Three Loose Ends

Small ramblings and rants

Way back in the heady days of 2008, when Obama was running for his first term, I would often debate political issues in an online forum. I had questions about candidate Obama and I’d try to give them an honest airing. What do we know about him? I asked. You tell me he is a constitutional scholar. What scholarship has he produced? We haven’t even seen his grades. He had (and has) never produced any scholarly work. None at all. One can not be a scholar without generating scholarly papers. That’s how academia operates and keeps score. The lowliest professor at the most backwater college will have some published scholarship. Obama does not. Yet, in those months leading up to Obama’s first term as POTUS, we were often told that he was a “constitutional scholar” or a “professor of constitutional law”.

His resume could fit on a Post-It Note, I said in 2008. What has he ever accomplished? As a private citizen or as a Senator?

The answer, always, boiled down to: He won the primary. That’s it. To my counterparts on the left who were quite literally in love with Obama, that was enough. He was qualified to be President of the United States (I was told more than once) because he was the nominee for the office.

This didn’t work for me. It felt too much like being told a doctor was a competent MD because he wore a stethoscope. Logic didn’t matter much, though. Then, because I had real concerns about Obama, I was told I hated him because he is black. That seemed doubly crazy to me, because I didn’t (and don’t) hate him and could give a rat’s ass about his melanin. This is why I no longer argue politics, on line or anywhere else.

Anyway. Today we are posed with a different question. What qualifies someone who never won a primary? Someone who lost, and lost badly, the only primary she participated in?

She wasn’t chosen by the voters, I ask my hypothetical debate opponent. Who was she chosen by?

That question gets ignored by the media and her campaign. So we move on. What is her record? What does her resume actually look like? How did she do as VP? List a few things she accomplished.

Crickets.

Why aim so low? I wonder. If an actual resume doesn’t matter and the intention is to just create her record, why not aim high and make her a practicing neurosurgeon, a particle physicist, a Buckaroo Bonsai type Rock Star? At the very least, why not make her a “scholar” of something?

Instead we get, “She’s Amazing! She’s a First! She is joy!” She is qualified to be President of the United States because she has been chosen, by someone, to be on the ballot. Her race matters when it matters, but doesn’t when it doesn’t, and the same is true of her gender. She can be Indian or Black or Jamaican, depending on the time and place and the audience. We can’t talk about her record as a DA or her performance as a VP, because she is a woman, and black, or Indian. Any criticism is either racism or sexism, because identity is far more important than actual accomplishment or success, but identity is fluid and can change. After all, what is a woman? What is “black” or “Indian”?

Is this about right? I am being unfair?

Because this is how it looks to me.

Personally, in my own life, I do not care about race. I don’t think it tells us anything about an individual. I am told that I have the “privilege” of feeling this way because I am white and male. I doubt this, but even were it true I ain’t changing. I will never prejudge a person or vote for or against a candidate because of their race or their gender. I don’t vote for anyone because they are “white” (whatever that term means), and I won’t vote for anyone simply because they are “not white”. If it is a “privilege” to not give a rat’s ass about any argument for or against that implies “All [insert race or gender here] are, do, think, believe [insert characteristic here]”, I’m good with that and embrace my status. I’m old and white, but I am not stupid.

In reality, I don’t think the Democrats care about race either. Or, more precisely, care about race only when it is a useful political tool

So what should matter to me, since race and gender do not?

I suppose I should consider what we actually know. Trump was President for four years and the sky didn’t fall (or even crumble at the edges). During his term we were pretty much at peace, the economy was good, the border was secure, and I was even able to save a few bucks when the bills were paid. Civil rights were not curtailed, his political opposition was not jailed, and we were not the international pariah the Democrats predicted we would become.

Harris has been VP for four years and things have gone, well, less than perfectly. This seems self evident to me, as simple as remembering what I have seen and felt, not very long ago. Just revisiting the events of the last three and a half years I can see the DoJ and the IRS used as political weapons, attempts at censorship, and failure across the board—everything from a dismantled southern border, crime in the streets, to simmering wars around the globe. Are we now expected to not look for fingerprints?

I don’t see how that can be done. Admiral Rachel Levine claiming Trump and Vance are “weird” is not a convincing argument.

*

In retirement I have a sort of faintly drawn schedule that consists of obligations I have made to people, appointments with dentists and other professionals (take good care of your teeth kids!), tee times and visits with the family. It’s fairly regular—this thing on this day, that thing on that—but this week, because of the weather and preparations for an upcoming family cookout/multiple birthday party, the ordinary pattern got shifted. It threw me off way more than I would have ever anticipated. For most of the week I had two conflicting calendars in my head, one that told me it was Tuesday and another that swore it was Wednesday. I actually missed a regular meeting on Thursday night because for a few hours I was operating in the wrong day and thought it was Wednesday.

Like everyone else these days I carry with me at pretty much all times a phone with a calendar and alarm, and I dislike it, but I think I may have to begin using it for real. I use it sometimes, like when I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled months out, but I haven’t used it for day to day stuff because part of me prefers to live in retirement much like I lived during my tenth or eleventh summer, with an August day spread out before me in the morning with nothing to do and all day to do it. As an adult, though, I think this may be impossible. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. At ten, I have to remind myself, no one was depending on me for anything. I had no bills and no expenses. At sixty-six years, people expect certain things of me and they are not wrong to do so.

