Greed was good.

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Admin

Michael Douglas was attractive. I don’t know that was ever a great actor but he had a style which is primarily what famous and good looking actors really need.

He is most famous for playing the role at the left.

Gordon Gekko, the Wall Street tycoon who lectured a bunch of neophytes that “Greed is good,” because greed, he felt, drove the economy. At least that’s what I presume he was saying. He believed that greed was a prime mover of humanity.

I’m not really sure he (meaning Oliver Stone, who wrote the character) is wrong. Ghandi almost said the same thing at the outbreak of the second world war. He is quoted somewhere as saying something like , ‘”‘you will never stop war until you solve the problem of human greed.’

As an aside: Virginia Woolf was asked, as a premise to Three Guineas (a fictional essay which is structured as a response to a letter received from an educated gentleman), how “we” might solve the problem of war. She turned the question on its head, and essentially didn’t answer the question, by pointing out that men were educated and almost no money was spent on a woman’s education, and what was spent, was spent mostly on teaching her domestic duties. It’s almost impossible to believe, but this argument is still absolutely relevant today.

I’ve been thinking about greed lately, because someone recently said to me, “What’s the matter, don’t you love money,” and I was almost physically repulsed by the question. It was like someone had thrown rotten and stinking food on me. I recovered by trying to say something silly, like, “I love wasting money.” But I can’t stop thinking about the smile on that person’s face as he talked about money (the money we were going to get). And to a lesser extent, greed in general.

Greed is pernicious. Philosophically, it is nearly identical to the question of evil. With evil, we are always trying to decide, from a philosophical point of view, whether or not evil is a real thing. This is because we can divide the world into good and bad, but stretching it to evil and — I suppose the opposite might be “divine” — is when what we call good and bad, which is purely an earthly phenomenon, starts to take on characteristics of religion or spiritual. So we have a car accident which results in someone’s death, which we label “bad,” but then vehicular manslaughter, which we label “evil.” Both are caused by a 2-1/2 ton motorized machine running over a soft body. One, however, has an intent that the other doesn’t. That’s why it’s hard to define “evil” and relatively easy to define “bad.”

Greed is similar. But I think it’s got it’s own — I don’t know — personality, maybe. And it would probably be good for all of us, in this western world, to think about how we have lived in a world dominated by greed since about 1980, when Ronald Reagan inaugurated an era of unregulated and unshackled greed. The exact quote in the movie is, “Greed, for a lack of a better term, is good.” That movie, “Wall Street,” was released in 1987, and the film opens in 1985 which means Oliver Stone probably wrote it somewhere around 1984/1985. Reaganism had taken over by then and he was just into his second term. In 1985 Margaret Thatcher was about 6 years into her long run. They both, perhaps because of the influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, gave people, including a young Donald Trump, that the pursuit of more and more money was a good thing.

The orange menace is full on greed. He’s all in for greed. He loves it. He is not a Gordon Gekko, who was also a thinker and probably a great Wall Street business person. No, the Orange Menace is one of those people in the audience, who only ate the fried chicken on his lunch plate because he hates vegetables, who daydreams of being admired simply for being rich and having beautiful woman hang on him, all day long.

What’s happening now, imho, is the death throes of greed. Even the 2025 project which they are still trying to implement — though it’s failing everywhere — is basically a treatise for embracing greed. Greed asks stupid questions. Greed ignores logic. Greed asks, “Why share money with people who are too stupid to work?” “Why should the government tax the wealthy when the wealthy could get richer by keeping that money?” “Why shouldn’t the tax code be rewritten and rewritten, for the benefit of the rich?”

But greed is insidious. It gets inside us. It gets inside all of us.

Trump’s multi-faced and ham-fisted attempt to imprint himself on everything in Washington is a sexual gift basket for a man who has made Greed his life’s work. He wants to be able to drive around Washington and see his photo everywhere, and gold plated statues of himself, and see his name on things like the White House Blahroom and the Arch De Disaster. This is where Greed ends, goes back underground. And it will continue with many more outrages which will make it seem like it’s never ending. But there is nothing more than this for Greed. This is the last stage of Greed — the stage when King Midas touched everything and it turned to gold, including a grape he wanted to eat and his daughter when she entered the room and he hugged her. Online, it’ll tell you that the story of Midas is about how we become slaves to our desires. I don’t think that’s the case. He wasn’t a slave. He was just gripped by greed.

With Trump, if he were, to say to himself, this dictator chic is awful and weird, I’m going to start giving away my money. Even then, I don’t think he could be redeemed from Greed. Midas begged the Gods to remove the curse of his golden touch, and they gave him a typical mythological type formula that got rid of it by washing his hands in a river. He went on to live a happy life and was beloved by his people. And I can almost see Trump being that type of person. He’d have to do a lot of penancing to get there — perhaps even public self-flagellation, but I could almost see it.

But it’s too late for him, and for us. As we call the kettle black, turn our back on our ancestors, and blame the immigrants for all our problems, we will continue to cover statues in gold. And pretend that the greed Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher brought into this world has nothing to do with it.

Posted in Money, Politics | Comments Off on Greed was good.

The minutiae of a writer’s life

Posted on May 15, 2026 by Admin

This is so typical of the scraps to which writers must cling in order to convince themselves that they are writers, and not hobbyists or imposters. I don’t know why actors have no problem with this. An actor may never have had a gig in his or her entire life, but she will still proudly call herself an actor. Writers are almost the opposite: we can’t even begin to call ourselves writers without feeling a sense of shame and braggadocio. The best description I read was in the Times — might have been the magazine section — where the very astute writer observed that writers must look to the tiniest of accomplishments: “I wrote a line for a movie;” “I got a job teaching at a community writing center;” or, in my case, “Once, I was a finalist in a New Millennium Fiction Award.

The prize for being a finalist in the 39th season was a copy of the anthology where all the first place winners works were published, and where the finalists’ names appeared on one of the pages. The thing is, I don’t know what story I submitted. I think the contest (it happened twice a year) was in 2015 or 2016. I suspect it was a story I wrote about a woman whose mother possibly kidnapped her from her father when she was a toddler, and then lived their lives on the run from the law and capture.

