About time!
In January I turned 70, had a party, gave a speech.
I dislike pomp in most forms, and don't have much occasion to speak to more than a few people at a time. Here I allowed myself the luxury of a Talk.
I hammered it out the day of the party, and there it was: politics. Not my fave rave, but couldn't help it. It's the flavor of the year, and not a good one.
70th birthday party
January 21st 2017
I feel so happy having you all here
and being able, with huge help from John, to feed and water and entertain you.
I want you to kick back and enjoy yourselves, talk, dance, meditate, enjoy the
wonderful music of the evening, enjoy the ‘whine’ corner if you want to
complain about politics (a good pun suggested by Karin), try a game of chess,
whatever.
My blog book from Bicontinental
Boomer is on the counter on a string – take a look at it! Had it printed up
last week for fun—there are only two copies! It’s unedited, unadulterated and
pretty much in the order it was written. My random ramblings, essays, protests,
musings, etc. If there’s any demand I may have a second printing, with smaller
font and at lower cost. I’m not a regular on my own blog, but it’s still there
in the blogosphere waiting for my rants on Trump and nationalism.
Family and friends from be-Trumped
America – Kira, Pete and Nora, Jeff and Mel – dear International School friends
from pre-EU and post-Brexit United Kingdom, the Netherlands via Slovenia, dear
old friends who made the harrowing drive all the way from the Canton de Vaud,
other school friends, work friends, old Petit Jardin Day Care friends, Tuesday
Pote friends, Saturday market friends, Sunday Ladies friends, Shakespeare
friends, music friends, and dear friends who defy categorization– thank you
sooo much for coming here tonight!
And other close ones who could not be
here, here in spirit, some with the heavy burden of ill health.
Some things are harder to put
aside. The ‘unreal reality show’ as Gowri put it, of the Trump presidency. And
as our son Adam says about it – ‘it’s all a reality show’. And it is,
and I guess the sooner we acknowledge this new reality and reckon with its
consequences the better.
This morning I went with some
friends to the women’s solidarity march which went from the Jardin Anglais.
I think of a demonstration as a
last resort, a form of despair that gets your legs moving – that drives
collective protest– when people feel unheard, when injustice is not addressed,
when people have been cheated or lied to, oppressed, impoverished.
I’m not much of a marcher, though I
have close friends who are.
I marched against the war in
Vietnam in the sixties and in the seventies, and each time felt it was a cry .
The jury’s still out on that one – whether these protests made a real
difference – auditory and visual drives to change directed at a complex and cagey government.
Now I’m marching because things are
angling out of control and a deep and dangerous populism is emerging --riddled
with prejudice, frustration, incomprehension and fatigue with what government
was apparently unable to do.
I wonder how much we can ask of any
government, any group, and when things begin to veer out of control.
But we must be vigilant for signs
of incipient fascism, a term I have never used to refer to any American or
western European country since Spain under Franco, with question marks for
Stalin, who was still alive when I’d
learned how to read, Hoxha and
Ceaucescu, who dictated under other flags…..as a very fortunate American
of Jewish descent living in a free Europe…...
The strange rhetoric we are hearing
from politicians, and now from a US President, of all people, of all
countries…..very troubling.
What at first seemed amusing, a
gamey game show of a wealthy manipulative man, now a man who cannot help lying
and whose moral compass has no point and spins with his whims and winds up
pointing nowhere but in his own ego.
Surely, we think, he will show
compassion, understanding, build bridges.
But listening, after the fact, to
his inaugural speech, every statement that could be construed as positive has a
troubling undertone, something subversive, unsavory. Change there will be, and just you wait, he tells us.
I don’t think we can----it is
terrible to see it unravel, undone, stripped of its sense of good, of
equality, of justice.
Even if a government never lives up
to its lofty ideals, people must carry on striving to live up to them.
Not just another birthday. A big
one, and you’re celebrating with me. It’s a real honor you’ve come here – and I
hope you eat, drink, make merry and are happy tonight, and we can forget the
troubles of a troubled world and the troubles of our smaller worlds.
