Leap Day

Secret Entrance         Christian Schloe



Here's a poem by Jane Hirschfield:

February 29

An extra day—

Like the painting’s fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots.

An extra day—

Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.

An extra day—

With a second cup of black coffee.
A friendly but businesslike phone call.
A mailed-back package.
Some extra work, but not too much—
just one day’s worth, exactly.

An extra day—

Not unlike the space
between a door and its frame
when one room is lit and another is not,
and one changes into the other
as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

Excerpted from “The Beauty,” by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Affluence Politics

On The Effects of the Coronavirus on American Politics

I was really struck by this article by Matt Stoler in the magazine WIRED:


WIRED OPINION

Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics

The possibility of a global pandemic will reveal our inability to make and distribute the things people need—just in time for a presidential election.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump dismissed concerns about Covid-19. As he put it, the virus is "under control" in the US and the “whole situation will start working out.” But according to Politico, Trump is privately voicing worries that the impact of the virus will undermine his chances of reelection. His panicked actions of late—including preventing an American from being treated in Alabama, at the request of a fearful Senator Richard Shelby—confirm that this virus is a political event of the first magnitude. While few in Washington have internalized it, the coronavirus is the biggest story in the world and is soon going to smash into our electoral politics in unpredictable ways.

As Jon Stokes notes, we will, in all likelihood, be locking down travel in some areas of the US for several weeks, as they did in China. People may be advised against gathering in large groups. It's not clear what any of this will mean for campaigning or primary voting, whether most of us will vote by mail or have our votes delayed.

Moreover, the coronavirus is going to introduce economic conditions with which few people in modern America are familiar: the prospect of shortages. After 25 years of offshoring and consolidation, we now rely on overseas production for just about everything. Now in the wake of the coronavirus, China has shut down much of its production; South Korea and Italy will shut down as well. Once the final imports from these countries have worked their way through the supply chains and hit our shores, it could be a while before we get more. This coronavirus will reveal, in other words, a crisis of production—and one that’s coming just in time for a presidential election.

We've been through something like this once before. My book Goliath describes the 1932 campaign for president, one that was carried out at the depths of the Great Depression and during an era when our productive capacity was shut down. Though the crisis at that time was caused by a banking collapse, not a pandemic, the political backdrop was analogous. Eighty-eight years ago, “old order” politicians, as they were known, proved unwilling—even in the face of crisis—to have the government apply its power toward the broader public benefit. Their recalcitrance prefigured, in certain ways, the reflexively libertarian thinking of today.

A toxic ideology invited disaster in 1932, as policymakers did little in response to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses. At the depth of that depression, cotton hit its lowest price in 200 years and steel production fell to 15 percent of capacity. The

situation became so desperate that in just one city, Toledo, Ohio, 60,000 of the 300,000 residents stood in bread lines every day. Children were competing with rats for food. And thousands were dying of dysentery. The politics too turned desperate, with one labor leader telling Congress that "if the Congress of the United States and this administration do not do something to meet this situation adequately, next winter it will not be a cry to save the hungry, but it will be a cry to save the government.”

And yet, the old order had no answers. Congress held hearings, but businessmen, academics, and bankers proffered only belt-tightening. Within the Republican establishment, President Herbert Hoover worked 18-hour days, exhorting confidence while refusing to take even basic steps such as having the government guarantee bank deposits. Instead, his administration’s army attacked hungry protesters in Washington, DC, a move that prompted an angry Republican congressman, Fiorello La Guardia of New York, to remind the president: “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs.”

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, conservatives and progressives in the party were locked in a bitter battle for the nomination. Many Democrats agreed with Hoover. Maryland governor and presidential candidate Albert Ritchie, for instance, argued that we should rely “less on politics, less on laws, less on government.” Another candidate, Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, claimed the greatest threat was the “tendency toward socialism and communism” and pledged a massive cut in government spending, as well as a sales tax increase. Others turned to extreme racism and xenophobia. Only Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went on to win a contested convention, campaigned on aggressive government involvement in the economy—or as he put it, a “workable program of reconstruction,” which later became the New Deal.

That era’s political desperation is alien to us for a few reasons. First off, we haven’t faced shortages of such magnitude for a very long time. More importantly, we have for decades lived under a political framework known as affluence, a term popularized by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1950s. As an affluent society, America automatically produces a surfeit of jobs and wealth, and the problem is solely one of distributing the bounty.

