it, that it somehow complemented their mood or their outlook on life or whatever, and that they were just groovin’ to it.
Who were they and what had happened to them? What was their life like?
It was certainly a different world of consciousness, immediately adjacent to my own.
Funny that the peculiarity of this had never occurred to me before. It was far from the first time I’d walked through a little pocket of strange, off-putting, intense, vaguely threatening “music” on that stretch of road, like briefly tuning into the vibrations of a parallel universe I wouldn’t even let my imagination stray into very far. (Some of it has been gangster rap, sure. But some of it – like this toxic incantation-like thing I heard coming from that black van — has had an even more penetrative and calculated diabolic feeling to it than what I think of as gangster rap.)
But hopefully, for whoever was deejaying in that vehicle, that noise was just the preferred backdrop for letting their mind(s) wander. To each their own, right?
Funny how different bubbles can practically scrape up against each other without ever bursting.
I Don’t Know What to Make of This Really
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of the wildly popular MSNBC news show Morning Joe recently announced that, after several years, they are once again on “speaking terms” with Donald Trump and that they recently visited him at Mar-a-Lago and had a civil conversation.
A number of people in the blogosphere and podcast sphere and substack sphere whom I admire and respect (and who know a lot more than me) – people like Robert Hubbell and Steve Schmidt – deem this disgraceful and inexcusable. They see it as a self-serving cave-in to power, “access journalism” at its worst, and an obscene dereliction of the show’s public duty to deliver unbiased news and help viewers understand reality.
These critics correctly point out (as what they seem to feel is evidence of hypocrisy) that Joe and Mika have repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler in the past, and have said innumerable denigrating things about him. Indeed they have. I know this from having watched any number of Morning Joe clips. I don’t love the show; I think the hosts are blatantly full of themselves and that really gets up my nose, but they have not pulled punches where Trump has been concerned; they have been blisteringly contemptuous of him over the years. Nor have they recanted anything they’ve said. It’s just that now they’re going to actually talk to him sometimes because, well, he’ll be president.
I’m not entirely sure this is a bad thing, though I may be missing something here. On the one hand, I guess, by treating Trump as a civilized human being (which he is not) they are – by appearances at least – “legitimizing” him. But then again, holding the office of the presidency confers a certain cache of “legitimacy” whether we like it or not. I don’t like it in this case, and I doubt Scarborough and Brzezinski are thrilled about it either. But my thought is this: Even as they outrage the leftist blogosphere and subcultures in this country (aka “my tribe”), perhaps they gain some credibility and legitimacy themselves with other demographics, simply by virtue of pissing off the left. No doubt they have a wide crossover audience for their famous TV show. So if they were to engage with Trump “respectfully” while enraging the icons of liberal America and then also report unflinchingly on the ramifications of Trump’s vile misdeeds and policies, well, perhaps they can reach some people who would normally just dismiss “the liberal media.”
I mean, I dunno. What’s the choice? Try to boycott Trump’s presence? Try to “cancel” him? Good luck with that.
The Year of Not Hurting Back Draws to an End
I made a commitment at the beginning of this year not to speak or act from vengeance. I pretty much kept it. A barbed word may have slipped out here or there, but I was careful and restrained myself on a number of occasions. (You know how life is. Hostility happens.)
Now. I began this little essay with a passionate excoriation of Donald Trump, whom I loathe. I also expressed a yearning to see him suffer justice. Something in my body would relax a little if he went to prison (goodbye to that pipedream), not because I’m afraid he’ll harm me personally, but because he “deserves” it.
Retributive justice is all about vengeance really. But I never pledged to scour vengeance from my thoughts – only from my deeds and words. And since Trump is not reading this, I don’t think you can say I’m exacting vengeance on him. Heck, even if he did read it, he’d probably get off on it because he’s president-elect and there’s nothing I can do about it. He loves to torment liberals, we know that.
So this is all just to say, “not hurting back” hasn’t been an entirely easy commitment to keep, but I may renew it anyway come the new year, because it’s something to cling to at least, and these days I don’t have much else. Well, actually I have plenty – the love of friends, a cozy home, some sense of spiritual okayness, and blah blah blah. But I mean, I’m really scaredabout the whole world right now. I’m scared about climate change, scared about the crumbling institutions of America, scared of the upsurge of authoritarian regimes all over the globe along with the resurgence of racists and skinheads everywhere, scared of the mindset that creates and/or imbibes the “message” of the satanic flavored “music” I hear sometimes on the Harrison Street strip that leads to the Mt. Tabor trailhead.
Then again, these are all just thought forms, right? The guy (I assume it was a guy) in the van didn’t pop out and bust me in the head or anything; he was just playing his music and thinking his thoughts. This is America; expression has to be free. (May it remain so – fingers crossed.) And there may even be “redeeming social value” (whatever that is) in that scary music for all I know. I don’t understand much — that much I do understand. Or, as the lyrics of the song “You Never Blow Your Trip Forever” by Gong (a European soft-psychedelic band of the 1970s) put it: “The more you know the more you know you don’t know what you know.”
I have come to the conclusion that everyone has crazy thoughts. Maybe one measure of mental instability is how many of our crazy (often unspoken) thoughts we believe and take at face value. I mean, there is an inverse relationship between our levels of sanity and how many of our thoughts we don’t take with grains of salt.
I’m pretty sure that cancel culture is insane. It’s a form of fundamentalism. What? Joe and Mika were cool when they were bashing Trump, but now that they went and spoke to him they’re the enemy? It’s nuts. Personally I can’t say I’d ever want to talk to the guy. But if they can stomach him, more power to them. (I have heard – and I believe – that Trump smells bad too.)
I mean, I don’t know. I don’t really believe anything I think anymore. These are confusing times.
Oh – and Something I’m Thankful For (Being Thanksgiving Weekend After All)
The new mayor-elect of Portland, Keith Wilson, strikes me as the anti-Trump. He is articulate, intelligent, and courteous, and his platform is centered on a commitment to end unsheltered homelessness in our city by the end of next year. He was criticized by the conservative mayoral candidate, Rene Gonzales, who charged that Wilson’s shelter policies would usher in a disruptive “migration” of more homeless people from all over the place, but Wilson doesn’t think so for a variety of reasons. Anyway, it’s exactly the opposite sentiment from “the migrant Haitians are eating our cats and dogs.” It’s a message of inclusiveness and compassion for our fellow human beings, regardless of what they look like.
But again, what do I know? Maybe Gonzales is right. Maybe Wilson has fooled Portland with love, just like Trump fooled the nation with fear. I guess it’s possible. We’ll see. (And I’m glad I’ll get to see.)
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