Metaphor
To the Editor:
Historically, WWII, “The Last Good War”, was fought to prevent Hitler’s military conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union. Metaphorically, it can be likened to radical chemotherapy aimed at stopping the aggressive spread of Hitler’s White Nationalist elitism. The Nazis were defeated, but the cancer has now metathesized into authoritarian regimes across Europe and into Conservative politics and religion here. That the Americas are regarded as God’s gift to the white race, its Manifest Destiny, is the greatest blasphemy of American Christianity.
-RP
Mockery
To the Editor:
That Donald Trump finds it necessary to mock Greta Thunberg for being selected over him for Person of the Year by Time Magazine reveals how “needy” he is for the glitz and glamor of celebrity and wealth, a child’s ego ruled by wants. “A 16 year old, flat-chested girl is more important than me? Impossible!” (I’ve caught flak over the un-#Me Too use of “flat-chested”, but I am only imagining the President’s inner voice.) What he and his myopic, echo-chamber followers fail to realize is just what a refreshing voice in the wilderness Greta is. She speaks clearly, with focus. There is no equivocation, no manipulation, none of the usual double-speaking “Yeah, but…” Everyone needs to pay attention to what we are doing to the Earth. There are no loopholes, no evasions, no easy outs. That she has also created her own echo chamber by mirroring his mocking tweets back at him is another sign of an unusual mind. Wake up world, before it is too late.
RP
Community Service
To the Editor;
The current spate of mass protests across the world have a common denominator: the global economy is not attending to the well-being of the general populace, with wealth increasing concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The same can be said of the new populism and rise of autocratic leaders pushing for national self-interest. Global trade has spawned an economic order favoring the corporate/financial sector. The power of capital today spares only crumbs for the average worker whose employment resembles more and more an enforced community service. Modern China, with a government operating essentially as a mega-corporate entity, thus far has been exemplary in raising it citizenry out of poverty, and, other than in Hong Kong, Chinese people thus far have been willing to accept an Orwellian iron hand over thought and the flow of information in exchange for economic security. (1984 should be required reading for all Chinese students in America.) It remains questionable how far Western democracies will follow this example.
RP
Starry Night
There is a steep aloneness
Here in the silence and depth
Of the starry night sky.
This is not a world
For fragile souls, yet
Still we are of the Earth,
Its strength and resilience,
Its mountains, oceans,
And flowing streams
Urgent with teeming life,
And too of this Universe
Of burning suns whirling
Across time and space,
Life ever in movement,
Stillness and death surely
Only the makings of myth.
The measure of humanity
Begins and ends thus here
On this whirling path
Of fellow living travelers.
Only time is truly ours.
It is a lost belonging,
The connection to place,
The Earth and one another,
That fuels the emptiness,
The pain and cruelty
That scar both the Earth
And the human heart.
The face of America
To the Editor:
Donald Trump, his Cabinet coterie of thugs and robber barons, his White Nationalist cult following, and Congressional Republican go-alongs regard themselves the true face of America. It is not a pretty picture, and, sadly, to a degree it is true. Up until the Civil War, the wealth of the nation was largely built on slavery in the South and immigrant sweatshop labor in the North. Exploitation of human and natural resources has long held sway in the American economy and the resulting class hierarchy based on the power of money has created the increasingly disparate distribution of wealth we see today. This is capitalism run amok and it is destroying the American dream. One can call those trying to rein in the excesses of wealth socialists, but they are the people in reality trying to make America a nation of ideals benefitting more than an elite few.
– RP
Divine Revelation
To the Editor:
In trying to come to terms with the Trump Presidency, I find myself having to maintain that this is a Divine Revelation of just how virally insane mankind can (and has) become. Man, mankind, humankind, homo sapiens, how ever you want to call us, we are the apex predator/polluter/destroyer species on the planet, this “our” Earth. That the trajectory of the evolution of life–LIFE! for God’s sake!–has arrived at us would seem to be the penultimate act of Absurdist Theater, equally so those scriptures claiming man was made “in the image of God. Man! I hope not. That is not to say we do not have virtues. There are many, but clinging to the twisted sense of power that comes with deliberately double thinking and casting doubt on the existence of Truth and Reality in all things borders on personal and group dementia. “Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth”, that is something you can have both ways.
RP
Time Capsule
Time Capsule
An errant baseball lying
Among the fallen apples
Of an overhanging tree
In hand has become a tactile
Time capsule bursting
With innocence and memory.
Baseball was summer
And sandlots, favorite bats
And big league teams,
Whiffle balls, heroic stars.
The town had Old Timer baseball,
Ages eight to fourteen,
And the Delta Blues,
A semi-pro, B League team
With games held at night,
“Under the lights”.
Foul balls into the neighboring
Small zoo would startle
The peacocks into alarm
And calls of “Help! Help!”
I knew a girl then already
Arriving at a philosophy of life,
While I wondered only
At the best care
Of a leather glove.
Democracy
To the Editor:
In a self-professed democracy, it would be presumed that voter suppression is a punishable, criminal act, yet the manipulation of voting rolls, rights, and access has become a vital campaign strategy for the Republican Party. That it has racist elements is additionally shameful, particularly in light of the contrast of the eight years of dignity, grace, and family values of the Obamas in the White House and the rise of an angry white mob in just two years of Donald Trump’s stewardship there. Swings in the political spectrum are to be expected but this feels like the pendulum has fallen off its pivot. What is America’s true vision of itself?
RP
Chauvinism and DoubleThink
To the Editor:
It is hard to imagine a more bumbling exhibition of male chauvinism than that of the Kavanaugh Judiciary Committee hearings. The level of discomfort of the candidate and the Republican members at being confronted with the female gestalt belongs more on the psychiatrist’s couch than under full public scrutiny. None the less, Kavanaugh’s display of privileged, All-American, sports-loving, beer-guzzling, combative prolonged adolescence seems not to have deterred their support for seating him on the Supreme Court. In deflecting criticism to Democrats rather than at Dr. Ford, they do recognize they are playing with fire in regards to women voters, but that they found, despite Kavanaugh’s frequently less than forthcoming answers, both testimonies “credible” indicates how deeply embedded DoubleThink, the ability to simultaneously believe two utterly contradictory “facts”, has become in American politics. Truthfulness no longer seems to hold great value, and here Donald Trump is the master of creating and manipulating the ensuing confusion in people’s minds. That the Republican Party has gone “all in” on this strategy of assuming power is disappointing in its disregard of honor once having been a Conservative value.
-RP
Notes from the Provinces 