But I’m sure it made me happy at the time. Little things.

Posted in Arts, Writing | Comments Off on The minutiae of a writer’s life

Art Isn’t Easy, by Daniel Okrent

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Admin

I’d have to go through my playbills and figure out when it was that Stephen Sondheim and his husband sat down next to my friend. He (Sondheim, not my friend), died in late 2021 so I’m thinking it was before Covid and not because of Covid. Anyway, what struck me during the performance was how loud Sondheim was with his reactions. He was the type of person who would annoy me, if I hadn’t known who he was — someone who gasps loudly at an obvious plot reveal in a movie. Or worse, someone who sighs very loudly when they’re bored.

But, like the time I sat across from Philip Seymour Hoffman on a subway, I realized that certain artists live with a natural intensity of observation that most people don’t utilize. Shirley Maclaine was also described as having this quality by Pete Hammill, who dated her, in his memoir “A Drinking Life.” I think, in Sondheim’s case, just from observing him, he approached watching a play (even a revival) as a completely new experience. Every laugh or revelation was completely brand new and he responded with the eagerness of a child listening to a story being told by a parent.

I think it also annoyed his partner, who stood up and walked out and never came back, even after intermission. But it was also telling to me that Sondheim didn’t seem to give an absolute shit. He enjoyed the second act as much as the first, and was just as engaged. He was famously unable to commit until extremely late in life — not until his sixties. He was married in 2017 to Jeff Romley, at the age of 87. Romley was 37. But it worked for them. When Romley walked out of the theatre that night, it seemed, as an observer knowing nothing at all about them, that they were having a relationship spat and nothing more.

The title “Art Isn’t Easy” is one of the lines from the song “Putting It Together,” from the show “Sunday In The Park With George.” Despite his status as a giant of the musical theatre world (and I have to add it is one of the nastiest and bitchiest of all the professions available, so don’t do it, if you have any sense. And it’s also dying a slow sad death as it prepares for a Phoenix.) he didn’t actually have a lot of great hit shows and he had only one song that “crossed over” to the radio, “Send in The Clowns.”

His greatest show and achievement was “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” That was 1979. But then there’s some confusion or controversy about what’s considered “his show” and what’s considered a show that he contributed to. This book adds more flesh to the story but I don’t think it’s definitive, if a collaborative art can ever be definitive or defined as “someone’s” show. For example, the music for West Side Story is by Leonard Bernstein. The lyrics are Stephen Sondheim. Book is by the piece of trash Arthur Laurents. Original play is by Shakespeare, who borrowed his story from one Matteo Bandello, an Italian short story teller who wrote something called (in translation) The Tragical History of Romeus and Julieta and in the original Italian language as “The Unfortunate Death of Two Most Wretched Lovers.” Shakespeare, as was his genius, added some characters: namely the Mercutio and Paris.

Nevertheless, Gypsy came along and the lyrics, again, are written by Sondheim but the music is by Jule Styne. This is solely because Ethel Merman refused to have a “new” songwriter do the work on a show that was designed specifically for her to play. It sort of begs the question or thought as to what that song list would have looked like had Sondheim been allowed to write it. I’d be hard pressed to say that Sondheim would have written better songs (tunes) than Jule Styne, who is one of the GOATs. “Some People,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and so on.

Sondheim was both composer and lyricist on “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum,” but it wasn’t until “Company,” that he finally refused to write lyrics without also writing the music.

And then it was all hit and a miss, almost in alternating order. (This is something the book doesn’t really discuss too deeply. Sondheim’s many failures.)

“Company” was a hit. “Follies” was a miss. “A Little Night Music” was a hit. “Pacific Overtures” was a disaster. “Sweeney Todd” was a huge hit and has remained so. “Merrily We Roll Along” failed after 9 nights. “Sunday In The Park With George,” “Into The Woods”: hits. “Passion”: failure. “Assasins”: failure. “Road Show/Bounce”: No one’s heard of it. By now he said he was too old — that the juices weren’t flowing anymore. There was a posthumous production called “Here We Are,” which was dreadful, in my opinion — like copying the script of a movie and then presenting it with some background music.

Almost all his failures have been revived and sometimes rewritten in a way that has brought them up to a certain level of great. “Follies,” in particular, has grown in people’s eyes — especially with the help of Cameron Mackintosh in London and The Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. “Merrily We Roll Along” has been rewritten so many times it’s hard to list, but the recent production with Daniel Radcliffe was an enormous success. I suspect that “Passion” will ultimately find its way to brilliance.

My first Broadway show “A Chorus Line” and the second was “The Wiz” — both in 1978. I saw “Sweeney” in 1980 (I think) and I might even still have the Playbill. I was on a class trip, and I also saw “Talley’s Folley” by Landford Wilson. My classmates thought I was crazy.

But I think with Sondheim, pulling off the layers of cult-madness that adorn him, what you find is a very talented writer and composer — he was actually more interested in composition than in lyric writing — who was animated by revenge and had the gay man’s ability to be an absolute bitch. But one thing I will always be grateful for, is that when he and the stupid slimy usurper named Arthur Laurents — a poser if there ever was one — “reconciled,” Stephen Sondheim still told him “You’re just smart enough to know how mediocre you are.”

I have my own personal reasons for hating Arthur Laurents but that in no way affected any of my feelings about this short, terrific, biography, part of the “Jewish Lives,” series. And if you believe that, there is a president who would like you to join his fan base.

Posted in Arts, Biography, Book Review, Theatre | Comments Off on Art Isn’t Easy, by Daniel Okrent

Midnight Cowboy, by James Leo Herlihy

Posted on March 4, 2026 by Admin

For an unsuccessful novel, it has certainly been published enough times. According to Goodreads, there are 60 editions of this short and intense novel and I suppose it’s almost certainly because of the amazing movie that was made of it, with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, which gave us the almost quintessential New York scream. “I’m walkin’ here!”

I wanted to read this because both Hoffman and Voight read it to prepare for their roles and they both realized that the characters were gay. I’m not sure and I’m not sure that sexuality was actually the point.

