Pictures At An Exhibition

I read an article in the Washington Post this morning about a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that I’m certain to see. It’s a series of nine pencil sketches, accompanied by audio clips, called “Thoughts in Passing.” All of the subjects were in hospice care when their likenesses were drawn. The story of each senior citizen’s life and impending death literally is written into his or her clothing, and is amplified in an accompanying audio clip.

It’s the work of Claudia Bicen, a 29-year-old self-taught artist who was born in Britain but lives and works in the San Francisco area. The oeuvre couldn’t be any more in my wheelhouse, given that I’ve visited with the very elderly for nearly two decades now (I write “very” to distinguish them from me at this stage of my life), and given that I’ve been a hospice volunteer. The invisibility of the elderly in our society deeply saddens me, as does the isolated anonymity of their death in so many cases. I vastly enjoy learning who they are, who they were, and what they make of a world so very different from the one they once knew.

In the article, Bicen says, “I wanted to create a feeling of compassion and empathy, of seeing yourself in that person.” That line really struck me, because I do see something of myself in every elderly person I’ve come to know and befriend over the years. And I don’t just mean that I recognize that I, too, may one day face the same physical and/or cognitive issues with which they grapple. What I see are the various points of intersection they and I have—the cultural references we share, the likes and dislikes, the nostalgia for people and things that no longer exist.

I was a hospice volunteer for only about 18 months, up until I moved to Washington, DC, in late 1992 from Savannah, Georgia. But those were rich months, filled with memorable experiences. I helped one terminally ill man sneak a smoke, for example, and took another on a manic grocery spree. I’ll never forget, either, the time when an octogenarian widower told me, out of the blue, that what he hated worst was that his “pecker” no longer got hard. Which brings to mind another thing Bicen says: “I went into this thinking that every person was going to provide me with some kind of wisdom. But people die as themselves. There isn’t going to necessarily be some kind of revelation or change. This it it.”

Isn’t that enough, though? Clearly Bicen thinks so. I do, too. True, not everyone is profound. But everyone has a story. That simple truth can, and too often does, get lost when we enter an assisted living facility, nursing home or hospice house and are greeted by a sea of infirm bodies, blasting TVs and medicinal smells that generically shout “old people.” But man, can those old people be uniquely interesting! And funny. And lewd. And angry. And bitter. And maddening. And philosophical. And more or less content—or damn tired of it all. Each in his or her own way.

But that’s only part of what I want to say today. Lately death not only hasn’t taken a holiday, but it’s practically been living with me. I just got back Sunday from a group remembrance in Greensboro, North Carolina, for a high school friend of mine who killed herself last summer after a decades-long battle with depression. The very next day came the news that a long-ago newspaper colleague of mine had died of lung cancer. The first woman was my exactly age, 57. The second was not much older, 64.

As I’ve noted before in this space, for whatever reason—maybe some combination of my appreciation of impermanence, fascination with darkness and utter cluelessness as to what if anything comes next—death has been an oft-visited theme in the six years I’ve been doing this blog. I’ve written of my love of the true-crime Investigation Discovery cable television channel, with its gruesome details and cheesy reenactments. I’ve drafted eulogies to the famous and infamous upon their entry into the Big Sleep. I’ve sketched my own portraits—literary ones—of some of the seniors I befriended very late in their lives. Just a few blog posts back, I announced plans for a “Dead of Winter” tour that would encompass the gravesites of a couple of those women. (It didn’t happen, but I may get to one of those burial sites very soon. Stay tuned!)

In the June 2, 2012, post about my Investigation Discovery obsession (“Grim-Reality TV”), I listed some of the homicide sites past which I regularly run near my Bethesda home and in the District—benign-looking homes in which individuals or entire families have been slain, and, in one case, a neighborhood from which a woman disappeared, never to be seen again.

Well, recently I ran, for perhaps the hundredth time, past a peculiar death site that I hadn’t mentioned in 2012. But think I will now, since I’m on the subject.

There’s a lovely little tableau on a far corner of the Georgetown University campus that memorializes with a plaque the 20-year lifespan of David A. Shick. His name means nothing to today’s Hoyas, though he was one of them not so very long ago. The junior from Connecticut died in February 2000 after an altercation in the school library’s parking lot between two groups of drunk students. Shick was punched, fell, hit his head on concrete, and died three days later at Georgetown University Medical Center. It was ruled a homicide, but charges were not pursued, given the unlikelihood of conviction. Shick himself, after all, had been a fist-wielding participant in the mayhem.

