There was an Old Woman

Who in their right mind wants

to bring a child into this world

in which not only tropical fish

but coral reefs are imperiled,

in which global warming

is dismissed as fake news,

like when “the experts” predicted

Trump would definitely lose?

Have mercy on your grandchildren

by not having children of your own.

What did Eve need with progeny

when she already had a crazy bone?

And why didn't that woman in the shoe

cook all her kids in a mulligan stew?

Golden Shower

"An uncorroborated report circulated by U.S. intelligence alleges Russian security agents watched Trump engaging in perverted sexual acts.”                                                                                                                           News item

                               He’s a joke from Berlin to Beijing, 

                               this fool who’s our president,

                               who’s persistently pissing

                               into, not out of, the tent,

                               which is not surprising.

                               Not only does he not know

                               Berlin from Beijing

                               but his ass from his elbow;

                               and it may happen now and then

                               that he not only gets (ahem)

                               pissed off at bloody women
                               but gets pissed on by them.

Our Smiling Shitty Manager

What is Portsmouth's shitty manager, surrounded by trash, smiling about?

Portsmouth’s Shitty Manager, Derek Allen,  is in the news again (click here), not for perjury in Pequa but for attacking the homeless on his  Facebook page. Allen has put his foot in his big mouth dissing the poor and homeless as lazy panhandlers living in a tent city in Portsmouth. The story includes what might be the most telling photo (above) of Allen's career in which he beams stupidly, surrounded by the trash of tent city, posing in a selfie like a happy pig in a heavenly sty in the sky. Et tu, Porky?

The Double-edge

The double-edge of old age

is that you forget so damn fast.

You no sooner turn the page

than you forget what you read last.

The novel renews itself 

by escaping from the past.

Books put in their place on the shelf 

decline politely to be typecast.

It’s as if you can live

life over, barely remembering,

as if memory’s a sieve,

flowing, not dismembering.

You see, you can relive the best

and bury the very worst,

pass the hardest test

and stand not last but first.

Your heirs might sadly think

that you’ve lost your mind,

or taken clandestinely to drink,

wondering if your will's signed.

It’s really none of the above.

You still have all your marbles.

Your heart sings like you’re in love, 

but your brain sometime warbles.

It’s not that you’re breaking laws

which old age is absently abetting.

It’s that the past’s not what it once was

and needs a hell of a lot of editing.

Avocado Cantata

          Still Life with Apple and Avocado by Dan Haraga

I had my first avocado in Las Vegas 

around 1953 when I was hitchhiking 

from Boston to sunny San Diego.

I had just turned twenty-one as I recall.

I was a college student in Vermont

majoring in English literature.

I’d never seen an avocado before

having grown up blue collar in Boston,

nominally Irish-Catholic,

I had eaten potatoes aplenty

until they were coming out of my ears—

boiled, baked, mashed, sliced, fried—“variety

was the splice of life,” my queer uncle said.

Not that he’d ever tried avocados

or anyone else in my family.

My reaction to my first avocado

was that it had no taste at all, nothing.

You had to develop a taste for it.

At least that’s what i told myself at first.

It was like chewing a lot of nothing.

I thought of it as “Vacant and voluptuous.”

That was the English lit major speaking.

What kind of poem might Keats have written 

about the avocado? “Hail to thee, 

Alligator Pear, puzzling forbidden fruit!”

Adam would have decried its tastelessness, 

Eve snickering at the sour face he made

when he bit into it for the first time.

I developed a taste for them that summer

in San Diego where they were a staple,

Mexico being the world’s major source. 

An avocado afficionado, 

I moved to San Diego with my B.A.

from Middlebury in Vermont

to pursue a Ph.D. at U.C.S.D..

writing my dissertation on 

“Keats’ Unconscious Craving for Avocados.”

I credit my advanced age to exercise and diet—

of which avocados were the staff of life.

“I’m eighty-seven going on nine-hundred,” 

is what I say when asked how old I am. 

But the truth is avocados and age

became much too much of a good thing.

I regret living as long as I have

and being crazy about avocados

from which I want an eternal vacation.

Even without any major illness,

life in the end is a pain in the ass

and I refer not just to hemorrhoids.

Global warming is now a reality,

not just a stark, hellish hypothesis.

