October 30, 2012

Snow on the ground, deep-voiced wind in the air. Bruce H swims to his car on Manhattan, which is underwater and a total loss.

We had our Highlands Fair in Humanities last night, where the students brought food or games or mechanical devices from the 19th century and told their stories. It was delightful. Makes me think that more time should be spent on the history of everyday things, when we know it. In the middle of one young woman’s presentation I thought of those sewing patterns my mother used to make clothes, the flimsy brown paper you attached with straight pins. They had to have started sometime, for some reason. One young man had built a bike out of spare parts, and told us the history of bikes, which seemed to have been more trouble than they were worth through much of their history.

Shocking polls have Romney pulling ahead, if slightly. I never worried about this election, much, because Romney’s status as a liar and plutocrat and cynical opportunist (or at least the public face of a cadre of cynical opportunists) was so clear. Pundits credit the debates for a rise in that man’s popularity, which is astonishing because most of what he had to say was simply made up. Maybe America is flattered when someone cares enough to lie to it. On the simple daily level, he will be a worse president than Bush. I can’t imagine such a victory– it’s like the rabbit voting for the fox–but the world is often enough unimaginable.

Four gigantic financial demands all at the same moment. Of course. Two futile, one unnecessary, but one goes through the motions.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to be satisfied with something? I made eggs and bacon in my newly seasoned cast iron skillet. That was satisfying. Sleep was satisfying last night. The sound of the heat kicking through the registers is satisfying. I found this pullover in my closet that’s very comfy. That’s about it for now.

October 29, 2012

Big opossum on the porch this morning, eating the mess the birds leave at the feeders. Moaning wind, roaring and cracking in the distance, the garage light continually on because it thinks the wind is a body passing. Not yet dawn, so if my garden is blasted or intact cannot yet be known. Harvested the last eggplants yesterday. The vine is covered with blossoms, as is a volunteer cherry tomato in the backyard. The pink terrace roses are blooming; this little inclemency won’t bother them.

JB phones from New York to say that the subways and airports and Stock Market are closed, but also that they want to do The Loves of Mr Lincoln as part of GayFest in May. Would that be all right with me? Of course it would. It’s not what I expected, exactly, but on what grounds I was to expect one thing rather than the other is difficult to tell. I haven’t figured out what my producers’ thinking is, or what timetable they’re working, and I can’t ask without a certain petulance coming into my voice–which comes from panic–so I resolve to keep silent and encourage what happens to happen. Any production is better than no production, and I can see great good coming out of it, and the worse coming out of it would be nothing, which is where we started, and no loss at all. So, New York in the spring. That is well. Lincoln is in the air right now.  At this moment, the big excitement is meeting the actors who will play the parts. I have always had excellent luck with actors. Almost always.

Prospect of getting the roof fixed after last night’s rains. Bitched my head off on the phone (in my gentle way) but the prospect of anyone on the roof in this storm– Frankenstorm they’re calling it–is even more distressing. But, this is going to be my season for letting happen what happens. No trying to steer the world’s course for a while.

Too much singing yesterday. Hoarse. Croaking at the cats like an old lady

October 28, 2012

Strange light this morning, I suppose of the city lights under fog. It’s dimly clear as dawn, though dawn is two hours off.

Two students from twenty years ago, Scarlett and Bill, take me to lunch. They are both successes, she a lawyer in Greenville, he a teacher in Rhode Island, father, mother. They are still the kids I remember, with more force and less scatter in their personalities. We reminisce. We catch up. Some of their teachers are gone, some dead. one fired for embezzlement, some endure. Both have staked their claim on wide lives, and both do me the honor of not only setting up the lunch, but crediting me with a role in their lives. I eat too heartily and too spicily, and lose the lunch in the holly thicket north of the Renaissance Hotel. Keep the memories.

Brought the potted plants in, though it has not yet frozen or even frosted. The golden trumpets blare seven feet above the ground. Most of my potted plants were orphaned in the studio by Jason, and I think of him when I water them. Filled the winter bird feeders. Took down the hummingbird feeders. Dug up weeds and planted a quincunx of lilies. I do not have luck with lilies, but we’ll see.

Another thought on the literature which my students recognize and I despise: it is the apotheosis of the nano-second attention span. No two thoughts are tied together, and no bundle of thoughts is ever required to form a story or an argument or a complete observation. They are a heap of stones in the desert: some of them are quite striking, but they never make a pyramid. This is not thought of as a deficit, but as the way things are.

