Category: Uncategorized

Ever since I learned about Pablo Neruda’s disabled daughter and how he abandoned her I’ve felt revulsion toward the man. Then I saw his admission of rape in his memoir and felt more revulsion. Then I revisited his praise of Stalin…and so on as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would say.

Poets are infantile, self-absorbed, charming, and generally not upstanding citizens. That and a buck gets you a cup of Joe. Didn’t we resolve this with Pound? Poets are lousy neighbors but still we want them around.

Of course the solution was to put them in the academy that old flophouse for deviants.

**

So anyway, last night I dreamt I was young once more. I was taking a class at the University of Iowa’s “Writer’s Workshop” with the late Donald Justice, a poet of distinction who was my teacher in the late 1970’s. Don was flinty, how does one say it–he’d fillet his students. He saw himself as the bulwark of literary decency. He was often mean.

He made young students who deigned to study poetry writing flee his classroom in tears.

Then the “visiting poets” would come to town to read their poems and attend boozy parties in their honor. They too were mean.

**

The only kind poet I ever met during those years was Gary Snyder who showed genuine kindness to his audience and at the requisite party “leaned in” as they say, listening to what the silly but yearning graduate students had to say.

**

Some poets are like playground bullies. They declare their patch of sand and dare you to enter their imaginary sacred space.

In my dream I was again in a classroom with Donald Justice. Daylight was turning de Chirico green which meant a tornado was coming.

Suddenly Justice had a conductor’s baton and was waving it about. He said it was a poet’s job to conduct the storm.

Even in my dream I knew this was exquisite bullshit.

Thank God I woke up.

**

Don was a good poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner. He didn’t like young people.

I admire poets who take a genuine interest in young people.

I read poets who were never nice.

I don’t have to like an artist to know her or his merit.

Once, again, years ago I saw the poet May Sarton humiliate a young woman who dared to say she was interested in the connections between poetry and dance. Sarton looked the poor girl in the eye and said, “you my dear are a fake.”

So, heck, she didn’t like young people.

But she sure could write about being old.

**

Auden said famously: “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”

Do you understand? Kindness is a mixed feeling.

And it’s what’s required if you want to live among people.

I am like you, by turns terrified or resisting terror. Oh my ancestors I see what you were about. My great grandfather, a wheelwright in rural Finland built more than his share of baby coffins. He saw trees as signals of dark futures.

It is sobering and admissible to say it will never be any better. That it’s wrong is beside the point. Dark feelings have you by the throat. Who can argue with feelings?

I see what you were about Grand-Grand-Papa. It’s the argument with darkness makes tomorrow possible.

It’s the Finnish lullaby which was always a dirge.

**

Who can argue with feelings? What a foolish question. Even a house cat does it. It bites its tail.

Ah but the cat doesn’t worry about tomorrow.

It doesn’t have to examine the trees and think, “there’s a coffin in there.”

I don’t think I’d prefer the gritty phenomenology of the cat.

Still I’d like to reach back through history and tell my forebear: “some day the trees will just be trees, antibiotics are coming.”

**

In Finland they burn the dead winter grass.

“I like the dreams of the future, better than the history of the past.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Do you see? Tomorrow’s people will be more loving though you can’t suppose it. (Me)

It is hard to believe in better dreams. It takes more than a little work. Man Oh Man soul work is difficult.

White silence is violence is a phrase that invites soul work for white people. Growing is not easy.

America with its long history of torch light parades and hangings and white silences.

Little America with its redlining and its gated communities, having abandoned “we the people” as, well, inconvenient.

Damn right I like the dreams of the future.

At the end of his life Jefferson wrote:

“I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance….”

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…”

Thomas Jefferson would have loved that song.

All human beings, whether they believe in God or The Gods or nothing at all walk about saying “one more minute” and only the birds hear it.

There are so many things I can’t explain. “Inside” I take things on faith. “Outside” I prize what’s explainable. This is why I only hint at God. “I believe,” I say, if pressed and change the subject.

I don’t want you to know about my soggy, superstitious, altogether sentimental heart.

Nor do I want you to know I think we’re in this world to suffer into truth. Think of the stars filled with tears and wisdoms.

