In Defense of Libraries

 

I don't post much these days, but this week is National Library Week, and in view of current events, I felt the need to say something in defense of our public libraries.

First, a little history. I suppose libraries, in one form or another, have been around since people first began to write things down, but here in America we owe most of our public libraries to one man: Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant, amassed a fortune in the steel industry in the late 19th century. A philanthropist who believed in giving away most of his money to good causes, he used much of it to establish public libraries.

I have always been an avid reader, so I have always had a close relationship with libraries. When I walk into one, it's like walking into a time machine. The hushed atmosphere and the smell of old books takes me back in time...

…to 1958. I'm three years old. My parents have just moved from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to the nearby town of Warsaw. I'm walking with my mother from the apartment house where we are temporarily living to the old Carnegie library in the next block. The building is not large, but to me it seems a vast palace of high ceilings, tall windows, and shelf after shelf of books. My mother tells me I can pick out a children's book to borrow. I choose The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, by Dr. Seuss.

…to 1968. We now live in Goshen, Indiana, and they've just opened the new library right across the street from our house. I just have to walk a couple of dozen steps from our door to be in this beautiful new steel and glass palace of—not just books, but record albums and movies. There is even a row of state of the art turntables with headphones, where I can listen to record albums in glorious stereophonic sound. (I still sometimes dream of that place!)

…to the late seventies. I'm with my father at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's the biggest, most glorious library I've ever seen, and it still doesn't have enough space to display all of the books. Many of them are in storage: you go to the card catalog, look up the Dewey Decimal Number, write it on a small sheet of paper, and give it to the librarian, who has the book sent up from the basement. But this time we're here to visit the library's genealogy department, where Dad is pursuing his hobby of researching our family tree. Genealogy doesn't particularly interest me, so I wander off and discover a rack of EC comic book reprints. I'm in heaven.

…to the early 90's. Loretta and I have been married for just a few years. We've just purchased our first home in North Tonawanda, NY, and we can barely afford the mortgage payments. We have no money for books, but luckily we live just a couple of miles from the public library. When the weather is nice, we ride our bicycles there. I've checked out Stephen King's latest, The Dark Half, and I can't wait to read it.

…to November of 2002. Loretta and I are visiting her Aunt Jean Carol, who volunteers at the Riverside Public Library. Knowing I'm a fan, she's invited us to attend "An Afternoon with Ray Bradbury." Bradbury, a passionate supporter of public libraries, has done scores of such events, donating all proceeds to the library, which he deems "the center of our lives." When he signs my copy of The Martian Chronicles, I want to tell him how much his books and his support of libraries mean to me, but all I can get out is, "Thank you."

…to a few months ago. Our power has been shut off for two days, a precaution the electric company has taken to prevent fires due to the fiercest Santa Ana winds we've seen in our thirty years in California. Following a neighbor's suggestion, we go to the Moorpark Public Library to charge our phones. A friendly librarian directs us to a table in the fiction section, with comfortable chairs and multiple outlets. We sit down, plug in our phones, and relax. The light, the warmth, the quiet, the smell of the books, are all comforting. It feels more like home than our home, which is presently a cold, dark, cheerless place. After reading for a while, I get up and explore. There are books, audio books, music CDs, DVDs. There are a few other people. Perhaps some, like us, are without power, and are looking for light and warmth. Perhaps some are without homes. At the end of a shelf, I see a poster with a list of "Tough Topics"—abuse, pregnancy, drugs, etc.—and their respective Dewey Decimal Numbers. At the bottom is the message, "Librarians are here to help, not judge."

Libraries are funded by tax dollars, which means that some people think that, as taxpayers, they should be allowed to determine which books go into the library and which people can take them out. Other people resent any of their tax dollars going to fund any library at all.

This is absurd. We need libraries for so many reasons. Of course they're places where people who can't afford to buy books can borrow them. But they're also places where people who don't have access to the internet can go for information, where people can find light and warmth, where people can charge their phones, where people can go for help and not be judged.

To quote Ray Bradbury, “Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”

 

An Agent of KAOS

 

If you're as old as I am, you will remember the 1960s TV sitcom Get Smart, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. (If you're too young to have seen it, you might have seen the 2008 film that was based on it—although probably not; it was a pretty big flop.) The series was a parody of another popular TV series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which itself capitalized on the popularity of the James Bond franchise. Don Adams and Barbara Feldon played agents 86 and 99 of the secret government agency CONTROL. They were the good guys. Their chief adversary was Siegfried, an agent of KAOS.

His supporters think Donald Trump is one of the good guys—an agent of CONTROL, if you will. He certainly seemed to be in control on July 13th, when a would-be assassin's bullet took off the tip of his ear and he had the presence of mind to pause for a photo op before the secret service hustled him offstage.

But Trump is obviously an agent of KAOS.

His speeches are insane, incoherent rambles on windmills, toilets, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, Arnold Palmer's... you know. (He calls it "the weave," but a more common term is "dementia.") And have you forgotten his presidency? Apparently half the country has. They claim they were better off four years ago. Apparently they completely forgot about COVID-19. It's been estimated that his reckless handling of the pandemic caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Remember the constant turnover in the west wing? It seemed that every day someone was being fired or resigning in frustration, something he was apparently proud of. ("I like turnover. I like chaos.") As expected, his Supreme Court nominees voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, turning the country into a chaotic crazy quilt of conflicting abortion laws.

And how can anyone forgot the chaos of January 6, 2021, when he became the first president in our history to refuse to peacefully transfer the reins of power, instead opting to incite a violent insurrection?

