2020 Election: It's About Much More Than Defeating Trump

I broke my vow to refrain from engaging in Facebook political arguments with “moderate Dems” (what moderate Republicans used to be) when one of them, for about the 10^th time, referred to Bernie Sanders as a “Bolshevik.” If people weren’t so stunningly gullible it would be an hysterically funny one-off. My brief response was: “So, was FDR a Bolshevik?”

That opened the floodgates. The so-called moderate Dem, who apparently sits in front of his computer all day long posting nasty comments on Facebook (and in letters to the editor in various online newspapers) and calls people who disagree with him assholes, dupes, or Bolsheviks, told me that FDR wasn’t a Bolshevik because his economy was nothing like today’s booming economy where everyone is enjoying the benefits that Bolsheviks like Bernie want to take away from us. The next day the stock market tanked in its biggest loss since the Great Recession of 2007 because of the corona virus (the 99 percent are already in the toilet).

It wasn’t this guy’s knee-jerk response that drew me further into the den of iniquity, however. In a previous private message to the moderate Dem whose Facebook page hosts much of his vitriol, I had respectfully asked why she didn’t call him out for spewing such nonsense. She sees herself as the voice of reason, an engaged Democrat who is avidly anti-Trump and a big proponent of engaged political discourse. Her response, which acknowledged he is “annoying,” is a climate change denier, and a beneficiary of the booming oil and gas industry, was “I don’t think shielding Bernie fans from the portrait people have of him is helpful.” So much for engaged political discourse.

The rants continued for a while until she accused me of hypocrisy in advocating for socialism while being a community organizer who advocates for local control of resources and government, citing my support for the integrity of acequias. She again missed an opportunity to really explore what Bernie’s agenda, or Elizabeth Warren’s for that matter, actually involves, much of which she and I, as community organizers, endorse: a government that makes sure policies are in place to protect and allow people to flourish in a more equitable society than the unregulated, late stage capitalism one in which we live. The social democracy that Bernie endorses means just what it says: that a society based on a leveled playing field is what democracy looks like.

I responded: “Yeah, Bernie’s coming for our acequias.” That was it for me, and I signed off for good. But if I hadn’t (we all like to have the last word, don’t we, and while I can’t really have the last word I do have Unf*#!ing Believable), I would also have pointed out another disconnect in this kind of group think. While they all rail against their elected Democratic legislators who have supported the settlement of a decades old water rights adjudication, the Aamodt, to which they are objecting parties, they fail to acknowledge those same legislators’ ties to the DNC, which directed the Clinton and now the Biden takeover of the primary (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Bloomberg). They love Biden but they hate Ben Ray Lujan, who directed the DNCC money flow for many years.

I broke my vow again, the day before Super Tuesday, but this time I had an excuse: I thought I was responding to an old friend from Antioch—ANTIOCH!—who had momentarily lost her mind and was saying she’d vote for Biden. I responded: “Are you crazy? Joe Biden!!??” Her response was: “I don’t see evidence of Bernie playing well with others. He did nothing to support Hillary after he lost the nomination in 2016. He’s too polarizing. We need someone who can heal the body politic. I don’t see Bernie helping the down ballot. I’m following the lead of African Americans who carry so much water for the Democratic Party and get little back for their efforts.” It made me almost nostalgic for the days when the SDSers and YSAers at Antioch were yelling at each other over who knew best how to start the revolution.

But I didn’t have time to point out her lie (Bernie did nothing to support Hilary) or get any further dragged in, as another Antioch friend then replied: “Now isn’t the time for healing with Republicans and oligarchs kicking our teeth in. That was Obama’s saddest miscalculation in his first two years when he had both the House and the Senate (by a large margin.) They strung him out until the billionaire funded Tea Party bullied its way into Congress. Bernie is building a movement (not a campaign) of mission driven activists that is growing daily. When was the last presidential candidate who campaigned on organizing the working class— not in our lifetime. That’s the movement that’s going to raise up candidates at the local level, not Biden’s gaggle of establishment endorsements. African Americans are part of the movement. Bernie’s agenda will lift all boats; well, at least 99% of them. Vote your aspirations, not your fears.”

