The Digital New Jerusalem

Too often I am confronted with arrogant geeks, arrested guys with money and no sense of their own limits. But they were meant by disposition to be cogs. 

Their interior story goes like this: I am good at something like math or the scientific method and it applies to everything so I am good at everything. 

Since they must actively repress the awareness of their inadequacy in a defense against self-knowledge the arrogance ramps-up, usually aided by money.

They get a little money and they don't think they're lucky they think they're demigods, and they get affirmation of this in fantasy worlds and video games. 

Math, for example, is a world of purity and they want to inhabit such a world. This puts them oddly in line with old, puritanical, utopian traditions. 

It's a digital New Jerusalem, a land of abstract, binary perfection. But they have advanced past their level of competence and into uncertainty. 

Bill Gates is a billionaire and he can't choose a shirt. The insecurity and constant need for reassurance causes many of them to fall for bogus, heroic nonsense. 

They see themselves as superior beings in the world-views of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, half-baked pseudo-philosophies of personal success.

They think they're winners but they're still just punks, pencil pushers and prospective bank managers running amok and drunk on self-importance.

Crazy Little Thing

Another image arising in my head is of Donald Trump dancing around and singing A Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen. What he has in mind, of course, is how much everybody loves him.

The Real Causers of 9/11 Have Names Like "Kissinger"

"Realism" is an arbitrary standard in application. In practice it turns out to be nihilism, so it is only a nicer term for the law of the jungle. Applied to American foreign policy, other countries and peoples are treated as means to our ends, not entities with inborn rights and deserving of respect. 

They are devalued. Is it a wonder they hate us? Individuals, like Henry Kissinger, who are drawn to this are the measure of all things to themselves. They see their own psychology of anger, aggression and insecurity in the world around them and so must always be able to out-gun everyone else.

If it sounds familiar there's a domestic, NRA version of this. All the 9/11 guys did was to accept the battle on our terms, which assume an ethical vacuum. We shouldn't complain. We have been playing cynical, power politics in the Middle East forever, resulting in chaos there and many deaths.

There were a lot of innocent victims of 9/11 but, as a country, we asked for it. The war-hawks have declared open-season on America, I hope inadvertently, but it is sick stuff anyway. We can add to the list of innocents all the noncombatants killed by us since then in Iraq and elsewhere.

Not that the Neoconistas care. They have reinvented themselves in other roles, typically with no loss of prestige for being deadly wrong. It's a simpler world when you don't care, and that includes about our own dead, and when there are no consequences no matter how badly you fail.

Benghazi's Got Legs

Hillary Clinton may have a problem. It's interesting, though, that her trivial sins won't go away and that the mortal--and I mean involving tens of thousands of deaths--sins of the Bush crowd are strangely forgotten. Her incompetence somehow outranks their criminality.

Loving the Ruins

My latest tactic is to love a ruined America. I should say, to love it as a ruin and because it is a ruin and in full ruination, not in spite of its being ruined. What good is that?

Who wants that kind of backhanded embrace? No, I will love America absolutely as the falling-down version of itself it is. Welcome to my ruin, and don't you dare criticize. 

The Shit on our Shingle

Trump does have a kind of sincerity. Put on the fuzzy glasses. Now look at Trump. Notice, he doesn't really pretend to be anything other than a piece of shit.

Reality-Show Rubbish

The great disgrace of America's current situation is that it is still a democracy. The American public is voting for the reality-show rubbish of the ongoing election cycle.

We have no one to blame but ourselves. For all the system's faults we could stop the shameful spectacle in a single election. We kind of did in 2008, to the world's relief.

But there was no respect for that outcome and another disgrace in the 2010 election. Yuck. On the Republican side the system is primed for permanent minority rule.

That is the end of democracy, realty-show style.

Asylum Seekers

There's a lesson that I learned early. Certain situations can't be changed. In the cases of addiction and insanity the only thing that someone can do is leave.

You have to get away from it. Pack your bags. Any involvement with people that messed up will be on their terms. As a kid I was stuck in such circumstances. 

I couldn't escape. That's why I write about politics, I bet. Being held hostage by political crazies resonates with my experiences with mentally unstable people. 

I so want to get away from the fanatics who have taken over our country. It used to be a good country and lived up to its ideals to a greater extent than most.

But not any more. For now we are stuck in an asylum for the politically insane and we have much more in common with the boat-people than we think.

Fight for Accountability

One of the things I argue with my Democratic friends is how we have been utterly defeated. Republicans have had their way completely and we have to own that.