In a couple of months, our country will once again be thrown into Donald Trump's chaos, and this time it will be even worse. Last time, there were people who were able to control his craziest impulses. (Drop a nuclear bomb into a hurricane?!) This time, there will be no guard rails. He will surround himself with sycophants who will serve without question. The judicial branch won't control him; the Supreme Court has granted him immunity. And if the Christofascist Heritage Foundation has its way, Project 2025 will undermine the legislative branch. The checks and balances carefully put in place by our founding fathers will effectively be removed, turning our country into a fascist autocracy.

Republicans I have admired—Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Ford—would never have stood for this. Even the ones I don't have much use for wouldn't. (We live just a few miles from where Reagan is buried; lately, I sometimes imagine I hear him spinning in his grave.) They would be appalled that their party elected a corrupt, pathologically dishonest demagogue like Trump, much less enabled him, with the aid of the Heritage Foundation, to systematically dismantle our government. But the Republican Party no longer exists. There is only the party of Trump, the party of chaos.

I could cry, but as Siegfried would say, "This is KAOS. We don't cry here."

Bernie Kopell as Siegfried

Pandemic Party Pooper

I've been posting ghost stories every December for five years now, because Christmas has traditionally been a time for ghost stories since—well, since before Christmas. The Winter Solstice is the darkest, coldest, bleakest time of the year, so naturally it's the best time for people to think of ways to scare the bejesus out of each other.

The trouble is, this year I couldn't think of a story scary enough to compete with the horror of a deadly worldwide pandemic. I was about to give up and not post anything, when I remembered The Masque of the Red Death.

To be honest, it was never one of my favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories. His most frightening stories, such as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher, are told in the first person—usually by a narrator who's as mad as Alice's Hatter and March Hare put together. In contrast, the detached third-person point of view Poe uses in The Masque of the Red Death makes the story seem cold and sterile—more allegory or fairy tale than horror story.

Well it's certainly horrifying now. It's also one of the few stories Poe wrote that qualifies as a ghost story. For who can the mysterious stranger be who appears at midnight, clad in "grave-cerements...untenanted by any tangible form," but a ghost?

Okay, so maybe it isn't a Christmas story. But then again, maybe it is. Who's to say Prospero's party isn't a Christmas party? It certainly sounds like one, what with the colored lights and that one party pooper everyone was hoping to avoid showing up at the last minute and spoiling everyone's good time. Sure, everyone's read it, but now's the perfect time to read it again—especially if you're considering attending a holiday party yourself.

Have a happy—and above all safe—holiday season. Stay home if possible, but if you must go out, be sure to masque up.

The Masque of the Red Death
by Edgar Allan Poe (1842)

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven — an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue — and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange — the fifth with white — the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet — a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to harken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.

He had directed, in great part, the moveable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm — much of what has been since seen in “Hernani.” There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these — the dreams — writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away — they have endured but an instant — and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture: for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.

But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus, too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise — then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood — and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.

“Who dares?” he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him — “who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him — that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!”

It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly — for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.

It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple — through the purple to the green — through the green to the orange — through this again to the white — and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry — and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

1919 Illustration by Harry Clarke

Every Little Thing

This has been a difficult week. I lost both a favorite aunt and a favorite Supreme Court Justice. (No, I'm not RBG's nephew; I'm talking about two different people.)

I suppose I should be grateful. Grief made me momentarily forget that we are still in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, that the west coast of our country is on fire while the east coast is flooded, and that our president thinks he knows more than all the epidemiologists and climatologists in the world because he has a big "a-brain" that can retain five random words for more than ten minutes. (Big deal. Loretta and I do that all the time when we go to the grocery store. For more than five items, we might need a list.)

Our country—if not our planet—has become apocalyptic, and for me there is no better escape from an actual apocalypse than a fictional one. Some of my favorite works of apocalyptic fiction are: Stephen King's The Stand, Robert McCammon's Swan Song, Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore's The Walking Dead, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.

There have been three film versions of I Am Legend, and this week I watched two of them back-to-back: the 1971 version with Charlton Heston (Omega Man), and the 2007 version with Will Smith. Both were pretty good, but neither was as good as the book. I suppose I would give a slight edge to the 2007 version. It had better special effects, and a forty-year-old Will Smith makes a much better action hero than a fifty-year-old Charlton Heston. Also, it has Bob Marley.

When he isn't fighting off monsters or trying to cure them, Smith's character, Dr. Robert Neville, is listening to Bob Marley. As he tells another survivor:

He had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate—literally cure it—by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why, he said, "The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness."

That quote stuck with me, and I've been listening to Bob Marley this morning. I like Get Up Stand Up, and I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have appreciated it, too:

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

However, I think my favorite is the song that is Neville's mantra in I Am Legend: Three Little Birds. I think my Aunt Sheila would have liked it, too:

Rise up this mornin'
Smiled with the risin' sun
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin' sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true
Sayin' (this is my message to you)

Singin' don't worry 'bout a thing
'Cause every little thing gonna be alright
Singin' don't worry 'bout a thing
'Cause every little thing gonna be alright

 

President Goofy

How's everyone holding up?

I retired a couple of weeks ago, and now I have even more time on my hands than I had when I was working from home. A lot of that time has been spent watching the news, and it isn't pretty. COVID-19 numbers are spiking in many states, including ours. The experts continue to urge the standard precautions: hand-washing, social distancing, masks. Most of the people we've seen seem to be complying, but as of this writing there is one notable exception: our president. Recently, one of his Fox Friends urged him to set a good example by wearing a mask, which I thought was pretty funny, considering the fact that he has consistently set the worst example for every sort of human behavior. It's the one thing he's good at—why, he's almost as good as Goofy.

Allow me to explain.