I’m a lovely failure. I read as much scientific inquiry as I can get. I especially love the double hydrogen bonds that hold DNA together. I love Gregor Mendel but wonder if he ever ate the damn peas.

Are you a lovely failure?

“What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.” (Edmund Wilson)

Edmund Wilson was not a lovely failure. He was mean. I swear my soggy heart wishes to never be mean and grieves for me when I am.

About face.

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before–more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.” (Charles Dickens, “Great Expectations”)

About face again.

“What was in our stars
That destined us for sorrow?”
(Anna Akhmatova)

Don’t worry Anna, that’s just wisdom coming back.

I’ve learned to ask questions of myself during “the pandemic” as we call it though I prefer “the time of anger and courage” hearkening to Augustine’s maxim: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

One principal self-directed question concerns my vanity though it’s not framed as a matter of sin. Blind as I am I’ve been told I don’t belong from kindergarten to faculty lounges. Vanity ain’t narcissism if you’re a cripple. It’s the third daughter Augustine forgot. She’s called Forbearance which is a lumbering and graceless name but nevertheless she knows more about her sisters than most.

She’s lately asked me questions as I sit alone and ruminate about being 65 years old and still watching my disabled peers struggle for what we call “inclusion” and which I call citizenship. An aside: if you’re blind and can’t get a driver’s license you can get a state issued I.D. that resembles it at the motor vehicle department. The average motor vehicle department in America is located beyond the reach of our meager public transportation systems. Maybe you can afford a taxi or Uber but given the 80 per cent unemployment rate for blind folks maybe you can’t. Without the plastic card your citizenship is in question. Inclusion is to citizenship as the lightning bug is to lightning.

We disabled live between Anger and Courage as the middle daughter, the one who says “get on with it” and then stirs whatever is in the elastic retort. Forbearance is the girl who loves chemistry and owns Carl Jung’s dictionary of alchemical symbols. She’ll turn shit into souffles when she has to.

But her middle name is Vanity.

(My vote is still out as to her last name but I’d like to think its Grace.)

I belong in this room. I matter. This is more than stamina. I belong genuinely. The disabled belong without question.

Resistance takes clarity, faith, energy, spirit, and a never retreat intelligence. Black Lives Matter depends on this as do all human rights struggles.

Yet sitting in solitude I’m aware I sometimes react too viscerally to the world, insist others are wrong, see ableism where it may not exist–this broken gate wasn’t designed as a slap at the disabled–it’s just broken. As the poet David Ignatow once wrote:

“I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.”

Vanity is, in my case, an overripe insistence on my victimization. This is an American problem and its larger than my small orbit. The disabled are in fact treated horrifically and that’s not debatable but the overripeness I’m describing is a matter for some reflection–at least for me.

Ignatow’s poem depends upon the word “content” and therefore we must assume he’s a man of some privilege. He can let go of his mountain envy. I live in a world that’s not accepting of the blind and built environments are nearly always exclusionary. Try getting through an airport screening process with a guide dog sometime.

I am allowed to be angry. I’m called upon quite often to have courage. Crossing a Manhattan street at rush hour when blind is in fact an act of courage even though the disability community winces at such language.

Now I see that I haven’t been good with the side effects of persistence. My Forbearance becomes Vanity. I’m willing to pound the table, assume “the system” is against me when sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it really isn’t.

All successful spiritual lives demand an engagement with Mr. and Mrs. Vanity.

There’s much to be angry about.

It pisses me off no end that the Democratic National Convention just now concluded had nothing to say about disability.

It pisses me off that the disabled are ten times more likely to die than others during this pandemic.

There are many rages.

It’s the inauthentic rage I’m trying to figure out.

In my recently published memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey” I wrote about an incident I experienced in New York City shortly after getting my first guide dog, a sturdy yellow Labrador named Corky. In this scene I aim at comprehending inauthentic rage and changing it:

“I walked into a large computer store on Sixth Avenue. I wanted to purchase a laptop. As we pushed through the door a security guard put his hand on my chest. “You no come in, no dog,” he said.

