Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Transcript of a conversation between a Homeless Guy (HG) and myself (SC) on a sidewalk in Berkeley this morning, between 24-Hour Fitness and the Downtown Berkeley BART station entrance at Shattuck & Addison. Given that I was rushing to BART to head to work, the conversation was sort of shouted over shoulders and at no point was either participant at rest. He started walking ahead of me and I ended up well ahead of him because of our relative natural paces.

HG: What they all working out for? We’re all gonna die!
SC: Maybe some later than others!
HG: Maybe so. We’re all gonna die soon, though!
SC: You think so?
HG: That Obama. He’s gonna ruin everything!
SC: You think so?
HG: He’s a crook!
SC: They’re all crooks!
HG: Yeah, but he’s the worst! He’s the Antichrist!
SC: I don’t agree with you there!
HG: You’ll see!
SC: We’ll all see soon enough!
HG: You got that right!

It is probably worth noting, though I do so cringing, that “Homeless Guy” quoted above is African-American/Black. Though I think that such observations make me slightly racist, they at least reassure the reader that his raving about Obama as Antichrist is not racism. Or at least not simple outsider-based racism with which such overt opposition to Obama is generally associated.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I am reaching the breaking point.

Out from my window, the people are passing on by
I hear them complain but I know that they don’t even try
And the lights down on Main Street don’t shine like they used to

At several’s request, I went to my old sub-employer’s Thanksgiving event last night. It was like walking through a prism to one’s own workplace funeral. I mean, it was all kinds of things. It was great to see the kids and the families and everyone celebrating in a bigger venue and a larger context than last year, which was in turn larger than the year before. Great to see things pulled off and successful and happy and hopeful amidst all that 2008 has been. It had a remarkable ability to pull back former people from the same sub-workplace. The department with the kids where so many of us have worked, so many of us have left.

And it had that same rhythm of all “programs” involving a series of kids, stair-stepping in age, taking way too long to perform on a stage for bemused/proud parents and disinterested/hyper kids. Younger kids taking three times as long to set up and stand in order and arrange themselves for a three-minute presentation. Something so real and heartwarming in a society where Hollywood has set a polished standard for the smooth way things should be communicated.

At the same time, there were slick video presentations including a year’s worth of effort on stop-motion animation. The proliferation of computers and cameras and the need for televised everything has changed even the politics of the classic (after-)school program. And watching the distinction in people’s attentiveness between cheesy kindergarten songs and a well-edited video of the first and second grade classroom was chilling. I could’ve written a lifetime’s worth of Sociology on the difference in ambient crowd volume alone.

But like so many things, the largest impact of the event for me was mired in my own perspective. It was a combination of so many things, but most prevalently that life goes on without me at places where I’ve been. What a stupid, selfish reaction to a joyful holiday event, but it hit me harder than I anticipated. Maybe it comes because I’m so close to contemplating the edge of my newest position, reaching that break point of productivity and usefulness. The answers to Brandzel’s self-regulatory question are getting thinner and thinner and my faith that people are nimble enough to react to what’s really going on is diminishing. We’re back on metaphors with runaway trains and quad-smokestacked ships and other forms of transportation gone amok. You can lead people to reason, but you can’t make them think. Not if they want to plug their ears and sing about times when things were easier.

And so I’m reminded that while one’s world at work may seem so significant and all-consuming and influential at the time, it is so easily released. People won’t miss you at your work any more than you’ll miss working. It’s just too “negative” or “inefficient” or focused on that which we cannot change. Which seems like a disappointment at first, but is really the greatest relief of all. It grants a sweet solace to all the fears one has of how important one may be in the context of their own self-constructed prison. All work is fundamentally prostitution – it provides a forum and a context for us breaking ourselves into pieces so we can feed ourselves or buy something useless. Your hooking, my hooking, isn’t making the world turn.