These days, with students having to attend virtual classrooms, instructional videos are nothing special. Even before the pandemic, I'm sure lots of teachers used them. But when I was growing up back in the middle of the last century, it was a real treat to get to watch a movie at school, even if it came with a lesson. Instructional films taught us to be more polite, be more careful, eat healthier—usually with examples of what not to do. The best ones were the Goofy cartoons by Walt Disney, where the narrator told us what we should do while Goofy did the exact opposite, with hilarious results.

Goofy as a demented driver in Motor Mania

During the past three-and-a-half years, Donald Trump has proven himself to be, at best, incompetent, lazy, and a pathological liar. He has demonstrated just about everything a president should not do, and refusing to mask-up during the pandemic is the very least of it. He has insulted our allies, praised dictators and white supremacists, promoted violence, attacked the press, solicited interference in our elections, and blamed everyone else for his own mistakes.

In short, he is President Goofy.

Look, I understand why a lot of people voted for him. They didn't trust politicians. They wanted an outsider, someone who knew nothing about government. The trouble is, President Goofy is every bit as incompetent today as he was when he was inaugurated. He hasn't learned a thing in the three-and-a-half years he's been in office, and he hasn't shown any interest in doing so.

It's time for this experiment in kakistocracy to end. President Goofy has been a useful illustration of how not to be a president, but now it's time to elect someone who knows how to be a president. If you feel you can't vote for Joe Biden in the upcoming election, that's okay. I will understand. But please, whatever you do, do not vote for Donald Trump.

You'd do better to cast a write-in vote for Donald Duck.

The Night the Bat Got In

How's everyone holding up?

Last week I read an article about the pandemic giving people vivid dreams. Well, this morning I had a doozie.

I guess because today would normally be our weekly meeting day, I dreamed I was in a meeting with some of my co-workers. However, because of the pandemic, the meeting was being held at a co-worker's house, and for some reason it happened to be the same house where my family lived when I was in middle school (or, as we called it then, "junior high").

Before I go any further with the story, I need to tell you a little bit about the house and especially about my bedroom. It was a big two-story house, about a hundred years old, with four bedrooms, a front and back stairway, and a small enclosed foyer between the front door and the living room. My bedroom was at the back of the house. It was by no means the biggest bedroom, but it was definitely the coolest, because it had access to a small second-floor porch and to the attic. And mind you, this wasn't one of those cramped attics where you have to get to it by climbing a ladder, you can't stand up without hitting your head on a rafter, and you have to be careful where you walk or you'll fall through the ceiling. This was a big, old-fashioned attic, fully-floored and accessed by an actual stairway behind a door next to my bed.

In my dream, my co-worker had turned my bedroom and the adjoining attic into a spacious, tastefully-decorated office suite. It bore little resemblance to the room I once occupied, but being there reminded me of something that happened to me over fifty years ago. I told my co-workers the following story, which is absolutely true.

---

One night when I was about thirteen, I was awakened by the sound of something flying around my bedroom, something much bigger than the usual fly or mosquito. I had seen bats flying around our neighborhood, so I immediately knew what had happened: somehow, either from the attic or the porch, one had gotten into my room.

My dream audience hung on every word as I described my dilemma: I couldn't stay in the room, but I was terrified to get out of bed. They laughed when I told them how I slowly slid out of my bed and onto the floor, then crawled to the door, reached up and opened it, then quickly exited, quietly shutting the door behind me. I told them how I spent the rest of the night dozing in my father's recliner, how I sneaked back into my room the next day and left the porch door ajar, hoping the bat would be gone by the time I went to bed.

However, the bat must have exited the room when I did, because the following evening it showed up in our living room.

My memory is a little vague about what followed; as I said, this was over fifty years ago. I seem to remember standing on the landing of the front stairs, wielding a broom. I seem to remember the bat flying straight at me. I seem to remember looking directly into its face—and it wasn't one of those cute bat faces; it was horrifying, with lots of teeth. I seem to remember someone screaming, and I'm pretty sure it was me.

I remember that somehow we were able to herd the bat into the foyer and close the inside door on it. Then all I had to do was go out the back door and around to the front of the house, open the front door, and let it fly away.

---

Because my dream audience enjoyed the story so much, I woke up thinking I had to write it down. I also thought it would be nice to tie it to National Poetry Month, this being the last day—and didn't Emily Dickinson write a poem about bats?

Of course she did.

THE BAT is dun with wrinkled wings
Like fallow article,
And not a song pervades his lips,
Or none perceptible.

His small umbrella, quaintly halved,
Describing in the air
An arc alike inscrutable,—
Elate philosopher!

Deputed from what firmament
Of what astute abode,
Empowered with what malevolence
Auspiciously withheld.

To his adroit Creator
Ascribe no less the praise;
Beneficent, believe me,
His eccentricities.

Absolute Reality and Poetry

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality."―Shirley Jackson

How's everyone holding up?

I have to admit the "absolute reality" of our situation sank in this week, and I went a little stir-crazy. I don't think I'm the only one, judging by the number of neighbors I see wandering restlessly up and down our street.

I've had trouble sleeping at night and concentrating on my work during the day. I've been spending far too much time on the Internet, tracking local COVID-19 stats and reading grim tales of death ships, body bags, and mobile morgues.

April being National Poetry Month, I naturally tried to distract myself with poetry. But I kept coming up with poems about death and pestilence, like this one:

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Thomas Nashe, have mercy on us! His "A Litany in Time of Plague" goes on like that for five more stanzas, but I'll spare you the rest. Right now, we're all better off reading Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
   That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
   In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

Poetry can be very be soothing, when it's not about the plague. So can nature, as Wordsworth and his fellow romantics knew. Looking out my window, in addition to our restless neighbors, I can see flowers, trees, birds, lizards, butterflies—even the occasional rabbit. And when I see such things my heart, like Wordsworth's, "with pleasure fills, And dances with the Daffodils." (Or, to be more accurate, "dances with the California poppies." Our daffodils have come and gone.)

