I WALKED DOWN A CORRIDOR...
TO A SERIES OF DESKS where I was asked to pay first and be tested later.   All of this was new to me, and oddly strange; it was like a chophouse demanding payment before serving me food.  At every step of this process, money came first.  There was a cynical assumption behind each and every contact in this unfamiliar world: All of you are deadbeat parasites, and I was amazed by the fact that nobody else in the surgery center waiting room seemed to be neither shocked nor stunned by being called a rip-off artist.  

 So I paid to have my blood pressure taken.  I was then asked to breathe into a machine and to pay in advance for the anesthesia.  I had now begun my private tour into the bizarre and secluded domain of the pay as you go diseased and debilitated.  

 I am one of those fortunate human beings who are almost never physically sick.  Over the previous 60 years, I had been in a hospital only twice as a patient: for the repair of a broken nose and for a bout with mononucleosis.  As a former Lutheran minister, of course, I'd been in dozens of hospitals, tending to the ill, serving emergency-room death watches, comforting family, all of which were part of my craft, but not my life.  And even though it was only a minor procedure, I found myself filled with a sense of dread.  I was on a gurney. I gazed up, seeing faces distorted by my point of view and by anesthetic.  The doctor entered my eye. In a minute or two, one eye of the cataract surgery was completed.  One down and one to go.

 Late that night, alone in that drowsy fog prior to falling asleep, I began to think about the eye surgeon, who had yet to charge me a penny.  Hell, this goddamned thing is probably going to cost me an Arm and a Leg, no matter how much insurance coverage I have!  It seemed absurd, even outrageous, that I had to be thinking about the almighty dollar when it came to the salvation of my own health, God bless America.

 I then began thinking about folks who are truly ailing. Maybe something had gone wrong on the operating table, some stupid failure of their body or the doctor's skill; it had happened to people I knew.  Even with the Affordable Care Act, those with chronic deceases still have to pay insurance.  I began to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my son and daughter, my granddaughter and grandson and my friends.  Their faces moved in and out of my mind; I spoke to some of them and hugged others.  Then I saw and heard some of those other people, places, and things that made my life a life.  I thought about never again being able to see the the light spilling above the valleys of Colorado like it had done when I was young, of never again having the ability to read Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain and Elmore Leonard, or ever again seeing another World Series. And what about all the words I hadn't written or said to the people I really cared about, people I didn't see much...

 ...Only because I happened to reside in the one industrial country in the entire world that did not have a universal health care system?

50 YEARS HAVE COME AND GONE...

SINCE THAT FATEFUL DAY IN DALLAS. Documentaries and docudramas have been made.  We've watched the Zapruder film over and over again.  We've read cheap fiction about the assassination of our President and boondoggle theories of conspiracy after conspiracy; until the consensus finally came to be that he was  killed by a lone punk with a mail-order gun that sold for $12.78.  

     The punk was liquidated on TV two days later.

      In the end, nothing was resolved.  

      If there was a conspiracy, the potters got away with it.  

    At the same time, other narratives have helped to debase the metal of the man: smarmy memoirs of women who said that they slept with him and others who said they did and did not. There was endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, complete with half-baked theories about the origins Don Juan complex, saying that he was revolting against his mother's rigid Catholicism or imitating his dad's own philandering.  

   Two other events helped eclipse the memory of Jack Kennedy.  One was the rise of Robert Kennedy.  In his own brief time on the public stage, Robert understood that Jack's caution had prevented him from fully using the powers of the Presidency.  If Jack was a man of the fifties, the later Robert Kennedy was a man of the sixties, that vehement and disturbed era that started with the assassination in Dallas and did not truly end until Richard Nixon's departure from the White House in 1974.  The murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968 played a part in the revision of the Kennedy legend.  In a quite different way, the process was completed by  the incident in Chappaquiddick.  

     In the years that followed, the country grew tired and decided to be free of the endless tragedy of the Kennedy's.  

    And after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, it was no accident that once we had been entranced by a president who looked like a movie star, then the next step would be to find a movie star that looked like a president,  which we did, and he gave us us trickle-down economics, allowing the affluent to become filthy rich and the poor to go bankrupt.  Then came "The Oreo Cookie Syndrome," where Bill Clinton found himself sandwiched between the George Herman Walker Bush and his boy, George W., who gave us an unnecessary war built upon fairy tale fibs, leaving 4 thousand of our military dead and thousands of innocent Iraqis slain.  And now we have Obama, our first African-American President, who has given us The Affordable Care Act and a promise of hope, a commitment still on hold, due to Republican obstinacy and opposition.

   Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and the Vietnam war, after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had been killed,  after Woodstock and Watergate - after all had changed from the world I knew in 1963, I still miss Jack Kennedy, in spite of his obvious flaws.  

     I can hear his voice still coming to me, insisting that the world must be challenged and life itself embraced.    

      He remains in memory as a man of wit, irony, courage: all combined with the way he honored artists and writers and musicians, inviting them to the White House for splendid dinners, insisting that Robert Frost read a poem at the inauguration.  He enjoyed Ian Fleming's books about James Bond; and brought James Baldwin and Pablo Casals to the White House. 

    Not many writers have felt comfortable in the White House in all the years since...

NONE OF US WANT TO BE BEATEN OR KILLED...

BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF OUR SKIN.  It's despicable when  whites do it to blacks; it is equally disgusting when blacks do it to whites, and the single most damaging change in the last few years here in America is the racism - black and white - unleashed since the day that a black man was elected as the President of the United States. What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn't risen in outrage.  

 A major reason for this passivity in the face of torment is the deepening cynicism and fatalism of most Americans.  For the last decade, our politicians have cheated, lied, plundered and become more and more corrupt; and in the larger cities like Chicago and Detroit anti-white hostility has grown more rapidly than at any time since the months following the murder of Martin Luther King.  Seldom has the level of social disparity been as drastic as it is today. Many young blacks and Latinos  seem to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back is understandable; but the level of racism isn't lowered by such collisions.  

 One one hand, the ferociously rich eat their way through our culture, consuming food, wine, art, real estate, companies, stores, entire neighborhoods.  They are all appetite and no soul.  The squalor of others seems not to bother them, the sight of the homeless neither disturbs them nor do they seem to care about it.  It is as if they are saying, "Hey, man, there's nothing I can do about that.  After all, it's not my fault that those people are the way they are."

 Every year, another fragment of grace or style or craft is obliterated, to be replace by the brutally functional or the commercially coarse. Sacking and smashing has become a way of life, perpetrated by political pillagers, who never rest, and when they strike, their energy is brutal.  Food Stamps and Social Security come under attack, the rights of women are defamed and disparaged, voting rights are ground down and civil rights devoured, immigration is dismissed as a fruitless fool's errand, while the working poor are demonized by the refusal of some in the political establishment to raise the minimum-wage. The steady grinding force of menace has become commonplace.

 That enervating sense of menace isn't mere paranoia.  We live here, where the bullets are killing children.  A young man is attacked and killed by a pack of kids looking for a black man to kill.  A tourist is stabbed to death in a subway while defending his mother because they are white. A street-smart Latino is approached by a panhandler demanding money, who jams a knife into his heart and kills him. Headlines, as usual, scream for a couple of days. But there is no outrage.  

 The rich, of course, continue to live well-defended lives.  But for millions of others, there is never any relief from the dailiness of  the menace of being mugged or the risk of a predator hiding just around the corner, strangers kill shoppers in malls and men and women are slaughtered in cinemas; we buy thousands of door locks and alarms and attack dogs, go to karate classes and apply to legally carry guns; but nobody feels safe.  If all of this is by now familiar, there seems no way to turn it around with the oratory of optimism.  

 It seems as if the humiliating sideshow of the poor will continue to slide deeper into decay, the middle class will flee our cities in greater numbers, drugs and crime and despair and illiteracy and disease will continue to rise, the division between black and white America will widen, the rich will become richer; and nobody in Washington who can do something about it seem to care - that is the horror of all horrors.

 The hypocrisy is that they are now more interested in their own re-election than they are in the the salvation of the American Dream. 

 Perhaps it would be best if these macho men with syrupy platitudes be voted out of office and replaced by men and women who have a sense of human decency and desire that all Americans can live the rest of their lives with a modicum of grace; who cannot and will not be coerced by immoral men and women who only want to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level.

We need to elect people who know that E pluribus unum was not intended to be a giant mockery...

THE RADIO CHATTERERS ON THE RIGHT...

