Letter from America

The following essay originally appeared on Todd Swift's Eyewear blog out of London on November 16, 2016. It originated as an e-mail to Kris Westerson.

President Obama gave a press conference at the White House on Monday, November 14, before leaving for a series of state visits overseas. His intelligence and grasp of the minute details of governance only highlighted the fact that Donald Trump is going to look like a complete buffoon at his first news conference. Maybe he'll get impeached for mental incompetence. 

Growing up in the years following World War II, one of the persistent questions that was always just below the surface was, "How could good people allow the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust to happen?" Well, now we know. There's not a lot you can do to stop it. Not everyone is enlightened, and sometimes the mob underbelly wins. I hate to sound defeatist, but all I can come up with is that Germany survived it. It took a generation or two, but Germany's still here, and better than ever. Better than us, in terms of education at least. It's gonna suck. People are going to die. People have already died. From the Emanuel 9 to the 49 at the Pulse nightclub, and all the black men killed by the police in between. Hopefully it won't be six million, but make no mistake, this is exactly how it happened before. Hitler was popularly elected. It is only a matter of time before a picture leaks of a Confederate battle flag being displayed at the White House. Steve Bannon may not survive the scrutiny, but there are going to be plenty of people who would like to mark their territory. 

I can't even. With a Republican president and the Republicans in control of both the Senate and House, they are going to have a free-for-all and enact all the batshit extremist policies they have been wanting to enact for decades. Already Trump has appointed a climate-change denier as head of the EPA. It's just going to be a mess. The only hope is that even Republicans will see how crazy it is and we'll elect a Democrat in 2020. I don't even want to talk about who right now. That's what got us in trouble this time, having a presumptive nominee for eight years. Let's see who does the best job in congress pushing back against the madness, and nominate her. 

Ironically, "Make America Great Again" will mark the end of American Exceptionalism. We will cease to be the leader of the world. Our universities will probably begin to suffer as the best students from around the world (who, admit it, are the best students at our research universities) will be afraid to come here. Our leadership vacuum will lead to political instability around the world to the extent that some other nation is going to have to step in and be the voice of reason. The scary thing is, policy and administration discord aside, our military is still wrapped around the globe like no other country's. What do we do with that? 

I woke up again this morning just about ready to smile because I'm awesome and I live in an awesome town and have an awesome job and have awesome friends like you, but that all lasted for about 15 nanoseconds before I reminded myself that I now live under a fascist regime that isn't going anywhere for at least four years. Now I know how intellectuals in Nazi Germany felt. Resigned and grateful that they were not Jewish (those who were not Jewish). I'm a white male. I'll be fine. And Jews will probably be fine this time around as well. But Muslims and blacks are rightfully scared for their lives. There is going to be a new, American Kristallnacht in our future. And it will go down in history. And America will not be the same. America is already not the same. Rachel Maddow said it best on the night of the election: "If you're a Muslim-American right now, I think that tonight has to feel not just like a seismic political event but like a seismic event about what America means."  

JFK famously said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." That is the United States that I grew up in. I took it for granted that we were the good in the world. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney negated that. The other thing you could always say about the United States--what Rachel is talking about when she refers to "what America means"--is that we were open to immigrants. America wasn't so much a place as an idea: the idea of freedom. We no longer represent that idea. We're just a bunch of pigs, and now we have a pig for our president. 

I'm just going to try to continue to be nice to the people I interact with daily. Beyond that, I don't think there's a whole lot I can do. The forces of history are too strong. 

That Time I Met Donald Trump

Before I tell the story of how I met Donald Trump, I'd like to make a couple of predictions. 

Prediction #1: During the week of July 18th, Cleveland, Ohio, is going to burn down. Honestly, it's a minor miracle that Cleveland didn't catch on fire when the Cavaliers won the NBA championship last week. But when the Republican National Convention comes to the Quicken Loans Arena in just under three weeks, the riot-inciting hate speech of Trump and his supporters may well lead to a conflagration that would make Chicago '68 look like a garden variety be-in.

Prediction #2: There is absolutely no way Trump wins the general election in November. First of all, the way the Electoral College has been trending the last few cycles (coupled with President Obama's approval rating), any Democrat probably beats any Republican, even a Democrat as unpopular as Hillary Clinton. On top of this, Donald Trump is a classic tea-party candidate (without the official affiliation) who appeals to the far right but is too radical for the average voter. Trump's campaign rhetoric has been so absurd that I'm inclined to believe that he's doing it on purpose, to drive the Republican Party right off a cliff. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he and Hillary got together over coffee a couple of years ago and hatched the whole sordid scheme. They're friends, and he's been a Democrat in the past. Hillary surely knows how unpopular she is, and she knows that the more conservative her opponent is the better chance she has of winning. In the process, Trump has exposed the base of the party for what it is. They took the bait, and the party leadership is rightly mortified, which is why some of the rioting might take place on the convention floor in prime time. Talk about reality television.

The only rational thing I heard Ted Cruz say during the primaries was when he told a Trump supporter, "With all due respect, sir, he is playing you for a fool." If it isn't obvious by now that Trump is playing a long con, you haven't been paying attention. His smear of Mexican immigrants as rapists wasn't said off the cuff when he thought the microphones were off; it came in his official announcement for the Republican nomination. And the rest is history. From an art history standpoint, it might be the most successful piece of performance art ever, but that's another story.