Look, I realize how lucky Loretta and I are. Not everyone can look out their windows right now and see the things we can see. (I'm so grateful we no longer live in a townhouse, where the view from our front window was the dumpster enclosure behind a supermarket.)

The point is, in this terrible time of absolute crap reality, I hope everyone can find something to fill their heart with pleasure and make it dance.

The Coronavirus Circus

"People can start laughing for all sorts of reasons. But sometimes they laugh because, against all expectations, they’re still alive and have a mouth left to laugh with."—Terry Pratchett

How's everyone holding up?

We've been self-isolating for a week-and-a-half, and we're doing pretty well, all things considered. I'm grateful that I'm able to work from home—something I've always wanted to do. But in the end it's still work, isn't it? I'm still grateful for the weekend.

I'm also grateful for Loretta. I don't know what I'd do without her. The other day she went out to buy a few things at the grocery store during the hour they reserve for us seniors. I called out to her to be careful, which used to mean, "Watch out for crazy drivers," but now means, "Stay away from other people, and don't forget your disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer."

Loretta has tried to keep us both active, mentally and physically, by proposing games, jigsaw puzzles, walks, and other activities. She even has us trying to learn the steps to the Laurel and Hardy dance routine from Way Out West. It's her way of coping. In return, I've tried to keep her laughing. Laughter is my way of coping.

I try to find the humor in any situation, which is probably why I'm one of the few people left on the planet who still reads the funnies.

"What are 'the funnies?'" I hear some of you ask.

You know—the comics? In the newspaper?

"What's a newspaper?" I hear some of you ask.

Ask your grandparents.

It's remarkable how little the comics have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Most of them have completely ignored it. I realize cartoonists create their strips in advance, but surely enough time has passed for the Bumsteads, the Flagstons, and the Forths to be self-isolating, and for Pig to spray Lysol into Rat's beer when he orders a Corona in Pearls Before Swine.

It makes me a little uneasy to see these characters continue to go about their business as if nothing has changed—just as it now makes me uneasy to see people not practicing social-distancing on television shows, no matter how long ago they were made. (Why are Andy and Barney always shaking hands, anyway? They've known each other for years.)

I think the award for first mention of the coronavirus in a comic strip should go to Scott Stantis, for his Prickly City strip from Friday, March 20th:

It wasn't very funny, but then Prickly City rarely is—as Stantis himself pointed out in Tuesday's strip:

One of my favorite comic strips is Darrin Bell's Candorville. Bell began to address the pandemic on Monday, with his characteristically wry humor. Here are his strips from Monday and Tuesday:

Family Circus has never attempted to be remotely topical, so I didn't expect it to mention the pandemic. However, because Monday's strip was just begging to be recaptioned, I couldn't resist remedying that situation:

Since then, I've made it my daily project to fix Family Circus to make it more relevant. Here's the rest of the week:

 

Hey, I know it's silly to be spending so much time on something so trivial, when things are so serious. But I'm hoping it gives the people who see it a well-needed laugh. If Jeff Keane sees it, I certainly hope he laughs, and doesn't sue me for copyright infringement. (Remember, Jeff—parody is fair use!)

If it didn't make you laugh, I hope you find something to laugh at. It's times like these we really need to keep our sense of humor, and remember that we're all in this together.

As long as we stay at least six feet apart.

Panic!

Just kidding. Please don't.

When I started this blog, I chose the title "Don't Panic!" as an homage to one of my favorite writers, Douglas Adams, and as a promise to keep things light even when writing about serious subjects.

Subjects like the current global pandemic.

It is a serious subject, indeed. Every day we receive emails from businesses reassuring us that they are doing all they can to keep their customers and employees safe. Schools are closed, theaters are closed, amusement parks are closed.

Yes, even Disneyland is closed.

Loretta planned to go to Costco for a few things this week. Then we turned on the news and saw the mobs of people lined up to buy toilet paper. "It looks like the end of the world in there," said one shopper.

"Forget it," said Loretta.

On television, the people who tell us that above all we should not touch our faces are rubbing their eyes and putting their fingers in their mouths, and our president, who claims he knows more than anyone about every subject and has a "natural ability" when it comes to virus outbreaks, is, as usual, saying whatever stupid thing comes into his fat orange head.

Loretta and I were supposed to embark on a long-anticipated Caribbean cruise this Wednesday. That's obviously not happening, but we will attempt to make lemonade from the lemons life has handed us. To be more accurate, we will make limeade from the limes in our backyard, add some rum, and pretend we're in Jamaica.

In other words, we will do our best to keep our heads and make the best of the situation, and I advise you to do the same. If you're interested, here are some specific suggestions:

• Don't join the hordes of hoarders at Costco. Stay home if you can; if you can't, at least try to stay away from crowds. 
• Try not to touch your face. (It isn't easy. I touch my face all the time without thinking about it. When I do think about it, I suddenly get an itch. Maybe I should try one of those dog cones.)
• Don't listen to bloviating blowhards who have "hunches." Listen to the experts. They're called "epidemiologists," and they work at places like the World Health Organization and the CDC.
• Wash your hands. Wash them after you use the toilet. Wash them before eating. Wash them before touching your face. Wash them after touching your face—or after touching anything. Basically, when you're not doing something else, you should be washing your hands.

And above all, don't panic.

Hakuna Matata, We're F***ed

I'm depressed.

Like all good liberals, I'm a firm believer in recycling. At work, I've even been known to fish recyclable plastic items out of the trash, brush off the crumbs and coffee grounds, and put them in the recycle bin, where they belong. ("Damn it, Karen! The recycle bin is right next to the trash bin. Right next to it, Karen!")

