Every day, Chloe sidles over to the gate, and whinnies for me to come and give her a bath. I am happy to oblige, it is one of my favorite chores now, a ritual of trust and affection. The water cools Chloe off and shoes the flies off of her, and she will stand there for an hour to get hosed down. I marvel that this big creature would stand so still and be so peaceful – sometimes her eyes close and I think she will be going to sleep.
On Monday, I reach a kind of milestone that once seemed unfathomable to me, I suppose much of my life is like that. I will be 69 years old. Maria is whisking me off to an inn in Vermont for one night and we will be back here on Tuesday morning. Sixty-nine years is a lot of life, and while I tend to be one of those people who lives in the moment – I don’t get too excited about birthdays – I am in a reflective mood these days.
Life has pulled me along in unexpected ways, and I suppose I never imagined I would ever be where I am today. I am a fortunate man. I have a partner that I love, work that I love, creativity that I love, animals that I love, a farm that I love, dogs that I love, friends that I love. There is a unique perspective for the person who has fewer days ahead than behind him, and the process of aging further is uncertain.
Getting older is like walking through a gate, it is not possible to see what is on the other side. I walk there with my head held high, my spirits strong, my heart beating soundly.
Sometimes I do ask myself if I will remain healthy and independent, capable of doing good work, of doing my share and supporting my wife, daughter, soon-to-arrive granddaughter and friends. I wonder how well I will get to know my granddaughter, I will be 81 when she is 10. I worry about Maria having to take care of me, even though she says that is not something for me to worry about. How can I not, we live in such an anxious world, and I am not blind?
For now, I am strong and in good health. My writing has never come more easily or meaningfully. My photography has opened a rich new chapter in my life, it has helped me to see the world differently. My blog has become the focal point of my creativity.
I have only wanted to do one thing in my life, and that is write, and I am a writer and I get to write just about every day of my life. How lucky am I? Getting older has been good for me and to me. I found Maria when I was 61, we got married when I was 63. Since then, my life has filled with riches beyond imagination.
I have experience bankruptcy and open heart surgery, both were important milestones in my life I have learned so much about myself, about life, about other people, about facing reality and taking good care of myself. I have a long ways to go in my ambition to be a fuller, peaceful and good human being, I am eager to contribute to the world.
The open heart surgery was good for me also, my restored heart is beating strongly, pumping blood and energy to the rest of me, it has made me stronger and better. I walk gratefully every single day of my life.
I am sorry about the tragedies that befell my original family, there is really only me and my sister left, and she is a brave and big-hearted soul, living her life with her dogs in a very remote corner of upstate New York. My brother is still alive but we have not spoken in years, and I doubt we ever will.
I have always worried about my sister, but that is not a necessary thing, but she is living the life she wanted to lead, and she is strong and tough. I turned to her some years ago when I broke down and was falling apart, she was there for me every single day in every she could be. I do not know I could have survived that time without her.
I tried all of my life to help and support her, and have sometimes succeeded. Our love and connection has somehow endured, that is a kind of miracle in itself. We have never run from one another.
Each of us is the only one who knows what we know and saw what we saw, that is not a bond that breaks.
So I am excited about my 69th year, I have a lot of plans for it. I hope to write a book, I will commit myself to my blog and my photography, to my farm and my community. I love meeting the people I meet (above, our new friend Treasure) and I love taking photos of good and wonderful people, most of whom have never been photographed before. In a sense, my chance to give voice to the voiceless, to the good people who heroically simply live good lives every day. They are rarely noticed.
I have learned to only take portraits of people I like or love. I seek to capture their souls and their spirits. I will continue to share my life as openly and honestly as is possible. I will continue to speak up for my identity, in the face of a fragmenting and sometimes hostile world. I hope to get to know my granddaughter a bit this year.
I am happy for my daughter, who is living a life she loves with people she loves. I am so proud of my wife, who grows and shines more with each passing day. I simply cannot believe sometimes how talented, good and skilled she is, at so many things. Eventually, after so much bumbling and stumbling, I found what I was looking for all of my life.
I think that is my great birthday present. Maria is making something magical for me in my studio and taking me to Vermont. My sister and I were talking a week or so ago, and we both agreed that each of us was lucky to be alive. After all this, here we are. Here we are. Enough to make me cry. Life is hard. Sometimes the pain and bear has been too much to bear. I have fought it my whole life, I have never quit on myself, and if there was suffering, there has also been great joy.
Life is wonderful. Sunday I’m taking Maria to a Wendy Wassterstein play in Williamstown, Mass., to kick off my birthday celebration, it somehow seems right. Maybe I’ll buy her brunch at the Round House Cafe.