And I see through the windows like I see through the lies
Like I see through every useless disguise that
Everyone wears but everyone swears that they don’t

How can people lose so much and pretend it doesn’t matter? Pretend that everything will bounce back and be fine again? And soon? The admissions people are willing to make almost make me blush. Their naivete despite ages that run circles around mine just makes me want to cradle my head. For all our trappings of cynicism and jaded postmodernism in this country, we’re really all just babyish dolts. We’re all expecting things to grow permanently, forever and ever Amen. We’re blind to how long the odds have been stacked in our favor, feeling somehow privileged enough to be immune to basic fundamental rules of reality that everyone everywhere else faces at all times. And clinging to our solipsistic jingoism as a reinforcement for why things will never change. As though the greatest sports stars never got older and injured and quietly retired. As though people never died or moved on. As though the one thing infinite and eternal and undousable were the myopic gasoline-fed flame of America.

But four in the morning and I just can’t sleep
The pills ain’t workin’ and I can’t get no relief
And I feel like a hound dog moaning along with the rain
Any day now, the jukebox could drive me insane
There’s an old man in the corner that nobody knows
He says: “laugh while you can cause someday you’ll be wearing my clothes”

And so I’m awake, writing and raving, feeling like I’m having less impact than I ever let myself fear. Not even here, in this context, for who knows if anyone reads this blog except my little choir of one and two halves. No, impact in the sense of why it was (theoretically, not really) worth it to hang on to such a carcinogenic routine for so long. Impact in some sort of measurable way as far as making people see the world differently. This would, ironically, all be different if I were sixty. People would listen, people would care. People would at least have an archetype for thinking I had something to say and contribute. They may still not listen enough, I guess, grass and green. I am deluding myself even now. All I would see then is the potential, the upside, the other archetypes, the hope and exuberance of youth. I am me now staring back and you there in the future and shaking my head and admitting I’m wrong. You’re right, there is no perfect time, no perfect position to be heard. People will hear and do what they want, fundamentally. How else would things have gotten the way they are?

And when I’m depressed I sleep and when I sleep I awake at all the wrong times and when I awake I despair and shuffle about, hydrating and clearing passages and feeling driven to drivel my consciousness on a board in case I die today and someone wonders how did he get there? How did he make so many mistakes and ignore so many signs? What kind of idiocy defines this useless species, anyway?

But I guess I can’t tell you what you don’t already know
And I ain’t no prophet, my landlord he told me so

As a postscript to yesterday’s post, the sign got fixed yesterday, if you can believe it. Maybe the universe wants(ed?) to make me believe there was hope or everything was going to be different. Nevertheless, the same person who came to fix the sign left a note on our car threatening us for leaving it six inches overlapping into the “driveway” that hasn’t seen a vehicle on it in about three decades. Beautifully, it was signed “The Owner” even though I know darn well Prudential hasn’t bought the building from the people we keep sending rent checks to. And the note was on a scrap of Prudential paper. It’s all the energy I can muster to not plot against the sign in ways that look like more continual decay in bitter demonstration of why it’s a bad idea for realtors trying to unload houses to be so cavalier about the feelings of the inhabitants of said house. In the end, though, it’s just another straw for the spine of a camel that long ago burrowed itself in the sand and waited, interminably, for dehydration to set in.

Ah but don’t mind me baby, I’m only dying slow

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Buddy, can you spare three-quarter mil?

I am gradually coming to terms with the fact that our house may never sell. This is not the worry that most people saying that sentence have – we of course don’t own our house, but just live here. Still, it does seem at least somewhat disconcerting to be in this kind of flux.

Berkeley’s renter-protection laws are perhaps the best (strongest) in the nation. We have strict rent control that only accelerates with cost of living (so I guess we’re in for a 25% hike this year). We are mandated to receive an annual interest payment on our deposit. We cannot be evicted for much of anything, certainly not for the sale of the house where we reside.

(I say “house” by the way, because the building is a house. But there are four one-bedroom apartments herein. Lest you get the idea that we somehow occupy a whole house.)

I don’t even remember exactly when the house went on the market, but it was sometime in late spring or early summer. It was before the Winnebago showed up and thus well before it disappeared. It was long enough ago to feel like a lifetime, or at least like life was comprised of different time. Like a house priced so cheaply in such a neighborhood might sell quickly and easily and there would still be markets for such things.