Consider this: Trump says he's not as crazy as he seems. He begins in the boonies because you lose if you start in the middle. Democrats start in the middle.

Republicans start in crazy-land. So even the seeming successes of the Democrats don't mean much, if anything, because everything has shifted so far to the right.

Democrats are now called socialists for proposing Reaganite stuff. But there's an unambiguous outcome and lesson, an extraordinary record of failure:

Tax cuts for the rich resulted in massive deficits, increased income inequality and no discernible benefit to the overall economy.

Deregulation and lax enforcement resulted in the Great Recession and an economy that feeds on injustice and insider trading.

Another holy dictum is that you give corporations anything they want and, again, that it will miraculously benefit everybody.

But corporations want nothing more than cheap labor. So, bye-bye, jobs. Bye-bye, happiness. The job growth has all gone to China.

Our foreign policy has no underlying morality and is a shambles. Our domestic policy has no underlying morality and is a shambles.

This is what Republicans have done for America. Democrats, hear me: we have actually been proven right. There's a clear course of action in this situation.

We shove it in their faces. And we don't stop confronting them with it until we see the whites of their asses heading for the hills.

I Was a Teenage Nut-Case

I was a sociopathic adolescent. I remember it too well to deny it. It's helpful to have once lacked a conscience because you can understand it, that It was a lot of fun. 

In my case there was a clear change of heart because of circumstances--an event which endowed me with a normally functioning conscience, not that I wasn't still a wreck. 

These things take time. I marvel at the kids I knew who weren't crazy. It seemed so natural to be crazy then. Credit goes to hormones. But to stay in that state is really monstrous. 

Why in the world would we want to opt for that adolescent brand of insanity? But that is what Trump and his supporters represent, America as a deranged, arrested mess.

The Art of the Dole

At Trump-corps the real art is real-time rebranding. It's a virtual-reality operation, a chance to live within a game world since the parents are still paying the bills.

The parents are us. The problem with Trump is not Trump, it's us: our desire to regress to a simpler place--to join junior, the Trumpster, at a summer camp that goes on forever.

But somebody has got to play parent. Someone has got to pay the bills. Trump represents the fantasy of staying on vacation forever but every summer comes to an end.

The Dehumanists

People with certain selfish and anti-social drives want to pretend that they can narrow the contexts of their lives and it doesn't matter.

"It's just business" is a phrase used to justify all kinds of horrible behavior, pretending there's a parallel world where it doesn't count.

Everything counts. But enter Donald Trump: charlatan as sage, the prophet of no-accountability. We are openly embracing evil. 

Putting Our Mouths Where the Money Is

Man, I wish we would just own it. Americans will do anything for money. Money is everything. Nobody cares where it came from. This is our version of morality.

The Pragmatist's Pipe Dream

Do you think you can see trajectories? Based on predispositions or on character, in the case of people? Let's consider a less metaphysical example: they now know that a devastating earthquake will occur in Oregon and Washington State at some time. In fact it's overdue.

It would be wise to prepare but it's hard to get it done because we don't know when it will happen. The trajectory is certain but the timing is uncertain. Let's say it's so uncertain that capital improvements relating to preparedness might not be needed over their useful life.

Do you roll the dice? I wouldn't, but this is the pull between practical considerations and principles, utility and ethics. I don't believe in engineering purely to outcomes but in engineering, including socially, to principles. This is positivism set against normativism. 

There are those who want to do what works and those who want to do what's right. But I argue that these are not choices in parallel and independent within a system but in a series. And I think that practical considerations, working to outcomes, is further out in the system.

If you believe in right and wrong then it's wrong to work only to outcomes because outcomes exist within a moral context. You work to principles and then, secondarily, to outcomes. Practical considerations inform moral choices but moral choices are everything.

Working only to outcomes is a denial not only of a specific morality but that there is such a thing as morality. We are already out on that, moral, branch. It's a choice we can't choose not to make. To try to not make it is the road to chaos and social disintegration.

Nadirism

The process and outcome of the 2000 presidential election are still instructive. The Democrats showed up in Florida wanting to see the system honored and a fair outcome.

Republicans showed up wanting to win. Screw the process. Win they did and the resulting eight years of incompetence may eventually be seen as the beginning of our end.

Who knows, but I see it as the dawn of a new age of elevating our worst aspects into ideals. It makes no sense but there you are, a case in point: making sense no longer matters.