It’s probably important, when discussing the novel, to emphasize that the character Joe Buck is the protagonist. It is not Rico “Ratzo” Rizzo, even though Dustin Hoffman plays him so well and so memorably. Joe goes the longest distance, makes the most difficult choices and goes through the most change. By the end, I think what you come to feel is that even the unlikeliest person can end up bringing meaning to our lives — and specifically, the meaning that you get by caring for someone.

When Joe starts off on his journey, all he really knows is that he has a big dick and that women like it. He has this fantasy of becoming a gigolo in New York City and is fairly quickly disabused of that notion. The movie and the script of the movie makes it seem like he goes into a “downward” sort of spiral, and ends up on the street, hustling for gay men. But that level of hustling, if you want to call it “low” and being a gigolo to rich ladies as “high,” happens very early in the novel and I don’t think it’s really meant to be seen as a kind of degradation. What degrades him, in a sense, is having to suffer in New York City.

I was reminded by this of how often New York has been depicted as a dangerous, tough, and dispiriting place: a place that will beat you down and that you must conquer. It really wasn’t until Seinfeld, and to a lesser extent, Friends, that New York started to take on the character of something that could be fun. And then of course Sex and The City was like an earthquake in that sense. People started coming here to enjoy their Sex and The City tours.

Are they gay? I don’t know. I’m not sure that it matters. Toward the end of the book, in order to get enough money to take Ratzo a bus down to Miami, Joe does some serious gay bashing which the victim seems to like and accept as a kind of punishment for indulging in his desires, smiling as he’s beaten. He doesn’t differentiate too much in his own mind about the difference between a woman and a man, although I don’t think he ever penetrates the men — he lets them, as he puts it, “hang off his pole.”

And then there’s just the plain stupidity. Joe is a dumb person — might even have a learning disability.

But it saddens me that James Herlihy killed himself at the age of 66. He seemed to have had a number of books published as well as some plays performed. He was also friends with Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin so it wasn’t like he was just an obscure writer with nothing to his name. He’s the kind of writer that I think should have had a small biography written — nothing large or too major — just enough to give us a sense of his life. Not every biography needs to be 1,000 pages. But 30 or so — that might have been useful.

Posted in Book Review, Gay Literature | Comments Off on Midnight Cowboy, by James Leo Herlihy

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta

Posted on February 26, 2026 by Admin

I just read that this was the most perfect series ever, lasting just 3 seasons for very good reasons. I’m not sure I would agree.

The book was published in 2011 and the series aired 2014 – 2017.

When I read it then and watched it then, I thought it was terrific, and I remember that the ending “blew me away,” to use a hackneyed phrase.

But re-watching it, I was overwhelmed with the tedium of having to listen to what is, essentially, a show where everyone is neurotic or just damn crazy. Everyone has joined a cult, or is following a cult-type leader, or is trying to justify and “prove” his or her religion. And because we’re constantly listening to crazy people, it’s not really possible to accept anything anyone says at face value. They are all unreliable narrators.

This is less true of the novel, to its credit. And the novel matches, somewhat, only in the first season: sort of like The Handmaid’s Tale. The following 2 seasons are additions to novel, but they are, essentially, repeats of the first season with slight variations.

Most of Tom Perrotta’s characters are sane people surrounded by neurotic people or impossible situations. What I like about his books, and what I liked about this one, is how these people, who are not quite Everyman or Everywoman in that they are usually smart, navigate a kind of “lesser” world — and illogical and fairly stupid world.

In the series, Kevin, the main character, is unfortunately suffering from some sort of repeated fugue state and may actually be following in his father’s footsteps. His father lost his mind and was committed. As a result, there is really no one to grasp onto — no one who you really want to get behind. Nora, the eventual love interest, is the closest to normal in the series: but even she shows herself to be unreliable and possibly crazy.

Not that they shouldn’t be or that if something like this happened — where 2% of the world simply disappears in front of everyone’s eyes — the world wouldn’t go nuts trying to find a religious or magical answer, simply because there is no science that can explain it.

But by the end, there were too many unexplained behaviors: why did the Nora character return but never told Kevin, the man she loved, that she was back? Why did Kevin pretend not to know their entire history? Why was Kevin not angry?’

And my pet peeve about any work, but especially movies, is why so much animal abuse? I know animals aren’t hurt on sets, because of the ASPCA, but it still bothers me when writers kill animals, either for some symbolic purpose or just for laughs. It bothers me when they use them at all. The last “Hangover” movie was so filled with animal abuse for laughs, I didn’t even bother to watch it. The second “Hangover” movie featured a smoking monkey. The first Hangover movie featured a caged tiger that was “stolen” from Mike Tyson and which they found in their bathroom. It also showed a chicken that was moving about the room. I don’t know why writers think that accidentally killing an animal is funny. I just don’t like to watch them. And this series was no better than the horrible Hangover movies: in the first season, he and some man who might not be real, are hunting dogs. There are deer that have some symbolic meaning. He hits a deer with his car and then kills it. In the second season, a goat is killed every day as part of some ritual that everyone accepts and in the third season, it’s a lion.

I know that closely observing animals and animal behavior can provide very helpful illuminations and even guidance into our own behavior: especially with the young and vulnerable. Jane Goodall, for example, said that watching the gorilla Flo as a mother taught her how to be patient with her own child. I myself have marveled at giraffe behavior which can seem so peculiar to others (if they notice it at all.) Giraffe have this strange sort of “presence” with each other, in that they will generally roam and graze in a group of 4 or 5, but then it’s not unusual or any surprise for one of the group to simply wander elsewhere and split off from its “group” and graze alone. It’s only during the female estrus that the males will actually engage and start bashing their next against each other, until one pushes the other off and he has won the right to mate. Other than motherhood, giraffe don’t seem to have much need for relationships with others.

While a pride of female lions always stays together and helps raise the youngsters (It Takes a Village). Or a pack of wild dogs have extraordinarily tight bonds.

These things can help us understand our own needs for relationships, or not. But hurting animals in movies: I just don’t get it and I don’t like it.