Under the siren song of affluence, we began offshoring critical production capacity in the 1960s for geopolitical reasons. In 1971, economist Nicholas Kaldor noted that American financial policies were turning a "a nation of creative producers into a community of rentiers increasingly living on others, seeking gratification in ever more useless consumption, with all the debilitating effects of the bread and circuses of imperial Rome." Still, Bill Clinton and George Bush accelerated this trend throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Affluence politics is not the politics of being wealthy, though, but rather the politics of not paying attention to what creates wealth in the first place. That is to say, it’s the politics of ignoring our ability to make and distribute the things people need. With the banking collapse in 2008, the election of Trump in 2016 and his mourning of empty factories, and now with Bernie Sanders dominating the early primaries, that era may at last be passing. A pandemic disease outbreak would only hasten this progression and force us back into the politics of production.

With potential shortages of goods, and restrictions on people’s movement, both parties

are heading into unknown territory. It is likely Democrats will use this opportunity to further their case for Medicare for All. Pandemic surveillance and medical bureaucracies focused on billing do not mix well—stories about astronomical out-of-pocket costs for Covid-19 testing are already circulating. Republicans are likely to take a more xenophobic approach, emphasizing restrictions on foreigners and infected Americans. When it comes to managing shortages, however, both parties are split, just as they were in 1932, between their Wall Street factions that assume affluence and the less mature populist factions that seek assertive public power. The Democratic Party primaries certainly echo those of the Great Depression, with candidates from Bernie Sanders to Amy Klobuchar trying to wrap themselves in FDR’s mantle.

Regardless, the end of affluence politics means focusing on whether medicine is on shelves, not bitter disputes over bloated and wasteful hospital and insurance billing departments. It means caring about bureaucratic competence in government, and accuracy in media, not because these are nice things to have but because they are necessary to avoid immense widespread suffering. It means understanding that pharmaceutical mergers that benefit shareholders while laying off scientists are destructive, not just because they are unfair, but because they make us less resilient to disease. (Shareholders, as it turns out, also have lungs.) Finally, it means recognizing that wealth, real wealth, is not defined by accounting games on Wall Street, but the ability to meet the needs of our own people.

We came to these realizations once before in 1932, and created a vibrant democratic state over the following few decades—one that rapidly expanded our life spans, defeated the Nazis, and helped create Silicon Valley. The convergence of the Covid-19 outbreak and the presidential election will force us to do it once again. We've lived in the world of unreality for far too long.

As Richmond Federal Reserve Bank president Tom Barkin recently put it, “Central banks can’t come up with vaccines.” It's time to get ready for what that implies.

---

ABOUT

Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) is the author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (2019) and a fellow at the Open Markets Institute.

Coronavirus --- so far

Here is part of a New Yorker "Cover Story" posted today:

BRIAN STAUFFER’S “UNDER CONTROL”

By Françoise Mouly

February 27, 2020

Coronavirus claimed its first victims in China, and the illness has now appeared in at least forty-eight countries, with cases soaring in Europe and the Middle East. On Wednesday, in response to criticism about his Administration’s response, President Trump held a press conference addressing the epidemic. His performance—as Brian Stauffer’s cover for next week’s magazine suggests—was not entirely persuasive. “We’re doing really well,” Trump said. That day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it had identified, in California, the first U.S. case that had not been contracted from travel abroad, and stocks continued to tumble worldwide. For more coverage, read:

John Cassidy on coronavirus and Trump:

From a political perspective, the virus presents two threats to the President. If covid-19 spreads inside the United States, the White House could be held responsible for botching its response to the virus’s outbreak. Democrats are already sharpening their knives. “The Trump Administration has been asleep at the wheel,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, said on Monday, on the Senate floor. “President Trump, good morning! There’s a pandemic of coronavirus. Where are you?”

The other threat to Trump is an economic one. If the stumble in the stock market is a one-off event, it won’t have much impact politically. But, if Wall Street goes into an extended slide, or if the broader economy gets hit badly as the virus spreads, it could change the political environment going into the election.

 Megan K. Stack on living with coronavirus anxiety in Singapore:

As of this writing, ninety-two people on the island are known to have contracted the covid-19 virus. First, it was travellers who’d been to the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, but gradually the disease seeped into the community and began to spread. So far, no one in Singapore has died of the disease.

But fear, it turns out, is also a virus. A low-level fright of this little-understood malady has taken hold in the international school where my children spend their days, and in the sprawling condominium complex where we live, along with a mix of Singaporean families and foreigners. This fear has the uncanny power to force out the uncomfortable questions that usually lurk unspoken in the communities it invades. You start out talking about the virus and end up picking apart parenting styles or foreign relations.

