Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

As much as I hate Donald Trump, which is plenty, there is a clear tendency among people who hate him to react to every single thing he says and does with outrage.  Bad strategy.  We should be outraged that he has denied aid to people in emergency situations.  We should be outraged that he has encouraged ICE to engage in horrific human rights violations.  We should be outraged that he has used his position as president for his personal enrichment.  We should be outraged that he attempted to pull off a coup in Venezuela, even though he failed at it.  We should be outraged that he has appointed horrible, authoritarian type people to the courts.  We should be outraged about the stupid wall, and the atmosphere of hate that surrounds the whole project.
But, signing bibles?  Eh, whatever.  As an atheist, it’s none of my concern whatever.  He’s not desecrating a religious symbol that has any importance to me.  If the Christian’s aren’t outraged (I suppose some of the are, hence the controversy, but obviously some of them aren’t, because there were people wanting to get their bible’s signed.)
Within the Christian religion, this war between purists and modernists has been going on a long time.  Back in the days of Luther, and Calvin, and Tynsdale, one of the controversies was whether the mass (and the bibles) should be in Latin, because that was like sacred, which is weird, because it didn’t exist in biblical times, and for most of the time Latin was a living language, it was the language of the people prosecuting Christians, or in the native language of whatever  country you happened to be in.  The reformers eventually won that battle.
Today, you have ‘prosperity gospel’ (e.g. Joel Osteen) which is basically a pyramid scheme which uses a lot of Christian symbology and code words.  It’s about 10 times more offensive than somebody writing their signature on the front cover of a book.  Of course, the prosperity gospel types just love Donald Trump.
Then there’s the whole literary symbology of it.  Usually, when somebody autographs a book, it’s because they wrote it.  So, maybe it’s a wee bit tacky on that point, but I don’t think he’s claiming to have written it, or to be God.  On the other hand, if his followers wish to think of him as such, he doesn’t object.
Summary:  tacky, laughable, but not impeachable, and therefore not what we should be focusing on.

I am still a supporter of Tulsi Gabbard .  Although I love Bernie Sanders, and think he has earned a place in history as the starter of the great progressive revival which is going to stop global warming and save the planet, and do all sorts of other cool stuff along the way to make human civilization better, she has made an end to regime-change wars her central issue, and has also come out strongly for the legalization of marijuana and recently took a stand for the legalization of prostitution as well, which I’m all for.  Also, I think it would be cool to have a woman president.
But, Bernie has exploded out of the gate.  As a candidate, he is a force of nature, a phenomenon.  Bar cheating (and, oh boy, is there going to be cheating) Bernie will win the nomination, and the presidency, easily.

There is one thing he’s got going in his favor, even more than in 2016: social media.  Not that it wasn’t a factor in 2016.  It’s just even more so now.  The internet is growing all the time.  Newspapers haven’t grown for the last 30 years.  TV has grown, exploded really, but the number of people getting their news from TV is not increasing.  Probably shrinking.  Also, mainstream media’s credibility is in the toilet.  Half of their news shows are entertainment shows, and even labeled as such.
Also, people who were 17 and unable to vote in 2016 will be 21 in 2020.  They, and people who will be 20,19, and 18 will be voting for the first time in a presidential election.  And they love Bernie.  (and Tulsi, but Bernie getting all the noise)  Also, four years worth of old farts who have never sent an e-mail will drop off the chart at the other end.

It is statistically almost inevitable that there will come a year when social media is more decisive than mainstream media in the nomination and election of a president.  I hope it will  be 2020.

The past is an interesting place.  There are so many books and movies about it, and it’s all very romantic, and people die heroically and their lives are very meaningful.  Partly, of course, that’s because films and books necessarily portray an abbreviated view of reality.  You may read about hunger without having to go to sleep hungry, and a view of a squalid 19th century slum does not contain the scent.
I saw a couple of things on Facebook just this morning (this blog should have been written last night but I got too high and fell asleep on the couch) about the past which were quite interesting.  One was a quote from a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo.  “I always though I would be understood without words,” he said.
Well, good luck with that.  Even people who are writers (Van Gogh’s letters are not entirely without literary merit.  He was a painter, but he was not a stupid man.) get misunderstood, like all the damn time.  We even say stuff like “It’s up to the readers’ interpretation,” which may be partially true, communication demands a receiver as well as a transmitter, but it’s always struck me as a cop-out.  If people don’t understand what I’m writing about, then I haven’t written clearly enough.
The other thing was also a letter, written by Abigail Adams to her husband John, in the Spring of 1776, saying (I paraphrase) “If you’re going to write a declaration of Independence, how about including a bit about women’s rights.”  She was much more eloquent than that, of course.  It’s evidence that some issues we talk about today, have been issues for a long time.  This goes back 2,000, 10,000, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, at whatever point patriarchy became a part of our culture.  Since all of the great apes with the exception of Bonobos (gotta love the Bonobos) have a patriarchal social structure, it’s a reasonable assumption that it goes all the damned way back.
We don’t just need to change.  We need to evolve.

Just came from a poetry reading, a new series, at least for me, called Literary Lavatory, and it seems to be a winner.  It always surprises me how English language poetry reading keep springing up around Prague.  You’d think, what with English language poets living in Prague being a subset of a subset with neither subset being that large to begin with, that they would all have the same people attending them, but there is surprisingly little Venn overlap.
The thing I liked about this one is that it was set in a back room, away from the bar, which you get at the Spit it Out readings at A Maze in Tchaiovna as well, but they’re in the middle of changing location and I don’t know when, or if, they’ll start with the poetry readings again.  It is definitely not the case at Ad Astra.  There were just enough chairs to go around, there might have been one or two people sitting on the floor at times.
There was no proper stage but the room was small enough that it seemed logical for everybody just to read from where they were sitting, and it led to a lot of back and forth conversation after each poem and I was surprised.  A lot of people are listening, a lot of people are thinking, a lot of people had a lot of interesting ideas on a lot of subjects.
Then I walked home from there because it isn’t really that far and it’s terribly scenic.  This is a very normal, ordinary neighborhood I live in, but the lights as seen from across the river are spectacular.

My good friend Steve Giglio died last night.  Car crash.  Poland.  That’s all I know.  He was treated for cancer about a year ago but he beat that.  He was planning to go to China soon.  Again.  He never stayed in one place for long.  Irrepressible.  I think that’s a good word to describe him.
I first met Steve 20 years ago, because it was the first year I was in Prague, and our paths crossed at the Chapeau Rouge.  That was one of our big hangouts at the time.  For a long time, he was somebody I’d see now and again, at a party or some event or something.  I remember one time he organized a tantric massage weekend, and he spent the weekend sneaking up on people and shouting “Meditate!”
I really got to know him better about 6 years ago, though, when he told me he wanted to write a book about his life, said he had a lot of the stories written down, but he wanted my help, you know, because I’m a writer.
I agreed, thinking “Yeah, I can dash this off in a couple of months.”  I had no idea.  There were stories from China, Egypt, Italy,  India, Amsterdam, and of course from Prague, and from his childhood in Ohio and his days on the commune there.  There were stories of his quest for enlightenment, the great gurus he met, and his ever evolving philosophy of life.  There were tales of romance, lots of those.  He loved women, and women loved him.  There were stories about old friends, and current friends, and cars, he really liked cars, and his antique business, and brushes with the law.
In the end, it took about two years to write, and I left out more than we put in, because if I’d left in everything, it would have been longer than The Lord of the Rings and all of the Dune books combined.
He had a big life.  He will be sorely missed.