There are liabilities, to be sure. While two of the apartments have been vacant since a month or so after our arrival here (March ‘06), one has been occupied since the mid-1970’s. The rent controlled rates on that kind of longevity are not exactly commensurate with the current market rates. And then we’re in decently below market as well, since the same factors keeping the other two apartments vacant almost kept us from renting the place. Let’s not spend a lot of time on this, but suffice it to say that our landlord crew (it’s a whole family and its patriarch’s passage is the catalyst for the sale) is “eccentric” and “interesting”.

All this crew wants is to be rid of this house. One can’t divide a house amongst bickering parties (or one could, but that’s generally best left to reality television). One can’t eat a house (with dental work intact). One can’t turn a house into cool, liquid cash, thus applying it to whatever one’s personal vices (or virtues) or taste.

All over America, people are facing this issue. And not just people who would be eligible to play Family Feud against themselves. People are wrestling with the permanence and stability of owning a house when all they want is a little flexibility and freedom. People are dealing with the finality of equity in a world where there are more diverse financial concepts than leverage. People are crying foul in every direction, talking about how they only did what they were told, what they assumed, what every knucklehead was doing because it was free money.

It’s unclear to me whether the sign out front (pictured up top) will be fixed or not. And while it may seem obvious what I’m talking about fixing, it’s noteworthy to mention that the sign lacks any reference to the word sale. It is, in the best postmodern spirit, a “for sale” sign without the words “for” or “sale”. I’m still struggling with the implications here, but they seem multitudinous. We have come to a point in society where such signs are so ubiquitous and self-evident that they need no label or declaration. They are transcendent of their own intentions. Or, perhaps contrarily, maybe there was never any hope of sale in the first place. It’s just a marking of territory, a notice of whose responsibility it is to fix the sign. Goodness knows the landlord crew forsook their already paltry commitment to fixing things as soon as the sign went up.

It may be a little early to predict the universal presence of these signs at every domicile or piece of property in North America. For one thing, the budget for upkeep would need some work. But what happens when we get to a point where 50% of the population is unhappy with where they live? 60%? 75%? Americans take freedom of movement as their birthright and interest in moving as their unique proud tradition. When this is compromised, what will make people feel American? Certainly not the lack of credit cards and shopping malls.

This occupant is starting to feel a little disturbed.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Hey kids!

Lest you somehow think that I have completely wasted this weekend, I am conflictedly proud to announce the availability of Duck and Cover merchandise!

Here’s an example of the kind of unparalleled quality and homespun handwritten charm you can expect from said products:

Or, if you prefer more overt puns:

This is the completion of a long-ago resolved (but undone) task of mine, at the request of a couple of regular D&C readers who aren’t even personally known to me. Also, it’s fun. Also, it’s just in time for the holidays and remarkably BP Merch sales haven’t slacked year-over-year from last year. Good thing it’s not available in malls.

Also, your money won’t be worth anything this time next year, so would you rather have money or your favorite political cartoon characters on a shirt? I mean, really.

There’s a lot going on in the new theme here at StoreyTelling (hit refresh if you’re not sure of what I write). This one might last a while, maybe all the way till next October or whenever something else seems more relevant. You may remember my “Stop the War” theme from Introspection back in the day (Spring 2003). As you can see on the old Past Graphics Archive for Introspection, it only lasted till May, when it seemed clear that the war wouldn’t be stopped.

It’s been five and a half years.

I don’t have a past graphics archive for StoreyTelling yet, but I should have one. I should make one soon. I should do a lot of things… small productive things or big productive things or just things in general. But I don’t want to. I’m miserable most of the time, it seems, set off by the smallest and the largest. It’s easy to be intractably busy and intractably miserable these days (it seems, for me). One would think these things might somehow rotate against each other, but they truly feed each other in some sort of ever-descending spiral. Even in the middle of Saturday afternoon, the threat of busy and the truly deep-seeded misery is rattling my cage. And hey, how did I get in this cage?

People in food lines are both busy and miserable. How can you be busy when you have that long to wait? It’s kind of like being busy in a job in America in the first decade of the third millennium. Everything is waiting and watching and shoving off for later, sandbagging and timing out. And yet it feels so busy.

How can you be busy when you have that long to wait? You’ll find out.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Despite how it may sound, this post is not about the stock market. At least, not directly.