CONTINUE TO RELEASE THEIR FEROCIOUS BARRAGES, attacking the President for everything he does and every word he speaks and where it was that he was actually born, in spite of certifiable evidence to the contrary. The Republicans, who cheered the "Affordable Care Act" when Governor Romney enacted it in Massachusetts, have suddenly developed wings of opposition and attack, dismissing the newest version as "Obama Care," and calling the President anti-American Marxist nut job; while journalists and reporters tend to dance around the fact that many folks on the Right are plain-ol'-racists, not facing the verifiable truth or implications of disaster with the venomous tone of those on the Right. The Washington  press corps are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain a certain objectivity. Few of them, however, like to face the question, "Why can't you tell it like it actually is?"

 The slashing, lacerating use of language came into the discourse with The Tea Party, in a tone which is sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental, and its essential component is always an insult. They deride women.  They detest Muslims.  They disdain labor. They despise anyone with another viewpoint.  

 These days, the Washington press corps seem to wear a self-absorbed sneer themselves, as they have slowly morphed into becoming pundits, leaving journalism somewhere back there in the dust. They guffaw at any expression of idealism. They look for gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies.  They doubt the veracity of National Security and question the IRS and at others for not being transparent enough. They fill columns with the assumption being that everyone has a dirty little secret, with the exception of themselves, of course; and one's duty is to pretend to make sad sounds and sniff it out, then do nothing at all about it, other than to masquerade as objective journalists, that is...

 ...And lost in this malignant process is the art of attempting to understand the viewpoint of the opposition and the practice of art of give-and-take.  Give us the whole loaf or nothing is now the way we govern.  God is on our side  They are always wrong.  We are always right.  We can make you feel better.  We can make you happy.  We promise not to tell you that the world is complicated.  If it weren't for them, your life would be perfect.  So allow us to do all of the thinking for you. 

 Thus, we have now become a nation which indicts the other side for being too liberal or too conservative, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to public opinion or too afraid of consensus and too dim-witted to know the difference...

 How sad for us all. 

IT WAS BREATHTAKING...

AND I WAS BOWLED OVER BY THAT, due to the fact that it was exactly the sort of a place a couple of decades ago I would have despised anybody for going to.  

 One of the great things about getting a little bit of pocket money to spend is that you can do all those things that you used to eat your heart out about when you watched other folks doing it and detested them for it: sitting around in an exquisite restaurant wearing sunglasses that cost what you used to earn in a month, ordering up flamboyant indulgences like  a dab of Beluga Caviar, being pampered hand and foot by - and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you in an East Hampton restaurant - staff who treats you as if you were rich and famous, whether you actually are or not - they truly and sincerely want you, not just any old guy sitting around in a sun hat and glasses, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about anything in any way at all.  We don't even dislike you for being as loaded as we think you are. 

 The home I was staying in was extremely pleasant, incidentally.  I'm sure you are anxious to know what it was like, since you may or may not be able to afford to go there on your own.  It was not what one would call enormous but it was very comfortable and sunny and tastefully decorated in pastels softened by the addition of gypsum.  My favorite item was the balcony that overlooked a bit of the ocean because it had an awning that automatically raised and lowered depending upon where the sun stood in the sky.  I thought that this was very funny.  I would sit and laugh and laugh and laugh and have another shot or two of Glenlivet Scotch and then laugh some more.

 We now come to another rather embarrassing part of the story about which I have so far been extremely silent.  I was in the Hampton's on money that I hadn't actually earned. Nor had I stolen it.   I simply inherited it and I hope very much that you will forgive me for having said that you may or may not be able to go there on your own, because I couldn't afford it either, and I promise I won't mention it again.  

 Allow me to be aboveboard, there's nothing harder than being a ludicrous impostor with a devil-may-care attitude pretending to be something that they are not. It's desperate stuff, yet one of the most blissful joys of doing it is to be able to pull-it-off, even for just a little bit; although the unfinishedness of it is that your bankroll will eventually peter-out.  

 So I asked myself, what difference does that make?   There have been  idle ne'er-do-wells who had no problem passing themselves off as something that they were not since the days of the female pirate Anne Bonney back in the 1700's, an Irish lass who cross-dressed and disguised herself as a male in order to team-up with her lover, Jack Rackham, and had a hell of a time pillaging Spanish treasure ships off Cuba and Hispaniola until the British Navy captured her along with her lover.  He was hanged.  She was pregnant and no record of her execution has ever been found.  Rumor had it that she eventually became a tavern owner in the south of England, where she regaled the locals with the tales of her exploits.   

