In training for another rough year

The year in review is something I don't do, even though this past year has been pretty good to me personally. Decent health at this age is a major gift; having a pleasant place to live is a blessing; I'm grateful for the occasional company of close friends and for my dear postal correspondents; and I'm finding my work more enjoyable than ever.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for the world as we know it, mostly via media that compel us to witness the worst of what's happening everywhere — though maybe not to us, for now. I won't recapitulate what we know more than enough of already, but any reader of this newspaper doesn't need to be reminded. I'd forget it if I could because it interferes with the ordinary pleasures of life in this lovely realm of ocean, mountains, good weather, changing culture and many interesting and accomplished people.

But then there is the problem of politics, which interests me as a citizen yet repulses me as a social process in which both service and the desire for power — presumably to do good — are in play and often mix badly. I respect many of the people who feel called to that work, but I don't have the patience to sit through meetings and study spreadsheets and formulate policy and calculate budgets — and I certainly couldn't stomach running for office.

One of my mentors, the great George Hitchcock — editor, publisher, writer, director, actor, teacher, gardener, artist, anarchist — used to call himself the “dictator” of his poetry magazine, kayak, while creatively cajoling a volunteer crew to physically assemble each issue, thus also cultivating community. That is my political ideal: an anarchist collective of working cooperation with benevolent leadership that knows what it's doing and is trusted by the team. This may be possible in small groups — though even then personalities can clash — but the larger you scale it up the more utopian it gets, which is why philosophical anarchism is unachievable in practice, and for a political system we are stuck with democracy and all its defects as the next best thing.

Those defects will be on spectacular display in 2024 as the presidential campaign heats up and the gears of justice grind ever so slowly and so many consequential cases make their sluggish way through the courts and our national horror-reality-documelodrama infects our helpless consciousness and we are possessed by the viral-demonvampire-mutant former president returned from the dead to take his revenge and occupy our psyches long before the election.

Terrible as it sounds, we must face facts and admit the unthinkable is all too plausible, and that here on the deep blue California coast we won't have that much to say about it, whatever kind of organizing we do or how we vote, because in the systemic sickness of the U.S. Electoral College this is not a swing state, a battleground state or even a purple state, friendly as it is to the queer and the otherwise nonconforming.

So I am mentally preparing for an unprecedented and scarcely imaginable historical catastrophe over which I have little control, and yet it's a reality I must deal with as a citizen, and as a human being. Some of my intellectual heroes and models of artistic integrity in such dreadful times are those writers in Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1940s who acted as couriers or editors of underground newspapers or in various other ways put their imaginative skills to work for the Resistance.

In his second coming, a rough and ugly beast is slouching toward Washington to be reborn and to deputize the mobs of Jan. 6 and weaponize the justice department and stack the judiciary and mobilize the military to impose his will. In that event, there will be turmoil in the streets and the internet will be on fire and the arts will explode and we'll need to find countless other inventive ways to subvert his poisonous paradigm.

We have the next 12 months to train for that.

Happy New Year.