Trash Talk of 2020: The Year in Quotes

-- By Tom Phillips 

 America survived the Civil War with the gravitas of Lincoln's speeches and the caritas of  Whitman's poetry to bind up our wounds.  We fought World War One -- "The War to End all Wars"-- egged on by Woodrow Wilson's visionary slogans.  We slogged though the Great Depression and World War Two heartened by Roosevelt's radio chats, and First Lady Eleanor's newspaper columns.  Kennedy and Reagan pictured castles in the air, and Obama could be stirring, when stirred.   

In 2020, we were on our own.  Rhetoric was barely a memory, giving way to the grunts of combat:   Curses and challenges, defiance and dares; trash talk, mayday calls, last gasps and pleas for mercy.     

What they said:   

"It is what it is.."  Donald Trump on August 31, downplaying US deaths from Covid-19 ".. because you are what you are."  Joe Biden, blaming him in the first presidential debate September 29.

“I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd, as he lay dying under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin May 25.  When Biden was declared president-elect November 7, CNN commentator Van Jones broke down on camera, weeping for his children and friends.  "It wasn't just George Floyd," he said through a flood of tears.  "A lot of people …felt they couldn't breathe."

 "Kill me!"  Luis Vasquez, a neighborhood resident who fired gunshots into the air in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, following a Christmas concert on the Cathedral steps December 12.  Police shot him dead.  The gunman's sister said he'd been "damaged" by prison time in the 1990s, and his mental state had worsened in the pandemic. 

"Please, call the cops." Spoken and recorded by Christian Cooper, a black man birdwatching in Central Park, on the same day George Floyd was killed in May. Cooper had asked a woman to put her dog on a leash. She responded by calling 911 and telling police that an “African-American man” was threatening her. The birdwatcher knew such white lies have meant prison or death for many black men.  Still he challenged his accuser and was vindicated by the video.

Future Bible Stories: King Donald and the Bugs

The manuscript fragment below was recently discovered by Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's campaign to develop a vaccine before election day.  Sources say the project had accelerated to several times the speed of light when engineers realized they were in a time warp.  The manuscript was discovered at a point corresponding approximately with the year 4525 CE.  It was damaged during the rapid deceleration that followed as crew members worked frantically to restore their present lives. It appears to tell the story of the 2020 presidential campaign, in the language of a latter-day Bible.  

In the fourth year of the reign of King Donald, in the second month, the Lord sent a bug to plague the people of the earth, as a sign against the king because he did not love justice.        

The prophet Woodward went to the king and he was afraid.  The king said, "You just breathe the air and that is how it is passed.  It is also more deadly that even your strenuous flu.  This is deadly stuff."  And the prophet wrote that in his book.  

Then the king went to tell the people. He stood at the gate and told them, "When it gets a little warmer it miraculously goes away.  The King of China is working hard and it's going to work out fine."  And the people went home and did not fear the plague.  

Then God sent the plague from another direction, because the king had not warned the people, and many were sickened and died. They covered their faces, but the king was proud and would not cover his face.  

My Life with the Cops

                     Run chillun run, the pattyroller git you --                                                                                  Run chillun run, it's almost day. 

                     -- Slave song 

One evening in the 1940's, a young James Baldwin took the subway downtown to 42nd Street, just to explore midtown Manhattan. A policeman asked him what he was doing there, then told him to go back to Harlem where he belonged.  

One evening in the 1950's, a young Tom Phillips walked out of a bar in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, in the poorer section of town around the railroad station.  Emerging from a parked patrol car, a policeman asked me what I was doing "in there."  I said I was having a beer.  He informed me that everyone else in the bar was black.  "So what?" I said.  At this he grew defensive.  He had nothing against black people, he'd "worked with them for many years."  It was just that I didn't belong there.   

Neither of these events would be likely today.  Black people are welcome on 42nd Street, which has become an urban extension of Disney World.  And the poor section of Roslyn has been torn down to make way for a parking lot.  My classmate and teammate Sam Brown, whom I saw in that bar that night, now lives in Roosevelt, a poorer town farther out in a suburban sprawl that has become more segregated as it has grown more affluent.  Such are the changes over time, but the basic principle remains: Each race has its place.  And the cops will let you know it.  

Tom Phillips's 116th Dream

-- By Tom Phillips 

Irreparable 

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the rebel force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight? 

At this point I woke up.  

Before military commanders go out to fight, they look at the balance of troop strength in a document called the Order of Battle.  Under my pillow, I found the current Order of Battle for the conflict between the Powers-that-Be (PTB) and The Movement (TM).  

Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

Old Movie, New World

-- By Tom Phillips 

Omar Sharif as Dr. Zhivago 

With nowhere to go until the Pandemic is over, we've been watching old movies we failed to see the first time around.  I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because it sounded like sentimental claptrap, and it is.  But it was a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation.  Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a sentimental movie about love during the Pandemic of 2020.  

No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic.  It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic.  Paging Dr. Zhivago... 

Then as now, politics comes first.  The pandemic will be over in a year or so.  The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery.  But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.

Devils Fall in Shootout: Bucket List Cut by One

Newark, February 5, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips

Tomas Tatar at full tilt 

The Montreal Canadiens defeated the New Jersey Devils 5 to 4 last night in a thrilling overtime contest decided by a shootout after the Devils tied the game in the final minute. No one in the crowd of 15.000 was more thrilled than a gray-bearded New Yorker in the fourth row behind the goal, attending his first professional hockey game at the age of 78.

Thus did one item get crossed off my bucket list.  I had always had a passing interest in hockey, along with every other kind of game covered in the sports pages.  But it was a game I never played.  Not having grown up with frozen ponds at hand, I can barely skate, much less juggle a puck through a hostile crowd at 50 miles an hour. So I was a pure fan; and I was agog.

The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                      
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting.