Are you shunning Trump to hurt him or help you?

     The Amish withdraw from the wicked world, but the wicked world goes on without them.
     Just as well, since the Amish don't reject cell phones and SUVs because they want to undercut modern life, but for their own benefit.
     That question — am I withdrawing to help myself or hurt someone else? — is worth bearing in mind as Donald J. Trump is inaugurated president two weeks from today, and we judge who participates and decide how much we will own the country shaping up before our startled eyes.
     A tough call. It was almost shocking when Barack Obama welcomed Trump into the Oval Office immediately after he squeaked out a victory with the help of neo-Nazis, the FBI and Vladimir Putin. But a victory nonetheless, and as pained as Obama's expression was, treating Trump with dignity seemed smart. It preserved a tendril of influence, and Trump could at least glimpse what class looks like.
     On the other hand, you had to feel good when stars turned down offers to entertain at the inauguration. Nobody who loves Bruce Springsteen would want to see him crooning "Born in the U.S.A." for Donald Trump. Yet Hillary Clinton will be there. Bad for her, good for the country.
     There will be big protests. I'm glad Trump might see the majority who voted for someone else. Though I also sense that many protestors are the same folks who backed Gary Johnson because they believe all politicians are the same. Had they cared less about their own moral purity and more about the country's fate, maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.

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How many calories was that forbidden fruit?

     Not to put you on the spot or anything.
     But do you remember why God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden?
     Yes, Eve gave Adam a bite of the forbidden fruit—we're not sure what that fruit was, maybe a pomegranate, maybe a fig, maybe an apple.
     But where was that fruit from? 
     Right, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (There is a theory that medieval artists settled on an apple for the forbidden fruit because evil in Latin is "malus" and apple tree in Latin is, well, also "malus.") 
     As to why God didn't want people to have knowledge, well, that's religion for you. Some things never change.
      Although, the first thing, the very first thing that eating from the tree causes Adam to do is to be ashamed of being naked, so he fashions clothing for himself, which spills the beans to the Lord about what he's been up to. Small wonder our society is so massively screwed up.
     But I digress.
     The focus on health being what it is, many restaurants, such as the Au Bon Pain Bakery pictured above, have taken to posting the calories of the items they offer. Helpful to those watching their weight, which is just about everybody nowadays. 
     Though it led me to a puzzlement. The pecan rolls above are 740 calories, about a third of the entire daily caloric intake an average-sized man, such as myself, should eat. Who, I wonder, would ever order and consume a pecan roll, knowing they're ingesting 740 calories worth of butter and glaze and pecans? I sure couldn't. 
     Then again, the world is not me. Notice that most of the pecan rolls are gone. If posting the calories of the things killed sales, then businesses wouldn't do it. 
     A few theories:
    1) People don't notice. The numeral is, you will note, in a different, thinner, lighter font.
    2) People don't care. Some blessed portion of the population is thin, no matter what they eat. 
    3) They do portion control. You could of course buy the roll, eat half, and save the other half for a treat the next day. Or if it constitute your entire breakfast write the thing off as a spree.
     The human mind has an infinite capacity for tuning out information that contradicts its desires—obviously, since we elected Donald Trump—and what is a tiny clutch of numbers compared to the deep satisfaction of snarfing up a pecan roll? Although some people do perceive information and act on it. Fifty years ago about half of Americans smoked. Then decades of information campaigns had their effect, and now the number is less than a quarter. Which is both heartening and depressing, in equal measures, both true progress and, well, that lingering 20 percent who'll happily buy a burst of cheap contentment now for the risk of painful, prolonged expensive death later. That's people for you.

If Trump won't lead, there's always Pope Francis

  

     If you visit the University of Notre Dame, located near but not actually in South Bend, Indiana, as I did a few years ago, scouting colleges with my boys, you might be surprised, as I was, by the Jordan Hall of Science.   

     Though opened in the relative yesterday of 2006, Jordan Hall is a gorgeous brick edifice with crenelated ramparts, Gothic tracery windows and arched doorways festooned with carved stone statues. Not statues of Catholic religious saints either, but the Catholic saints of science: Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, and, I noted with amusement, Galileo.
     Galileo Galilei, you may recall, ran afoul of the church by claiming the Earth revolves around the sun; heresy because it implied that little old us are not the center of the universe, the hub of God's creation.     

      The church has come around since then, and admitted the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun whether the pope says it does or not, just as — and you saw this coming, didn't you? — the Earth's climate is heating up because of the carbon emissions humanity has been spewing into the atmosphere for the past 200 years whether Republicans acknowledge it or not.
     Most of the world accepts this, but the GOP — in the lazy denialism that also elects a Donald Trump to the presidency — are loath to recognize this ...

