Joe Biden

 

Joe Biden gave a speech yesterday.  He stood in front of a yellow backdrop, the color of sunrise, or of the lymphatic system.  There were two American flags, or it may have been four.  His design team has created a transition logo with a small, tasteful “46” at the base of the presidential seal; this may run afoul of the presidential seal style guidelines, but no one seems to be complaining.

Joe Biden walked on stage, looking like the old man that he is.  His walk has that combination of stiffness and teeteriness that suggests a fractured hip is in the realm of possibility.  As he crosses the stage, you see him in profile, and you notice that mini-mullet-flip of white hair at the back.  Like all of us, he probably assesses his appearance by how he looks straight-on in the mirror, so the mini-mullet-flip doesn’t really come into play.  Joe Biden looks straight ahead when he walks, which may be a strategy to avoid a fall, but it gives him an air of purposefulness.     

Joe Biden talked about his own loss and suffering, which he is not shy about doing.  He quoted the psalms.  He said, “To love your neighbor as you would love yourself is a radical act.”  I wonder how many so-called Christians in America heard this.  

Homemade Prayers Vol. 2

 

TCS

Dear God,

Thank you for the TCS* guy,

who comes to set me free

when the car won’t start.

It’s reassuring to see

how orderly everything looks

under the hood,

even though I know

the orderliness is

more or less

an illusion.

Amen.

* Touring Club Suisse, like Triple-A in the US.

Tresspasses

Dear God,

My bad.

Amen.

Sunrise

Dear God,

This morning,

Your indigo sky looks

Somehow both indifferent and loving,

Above the rooftops of the city,

Whose façades of metal and glass strain to reach You,

but know they can’t.

The sky knows what’s going on down there:

People going about their business, etc.

She tolerates patiently,

Like a mother waiting for the child’s tantrum to fizzle out,

Before it falls,

Spent and inarticulate,

Back into your embrace.

Amen.

Palate Cleanser

I reread what I posted yesterday, and I thought I did a decent job summarizing the whole dual/non-dual thinking concept, which is not so easily summarized.  Though for the life of me I cannot figure out what I thought that dream had to do with it.  Witness the risks of trying to publish something every day.

Anyhow.  Here’s a pretty picture from a hike we went on last weekend.

The Doors

 

This morning I had a fragment of a dream in which I was in the bathroom at the other end of our apartment.  I extended my hand to turn the door handle, which makes a heavy “clack” sound when you turn it.  At that moment, my dream overlapped with my waking experience, and the same “clack” came from down the hall as C exited the bathroom.

I felt the neutral emotion of my dream get displaced by a feeling of annoyance that C was making too much noise and waking us up.  This feeling wasn’t justified: he wasn’t being too loud, and it was already time for me to get up anyway, and I was already half-awake.

I occurred to me that I had just been presented with a metaphor, at a mundane, micro-level, of the difference between dual and non-dual thinking.  Non-duality is a central concept among the neo-contemplative crowd, including Richard Rohr, Cynthia Borgeault, and Thomas Keating.  The basic idea goes like this: our perception of reality is conditioned by an “egoic operating system” which makes sense of  things by differentiating between them: I know an apple is an apple because it is not a unicycle, I know three is three because it’s not four, and so on. 

Our sense of ourselves and our reality follows the same framework: I know who “I” am because I am not you.  This “this-or-that” logic creates additional binary categories like good and evil, right and wrong, yes or no. 

This way of thinking isn’t all bad.  It comes in quite handy as we go about our lives, doing our jobs, and going from place to place.  But, as Rohr argues, “the dualistic mind cannot process things like infinity, mystery, God, grace, suffering, sexuality, death, or love; this is exactly why most people stumble over these very issues.” 

In The Wisdom Jesus, Bourgeault applies this thinking to an interpretation of the gospels, arguing that JC was not trying to teach us the difference between good and bad, or between “Godly” vs “Ungodly” living.  Instead, he was trying to show us how to evolve beyond our self-centered, nondual way of thinking and being.    

A prime example is in Matthew 4:17: “From that time on, Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’”  An old-school Christian interpretation of this line might be something like, “Jesus says stop sinning and doing other bad things, because God is keeping score and if your spiritual balance sheet is not in order, you’re not going to get into heaven when the time comes.”  This interpretation is not only false, argue the neo-contemplatives, it's also highly dangerous, and it's led to all sorts of suffering, on the personal and societal level, over the last 2,000 years.