So as much as I cherish spontaneity, I’m going to have to whittle away at it some to be at the places I promise to be.

That is half of the story, though. My mother, two of her sisters, and one of her brothers, were afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease. I watched it take them and in each case the symptoms began when they were in their 60s and early 70s. It is a singularly ignoble way to go.

At the most basic level every death feels like a tragedy because a universe of memories unique to the individual passes away. I have mine, you have yours, everyone contains their own, both terrible and magical, and when we go those memories go with us. Alzheimer’s seems particularly awful because the process begins long before death as the memories drop like golden leaves from an enormous tree and scatter in the wind.

People afflicted in such a manner do everything they can to hold on. My mother, once she knew what was happening, put Post-it notes around the house and wrote everything down, did crossword puzzles, placed photographs of family and friends in highly visible places.

This is probably why I am so reluctant to use my cell phone calendar. It is a concession to time and an acknowledgment that though I show no signs of dementia I am getting older and dotage awaits, up ahead, like a mugger in a dark alley. The concession grabs my delusions by the collar and gives them a good shake. The young women in their summer dresses, with smooth skin and tight lines, are no longer my concern, now just something to be admired, and maybe remembered, like body surfing big waves, full court basketball, or crashing helmets on a football field. I continue to learn new things and skills, but I’d be kidding myself to believe I could start a new career.

Getting old is, I think, always a surprise. I remember a conversation I had with my dad one day when I was in my forties and he about seventy. “Wow,” I said, remembering an event that had happened in 1969 when he was driving a Galaxy 500 and I was eleven, “time goes so fast!”

He just looked at me, like I was speaking of something I knew nothing about. “Tell me about it,” he said.

There is nothing about this that is in any way unique. This is simply the human experience and the important thing, for me, is to experience it with an appropriate amount of gratitude and grace. Everyone has to face down their own expiration date eventually. It’s important to not be a whiner about it.

So I’ll use the friggen calendar and carry on.

*

Every human relationship is (at least partially) an exercise in validation. Like all people, I’m going to be attracted to those who agree with me on most things, because they validate my opinions and prove to me that I am not awful. They like Miles Davis and they aren’t awful or crazy, and I like Miles Davis, so I must not be awful or crazy either. I think we all do this, multiple times every day and most of the time it is harmless.

But not always.

I am thinking of the crazy time of Covid, of paper masks and silly markings on the floor telling you precisely where to stand to remain six feet apart. Those days of closed churches and funerals, but wide open awards shows, Home Depots, and Walmarts. The Crazy Days.

During the Crazy Days I found people became offended when I did not share (and thereby validate) the fear they felt.

Suddenly 2016 made a lot more sense to me, when people I have known for years and cared about deeply vanished because I did not fear the hated Trump as much as they did. From their perspective, much like the people who were angered when I didn’t share their fears and religiosity around Covid, they imagined that my job as their friend was to validate their beliefs and feelings, and I had failed.

Today I suspect the root problem is a misconception about the nature of friendship and boundaries. I never expected those I value and love to validate my preconceptions. It never occurred to me that this was their job. In fact, if I was loping down a bunny trail I expected those around me to point that out and warn me.

But somehow, for some reason (probably about the time Obama became The One They Had Been Waiting For) politics, like the Covid reaction, became religious. Disagreement, on one side anyway, became blasphemy. Not validating the preconceptions and dogma became more than simple disagreement, a matter that adults could debate and hash out, and was instead a battle between the true believers and the heretics. Friends, close friends, literally vanished from my life.

More and more events and narratives have since been heaped upon that conflict—George Zimmerman the “White” Hispanic, Anthropogenic Global Warming (or, now, Climate Change), systemic racism, the value of Experts, the “rich” paying their “fair share”, the redistribution of wealth, critical theory, the spectrum of gender, unbridled immigration, and on and on and on). Questioning any of the points of dogma was to threaten a belief structure and the expectation became: “Validate Me. If you do not validate what I believe, your words are literally violence.”

Yeah. I can’t do that. It is not in me to do that. Because I am generally polite, I do not tell people that they are full of shit (I did not openly laugh, for example, at people who would dutifully wear their masks when entering or leaving a restaurant, but remove them while they were eating) but I am also unwilling to fake a fear I do not feel just so people can feel better about theirs. That is a step too far. I can not fake a worry about climate I do not have, or pretend I am afraid that Trump will “end democracy”. I can’t pretend I see a racist behind every black person who fails or succeeds, pushing them to bad decisions or greatness. I can’t pretend that a guy who is clearly a guy in makeup and wig is a woman. I can be polite, but I can not pretend. When I was a child and we read The Emperor’s New Clothes, my impression was that the hero in the story is the kid who gave voice to what he saw, not those who went along to validate the Emperor’s fantasy. That has stuck with me and it’s too late to change now.

On the other hand, I do not expect my friends to validate me in order to remain my friends. I suppose I set the bar lower. Respond to my calls, be willing to lend a hand or ask for help, share time and a few laughs, give me a mulligan here or there, be kind to people and animals...being my friend doesn’t require much in the way of belief systems. Keep your word. Simple things. Reinforcing my prejudices, preconceptions, and fears is not part of the package.

I don’t expect to fix the world. In fact, I don’t expect to fix anyone but me, and even there I have mixed results. I don’t see perfection in my future.

But I can try.

Peace.