Viral Spring #15: Old Movie, New World

-- By Tom Phillips 

Omar Sharif as Dr. Zhivago 

With nowhere to go this Viral Spring, we've been staying home, watching old movies we missed the first time around.  I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because I thought it was sentimental claptrap, and it is.  But it's a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation.  Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a blockbuster tear-jerker about love in the Pandemic of 2020. 

 No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic.  It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic.  Paging Dr. Zhivago... 

Then as now, politics comes first.  The pandemic will be over in a year or so.  The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery.  But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.

Viral Spring #14: The Glamour of Evil

-- by Tom Phillips 

Yes Sir, Boss: Parscale models campaign gear

When President Trump's  campaign manager Brad Parscale called his media attack machine the Death Star, Democrats mocked him for invoking the Evil Empire from Star Wars, and scolded him for joking about death while the world is in the grip of a Pandemic.  But Parscale didn't apologize, and won't.  "Laugh all you want," he tweeted. "We'll take the win."  

It's the Democrats who are being naive here.  They don't understand that evil and death are part of the president's appeal.     

Viral Spring #13: The Death Star

-- By Tom Phillips 

Inside the Death Star 

Listen up, everybody:  Brad Parscale, President Donny's campaign manager, has an important announcement,  Brad?  

"For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time." !!!!

Thus tweeted Parscale last week, shortly after the President threatened to sue him over a poll showing him ten points behind Joe Biden.

The last guy who boasted about an attack before pressing "fire" was Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary for George W. Bush -- who in 2003 called his machine "Shock and Awe." It was supposed to be so awful that the invasion of Iraq would be over almost as soon as it began, with Iraqis panicking at the sight of American power.

Like Rumsfeld, Parscale is super smart and super confident. He says Joe Biden won't know what hit him. So what can we expect from his video game?

Viral Spring #12: Life in Stir

   -- By Tom Phillips

In 2011, a 59-year-old North Carolina man held up a bank, then waited for police to come and arrest him.  He was sick, uninsured, and wanted to go to prison to get health care.  Here in New York, many young black men say prison is the only place they've ever eaten regular meals.

Prison offers educational opportunities and a chance to make long-lasting friendships. It also gives you freedom to think and create.  Many authors have found inspiration behind bars -- from Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet to Eldridge Cleaver and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  And Martin Luther King  made his most profound and moving plea for racial justice in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  

Not to romanticize incarceration; it's a drag at best, violent and life-threatening at worst.  Boredom and rumination are your worst enemies -- with little to do in present time, you can get hung upside down in the past.  It takes discipline to stay in the present, and not think about the future -- i.e. when will this be over?  It ain't over 'til it's over.

 But now that we're all under house arrest, those of us who have our own living space should count our blessings.

Plaque near Thoreau's cabin site, Concord MA  

Chief among them is the radical simplification of life.  Work has dried up, travel is out of the question, restaurants and bars are closed, meat is scarce, parties are banned, money sits in wallets with nowhere to go.

In a way our souls have transmigrated to an earlier America: e.g.Walden Pond in the 1850s.  Like Henry David Thoreau, we sit in our cabins, alone or with a lone companion, contemplating ourselves.  And like Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, we must rely on ourselves.

Viral Spring #11: Poetry in a Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips

One of my stay-at-home pleasures this Viral Spring has been perusing my friend Bill Christophersen's new book of poems, his fourth and I think his best. Like the ancient seafarer whose song closes this collection, he deliberately steers into the worst kind of storm -- the so-called post-truth moment that poisons the world's discourse today. And like the seafarer he comes out banged up, weatherbeaten, exhausted, but alive and articulate. I wrote something like a review, but since Bill and I are long-time friends and collaborators --  thick as thieves -- let's just call it an "appreciation."  

Rarely does a collection of poetry begin with a headline – but Bill Christophersen is a journalist as well as a poet, and he knows from a header and a lead.  The headline is the title – Where Truth Lies – in three syllables, the crisis of the world today.  The Pandemic is just the latest case in point: we can find where truth lies, only by finding where it doesn't.   

The difficulties of this quest, seen and unforeseen, are the plot of this Odyssey of epistemology, testing experience and language for the presence of truth.  Not much pans out.   

Objects gather dust, lose their emotional charge -- the ferris wheel he jumped at 18 creaks on in middle age ("The Wheel").  Memory bobs and weaves ("Tip of the Tongue"). Fiction sucks with “dark vapors” ("The Rise of the Novel").  Poetry itself prevaricates – “a license to deceive" ("Lies").  Speech loses its nerve and curdles in the throat ("The Right Thing").  

And yet there is a metal that can be truth-tested. He finds it in a newspaper story of murder with a blunt instrument – an aluminum baseball bat ("Being Here Now"). And in the title poem, truth bides its time, conceals itself and finds him -- in dreams and dust-balls, in misread blurbs that morph into indictments ("Where Truth Lies").  He sums up the quest with a spring-cleaning haiku: "Beneath the shag rug /the vanished salamander’s /sooty skeleton."