The key to interpreting this passage is in the original Greek word which is translated into “repent.”  That word is metanoia, which literally means “go larger than (or beyond) the mind.”  In other words, get out of your own head, because, guess what?  Heaven is not some nightclub in the sky with St. Peter behind the velvet rope checking to see who’s on the VIP list; it’s right here, right now.  And all you have to do to experience it is to see things, not from your small selfish perspective, but as God wants you to see them.

This is enlightening stuff, and I know I haven’t done it justice here.  I also admit I find it hard to completely embrace.  Non-duality can easily get swamped by an inchoate, new-agey vibe of “it’s all good, man” which struggles to get traction.  Taken to an extreme, it leads to passivity and even apathy.  I have a tough time reconciling it with other worthy concepts like growth, accomplishment, and positive action.  Nonetheless, spending some time with it (e.g., in meditation or contemplative prayer) does encourage greater empathy, openness, serenity, and, if you will, peace.  And maybe there’s your answer right there.

Crow

I’m reading the Ted Hughes biography by Jonathan Bate.  I’m ashamed to say I knew next-to-nothing about him before starting it, further evidence of the rickety foundations of my undergraduate degree in English, as L is fond of pointing out.  In any case, the book is well done, and Hughes’s life certainly provided no dearth of drama.  Ted Hughes the man was as epic as his poetry.  Over the weekend we stumbled across an audiobook of his reading Tales from Ovid, and his deep northern burr gives one chills.

Dude’s personal life was a major-league mess, though.  His bouncing around between women – marrying one one day, then motoring up to Devon to spend a week in bed with another one the next – is exhausting and almost farcical.  Of course, his larger-than-life sexual energy was central to his mythical persona: as Erica Jong, who only barely escaped becoming one of his conquests, put it, “He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal.  He reeked of virility.  He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia’s ghost kept me from being seduced.”  One could cut him some slack and say that he never recovered from Sylvia Plath’s suicide, but that would ignore the fact that his romantic adventures were already in full swing by then, as well as the extent to which they may have contributed to it.    

But really, there’s no slack to be cut, because “judging” Ted Hughes is a waste of time.  If you're worried about karmic justice, it seems that his suffering was at the very least in proportion to his transgressions.  Engaging in self-righteous nit-picking would also make you lose sight of his art, which was by any measure extraordinary.  There’s a lesson here for those lining up to boycott H.P. Lovecraft, or Juno Diaz, or Kanye West, for that matter.  Don’t read or listen to them if you choose, but judging artists on their human failings is fraught with hypocrisy.  More importantly, it prevents you from seeing the humanity (and your humanity) which their work illuminates.

In the future the robots will care for us

 All the races are cancelled, so I perked up last week when I received the email saying that the 20km de Genève was organizing something.  Initial confusion at the subject line which read “2.0km de Genève.” I thought this was either a typo, or that perhaps they had broken down the race into 2.0km intervals, which seemed odd.  Finally I realized that they meant “2.0” as in “version 2.0,” a clever touch further over-egged in the modified logo, which had the “.” in “2.0” at the tip of the accent grave of “Genève,” like a typographical shooting star.  This year’s edition would have the usual choices of 5km/10km/20km distances.  But since we wouldn’t be able to run all together given COVID restrictions, each participant could run whenever they wanted (before Nov 22^nd), and we could follow the course and track our times via a smartphone app.  I signed up for the 10km. 

I set the alarm for 7:45, but I woke up a few minutes before it went off. I fed the cats, had coffee and toast with almond butter, drove to the other side of the lake, and parked near the finish line.  I traversed the Paquis (the closest Geneva has to a “red light district”), past a disheveled woman on a park bench speaking loudly to herself and a young African guy listening to music on his phone, which he held at ear level but looked away from.  I arrived at Rue de Lausanne just in time to catch the #15 tram, which would bring me up to the starting line at Place de Nations.  I realized that I had forgotten to bring a mask, which is obligatoire on public transportation now, so I slid the Buff I had brought with me over my head and wore it bandit-style.

Near the front gates of the United Nations, a few other runners milled around, heads bowed as they consulted their phones.  I almost never run with a phone, as I don’t listen to music or anything when I run, and I don’t like to have the extra weight on me.  I also enjoy the feeling of not knowing exactly where I am when I’m running, when the aperture of my senses seems to be at its widest.  On those rare occasions when I have brought my phone with me on a long run, it’s been stowed away in a pocket in my hydration vest, withdrawn only to take a picture if the scenery is especially nice.  I cringe whenever I see someone running with their phone in their hand, as if they were desperately chasing after it.

