Digby is Dead: Reflections on the End of the Decade

2009-12-28T18:36:00Z

Preface

It is the end of the decade; all decades require some requiem, this one more than most.

2009 is the last year of the first decade of the third millennium of our current common chronology – you know, the one anchored to the birth of Christ. It’s also the year in which I turned fifty years old. By all accounts, turning fifty is a significant marker, but my doing so in a decade-ending year seems sufficiently noteworthy as to write something to commemorate the occasion. And so I have written this two-part Reflections on the End of the Decade entitled Digby is Dead.

Part One, National Notes, broadly explores the last ten years of the American experience. Here, I use a set of decadal bookends, which, in addition to delimiting the years in popular culture, serve as information cues from which a great deal may be inferred about the historical period. This, then, is a good time to make plain my bias favoring the political and economic as the best historical indicia. I suppose, were I writing at age thirty, I might favor popular culture and higher arts and literature because, well, it’s more fun. However, I’ve come to realize Adam Smith was right, defense does come before opulence, and I am now more concerned with economics and politics than I’ve previously been. And, operationally the economic condition of the times invariably reflects itself in popular culture anyway.

So, on one hand, the concept of decadal bookends is anecdotal and subjective; on the other hand, we commonly think of history in the terms of decades – the Roaring Twenties, the Groovy Sixties, the Greedy Eighties – so correctly-determined decadal bookends can be very useful. For example, the ‘30’s began on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929 and ended on December 7, 1941 with our formal entry into World War II. As the trailing legacy of Black Tuesday, the Depression would imprint the 1930s and World War II would do the same to the ‘40s, particularly via its economic impact and its stimulating effect on technological innovation. With just that information as a set of cues, we can infer a great deal about the American experience of the 1930’s. Using this type of framework, I reflect on America’s decade just passing.

Part One: National Notes

The decade’s dawn brought George W. Bush and his presidential ~~election~~ ~~victory~~ “victory.” Surely he was the right man at the right time, by which I mean if you were standing in the future looking back at the now-ending decade and wanted to engineer this exact outcome, i.e., you actually wanted the decade to end with the country in its current economic diminished capacity and at war on two fronts in a world just dripping with Jihad, you would surely want George W. Bush, or a man or woman just like him, to assure these outcomes. You would need a person with the proper depth of thought and temperament to handle 9/11 and its trailing effects, things like the Patriot Act, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the galaxy-sized constellation of moral, ethical, economic, practical, tactical, strategic and international-relations implications of these things. So for eight of the ten years of this decade, the Free World was lead by George W. Bush, whose very presence as our head of state devalued, indeed, called into suspicion things like curiosity and clarity of expression and, in turn, finished Reagan’s work of smearing the words liberal, academic, intellectual, elite, and expert into expressions of contempt, far cries from the value these words ought to generate in a society that privileges things like good grades and learning and research and teaching and stuff like that.

But new decades are built on the old, and before Bush sat Clinton. I loved Clinton as president not in spite of his exposed humanity, but because of it. He was impure; he was sexual; he had appetites our Big Bubba did, yes sir, he sure did, but damn could that Old Boy make politics sing. Remember the budget impasse that shut down the federal government in late 1995 and very early 1996? He blamed that embarrassment on the Republicans in Congress and it worked like a charm. Forget the facts, the strategy was cagey and brilliant and that’s more typical of his presidency than his early stumbles with universal health care and gays in the military. Health care was a tactical disaster, gays in the military a strategic one, and those may have facilitated the Gingrich-lead 1994 midterm Reagan Revolution Redux, but nothing held Bill Clinton back in the 1990’s. Not even impeachment. Remember the impeachment of a sitting POTUS? Now that doesn’t happen all the time.

