Maggot In Chief

“Follow your Muse” is the unspoken agreement of any author who has been chosen to be the conduit for private thoughts that at their best, serve a public purpose. No one can predict precisely how they will land with a reader or with whom, but that’s not our business. Just maintain an intuitive faith that something needs to be said and if you don’t say it, no one else will.

 

In the past few days, my Muse has turned me towards the unfathomable chaos of my confused country come face-to-face with centuries of undigested grief and deep shadows. All of it coming to light at once. So any insight that goes beyond name-calling to a deeper understanding of the forces at work is fair game. In that spirit, I ask:

 

“Has anyone noticed how closely MAGAS and MAGGOTS are connected?”

 

If you do, it should send you running to Google to remind yourself as to what exactly a maggot is? But I’ll save you the trouble. Here was the first definition:

 

A maggot is the soft-bodied, legless larva of a fly, a worm-like stage that hatches from eggs and feeds voraciously on decaying organic matter like rotting food, feces, or dead animals, rapidly growing before transforming into a pupa and then an adult fly.

 

So calling the MAGAS maggots is not just an amusing Shakespearian insult, but a scientific description they’ve earned. They have no spine and their heart and brain are negligible. Led by the Chief Maggot of all, they feed voraciously on the shit that he releases into the sewers of his Twitter. They are disgusting creatures that wriggle and worm in the decaying flesh of people killed by ICE, in the moldy, crumbling pages of our Constitution, in the rotting, deteriorating, corroding beams of our Institutions, in the trash heaps of lies and deceit and spin. 

 

And fed by it all, what do they grow into? Flies! Who buzz around our heads and keep feasting on feces and use their whining voices to annoy us at picnics. 

 

The metaphor enters new territory when we consider that in the natural world, these pests actually have a role in the ecological balance. They assist the process of decomposition, releasing new energies into the system that are vital to life and growth. In short, the compost of our waste matter is an essential component of growing food and flowers. 

 

But balance is the key word. When the waste is overwhelming and lines our streets like a New York City garbage strike, and the flies multiply and the rats show up on the scene, there is trouble in paradise. If we can convince the red-hatters that they are on the lowest level of the food chain, secretly stick maggot stickers on their hats and awaken them to the shame they’ve refused, maybe that would help support the balance. And after looking for new names for the unspeakable Head of the Trash Heap, perhaps we might consider:

 

Maggot-in-Chief. 

 

So ends your science lesson of the day. There will be a test. 

The ICE Floe

It has been said that in some Inuit cultures, elders who had outlived their usefulness were sent out on an ice floe to die. Closer examination reveals that if indeed this practice (called senicide) was real, it only might have happened when resources were scarce and the young were in danger of death by starvation. Nevertheless, the term “sent out on an ice floe” drifted into our language and describes the sense that an elderly person might have of no longer being needed or useful.

 

If there is one person on the planet who qualifies for this practice, someone who has not only never been useful or needed but does nothing but daily wreak havoc and horror wherever he turns, it’s ………. 

 

Well, if you don’t know now, then you never will. Let’s just say that he is responsible in direct and indirect ways for the recent murder of a kind, compassionate, patriotic mother of three and will never admit an ounce of remorse or offer a microdot of condolence. He has completely transformed ICE, a formerly legitimate branch of the government, into a group of vigilante thugs with no training in law enforcement and let them loose to tear families apart, spread terror and murder innocent people. All the while abducting the leader of Venezuela and threatening to take over Greenland.

 

So if there’s any justice in this world and any God still functioning in any celestial realm, then I have the perfect natural consequence. 

 

IN HIS UPCOMING TRIP TO GREENLAND, HE SHOULD BE ABDUCTED AND SENT OUT ON AN ICE FLOE TO A DIE A SLOW AND PAINFUL DEATH. WHILE INUIT DRUMMERS, JOINED WITH PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD, WILL PLAY, SING AND DANCE, “GOOD RIDDANCE!” 

  

Requiem for Renee

Yesterday I asked how much to let the news seep into my heart and used my privilege of being far away from the direct impact of ICE violence to make it seem okay. Shame on me. But today, Renee Nicole Good’s story found its way into my heart and this poem is my response. 

