After Trump, Making Connections

There is no way to ignore Trump, but you can work around him. This seems to be what the world is finding. A personal answer might be: rediscovering connections to the significant people and circumstances that were part of one’s life history, reaffirming your values. For me this meant recognizing how I sustained myself for 91 years in this strange world. I tried various roads to avoid the sinkholes.

The most important connection I made, early on, was a commitment to music, primarily jazz. Never a musician, I later wrote a music column, reviewed rock and classical for Playboy, and made connections to some of the great jazz practitioners in New York. I was teaching literature at NYU and City College, but music was becoming almost a second career.

Academia proved a dead end, though my love for literature and the arts remained. Musicians like Monk and Mingus spoke strongly to me. Here’s something I wrote 10 years ago about Thelonious:

The genius of Monk is to fit his particular quirky approach to many kinds of music, sucking you in often through irony and humor, but always respecting the original, corny as it may be. “Dinah (Is there anyone finer . . . )” is a case in point. Here Monk resuscitates an Eddie Cantor favorite (I can remember hearing this hoary record as a kid) and pulls you into a bouncy stride version with marvelous melodic inventions and rhythmic changes. You buy in because the radical changes to the tune are musically right, and they make you smile.

I began to find linkages in my own personal connections. Some were offbeat and indirect. My good friend Karen, for instance, was for a time styling assistant to Burt Glinn, the photographer who took the above photo of Monk. Sue Mingus grew up in Milwaukee, not far from where I evolved in the north suburbs of Chicago. My book on Charles would not have happened without her. Her father, she told me, was part Jewish. Like me, she got involved with music through journalism.

These oblique connections ramified, as they will, to people with other connections. They  made my musical existence into a rich web with the potency to touch and empower other aspects of my life. Like politics.

I was 11 years old when the big war ended. I got very involved in its progress and politics, even as a kid. The lessons were everywhere―in newsreels, the radio and the papers. As for the rise of Trump, I found him to be plainly no Hitler. He was a Mussolini―that tinhorn Mafiosi type who wanted power and “living space” for Italy. Cf. Trump and Greenland. Benito made dumb choices, changing his mind frequently, but always hating the Socialists. An assassination attempt left him with a slight wound to the nose. “Bullets pass, but Mussolini remains,” he said. Such similarities.

The war changed everything in my privileged world. And the postwar years changed how I thought about Judaism, politics, the world of business, and the conventional world of my family. Moving away from family values and the traditional aspects of the business world took me into politics, eventually. In the ‘90s I did writing and communications for the DNC and worked on Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan.

Since then, it’s been blogs, a couple of books, freelance writing and editing, and a long series of anti-Trump pieces, mostly out of print. I’ve been ranting about Trump from the beginning of his political career. That career has now taken a different, horrifying twist, without an ending yet. It may end sooner rather than later, though the disease he brought to the world will persist for some years.

The strength to resist that is the only medicine we have. It’s what gives you the power to protest and, indeed, to survive. For most of us, the connection to Trump is bogus. Resistance comes with exposure to the infection and reliance on the good life connections you have made.