should i stay or should i go?
The
2018 volume of My Year, much like its
predecessor, began very early on in the previous year, and was written
basically parallel to that volume. In a sense, when you have established the
borders, as I had in the 2017 subtitle of “Barbarians at the Gate,” you have
already declared a notion of insider and outsider narratives. And, of course,
that had been President Trump’s dialogue even before 2017: we had to build a
wall not only to keep the “barbarians” out, but to establish what was our
notion of being American and as well as was the “dangerous other.” And in that
sense, this volume might almost be seen as a continuation of the madness
expressed in My Year 2017, during the
year when each new day seemed to proclaim a significant breakdown in American
government and governance. Yes, the news sputtered on about Trump’s daily
transgressions, and the major newspapers seriously tsked-tsked his actions, but the absurdity of his behavior and political
actions were so egregious that no one, least of all his Republican followers,
could possibly assimilate them.
I think the entire country, me among its
citizens, were so daily stunned by the “noise” of his ridiculous assertions and
political decisions that none of us quite knew how to respond, as if we were
shell-shocked by this clown who had managed to wander into the American
presidency. We might have been prepared to fight, but none of us could quite
deal with the cynical absurdity, the kind of daily beat of a new kind of
dictatorship that Trump drummed into our heads. I so recall not even wanting to
get up, despite the fact that I am an early riser, to face the daily newspapers
(we subscribe to both the Los Angeles
Times and The New York Times and
listen every morning to CNN’s reports). What was the disaster of the morning, I
always asked of myself, as I stumbled into the living room to face the media
reports. The shock of the president’s daily twitters and tweets, along with the
nearly always destructive policies of his cabinet members, sickened me and
allowed to me to justify my natural alcoholic tendencies.
How could anyone like me, an old angry
man, do what was needed to stop this madman? I didn’t have much money but tried
to give as much as I could to the very disorganized Democratic Party. I cried a
lot. I even wrote some essays, but after a while even the outraged pleas of my
Facebook friends failed to move me. All seemed to have no effect. And suddenly
I realized how the Germans must have felt in the early days of Hitler. How can
you destroy such a fiend, when you, yourself, have been convinced you are
simply a puny voice?
I had no friends of whom I knew of who
had voted for Trump. My brother and sister back in Iowa—a state that
regrettably had voted for Trump—had
long ago assured me that they were not registered Republicans, and were, if
nothing else, not Trump supporters. My own state of California voted strongly
for Hillary Clinton. In fact, despite Trump’s attempts of denial, most of the
country had voted strongly for Clinton. Why, given a few irate voters in states
such as Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, were they holding us
all hostage to the monster to which they had decided to support, I believe mostly
out of hatred for the black president Obama, with a hostility to the democratic
principles which had previously helped to make my country so great? Yes, I know
this is a kind of simplicity. In these same states and others, many of which
were suffering from vast unemployment and strange over-prescription drugs, they
had felt that they had been left out of whatever one might have imagined was
the American Dream. I had never believed in the American Dream; but it doesn’t
matter, they and many others had.
Many
a critic attempted to describe the source of this national dissatisfaction, but
few had convinced me with their explanations. The few had clearly—not for the
first time—used the Electoral College to select a president not of the majority
choice. Is it any wonder why the despicable, but desperate-to-be-loved Trump
spent much of his first year in office trying to explain his choice as
president by explaining that close to 3 million Americans had voted illegally?
Or that he was determined to describe his inauguration ceremony as the largest
event of all time? He was not loved, and he was unpopular, and he blamed the
press, the opposing party, and even members of his own Republican constituents
for those facts. Although the cartoon below expressed his view of “America
First,” in Trump’s case, the expression should have read “Trump First.” America
(a country that might never in his thinking be described as a United States) was clearly not as
important as his own ego.
In his incompetent leadership, this man
was clearly not even a Hitler, despite the fact that he desperately wanted to
be a kind of dictator in the manner of Putin and other such iron-clad leaders
(at one point even admitting that he wanted “his people” to sit up an listen to
him like Korean dictator Kim)—anybody who led democracies to civically support
democracy came under immediate suspicion, to this way of thinking, while true
authoritarians he defined as models and friends—he accomplished in the first
year nothing except to undo every civilized achievement Obama had accomplished,
and to pass a tax bill that he and the Republicans lied about, suggesting it
supported the middle-class (actually statistically a very small number of
Americans these days), while it gave most of the benefits to the wealthy.
Fortunately, he often failed in his
odious promises to undo American civil liberties, while undoing such major
changes of the former administration that it will take years for individuals
and organizations to regain their proper protections and simple dignity. You
might describe his tenure, at least in this first year, as one who that
accomplished a great deal in breaking down anything one might have thought of
value. The saddest thing I have ever seen in my now fairly long life was how so
many congressmen and senators went along with his ISIS-like destruction of the
great artifices of previous presidential administrations, not only Obama’s, but
those of Clinton, Carter, and Johnson—even the Bushs’ and Reagan, whose
presidencies also troubled me.
Narrow-minded and loud-mouthed, with a
propensity to lie about nearly everything, Trump displayed a verbal ignorance
that has never before penetrated the presidential office since Andrew Jackson
(one of Trump’s heroes), dismantling American icons as intently as the Taliban
and ISIS soldiers had previously destroyed the masterworks of their own
cultures. Many ignored him, even encouraged him, but most of us were utterly,
if somewhat silently, shocked.