You see, Bubba liked his women, plural and Rubenesque, and so for his sex drive, and his stupidity about lying about it, he was impeached, and between the intern, the dress, the tape-recorded not-so-best friend, the whole thing was a circus. In fact, looking back, the only one who handled it with any dignity and came out not stinking of mendacity was Hillary. That notwithstanding, I still can’t tell whether the whole thing was a “high crime” or a “misdemeanor,” but there we were spell-bound by a Republican-elite driven impeachment that was more-than-widely unpopular, that pretty much went nowhere, and surely hasn’t seemed to have even slightly harmed his ex-President gig. At the time, the whole thing had an “oh, puh-lease” feel to it. Its sheer ludicrousness, however, is best visible in hindsight, when we remember that Representative – now Applachian-trail-hiking-but-really-in-Argentina-South-Carolina-Governor – Mark Sanford voted in the House to pass bills of impeachment to the Senate where Nevada Senator John – My-Parents-Paid-Off-My-Lover’s-Cuckolded-Husband – Ensign voted in favor them. Such layers of sexual hypocrisy and moral relativism! Uniquely Republican? Perhaps not, but it sure seems so.

In any event, time passes, people forget, and our good-old-boy-Rhodes-Scholar Bill Clinton sets the stage for the beginning of the first decade of the new millennium: a budget surplus domestically and, generally speaking, international peace between most nations. Now don’t get me wrong, I recognize Bill had serious policy issues. There was the AFDC “welfare” thing in or around the 1996 election, and one critic friend of mine pointed out that it was “Clinton, after all, [who] told us all the Era of Big Government is over” and “I love Bubba, but his policies were really only progressive in comparison to Puritans and lunatics.”

Speaking of circuses, Clinton’s heir apparent played the campaign of 2000 all wrong and so that year, the Christmas we got, we deserved. Such promise Bush had, the dopey-man’s Reagan. Lacking the capacity, much less the inclination, to handle such complex social issues as the use of torture or church-state relations, and to project the cultural sensitivity one expects of our Head of State, he stumbled along for the eight years of two terms and only started two wars. For my money, his refusal to pardon Scooter Libby (notwithstanding his commuting Libby’s 30-month sentence) was the only significant decision he ever made that I respect. By that time, however, he was beyond any serious historical redemption.

So say what you will about Clinton, but he probably would’ve made better use of the CIA-prepared August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” which specifically mentions airplane hijacking as a tactic. And, after Clinton’s eight years, we had a budget surplus and no active armed conflict and an end-of-1999 economy running about 4.1% GDP growth with unemployment around 4.2%.

Would that we had those numbers now. As I write this, the best estimate for the end of the decade is unemployment dancing around 10% and, for the first two quarters of 2009, the change in GDP was negative. These are simple equations, folks: Collective impoverishment breeds discontent; unpopular wars breed ambivalence in a public already confused and caught between not just the desire but the need to support the real human beings who are “the troops,” and not-quite-understanding why, exactly, we ever had to do that in Iraq, and how the hell, exactly, we’re going to do this in Afghanistan. This is how Bush left us; this is his Legacy: leaving God’s Green Acre, our Shining City on a Hill, literally bankrupt and in combat on two fronts in an international setting that teeters on the brink of an irrational Holy War between some warped conception of God’s will in the middle East and our imperfect expression of capitalist modernity in the West.
I digress for a moment, but the problems with that Holy War match-up are two: First, the sides don’t agree on the rules of engagement, particularly drawing distinctions between who it’s o.k. to kill or at least try to hurt sufficiently as to make unusable as a human, and who it’s not o.k. to try to do those things to. That’s probably because of the second problem, which is that the two sides don’t assign the same value to death. They do not agree on the limits of rationality; they operate in the same physical environment, but under entirely different and only partially overlapping social psychologies. The most dangerous part of this mismatch is that for one side, voluntary death is a military tool. Indeed, it’s emotionally repulsive to even think, but the side that has suicide bombers has a tremendous tactical advantage.

I like to “Big Picture” historical periods with what I call “decadal bookends” – start and stop points that help me to order things to better understand historical sequence. The best example is the 1960’s, which began on November 22, 1963 with the assassination of JFK, and ended on August 9, 1974, with the resignation of Richard Nixon. To the decade now ending, many argue that 9/11 is the right-and-proper way to tag the start, but I think not. Yes, here in America, if not the world, 9/11 would change everything: we now divide the world into pre- and post-9/11 dimensions with regard to so many things – air travel, patriotism, New York City – and this would, in the early part of the decade, generate a vulnerability that would drive a fast-grasping of all the trappings – if perhaps not the reality – of national security. Still, even with all that taken into account, 9/11 is not the essential start point to the American experience of the decade just passed.

