November 7, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (79A)

Those of you who were with us last week will recall the Canadian landscape artist Monica Tap and, as I mentioned in passing, her 2008 series of paintings of the view out the side window of a car speeding by various sylvan expanses, as in paintings like these

Monica Tap, “Split Second” series of dyptichs, “House Divided” (2008)

which I mention here because my having so recently recalled them may have had something to do with the fact that this past Monday, just before the elections back in the United States, which I happened to be spending in Madrid, Spain, I found myself training my iPhone camera on a passing pine forest as seen from the window seat of a tour bus en route back to town from a visit out to the old royal monasteries of El Escorial, when I happened to capture this streaming vantage:

Watch the short snippet here.

WTF, indeed, my thoughts exactly when, as the bus momentarily crossed the bridge over an intervening ravine, that gargantuan superstructure suddenly hove into view. Though those of you in the know will already have identified the apparition as the Valley of the Fallen, the Spanish fascist claudillo Francisco Franco’s self-celebrating monument to his legacy as victor of the Spanish Civil War (or, as he preferred to characterize things, as the beneficent Catholic uniter of the Spanish people in the wake of that war, having ordered the reinternment of several tens of thousands of Republican victims, decidedly against their wishes and unbeknownst to their grieving families, right alongside their martyred fascist overlords), for more on all of which see here.

Thirty-six hours later, mourning again back in America, you can well imagine how that horrific well-nigh gaping vision had taken on an uncannily premonitory aspect for me. For that is indeed how fascism takes hold (gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway once said of bankruptcy in his own first Spanish novel), and now here it is, blatantly amongst us, and of us. In the hours since, the full bore force of its implications have kept slamming into me like successive waves: oh my god, Robert F. Kennedy as health czar, and Stephen Miller in charge of mass deportations (and those poor souls in their millions who pick our fruit and pack our meat and build our houses, how must it be for them this terrible morning?), and Elon Musk getting to take a buzzsaw to the regulatory civil service, and Leonard Leo getting to replace the aging Thomas and Alito with teenage mini-replicas and that’s before we even have to deal with Sotomayor’s frailty, the coming national abortion ban and myriad other instantiations of a resurrected Comstock Act, the whole Project 2025 wetdream, and what must it be like to be a Ukrainian soldier on the frontline this morning staring down the gathering North Korean horde, or a desperate family in an already fully gutted Gaza, or for that matter a West Bank Palestinian or a Lebanese bystander or a Russian political prisoner (which parenthetically gives me an idea for Time magazine’s Man of the Year next month—why not go for a three-fer, that Vampire Trio of Trump and Netanyahu and Putin, if for no other reason than that such a combo would rob Trump of his long-standing ambition of claiming the prize all on his own, as a result of which he might just start lashing out at the other two in retribution?)—and that’s not even factoring in the fate of the entire planet in the immediate throes of climate change. And on and on.

Of course this too shall pass, history swallowing this whole terrible interlude back up on the far side and in the fullness of time, that’s how history works—though not without our own somehow picking ourselves up and hurling ourselves into the urgent labor of making it so. As Hemingway’s contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” though the rest of this aphorism is less frequently cited, since, he went on, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Which in turn brings me back once again to the concluding lines of last week’s Cabinet, drawn from the ending of that other great American author’s masterwork, an undying benediction welling up from out of an earlier moment of no less coruscating and seemingly hopeless impasse:

The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come…
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life!
The Great Work Begins.

* * *

See you next week, and the one after, and the one after that, amen.