Liam went after Fate yesterday in the far pasture, Fate does not have the eye strength to intimidate him or back him up, nor is she mildly interested in nipping or challenging anything. She is a Joy Dog, a flower child, full of fun and mysterday. She did hold her ground, and then backed up and ran to hide behind Red.
Then she came charging out and did the Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope, circling around and around until Liam got dizzy and gave it all up. I sent Red it to teach Fate some manners and back Fate up. Fate can sure dance, she made Liam look like a tree trunk.
“A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: my strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”
Most of us are talking and thinking about our democracy these days, and uncharacteristically, so am I.
I was a political writer for some years, and have not generally missed it.
I’m not interested in arguing about politics – you have a lot of places to go for that – but in understanding politics this year, something in which we all have a stake. I hope I can be helpful to you, but I am eager to be helpful to me, politics have become more important to me, more relevant.
In my search for understanding, I’ve decided to pair up with the iconoclastic critic, political analyst and writer H.L.Mencken. I am sorry he is not alive to see this political year, it is, in many ways, the culmination of so many of his ideas, dreams and observations. And his nightmares.
I’ll share the journey.
Mencken was harsh sometimes, but also prescient, brilliant and piercing. He was merciless in his skewing of feckless citizens and politicians, he had little faith in either.
I am quite in awe, re-reading his famous “Notes On Democracy,” of how little things have changed in American politics, or put more gently, how much they are the same. Historians tell us that nothing is really new. Reading Mencken, you see that they are correct, for all of the hype and hysteria of the pundit class. The commentators telling us what to think don’t see to care much for history, every utterance is a revelation, never before spoken or thought.
Political journalism has become punditry, not reporting. The reason we are all so stunned by what is happening, is that commentators talk mostly to one another, not the people. Nobody ever broke a big story sitting at an anchor desk in Washington or New York. And there are hardly any reporters anywhere any longer who go out and talk to ordinary people. It’s no longer in the budget.
That’s why we didn’t begin to grasp or foresee the rage building among white working class people in America, their lives trampled, discarded and abandoned by the political parties supposed to be representing them. Someone is finally speaking to them.
Everything that happens seems to stun the people responsible for telling us about it. If you read Mencken, nothing that is happening is even surprising.
Mencken is going to help me get through this election year. You are welcome to come along. Mencken did not write about democracy so much as he wrote about The Democratic Man. He defined our society as a never-ending conflict between the superior – or civilized – man and the mob.
The Political Mob Man was a monster, governed only by emotion and ambition:
“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not., he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history, he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race..In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true…”
This inferior political man absorbs delusions, Mencken argued.
His mind is stocked mostly with fear and rage, which he ruthlessly exploits. “The demagogues, ie., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the cornerstone of their exact and pussiant science.” Politics in a democracy, he wrote, consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of hysterias and bugaboos, most false or exaggerated.
Many of the sound elements that exist in a stable democracy – equal rights under the law, free speech limitations of government – are abandoned in times of war and fear and danger, real or perceived. Mencken saw this first hand in 1917 when anti-German hysteria peaked in American on such an epic scale that pacifists were silenced and jailed, sometimes killed; newspapers were censored and shut down, citizens joined private militias to spy on their friends and neighbors.
These terrors are episodic, they date back to the Salem Witch Trials, they move forward with history – African-Americans, Native-Americans, Bolsheviks,Communists, Japanese-Americans, Terrorists, Muslims, Mexicans, sometimes the Irish, on a smaller social scales, gays and transgender people. There is nothing new about them.
It is not a new story. It is not even a different story. In Mencken’s view the wise and noble democratic citizen is a myth, some Americans have always been ready to join mobs eager to trample the underpinnings of democracy. when they are frightened. And there are also always political leaders eager to grab a torch and lead the way.
Mencken sometimes seems bitter in his writing. Instead of a democracy as laid out by the Founding Fathers, he saw a country bent on blindly following leaders eager to hound their critics and enemies. They waste public money, persecute opponents and critics of war, openly bribe labor leaders, (and now, corporate leaders) spread hysteria and false information and often abandoned decency, decorum and self-respect. And Mencken did not even live to see the Corporate Nation, hard at work buying the political process with billions of dollars.