The shelf life of picked avocados is brief

in contrast to which apples are Methuselahs,

but in global warming an avocado

is like a snowball in hell or a popsicle

in a pizza oven in Pensacola.

A peeled avocado is fresh as long

as a firefly’s flash lasts, which is about,

roughly speaking, 0.76 of a second.

The edibility of peeled avocados

can be lengthened with refrigeration

and polyethylene food wrap.

But what’s the point of it all?

Of life I mean, which will become

intolerable in the lives of our children,

which I thankfully have had none.

It’s a small consolation but I don’t

have to think about progeny

roasting in Canada and Siberia

which will be crowded with refugees

and where avocados will be sold

on street corners because in

tropical climates they will grow

profusely as fruit on trees,

which is what they can’t help being.

                        Robert Forrey

Somersaults

She was so unlovable the birds

would stop singing when she was near,

parrots be at a loss for words,

and blue skies would turn drear.

Spring  would come late as possible,

and summer seem so very far

and winter even more terrible 

than March in Antarctica.

Personally she was a wet towel

who was rarely ever in fashion.

Her smile was more a scowl

and worst of all she was never fun. 

But I loved her madly, for all her faults,

which I proved by doing somersaults.

Structure and Meaning

                                  selfie         

Thinking a lot about suicide

gives his life meaning and structure

separates the ephemeral from the puncture

that caused the crash fifty-two years ago

that killed his mother and brother

but left him unscathed with hardly

a scratch, just an inane ability

to recall the moment of impact

his VW bug colliding head-on 

with the fucked-up scrap iron truck 

that was in the wrong lane

because of the puncture

that caused him to lose control

with only one headlight

which made him think he was about

to hit a stupid motorcyclist

when normally he was trying

to refrain from swerving into

some unlucky son-of-a-bitch

who woke up that morning

without any inkling that somebody

namely him, who felt thinking a lot

about suicide gave his life

structure and meaning, was going

to crash into someone without blinking.

Doubting Mantis

The form precipitation took—

a pitiful, will-o’-the-wisp mist—

would have disappointed even

a dyed-in-the-wool optimist.

So a Mantis praying

for the end of the drought

looked like a grasshopper

discombobulated by doubt.

Sonnet on Sunday

                          Billy Sunday Preaching

Like Clark Kent in a telephone booth,

Billy’s favorite colors were red, white and blue.

His favorite truth was the gospel truth—

he was one of Our Pilot’s great ground crew.

If he did not know what the future would be,

or what each wrinkle in time’s brow portended,

he nonetheless knew with great certainty  

it would be what the Good Lord intended.

If anything ever appears amiss,

Billy said it was just the perspective.

First turn a bit that way and then turn this

until you see the corroborative.

Nothing’s impossible for a man of faith

provided he believes what the Good Book saith.

Obscene Jester

"Mr. Met's Obscene Gesture Makes Crazy Season Even Crazier."
                                                          N.Y. Times


Mr. Met gave fans the finger?
On this let us not linger.
Yes, he has a big head,
But he’s not brain dead.
And furthermore, unlike Trump,
He doesn’t fire the ump.

Discrimination in Arkansas?

       Last night I watched a 1944 Hollywood movie I’m from Arkansas. It is what was called a “B movie,” meaning it was low-budget, made to satisfy the film appetite of the large movie going public of that era. If there was a double feature, it would have been the B rather than the A attraction. There were no well known actors or actresses in it. The leading character was played by Slim Summerville, hardly a star, though he appeared in about a hundred silent and sound movies. That's him in the lower right-hand corner of the poster above.
       Only after I watched I’m from Arkansas did it occur to me that there were no black characters in it, not even in menial roles as servants, not even the face of a black or two in a crowd scene. Arkansas is not in the deep South. like Alabama or Mississippi, where blacks are a large minority. But Arkansas is a border state and had about a 15 percent black population in the 1940s. Why then was there not one black in I’m from Arkansas? The director, Lew Landers, was from New York City. He had changed his last name, presumably because it sounded Jewish. It is unlikely he was prejudiced against blacks. Since blacks were confined to menial roles, maybe somebody decided it was better to have no blacks than menial ones, such as the appalling racist black stereotype Stepin Fetchit, billed as “The Laziest Man in the World.”
       Lacking the lazy black stereotype, what I’m from Arkansas does have is an incredibly lazy Appalachian father and son pair, the father played by Slim Summerville and the son by a cretin-looking young actor. When I arrived in Portsmouth back in 1989, I recall a Portsmouth resident observing that Appalachians, or "rednecks," were the last American minority that you could still make fun of without fear of criticism. I’m from Arkansas ridicules Appalachians as if they were all palookas. What's a palooka? You can see for yourself in the 1934 movie Palooka. Both of these movies are available on YouTube.

