October 28, 2015

Cold rain.
   
Last night at the Magnetic for a rehearsal of Washington Place. It was necessary agony. The direction is precise, the actors dedicated to their roles. All’s well there. I might go again tonight to see a “stumble through.” Listening, I tried to characterize my style of writing, and I couldn’t. The most I could flatter myself was by saying the speeches seemed appropriate to the characters.
   
E-mail account hacked, so I was sending weird messages out to everybody. Didn’t read it myself, so I don’t know exactly what it is. Ste in Cambridge says it’s “terrible.” .
   
Margaret Spellings is the new president of the university system, a bad choice replacing a good choice who was ousted because the Republicans (by definition Vandals) wanted some unspecified change.  If you had deliberately laid out a list of things you didn’t want in a university president, you couldn’t have chosen closer to the mark. She prides herself in knowing nothing about education. Brags on it. It was a gesture of contempt for education on the part of the legislature. Today’s Republican majority is like Melkor or Ahriman, incapable of creating anything, only of ruining and destroying. Lincoln and Roosevelt and Eisenhower cry out from Eternity.
   
But I will not let those thoughts guide me through the day. What bothers me more is that the passages of public stupidity and vandalism seems never to get so extreme that people begin turning away. Carson or Trump will say some clearly idiotic thing and the response is “Yeah, well, I like his style. He tells it like it is.”  Stupid people want their say. Stupid people want to hear others saying stupid things so that they might “like their style.” It’s not that I’m not stupid, but I don’t rejoice in it. I want a cure for it, a correction, not flattery.