American Fez

Where The Buoys Are

I dreamt I was Matthew Arnold, musing on Dover Beach, until my poetic reverie was disrupted by a family of apes on jet-skis and I woke up in a cold sweat thinking Sophocles long ago most certainly did not hear those obnoxious screeching engines on the Aegean; nor would Sophocles suffer endless traffic gridlock on his way to the Athenian Agora; or pitch his tent on the Attic plain only to wake up and discover his tranquil beauty spot has been transformed overnight into a parking lot for enormous camper vans.

Although not actually in ancient Greece, I am in Acadia, the national park in Maine. I just wanted to 'get way from it all' for a while and relax in the mountain air. Mission impossible, of course, because everybody else is also trying 'get away from it all,' so I am constantly followed by 'It All' and its entire family in their fluorescent orange colored kayaks and rattling mountain bikes. Mind you, I suppose it's equally as painful for everyone else being forced to tolerate my unsympathetic  presence. "There he is again," they whisper, sitting around their portable fire pits. "That judgmental misanthrope who thinks he's Matthew Arnold in hiking boots."

So I escape to Bar Harbor town center, where there are fewer people than in the park's rolling hills. Feeling hungry, I order Maine's version of surf-and-turf: a dollop of lobster salad and a slice of moose meat served inside a huge, genetically enhanced blueberry orb. I wash this down with two blueberry infused martinis poured into a lobster-claw shaped glass. Dessert is blueberry pie topped with blueberry "moose mousse" layered on a bed of fresh blueberries. I pay with greenbacks because I have no beaver pelts to trade with. 

Leaving the restaurant, I spy a colonial-style hostelry next door named the Lobster Trap, sporting a large and inviting Vacancy sign. Any potential guests are obviously crammed together cheek-by-jowl up in the mountain campground ghettos, failing miserably to 'get away from it all,' so there is plenty of room at the Inn. I book an ocean view room called the Blueberry Suite and hang my straw hat on a moose antler coat rack for what remains of my vacation. It's so peaceful here in the harbor. Perhaps I could even take a stroll along the shoreline at low tide and consider composing a poem about what Sophocles might experience in a similar situation.

 

Cassandra At The Movies

At the time, the Trump versus Biden election recalled to mind a Laurel and Hardy film: the fat loudmouth who believes he knows everything but actually knows nothing; and the frazzled nitwit who runs around aimlessly while scratching his head. Voters, of course, were the long suffering saps whose piano the incompetent double act will fail to move safely from one place to another. We are currently well into the third reel and the Keystone Kops have appeared, Trump is now  recast as evil Fatty Arbuckle and Biden wants to be Harold Lloyd but has failed his screen test. "Not ready for his close up" it seems.

In fact, last week at work, while despondently discussing the state of the world, I momentarily forgot who was President of the United States. I could easily name check Johnson, Macron, Draghi, Scholz and all the other pretenders to defending the free world, but who was in charge here? It took me at least a few seconds to dredge Biden's identity from the depths of my brain, where it languished in apparent ignominy. Compared to Trump, whose bovine, pungently visceral personality was inescapable during his administration, Biden is the shapeless shadow of spectral vapor left by decrepit DNA engulfed in an opaque cloud.

So what comes next? Which two celebrity icons of zany, madcap dogmatism and delusion will contest the next election by knowingly exploiting and exacerbating the American public's fear and desperation? We are so far beyond parody now that even second-rate vaudevillians of the recent past like Bush and Obama seem like venerable jesters from a golden age of comedy. Who knew they were merely the warm-up act for Laurel and Hardy, followed by 2024's high camp farce, featuring two cartoon clowns hitting each other over the head with red and blue balloons while trying to drive away in a tiny car stuffed with spoiled ballots.

Seventies Revival

I somewhat remember the austerity of the nineteen-seventies: washing in a thimble of hot water; three rooms illuminated by a single light bulb; long-distance telephone calls regulated by a stopwatch; Coca Cola rationing; the cookie jar patrolled by guard dogs; and grandmother merrily knitting a draft excluder like one of those French crones at the foot of a guillotine. She'd survived the war, you know, and knew everything there was to know about deprivation. But on the whole my memory is hazy. The world back then was engulfed in a cloud of spray-on deodorant, after all, so perhaps I only saw through a veil of polyester, darkly.

Inflation, stagflation, conflagration of money. Here comes Herr Bankrupt with his Weimar wheelbarrow full of worthless Deutschmarks. This bodes well for nobody but the steel barons. They not only manufacture the wheelbarrow but the bombs and guns that load themselves in its wake also. Then again, who knows what the weapons of modern armageddon will be? I imagine heat-seeking missiles are the equivalent of blunderbusses and muskets now. The last President mumbled something about 'Space Force.' Maybe we will destroy Moscow with lasers fired from the moon. Or will it be a ferocious struggle for control of our minds? There is already a large scale skirmish underway for our attention. Yes, it's battleground brain these days with a no man's land of the heart.

As always, it is the best of times and the worst of times. While we improve at one life skill our aptitude for another declines. I blame the tale of having only two political parties. The perpetual 'who's on first' double act that's more Vladimir and Estragon than Abbot and Costello. At least there were happy endings with Bud and Lou, no matter how badly they screwed things up. We, on the other hand, are heading for a flooded planet, wracked by earthquakes and withered by chemical poisons. It's like one of those disaster movies I remember watching in the nineteen-seventies, except humanity is waiting for Godot to post another distracting video on TikTok instead of teaming up with The Professor and Jacqueline Bisset to stop the rot.