However, given the set-up of this race, leaving the phone behind wouldn’t be an option, especially if I wanted to “register” my time – something with no tangible value whatsoever, but one likes to be “official” and to compare times with other runners.  I wore a long-sleeve top with a phone-sized pocket over the left breast, so my plan was to put the phone in there, hoping that it wouldn’t bounce around too much.    

The blue sign marking the starting line was attached to a lamppost at the bottom of Avenue de la Paix, which curves up and around the UN headquarters.  As I approached, three fit looking guys fiddled with phones and watches as they engaged in pre-race bouncing-in-place.  They were lean and fast-looking, with close-cropped hair and red knee-high compression socks, so I figured I would let them go first, so I wouldn’t have to endure the psychological blow of watching them speed away from me.  After a few seconds, one of them said, “Okay, allez,” and off they flew, only to come tramping back down the hill around 20 seconds later, frowning and muttering that the app hadn’t started properly.  A moment later, they had sorted things out, and they disappeared around the corner for the second time.

I took out my phone and opened the race app, which required logging in with a registration number I had been emailed.  Once open, the app told me cheerily to “approach the starting point!”  I looked up and confirmed that I was standing immediately next to the start sign, but for some reason the app said I was 35 meters from the start, then 50 meters, then 10 meters, as I assume the GPS was trying to find me.  Then all of a sudden, a synthetic male voice with a British accent began counting down, calmly but very loudly: “TEN…NINE…EIGHT…”  I managed to stuff the phone back in my pocket and get the zipper closed by the time he reached “ONE,” and off I went. 

Normally at the start of a race, you feed on the excitement of the people around you, so you run faster.  This morning, there was no one around me save the stray passing car, but I still found myself breathing and stepping more quickly than I would on a normal Sunday morning. 

Soon the app’s voice (hereafter “the Voice”) switched over to synthetic British female.  She gave a plug for a breast cancer charity.  I huffed up the long hill, past the US mission and the hotel school.  The Voice then instructed me to take my next left onto Chemin de Machéry, butchering the pronunciation and making me wish I had chosen the French Voice.  I passed through the village of Pregny-Chambésy, and the Voice welcomed me, mangling its name as well. Then the grade smoothed out and the road narrowed, and I moved through the quite pretty and bucolic fields outside of town.  Ahead of me, beyond the airport, the Jura mountains hung purple as the sun strained to burn through in the morning mist.  This is one of the cooler things about living here: one can go from the center of town to farmland in a matter of minutes.  My legs felt strong and my rhythm steady as I headed downhill in the direction of the autoroute.  My km splits were under 5:00, so my rough target time of less than 50:00 (respectable for me on a hilly course like this) was still within reach.  

As I came to an intersection, the Voice instructed me to cross the street, turn into a private driveway, and follow a path into the woods.  This sounded a little suspicious, but I did as I was told, and behind a row of jumelle houses there was indeed a path, which I followed.  I checked my phone, and the little blue dot indicating me was still overlaying the red line indicating the course.  The path became a trail through thick woods, but the Voice’s commands were clear, and I negotiated a couple of turns while keeping a brisk pace.

The path hugged the edge of the woods parallel to the autoroute, then turned east, back toward the lake.  I checked my phone a couple of times to make sure I was still on course.  After another 500 meters or so, the light ahead of me started to brighten as the path neared the edge of the woods.  I emerged to find myself at a T intersection, with concrete paths the color of butter leading to the left and right of me.  In front of me on the other side of a wall were train tracks. 

I realized that I hadn’t heard the Voice in a while, and when I pulled out my phone to check, I saw that I had somehow flicked the little “silent” switch on the side.  The red line on the phone map seemed to lead to the right, so I continued that way.  I held my phone as I ran, trying to get my bearings, but the little me-dot was drifting away from the line of the course.  The Voice remained sullenly silent.

Raising my gaze, I saw figures moving quickly toward me, and as they got closer, I recognized the three fast-looking guys from the starting line.  They passed me and headed back in the direction I had come.  I paused for a moment, and then decided that I must have made a wrong turn, and that I should follow them, at least until I could figure out where I was.  I turned and ran back for another 3 minutes or so, past the T intersection, before realizing that no, this was actually the wrong direction.  The three fit guys were probably running the 20km, which starts with the 10km, but then peels off into a different direction. 

Still clutching my phone, I headed back in the other direction, past the T intersection again.  Looking down, I noticed that my screen had gone black, as my phone had locked itself.  I unlocked it, poking awkwardly with the touchscreen-sensitive tip of my gloved index finger, to find that the app itself had closed.  I reopened it, and it asked me for my password again, which I had to dig around in my email to find.  Finally, I managed to log in, and a cheery “approach the starting point!” message appeared on the screen.  The app had evidently forgotten that I had already started.  I poked around, looking for other menus that might be able to let me pick up where I left off, but there were none.