Since then, I have come to realize that
individuals locked within a society so self-destructive often perceive the
world in terms of an “inside/outside” perspective. Some, indeed, leave for the
outside—several of my own personal
friends being examples—while others of us are locked within, either because we
feel too old to leave or can’t quite determine whether or not we might have an
influence by remaining within, by staying behind. It’s not an easy
determination, nor must it have been for Germans and other Europeans who began
to suffer in the beginning of Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist rise. Can we still
make a change, those of us who remain ask? Are things truly as bad as they
appear to be? It’s not accidental, and incidental, that a popular hotel chain,
Choice Hotels, uses The Clash’s song “Should I Stay, or Should I Go,” as a
theme to question whether or not their guests might stay at home or leave to
return to their hometowns for their class reunions and other events.
I had originally subtitled this book,
“Inside Outside.” And it was not merely coincidental, surely, that after I had
chosen that 2018 subtitle, early in 2017, that my friend Brad Morrow had chosen
the title Inside Out: Architectures of
Experience for the title of his 2017 volume of his magazine Conjunctions, or that my friend Joe Ross
(an expatriate living in France) chose to write a new series of works, with
others, based on the same title. Ross, as he explained to me, wanted to give
new essays and writing a context of “inside and outside” of whatever the
writers might define as their own global identities. Clearly, it was an issue
that many others were also experiencing.
But over the year, I realized more and
more, that it was not simply a matter of feeling “inside” or “outside” of a
culture, but that we were all living in a world in which we might feel as if we
were in “enemy territory.” Even though Trump might never be able to build his
wall, we had all psychologically built up our own walls, as particularly those
of us who were desiring to live in an international community, were truly
living in enemy territory. Some of my friends had escaped, while I remained
entrapped in a country with which I could longer identify. It was time to take
on the fact that I wasn’t in a world of what might be perceived as documenting
the inside and outside of it. I was already imprisoned, at least in the context
of dialogue and discussion, as well as my personal actions. Suddenly I
perceived it was no longer an issue of leaving or staying, but that, in my
reticence to leave, I had already, at least psychologically become a prisoner
of my own environment. And suddenly, the issue was no longer about escaping,
but about surviving to document the experience.
Old fashioned art historians, of course,
like to point to their artists’ encountering the work of other artists which
made for determined changes in their own art. But we all know that such
coincidences come out of the air and time in which writers and artists exist.
World events help us all to conceive things in similar contexts. Mightn’t
people caught in cultures as vastly different as Syria, Russia, Poland,
Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela, Turkey, and numerous other countries feel
the same “Inside/Outside” perspective? Should I stay, or should I go, or if I
might want to go, to where and how might I get there? Many certainly must have
perceived themselves as living now in enemy territory, as journalists were
imprisoned or killed, and law-abiding citizens were destroyed. Why did Gertrude
Stein stay in France during World War II? And the question of why we are
remaining in the US during the early destructions to American democracy by
Trump do not seem, in hindsight, so very different; except for the attacks on
particular religious and social groups—which are happening in more subtle ways
in Trump’s reign—it is difficult to imagine abandoning one’s own culture if
there are still possible ways of effecting change.
But staying does, after all, begin to
feel like a kind of prison in which one is trapped inside as opposed to the
world we know lies outside of the walls our President is so determined to
erect. The fear, of course, is that in our delay to escape, we might never be
able to extricate ourselves from the guilt that must surely follow our election
of such an absolute fool to lead our country. And the embarrassment of that
choice, no matter what our personal votes and consciences, can never truly be
truly assuaged. Generations of younger Germans, Japanese, and Italians have had
to live with the guilt of their grandparents, just as all US citizens can never
live down the generations before them who killed Native Americans, put African
and other blacks into slavery, or locked up their Japanese citizens during
World War II. Today, even writing this, my tears almost destroy the image of
the computer screen upon which I try to write. I might just add, I’d move in a
moment, but my husband Howard won’t and can’t. I am sure every generation has
had precisely these indeterminations: Fritz Lang left Germany and his wife the
very day he was offered the position of the director of German cinema; the
great German poet Gottfried Benn, who’d had a relationship with the Jewish poet
Else Lasker-Schüler, stayed behind.
And then….and then…there is always the
hope that things are not truly as bad as they seemed. I began this introduction
the very day after Trump tweeted (I hate that word) that all transsexual men
and women must be expunged from the military and on the same day he attacked
his equally mean Attorney General Jeff Sessions, not because he disagreed with
Sessions’ concerted attacks on immigrants or his other terrible policies, but
because Sessions had legally and necessarily recused himself from the
appointment of special consul Robert Meuller, the independent prosecutor
investigating the Trump administration’s Russian connections. Certainly,
Sessions is no hero in this case, but yet Trump is still the monster,
determined to destroy anyone whom he perceives is not loyal, meaning those who
do not advance his interests—which increasingly
clearly are both personal and financial connections with him.
