The 2016 Shitshow Comes to a Blessed Close

(Author’s note: Upon review, this is crazily all over the place (no, I haven’t been drinking; I opted for abstinence in the face of potentially devastating news tonight) and it seemed a lot more coherent when I thought about it over the course of the day, but…oh well.)

voting-repub

One friend said it was “rude” when I posted this image to Facebook in 2012. Perhaps. But it’s still true.

I’ve had the urge to write a column on the 2016 election for many months now. At various times during this tragi-comedy that passes for our political process, the urge to open the window and scream, “I’m mad as hell! And I’m not going to take it anymore!” has been almost overwhelming.

Almost. Which is why I’ve been able to refrain. “Why bother?” I wondered. “I’m not going to change anyone’s mind in the United States in 2016. Everyone’s mind was made up on day one.” And in that case, why bother wasting my time writing down my thoughts on the situation.

And yet, here I am, doing just that on election day itself. Obviously, at this late, I DEFINITELY won’t change anyone’s mind. And to be honest, I don’t really want to. I just want to get this stuff off my chest and on record before the results are known, and if I can get through to some of my friends — no, not change their mind; just reach them so they’ll at least think about and discuss some of this stuff with an open mind — well, that will be icing on the cake. But mostly this is for me. So here goes…

No one who knows me has any doubt where I stand in the current election. And yes, I voted this morning, so that stance is now set in concrete. But let’s go open this diatribe with one assertion right here:
Anyone who votes for Donald Trump is guilty of treason because the man is an existential threat to our nation.

Whatever your opposition to Hillary Clinton, there’s no denying that the United States will survive her presidency and perhaps even thrive. With Trump’s hair-trigger ego in the White House, we can’t say that about the country — or, with him having the nuclear codes, the planet. Should that horrible day come to pass, your act of treason will rise to a crime against humanity.

Why are people so anti-Hillary? It boggles my mind that someone can have such a deep-rooted hatred for someone they don’t even know, especially someone who has spent her entire adult life in public service. You may not like that service — which I get because, you know, an emphasis on the rights of children, women and the poor is odious and reprehensible — but there’s no denying that she’s given more than you or I have to the betterment of this country.

Oh, that’s right: She did that so she could get rich via the Clinton Foundation. Right. Because she couldn’t have gotten a whole lot richer had she been in the private sector over those years.

And then there’s that whole tired trope about how Hillary lies. Please. Trump lies so much more and what’s worse, he lies right to your face. And you eat it up. Yes, Clinton lied about her email while secretary of state and that is regrettable. She also copped to it and apologized for it in a simple, declarative statement during the debates.

But if you’re all bent out of shape about Hillary lying, where’s your indignation about Trump lying? Virtually every independent analysis of everything Trump has said or tweeted has his lies outpacing Clinton’s by about 7-1. Trump lies to you — and you know he’s lying to you…and he knows you know he’s lying to you — and you accept what he says as fact. It happened countless times during the debates, countless times while campaigning, countless times will being interviewed and it continued to happen right up to the weekend before the election.

On the topic of Hillary’s emails: Where was your outrage when the Bush administration “lost” more than 20 million emails from a private server? Where was your indignation when both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice used private servers for official business? Uh huh. Thought so.

Oh yeah? Well, Hillary killed four Americans in Benghazi! Really? And who controlled the Congress that denied her requests for more security for foreign embassies? Oh, that’s right. Another thing: When 224 people, including 12 Americans, died during attacks on American embassies in Africa in the 1998, no one was calling for the secretary of state’s head. So admit it: it’s only because it’s Clinton that you’re after her.

And if you’re all up in arms about tax-and-spend Democrats, why aren’t you pissed that Republicans spent $47 million of our dollars — that includes yours and mine — in a doomed-to-fail-before-it-started attempt to affix a scarlet letter on Bill Clinton? Why aren’t you pissed the Republicans spent more than $20 million investigating and reinvestigating Hillary on her emails — even AFTER the FBI had cleared her? Because it’s the Clintons and, well, fuck them. Am I right?

So if you’re willing to vote for Trump — at the expense of our country’s safety and strength — because you hate Bill Clinton so much that you want to give his wife the finger well then, that’s an act of treason.

Because there’s no question that on every level, Hillary Clinton is infinitely more qualified for the presidency than Donald Trump. To wit:
* Trump runs on his business expertise…yet he’s filed for bankruptcy multiple times and has stiffed contractors working for him. All of you friends who are small businesspeople supporting Trump: How would you like it if you did your job as contracted and got stiffed?
* Speaking of getting stiffed: Trump hasn’t paid income taxes in decades. Talk about a free ride. He gets government grants and contracts — and then doesn’t pay income tax. But you and I do. And yet you think he’s got your best interests in mind.
* Policy: The ONLY policy Trump enunciated during his campaign was building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. That’s it. Not one policy otherwise. What are you basing your vote on? Oh, yes: he’s on your side. Well, see the above points. I’ve posted this photo a few times on Facebook and it’s appropriate at this time. Trump has one person in mind and it ain’t you.