But for me, the real flaw of the series is the constant screaming about God and religion and faith and blah blah blah. I can’t stand to even listen to people talk about God or Jesus or any of it, because THEY HAVE NO PROOF. What they are essentially always, endlessly arguing about, are the words and instructions of an invisible being who has given us no evidence that he exists. And that I find exhausting.

Posted in Book Review, Television | Comments Off on The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta

Getting angry at a demented person.

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Admin

By me.

A long time friend — a short black woman who always described herself, jokingly, as a “poor black child from Harlem,” asked me in… roughly… 1999, maybe 2000, to be her executor of her will — actually what she asked was to take care of her things if she died. She was too cheap and stupid to hire a lawyer to do a will. But oh God, I wish she had.

I had managed to get her a 3-page internet based will which she signed and had witnessed and notarized. The will basically said that all her money would be divided up and given to 3 charities. She was a very cheap and somewhat horrible person and she just kept saying, for years, that she didn’t want anyone spending her money and that she’d never rest if she knew someone had it. (She is money obsessed.)

Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and she just seems to be having one problem after another, and I was too blind or ignorant, maybe, to see that her dementia was advancing on her. She had just turned 88, when she had a fall on one of the coldest and iciest days of the year. That put her in the hospital where she needed surgery and she just kept saying, I just want to die. When I spoke to her on the phone she asked me why they couldn’t just give her some pills and I told her that’s not how hospitals work. After a week she agreed to have the pins put in her leg and then, this year long nightmare began. She was no longer able to walk and, physical therapy did not improve the problem.

Now the odd thing is that if she hadn’t had the surgery, the big “threat” was that she would never be able to walk again. So surgery or no surgery, she can’t walk. And she has dementia. And she has COPD — has had it since the time when they called it emphysema. And she has a large section of her left lung removed because she had tuberculosis as a child — she was in an iron lung for six months. And she has glaucoma. And she has no teeth.

I’m going to cut this memoir down to nothing and flash forward to yesterday. Almost 1 year and 2 weeks after her fall and the surgery. We had finally found a place for her to live out the rest of her years but, since personality doesn’t change, she has been nothing but uncooperative and vicious to all the people that are there to help her. The administrator of the center is going to tell me tomorrow that she has to be moved to their second floor, which is $7,500/month, or that we have to find a proper nursing home for her.

And I am so angry now. I am angry that I ever agreed to help this woman. She is ungrateful and spiteful. She gets combative for no discernible reason. She is racist — hates any Spanish speaking person and supports Trump’s so-called “crackdown.” She is self-hating because she also hates other black people. And most insulting — I guess most personal to me — is she has absolutely no respect or consideration for my sexual orientation. She knows I’m gay, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s a real thing in exactly the same way many people today do not accept that transgenderism is a real thing.

She is always carrying on about how she knows I want her body and she says it with so much anger. She said this yesterday in response to nothing at all.

“Listen. I know my body better than anyone, and you will never have it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Yes you do you fucking liar. And you’ll never get it.”

Yes this is the way she talks, at 89, with almost no ability to even push herself across the room in a wheelchair, or find her way back to her room because she’s forgotten where she stays.

But I also find it upsetting that someone who has known me for so many years — about 4 decades — can no longer accept, and maybe never did accept, that I actually am gay. That it’s a real thing and not a phase or an accident or something caused by the mother’s hormones in the womb. Perhaps one day they will find a gene that most gay people have in common — sort of like that gene that makes people sneeze when they get sunlight in their eyes, or the gene that causes some people to smell cilantro and think it smells like dish washing soap.

But never mind. The problem with dementia — perhaps one of the main problems people come to realize — is that you can no longer actually have a conversation. They are still the same personality, but the levels have shifted. She is on a level closer to that of a child. And I’m supposed to be the adult. And last night, after learning that she is being kicked out of the center, I never hated her more. She knew something was up but she could only be nasty about it and asked my co-guardian, “What’s wrong with his ass?”

And then two minute later she throws a fit, starts sobbing about the pain her mouth which wasn’t there last week. I just can’t take it anymore. I want to find a place and leave her there for other people to bother with. I will probably let them move her up to the second floor which is their memory unit and then we will look for a place that takes medicaid and provides memory services, or proper nursing care. But all I can see at this point is her continued decline and, because of her nasty personality, a lower and lower standard. Right now she’s in her own room with a small kitchenette and a tv and a table and a big bathroom. And she hates it. And they will kick her out and she will end up in a hospital type room with a curtain for privacy and virtually no room at all. And it will be all her fault because we have bent over backwards for the last year.

And ultimately it was the judge’s fault. but that’s another story.


Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Getting angry at a demented person.

It’s just lies, all the way down.

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Admin

With apologies to the joke told through the ages in various forms. The joke, which is really just a reaction to an ancient belief that the world rested on the back of seven elephants, goes something like this:

An astronomer who lived in an era long ago was giving a lecture about how the earth traveled around the sun when someone in the audience asked what the earth was resting on.

— It’s not resting on anything.
— Of course it is. Everyone knows the world sits on the back of a giant turtle.
— If that’s the case, then what is the turtle standing on?
— It’s turtles all the way down.

I think it’s called the problem of infinite regress. It’s an issue with existence, I suppose, because even now, with unbelievable calculating powers of computers, it is still impossible to describe anything before the big bang. So we’re stuck in the same (useless) problem. What came before the big bang. Turtles. What came before that. Turtles all the way back. And of course religious lunatics say now that that’s where God exists. Who knows. The bible may be right in a way: the universe more or less expanded into existence in less than a second. It was so hot that light could not escape for the first 100,000 years. The expansion was so large and fast it’s really impossible to even conceptualize, except in math. Basically the current “expansion theory” is that the universe began as a “sphere” of energy that was about the size of 4 x 10 to the negative 29th power meters, which means: 0.000000000000000000000000000004 meters large and expanded in 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds to something that was about 9/10ths of a meter in size — let’s 3 feet. From that point, it went “much more slowly,” to quote Wikipedia. I don’t know much about the expansion after that but it was faster than light but it was also dark and it was not an explosion. The “let there be light” phase of the universe didn’t begin until about 100,000 years had passed. But time being relative and affected by gravity, who knows what this really means. All we know — and it’s still a theory but with some pretty good evidence to help the proof along — is that it began, somehow. And that’s the problem of infinite regress.