I pressed forward and the guard stepped back. “Stop! Stop!” he shouted and waved his arms. Customers stared. My civil rights and the security guard’s dignity were equally delicate. I didn’t know where the guard came from, but his accent sounded East African. How could he possibly know anything about guide dogs? The store’s manager hadn’t given him information. All he knew was “no dogs allowed,” and there I was with a big-assed dog. As we stood in the doorway I figured it would be my job to foster dignity for both of us. They hadn’t taught me this at Guiding Eyes; they’d given me a booklet with access laws—a useful thing—I had the right to go anywhere the public went—but no one had mentioned emotional intelligence or how to engage in public mediation.

I made Corky sit. “Listen,” I said, softly, “get the manager. This will be okay. This is a special dog for the blind. I wanted to turn our misunderstanding into something respectful.

The manager was one of those guys you see all the time in big-city stores: sadder than his customers, red-faced and put-upon. He had a scoured toughness. He approached and began shouting at the guard. “It’s a seeing-eye dog for God’s sake! Let him in! Sorry, sorry!”

My fight-or-flee rush was subsiding—I wanted all three of us to experience kindness.

I was in a Manhattan electronics store and dignity was in peril. It would have been easy to say “Fuck it” and look out for myself alone. I’d gotten into the store. I was angry. I could have pitched a fit. But I didn’t feel like doing that. The guard’s name was Ekwueme. My name was Stephen. The manager’s name was Phil. “Listen,” I said, “dogs for the blind are not common, you don’t see them every day. This is Corky. She’s very smart.” I let my voice become soft. Ekwueme and Phil both petted Corky. A customer approached, said: “I’ve raised puppies for the guide-dog school! Best dogs in the world!” Phil seemed suddenly pleased, as if he too was philanthropic, or could be someday. Ekwueme admitted he loved dogs.

Outside with a computer under my arm, I reckoned life with Corky was more complex than just a story of freedom. Ekwueme and Phil would become legion in my travels but I didn’t know it yet. What I did know was reflected in a quote I’d always liked from Martin Luther King Jr.: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

I sensed that having a service dog meant something more than honoring my own rights. “Take the first step in faith,” said Dr. King. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

I admit freely I’m not always this good. I share with disability cultural warriors the full recognition that our lives are often at stake. From the medical care system to the streets, from disaster relief to public policing the disabled are ill treated and often threatened.

I do however understand I’m not always able to find the proper musical notation for emotional intelligence and with that failure I can be brittle, self-assured, and wrongheaded. In America this doesn’t make me exceptional. It makes me like everyone else. Maybe that’s what my Vanity is after?

In his new book “Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives” Philip N. Howard suggests that according to his research at Oxford University, there was a one to one ration of junk news to professional news on Twitter during the 2016 presidential election. I say “suggests” because Howard is doing research and one thing researchers know for sure is that it leads to more work. I’m willing to venture the ratio has only gotten worse.

Howard writes: “for each link to a story produced by a professional news organization, there was another link to content that was extremist, sensationalist, or conspiratorial or to other forms of junk news.”

Bots, algorithms, trolls, and organized cyber disinformation campaigns have strengthened over the past four years and accordingly we don’t know what the ratios may be right now.

The effect of so much disinformation is to turn people off from believing in the very things social democracies stand for: justice, equality, truth in the practice of law and medicine, the free expression of ideas and the dignity of citizenship. Instead you’re to embrace the idea that the system is out to destroy you, cheat you, undermine the good life as you imagine it. The “Lie Machine” is built from fascist ingredients: sinister minorities or foreigners are stealing your life force.

The social effects of this are now everywhere. As a university professor I’m watching many of my colleagues assert that the administration is trying to kill students and staff by reopening the campus–this despite tremendous safeguards and protocols to keep people safe. It remains to be seen if my university, Syracuse, can stay open, but I know full well that the leadership is not sinister or malign. Yet there’s a one to one ratio of vetted accurate information to falsehood in digital spaces and public exhaustion and conspiratorial thinking is the direct result.