But what's the point? This week I learned that China, which in the past would take our recyclables, sort through them, and use them to make more plastic goods to sell back to us, has decided that it is no longer profitable to do so. Not only have they refused to take any more of our recycling, they are sending boatloads of it back. All of that plastic waste is just going to end up in a landfill—or worse yet in the ocean, to be eaten by fish that will in turn be eaten by us. As a matter of fact, it's already happening. You could call it "The Circle of Plastic Life."

But, hey—hakuna matata! No worries, because our president doesn't believe there's a problem. In fact, while more and more places are banning single-use plastic items like drinking straws, he is selling them online to raise money for his re-election campaign. Which means that, sooner or later, someone will be eating a fish that ingested a drinking straw with "TRUMP" printed on it. (There's got to be a joke there, but I'm too depressed to think of one.)

"But wait," as the TV hucksters who sell such crap would say, "There's more!" This week I also read a BBC article that says scientists are now giving us just 18 months to do something about global warming.

18 months.

Again, not a problem for our president, who once famously tweeted that, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." Besides, even if it's not a hoax, it would be far too difficult and expensive to do anything about it at this point, right? Hakuna matata!

We're f***ed.

Or maybe not.

Fifty years ago, we put a man on the moon. It was an incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive task, but we had a president who believed it could be done and was worth doing, and he convinced our country that it could be done and was worth doing.

"We choose to go to the moon," he said. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win..."

Just imagine what we could do if we had a president who believed we could save the planet.

Nothing Is Forever

It's National Poetry Month, and I have spent the week racking (or is it "wracking?") my brain and the internet for a poem to express my feelings about these "interesting times" we live in. I finally thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias," but when I searched for the poem, I discovered that there are, in fact, two "Ozymandiases" ("Ozymandii?")—one written by Shelley, the other by his friend and fellow poet, Horace Smith. Here are both poems:

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias (aka "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below"*)
by Horace Smith

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

According to Wikipedia, both poems were likely inspired by "the announcement of the British Museum's acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II..." You may remember Ramesses (or "Ramses") as the pharaoh of Exodus, portrayed by Yul Brynner in "The Ten Commandments." "Ozymandias" is what the Greeks called him, and if the Greeks wrote about him—well, in those days, that pretty much meant he was world famous. He was the most powerful and longest-reigning pharaoh in Egypt's history—not to mention the most egotistical. He ordered the construction of numerous temples and palaces bearing his name, and the erection of enormous statues bearing his image.

Statue Fragment in British Museum

You know how some people think they are "God's Gift?" Well, this guy thought he was a god—literally. Yes, I know the word "literally" is used far too frequently and generally incorrectly, but as an English major, I know the time and place to use it, and this is one of those times and places. Ramesses believed himself to be literally immortal.

He was wrong, of course, and that's what both "Ozymandias" poems are about.

Nothing is forever.

And these days, that's a very comforting thought.


*Smith changed his poem's title to avoid confusion with Shelley's, which may have something to do with it's having been all but forgotten. "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below," does not exactly roll off the tongue, nor is it an easy title to remember.

Of Crusties and Pizza

Some time ago, one of my young Facebook friends complained about the bad behavior of a “crusty old white man.” I don't think I'm particularly crusty, but I am an old white man, and I apologized on behalf of all crusty old white men (whom, for the sake of brevity, I will henceforth refer to as "crusties"). I couldn’t help but think of some of the horrible things crusties have done, and continue to do.

Case in point, this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, in which some exceedingly crusty crusties publicly displayed a flagrant disregard for truth, for justice, and for women—not to mention a couple of temper tantrums worthy of a three year old.

We crusties can't change the fact that we're white, that we're men, or that we're old (and that may be part of the reason we're crusty). But we can certainly strive to be less crusty. In other words, we can try to be more kind, tolerant, patient, respectful.

In other words, we can try to be more like my father.

Thirteen years ago, Loretta's job required her to travel to the Philippines for six weeks. After listening to me whine incessantly about being left alone for such a long time, she proposed that we invite my parents and my mother's last surviving sister to California to keep me company. They were all at an age where travel had become an ordeal (an age I am rapidly approaching), but to our surprise they agreed to come.

I had misgivings about entertaining guests without Loretta, but she made it easy. She spent much of the time before her trip ensuring that we were amply supplied with ready-to-microwave, home-cooked meals. After she left, I had very little to do other than to take them out for a few meals (always paid for by my father) and a little sight-seeing. The rest of our time was spent at home: watching TV or lounging on the patio, happily reminiscing about the old days.

However, there inevitably came an evening when we had run out of Loretta’s home-cooked meals and nobody wanted to go out, which left me responsible for dinner. I rose to the occasion, doing exactly what anyone else with my level of culinary skill would have done: order out for pizza.

I called Round Table, our go-to place for pizza delivery. We were regular customers, so they already had our address in their computer. The manager, who took my order, said delivery would be in approximately half an hour.

A half hour went by.

Another half hour went by.

We were well into the third half hour, and people were getting hungry. I was especially concerned about my mother, who was diabetic and was supposed to eat regularly scheduled meals. I called Round Table and asked the manager very forcefully why our pizza had not yet been delivered.

“Just a moment,” he said. A minute or so later, he returned to the phone. “I just spoke to the guy. He says he is outside your house now.”

“Oh, really?” I said derisively. “Then why hasn’t he rung the doorbell?”

“He says he did, but there was no answer.”

I went to the door and opened it. As I suspected, there was no one there. I walked out into the driveway and looked up and down the street, thinking he might have mistaken the address and gone to a neighbor’s house.

“There is nobody outside my house.”

“I’m sorry,” said the manager. “What can I do? He says he is outside your door.”

