KATE BRAVERMAN, RIP

Sorry to hear this. Braverman was an especially brilliant prose writer and a powerful lyric poet who could twine together the insane sweep of mythology, feminist, confessional revelations , erotic depositions and the like into a captivating , galvanic roil of language that seemed nothing less than a controlled, emotional explosion  remindful of the classic image from Apocalypse Now when a napalm strike took out a long row of trees in a Vietnamese forest. Really, her "incantatory writing" , as she called it, got the nerve endings flaring.I met her after I'd written a rave review of her book FRANTIC TRANSMISSIONS, a mesmerizing memoir if one has ever written, something that led to a brief communication and an eventual appearance at the bookshop where I worked at the time. She was a handful to be around, I should say, and as much of a genius she had as writer and poet, there was tangible relief when she left for the evening. All said, Kate Braverman was an amazing writer who deserves a broader readership. There is more I could say about my encounter with Braverman, but lets instead consider my summary judgement on her prickly and hallucinogenic memoir Frantic Transmissions  from 2009:

"Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles is a memoir, of sorts, about growing up in Los Angeles, and then the eventual moving away from that famously center-less city. Writing in a high poetic and semiotically engaged style that recalls the best writing of Don DeLillo (Mao ll) and Norman Mailer (Miami and the Seize of Chicago), Braverman deftly defines isolated Los Angeles sprawl and puts you in those cloistered, cul-de-sac'd neighborhoods that you drive by on the freeway or pass on the commuter train, those squalid, dissociated blocks of undifferentiated houses and strip malls and store front churches; the prose gets the personal struggle to escape through any means , through art and rage, and this makes Frantic Transmissions not unlike Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wherein the prodigal son or daughter deigns to move up and away from a home that cannot keep them, with only raw nerve and the transforming elements of art to guide them.

What Braverman confronts and writes about with a subtly discerning wit is the struggle of defining the place one calls home, and what roles one is obliged to assume as they continually define their space, their refuge. All through this particularly gripping memoir there is the sheer magic and engulfing power of Braverman's writing; I was fortunate to receive an uncorrected proof of Frantic Transmissions a couple of months ago, and I was knocked out by what I beheld. Sentence upon sentence, metaphor upon simile, analogy upon anecdote, this writing is rhythmic and full of stirring music. There is poetry here that does not overwhelm nor over reach; this is an amazing book, and it is one of the best books about life in Los Angeles , quite easily in the ranks of Nathaniel West, Joan Didion, and John Fante. "

HAROLD BLOOM, RIP

Harold Bloom, the Methuselah of American literary criticism, has passed away at the age of 89. Best known , celebrated and berated for his tome The Western Canon, an encyclopedic argument in defense of individual literary genius against the intimidating attacks from fresher and bolder currents in literary thought, Bloom became something a of a one-man cottage industry in his later years, producing a stream about books, some good, some brilliant, more than some so much mush, speaking of Dead White Males and the poems they wrote. I am heavily indebted to his book The Anxiety of Influence, as it gives a subtle and useful dialectical model on how great genius influences great genius that follows through the centuries, with the younger men (and women) writing superbly in another stylistic, spiritual and intellectual direction than the great poet who influenced them, desperately trying to escape the long and looming shadow.

But as that First Great Genius was Shakespeare, a genius who Bloom argued is singularly responsible, in plays and poems, for the creation of what we regard as Modern Man and Modern Literature, the sage who began the whole unstoppable progression of how modern poets would write, escape from the shadow is impossible; The Bard is Present, no matter how much one attempts to be unlike him. You can argue with his sweeping conclusions, but the book I'm thinking of, "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human is a critical delight. It may be that Bloom is luxuriating in the laziness of a higher caliber. The difference between them is that Bloom has a thesis that he's worked with for decades, a set of subtle arguments crystallized in his landmark book The Anxiety of Influence a brief but trenchant discussion where the Professor posits that Shakespeare is the premiere genius casting a long , indelible shadow across the legions of subsequent genius that arose after his time. Bloom argued that Bard's influence is so pervasive that no poet or other literary artists cannot help but be influenced by him.

Those great geniuses who've emerged after Bard's time have either engaged their influence from him and written great works extending, modifying and altering the system of metaphor Shakespeare changed our collective consciousness with, or there are other geniuses who've emerged over the centuries who, being painfully aware of the Bard's embedded influence on how sentences about human experience have come to be written, write furiously in the other direction, against his style, assumptions and rhetoric, experimenting, taking political risks, deconstructing, inverting, abstracting and defamiliarizing the artful language in ways only a new kind of genius would conceive and execute. But here's the rub: even for those great writers who've made great art with language that artfully contains the human impulse to go beyond mere description of the world and peer at what is behind the veil of enumerated appearances, Shakespeare is present, his aesthetic, his metaphors, his language influencing new writers in one direction or the other.

That is a rather crude summary of Bloom's basic premise and there are dozens of other notions woven through his life's work, but the point is that his a set of ideas that make the ideas tangible and convincing once the initial "aha!" of flashing insight wears off. It's not science, of course, but it is a craft, a profession, this kind of thinking, and what we have in Bloom who has taken his working theory and tested it against new ideas, new writers creating literature in cultures other what is routinely aligned in the Western Canon. Bloom, who defends the existence of the canon and wrote a book on the issue, believes dually that there are permanent genius and masterpieces of Western Literature, as he is a man who has made a career judging books with imposing standards. The standards are not fixed, though, and Bloom further asserts that the Canon is a living thing, like the American Constitution, a category of books and authors that must be continually revised as matters with human existence come to mean something different. All things said, Bloom's career as a critic was a brilliant one, and he was a joy to read and argue with as one passed through the pages of his exception-taking views.

Notes Concerning Neil Young's ON THE BEACH

ON THE BEACH--
Neil Young

Well yes, to answer a question no one’s yet asked me, I was one of those guys in high school, in the very early the Seventies, who had found their Reason to Be through a sheer immersion into the contemporary grind of rock and roll. Leonard Bernstein declared it an art form, Ralph Gleason informed us that rock and roll lyrics were the new poetry, and the larger media, Life and Time magazine specifically, uniformly declared rock music a vision of the world to come. I was all in, to be sure, 16, 17, even 18 years old, a would-be poet, a record review for school newspapers and cheaply produced undergrounds. Dylan, Mitchell, Ochs, Simon, Beatles, Stones, Buffalo Springfield, poets, prophets, philosophers all, would the models who’d be useful to gauge my own experience. Their effusions would make my evolution. It seemed like the best idea in the world. Gradually, relying on millionaire rock stars made less sense as I got even just a little bit older. My young frustrations grew faster than my admiration of the songwriters. Rather irrationally, I felt betrayed. Dylan turned to Jesus, Ochs hanged himself in alcoholic depression, The Beatles and Stones seemed distracted and distant from those of us working minimum wage day jobs to buy their records.  The Rock elite seemed addled all at once, bereft of a good lyric couplet, a chorus that could unlock emotions and private. Heroes fell from the pedestals I put them, and I took a cheap pleasure wallow in shallow cynicism. It seemed increasingly the case that pop stars, wallowing in ennui and wealth couldn’t speak clearly or convincingly about a life that confounds them. It’s a trauma that confuses many who’ve obsessed over the music and the musicians:  I no longer cared what befell them either in their lyrics or real life. At the time it didn’t take much to make me a despairing sad- sack. I was a self-made made a Grim Gus for a time, of sorts, a premature cynic in my early twenties who wanted to now speak of everything as being false. There was no one to relate to, no one speaking to the persistent chattering anxiety firing along with my synaptic patterns. Or was there? The Revolution hadn’t happened, and the promises of Woodstock were a stale joke. There was no garden to get back to.