People often wonder why it seems like life is speeding up as they go, why it seems that an hour just doesn’t mean what it used to, let alone a day or a year. People attribute this perception to irrationality, to craziness, to an overarching sense that time is careening toward some flat-line horizon of horror in the not-too-distance.

What people don’t often realize is that this perception is real. And completely rational. It is a logical, graphable function of the nature of existence on a temporal plane.

Nearly four years ago, I compiled a compact disc to serve as Emily’s and my New Year’s letter for the annum. While I’m a big fan of New Year’s letters conceptually, Emily and I have sort of run aground in an ongoing conflict over the nature, tenor, and sourcing of these letters, and thus have released only two in seven years of cohabitation, at New Year’s 2003 (letter) and 2005 (CD).

2005’s aptly named Welcome 2005! was mostly other people’s songs, but it did include two readings of other people’s writings and two readings of my own original work, primarily written for the CD itself. One was a sort of fiction/parable that was as much a vehicle for its closing punchline as anything else, called “The Legend of Jill and Will”. The more serious piece was an essayish thing called “The Shortest Year”, wherein I outlined much of my theory about the logic behind each person’s sense that time is literally getting shorter. With begging of forgiveness from those who received this CD (hey, it’s been four years, you might’ve forgotten), I reprint the text here:

The Shortest Year

In contemplating another year’s conclusion, it seems only obvious that it has passed too quickly. Too recently were we contemplating the same changing of numbers, the same lighting of lights, the same long nights. And short days.

Indeed, the shortest day of each year – a strange reference to a timeframe that lasts 24 hours just as any other day – falls in late December each year. Though winter always seems to be closing in through the year’s early months, the days are actually on their march back towards springtime equilibrium. Just before Christmas, in sight of New Year’s, night wraps its dark fingers tightest around the receding daylight.

Yet in examining the shortest day, it seems to find itself a parallel in the year just ending. Was not this year the shortest on record? Can we not seem to feel the pulse of time speeding, hurtling us ever closer to years that seem more science fiction than contemporary? Whatever happened to the endless waiting of childhood, when next Christmas, birthday, or even schoolday seemed impossibly distant?

It may be of some comfort to understand that there is a statistical basis for this rug-pulled-out-from-under-us feeling that each winter brings. Each year that passes, though 365 days in length like the 24 hours of the shortest day, is less time in one’s life than the year prior. While your third year of life was a full 33% of existence to that point, the fourth was only 25%, and the 10th just 10%. Finishing a year that struggled to be more than 4% of my life is indeed daunting. The knowledge that the percentage will only shrink from here speaks like an urgent call to action in my soul. Time is running out!

While it may seem trivial that the first year of life was, at the time, all there was to life, can we really imagine how much we learned in that year? More and more it seems clear how childhood has greater presence and impact on an adult’s perspective than all the subsequent years put together. While highly significant events can increase any given year’s impact beyond its percentage at the time, time still seems to pass faster with every passing day.

And as I am about to launch into a call to haste, if not near-panic, I am reminded of what seems to be perhaps the most valuable lesson of this, the shortest year. Patience, the ability to wait without concern or a sense of urgency, is among the most vital and under-rated skills one can develop. Whether one is trying to increase a stack of chips at the poker table, trap a king of the opposite color, encourage a governor to sign a piece of paper, or convince a child not to throw a fist, patience is essential. In American society especially, patience seems the lost art of those who somehow replace stress with serenity. Doctors and dentists especially are lost without patients!

Thus we face the importance of patience in a life of ever-shortening years. It is likely unsurprising that such schizophrenic conclusions emerge from reflecting on the shortest year. How else but with paradox can we account for the lunacy of these times? This country, mired in a highly unpopular war, offers only candidates who promise to extend and perpetuate that war. This world, able to produce sufficient food to feed its human hordes, still starves millions with its inability to properly distribute such food. This era, filled with tremendous technology and wealth, still finds cruelty and misunderstanding in almost every corner of the swiftly-shrinking planet. And even at home, I struggle with the knowledge of how much needs to be changed and the utterly overwhelming odds against any such change occurring, let alone with my having a hand in it.

My friends, it is a very difficult time to have hope, to have joy, to have happy holidays.