When I do post articles on Facebook that I think are insightful, it’s to do exactly what my Antioch friend said, to encourage voters to base their decisions on who best exemplifies their values, not who is the most likely to defeat Trump, a futile exercise, IMHO. But today, independent journalist Arun Gupta posted an opinion piece by The Guardian’s Nathan Robinson that was really disturbing but probably prescient: “Stop saying Biden is the ‘most electable.’ Trump will run rings round him.” It’s basically 2016 redux: “Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians.” And the baggage Biden brings to the table as that establishment politician is daunting: “He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the ‘capital of corporate America’. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war. Even Matthew Yglesias of Vox calls Biden the “Hillary Clinton of 2020” for his corporate ties and war support.” Another columnist, Shaun King, posted a heavily researched piece that exposed Biden's lies about his participation in the civil rights movement.

Then there’s Ukraine. They will go after him unmercifully for Hunter Biden’s obscene $50,000 a month Burisma salary even if it’s only nepotism, not criminality.

Joe Biden offers no progressive or radical values like Sanders or Warren offer. He only proffers “virtuousness and decency. But if Biden doesn’t actually look virtuous and decent—because he isn’t—the argument that he has made for himself collapses completely.”

So we’ll keeping plugging away for Bernie. A friend of mine wrote me the other day (another Antiochian), “I wish he would just settle for being Moses, someone who almost single-handedly changed the terms of the debate, but never saw the promised land.” I know he’s an old white man but there will be young women or people of color or atheists (Bernie’s a Jewish atheist!) who will come after Moses gets to the promised land.

It may Involve mud slinging, but we're still trying to make the world a better place.

I followed a Facebook thread the other day that was initiated by someone who said she wouldn’t be voting for Bernie Sanders after all because of his “bros’ ” nasty “memes.” Then someone else told me he wouldn’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren after all because several of her staff members claimed Bernie had told her in a private meeting that “a woman can’t get elected president.” He, of course, denied that he’d ever said this.

A reluctant Facebook responder—saying she didn’t like engaging in these kinds of discussions on that platform—stated that politics has always been nasty and mud slinging in an election was to be expected, particularly when campaigns seemingly last forever. But that was no reason to abandon the candidate whose policies and values are the ones you endorse. Once the mud starts getting slung it really diminishes the character of those doing the slinging more than the candidates, but unfortunately, it also impugns the organization or cause to whom the characters belong.

Those of us on the left are very familiar with this scenario in our organizations and movements that seek to make the world a better place (not to say that the right and alt-right don’t know how to mud sling, it’s just that there’s no pretense that it’s to make the world a better place—just their own pocketbooks). Because the United States is such a massive country, with such a massive and diverse set of ideological interests, it’s always been extremely difficult to bring together those interests, who even though they share an understanding of the kind of world we want, don’t necessarily share a methodology about how to get there.

 I’ve been involved in community organizing all my adult life. I’ve witnessed what happens when groups let their sense of solidarity be eroded by special interests, misunderstandings, and battles among egos. The divide in the environmental community between those who identified as “deep ecologists” and those as “social ecologists” (who helped define the environmental justice movement), was bitter and self-defeating as they argued over how our degraded forests should be managed while they continued to decline and burn and our communities suffered.

There is an example of one of these failures right now in another coalition of groups with whom I’ve worked. I’m not going to be specific; naming names would only contribute to the conflict that I’m trying to help mitigate by writing this essay. This particular conflict has been extant for some time, but has recently been exacerbated by government policies that are immanently threatening to impact all of our lives.

Just as in the Warren/Sanders case, activists of integrity and commitment comprise this movement. And just as in the Warren/Sanders case, there are disagreements  about methodology. But when one of the activist groups continues to try to impugn the integrity and commitment of the other members of this community, it discredits the movement as a whole. It transfers validation to those interests trying to enact the policies the community is trying to dismantle.

Although the group claims it is respectful in its public statements, this is far from the truth. In letters to newspaper editors, in e-mails, and in press releases that address the issues that the entire community is dealing with, it often disparages the work of the other groups and makes misleading, and even false, accusations that constantly confuse the public over the basis of their criticism.