One maple in the parking lot behind Starbucks flames in surpassing reds. I thank it every time I pass.

October 25, 2012

I continue to figure why I find the works chosen for the autobiography class so disappointing. None of them is good; no part of any of them is particularly good (though they’re beautifully bound).  Finally I realize that the mediocrity is not accidental. These texts represent the apotheosis of post-modernism, which is to say the theory that there is no “better” or “worse,” but only a community of witness, all perspectives and levels of achievement being essentially equal. My opinion formed in the last five minutes is as good as that of a scholar who has pondered the same question through his life. The most witless poem is valuable if someone values it, and the reasons for the valuation are irrelevant. This includes, of course, the author, whose ineptness or error is validated if he buts avows ineptness and error were his intentions. No one has the courage to say that this is boring and that idiotic, for if one observation passes through the refiner’s fire, so must they all. Art becomes a circle jerk. Politics becomes just what we have seen during this campaign, an orgy of ignorant convictions based on the apparently inalienable right to have ignorant convictions, and the belief that all convictions, ignorant or sublime, are on exact par. My ignorance is as good as your wisdom. My sloppy crap is as good as your elegant, skilled and well-considered prose– even better, for am I not “keeping it real”? To their credit, my class is having these same reservations, if expressed more tentatively. They seem to be astonished that, given the opportunity of free expression, some clearly choose to slur or babble or profane.

October 23, 2012

BC says, “You still watch movies on DVD. I love that about you.”

Kipling’s Kim in Humanities. It’s a far better book than I thought it was. I don’t think many in the class actually read it, so my lecture assumed the problem of conveying meaning in a contextual void. But, at least it was meaningful to me, and perhaps I communicated some of that. The book should strike modern readers favorably, as it is about diversity, though it doesn’t hold to modern shibboleths concerning diversity. We think we must admire diversity without judging it, without comparing one thing to another, and when we catch ourselves comparing, the thing least like ourselves must be preferred. This is a tenet of faith rather than a method of cognition. Kim compares merrily, accurately, shamelessly, and therefore his perceptions are sharper and more useful than ours can be. The book is also about choosing. If you choose a straight path, you are no longer free to wander; you have lost part of the potential of your character. If you do not choose the straight path, you lose power and are never anybody in particular at all. I cherished it as a boy without knowing exactly why. I was already on the path–though I didn’t know it–and Kim’s prolonged freedom seemed exhilarating. For a while I wanted with all my heart to be called Kim.

My students point out that I am to do two readings in coming weeks that I had completely forgotten about. Naturally, they conflict with everything else. These same students, in class just today, finally affirmed that obscurity and randomness are not necessarily virtues. I blew in my head the horns of triumph.

October 22, 2012

Woke wrong, neither rested fully nor spent enough still to sleep. I’d gone to bed quite early, so maybe I was trying too hard. Woke to a terrible dream. There had been a long war between me and a monster which took various forms, and I had to overcome it in each form. I ran home to Ohio and was living in my old house, and it came there and took the form of a teddy bear. I had to fight the teddy bear. I almost lost, and was lying in the front seat of a car  beside the ruins of it, when I looked over to see it was getting itself back together. A narrator’s voice came on and said, “The thing was getting healthy again before his eyes.” I grabbed the reconstituting teddy bear and slammed it to the garage floor, praying, “O Lord, let this one thing die forever!” Of course I woke trying to figure out what one thing in the light I meant. The list of potentials is too long.

Turbulent Cantaria rehearsal, many things in many directions. RH, a former student from Phillips Exeter, of all improbable things, has joined the group. He was part of my inner circle there. I haven’t had the chance to ask him how he got here. He was Harvard-bound the last I knew, and then was living in New York. The man the boy grew into is very plausible. I could see the one in the other the minute he identified himself.

October 21, 2012

Revised Man in Flight. I don’t know why it entered my head to do so, but doing so induced the realization that it’s one of the pieces ruined by the “development” process. It languished for nine years after the reading in Manhattan, where Ben and his Fat Chance Productions did their level best, but gave exactly the wrong advice, which I–in an impulse of cooperativeness–followed. Readings and productions of my work have taught me much, “development” has been invariably counterproductive.

Blazing, blameless days.

