29 Dec 2010, Boise
An inch of snow before dawn. The yards and rooftops and forks of trees piled white as clouds, and through them from the cabin window of my study I can see a robin's egg blue sky stretching out over the ruddy bare trees to the white hills across the plain. A frigid pale blue sky scrolled with thin clouds that look like they've just breezed off the sea. That springtime urge to travel, to move out into the land, to gain a ridge or walk a hillside in the sun, comes in winter too. Days like this ignite a spring inside you, especially after so many hibernating weeks of snow and sleet and cold. If I didn't have to work I'd haul the family up to Bogus and ski the trails up there. But work I must, and sharpen my daydreaming mind to the task ahead.
The novel has been finished for days now and I feel both liberated and desultory. The weight on my shoulders is also an engine of purpose at my back driving me forward, the engine and the rudder with my hand at the wheel as I scan ahead over the lake and study the ridges against the sky. I find myself seeking another project, when I know now is the perfect, rather the natural, time to take it easy, to sleep in and play with Ada and to go off to work after breakfast has been had (instead of sitting down for another session of writing). But it isn't easy. I wonder if until I get this novel published and get some kind of break if I'll ever rest over the matter. I recall what Steinbeck wrote to a friend about how it never got easier — he was on his fourth or fifth novel and by then he'd figured it should've been easier but it wasn't. Each book is it's own new and different ball game.
4 Jan 2011
Well, Obama came out of the scrum smelling like a rose. Just when it looked like he was in real trouble after the mid-term “shellacking”, he changed costume and stepped onto a new stage of politics: that of the centrist. Stage left you have the folks like me, progressive and pissed and feeling abandoned by our great white-black hope. Stage right are the Tea-party-ers, snorting and dagger wielding, ready to tear the theatre down to its Constitutional foundation once they assume power in the House. They now have the “hope” the left once had, and they'll soon have our disillusionment too. For center stage is where the action is. There, doing an even better impersonation of Clinton then Clinton ever did, is Obama, dancing to a two-base hit of Start Treaty ratification and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. The opening number which started the dance – and the ill tempers on the left – was the full extension of Bush's tax cuts, particularly those to the super rich. Nobody but the wealthiest in the country – and the poor saps who believe in the wealth-myth, and Obama's strategists – thought the tax deal was a good idea. For the rest of us it's an infuriating social injustice, especially in tough times like these for schools and families and social services. A typical tax refund for the upper bracket is more than an average American family earns in a year. Must capitalism be as corrupt as the Soviets portrayed it be?
But I'm getting off target. Nobody wants to see that sideshow, the desperate ventriloquism act so far to stage left we're bumping up against the curtains. What Americans want to believe is the same old show right down the middle, the one we know so well: The Play of the American Dream, in which everything turns out all right in the end if we just work together and don't rock the boat, don't over-regulate or over-tax the system that pours billions of dollars upwards into the hands of the few and the wise, the investors and the inventors of this great economic vessel, who, in due time, always right the ship and distribute it's surplus bounty fairly and evenly over the sea of bent backs below. There at center stage is the massive gleaming paper mache craft, Obama and Bernanke at the helm. Somewhere at the back of the cockpit Clinton is orating directions and Bush Jr. is strutting around in his aviator suit. Murdock has written the script and is working the lights. Stay true to the course, steady down the middle of a wake already carved for us. And merely because we can't see the mast-tops of the last boat to go before us shouldn't arouse doubt or suspicion that that long parade has dropped over the lip of a cascade we can't see. No, we're to keep our eyes on stage, on the dream and on the actors playing it out. And when finally we step outside the theatre into the streets of our lives we'll have the warm afterglow of their performance to sustain us. And should those memories tatter there'll always be another “reality” show on Fox to keep us believing, enamored of the myth instead of angered by its makers.