The essential start point of this decade was the election of 2000. After all, the planes would hit the Towers regardless of the outcome of that election. I personally have no proof in hand but, by early August of 2001, the CIA did and so they advised the Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces, the person charged with protecting us from foreign attack, that bin Laden was determined to attack us. So, no, it wasn’t that strangers came from afar to hurt us badly on September 11^th that best marks the then-new-decade; it was that a year earlier we elected a man with a propensity to ignore Gathering Storm Clouds, and a disinclination to review, much less learn, from his Hurricane-Katrina-sized-mistakes. So, what marks the beginning of the now-ending decade? Not what happened to us in 2001, but rather, what we did to ourselves a year earlier in the presidential election of 2000.

The leaders we choose reflect what we think of ourselves. What we needed in November of 2000 was a woman or a man with the capacity to entertain competing ideas simultaneously, to weight and value them according to complex models, to have a robust approach to empirical data gathering and to care deeply about the methodological soundness, comprehensiveness, and truth-quality of the data on which he relied, and to possess the capacity to exercise, as appropriate, a subtle and nuanced approach to understanding who the other relevant actors are, and what their motivations, foci, and procedures are likely to be. What we got was George W. Bush. He started two wars, one of which might be justifiable, the other of which was shown to be simply unnecessary, and likely to have been, or should have been, known to the Bush administration to be unnecessary and likely to result in the loss of American and innocent foreign lives. And even though he started two wars and managed neither well, we selected Bush again in 2004. So, for eight of the last ten years, George W. Bush – with only the most minimal Congressional oversight – lead the United States and, in turn, exercised an enormous impact on the security condition of the entire Free World. We started the decade by electing him, we ratified that decision in 2004. That’s what started this decade in the direction it went; not that we were attacked, but rather how we dealt with the information that we were about to be attacked, and, how we dealt with the aftermath. The thing about us, as an American people, that best captures our input into those processes was our election of George W. Bush. The key impact of the starting decadal bookend, then, is the lamentable dumbing down of America.

But we need a closing decadal bookend. Let’s face it, the decade’s dusk was mostly more of the same punctuated by Obama’s Magic Moment. When the magic of leadership morphed into the banality of daily governance, after the campaign team of 2008 became the transition team and then the White House staff of 2009, we were focused on Wall Street bailouts and stimulus packages. And the lens through which we hoped and prayed all that made sense was economics and the data that drive it. Indeed, as the decade turns to the second of the century, we are obsessed with economic reports. While there is likely a good historical reason that in 1849 Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics “the dismal science,” in modernity I would call it that because we seem to only pay significant attention to economics when times are dismal. And times are dismal and have been so and will be for a while yet. So, the Bookend at the End of the Decade is the American economy.

As this decade began, together with my mentor and friend, I edited and wrote part of a book called “The Future of American Democratic Politics.” Incidentally, at the moment, the book is available electronically for Kindle download, while the paperback is Amazon sales rank 2,218,090, which is better than the hard cover, sales ranked at number 3,697,786. More importantly, though, in that book I wrote the following:

In varying degrees… all ages are ages of crisis, and it is crisis that tests the mettle of our national ethos and our political culture. The current test… shows the tremendous endurance and great flexibility of that mettle.

* * *

And so perhaps the most important consideration for the future of American democratic politics in the post-9/11 world… is the continuity of our Madisonian constitutional framework, a workable mechanism enabling us to exercise diligence against outside threat and still live, work, love, and play in a free, liberal society (2003, pgs. 217-18, Rutgers Univ. Press).

Standing here now, looking back at the decade for which I presumed to predict the political future, I confess self-doubt. I confess that the Kool-Aid has worn off and that I am but a nod-of-the-head away from repudiating the conclusion that the Madisonian constitutional framework still serves us well. And, for my money, if anyone killed the system, it wasn’t even the Republicans, though they really, really tried. Rather, it was Joe Lieberman. But, again, I digress and it’s still too soon historically to assess Lieberman anyway. More to the point, the word-count tells me it’s time to move from the political to the personal, so after a short interlude Part II offers my personal reflections on the now-ending decade.