October 20, 2012

Drinks with B, who had been in DC all these years. Great to catch up, great to hear about a genuinely unique and self-made life. It’s flattering to be with him. He thinks my books are genius and my acting is superb, and he’s smooth enough to make me believe he really thinks that. He prefaces a statement with, “You will agree you’re a bit of an eccentric–“ I always nod when people say that, though I don’t agree, don’t even know what it is they’re talking about, for sure. Is anyone eccentric to himself? It would be exhausting to be forever laying out the logic of your deeds before your audience.

Ran out to take photos of the pendant multitudes of golden angels’ trumpets, fearing that they will be gone before there’s another chance.  Much digging and planting yesterday, as well as the digging up of big volunteer wild roses–monstrous stabbers– which were suddenly in the way.  Roses blooming. Furnace on when I woke.

As I got out of bed–the second time, after rising at 4 and feeding the cats–I happened to think of the time when I joined the Cub Scouts. We met at the Meade Avenue Church. Our leader was teaching the mass of us how to say the Cub Scout oath, raising his right hand into the sign and saying, “Repeat after me. I, Maynard Johnson–“ All the Cub Scouts raised their hands and said, “I, Maynard Johnson–“ Yes, it was funny. My mother thought it was hilarious. Whenever the subject of Cub Scouting came up she would raise her hand into the Scout sign and say, “I. Maynard Johnson.” But what I happened to think was that, of all the people of the earth, maybe only one now remembers, “I, Maynard Johnson.” Think of the billions of little family jokes and gleeful references that are gone. Maybe there is an angel who remembers them all.

One of those Saturdays when I think of all the things I have to do, and each task seems wonderful, and I wish the day were twice as long as it is.

October 18, 2012

Most excellent Wednesday passed. Good workout at the Y. Wrote a poem still before dawn at the café. Then much and strenuous gardening, including eating what I assumed was the last of the tomatoes and the pulling up of the spent vines. Planted iris, sage, hyacinth. Bought other things and left them unplanted, because I had been fasting and the gardening (largely the uprooting of stubborn growths and the rearranging of boulders) made me dizzy. Blithely missed an important committee meeting, but the chair assured me nothing much happened but the attempt of the members each to top the others’ hyperbole. Sorry I missed that. Choir afterwards. It’s amazing how that experience can be changed (yea even from good to bad and bad to good) depending on whom you sit beside. As I pass through the house I notice the things I should put in a Goodwill box and be rid of forever.

Here is the odd, encouraging thing. I am impatient with my poems until I read those of others far-famed among us. Then I settle back with secret smile.

October 17, 2012

Interesting Tuesday past. It is my longest day. I was at school from 7:30 AM to 8:30 PM. One student was angry because we were wasting time he had paid good money for by straying frivolously off task. I’d never see a display like that. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to rebuke. Whatever this noble generation is learning, it does not include the notion that personal impulse should be curbed or moderated for the sake of the whole. Students in the creative autobiography class spent time holding up for discussion what I would have called, simply, bad poems. The poems’ strategy is to assemble a range of sometimes interesting, sometimes not, more or less random observations, and then to depend on the reader to make sense of them. No two independent interpretations could possibly be alike, and it was fascinating to watch the class discussion make of the pieces what they were not on their own. The students seemed happy with this procedure, and I have to admit it did redeem works that were otherwise not worth their ink. Their skill at making sense out of what did not have sense on its own was remarkable to me, even if it ran counter to my notion that a poem must take a stand, have a perspective, provide wisdom or insight, or at least pleasure, and not merely lie there in a jumble waiting for meaning-hungry souls to put them together in order they couldn’t bother to attain for themselves. I think of a poem as insight to work from rather than a puzzle to be put together. This is not to say that their comments were not often soaringly insightful; it’s just that the poems were not legitimate cause for their insight. We discussed slam poetry, too, without noting that what had just happened in the classroom and slam poetry are directly opposing forces, one seeking to make poetry public and accessible, the other sinking back into unshare-able hermeneutics that would make Eliot blush.

October 15, 2012


Mighty rain outside, a little rain through the ceiling onto the study floor. Gray depression springs from the littlest things. But one considers that the leak is in one of the least obnoxious places it could be. That's the sort of thing they tell you to be thankful for in Sunday School.