Per the school newspaper The Hoya, on October 11, 2000, “The David Shick Memorial was dedicated in front of a group of about 150 students, faculty and family members on what would have been Shick’s 21st birthday. His parents were joined in prayer by University President Leo J O’Donovan while an a capella group performed.”

The memorial, funded by the Friends of David Shick, is described in the piece as including “a small pond stocked with fish, flowers, stonework, shrubbery and two cascading waterfalls.” A family friend told The Hoya that the memorial was meant to serve as both a tribute and a warning—a reminder of the tragedy that foolish behavior can cause. “The running stream symbolizes the waters of chaos,” was how President O’Donovan rather eloquently put it. “The waters of the River of Jordan and their healing quality. The baptismal font and waters of life.”

Sixteen years later, the memorial remains a lovely and tranquil site. I’m not sure, though, that its presence is meeting the stated purpose of “facilitat[ing] the continued retelling of David’s story among future generations, so that they will have the opportunity to internalize those lessons.” It would have a better chance of doing that if an addendum to the plaque were to read “Victim of a drunken fight. Think about that before you booze and brawl.”

Still, as someone who had read the newspaper story when the incident happened and subsequently doubled down on the details online, I can assure the Friends of David Shick that I indeed think of their son, their sibling, their friend every time I run past the memorial. No, I didn’t know the guy. He might have been a great kid. He just as easily might have been a rich, entitled asshole. I have no idea. What I do know is that he was a real person who many people loved, and that he died in an incredibly stupid way. Like the hospice dwellers in Claudia Bicen’s sketches and the scores of elderly people I’ve known, David Shick had his own unique story.

As did Franklin Manzaneres and Gradys Mendoza, whose lives still are commemorated, nearly six years after I first blogged about them, with makeshift crosses near where they plummeted to their death in July 2009.

I wrote on August 12, 2000, in a post titled “The Fallen,” of how I’d seen the crosses near a highway overpass, read the names on them, and decided to see what I could find out online about the deceased. I learned that they were the victims of an infamous drunk-driving case about which I’d read the previous summer. Their car had been forced off the Beltway by a woman who’d had several too many drinks at a Bethesda restaurant.

Mendoza, I’d learned, was a 39-year-old Honduran immigrant who’d made good in America, rising from restaurant worker to owner of his own construction company. He lived in Springfield, Virginia, was married and had three kids. Manzaneres, his friend, was 37. The Internet otherwise is silent on him. He was the passenger, Mendoza the driver when a Jeep Cherokee driven by 33-year-old Kelli Loos rammed Mendoza’s truck, sending it through a guardrail and down a 60-foot ravine very near where those crosses now stand. Loos kept driving, crossing the nearby American Legion Bridge into Virginia, where she crashed and registered a blood-alcohol level of .20—more than twice the legal limit.

The reason I mention this now is the Kelli Loos recently was back in the news.

The last line of my blog post in 2000 was this: “I can’t imagine ever again running past the site without thinking about two men on their last ride, a grieving widow, three fatherless kids, a convicted killer with a lifetime of guilt coiled cancer-like in her chest, and a bereaved old Army man living out the rest of his days missing the Honduran man he loved like a son.”

As it turned out, I had discounted the power of addiction, while overestimating the power of guilt. After serving four years of a 10-year jail sentence, Loos was paroled in 2013 and permitted to resume driving if she blew into a device that would prevent her car from starting were she to be legally drunk. Per a story published in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago, Loos was ordered back to prison after having failed the interlock test at least three times.

The article quoted an “exasperated” Montgomery County Circuit Court judge as telling Loos, who now is 40, “I don’t know what to do with you. I truly don’t.” This was after Loos recanted her story that a breath mint somehow had triggered the interlock.

Loos expressed deep remorse at the recent court appearance, as she had upon her initial sentencing in 2009. She told the judge that she continues to make “poor decisions” because “I’m an alcoholic.”