 And Michael Specter on a possible vaccine:

Scientists are moving with great speed to stop this pandemic. They sequenced the virus in less than two weeks—an essential step in creating diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines, and one that only a few years ago would have taken months. But, even with expedited trials and drug development, it could take a year to create a vaccine. If this virus were to swerve out of control before then, the death rate could soar. In addition to the human toll, the economic damage to China—and, eventually, to the rest of the world—would be enormous. Industrial supply chains throughout the world have already been badly disrupted. Travel to and from China has all but stopped, and xenophobic attacks against Asians are rising. Although New York City has not reported a single confirmed case of covid-19, business in Chinatown has reportedly fallen by more than fifty per cent since the epidemic began.

So Scary to me.... this sure to be  pandemic.  No idea at this point how our lives will be changed.

Ash Wednesday

RIP Lisel Mueller

Sunrise at Cape May    Photo by Sheri Duris


Just today I learned that the poet Lisel Mueller has died at age 96.  I never met her, but I loved her poems.  Here is one of my favorites:

One More Hymn to the Sun by Lisel Mueller

You know that like an ideal mother

she will never leave you,

though after a week of rain

you begin to worry

but you accept her brief absences,

her occasional closed doors

as the prerogative

of an eccentric lover…

You like the fact that her moods are an orderly version of yours,

arranged, like the needs of animals,

by seasons: her spring quirks,

her sexual summers,

her steadfast warmth in the fall;

you remember her face on Christmas Day,

blurred, and suffused with the weak smile

of a woman who has just given birth

The way she loves you, your whole body,

and still leaves enough space between you

to keep you from turning to cinders

before your time! …

She never gave up on you

though it took you billions of years

to learn the alphabet

and the shadow you cast on the ground

changed its shape again and again

Lisel Mueller

Sun shining over the Atlantic Ocean, Cape May NJ      Photo by  Bernice Alibrando

One more week of February

This month has gone on forever, it seems.

Depression over the Democratic debates and primaries... I will vote for Blue no matter who, but I am seriously worried that Bernie Sanders  (a) will be the candidate , and be beaten by Trump  or  (b) will not be the candidate, and his supporters will not vote, thus increasing the odds that Trump will win a second term.

I wish I could stop thinking about this, but I can't.  It wakes me up in the middle of the night.


I did have a lovely time last evening, though, visiting friends and getting kisses from their young and beautiful Irish setter:

Halfway Through February

Night Owl   by   Sophie Eves

From  The Guardian:

And so we find ourselves in February, at one time the last month of the Roman calendar and a time of ritual purification by washing. In Ireland, by way of contrast, it is officially the first month of spring, and the first day of the month was Imbolc, a Celtic fire festival. While the designation of early February as springtime often strikes us as lunacy, this mild year the first buds are appearing on the trees outside the window here already.

Spenser, in the prologue to his Shepheardes Calender poem for February, explicitly draws on the Roman tradition and the poem evokes the idea of the old age of the year to underpin its call for youths to respect their elders. The poem takes the form of a dialogue between the aged shepherd Thenot and Cuddie, a herdsman's boy. The youth is, at the beginning, contemptuous of the old, but the shepherd reminds him that distain for age is distain for God, the oldest being of all.

"The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red."
-  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Afternoon in February 

"February is a suitable month for dying.  Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long."

-  Anna Quindlen, One True Thing

"Be off!" say Winter's snows;
"Now it's my turn to sing!"
So, startled, quivering,
Not daring to oppose
(Our fortitude grows dim in
The face of a Quos ego),
Away, my songs, must we go
Before those virile women!
Rain. We are forced to fly,
Everywhere, utterly.
End of the comedy.
Come, swallows, it's good-bye.
Wind, sleet. The branches sway,
Writhing their stunted limbs,
And off the white smoke swims
Across the heavens' gray.
A pallid yellow lingers
Over the chilly dale.
My keyhole blows a gale
Onto my frozen fingers."


-  Victor Hugo, Be Off Winter Snow

Get ink. Shed tears

February    by Boris Pasternak

February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noise of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all you grieving
Are muffled when the rainshower falls.

To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.

Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out.
 

"Valentine's Day is most closely associated with the mutual exchange of love notes in the form of "valentines." Modern Valentine symbols include the heart-shaped outline and the figure of the winged Cupid.  Since the 19th century, handwritten notes have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards. The mid-nineteenth century Valentine's Day trade was a harbinger of further commercialized holidays in the United States to follow.  The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately one billion valentines are sent each year worldwide, making the day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year behind Christmas.  The association estimates that women purchase approximately 85 percent of all valentines."