Warren and Sanders seem to have taken a step back from confrontation after witnessing how the media played up their so-called dispute (CNN’s moderation of the debate was disgraceful—they, more than “bros” or “memes” are the problem) and the public sighed in exasperation. The conflict I’ve been describing is being played out in a smaller, more insular world here in New Mexico but the ramifications of its dysfunction loom large. What will it take for this community to come together? I would hope that those who believe they are always right and everyone else is wrong will eventually recognize that this leads to the distortion of facts, blanket accusations, paranoia, and outright lies to support a destructive position.

"Embracing the Positive"

I recently read a letter in The New Yorker referencing Erik Erikson, a “brilliant neo-Freudian thinker from the past century,” who, according to the letter writer, posits that as we get older we either embrace what was positive in our lives or wallow in feelings of failure. Can’t be more polarized than that, but as one who levitates between the two poles, I decided I better look into exactly what Erikson had to say to maybe find out how to embrace the positive.

Erikson sees this choice as a process, a series of stages, in which one develops a personality based on social experience and relationships. In each stage people experience a conflict that determines whether one meets that conflict with a quality that allows for growth or fails to meet that conflict or develop essential skills needed for a strong sense of self. Mastery of the skills needed to grow equips one with “ego strength” or “ego quality.”

That’s all well and good, but how do you deal with ego strength in a society that emphasizes competition and comparison that is exacerbated by unlimited access to information about everyone with whom you can possible compete or compare?

I’m almost 70 years old. I can easily “wallow” when I think about all the incredible things that other 70 year olds like Louise Erdrich and Bill Frisell have provided for me. I’ve also lived through many “stages” that are life affirming. So how do I refrain from the competition and comparison to focus on the positive? I decided to make a list, starting with my early adult life, of the experiences and relationships that have made an impression.

1.     I went to a crazy college—Antioch—where I learned all about love and politics and expanding the mind and met lots of crazy people.

2.     I got a co-op job at the Central Clearing House in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I never left—New Mexico, that is.

3.     I invented a career as journalist for alternative newspapers like Seer’s Catalogue that floated around the Albuquerque underground.

4.     I found my dog Judge, my dearest companion, in an Oregon forest while doing shit work one summer for the Forest Service.

5.     I got to spend two summers as a fire lookout on Mount Taylor while acting as a spy for environmental groups fighting uranium exploration in the forest.

6.     I fell in love with Mark, my partner of 34 years, in the fire lookout.

7.     Mark and I built a house in Placitas from scratch.

8.     We traveled all over Mexico, having all sorts of adventures, from Yucatan to Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara and Mexico City, where Mark got his pocket picked and we had to go to the US Embassy to get enough money to pay for a hotel until we could get money wired from his parents for a bus ride home.

9.     I got to earn money hiking around the Sandia Mountains (again, the Forest Service).

10. I parleyed those hikes into classes—hiking and cross-country skiing—and guidebooks under my own imprint: Acequia Madre Press.

11. I gave birth to Jakob Matthews Schiller in 1981.

12.  I fought the Forest Service—Cibola Forest Plan—and the Forest Service won. I fought the developers—building Placitas fake adobe haciendas—and the developers won.

13. I gave birth to Max Matthews Schiller in 1988.

14. Mark and John Kennedy and I wrote the UnReal Estate news to parody the developers Real Estate News and nobody knew it was us.

15. Mark and I wanted out of Placitas so we traded houses with a woman who lived in Llano San Juan but she wanted us to exorcise our house in Placitas so we kicked her out.

16. Mark and I did get out of Placitas, but to El Valle, where we finished a house, restored a hay field, planted a garden, and started an orchard.

17. Mark and I became norteño activists and got to hang out with Ike DeVargas, Max Cordova, and Chellis Glendinning.

18. Mark and I went after Forest Guardians and Sam Hitt, those absolutist, urban environmentalists, in our radical rag newspaper, La Jicarita News.

19. We went backcountry skiing and backpacking all over northern New Mexico. We taught our kids to downhill ski. Climbed a few Colorado peaks as well.

20. We went to demonstrations where environmentalists were hung in effigy.

21. We went dancing with Tomás, the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle, and his girlfriend, in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoons.

