Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-six days until Tuesday, November 3 2020.

     Today John Lewis pretty much completed the transformation from being one of us to being a monument, a mighty monument. To what? Let each find one’s own answer. Here’s mine.

     John Lewis was an angry man who very early in life, perhaps from the start, understood how to yoke that anger to love rather than hate. Love so easily is ethereal, so often is fragile. John Lewis understood how to anker love to his anger, which gave his love immense substance.

     Who would even think to yoke love to anger? Some others have, but most of us either deny and suppress our anger or yoke it to hatred, not love. Most all those purportedly aggrieved blue collar white people who helped make Trump president do precisely that. But they are not alone; it seems so much easier to let anger become hatred rather than love. Many a biography, many a novel, many a history or world history could use this as a theme.

     We fondly contend that love conquers all, will always prevail. Really? I don’t want to be void of hope, and my way of securing at least some hope is to contend instead: love will never conquer hate but, if we draw inspiration from people like John Lewis (I gladly remembered today that the ten years I lived in Atlanta, John Lewis was my congressman, that I had the honor to vote for him), love, oftentimes angry love, will persevere.

     So many others have opted for hatred. We´re foolish to believe many of them will change. It is so much easier to hate than to love.

     Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall. With love, let’s take one down and pass it around.

I just sent an email to some friends, hoping to recruit some help. Here´s the email:

Hello friends!

In 2017 my sister Jill recruited my brother Skip (aka Paul, his stage name) and me to conspire in a blog she cooked up. She had what in the business world is called a ´great vision´ for the blog:

¨We’re not here to proselytize, evangelize or monetize. And as for a central theme, you won’t find that here either. We write about what moves us, whether it’s a musical performance, a political opinion, a walk in the woods, reflections on daily life, thoughts about religion or spirituality, a poem, a great recipe or a million other things. Who knows? We certainly don’t. All we know is we’re going to have some fun. Feel free to join us if you’d like, with both reading and writing. Guest blog posts from our friends and family are welcome. There’s plenty of room here in the back-back.¨

Our emails amongst ourselves running up to the last election was part of Jill´s inspiration for the blog (sorry for again already using another business type buzzword). But, as she wrote above, she wanted the blog to be free-ranging. I killed the blog, or at least put it into deep sleep, by ranging way too freely, imposing on the world (in my mind) my brilliant thoughts (in my mind) about Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature. Dead or asleep, the blog has rested in peace since August 2018.

Until Brian William´s pronouncement ¨and one hundred days until the next presidential election¨ roused me to try to rouse the blog.

Between my junior and senior years of high school I was lucky enough to be one of the few (four hundred that summer from all of Georgia) selected to take part in one of the few great things the State of Georgia does, The Governor’s Honors Program (my favorite president, and not simply my favorite post-president, Jimmy Carter was Governor at the time). I was selected to study English for ten weeks on the summertime vacant campus of Wesleyan College in Macon (This was the summer of 1971 and I remember, when making an afternoon visit to downtown Macon, seeing public water coolers marked ¨White¨ and ¨Colored¨; 1971! The mayor of Macon at that time was monstrous.) I selected a class with the title Man and God in Literature. Eight of us, guided by a wonderful teacher (the next school year he was named Georgia Teacher of the Year, then quit and became an Episcopal priest) read Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Siddhartha,  Brautigan´s Trout Fishing in America, Ferlinghetti, Vonnegut´s Fahrenheit 451, Carl Jung, Sartre (and my parents never discovered, as hard as they tried, how they lost their boy to philosophy), and Ecclesiastes and Job. My guess is that if one of us showed up to class with enough pot for all of us, Mr. Drummond would have acceded. What a better combo: hippie lit and pot. What a world opened to me and us!