If anyone imagined that the New Year 2018,
might possibly represent a shift in the President’s behavior and that his
actions might have been more tolerable, they were badly mistaken as early
January, through Michael Wolff’s book Fire
and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, revealed what we all know, the
complete incompetence of Trump, highlighted by the utter stupidity and
ignorance of the entire Trump family. Even his mean-spirited confederates, his
close associates and cabinet members threw out pointed barbs directed at the
President, such as “moron,” (Tillerson) “idiot,” etc. The President’s
reactions, to have his lawyer deliver a cease and desist letter to the book’s publisher,
only demonstrated Trump’s stupidity, as the publishers immediately pushed up
the release date of what, despite Wolff’s own spotty past as a writer, would
surely be a best-seller.
The same day, only the 4th day
into the year, my mother died at age 92, as I had predicted, after a visit to
her late in 2017. I’d already written my eulogy and now had to immediately pack
my bags for a trip to Iowa.
If my mother’s death was expected, the
sudden accidental death, in an automobile crash, of French publisher, Paul
Otchakovsky-Laurens announced on the very same day, further devastated me. I
wrote on Facebook:
Really sad to hear today
of Paul Otchakovsky‐Laurens' death, evidently in a car accident. He was one the
great publishers in the world, presenting P.O.L writers such as Lilliane
Giraudon, Jean Fremon, Henri Deluy, and returning many such as Georges Perec’s
works to print. He was a great editor, a magnificent force, a dear friend, and
a witty confidant. I so admired his press, and I published many of his authors,
visiting him every time I traveled to Paris. He made the Parisian publishing
scene over, giving it new visions for the 21st century. We will all miss him
dearly. What with my mother's death, it's been a hard day!
The
very next morning, The New York Times reported
that Trump attempted, illegally, to convince Jeff Sessions, his Head of the
Department of Justice, to not recuse himself in the investigation into Trump
and his family’s involvement with the Russians and his firing of FBI head James
Comey, angrily shouting out “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump’s terribly nasty
former friend and mentor had supported the most monstrous figure of American
politics before Trump, Joe McCarthy.
A few days before
the New Year Howard and I encountered an artist friend, Susan Silton, with whom
we briefly discussed the events of 2017. “Some say, at least, we now know the
worst of what to expect,” she and Howard agreed. I responded, “I can’t imagine
that it is good for us to try to accommodate ourselves to his insane behavior,
nor do I feel that we’ve seen the worst. I think, alas, that 2018 will only be
more terrible.”
Yes, there was
worse, when we discovered on January 25th that Trump had attempted
to fire Special Prosecutor, Robert Mueller, way back in June of 2016, but was
stopped by his advisor Donald F. McGahn II, who suggested that if the President
attempted to do so, we would resign. For all the months since, Trump and his
staff had been lying about the President’s position, and even when faced with
the evidence, argued that The New York
Times and CNN’s reports represented “false news.”
And then, as if to
mock the seriousness of what Trump had already done, in March the President
outdid himself in terrifying behavior. After promising that he would support
changes with regard to the age which young people could buy guns, he quickly
flipped his position when he perceived that the NRA would not even support that
mild-minded alteration of the law.
Porn star and
director, Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford), not only admitted that Trump’s
lawyer Michael Cohen paid her hush money of $130,000 (incredibly out of his own
pocket after a personal loan, although later in the year it became apparent
that Trump had ordered the payment) to shut her up about what she claimed was
an affair with Trump. Daniels even claimed that she was willing to give back
the hush money simply so that she might speak out about the events, which Trump
and his lawyers claimed never occurred and who had secretly sought out a
restraining order against the outspoken woman. Other women also spoke up again
about being abused by the President. And that was only the beginning.
After the nerve gas
attack (a rare nerve agent created by Putin and the Kremlin) in England on a
former Soviet spy Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter Yulia, delivered evidently
in through the doorknob of his home in the small city of Salisbury, Trump’s
Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, admitted in The New York Times that “it was an egregious act” that appeared to
have come from Russia. The very same day, Tillerson was fired (told through
Twitter) from his position, while the hawkish CIA director, Michael Pompeo, was
positioned to replace him. The very same day Trump’s personal assistant, John
McEntee was ushered out of the West Wing, evidently because of background
checks—slow to come in Trump’s administration—which had found him guilty of
shady financial dealings. Trump promised him a position in his 2020
presidential campaign.
Just the day
before, the spineless GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee determined to
close their investigations of Russian meddling, arguing not only that there was
no collusion on Trump’s part, but, against any findings of US intelligence sources,
that it may not even been Russia’s intent to support Donald Trump in the US
elections. This, on the same day that I finally finished Jane Mayer’s
brilliant, insightful, and extensive essay on Christopher Steele in The New Yorker, which revealed the
integrity of Steele’s report and the truth (to the best of possible knowledge)
of Steele’s reportage of Trump’s sexual dalliances in Russia (where he was
witnessed in the same hotel room where President Obama and Michele stayed,
asking prostitutes to piss on the bed), but also was responsible for numerous
acts of treason, working with the Putin administration to help put him into the
American presidency. Mayer’s article convinces anyone who is not a dunce that
Trump very much knew what was going on, but also was seeking help from Putin’s
Kremlin. And the US GOP’s leaders, such as Nevin Dunes, Charles Grassley, and
Lindsay Graham, have been using the very fact that Steele, as a former
government employee, cannot openly speak, to create a series of lies and untruths
to help to undermine his honesty, as well as putting him in harm’s way with the
Russian government.