Which brings us back to patience. The serenity to ride things out, to wait for better, to know that the days will again lengthen and the light will return. It is something akin to faith, to resigning oneself to possibility rather than insisting on dread. It is not easy to do in the shortest year, but it appears to verge on necessary.

And how else but with an eye to the waning percentages of the shortest year can we resolve ourselves to address the problems still plaguing us? We must be spurred on by the ever-shortening years, understanding that the horizon always draws near and only we decide whether the road to the horizon is one of potential or peril. A resolution to our paradox may be found in making haste to act in these shortest years while somehow having patience in seeing results from such actions. Indeed, we may be better off waiting for Godot than for such results. But does such futility diminish the need for action in the shortest year?

Songs and stories will follow this open letter. Not all are merry and bright, but then not all Christmases are white. In the time of respite between the shortest day and the newest, even shorter year, we have time to hope. To resolve. To reflect, as the snow reflects the light of both sun and moon. Dear friends, make patient haste. May we all take joy in the thoughts, deeds, and yes holidays of peace. Actual results may vary.

What I didn’t do in 2005 after developing this theory, and what occurred to me to do this morning in the shower, while contemplating meetings I needed to prepare for with graphs at work (the meetings were subsequently cancelled upon my arrival at work, a growing theme lately), was actually graph the rate of diminishment of marginal temporal returns.

In other words, by plotting the percentage of each year (or even day) of one’s life in terms of its percentage of the overall amount of life one had lived thus far, one could visually see how much longer units of time would seem to someone in the early years vs. the late. And this staggering graphic representation would illustrate exactly the magnitude of apparent speeding up that life undertook in any given year (or day).

To wit:

Look at that. It’s breathtaking, isn’t it? If you ever wonder why people are obsessed with early childhood development and its impact on the trajectory of one’s life, or even why psychology seems deeply rooted in understanding childhood influences, wonder no more. It’s no wonder. Look at that graph. Childhood really does impact life by an insanely disproportionate rate. Time in the first year of life is five times as significant seeming than in the fifth year of life and twenty times the twentieth. Even the fifth year is four times the twentieth.

Practically, this means that a season at age twenty will feel like a month did at age five. A year at age sixty will feel like that same season at twenty or that same month at five.

But this graph makes it look like things really slow down at around age twenty and just trail off indefinitely, with little difference between the years. This graph does a great job of illustrating the unexaggerable significance of the first ten years or so of life, but one could reasonably glance at this and assume the rate of speeding up one feels thereafter is not so notable.

Au contraire:

Here we see that while the rate of sheer maddening speeding that happens over the course of childhood is diminished, adulthood nevertheless speeds up over time at a notable clip, especially early adulthood. A year at age 100 is roughly equivalent to two months at age 18. A year at age 50 is roughly a season at age 18. This is still significant speeding… most of my audience is approaching 30 and would do well to consider that the twenty-four hour day you just had will feel like eight hours if you’re lucky enough to reach age 90.

Puts a new spin on living longer, doesn’t it? Makes one wonder why the drive is to extend life without being nearly as mindful as the quality of that life. Can one really say that living to 120 is such a joy when each of those years past one-hundred feels like a month did in mid-childhood?

The line does flatten a bit toward the end, by the way… the difference between time at 50 and 100 is significant, but the difference between, say, one’s sixties and eighties is not all that notable:

So that’s a mixed blessing of later life – while time is constantly speeding up, the rate at which it speeds is constantly slowing, such that time will all feel about the same very late in a long life (though still a veritable blink compared to childhood or even mid-life). Is it thus any wonder that people have a harder time remembering such relative insignificances as the last few days at the end of such a life, yet very few old folks seem to have trouble with long-term memory? The immediate past may seem more relevant to a younger outsider whose years are still around 2-3% of their life at that point, but to those filing away days that are less than one-two-hundredth of a percent of their life, how important are such days? Especially when contrasted with shining days that were a whole twenty-fifth of a percent?

And yet of course, it must be observed that this is all a study in perception, not actual time itself. It can be well debated how much time is a construct for a perception or a legitimate objective reality, but let’s leave that on the side for now. The fact is that a second (probably) lasts for exactly one second, be it a moment after your birth or a moment before your death of old age. Time is time. One can take control of this day just as much as a day years ago and it will have just as much opportunity for productivity, use, and benefit to the future.

