Musings on a Passing

A friend of my ex died this last week. I had known him as well as he had worked with her at an adolescent treatment facility in the seventies. My younger son posted about him this week too, talking about how he had been helpful when my son was in his teens.

I liked B. He was amusing and witty and quite smart. My real first trip out of the country (not Canada or Mexico) was because he offered friends of his family as host in London. We had a great time. He had a pilot license and once took me up with him. That we nearly flipped porpoising on landing didn’t diminish the experience. In fact it probably made it more memorable.

After my wife and I divorced, he became part of her close support network. I never thought much of it because by that time I was pretty sure that B was gay. I’d never known him to date. I’d never known him to be in any romantic relationship.

That got confirmed in the mid eighties when B showed up on local television news as a spokesperson for NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association. I was both shocked and somehow not surprised. It did prompt me to say something to him the next time I happened to see him to the effect that “If I find out that you have acted improperly with my sons, I will come after you.” Not a threat I could have carried out, but I was pretty concerned.

In my late teens on my own in Boston I had been the target of grooming efforts by older men that sometimes proved difficult to fend off, and I viewed and still view NAMBLA as justifying that kind of predatory behavior. And I know my cultural history and am aware that such “mentoring’ was a common feature of elite Athenian society, among other places.

I supposed that my wife would not have found B acceptable if he had been inappropriate with either my sons or the patients at the treatment facility, but seeing him on the evening news jolted me.

I moved away, married and divorced again, and then settled down where I am now with a lovely partner, friend, spouse. My connection with my sons is somewhat attenuated by the miles, and certainly that with my ex. News about B showed up on Facebook where I stay in touch with old and new friends and my sons and their children. B was living in Thailand.

I never asked my ex about it but I had my suspicions about why he was living there, and it raised all my hackles again.

Sometime during this last year my ex posted something about B having cancer and coming back to the states for treatment. He had been treated then returned to Bankok and not very long ago was readmitted to a hospital and then to a hospice where he died earlier this week. I called my ex-wife to offer condolences and then read a post from my son that talked about B encouraging “a shy teenager to come out of his shell,” or something to that effect.

My son is married with a son of his own. My other son is married with two daughters. I don’t have much question about them knowing who they are and living the lives they want to live.

As for B, I’m ambivalent. I think he was a good person. I’m pretty sure he behaved appropriately and responsibly with my sons, and I’m not about to ask them about it at this point. If there is something to tell, they will if they want to. The ex had said something about B “having his quirks, but don’t we all,” and I understood her, though I think of older men pursuing relationships with under age boys as off the appropriate scale.

I understand the aspect of mentoring in that kind of relationship. I think I actually may have benefited. I had a teacher who took me in so I could finish my third year of high school without being disrupted by a move to another city. I didn’t think so at the time, but now I am pretty sure he was gay. He lived with his elderly mother and worked two jobs to provide for her in case something should happen to him. His closest colleague at the school where he taught was a flaming queen. He also appears to have known my father in other contexts. My father was living with a younger man and had worked part time as a waiter in a gay bar. My teacher was never inappropriate and was very helpful in providing some useful life lessons.

So I wonder why B was living in Bankok, and I wonder about his relationship with my sons. I’m pretty sure he was responsible about his orientation, but there is the smallest doubt that nags a bit. Most adults do manage themselves responsibly in this area, and most, as my ex suggested, are probably not in a place to cast stones.

Yet despite my doubts about him, I still feel like a small piece of me has passed on. Rest in Peace.

And We Are Worried about Children at Our Borders

A couple of different things are intersecting for me right now as our once hopeful land of opportunity remains frozen in partisan gridlock, maybe more than a couple.

Krugman’s column in my local paper today is about corporate “inversion,” which is about as obscene as it sounds. It is the practice of corporations declaring that their off shore subsidiaries are now the corporate owners in order to avoid corporate taxes. Apparently Walgreens is about to do it, so I guess it is time for me to consider changing my prescriptions to a small locally owned chain. [Scratch that. Walgreens backed away from it. I still may change, just because they floated the idea.]

And speaking of corporations, those friendly church going neighbors of all of ours, and Big Pharma in particular: I’m getting really tired of all of the medication ads on the network nightly news shows. Apparently we are like one of only two or three countries that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. On vacation recently I was talking to a doc who works for NIH and he was telling me that doctors hate them, too, that they tend to make for bad medical decisions. So who wants them? Big Pharma, the same people who have instructed their Congressional delegation to prevent Medicare from negotiating price with them.

If corporations are people just like me, how come I don’t get to own a few dozen Congressmen? Really. It hardly seems fair.

So with this as background I am about 2/3 of the way through an interesting piece of speculative fiction—the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson—I’ve read Red Mars and most of Green Mars. It’s extrapolative sci-fi. It takes current science and scientific trends and extrapolates some time in the future. Red Mars begins in 2026 with the expedition to colonize Mars. It’s 2114 now and the members of the first one hundred not killed by murder, war, or accident, are still alive thanks to restorative gene therapy they invented on Mars.