What saves democracy?
Mencken believed in the Civilized Man, the Superior Man. This was a man (or woman in our time) of honor, regardless of race or social background. The savior of democracy is an independent, enlightened citizen, disposed towards liberty and the protection of people’s rights, on guard to keep freedom from being eroded by self-styled patriots or ambitious politicians who play upon the fears of people.
The Superior Citizen is beset on all sides, their troubles grow and grow.
Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner also had a concept of this noble creature, he called it “The Forgotten Man,” the man who fought to keep the mob in check, “the normal, educated, well-disposed, unfrenzied, enlightened citizen of the of the middle minority, whose virtues include initiative, enterprise, self-reliance, courage and hard work. And honor, a commitment to doing the right thing for the greater good.”
These are the people who stand up to the mob, keep it at bay. I don’t see any of them on the news.
I am touched by Mencken’s writing, however cynical it sometimes is. But I want to be that kind of citizen, with those kinds of values. It is exciting for someone who doesn’t care to be in the left or right to see another path that is comfortable and inspiring.
At heart, Mencken loved the ideals of the democratic system, a nation of equal justice under the law.In his own way, he was fighting for them.
He was not always optimistic about the future of democracy, much as he loved it. He thought the only way it could ultimately survive was by developing and cherishing a class of men and women honest and independent enough to challenge the political class. Mostly, he thought, this responsibility lay with the press, their clearest mission was “to keep a wary eye on the gentlemen who operate the nation, “and only too often slip into the assumption that they own it.”
When the press fails to do its duty, the quack would rise up and take control, he predicted.
In our time, no such class has emerged in any great numbers, and the press is a shambles.
No one is keeping a wary eye on those gentlemen.
Mencken warned that leaders keep the mob at bay, real trouble comes when the mob becomes the leaders. Instead of uplifting the people or steering the passions in a positive direction – think Churchill or Gandhi – Mob Men in politics fuel the fears and exploit them to gain power.
But I know what I want to do. I am looking to find that Civilized Man or Woman, the Superior Citizen, the person, he or she, of honor and courage, I want to follow him or her and support him or her. I’d like to be him in my life as a citizen. I can be normal, educated, unfrenzied, an enlightened citizen of the middle way.
I am grateful to Mencken for guiding me, I am more hopeful than he was.
I asked Maria this morning when the Fiber Chair would be finished, she said it would be done as soon as we stopped feeding hay to the animals – that would be a month or so. There would be no more baling wire. In the Fall, she said, she would start on another old chair, there are several upstairs in the barn.
It’s been an education to see Maria out there every morning, transforming this ratty old chair into something, a work of art. She sees things I do not see. But I see the Fiber Chair, and it is a beautiful thing, an organic work of art from the farm and of the farm.
“Comparing penis sizes is a much more nuanced and sophisticated way to determine who’s right and who’s wrong than something as clunky and uncouth as a debate.” — Jared Kintz, author.
Times are definitely changing, and I am determined, as always, to roll with them. Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a woman who disliked something I wrote about animals, she said “and I bet you have a small penis, too.”
And then, this morning, as I was still pondering what to tweet in response, I got another message, this one from another woman, she said, “it is obvious that Maria pushes you around, and you seem to follow her around like a milk-starved baby goat, and you say you do whatever she says. Another man with a big mouth and a small penis.”
Well, I am not running for President, but I do feel that my manhood has been called into question.
It is true that I do what my wife tells me, and it is also true that I do not cross her lightly, she is half Sicilian and half German, and I had a dream once that she was walking barefoot in a small village on the water in Sicily, branding an enormous bread knife and threatening to remove one of my most precious parts (there was a time as recently as a week ago, when I would never use the word “penis” on my blog) because I was flirting with another woman.
I ran and hid.