Even Steele was
openly shocked by what he discovered in trying to determine Trump’s
relationships with Russia. Having already perceived, through other
investigations, that a great many of Russian underground and illegal dealings
somehow occurred in apartments rented in Trump Towers in New York City, he was
still totally startled by what he had suddenly uncovered. As Steele’s friend
Christopher Burrows put it, “We threw out a line in the water, and Moby-Dick
came back.”
Even more sorrowful
is how hard Steele attempted to get the information to the American FBI, but
either they simply ignored it or buried it as implausible truths. Much of the
Dossier since has been confirmed.
I love Mayer’s
sense of detail, the meetings of Steele and others at Washington, D.C.’s Tabard
Inn—a kind of out-of-the-way place where Howard and I dined many times with our
former friend Frank Schork. Equally fascinating is how Putin himself may have
tried to dissuade Trump from hiring Romney as head of the State Department,
preferring the now suddenly disappeared Rex Tillerson. Indeed, Mayer’s work
reads eerily like some of the events in All
the President’s Men, or even worse, The
Manchurian Candidate. No, we could clearly not imagine how bad it truly
was.
Soon there came the
firing of his security advisor, H. R. McMaster, who also blasted Trump for his
inability or his determinedness not to
criticize Russia. Trump’s personal advisor, head of communications, Hope Hicks
also left the White House, with Trump evidently feeling he need not even
replace her. Increasingly in March and April Trump felt he could do all jobs
alone, and ordered tariffs against Chinese products, setting off fears, after
China responded with tariff demands of their own, of a trade war; the stock
market fell.
In early April he
argued for a pull-out of US troops in Syria, something many of us long for, but
cannot be so easily accomplished. On April 4 he ordered that
National Guard members be sent to the Mexican border to protect it from border
crossings. There seemed to be no possible end to the insanity of his
inabilities and mis-perceptions of reality. In the annual Easter Egg Roll he
lectured the children on his achievements and the power of the American
military while a strange looking Easter Bunny stood by, his face frozen (by the
costume) into what appeared to be total startlement. As the president himself
said on April 5th: “It’s insanity. Nobody knows what’s going on.”
Surely, he did not know where his own rhetoric had taken him. Most people also
felt Trump’s confusion, but, obviously, it was Trump who had created it.
As the year
progressed, Trump bowed out of the only logical treaty the West might have made
with Iran to stop them from producing nuclear weapons, startling the European
countries, such as France, Britain, and Germany, whose leaders had attempted to
talk him out of it. It was clearly another attempt to alter any achievements
that Barack Obama might have made.
His cabinet members
(Ben Carson) determined to get rid of laws protecting the poor regarding
housing (he planned to raise their monthly rents), to close down (Betsy De Vos)
fraud cases against profit-making universities and to federally fund religious
institutions, to crack-down even further on migrant workers and individuals who
might cross our borders (Jeff Sessions) causing huge back-log decisions for US
judges, to dump chemicals into US waters (Ryan Zinke), and to breakdown
environmental protections (Scott Pruitt), the latter of whom was also under
investigation for numerous financial offenses. Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, was under investigation for numerous offenses, including his career in
real-estate and rental properties. Trump himself was accused again for lying
when his lawyer Michael Cohen’s home and offices were raided, and investigators
revealed that he had not only paid to cover up Trump’s sexual peccadillos, but,
as even as a replacement lawyer such as Rudy Giuliani admitted, was knowingly
paid off by Trump himself.
Yet as corruption
was more daily revealed, Trump madly moved forward, denying all, permitting a
lower aide to even make fun (a joke she called it) of Senator John McCain’s
slow death from brain cancer, and even worse, refusing to fire her or even
admit the moral indiscretion. Similarly, his new appointee to head the CIA,
Gina Haspell, refused to characterize, despite her insistence that she would
never allow it again, the enhanced interrogation methods (including the
despicable practices of water-boarding, deprivation of sleep, and other methods
of torture) as immoral acts.
A revealing article
in the May 21, 2018 issue of The New
Yorker by Evan Osnos recounted just how Trump and his cabinet members
worked in concord to dismiss or diminish the jobs of those they felt disloyal
to the President, many serving under several different presidencies and most of
whom had far greater experience than the often younger and unqualified people
who replaced them. Entire departments, such as the Department of State, were
decimated as replacements where not rehired, and the wisdom of hundreds were
lost to the often clueless Trump administrators.
Even events that
might have been seen as presidential achievements came to nothing, such as the
Trump-Kim summit meeting, which saw no major changes in North Korean policies,
despite the President’s claim of a “major breath through.” We’re still waiting
to here of real changes.
In June it became
even more apparent just incompetent this President and his administration were
when his demands for tariffs—not only on China, but allies such as Canada,
Germany, and England—began to severely effect the American and other world markets,
surely the beginning of a trade-war which might end all the recovery of the
economy over the past 3 years.
That same month
Jeff Sessions and others of the Trump administration announced that they
intended to and, soon after, began to separate children from their parents at
the borders. The terrifying conditions of these children, some held in
converted WallMart stores and others sleeping on the floor of old warehouses
with Mylar covers, while other very young children screamed out in the night while
being separated along the border from the mothers and fathers who had attempted
to bring them to a better life. The shock of these events, and Trump’s and his
administrator’s callous dismissal of all those who opposed these odious acts of
child-abuse brought about a widespread criticism of his values, including from
his own wife Melania, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton.
