Diary

The visitors have departed, my bout of shingles has almost healed and I am just about back to normal. However, it is still hot in Vermont, and now my grass pollen allergy is affecting me again. The tomatoes are still catching up after a cold June. This year I'm growing a Sun Gold, two Brandywines, two Fantastics and a Ten Fingers of Naples. I have a new book to read, which I'll start soon.

Since the visitors were family members, I have been thinking about how difficult it is to maintain high quality communication with anyone else. It seems that in the U.S. most relationships become impoverished, and the best one can hope for is a modicum of closeness with one's offspring. The prognosis is not good for those who have none. For most there is just work, material accumulation and death, with little pause for reflection and certainly not much commiseration with others. Even this blog sometimes seems like a voice in the wilderness: not many read it, and who knows what they think? One must resign oneself to chatty relationships of the superficial sort and hope that that will be sufficient. I remain appalled by the destitution of life in the public domain, in which intelligent people unanimously agree that Donald Trump is a dangerous and incompetent president, yet he remains in office. No amount of commentary by the news media or biting satire on TV seems to make a dent in his presidency, when it has been clear from the onset that he is unfit for the job. Donald Trump is, so to speak, one of the great problems of our time, and what is being done about it? The congenital inability of Americans to engage in meaningful discourse has been an enabler for Trump, and the media still assists him by pretending that the uninformed views of his supporters should be given credence. There are signs that the Trump presidency is beginning to implode, but the process seems to be occurring in slow motion. I look forward to his exit, though that won't fix the problems that allowed him to be elected in the first place.