22. We went to Spain—the Prado, the Alhambra, the Pyrenees— to visit Jakob who was there for his senior year.

23. I wrote a couple of children’s’ books.

24. We sent both kids off to college.

25. I hiked the Grand Canyon, backpacked in Big Bend, and skied to the yurts with the “girls,” who became my boon companions on many outdoor adventures.

26.  I published a couple of books with Sunstone Press: Culture Clash; Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, and Stories From Life’s Other Side.

27. Jakob married Casey in 2010; 10 months later Mark died of pancreatic cancer.

28. David Correia, Eric Shultz and I pounded out La Jicarita online, extending coverage to police violence in Albuquerque and fascism at the Santa Fe Opera.

29. Jakob and Casey gave me two grandchildren, Lulu and Marcos.

30. I published two more books under Acequia Madre Press: Unf*#!ing Believable and ¡No Se Vende! Water as a Right of the Commons.

31. John Nichols wrote me a 60 page letter in response to Unf*#!ing Believable and we became fast friends.

32. Jakob and I taught the grandkids to downhill ski. I won’t be able to keep up with them in a few more years.

33. I volunteered at the Mexican border with shelters harboring Latin American refugees seeking asylum in the United States as Trump separated children from their parents and put them in cages.

34. After years of lambasting Forest Service policy I helped start the Rio de Las Trampas Forest Council to develop a forest restoration program on the Camino Real Ranger District.

35. I helped John publish what he says will be his last book, Goodbye Monique: Requiem for a Brief Marriage, about the death of his mother when he was just two years old.

36. I’m piddling around with my novel. I don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not writing something.

It turns out Fred Rogers was also heavily influenced by Erikson in developing his much beloved series for children. Supposedly his favorite quote was from “The Little Prince:” “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” He took that to mean that what is essential to life isn’t the “honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. . . . It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff . . . What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye.”

As my life becomes more circumscribed and my body declines, I hope “what is essential” about me remains.

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Am I a Literary Luddite or do I Just Have Good Taste?

I read two books in British writer Rachael Cusk's much acclaimed trilogy and I have to tell you I don't get it—meaning I don't get what all the fuss is about. She's been quoted as saying that a novel's traditional make-up—characters, plot, description—is "fake and embarrassing," that because one has sufficiently suffered personally one only has to tell one's own story. I barely made it through the first book, Outline, where a writer in a first person narrative—has to be first person, remember, as there are no made up characters—gets on a plane and travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. It's neither autobiography, novel, or memoir, but is what is now called autofiction, like the unbelievably long books by Karl Ove Knausgaard that might not be so boring if they weren't so long. Is it because it has a new name that all the literary critics think it's so wonderful?

I skipped the second in the series, Transit, and made it through the third, Kudos, in which a writer gets on a plane, travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. This time I found the people she encounters a little more interesting than those in Outline, and their stories a little more emotionally engaging, but their suffering is not contextualized, their stories are fragmented and existential, and if there is something in this structure that is supposed to supplant the lack of theme and cohesiveness supplied by character, plot, and description, it's lost on me.

To not appear a literary luddite I have to say that I read another relatively new book that the critics loved called 10:04 by Ben Lerner, who is also a poet. If anyone had told me, you should read this book by someone who is a white Gen X guy who lives in hipster Brooklyn I would have said, not interested, but the book is beautiful and brilliant and I read it twice. Lerner's book could also be classified as autofiction, I suppose, but the difference between his conception of the genre and Cusk's is night and day: the warmth and breadth of the interplay between his muddled personal life and the neoliberal streets of New York or the art/fart of Marfa challenge the reader's imagination with humor and intelligence. In a passage in which he falls into the third person, Lerner summarizes the book: “His narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation.” This is expressed in numerous ways throughout. While dealing with his own serious illness the author agrees to become a sperm donor for his best friend Alex, scrupulously maintaining a Platonic relationship with her and trying to figure out what parenting might mean. He tries to establish community with an Occupy activist by allowing him to shower in his apartment and mentoring an eight-year-old boy while questioning the sincerity of his efforts. He volunteers at a food co-op as an ironic statement of capitalist consumerism while listening to a riveting story of a fellow worker's life. Ironies, contradictions, politics, personal dilemmas, humor, fear, and anxiety: the mixed bag of who we and what we confront explored by someone who's razor sharp intelligence makes every page a delight.

