Category Archives: Election 2016

“I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home”: Lorrie Moore’s School of Death for Beginners

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Reviewers seem a bit confused by Lorrie Moore’s new novel about love after death. Most exude this weird kind of shock that Moore could write something so, um, well…trite. And icky. But it’s good! They all say. It’s better than all the other crap out there. She’ll write something better soon.

Anyway, every review covers the surface action well, so I won’t get too far into that. History teacher’s brother is dying, while his ex-girlfriend is suicidal, then dead, then sort of alive again, sort of a tree, and off the two of them go, on an obliquely adventurous/fantastic/surreal “road trip” that hugs the Mason Dixon line, as her dead body decays. That is indeed what happens.

And the epistolary framing provided by the out-of-time innkeeper, Libby, does indeed send us into brief moments of literary splendor, with Moore kind of showing off (with purpose) in the form of Libby’s well-executed Cormac McCarthy-style liturgical drawl. It’s good stuff, I agree.

But after auditing many reviews, I find only a few writing on this novel have touched on the main time-traveling conspiracy theory threading its way through this doube narrative.

And folks stumble on the bad jokes, the bad puns, the bad one-liners, homophones, narrow cultural references that fall short—the desperation humor, you might call it, that bobs and weaves its way all through this short American lamentation on four wheels. 

Why are they doing that? Why doesn’t Lily (the too-perfect name —the “life” of death) know more about death, or even that she’s quite dead? Why must Finn keep at her, keep hounding her on the question of just how dead she is? 

“Maybe it’s a spectrum,” she offers. Indeed, maybe it is, in some kind of deaths. Maybe it’s slower, less absolute right away, less tangible and solid. More a dying than a death.

And what of this innkeeper? What is her role? Why do Finn and Lily end up at her broken down boarding house, where her ghost surely resides in the form of her bound letters to her dead sister—just as Finn’s brother is about to become his own ghost. What is in this parallel structure to make it mean something?

My key to this minor enigma can be found in some of the recurring imagery itself — Lily’s decay, a vehicle on the road to nowhere, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, the Mason/Dixon, secessionists, conspiracy theories, Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and skies that offer patterns significant to others but, we are told more than once, not to Finn, who doesn’t understand how anyone sees anything in the constellations. 

And what does Finn say more than once, amid what appears to be a salad of jumbled, barely appropriate cultural references uttered by each of them seemingly without willing it (the pair are constantly self-critiquing each other’s prowess at this, to be fair):

There are no more Rice Krispies.

Here, you must be not only a cultural historian but one of a certain age — Lorrie Moore’s age — to even get the joke at all. And if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. Yes, the book is about loss. Of course it is. But it’s more than that.

But that’s the idea. I feel like you can read this book two ways (at least) — as someone ignorant of history (or who conflates history with its attendant popular conspiracy theories and various tv shows about history) or someone who knows history. If you’re the former, you will be confused and perplexed (kind of like Finn and some of these reviewers) by this narrative’s sort of half-knowledge of history mixed with commercial fodder gleaned from a lifetime of television exposure, shot through with a sepia-toned conspiracy theory born in 1865 and still living today. For a quick shorthand, you can think of what Don DeLillo was trying to do (and did) in his 1985 novel White Noise. It’s part of what Moore is doing here – throwing us off balance with our own fractured culture.

But if you’re the latter, you see the thread Moore is weaving, from the political theater of 2016 to the theater (Ford’s) of 1865. There is no character more salient to the post-2016 American condition than a spoiled rich charlatan—a famous con man wrapped up in an overly coiffed disguise of himself that exudes charming bravado, but who in his nihilistic solipsism will threaten the stability of a nation, perhaps the world. 

And that man was John Wilkes Booth. Or was it Abraham Lincoln? 

You see? If we go back to 1865* we find a familiar world, with familiar actors, where history has not yet finished the chapter but soon will. A disgruntled and just-defeated South, where the president is despised as a tyrant, had nurtured the famous Booth and then birthed, in the final hours, the fanatic Booth, who goes on to carry out the vengeance their own hearts nurtured at home. 

