6/10
 |
| Fredrick Douglass looks into Harlem from Central Park North |
Our topic sentence of the day is “Can it happen here?”….but before we get there…I share my “Grateful Distancing Stay at Home Tour 2020”t-shirt,
 |
| "....Stay at home tour.." |
 |
| Grateful Cyclones |
Clyde has an ingoing concern that Mayor DiBlasio has not responded to requests to provide more hotel housing be infected with coronavirus. DiBlasio also gets heat for standing by 50a which allows police officers to shield their rerecords…Some of our circle are surprised the mayor has been so supportive of rough police tactics, seemingly not challenging the all powerful Police Benevolent Association President Mike O’Meara. The PBA protects police above all and is a solid blue wall against reform. Or even mere accountability. I have always found the Mayor to be more classic liberal than progressive.
A big concern has to do with the protestors rhetorical demand to “defund the police.” Norm fears this will discredit the protests and Steve P feels it will give the “red meat” he needs to rally his base and cruise to reelection. Giving up the possibility of reclaiming the White House for the sake of rhetoric, Clyde on the other hand says that what it really means is that we have handed over to the police all kinds of jobs that unarmed professionals like mental health workers and social workers should be doing. By reducing armed police, you could raise the standards and pay the police better wages with more professionalism. And that the current program is destroying the constitution. Steve and Norm are still not sure. Rhetoric or not, practically speaking Clyde is right. Joel says what’s what we need is a Control/alt/delete, a re-do, re-boot.
Joel also feels we are already in a weird state of cold civil war.
Steve P has been reading about Qanon, a far right project selling the idea that there is a deep state conspiracy to defeat the President. (These were the folks responsible for Pizzagate, the story that Hilary Clinton and her friends were using a pizza parlor basement for sex orgies with children. Which gained enough traction for an automatic weapons armed man to raid the parlor.) It has a strong religious element and sees the world in apocalyptic terms with the President as the chosen savior. ((Anyone that says ‘I am the one” is clearly not. ).And a frightening conviction that only total violence can defend the US. So in the sense that both sides see our reality apocalyptically, Joel may be closer to right than I’d like to think.
How do we even begin to talk to one another? Steve P sees no way that logic and reason can work in this dialectic because it is not reason-based. Joel has a story of a ma turned around when people raise money for a life-saving medical procedure. I recall my Danish photographer friend Jacob Holdt befriending an imprisoned Klan leader and winning his freedom. He ultimately left the Klan, though not without suffering the loss of his son and violent reprisals . (https://uniondocs.org/an-experiment-in-oppression-jacob-holdt-at-uniondocs/). Jacob believes unequivocally in the power of love. The thing is, these are one-on-one stories. How does that translate into massive groups? Is there time left for one-on-one?
We recall he 1980’s and Hal Lindsey and “The Late Great Planet Earth.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late,_Great_Planet_Earth) Seems to be a particular American kid of virus. Steve H sees the influence of a religion that has people being afraid of being left out and going to hell. Pro-life as an extension for white fragility. The idea that liberals bow to humans, not God, and Jesus turning into Uncle Sam.
I see Jesus as the ultimate humanist. Norm points out that he says in John, you will do greater things than I. My success in a “conservative evangelical" church came about because I connected with their sense of community and from the start that I took the Bible seriously.
We talk about northern Europe. That while secular, has a residual morality rooted in centuries of Christendom and a remaining vestigial Lutheran culture that has a strict sense of righteousness. I see in this a parallel with secular Jews in the US who retain a Jewish social ethic long after “belief” has ended --from communism to the librals of the Upper West Side. (Long represented by Bella Abzug)
In spite of its inherent problems from the beginning, there has nevertheless been something nobel about ‘our experiment” and that experiment now seems to be in grave danger. There is a from the start contradiction in the US that now must be resolved. TV series like “the Plot against America” (https://www.hbo.com/the-plot-against-america) and Handmaids’s Tale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale_(TV_series) show dramatically how easily it can all slip away. Yes, it can happen here.
Dre cautions that we need to move away from endemic Christian authoritarianism. And that webs work better than pyramids. Norm calls unto look at Cotton Mather vs. Roger Williams, theocratic Massachusetts vs. separation of church and state Rhode Island. (Whatever happened to Baptists, by the way?)
In lights of uncertainty, Steve P calls us back to Job. The importance of the Wisdom tradition…Job, Ecclesiastes,, Lamentation... providing poetry but no answers. That’s where we live.,
(Joel recommends Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. And SteveP the poems of William Blake.) Tough days ahead.
****
My friend, the extraordinary artist Heide Hatry, most recently known for her portraits from cremation ashes (https://iconsinash.com/). has recently completed a portrait of President Trump made entirely of thousands of aphids and lice, greenflies, harvested from her garden. Note the ant attracted to the smell of lice. Some art tells its own story.
 |
| a Trump made of aphids attracts an ant |
****
In Central Park, the emergency field hospital is gone. Only fences remain. This is good
.
 |
| Field hospital hospital gone |
***
The tulip beds are still empty.
 |
| empty beds |
****
The penultimate Zooey Gluey show explores Time (there is no time, only the present moment)...and features, among others, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Jeannie Skelly. once described as the essence of anti-folk.
****
And still we die.
****
 |
| and still we die |
No comments:
Post a Comment