Post Trump Stress Disorder

Melania Trump's colorful, $51,500 jacket

       As is generally known the acronym PTSD stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I saw recently online the christening of Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the need for which arose because we have as president of the United States a mentally unhinged man who illustrates vividly the expression "there is no there there." We wait from day to day to wake up and read what crazy thing the unpredictable Trump has said or done the day before. So perhaps we should speak of both a Post and Pre-Trump Stress Disorder. Trump recently impulsively went on a European  extended tour to distract from the encroaching calamity surrounding the goings-on and "gonnections" (to work in the Great Gatsby) of his White House adviser  and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is the husband of Trump's daughter Ivanka. The issue with Jared, or one of the issues, is his possible political and/or financial collusion with the Russians. In spite of the fact that Trump visited the scowling Pope to sponge on the Pontiff's piety, Trump's trip did nothing to quell the Jared Kushner controversy, which might lead eventually to Trump's impeachment or resignation.

       It is not just Trump and Kushner who keep us wondering what the New York Times will be reporting next about Trump et al. Trump's wife Milania's mania for clothes, and her frequent changes of expensive costumes,  provides grist for the media mill. The minx's colorful puffy jacket alone, which looks like a giddy eskimo getup, caused a sensation. It reportedly cost in excess of $50,000 in spite of not having a scintilla of mink, let alone an inch of chinchilla. There were reports early on that early on in her career Milania had been a high-priced prostitute, but the press respectfully, perhaps out of deference to the oval office, refrained from repeating that rumor. But what male politician has not had to be a high-priced prostitute in his rise to higher office, at the same time keeping any cross dressing jackets and Weinerish sexting tendencies in check?

Pillars of Pretentiousness and Hypocrisy

The 1810 House

          There is  an op-ed piece by David Leonhardt in The New York Times dated May 25, 2017, titled “The Assault on Colleges— and the American Dream.” I read it wondering, since there were 171 colleges included in it, if Shawnee State University  in Portsmouth, Ohio, was among them. It wasn’t.  I ended my career teaching at Shawnee State, having retired in 2012, so I have more than an academic interest in it. Having been founded relatively recently, in 1986, SSU is the new kid on the state college block in Ohio, being the newest public college. It is relatively small in terms of campus size and student enrollment. But there is another reason SSU is relatively unknown, and that is  its location. Portsmouth is located in the south-central  Appalachian region of Ohio, the boondocks of the Buckeye state. Historically, there has been a stigma attached to Appalachia as an economically and culturally backward region. This  was the case particularly in popular culture, in radio, movies, and on the stage in the first half of the twentieth century. Li’l Abner did more to stigmatize and poke fun at Appalachia than any other fictional character. Where was Abner’s creator Al Capp (1909-1979) from? Appalachia? No, New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, which in the first half of the twentieth century was one of the most elite and snobbish colleges in the country. Yale and Dogpatch were diametrically opposite cultural entities.

         One of Portsmouth’s biggest problems is its inferiority complex, which it owes at least in part to its being Appalachian. I have already suggested on this website that the architectural embodiment of Portsmouth Southern hypocrisy is the 1810 House with those pretentious white pillars, which were not there during the Civil War but were added early in the 20th century.* They are not pillars of strength. They are pillars of pretentiousness. Many of the earliest settlers of Portsmouth came not from the South but from Appalachia. They were not plantation people from the Deep South. They were for the most part, at least those who were not carpetbaggers,  hill people from Kentucky and West Virginia.

       The trouble is Portsmouth won’t admit it’s Appalachian. It wants to pretend it’s Southern, not Appalachian. What is its official motto? “Where Southern hospitality begins.”  A more apt title would be, “Where Southern hypocrisy begins.” One of the roles SSU might assume is dispelling the Southern hospitality myth and embracing, as a certain number of Scioto County residents proudly do, their Appalachian heritage.