Okay, I’m tired of this rambling diatribe and if anyone is still reading I’m sure you are too. So let’s make it a bit more personal…

What’s been most distressing about this election process has been finding out some unsavory things about friends of mine. No, not that they support a buffoon like Trump. Rather, what their support of that buffoon has clearly demonstrated: rampant racism, sexism, xenophobia and a willful ignorance of fact and reality. Harsh? You didn’t see what they were posting and commenting.

I didn’t unfriend from Facebook anyone who posted pro-Trump propaganda. But I did unfollow a few. Namely:
* The friend who was posting the most blatantly sexist, anti-Clinton websites (which I won’t link to here because I am not contributing to their traffic). This friend’s mother, whom I adore, was all wound up in recent years about that Muslim president of ours and all he’s doing to tear down America — it seems my friend has followed his mother around the bend
* The friend who posted “news” that was in fact made-up bullshit by teens in Macedonia tweaking Trump fans for clicks to pad their wallets. When called on it, this friend said it didn’t matter; he wasn’t being played. This is the same friend who told me in 2004 that John Kerry shot himself in Vietnam so he could get those medals. Really
* Another friend whose unhinged comment on someone else’s pro-Hillary post had me wondering if he’d come off his meds. The vile, personal assertions about Clinton were the same old tired and disproven talking points we hear from Fox News all the time
* And a couple of others, including some 20somethings (and one 20something woman) which is a demographic (or two) I can’t believe would fall for Trump’s bullshit

So it was heartbreaking to find out that people I respected and consider friends turned out to be filled with hate. And several of them are self-avowed Christians — and yet they’re all-in for an adulterer who’s twice divorced and has no discernible morality or religion beyond Mammon.

And that’s going to be the legacy of this election, regardless of outcome: the divide in this country, even among friends, is only getting worse. The Republican party encouraged the tea-party bullshit and then couldn’t control it, so the underlying racism and sexism and xenophobia driving those outliers is now mainstream. And that’s my great fear: that even if Trump loses tonight, someone who isn’t as clumsy as he is but still espouses the same evil, fascist crap will come along in four or eight years and succeed where he failed.

Because here are a couple of other facts for you:
Fact: If the Republicans had put up anyone other than Trump against Hillary, they’d have been measuring for curtains in the White House by Labor Day.
Fact: If the Democrats had put up anyone other than Hillary against Trump, the race would have been over after the first debate.
The system is so broken that it’s only a matter of time before another disaster-in-the-making gets nominated. And that time, we may not have someone who, while unpleasant, isn’t so qualified for the job.

But telling the system “fuck you” by voting in someone so dangerous and obviously unqualified is tantamount to saying that the American experiment is over. And that’s heartbreaking because we’re still the first and best at what’s possible.

Opinion

The Big Room

On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room.

I hadn’t been able to make the move sooner for a variety of reasons. For one, I like my old room. It’s cozier than the master and it looks out toward the northeast and the Atlantic Ocean — or rather, it did before the asshole put up the oversized monstrosity on the lot across the street. The bizarrely designed box took the place of the small cottage that had been there for decades; the woman who lived there died and the charity group she left the place to sold it off to the new guy. He’s an architect who ruined a nice, stylish beach place down the street a few years ago and the worked his magic on this beachfront lot. But I digress…

Anyway, yes, my old room is cozy and nice. But it is also small. And the bathroom is down the hall, shared with two other bedrooms on the floor.

The master, on the other hand, has high ceilings, a wide-open floor plan and an en suite bathroom. It also has a view of the Atlantic (to the east and southeast) and direct access to the deck. While not an issue with winter approaching, deck access is nice because that’s where I spend a lot of my evenings at home. My usual spot on the deck, accessed through my sister’s room, faces east and northeast, and while nice, has been assaulted by the aforementioned glitter dome. That the palace is lighted all night also lessens the stargazing.

But at my parents’ corner of the house there’s a wondrous shadow. No streetlights impinge on the sky and the neighbors on that side value the night sky as much as I do. And instead of having to carry speakers outside with me when I chill out on the deck in my old spot, now I’ll be able to simply open a window and turn a speaker to face outside and I’ll have tunes to suit the occasion.

So there were concrete reasons why it took me three months to make the move. But there were also more subtle obstacles to be overcome.

For starters, it’s not my room. It’s my parents’. It’s ALWAYS been their room. Moving in there puts the final touch on the fact that they’re gone and the generations have changed hands. It’s like it’s the next, penultimate step in the path of life: birth, cradle, shared bedroom, own bedroom, master bedroom…casket. It’s been weird enough no longer having living parents and moving into the master bedroom makes that fact even clearer.

There was also one unanticipated consequence to moving into the master bedroom: doing so has made the already-too-big house even bigger. When I occupied one bedroom and the shared bath and the hall in between, I was using a good half of the floor. Now, with everything self-contained in the master suite, I’m using maybe a quarter — and the rest of the floor can essentially be shut down. That’s nice financially — the heat can be turned way down in those other rooms and the sun bakes the master room to a high temperature all winter long, which is nice — but it makes the place a little lonelier.