So in our world right now, it’s lies all the way down, instead of turtles. And I just will never understand, I think, how it is a pathological liar like Trump is able to so totally infect the world with his lies that everyone — literally everyone including the media, newspapers, and so on — loses sight of what started this whole thing in the first place: a lie — or several lies.

The very superficial top of this stack of lies is the horrible case of a named Pretty. Pretti is the proper spelling, but I’m using adjective here because it feels so appropriate and its the way he pronounced it. The government killed Pretty. A few weeks earlier they killed a woman named Good. Pretty and Good. It would only be more appropriate if they killed a person named Justice. Or Honesty. Or Integrity.

And while the media focuses on this vicious act of killing, and forgets the horrible things Trump said last week about almost all of Europe and the rest of the world, and forgets the killing two weeks ago of Good, no one covers or even asks the question is it necessary to control immigration, because the accepted answer is yes. EVEN THOUGH, our growth rate has now slowed to a trickle and that will have severe consequences as was shown in the tome “Capital” by the French economist, Thomas Piketty.

But I want to work our way down to the base of these topics.

  • Top is the murder of Pretti and Good.
  • Below that is the untrained thugs who enjoy killing people that are currently acting as agents of ICE and CAB or whatever that acronym is. The government uses two agencies to conduct these attacks because legally, customs and immigration is only allowed to work up to 100 miles from a border. Most people live in 100 mile zone. But in a place like Iowa, they need another agency, so they use the second. Anyway they are thugs and untrained. Many of them are probably the same people that Trump pardoned from January 6.
  • Below that lie is the 3,000 “agents” they sent into Minneapolis to control “rioting” and assaults — all of which they claim are being waged against the first agents they sent in. But that doesn’t matter because they lie about the assaults. There aren’t any. Most people back away from assault rifles and have to leave places where they’ve deployed tear gas.
  • Below that lie is the initial group of “agents” sent in to look for “illegals,” which they have identified as Syrians (Or Ethiopians — check this, but I’m pretty sure it’s Syrians).
  • Below the Syrian lie is the lie that Syrians are committing a 2 billion dollar fraud against the government.
  • Below that lie is Pandemic Era relief funds from late in the Trump administration and early Biden administration that provided money for companies to keep their employees paid and keep the economy from collapsing. There were flaws in this system that made it possible to defraud the government.
  • Below that lie is the notion that people in the rest of the world are not even allowed to ask for asylum. (This is getting into basic human rights of travel, starvation, the search for help.)
    Below that lie is the idea that the United States controls the world. (This is where Trump’s mind is at.)

There is one truth to this whole bizarre matter. There was a 250 million dollar Fraud committed by a Syrian American woman in Minneapolis during the Covid pandemic. It was dealt with. They were prosecuted. 50 people in this scam pleaded guilty. They’ve recovered approximately 75 million of the 250 stolen, probably by seizing bank accounts of the actual criminals. I believe the ringleader might be in jail but it’s hard to find information about this group. This is the “2 Billion dollar Syrian fraud,” the lie that sits at the base of Trump’s attack on Minneapolis. This is the lie that caused Alex Pretti and Nicole Good’s deaths. And this is how we end up talking and screaming about the surface of things, and don’t dig down into the very base of it and start looking at some of the more egregious things he has done.

Asylum seekers are often lying. They are often looking for economic gain and are not actually threatened back in their homes. Just because someone asks for asylum should not mean that they are thrown into a concentration camp/jail. Common morality, whether you’re religious or not, says you should not jail someone who asks for help. And until Trump, they weren’t. They were allowed to live in the United States until their case came up to be judged.

Unfortunately, Trump and his ilk decided to slash the number of judges, so that their cases never come up due to a lack of judges. This doesn’t even address the matter of incompetent judges. They COULD have dealt with the asylum seekers. But they would rather cause death and destruction because it’s better for their side.

His disdain for all people is bottomless. This is where he starts to violate human rights by indicating that anyone who even asks for asylum should be criminalized. And especially if they’re from south of the Rio Grande.

[NB: There are no human rights. No one has a “right” to live, or to reproduce, or to health care, or to drive a car, or own a phone, go to church, or eat or sleep. But in a proper civilization, we recognize that there should be some sense of rights, thus the framers called them “inalienable rights,” even though they are basically made up.]

America is the richest country in the world and has a reputation, which it is happy to spread and boast about, that you can achieve anything you want. This myth is still being perpetuated by both liberals and conservatives, by progressives and Maga-nuts. When an Oscar or Tony winner gets up and says to the camera, “Never let go of your dreams,” instead of just thanking people, or any other one of those platitudes that Americans are so good at spouting, it sends the message that this is the country of dreams come true — and we’ve been selling it for decades, if not centuries. There is a certain truism to the notion; and that goes back to the initial reason we decided, mainly with the help of Thomas Jefferson, not to have kings or to allow religion any governmental power. Before coming to America, people could not own land. If they were lucky, they could lease it from their local “Downton Abbey.” If they were unlucky, they simply had to go from one farm to another and offer their labor for sale. But America, since 1630 when my first ancestor came over as an indentured servant, was always a dreamy place where you didn’t have striations like England, or France before the revolution, or Germany with all its fiefdoms.

(Never mind that almost immediately, people were divided into “Newcomers,” and “Oldcomers.” My own ancestor, only ten years late to the foundation of Plymouth, was considered a “newcomer” and therefore was not allowed to own land unless he could “buy” it from an American Indian, or was granted tracts of land from the Plymouth colony Oldcomers. Almost every town founded in New England and the Virginia colonies were founded because “newcomers” could not own land in the new world. This went on and on and included the great land rushes depicted in Tom Cruise’s movie “Far and Away,” as well as others. People actually had to race on foot to grab pieces of land and plant their own flags. Cheaters were shot on site — all of this took place on what we would call Indian land, of course.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a long way down this ladder of lies, and when you get to the bottom of it, it’s usually history that we’re talking about. Or lies about history. And sometimes, little posters or memes can dig right through all of this. The latest I saw was, “Every refugee boat is a Mayflower.”