*Click here: http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2015/09/301-front-st-unpretentious.html

Some Things a Poem Can and Can’t Do

            Exhibition of Mark Rothko's Black Paintings
                     at the National Gallery of Art

A poem can’t raise the dead, and it can’t

stop a rising river flooding the marsh;

It cannot brook toleration of cant,

cannot sweeten a suite that’s harsh.

A poem can’t wet a wilting flower,

it can’t end even the mildest drought.

It can’t right a slightly tilting tower,

nor relieve a gourmandizer’s gout.

What a poem can sometimes do is inspire,

or sometimes, more humorously, amuse.

A poem can express love, grief, or ire,

but it cannot drink or replace a fuse.

As has been true since at least the Fall, 

it can do some things well, others not at all.

                                    Robert Forrey

The Insane Sonnet

Winking the eye happens everywhere,

early morning, at noon, not just at night.

Winking the eye’s a meme in Shakespeare,

the me and the thee united in sight.

Winking the eye is love’s opening ploy,

the fond first move, the shy winking glance.

It is hard to resist Venus’ sly boy,

who prefers winking to the song and dance. 

Both in the boudoir and crowded harem. 

where females practice winking from the start,

Love at First Wink is love’s hoary anthem,

a song fondly sung by the faint of heart.

And it all begins with winking the eye,

so the me and the thee can deny the I. 

                                Robert Forrey

Tie-less in Gaza

Et tu, McCain?

The above photo of independent-minded Senator John McCain suggests the big tie addiction is pervasive in all wings of the Republican Party from President Donald Trump down to the crotch. 

Trump's bald-faced tie

Airhead Trump as president is a painful reminder of just how far red-state America has come down in the world. We don’t need Freud to remind us of the psychological compulsion of males to over-compensate. The big tie is a conspicuous phallic symbol and for a man with Trump's little hands, a convenient distraction from his frumpy persona, his amorphous personality, and his egregious asininity. Trump is the WASP wimp, the doofus dickhead who introduced the Nu (as in “nu?”) Deal to the White House.

                               Woody Allen, tie-less in Gaza

Not just Republicans but politicians generally are adopting a policy of speaking proudly and wearing a big tie, trying to persuade the American public through nonverbal communication that they are a big prick not a little schmuck. Schmuck is a Yiddish slang word for penis. Schmuck was the linguistic result of the Jewish male’s extended, wandering,  pre-Israel schlemiel period of stateless existence. Woody Allen is the eternally tie-less in Gaza incarnation of the schlemiel, of the nebbish nonentity. Oh, but how nicer it would be to see him in the White House rather than the WASP putz Trump.

                          

The Carptetbagging Sitting Manager

The Sitting Manager in the Store Window




Tell me who's that smiling store-window dummy,
that  crooked chair warmer with the big tummy,
that perjurer whose scam began to unravel
when he awarded a crony a contract for gravel?
The road to hell is paved with lots of dirt
on deals in which taxpayers lose their shirt.
Does the crook end up going to jail? No, sir!
A crook with connections doesn’t end up in stir.
His sentence gets suspended, he does no time.
Who says it doesn’t pay? (I mean crime.)
Corrupt public officials are notorious.
Mendacious, meretricious, unmeritorious,
they deal from the bottom of the deck—
the human equivalent of a bad check.
The photo above’s from his own Facebook
at which you might be afraid to look
because it includes lots of selfies
that make him look bats-in-the-belfries.