By this point, around ten minutes had passed since I had first emerged from the woods.  Fortunately, I could still see the course map on my phone, and I was able to pick my way across a bridge over the train tracks, then down a set of stairs to a paved path that ran parallel to them, alongside a cluster of houses near the lake side of Chambésy.  My pace had slowed, and finally I emerged near the gas station close to the autoroute on-ramp, a landmark I knew well, so I would be able to find my way "unofficially" to the finish line from there.

I would like to say that at some point I experienced a peaceful moment of “letting go” and giving thanks for the misty fall morning and for living in such a lovely place and for the ability to go out and run: a Zen-like realization that it’s not about how fast you get to the finish line, but the joy in the journey, etc.  I did not. Instead I just felt sour as I loped past the WTO, then down alongside the water for the final kilometer or so.  The paths next to the shimmering lake were already crowded with people, desperately clutching at the few remaining strands of fall before the arrival of the long, dark winter, whose approach this year feels especially ominous.  I passed the blue sign marking the finish line, then walked to my car and drove home, feeling the chill from the sweaty clothes clinging to me.

The Truth

Composed entirely from subject lines from Trump campaign emails received between September 10 and September 21, 2020.

This is the TRUTH.

47 Days left until the Election

Almost to the finish line

This is the LAST leg

 

One question

This is important

Do you want this MAGA Hat?

Perfect for Election Night

 

I’ve got an offer for you

Hot off the presses

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

FILL THAT SEAT

 

your invitation

Automatic DOUBLE-ENTRY

Now you can enter TWICE

PRIORITY-ACCESS

ACTIVATED: DOUBLE-ENTRY

LAST CHANCE

You’re in!

 

I really want you to be at the debate

We couldn’t do this without you

 

What do you think?

Hollywood Elites

Can we rely on you?

 

I need your help

MATCH THIS

I’m so proud

 

Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence in Gilford, NH

Join Vice President Mike Pence in Gilford, NH on Tuesday

IN TWO DAYS: Join Eric Trump in Milford, PA

 

Let’s talk strategy

Will you help me prepare?

Defend the White House

 

President Trump vs Joe Biden

Patriots vs Socialists

Liberal Mega Donors vs. Patriotic Grassroots Donors

 

Sleepy, Sleepy Joe

Red is your color

I need you

 

Make no mistake.

I LOVE being your President

You’ll never forget this

It’s time for our counterattack

You’re on the list

Homemade Prayers Vol. 1

Metaphors 

Dear Lord

Lead me not into cheap metaphors,

like, “Running is like faith, because

you suffer but you persist

and try to be disciplined

and at the end you feel something

approaching glory.”

Also please lead me not into

trying to sound clever

all the time

by, for instance,

trying to avoid cheap metaphors.

Amen.

BA214

Dear God,

Normally,

I’m not into those prayers

which ask for Your direct intervention

in things.

Like people who pray for their football team to win,

or to get that big promotion

or even for a sick person to get well.

I feel like You don’t really like to get involved

in things like that.

And that what we really should be praying for

is Your help in living through whatever might befall us.

I feel like

that’s more Your scene.

Having said that,

it would be great if this airplane didn’t crash

into the North Atlantic.

Just putting it out there.

Amen.

The Butterball Effect

The turkey market is in turmoil, so says The Economist. The annual supply of 40 million turkeys is ready for the chopping block (or has already faced it), but big family gatherings are out this year. Meanwhile, Denmark is culling 17 million mink, for fear that the coronavirus they carry could make human vaccines less effective. And the number of wildfires in Brazil’s Pantanal region, home to thousands of species of birds, mammals, and fish, has reached a record high.

So much for those springtime feel-good images of “nature reclaiming the planet.”

Remembrance

Followers of the Barclay’s Premier League will be familiar with the red poppies which start appearing on uniforms and managers' lapels in early November. Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday, which is to the UK as Veterans Day is to the US. Our online church service therefore took on martial overtones: a soldier playing a bugle followed by a moment of silence; a reading of “In Flanders Field” by Anne, one of our congregants who rocks up in a jaunty uniform from time to time; a sermon evoking memories of fathers and grandfathers who were on the scene in Ypres, Gallipoli, Verdun.