But it won’t feel like it, mentally. Because one is not an amnesiac, is not discovering life for the first time, one will feel this day as a point against so many days that have come before, the collective memory of a life piled up to get to this moment. And it’s that weight of history and memory that came before that squeezes this little day into feeling like the shortest yet, and all to come will infinitely follow the same mold.

The trick, then, to getting the most out of life seems to be twofold:

First, one must do everything possible to maximize the impact and use of the early years. This is very challenging, especially in modern America where everyone has been taught from birth to invest in the future, defer things till later, put off everything fun or expensive till retirement. This reality may seem in stark contrast to the realities of debt and short-term gratification standards that American life has really manifest into, but nevertheless people train themselves to always wait till later to really make the most out of their meaning in life. The extensive and extending amount of minimum education that America requires of its children to get by is an excellent example of this ever-onward march toward investing now to reap later. Combating this trend may be the best possible way to make one’s life more significant. This does not necessarily mean dropping out of school, of course, but engaging in life during those times with the seriousness that its relative weight in one’s ultimate memory connotes. This really is in stark contrast to how most people in their teens and twenties live their life. As a serious person at that age, I remember just how weirdly alone I felt in being so.

Second, one must do everything possible to counteract the perception of speeding up that life has. One could make a decently strong case for forgetting everything one has done prior to any given day. This could indeed create a sort of infantile rebirth of one’s perspective and lead to some really fruitful midlife years. However, the expense of losing the lessons learned and the improved ease of navigating life that comes with age seems too prohibitive to make this the ideal solution. A better solution seems to be about taking steps to slow down one’s perception of life in any given moment. People have made bazillions of dollars writing books and crafting self-help videos and seminars to this very purpose, but I think mostly without the context that the theories and graphs above provide. And not wanting to jump into the self-help market myself, I can only offer you this kind of writing in this context: find a way to really appreciate each hour and to make sure you’re doing the most with it. Remember how long a day felt when you were in first grade and try to recapture that slowness, that extensive volatility over the course of one whole day.

The biggest impediment to this second course of action, of course, is that most adults have constructed lives that are 90%+ filled with things that one wants to get over with as fast as possible. Indeed, living a day at work that seems as long as a first grade day used to seems downright terrifying. Most of us give thanks that days at work go way faster than days in grade school, that even boring and dull days now can’t compete with the interminability that was a hallmark of such days decades earlier.

So the solution must be not only extending the days’ apparent length of time but… watch out now… filling the days with things worth remembering and taking one’s time on. There’s the rub, no?

And while that may sound like a pipedream, the luxury only of the very wealthy or those who forewent education and thus are not saddled with debt (and, you note, may be dead of starvation in a year or two), this period of history may be your grand opportunity, your time of great hope to cast aside the trappings of an ever-shortening life filled with lame drudgery. Because, of course, you may soon lose your job. Lots of us, everywhere, may be about to have one thing in a larger quantity than we ever expected: time.

And while those who wish to eat may (we don’t know for sure – things may be economically too dire and hopeless) have to spend at least part of that extra time hunting around for another source of interminable drudgery (i.e. a job), we may end up capitulating and finding free sources of sustenance and shelter and just all being in the same boat with a whole bunch of suddenly re-lengthened time.

This looks a lot like some terrifying monolith to most folks, but it makes me giddy with excitement. If we have all that extra time to think again, to play, to contemplate the future, it’ll be just like being a kid again. But with less awkwardness and angst, plus more knowledge and understanding. To me, that sounds like the greatest opportunity America’s had in a long old time.

So maybe, folks, instead of clinging to that almost-chopped job with all your might and last tendrils, it’s time to just let go. To release, be free, rediscover the childhood you weren’t paying sufficient attention during in the first place. Let yourself be. Be. Take your time. Literally.

I guess this post was about the stock market after all.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht, the pogrom that history remembers as the opening salvo of the Holocaust. It was a gargantuan riot that killed 91, hauled 30,000 into concentration camps, and left thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned buildings damaged or destroyed. To my surprise, Germany is commemorating Kristallnacht with a sobering day of reflection. Maybe they do this every year; maybe it’s only on the ten-year anniversary cycles.