 

ON THE MURDER OF RENEE NICOLE GOOD

 

My silence is not complicity. 

It is neither uncaring nor unknowing. 

My silence comes from a heart which can find no words large enough 

to express the enormity of this next calamity. 

Add together grief and anguish and deep sorrow, 

outrage and horror and fury, and 

you still don’t get one step closer 

to expressing what needs to be expressed,

but is impossible to express. 

 

The grief has come, arm in arm with the fury. So as the politicians begin their avalanche of lies, the talking heads begin their empty chatter and the Facebook comments reveal our calloused hearts, I give voice to my Fury.

 

“Any citizen who dares to defend this action, to spin it, to ignore it,

to justify it, to refuse it, to shrug it off,

is not fit to claim membership in humanity.

If you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or other, you will be

denied entrance into your sacred buildings—you have defiled any god’s mandate to see the divine in all. If Catholic, you will be excommunicated.

If you are a teacher, you will be fired for violating the sacred trust of protecting children’s future.

If you are a politician, you will be impeached and taken from office for violating your oath to uphold the Constitution.

Family members who defend the Criminal-in-Chief will be struck from all wills, public figures blocked from all media, social and otherwise, spouses instantly divorced and prohibited from any further contact with the children.

 

Then all of you together will be locked into a football stadium or 100 or 1,000, 

to begin the education you never got or refused to learn. To finally look clearly at who we have become, and realize, once the lessons have begun, that it is exactly who we have always been. Consider the following:

 

• Our gifts of smallpox blankets to the native peoples who helped us survive.

 

• The brutal rapes and lashings of those enslaved human beings who made us rich. 

 

• The burning of those mothers who bore our children, denounced as witches.

 

• The assault and massacre of strikers who worked in intolerable conditions to give us warmth in our home.

 

• The church child-abuse perpetrated by those who led our worship services in the name of God, covered in the cloaks of institutional silence. 

 

• The lynchings and later, the sanctioned police murders, of black folks who gave us jazz, sports, literature, uplifted us with the moral courage of Martin and Malcolm and Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm. The endless list of innocents slain with their murderers mostly getting off scot-free —Tarika Wilson, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, Fred Brown, George Floyd and 583 more black people since 2010.  (Every morning, all in that football stadium will be required to say their names.)

 

• The slaughter of innocents abroad and our own young soldiers in needless wars 

  so we can claim the oil that mysteriously got in their fields, 

        the oil we need to drive to the mall that has defaced our own land 

               to buy products made in sweat-shops far away that no one needs 

                        and then fill up our oceans with unrecyclable waste. 

 

Perhaps then all of you who have refused history’s lessons,

 will finally understand that everything that happens like this 

         makes sense inside a narrative 

                that makes no sense at all. 

 

Now you just might understand that a human being who just wanted

      to raise her children with love, 

            write poetry to praise this life and

                  perform her duty as a concerned citizen,

                             has now joined the Ancestors of the Needlessly Slaughtered. 

 

While the leader who set this all in motion and approves it, will wake up the next morning in his defaced White House without a single word of remorse or condolence. 

 

Oh, day of reckoning, when will you finally come? How many more must needlessly die before we greet you?

 

 R.I.P. Renee Nicole Good."

Coming to Ground

It’s a Sunday morning in Singapore and I awoke with the sense of coming back to an authentic self. Jet lag mysteriously already gone, my dizziness switch turned off, the body in some blessed state of homeostatic equilibrium and the mind happily free to wander through its own appointed regions. These things are rarely a simple “cause and effect,” and yet, doing the right things and making the right choices does make an impact. Like what I did yesterday, for example. 

 

1)   Wandered the new neighborhood a bit to get to see what’s here and begin the day with some two miles of walking in fresh air.

2)   Swam a vigorous 600 strokes in the hotel’s lovely 7^th- floor-with-a-view pool, then sat by poolside with a Crostic puzzle and my book.

3)   Skipped lunch and walked down Alexandra Road to the Labrador Nature Reserve, a lovely park by water’s edge. 