Booth was famous, you know, on both sides of the Mason/Dixon. He was beloved in Maryland and the greater South for his acting talents and his place in the impressive Booth family. He lived a life of celebrity, ease, and wealth. Yet something in him transformed him into the assassin he became. That something was the Union’s victory, and specifically Abraham Lincoln.

We know his story too, basically. He shot Lincoln, then got away to a barn somewhere after hurting his leg (either from jumping onto the Ford’s Theater stage or later when his getaway horse fell on him, it’s not known). The authorities found him there, besieged the barn—and then the story gets murky. Suffice to say, many believed he got away that night, and some other poor soul was shot in that burning barn.

Now let’s look again at Jack, the southern dandy described with such detail by landlady Libby. He knows Shakespeare, he has grandiose ways, mutton chops, and flashy clothes (along with a trunk full of wigs, tights of all variety, and several shining swords). He winks and hints cryptically to Libby regarding secessionists in the area. Most tellingly, he has a cork leg–“from the secesh, he says”. Oh, and he’s a real jerk to women. Libby describes him often, as in:

“Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can recite bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans (note: whose poetry runs from kitchy patriotic themes to the suicide of women) … His mustache is black and thick as a broom bristle and the words come flying out of it like the lines of a play in a theatre on fire…”

Of course, that would all add up to just a hunch if not for the curiosity seeker who comes calling at the boarding house asking for Jack’s body (Jack is traditionally a nickname for John, by the way). His name is Phineas Bates, and Libby surmises that he wants the body to mummify it, and to then cart it around the country as a sideshow curiosity. Why does Libby think this?

Because it’s what happened. Sort of. The controversy still swirling around John Wilkes Booth’s death at the turn of the century prompted one Finis L. Bates to write Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, a bestseller contending that a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the Garrett farm while Booth eluded his pursuers until he committed suicide in 1903 in Enid, Oklahoma. Later, Bates went so far as to exhibit what he claimed was Booth’s embalmed body at carnival shows. 

Finn mentions the controversy and mystery of the barn episode to Lily, with Booth’s possible escape part of the wider web of conspiracy theories in which he’s interested (including UFOs and the possibility that the moon landing was faked to reach Kennedy’s arbitrary deadline).

All subsequent attempts, by both the Booth family and researchers, to exhume the body buried in John Wilkes Booth’s grave have been rejected by the authorities based on what they call the “unreliability” of Bates’ story.

So Finn interprets this as perhaps we all should: the bottom line is that this is a story known to history, but without evidence, because those in charge don’t want to see it.

Still, given all that, what is Moore’s point in resurrecting (if you will) this old saw and then burying it in a story about lovers on the run? 

It may be helpful to examine the mind of Booth a little more carefully. Here he is in a letter from January 1865:

I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as this, where, on one side, I have many friends and everything to make me happy … to give up all … seems insane; but God is my judge. I love justice more than I do a country that disowns it, more than fame or wealth.

Does that bullshit sound familiar at all? Or how about this:

I have ever held the South was right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln, four years ago, spoke plainly war upon Southern rights and institutions. …And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution, I for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation.

Feelings like this transformed Abraham Lincoln into a tyrant and violence into the only solution among people like Booth. In other words, the destruction of their “way of life” (which was a way to death for Black people) was tantamount to genocide and a call for the very civil war that had then lain waste to their society. They were defeated, yes. But in many Southern homes, for years afterward, proud portraits of John Wilkes Booth were displayed in the parlor. 

And in Moore’s telling, he struts around a Chattanooga boarding house in a continuation of his self-important drama, the stage play of the brave patriot who brought down a tyrant and lived to tell the tale — even after his celebrated death.