“Then he’s a liar!” I said, slamming down the receiver. (Well, I would have slammed down the receiver, had this happened thirty years ago. Unfortunately, it was a cordless phone, and I could only press a button—an extremely unsatisfactory way to end an angry phone call, if you ask me.)

“It looks like I’ll have to go out and get our pizza,” I said irritably.

“I’ll go with you,” said my father.

As we headed for Moorpark’s second-favorite pizza place, I ranted to my father about incompetent, dishonest pizza delivery persons, all of them no doubt drug addicts.

In short, I was being a crusty. 

Then we drove by the neighborhood where we used to live, and something in my brain clicked. When was the last time we had had pizza delivered by Round Table? We had moved two years previously, our new street number was similar to our old street number, and I had not been listening that carefully when the manager asked me to confirm the address...

Crap.

“Change in plan,” I said, and explained to my dad what I thought had happened. When we arrived at Round Table, I left him in the car and went inside, feeling very sheepish.

“Hi,” I said to the manager. “I’m the guy who just called about the pizza that didn’t get delivered. Could you tell me the address you have for us in your computer?” He looked up our account by our phone number, which hadn’t changed. As I suspected, they still had the old address.

I explained my mistake, apologized profusely, and paid for the pizza, leaving a generous tip for the delivery guy.

“I feel terrible,” I told my father as we drove home. “Especially for calling the delivery guy a liar.”

“But you admitted your mistake and apologized for it,” said my father. “I’m proud of you.”

“It’s what you would have done,” I said.

Cockroaches

Imagine walking into your kitchen in the middle of the night, turning on the light, and seeing hundreds of cockroaches scurrying around your feet. You would feel horror and disgust, I'm sure. You would probably also feel some degree of shame, because what kind of good-for-nothing slob allows hundreds of cockroaches to take over their kitchen?

Thirty-some years ago, my two aunts and I were driving through my grandmother's hometown of Angola, Indiana, when we found ourselves in the midst of a massive Ku Klux Klan rally. We experienced much the same horror, disgust, and shame we would have felt if our kitchen had been overrun with cockroaches. We wanted to open our car windows and scream at the creeps to get out, to tell them that they had no business in our town, our state, our country. I am by nature a peace-loving person (not to mention a coward), but I confess that I had the urge to jump out of the car and beat the living crap out of each and every one of them.

What we did, of course, was lock our car doors and got the hell out of town because, let's face it, we were terrified.

Having had that experience, I believe I have an inkling of the horror, disgust, and shame the citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, must have felt last weekend, as hundreds of terrorists paraded through the streets of their normally peaceful college town, carrying symbols and chanting slogans of hate.

We should all feel horror, disgust, and shame. The cockroaches that invaded Charlottesville came from all over America. In fact, the one who willfully drove his car into a crowd of citizens taking a stand against the hatred, killing a young woman far braver than I will ever be—that particular cockroach came from a small town in northern Ohio not far from Angola, Indiana.

The president made a statement eloquently expressing what every true American felt about the events in Charlottesville:

Our Founders fought a revolution for the idea that all men are created equal. The heirs of that revolution fought a Civil War to save our nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to that revolutionary proposition.

Nothing less is at stake on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, where a violent attack has taken at least one American life and injured many others in a confrontation between our better angels and our worst demons.

White supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us as a people and make our nation special.

As we mourn the tragedy that has occurred in Charlottesville, American patriots of all colors and creeds must come together to defy those who raise the flag of hatred and bigotry.

Just kidding. That statement came from Senator John McCain. It's what the president should have said. Instead he said this:

We condemn in strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence — on many sides.

He looked into the camera as he said "on many sides," and then he repeated the words for emphasis.

On many sides.

Many sides? There are only two sides to what happened in Charlottesville: human beings and cockroaches. Mr. President, which side are you on?

He was unwilling to denounce the cockroaches when he was running for president, because he needed their votes. (You may recall that he claimed not to even know who David Duke was.) Apparently he is still unwilling to denounce them. Oh, he finally came out with a stronger statement on Monday, after receiving harsh criticism from "many sides." But in a press conference on Tuesday he reversed himself, doubling down on what he said the first time, calling it "a fine statement," and saying that he believes there were both "very fine people on both sides" and "blame on both sides."

At least he can now count the number of sides.

The cockroaches have no doubt about which side the president is on. After Tuesday's press conference David Duke, one of the very finest of those "very fine people" (You know who he is now, don't you, Mr. President?), heartily praised Trump for his "honesty & courage."

Mr. President, let me give you a hint: when a cockroach praises you—especially when it's the head cockroach—you're on the wrong side.

Why Can't We Agree?

A couple of days ago, I was reading a BBC news story when I came across the following passage:

And what's happened since the election?

The investigation remains closed but the debate about Mr Comey's actions rage on.

The anger felt by Clinton supporters were compounded when it emerged that the FBI had been looking into any links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but Mr Comey chose not to go public with it.

In May, he gave evidence to a Senate Judiciary Committee and defended himself.

He said that it was a "painful" dilemma when he decided to make his October pronouncement, but if he had not come forward about the new Clinton emails, he would have been guilty of concealment.

Mr Comey said he felt "nauseous" at the thought he might have had an impact.

I felt a little "nauseous" myself. Can you guess why? (If you're an English major, I'm sure you can. If not, I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with politics.)

I immediately fired off an e-mail to "the Beeb," the gist of which was:

I spotted a couple of glaring grammatical errors in your article. I have been hearing such errors more and more frequently on TV and radio, but to see two of them in writing (and from the BBC!) makes me despair for the future of the English language. You should be better than this.