True, in its way.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on It’s just lies, all the way down.

Next year’s words.

Posted on January 2, 2026 by Admin

I think when I am finally able to start writing again, I am going to keep this little saying or aphorism by T.S. Eliot in my wallet, laminated, and look at it every so often to remind myself that I am now part of “last year’s words.” I think this might be freeing, in a way. One of the things I’ve had to come to understand — as an imperative really — is that I was not very good and my writing was unrealistic and actually a little bizarre. It was almost too much of a series of non-sequiturs that have no real meaning and, worse, no place even as non-sequiturs.

There was a character I once wrote who cut himself. I named him Greg because I was loosely basing him on a friend of mine whose name was Greg, but who basically dropped me without even the slightest concern once he had a boyfriend. He was weird in so many ways. New York is full of jaywalkers because it’s just the way people are and they step into the street in order to cross as soon as the car goes by. Well Greg thought that they were all trying to kill themselves by stepping in front of his car and he slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Oh my Godl They’re trying to kill themselves.”

He was constantly saying and doing things like that. He was insatiable when it came to sex and men and would have sex with any man that he could if the opportunity existed. Once, out on Fire Island, for example, we were at a house and he saw an outdoor shower that one of the guys in the house decided to use. So he went down to the back yard and sat on a bench until the guy was done showering and opened the door and saw Patrick just sitting there staring at him. Patrick got up and walked into the shower and the guy let him and they sucked and jerked each other off. Patrick thought absolutely nothing of it. He wasn’t even doing it to boast to the others. He would go to sex clubs and call me later and told me that he came six times in one night.

Then I learned he had been gay bashed outside a bar in Staten Island, where he was from. He didn’t remember the incident, but all the windows in his car were smashed out and his head was bashed in with a baseball bat. He was in the hospital for weeks. He was never the same after that and he spoke, almost entirely, in non sequiturs. We used to make a motion of “changing the chanel” every time he spoke up and said something that was completely unrelated to whatever the people were talking about. Gene Stanley would always roll his eyes. But I liked Patrick and so when it came time to write Greg as a character, I created a strange guy who came out with odd jokes told at completely inappropriate times, but had enough sense to know that he was odd. He cut himself, relentlessly, and his chest and upper arms were covered with scars from all the cutting. He did this cutting, supposedly, to release the emotional strain of loving people who could not accept love.

But when I looked at it again, I realized it was utterly ridiculous. It was absurd. And I think my work has always had that quality of being absolutely unbelievable and maybe stupid.

But that was, in fact, my voice. It was who I was. The entire quote (of course it’s from “Four Quartets” but I don’t know if it’s Little Gidding or another one), is:

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”

When I resume my writing, which I must do soon, and I think before Ellie passes away, I must remember that one of the reasons — perhaps the main reason I stopped writing in the first place — was that I realized I was working in a language that was no longer contemporary. What I was writing had no more relevance, even to me. I still want to finish those books, and the Cigar Tree is now cemented enough in my brain that I don’t think there’s anything more that I need to do to that one.

I have to find a second voice. Another voice.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Next year’s words.

Safe. by Todd Haines

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Admin

I recently had a chance to see the 4K restoration of this movie, and to see Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes “introduce” the movie. They were fine but mostly just said how much they enjoyed working together and how it came to be that this was their first movie together. It wasn’t a Q&A, which I gathered they had just done for the previous showing. Poor things were tired.

I would have loved to hear what they — especially Todd — had to say about it. It’s a completely indescribable movie: ambiguous but in absolutely all the right ways.

One thing he said that kind of gave me a clue as to what he was intending, was that his producing partner (I think he meant Christine Vachon) had said to him, after the umpteenth rejection, “Are you sure you want to make this movie?” And he told us, the audience, that he said he really wanted to make a movie about this woman.

I think moving the emphasis from the idea of environmentalism or illness to this particular woman’s journey is helpful. Because when I saw it in the 90s I could not stop interpreting it through the lens of HIV/AIDS and what I had just lived through, which included a number of deaths of friends and acquaintances between 1983 and and 1995, when this movie was released. (It took place in 1987 and was filmed in 1992.) The title was also a kind of punch in the face, as “safe” at the time, conjured up thoughts of sex, condoms, etc. And it’s also vaguely sci-fi — especially with the poster above.

I remember some people seeing it specifically through the lens of environmentalism, modernism, etc., and I, myself, could not help seeing it through an additional lens of religious fundamentalism, because the community where she ends up brought back personal nightmares of being trapped in that religious environment where you were supposed to enjoy happy songs and songs about Jesus.

Now, decades later, the movie feels like it’s about anti-Vaxxers, gluten intolerance, lactose intolerance, autism, and even, to a lesser extent, about transgenderism. I think the reason our interpretation can change over time is because he managed to capture something that is both eternal and also rooted in a particular culture. There is a medical term or medical conundrum, which I can’t remember, but it’s basically that every age has a “made up” condition that seems to afflict huge numbers of people. But there is no actual condition — it’s just a large cultural delusion. So in one age, the one depicted in this movie, it’s “environmental toxins,” while in another age, it’s “chronic fatigue,” and then there are conditions that go back to issues like “melancholy,” and excessive bad blood. There was a time when people who felt sick and tired only began to feel somewhat better if they had their blood drained with leeches. There was a time when people insisted that their doctors had to taste their urine.

Now we have people carrying on about vaccines causing autism, and 5G signals causing Covid or, more properly, the novel coronavirus by “thickening” the blood. One of my own relations believes that his daughter, who is transgender and was known as male until she “came out,” thinks that it was “caused” by an excess of a particular hormone secreted by the mother during the pregnancy and specifically acted upon by microwave radiation.

