Desultory Diary: Episode Thirty-One: Onam in New York

 

We have so many to choose from! Fact checkers have compiled a list of some 20,000 lies and inaccuracies since Trump assumed office. Here's one of my favorites among the most recent: When asked why he has been downplaying the virus that has caused so much devastation, he replied that he actually had been 'upplaying' the virus!

 

This might take some explanation--which I will provide--but the lying Maha-Belly reminds me of the truthful Mahabali, the mythological king of ancient Kerala, located in South India.

 1.

Mahabali was a very good king indeed. He presided over what could be called the Golden Age of the Kingdom of Kerala; there were no thieves, no strife, no problems of inequality, much like the Golden Age of Greek lore. In Indian mythology, when a mortal becomes so good that he impinges on the divine, the gods get jealous. Thus, to test the king,  Lord Vishnu assumed his fifth incarnation among ten, that of the Brahmin dwarf, Vamana.

 

Vamana approached and asked Mahabali for some land. The King, good man that he was, agreed to give him as much land as he wanted. Vamana requested that he be permitted to measure out the boon by taking three steps. How far can a dwarf get with three steps, the King said to himself, and agreed.

 

The dwarf, being an avatar of Lord Vishnu Himself, thereupon assumed cosmic proportions. With the first step, Vishnu spans the Heavens; with the second, he spans the entire Earth.  With nowhere else to go, Vishnu places his foot upon the head of Mahabali, atthe king's request, and pushes him down to the netherworld.  Like Persepone, Mahabali returns to Kerala once a year, symbolizing, perhaps, that traces of the Golden Age, though exceedingly rare in the current Age of Lead, still flash up occasionally and fan 'fresh our wits with wonder.' His annual return is commemorated by the South Indian holiday of Onam.

 

Now let’s update the tale for the current Age of Lead. I call it Onam in New York. In this tale the characters are reversed: Vamana, the dwarf, becomes Mega-Belly, President Trump; King Mahabali becomes Truth Itself, the eleventh avatar of Vishnu.

 

The scene is in front of Trump Towers in New York. Maha-Belly,  more old and feeble than he is now, is at the point of death. He approaches Truth for a final reckoning.

 

Maha-Belly: I had a nightmare last night that I am doomed for a terrible rebirth.

 

Truth: You opposed me your entire life. Your karma is as negative as it gets. Greed demands that you be reborn in hell as a Hungry Ghost, that is, a beast the size of an elephant with a pin-sized head. A huge body combined with the ability to eat of an ant guarantees that you’ll suffer the torments of a hunger which is never satisfied. Your mendacity, however, demands that you be reborn as a dung beetle. Your choice.

 

Mega-Belly: No hope? I was, however, a malignant narcissist; can’t I claim the innocence of the piri-loose, the baityam, the mad?

 

Truth: No. Yes, you were nuts enough to make a squirrel salivate, but sane enough to know right from wrong. I will, however, give you a chance to do better. You’re such a mess that I can’t promise much. Perhaps instead of a hungry ghost you will be reborn as a semi-satisfied spectral moron; perhaps instead of a dung beetle you’ll be reborn as—well, I can’t do much about that, but I can try. Tell me three truths and I might be able to have you reborn as a bluebottle, aka a blow fly, aka. as a carrion fly. At least you’d be able to spread your wings and fly—albeit from carrion to carrion.

 

Meg-Belly: I have done more for Blacks with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

 

Trump’s Pinocchio nose thereupon assumed cosmic proportions.

 

Mega-Belly: Climate change is a hoax.

 

Trump’s Pinocchio nose thereupon encircled the earth.

 

Truth: You now have nowhere to go. Can’t you tell the truth even once? This is your last chance.

 

Mega-Belly: I have done a fantastic job with the epidemic. I could not have done better. Besides, a vaccine is coming which will heal the public by providing Herd Mentality.

 

He babbles on and on and drives Truth into the ground. Soon Truth’s chthonic voice is heard from the depths: Oy, Oy, Oy!

 

At least this is certain: dung beetles will survive the ravages of climate change.

 

2.