The Perversion of Everything

I've heard it said that a person's strengths and weaknesses are different aspects of the same attributes. Could that be true of societies? 

Hmm. If that's the case then we are seeing the dark side of the American Dream, the inversion of what it stood for. Look at the loss of hope and opportunity.

Correspondingly, our ability to evaluate ourselves honestly is taking a hit. We are as defensive as we are a failure, unable to own who we are.

Feel the Vibe

Some people think Trump is an earthquake but I think he's a tremor. If there hasn't been an earthquake for too long it's easy to lose perspective. 

The Great Depression was an earthquake but not a really bad one. You never fully recover from the really bad ones.

Worryingly, Trump may be a harbinger of a monster shaker. There's no way to know but it's mighty dumb to mess around with this stuff.

The Biggest Loser

If I get on too strong a jag about something it must be about me--that's what I think, that taking anything too seriously is a form of self-importance.

What the jag is about is revealing. Whatever I'm seeing "out there" must have a corollary in me, an area of sensitivity or underdevelopment or whatever.

And humorlessness can reveal sensitivity about something as well. Trump's jag is clearly about winning. Ergo and Q.E.D., he must be the biggest loser.

Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight

Is Trump tragedy or comedy? I don't know, but he sure is a show.

I think he's comedy now. The tragedy comes later.

Dame ex Machina

At times Donald Trump shows signs of common sense. On the bathroom brouhaha, for example, he saw that it was a problem created by the kind of social conservatives who should be institutionalized or ignored. Similarly with the fiscal nuts' designs on Social Security. 

Megyn Kelly, of course, is now drooling over Trump as are all the party poobahs. They get paid not to have common sense so none of it is surprising. To outsiders this world of sociopathy appears undifferentiated but there are subgroups and constituencies. Where will Trump fit in? 

In my opinion he is only quantitatively different. He is from Megyn's more dignified stratum of degeneracy but he has succeeded without her and her crowd's approval with the help of the rocket fuel of the pure crazies, whose energies he has burned in his bowels to achieve lift-off.

A peek into that sociopathic political vortex has so far yielded a scene of the faces of traditional conservatives swirling down the drain into the pit of hell of their southern, socially backward brethren. Notice: as of now I am adding The Long Good Friday to my list of must-see movies.

Together with the movies on Enron and Lee Atwater it cracks the door to that world of incomprehensible irrationality and compulsion and corruption which was assumed not to be a part of America's political birthright but is now welling up out of southern sewers to destroy us. 

In The Long Good Friday those strains of crazy come together. Guess who wins. The rationally sociopathic money-guy, played by Bob Hoskins, doesn't see that he has entered another arena. It's the political world in which suicidal devotion makes sense and they really don't give a shit.

Helen Mirren is Hoskins' girlfriend, his anchor, and she can anchor me anytime. Hoskins, in an excellent end to the movie, finally understands, in a futile instant, both what he is up against and that he has lost. Maybe Dame Helen will be able save America, with her beauty and élan.

She couldn't save Hoskins and we are now in similar circumstances, unable or unwilling to understand the forces we are up against.

Coming Around to Trump

I am really coming around to Trump. Apart from the annoyance and shame of seeing his name plastered-up next to Central Park I had nothing to do with him. I never saw his show so all I knew about him was what was obvious: that he is an ongoing, public celebration of being a pig. 

And this is America. The Greatest Generation bequeathed to their kids material largesse and a sense of rightness. For the kids it was unrooted in anything, the nature of inheritances. The kids could choose to dig down on it or not. Trump is unimaginably unreflecting, simply aflame with superficiality.

The point is, he is what the presidency is meant to be: our national ego. A president mediates between our id and our ideals. The instinctive part of Trump is right on the surface. He's a sated baby still demanding to be fed. But he also embodies our ideals. We now aspire to be like him.

Our ideals are now so superficial and greedy it would be good to get it out in the open. The rest of the world sees it anyway. America is an ongoing celebration of excess, a culture with no absolute sense of its good-fortune or anything. Hillary is a pig with pretensions. Trump is a pig without pretense. 

Angry Bards

Things are so screwed up it can only be captured obliquely. The events themselves are indescribable. Our two heroes at this, Colbert and Stewart, have moved on. 

Poets are required. We need humor and irony, a job for creative people. And they have to be indignant. Even then all they can do is glance off of reality at assorted places.