One friend is embittered with the world because he speaks his mind and then people are mad at him. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that he speaks his mind always, immediately, reflexively, without concern for appropriateness or effect. He is always the issue. He is always the one whose concerns are being addressed, who stops the course of things to have his say, and if not, his selfhood is being violated in some way, and there's THAT to lament. To some people the concept of private thoughts simply does not exist. That is charming, sometimes.


My Starbucks coffee had grounds in the bottom. Took a big swig near the end and almost puked. Still want to.

The roof I had put on–what?–three summers ago is defective, apparently. The two boys played Jesus music the whole time they were up on the roof. That should have been the giveaway. I overpaid them because they had worked so hard.

October 14, 2012

People come to my studio while I’m painting. I like this. Sometimes they’re hesitant, sometimes as bold as if entering a store.  One group the other day, some from Charlotte, some from New Jersey, stayed a long time and really looked, critiquing, appreciating, figuring out the goofy titles. They thought the paintings were “powerful.” To another yesterday I told the story of Miss Gossen saying in eighth grade that I had better give up the idea of being an artist. She said, “Oh, no, I think you’ve found your vocation.” Others say “Oh, what beautiful light you have in this studio,” and you want the plaster to fall in on their heads. Locked the key in the truck and DJ had to come for me, but before that Jinx tried to jimmy the door open. He was unsuccessful, but it was the longest conversation we’d ever had. I tried to say, “I appreciate the effort” when we were done, but what I said was, “I like you.” One set of words became another by their own volition. Maybe it’s a kind of eu-tourette’s.

Finished a revision of The Riding Funhouse this morning. I didn’t expect this to be the case, but the rectification of various versions was the big effort. It was like digging through the levels of Troy.

Fasted yesterday and then ate birthday cake at J and L’s. I thought I was having a stroke, but then realized it was a sugar rush, a sort of creeping heat that leaves one on the edge of passing out. Didn’t like it. The moment I arrive at a party I begin plotting an exit strategy. I don’t even notice myself doing it.

October 13, 2012

Yesterday began in almost ludicrous frustration. It seems ludicrous now; then it seemed tragic. Unnecessary phone marathon with Microsoft, bad news in email, etc.  Good trip to the Y, though. Printed The Mermaid to show to Tom, but it wasn’t one of his mornings at Starbucks. Stood for a while with the spade in my hand, but did not garden. Drove to the studio but did not paint.

Went out in the evening to celebrate Leland’s birthday. We took the La Zoom bus, which turned out to provide a hilarious and endearing show. Laughed myself out of the gloom. Drinks then at the Sky Bar at the western corner of the Flat Iron Building. The view through approaching night was beautiful, all the towers of the little town– Florence seven hundred years ago–alight, Patton Avenue burning westward like the path of a dragon. Walking back to my car, I took in this very lively and delightful city. I say, as I always say, that I must get out more. Unlike the old days, I recognize practically no one on the street. You can’t eat enough to be able to go into all the interesting new eateries, drink enough to sample all the bars. Ran into MG, who accused me of slurring my words. I’d had one chocolate martini but no food–all day–and that is an interesting high.

October 12, 2012

Venus alone high in the east.

October 11, 2012

Finished The Mermaid yesterday, thought surely I’ll be tinkering with it late today when my duties are over. Showed Apothecary to Leland, that window coverings might occur. Hauled myself to Fired Up on Wall Street finally to paint a Robert Creeley bowl for Connie’s fundraiser. I resented the time expenditure, but the actual activity turned out to be enjoyable and calming. Headache this morning from the richest wine at Avenue M last night. Waiting for frost, so the garden ceases to be a concern. I wrote the play in four days. Whenever I was ready for the next bit, the next bit lay under my fingers. Must prepare the house for the housecleaners. Must prepare Genesis for my first class. Must flush this headache. Mitt Romney is in town today. I’ll keep a wide berth.

Today's e-mail

Thirty-seven new messages on my primary email account since this morning. One of them-one–was personal. I was warned four times that there might be sexual predators in my area. I was warned about the closing of three different shows in different parts of the world that I might want to go to. The Democratic Party asked for money twice, My chance to buy tulip bulbs in bulk is slipping away. I have been nominated for inclusion in Outstanding Women of America.

