I love how Alice Munro, in her short story “Floating Bridge,” both delays the news her protagonist’s oncologist is about to deliver early in the story and towards the end swerves away from its unexpected content to this: “It removed a certain low-grade freedom. A dull, protective membrane she didn’t even know was there had been pulled away and left her raw.” That’s not at all how I felt but it comes close to how I reacted—and continue to react–after a February 2023 PT scan recorded my body’s “complete response” to three months of chemo- and immunotherapy, leaving me in a temporary state of remission. Before the PT scan, I had just about finished settling accounts–not that I entirely believed in my imminent demise but its likeliness put a kind of frame around the picture, brought some coherence to the “plot “as it were. In Oedipus that the Chorus says something like “count no man happy until the moment of his death, free of pain at least,” which I’ve somehow always misinterpreted to imply that the manner (and date?) of one’s ending supplies a retrospective pattern on one’s life, helps decide whether it’s comedy (“she died at 88 surrounded by loving family and friends”) or tragedy (“in the prime of his life a tree fell through the windshield of the happily married father of four and killed him instantly”). In recomposing my fate, I get to see & experience the comic dimensions of my likely evolving tragedy, but there’s a dulling also involved as if I’m effectively, if not actually, posthumous. And that, my friends, has largely left me speechless, or at least insufficiently motivated to complete almost anything I’ve started in the last twelve months….

“ALTERNATE SIDE OF THE STREET IS SUSPENDED B/C OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION”

As a former and recovered New York Catholic school boy, I loved hearing this shorthand announcement on WNYC on December 8 and took particular pleasure in the implications of what the announcement left out. This is a fading remnant of New Yorkese at its finest, reminiscent of how I was taught to say a hun25th St. instead of 125 St. To be comprehensible to outsiders, the statement would at least have to read: “Alternate side of the street parking is suspended because of Immaculate Conception,” or better yet: “Alternate side of the street parking is suspended because of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception?” But if you go that far, you might have to also have to explain–this being December 2023–what a feast is, religiously speaking, whose feast it is, and why the rest of us (who aren’t Catholic) honor and benefit from it. Not to mention whose conception was immaculate, how a god made man’s mom—in anticipation of a virgin birth!—was herself conceived immaculately by her mother, which is the original claim within the claim.  Thinking harder, I wondered how my former parish priests and Jesuit inquisitors could explain more recent discussions about Jesus’s sibling: were they too immaculately conceived by their immaculately conceived virgin mother? It just doesn’t make sense. But I guess the NYC Catholic vote matters enough to keep the whole concept in circulation and let observant cars of all faiths stay where they are.

THIS WAY TO BIZARRO WORLD

University presidents are maligned for failing to censure or condemn expressions of alleged genocidal intent made by pro-Palestine or simply anti-Zionist students who have been calling for a new intifada and/or parroting the Palestinian catchphrase “From the river to the sea.” But not a single Republican inquisitor, or outraged billionaire donor to the University of Pennsylvania, appears to notice that Israel is expressing genocidal intent—on the ground— by annihilating 25,000 Palestinians, few of whom were combatants and half of whom were women and children. Neither party acknowledges that Netanyahu’s government is hell-bent on making Gaza as unlivable in the future as it seems unsurvivable today while also using the cover of a defensive war to dispossess West Bank Palestinians of lands they have inhabited and worked for centuries. “From the river to the sea,” indeed!

Meanwhile, Biden continues to claim he’s the man destined to re-defeat Trump but his repeated vetoes of UN Security Council calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza have already made him morally bankrupt if not yet unelectable. In falling in love with himself and his high office, he’s proven himself more rule than exception, whose legacy may well be the ending of the democracy he set out to save.

PAVEL, THE MADONNA & STALIN

Reading today an extraordinary piece in Harpers about what ordinary Russians are doing and thinking during Putin’s war, I came across an account about Pavel, a taxi-driver and father of three, who enlisted in Putin’s army for the money it would bring. After 10 days of training, he was sent to Ukraine where he was told to scout ahead for mines, one of which took his life. At home his common-law wife (who is not entitled to his effects) has set up a shrine of sorts: a straw hat, a picture of the Madonna (whom he worshipped) and presiding above it all a framed photo of Stalin, whom Pavel idolized. One of his three children, an 18-year old daughter, is pregnant and is described (with a rare poetic flourish) as having yellow-green eyes the color of the steppes.

What leaps out here and elsewhere in the essay is the widespread, though generally unacknowledged, veneration of Stalin in contemporary Russia, something that may make the ease with which Putin exercises power more understandable. As authoritarianism spreads throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, it bears wondering what possible fascination our so-called democracies (in the West, East Asia, and South Africa) can offer to compete with the fact that masses of people appear perfectly content with, and often prefer, authoritarian rule.