Okay, that was pretty harsh, but BBC newswriters really should be better, as should anyone who writes for a living. Subject-verb agreement is pretty basic grammar—although I can see where a layperson might get lost when there are prepositional phrases involved. In such cases, it can help to diagram the sentence. For example, here's a diagram I found of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

Don't worry. We're not going to do that, because I hate diagramming sentences. All you really need to do to ensure subject-verb agreement is to ask yourself three questions:

1. What is the verb in the sentence?,
2. What is the subject of that verb?, and
3. Do they agree?

Let's take a look at the first sentence in the passage:

The investigation remains closed but the debate about Mr Comey's actions rage on.

This is a compound sentence, with two clauses separated by the conjunction "but." Actually, it's a run-on sentence; there should be a comma before the "but," but I won't quibble about that now. See what I did there? In pointing out the missing comma, I gave you an example of a correctly punctuated compound sentence. Impressed? (Never mind; don't answer that.)

In the second clause of this compound sentence, the verb is obviously "rage." Now, we ask ourselves, what is the subject of that verb? What is it that is raging? Is it "Mr Comey's actions?" Well, let's try it:

Mr Comey's actions rage on.

Please! The only way that sentence could possibly make sense is if it were part of the dialogue from some far-fetched science fiction film:

First Scientist: "Mr. Comey's actions have taken on a life of their own! They are destroying the city!"

Second Scientist: "They cannot be stopped! Mr. Comey's actions rage on!"

Okay, maybe not so far-fetched, and I should seriously think about developing it into a screenplay, but the fact is, "Mr Comey's actions" is not the subject of the verb "rage," it is the object of the preposition "about." The phrase "about Mr Comey's actions" modifies the noun "debate." If we remove the phrase, we are left with the simple sentence:

The debate rage on.

Does that sound right to you? Of course not! That's because "debate" is a singular subject, and "rage" is a plural verb. They do not agree. Here's the corrected sentence (just for fun, we'll put that missing comma in—and what the heck, because we are a bit OCD, a period after "Mr" as well):

The investigation remains closed, but the debate about Mr. Comey's actions rages on.

Much better! See if you can find the second subject-verb error in the passage. If you didn't notice it before, it should be much easier now. After you've done this sort of analysis a few times, you should be able to spot such errors immediately. If only politics were that simple.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. Comey, the word is nauseated.

(Note: Before publishing this post, I took another look at the story and found that both errors had been fixed. Bravo, BBC!)

Science Matters

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson

Without science I would literally not be here. I know the word “literally” is often misused by people who actually mean “figuratively,” but in this case I literally mean literally. When I was born I had a severe allergy to milk and had to be given soy formula. Without it, I doubt I would have survived. At this point, I would like to have given a shout-out to the scientist(s) who invented soy formula. Unfortunately, I could not discover their name(s). The only information I could find was a paragraph on the National Institutes of Health website, which states: “In the 1920s, scientists also began developing nonmilk-based formulas for infants allergic to cow's milk. The first nonmilk formula was based on soy flour and became available to the public in 1929.” Whoever those scientists were, I thank them.

Science has saved me in other ways, too: from the decongestants, antihistamines, and antibiotics that got me through countless respiratory infections as a child, to the three-point safety belt and curtain airbag that protected me in an automobile accident last year. Let’s face it, without science most of us would not be here. Those few of us with the fortitude to survive would still be living in caves, chewing on bloody hunks of raw meat. Because the first scientist had to have been the person who discovered fire. I can just imagine the scientific paper he/she might have written in support of his/her theory. Of course, it would not have been an actual paper, as paper had not been invented yet. It would likely have been pictures drawn on a cave wall, the translation of which would be something like:

Fire
by Ogg
University of Cave

Abstract
Fire burn. Make meat tasty.

After peer review, fire would have been patented and marketed to the general public, and that early scientist would have no doubt gone on to invent other important things, like the wheel and beer.

My point is, science matters, and I'm sure that most of you reading this agree. But, as difficult as this may be for us to comprehend, there are quite a lot of people in America—supposedly one of the most advanced countries in the world—who reject science. They are the people who steadfastly refuse to believe the scientific evidence that vaccinations are a good thing, or that continuing to burn fossil fuels will give future generations the choice of living in an arid wasteland or under water.

Ironically, many of these same people believe, unquestioningly and without a shred of evidence, all manner of pseudoscience, from colon cleansing to conversion therapy. There are even an alarming number of Americans who reject evolution in favor of a theory that states, despite all geologic and paleontologic evidence to the contrary, that the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, and that human beings rode around on dinosaurs. (Admit it, you are thinking how cool would that be? and humming the theme from The Flintstones.)

I blame the Internet. There have always been crackpots, but most of us knew they were crackpots and ignored them. Now, thanks to the Internet, crackpots have a platform for their theories and a way to network with other crackpots. Pretty soon, you have a consensus of crackpots. Then other people—people who are not necessarily crackpots but who are unable to discern between science and pseudoscience—start to take notice. These undiscerning people think, "By golly, if that many people agree about this, there must be something to it!"

None of this matters to the rest of us until, thanks to special interest groups, gerrymandering, and undiscerning voters, we end up with undiscerning elected officials who make undiscerning decisions that affect us all.

In 1970, Richard M. Nixon, a very bad president (I used to think the worst I would see in my lifetime), did a very good thing: he established the Environmental Protection Agency. In a message to Congress he stated: "The Congress, the Administration and the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man." Unfortunately, our undiscerning current administration and congress do not share that "profound commitment." Both the EPA and the NIH (whose web page I referenced in the first paragraph) are slated for massive cuts in the president's proposed budget.

Of course, a budget cut will make no difference to the EPA if the agency is terminated, as a house bill introduced in February proposes to do.