Perhaps he really did get away, with help from sympathizers, in the same way he got to that barn after shooting the president in the middle of Washington, DC. Finn points out that Lincoln’s personal guard was conveniently off drinking beer when Booth pulled the trigger, and that a lot of other folks were conveniently placed around the area. Because we’re not allowed to find out who’s in that grave, we will never know if Booth got away. But we know there were folks positioned to help him, right there in Washington.

The idea was to re-charge the war by decapitating the Union government. A plan worthy of Q-anon.

It was a slow dying. Their ideals stayed the same, or maybe even hardened a bit, like pre-rigormortis of the soul. They are still dying, and dying hard. Will they ever die? Whom do we ask?

Like the protest sign carried by a character living in a tent shown on the television in Max’s hospice room early in the novel, we can all say it to them, those who want to start it all over and maybe win it this time, against logic and history, who want to “take their country back” from no one they can name—because really, they want to resurrect another country that’s dead and doesn’t know it:

We are not homeless. This is our home.

What is death really, and what will be dying this time around the horn? Is it already dying? Is it dead? Can we be sure? Lorrie Moore probably isn’t any happier than I am about a curiosity that can seek but only find the lack of an answer—an answer we cannot know yet, and may never know, like the slipping patient his time of death. So we make dumb jokes and wait, like people in the hospice room do, step out for hot drinks, hoping it won’t be as bad as it feels like it’s going to be. Hoping at least there will be some finality, sometime soon, to whatever is dying. Hoping–even better–that something will happen to undo all this. Someday soon.

No more Rice Krispies.

Hope floats around our grief—as Moore describes it, like a soap bubble, its swirling colors ready to pop into nothingness—hope that it never happens to us. To me. To all of us at once.

But as Finn finally realizes, and as the young African assistant to his dying brother Max already knew, one must make one’s peace with death early and often. Because it’s everywhere, all at once. It never goes away. It is as relentless as life.

So if you read this book and, as you read, you get more comfortable with Lilly’s paper-like skin, her lavender lips, the Venetian blinds of her ribs, the sag of her bloated organs—you’re getting some of it. The rest is the hard part. None of us really wants to know or believe it—this—can end, just like anyone who has ever faced the possibility of a generalized loss of everything. I know I don’t. But as our two star-crossed lovers have shown, as much as Finn wanted their story to end differently, to never end: you can’t outrun the fate awaiting all motions of the clock, not even if you drive all night until the sky is no longer the night sky but one full of Van Gogh’s swirling storms.

And anyway, you just might be driving in the wrong direction.

________________________________________

*Because this stuff is unmentionable, right? Like it never happened. Or here we go with the “Trump derangement syndrome” and the death threats. Nobody I know talks about our biggest problem in nearly a century.

L’État N’est Pas Nous

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Here’s the thing about political power in America in 2020, from a pragmatist/realist viewpoint: 

When you hold as much power as the Republican Party currently does, you hold the actual levers of power in this country – Congressional, Executive, and Judicial power. Rather than a representative government, where a Congressman or Senator works on behalf of constituents, the government begins to revolve around this party’s central power base, to which these so-called representatives must show fealty. The party becomes the power. And when the interests of this small power base clash with the interests of the people, the politicians of this party who side with the people become  apostates, they are banished from the halls of power. As we’ve seen, no current member of the party in power has the wherewithal to defy the power base. And therefore the people hold no power.

As we are witnessing this week, it becomes difficult-to-impossible for a small majority in one half of one branch of government to hold the other party to account when that party, basking in its power,  decides it is not subject to the Constitution’s accountability measures—its so-called “checks and balances”.  

That is our American irony. No one is interested in checking or balancing their own power.

In this situation, the pejorative “above the law” can cease to be a pejorative from the perspective of the few who wield the vast power undergirding law and its enforcement. “L‘état,” the French king said, “c’est moi.” The law becomes what they say the law is. It exists to serve them, not to restrain them. In the common tongue, the question being posed by a party whose primary long-term goal is to retain and consolidate that power into permanence is, “Who’s gonna stop us?” We are witnessing the answer to that question this week. That is, we are watching a proceeding called a “trial”, the outcome of which — acquittal — we already know. It is assured. Because a power advantage, not facts or law, will determine that outcome.