In this way the insanity can be captured over time, an invisible monster occasionally revealed by a force-field of truthiness. And, remember the Colbertian motto:

videri quam esse (appearance is everything)

War Can Be Good For You

Firstly, you have to survive. Beyond this the common effort entailed in wartime is the kind of thing we should do all the time. And by common I mean everybody. 

It doesn't work otherwise. The idea is not to make war on someone else but to fight to make life worthwhile for everyone, meaning all of humanity and creation.

Anything else is suicidal, unproductive and shortsighted. Generally people don't have enough of a sense of urgency or what they have is misplaced and selfish.

We need urgently to take care of one another and the systems that sustain us. Whatever kind of a weird gift it is, our lives on this planet, it is what we have.

Bride of Trumpenstein

In order to understand Trump's missionary position on women I look at his wives. Not a wife has been remotely his equal. And most have been foreign and so less likely to see that he is a joke and a loser.

They would be less adept at cultural clues, that is. Ivana, however, got uppity by not understanding her real role as an appendage. To Trump women are only an expression and extension of his power.

Our country would be down to this if he were elected president, in which case we better not be uppity. There's no telling what he might do. He will not stand for anything independent, assertive or unattractive. 

We would be a part of his brand. America would have to be nicely made-up and "beautiful" and present well on his arm. It wouldn't matter if everything were utterly rotten and unusable underneath. 

Nose Rings for Republicans

I am not confrontational. I am a peaceful person. My idea of a protest is when people show up in colorful costumes and stand around.

But these are different times. I have been fantasizing about going to a Trump rally and trying to make a statement, most recently by selling nose rings. 

At one time we elected people who thought like us. Then we elected people to think for us. Now we want people who don't think at all.

Along for the Ride

When I have a nervous, passenger-side driver in my Miata I tell them they might as well relax and enjoy their last minutes of life if I'm about to get them killed.

I try to have that attitude about the Republicans running everything, seemingly into the ground. Life is good but it's hard to ignore the feeling of impending doom.

Where Entitlements Really Go

If the less fortunate in America are such experts at taking advantage of government largesse how is it that they don't have anything? 

And how is it that the divide between rich and poor began its slide into extremity with the coming of Reaganomics and Republican rule?

It all makes sense when you look at it. We know who the real takers are. Republicans have been playing the government and sucking off the American people for decades.

I remember someone saying, at the time of the Rodney King trouble, that if you want to see real looting look at the Savings and Loan scandal. 

So right. No wonder Republicans are defensive, with so much to hide. And they only want more. Or, at least, for there never to be a reckoning.

Triumpalism

As a limiting case himself, Donald Trump makes it easier to see the assholes around us. Is it my imagination or did Americans once have a conscience? 

When did it become passé to care? Anyway, weenies like Trump are everywhere, playing the system and trying to convince themselves of their worth.

They overreact to everything, being weenies. They are devastated by any slight or small failure and their triumphalism is boundless at any success.

The Fifth Column: the Evil Forces of the Right Wing

I just read some more drivel which tried to analyze the latest misadventures of the Republicans. It came with all kinds of caveats and conditions and partial conclusions. There is an explanation. It makes sense of everything: Republicans are evil and completely out of their minds.

That O'Reilly Fucker

Around my house a certain cable news show is known as That O'Reilly Fucker or Spin Cycle.

The Reassignment Scam

Republicans seem to think that transgender people are play-acting and therefore gender-inauthentic. I would make a similar case against Evangelical Christians, who were clearly born Satanists and chose reassignment in order to conceal themselves and for the perks of accepted religious status, such as social respect and tax-evasion.

They should be forced to use the church of their birth, the Church of Satan. It is easy to see that the evangelicals have the inborn character of devil-worshippers from a quick look at naked values. An analysis comparing core Christian precepts with the ethics of evangelicals gives a predictable result, that they are working for the other guy.

This is the real reassignment scam. What motivation does anyone have to undergo difficult, unnecessary surgeries? The Satanists, however, are known to be motivated by a quest for power and the reassurance of injustice, complementary things. Injustice and arbitrary power are exactly what evangelicals pursue in attacking vulnerable people. 

Lift and Separate

Donald Trump has delivered such a blow it lifted the Republican Party right off its feet and they are settling into different camps now and still sorting themselves out.

The Palinites are furring up to Trump. John Boehner and the country club, smokey-drunks are hanging desperately onto their fumy, failed ethos and opposing Trump.

We are seeing which groups knew that they were jerks to begin with and which didn't. Those who knew immediately embraced Trump, the master of the martial art of fuck-you.