This has been exported back to Earth which was already a disaster of overpopulation, pollution, and armed conflicts between haves and have nots, now exacerbated by the new division between those who can afford the longevity treatments—the wealthy and those who work for the big corporations—and the rest. And those corporations have changed, too.

Ongoing consolidation has led to the creation of a very few “metanational” corporations which now run things, the UN being shunted aside, and multiple countries actually owned by the megacorporations. Even the largest countries are an insufficient counterweight to the metanationals that actually have armies. What has resulted at this point in my reading is a kind of feudal plutocracy. The democratic idea has become meaningless, and the thirty-some odd who remain of the first hundred Mars colonists, now in their 130s, and their children and grandchildren plot revolt.

I described it as extrapolative fiction and it believably is an extension, and not a very far one, from where we are now.

Corporations, now declared in multiple Supreme Court decisions to be people, essentially own Congress. The huge expense of the eternal campaign and its associated fund-raising makes that inevitable. Given that many of those corporations cannot even operate in the interests of their owners and employees, but instead serve the interests of the small cabals that constitute their boards and the C-suites, it is silly to expect that they might operate in the interests of the people.

The hope at one time was that government could supply the counterweight, but the phrase “too big to fail” probably is now completely synonymous with “too big to be regulated and controlled.” And the spin doctors have convinced the social conservatives and their allies that government must be shrunk to the size where it can be “drowned in a bathtub,” as Grover “the pledge” Norquist has famously said.

The irony is that it is plausible to oppose government since it no longer seems to be “us.” Remember, government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

And the irony for me is that I was educated to be a member of that corporate leadership class. I made choices to alter that, as I was committed to the idea of making workplaces be healthy and affirming for all of their constituents; but perhaps I was, as we used to say, “shoveling shit against the tide,” or “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Now I’m thankful to be done with it and thankful that there are not longevity treatments yet.

But really—we have the little people all stirred up about the children running for their lives who are here to destroy our Amurrican Way of Life. It’s theatre. It’s theatre like the security crap in the airports 13 years after the event that prompted it. It’s theatre like the elections that we think will influence things and make not much difference in the long run. It’s theatre like the medical industry controlled by corporate hospital chains, big pharma, and the insurance industry. It’s theatre like the sacrosanct pork barreled military budget. It’s theatre like the cops armed like paramilitary, primed to SCOTUS approved no knock entry. Deadly, persistent, toxic fucking theatre, with 500+ channels and facebook to serve as bread and circuses.

The “Man/Woman on the White Horse?” That’s Don Quixote.

I want to apologize to my children. Really, I am so sorry we have left you this fucking mess.

I Knew It Was Coming, Didn’t Expect It to Feel This Way

Over the last dozen years or so my wife and I have made an annual road trip to Montana. For Western Washington folk, a trip to Montana is a little like a trip to the Cape for New Englanders. We go ostensibly to fish, though each year we have done less and less fishing as much as we enjoy it. Mostly we hang out at a little streamside cabin we rent and go and do things or visit people, and do a lot of reading. We take our two Blenheim Cavaliers and they get to run about more than they do in the city.

We go to a little town in southwestern Montana, a few hours north of Yellowstone. There are a number of good rivers to fish in the immediate vicinity. The reason we go there is due in part to my wife taking a three month sabbatical in 2002 and spending it in a camp on the Jefferson River with a friend’s dog and the works of and a biography of Wallace Stegner. She became an adopted citizen of the nearby town—the one we now visit—and in the process became friends with a couple of people we both came to know a bit over the years.

One you might know if we mentioned her by name, the other was a local man who had a kind of crafts shop and did some weaving. We went to the ranch the woman owned in 2004 to get married in a restored schoolhouse on a bluff overlooking the Bighole River with the weaver officiating.

Last year is the last time we will have seen either of them in Montana. Our minister/weaver had a heart attack the previous year and in the process of recovery wrought some changes in his life. Last year his shop was closed the whole time we were there.

Our other friend showed up last week in my wife’s office. She was in town closing out some business about the sale of her ranch. She had had it on the market for several years. It was not easy to keep it going and Montana winters are hard. I wouldn’t want to face one in a small cabin miles from anything, and she has a few years on me.

I think it is good for her to have sold it despite deep attachments that must have made it very difficult. She will probably revel in the freedom to go places.

She’ll miss it, too, as will we. Once this happened, I realized that she has been a very big part of why we trek to that particular little town in that corner of Big Sky country. We didn’t spend a lot of time with her, but the time we spent was special.

And as if to put a cap on the whole thing, the couple who rented us the streamside cabin we used for the last several years announced their retirement this year. Someone else will be managing the rentals they had so the cabin is still available, but it really feels like our annual pilgrimage is over. Time to go somewhere else.