Howard writes: “Public life is being torn apart. Lie machines sow distrust and infect political conversations with anger, moral outrage, and invective in ways that forestall consensus building. It is not simply that social media may have side effects, making us dependent on our screens for news and information, or that our mobile phones may be isolating us from our neighbors. Troll armies, bot networks, and fake news operations are formal structures of misinformation, purposefully built.”

“Many outrageous political stories, rumors, and accusations spread rapidly over social media, and there are businesses that profit by marketing, amplifying, and advertising political lies. In 2016, bots were successful in spreading a crazy story, often called #pizzagate, that supposedly linked Hillary Clinton with a pedophilia ring based out of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC. In 2020, it was automation on TikTok and Twitter that tried to convince local activists and the world at large to dismiss Hong Kong’s democracy advocates as violent radicals. Every country now has similar kinds of politically potent lies—stories that remain believed long after they have been disproven. Who takes a potent piece of misinformation that serves the interests of political elites or some ideological agenda, does the market analysis, and unleashes a marketing campaign over social media? Who are the political operatives who buy and sell our data, make or break politicians, and distribute political lies over the internet?”

Of the “who” there are many. The arrest of Steve Bannon for his role in crowd sourcing fraud is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg as we say.

Howard:

“There are multiple challenges before us if we want to live in functional democracies: A politician who doesn’t like how a question is phrased dismisses the questioner as “alt-right” or “alt-left.” A political leader who doesn’t like how a news story is framed labels it “fake news.” A political consultant who doesn’t like the evidence comes up with “alternative facts.” Growing numbers of citizens believe junk science about climate change and public health. Traditional pollsters can’t call an election, and the surprising outcomes of elections seem to have their roots in manipulative leaders in other countries.”

This is a very timely and important book. As he says:

“By closely examining lie machines, we can understand how to take them apart. I offer basic policy recommendations on how we can protect political speech while demolishing the mechanisms for producing, distributing, and marketing misinformation. I provide civic defense tips that should help us proactively protect ourselves in the years ahead. Yet the best way to solve collective problems is with collective action, so I also identify ways that our public agencies can protect us with policies that make it tough for these big lie machines to operate in our democracies. It is possible to block the production, dissemination, and marketing of big political lies, but we’ll have to act together to do this effectively.”

I’ve long been fascinated by conspiracy theories and with Trump’s proleptic declaration that the presidential election is already a rigged affair and with staged events where quack doctors share stories of alien sex it seems like a good moment for me to out myself as a skeptic with skin in the game.

I was eight when John F. Kennedy was murdered. I came home from school and told my mother he was dead. My mother hit me and said: “Don’t you ever say something like that again!” My mother was a drunk and in that instant I understood the world could be ugly and adults were not always reliable.

My mother did me a favor. My nascent discovery was and remains my principle antidote to conspiratorial belief systems. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote: “the world is ugly and the people are sad” and knowing this is central. Add “the adults aren’t reliable” and you’ve got a prescription to think for yourself. It can be a lonely world if you don’t believe in conspiracies.

How could a chinless psychopath shoot the most powerful and handsome man in the world? The story was too ugly and random. Straight away the conspiracy theorists said it couldn’t be so. Never-mind that the Warren Commission got it right. Forget evidence based research. Why, the Warren Commission was part of the coverup you see? John Kennedy had to have been the victim of an elegant, secret, furtive, organized system. The truth is just too painful: JFK didn’t want secret service agents on the back of his car; Oswald actually worked in a building situated along the motorcade route; he owned a shitty mail order Italian carbine that he’d already used in a failed attempt to kill an Air Force general; he actually had no ideology at all; he wanted his fifteen minutes of fame; opportunity knocked; he committed a murder most foul as Dylan says.

What’s the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory? The Wannsee Conference was an actual conspiracy. Powerful men gathered in Nazi Germany and outlined the logistics necessary to kill the Jews. People gathering in secret to plan crimes is the vital chief ingredient for a true conspiracy. This happens in fraternity houses, corporate board rooms and malevolent union meetings and in hundreds of other clandestine spots. The difference between a conspiracy and a theory is the former is provable and that’s because conspirators talk. Almost no one can keep a secret. Even the CIA can’t keep secrets. Nixon couldn’t do it. Bill Clinton. J. Edgar Hoover. (When JFK was informed that Hoover was having surgery he said: “What’s he getting? A hysterectomy?”) In general you can’t keep secrets in a free society. Even Stalin couldn’t hide the fact that he made his dinner guests dance to a gramophone record of howling wolves.