October 9, 2012

Yesterday a boiling cauldron of deeds. I finished Act I of The Mermaid. I sent off my application for an artist’s grant from the state (my eighteenth application, with no reason to think it will find more success than the others). Worked out memorably at the Y (still stretching against leg cramps), met with TD at Starbucks to convince him to enter his screenplay for a grant as well. Did not once look at my portfolio. Made a slumgullion of the vegetables left from the garden, peppers, tomatoes, red onions, the un-eggplant looking white eggplant. Then it was noon.

The Mermaid sends me back to those days when I set down to write and the writing rolled out before me like landscape before a moving car. All I had to do is look, and write. Great joy, but also, behind the joy, anxiety that this too will never find its way into the world. Does the world need it? Not so much as a cure for cancer, as much as anything onstage now. I hear MM saying the lines as I write them. I must tell him.

Late dream that DJ and I were in a hurricane on the coast. I parked the car, with him in it, and ran. I assumed he’d follow, but he didn’t. When the wind died down, I went back to look, and the street was empty, no cars, no people at all, just emptiness and debris.

No frost yet, but the garden looks as battered as after a night of frost, or it will when the light comes. It must sense what’s coming, give up, some of it, on its own terms.

October 7, 2012

The roof leaks again. I thought my golden friend had fixed it. No match for the autumn rains.

Cantaria sang for Blue Ridge Pride yesterday afternoon. It was far more clement than it had been the year before. Bright skies. Enthusiastic audience. Had a sort of crush on the one who was singing to my left, so there was an interesting frisson to the event.

Bought a Mac Book.

Can hardly bear looking at my garden, for it’s in the transition between abundance and productivity and the sort quiescence which allows one to dig it up and prepare for the next round.

The movie Battleship (which wasn’t as bad as everyone said) and shots of moonshine in apricot nectar at DJ’s. Staggering home in the dark and the unanticipated cold.

October 6, 2012

Aches and bruises left over from yesterday’s tumble. Everything is worse than you think it’s going to be, except those things which you think are going to be really bad. Often they’re nothing at all.

October 5, 2012

Zach had double booked (more likely I had forgotten a changed arrangement) so I went without the massage around which I had planned my morning. Worse, leaving the building I slipped on the steps and crashed down, breaking the step under me. I could feel my skeleton jolt inside me, and I had to sit for a moment before being assured nothing–but the step–was broken. Gashed elbow seems to be the only effect, aside from jolted nerves. There was something on the step which was invisible and slick as ice. Didn’t matter going up, but coming down it did. What I took to be a homeless man helped me up and said he'd pray for me. The receptionist who came out to investigate fell at exactly the place I had done. She was afraid to get up, so I held her hand and eased her down the remaining steps. Stopped for an extra coffee coming home.

Working on my lost-play-of-Shakespeare play. I’d thought of it long ago, but forgot, until TD reminded me over coffee. It’s good to have a specific project again. I know it’s right because it’s going fast and, if not easily, unwaveringly.

Went downtown to see Kenn’s work at the new Aloft hotel. Wine on the fine balcony overlooking Biltmore Avenue. He was being lionized so I didn’t have much time with him, but I discovered I was in the midst of a gallery walk, which I have not attended in a long time. Walked among the galleries, seeing much I liked but nothing I wanted. It used to be I couldn’t walk down the street without seeing somebody I knew.

October 4, 2012

Blue day, scorching but still, somehow, autumnal.

Migrating parula warblers in the limbs over the back yard.

Attended my last meeting as a member of the Board of the Friends of the Warren Wilson Library. It was an interesting enterprise, if an anomalous one.

Colossal directory of the alumni of Syracuse University arrives at my door. I must have ordered it thinking I would be in it, or some of the friends I remember, but it is all undergraduates. Too big even for a doorstop.

Committee meeting in the science building. Seven of us were present, representing a commitment of time at 75 minutes x 7. We had each read and considered the applications set for consideration that day, and the submitters had presumably spent many hours meeting our rather precise requirements. We were all serious and honorable. Nevertheless, one recognized that all that expenditure on all sides had no necessary influence on the delivery of curriculum, and was not likely to improve even a single student’s educational experience. It was all, in the basic sense, irrelevant. It was all busywork set up by people with a need to make busywork look like real work. After that revelation came the one whereby I realized that–perhaps accidentally–I have conducted my career correctly, avoiding what I sensed may be irrelevant to education and to art, concentrating on what needed to be done, despite the fact that this choice marginalized me. I may be marginalized, but there are a thousand hours not wasted, and I will take that as a bargain.

