I want to write some light comedy and satire again but the society we live in makes this nearly impossible. Every time Mrs. Norman starts rattling around in my head and I feel like I can let her out to play and write some new movie columns, reality trumps anything (pun very much intended) I could possibly dream up for her outlandish adventures. Maybe my vacation next month and a few weeks in a culture not subject to the whims of a would-be autocrat in decline will align my brain cells in such a way that she can creep back into my regular writing routine. I have thought of a way to explain her prolonged absence and perhaps she’ll get involved with the Kennedy Center on some sort of production celebrating 250 years of the USA. I’m old enough to remember the bicentennial summer of 1976 quite clearly and all of the various celebrations, and bicentennial minutes, and American flag 70s couture etc. It was a time when the American Dream was feeling achieved. It was a decade after the Great Society programs had bettered the lives of the working class. The turmoil of the late sixties was in the rearview mirror. Vietnam and Watergate were over. Everything and anything seemed possible. A few years later, though, the election of Ronald Reagan set the country on a very different course which has led us to where we find ourselves now. I’m trying to think of something to celebrate this July but with the Project 2025 led destruction of our social, political and cultural institutions and our reputation in the world in free fall, all I’m seeing is the amount of work that will need to be done when we’re finally allowed to get out the dustpans and brooms.
My May vacation is set. For those of you inhabiting cultural capitals and who might like to get together as I pass through, I will be in New York May 14th-18th. London May 19th-22nd. Paris May 22nd-26th. Milan May 26th-27th and Rome May 27th-June 1st, heading back to Birmingham that afternoon. This means, of course, that this space will devolve back into travelogue in a few weeks. I’m not sure that I’ll have all that much to say about New York and London as I’ve been to both quite a few times over the last decade. I have not, however, been to Paris in over forty years. The last time I saw Paris, there was no glass pyramid at the Louvre. I’m checking a few things out for a planned longer trip to France in a year or two and will be in and out of the company of my friends David and Jonathan (not the biblical ones) both there and in London. The best train service from Paris to Rome stops in Milan, so I am going to spend a night there, a city new to me. I shan’t be there long but I should be able to see the Duomo and La Scala. La Scala is doing Nabucco that night and, while it would be lovely to hear Va Pensiero sung in the hall for which it was first compose, it was sold out many months in advance. I may wander by to see if there’s some sort of standing room rush available. It’s been decades since my last Rome trip as well, but only two rather than four. There I’m hanging out with my friend Thomas who has a summer gig digging up Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. I have been to Tivoli many moons ago and recall the fountains in the gardens of the Villa d’Este quite well but don’t remember a thing about Hadrian’s Villa. Maybe they hadn’t dug much of it up yet in 1984.
I have firm retirement plans in place. My official retirement date from UAB will be July 1, 2027. I may step out of clinic earlier than that depending on the implementation of the new electronic medical record system. Having been through a number of those changes in the past, I refuse to do this one when I am planning on retiring just a few months later. I have asked to be considered for emeritus status so that I remain affiliated with UAB and can bounce around offering a few dollops of sage wisdom garnered over my more than forty years in medicine. My division thinks this won’t be an issue, but we shall see. I will probably step down from the VA at the same time but that will depend a lot on what will happen over the next year with a pending change of leadership and how the federal government budgets and supports the kind of programs with which I work. Of course my carefully laid plans are likely to blow up due to life’s usual curve balls. It’s the sort of thing that usually happens to me.
I did a one-off theatrical gig last night for Terrific New Theatre. Their current offering is a British play, The Events, in which a female chaplain who leads a community chorus is confronted with a young man who commits an unspeakable act of violence. The play is told in short, non-linear scenes, leaving the audience to puzzle out the whole story with some gaps that must be closed by inference. It’s sort of like a jigsaw but with a couple of missing pieces. There are only two actors in the piece. The chaplain (played by my long-term friend and stage companion Holly Dikeman) and a young man (Ryder Dean whom I have known since toddlerhood) who plays the perpetrator and everyone else who interacts with her. The third character is the chorus – part Greek chorus, part church choir, part plot device. Director David Strickland (whom I first worked with when he was a twelve-year-old wunderkind) and the theater company made the decision to invite the church choirs of greater Birmingham to participate rather than to cast a chorus with actors. It’s not complex for the chorus. You basically just sit on stage and sing on cue (with a few other things thrown in which can be learned in less than an hour). The UU church choir did the honors last night. I found the play engrossing and timely and I’ve been reflecting on it all day. It runs one more weekend so if you’re in town, it’s worth a trip to 5th Avenue North across from the Redmont Hotel.
While acts of violence are committed by deranged individuals on stage, they continue to be committed by the men and women who ostensibly work for We The People in real life. Iran remains a quagmire from which the only plausible exit is going to be putting ourselves in a worse and Iran in a better position than the thoughtful diplomacy of previous administrations. Leaks suggest that Iran’s bombing of our Middle East bases has been far worse than the Pentagon is willing to admit and the repair costs will run in the billions. The rest of the Middle East appears highly unstable, and the Netanyahu government continues its usual rapacious and aggressive policies. INS announced this week that protesting or criticizing the state of Israel could be grounds for the denial or revocation of a visa or green card. They’re also hard at work on facial recognition technologies which could easily be turned against political opposition. The president threatened to throw Spain out of NATO (something he does not have the power to do) as the Spanish Prime Minister remains highly critical of our adventures in Iran and the president still seems very confused about the role of a defensive alliance in an aggressive campaign.
The weaponization of the DOJ against Trump’s political enemies reached a new low with the somewhat laughable allegations against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Basically, DOJ is trying to criminalize standard techniques that they themselves have employed for many decades when dealing with terrorist groups of any stripe. As there are few competent attorneys left at DOJ, I don’t really see this going very far – it’s more a battle of propaganda and public opinion and the news cycle than it is of actual criminality and most judges will toss it on merits (they can’t assign every federal case to Aileen Cannon). I have to wonder Cui Bono? Who benefits if SPLC is hamstrung? Predominantly right wing nativist racist groups and it’s just one more example of this administration wholeheartedly embracing their repellant philosophies.
Then there’s the news tidbit that suggests that no one at the White House understands high school physics. This involves the ‘renovations’ to the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. Trump was upset that the pool is dark and lined with a dark granite. He wanted to paint it turquoise as if it’s the pool at Mar-a-Lago. (Someone did step in and get it changed to ‘American Flag Blue’ which is a bit darker. Due to the nature of light and optics, for a pool to be a reflecting pool, it must have a dark lining. That’s what allows us to see a reflection. Light colors don’t do this. It’s why your average backyard swimming pool isn’t very good at reflecting. I keep telling myself physical objects can be repaired and replaced. But it’s going to be a lot harder to replace the institutions that are so casually being decimated. The latest being Trump’s firing of all the members of The National Science Board today. This body, which provides expert advice to the National Science Foundation, Congress, and other federal agencies, was created by Statute of Congress decades ago, so this move is of dubious legality at best and just another step in the continued destruction of education, science, and academia on which the last century of America was built. Maybe when I retire, I shall retire into some sort of bubble where no media can penetrate. I might be a happier man.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 