Typical of Trump,
he blamed the decision on a pre-existent “law” (although no such ruling to
separate children was ever apparently in any statement about immigration; the
Flores decision had simply argued that children could be held only for a
limited number of days) blaming it on the Democrats since they had failed to
approve money for his beloved wall. Comparisons to the Nazis immediately arose,
particularly since some of the border guards had evidently told mothers that
they were taking their children to be bathed, only to report, later on to these
women that they would not see their children again—which is probably the truth
since the parents would be quickly shipped back to their home countries, while
their children’s cases would take months to wind through the courts.
On one tape the
cries of children losing their parents was punctuated by seemingly uncaring
guards who joked about their crying “We have an orchestra.” Another responds,
“All we need is a conductor.” The cruelty of this decision created an outcry
across the globe.
A day after,
Trump described the necessity for immigrants to not “infest our country,” a
term that took him yet closer to the Nazi linguistic evaluations of
“outsiders,” including people of the Jewish faith. “We need security, we need
safety,” he repeated again, as if we were being attacked by hordes of
barbarians.
For a few days,
thankfully the Trump rhetoric was interrupted as our attentions turned to 12
soccer-playing boys coach were found deep within a cave in Thailand and, as
oxygen levels grew dangerous were rescued through deep waters and narrow crawl
spaces by Thai Navy Seals advised by British and US authorities. The seeming
miracle that they were all saved and appeared to be in good health buoyed up
communities around the world, a relief in these bad times
But, of course,
Trump could not stay away from the limelight long, and stopped into Belgium on
a visit to a NATO meeting, describing NATO members and economic foes and
demanding they pay more dues, ultimately declaring they should pay more even
that does the US. He was particularly hard on the embattled Angela Merkel,
declaring that because of Germany’s reliance on Russian oil, they were pawns of
Putin—a statement that had long been leveled against him.
If damaging NATO
were not enough, he then flew to England where, in a newspaper interview, he
spoke out again Prime Minister Theresa May’s handling of that country’s exit
from the European Union, and praising her former advisor, Boris Johnson, who
had been forced out of her cabinet a few days earlier.
The next day he
kept the Queen waiting for 14 minutes before lumbering about, often walking in
front of her, as she attempted to review her guards with him. Anger was written
across her face.
Then on to Helsinki
where he met with Russia’s Putin, appearing after their meeting with vague and
meaningless agreements, and far worse, expressing the fact that he believed
Putin over his own FBI and CIA operatives that there was no attempt by the
Russians to interfere in the US election, despite the fact that when asked if
he preferred one candidate over the other, Putin admitted he backed Trump. As
some commentators such as CNN anchor Chris Cuomo observed, this was perhaps one
of the darkest days of any US presidency. Even Fox Network commentators,
despite that stations clearly pro-Trump values, were shocked by the President’s
behavior. Several Republicans expressed
their dismay, without doing anything about it. The word “treason” was spoken
throughout the country regarding Trump’s behavior. And the next day, July 17,
even the President, himself, attempted to deny his quite obvious
recapitulations to his Russian “friend” by claiming that when he said:
My people came
to me. They said they think it’s Russia, I have President Putin; he
just said it’s
not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.
that he had intended the sentence to be a double negative, “I
don’t see any reason why it would not be.” Yet, even in that denial he couldn’t
resist going again off script, suggesting that it perhaps was others and well,
and again insisting that there had been no “collusion,” even as it appeared
that the day before he had now publicly colluded with the Russian President.
Many felt that American politics had descended to the very lowest it could get.
It went still
lower, if that is possible, when the President attacked former CIA and other
special workers such as Director such as John O. Brennan’s special security
clearance, simply because he had spoken out against Trump and his policies.
Bennan responded with a clear dismissal of Trump and his policies in The New York Times. Trump was perceived
truly a vengeful man, who refused to even take responsibility for his actions,
and was clearly terrified by how others might tie him to to Russian involvement,
“collusion” being beside the point. From day to day throughout the year, one
never knew what to expect from this totally mecurial and erratic “leader.”
On August 21st,
in an astounding one-day pounce against the presidential honesty, Paul Manafort
was found guilty by an American jury of 8 out of 18 accounts of fraud and
hiding illegal funds. A few minutes before Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen
admitted to several illegal activities, including, so he insisted, his acting
on behalf of the President to cover up his affairs with two women by paying
them illegal funds to keep them quiet before the presidential elections. Trump
and his group predicticably attempted to present Cohen as a liar and their
insisted upon their own innocence. We
all know that the President had endlessly lied, but now we had evidence, which
even, after the fact, Trump tried to eradicate. This was a madness we might all
have predicted.
When the war-hero
John McCain died, not only was Trump uninvited to the funeral (as he had also
been to the funeral of Barbara Bush, and to the royal marriage of Prince
Harry), but hung the White House flag at half mast only for a day—at least
until veteran and legion groups demanded he alter his behavior, resulting in a
few clumsy words of admiration. It was clear the President wanted no part of
it, as he struggled, as he did constantly, to shift the attention by announcing
a new NAFTA-like agreement with Mexico, without resolving our country’s failure
to include Canada. A bit like a trapped beast, he attacked Google for being
prejudiced against him; increasingly he appeared to have gone mad.