But there was Neil Young. It was Young’s songs on the Buffalo Springfield albums I returned to over and over again, it was Young’s worrisome vocals and sparsely filled cadences I related to, it was Young’s ongoing sense of feeling overwhelmed, dumbstruck, stunned into a psychic motionlessness in the face of a  feckless reality that overturned one utopian ideal after another. If Dylan had spoken to the youthful urge to explore, challenge and derange the senses in “Mr. Tambourine Man” , Paul Simon sought authenticity  against a materialism in “Sounds of Silence”, and Joni Mitchell entreated listeners to embrace all their travels and affairs with an openness that would transform the world, Young never lost sight of himself in a world that he might not be able to transform through good intentions or a collective Good Vibe. Says Polonius to an anxious Hamlet “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man…”   This above all, Neil Young remembers his mortality and remembers dreams of a perfect world are not facts, and that he will show himself to be anything other another fellow who’s been bashed, bandied and bounced about by the unschooled churn of the world As-Is. This is what I’ve always liked about Young in contrast to his admittedly worthy compatriots, that he’s seldom if ever, sang as though speaking from On High.He was in the trenches with us, rolling with the punches. As early as his song  “Helpless” on the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young release Déjà Vu  , a time when the puppy-hug conceits were giving way in a time of post-Altamont , Young admits that his life is too crowded with the stress and consequences of other people’s expectations, and that he needs to return to something simpler, finer of mind before he grew his hair and ventured from his hometown in Ontario.

 There is a town in north Ontario

With dream comfort memory to spare

And in my mind

I still need a place to go

All my changes were there

 It’s a lovely, three-chord song, and the lyrics, delivered in Young’s fragile whistle of a voice,The lyrics have a plain-spoken plainness that brings to mind the idiomatic precision of William Carlos Williams. Nothing especially poetic in effort, but certainly poetic in effect, the plain and clear admission of needing to get away to a time that no exist, if it ever did. The appeals less for the message, which is one of escape from the world—clearly, no one ought to rely on lyrics as solutions to real problems—but in the way, it simply crystalizes the yearning, the fleeting thought. There is no thesis, no lesson, just an intimate revelation as the problems of the universe continue apace. There was a flurry of junkie laments and tales of ecological disaster that found their way onto the albums of politically timely artists. Young, a man concerned with the environment and the survival of the species and someone who has had experience, we assume, with the fatal travails of heroin addiction, combined both these themes in the title song of his 1969 solo album After the Gold Rush. The song is a science fiction eco-disaster fantasy akin to what Paul Kanter and Grace Slick offered up with their Jefferson Starship Blows Against the Empire album. But where Kanter, Slick, and the Jefferson Airplane entourage offered an album’s worth of Sturm and Drang about angry hippies high jacking a starship and leaving a wasted and wretched planet, Young remains the effective minimalist.  Three spare, elliptical verses vividly outlining a world that can no longer be fruitful inhabited, a ceremony sounded off, a revelation that our narrator is among the debris of a dying planet, that there is a new hope arising as spaceship arrives and the selected ones board the vessel. They are off to find a new home for Mother Nature, our narrator reveals, but he won’t be among the citizens of a New Earth.

I was lyin' in a burned out basement

With the full moon in my eyes

I was hopin' for replacement

When the sun burst though the sky

There was a band playin' in my head

And I felt like getting high…

The facts are is that Young knows that he is a man who, though blessed with the capacity to learn and imagine, lacks a clear channel to the future, that his senses are as fallible and that he is a mere mortal among the herd.  Jefferson Starship harmonizes cleverly for a skewed utopia where all our friends will be, and croon and cruise for two album sides about setting up camp on another heavenly body. Even in a fantasy, a reverie, Young embraces the simpler tale and the pitiless outcome: although his song suggests the possibility that the species will go on, the narrator is left behind, never to see the new sun.  While I find much to enjoy in Starship’s grandiosity, Young’s fatalism is all that much more powerful. Cogent, reserved, simply stated, with an ending uplifting and tragic at once.   It’s that fatalism, the lack of heroic pretense in Young’s writing that has been a major draw to his music. This isn’t to reduce the singer to a single -topic Worry Wart who can only give grim tidings to the largeness of life. Hardly a guy to roll over and go back to sleep when the stress is too much, Young’s long career has been fascinating for reasons quite a part of his admittedly occasional persona as a small voice describing the dying of the light. He has been a restless intelligence musically, as observable through his proto-grunge rock, collaborations with Crazy Horse, the earnest balladeering of love songs from deep in the heart, or his fruitful side trips into the areas of country and western, blues and soul, and digital boogie. He is not going quietly to any impending good night.