I am certainly down with honoring lost loved ones or the horrors of war. But I’m not sure if war commemoration is the role that the Christian church should be playing here. Yes, we did read from Isaiah 2 about beating swords into plowshares, but this was far overshadowed by glorification of men in uniform.  Our closing prayer cited, mistily, “the call to arms, the patriotic songs, the courage, the comradeship.” At the end of the sermon, we ran a short video from a WWII veteran saying that the men he served with were “real heroes,” and who am I to say they weren’t.  But is it the role of the church to glorify war heroes, or to ask why they were there to begin with?  What beliefs and actions of men put these pour souls in a foxhole somewhere, and how do we reconcile this with our idea of God?  What, indeed, would Jesus do?

I’m a fan of C.S. Lewis, but this speaks to something in his writings I’ve always had trouble swallowing. In Mere Christianity, Lewis lays out elegant and convincing arguments about right and wrong, and why those concepts are universal, and how we all know it deep down (i.e., because they come from God). Yet some of his examples – “there are situations in which it is the duty…of a soldier to encourage his fighting instinct,” or “if no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality” (whatever that might be) – give the impression that he conflates being a good Christian with being a good Englishman.

Easy for me to say, I suppose, as I’ve never been compelled to take up arms to defend my children while bombs rained over my hometown.  Compared to most of the people in my congregation, I’m a generation removed from World War II.  Also, as an American, my associations with war are less about fighting off the Nazis, and more about the neo-imperialist aggressions of my home country in the Middle East. In any case, my understanding of the gospel tells me that war is wrong and evil, full stop, and we should be extremely wary of myths and rituals that might lead us to believe otherwise.   

A confession

Okay, one last thing about the election and then I’ll get back to writing about Thomas Merton and running and stuff.

I have a confession to make.  I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Of course I didn’t vote for Donald Trump.  I didn’t vote at all.  I can offer excuses.  Getting an absentee ballot from overseas is kind of a hassle.  I vote in Massachusetts, as reliable a blue state as they come, so my vote wasn’t going to change anything.  I was lulled into complacency by the pre-election polls, all of which characterized a Clinton victory as a metaphysical certainty.  I also have to admit that the Democratic nominee was not exactly the most compelling candidate ever, for various reasons which aren’t worth exploring here, but I think you know what I mean.  I suspect that many people of my political persuasion didn’t bother voting either.  We all know what happened after that.

My hope was that 2020 would be different.  Chastened by 2016 and four subsequent years of incompetence and nastiness, Democrats would turn out in far greater numbers. Perhaps even some of those who voted for Trump in 2016 as a kind of protest would come to their senses and vote for his opponent, or at least sit this one out.  This year, I dutifully emailed my absentee ballot to the Scituate Town Clerk in September.  And everything worked out like I hoped.

Sort of.

Let’s be honest: I am not shouting the DNC platform from the rooftops, and I hold no deep passion for Joe Biden (though I do admit he has grown on me over the past couple of months).  My vote, and probably yours, was cast primarily out of disgust at the current occupant of the White House.  Running as the antithesis of a vulgar con artist was an effective strategy for the Democratic party in 2016, but it’s not going to be so useful in the long term.

And while Proud Boys and the QAnon crowd make for good television and enable us to feel all glib and superior, it should be clear by now that Trump’s supporters are not the lunatic fringe.  57% of white Americans (and 55% of white women) voted for Donald Trump last week.  So did 26% of nonwhite people, 28% of GLBT people, and 42% of college graduates. 

The Democratic party has some serious reckoning to do.  For starters, they need to find a way to skillfully incorporate the left wing of their party.  Long before anyone had called PA, the media (from Fox News to the NYTimes) was already trying to drive a wedge between so-called “centrist” Democrats and "The Squad” (see also Biden's bizarre “I am the Democratic party” line in the first debate).  Bernie Sanders may or may not be your cup of tea, but the issues that he is hollering about – the disastrous state of the US healthcare system, the climate crisis, the collapse of American manufacturing – are not going to solve themselves.  They’re certainly not going to be solved by a return to the good old days of neo-liberalism with some BLM-friendly branding tacked on.  Let’s not kid ourselves: if these issues are left unaddressed, the US could very easily find itself right back at the brink of fascism, or worse, in the not-to-distant future.  So, fellow "progressive," I ask you: what are we willing to do, and to sacrifice, to prevent that from happening?  

Update

 

I know it doesn't magically solve everything, and I know that around 70 million of my countrymen voted for a sociopath, but this will at least make the next four years a little less exhausting, and hopefully a little brighter and better.  Now all we have to do is survive the next 11 weeks.

