Month: September 2020

The Wit and Wisdom of Raylan Givens

One of my all-time favorite TV or movie lines comes from Elmore Leonard’s Justified, a long-form television show chock-full of memorable quotes. In one particular episode, US Marshall Raylan Givens explains his basic philosophy: “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

I was reminded of this line while watching the latest smear commercial by the Donald Trump campaign. In the ad, the GOP tries to paint Joe Biden as unreliable by showing a film clip from 1987 in which he lied. That in itself is no surprise; that’s what politicians do. They lie, exaggerate, or spin everything to make themselves look better. What makes this ad so amazing is that they had to go back 33 years to find such a clip. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting with the president in which he devised that brilliant strategy and decided to use the clip. His aides would have been looking uneasily at each other wondering who would speak up. Finally, one of them would mumble, “Umm . . . sir . . . Mr. President . . . according to the latest impartial fact-check count, you have misled, deceived, or outright lied well over 20,000 times—and that’s just in the four years since you have taken office. Last weekend, you told four lies in one tweeted sentence. Do we really want to go there?”

Trump, of course, operates by the philosophy of “Why tell the truth when a lie will do?” and has doubled down every time someone calls him on this multitude of prevarications. He simply points to someone else, says they are the liars, and indicates that they are out to get him. (This is, by the way, the definition of paranoia.) According to him, the “liberal media,” which includes every news source on the planet except the bobble-headed sycophants at Fox, lied. The Democrats lied. The generals and officers such as Colin Powell, James Mattis, and Alexander Vindman lied. The journalists who reported that Trump called military personnel who gave their lives defending this nation “losers” and “suckers” lied (even Fox verified that one). The doctors and scientists who actually care about the number of deaths in the US lied. The women he assaulted lied. Authors who write about him—even close family members—all lied. His own appointees who insisted on doing the right thing, rather than what they are ordered by him to do, lied. The few Republicans with the guts to speak out lied. Our own intelligence agencies, from the FBI to the CIA, lied. You get the picture: He met liars in the morning. He met liars all day long. The poor man is inundated with liars.

What would Raylan would say about that situation? I have a pretty good idea.

So, in Trump’s disturbed mind, or at least in his bombastic political rhetoric, the entire world is part of a massive conspiracy to discredit him with “hoaxes,” “fake news,” or other falsehoods. He constantly assures his followers that he—and he alone—is capable of telling them the truth. To students of history, this must all sound eerily familiar. It’s a technique called “The Big Lie,” and has been used by such luminaries as Benito Mussolini, Joe McCarthy, and the man who perfected it, Adolf Hitler. The “Big Lie” means that the speaker makes up something outrageous, and repeats it so often, and with such conviction, that people stop questioning it, regardless of the ridiculous nature of the statement. Followers become hypnotized by the Big Lie in a cult-like fashion. Hitler, like Trump, harangued his audiences with a barrage of messages designed to generate fear and distrust. He created a fictional conspiracy and convinced the German people that the Jews were responsible for the Great Depression and every other problem they faced. Newspapers, radio stations, and anyone who disagreed with him were labelled liars, and he contended that only he would tell them the truth. Amazingly, this strategy worked, and he slowly eliminated all opposition within the government and news media until he had dismantled a republican form of government and replaced it with a personal dictatorship. You all know the rest of that story.

With an election coming up, a Nazi-like disaster can still be averted. The bigger concern, though, is the long-term damage that Trump’s tsunami of lies has done to democracy and our nation going forward. The recently released tapes of Trump talking to Bob Woodward indicate that he absolutely understood the lethal nature of the Covid virus back in February and March, but consciously chose to lie about it as a political strategy. The fact that about 40% of American voters still support this man despite the relentless lies, the complete destruction of our national reputation, and the staggering failure of his response to the Covid crisis, indicates that the truth and competent leadership are no longer expected from our president. A significant portion of the country just wants to hear comfortable lies that fit their world view. Or, more accurately, most of his followers actually believe the fictional version of the truth that is manufactured by Trump and his Fox allies, regardless of how preposterous the lie and despite all evidence to the contrary. And now, thanks to the Woodward tapes, we know that he purposely creates those lies and falsehoods; they are not slips of the tongue or “jokes” as his spin masters disingenuously try to characterize them. They are intentional, because he knows that those 40% of the people will accept them as the truth. I can’t imagine a more dangerous development than this.

