Are we playing Calvinball yet?

The rules of the game are what you make them...

I try quite hard not to steal copyrighted material. This is a photograph of the cover of a book I own, so I think it’s copacetic.

Clearly he who shall not be named is playing Calvinball. Calvinball is not the same as hardball. ‘Playing hardball’ assumes a way of playing that is aggressive and antagonistic in the context of everyone’s playing the same game. Calvinball is a different game.

Our system of government was designed to withstand people playing hardball. The Founding Fathers did the best they could to create a system of checks and balances designed to check and balance competing interests as long as everyone plays the same game.

But are we still playing The United States of America is a Constitutional Democracy game?

The present ‘ruling’ party has no interest in respecting the rules of the game, for elections or anything else. That became undeniable on January 6th, 2021, though it’s been obvious all along. When the leader of the pack is a incorrigible con man, what do you expect?

How long does it takes for one team to notice and accept that the other team is playing a different game? How long did it take, in Germany, as Hitler kidnapped the political system, before everyone, and especially the Jews, realized that what they thought were established cultural/political/legal norms, weren’t. Someone who is versed in history could answer that question. I can’t.

My question to myself is, what am I supposed to do now? On the one hand, I have a long view that tells me that people doing harm in service to their will to power are always engaged in a losing battle. Everything/everyone they view as enemy is small fry compared to their real enemy: reality, cause and effect, Newton’s third law of motion, human nature, the nature of everything.

Their intentions and desires, long on fear, loathing and greed, short on understanding, can never be fulfilled. Dreams of unlimited power and total domination will always be dependent on control over what doesn’t want to be controlled, what can’t be controlled by force—the human spirit.

How about the short term though? The short term is now. Feckless fools are causing terrible damage to our government and to actual people. They are ruining lives as well as systems.

Call it Dark Calvinball, call it an attempted coup d'état—unconstitutional executive orders, the DOGE bulldozer, goon squads kidnapping and disappearing people without due process, and every other tactic and lie in service to the insatiable desire for domination. How do we resist; how do we fight back?

For now, it is the job of everyone who is not playing along with the current administration to uphold whatever is still working in the This is a Democracy game. The law, the courts, elections, protests—we have to play by the established rules if we want them to continue to be rules. Using the systems that exist to counteract the will to dismantle those systems is what will strengthen and revitalize them, if they can be strengthened and revitalized…

There may come a time when we have to segue from calling our elected officials, supporting good people running for office, writing letters to the editor, making funny signs and walking down the street with our friends and neighbors, and voting, to hiding people in attics and basements, forging papers, and becoming part of the underground resistance. We’ll figure it out as we go along.

Maybe it is time for a new system to be born based on a more profound understanding of what stewardship and sustainability mean.

Just another joker who wants to rule the world. Star Wars/Ron Riccio, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I admit I’m scared…

I admit that I am scared by the meanness, the smallness, of the people in power. Most of all, I am horrified by their cruelty. No matter what tales for the mirror or the media they concoct, the essence of their regime is a sickening cruelty.

Whether they are taking away food stamps, medical care, or disaster relief from people who need it—whether they are shoving people to the ground, handcuffing them, and roughly dragging them away from their families and their lives to an unknown fate without protection from law or compassion, their cruelty is who they are. It is their destiny.

I am well aware that ruthless cruelty is ubiquitous in this world, as is generosity, kindness, intelligence and creativity. We humans are a strange bunch.

Didacus Valades, Great Chain of Being, 1579. I’m not sure we belong in between angels and birds.

How about an awe-inspiring version of Calvinball I call Art?

As we play the Let’s Save Democracy game, let’s also play a special version of Calvinball that can be played alongside other games. It’s the art version, the creative spirit version. It involves not just figuring it out as we go along (though that is part of it), it means PLAYING. It means that instead of using human ingenuity to try to control people, we use it to enrich the collective consciousness with creative work that embodies a call to human freedom, just by being. We use humor and love to manifest a truth that eclipses fear and greed any day of the week or eternity.

What is the opposite of fascism? Art.

A new plan, or at least an idea…

I still want to use this publication to talk about process in artmaking and share my work.

Lately I have felt unable to do this, mostly because what is happening in this country is so real, the damage being done to bodies, institutions, support systems, cultural concepts and collective sanity, so profound, that I find myself shivering with confusion about my role, my responsibility, as an artist, an elder, as a citizen of this country.

I don’t have big answers. My new idea is to make two categories of posts and alternate between them: art/process posts and what I’m thinking/feeling about this crazy world posts. We’ll see how that goes. I’m playing Calvinball with myself.