Last Writes

I’ve had obits on the brain lately.

OK, I usually have obits on the brain, to some extent. Not because I’m death-obsessed, but because I am interested in what obituaries say about lives well- and ill-lived, and what our reactions to them say about our own lives, and the state of the society in which we live.

Filmmaker Vanessa Gould must have similar thoughts, because her excellent documentary Obit—described by New York Times film reviewer Gene Seymour as profiling “The Times’s necrology team at work”—approaches the subject from the perspectives I’ve just described. In the film, Gould interviews the newspaper’s team of obituary writers about their craft. We learn more, along the way, about a number of fairly recently deceased people whose lives—for reasons obvious or explained—merited special attention in a newspaper whose very nickname, “The Old Grey Lady,” suggests the approach of rigor mortis.

But it isn’t just because I recently saw Obit—more on it shortly—that the subject is particularly prominent in my mind these days. It’s also because of a local obituary that led me to a memorial service a few weeks ago, a national obituary that sparked  headlines, and my personal history as a print journalist and occasional obituary writer.

I’ll take those things in reverse order.

When I was on the staff of the High Point Enterprise in North Carolina for most of the 1980s, about once a month I had to work the late shift on Saturday nights, remaining at the newspaper until the Sunday edition went to press after midnight. Although the “late man” (who could be and sometimes was a woman) most importantly was tasked with reporting on any big local story that might break at the last minute, such as a significant crime or fire, writing obits also came with the territory.

To be sure, this was not creative work—as much as I would like to group myself with the likes of the reporters profiled in Obit. What they do is, well, reporting. They dig for facts about the deceased through phone calls and research, and craft a succinct narrative that’s both factual and compelling. What I did was field phone calls from local funeral home officials, who dictated information to me that I then wrote up in a standardized format. As much as I love the description and idea of being part of a “necrology team,” I simply was a lone functionary plugging non-bylined words into holes (appropriately enough)—asking the same questions in sequence, adhering to a format.

Still, it actually was kind of fun. The guys (always guys) from the funeral homes were easy to deal with and always in a good mood. Whether that was because I offered them relief from the enforced somberness of interacting with grieving families, or because they regarded dealing with the press as “public relations” that behooved congeniality, or what, I don’t know. I was happy to be speaking with them—insofar as I could be happy to be spending my Saturday night working in a newspaper office. I mean, it beat running off to cover a fire or a police shooting on deadline, which almost never happened but always could happen. Writing obits was mindless, rote work—which was my absolute favorite kind at the end of a long work week. The funeral home guys were friendly and even funny, in the corny, homespun way that is the lifeblood of men whose careers are built on inoffensive chitchat and the ability to sweet-talk bereaved people into spending obscene amounts of money to objectively needless ends.

I didn’t judge them. I just asked prescribed questions and took dictation. We might also talk about the weather, or a Tar Heels’ basketball victory. We exchanged niceties while I checked correct spellings and confirmed numbers of grandchildren. We were two guys shooting the breeze while giving the recently deceased his or her final written sendoff.

So, my professional association with the obits was positive, and the documentary brought those times back to me. My work week was winding down at those moments. My truncated weekend was about to begin. After my obit duties were completed, I’d listen to my crusty old city editor Forrest Cates tell stories about bygone days at the Enterprise, where he’s started as a paperboy decades before, until the presses ran. Sometimes I’d follow him back to his house for a beer and a little late-night TV. Forrest is long dead now, of course. His obit, which merited a bylined write-up, ran years after I’d moved on and he’d retired.

But I’ve also had obits on my mind because of two recent deaths—one of a man I knew and loved, the other of a man I never met but loathed. The former was Paul Plawin, my one-time boss at the Association for Career and Technical Education (originally the American Vocational Association), and the latter was Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The two men were similar in age at death—Paul was 78 and Ailes 77. But oh what a difference in how they used those years, and what they left in their wake.

Paul’s obit was so brief and nondescript, unaccompanied by a photo, that I completely missed it in the Washington Post. I cursorily scan the section daily to see if anyone I know died, and to read obits that catch my eye for whatever reason—the prominence of the deceased, his or her age, or just a compelling headshot. I was alerted to Paul’s death by a text from a friend and former colleague, which was how I came to be at his memorial service in Northern Virginia.

To call Paul an original or one of a kind is not to do him justice. He was an old-school journalist whose professional standards were high, but whose credo was carpe diem—with whatever the Latin is word for “fun” overlapping and complementing the diem. Though most talk at the service was about what a great husband and father he’d been, Paul’s adult children’s recollections and visual props dovetailed with my memories of him as mirthmaker-in-chief.  To give you a sense of him, those props included singing, dancing toy figures of Elvis Presley and James Brown, Paul’s favorite entertainers; a mock magazine cover on which he expressively simulated electrocution while sitting in a faux prison chair; and a couple of hats he sometimes wore around the house and even in public. One came with a blond ponytail, the other with attached dreadlocks.