A selfie of the sitting manager

























He could turn out to be Portsmouth’s answer
to him who might be our national cancer—
I refer of course to President Trump
who lies like a rug in a garbage dump,
not to mention Donald’s yellow hairpiece,
which lies on his head like the Golden Fleece,
about which he is notoriously nuts,
as revealed in The Donald and the Argonauts,
which gets us back to the fat fellow,
the sitting manager in the store window,
who, we might say, smiles madly, without cease
because, alack, he lacks a golden hairpiece.
So he’s mad, mad as Alice’s hatter,
or frustrated as a fangless puff adder,
and that’s why he sits, day after day,
neglecting his duties but collecting his pay,
when not commuting to his home far away.
                                  Robert Forrey

Trump: Ticking Cardiac Time Bomb

Senior citizen jogging

A news report over the weekend reminded us what is generally well known even if often ignored. Exercise is good for our overall health and increases longevity. A 1995 study of Harvard alumni showed that vigorous exercise by men at least two days a week significantly increased their longevity. The life expectancy in the U.S. in 2012, rounded off, was 79 years, which I found hard to believe. In 1935, the first year of Social Security, when I was two years old, the average age for Americans was only 61, and that was back when Americans got much more exercise walking because they were in vehicles a lot less.

The exercise issue is especially relevant because the president of the United States, Donald Trump, apparently does not exercise vigorously at all unless you count, as he does,  all those speeches in which he gets apopletically exercised ranting  against his critics on the left. Don’t expect a treadmill or any other exercise equipment in the Oval Office during his tenure, unless it is there just for the sake of appearances or for photo ops. The most exercise Trump gets is with his mouth, eating and jawing. Maybe that’s why he was called  a “zaftig blowhard” in Esquire magazine.

The fact Trump is the oldest president ever elected for the first time to the highest office might mean that exercise is not quite as important as these studies suggest. After all, he reached 70 without much sweat. Why couldn’t he live into his eighties or even nineties?  Why shouldn’t he continue to chow down at his favorite eateries, McDonald’s and KFC?  Because there is another more likely explanation for his longevity and that is he is pressing his luck. He is an overweight ticking cardiac time bomb close to exploding. If his diet and eating habits, like his lack of exercise are not good—as the statistics suggest— the odds of his finishing his four-year term are not good either.

Trump and the Colonel: Finger Licking Good

According not only to himself but to the golf editor of the New Yorker, Trump does play one sport and he plays it fairly well, namely golf. That golf is the least strenuous of the major sports may be why Trump first took it up. He plays in the scads of profitable, top-rated golf courses he owns in a number of countries on both sides of the Atlantic. But he doesn’t look the part of a good golfer. The same New Yorker golf editor, who played eighteen holes with Trump on one of his golf courses, mistook him when he first saw him for an attendant, not the Donald himself. The only photo of Trump the golfer I have seen makes him look like a paunchy duffer in the rough.

Donald Trump: Paunchy duffer in the rough

While the legions of Trump haters might hope he croaks before long, the immediate effects of his death could be bad for the nation’s health. His cabinet appointments of elderly extremely wealthy rightwing often overweight businessmen  increases the chances of a rough transition to a new administration if Trump should have a fatal heart attack. For the most part, his cabinet appointees  are not philanthropic do-gooders. They did not become billionaires by helping with the greening of America. The only greening of America they have done is financially, in their own backyards. The transition to a Mike Pence administration therefore could be accompanied  by  more jockeying for position than a crowded field at the Kentucky Derby. And not just jockeying for position but backstabbing too. Steve Bannon, a leader of the alt-right, was Trump’s campaign manager. Bannon is the  former chair of Breitbart News, which the Guardian called a clearinghouse for hate groups of all kinds. Impeachment is one reason Trump might not finish his term, and a coup d’état has been mentioned as another possible reason. What role Bannon might play in this night of the long knives scenario is anybody’s guess.  But the idea that such things couldn’t happen in the U.S. is being heard less and the proposition that it could happen here is heard more. Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here is relevant today because a coup d’état does take place in it.

Trump’s ruddy complexion is something of a puzzle. Just as he has an over-the-top hairpiece, he also appears to have a sunlamp tan complexion. The whiteness around his eyes might be explained by the sunglasses he might wear to protect his eyes from harmful sunlamp rays. If the self-appointed psychoanalysts are right, he may suffer from pathological narcissism, in which case the hairpiece and sunlamp would be the tools not of ignorance but of vanity. The famous pronouncement, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, “Vanity, thy name is woman,” perhaps should be brought up to date:  “Vanity, thy name is Trump.” Trump’s wife Melania, the allegedly former high-priced call girl,  may be the Marie Antoinette in this nightmarish scenario. Marie's apocryphal  injunction about the poor was, “Let them eat cake.” Melania's injunction could be, "Let them eat jewels" because she appeared on the cover of the Mexican edition of Vanity Fair pretending to eat not cake but a bowl of jewels. Her husband, now president has begun to keep his campaign pledge of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Some pundits predict the wall won't make much difference. It will be a Mexican standoff. Meanwhile the cardiac time bomb keeps ticking.