So the movie addresses, in some sense, all of these made up illnesses and conditions, but it very adroitly and importantly combines them with actual diseases. The main leader of the quasi-religious group where she lands has AIDS/HIV, which is a real disease, caused by a real virus, and was killing people for decades — since at least the late 40s. It exploded in 1980 when a San Francisco doctor realized there was an outbreak of something unknown happening to his patients. That focus — that concentration of illness — actually allowed us to progress and learn more about it, but until then, there were people who died of something without any explanation at all. Medicine could not tell these pre-1980 sick people why they were sick.

And that’s what the film captures so perfectly. That there are many reasons why someone might be sick and why it might be real. But the invisible nature of these things that stalk us mean that we will probably end up looking like a crazy person when we keep insisting that we’re sick and trying to come up with reasons why.

But there is also another thing going on in the movie, which is the inability to examine oneself. Disease in this movie is a crutch — a way of avoiding self examination. That comes through in the many instances of the vapidity of the main character’s life before she develops her chronic condition: like at one point when a large couch is delivered that is the wrong color, they tell her that the original order is for the brown or black couch. Her answer is that that isn’t possible, because that color wouldn’t go with any of the other furniture. Later, when the leader of the group is trying to explain away having AIDS, he blames the modern world and everything else for creating “blood toxicity.” These people cannot face themselves. And the word and title “Safe” means, essentially, safe from oneself.

Posted in Arts, Movies | Comments Off on Safe. by Todd Haines

Trans, part 1. August 5, 2025

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Admin

This will probably be a long rambling entry, which only means that you can be sure it wasn’t written by an AI bot.

(On Facebook, I get these entries about dead movie stars, or sometimes closeted dead movie stars that have perfectly written and very long mini-biographies, and though they are readable and clear, it doesn’t feel like there is a person behind them. It’s something most people don’t think about, but the narrator of a written work is always present, and how you read something depends a lot upon what that narrator “sounds” like. This is an issue that affects women more than men, and is different for fiction and non-fiction and perhaps poetry — and it’s right there in the word “author.” Author, authority, authorize. Maybe we’ll save this for another essay.)

But I want to write about Trans and raise a few questions. This is in part a response to this New York Times essay that appeared in its magazine section on June 19 and which I just got around to reading a few days ago. The article (is probably behind a paywall) is called “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost.” And although it sounds kind of trivial, the loss of that case “U.S. v. Skrmetti,” could have many more long range implications than it might seem. It threatens gay marriage, the right to serve in the military, job discrimination issues and it could possibly elevate “religious exemption,” to become a new constitutional right. (This is the ultimate goal, anyway, of the fundamentalist Christians on the Supreme Court, which include John Roberts, the superspreader woman, Neil Gorsuch, the man who overturned Roe, and the beer guzzler. But this case may have started that train rolling.) The trans issue didn’t win the presidency for the current usurper, but issues like “pronoun ownership,” certainly didn’t help Kamala or Biden or anyone on the left for that matter. Not that I think this Supreme Court could have cared 2 cents for the Biden administration, but Biden was somewhat forced to support this very questionable case on behalf of the left, which many gay rights activists didn’t support. And as soon as the new administration took office, it switched to the other side and was completely against it.

The first thing to remember is that trans rights and gay rights are a subset, or a child branch, of feminism or women’s rights. The attack on trans and gay people is basically a subset of the attack on women. A lot of gay people don’t like to think this, but there is a direct line between women questioning their role in society: “Wife, mother, home maker, emotional support for the husband,” and gay men and women questioning their supposed mental illness. In 1968 — I was 8 or 9 — homosexuality was listed as a mental illness in the DSM (the psychiatry diagnostic manual). A compromise was developed 5 years later which then labeled it a “disturbance.” — I was 13 or 14, and it wasn’t until 1987 that homosexuality was removed altogether as a mental diagnosis. I was 27 or 28. But this questioning of society — which more or less meant questioning of the white male-dominated religious and political institutions beliefs about the rest of us — began with the women’s movement. And it began a long time ago before the 60s and the “sexual revolution.” Someone, somewhere, has probably linked the rise of the women’s movement to industrialization. Farmwork has this natural tendency to separate men and women into different jobs. Both roles are exhausting, torturous and necessary. But I remember reading an interview with a hippy dippy trippy family — back to the earth types — who said, “Nature quickly sorts out who does what.”

(I was going to add here that mammalian species are male-dominant to start with, but that is not actually as widely true as once thought. A small survey, which is not a good reference, found that about 45% were male dominant, and another 30 to 40% were more or less equal. About 15% or so were female dominant and those included the African elephant, hyenas and lemurs.)

The quest for racial equity began also a very long time ago too, long before the 60s civil rights movement, but the events leading up to the civil war probably had a closer relationship with religious belief, economics and morality: that enslavement was an affront to God; that it was not humane and that it was economic exploitation. And of course the south thought exactly the opposite: that God wanted white men to enslave black men, that it was the natural order and that black people were meant to do the hard work. And then you had South Africa and The Mormons that kept this religious idea going until the 80s I think — can’t remember when The Mormons finally removed racism from their dogma.

Anyway, after a hundred plus years, what women achieved, in a few parts of the world, was that women deserved equal treatment, pay, the right to vote, serve in the military, and so on. Later, gays — and I’ll just talk about gay men for the moment — gays lost their quest to have gay sex decriminalized in the 80s, by a Supreme Court that was not even remotely as conservative as this one. The argument in Bowers v. Hardwick was based on a “right to privacy” that was found earlier when it came to using contraception. Five members of the court found that they could not locate a right to privacy for an “immoral act” that was worse than rape. (Yes, one of the justices actually said that a consensual blow job by a man on a man was worse than rape.) Four of the justices dissented, strongly, that anyone with any sense could see that what goes on in a bedroom is between the two consenting adults.

[Personally, I remember feeling more despondent about this country than I ever had before, at the ripe old age of 27. I did not feel like I was an American. The decision permanently hardened my attitude toward the U.S. Until then I had felt kind of like Woody Allen, that it was a mess but it was better than most alternatives. After that, I no longer cared, and started to believe that living in another country would be better.]