This set the tone, I think, after that I just decided to do what I was told and say these precious words: “you’re probably right dear.” Yesterday, hobbling around on my blistered feet (too much walking in New York City) I went to lift up a bucket of water and Maria appeared behind me like a spirit.
“You are not lifting that bucket,” she said. “Put it down.”
As I have often seen my beloved Red do, I lowered my head, put my tail between my legs, and dropped the bucket.
This very same morning, Chloe nosed me right out of the pasture gate and nearly plowed right through me, she was trying to get to the barn for her morning hay. Fate began eating chicken droppings by the roost and totally blew me off while I yelled pointlessly at her to stop. Zelda ran me and Fate right out of the pole barn when we dared to try and move the sheep.
And the hens came right up on to the porch while I was right there and began eating the barn cat’s food, ignoring me completely while I stomped my foot and waved a broom around. It was a rout. The barn cats charged the open door to come inside, even as I tried to stop them – “it’s warm out here,” I thundered. They ignored me and rushed into the living room to sit on their favorite sofas.
You can see where I am going here, and it just got worse.
I went out to commune with the donkeys, Lulu and Fanny, they were not in the mood, they were hungry, they turned their backs on me quite haughtily and walked away, as if I were a rock or a fence-post, they seemed almost to jeer at me. “Your hands are tiny,” I could almost hear them saying, “you can’t brush us!”
There are a lot of strong women around the farm.
Red and I are the only males, we have learned how to get along, and I’ll give you a tip, it isn’t by arguing with all of these women. Fate chews on Red all the time, he just wags his tail and sits still. She steals his treats and jumps on him when he’s in the car. To get along, you have to go along. Don’t worry, I often console my gentle dog, you have a large penis, I am sure.
Perhaps I was delusional this morning, it seemed like a dream, it seemed like my entire world was looking at me and pointing to my penis, and laughing at me. I could hear them all chanting, “look at his hands. see how tiny they are.” And if my hands were tiny, well, you know what else they were suggesting might be tiny.
I want to tell you that Linda L, the first woman I ever dated and had sex with, told me that it was “the greatest sex that I have ever had.” So there. I didn’t learn until later that it was the first sex Linda had ever had (me too) but by that time, we were no longer in touch. I wonder if she would give me a reference though.
I worried all morning about how to handle this, I did feel my masculinity, or what was left of it, was right on the line. I couldn’t let it slide, but I also promised myself a few years ago that I would be honest, and never lie for the rest of my life. You know, be authentic, stand in your truth, you can’t do that if you are small.
But I do want to be truthful. So here it is the truth about my hands. They are pretty large, XL for gloves.
As for my penis (pause):
It is small. I’ve said it. It has always been small. My body is pretty big, but I cannot guarantee you that my penis is large. Because it isn’t. If it was large, all of these women would not be pushing me and Red around all day. They would be listening to me, not telling me what to do.
I’ve had no complaints mind you, creativity can trump length much of the time. My penis has always been big enough, is the way I would put it. But it is not huge. Or even large.
And I am 68 years old, if that counts for anything. I don’t suppose it does, it wasn’t large 20 years ago either.
And I’ll tell you this, men with big penises are invariably dumb, scientists have proven this again and again. I’ve heard this from doctors that I trust. The smaller the penis, the bigger the brain, I know this for a fact. Something to do with nourishment going from one place to the other at birth. Really. You can Google it.
No man has ever had a big penis and a big brain. (If you follow the news, you know this is true.)
It’s a big step for any man to say this, but Red and I have both learned the hard way what it takes to be a real man. And it is not, fortunately, just a big penis. You have to find smart and hardy women and do what they tell you, and things work out.
I guess I shouldn’t draw Red into this, I don’t really know if he has a big penis or not, I have not really checked it out, that would be weird to me. And I don’t know a lot of men with big mouths and small penises, it isn’t something we men talk about when we get together, unless we are running for President of the United States.
I just wanted company in my moment of revelation. It is not easy to stand alone on this.
I hope you won’t think less of me, or my blog, or my books. I hope I can remain large in your eyes, if not in every part of my life. The truth is out. I have a small penis. I guarantee it. I guarantee.