When in September
of the year, Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump
in the White House (see my review below) was published, the horrific
“crazytown” which the author revealed seemed almost like old news, as did the
anonymous op-ed piece in The New York
Times that which declared that some members of Trump’s own staff knew of
his madness and had worked behind the scenes to help keep the government in
steady keel. As Trump further stormed and fretted, even calling for a Justice
Department investigation into the author of this piece (which would, in itself,
be an unlawful action given the rights of the First Ammendment), the public
split on whether to call this secret spokesperson a coward who should reveal
his or her identity or as a kind of hero protecting the country from the
would-be king.
By November, when
Trump refused to even meet with foreign leaders, rejected any visits to
celebrate the soldiers of World War I, stayed home on Veteran’s Day instead of
the standard presidential attendance at Arlington Cemetary, and replaced the
incompetent but, at least, somewhat honest (at least he recused himself from
the Mueller investigation) Jeff Sessions replacing him with an Iowa hack,
accused previously of trying sell people shares in “time travel” and who
already appeared on TV claiming that the Mueller investigation was pointless,
since Trump had clearly not been guilty of collusion—I was so exhausted with
recounting the horror we all felt, that I knew I could no longer go forward.
Only the mid-term elections, wherein the House of Representatives flipped
control of numerous Republican seats, allowed me and others to catch out
breaths. More wacky things followed, but I will save them for the 2019 volume.
Usually, in these early pages I try to
connect my numerous essays on film, poetry, fiction, dance, theater,
television, and all other cultural endeavors, including politics, with the
essays that follow. But this year, I’ll permit the readers to determine those
connections. Every work I’ve included within, with far too many bows to film,
has something—to my way of thinking at least—to the subject at hand.
There are many ways to be outside and yet
inside a culture: sometimes it involves immigrants who have not yet found a way
to assimilate as in the films of the wonderful director Ramin Bahrani; or it
involves sexual identity as in Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film, Milk, the older film, now revived as a play on Broadway, The Boys in the Band, dancer Freddy
Herko’s sexual and drug addictions, or as in the Turkish-based film on Zenne
dancers and Parvez Sharma’s story of a gay Muslin couple, A Jihad for Love, just being sexually different; religious
separation is obviously the subject of 2017’s documentary film titled One of Us; or that sense of “enemy
territory” can arise simply from experience of the confusions of adolescence as
in André Téchiné’s The Witnesses; or,
as Betty Davis discovered, by being a mother or lover who is unable to expose her
true identity and feelings, and, finally, being an old woman who has lost her
abilities to cope, as my own mother had. And then, obviously, you and your
brother can just be perceived as “racial freaks” as were the original Siamese
Twins, whose lives were recounted in Hunte Huang’s book Inseperable. There is a tortured history in all artistic forms
about just this issue, with writers, artists, dancers, and theater writers
desperately seeking to balance the inside of their lives with the
often-destructive outside demands, or, just as often, vice versa, attempting to
assimilate the inside demands with their outside aspirations. Either way, it’s
a prison which isn’t generally of one’s own making. This same year, what might
have once been thought of as a complete outsider, given the culture of the
British royalty, Megan Merkle, a bi-racial American became Prince Harry
Windsor’s wife.
I fear, as I move on in years that my
introductions and the essays behind them are becoming more and more dour. To
counteract that, in part, I have spent long hours in 2017-2018 on writing about
things I love, such as my piece of “My Favorite Musical Theater Songs,” and by
attending opera, musical concerts, and art exhibitions; yet even in those
events I often saw the living in enemy territory theme and the inside/outside dichotomy,
which had originally been my focus. The show on Merion Estes’ art by my husband
Howard Fox, with work that dealt with the tensions we were facing, the beauty
of nature during its simultaneous destruction, was like a balm, about which I
wrote in my essay “Stubborn Beauty.”
And then a minor miracle had also
occurred: the outraged survivors of a Florida mass-murder shooting in Parkland,
mostly students, spoke out, and began what I can only perceive as a new
engagement of youth around the nation, all of which made me feel that perhaps
we had all done something right, at least in educating our youth. Maybe as a
country we might still survive. I write more about the event below. But even
here Republican sympathizers attacked some of the students such as David Hogg
and Emma Gonzalez personally, using the same tactics as Trump has throughout
his career. And, of course, the NRA offered their hostilities as well. We seem
to have become a nation of hatred. If many of this year’s essays have harsh
criticism of our current President, I can only explain that he deserved it, and
I refused to keep quiet about it.
Is it any wonder that by even the middle
of the year I was beginning to post titles with words such as “Sound and Fury,”
“Going Crazy,” “A Force of Madness” and “A Landscape and Loss,” “The Pure
producuts of America go crazy.” Dear Bill, I’m nearly there.