Fast forward to 2003 and the case Lawrence v. Texas. There were only 13 states that had sodomy laws remaining on the books. Most were in the south: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. 1 was in the north: Michigan. And the other was Mormon: Utah. Missouri also had a partial ban but I don’t know what that entailed. The court ruled in our favor this time, and found that a “right to privacy” does exist in the 4th Amendment (protection of the home from search and seizure) as well as the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, and the 9th Amendment’s assurance that rights ‘not specified’ in the constitution are retained by the people. This was important because the “right to privacy,” is one of those rights not specified in the constitution. Therefore, it can only be an implied right, and therefore falls into the realm of subjectivity, bigotry, bias, religious persuasion, disbelief, and so on.

After the right to sodomize each other was affirmed 6-3 with Scalia, Rhenquist and the vile Thomas dissenting, activists first set about making sure that the states followed the law. This is sort of where I came into some of my knowledge about these things, because I started working at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (now known as Lambda Legal), and they would talk to us during the weekly meetings about where our cases stood, what we were working and doing, and so on. And I remember very specifically Suzanne Goldberg talking about suing to remove sodomy laws off the books in the states that still had them. It was all well and good to get the supreme court ruling, but states were not required to remove those laws from their books, she said.

Around the same time, at Lambda anyway, gay marriage became the “next” big thing. And in fact, it probably was much bigger than the right to have consensual sex. Young people, especially, took to it — a lot more than older gays, because older men tended to see it as imitation rather than a simple civil right that was being denied to us based on the gender of our attraction. I remember an Irish friend (straight female) who did not support same sex marriage said, “They are allowed to get married. They just have to marry a woman,” — perhaps one of the first times I encountered such stupid twisted logic. Anyway, the history of the marriage movement is very long. It’s so long a 928 page book was written about it, and I reviewed it here. It’s hard to tell, but it was felt by some that gay marriage was kind of like the cross beam you could hang everything from — that once straight people saw that gays could live in committed relationships — all other rights and privileges enjoyed by the heterosexuals would fall into place. And I think there probably was a sense in all queer communities that we had achieved it. We had made it.

(What goes unasked in that ideology, which is essentially a conservative one — showing heterosexuals that we can be committed, monogamous, family oriented, etc. — is what if it were the case that gays were not capable of living in monogamous relationships? Would that make our sex lives undesirable and something that should be criminalized? Obviously, my opinion is “never.”)

But the acceptance of gays into the institution of marriage (which I think was probably an illusion anyway) did not include, for example, private discrimination. Say, for example, a church learned that one of its workers married someone of the same gender — they could fire that person because workers basically have no rights. Just about everyone is an “at will” employee. The only counter to being fired just because your boss doesn’t like you, is a discrimination lawsuit based on attributes like age, gender, handicap, etc., and issues like sexual harassment or physical abuse. So (and I know a little about this because I own some businesses with my brother and sister), it’s perfectly legal for a boss to fire an employee because they don’t fit in, or they’re too fat, but you will automatically open yourself up to a lawsuit if you do. This isn’t really worker protection; it’s just a creative use of the law with a hint of blackmail. The same Irish woman I mentioned who, in her twisted logic, thought that gays already had the right to marry, also wanted to quit her job as a receptionist, but couldn’t just give notice, get a letter of recommendation, leave with the usual false smiles and move on. She wanted money to leave — and ultimately stayed there and made everyone’s life miserable until they gave her a year’s salary and paid for her COBRA insurance.

Gay marriage also did not address the problem of transsexuals, who had complained for decades that they were forgotten in what was essentially a white and wealthy civil rights campaign — an elitist issue. I’m specifically calling it “the problem” because in some ways, what transsexuals want is exactly the opposite of what gay men and women had fought for. Gay men and women, but especially men, did not want to be punished for their behavior. We wanted the right to behave as we wished — to have the sex we wanted and to love who we wanted. What we wanted was to express ourselves in a way that “did not match” our physical appearance. What transsexuals wanted (and this may have changed somewhat) was to change their physical body to “match” what they felt.

(I really wish html allowed for indents. There’s probably code somewhere on the internet I could copy and use but you shouldn’t have to know coding to be able to write.)

In other words:

  • Gays feel that their body does not match what they feel inside and that’s okay.
  • Trans feel that their body does not match what they feel inside and that’s not okay.

This is a highly selective filter and doesn’t take into account countless other issues, but I think it can help explain why many gay men and plenty of allies, including people like my friend Bonnie and J.K. Rowling can support one but not the other. How can gay men and our allies not support our transsexual brothers and sisters? It’s the same question when you encounter a gay person who is also a racist. When you have been marginalized, attacked in papers and pulpits all your life, treated like a non-citizen or someone who doesn’t matter, or criminalized, how can you then turn around and discriminate against someone else — even if it’s just by having the thoughts that you have?

This is where Identity rears its ugly head and by extension, identity politics and even “context” when it comes to the study of literature. Because now we have to start considering the subjective nature of experience and feelings. Gay men were essentially unified in what they wanted. “I am what I am,” is that song in La Cage Aux Folles, the gay musical which is, ironically, about a drag performer who, in the real world off stage, couldn’t be “masculine” to save his life and ultimately gives up and throws on some drag in order to make his outward presentation “match” his real self. Gay men have always said, “I am what I am,” and it was the backbone, you could say, of the struggle for gay civil rights. Trans men say, “I am not yet what I am,” or, “I am what I have not yet become.” The message is harder to understand, and you can’t sing it. Plus, it’s, in most cases, completely subjective and has nothing to do with biology.

But so is being gay. And I think this is where we have to accept that trans identity and trans issues may appear like different issues, but they are not. They are both identities rooted in the subjective experience of being alive — walking around with thoughts and emotions — seeing and incorporating the world out there into one’s sense of self. The rejection of trans issues by many gay men, a la, “I support the LGB part but not the T,” doesn’t properly acknowledge that it’s all feeling and that approaching these issues from the outside will fail and provide no answers, and also will not change anything.

Much more to come… but I want to publish this now so I remember to finish it later. Basically, the rest will be about the folly and stupidity of one particular trans activist at the ACLU.

Posted in Civil rights, Politics | Comments Off on Trans, part 1. August 5, 2025