Interlude

One of the hallmarks of maturity is perspective, i.e., keeping the long view, even in especially interesting times. The methodological difficulty with developing an emotionally and intellectually useful perspective, whether on the world, the nation, my family, or my life, is that it’s easier to reflect on the events and conditions of ten years ago, than it is this past year. Part of that is just the natural interplay of short- and long-term memory; by 2009, I’ve already forgotten what was hip, happening, and the joke of the day in the early years of this decade, but I’ve still got Balloon Boy, Michelle Bachman, and Tiger Woods jokes stuck in my head, and they’re likely to stay there until, say, the summer of 2011.

In the preceding part, I focused on the big picture by using capstones that, to me anyway, define the decade; analytically, I sought to leverage the incrementalism of decadal analysis. Here, in Part Two, I reflect on the last ten years from a purely personal perspective by centering on la fin de la décennie. This makes perfect sense to me because in the narrative of my life so far, the dyad of 2008 and 2009 constitutes the money shot.

After a read-through of an earlier draft of the main essays, a writer-friend wrote that “it seems to me, from what you’ve said, the end of this decade has been more about your almost mortality followed by a new rebirth.” And you know, he’s right, it has. From a personal perspective, I’ve experienced a rebirth, a mid-life reinvigoration fueled by a fulfillment of lots of cool fantasies, some naughty, most nice, but overall, the feeling of redemption, of liberation, of release, of finally having arrived, of having unzipped my skin and stepped out into the fresh air and light of day. I am fifty years old. I was born over fifty years ago, in 1959. I am alive. And it is very good. And that’s why the essay is called Digby is Dead.

You see, my last and by far most public writing period started shortly after my embarrassingly-all-too-public-not-near-death experience in 2008 and ended right around the late spring of 2009, by which time I’d spiraled into an epic depression and was incapable of generating fully-formed sentences, much less writing. Also blocking my dainty way was that I didn’t have a study in which to write, something explained more fully in the next essay.

The little writings and essays and things that populated my website Digby at Large first appeared in January 2009 and the last, actually written about a month earlier, was posted near the end of May 2009. So, like so many tarantulas and snakes, Digby shed his skin. Digby molted. And so I can’t go back to that; I’m not the cat I used to be – I wouldn’t fit anymore. More importantly, over the last five decades or so, I’ve gotten used to – even accepting of – the utterly inviolable rule of human relations that you can’t go home again. And the experience of not being able to go home again – parents dead, childhood home gone, world changed – is at first terrifying, and later, liberating.

Look, psychological, emotional, and spiritual death-and-rebirth are fairly common recurring experiences; we sometimes bring them on ourselves or they sometimes happen to us, and we either get on the bus and ride boldly into our personal futures, or we resist, holding tightly to formerly successful strategies for living, or we flounder not quite knowing what to do. But either way, the most difficult part is, figuring out how to be in the interstices between spiritual death and rebirth. From Tony Kushner’s, Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika:

If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin?

Although I didn’t know it when I wrote it, Part Two is dominated by a sense of death and rebirth. However, my writer-friend lamented that the death element of it

isn't quite expressed. You play with the concept of imminent demise, but its still sort of something set in the abstract future, where as I think at the time there was a bit more of an immediacy to it, which brings all sorts of other implications.

Well, yes. On one hand, it – the being really sick and then not dying thing – was a genuine, authentic experience and I have the medical insurance receipts to prove it. On the other hand, it’s kind of embarrassing to think about now, because even if it didn’t take a village, I kept the whole village in the loop. If you were there at the time, you know what I mean – look, I could have just kept my mouth shut.

More importantly, though – and what is most likely to have motivated Part Two – is the confluence of all these things – a genuine recognition of my mortality (regardless of the medical or other mechanism of my eventual death); turning 50 with all the post-modern-social-psychology-numerology that entails; and all of this happening during the tail-end of the decade during which we, as a country and nation, went from peace and prosperity to war and bankruptcy (see, Part I, above).