Sophie observes that the ancient Greeks in greeting shouted, “Happiness!,” the Romans, “Health!”
“Upon that,” she continues,”turns the whole story of two civilizations.”

Off to Flat Rock to see their new musical, Zelda. I get down there infrequently enough for it to make an impression. It’s clearly more than a venue; it is a destination, with places to eat and lounge, with eager, helpful students waving you into parking places at the edges of the actual flat rock, which is not flat at all but more like a gouged and pitted shield. The boy at the T-shirt cart was practicing his time step as he waited for customers to make their choices. It was nice to be the youngster in the crowd again. Whatever mirth in the campus, the show itself was pretty awful. Flat Rock had poured its considerable resources and expertise into putting over a generic automaton, a show made to look and sound like a Broadway show, but without any soul whatever. The subject was supposed to have some regional flavor–Zelda having suffered and died in Asheville and all– but it could have been about any two glamorous people anywhere, for all the characterization was bad Broadway, telegraphed to the audience by timeworn gestures and signature pieces. It was not about anything but the collaborators’ pride in being able to make a show by collage, without having to bother with imagination, inspiration, an actual melody, or even that much research.  It was not quite dreadful, for the performance was excellent. But I thought overmuch of the long ride home, and gloated overmuch that I had not bought my own ticket.

October 2, 2012

Driving dark rain.

Joe Biden throwing the campus into turmoil with his appearance later today. Classes canceled, uncertainty about parking. I suppose it’s an honor. I would go see him if it were easier.

In contact with my director for Night Music, though he not with me just yet.

Daniel calls the Prius “the vaginamobile.”

Made magnificent chili from my homegrown tomatoes, onions, peppers. Did not grow the beef. There’s a sharpness to homegrown tomatoes in a recipe (I noticed this when I made tomato soup) that’s not in canned versions. A greenness, one might say. They probably purge it with sugar, though I rather like it.

One remembers the famous announcement from our Provost that the university was turning to a “culture of evidence.” That was the opening slip of the assessment debacle. Though there’s nothing to criticize in the first few seconds after the words are uttered– of course we are and always have been a culture of evidence– another moment’s reflection reveals a central difficulty. To whom is this evidence presented, and with what methods of evaluation? Nobody minds being held accountable, but the question is, to whom? It makes perfect sense for the each department to hold itself up constantly to the scrutiny of its own best practices, and, so far as I can tell, that’s what had been happening since I came to teach. But for the French department and the Chemistry department and Lit and Art to be held up to the general scrutiny of the administration– or any heterogeneous body assembled for that purpose–is not only insulting but absurd. The administration which insists on reviewing the practices of the individual departments lacks the expertise to do so. One should not be evaluated by those whose understanding of one’s practice is less than one’s own. And yet, this is precisely the demand that was made, with much grumbling from the faculty but, oddly, no serious resistance. Recognition of their own incompetence to evaluate properly has led the administration to insist on new criteria of assessment, a Procrustean bed whereupon the most disparate things are reduced and made to conform to some pattern the assessors think they can recognize. All is in the service of the limitations of the assessors, while the actual achievements, practices, and ambitions of the individual disciplines are rendered irrelevant. It is not merely destructive, it is risible. Someone standing outside of us would be writing a comic operetta.

My sister’s birthday. Hanging with her this weekend in Georgia, I had this thought: she is the most successful person I know.

October 1, 2012

Late rising, though it is still dark.

Cantaria grows by a few singers a night. Our sound must be quite formidable –rough and formidable just now. Some of our time is frittered away by divas, some of it by chatterboxes. But that many gay men together in the same place, what else could be expected?

Unearthed a sheet of paper, and remembered that during the last class my student taught I had been practicing writing with my left hand. On that day I wrote more with my left hand than on all the days of my life before. Felt like a student again, doodling like mad, watching the clock.

Obama ahead in most polls in most constituencies. This is well, for a Republican administration is unthinkable. They’ve not even bothered to conceal their selfishness and scheming love of inequity. They have not participated in government for four years except to insure that the president’s plans should fail. They probably think of what they do as politics, but it is actually evil. Amazingly, Romney feels worse than Bush. One imagined that could not happen. Bush had at least a bit of the scamp about him. Solemn evil is worse than twinkling incompetence. Justice would be for the Republicans never again to have a national presence, having lost the right to govern anything, anywhere.