The future hungry ghost, the future dung beetle once infamously claimed that he is “a very stable genius.”  I wonder if he knows he’s lying and ignorant, or whether he’s doing his best to cover it up. Recent revelations in Bob Woodward’s book, Rage, lead me to believe that he knows more than he pretends to. This makes matters worse, since his cover-up regarding the handling of the Covid epidemic indicates deliberate failures to protect the American people. Even before his disastrous rebirth, he possesses the empathy of a dung beetle.

One of the most egregious examples of his idiocy is when he asked Dr. Birx, the national Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator, a renowned scientist, whether injecting bleach into humans would be an effective means to combat the epidemic. This evinces the knowledge of virology of a picturebookish toddler. Any sane person would have run this quack idea before an expert (or even a picturebookish toddler) before blurting out this humiliating theory in a national press conference. One can conclude that this semiliterate moron really believes that he is a genius, and his bleach theory would finally bring the fame his neediness so craves.

 

After the notorious press conference, I wrote the following poem, entitled, “Bleach or Water”—

 

Neighbors, do not get uptighter,

Trump just wants to make us whiter—

Let’s blanch our inner Mexican

Back into John Wayne again: drink bleach!

 

Fallen from their privileged nests

Into multi-colored mud, souls

Flap about in muck like crows;

Burn them into turtledoves. Drink bleach!

 

Though you might turn Kelly green

Let your insides churn pristine,

For white is pure. So, do not go chiaroscuro;

This is not the Renaissance. Drink bleach!

 

Yet, despite President Narcissus,

America still has a choice: Science or Trump;

Whatever the Mad Hatter says,

Let us do the opposite! Drink water.

 

 

3.

Vote.

Desultory Diary, Episode 30: Is Still Possible?

1. 
One might be the loneliest number, two might be the coziest number, but three is sometimes the holiest number. After all, it is written somewhere in the Christian bible, that "When two or three are gathered in my name, I am there as well." (That would make a fine Bach aria, wouldn't it? Well, it did.) Three is society; it is a crowd only when it impinges on lovers' privacy.

Let me summarize: with one you get I; with two you get you and I; with three you get we, the world.
Troubles come not in single spies nor doubly, but in battalions, that is, in three or more, and usually in a lot more units than that.

2.
Many years ago, my mentor in poetry, the late, great Filipino poet, Jose Garcia Villa, asked his students to come up with definitions of poetry. I, being a student among them, came up with the following:

Poetry is not just three things, but three times threelessness, and more.

He liked this definition very much, although, admittedly, hyperimaginative language went over better in those days than it does now.

What a laugh I had, when, fifty years later, my friend's friend, a troubled philosopher, came up with the following apothegm:

Is three truths
Makes sense twice
Is still possible

Proof, at last, that persons exist who have even a wackier imagination than I have.

3.
And now it's time for something completely different--and wholly troubling. (This is, after all, an entry of my desultory diary.) The political mess we are in is not just three things, but the three things I'm about to discuss are real doozies. This is a rocky segue, I must admit, but the discussion it takes you to, you must admit,  is crucially important.

First Truth: Inequality

https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

This is a beautiful presentation of a very ugly reality.  90% of Americans believe that wealth is far more equitably distributed than it actually is. The obscene truth is that the top 1% own 40% of the wealth, while the bottom 80% only have 7% of the wealth. The top 1% own 50% of U.S. stocks--no wonder that the stock market has little to do with the economic health of the country. It wasn't always this way. Before Reaganomics, the top 1% earned 9% of the nation's income; now it is 24%. If you make a chart of the wealth distribution in the United States, the top 1% are now way off the chart.

Yes, it wasn't always this way. The trend toward increasing inequality in the U.S, began in the 1970s. As late as 1989, the top 1% owned 30% of the wealth, as compared with 40% now, a staggering increase. Similarly, the bottom 90% had 33% of the wealth in 1989, compared to 23% of the wealth now.