This is what is on my mind on my birthday on Monday.
I wrote a couple of days ago that I was temporarily ending my self-imposed exile from political writing – I was a political writer before I started writing books and migrated to the county – but that the current presidential election had brought me back to it, hopefully briefly.
Every political reporter knows this campaign is over, and so does every experienced political consultant. One, a good friend of mine, we used to work together in newspapers, messaged me last week. He said the data is clear, the election is over. “It may well be a landslide.”
Politics is never fully predictable and there is always some chance Trump could pull off a miracle. It is less likely every day, especially given his increasingly erratic and disturbing behavior.
I wanted to write about this because so many people are so worried about this election, I wanted to ease their worry. I am not worried about it, and I think a lot of good will come from it.
The piece I wrote went viral, it may be the most shared piece I have ever written, you can see it here.
I have a foot in both worlds, really. as a book author and former journalist and media critic, I understand how media has worked, as a user and early enthusiast about new information technology, I also grasp the power of social media to affect change. It is easy to misinterpret the power of social media, even easier to overrate its influence. That is happening in the political coverage now.
It was eerie, but the minute I wrote the piece, a raft of new polls came out almost immediately showing Hilary Clinton beginning to break away from Trump in ways that are now almost impossible for him to overcome in a couple of months, especially as he seems utterly committed to alienating and confusing the greatest number of people every single day.
I felt good about my post.
I want to write today about the underlying truth of where we are now: social media has played a key role in this campaign, both in elevating Trump and in the spectacular disintegration of his candidacy.
Today, and especially since his insanely stupid confrontation with the Khan family, and his bumbling through everything else, following the Trump campaign is more like watching the Hindenburg catch fire and crash.
The political history of social media is that it is a powerful medium for starting revolutions, a poor one for keeping them going or making them succeed. Consider the collapse of the Arab Spring, the great democratic experiment in the Middle East. Social media awakened fierce social protests and even toppled governments, but could not make them viable or enduring. Democracy did not come to the demonstrators.
Evil people can get on Facebook and Twitter too, and use them effectively.
Both journalism and politics have been traumatized by social media. Both are essentially closed, elitist institutions whose success depends on the exclusive control of information and political power. Presidents get nominated by a very small number of very entitled people. It is, as Trump suggests, a closed shop. Until the Internet, so was media.
The idea of so many millions of people communicating to one another directly would have made Jefferson happy, but has terrified both politics and publishers. If the people get hold of the tools of information, there is not much for them to do, not much money for them to make.
Trump is the first national political figure to grasp the possibilities of using a platform like Twitter to quickly reach a like-minded audience and bypass the entrenched institutions of information and politics. In this case, working class white men who feel they have been left behind, especially in the face of liberation movements for women, African-Americans, Latino’s and gay and transgender people.
Trump got the big and uncovered story of working-class America: they have felt and been betrayed by Washington economists and politicians, who promised them they would flourish in the new global economy. They have not, their work, lives and communities have been shattered and abandoned, and no one has lifted a finger or spent a dollar to help them.
Both parties completely missed the rage and hurt that was building. Hillary Clinton certainly didn’t talk about it much, and neither did any of Donald Trump’s 16 fellow candidates for President. Trump broke the story on Twitter, and it was an instant sensation there and in almost every primary state.
Trump, a billionaire who seems somewhat oddly to share this working class anger and sense of grievance, was able to completely by pass the networks and big newspapers and the Republican political establishment. They all thought he was a joke who would fade.
But Trump had reached his own natural audience and was also able to attract millions of disaffected people from outside of the political system who felt the country had forgotten and abandoned them. They will stay loyal to him in the end for that, but there are not nearly enough of them to win a presidential election.
In terms of launching his campaign, his Twitter initiative was stunningly effective, his more traditional opponents were steamrolled by his ability to hold a running conversation – he posts on Twitter almost every day, sometimes several times a day. It was their turn to be left behind
In a primary, this worked beautifully. People sent him money, came to his rallies, voted for him. He didn’t have to speak to the broader audience or win them over to win.
On social media there is a curious phenomenon whereby people attach strongly to people who talk directly to them, and do so regularly. Most people don’t get to chat with powerful leaders every day, Trump is viscerally interactive. It is quite easy to build a large following on Twitter, tens of thousands of people have large followings there, it doesn’t necessarily mean a thing in relation to the larger world.
Lots of authors have Twitter Feeds, but they will almost all tell you that they don’t sell any books. One thing does not necessarily follow the other.