 Maybe that is why I enjoyed it as much as I did, by virtue of the fact that I was having a hell of a time, too.  I was now in a world which compared to a pre-fall Eden, an entire innocent and benign Paradise of the well-to-do, never burdening myself with the task of justifying the fact that I did not actually belong in such a heady crowd; and thus remained inextinguishably happy.  

 I was, after all, at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments of my life.  Not because I was mingling with the those folks who had it made, but because I was in a place of magnificent and stunning beauty in the atmosphere of what nature can do, where you could find the stars and the sea, both intermixed in the realms of pure, creative artistry.  Not a bad place at all for a man with limited means to find himself...even for a little bit...

BEFORE I BELLY FLOP INTO THE MIND SLUDGE...

I AM ATTEMPTING CLARIFY, I think I ought to give fair warning that my upper story wit has been a bit far-out of late, so if I  occasionally do go off on something that seems to be utterly foolish and completely meaningless, my hope is that you will forgive me...

 ...For example, my first thought upon awakening this morning was trying to recall the overnight dream I had about casting the perfect people for roles in my version of the American Revolution, which I would call "The Little Boycott That Was." My Cast would include: Adam West, the original Batman on television, as General George Washington, Senator Ted Cruz as Benedict Arnold, and  Dick Cheney or Glen Beck as a cross-dressing Betsy Ross. With a guest cameo appearance by Sophia Loren as the mentally-cracked grandmother "Liberty Belle," a completely fictional character, of course, but one who would undoubtedly add a little pizazz to an otherwise well-known tale.

 I then gave thought about the fact that I was standing on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and was not at all upset by that.  Curiously enough, my mind instantaneously began to ask me what I would do if I were the Pope lounging around in the Vatican nibbling on peanut butter and saltines, when I decided that I would temporarily give up the papal crown to go scuba diving in Australia, out beyond the Great Barrier Reef to the wonderful clarity of the Coral Sea - and then stop off for a burger at a McDonald's on the way home; and after arriving back in Rome, as I stood in front of the usual big Easter Sunday crowd gathered to hear me speak, began to make fun of Jesus.

  As I washed the breakfast dishes, I gave pause to ask why it is that out of sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses, from lenses we make telescopes - and with those thoughts in mind, I suddenly wondered what had become of my eyeglasses?  It turned out I was still wearing them and had nothing to worry about; and I thought about the possibility that there may be billions of universes, and there were a whole lot of other guys somewhere out in the vast solar system who were puzzled about where they had left there glasses, too.  I rather loved that notion, and began to chuckle...

 ...All other sorts of entities began rapidly running through my mind as I dried my dishes.  I became aware that I was unaware of other possibilities out there in the universe, like the fifty-fifty chance of being able to order a simple apple pie a la mode in another far-off galaxy, or if they have the simple things like tables, chairs, rocks, and so on, along with cats and cows and silicon chips.  

 Let my try to illustrate what I mean.  This is very speculative; I'm really going out on a limb here, because it's something I know nothing about whatsoever, so I think of this more as a thought experiment rather than I real explanation of something.  What exactly is fungus, for instance?  What does it mean if fungus is dimorphic?  Does it apply only to mold and mildew or other things like earwax and nasal hair? To figure something like that out when you don't really have a clue - I began to think about an awful lot of other things I was also unsure about, as I'm certain a lot of other people do, because there is this theory and that theory, this bit of information and that bit of information about almost everything; and you really don't know what to make of any of them, since they seem to zip past you in a flash.

 Before we go on, allow me back up for a moment and talk about God.  I would argue that if there is an actual God, and we should probably bear in mind that there could be, why not allow Him-or Her to worry about all of this stuff and feel free not to think about anything at all?  I do find it curious, however, that if God does actually exist, why He-or-She did not invent the computer sooner so that the folks who wrote the Bible didn't have to waste so much time sitting around in sand inside a darkened cave without any underwear on and having to scratch away at themselves in a frenzy to relieve the itch until it caused a rash, or scribbling stuff down on papyrus and parchment and ruining their eyes because of a lack of electricity?  No wonder there are so many agnostics and atheists.

 Nevertheless, it occurs to me that if you think some of the above is utter nonsense and wish to disregard any of it or all of it or even the smallest portion of it, I am quite OK with that.  I do, however, beg your forgiveness, in that I did not realize that it was already 10 o'clock in the morning and time for my afternoon nap, and apologize that I cannot share my afternoon thoughts  with you until I, once again, awaken...