Some Notes On The Body Politic

The zipper on my running pants has gotten sticky. Must be rust. I haven’t worn them since early last spring. And it’s been an unusually humid summer. We’re well into October now, Halloween ghosts and witches and giant spiders everywhere on neighborhood lawns and houses celebrating the pageantry of death and the proximity of the supernatural. The air is crisp, and getting crisper. When I get up in the morning, I turn on the heat.

Change is in the air. There have been far fewer crows this fall. It's a bit spooky. There are normally hundreds of crows out by now. Why is this happening? Is this an omen? Is that magnitude 9 earthquake dormant in the Cascadia fault been agitating in ways apparent to wildlife?

Everything feels ominous these days. Precarious. The body politic has been morphing into increasingly authoritarian actions and behavior. The United States feels less and less like the United States and more and more like something foreign; it looks the same, a little more haggard, bridges collapsing, roads too raggedy to drive, but still recognizable, an IHOP still serving breakfast, people saying things you’re not supposed to say on podcasts. The shreds of democracy are still visible, but every day someone gets kidnapped or bombed. Laws broken. Ethics, principles, standards, honor, decency, have become so much flotsam on a putrescent sea of enlightenment debris. The zeitgeist is diseased. It hasn’t morphed into anything identifiable as yet, but pustules and sores encrust its body as it crawls upward from its cradle in hell. Laws that once carried weight and force mean nothing. They’re either gone, gangrenous with corruption, amputated, lying on the congressional floor, or linger in limbo, because no one bothers to enforce them. Or chooses, rather, to ignore their obligations to the constitution. What was once a strong national identity now lingers like a fairy tale confronting a mountain of blackmail and evil.

9:30 a.m. I grab The World Within the Word, Essays by William H. Gass, from the bookshelf to read over breakfast (a bowl of fruit topped with whipped cream and two slices of toast slathered with cherry jam), and open it to the chapter "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," which has been bookmarked with an index card.

There is writing on the card. My writing. “Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Insider Pentagon.” I have no idea what this is about. I’m guessing it’s from the Obama era. Something I was writing, or considering writing, 15 or 20 years ago.

There’s more: “John Murtha would not join the U.S. military today. The services are struggling with unanticipated personnel shortages due to a sharp decline in first-term enlistments and an exodus of experienced mid-level cover specialists.”

There’s also a quote, at the bottom of the card, by John Murtha: “Let me tell you, war is a nasty business. It sears the soul.”

I’m guessing this goes back even further than the Obama era, back to the Bush era. George W.

I was against the Iraq war. I’m guessing I was prepping to write something in protest. If I did, it’s long forgotten. What I remember is walking around Green Lake, holding a candle with hundreds of other souls, most of them elderly, protesting the coming war. It had been a warm, gentle evening. From a distance, it must’ve looked like a religious procession. It was mostly quiet, with virtually no police presence, and disappointingly unremarkable. Unlike the Battle of Seattle – the WTO protests in 1999, a mere four years in the past – the walk around Green Lake, a mostly meditative stroll while cupping the little candle flame with my free hand from the occasional stirring of air, felt impotent and futile. The only adversarial moment of any measure was a giant black Cadillac Escalade filled with frat boys hollering insults.

Twenty years later, the so-called left – shocked and repelled by the specter of Trump – had reappraised George W. as some kind of former statesmen, a benign, aw shucks downhome man of the people and overall good guy, painting his toes in his bathtub. The image of George W. slipping a piece of candy to Michelle Obama during the funeral of his father went a long way toward softening former attitudes of revulsion. His criticism of Trump also helped the democrats reevaluate those years of daily rebuke and mockery. He was one of us now, seemed to be the general feeling. And when Liz Cheney – daughter of the much maligned Vice President Dick Chenery – joined the democrats during Kalama Harris’s campaign for the presidency, she, too, was heartily embraced.

Obama had his share of war, too. He kept the war in Afghanistan going, increased the U.S. presence to 100,000 to combat the Taliban and disrupt al-Qaeda. And in March, 2011, Obama authorized U.S. participating in a NATO-led air campaign, which led to the overthrow and death of Muammar al-Qaddafi. Today, Libya remains mired in political paralysis and economic instability, marked by localized violence and a human trafficking nightmare for migrants attempting to reach Europe, where they are vulnerable to extreme abuses, including torture, forced labor, and extortion by smugglers and armed groups. None of this, however, threw shade on Obama’s continuing image of angelic rationality and intellect, a worthy recipient of the Noble Peace Prize.

“Books contained tenses like closets full of clothes,” writes Gass in his essay on Gertrude Stein, “but the present was the only place we were alive, and the present was like a painting, without before or after, spread to be sure, but not in time…The earth might be round but experience, in effect, was flat. Life might be long but living was as brief as each breath in breathing. Without a past, in the prolonged narrowness of any ‘now,’ wasn’t everything in a constant condition of commencement? Then, too, breathing is repeating – it is beginning and rebeginning, over and over, again and again and again.”

The paragraph clears the clutter of politics from my head. I return to my body, the actuality of living, of pineapple and grapes and strawberries and whipped cream. The crunch of toasted bread in my mouth, the sweetness of cherry jam seducing my tongue and palate into an aplomb of life affirming renewal.

The rest of the day evolves according to a set pattern of creative endeavors – practicing French on Yabla, watching a few podcasts, a few of them in French, while R attends to her horticultural chores outside, then – several hours later - going for a short, four-mile run – followed by dinner and watching another episode of True Detective, season 1, on our new flatscreen TV. After dinner, I retire to the bedroom to continue my reading of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

5:30 p.m. R returns from a short walk hoping to find Louise, the crippled crow we’ve been feeding for over a decade. She sometimes comes when we whistle, and hops around on her one good leg while pecking at a peanut. We haven’t seen her for a number of days now. The street where we are most apt to find her is lined with luxurious homes well into the millions. A woman emerged from one of the houses and yelled at R to stop feeding crows, the harshness of her voice galvanized with hostility. R is non-plussed. This is not the first time we’ve been yelled at by the neighbors for feeding crows, which they believe responsible for an uptick in rats. We’ve tried explaining to several of them that crows outcompete rats for resources, and are more apt to reduce the rat population, the source of which is the waterfront and granaries on Puget Sound, which are a mile or two distant. Our argument falls on deaf ears. The easier solution is to avoid that area from now on, if not stopping this pastime of feeding the neighborhood crows altogether.  

This weird hostility is puzzling. One would assume that people gifted with so much affluence, and thereby freed from the anguish the less fortunate suffer, fearing bankruptcy and homelessness from Godzilla-sized medical bills and stagnant wages in an inflationary economy, would be calm and charitable and tolerant. They’re not. They’re deeply unhappy. Whatever darkness is troubling their serenity is etched on their faces in broken capillaries and sunken eyes.

During an afternoon run the following day, we notice a silver 2024 Tesla Cybertruck parked in front of the mansion across the street from the irate crow hater. It looks military and futuristic, a solid structure of defiant, unapologetic hostility with clean, stern, no-nonsense lines and a heavily armored persona. I would not be surprised to see a turreted machine gun rise out of the roof.