In a different Justified episode, Raylan Givens attacks a criminal while trying to elicit information about the location of a missing and endangered person. While the man is still on the ground, Raylan ejects a bullet from his gun and tosses it on the man’s chest. Then he says, “Next one’s coming faster.”

As a metaphor for our current situation, that guy on the ground is us, the people of the United States, laid out flat by the string of disasters wrought by Donald Trump and his audacious lies. Raylan personifies the warning about what will happen if Trump is re-elected. “Next one’s coming faster.”

Covid Summer

We’re approaching the end of summer now, as the fall season officially begins on September 22. The end of one season or the start of another always represent nice break points in the year. Most people just ignore those artificial landmarks and plow on with their lives, satisfied with surviving another season. Others change their smoke-alarm batteries or their heating-system filters on those days each year. The anal-retentive side of me applauds those people, but I usually forget to take such responsible actions. Instead, I like to pause on those milestone days and take stock of the previous season. So, how will I remember the summer of 2020?

Certainly, this has been the strangest year of our lives. When spring officially began back in March, Kathleen and I were returning home from Florida under surreal conditions. The Covid emergency was just beginning, and no one was quite sure what was going to happen next. Most businesses were closing up and we weren’t even sure we would be able to find food, gas, and lodging on our return trip. Despite the fact that numbers of infected were skyrocketing and people around the world were dying by the thousands, our president assured us that, if we just did nothing and removed all restrictions, the virus would magically disappear. Nearly 190,000 American lives later, he is still saying the same thing and continues to provide zero leadership during this national emergency. People often refer to September 11, 2001 as “the day the world changed.” This virus, however, has been much more traumatic and will produce many more life-altering changes than that terrible day at the start of the new century. Still, as they say, life goes on, and everyone has tried to cope with this bizarre situation in their own manner.

Many people have embraced their families as a haven against the storm. Others, forced to work from home while simultaneously teaching school lessons to their children, would probably prefer a little less family. One of the highlights of the summer for me occurred on a night in which the grandchildren were staying overnight with us. Luke (7) and Abigail (10) were sitting at the counter in the kitchen, starting their dinner, and Kathleen went to the refrigerator to get them something to drink. Since we are the grandparents, and our job is to spoil the kids, she agreed to give them a soft drink. She pulled out a two-liter bottle of Sierra Mist and, for some inexplicable reason, began shaking it. I’m not sure if she thought it was some sort of “shake-before-using” fluid made from concentrate, or if she was so engrossed with her conversation with the kids that she forgot what she was doing. But there she was, one of the smartest women I know, moving the bottle of carbonated liquid up and down vigorously. Of course, the predictable happened: when she opened the top, the clear, sugary juice exploded in a volcanic eruption. We’ve all seen this scenario in cartoons or bad sitcoms, where a hapless character just stands there as liquid from a broken faucet or some other source blasts them in the face for an extended period of time. They don’t move away, they are simply immobilized while the dousing goes on and on. A real person would never do that, you might think. Any normal person would quickly move away. Not so, my friends. The kids roared with laughter as the sticky soda shot into Kathleen’s face until its energy was spent and the carbonation subsided. Not only did she not duck away, I swear she actually leaned into it. I must admit that I was laughing right along with the kids. That is, up until I realized who was going to have to clean that viscous mess from the cabinets, floor, and the various items we had on the counter-tops. It took two days and multiple cleanings on my hands and knees before we stopped sticking to the floor. On the bright side, though, the kids have an indelible memory of Nana Henderson from the Covid Summer.