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"Hillary Clinton will beat him"

  
     I've pretty much tuned out the second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking on why Hillary Clinton lost. Stabbed in the back by the FBI? Too wooden and a woman? The world turning on expertise in a populist rebellion of the feeling against the thinking? 
     Doesn't matter. The American people threw in their lot with a fraud, and now we have to face the consequences. We're on to the next crisis. 
   Although.... When clearing the decks over New Year's, I was going over some old recordings on my Olympus, and came across Nancy Pelosi's Oct. 7 visit to the Sun-Times.  The minority leader reflected utter certainty about Clinton.
   "Hillary will win," she said. "The question is, will the American people win in the embrace of the future in a bipartisan way."
     The column I wrote at the time focused on why Clinton's possible election wasn't more of a milestone — the true answer turned out to be "because she wasn't going to win." Pelosi focused on Obama already "kicking the door open" for other marginalized minorities to flock in (women are not, technically, a minority — actually they're in the majority, barely. But heavy on the marginalized). 
    She flatly stated Clinton's certain victory several times, the only question being how big her win is and whether she takes one or both houses of Congress with her. That wasn't the world I was seeing, and even though I saw my role at the meeting was to keep my mouth shut and fill out the room, eventually I had to call her on it. This part I didn't print at the time but, with all this post-morteming of What Went Wrong, seems worth sharing.
    "You're certain Trump is here today, gone tomorrow," I said. "But people were certain that Britain would reject Brexit. If you look at the world, there is a right wing  xenophobic surge: Duterte in the Philippines. People are electing madmen. If the unthinkable happens, what would a Donald Trump presidency mean for the this country?"
    "It's not going to happen," Pelosi replied. 

     "So it's impossible?" I pressed.
     She scoffed at me. 
     "I could do brain surgery on you in the next half hour.," she said, groping for other examples of things that were ludicrous yet possible. "But it's not going to happen."
      "They were neck-and-neck before the debate two weeks ago," I continued. 
     This is why I don't write politics. It's hard to have one foot in the real world and one foot in the political. They tend to drift apart and drop you in the water. 
    "You know what — what does 'neck and neck mean?'" Pelosi said, launching into a little lesson on political wisdom for the benefit of this dolt spouting nonsense. "Let's talk baseball. This is not how many home runs you score in the series, it's how you do in each game. This is how you do in each state, and Hillary Clinton will beat him in enough states in order to win. At the end of the day she will also win the popular vote. Why? I have confidence in the American people. They may want to send a message. They might be sick and tired of Washington — and by the way, they have been sick and tired of Washington forever."
     Here she laughed.
     "This is not anything new."
     There you have it. "This is not anything new," is the reason Hillary Clinton lost. Because we were so obviously into something new, where the old verities no longer mattered. Clinton was playing the old game when the new roles had already fallen into place. Thus she could be tarred with the most amorphous scandal — something about her emails being not to State Department guidelines, laughably trivial non-issue, had it happened previously. While Trump committed gaffe after horrendous gaffe — again, on the old standard — from dissing American POWs to boasting about grabbing pussy. Jarring missteps that would be unbelievable in a Christopher Buckley novel. Didn't matter. The public flocked to him. Not a majority, but just enough. 
    Although Pelosi was right about one thing. Clinton did win the popular vote, for all the good it did. 
     The lesson here: if you want to win, run like you're losing. Especially if you think you're winning. The election is past, but it's also a good life strategy. Sometimes friends will accuse me of not being sufficiently satisfied with whatever career I've managed to mound up,  and I'll try to explain I'm not humble, God knows; I'm trying not to be smug, not to stand top my little pile of crumbs and pretend it is the mountaintop. 
    Clinton didn't feel the panic that she was losing to this fraud who would lead the nation over a cliff. Or if she felt it, she didn't show it, which was a big mistake. 

Pouty about 2017? We have lots to look forward to.

     Well look at this! A shiny New Year — 2017 apparently, though that's almost hard to believe. The numerals look strange. Were it suddenly 2077 or 20A6 it would hardly seem stranger.
     And that's before we factor in the news.
     Still, a new year, whatever we call it, with much to look forward to. Much to mark on your new calendars — I just unwrapped my Brownline 2017 Daily Planner, well aware that using a physical journal in this era of iPhones is like carrying a walking stick. "They sell the things," I say, huffily, meaning: "It isn't just me, yet."
     A year of exciting occurrences, starting with Friday, Jan. 20. Yes, a lot of garment-rending, but I'll be honest: I'm anticipating the 20th with undiluted enthusiasm and not a trace of ambivalence, as a chance to experience something truly wonderful and inspiring.
     I'm referring, of course, to the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, whose opening night is Jan. 20 at the Biograph Theater. It includes Chicago's Michael Montenegro's "Kick the Klown Presents a Konkatention of Kafka," which might be redundant after Donald Trump's inauguration address earlier in the day.
     Let's not think about that yet, first we need a collective Limbo Party of Lowering Expectations. Right now I'm trying to convince myself that the Ku Klux Klan won't be....