Those who still held onto the delusion that Republicans represented anything other than greed, racism and a national death wish are stupefied. It's a hard time to be rational. 

Sane, caring Americans are involuntarily witnessing a half-ass pro-wrestling match, strapped to their chairs, and undergoing intense emotional pain and ethical despair and exhaustion.

Sphincter Asset Management

At Sphincter the primary investment vehicle is called the Tight-Ass Trust, which employs a digestive algorithm. They operate out of a renovated warehouse called The Closet, within which there is a small, neatly appointed suite of offices known informally within the organization as doily-world. 

Tea is served there religiously at three, for the partners. The investment philosophy at Sphincter is pessimistic. It assumes that the easy money is over and that it's time to get retentive. Sphincter's associates are famously risk averse but prone to emotional outbreaks of adventurism, or "acting out".

It is thought that acting-out is another sad spectacle of overpaid geeks trying to find a mojo. Sorry, boys. Those who have one don't have to look. They are, however, usually rational and practical and understand that the only way real pussies make money is to play the system. That is what they do.

Catholics: The Best Cannon Fodder Ever

Apart from the hideous WASP at the helm Fox News is a deeply Catholic organization. The training in obedience and blind allegiance to authority come in very handy at Fox.

The Bad Shepherd

Republicans were fine turning their share of the electorate into sheep and imbeciles until Trump came along. Now they whine and whine and whine.

"He stole our sheep." Well, tough.

Let Us Pray

Several times I have been to Gethsemane, the monastery in Kentucky, and I thought that the monks could see current events more clearly because of their distance from them. Thomas Merton saw that the defining issue in America is race. 

We will conquer it or be consumed by it. What is it like to die? Picture dying with the awareness of it and with regret because the meaning of your own life and life in general is being challenged as it happens, incidentally or otherwise.

Race has put us there. For those who aren't in denial, or shock, we are witnessing our own death. Merton understood that the issue of race in America required a transformation. It was a crossroads. We could not go on as we were.

We would be transformed as a people or die. Unchallenged and unchanged we would fail and that meant dissolution into moral misery and degradation. The issue could not be withdrawn. And we have taken the wrong road and are dying. 

It may be inadvertent and it's three-dimensional, at least. The road not taken travels the wrong road with us. We are prodigals with the hope of transformation always at an elbow. It is always an option and inadvertence isn't an excuse. 

Injustice can demand to be addressed and denial is hard work. It is wearing us out. There's lightness and grace in the transformation and if we can get a glimpse of it, well, it might be self-reinforcing and keep on happening. 

Meanwhile, as the monks would do, let us pray. The wages of sin are upon us.

Horror

Let's view it as a learning opportunity. I didn't know it was Ted Cruz who really terrified me until he quit, for example. He's a horror greater than which it is impossible to imagine. 

I couldn't have thought up someone as terrifying as Cruz. I still can't and he actually exists. I can't comprehend the horror of Ted Cruz. The other guy, the survivor--what's his name?

The presumed nominee is kind of a joke. Republicans have such a thirst for tabloid entertainment. In this series, Survivor: The Republican Primaries, what-his-name has won.

The final ceremony, coronation, or whatever awaits. And a general election version may be in the works. Couldn't we stick them on an island? The winner could then rule that.

Puerto Rico? Running our country is an important job, we seem to have forgotten. But maybe Cruz's or some God will pity us and we will survive this mess, not that we deserve to.

Exit Strategy

We probably ought to have an exit strategy. An exit strategy for America. I mean, we may have to abandon the place, what with Trump.

Damn, but where do we go? We may have to think big. Go global and interplanetary. Why stop there? Let's make it existential, or supernatural.

That's interesting. I've wound up in the same place as the religious fanatics, fantasizing about an unseen world. Maybe that was their plan.

They want to bring us all to Jesus because we are afraid for our lives. Truthfully, I'm not afraid of Trump. He's an opportunist, not an ideologue. 

He's nowhere near as scary as Cruz. But I'm very afraid of the people who vote for Trump. And I have no idea how to get rid of them.

Or Die

It appears I will become an old white person. Either that or die.

It's the most horrible demographic ever. I think death should be an option.

For now I just hide.

We Have Guts

Republicans campaign and govern from the gut and Ted Cruz has thrown in the bowel. Gut-government has made Democrats attackable and impeachable for anything, like winning, or nothing, and Hillary has a lot of baggage since she was already a winner by marriage. 