When oligarchs reign, they shore--they shore and shore and shore up more wealth. The wound on the working person's back needed antibiotics and a bandage, instead it got salt and a widening gash. "Corporations are people, too," said Mitt Romney, in 2011. He was responding to criticism of the infamous Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court in 2010, which permits corporations to spend unlimited amounts in support of political candidates. This was, I think, perhaps the worst setback to the working class in recent U.S. history. Decency demands its repeal, but, unfortunately, the Court is stacked with justices who support it,

Perhaps we should replace George Washington on the front of dollar bills with the banker on Monopoly Money. Might as well.

We are in the dead of night. Does that mean dawn is closer than it was when evening fell? I wish.

Second Truth: Climate Change

How can we still act like ostriches, sticking our heads in the sand, while ignoring the danger we're in? Well, we're not going to be able to do this much longer, for the sand is becoming too hot.

As I write this, unprecedented wildfires are consuming very large areas of California, Oregon, and Washington. At the moment, ash in the sky over Portland, Oregon, has caused it to have the worst air quality of any city on Earth. This, along with increasing calamities elsewhere, is undoubtedly due to climate change, the result of society's quick fixes, not with heroin, but with fossil fuels, among other destructive habits. (Trump's solution reminds me of Marie Antoinette's infamous suggestion, 'Let them eat cake,' namely, 'Let them rake leaves.')

I've read that 68% of world wildlife is under threat of extinction. (A ladybug is a miracle of evolution; is a lion something less?)

It is even more distressing in these distressing times that the Covid pandemic has not caused people to reflect on how their diet influences climate change.  Livestock production results in about 18% of greenhouse gases! A vegan diet would be best, but a vegetarian diet would significantly cut (by about one half) an individual's carbon footprint. Most people I know or I know of would think reducing meat in one's diet makes as much sense as planning a vacation to bask beside a methane lake on Titan. No informational campaigns to educate the public. Sad.

I read an article today that flaring, the burning off of excess natural gas, goes on unabated. Methane, released into the environment whenever oil is discovered, goes on unabated as well.

The glaciers are melting. As the Earth surrenders its benevolent form of white supremacy at the poles, less sunlight is reflected back into space, causing these areas to warm up even faster.

The sea level is rising. Perhaps 30 cm rise by 2050, which means, at the very least, that storms will press farther inland and coastal areas will be inundated.

While sea levels rise, potable water, due to arid conditions, becomes more and more scarce. It's like we're trying to conserve water by turning all the faucets on and walking out of the house.

Storms will be worse; populations will be displaced. The refugee crisis is already underway; it will increase dramatically. Bye-Bye, Miami, Bye-Bye Bangladesh, etc. A true disaster!

I am not sanguine that we will win this battle. The world would need a significant amount of global cooperation, which is sorely lacking in this increasingly populist era. Every nation for itself--we know how that mantra worked out in the twentieth century; such an attitude will lead to unprecedented environmental destruction now, when international cooperation is a must.

When Faust recovered from a personal crisis, he exclaimed, "Die Erde hat mich wieder!"--"Earth has me again." If we ever recover from this crisis, there may be no earth left to have.

Third Truth: Lack of Universal Health Care in America

The U.S. is the only wealthy country that lacks universal health coverage. During the pandemic, 14 million lost their employer-coverage health care; add this number to the 22 million who lacked health care before the pandemic started, and you come up with a crisis of enormous proportions.

Obamacare promised to end this national disgrace; it was a huge step in the right direction. It needed fixing. Surely if Obama's had been followed by a Democratic regime, along with a majority in Congress, lack of health care would become a distant memory. Trump's attempt to repair the edifice of health care by dynamiting it and rebuilding it imaginary brick by imaginary brick has proved to be as constructive as a landmine.

Not to mention outrageous drug costs and the fact that we spend more ($10, 244 per capita, while the comparable country average is $5,280 per capita) on health care--with poorer outcomes. We don't get what we pay for--ain't freedom grand!

Conclusion

If Trump wins, it would be hell. If Biden wins, it would be purgatory. The latter is much much better than the former, but the problems we are facing are too great and too long in the making to be solved any time soon. But a Biden victory would certainly be an important step in the right direction. After that, without the dedicated hard work of millions, progress will fail.

Imagine a future when forests and city streets are no longer burning.

Is still possible?