Is this one of those movies where the president isn’t a real president but an aging playboy grifter recruited for his entertainment value?
Is this one of those movies where a president known to spend his days golfing and watching television seemingly devises daily ideologically-driven attacks on the centers of American culture and democracy?
Is this one of those movies where the president, though too lazy and ignorant to come up with them on his own, is being fed those actions tailored to satisfy his egotism, cruelty, and desire to punish the many who oppose him?
Is this one of those movies where the president is bored with his own wealth and can only feel alive when he’s damaging others’ lives?
Is this one of those movies where the world most of us inhabit and the earth itself aren’t real to the president?
Is this one of those movies where the power of the president is ratified by a historically documented mean streak in the American psyche?
Is this one of those movies where the American people would rather themselves starve than feed the world’s poor?
Is this one of those movies where, more than to live, the American people hunger for their leaders to break things?
GHAZAL: BEING
Blake warned against nursing “unacted desire.”
The philosopher Rene Girard said that
“all desire is a desire for being.”
The groomed excellent bodies of young
Olympians execute moves we’ve only dreamt of
on the physical frontiers of being.
The most charismatic performers entice
their audiences with participation
in the glitter of their celebrity-being.
Fandom is all right, but what of that long
epilog in which the body lays down
non-negotiable limits on being?
There are shrunken spaces inside many
who attend the autocrat’s rally
hoping to be filled with the fiery gases of being.
Those defeated by desire are around us, in us.
Why have so many given up on beauty?
How did we lose that birthright of being?
Thomas, you have no right to point a finger.
We have all many times refused that spring
that offers the purest water of being.
ALEJANDRO
At Pension Caribe in Barcelona we savored the city on the cheap. Cold those winter nights when the cleaning woman left windows open to dry the floor, dark and a little dingy, but we were able to make our green-painted room a cozy nest between outings to the Sagrada Familia and Montserrat. Let’s Go, our guide that year, pegged Alejandro the proprietor as “reserved though not antagonistic.” In our weeks-long stay, we developed a true affection for this quiet, tall Galician, who possessed, as we soon discovered, a dry, melancholic wit. After our report of a mouse in the room, Alejandro delivered a cat to stand watch over the hole. When the raton finally showed, the gato turned tail and ran! Later, when we inquired after the cat, of whom we’d grown rather fond, Alejandro merely smiled sadly and said slowly, as if speaking to a child, in his simplest Castilian, “El gato va a el parque.” The cat went to the park, as though by its own volition to join the other feral cats skulking there. For years afterward our joke when something went missing was that it va a el parque.
On Christmas, a lonely time for travelers in a foreign country, Alejandro brought us a tray of the regional nougat turròn and sherry. Like the unapprehended mouse, we were happy to stay, and came to think of Alejandro as a friend. Ever after, he’s been one of those souls met on the road, frozen in memory, for whom we feel warmth whenever their name comes up. Three decades after Caribe, how I’d love to talk with that saturnine Galician about the pilgrim’s path to Santiago de Compostela and his region’s fierce defender Maria Soliña. Sometimes I think surely we’ll see each other again, the bonds of human love stronger than death and parting, all of us together in the light of the day that never ends.
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—Thomas R. Smith
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