Anyway, I met the man back in the late nineties, when I was living in Manhattan and doing freelance work for the League of American Theaters. The League was responsible for recruiting Broadway stars to participate in the Donald J. Trump Fifth Avenue Mile. I was a regular runner then, and I often ran in 10K races in Central Park, coordinated by the New York Road Runners Club. This is the organization that puts on the New York City Marathon each year, and they were also in charge of the Trump Mile. This annual event actually consisted of something like thirty mile-long races, each one associated with a different group or organization. There was one race featuring world-class sprinters, one featuring local high school athletes, one featuring Wall Street lawyers, and so on. 

The Broadway Mile (as our division of the Trump Mile was called) was supposed to feature Broadway stars, but by the eve of the race, there were only three confirmed participants. I got a call from my contact at the League. "Hi, Ned. What are you doing tomorrow?" I knew right away that she needed me to run the race, as filler, so to speak.

Here's a gratuitous picture of me as a runner from around this time, although this picture was taken in Charleston.

My contact told me to report to the V.I.P. tent in front of the Plaza Hotel the next morning. I said, "I like it already!" I was the first of my cohort to arrive. I was told that our race would start in about an hour, and maybe fifteen minutes beforehand we would be driven in a limousine to the starting line in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They used the word "limousine." I told them that since the race was only a mile, I would run to the starting line to warm up. They said, "Suit yourself."

But when my cohort arrived, we bonded quickly and I easily changed my mind. The Broadway "stars" turned out to be Martha Washington from 1776 and two understudies from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. When our time came to be escorted to the starting line, our "limousine" was a two-and-a-half-ton Dodge pickup truck. We all climbed into the bed of the truck and were whisked the wrong way up Fifth Avenue toward the museum. It was a gorgeous October morning. The street was lined with spectators and I started waving like a fool. I felt like Kramer.

When we got to the museum, the steps were packed with more spectators. There was a PA system set up, and before I knew it I was being announced to the crowd. "And from the League of American Theaters: Ned Hartley!" I smiled and waved to the crowd. My head was swimming. At one point I was vaguely aware that my contact was talking to someone behind me, but I didn't know who it was and I wasn't paying attention to what they were saying. Then I heard this soft, benevolent voice say, "I want to thank you so much for coming out today, Ned." I turned, offered my hand and said, "Thank you," and I did a double take: "Mr. Trump."

I'm going to be honest with you. My first impression was that this was a handsome man. I didn't look at his hair, and we did not speak at length. Somebody from the Roadrunners Club took a picture of my cohort flanked on one side by Trump and on the other by then Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Man, I wish I had a copy of that photo. Also, the race T-shirt was pretty cool. Here's a detail of an old photograph of a friend of mine wearing the shirt. Note that the lettering is in gold, of course.

As for the race, I came in second. When the actors (two women and one man) arrived, they all confessed that they weren't regular runners, and one of them looked at me and said, "Well, we all know who's going to win." I only mention this because it led to one of the best parts of the story. I reminded them that I wasn't allowed to win, and I recommended that the three of them hold hands and cross the finish line together. Which they did! My contact and I held back, which was good for her because shortly after the start of the race she informed me that she wasn't a runner at all and was already starting to experience shin splints. It was easily the slowest mile I ever ran.

The top three male and female finishers in each race division were awarded a round silver-plated trophy platter. I overheard a race official wondering how he was going to distribute the female awards, since the top two women had essentially tied. As for me, I was awarded the platter for Second Place--Male. I don't know where it is now. For many years my dog ate off of it.

Enlightened Mad Men

This is a discussion board post that I wrote for one of the online classes that I teach. The discussion prompt asked the students to describe two works of art with a similar theme. I went first to give them an idea of what we were looking for.

Mad Men is a serial television drama that ran on the AMC cable channel for seven seasons, airing its final episode in 2015. The primary theme of Mad Men is United States culture in the 1960s, seen through the perspective of the advertising industry. Other main themes are personal relationships, the search for identity, women in the workforce, alcoholism and the Civil Rights movement. The series was created by Matthew Weiner, who had previously worked as a writer for the HBO series The Sopranos.

The series follows the exploits of fictional copywriter and creative director Donald Draper (born Dick Whitman) and his relationships with his two (successive) wives, his children, many mistresses, and his young protégé in his ad agency, Peggy Olson.

A major theme toward the end of the series is the concept of enlightenment. SPOILER ALERT: In Season Seven, Don's first wife, Betty, learns that she has inoperable lung cancer and decides to forgo chemotherapy or radiation treatment. She accepts her fate and chooses not to fight the cancer. I suppose it is debatable as to whether this is an enlightened decision or not, but the last time we see Betty onscreen, she is walking up a flight of stairs toward a source of light, and above her head is a light fixture that symbolically represents a halo.

(screenshot from Mad Men, via Netflix)

This is a perfect example of how film and television are the natural successors to the art of painting. Weiner here is referencing any number of paintings that represent the ascension of the Virgin Mary into heaven. One of the best-known examples is by Titian.

Titian, Assumption of the Virgin (Venice, ca. 1516-1518; oil on wood, 22' 6" x 11' 10") (Kleiner 643)

These two images both show a woman moving upward, with each woman's head symbolically surrounded by light, suggesting enlightenment.

In the last episode of the series, the same formal device is used in an image of Don Draper, when Don has literally experienced enlightenment at a "hippie" retreat on the California coast.

(screenshot from Mad Men, via Netflix)

Here's another of my favorite images from the series.

(screenshot from Mad Men, via Netflix)

Betty is verbally sparring with a rival female neighbor, and their cigarettes symbolically take the place of swords. There are many examples in the history of western painting of sword fighting, and again Weiner is providing an update on a traditional formal device.

Edward Hartley

 

Works cited:

"Matthew Weiner." Internet Movie Database. Web. IMDb.com Retrieved 15 June 2016

Kleiner, Fred and Christian J. Mamiya. Art Through the Ages. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.