If Twitter sparked his early success, it also doomed him, he could never see beyond this superficial and juvenile adolescent way of communicating. There is, in fact, something of the arrested adolescent in Trump, he does not seem to have grown up, for all his success.
Trump, among his other problems, got caught up in the echo chamber of the Twittersphere, he came to see it as the real world, as the entire political reality. He was so busy pandering to his 10.5 million Twitter followers he forget to speak to anyone else. This worked in the primaries, general elections are a very different story.
The media loves to quote Twitter and Facebook as if both speak for the entire country and are extraordinarily powerful. They aren’t. Twitter has 7 million users, or about 17 per cent of the U.S population of nearly 324 million people. (About 53 per cent of Americans are on Facebook, but Facebook does not play nearly so large a perceived role in the media/political world). That means Trump was not speaking directly to more than 83 per cent of Americans, most of whom do not spend their days and nights on Twitter, they are busy working or taking care of their families.
Twitter is important, but it is not nearly as powerful as Trump believes, or as the tech-traumatized media likes to think. In fact, one could argue that the media and political obsession with Twitter – they are all on it – has blinded them to seeing what is happening the wider world.
The great reporters once got their insights by traveling around talking to human beings, not by monitoring Twitter feeds and screaming at one another on cable television. We see the consequences of this every day. The great political writers – David Broder, James Reston, Eugene Roberts – used to get it right, not wrong. They were rarely shocked by the mood of the people, mostly because they spent most of their time traveling and talking to them, not sitting in studios tweeting.
It is a shock both to journalism and politics that tens of millions of Americans, devastated by national economic policies are furious and disconnected. It is not a surprise to me, if you go to Stewart’s, a regional convenience store chain in my town where people gather for their morning coffee, you will hear about it every day.
My town has never seen a reporter. No one talks to real people any longer. Trump speaks directly to them.
No one predicted Trump’s rise, no one foresaw his fall. Journalism is no longer able to guide us or help us understand what it is really happening.
In this new political environment, we are on our own, your idea is every bit as good as theirs or mine. But the Trump campaign is also frightening, it has greatly disturbed many people.
Trump failed to evolve, the danger of an egomaniac billionaire running his own show.
The nominating conventions are the first time most people get to see the candidates and form enduring impressions of them, and these impressions rarely change much after the conventions. In recent years, the country has broken into rigid ideological constructs – the dread left and right – which means even fewer people will change their minds about anything, no matter what is said. The middle is shrinking.
No presidential candidate in the history of the country has ever lost with the lead Hilary Clinton now has over Donald Trump.
Hilary Clinton’s staff understood this profoundly important reality, Donald Trump did not. He was and is mired in his own Twitter World, it became reality for him. He seems not able to believe that it is time for him to move on. He appears now to be addicted to it.
Feedback on social media can be intoxicating, it is easy to feel like the Pope waving from his balcony.
The political reality is that Trump’s supporters will mostly support him no matter what he does, and the same is true for Clinton. To win, he has to win over hers and those who are undecided. She has to keep hers, she doesn’t need his to win. He didn’t. She did.
Trump is far more provocative, insulting and, frankly, foolish in his political judgments than Clinton or her handlers have been, and a week after the conventions, a significant majority of Americans are now more comfortable with her than they were, and less comfortable with him. People did not go for his Transylvanian view of America.
If Clinton makes strangely unaccountable blunders at times in her life, her campaign has been almost flawlessly run. Her campaign also speaks directly to voters, but not via angry Twitter feeds. She has stayed focused and avoided a single major error while campaigning. She is the anti-Trump.
She might be unpopular, but she is not scaring people or attacking Gold Star Mothers.
Trump is already whining about the election being rigged, a certain sign that he is floundering. You don’t claim something is rigged if you are winning.
The conventions proved a striking contrast between the two and the millions of voters who have now made up their minds, and whom Trump has almost willfully alienated. It is possible that the televised debates – if they occur – can change that equation, but Hilary Clinton is far less likely to mess up in a debate than Trump, he is much more likely to implode, which he has been doing nearly every day.
The debates are not likely to be transformative, even if they do occur. Trump may skip at least some of the debates altogether, he is already claiming that they are rigged.
When the history of this campaign is written, Khizr Khan will be at the center.
Khizr Khan changed the equation further. He is not a political person, despite many efforts to label him that way, he is the most American of figures, a patriotic immigrant who son sacrificed himself for the country. And whose parents are in awful grief.