Still, though, I return to something that intrigues me still, a 1974 album called On the Beach, which I consider a landmark disc from the period, a confession as profound and unavoidable as John and Yoko's "Primal Scream" album Plastic Ono Band or the outsized confessions of poet Robert Lowell, Though lacking the anger of Lennon or the particular detail and depth of Lowell's incessantly detailed and personal verse, Young's work is nothing less than a stark declaration that was perhaps at the end of the line as an artist and that his interest in remaining with the rest us on this side of the dirt perhaps hung in the balance. Returning to the idea that Young is an artist aware  limits in a perilous existence, On the Beach is lament that old ideas aren’t working. By constant tone, theme and implication, this is a chronicle of someone feeling powerless over his life. Even his artistry, performing, writing, singing, becomes the millstone he must wear around his neck. The title song, doleful, a chunky strum of the guitar, is a straightforward admission of his love-hate relationship with his dedicated audience.

I need a crowd of people

But I can't face them day-to-day

I need a crowd of people

But I can't face 'em day-to-day

Though my problems are meaningless

That don't make them go away…

This is the ultimate mind-screw, being an artist who has reaped handsome reward from fans and corporation for the good work he’s done who is alienated from the gift that provided his life with purpose. He needs his audience to feel whole but loses himself in the bargain, he has achieved riches from doing exactly what he wanted to do, but feels a prisoner obliged to respond to the demands on his time, talent and soul. It’s less of a bold admission than it is one of those fantastic blurts of truth, that unguarded moment when you find yourself thinking out loud, unfiltered.

The mood remains downbeat with “Vampire Blues”, an extension of the festering resentment addressed in the title song. Young is no longer the fatally alienated superstar, but now instead of a blood-sucking creep, a user, a liar, a low grade demon who will steal your vitality, your love, your passion, who will feed upon your good graces and leave you a  charred chunk of humanity. It’s nothing personal, you understand, it’s planetary:” I'm a vampire, babe,/ suckin' blood

from the earth/I'm a vampire, baby, /suckin' blood/from the earth./Well, I'm a vampire, babe, sell you twenty barrels worth…”   Young effectively reflects the world he has seen too often and too long up to this point, an existence of full of takers, exploiting resources and replenishing nothing in their wake. Implicit here is Young's idea that he is like the earth, a resource being used up and exploited to fulfill the emotional and material needs of others, with nothing left, no fertile soil, no soul, as a result. Only burnt-out husks remain of formerly glorious beauty.

The songs are a string of sharp, acute glimpses of life that has been stripped down to routine, drained of joy, passion. “For the Turnstiles” is a terse sinister conflation of sailors, pimps, touring bands and hometown heroes revolving around each other both as contrasting metaphors and real-life figures locked in a deadpan dance of entertaining the paying customer while offering mirthless smiles revealing grim clenched teeth. Everyone is paid for what they do, everyone gets what they want, everyone feels like they’ve been robbed. “Revolution Blues” outlines a diorama of survivalist paranoia, every neighborhood is a camp, no one believes a word anyone says: this is an America where whatever is going to happen will happen soon and without warning. The narrator is ready, his gun is handy, he has plenty of ammo, he has no idea what he’s defending or who he’ll be fighting. 

