January 28, 2018

Invited Sam to come with me to NM run-through Saturday afternoon. Glad I did, for many reasons, but also to confirm that what I saw was sweet, lyrical, innocent, heartfelt, adept, all the things I was hoping the production would finally be. Deep sigh of relief. Tech, of course, is still a catastrophe, but one carries a measure of faith for just such things. Pizza down the street afterwards– the first time in a decade or more when I actually had pizza at a pizza place, the “drunken clam” version having proved irresistible. I admire Sam for the wide open road before him. Told him–without expecting to–of my hurt at the prevaricating betrayal of the cadre of students from last semester. We agreed that two things astonish us– my astonishment being greater because I went longer without seeing them coming: the first is that women, most women, most women whom one knows, perhaps the great preponderance of women, have lived lives of threat and peril and open fear, unable to move freely through their own destiny because of the fear of violence or ruinous partiality on the part of men. Not feeling these things myself, I didn’t credit them until “Me too” fell like rain. The second is how American institutions and American prestige can fall into ruin in the course of one year with the right bad man with the right wicked party behind him. The rhetoric of the Republican Party is not different from that of the Gestapo; the rhetoric and tactics of Trump are not different from Hitler’s; the difference is that the tattered remnants of those democratic institutions prevent, so far, actions fit to the words. The last time I remember feeling such sea-change was the day of the Kent State murders.