But then I had a conversation with my friend Terri, who I loaned Lerner's book to, and while she also thought it was an intelligent, funny book, especially the part about Marfa (she's a visual artist), as a working class lesbian she had more trouble with the white Gen X hipster Brooklyn genesis than I did. "Am I really all that interested in hearing the perspective of the dominant voice in literature again?" as she put it, even if he's smart and witty and entertaining?

I suppose what this all reveals is that I'm a white privileged secular humanist and that the literary trends that are correlative will resonate, and those that aren't, won't. That's why I never read Derrida, struggled with Foucault, could only read Pynchon and Burroughs in my twenties, gave up on Foster Wallace, am very picky with DeLillo, and am embarrassed that I've hardly read Borges.

But even within these boundaries there's something else at work, what you just have to admit is taste, or more presumptively, discretion. Just as when I thought the movie that won the Oscar year before last, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was a racist piece of crap (eventually a number of other critics finally expressed this opinion as well) or Crash, which won a few years ago, was a contrived piece of crap. This may never happen with Rachel Cusk, but I'll stick to my opinion that her deadpan look at suffering doesn't do much to enlighten, entertain, or delight. 

Brett Kavanaugh Unleashed

I watched the whole, damn, disgusting spectacle on Thursday. I thought the painful part would be when Christine Blasey Ford testified about the sexual assault she accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of perpetrating 36 years ago when she was 15 and he was 17. Although a #MeToo victim myself, which I wrote about in a former blogpost, I worried more about her and the many women out there who like Dr. Blasey, had suffered or are still suffering significant trauma. I was raped in my early twenties, but I haven't experienced the residual trauma that many others have. As Sarah Shulman explains it, "two people can have the same experience  and one can be devastated for life" but the other can move beyond it because of other factors each person brings to it. I found that watching Dr. Blasey's testimony —brave, measured, forthright, and authentic—wasn't painful, however; it was validation that although her assault had deeply affected her at different times in her life, she has a sense of purpose and composure that  compelled her to come forward as she put it, to do her "civic duty."
 
No, the painful part of yesterday's hearing was when Brett Kavanaugh sat in the witness chair. In either my political naivete or astuteness, one of which will be born out in next week's full senate hearing on his nomination to the Supreme Court, I thought Kavanaugh would come out prepared to woo the few Repubs who just might have a modicum of decency left to vote against him (or more likely, the constituency that forced them to vote against him). Like he presented himself at the initial hearings before the judicial committee: good Catholic student who went to a prestigious prep school who got into Yale law school on his academic record and then went on to work in Washington D.C. for George W. Bush and became a judge because of his brilliance as an attorney and married a wonderful woman and had two wonderful girls and coached their basketball teams because he's such a good guy.

Instead, Brett decided to come out as the Trumpster: mean, vicious, petulent, full of lies. You, know, the white man of privilege who thinks he's the victim when anyone gets in his way. He went on to reveal himself as the partisan hack he's been since he graduated from law school and joined forces with the cabal of conservatives that included Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and George Conway (Kellyanne's husband). He worked for Ken Starr on the Clinton investigations where numerous Justice Department policies were violated including leaks to journalists, particularly regarding Bill Clinton's sexual activities (which led a federal judge to commission an investigation into whether members of Starr’s staff violated the prohibitions on disclosing grand jury information). He was intimately involved in the conspiracy theory that Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster had been murdered rather than committed suicide, tormenting Hilary and Foster's family. During his tenure as a White House staffer under George W. Bush he was accused of using stolen materials from Democratic senators' offices to help judicial nominees and then lied about it under oath during hearings. It's also likely he reviewed materials involving "enhanced interrogation" methods while in the Bush White House but because Trump withheld so many documents from the the 2018 Senate judicial committee no paper trail was evident.