It was Paul who once proudly showed me the inscriptions he’d written to himself in the volumes on his office bookshelf—like, say, this appreciation in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “To Paul, who taught me everything I’ve ever known about success in business and life. Best always, Steve Covey.” It was Paul who once shouted hysterically in a Las Vegas casino (we were in Sin City for a conference) that he was rich, rich, RICH! after positioning himself next to a nickel slot machine that someone else had just jackpotted.  It was Paul who assured us that any dreck we might write in our magazine could improve in quality if we’d just “spiff it up” a little bit.

I loved Paul’s memorial service so much that I felt compelled to share its highlights in a lengthy email that I sent a few days later to a number of his former staffers who couldn’t be there. Their replies, and their comments in commiserative emails when we all first heard the news, left no doubt that the length of an obit does not necessarily reflect the breadth of the person’s impact.

Just as the length of an obit doesn’t necessarily reflect positive breadth of impact. Take Roger Ailes. (Please.) As the founding father of an alternative-facts “news” network that’s spawned a thousand imitators, has empowered and normalized countless intolerant jerks, and has enabled and abetted the presidency of unfit, unstable man-child Donald Trump, Ailes scored lengthy obits upon his death. Of course, those accounts were lengthened by the necessity of recounting Ailes’s last-act humiliation and comeuppance—his being ousted from Fox for sexually harassing a long line of his own female employees. Still, Ailes’s death was Big News, with the column inches to prove it.

Sure, the usual suspects on the Right praised him for leveling the media-bias playing field—if willfully ignoring facts and making reportage a race to the bottom is what’s meant by  “leveling”—but even they were silent on his interpersonal monstrousness toward women. A lot of obits I read about Ailes took the form of op-eds and other opinion pieces by people who didn’t feel compelled, under the circumstances, to speak well of the dead.

Take this headline, for example, from the Onion’s AV Club: “Human Boil Roger Ailes Mourned Online with Ceaseless Parade of Insults.” Its first paragraph read: “Slug-like sexual predator and architect of today’s broken political discourse Roger Ailes died this morning, disgraced and unemployed. Online, you can read equivocating takes that attempt to contextualize his crimes with praise for his media savvy, as well as positive takes from the strong-chinned know-nothings still thriving in the house he built along with fellow sexual predator Bill O’Reilly. But mostly, what you will see online today is people lining up to take a shit on his corpse before it can even be put in the ground.”

So, not exactly an expression of deep grief and boundless thanks.

That item, in turn, linked readers to a piece by Rolling Stone political reporter Matt Taibbi that was headlined, “Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever.” Taibbi opined, in part, that “We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.” Taibbi called Ailes “the Christopher Columbus of hate.”

Which legacy would you rather leave behind—Paul’s or Ailes’? And the thing is, Paul would’ve modestly downplayed the notion that he left a big, positive impact on all the people with whom he crossed paths. Ailes, on the other hand, clearly took delight in the fruits of his cynical and fraudulent handiwork.

This gets me, finally, back to Obit—the film, not the postmortem writeup itself. Documentarian Gould wisely lets the dedicated, articulate and appropriately detached members of the Times’ necrology team do the talking. And the stories they tell bespeak, in a moving way, what really survives when a person dies, and how important it is to tell those impactful stories both factually and well.

As a one-time reporter myself—and someone who struggles still with brevity in both my professional writing and in recreational pursuits like this now-1800-word blog post—one comment in Obit particularly resonated with me. I think it’s spoken by veteran Times obit writer Bruce Weber. He cites it as an old journalistic saw, and I’m sure it is, although I hadn’t heard it before.

Anyway, Weber, is talking about the daily task of researching, then shrinking down, a person’s entire life into an 800-word box on deadline. (Some obits are much longer, but that’s pretty much the standard length for write-ups on people such as, say the inventor of the Slinky.) Weber cites the scenario of an editor breathing down a writer’s neck to complete the story and release it to the news desk. “Just keep it short!” the editor screams. To which the reporter—Bruce Weber, me, anyone who’s ever tried to write anything well in a modicum of words—replies, “I don’t have time to write short!”

That is so true! But the necrology team must do that every day. In Obit, they tell some great stories. Like how a bit of research revealed that a little-remembered media consultant arguably had been instrumental in tipping the 1960 presidential race to John F Kennedy. And how the Times’s pre-written obit with the longest shelf life probably was that of high-risk teenaged aviatrix Elinor Smith, who instead would die of old age at 98 in 2010. And how the exploits of transoceanic oarsman John Fairfax nearly were lost to history.

The reporters in Obit won’t ever write about the Paul Plawins of the world—men and women who lived exemplary and inspirational lives, but who did so in ways that didn’t distinguish them from countless other individuals who fit that same description.

The Times’s necrology team members have written, and will continue to write (usually in many more than 800 words), about prominent people like Roger Ailes, entertainment figures such as Michael Jackson and Philip Seymour Hoffman (both referenced in the film), and subjects of international fascination like Princess Diana (ditto). Whoever the Times staff chooses to profile, the obituary will cover both the good and the bad in that person’s life, but will not express the writer’s opinion about any of it. Because that’s not what reporters do. Except of course, on Fox News and its many mutations.

