George Packer, one of America’s greatest journalists, sent me off to sleep last night… and I wasn’t ready. A staff writer for the Atlantic, he had done a beautifully concise and articulated feature on the staggering destruction done to our federal agencies under Trump. Few things can be more disquieting than this, the dismantling of a social structure.
It has been said before, tirelessly. But there are legions of people who devote themselves to government service. They keep track of air quality. They look for patterns of abuse in the courts. They look for patterns of abuse in families. Some of them work overseas. None of them make the fortunes that come with similar corporate jobs.
What is disquieting is the very fragility of this structure. Even more disquieting is how out of control this seems. Have we all been asleep at the wheel? Where is the wheel? What direction should we have turned it?
Over 1000 scientists have left the EPA alone. The nation is a massive ship crewed by madmen. And with such thoughts last night about 10 PM I went to bed.
The day did not dawn bright. I mean this on the merely meteorological level, San Francisco’s summer fog having descended overnight. Through that fog are the people of my neighborhood walking the dogs, buying the lattes and rolling the strollers of Glen Park. They are breathing into the morning mist all of their exhalations, the whole thing swirling around in a pandemic miasma. Which is probably not infectious itself, this fog. But does suggest something of the insidious quality of the virus, while invoking memories of the 14th-century plagues and the latter version recorded by Samuel Pepys. Miasmas were a thing. They still are.
I am not sure how to emerge from my current one. Time helps. So does Jane. On this particular morning she gives a sermon, which I watch on Facebook. She is invariably encouraging, often uplifting. And, yes, slightly baffling in terms of Episcopalian detail. But never mind. Her sermons deal with the issues of the day. We are all in this together.
Which is the thing that’s easy to forget when the day looks bleak. However the day looks, my view of things is now mediated by a glowing screen. Everything, from Jane’s sermons to meetings of the synagogue’s Environmental Justice Committee to the occasional gathering of siblings and cousins…now occur online. I am not on board with online. It is too eerie. It is all there is. I am trying to get used to it.
The CG Jung Society in New York is offering a course that starts this evening, something along the lines of “Jung on the Hudson,” a title that is more a motif than a description. Which is okay. And can this stuff be taught via screen? Yes. And what does “taught” actually mean here? The answer, the only real one anyway, being can this teaching strike a chord over the electronic distance?
The only reason I even asked this question is that I am old. Telephones must have had the same impact on another generation. “Imagine talking into the wall.” That sort of thing. I wear my trousers rolled. Onward.