Another of the chosen four hundred was Wayne Knight, who went on to portray the character Newman in the Seinfeld Show. He was summering in Macon as part of the Governor’s Honors Program´s drama program, of course. The task for the drama students that summer was to produce and perform for the rest of us Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a surreal (people today would say ´dystopian´) story about people in a town all gradually growing scales on their skin until they turn into rhino´s (real one´s, not ones like Mitt). Wayne, surprise, played the central character, who, contrary to everyone else in town, resisted as hard as he could a metamorphosis into a rhino (the others accustomed themselves readily to the new you´s). Wayne´s character, as soon as he realized what was going on, regularly pronounced: ¨I will not become a rhinoceros!” The play ends with his wailing ¨I will not become a rhinoceros!” while indeed, despite the intensity of his willful efforts to the contrary, becoming the last one in town to turn into a rhino.

When I heard Brian Williams tell me that there were only one hundred days until the election, I didn’t think of Wayne but I sure felt like that character. At which point I decided to rouse the old blog, if only to cry out to a disinterested universe and if only in vain: I will not become a rhinoceros!

In the few days since, I´ve posted a blog daily, on the theme of One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall. So far I kind of like what I´m coming up with and want to share it with you guys, if you wish to share with me. After all: take one down and pass it around! There is no price of admission, though also no money-back guarantee. You certainly may take it or leave it. Hopefully my sister and brother will chime in as well, to balance out their wild Georgia hillbilly brother. You too (though some of you, it seems, may be on the wild side too). If you wish, you may find us at: https://viewsfromthebackback.com

Everyone take care: if the virus don’t get us, Trump is fixin´ to, but not before we all (here in Gilmer County, Georgia we say we´uns) cry out as loud as we can (or dare)…

Jim

     Ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall. Sounds like a lot, doesn´t it? Ninety-seven days until November 3rd.

     Toward the end of the George Bush presidency and on into the early days of President Obama, a Russian academic named Igor Panarin was in the news due to his predictions that the United States of America was on the verge of civil war which would result in the break up of the U.S.A. into four or six separate new countries. He thought it would happen by 2010.

     I vaguely remembered this being reported at the time. The reports were all condescendingly dismissive. Panarin was viewed as another crazy Russian (and lord knows, there are plenty of them!, thank you very much Mr. Dostoyevsky) and Russia itself viewed still as vanquished and almost unimportant. The story was used as a charmingly amusing distraction from the economic distress of the times. Another U.S. civil war? The United States devolving into the Disunited States? Preposterous! We were on top of the world, the one and only superpower, no longer leader of only the free world but of the entire world.

     Today I googled ¨Russian academic U.S. civil war¨ in order to freshen up my vague memory and, sure enough, story after story about Igor popped up.

     The crazy Russian of course was wrong; we got through 2010 just fine, didn’t we? What, though, to a crazy Russian is a discrepancy of ten years? What if he was half right, and right about the more important half? That there will be civil war in the U.S. of A. and that civil war will result in disunion? Ten years later than predicted? Ok then, subtract some points from the grade, but he still gets an A-.

     Worst case scenario is that there will be no civil war because Trump, by hook and crook and/or by the native idiocy of the American electorate (the ghost of P.T. Barnum feels so very vindicated) wins reelection and then quickly implements the fascist rule he so much wants to wield. Oddly, civil war after a Biden victory would be a better outcome. At least my family and friends in California, Washington, likely Colorado, the northeastern seaboard would stand a chance, while we down here in the South practice our fervent Sieg Heil´s. Please when you can, if you can, send us an occasional goody box. It probably won’t reach us, but then it´s the thought that counts.

     Ninety-seven bottles of beer on that wall, just take one down and pass it around because it may soon be too late to pass things around (socialist, even commie, perhaps even anarchist behavior; Billy Barr will have none of it!).

     Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, take it down, share it around …

     Ninety-eight days until we cast votes. Will they be counted? In California yes, in Washington yes, in Colorado yes. In Georgia? In Wisconsin? In Florida? How many places can we not count on our votes being counted?

     I ask myself: should I do a mail-in ballot or in-person ballot? Which is most likely to be counted? Which more likely to be discounted? The Republican machine will do everything it can to shred my mail-in vote. And if Vlady Putin has designs on my machine ballot?