On the Beach is powerful revelation of sorts, both an admission from Young and his generation are no longer in the figurative Kansas anymore. In his mind, he may still need some place to be, but the record might be considered as a journal of a moment when the existence became too big and , that the dreams of utopia, peace free and justice were destroyed by assassinations, a bad-faith war that would not end and a death-trip rock festival that all but gave a lie to Ralph J. Gleason’s insistence the music would set us free if we believed long and hard enough. Young became woke, in a manner of speaking was stunned and for a while conquered by anxiety at the loss of his naivete, But with On the Beach he confronts his fear, the despair and depression and writes his way through the dilemma. No philosophizing, no rationalization, just the blunt admission that he was having a hard time of it, coupled with a coarse imagining of an America without hope or love.  In a Hollywood scenario, this would have been the point where the disillusioned artist bids farewell to all that and lapses into silence, but Young refused to become cynical; through his career he has shown himself to be one of the most interesting artists remaining of the Golden Age of California sound, a man willing to experiment, try new things, switch up styles and attitudes, explore the furthest and most resonating reaches of emotion . What I believe we have in Neil Young is one of the worthiest bodies of work any rock singer-songwriter has created over time. There is much to discuss in other essays yet to be written. He is oeuvre rivals Dylan’s. (That would be a debate worth having). But it is worth it to consider, again, On the Beach. Without this significant record, Young’s work could well have been much less endearing.

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission)

some words

I never thought the Sex Pistols weren't called for, as the pretentiousness of the musicians and the gullibility of the audience had choked off the life force that made rock and roll exciting and worth caring about. Some of it might be laid at the feet of rock criticisms, since the advanced discussions of Dylan's relationship to Chuck Berry's every man existentialist demanded a musical technique and lyrical concept just as daunting. This is the danger when folk art is discovered: it stands to become something distorted, disfigured and bereft of vitality. 

I was lucky, I guess, in that I was a fan of the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges long before the Sex Pistols caught the punk wave. They and bands like Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath were a grounding principle--rock and roll is beautiful because it's energetic, awkward, and stupid, but profoundly so. There are “concept albums” I admire and still like, if not listen to, but I won't name them here. I am pleased, though, that the idea of the Album is a literary object has been dropped in a deep grave and had dirt thrown over its bloated remains. I miss albums too. 

Likewise, I like holding them, reading them, meditating on their physicality while listening to the record. It was part of the experience of absorbing what the musicians were doing, instrumentally and lyrically. Albums made you think that their size and shape were part of the home you made for yourself--house, room, cave, apartment--and that the collection of them, along with books and other such things, marked your growing interest in the world around you. Now it seems like disembodied noise too much of the time, piped into devices, not really played nor considered before the music commences. It seems much of the time like a streaming hurry to get done with the whole thing and then move onto another distraction which, as well, will provide no real reward.

SAVING ZAPPA FROM ZAPPA

ZAPPA PLAYED BY OTHERS

Frank Zappa was often brilliant in his composing in his multi-decade career as an agent provocateur in America's fickle, short-memory popular culture. Most early fans, I am convinced, because they thought he was weird, off the wall, psychedelic to a high degree, a man with a band, the Mothers of Invention, creating the perfect soundtrack for whatever recreational drugs you happen to take. It may seem like a conceited thing to say at this point in my life, and it may be due to romancing the glory days of the Sixties when one was discovering literature, art, great music,; I love his odd time signatures, abrupt switches between genres sans easy-going transitions, his dedication to dissonance. 

It was an audio-assault American audience weren't used to, large audiences, mass audiences in any event, but I soon suspected there was more to Zappa's game than random bizarreness as I encountered him in interviews insisting, over and over, that he didn't do drugs of any kind. He did imbibe alcohol from time to time, which was a relief since I couldn't imagine, in my still expanding mind-- because I was incapable of conceding that anyone could be as not-of-this-earth as Zappa without having to insult his brain in some manner.  Even so, he was sober as a judge, a serious composer, and the music he made from the early efforts to the end of his was the work of a man who regarded himself not as pop star, rock star, or  even professional celebrity, but rather as an artist, a composer, a serious composer making use of anything he found useful  in his goal of  alternately inspiring or antagonizing his audience . There's much admire to the dedication to complexity, although I understand why many have found him off-putting and arrogant. 