Promise me that I can write Fox’s obit, and I’ll happily jump back in the game.

Words From Our Sponsors

Plumbing to electrical/Heating to air conditioning/If you can’t we can/Michael & Son!

In this relentlessly fractious world, it sometimes seems as if there’s just one thing on which everyone agrees—hatred of advertising.

Once societally regarded as at worst a tolerable quid pro quo for delivering the radio and TV programming we enjoy—and at best a source of memorable jingles and clever wordplay—on-air ads now are almost universally loathed. Baby boomers like me are cutting the cable cord in part to avoid them. Instant gratification-demanding millennials can’t imagine a bigger waste of their precious time.

To which I have three words: Just. Shut. Up.

OK, I don’t love advertising. It isn’t as if I’m happy to hear that obnoxiously insipid “I-877 Kars for Kids” vehicle-donation spot crank up. I, too, change the radio station in the car when the classic rock station is in the midst of an ad block longer than even the endless Iron Butterfly song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” It’s not hyperbole, however, to say that radio and TV advertising helps keep me keep me sane in a world that has gone increasingly mad. For me, it’s a reassuring tether that calms my waking hours.

Ads are my connection to a largely lost world in which things had order and made sense. In which nobody got something for nothing. In which it was understood that much of life is kind of tedious, and that that’s OK, maybe even character-building. In which some things never change, like the insistent reliability of Michael & Son when your HVAC system has gone haywire, and the conviction that, for all your oriental rug-cleaning needs, just one call to Joe Hadeed will do the trick.

I mean, let’s not sugar-coat the current state of the planet. Things are changing at a dizzying pace, and in extremely few cases for the better. Both the atmospheric and the sociopolitical climate are spiraling downward. Wars and famine are escalating. Wisdom and vision are sorely needed, but our leaders, elected and not, are autocrats, petty tyrants or ineffectual bumblers. It’s All Going to Hell. When I tell people that I’m glad I’m 58 and not 28 because I believe that extra 30 years will, in the not-too-distant future, be the difference between impervious death and full, agonizing immersion in the shitstorm to come, I find that my pessimism encounters little blowback. I sense growing consensus that this may be, and probably is, It. That the jig may well be up.

People respond to this reality in various ways. Some, counterintuitively, become parents, in willful optimism that maybe, just maybe, their kids and that new generation will do a vastly better job than have the existing ones at pulling everything back from the precipice. Young people are either too preoccupied with loan-repayment and scarce job prospects to dwell on the Earth’s future, or they bank on the ability of their friend, technology, to solve all the world’s ills. Those established in their working careers retreat into Netflix and YouTube, or banter on Facebook. People my age and older get mad, get sad, maybe join protests, maybe find solace in their place on mortality tables.

I take comfort in the repetition and sameness of advertising. I actually listen to the ads. I know the words. I hum the jingles to myself—even, sometimes, the ones I find grating, which nevertheless worm their way into my brain. I welcome the distraction. I wonder what Dr Alison Tendler is really like, and whether she’s shunned by her fellow ophthalmologists for shilling on TV for the drug Restasis. I think about how much I used to like Tina Fey before she apparently decided she desperately needed the money she gets from American Express to laud their credit card approximately 15,000 times a day on any given television channel. I even daydream about past ad campaigns, hearing long-dead naturalist Euell Gibbons observe appreciatively that Grape-Nuts cereal reminds him of the taste of wild hickory nuts, and wondering why buying the world a Coke never resulted in world peace, when the joyous young people on the hilltop in that sunny commercial had seemed so certain that it would.

My perfect afternoon, in a sense, is one spent working in the yard while listening to the radio. The music often is that of my youth—a far less complicated, fraught and fragmented era. The baseball games evoke an unchanging timelessness. I may hear the same ads 50 times in the course of my toils, but I generally don’t mind. There’s a rhythm to it, a drumbeat that parallels the act of methodically  pulling weeds or cutting row after row of grass. It’s as comfortable as the old sneakers I’m wearing as I restore order to the front lawn. I could be 15 or 35 or 75, out there in nature, doing the same thing. Working up an honest sweat. Earning, afterward, a cold drink and the breeze of a fan pointed directly at me. It’s great stuff. It’s a wonderful constant. It makes me happy in a way that few things do.

Advertising, for all its repetition and banality, is a part of all that. I feel kind of sorry for those who deprive themselves of its comforts by regarding it as an irredeemable nuisance.

I haven’t expressed any of this as elegantly or coherently as I would’ve liked. I’m a little distracted by a loud deluge of rain falling outside my window. I told my sleeping cat Moz at the outset that I don’t quite have it today—that just because I take the day off from work to write doesn’t mean the best words will obligingly show up at the end of my typing finger. I certainly don’t fancy that I’ve changed anyone’s mind.

All I’m saying is that, unlike everyone else, I don’t want TV and radio ads to go away. I get why people despise them, but I hate to see them underutilized. Succumb! They can help you through days that are filled with horrible news—the dismantling of democracy in America, the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, chemical warfare in Syria. Ads won’t make any of that go away. But they can, somehow, improbably, dull the panic a little. They can provide subconscious mantras that will leaven the discord just enough to be helpful.