Melania Pretending to Eat Bowl of Jewels

Kasich Wins with Crossover Vote?

Screen showing the 35% Democrat-Independent crossover vote

      Perhaps the biggest late night revelation about Ohio’s Republican and Democratic primary elections yesterday, Tuesday, March 15th, was the unprecedented number of Democratic and Independent voters who crossed over to cast their ballots in the Ohio Republican primary. Exit interviews by MSNBC reporters revealed that a large number of these crossover voters wanted to stop Ohio  Republicans from making Donald Trump their nominee in the upcoming presidential election. The way they accomplished this was by casting their ballots for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio. There was nothing illegal about this crossover voting. Ohio laws permit it. All’s fair in love, war, and Ohio presidential primaries.  But the results of it were that the Democrats and Independents had effectively prevented Republicans from nominating Trump as  their candidate in next November’s presidential election. They were using Kasich as their stalking horse against the heavily favored Trump. Would Kasich have won Ohio’s primary without the support of the crossover voters who made up 35% of the voters in that primary? Since Kasich beat Trump by 11%, it appears Trump probably would have won the Ohio primary if it were not for the crossover Democratic and Independent voters.

      There is not likely to be much protest at this subversion of the democratic process because Trump has been increasingly depicted by the Republican elite and most of the media as a rabble rousing  fascist bully, if not the incarnation of evil itself. So those crossover voters could be considered as heroes for having prevented Trump from taking a prohibitive delegate lead in the primary voting. That is certainly the way Kasich characterized himself in his victory speech last night, as a homespun hero who saved the Republican Party and perhaps the nation from disaster. A closer analysis of the crossover vote may prove that it did not make a decisive difference in the Republican primary. Or Trump may end up as the Republican nominee in spite of Kasich’s victory in the primary. But Kasich’s win makes Trump’s nomination that much more unlikely, especially in view of the tremendous support Kasich is likely to get, and is already getting,  from the Republican elite and the media.

      Is Kasich the answer to the anti-Trumpists' prayers? I personally find Kasich frequently wallowing in his self-righteous, humble, mailman son’s origins insufferable and his claims for the Ohio miracle vastly over-hyped. Fracking may have more to do with Ohio’s relative prosperity than whatever gods may be backing Kasich. In the New York Times (5 March 2016) my favorite pundit, the Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, wrote a column with the caustic, alliterative title “The Kasich Con.” And in Solon (10 Feb. 2016) Amanda Marcotte wrote, “Kasich is being held out as the ‘compassionate’ alternative to Trump, but in most ways, he’s nearly as bad.” It seems hard to believe that anybody could be as bad as Trump is depicted, but I suppose the con artist Kasich is bad enough. And isn’t con artists what nine out of ten politicians are?

The Appalling Whiteness

"If politics is the art of the possible, the scowling, cranky, choleric, 

septuagenarian Sanders is a somewhat impossible candidate."

      Because citizens can now vote weeks before a scheduled election, the results of that election may already have been decided before the date of the election. But if the candidates are running neck and neck last minute votes could play a crucial role in who wins and who loses. The contest I have in mind is the Democratic Party presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. I wish Democratic voters had a better choice than Clinton and Sanders. Just as there is no Bush on the Republican side, I wish there was no Clinton on the Democratic side. I think the United States suffers from a depressing Bush and Clinton fatigue. New blood is needed. But we must deal with who is running, not who we wish was running. The choice for Democrats is between Hillary and Berni, but Sanders does not represent new blood. He has been a politician for a long time and his advanced age is one of his drawbacks. What little hair he has left is snow white. At 74 he is four years older than Clinton. If he wins he will be seventy-five when he takes office. The physical and emotional demands on  the president are far greater than they are  on Supreme Court justices or even on a senator from a sparsely relatively racially homogenous populated rural state such as Vermont. Clinton is four years younger than Sanders, but if she wins, she will be seventy when she takes office in 2017. She is far from being the ideal age for the highest office, but Sanders is even less so. But her varied experiences, domestically and internationally, makes her a better choice for the chief executive office than Sanders.