He will bring his staunch conservative record displayed on the D.C Circuit Court of Appeals to the U.S Supreme Court: support of the Citizens United decision; desire to overturn or severely limit Roe v. Wade (he has said he considers contraception abortion); limiting government agencies the ability to enforce environmental, safety, and other regulations; immigration restrictions; support of gerrymandering; voter suppression; the list goes on and on.

So was his revelation of who he really is a calculated strategy or just a monster unleashed in panic mode? He said he had thrown out his prepared speech and rewritten it himself with no vetting the night before. But he lies, so we don't know if that's the truth or it that's part of the calculation, either. But Trump already has his back. So does every Republican on the judicial committee. Lindsay Graham broke out in a raving rant that the hearing was a "sham", a "circus", a "disgrace" and I think he threw in McCarthy as well, destroying this good man's name. He sounded a lot like Clarence Thomas. Oh how far we have come. Seems to me he was taking a big chance of putting Susan Collins and those other fence sitters in the public eye of those who realize that women like Dr. Blasey could be their daughters or sisters or granddaughters and we better fucking listen to them.

I couldn't bear to watch the hearings again on Friday but I turned it on just at the very end to hear the vote. Lo and behold, our fence sitter Jeff Flake, Republican who isn't running for Senate again and has nothing to lose and who likes to talk bravely but continues to vote for every pernicious bill that comes down the pipe, pulled a last minute punch. Just as they were set to vote, he asked for the floor and announced that he would vote no for Kavanaugh next week in the full senate vote unless Senate leader Mitch McConnell asks for a one week delay for an FBI reopening of an investigation into the allegations made during the senate judiciary hearings. But remember, there would have to be one more "no" vote to block Kavanaugh's nomination in the full Senate. Flake said he was willing to ask the White House to reopen the FBI investigation.

So the drama continues. Will wily Mitch McConnell figure out a way to wiggle out of this one so that injustice once again prevails? That is his modus operandi, of course, to win at all costs. As one of the senators on the committee said yesterday, Dr. Blasey, like Anita Hill, will be remembered for her courage and forthrightness. Unfortunately,  those who have damaged them personally and publicly will continue to do so until their power is broken and they are held to account. The #MeToo movement has done much to bring down some powerful figures in some powerful industries: Hollywood; broadcast media; print media; and a few others. If Kavanaugh is brought down, it will be the most important power figure to date because of the impact his tenure on the Supreme Court would have on the lives of so many people. It's still the tip of the iceberg, but if it could break a hole in that Titanic, a lot more of 'em could go down.

Thank God for Novels

While I was rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls John McCain died and I found out that it was his favorite book. That was a bit discombobulating, but understandable within the context of war and heroism and all that good stuff Hemingway writes about. But Jesus, all the other stuff that Hemingway writes about in that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism suicide, and death.

Listening to just the stuff about war and heroism as applied to McCain for almost two solid weeks was a good lesson in reductive thinking. Because McCain, a hawk, war monger, misogynist, and neoconservative, was also one of the few Republicans who expressed any opposition to Trump, in death he became the untainted hero. Obama delivered one of the eulogies. All the Democrats spewed laudatory sound bites. All the mainstream news outlets ran patriotic story after story documenting his years as a tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam and his distinguished career in the Senate where he manufactured a reputation as a maverick—he had a contrarian streak that sometimes played out against his own team—despite never seeing a war he didn't like.

But I digress. For anyone who hasn't read Hemingway's book, or those of you who don't remember it that well, it's the story of the Spanish Civil War and a band of partizans assigned the task of blowing up a bridge as part of a larger offensive against the fascists. The story is told through the eyes of Robert Jordan, an American (the Spaniards refer to him as Inglés) who had been studying in Spain before joining the Republicans to fight the fascists. Hemingway takes 471 pages to tell what happens over the course of three days. That is what makes this novel so wonderful. While I digressed about John McCain, he digressed about everything possible pertaining to a small band of guerrillas living in a cave in the mountains caught up in a war that presaged an even more horrific fight against fascism that would engulf the world just a few years later.