And finally, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to make the master room mine. I’ve hung some things on the wall and put my clothes in the closet, but I don’t know that anything less than a wholesale overhaul — new paint, new window treatments, maybe new flooring — ever makes it seem like I’m doing anything other than sleeping in my parents’ room. Or maybe that’s just a function of time. I guess we’ll find out.

With the finality of my father’s passing, and the fact that my siblings and I are now the oldest limb on this family tree, everything has become a function of time, and finding things out down the road. I guess all of life for everyone is that way, really, but it’s still weird to make that right turn into the master bedroom instead of continuing on down to the end of the hall when turning in for the night.

*    *    *

Sidebar: People have asked about the future of the house. The short version is this: The house has, for almost a decade, been owned by a trust comprised of my brother, my sister and me. My sister has no interest in the home but my brother and I do so we’re going to buy out her third and keep the place. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how finances work out and that won’t be determined for several months. But I’m living here now and have been since the spring, and I’ll stay here for the foreseeable future barring any amazing job offers elsewhere (hint, hint to anyone reading). On the job front, my goal is to set up some freelance projects (another hint, hint to anyone reading) — consulting, writing, editing — so that I can remain here. And in the meantime I will continue to clean and thin out the inconceivable amount of stuff my we-grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression-so-we-saved-EVERYTHING parents had stashed all over the place. One dumpster’s worth of stuff has already been removed and another will be needed soon. I also have close to a thousand books to be donated or discarded — and that doesn’t include the hundreds of books I’m keeping because they’re of interest to me personally or they’re first editions or autographed or an antique or some other reason that gives them a particular value. If you’re a bibliophile, give me a shout.

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Eulogy for My Father

Dad with Sean the golden retriever...sometime in the mid-'80s, I'm guessing.

Dad with Sean the golden retriever…sometime in the mid-’80s, I’m guessing.

As you know, my father was a journalist. In that role, he was a storyteller: he relayed information about lives and events that readers could use to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.

What occurs to me is that what we remember about my father were HIS stories — stories that serve as signposts illustrating a truly amazing, well-lived life.

There were anecdotes about growing up during the Great Depression — with which we would tease him about by saying, “we know, dad, they cut up your little red wagon for firewood when you were a boy” — that provided a background for the person he became.

And there were stories about growing up around Medford, stories he would bring to life for us when he’d show us around that area and point out how things had changed.

And of course, there were the stories from his time during World War II…stories that are all the more amazing to me for having been lived when he was just 20 years old. Pleasant stories such as:

  • Christmastime in 1944, and being so close to a German patrol that he could hear them singing Christmas carols, or…
  • Teasing a newly-arrived-at-the-front soldier by saying they used their bayonets regularly. After pausing for effect, Dad and his buddies showed the newbie how the bayonet was the best tool with which to open a can of food

And of course there were the not-so-pleasant stories such as describing the horrors of tree bursts in the Hurtgen Forest and the horrible weather conditions that winter and the horrors he’d seen.

But there were a lot of other stories — incredible stories, to my mind — that maybe some of you haven’t heard. I’d like to share a couple of them with you.

While a student at Dartmouth Dad met poet Robert Frost, who was in residency in Hanover at the time. Dad told Frost that he didn’t particularly care for poetry and when Frost asked why, Dad said it was because he didn’t like professors dictating what a poem meant. Frost asked for an example and Dad cited Frost’s poem “Birches.” Dad said he thought it a wonderful description of a joy he had enjoyed as a poor boy having fun in the woods, but the professor insisted it was about the poet’s latent desire to commit suicide. THAT got Frost’s hackles up and he gruffly told Dad, “Don’t tell me who that was or I’ll kill him.”

When we kids came along, Dad read us the poetry of Robert Frost.

Some of my favorite dad stories were ones he told about meeting Ernest Hemingway, his writerly idol, in Cuba in the 1950s. Dad was there on business and was introduced to Papa at the famous bar in Havana where Hemingway held court. Dad described a specific location where he’d fought in the war, an obscure spot that Hemingway also knew, and the two bonded. Dad ended up hanging out with Hemingway for the rest of his stay in Cuba.

Years later, Dad would pull a Hemingway volume off the shelf some evenings and read us passages from his work.

And then there was a story that prompted a nickname for my father used by several of the boys who played hockey for him:

While coaching the 78th Division hockey team in Germany after the war, Dad was told to show a visiting Russian man how the team trained and played. Dad said he had long discussions with the man, and diagrammed and demonstrated drills and plays the team. That Russian man turned out to be Anatoli Tarasov, the so-called “Father of Russian hockey” who created the Soviet Union’s dominant hockey culture of the second half of the 20th century. So my father at times would say that he could lay claim to being the founder of Russian hockey.

Some of my teammates and I took to calling Dad “The Founder.” It’s a name that stuck so well that one teammate Tim Caddo, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, brought it up again in an email exchange this week.

There were many other stories Dad lived and told…to me, to my siblings, to you. I would ask that you remember those stories…and live and tell your own amazing stories.

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