this dreadful day, and Winter Solstice
I just have to write to you on this nauseating day, when hell is literally freezing over – it’s bitter bitter bitter out there, in more ways than one. Media is vomiting forth endless coverage of the day, of the creature, to our immense disbelief and dismay, returning to the White House to helm the most powerful country on earth. When you think of what needs to be done to fix our world, and the time and money and effort wasted on this most appalling human being, who for some incomprehensible reason keeps being rewarded for disgusting, illegal behaviour – and escaping an assassin by millimetres – how is it possible? The worst people are boosted by his rise; the tech bros, white supremacists, and billionaires rejoice. I just heard Matt Galloway bravely interviewing a Republican politician, talking about how Biden had destroyed America and how his guy would bring prosperity back for everyone.
Yes, right. Good luck with that.
To make my heart even heavier, I went to see a terrific production of Winter Solstice by the famed German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig (love that name!) at the Berkeley St. Theatre yesterday. It shows a cultured, educated, upper-middle-class liberal couple – he a writer, the book he’s writing entitled “Christmas at Auschwitz” – she a filmmaker of obscure films – bickering with each other about the unwelcome arrival of her mother for Christmas. There’s someone at the door, a stranger the mother has met on the train. He comes in and proceeds to charm the room, playing Bach and Chopin on the piano, gradually talking more openly about purity and homeland. He’s German, from Paraguay – where, we realize, many Nazis were welcomed after WWII. And we realize, as the writer does, that this man is a Nazi too. But he has embedded himself in the family and turned most of them to his POV. The writer, addled by the pills he takes to quell his growing fear, is too weak to throw the enemy out. He stays.
It’s a play about how we are sleepwalking into fascism. It chilled me to the bone, and let me tell you, it’s already bone-chilling out there. We are sleepwalking into fascism, with a huge boost in that direction today.
I filled the bird feeder and will put more change in my pocket to give to anyone who asks. What can we do? We can try to be kind. Because it’s sure many world leaders, including soon our own, will not.
I think this bit of Dorothy Parker holds true today, in terms of my own conviviality and good fun. It’ll return. But not today.
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