But if that judge doesn’t know what to do with Kelli Loos other than send her back to jail, Maryland lawmakers do. She’s now a poster drunk for pending legislation that seeks to lower the state’s interlock-activating blood-alcohol level from a surprising .15—well above the legal limit—to the legal limit of .08. The bill is given a good chance of passing, boosted by the high-profile recent death of a law enforcement officer who was run down by a drunk driver while he approached a different drunk driver he’d just pulled over.

If I can briefly editorialize, I’m not personally sure why the interlock threshold isn’t .00—a single drop of alcohol on your breath and this car sits idle. But then, I’m not a state legislator who’s apparently sitting snugly in the back pocket of the liquor industry.

Anyway. I hope the path I’ve taken to get here hasn’t seemed too strained, but when I saw that article this morning about the art exhibit, it presented a way to link together the various thoughts about death that were on my mind. To die, one must first have lived. Everyone dies, so that’s uniform. But lives are infinitely varied. Because of that, there are pieces of every one of the dead in all of us.

I mourn my friends who died, with whom I shared time and space.

I wonder what David Shick was all about, what he might have become, and even what idiotic argument proved fatal to him.

I think about Gradys Mendosa living a life he couldn’t have imagined growing up in Central America, then losing it in an instant.

I see Kelli Loos, committer of vehicular homicide, back in her cell—safely removed from society but never safe from herself.

“See yourself in that person,” Claudia Bicen urges. As someone who went to school with, worked with, and befriended those who now are dead, and as a man who more times than once has driven a car when he really shouldn’t have, I  hardly can do otherwise.

  

Accent on the Asinine

My intention was not to wish recipients of our annual holiday letter a “happy new anus.”

Although I hope it would go without saying, if you know me at all, that I always, every year, wish even my worst enemies (well, most of them, anyway) a complete absence of anal discord—whether the area is intact since birth or is new thanks to reconstruction after some tragic mishap. Anal happiness is the kind of thing that isn’t top of mind unless and until there’s a failure down there. But I don’t take mine or anyone else’s for granted. Let me be clear.

Still, I tend not to reference excrement-producing body parts in the opening line of our holiday greeting. (Although I certainly reserve the right to do so thereafter, should it serve my comedic purpose.) What I meant to do, rather, was to wish letter recipients a happy new year, in Spanish, exactly as singer Jose Feliciano had done in his 1970 Christmas-season hit Feliz Navidad—a Feliciano-penned song in which the anus is mentioned not once, in any language.

The one-page letter’s unifying theme was the fact that Lynn, in 2015, took up the study of Spanish, in egregious violation of the unstated but nevertheless time-honored mutual non-ambition pact we’d entered into when we married way back in 1992. (For further reference, see the July 2015 post titled “Tongue-Tied.”)

Along the way to sharing with holiday letter readers some of the “highlights,” such as they were, of our “year that was,” I described my disappointment that Lynn not only unilaterally embarked on a self-improvement project as ambitious as learning a second language—ripping to figurative shreds the mental and emotional (if not physical) life contract we’d all but signed in blood when we linked our lazy-assed non-fortunes together during the waning days of the George HW Bush administration—but that she thereafter rubbed salt in the wound by tirelessly studying and consistently applying herself to the pursuit. So, where I might have forgiven the transgression had it been half-hearted and quickly abandoned—as, indeed, had been our joint effort (if you want to call it that) to learn Spanish years ago in an adult education class under a crazy Cuban woman who blessedly was such a bad teacher that we happily gave up just a few weeks in—Lynn’s renewed determination to habla espanol under her yoga-class friend, Gabriela from Uruguay, seemed absurdly ambitious and almost punitive toward her TV-watching, couch-drooling spouse.

So—appropriately, I thought—I used our holiday letter as a way to air my grievances, in a nod to Festivus, yes, but, also in the way that the leader of a sovereign country might reference outrageous treaty violations in a year-end address to his or her people on the national highs and lows of the preceding 12 months. To quickly establish my theme, I opened the letter in Spanish with the salutation, per the song title, Feliz Navidad! (Merry Christmas!) Continuing the Feliciano-esque message, the letter’s first line was, “And prospero ano y felicidad, while we’re at it, although Eric had to look up the spelling of that phrase just now.” That indeed had been the case, as my proficiency in Spanish is nada. I therefore consulted a couple of different websites to ensure that I’d spelled every word correctly. (If you think I typed even the words habla espanol above without consulting the Internet, you are mistaken.)