That he was, but I still like his music, and continue to listen to it since I first bought my first Zappa album, We're Only in it for the Money, in the late Sixties. That said, I have become less and less of a fan of Zappa's guitar solos, which I find, and have always found, repetitive and without direction. His long, live solos on many of his albums ruin the experience of hearing fine musicians play arresting compositions. It's a habit born of modern jazz players developed in the  40s and 50s and through a major portion of the 60s, when soloists of exceptional caliber would improvise ad infinitum, engaging the process of "spontaneous composition", an idea that a musician, responding to impulse, urge, inspiration and certainly without a great deal of preparation, careens off the highway and ventures down several tonal tributaries in a hunt for a better combination of notes in increasingly difficult formations. There are geniuses who've managed this consistently in their work, with John Coltrane coming to mind most easily; his music, with his friends Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison among a handful of others, is all of a piece. The invention, energy and spiritual power of the extended forays went far beyond a riffing variations-on-a-theme and became whole compositional endeavors.  Keith Jarrett also should be mentioned, although that for all the brilliance he demonstrates as band leader and band member, his several multi-disc solo piano concerts have merely bored me ; so much effort getting himself warmed up for the inspired parts  makes you think more of someone burning gasoline looking for the perfect parking space rather than an artist working his or her way efficiently to the dimension where they exceed their expectations. For Zappa, he is neither of these two musicians to whatever degree. He is an interesting guitarist, recognizable from the first note, effective in relatively short solos tailored to the material (One Size Fits All). He is not, though, the world-class concert soloist, although his True Believers wish it were the case.I wish he'd written sections for his best improvisers and let them shine; a lesson he might have learned from the Great Ellington. Lately, I've been dialing up interpretations of his daunting pieces, with generally good, even spectacular results. 

Here's a unit doing a tight and together take on the dizzying and sonically cubist "G Spot Tornado", originally from his  1986 release Jazz from Hell. This was a disc of wholly instrumental tunes with uncompromised complexity and density, with the majority of the tracks being the efforts of Zappa's programming of a then-bleeding edge synthesizer, the Synclavier, without the aid of other musicians for most of the album. The band here, Germany's hr-Bigband out of Frankfurt, serves a blistering version in this clip.

MR.MIRACLE WHIP

TB:Seeing Joe Biden on Steve Colbert's program has me concerned about this man, an honorable man , becoming out next President. I thought he was in bad form.Biden really does seem like a senior citizen who is experiencing worsening memory problems. He has always been burdened with misspeaking and getting things wrong, if unintentionally, or confusing audiences and journalists with statements where his point was ambiguous or some such thing. But now he's running for President again, and his gaffes are piling very quickly, with increasing frequency. He too often , for my comfort, seemed to be searching for the right words when asked some surprisingly spot questions by Colbert; he couldn't seem to explain why Medicare for All (universal health care/single payer) and why we'd be better off maintaining and extending Obamacare instead. He rather obviously wants to keep private insurers in the equation when it comes to providing funding for medical care. In brief , he did not make a convincing case for why it's a good idea to keep the corporations involved; he rather ignores that other democratic countries have successful, very successful government driven health care systems that exist to virtually no one's detriment in the respective countries. What disturbs me is that he has a pronounced tendency to drift away from a direct question he started to answer . When Colbert pressed him about hiss fundamentally incorrect recent recounting of the Medal of Honor he was awarding--incorrect date, rank, branch of the service, etc, etc,etc--I thought his answer was a bit cavalier, saying that the small details don't matter as long as the main point is true. In his defense, we can say yes, his main statements about the soldiers, vets, public service are correct (who wants to come out against go old fashioned patriotism), but facts do matter, even the details he think might be insignificant stacked against A Greater Truth.His response as dismissive and vaguely Trumpian.I rather imagine that Biden at that moment related this awarding of the medal on the spur of the moment, off the cuff, unplanned, but even so his getting so many crucial details wrong--a recollection of something he was involved in!--goes beyond casual tsk-tsking and burying your in your hand in embarrassment. This is the man who wants to make the crucial decisions that will direct the country. I fear this man is losing his grip. I would like him to reveal his full medical records, including results from tests that might on encroaching onset of dementia. We do not need another man in the White House with an increasing inability to make decisions based on information and intelligence brought to him. Biden worries me.