In Germany, as in much of the world, they write the dates in a sensible chronological order: 9 November 2008. Day, then month, then year, units of time going smaller to larger. Sometimes they shorten the dates to all numbers: 9/11/08.

Kristallnacht was the original 9/11.

Kristallnacht was 63 years (less a couple months) before 9/11/01, what we traditionally call “9/11″. Thanksgiving was declared in 1863, in November, by a wartime President who’d suspended habeas corpus and declared half the nation as enemy combatants. Sure, there had been a couple original Days of Thanksgiving to start the tradition, under Washington and Adams, but the idea didn’t annually stick until Lincoln got it going with these words:

In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.

Maybe the principles of our Presidents have never changed. Maybe the issue of change is especially pertinent as we have another tall eloquent Illinois politician coming to power in a time of war, fear, and the threat of dissolution.

And maybe it’s time to change Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has changed plenty already… the declaration of President Lincoln goes on to make clear that this is not a secular holiday (”I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”) And yet it’s become overtly secular despite such a foundation. The day has also, though initially seemingly mostly about the Civil War, become integrally about one of our founding self-perceptions and America’s own opening salvo with its own genocide.

This salvo began on 12/11/20 (1620), when Europeans landed on Plymouth Rock. They nearly starved to death, but 91 (yes, 91) Native Americans came to live with them and teach them how to survive in the New World. As the story goes, they celebrated their first winter of survival with a great feast of thanksgiving in 1621. And the rest of the Native Americans were history, all but completely wiped out in a three-century span of deliberate and conscious ethnic extermination.

To say that Thanksgiving (the apocryphal “First Thanksgiving”) is Kristallnacht for the North American Holocaust is perhaps slightly exaggerative. But the symbolism and parallels are evident. Kristallnacht at least served as a clear warning for all those who remained in Germany that it was time to leave. Thanksgiving deceived those who were hosting into believing they’d always have reason to stay.

One of the people who didn’t leave Germany was Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become the current standing Pope. Instead of leaving, he joined the Hitler Youth. No joke – read the article linked above. While much has been made lately of whether the Holocaust-era Pope collaborated with the Nazis, turned a blind eye to them, or secretly worked against them, there can be no doubt about Benedict’s stance. He signed up.

And yet in just two more days, the US will honor another day set aside for those who also just signed up in feeling of solidarity with their country, right or wrong. People who signed up to exterminate Native Americans, people who signed up to kill Nazis, people who signed up to wipe out enemy combatant Americans. People who chose to go where they were assigned instead of standing, resisting, refusing, running. 11/11, no nines about it. Ninety years ago on Tuesday, the war to end all wars. Twenty years later (less two days), Kristallnacht.

Those of you still reading at this point may find this post a lithely macabre version of one of those e-mail chains that went around in the early days of e-mail (the late ’90’s) about the links between Lincoln and Kennedy. Assassins leaving warehouses and being caught in theaters, secretaries named each other and such. Maybe so, maybe so. But it seems, for all my talk about October, that there is something charged and malignant about November, especially (perhaps) Novembers ending in 8’s. After all, November 1918 led to the Treaty of Versailles which, in most historians’ opinion, led directly to Kristallnacht. There’s only so much debt and guilt one can heap upon a people before they find a scapegoat and start massacring people. Maybe.

As I talked about last year, I love the idea of Thanksgiving and despise its origins. I adore the idea of setting aside time where everyone humbly admits that they don’t deserve the incredible blessings granted them, that they are in debt (a real debt, of gratitude and not money) to others for their standing and situation, however meager it may be. The origins, however, are a little like a hypothetically victorious Nazi Germany setting aside today to celebrate what riches they were able to steal from the Jews before slaughtering them wholesale. Think about it. Think about the land on which you live, the territory you occupy, the buildings and the society and the continuous peaceful transfer of power from one regime to the next manifestation thereof. Think.