So, I was quite surprised recently, when a friend and long-ago coworker of mine mocked me good-naturedly about having wished her, her husband and her two sons a “happy new anus” in 2016, while expressing surprise that a man who writes and edits for a living had made such a vulgarly comical blunder. Marlene’s family is from Bolivia, and she grew up speaking Spanish. She took smirking pleasure in informing me that, while I’d spelled the Spanish word for “year” correctly in the letter's opening line—a-n-o—by failing to place the squiggly-line accent mark called a tilde over the “n,” I’d inadvertently written not the Spanish word for “year” but the Spanish word for “anus.”

To quote the similarly monolingual English-speaker Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”

Had I even noticed that tilde when I’d looked up the phrase’s spelling? Maybe. Or maybe not. If I had, I no doubt asked myself, “What difference could it possibly make?” It’s long been a peeve of mine that non-English languages seem to stick all manner of vexing and seemingly superfluous accent marks over random letters, in what surely—much like the designation of masculine and feminine identities to words regardless of any apparent rhyme or reason—serve no purpose other than to stick it to English-only speakers like me who are perfectly content to play the role of global-village idiot. Why dignify such nose-thumbing with additional research, to see if the tilde’s absence could have any consequences?

Also, I might observe, if the tilde is so freaking important, in an age in which America fast is becoming a majority-minority country, why isn’t it even included on contemporary computer keyboards?

Oops. As it turns out, “D’oh!” again.

Actually, the tilde is there, I discovered that literally as I was typing this post. It’s in the upper left-hand corner, just below the escape key. But I guess it’s kind of like how I never see the condiment container in the refrigerator, sitting on a shelf directly in front of me, until my exasperated wife reaches around me and grabs it.

I never noticed the tilde key until I just a few moments ago Googled the search term “insert tilde in Microsoft Word.” I’d previously thought it might be included in the weird symbols under “Insert” on Word, perhaps abutting the sign for the British pound. In fact, I’d looked there after the conversation with Marlene, but, for the life of pi (which was there), I couldn’t find it.

So, I read the instructions off the Internet for how to insert the tilde over a letter. They were, “Hold control and shift keys. Press the tilde key. Press the letter “n.”

The “tilde key?” I thought. Where the hell is there a tilde key?! That’s when I took a closer look at the keyboard—and found it in approximately three seconds, “hiding” right there in plain sight.

So, I followed the instructions. And, what do you know? “Anus” quickly transforms into “year.” Ano to año. Similarly, one can change espanol to español; I realized that I got that wrong above, too.

(I didn’t check, though, to see if “espanol,” without the tilde, turns the English word for “Spanish” into something inadvertently vulgar, such as the Spanish word for “erection.” I sort of don’t want to know what transgression I may have committed several paragraphs ago.)                   

As Marlene laughed at my mistake a couple of weeks ago, I defended myself as best I could, noting, “I am a good editor in English. In Spanish? Not so much.”

At least I won’t make the same mistake in any future holiday letter. I already made an anus of myself once. That was suficiente. ("Enough." No tilde.)

Hardly Adrift

Snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon. Snow way to escape the hyperbole.

The Washington, DC, area experienced one its rare mega-snowfalls this past weekend, as you’ve undoubtedly heard, wherever you are. Because, even in this new information age, “If it snows, it goes” remains the climatic equivalent of the age-old crime-reporting mantra “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Nationally, the blizzard, which hit the entire mid-Atlantic area, no doubt delighted climate-change deniers and those who hate the federal government—when they don’t control the presidency and both houses of Congress, that is—because two feet or more of snow and single-digit wind-chills don’t neatly scream “global warming” and two weekdays now of federal shutdown have produced no hint of anarchy or evidence of the need for Washington lawmakers.

Lynn and I don’t doubt climate change for one second, nor do we loathe the federal government—not, at least, when a Democrat controls the White House and has enough party-mates in Congress to watch the Republican foxes guarding the regulatory henhouses.