Every year friends and major artists leave
our temporary existence on earth: and this year the Italian film director, Ermanno
Olmi, whose film Il Posto I reviewed
in February, died on May 5th; my own mother died, and I wrote
several pieces about her death and funeral. Composer Harvey Schmidt (of whom I
wrote of two of his musicals in “My Favorite Musical Theater Songs”) died in
February at the age of 88. Noted film director Miloš Forman died at age 86 in
April, when I determined to review his early Czech comedy, The Fireman’s Ball. And, obviously, the sad death of Paul
Otchakovsky-Laurens and his wife occurred early in the year, which I mention
above.
Later in the year, fashion handbag designer
Kate Spade unexpectedly committed suicide by hanging herself with a scarf (a
death that brought back the memory of another young woman whom I’d admired, who
did precisely the same thing). I hadn’t known anything about Spade—fashion and
women’s handbags are not on my radar. But a few days later, The New York Times reported that since
1999, the suicide rate had risen in nearly every state except one by 25-30%.
What was happening?
That same day CNN reported the death,
again by hanging, of their food and cultural critic, Anthony Bourdain, someone
who I had watched and admired for years, who had hung himself overnight in a
French hotel. Reporters, such as author Benedict Carey sited that during these
same years (1999-2016) the economic crises had perhaps been responsible for
many of these deaths; at the same time the opioid addictions of many may have
contributed to the problem; guns, the primary tool of such suicides were more
available than ever. Marriage rates had declined, and social isolation had
increased. By August it was reported in The
New York Times that over 72,000 people had overdosed on drugs. Something
was terribly wrong with our culture. And perhaps this suicide might have been
related to his girl friends, Asia Argento’s accusation (by a boy, then of 17
years of age, of child abuse); Bourdain had evidently paid hush money to the
now adult actor.)
Yet only a few spoke to what I and several of
my friends perceived as the largest of whispered issues: perhaps the ugly
politics of the period, the very divisiveness of American politics and culture,
had helped people feel separated in a world that had once represented a broader
and more openly shared community. Trump’s politics struck at the very heart of
this issue, as he and his allies centered their tactics on a kind of
divide-and-conquer method of governmental control. There no longer seemed to be
any middle-ground, any shared sense of what our country was, and, furthermore,
which sought to separate our own country from the rest of the world—surely a
matter that would have meant a great deal to Bourdain.
In late June, gay pioneer Dick Leitsch died
of liver cancer, and I felt it necessary to tell his story since he had so
impacted my own and Howard’s life, allowing us to live as a gay couple, even
before gay marriage was allowed, with cultural acceptance. It’s painful to
recognize without his, Frank
Kameny’s, Jack Nichols’ and others’ sacrifices my life and Howard’s might have
been nearly impossible. We did little things—protesting the gay stereotypes of The Boys in the Band and representing
openly our relationship—while they gave up their lives in order to change
cultural values. Without them, our actions would have meant very little.
In July the great French documentarian of
the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann died, in memory of whom I reviewed his 2013
film, The Last of the Unjust.
Soon after, we lost the 1950s actor Tab
Hunter, for whom I pulled out a past essay on a documentary on his life.
In August, the “Queen of Soul,” the great
singer Aretha Franklin died of panecratic cancer, determining that I
immediately write a piece about her as well. My eyes were not dry for days. And
then, later in the month I read of the death of the great British publisher,
with whom I had met in Paris, John Calder; a death followed the next day by the
remarkable American actress and singer, Barbara Harris. I wrote about the
former and chose to write about Harris through the discussion of a movie in
which she appeared, Plaza Suite, which
also gave me an opportunity to memorialize the death of playwright Neil Simon;
yet I also couldn’t resist writing about her performance in Robert Altman’s Nashville.
As I described on that week, I felt as if
I were playing a sad game of ping-pong, trying to manage my emotional responses
about death with the political concerns of that day (August 21st).
As I argued, perhaps we just experience too much information far to quickly,
without being able to entirely assimilate it. Perhaps it is simply “too much
noise” that even the hated dead cannot comprehend.
On the same day that the country grieved
Aretha Franklin and John McCain in funeral ccermonies, The New York Times announced the death of the great choreographer
Paul Taylor. When I was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin his company
came to Madison, Wisconsin for a performance. Somehow, probably on a street
pick-up, I met his young company manager with whom I had sex, later attending,
upon his invitation, an afternoon rehearsal of the company, and after that
accompanying the manager to a film, Barbarella,
starring Jane Fonda. I think I also attended the evening performance before
meeting up with Taylor, finally, at the Madison local gay bar. There I
discussed with him my lifelong love and interest in dance, sadly proclaiming
that I had missed my opportunity, and was now too old to turn to a dance
career. He looked me over and said, “No, it’s not late. I too came late to
dance. Try it if you love it as you say.” A year later I did just that, taking
nightly lessons at the Joffrey Ballet. I loved those evenings, before taking in
the gay bars. But even though I eventually received some attention from the
taskmaster dance teacher, I realized that I simply didn’t have the proper body
nor the right muscles to achieve what I might have wanted to, just as I had
previously had to face the fact that although I may have been a good choral
tenor, I would never be able to sing opera. Yet I truly appreciated Taylor’s
kindly advice, since he might have looked over my then scrawny body and simply
replied, “Kid, don’t try it.” I had always wished to be able to see a dance
performance of his group ever since but was never in New York or other places
in which the much-lauded company appeared at the right moment. Yet I
religiously followed the reviews, and felt so saddened about his death, yet
another significant figure to disappear from the landscape of my life.