Trust me on this. Trust Michael & Son to get it done.

The Scrapheap of History

I spent a few hours time-traveling yesterday afternoon. It was entirely pragmatic, but I welcomed the opportunity to escape from 2017, given what’s happening in this country and the world.

(I’m typing these words on Presidents Day, which puts a fine point on the depths to which that office has devolved—from Washington to the Worst. Also, the temperatures are in the 60s in February, manifestations of climate change that the current administration has no interest in addressing.)

So. My parents are in their 80s—my dad will be 89 soon—but the closest they’ve come to downsizing from their big split-level house is giving a tiny fraction of their possessions to me to go through and dispose of as I see fit. This fraction comes in the form of scrapbooks my mom compiled from her teen years to the dawn of the 21st century. She’s been giving them to me piecemeal for years, but I think there still are more to come.

The scrapbooks spent decades in my parents’ attic. They look like it. But mostly, they smell like it. When I first started going through them—periodically, as the mood struck me—a couple of years ago, I set up a card table downstairs and strolled down memory lane (sometimes my own memory, other times my mom’s, before I was born) in the comfort of my own home. But Lynn ultimately declared the moldering keepsakes a biohazard. Which was why yesterday I felt on my skin the impact of global warming. The card table, which itself has been banished to the garage, along with all the remaining scrapbooks, was set up on our screened-in, open-air front porch, so as not to release its toxins inside the house.

As our dog, Bean, slept in the sun beside me, I went through four scrapbooks I’d randomly grabbed, not knowing until I opened them which years they chronicled. As it turned out, they were sequential, covering 1978 through 1985. Those were highly eventful years in my life, as it happens, taking me through college and my first jobs. Appropriately, my portable radio was tuned to the classic rock station throughout my time on the porch, providing a soundtrack that was historically accurate much of the time.

On the street below me, where passersby walked their dogs and kids rode their bikes, it was the year in which I’ll turn a shocking 59—the cusp of 60! On the porch, however, I was aging from 19 at the start of my scrapbook excavations to 26 by the end of them. It felt intensely familiar yet happily distant.

I write “happily” because I wouldn’t relive those years for all the tea in China. (As the phrase used to go when China wasn’t yet better known for consumer goods and computer hacking.)

At the dawn of 1978, I was an uncertain and socially inept college student with no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. By the end of 1985, I’d cycled through a trio of jobs and found myself back at the first one by default, for lack of a better plan. I’d acquired and lost my first real girlfriend in that last scrapbook year. I was kind of back at square one.

Not that the scrapbooks told that story. There, I was part of a glowing family narrative, full of achievements and entertainments and special occasions. Every holiday was a happy one. Greensboro, North Carolina, was the cultural capital of the world, judging from the array of orchestra programs, celebrity appearances and ticket stubs. My brother was well on his way to domestic and career success, and I was blowing the competition away in everything I did—in academics, in writings for my college newspaper and literary magazine, as a fledgling journalist after graduation, then as a congressional press secretary on Capitol Hill. Only in 1985 comes a hint of discord, with the scrapbook notation that I returned to my old newspaper job in High Point after an unhappy six-month stint with an employer in downtown DC.

In fact, the end of 1985 was the low point of my adult life—not that I'd exactly felt like I’d been killing it before then, my mom’s rosy commentary and displays of my awards and articles notwithstanding.

I’d graduated from college with a high GPA but no idea what to do for a living other than to apply to newspaper work, since I’d written for my college paper. So, I ended up working for peanuts (and a canned ham as a Christmas bonus) at a middling local newspaper for a few years. Then, because I’d covered politics in my job, I got asked by the local congressman to replace his fired press secretary in DC. I spent a year at that job, was terrified the entire time even though I frankly was given little real responsibility, then was out of work a year later when my boss lost his reelection bid. I spent the subsequent six months—the first half of 1985—living at my parents’ house, being un- or underemployed, and losing my girlfriend because having no money or self-confidence proved to be the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac.

That six-month disaster in DC that had merited a rare down note in my mom’s scrapbook was my job as administrative assistant at an outfit called the National Waterways Conference. Its interest was in barge commerce, or something like that. I honestly never did quite know what the organization was all about, because it was a three-person operation, and my boss was a petty tyrant who somehow had gotten it into his head that I would learn everything I needed to know on the job without any direction from him.

And I thought I’d been terrified working on Capitol Hill! My boss would tell me to compile information on this thing or that—all related, somehow, to transport on our nation’s inland waterways system—and report back to him on my findings. But his only instruction, when I’d ask how I might best educate myself—the Internet and Google didn’t yet exist—was, “Just make some calls.”

“’Calls’? To who? To ask what?”

“Just make some calls.”

“Um, can you please expand on that? With whom might I start?”

By then he’d be seething at my ignorance. He’d finally spit out a contact name, who I’d then call. But that person never would be of much help to me, given that I no context about what I was supposed to be learning.