Of all of the people we have seen in the political spectrum, Donald Trump is perhaps the only one who could not find it in himself to be gracious or empathetic to this noble and pained man. Beyond that, he managed – on Twitter – to be cruel to the Khan and his wife, for absolutely no reason. This is the stuff of mindless Twitter posts, not of the real world of human beings. Trump lost it there, if not there, it would likely have been somewhere else.
In the same way that Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welsh exposed Joseph McCarthy as a liar and a cruel and indecent fool, Khan exposed Trump as a man trapped in his own universe, no longer able to judge his new and broader audience. Trump revealed a cruelty, arrogance and insensitivity that was simply unacceptable to the very audience he most need to win over – the people who are not angry, not always left behind, not disaffected, not on Twitter.
His Twitter jibes at Khan excited his followers and repelled just about everyone else. Trump now had a tin Twitter ear.
These were also the very people Clinton needed to reach – remember the two were tied after the Republican convention. The new polls suggest a dramatic, even massive shift to Hilary Clinton. Trump blew it, even as he fumed and whined and sputtered out more insulting Tweets and continued to attack the Khan family.
Twitter is a valuable tool, it is not the place to offer a vision of the country or a political campaign. It is good for provoking and declaring, not for explaining complex ideas and policies.
The language of Twitter – the abbreviated jabs and bursts that are Trump’s hallmark, do not translate well to many people, including the vast majority of the country who do not Tweet.
Trump became addicted to his own Twitter rants and the endless publicity a feckless media bestowed upon them, as if they were the very pronouncements of Socrates. They did not know better.
The people running Hillary Clinton’s campaign did know better. You do not see her trying to define herself via Twitter outbursts, it it is not the way most people see their presidents communicating. There are so many much better ways to do it.
Clinton has not even bothered to defend herself against the avalanche of accusations Trump has thrown towards her, she is the steady ship, chugging along. All she has to do to look good against Trump’s increasingly frantic and desperate rantings is nothing. She can let him destroy his own campaign, he is happy to oblige. What a good position for her to be in, just weeks after she faced a threatening scandal at the worst possible time.
You could call Trump’s disintegration death by Twitter, or at least that’s what I call it.
The campaign is really over now, for all practical purposes, not matter how much they try to frighten you. Of course, there is time for things to change, for new things to happen. There is growing talk in Washington that Trump may withdraw from the race, many Republicans are now convinced his campaign will be a catastrophe in November. I would tend to agree.
There is no evidence that Trump is a generous or selfless enough person to do that. He seems to be loyal to no ideology or belief. Although he senses the suffering and pain of one group of people, it is not clear how he intends to help them, he is still all about himself.
There is also right now no evidence to suggest he can possibly win. My tweet: It’s over. Stop Worrying.
In the forest, a symphony of light and shadow, the light from the sun cuts through the forest in a million different ways, great news for any photography, and great subjects in black and white. If you walk along the path with the sun behind you the leaves are cast in beautiful shadow on the trunks of trees. This is only visible when the sun is behind me as I walk along the trails. I love the idea of seeing the different ways in which the light and trees and the sun interact with one another.
My monochrome camera is the right choice for this beautiful nature show, a kind of forest movie.
I had some happy dreams last night and Maria said if I wrote them down she would make a quilt that was inspired by them. Maria does not, of course, follow anyone else’s idea of a quilt, so it would be her own interpretation, but I would love to see her do it, I know it would be wonderful.
Maria and I both have a lot of dreams, not too many of them are happy, you can move beyond the past, but it never leaves you, it is a part of who you are.
In my dream, a dozen or so of her goddesses were hold hands and dancing in a circle around a fire. They were surrounded by trees, I remember an big owl with one eye closed watching them, he seemed to be smiling. Across the forest, a band of vultures were singing and also dancing, they were having a secret festival of joy.
One tree was alive with small birds, they were flying in a circle. And Shekinah, the Divine Feminine of the Kabbalah and of the prophets, was racing across the sky in her chariot, chasing after God to remind him that his work of creation – the earth – was incomplete. She was trailed by a cloud of cherubs with wings, and some angels.
In the background, a giant and smiling sun was rising over the forest, his rays of light were streaking out in every direction, he was radiant and joyous. Around the perimeter of the trees, a Peaceable Kingdom of animals peeked through the trees – dogs, rabbits, deer, sheep – and bushes to watch the Goddesses dance (there were fish in the sky, too, leaping out of water, off to one side.) I’m not sure, but I think even the trees were dancing.
That’s what I remember about my happy dream, it was a riot of color, sunshine, a celebration of life. I can’t imagine making a quilt out of all that, but then, I’m no artist. I was grateful for the dream.