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"Make a vineyard of the curse"

Duke Gardens, Durham, North Carolina

    So now we wait. Twenty days, to see if, or rather how, our fears bear fruition. To step aboard the train that we've all bought a ticket on, destination unknown.  
    I can save you three weeks of uncertainty. We won't know, not Jan. 20, or Feb. 20, or at any given point. There will be the same daily shocks that we're experiencing now, that the thickening cataract of custom won't obscure. 
    Will it be good? Bad? Yes. Of course it will be both, now good, now bad, depending on where you stand and when you ask. And depending on who you are, and how attuned you are. You can focus close and constant, you can track it through latticed fingers.
    We seem to think we can ameliorate the harm by rolling around in it. Maybe. But it hasn't helped much up to now, has it? One thing you can say about Donald Trump, none of this was hidden -- oh, there will be submerged parts revealed: exactly how much he is in bed with the Russians, and such. But even the secret stuff will be expected. You can't be shocked by it. Not anymore.
     There needs to be a way to process this. As always, I find refuge in poetry—"refuge" might be the wrong word. Utility. The comfort of words, of knowing what seems a fresh shock is really just the same old shock, come around the track again.
    I've been reading W.H. Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" a lot in recent weeks. A half a dozen times at least. It's of the season, beginning, "He disappeared in the dead of winter"—Yeats died Jan. 28, 1939, another period of growing unease, of watching the disaster come into focus, form, grow, unavoidable, before our ever startled eyes.
    An airport shows up, as do suburbs, always a little jarring in a poem, where we expect brooks but not sidewalks, glades but not cul de sacs (these modern totems must have been in the poetic air in the 1930s; another poem about the death of a revered figure, Sir John Betjemen's "Death of King George V" written three years earlier, concludes with both: "At the new suburbs stretched beyond the run-way/Where a young man lands hatless from the air.")  
    Auden serves up some wonderful lines. "And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom." Preach it, brother. Yeats, dying, "became his admirers" and "The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living." 
    If he's lucky.
    The poem makes me remember the debt a poet like Billy Collins owes to Auden. All Collins' anthropomorphized poems, crackling like breakfast cereal, honking like sea otters, are mere homages to lines like "The death of the poet was kept from his poems."
    We are reminded, "poetry makes nothing happen." Technically true. But it does grease the gears of what's happening.
    Especially in the third section, where Auden clicks into horror movie, ring-around-the-rosy cadences, each blunt line rhyming with the next.

    In the nightmare of the dark
    All the dogs of Europe bark,
    And the living nations wait,
    Each sequestered in its hate;

    Intellectual disgrace
    Stares from every human face,
    And the seas of pity lie
    Locked and frozen in each eye.

    Man that sounds familiar. In a country where the doors of freedom were slammed in the face of Syrian children before Donald Trump arrived. Where those 11 million undocumented Mexicans toiled in rightless limbo every single day of the Obama presidency. Always remember, Trump didn't ruin us. We ruined ourselves, and then he showed up, our reward for falling so below our standards, to violate the corpse. 
    Grim, but who can say inappropriate to now? At the risk of reprinting a block of the poem -- I can argue this is commentary, but if the Auden folk feel ill-used, I'll send 'em a check -- the poem ends with comfort that I feel compelled to share:

    Follow poet, follow right
    To the bottom of the night,
    With your unconstraining voice
    Still persuade us to rejoice;
  
    With the farming of a verse
    Make a vineyard of the curse,
    Sing of human unsuccess
    In a rapture of distress;

    In the desert of the heart
    Let the healing fountain start,
    In the prison of his days
    Teach the free man how to praise.

    "Make a vineyard of the curse." Now that's a plan. Not in the glug-glug-glugging wine aspect, though if you can pull it off, go for it. But in the sense that the vineyard is a lush and joyous place where nature shows off her bounty. "Let the healing fountain start." I can't say what that is, precisely, but I'm ready to bathe in it. Though my hunch is doing so now would be premature, like putting a bandage over a wound you haven't received yet.
    Poetry helps. I can't join those squatting in the dust over Donald Trump, first because he hasn't done anything awful yet, second because life goes on, third because if the choice is to resist him confident or resist him miserable, I choose the former, with an option of shifting into the latter as events warrant. Just as winners are told to win as if they've won before, so those in peril, those in this troubled world as it slides down toward calamity, should keep our heads up, as if we have done this before, because we have, or people very much like us have, our parents and grandparents. They made it through, most of them. So will we.

You have permission not to drink this New Year's Eve

   
     "Red or white?" is the traditional question. When your answer is "neither," it can throw a wrench in the gears of festivity.
     I remember standing in the fancy kitchen of a fancy home before a fancy dinner party. Our hostess, bottle in each hand, realized that she had a guest who, astonishingly, did not drink. She looked desperately around, then ended up sloshing tap water into a cut crystal glass and thrusting it into my hand.
     That worked.
     The holidays are upon us. With the biggest drinking holiday of the year lining up with Saturday night, some people are trying to navigate the arrival of New Year's without ending the weekend in the hospital.
     Doing publicity for my new book on recovery, I've had a number of hosts — TV, radio, podcasts — ask, "How do you cope with the holidays?" I offer some glib reply, but what I really want to say is, "You know Scott, the very same not-drinking-today strategy I use on March 2 and Sept. 3 also works amazingly well on Christmas and Dec. 31."
     But that's condescending. And simplistic. I understand it's hard for many people to get their heads around going to a holiday party and not drinking. It's like going to the movies and hanging out in the lobby. What's the point?
     A few tips.
     First, recognize it is possible. People do it....

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