Every minute was a nightmare. I spent my days fumbling helplessly for relevant information and dreading the sound of my boss buzzing me into his adjacent office. The only other employee, a young female secretary, was sympathetic to my plight but could do nothing to relieve it. The weekends offered no comfort. All I did was count the hours until the renewed hell of Monday morning.   

My single happy memory of that entire half-year was the time I went directly from work to a movie theater on a Friday afternoon to see this crazy horror movie named Reanimator. There was a scene in which a mad scientist held his disembodied head while it vigorously performed oral sex on a woman. The sequence was so outrageous and weirdly campy that it made me laugh out loud, at length. Why, it was almost as if I’d had all these pent-up emotions that need to be excised, whatever the stimuli! Go figure.

Needless to say, my ticket stub from Reanimator was not among the postcards, sugar packets, travel brochures and other archival materials in my mom’s scrapbook of the events of 1985. But later, after I’d removed everything I wanted to keep from those four deteriorating piles of construction paper and thrown the rest into the garbage, I thought long and hard about that dreadful job and the distance I’ve come in the 32 years since I left it.

When I resigned from the Waterways Conference to return to my old newspaper job in North Carolina, my boss audibly scoffed at my surrender, yet insisted on giving me a fancy pen as a parting gift because his inbred manners as a native Alabamian demanded the gesture. But, while I wasn’t thrilled to go back to High Point and my old newspaper job, at least I stopped being terrified. And I was back to doing something at which I was reasonably good. My confidence gradually grew, to the point that I moved on, in late 1989, to another newspaper job in Savannah, Georgia. It was during my three years working there that I began dating Lynn long-distance. I joined her in DC when we got married in November 1992.

Everything since then has been on an upward trajectory. My personal life has never been happier, and my professional one is generally satisfying. (Although make no mistake, I’d exchange it for retirement in a heartbeat.) I’ve done good work at three different membership organizations over the past quarter-century, and I've had great bosses at each stop.

Still, it’s helpful to look back, and it's beneficial to keep perspective.

The Tale of the Scrapbooks, for me, is “this, too, shall pass.” Returning to the present, and staring the socio-political horror that is 2017 squarely in the eye, I can only hope the same phrase applies on a national and global scale.

I mean that literally. Seriously, hoping is all I can do. It’s not like there’s empirical evidence of impending change for the better.

Deja Vu

It’s Groundhog Day. Is it ever.

I’m not talking about the ritual of scaring a poor woodchuck half to death in service to a bogus weather forecast. I’m referencing the Bill Murray movie in which the same day, the same sequence of events, keeps happening over and over again. I’m talking about the pattern of scaring progressive Americans more than half to death in service to a president driven to bogus certainties by his own ego, ignorance and incuriousness.

We’re now a few weeks into the Trump administration—two words that continue to be, and I’m pretty sure always will be, very hard for me to write—and it’s utterly clear that anyone who thought that Petty, Boorish Campaign Trump would yield to some semblance of Statesmanlike President Trump was dead wrong.

Evidence of this is so abundant that it’s hard to choose among the seemingly endless cases in point. Who and what hasn’t the man insulted, belittled, and attempted to silence or marginalize? Examples range from our free and objective press to the tenuous existence of the Senate filibuster as a safeguard against ideological extremists on the Supreme Court. But here’s a for-instance from this morning’s newspaper—word that our Diplomat in Chief hung up on Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after harshly criticizing an Obama-brokered refugee-acceptance deal between the two nations and informing Turnbull that, of Trump’s five telephone conversations with world leaders that day, “this call was by far the worst.”

This, in a nutshell, is what we’re dealing with: A deeply disturbed—I believe mentally ill, far beyond the obvious narcissistic personality disorder—chief executive who’s incapable of an iota of civility in the face of anything he doesn’t like, and whose off-the-charts ego brooks no thought that anything isn’t ultimately All About Him. I mean, how childish is comparing phone calls? (“Why can’t you kiss my ass like Putin does?”) Did I mention the fact that the reason Trump so loathes Obama’s agreement to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center is that “I’m going to get killed politically for this”?)

Also, the Washington Post reports, BLOATUS (tip of the hat to humor columnist Gene Weingarten, who was referencing Trump’s girth but might just as easily have been invoking the apt noun “bloviator”) managed to insert into the 25-minute conversation with Turnbull (it was supposed to have been an hour) yet another boast about the “magnitude” of his Electoral College win—which actually was small by historical standards. (And never mind the popular vote, which Trump delusionally refuses to acknowledge he fairly and legitimately lost by almost three million ballots.)

Anyway, back to Groundhog Day. I was among the roughly half-million people who, on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, thronged Washington’s National Mall to signal our fury at the new president’s rhetoric, personal assaults on, and promised actions toward women. We were joined that day by perhaps 1.5 million more protesters across the US and around the world. Friends of mine turned out in towns as small as Sonoma, California, and cities as large as New York and Philadelphia.

It was energizing and encouraging—if hugely claustrophobic and sometimes chaotic—to be in the midst of so many like-minded Americans, who importantly—in their signage and their chants—emphasized not only that women’s rights are human rights, but that matters such as the health of the environment and our education and health care systems are universal concerns, as well.

