Vic Socotra

01 January 2011

If the Glove Fits

(Mr. Simpson tries on the famous glove as a deputy looks on. Photo courtesy of the Guardian, UK)

We will make it short and sweet this morning, since we are all still trying out the feel of this brave New Year, a little like Orenthal James Simpson and the famous glove.

A good pal wrote me yesterday about the Dylan Thomas poem that so powerfully led off the last story of the dead year of 2010. She said that she had mixed feelings about that poem . . . “perhaps it's just a young man's poem, a young man who hasn't seen what the dying of the light is like.”

That struck me, too. Age is not the time for rage. In her experience with her father’s generation, “this isn't the time to fight, this is the time to be able to accept and welcome what is coming.”

The curse is that of the dementia that so profoundly steals all from you. “My father,” she said simply, “and his continuing rage against the dying of the light was devastating.”

So no rage this morning. The year is too young and we don’t know if the glove is going to fit yet. I was going to test your mental acuity this morning with a discussion of the controversy being stirred up over the Cloward-Pavin strategy to bring radical change to America, but the accounts on the radio of the first of the Baby Boomer class of 1946 lining up to cash in on Social Security left me too depressed.

This is the year, the commentators tell me, that America has to "eat it's vegetables" and get a little "fiber" in our national diet.

Those who claim to know what is going on seem not to actually know anything worth knowing. Is the planet warming or cooling? There seemed to be complete consensus on the matter just a short time ago, just when the sun lost its spots and things began to cool off.

We have such strange creatures abroad in the land, Birthers and Warmers and all manner of those who know much better about how we should live than we do. And those implacable Chinese, who are going to more than double their coal-fired generator capacity by 2030, and who will continue to rely on that source of power for 75% of their electricity.

I am sure that whatever we do to deal with the deficit, which is quite real, and global warming, which may not, there is a strategy by which the government will become a much more intimate bedmate.

I am hoping for better tidings, but who knows. The glove may actually fit.

Actor Bette Davis was one of my philosophical touchstones growing up. As the inscription on her tombstone reads, “She did it the hard way.” I suspect we are going to as well. But as she said in the 1950 film All About Eve she utters her famous line, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

For this New Year, I think I will just leave it at that.