4)   Did not listen to my story on Audible on my phone, but instead, listened to the bird life, noticed the plants and trees, let my thoughts freely roam without interruption from other’s music or stories. 

5)   Discovered a lovely little place with Japanese bean cakes and a friendly owner and then a vegetarian restaurant next door— Pad Thai and a barley drink for $8 U.S.

6)   Returned to the hotel having walked 7.8 miles and decided to swim 180 more strokes for some 780/7.8 harmonious connection. Sat at poolside watching birds dive and dip briefly in the pool where no one was swimming, wrote in my journal and felt myself closing with the day.

7)   Back to the hotel room and my little project of organizing the list of where I’ve taught the past 30 years (not counting the U.S.) and how often I have returned to places to teach. For the city’s record, Salzburg was first with 22 visits, Toronto 18, Madrid 14. For countries, Canada was first with 42, Spain, 37, Austria 28. More important than the numbers game was sparking of memories of each of those courses, who I was, who was with me, what I was feeling then. A slow motion “traveling-music-teacher-life-flashing-before my-eyes” that brought back the full measure of blessings of my life choices and great gratitude.

8)   Read my book, go to sleep and (miraculously), sleep through the night.

 

Naturally, this is more a reminder to self than a list for others, but the general principles hold true for all to consider. 

 

1)   Eat lightly and healthily. 

2)   Exercise, preferably in the open air. 

3)   Read and write. 

4)   Use phone sparingly and leave space for your own thoughts.

5)   Reflect on your life with gratitude. 

 

Another day awaits before the teaching begins. Back home is government violence and  murder alongside resistance to it all and it’s hard to know how much to let seep into my open heart. But I remember a line from the movie Bridge of Spies, where a character asked if he was worried about what was happening, answered, “Would it help?” When it does, open the doors wide. When not, choose the wisdom of the microdose and go deeper into your own beauty, power and celebration of life. Find the ways you can support others to do the same. That’s my work in this coming week of teaching. 

But first, another blessed day of wandering and wondering. 

Food Court

Let me begin with one more entry from 1979.

 

 April 21, 1979— A day of contrasts. Began with a two-hour Indonesia trance dance called Kuda Kepang. The dancers “became” horses, stepping on and eating glass, tearing coconuts apart with their teeth and breaking the shells on their head, were whipped without flinching, all of this in an outdoor Shopping Center! There were about eight dancers, both men and women. It began with an introductory dance and then they sat astride 2-dimensional wooden horses hung by a strap over their shoulder. They all seemed to go into trance at the same time, accompanied by repetitive ostinato on three xylophones with drums and gongs. When it was over, the dancers sat around drinking Coke and whistling pop tunes as if nothing special had just happened. 

 

From a trance dance in an outdoor mall to another Shopping Center to see the movie South Pacific, which somehow I had never seen. Like I said, a day of contrasts! Not a fabulous movie, but some familiar songs (Some Enchanted Evening/ Bali Hai) and a surprising song about racism suggesting that “you’ve got to be taught how to hate.”

 

From there, to the airport and writing this on a classy Singapore Airlines plane with its purple carpet and jazz on the earphones, en route to Jakarta. Farewell to Singapore, at the end of my second journal and the first time I will have crossed the equator. On to the next chapter in this most amazing year. 

 

An intense trance dance in a shopping center was one of the more cognitive dissonances I’ve experienced in this life! Who would have imagined?

 

And so back to 2026, a night of some awakenings, but mostly managed to stay horizontal to 8 a.m. My usual morning routines and then in search of breakfast. My greeter from last night had recommended the IKEA store right next to the hotel, so sure, why not? Sure enough, there was a little Swedish restaurant tucked away in a corner and one of their offerings was a croissant, scrambled eggs, hash browns, chicken sausage, five cherry tomatoes, a juice and coffee for (drum roll here!!!!), 8 Singaporean dollars!!!!!! Which is around $6 U.S.! TOTAL!!! I was stunned. 