Still, I’d have to say that the blizzard, on balance, delighted us, too. It did seem for a while there as if the flakes never would stop falling, and that the need, therefore, to constantly shovel the accumulating layers wouldn’t either. More than counterbalancing that, however, was the snow’s beauty and, perhaps most important, the joyfully unexpected fact that we never for one second lost power. This allowed us to stay warm indoors for the duration. And to use the computer, watch TV, prepare meals, take showers and spare our dog’s life.

About that last thing: It was touch and go for a while, as the inches multiplied but Bean’s refusal to do either form of his business remained steadfast. The snow started falling about mid-afternoon on Friday and probably measured around a foot and a half on our pink 1993 DC gay rights march yardstick 24 hours later—without our three-legged refusenik having peed so much as a drop or pooped so much as a dot in that entire timespan. This despite the fact that we’d not only repeatedly cleared and re-cleared a path down the stairs and along the driveway for him, but we also had laboriously hollowed out a large section of our front lawn down to the grass and over to the tree line for the presumed pleasure of our hesitant hound. There was nothing doing, however. And, with the world beyond our driveway a tall wall of white, he wasn’t about to venture any farther afield in search of a snowless nirvana that didn’t, in any event, exist.

At one point Lynn hit on an idea that we both regarded as possible genius. One of us could pee in a cup, she suggested, then splash the urine in a likely spot in hopes that Bean would sniff and follow suit, the way dogs tend to do upon encountering the yellow trails of their peers. It wouldn’t be canine piss, of course, but perhaps Bean wouldn’t notice. (He spends half his life licking his own dick. A Rhodes Scholar he is not.) We quite nearly were at our wits’ end, so it seemed well worth a try. We’d do it ahead of Bean’s next scheduled trip outside the house.

Given the utter lack of street traffic during the blizzard, I offered to eschew the cup, unzip my pants and let loose in the front yard. Lynn rather prudishly, it seemed to me, nixed that idea. I was outside shoveling a bit later that afternoon when she came down the steps with a warm cup of her own excretory juice. She splashed it against a tree in the exposed area of the yard and brought Bean out. He saw. He sniffed. He … continued to hold it in. Veni, vidi, viciously annoying!

This was the point at which, had we not had heat, lights, preserved food and various entertainments awaiting us indoors, we might well have looked beyond our deep love for, and hefty financial investment in, our dog and strangled him with our own three (cumulative) hands. At that point, Lynn was envisioning Bean’s inevitable urinary tract infection and/or complications from having a waste-impacted ass. I was envisioning either everything coming out inside our house or my wife being a nutcase worry wart for days to come, and wondering which thing would be worse.

As fortune had it, however, soon after the pee toss a neighbor with a shovel-equipped truck plowed a lane down on our street. Bean, on his next trip outside, deemed this pee path sufficiently pleasing, and promptly anointed it with his urine. About six hours later—on his final trip outside before bed Saturday night, with all but the last inch or so of our two feet having dropped—Bean further christened the street with the literal shitload of number two he’d been storing up. Lynn and I rejoiced, which frankly felt a little sad as a sign of what our lives had become. But no sadder, we guessed, than the gross euphoria that doubtless seizes parents when their young son or daughter finally drops that first big boy/big girl load from atop the porcelain doughnut.

Sunday, then, was dig-out day. It was mostly sunny but still cold when I headed outside to uncover our cars and afford them clear passage onto the street. I was grateful for the continued exercise, given the impossibility of running outside, but my body already was creaky and sore by that time, my wrist hurt from lifting the shovel, and the prospect of moving the twin mounds of vaguely car-shaped snow was daunting.

About two hours in, however, our next-door neighbor, his brother and the brother’s teenage son, having mostly finished their own shoveling, offered to lend their cumulative muscle to my project. Being the proud, macho guy I am, I hesitated for as many as two seconds before vigorously shaking my head affirmatively. They did an outstanding job, completing the task in a fraction of the time it would have taken Lynn and me to do it. (This annoyed me ever so slightly, because now I feel hugely indebted to a neighbor I hadn’t much liked, for admittedly petty reasons that have everything to do with me and nothing to do with him. But I’m pretty sure I’ll get over it.)

The upshot was that, by about 1:30 Sunday afternoon, my battle with the elements was done. The snow still was, and is, beautiful. I therefore was well-rested, and literally empowered, to watch the initial episode of the X Files reboot on TV Sunday night. The federal government has given me abundant reason not to hate it by being closed yesterday and today, as this means no work for me, given that my office takes its cues from the feds. As of this morning, our sorely missed old-school print newspaper again is being delivered. Why, I could jump in my car right now and attend a movie matinee if I so chose. Life is good. (No, not for the planet in the long term, but I’m trying to stay in the moment here.)  