“We have the vote”, we say, but who are “we”? One party is steadily gathering to itself the power over who votes, and how, and where, and in what gerrymandered district. I submit that a newly emboldened narcissist madman, with fresh confirmation that he can do “whatever he wants as president”, will have his people get right to work on expanding that advantage (with welcome help from his friends in the East). They will choose which voters they want to vote, and if your profile matches those on the other side, or even those on the fence–they won’t choose you. 

They vote in Russia. They vote in Iran. Those bastions of democracy. But only the approved candidate wins. Remember the last “election” for Saddam Hussein? Iraqi officials declared Saddam had been re-elected by a 100% unanimous vote of all 11,445,638 eligible Iraqi citizens.

I’m just figuring this out for myself, not preaching. I am over the shock of this realization. I’m neither Democrat nor Republican, I feel no hatred or need for vengeance, though I do feel some pity and disgust at unchanging human nature. At this moment I feel, maybe for the first time, that Martin Luther King’s optimism for the future of America was misplaced. It appears that the arc he spoke of does not, in the end, bend towards justice. It bends toward greed and malice. And that seems to be the way the minority of this society, clinging to power by whatever means necessary, wants it.

I’ve always been an observer first, and I have no illusions regarding the extent of my own political power, which is negligible (like any American who is not very wealthy or in office).  I am aware that even my presidential vote (thanks to the antiquated Electoral College) is powerless. I am aware that power in this country, rather than resting with the people as the old document says, rests with those ravenous and ruthless enough to crave it beyond the pale of all moral or legal restraint. And that is not me.

And so the question hangs unanswered in the air – who’s gonna stop them? 

Gaming the Throne

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Like me, other Americans who have yet to drink the Trump team Kool-Aid may be wondering why an otherwise widely respected and successful private attorney like William Barr would want to insinuate himself into the orbit of a “man” [sic] like Donald Trump. (As we have seen with Mr. Cohen, Mr. Stone, Mr. Manafort, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. McGahn and so many others, those who seek membership on the president’s much-investigated team often become the target of investigation themselves. Not to mention the indictments and convictions.)

So why would Barr submit an Attorney General “job application,” back in 2017, in the form of an unsolicited memo opining that the Mueller investigation was improper and that the president is, for all practical purposes, immune to prosecution? He had to know this would ingratiate him in the mind of a president who, at the time, had only Twitter derision on offer for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And as we know, Mr. Sessions was not long in the job thereafter.

Was it so that once he attained the job of running the Department of Justice he could effectively quash the special counsel’s report? It would seem so, given his highly controversial “interpretation” of the report as “exonerating” the president from any possible charges of obstruction of justice (controversial because we now see, even in the highly redacted version provided by Barr, that it does no such thing). Not content to “sweeten the well” with his nearly fact-free “summary” of the report (which contains not so much as one complete sentence from the report), he also made the highly unusual gesture of holding a press conference on the day of its release. This was apparently to explain away the president’s attempts at obstruction using the novel (and bizarre) “Kavanaugh” doctrine. That is, the president’s “emotionally driven” attempts to get others to end or undermine Mueller’s efforts–then in some cases firing them if they refused — were understandable given the highly partisan pressure he was under since day one of this presidency. In other words, who wouldn’t attempt to subvert the Constitution, who wouldn’t try to slow the progress of justice, when it was this same  justice that had been bearing down on one so relentlessly for so long? Who indeed.

But why would Barr do that?  Why would he venture beyond mere flattery and submissive/sycophantic rhetoric to willingly putting himself on the list of those actors who, in the end, may be found to have aided a presidential law-breaker? Surely Barr knows that although Nixon walked away from his crimes, Dean and Haldeman and  the rest did some time.