Crumbs

I was starting to feel a little strung out and in need of fresh air from the perpetual CNN-watching here.  So I walked down to the bank in between Zooms to get cash for the cleaning guy. 

Passing the newspaper stand, I noticed with relief that the headline had nothing to do with the election, but instead was about whether the cantons or the communes should pay for something-or-other.  In Switzerland, power and resources are generally devolved as locally as possible.  To wit: around 80% of the taxes I pay go to the canton or commune, and only 20% go the federal government.  If you asked a random Swiss person on the street who the head of the federal government is, chances are they would have no idea.  I couldn’t tell you who it is right now either.  (ed: It’s Simonetta Sommaruga from Aargau, member of the Conseil Fédéral (and educated as a classical pianist), who is currently serving her one-year rotation as President of the Confederation.) 

On the way back from the bank, I picked up a few things at the grocery store.  I still had a little time before my next meeting, so I took the long way home to pass by the Tour de Champel, where I planned on sitting and eating a ham and cheese croissant.  The tower itself is fenced off for renovations, and the lone park bench in the grassy area next to it was occupied by a woman, speaking animatedly.  As I approached, I could hear that it was an American woman.  “I’M SITTING THERE *CRYING,* AND YOU’RE TELLING ME OFF!” I heard her yell to the man who stood in front of her, indicating to her left with a straightened arm, as if she were making a left-turn signal while riding a bicycle.

My first instinct was to approach her and say don’t worry it will be okay the election seems to be trending in the right direction, but I quickly discarded this idea and diverted to the grassy area across the street from our apartment.  I sat on a park bench and watched the birds and ate.  I made the tactical error of removing the croissant from the small paper bag, so I ended up with crumbs all down the front of my jacket.

The End

You need to see it for yourself.  Because just reading the news stories about Trump’s statement at around 7pm ET on Thursday will lend it a degree of coherence and sanity, and it was anything but coherent and sane.  It was the desperate ramblings of a supreme narcissist who, seeing his world beginning to crumble, would rather destroy everything than submit to a reality which doesn’t fit his narrative. We’ve moved beyond electoral politics into grotesque theater.

In around 15 minutes, the President of the United States managed to claim that the country’s election process -- the process on which his authority rests -- is corrupt. That the counting of legally cast votes should be stopped (except in Arizona, where there’s still a chance that he could chip away at Biden’s current lead).  That the polls predicting a big Biden win constituted voter suppression (evidently this was no problem in 2016).  That votes for his opponent are illegal.  That this was all perpetrated by “big media, big money, and big tech.”  That bursting pipes and nonexistent “secret counting rooms” have been engineered by a corrupt Democrat machine to steal the election.  This is gaslighting taken to its more extreme and most dangerous.

Meanwhile, one by one, Trump’s enablers turn their backs on him.  Fox News, whose coverage of this election has been commendably fair and critical, stuck by their decision to call Arizona for Biden, despite Jared Kushner’s frantic phone calls to Rupert Murdoch. Twitter, long the vehicle for Trump’s most specious and inflammatory rhetoric, began flagging his posts as false and misleading.  GOP leadership, realizing that Trump has outlived his usefulness now that certain congressional districts have been retained, refuses to parrot his conspiracy theories.  His inner circle has dwindled to a smattering of sycophants and immediate family members.  

It almost makes you feel sorry for the guy.  Almost.

This election could still go either way.  As I write this, Trump leads in Georgia by less than 500 votes.  Biden’s lead in Nevada is less than 9,000.  I honestly have no idea what will happen over the next two months.  Yet I am given some confidence and hope by the people, Republicans and Democrats, who are actually administering the election process.  Public servants in department store clothing who are discharging their duty, capably and seriously.  People like Joe Gloria in Nevada,  Gabriel Sterling in Georgia, Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, Kathy Boockvar in Pennsylvania.  These are the people who give me some hope that my home country might be able to pull through this in one piece.  May God keep them safe.

Breaking

(all times CET)

6:00am: I slept longer than I thought I would.  An early glance at my phone: Trump carried Florida and Ohio easily, and a scroll down the list of the battleground states reads Trump Trump Trump, some by sizeable margins.

6:30am: Robert Reich tweets to stay calm and “drink water.”

6:45am: Doing rough math on my phone calculator as CNN goes county-by-county through PA.  It looks to me like Biden can close the gap there.

7:00am: Trump misspells “polls” as “Poles” in a tweet.

7:15am: Rick Santorum is on CNN already talking about signatures on mail-in ballots in PA.  I think we can see where this is headed.