And yet Thanksgiving has an element of forgiveness. In an irony nearly as equal to the foundational irony, Thanksgiving’s major event with the President each year involves pardoning a turkey. The irony being that Americans slaughter 45,000,000 turkeys while one (or apparently, more recently, two named) turkey(s) is(/are) pardoned. Those are worse odds than a Jew or Native American surviving their respective genocides.

But what role forgiveness, mercy, looking past the sins of the past? Forgiveness remains the triumphal (and perhaps only) virtue that is widely espoused to which I simply cannot relate. It’s not that I don’t believe those wronged by others should refrain from acts of revenge and violence. This belief is foundational to my perception of the world. But forgiveness is something far greater than refraining from acts – it is a deep-down, soul-clenching release of ill will for past wrongs. I don’t get it. I don’t think I’ve ever felt it, not for a wrong that really felt injurious. It remains widely perceived by others as my glaring moral blindspot.

And yet I may not be alone – Ehud Olmert discussing Kristallnacht last week, addressing his Cabinet: “We will never forgive or forget.”

And perhaps it’s the implicit link between forgiveness and forgetting that I cannot stand, that blinds me to any possible merits of forgiveness conceptually. For forgetting, it can widely be acknowledged, is never the solution. Jumbling the old numbers, burning the history books, shoveling heaps of smoke and ash and mirrors on the past is simply not the answer. Surely we need fresh thinking and fresh beginnings, but only if they are informed by our past mistakes can we truly hope to make something new and viable for next time.

And even America, amnesiac of the world, realizes this. It’s why we do commemorate 11/11/18 and 9/11/01 and even 12/7/41. It’s why I wouldn’t have to explain any of those dates to you even if I hadn’t referenced them earlier in this post. If you’re an American, you know them. You feel them. You do not forgive.

But what of 8/6/45? Or 2/13/45? Or yes, even 12/21/20? The United States of America does not embark on the somber reflection of Angela Merkel’s Germany, even now. We do not apologize. It is hard to imagine that Barack Obama will not finally break the Presidential streak on refusing to apologize for slavery. But what bizarre symbolism would that moment be, someone who is African American and yet not descended from slaves, someone whose generational lineage includes Cherokee, being the one who will stand up and say America was wrong. It is easy to imagine Obama apologizing for a great many number of ills, turning America’s arrogance on its head in a wave of sobering regret. It is also easy to imagine Obama labeling such actions as dwelling in a mired past, as a waste of time, as something that he is (perhaps arrogantly) different enough to not have to own. Such is the reality of having elected what one CNN anchor on election night aptly called “The National Rorschach Test”: everyone looks at him and sees what they want to see, what they see in the back of their own troubled mind.

President Obama is related to both George Bush and Dick Cheney. And yet he is also a first generation American on his father’s side. These are the paradoxes and quandaries of a man who embodies contradiction and potential. The real excitement of the election is not a week past on the eve of the decision (which was a foregone conclusion), the real excitement is two months hence, when we discover with each pronouncement and policy, which side this man favors. Which way he goes. Which chances he takes. The odds, of course, are best that he does both and all and is awash in compromise.

But President Obama, I call on you this year, before you’ve made any official plans, to think about next Thanksgiving. November 2009 is dreamily impossible for me to imagine… something akin to imagining 2008 from the perspective of 1938, or maybe even from 1620. It is hard to contemplate what will have transpired and changed, what kind of America we’ll be facing, if indeed there is really an America left at all. Mr. Obama, consider proclaiming a change in the way we handle Thanksgiving. It doesn’t have to be a day of mourning, it doesn’t have to be exactly like today in Germany. But this quote, from Angela Merkel, seems to have a ring to it: “We must not be silent.”

It’s because forgetting is connected to forgiving, and vice versa. It’s because those who have had the most courage are always the ones who are willing to buck the trends of their own nation, to point the accusing finger in the mirror or across the street. Not to sign up for the Hitler Youth, not to register with the SS (Selective Service). Not to sign up for a credit card or a draft card or to sew the yellow star on your clothing or march toward the reservation. To resist, to buck, to stand against.

America may be newly in love with itself, so proud to be able to elect someone of mixed skin tone. President Obama, it is up to you to remind us that we have much more to be ashamed for. And that this shame compels us to change everything.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.