      Another of Sander’s limitation as a presidential candidate is that until recently he has not been a member of a political party. When he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, which was the youth division of the Socialist Party of America, but he apparently did not join the adult division of the party. He has been an independent, at least until 2015, when to facilitate his run for the presidency, he joined the Democratic Party.  Being a Democrat might not seem like an advantage when both political parties, Democratic and Republican, but especially the Republican, are held in such low esteem by many American voters. But Sanders is not just an independent, he is a self-proclaimed socialist, an independent “democratic socialist.” But until 2015 he apparently had not been a member of any party, Republican, Democratic, socialist, or otherwise.  Sanders is an arch individualist  who calls himself a socialist but he doesn’t have to answer to anyone but himself. The only party Sanders belongs to is the Bernie Sanders party. His career has been confined to the whitest state in the United States. Twenty years after Sanders moved to Vermont, according to an August 23, 1987, New York Times article, that state had the fewest blacks and therefore the largest percentage of whites in the United States.  Yes, Vermont is Sanders country where white gun owners are as omnipresent as maple trees and a refugee from Brooklyn has, like maple syrup, been running for public office ever since. The Wikipedia entry on Sanders, which reads like  flattering campaign puffery, says, “He essentially created his own political party in Vermont . . .” Sanders is a strong pro-gun advocate who admires Newt Gingrich, whose hair turned prematurely white. Sanders admires Gingrich almost as much as Gingrich admires himself. Why did Sanders choose Vermont to spend the rest of his life in? Because, according to Wikipedia, presumably quoting from Sanders 1997 political memoir Outside in the House,  he had been “captivated by rural life.” 

      When I was a freshman at Middlebury College in 1953, I too had been captivated by Vermont. Born in 1933 into a large, Irish Catholic family I spent the first seven years of my life in a blue-collar neighborhood in a tenement on a virtual dead-end street in  East Boston in the middle of the Great Depression. Vermont and the beautiful Middlebury campus in particular was like a beautiful Shangri-la for  me, but I was a radical, influenced by my oldest brother, who was a communist in the Merchant Marine. I went to Middlebury on what was a virtual football scholarship, but I was the only radical among the student body from what I could see.  With conscientious objector tendencies, I was the only one who refused to take the compulsory Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) class, which had been instituted after I had committed myself to Middlebury. Because of my refusal to take ROTC, I was told at the beginning of my sophomore year that I would have to leave the college. I transferred to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, at the beginning of the second semester of my sophomore year. I had discovered at Middlebury that I could be a much better student than athlete, so I was no longer interested in playing football. Middletown was a somewhat drab mill town and sandstone looking Wesleyan was no white marbled Middlebury, but it suited me much better. 

      Having written an M.A. thesis on the whiteness in Melville's fiction, I went on to study for a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, becoming very involved in radical politics in New York City in the 1960s including in Sanders’ old stamping ground, Brooklyn. I met some “democratic socialists” of the Bernie Sanders type in New York. They considered themselves pure and uncontaminated not only by the Communist Party but also by the Democratic Party. I thought of the democratic socialism they believed in as a less obvious political expression of American individualism, which enabled them to be daringly radical but political vestal virgins at the same time. Sanders has carried that vestal virgin shtick about as far as anyone can, but I doubt that he could be elected president. I would certainly rather have him as president than Donald Trump. But I think Hillary, who is definitely not a political vestal virgin, can be elected president, in spite of her considerable political sins, and would make a better president than Sanders. If politics is the art of the possible, the scowling, cranky, choleric, septuagenarian Sanders is a somewhat impossible candidate. What politician is not fundamentally an opportunist, and how could they succeed if they weren’t? They are necessary evils, of which there is much more in life than we want to admit. Sanders is certainly not evil, but I believe we will probably learn from his presidential campaign, as Ishmael did from Moby Dick, that "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me." It is the whiteness of Sanders, so to speak, the born-again Vermonter, that above all turns me and apparently many other Americans off. I am old enough to remember when the expression "That's mighty white of you," still had some currency. Although he would sincerely vehemently deny it, I think that expression is one of the sources of Sanders'  popularity among white voters.