7:30am: The doorbell rings and it’s the pest control guy who comes to our building every few months to pour pesticide from an enormous jug down the kitchen drain.  L and I call him “Monsieur Cafard” (“Mister Cockroach”), which we find very funny for some reason.  He is polite and friendly, and before he leaves he tells me not to use the kitchen sink for the next 2 hours.

7:48am: Trump still up by 700K votes in PA, with 69% of the vote counted.

7:57am: So far this is all the horror of 2016 with all the slow-drip torture of 2000. 

8:14am: Trump’s lead in GA is down to around 100K votes as he steps to the podium in a room packed with people who are not wearing masks.  Standing before a phalanx of American flags, Trump riffs about all the states that he has won and the victory party he was planning, then pivots to the “sad group of people” who are evidently "stealing the election."  “This is a major fraud on our nation.  We want all voting to stop.  We will be going to the Supreme Court.”  Mike Pence concludes, kind of sheepishly, “We will make America great again again.”

8:39am: CNN reacts with predictable moral outrage at Trump’s statement.

9:00am: I get back in bed for a while.  My (German) wife asks me how it’s possible to declare a winner when the votes haven’t been counted.

9:30am: It’s okay to use the kitchen sink now.

10:30am: I have a Zoom call with our General Manager in Italy.  We talk about business and COVID19.  He doesn’t bring up the election, and I don’t either, and it's reassuring to know that there are people in the world with other things on their minds.

11:00am: Biden now leads Wisconsin by around 10,000 votes.

11:23am: My employer’s stock price is up 3.6%.

12:30pm: Online service for the Church of Scotland Geneva, for which I play Zoom technical director.  Today’s scripture lesson is from Matthew 18, the parable of the unmerciful servant.  The king forgives a big debt from one of his servants, who then turns around and roughs up a few of his fellow servants who owe him money.  The king catches wind of this and has the servant hauled off to prison to be tortured until he pays up.  The metaphor being that God is the king and we are the servant, and we should “pay forward” God’s mercy and forgiveness to others, even (especially) those who are indebted to us.  Or else.

1:36pm: Trump’s lead in Michigan has closed to fewer than 30,000 votes.  There remain around 200,000 uncounted votes in in Wayne County, where Biden currently leads by 36 points.

2:15pm: I do work Zooms as primary blue and red polygons flash on CNN on the other laptop. 

2:22pm: The gap is PA is down to ~600K votes, which might be a smaller than it was, but I’m having trouble keeping track at this point.  My employer’s stock price is up 4.6%

2:41pm: My home state of New Jersey has voted for legalizing recreational marijuana use.

3:12pm: Biden now leads in Michigan by ~8,000 votes.  Tweet of the day so far: “No matter what happens today, the United States of America is the country that made Donald Trump its President, and it always will be.” (@Vinncent)

3:44pm: I have a spring in my step as I go to my doctor to get the flu vaccine.

4:46pm: I put a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, in the hopes of opening it tonight around 11pm during my Zoom call with my college friends, thereby guaranteeing a Biden loss.

4:51pm: On CNN, PA is being characterized as being “very much in play.”  Trump’s lead in PA is now ~540K votes.  My employer’s stock price is up 6.27%.

5:16pm: Biden leads in Wisconsin by around 21,000 votes, and in Michigan by 32,000.

6:12pm: My employer’s stock finishes trading up 6.21% for the day.

6:37pm: The Election Commissioner for Wisconsin, a woman named Meagan who looks around 28, with straight blond shoulder-length hair and a northern midwestern twang, is on CNN explaining how they officially tally votes.  Election officials from several states have been doing this over the past hours, and I find it inspiring and comforting.  

8:00- 10:00pm: We spend a couple of hours sitting on the couch watching CNN on my laptop.  Watching American TV is a novel activity for me, and generally I think the cable news stations on both sides of the spectrum are toxic and harmful on many levels, but I can’t resist watching today.  After following John King for several hours, I’m pretty confident that I could operate the interface on the “Road to 270” screen.  CNN announces that Biden will speak “soon,” and I spend the next hour or so mentally drafting the speech I want him to give: celebrate the voting process, calmly call for remaining votes to be counted, project confidence in the outcome but do not claim victory.  At around 10, Biden walks onto a stage in Delaware and gives more or less that speech, and I am buoyed by the probably illusive feeling that civility may still be possible in my home country.

11:02pm: I Zoom with several of my friends from college who are in DC, Boston, California, NYC, Zurich, Tokyo.  I leave the champagne in the fridge and crack open a beer instead.