Yes, it remains to be seen how effectively all of this outrage can be channeled in ways that truly impact decision-making and policies, given the Republican stranglehold on Washington. We marchers and other progressives must do much more than preach to the choir. We need to let lawmakers know where we stand, donate and/or volunteer our time to causes in which we believe, and, perhaps most importantly, try in whatever small ways we can to engage with those with whom we disagree—trying less overtly to convert them than to help them understand why we fear America is selling its soul to broad and outlandish promises of backward time travel to an era when coal was king and the world was far less dangerous.

I guess I didn’t actually get back to Groundhog Day, as I promised a few paragraphs ago. But that sentence above about coal and danger hints as where I’m going with this. Please stay with me.

I mentioned the signage at the Women’s March on DC. It was inventive and wonderful. It tended to get to the heart of things in a modicum of words. Much of it centered on reproductive rights, sexual assault (per Trump’s brags in the infamous Access Hollywood video) and misogyny (Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman”). Inevitably, though, the writings also focused specifically on the polarizing man who prompted the marches. Signs and posters read “Toddler in Chief.” “Apologize.” “We Shall Overcomb.”

Perhaps my favorite sign that day was the profane but all-encompassing “Fuck This Shit.” But that’s also where Groundhog Day comes in, because inherent in that three-word epithet was a sentiment that was expressed in a number of other signs and posters that were worded slightly differently but all conveyed the sense of frustration and exhaustion that was captured in one that read “I Can’t Believe I’m Still Having to Do This.”

Take reproductive rights: Wasn’t that settled by Roe v Wade in 1973?

Take sexual assault: Didn’t we as a nation decide long ago that it’s an awful and intolerable thing?

Take misogyny: Hasn’t our national progress against this hideous mindset been slowly but steadily improving over the years, as more and more glass ceilings have been broken?

Take the environment: Wasn’t the first Earth Day held in 1970, and wasn’t it Richard Nixon, of all people, who signed legislation establishing the Environmental Protection Agency that same year?

Take health care: Isn't there agreement now that all Americans deserve an affordable option, even if there’s vast disagreement about how to achieve that goal?

Take education: Hasn’t improving public schools always been our national aim?

But then, look at today’s Trumpian realities:

Zeal to overturn the Roe decision, as reflected in the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to claim the Supreme Court seat that was outright stolen from Obama nominee Merrick Garland.

Election of a president who’s on record bragging about sexually assaulting women.

A national misogyny so pervasive that not only could Trump get elected despite his treatment of women, but that Hillary Clinton was constantly attacked on the campaign trail by Trump supporters in the most hateful of terms, as he encouraged cheers of “Lock Her Up.”

Utter disregard for the environment, reflected in Trump’s dismissal of climate change as a “hoax” and his appointment of an avowed EPA enemy to lead the department.

The gleeful dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, to ultimately be replaced by a system that seems certain to start with devastatingly high deductibles.

The nomination as Education Secretary of a woman who has thrown her considerable wealth behind decimating public education and funneling public dollars to for-profit vendors and religiously affiliated schools.

It’s instructive to note that Gorsuch supporters laud him as an constitutional “originalist” in the mode of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Webster’s Dictionary defines “originalism” as “the belief that the United States Constitution should be interpreted in the way the authors originally intended it.” The Constitution was signed in 1787. Now, I’m not saying the Founding Fathers weren’t in many ways wise and even revolutionary men. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. We do not, however, owe them fealty to a literal, stuck-in-time interpretation of a document that now is 230 years old and was written at a time of horse travel, outhouses and the 13 original colonies.

This, to me, is the ultimate in Groundhog Day. Hey! Let’s live by the values and precepts of 1787 to determine the laws of 2017!

Let’s work under the assumption that nothing has changed, and that the complexities of modern life never happened! It’s the same principle, after all, that’s governed the one-sided gun control “debate” that the National Rifle Association won long ago. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1789, reads, “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

Never mind the explicit reference to “militia” in those dangerous times, when much of America was drunk and rowdy, and Native Americans were inexplicably hostile toward the White Man’s confiscation of their lands. Disregard the fact that the US has by far the highest murder and violence rates in the Western world, thanks to the flood of firearms and our toothless checks on easy access to them.

It’s all Groundhog Day. Nothing seems to really change. Or, if something does, in an evolutionary way, it’s subject to reversal.

So it is that reproductive choice now is seriously threatened. Sexual assault is dismissed as “locker room talk.” What would have been the first female president became yet another white male—and a particularly nasty one, at that. Big business and Wall Street get every break from this administration, while the planet gets none. The high ideals of “Obamacare” are thrown on history’s scrap heap. Public education seeks an advocate in vain.

There was another profane but spot-on sign at the DC march that I particularly liked. It read, “Dear Congress: Stop Being Assholes. Signed, the United States of America.” Sadly, though there’s no hint that the Republican-led Congress has any interest in discontinuing or even leavening its assholic-ness. What’s even worse to me, though, is the reason for their intemperance: They have the backing of their constituents.