 

From there, I wandered the neighborhood in the way I like to do, checking out what’s around me. Wandered in two Food Courts and the people’s vibe from 1979 was still alive and well. Rows of small stalls run by families offering Indian, Chinese and Malaysian cuisines, a diverse group of people eating at the outdoor tables, pigeons wandering in and out. Once again, the prices were astoundingly cheap (see photos below). My hotel is expensive and my room’s high price doesn’t include breakfast, so this is good news. I will happily have lunch and dinner today at these outdoor food courts and enjoy the kind of earthy cultural vibe I’ve stayed comfortable with my whole life. 

 

And who knows? Maybe a trance-dance troupe will show up!

Then and Now

As mentioned last post, I have a second-draft book on my computer waiting for me to birth it someday. It’s the story of a year-long trip my then- soon-to-be wife and I took in 1978 and 1979. A few months in Europe, five months in India, a month or so in Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, two months in Java, Indonesia, ending with a few weeks in Bali and Japan. Quite a memorable adventure that echoed through the succeeding years in all sorts of significant ways. 

 

So when my “Meet and Greet” driver picked me up at the airport yesterday and asked if it was my first time in Singapore, I mentioned the eight times since 2008 I’ve come here to teach and then added, “But I was also here in 1979. It was quite a different place then!” She seemed embarrassed by the city that used-to-be and went on to send me, through WhatsApp (on her phone, while driving!), all the places she thought I would enjoy. Which unsurprisingly came down to 1) Shopping malls and 2) Restaurants. 

 

Quite a contrast to my experience in Ghana many years back, when I told a local person in the South that my family and I were planning to visit the North and he replied, “You will enjoy it so much.” When I asked what the main attraction was, he answered, “Good culture.”

 

But no surprise that the main attraction here is shopping, shopping, and more shopping. And to be fair, also some lovely parks (Botanical Gardens), science museums and yes, clean streets and things running smoothly. All of this was already here in infant form when I visited almost 50 years ago, as noted in my journal entries from that time. Fresh from the ancient and close-to-the-earth feeling in India, it was an adjustment for us to get used to “modern civilization” again. Here’s what I wrote: 

 

April 16, 1979— At the Malay border, we had to change buses and boarded a crowded, dirty, uncomfortable bus with non-stop insipid Muzak that made my ears want to throw up. Constant chain-smoking with windows closed and freezing air-conditioning that they couldn’t shut off. An all-night bus ride and rolled into Singapore at 9am, off the bus and through a room of pinball machines and shooting games. 

 

Found a Chinese hotel with men hanging out in those white, sleeveless T-shirts (wife-beaters, they’re called in America), and an Old-World  atmosphere with a 1950’s New York vibe. Late breakfast of rice, vegetables and tofu (our first!), then off to do errands in our most modern, upper class American-style city yet. Huge air-conditioned malls, everyone dressed up, back to the world of things, things, things. Tried to get our 10 rolls of film developed but no luck.

 

We lunched in a little outdoor place with three cooks side-by-side— a Tamil Indian, a Chinese, a Malaysian— welcome to Singapore! We opted for the Indian, eating again on a banana leaf and almost crying from Kerala (India) homesickness.

 

April 18— What kind of place is this anyway? We walked past long chains of hardware stores, auto-part stores, electronics stores and fancy air-conditioned malls that rival anything in the U.S.  Stopped at Dayville’s Ice Cream store where young girls served us wearing surgical masks over the nose and mouth, handed us the cone with plastic gloves on and cardboard fitted over the bottom of the cone. Quite a contrast to the man on the street in India handling cow dung as fuel and then giving us the chapati made on the grill! Now it’s the world of exchanging money done through a computer with a receipt, packaged in plastic (no banana leaves or newspapers), technology rolling on like an out-of-control monster determined to remove human beings from the market of exchange. 

 

After walking some more, we concluded that there is no place on earth with as many shopping centers as Singapore, each center with between 50 to 100 stores. All bright and glossy, sterile, stuffed with things, much of which no one really needs. Here’s a city with $500 fines for smoking on the bus, signs in the post office that says “males with long hair will be served last” with a photo of what “long hair” means (over the ears, eyes or collar), postcards boasting about its tall building and malls. If Bombay represents one end of the urban spectrum, Singapore is surely at the opposite end. 