BARRY ALFONSO: I do think your concerns are real and serious, Ted. In an earlier era, Biden's age and longevity of public service would have eliminated him as a serious contender. The weird circumstances of this coming election have made him attractive as a figure of continuity, moderation and normalcy. Judging by what I have seen of his recent appearances, I think issues of his memory and general cognitive ability are ambiguous -- some of the gaffes he is being called out on are not important, while some of them are. The whole issue of "gaffes" troubles me somewhat -- it harkens back in my mind to Ed Muskie's famous "crying" episode in New Hampshire and the overblown importance given to a stumble or (to quote Lene Lovich) a momentary breakdown. Biden's clumsiness in stating what was valuable in his working relationship with racist Southern Democratic Senators is more troubling to me that his conflation of details about awarding a combat medal. That doesn't have to affect his decision making ability if he is the leader of a capable team. His dismissal of the details (if that's what he did) isn't remotely Trumpian in my mind. It is a stretch to compare Biden's blurring of memories with Trump's obviously lazy and probably addled mind and, worse, his unwillingness to take in information. Yes, Biden should release his medal records, as all the candidates should. Speaking of medicine, this current debate among Democrats about expanding Medicare vs. Single Payer vs. expanding the ACA IS troubling to me and in fact seems rather stupid. I watched Elizabeth Warren spar with various opponents in one of the first debates and I recalled that the ACA was the result of a slow, grinding, rather ugly process and series of compromises (pushed by such famous public tribunes as Bart Stupak) that disappointed many on the left, just as the next round of health care extension will. Whatever hyper-detailed plan Warren, Sanders, Harris etc. advocate in this campaign will almost certainly NOT become law if he/she is elected. It is a stupid ideological fight that just helps create divisions and re-elect Trump.

TB:I wish I could be assured by your cogent response, but I've watched him closely for years and it appears to me that his habits of mind are less than the absent-mindedness they used to be and more signs of an encroaching fragility. It's not the blurring of details so much that I thought seemed Trump like--Trump just lies, period--but rather Biden's reflection on the details being correct or not as unimportant when your conveying what you think is a Bigger Truth. The details do matter, and I'd been happier if he were more forthright about his verbal errors of statement and promise fervently to do better.He relied far too much on the you-guys-know-who-I-am defense , that he's been around along time, that he has a record and that you know what he stands for, to side step the question as to whether he's fit to be president on his third try. Actually, we know who he used to be, but now he wants to be president, which is very different from his other offices, including that of VP. He is not making a very compelling case for himself, his centrist-progressive policy statements are comfortably piecemeal for those with heart conditions. For me, he has that Ted Kennedy thing happening , a man who could not fluidly and with conviction tell us why he wants to be president. What disturbs me about the MFA v ACA debate is that it's framed in terms of the absolutely apocalyptic--millions will lose their health care!!! That wouldn't happen, but I think the bickering about it among our own takes the focus on why we need to change presidents and the senate.

God is or he isn't, and it doesn't matter anyway

In AA circles, one -on-one chats between members with some amount of  consecutive accumulated time turns to one's idea of God. That is, as the organization's basic materials inform,  a  God our individual  understanding; I remain grateful that AA does not require belief in a specific deity. So the question, when posed, makes me do a little dance of rhetoric, or it used to, in that I would shy away from theological particulars and the like because it results in dissension and division with those who have no real idea of who I am as an individual. It's been different lately, and my answer is slightly more direct. I tell most who ask me about my Higher Power that I remain an agnostic, which many mistake as the same thing as being an atheist.I give them the dictionary definition, which is that the existence of God is unknown and unknowable.This satisfies few of those who ask the question.Personally, I find it a more honest response than telling folks I'm a zen Buddhist.Although, I have taken an interest in Deism , an American spiritual notion observed by several founding fathers that God, such as he is, is responsible for the whole universe, and that his machinations are revealed according what natural law--scientific inquiry in other words--reveals to us constantly. And I am attracted to the to the idea that God does not intervene in the course of naturally -occurring human events; prayers are for a clarity of mind to make the best possible choice out of many to be made. God, though, does not act as a dating service or a loan officer.