What the presidential election of 2016 told me was that a majority of Americans (with caveats—voting Americans, Electoral College-vote Americans) don’t, on balance, care about anything nearly as much as they do promises that jobs lost to globalization and mechanization will magically reappear, and pledges that domestic terrorism will cease if this country will reject its history of welcoming immigrants. Just look at the poll numbers: While people like me are decrying Trump’s assaults on our civil liberties, the majority of Americans, the numbers say, are being persuaded—by his tweeted threats to individual companies and his sweeping executive orders on immigration—that he’s Creating Jobs and Keeping America Safe.    

Other signs I spotted at the Women’s March on DC insisted that “This”—meaning the Trump administration’s priorities—“Is Not Who We Are.” But I seriously wonder. It’s certainly not who many of us are. But are we really in the majority?

It may be that social media—that liberating and bullying societal force that simultaneously puts at our fingertips both facts and those who willfully reject them—has freed the America that’s been hiding in plain sight all the time. I’m talking about the embittered America that will support anything and anyone that it believes will return the nation to an illusionary, halcyon past. Perhaps the xenophobic, isolationist, racist and sexist America that has startlingly revealed itself at various times in our history not only never went away, but simply needed embolding chat rooms and Twitter feeds in order to reach full flower.

I very much hope I’m wrong about that. But then again, I’d hoped that my worst fears about Trump would prove to be overstated. Instead, as I look to tomorrow, the day after Groundhog Day, I see only a repetition of today.

               

Two Federal Holidays, One Federal Offense

I already had today’s subject in mind when a reinforcing email appeared in my office in-box late yesterday afternoon.

It was from a physical therapist I’d best not identify, given that my employer, the American Physical Therapy Association, is steadfastly nonpartisan and hasn’t even ever taken a stand—unlike many health care organizations—on the soon-to-be-trashed Affordable Care Act. She was writing to me about something work-related, but felt compelled to lead her message with this:

“Happy Martin Luther King Day weekend. I am still trying to wrap my brain around starting the week by celebrating the work of Dr King and ending it with the coronation of our new president.”

I might have put it a little differently myself: “I am still trying to wrap my shell-shocked brain around how today we’re celebrating a great man who sacrificed his life to the highest of ethical principles, yet on Friday we’re elevating to our nation’s highest elective office a petty, self-serving man who takes pride in sacrificing nothing, siphons money from his own sham charity, and just the other day childishly tweeted that one of Dr King’s leading foot soldiers, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, is “all talk and no action” and impoverishes his own constituents, simply because Lewis had the temerity to question the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s Russia-aided Election Day victory.”

But, hey whatever. Different strokes of the keyboard for different folks. (And many more strokes of the keyboard for the likes of long-winded me.) Regardless, our point was the same. This is one strange, and ethically discordant, week in these Disunited States.

If I were Donald Trump, and thus looked only at my personal bottom line, I’d have good reason to praise Dr King and him equally, without convolution. I mean, the dead freedom fighter and the regrettably very much alive soon-to-be president of the United States each has given me a day off work this week, since both King Day and Inaugural Day are federal holidays, and my workplace closes on federal holidays. Trump praises anyone—a rogue’s gallery that stretches from Steve Bannon to Vladimir Putin—who, in one or another, scratches this back. Thus, if Trump were my role model, I might be sitting at our home PC at this very moment, late on a weekday morning, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt and exclaiming, “Praise the man and pass the Lucky Charms!”

(In fact, I am sitting at the PC so clothed, and I did just finish a bowl of Lucky Charms—a breakfast cereal that I still, at age 58, find magically delicious, even while I concede its nutritional noxiousness. It occurred to as I was slurping down yellow moons and green clovers that this act of nutritional disobedience toward the healthy-eating agenda of Big Sistah—outgoing first lady Michelle Obama—probably was the most bipartisan thing I’ll do all week. Well, other than listening to bluegrass music, which appeals to both Blue and Red fans of  the fiddle because it references, more or less equally, New Deal populism and Our Savior Jesus Christ.)

So, where was I? Oh, I was noting that a Trumpian approach to the optics of this week would be simply to say, “Ethics, schmethics! A day off is a day off! Ain’t America great (again)!?” But that’s not at all how this week feels to me. It feels, rather, like cruelly ironic juxtaposition.

A few caveats here. I would never suggest that Martin Luther King Jr was a perfect man—“perfect man” being an oxymoron in and of itself. He serially cheated on his wife, for example, and he plagiarized parts of some of his speeches. Donald Trump, on the other hand, may well have done something nice for somebody, at some point in his life, without any expectation of, or demand for, credit and praise. While I’m extremely dubious that’s ever happened, I do allow for the possibility. And, finally, John Lewis’s suggestion that Trump’s election is illegitimate because of Russia’s electronic interference strikes me as hyperbolic and needlessly provocative, given the intelligence community's consensus that nothing Russia did was definitive in securing a victory for Trump that required only a fateful confluence of voter fear, anger, ignorance and insistence on change at any cost.