So regardless of how my personal psychology links to the Jungian collective moment, I feel very much a part of it. Maybe it’s teaching college and being connected to youthful energy – in many respects we are, after all, who we hang out with. Maybe it’s playing in the band – that’s a very difficult experience to explain to folks who haven’t done it – but it’s a very energizing, emotionally-connecting, even spiritual activity. And, as I said, we are with whom we hang out.

Or, maybe it’s that I’m no longer in the anticipatory and anxious stage of growing older. I’m not growing older. I am older. I’m fifty. But I gotta tell you, I’m totally digging it. Youth – being young and all that – was cool; in fact, it was very cool and I certainly got my money’s worth out of it and I seek no refunds. But in the back of my mind I always feared getting older; I always feared losing my youth.

Well, I am older now and I have lost my youth. And there really wasn’t all that much to worry about. Actually, all in all, it’s not so bad. Indeed, it’s all right now. In fact, it’s a gas.

Part Two: The Poems of Horace

I began the decade in my 40’s and ended it in my 50’s, by which time I could finally straight-face-claim maturity, or at least enough maturity to assert the fact of a real – as opposed to an imposter – adulthood. Ironically, I started playing in a rock-and-roll band again, with all that entails. What can I say? Boomer Maturity. An astrologer told me a long time ago, the Neptunian pull is strong on my chart, in which, for Chrissake, Mercury is already rising on a Gemini. Astrologically-speaking, Gemini is crazy enough, but anything to do with Mercury can’t be good, and Neptune sounds very downstairs, if you know what I mean. In any event, rather than Big Picturing my personal decade, I’m focusing on the end, the transition year 2009.

After a short break – short, but long enough to have developed and institutionalized in my life a love of 1950’s and 1960’s doo-wop and early rock and roll so much so that people now identify me with it without so much as a hint of irony – I started writing again; my study is done; I have no excuse. I’ve always thought Patrick was delicate and I robust, but the truth is probably more reversed than I’d care to admit. It’s sort of hard to self-assess – after all, everyone wants to be robust, it’s just better than being delicate, which implies a somewhat undesirable state of high-maintenance. But I was being very delicate about writing; any writing on my part ceased in early May, which correlated with the start of major renovations on our home. The beginning of every major renovation is a demolition of some sort, and the metaphor was not lost on me. I claimed I could not write a word until every detail of my new study was perfectly completed. Such fragility. Such an orchid.

But a lot has happened since I last wrote anything public, a lot that would divert me from writing. Most deeply, our beautiful, loving, and loved dog, Hamlet died at ten-and-half years old leaving Rhepp, our twelve-and-a-half year old dog companionless and Patrick and I forlorn; our home underwent self-induced renovations encompassing our sleeping and bathroom quarters such that we can now claim, thanks to a cast of dozens traipsing through our home during contractors’ hours, that we lived through a major home renovation; I resolved and made preparations to quit my band yet again, but ultimately did not, yet again; and of the 51 summers I have spent on this earth, 2009 was the most next-to-worse one. And it was no day at the beach for Patrick, either.

So the end of the decade turned out to be quite the architectural metaphor. In the middle of this past year, I turned fifty years old and at the same time, the floor plan of my life changed; walls in my house were moved; one of my dogs was gone. And, at 50, there was no denying that the clock was running and if I wanted to do things – if I wanted to leave something behind, to still matter after I’m gone – I’d best get to it. And I’m feeling pretty good about it: I have hope for 2010, and this brings me to why this part of the essay is subtitled, The Poems of Horace.

Here, at decade’s end, I’m fifty years old; not particularly young but, I’ve come to realize, not all that old either. I’m a pretty young fifty. But I am fifty, so the playfulness of youth is tempered by the caution but not yet fragility of age, as well as some of the social privilege that being old(er) – but not too old – brings. And, I have the power of verbal and musical expression, perhaps a gift, perhaps a labor, but something that keeps me playful and creative.

In any event, a couple of days ago I was composing a note to accompany an engagement gift to a young couple of whom I’m quite fond and I was reflecting on being young and growing old. That lead me to remember a play I’d seen. Patrick and I had gone in mid-2001 with friends to pre-9/11 New York to see a play on Broadway and I recalled a line in the play that at the time stopped me dead in my tracks.

In Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play, “The Invention of Love,” the noted and some say greatest classics scholar of all time, A.E.Housman (1859-1936), appears as two characters simultaneously, one of himself aged 77, the other of his same-self aged from 18-26. In Act One, Housman the elder delivers a monologue in which he starts off reflecting on whether he is, in fact, the greatest classics scholar of all time, and then – conscious that he is talking to himself roughly 50 years younger, gets lost in time and quickly ends up reflecting on his youth, which, or more accurately, who is standing there right in front of him, listening carefully. And given Stoppard’s skill at tweaking time – for e.g., see his magnificent 1993 time-twisting play Arcadia – the scene is incredibly effective.

I saw this play on Broadway in 2001; Robert Sean Leonard, late of Dead Poets Society and recently of House, played the younger and Robert Easton, whom I hadn’t heard of at the time but who was very good, played the elder. I’ve italicized the line that when Easton said it out loud in the open theater I sat up straight and started to listen very carefully. So, here Housman, age 77, reflects on his intellectual legacy, starting with the claim by others that he was the greatest classics scholar ever:

There are people who say I am but they would not know it if I were. Wilamowitz, I should add, is dead. Or will be. Or will have been dead. I think it must be time for my tablet, it orders my tenses. The future perfect I have always regarded as an oxymoron. I wouldn’t worry so much about your monument, if I were you. If I had my time again, I would pay more regard to those poems of Horace which tell you you will not have your time again. Life is brief and death kicks at the door impartially. Who knows how many tomorrows the gods will grants us? Now is the time, when you are young, to deck your hair with myrtle, drink the best of the wine, pluck the fruit. Seasons and moons renew themselves but neither noble name nor eloquence, no, nor righteous deeds will restore us.

And so the threshold is “if I had my time again…” Well, feeling alive and vital at age 50, I sort of do have this sense of having my time again. I mean, hell, why shouldn’t this year be any more Golden than my bar mitzvah year, my senior year in college, or the year I turned 30? or 40? So, knowing what I know now, I do have my time again, and I am paying more attention to those poems of Horace that tell me that I will not have my time again. So, I’ve got some time and to know what to do with it, I turn to the two reasons I’ve always believed we were put on this earth: (1) to seek and find suitable recipients for our love; and, (2) to perfect our spirit.

After all, what better time than the start of a new decade at age 50 to contemplate the Big Question, Why are we here?, sometimes more operationally, What should I do with my life?, sometimes more existentially just an incoherent hunh? Regardless of the wording, the question is fundamentally ontological and the answer provides general guidelines that if practiced at an individual level might well have positive aggregate-level impacts. The details are different for everyone, but the basic guidelines for good happy living are two: (1) love first, and then be loved; and (2) know yourself well and fulfill your potential and desire, and try to know others well and help them, at their option and speed, to fulfill their potential and desire.

In terms of actions, attitudes, and behaviors, the specifics of following these guidelines are different for everyone. In my case – and it was a long time coming to figure out the details – it means teaching and genuinely helping my students with all the intellect, compassion, experience, and understanding I’ve got to figure out how the world works and how to fit into it; it means playing in and with the band with joy, friendship, gusto, and the unfettered desire to make myself and other people happy; it means to love Patrick, my partner, with depth and authenticity; it means to enjoy the company of animals and the presence of nature, in my case dogs and the colors of October; and, it means engaging fully and, to the degree sensible, lovingly with the people around me.

At 50, at the end of this dreadful decade, I’ve come to realize that if I get through the day without a knot in my stomach, I’ve done o.k. And if I can string enough of those together, then the week, the month, the season, the year, the decade, they’ll all probably end up o.k. And then, as the song says, maybe everything will be all right. After all, it’s a new decade.

Parts I and II, Princeton, New Jersey

December 21, 2009

Preface and Interlude, West Bloomfield, Michigan

December 24, 2009

I am grateful to Ian M. for thoughtful comments and suggestions.

Anything you didn’t like, though, was my fault, not his.

I am also grateful to Patrick S. for editorial nit-picking that clearly improved readability.

Any remaining verbal awkwardness, however, is my fault, not his.