I'm sure the president's new EPA administrator would have no problem with that. While Attorney General of Oklahoma, he filed fourteen lawsuits against the EPA to block the enforcement of clean air, clean water and climate regulations. Unlike the president, he has not gone so far as to claim global warming is a hoax. He has, however, stated that "there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact" of human activity on climate change. In fact, there is virtually no disagreement. There is a 97% consensus among climate scientists that human activity—specifically the release of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels—is a major contributor to global warming.

In a 1983 Playboy interview, appalled by a secretary of the interior whose idea of conservation was to "mine more, drill more, cut more timber," photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams said, "It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

The time has come when those who care about the environment must fight again. That is why today, on Earth Day 2017, Loretta and I will be joining the March for Science.

The Five Stages of Grief

Many years ago, when I was a social worker back in Indiana, I attended a seminar on death and dying conducted by a student of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the world-renowned psychiatrist who introduced the concept of five stages of grief.

According to Dr. Kübler-Ross, when you are facing either your own death or the death of a loved one, you commonly go through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. A wonderful example of this is the scene near the end of Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical film, All That Jazz, where director Joe Gideon, played brilliantly by Roy Scheider, acts out each of the five stages prior to accepting his own death.

Not everyone goes through all of the stages, and not everyone experiences them in the same order. Also, the five stages do not apply only to death. They can be applied to any traumatic loss: divorce, the loss of a job—even a Super Bowl loss, as anyone from Buffalo can tell you.

I think you see where I'm going with this.

This week, Loretta and I have been struggling to come to grips with the fact that the next President of the United States will be Donald J. Trump. For two life-long Democrats, this has been terribly difficult. (Let’s face it; it’s been difficult for many Republicans.) Since the election, we have both been working through Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. It’s been a rough week, and neither of us is anywhere near the fifth stage yet.

Stage 1: Denial

We did not watch the election unfold on any of the major networks or cable news channels. Instead we watched Stephen Colbert’s coverage on Showtime—because, you know, we thought if anyone could make election night fun, it would be Stephen Colbert.

Boy, were we wrong.

As the results came in, the look of horrified disbelief on Colbert’s face mirrored our own. Like us, he was in denial. The frivolity began to seem forced. The jokes began to fall flat. By the end of the show, Colbert, his guests, and his audience were close to tears, but we had not quite reached that stage yet. We were at…

Stage 2: Anger

We turned off the TV and tried to go to sleep, but sleep would not come. My mind kept going back to something I had seen on the Internet earlier that day: a picture of Donald Trump with that smug smirk on his face—you know the one I’m talking about—and the caption, “Trump reminds me of my dad! He tells it like it is, and that’s what my dad always did.”

How dare they compare Donald Trump to my father!

My father was a kind, wise, honorable man, a man who always tried to see the best in people, a gentleman in every sense of the word. He would have been appalled at our new president-elect: a narcissistic, unprincipled demagogue who ran his campaign based on a toxic mixture of fear, anger, and hatred. A man endorsed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party, for God’s sake! If Trump's supporters really did have fathers like that—well, I felt sorry for them. They must have had truly horrible childhoods. But that did not entitle them to force such a father on the rest of us.

How dare they!

I got out of bed, went to the computer, found the picture, and posted it on Facebook, accompanied by a somewhat incoherent rant. I later regretted this a little, but not much. It was nothing compared to what some people were posting.

Stage 4: Depression

(Yes, I realize I skipped stage 3. We’ll get to it later. Remember how I said they could be experienced in any order?)

I spent the day after the election in a stupor of exhaustion and depression, occasionally interrupted by flashes of anger. It helped that friends, relatives, and a couple of coworkers were experiencing the same feelings. It did not help that others were positively gleeful.

I don’t recall rubbing any noses in it when Obama was elected.

Stage 3: Bargaining

On Thursday, I started seeing the Facebook posts: “Already Enough Evidence to Impeach Trump” (surely a record, considering he’s not even actually president yet), “Sign Petition to Force Electoral College to Vote for Clinton,” “Sign Petition to Abolish Electoral College,” “Sign Petition to Demand California’s Secession.” (Dear God, please do not let California be that state—the spoiled, whiny brat that has a tantrum when it doesn’t get its way, the Texas of this election.)

Personally, I skipped the bargaining stage. What good does it do? If we could somehow wave a magic wand and take the presidency away from Trump, it would only add more fuel to the fear, anger, and hatred of his followers. We might even end up in another civil war.

No, best to keep working toward…

Stage 5: Acceptance

As I said, Loretta and I haven’t made it there yet. I dare say neither have any of the other millions of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton—hundreds of thousands more Americans than voted for Trump.* But that’s okay. We have a right to take as much time as we need with the five stages. We even have a right to go back to a stage we thought we were done with. (Personally, I keep returning to stage two.) We don’t have to listen to anyone tell us to “get over it” or “suck it up.” Hell, most Republicans steadfastly refused to “suck it up” through all eight years of Obama’s presidency.

We must allow ourselves to grieve, but we must not allow ourselves to be afraid, because as a much wiser person than I once said: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” (Yes, it was Yoda, and yes, I'm a huge nerd.)

I know what you’re thinking: "Easy for you to say. As a heterosexual white male, you've got nothing to worry about. In Trump's America, you're gold." Well, I do worry. I worry about my non-heterosexual, non-white, non-male friends. I know that many of them are feeling terribly uneasy in the wake of an election that seemingly validated a segment of the population that hates them solely based on their gender, sexual identity, or color of their skin.

But please know that the vast majority of Americans are not like that. Please know that the vast majority of Americans have got your back. (And yes, that even includes many Americans who voted for Trump.)

Take heart, and always remember those immortal words inscribed in large friendly letters on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

DON’T PANIC.

Footnote

* If you're not an American, this probably makes no sense to you, but we don't elect our president directly. Instead we use a convoluted system called an Electoral College. (I know. It doesn't make sense to a lot of us, either.)