     Ninety-eight bottles of beer on that wall. We have some caps to pop!

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, and ninety-nine days to our next election day. Let’s take one down, pass it around …

     Today I finished reading Anne Applebaum´s The Twilight of Democracy — The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. She sees a world on the verge of general authoritarianism, and argues well for what she sees. She sees liberal democracy as the exception to mankind´s rule, a tender flower of reason which requires utmost care to thrive and survive. She documents examples from the recent events in Poland, in Hungary, in Spain, in Great Britain, in the United States all as her evidence that more likely than not we will all soon be learning what it is like to live under an authoritarian regime.

     Before I bought the book, I read the customer reviews on Amazon. There were only a few, as the book is only days old. Slightly over half of the reviews were 5 Star reviews, with some thoughtful justification for the five stars. Slightly less than half the reviews were 1 and 2 Star reviews, with very Trumpian ´justifications´ for the star stinginess.

     So these days we can see the dynamics of our world at large clearly reflected on an e-book vendor customer review page. This virus, the true Trump virus, is everywhere, infects everything.

     Slightly less than half? As in: Trump’s base of support percentage? It has become standard etiquette to avoid connecting current public figures to Hitler and the Nazis. Good manners will not save us.

     In the 1932 presidential election in Germany, Hindenburg barely missed winning a majority of the votes, so a runoff election was required. Hitler was second in the first round, with 30% of the vote. (Trump’s hardest core base seems to be about 30%). Hindenburg won a majority in the runoff and remained the German president. Despite that, Hitler within months managed to get himself named Chancellor of the Reichstag. He and the Nazis forced new Reichstag elections. 

     Here’s what we learn in Wikipedia about those elections:

¨The 1933 election followed the previous year’s two elections (July and November) and Hitler‘s appointment as Chancellor. In the months before the 1933 election, brownshirts and SS displayed “terror, repression and propaganda […] across the land”,[1]:339 and Nazi organizations “monitored” the vote process. In Prussia 50,000 members of the SS, SA and Der Stahlhelm were ordered to monitor the votes by acting Interior Minister Hermann Göring, as auxiliary police.[2]

The National Socialists registered a large increase in votes in 1933. However, despite waging a campaign of terror against their opponents, the National Socialists only tallied 43.9 percent of the vote, well short of a majority. They needed the votes of their coalition partner, the German National People’s Party (DNVP), for a bare working majority in the Reichstag.¨

     43.9% is pretty much Trump´s baseline approval rating. The Third Reich needed only 30% and then 44% to establish absolute control. I know, the American system is not a parliamentary system so, says polite society, I am drawing a false equivalency. I say: enjoy yourself while you whistle past the cemetery.

     Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall! Take it down! Pass it around!

     When the last bottle is down and downed, will we be humming the Brecht/Weil tune from Mahagonny? ¨Oh moon of Alabama, we now must say good-bye. We´ve lost our good old mamma, and must have whiskey, oh you know why!¨

     One hundred bottles of beer on the wall … and one hundred days until our next election day. Let’s take one down and pass it around, one day at a time, then see where we land one hundred bottles and one hundred days from now.

     Will we, by the slightest hair of our skinny chin skin, have managed to avoid the establishment of a fascist state, or will we have set that fascist state on its merry way? Only time, very little time, will tell.

     Our blog has been quiet. Time to wake it up, because of the little time we have.

     No one likely will notice what we say here. Historians, should they be allowed, will notice if we say nothing.

     One hundred days. Lord knows, Joe Biden is no savior. Lord knows, the Democratic Party is no savior. Lord knows, Donald Trump and his Trumpublicans are damnation.

     So, let’s make some noise here each day of these hundred days, let’s take one down and pass it around each day of these hundred days. Lord knows, when the last beer is down and downed, we´ll probably need something far stronger than beer.

     One hundred bottles of beer on the wall!!!