Beads for the week of 6/28 to 7/4 2020

If what makes you come alive tells you what your work is, at least part of my work is combing through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and a couple of newsletters looking for stories about people becoming better when circumstances might have made them bitter and proposals for changes in thought and action that promise to promote prosperity socially, emotionally and and materially.

Austin Kleon says “Show Your Work”. This weekly blog post in which I string together some the stories/proposals I have read is just me doing that...showing my work.

This week I picked up a couple of threads: writers with different views about the progenitors of Trump's madness and the ways people cope with the plague of loneliness. You can find the work at “Miller’s Outposts” https://rexmcdaniel.net/millers-outposts

In one week I came across three writers offering different characters as the template for Trump’s hate and fear mongering. Nicholas Goldberg went to the classic villains - Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. “Trump, at the end of the day, is more irresponsible and dishonest than either Nixon or McCarthy. But he learned from their examples. He knows they reaped rewards for warning of anarchy, mob rule, disloyalty and subversion. He understands that fear is an effective tool for winning votes.” (1) Robert Slayton nominates Ronald Reagan. “Nothing exists in a vacuum. The roots of Trump’s disastrous handling of America’s coronavirus scourge were planted in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan. When Reagan forged the GOP’s connection to the most anti-science branch of Christianity, he laid the groundwork for the Trump administration’s response to pandemic.” (2) Jennifer Senior lifted up the conclusions of Julian Zelizer in a forthcoming book “Burning Down the House.” Zelizer argues that Newt Gingrich is the ur-villain. “Gingrich had planted; Trump had reaped,” (3)

Meanwhile the arrogance and self righteousness of statue topplers and name strippers make it too easy for Trump to caricature them. Ross Douthat has a sharp and I believe wholesome perspective. “But our monuments and honorifics exist primarily to honor deeds, not to issue canonizations — to express gratitude for some specific act, to acknowledge some specific debt, to trace a line back to some worthwhile inheritance.” Repudiating the benefactor while accepting the benefits only adds “self-righteous amnesia and historical ingratitude to its list of sins.” “ ...for now the ingratitude is being presented as a clear moral advance, and it is not. To enjoy an inheritance that comes from flawed men by pretending that it comes from nowhere, through nobody, is a betrayal of memory, not its rectification — an act of self-righteousness that may not bring the revolution, but does make our ruling class that much less fit to rule.” (4)

Ryan Cooper took a jaundiced look at the soaring popularity of Robin DiAngelo and her book “White Fragility.” Cooper points out that with admittedly little to show for it, corporations have paid DiAngelo handsomely and “For all her talk about difficult conversations, it is hard to miss how DiAngelo totally elides questions of economic justice that would be uncomfortable indeed for the wealthy corporations and executives that hire her to harangue their employees. A gigantic redistribution of income and wealth down the social ladder would be perhaps the most effective single attack on racism America could undertake, because it would address many aspects of the problem simultaneously.” (5)

Roy Rivenberg reported on a pet food/toy/accessory expo. Doting owners spend millions upon millions of dollars a year on stuff pets cannot possibly value or appreciate. Why? …”an epidemic of loneliness and alienation.” (6) People are cut off from family and friends.

The exigencies of borders and citizenship have left a teenaged girl and mid-sixties father cut off from their families. Dalia Hurtado, 16, is a “one-girl lesson in diversity: a U.S. citizen with Mexican parents, a tough girl with a tender heart, a rugged athlete who applies her makeup with great care, a teenager who wants to hang out with friends yet spends much of her free time on weekends helping her grandmother.” Dalia was born in Los Angeles, returned to Mexico for a few years in childhood and then insisted on returning to Los Angeles for the opportunity here. She plays on the football team at Garfield H. S. “She yearns to visit her mother in Mexico, a trip she had long planned but was forced to cancel because of the threat of COVID-19.” As for why she wants to be a doctor, her soccer coach said the answer is obvious — and indicative of Dalia’s character. “She wants to help people.” (7)

He, Mauro Rios Parra, 65, “likes to make people smile. These days, it’s a much more difficult task.” Parra works as a palatero, a vendor who sells ice cream confections from a push cart. Despite working seven days a week in Mexico, there was never enough money so he came to the U.S. for his children. “At least three times a day, he talks to his now-adult children and Reyna Regina Martinez Hernandez, his love of 35 years. He hasn’t seen his family in 16 years. His sacrifices have been worthwhile. His children did indeed study as much as possible. One is a doctor; two are lawyers. In two years, Rios plans to return to Oaxaca. He wants to have a garden and a chicken coop. He wants to open his own business, sell roasted pork, Cuban style. He won’t be a paletero anymore. But he will be with his family.”

Chris Vognar lives with a kind of family. After a stint of intensive psychiatric treatment for suicidal depression he couldn’t risk living alone. He found a place at a sober half way home with others in varying stages of recovery. Then came the corona pandemic. It makes living with a bunch of practically strangers risky. But says Chris, “It’s a scary world, and it will remain so whenever each of us decides he’s ready to venture back into it. For now, communal living has been a godsend. We run the risk of physical illness, but we keep the plague of loneliness at bay.” Pets, football, phone calls, communal living…..keeping the plague of loneliness at bay. May it be so.