The truth will out. Cue Jack Nicholson: “You can’t handle the truth!”

In short, that’s the ars poetica of conspiracy theorists though they don’t know it. They’ll always say you’re insufficiently schooled on the subject at hand–fake moon landings, George Soros, hydroxychloroquine or the fraudulent media who ruin everything in the world (this is essentially the eggs in their mayonnaise) there’s not a fact that’s safe from the cool kids in the conspiracy lunch room–see their moue of disgust, you nerd unfit to sit at their table, you with your dopey facts, you dweeb!

There’s an adolescent quality to the affair. Left wingers and right wingers are equally prone to this. The left thinks 9-11 was orchestrated by George W. Bush. The right thinks COVID-19 was invented by Bill Gates. Some on the left tend to believe Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the Democratic nomination both in 2016 and 2020; people on the right think the post office is their enemy. Each viewpoint is puerile, unmoored from reality, and rife with teen angst. Scary secretive adults are the problem! Don’t trust anyone over thirty. (Remember that?)

Joe Forest has a terrific article over at Medium entitled “Why Your Christian Friends and Family are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories.”

He writes:

“When people attach their belief in a conspiracy theory to their ego, it can be nearly impossible to convince them that they’re wrong. Every piece of contrarian evidence you present to a friend or family member simply becomes part of the conspiracy and expands the scope of the deception.

That’s what “They” want you to believe. If you just did some research, you’d find The Truth. All your sources are just part of the Cover-Up. I wish you’d open your eyes and not be such a sheep.

It’s an insidious bit of circular logic that not only creates a criticism-proof belief system, but it also makes a twisted sort of sense.

Conspiracy theories are self-perpetuating rationalization machines. They eat facts, distort reality, and destroy relationships. And, by the time someone realizes they’re in too deep, it’s often too late to salvage a reality-based worldview (or the relationships of the people they isolated in the process).”

**

One of the best books on the subject of conspiracy theories is by the Dutch psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen. In “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories” he points out that there are five essential elements to the thing:

"1. Patterns – Any conspiracy theory explains events by establishing nonrandom connections between actions, objects, and people. Put differently, a conspiracy theory assumes that the chain of incidents that caused a suspect event did not occur through coincidence.

2. Agency – A conspiracy theory assumes that a suspect event was caused on purpose by intelligent actors: There was a sophisticated and detailed plan that was intentionally developed and carried out.

3. Coalitions – A conspiracy theory always involves a coalition or group of multiple actors, usually but not necessarily humans (examples of nonhuman conspiracy theories are The Matrix and the “alien lizard” conspiracy theories). If one believes that a single individual, a lone wolf, is responsible for a suspect event, this belief is not a conspiracy theory – for the simple reason that it does not involve a conspiracy.

4. Hostility – A conspiracy theory tends to assume the suspected coalition to pursue goals that are evil, selfish, or otherwise not in the public interest. Certainly people may sometimes suspect a benevolent conspiracy, and benevolent conspiracies indeed do exist (as adults we conspire every year to convince children of the existence of Santa Claus). But in the present book, as well as in other literature on this topic “ the term “conspiracy theory” is exclusive to conspiracies that are suspected to be hostile. Belief in benevolent conspiracy theories is likely to be grounded in different psychological processes than described in this book.

5. Continued secrecy – Conspiracy theories are about coalitions that operate in secret. With “continued” secrecy, I mean that the conspiracy has not yet been exposed by hard evidence, and hence its assumed operations remain secret and uncertain. A conspiracy that is exposed and hence proven true (e.g., the Wannsee conference) is no longer a “theory”; instead, it is an established example of actual conspiracy formation. Conspiracy theories are thus by definition unproven.”


This list is of course built on the premise that falsifiability is impossible. Research is suspect; news agencies are merely propaganda; universities are places of collective ideational malevolence.

Dorothy, wake up!