All of that written, though, to get at the heart of why the contrast between these two holidays feels so devastating to that PT, to me, and, I have to think, to anyone who still believes in actual facts and unassailable human values, one need only imagine what Donald Trump would be tweeting today to Dr King, were the reverend not to have been slain in Memphis in 1968 and were he instead to have celebrated his 88th birthday yesterday with a statement denouncing—in defense of a just and pluralistic America; nothing personal—the substance and tone of pretty much everything Trump has said, tweeted and done since his nomination, on subjects ranging from health care to housing (Ben Carson at HUD? WTF?!) to guns (for) and environmental safeguards (against).

“MLK old and senile! SAD! Never created a single job! DID help create LA riots in ’90s and record murder rates in Chicago today!!”

Did that exceed the Twitter character count? He might have completed the thought in a subsequent tweet, adding “I have a dream … of making America great! Not of every black person living in a horrible ghetto!!!!”

If you doubt that, just look at the way Trump attacked Lewis—a man who’s probably done more in any given week to try to improve the lives of those less fortunate than himself than Trump has done in his entire lifetime. It isn’t just the vitriol. It’s the utter lack of any historical perspective or personal restraint—qualities that seem certain to define the presidency of a man who hates to read, has zero patience for instruction and always must win.

I’m hardly a fan of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who’s a “true” conservative in every scary sense of that word. But it’s reasonable to assume that he—like a Bush or Reagan of past years—would have responded much more generously to Lewis’s remarks.

While I’m no presidential spokesman, I feel secure in speculating that Pence’s response would’ve sounded something like this: “I have the deepest respect for Congressman Lewis, who fought for equal rights for all Americans alongside Dr King, whose birthday we celebrate on Monday. I find the congressman’s comments on the president-elect unfortunate, however, given the absence of any suggestion that Russian actions decisively affected the execution of a democratic process that Dr King gave his life to promote.”

Now, how hard would it have been for Trump—instead of tweeting his typically infantile version of “I know you are, but what am I?!”—to have issued a civil, rational statement pairing a compliment with a complaint, in time-honored political style?

Answer? Very hard. Impossible, in fact. Because, unlike Dr King and John Lewis, who had so much self-control in the service of principle that they preached and acted with nonviolence even toward those who would, and did, do violence toward them, Trump has no self-control in unprincipled pursuit of his relentless quest to elevate himself, whatever the cost to others.

I noted this past weekend that Trump took a few seconds out to tweet his praise of Detective Steven McDonald, the New York City cop who was famous for forgiving the young gunman who’d shot and paralyzed him in 1986. When McDonald died from a heart attack the other day at age 59, Trump called him “a real NYC hero.” For once, Trump got something right. But it surely was lost on the president-elect that McDonald stood for everything that Trump—who’s brooked precious little adversity since being born with a silver spoon in his mouth 70 years ago, and who, in the interim, has dodged drafts and done everything else he could to avoid any personal danger or meaningful public service—does not. I found it interesting to note, in a newspaper account of McDonald’s funeral, that David Letterman was there, and that he had, in fact, been one of McDonald’s closest friends in the decades since the shooting. The retired talk show host had, in a New York Times piece in the run-up to last fall’s election, struggled to understand the frequent cruelty and utter lack of introspection of Trump—a nevertheless crowd-pleasing showman who’d been his guest many times over the years. Letterman finally settled on the word “damaged” to describe the real estate mogul, using it as the epitaph to a candidacy seemingly doomed to die from a thousand self-inflicted blows.

Except, of course, that what surely would have killed Trump in a more-reliably Blue America only made him stronger in a blindly enraged Red one that gave him the electoral votes he needed to put him over the top.

So, now here it is, Martin Luther King Jr Day, and we honor the bravery, resilience and predominant goodness of this man whose root message was one of love and respect for all Americans. On Friday, we will inaugurate as president a man who in many respects is King’s opposite. I think about how Dr King literally put his life on the line for years, as his own safety and his family’s were relentlessly threatened, and how he courageously continued to do so until the day he was gunned down while trying to help striking sanitation workers get decent benefits and a living wage. I think about how, conversely, in  2017, I’d never put a “Black Lives Matter” bumper sticker or an anti-guns decal on my car because I’m certain my vehicle would be vandalized, and I fear that I would be assaulted, and that a bullet might even find its way into my house.

This acknowledgement frankly makes me a bit ashamed of myself. But it makes me more ashamed still to live in a country that’s rife with people who would punish those who try, in whatever small ways, to honor the values King championed. It makes me despair, too, that we’re about to swear in as president a man whose selfishness and intemperance has encouraged and exacerbated today’s hothouse atmosphere of impatience and absolutism.

I plan to attend the Women’s March on Washington this Saturday. Its recently published “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles” references a wide range of social-justice issues—not just gender rights, but economic, legal, reproductive, environmental and immigration rights, as well. It will make me feel good, I think, to end this strange and unsettling week by doing something that Dr King would surely do. And yet, I’ll be ever so slightly concerned, as well, for my own safety, never mind the heavy police presence.

That fear will in part, be on you and what you’ve encouraged, President Trump.