Roberto (as he is lovingly called by Maria, the young woman rescued by the guerillas after her family is shot by the fascists) questions everything in his stream of consciousness and flashbacks: why is he here, who are these people, can they be trusted, who is he to question their trust, how has this war come to be, will the communists, anarchists, and Trotskyites destroy the movement with their internecine bickering, will he and Maria live to walk the fascist free streets of Madrid as husband and wife? Yet minute by minute, hour by hour he must focus on how he is going to blow up a bridge when the Republican offensive begins and then figure out how the hell they're all going to get down from the mountains to safety.

It was such a pleasure to read as a distraction from John McCain's death and Trump's rants and Brett Kavanaugh's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as the Republicans push through his nomination to the Supreme Court. This appointment is not made by Congress anymore; it's made by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which draws up the list of potential conservative nominees to present to the president who then chooses the one he thinks will fulfill all his promises made to his base: overturn or severely limit Roe v. Wade, protect the president from prosecution, limit government agencies from enacting environmental and safety regulation, etc. etc.

But again I digress. I guess it just goes to show that our attention is riveted by this unbelievably strange vortex that sucks us deeper into a world we never thought we'd witness, but upon analysis was barrelling along all the time setting us up for the Trumpster. But wait! Another bomb. Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a professor in California back when they were in high school. Another disgusting Republican conservative who not only wants to control women's bodies by policy but apparently by physical force as well. Good thing I started rereading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: about as different as you can get in so many ways from For Whom the Bell Tolls but so beautifully written and actually just as incisive a look into the human condition. No, Virginia, there's no Santa Claus, but there's still beauty in the world and I'm going to stay out of the vortex for two hours a day with the another Virginia who's even better than Santa.

A Memory of Days Gone By

While I was on my morning walk a memory of days gone by popped into my head. I don’t know why, it just did. The memory was of an old friend who I met in the Women’s Studies Department at UNM many years ago. She was a part-time student, a nurse by trade, married to a doctor with two small children and a house in an upscale neighborhood in the North Valley. We became friends in class and soon she invited me to come meet her husband and kids. Which I did, and soon after, she asked me if I’d be interested in staying at her house and taking care of the kids while she and her husband went to Mexico for a few days.

I knew nothing about taking care of children. I had twenty-something priorities of drinking beer at Okie’s, the university bar, and dancing at Rosa’s Cantina in Algodones (always political, I found time to write for the alternative papers Seer’s Catalog and Coatamundi). I’d only known her for a few months and she was willing to trust her children to this ignorant caregiver? And these were young children, four or five and two or three, somewhere around there in age. I, of course, said yes (again, I’m a pretty nice person who likes to help people out), but I’d have to bring my dogs with me, which I did, to combine with their several dogs, and, as a bonus, a gorilla.

Now, I don’t remember if she provided the gorilla information to me at the outset and I was intrigued by the situation, or it came as an afterthought and I was caught off guard. The gorilla was named Huerfanita, who had been born at the Albuquerque Zoo but abandoned by her mother and was being raised by the wife of the zoo director. My friend and her husband were taking care of Huerfanita for a short period of time to give the zoo keeper’s wife a reprieve, but why they thought they could go off to Mexico and leave this baby gorilla in my care is also a mystery.

So for three or four days, I don’t remember (a recurring theme) which, I stayed with two toddlers, four or five dogs, and a gorilla that clung to my chest during its waking hours while I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or spaghetti to feed these children who spent a lot of time tormenting me by getting into all kinds of trouble in the house, usually involving water in the bathroom. But I survived, I stayed friends with the family, and watched these children grow up. I babysat many more times over the years and enjoyed their packed refrigerator, pantry, and bar. When Mark and I became a couple, he and I babysat the kids and enjoyed the amenities together.  And many years later, the doctor ended up delivering our first baby, Jakob, when I had to have a Caesarian section instead of a natural birth at a the Southwest Maternity Center (he was the consulting doctor for the Center). We paid him for his services with pot.

Mark and I attended the wedding of their youngest son. But then years started going by and we largely lost touch (we had moved to El Valle and were much farther apart logistically as well). The last time I had any contact was when their older son developed a critical medical condition and we spoke on the phone. As far as I know he recovered.

Now I don’t know if they’re even still alive. She was 10 years older than me, he even older. But I’m very happy that for some inexplicable reason I thought of them this morning: they came in and out of my life, as so many others have done, but I have the memory.

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