 

(The aforementioned book ping-pongs back and forth between my old journals and my commentary that I wrote in 2021. It goes on:) 

 

“So that’s what it was like in 1979. And now? Still over-air-conditioned shopping malls without end and that funky little neighborhood our Chinese hotel was in long gone, more parks and botanical gardens than I remember from back then and still the blend of Chinese/ Indian/ Malay culture (though also long gone those roadside little stands where all three cooks stood side-by-side). It was clear back then, with its $500 smoking fine and discouragement of hippies, that the government was on a massive clean-up campaign and given the choice between Bombay’s homeless and the rats in the hotel we stayed in and the chaos of traffic, it didn’t seem like a wholly bad idea. But the policies were definitely leaning towards some kind of “benevolent dictatorship,” some “repressive peace and order,” with laws and fines that go from the serious (drugs) to the silly (durians), to the archaic (caning). Amongst them: 

 

1) $300 fine for littering (like a cigarette butt or candy wrapper).

2) Chewing gum ban, subject to fine and/or imprisonment

3) E-cigarette ban.

4) Public nudity ban, including walking naked in your home with the window blinds up ($2,000 fine or jail up to three months).

5) Boarding a public bus with a durian fruit ban (it smells strong).

6) Gathering in groups of more than three people after 10 pm in a public space ban.

7) Death penalty for serious drug trafficking. For those caught with less than the Death Penalty amounts, punishment can range from caning (24 strokes) to life imprisonment. 

 

While my liberal background has me questioning much of the above, I can also say, “Hey! It works!” San Francisco is awash with litter and suffering from drugged-out people, many of them homeless. I’ve been in Singapore some eight times since that trip and while still not a big fan of the malls and their way- too-freezing air conditioning, it is certainly a clean, safe and pleasant place to hang out in. But I’m sure that I’ve been out to dinner with friends past 10pm, so if you ever get an e-mail from me begging for your help in releasing me from a Singapore jail cell, it might not be a con! Back to the storyline.”

 

To be continued. 

Row, Row, Row Your Boat…

I write this at 1:30 in the morning. No surprise, because I’m in Singapore and in San Francisco, it’s 9:30 am. Counting the 90 minutes sitting on the runway in SF airport traffic, I sat for 18 hours straight on the plane, in company with my book, my Crostic puzzle, five good movies and a few hours of restless slumber. I left San Francisco at noon on Thursday and when I finally entered my hotel room at 10:00 pm (Singapore time) on Friday, I was so happy for a horizontal position and a night of needed sleep. 

 

But as that first sentence notes, my body had other plans. As one music teacher so eloquently put it, “I’m in canon with myself.” Canon meaning “round” a la “Row Row Row Your Boat,” where one group starts singing and the next group comes in some (usually 4) beats later, singing the exact same thing. In music, the goal is to keep that 4-beat distance to create harmony. In jet-lag world, the goal is for the second part (the astral body) to eventually catch up to the first part (the physical body) to achieve a harmony of equilibrium. Usually 2 or 3 days later.

 

I purposely arrived two days earlier so I could be more present in teaching on Monday, so I will have some welcome time on my hand to wander the somewhat familiar territory of Singapore. In fact, alongside Salzburg, Spain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, it’s a place I’ve returned to teach many, many times—2008, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, to be exact. Coming in from the airport, the sights of the Singapore Flyer, the hotel with the pool on the roof, the Science Museum, were all familiar. I suspect I’ll do some walking in the Botanical Gardens and along Orchard Road and feel right at home. 

In fact, it’s my 9^th time here, as my first visit was in 1979 when it was a different city altogether. Could be interesting to share my journal entries from that time, captured on my computer as part of my next book about a year-long trip my wife and I took way back then. If I’m up again at 4am, I believe that’s how I’ll pass the time until daybreak.

 

Meanwhile, back to horizontal and see if the astral body continues chasing the physical one, while I sing in my head “Row, row, row your boat…”

PS For those curious, the plane movies I enjoyed were: Roofman/ The Best You Can/ The Roses/ Good Fortune/ Good Night & Good Luck. And a Gina Brillon Comedy Special called "Mind Your Business."