People really don't know what horrible French aristocrat said, "Après moi le déluge" - the flood will come after me - Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour - and whether it was said (if it was said) in despair - after me, the flood will come, I'm the only one holding back the waters - or in cynicism - the flood is coming after me, and I don't give a damn, because I'll be dead anyway.
Soon I'll be seventy-two. Leonard Cohen just died at 82, and no one thinks he died young. So do I have another ten years? Who knows?
When I'm in a particularly gloomy mood, I wonder which of my friends will attend my funeral, and which of their funerals I will attend.
When I read disastrous predictions about rising sea-levels and all the other attendant disasters of climate change, I comfort myself, egotistically, by thinking that I'll probably be dead by the time the catastrophic scenario plays out, though I'm not at all happy to think that my children and grandchildren will be around to suffer.
But the election of Donald Trump tells me that the deluge is already here.
I have lived to see the fatal malfunction of American democracy, probably a harbinger of the breakdown of democracy all over the world.
One of my favorite Jewish benedictions is the "shehekhianu" - thank you, God, for keeping us alive and sustaining us and bringing us to this time. But can any sober person thank God for getting us to this time, when a dangerously unqualified man is about to assume leadership of the most powerful country in human history?
So, the tidal wave has broken upon our shores.
The flood has come.
Is there any reason to think the waters will recede?
Soon I'll be seventy-two. Leonard Cohen just died at 82, and no one thinks he died young. So do I have another ten years? Who knows?
When I'm in a particularly gloomy mood, I wonder which of my friends will attend my funeral, and which of their funerals I will attend.
When I read disastrous predictions about rising sea-levels and all the other attendant disasters of climate change, I comfort myself, egotistically, by thinking that I'll probably be dead by the time the catastrophic scenario plays out, though I'm not at all happy to think that my children and grandchildren will be around to suffer.
But the election of Donald Trump tells me that the deluge is already here.
I have lived to see the fatal malfunction of American democracy, probably a harbinger of the breakdown of democracy all over the world.
One of my favorite Jewish benedictions is the "shehekhianu" - thank you, God, for keeping us alive and sustaining us and bringing us to this time. But can any sober person thank God for getting us to this time, when a dangerously unqualified man is about to assume leadership of the most powerful country in human history?
So, the tidal wave has broken upon our shores.
The flood has come.
Is there any reason to think the waters will recede?
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