As always, there is an answer, and the answer is that Barr himself has a personal interest in permanently shelving the results of the special counsel’s inquiry. According to an April 15 article by Cristina Maza in Newsweek: “This much is known: On Barr’s public financial disclosure report, he admits to working for a law firm that represented Russia’s Alfa Bank and for a company whose co-founders allegedly have long-standing business ties to Russia. What’s more, he received dividends from Vector Group, a holding company with deep financial ties to Russia.”

Remember Alfa Bank? The Russian Oligarch-controlled entity that was found to somehow be in regular, secret communication with the Trump campaign’s server located in Trump Tower back in 2016? Barr worked for the firm that represents Alfa right up to his confirmation. And as for the Vector Group, according to Maza, “The company’s president, Howard Lorber, brought Trump to Moscow in the 1990s to seek investment projects there. The trip is widely seen as the first of many attempts to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow.” And Don Jr. is said to have been communicating with Lorber as recently as during the 2016 campaign (when, we recently learned, contrary to their earlier claims the Trump’s organization was still talking to Russian interests about the proposed Moscow project).

As with so many other Trump “associates” we’ve known, in the end it doesn’t take much digging to connect the dots that connect William Barr to the same Russian financial and government interests that were so famously represented at the Trump Tower meeting attended by Don Jr., Jared, Manafort and, of course, Russian operatives waaaay back in the olden days of 2016. What is difficult to understand is how none of this came up during Barr’s “lightning round” Senate confirmation.

Then again, it’s not as if rife incompetence,  disdain for democratic norms, not to mention fear, naked self-interest and shameless self-promotion only pervade the one half of Congress. There’s more than enough of that disease infecting both parties’ representatives on Capitol Hill, not just in the White House these days. This is not to mention the newly politicized, Garland-free Supreme Court. We seem to have drifted completely away from the idea of actual accountability and this quaint old notion called rule of law, toward an endless parade of grandstanding, toward tiresome identity politics mixed with careful political maneuvering, toward basic acquisition of power for one’s own tribe, for one’s own selfish purposes and one’s own exclusive ideology.

Trump likes to trade in “Game of Thrones” memes, because he sees American society and American government in the stark transactional terms he learned in the bare-knuckle world his family inhabits–one of conquest, dominance and submission of the type that pervade that HBO fantasy. It is a strongman’s world where one’s reputation is forged not by one’s character or actions but by one’s ability to control or successfully manipulate  the actions and words of others toward one’s own advantage. “Rules” and “law”—”ethics”—those are for the powerless, for weak ineffective nobodies to worry about. But while TV shows come and go, the question for the rest of us—as Trump collects his campaign fortune, builds his base and secures his independence from a weak and feckless Congress, as he secures the courts—is whether we citizens want our elected representatives to play their roles as if they are starring in a winner-take-all TV game. Because they are playing their game in our real world, and it appears playing for keeps. It seems to me the question is being answered for us, by people who’ve forgotten how to represent us, people who’ve abandoned the idea of governing and now settle for the chance to win their portion of the tawdry spoils of our pointless internecine war.

Rather than effectively represent the interests of those who put them in office, or even simply uphold the rule of law on which this society was founded, our so-called leaders and “arbiters of justice” appear content to act as low-level players in a greedy simpleton’s lawless, zero-sum game.

Contest of Wills? No, a Developing Constitutional Crisis

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The news is so frustrating. The media – out for ratings, just like the reality show star in the White House – portray our developing constitutional crisis as some kind of battle royal between two outsized personalities. The sense we get from the media is that we’re watching the trash-talking preliminaries of a heavily anticipated title match (although, of course, only one party to the fight is engaging in the trash talk). The idea is that we’ll have this big battle, and the winner will take all as he is showered with accolades by his loyal fans. The loser will vow to rise again, saying “wait till next year”. Then it will all be over, and we will shut off the TV and go to bed, satisfied that it was a very exciting man-to-man contest.