Soon after, in early September,
screen-star Burt Reynolds died. Reynolds, to my way of thinking, was no great
actor and most of his films (despite good roles in Deliverance, Boogie Nights,
and a few other movies) were forgettable except for his good looks and good
ole’ southern home-boy smiles and winks. Howard once joked that when a student
of mine had called, he’d answered “Fessor Messerli can’t talk to you right now
‘cause he’s watchin’ Smokey and the
Bandit,” a movie we had indeed watched together—a complete anomaly in my
viewing habits. Reynolds was so modest about his talents and good looks that he
often played something close to a camp version of a macho Hollywood hero, at
one point describing the handsomeness of some of his fellow male thespians as
almost making him want to go to bed with them. Mel Brooks toyed with ideas of
Reynolds’ ego and sexuality quite wonderfully in his Silent Movie, in which he, Dom DeLuise, and Marty Feldman join the
hirsute beauty in the shower to try to convince him to perform in their movie. It
didn’t take much to set Hollywood to talking. I recall, when Reynolds was
suffering from pain after an incident after which he suddenly lost a great deal
of weight (evidently from the drugs he had to take) and dropped out of sight
for a couple of years, that Hollywood producers all assured Howard and me, time
and again, at Bel Air parties that he was dying of AIDS. Fortunately, it was
simply their own imaginations.
On October 1st of the year, the
great petite (as the French described
him), French-Armenian singer Charles
Aznavour died. I listended to several of his major songs but thought perhaps it
might be better to pull out the film review I wrote in which he appeared, François
Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianist, from
2014 to represent his major contributions.
In November screenwriter William Goldman
died. I have already written on Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock and Alan Pakula’s All
the President’s Men, for which Goldman also wrote the scripts. Later in
that month the British director of great musical stars (David Bowie and Mick
Jagger), Nicolas Roeg died, and I pulled up my essay on his film Performance. The very next day the great
Italian director, Bernardo Bertolluci also died; I chose a lesser but wonderful
film, The Sheltering Sky, to
commemorate his death. It was a very sad month.
For during that same month greater
disasters occurred when a gunman entered a bar in nearby Thousand Oaks and
mowed down 12 people. And before we could even recover from the news fires
broke out in Northern California—where to date at least 77 people died—and in
Malibu and Thousand Oaks, where thousands were displaced, and 3 more
individuals were burned to death. Trump, after long delays, finally visited
Paradise, a city destroyed in the flames, which, in now nearly open dementia,
he kept calling Pleasure, and argued that to prevent forest fires (these were,
in fact, mostly hill fires, fueled by dry chaparral and other plantlife) by
raking the forests. No, he insisted, he did not believe in climate change—this,
despite that fact that his own government employees and participants issued,
soon after, a 600-page report arguing for the devastation of the effects of
climate change and suggesting that it will cost millions of lives and billions
of dollars in the near future. The First Ostrich again put his head into the
sand.
Meanwhile, Washington Post correspondent, Jamal Khashoggi, who reported on his
homeland Saudi Arabia, was lured into that country’s embassy in Turkey,
murdered, and his body destroyed. Turkish authorities and our own CIA found
this to be directly related to the Crown Prince of the Saudi government, Mohammad
bin Salman; yet Trump, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both close friends
with bin Salman, and who have received large amounts of money from the Saudi
empire, refused to believe it, arguing that they would do nothing to punish the
Saudis.
An attach by Russians of Ukrainian ships,
after Thanksgiving, was treated with the same apthetic attitude. The big threat
at year’s end, according to Trump, was the appearance of a “caravan” of from
Central America seeking asylum in the US. Here, I stop, certain that the final
month will certainly contain other horrors. It has been, in summary, one of the
very worst years of my life. Perhaps I am growing simply sentimental, but every
morning after reading the newspapers and hearing early CNN new items, I wept.
Thankfully, my own life has been filled
with loving friends and associates who daily present me with other
alternatives. If this is a bubble in which I live, I am, nonetheless,
appreciative of their support. This year, many old friends and new helped me,
as I hope I helped them, to survive a nearly unbearable political fog, among
them Eleanor Antin, Thérèse
Bachand, Lita Barrie, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Nina Berson, Régis
Bonvicino, Paul Breslin, Diana Daves, Merion Estes, Rosemary De Rosa, Merion
Estes, Elsa Flores, Tom Frick, Peter Glassgold, Sid Gold, Rebecca Goodman,
Michael Govan, Dan Gurerro, Ira Joel Haber, Kelly Hargraves, Yunte Huang, Kim
Soo-bok, Mary and Ben Klaus, Tom La Farge, Zach and Alice Leader, Nikki
Lindqvist, Deborah Meadows, Robert Messerli, Albert Mobilio, Jim Morphesis,
Martin Nakell, Lucy Pollack, Marjorie Perloff, Murray Pomerance, Francesco
Rodriguez, Paul Sand, Pat Thieben, Paul Vangelisti, Wendy Walker, Holly
Wallace, Diane Ward, Mac Wellman, David Wilk, and Marvin Zuckerman.
Once more, Pablo Capra helped to bring
this book to life, accompanying me to many a performance; and my husband Howard
Fox offered his gentle and, sometimes, not-so-gentle commentaries and support.