So, yes, I’d have to say that on balance, we count ourselves as fans of the recent blizzard. We survived it quite nicely. And our dog did, too. He can thank that neighbor with the plow.

Revenants

Yesterday I went to see The Revenant at a local movie house. It has received a dozen Oscar nominations and is getting a lot of buzz. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the story of a trapper in the 1820s West who is mauled to within an inch of his life by a bear, is left for dead by a scoundrel who also kills the trapper’s son, but survives and drags himself 200 miles across the snow—fueled by revenge and empowered by his survival skills—to exact his revenge.

It’s a ripping yarn that’s based on a true story—albeit one that’s in many respects unverifiable and in others clearly is embellished by artistic license. As impressed as I was by the film’s cinematography, attention to detail and acting, I was distracted by the number of times I found myself asking, “Why is this guy STILL not dead?!” (Each time, Leonardo DiCaprio, in his lead role as 19th-century fur trader and bear-mauling survivor Hugh Glass, answered my disbelieving query with a wheeze and a grunt, and took another emphatic bite of something disgusting—like bison liver or the flapping fish he’d just yanked out the river.)

I was thinking about The Revenant this morning as I ran through my Bethesda neighborhood in low-teen wind chills. I’d layered myself to the nines, so I actually was quite comfortable as the few drivers who passed me at that early-morning hour on a federal holiday looked out their windows and no doubt thought, “What a moron!” But afterward, back in the house, I had to concede that completing an hour-long run on a chilly-for-DC morning is pretty much the extent of my survival skills. Were a movie to be made of my epic revenge saga against the elements, starvation, and hostile whites and Native Americans, its title would be The Corpse.

Which brings up the subject of the film’s title. When I got home from the movies yesterday, Lynn asked me what a “revenant” is. I told her I frankly had no idea, but that I’d been meaning to look it up. So, I immediately did. The first definition I found on the Internet was, “A person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.” Which makes abundant sense in view of the mini-synopsis I just gave you. DiCaprio’s Glass even says at one point that he “ain’t afraid to die” because “I done it already.” The guy who wrote the book on which the movie is based picked an apt word for the story he was telling, all right.

Lynn then asked why such a simple but highly descriptive word is so obscure that the likes of us—non-geniuses, for sure, but reasonably intelligent and articulate people—had never even heard of it until it became a movie’s name. The answer to that is, who knows? I’m not a lexicographer. Maybe “revenant” sounds too much like other English words that get much more use, and society didn’t want to gum up the works with one that might become conversationally entangled with “reverend,” “reverent” and “remnant.” Perhaps “revenant” was poised for the primetime as handy linguistic shorthand for the longer “reanimation” when the Zombie Craze of the early 21st century hit and the Z Word became everyone’s go-to description for returning from the dead. It’s a mystery. The English language is littered with perfectly serviceable and even cool words that languish largely unused (take “languish”), while arguably inferior and imprecise words and phrases (such as “just sit there” in place of “languish”) thrive.

So. This word, “revenant,” and its meaning got me to thinking about the new year and the presidential race. Well, not directly, but those are things about which I also want to write today, and I’ve been looking for a way to tie all this together. What I’ve come up with is this: The story of the Republican presidential field also could, in a sense, be titled The Revenant. I mean, the campaigns of all the frontrunners, at least, are built on returning certain ideas, philosophies and approaches from the dead. Or, if not the dead, at least the largely dormant..

I’m always struck by Donald Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again." Again? What're we going back to, then? As The Donald sees it—and as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and all the others echo in their remarks and beliefs—back to a time when the United States was strong, respected, “moral” by their definition, and not enslaved by “political correctness.” As I see it, however, “Make America Great Again” means taking the country back to a time when might made right. When white meant right. When America didn’t have to accommodate or cede power to anything we, as a nation, didn’t like or couldn’t understand.

In truth, belief in things like American exceptionalism, the business of America being (unfettered) business and Big Government being the root of all ills (as opposed to the mitigator of many) never were dead—which is why the “revenant” analogy isn’t entirely apt. But maybe that’s where that “supposedly” in the word’s definition comes in.