We also remodeled our master bathroom in July. We had planned to tackle the project next year, but moved it up when the shower grout and tile began to crumble, creating water stains on the ceiling below. The room was gutted and everything either re-built or replaced in a 2 ½-week project. Our contractor had already done several things for us in our first months in the duplex/condo, and this, too was excellent work. It cost considerably more than we originally planned to spend, but the end result is a master bath you might find in a high-end hotel, complete with a state-of-the art bidet. As you might guess, the bidet was not my idea. I have to admit, though, that the heated seat is pretty nice. Also, whenever you walk into the room, a light goes on and the outer lid opens up automatically. It’s a nice demonstration of respect. I feel like a Four-Star General walking into a room full of Privates. Also, when I need to . . . do what men do in a bathroom . . . I just reach to the left and press a button, mechanically lifting the seat. No more bending over to raise the lid like some sort of a cave man. Another press of the button lowers it when I’m done. Very civilized.

As the world ground to a halt this summer, the slower pace actually created one of those “stop-and-smell-the roses” moments for me. During my many ambulatory explorations of River Falls, I finally noticed that this town is a hotbed of Little Free Libraries. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, it is an informal program that began about ten miles from here, in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009. Using scrap lumber, a man named Todd Bol built a box in the shape of a schoolhouse on a post, put a few used books in it, and installed it at the end of his driveway. The idea was that anyone who happened by could take book or leave a book in the box in order to encourage recreational reading in an inexpensive way. This simple concept took off, and today there are more than 100,000 of these little boxes registered around the world, with thousands of other, unregistered libraries springing up every day. This summer, I have discovered at least a dozen of these around town. There is a whimsical, serendipitous quality to opening the door and seeing what treasures might be hidden inside. In a regular library, you tend to know what you’re looking for and go to that section of the building. With the LFLs, however, you never know what you’ll find. This summer, I’ve read several books that I stumbled onto in this way. So, if you’re seeking something new to read, look for a little box shaped like a house and take a peek inside. Or drop off one of those books that are just gathering dust in your basement. You might be starting that book on a journey that will take it far from home.

The other thing that has happened recently is that I have started a new job. I have tried golfing this summer with terrible results. I enjoy playing, and I hit just enough good shots to give me hope and bring me back for another round. I finally came to the realization that, if I want to improve, I have to play more often. Golf is an expensive hobby, however, and I can only afford to go out once every other week or so. I also go to the park to hit fairly regularly, but I spend more time looking for my balls in the tall grass than I do hitting them. So, when I saw a pop-up, “now Hiring” ad on the website of the Kilkarney Hills Golf Club a few minutes from my house, I thought it must be fate. During my interview, I was asked why I wanted that particular job. At that moment, I realized that there is a wonderful freedom that accompanies applying for a job that you don’t really need. So I just waxed poetic about how, since my days as an 11-year-old caddy, I have loved the sight of a golf course in the morning, with the silver dew glistening on the green grass. He hired me on the spot. It probably had less to do with the poetry and more to do with the fact that all of his summer employees were returning to high school or college, but I am now gainfully employed once again. I will be working the pro shop, the kitchen, and the bar simultaneously, but it’s a small operation and it should be fun. I even offered to mow the fairways, should my services be required. The best part is that I get to play golf and use the driving range for free as often as I want. Actually, it just dawned on me as I was typing this: I have no idea how much I will be paid. I probably should have asked that during the tense salary negotiations that accompanied my interview. The phrase “minimum wage” springs to mind, but the free golf is the perk I was after.

Okay, so the past three months haven’t been, in the words of an old Nat King Cole song, “Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer,” and you may not want to “dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer.” (If you want some campy fun, check out the film clip below of Nat entertaining a bunch of really, really white people.) Most Americans have not been able to take their usual vacations, cruises, or trips to exotic lands. Instead, it has been a summer of simple pleasures, and, for me, the season had its moments. Take a minute to stop and think about what you will remember most from the Covid Summer of 2020.