-   Valentine's Day - Wikipedia

Safe in the Harbor

Cape May     photo by Ann Seeger


For some reason, these two songs, which I have loved for years,  are with me very much this morning. The lyrics are very meaningful to me:


 Harbour    by    Eric Bogle




Have you stood by the ocean on a diamond-hard morning
And felt the horizon stir deep in your soul?
Watched the wake of a steamer as it cut thru blue water
And been gripped by a fever you just can't control?
O to throw off the shackles and fly with the seagulls
To where green waves tumble before a driving sea wind
Or to lie on the decking on a warm summer evening
Watch the red sun fall burning beneath the earth's rim

Chorus:
But to every sailor comes time to drop anchor
Haul in the sails and make the lines fast
You deep water dreamer, your journey is over
You're safe in the harbor at last (2x)

Some men are sailors, but most are just dreamers
Held fast by the anchors they forge in their minds
Who in their hearts know they'll never sail over deep water
To search for a treasure they're afraid they won't find
So in sheltered harbours they cling to their anchors
Bank dow their boilers & shut down their steam
And wait for the sailors to return with the bright treasures
That will fan the dull embers & fire up their dreams

And some men are schemers who laugh at the dreamers
Take the gold from the sailors & turn it to dross
They're men in a prison, they're men without vision
Whose only horizon is profit and loss

So when storm clouds come sailing across your blue ocean
Hold fast to your dreaming for all that you're worth
For as long as there's dreamers, there will always be sailors
Bringing back their bright treasures from the corners of earth

Diamond Hard morning.... my own photo at Cape May one June

I'm ready             by Tracy Chapman

I want to wake up and know where I'm going
Say I'm ready
Say I'm ready
I want to go where the rivers are overflowing and
I'll be ready
I'll be ready
I'm ready to let the rivers wash over me
I'm ready to let the rivers wash over me

If it's love flowin' freely
I'm ready
I'm ready
If the waters can redeem me
I'm ready
I'm ready

I'm ready to let the rivers wash over me
I'm ready to let the rivers wash over me

I want to wake up
I want to know where I'm going
I want to go where the rivers are over-flowing
I'm ready to let the rivers wash over me
I'm ready to let the rivers wash over me
I'm ready
I'm ready ...

Cape May harbor

February and Imbolc and Brigid

(source:  blog   Anam Cara Retreats)

Welcome to Imbolc, the season of change and transformation-- sometimes all in the course of one day.



On the Celtic calendar, February 1 is the beginning of the season of Imbolc, early spring, and the celebration of the feast of St. Brigid. The veneration of Brigid is one of those interesting conflagrations in Celtic spirituality, the coming together of a pre-Christian goddess and fifth century saint whose stories have been woven together to create a tapestry of legends that continues to intrigue and inspire. 

Brighid the goddess invented keening after the death of her son and, according to the story, was the first one to whistle in the dark to let others know of her presence. Brigid the saint traveled through time, had a magic cloak, and always seemed to find a miraculous way to provide for the sick and needy who crossed her path.  They were wise women, known for their powers of healing, and both goddess and saint are credited with being keepers of the flame and patrons of poetry.  

Part of following the path of Celtic spirituality in the 21st century is re-imagining the rituals of the past to fit the world of today. Many of the ancient rituals of Imbolc focus on hearth and home, a realm watched over by Brigid. Cleaning out clutter, kindling the hearth, lighting fires, and inviting the holy to cross the threshold are all activities for the first stirrings of spring.  

The Three-Fold Fire of Brigid

Fire in the forge that
shapes and tempers.

Fire of the hearth that
nourishes and heals.

Fire in the head that
incites and inspires.

Prayer to St. Brigid

You were a woman of peace.
You brought harmony where there was conflict.
You brought light to the darkness.
You brought hope to the downcast.
May the mantle of your peace
cover those who are troubled and anxious,
and may peace be firmly rooted in our hearts and in our world.
Inspire us to act justly and to reverence all God has made.
Brigid you were a voice for the wounded and the weary.
Strengthen what is weak within us.
Calm us into a quietness that heals and listens.
May we grow each day into greater
wholeness in mind, body and spirit.
Amen

May Brigid bless the house wherein we dwell.
Bless every fireside, every wall and door.
Bless every heart that beats beneath its roof.
Bless every hand that toils to bring its joy.
Bless every foot that walks portals through.
May Brigid bless the house that shelters us.

Saint Brigid's Day

Statue of St. Brigid  at Brigid's Well, Kildare, Ireland

I'm quoting from Jennifer Heath's wonderful book The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory:

"... Goddess and saint share the same attributes. Blessing newborns with fire and water, Brigit brings life to the dead of winter and mediates the month's travails as it labors towrd the Vernal Equinox. In her Christian aspect as Saint Bride of Irelnd, Scotland, and England, she is known as the "Midwife of Christ." ...  In Ireland, a protective harm in the form of a straw rope with crosses on it, a Brigit's Girdle, was worn on imbolc.  The word means "surrounding the belly," and the belt encouraged fertility.  Brigid surrounds and midwives the garden, nurses it as the plants labor and crown."