But that’s not what’s happening, not at all. What’s happening is we have a secretive, lying, cult-like, bullying, paranoid, ignorant, truth-averse, and very likely criminal gang squatting uneasily on what should be a presidential administration. They fear the revelations of truth and the application of the law so much, they and their co-conspirators in Congress appear willing to go above the law, to exercise raw power in challenging hundreds of years of legal and institutional precedent, in order to protect themselves and their cash cow – what the rest of us call the federal government. Anyone who threatens to reveal the truth they eliminate if they can, or try to intimidate into silence if they can’t (yet). They are not administrators, they are a modern day confederation of mobsters. They are looters and anarchists who demonstrate on a daily basis their utter contempt for the rule of law and for our democracy’s institutional norms.

Should they prevail, there will be no “next year” for this republic and its few dedicated defenders. We know how the “five families” ended up in the long run – they took everyone else down with them.

And opposed to them, we have a dedicated REPUBLICAN war veteran and prosecutor of lawbreakers, an administrator of justice, who has served honorably and with distinction for decades under Republican and Democratic presidential administrations alike (real ones). He runs an experienced legal team working quietly, professionally, humbly and methodically in the cause of justice.  The team has already secured guilty pleas from several of the administration’s former foot soldiers and lieutenants. There will be more. But, as opposed to the unhinged daily stream-of-consciousness tweets (mostly lies and fabrications) from the reality show star, their story is as yet untold. Seizing on that legally and procedurally necessary information vacuum, the mob attempts to explain the character of the investigation  to us as a witch hunt (without explaining to us why a Republican career legal professional would conduct a witch hunt against a presumably innocent Republican president).

The media should stop pretending this is a contest of wills devoid of legal or moral context. Based on all we’ve seen and heard, this is people at the top levels of government—in concert with an antagonistic foreign power and self-aggrandizing criminal leak weasel–attempting to bring down this republic and everything it stands for. They do it all in the name of ego and personal gain, allied with the most ignorant and self-serving among our citizens, their hallmarks being contempt for truth, ethics, morality, justice, or any other admirable quality that exhibits even the smallest trace of human decency.

Saint Putin

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I keep encountering people who seem to think Putin is some kind of heart-pure Diogenes, coming on American TV and telling us how screwed up our system is, and how our political system is the SOLE reason for all our problems. Never mind that he was actually here, as is his and the KGB’s tradition, to rub it in for his own amusement (and his people’s). He’s to be admired by Americans now. Because Megyn Kelly (or whatever her name is) sat there dumbstruck (emphasis on dumb) while he rattled off a string of spying/meddling/etc. accusations (which are true for both countries, of course, not just the US).

So for the record: Putin denies any and all involvement in the 2016 campaign (which is a denial of documented fact). He – in a Trumpian move – instead offers up that it is YOU who are guilty of (insert crimes here). I guess he showed us! Just not with any evidence.

We seem to have come to a place where Trumpers have had to manipulate their brains into thinking that the president was right when he (under orders)  excoriated the US for its own “evil deeds” whenever Russia’s 2016 Trump campaign (Moscow branch) was brought up. To do this, you also have to believe – Trump-like – that it’s a zero-sum game, that “both countries do it” so “both countries” are equally “evil.” Just two powerhouses duking it out for the spoils, right? To the president, who remains to this day “neutral” on Russia (!) there is no moral question. After all, he just appointed a CIA director who not only willingly tortured American prisoners, but who participated in a cover-up after mistakenly torturing an innocent person. What morality? It’s all about WINNING.

And that is somehow patriotic and in line with traditional Republican attitudes on Russia, yes? That there is a moral equivalence between the Russian kleptocracy/dictatorship and (what’s left of) American democracy? Or, if we’re not equivalent yet – we’ll get there?

Yes. That’s the new patriotism – Putin is all right, just looking after his “Russia First” interests, murdering rivals and invading neighbors. This paves the mental pathways for accepting a morally bankrupt president as legitimate. Because in the Trumpian world, everyone’s equally morally bankrupt. And everyone’s legitimate – until proven guilty.