Nobody really likes her, and American voters have been held hostage for so long by Republicans they have Stockholm syndrome en masse and are unreliable. And Trump has turned the entire election cycle into a reality show. Oh, this will be interesting, but messy.

What To Do at a Coup

Most mornings I wake up to the innocence of a new day. I can say that I'm living the life I have chosen and, though some things have turned out unexpectedly, I am very fortunate and I feel it. In the moment I am happy. Then, breakfast. Ah, the pleasure of food. 

But, as I head out, my mood changes. Am I in a foreign country or what? Have we been invaded? Tell me, how do you get from where we were, or were assumed to be, to Donald Trump? I've had a sense of dysfunction since Nixon but it was, well, kind of normal.

It didn't challenge everything. Trump challenges everything. Trump isn't operating within an intelligible context he is challenging the whole context. This means that we are witnessing a coup or a crackup or a breakdown. What do you do at a coup? Hors d'oeuvres?

It is too weird for words.

Grey Gardens

Sometimes things are so out of sync it's impossibly sad. It can quell any impulse you have to fight it or fix it or flee or even to numb yourself somehow. All you can do is look at it and feel the sadness. When I first saw the movie Grey Gardens, in the 1970s, I felt that. 

The Beales of Grey Gardens, Big Edie and Little Edie, mother and daughter, were at best impractical. Did they have to live in such squalor? Was it a choice? Probably, more rightly, it was an external expression of an internal state, removed from the norm, though Little Edie alluded once, if I remember, to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And they had family. There were sons and brothers somewhere. How could they let them live in such a mess? 

And what did I do?

Not about the Beales, I mean, but about my sister. She died in New York City, in 2010, in squalor. She was brilliant but difficult: hugely intelligent and talented and impossible to live with. She coped with the tough, improbable life she had made for herself, again an external expression of an off-beat, disconnected internal state, with resiliency but it seemed so unnecessary. People don't have to live like that.

Oh, but they do.

I think that there was unwarranted optimism once, that there would be the equivalent of a Salk vaccine for everything. 

We would be able to fix everything. It's an attitude that dies hard and is characteristic of a kind of American optimism compounded by innocence. We are still dealing with the fallout of that false optimism. There's a resistant strain of it around, that you can still fix anything if you have enough money, but even that is failing as so many aging people live in pain and lose more function than they thought possible. 

The scientists and medical people now know that, with so many things, there are statistical distributions, often normal curves, and that there will always be people out in the tails. The crazy will always be with us, and so on. People will always have problems, many unfixable, or new problems arise as others fade. But what does it mean? I was taught, when I was a child, that people who suffer somehow suffer for all of us. 

They bear a burden for all of us. How is this not true? It means that it is true. We are a people, a common entity of sorts. When we care for other people we care for ourselves. When we neglect them we neglect ourselves. And I neglected my sister. Was she crazy? It doesn't matter. Who are we to judge. I didn't know how bad her life was. Would I have helped her if I'd known? Yes, but only if it was really necessary and with conditions.

My brother and I had never known how she made a living. She was guarded about it, but she was an intermediary in the sex industry. This immediately impressed us as an honest thing in the context and as characteristically defiant. In Summer, 2007, I had visited New York and hadn't contacted her. It may have been better. As it happens, I saw the stage version of Grey Gardens while there, with Christine Ebersole as Little Edie.

And I was at Marie's Crisis, a piano bar with ties to Broadway, when Ebersole won a Tony for her performance. I had wondered what it would be like to take my sister there. She was a singer. Would either of us have gotten anything out of it? I will never know. The Beales may have been happier than I am. My sister probably wasn't but this is the thing, with these strange worlds people create, some more invented than others.

There's always a qualitative cast to it. The Beales' world was in some ways beautiful. My sister's probably wasn't. But all of this makes me think of the disconnect in the way we Americans now view ourselves, in a romantic way even in relation to past standards, as we abandon any sense of who we are and what we stand for. And it's becoming more delusional by the day, more reflexive and a reflection of something lost.

Our national sense of self is a crumbling mansion. We are increasingly out of touch with reality, unable to step back and see the mess in the trappings of past successes, and there's increasingly less connection between our view of ourselves and what we are. The longer it goes on the more defensive we are and resistant to the truth. It's also less likely that we can recover and again be more of what we claim to be. That's impossibly sad.

In honor of my sister, a sample of her singing:

https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Fapp.box.com%2Fs%2F9mz1iggqmscwbk894t85/view/19130828505