You might suppose that such resounding successes of optimism, such triumphs of our better nature, as trust-busting, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the civil rights movement might have killed off the kinds of dark, victimized, conspiracy-laden, bigoted nonsense now being trumpeted (pun inadvertent) by the Republican presidential aspirants. But no, sadly. Those malignancies may have been left for dead, and hoped dead, by progressive thinkers, but they limped along for decades, often in the shadows, finally to be given new and pulsating life by a group of rage-filled politicians who gaze out upon a complicated and unfriendly world, and a multicultural and needy country, and don’t at all like what they see.

This new revenant has something else very much in common with the cinematic one: lust for revenge. This new revenant says, “This is not the America we want—the one that conforms to our inaccurate but self-serving vision of what America was and should be—and somebody has to pay for it. Actually, a lot of people must pay for it. Without nuance and without mercy. We will carpet-bomb Syria—civilians and ISIS foes stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time be damned. We’ll close our borders, arm our citizenry and impose our vision of what a righteous God Would Do on the liberals, the illegals and even the insufficiently compliant women who’ve continually thwarted us from getting our due! Which is to say, everything we want.”

The thing that the political revenant has stirred that perplexes me is the dimension of the societal revenant it has exposed. That so many of my fellow Americans find the fury, vitriol and incivility of Trump and his ilk energizing, empowering and expressive of their deepest thoughts is frankly startling, alarming and confusing to me. It tells me that I’m out of sync and out of touch with a force that’s big enough to be a movement, and perhaps even to win the White House.

I’ll concede that I’m economically in a better and more secure place than are many of the most ardent Trump supporters, who counterintuitively trust a transparently megalomaniacal billionaire to champion their interests over those of (his fellow) rich and powerful. I’ll grant that I’m not religious like Ted Cruz’s evangelical followers, and thus don’t feel threatened by alleged evidences of the insidious spread of “secular” society.  I’ll admit that, while I admire much about my country, its history and its people, I can’t and won’t edit out the flaws. I’m not in every instance proud to be an American, so the jingoistic appeals of seemingly the entire GOP slate go nowhere with me. Likewise, I didn’t grow up with guns, though I’d like to think that even if I had, and therefore liked to target-shoot or hunt, I wouldn’t equate reasonable steps to curb gun violence with a government plot to confiscate them.

Recently President Obama gave his final State of the Union address. Like every incumbent chief executive regardless of political party, he pronounced the state of the union to be strong. Which, by many economic and social indicators it is, whatever Obama’s detractors might claim. But the words I’d use to describe the state of the union I see before me at the beginning of 2016 are “angry,” “paranoid,” “bitter” and, yes, “vengeful.”

Admittedly, many months—too many, I think both Left and Right can agree—remain in this election cycle. Presumably, moderate voices will yet be heard among the many millions of Americans who have no proverbial dog in this internecine fight among highly partisan Republicans. It’s far from a foregone conclusion that Trump or Cruz or Rubio or one of the other frightening entrees on the GOP plate will prevail in the general election, although I’d feel better if the Democratic candidate wasn’t destined to be either a woman many people irrationally hate or a guy who proudly calls himself a socialist. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that word—speaking of words—except for the fact that a lot of Americans deem “socialist” less a shorter way to say “adherent of European-style democratic socialism” and more a synonym for “communist.”)

So, will the American revenant succeed? Will the forces of rage prevail in wreaking their revenge upon those they despise? It’s too early to tell, but this revenant’s strength and seeming momentum are deeply unsettling.

Interestingly, there’s another way in which the story of Hugh Glass nearly two centuries ago and that of a slice of the 2016 electorate diverge—besides the whole resurrection-from-death thing and the differing justifications for vengeance.

After I looked up the meaning of “revenant,” I sought out the details of Glass’s real-life story. Again, much is unknown and unverifiable, beyond the facts that he indeed was mauled by a bear, was left for dead and was understandably aggrieved by that. Historical accounts seem to agree on one key point, however, that was understandably ignored by the yarn-aggrandizing novelist and filmmakers, but that, one wishes, the modern-day revenants would consider:

The revenant Hugh Glass, in the end, forgave his adversary.