J-0

Seeking peace-of-mind on a day like today is like trying to meditate with a car alarm going off in your living room.  And knowing that the car may explode at any moment.

The words of Richard Rohr, OFM, are always good, but especially today:

“We project our anxiety elsewhere and misdiagnose the real problem (the real evil), forever exchanging it for smaller and seemingly more manageable problems.  The over-defended ego always sees, hates, and attacks in other people its own faults – the parts of ourselves we struggle to acknowledge.  Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”

Election Eve

 

Over the weekend, groups of Trump supporters stopped traffic on several bridges and roadways in the NYC area – the Whitestone, the GSP – parking their pickup trucks and SUVs across all lanes of traffic and waving flags and whooping while the traffic stacked up behind them.  I wonder what motivates a person to do that.  I plumb the depths of my empathy stores, and I cannot see a shred of equivalence between these people and a BLM protestor, much less your run-of-the-mill Biden/Harris canvasser.  This is no more than trolling in real life: annoying and inconveniencing people for the sake of, what exactly?  To convince someone to vote for Trump?  I suppose one could stretch the rationale to its thinnest and argue that this could show the “silent” Trump supporter that they’re not alone.  But let's be honest: this gesture is not about making a case for a candidate, it’s about people giving the finger to anyone who doesn’t want what they want.  It also sends a not-so-subtle message to anyone who might be looking: we are prepared to break the law, to put people in danger, to create problems for you and anyone else who might be behind us, in order to show our loyalty to the Great Leader. 

Seeking succor, I consulted the Economist election poll aggregator, which currently gives Biden a 19-in-20 chance of winning.  Of course we’ve been here before, with Nate Silver in 2016, etc.  My college friends and I are planning on Zooming Wednesday night, and I have made mental plans to chill a bottle of champagne to open during the call if (and only if) it’s called for Biden beforehand.  I try not to think about this too much.

In any case, you could argue that we’ve survived the past four years, so, if the unthinkable were to occur, we can survive another four, right?  Unless of course you’re one of the 231,182 people who didn’t.

November

I don’t hear so much about NaNoWriMo these days, if that’s even what it’s still called.  National November Writing Month.  I’m not sure if that’s because its popularity has waned, or if that’s a function of the social media circles I travel in (or not) these days.  In any case it came to mind a couple of weeks ago, and I toyed with the idea of trying to write something every day in November.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Last year I took a stab at this, and inspired by Flannery O'Connor, tried writing a prayer every day.  I didn't get very far before concluding that I was not a good writer of prayers, but I reread them recently and a few were actually okay.  Hope.

I set the alarm for 7:45 this morning, fed the cats, and drove to Gy (pronounced “zhee,” with a soft “g”), which sits at the edge of the Geneva canton on this side of the lake, around 10km ENE as the crow flies.  For some reason, I’ve done most of my running to the SSW of here, so this was relatively new territory.  I was unsure of how far out to go, as I needed to be back in time for online church at 11.  Originally, I was planning on parking in Meinier, a couple of villages closer to town.  But then I drove through Meinier and kept going to Gy, pulled by a similar desire that I suppose captures mountain climbers.  One wants to keep going.

I parked on the main street in one of those 15h disc parking spaces, close to a bus stop, which I would need later to go pick up the car.  I quickly oriented myself with my phone, then traversed the traffic circle and took the first left onto a chemin that was about wide enough for a tractor.  I was considering tracking the route on Map My Run, but I quickly decided against it once I heard the synthetic voice start talking to me.  I had my GPS watch for the distance, and anyway the whole point of runs like this is to not know exactly where you are and where you’re going.  

Sometimes, there’s a significant delta between what one thinks the terrain will look like from the map and what it’s actually like when you’re trying to navigate it.  What looks on the computer like a nice path along the river can turn out to be a parking lot next to the wastewater treatment center.  Happily, today was not one of those times, as a mile or so after departing Gy, I managed to pick up the Seymaz River, which trickles from the border with France all the way down to the Arve, and which I was hoping to follow back home.  Evidently there was some big restoration project around 10 years ago, and the trails along the entire way are well-tended.  Near Corsinge they have laid down a narrow boardwalk to span a marshy area.

Around halfway home I encountered the Prison de Champ-Dollon, which sits right along the path near Puplinge.  The contrast between the gentle stream and fall colors on the one hand, and concrete, barbed wire, and grated windows on the other, made my heart ache.  The walls of the prison have reliefed arches, which reminded me of the Reformers’ Wall in town, except these walls have prisoners behind them.