Running for Your Life: “They Go Low, We Go High”

Here’s a thought that came to me when I was running on Tuesday (Nov. 26).

Famously, Michelle Obama said of the Democrats enemies:

“When they go low, we go high.”

It’s hard to stress just how misguided that marching order has been given the modern media world.

Will the Times EVER go low. Or CNN or MSNBC?

Will they ever consider the lesson of LaCorte News, the brainchild of former Fox News dude Ken LaCorte.

An article in the New York Timers last weekend (Nov. 24) characterizes the news site as one that has proven to be successful in delivering extremist “news” to both the left and the right for a profit after failing to find any business traction with more legitimate news sites.

Do progressives ever go low? I wonder. Progressive find succor in the philosophes: Cicero, Aristotle – those who labored on theories regarding the betterment of man.

Consider this from Aristotle:

“He who exceeds in confidence when it comes to frightening things is reckless, and the reckless person is held to be both a boaster and a pretender to courage.”

Our current brand of leadership ‘conservatives” jones for philosophes of entirely different stripes. Say, Thomas Hobbes, for example: Hey, human nature makes for a life that nasty, brutish and short. So in the time you have on earth, you wanna get yours, Jack.

Also Machiavelli, who is given to suggest – although he didn’t actually write these words – the end justifies the means. (He actually said, “One judges by the results …”)

Guess what, Michelle, the go-lows have the edge. I can’t begin to think that most thoughtful folks will be satisfied with another moral victory in a presidential election, this time in November 2020.

Next: Running for Your Life: Anonymous Heard From

Running for Your Life: Why Run (the late November version)

Before my run today (Nov. 26), I wasn’t feeling it. It’s been a busy run-up to Thanksgiving, lots of errands, personal matters, of course, work.

But I run every other day, and this one, was a beauty. Shorts-wearing weather, and sure enough, off I go. It’s what I do.

Pretty much every run for – I don’t know how long – I go past a kite that has been trapped in a tree in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. (Remember, if you are one of those folks of a certain age, Charlie Brown’s kite in a tree? That’s what I’m talking about.)

It’s been at least a couple of seasons, but the colors of the kite have not dimmed appreciably. In fact it is just beautiful, and in pristine shape, and I start to think about the simple wonder of leaflessness. For months at a time I can’t see the kite because it is obscured by the leaves in this healthy oak tree.

Further on, I thrill with the look, the glistening quality of the larch at the bridge overlook of the park’s boathouse: the golden aura of this monument pine.

Next: Running for Your Life: “They Go Low, We Go High” -- Discuss

Running for Your Life: “The Testaments” and You

Here’s a “Testaments” truth for you …

In reference to the novel by that title by Margaret Atwood, a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale: Documents written by principals in a coup or even in a “legitimate” democracy aren’t enough to merit the undoing of a corrupt, even society-destroying command.

This observation was made by “The Testaments” reviewer at the London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell:

“If 'The Testaments' were truly a novel for our times, after Aunt Lydia and her allies had succeeded in getting the documents out, after having risked, as they do in Atwood’s book, discovery and death in almost every chapter, journalists would write about them; and nothing would happen. ”

Next: Running for Your Life: A Word on “A Warning”

Running for Your Life: Lonely Hearts

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof write about loneliness being a silent killer (11-17-19).

How people, depressed in a crushing solitude, have lost their way in the dog-eat-dog world that is modern life.

Conversation is one thing but continuity that comes from listening, from paying attention, what Zen followers call the sincerest form of gratitude, that will set us on a path to good health.

“Without:” that is the active ingredient that defines the inactive life “without” energy.

Without love, without meaning, what is a life?

Sorrow yields a living death. Isn’t that why we pepper our fiction with zombies – the sci-fi manifestation of the oblivion of without?

Smile and then what? Recover? Why?

Because when you believe in yourself, in the work you do, that you continue to do, you show the natural joy and boundless energy of, yes, the dog.

It is too bad that Kierkegaard did not write about the moral lessons of a dog, a dog’s nature, her behavior.

Oh, wait a minute, maybe he did. (This line courtesy of “Kirk” – my pal Kirk Nicewonger, that is):

“When one has once fully the realm of love, the world – no matter how imperfect – becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Yes, David Jones!

Running for Your Life: Still Running

Here’s something that lies at the heart of this blog.

Running, of course.

Not every day but every other day. It’s surprising how many times I’ve been asked this question: “Are you still running?”

I say, yes, of course. To the literal question. God bless, I am still running. I turn 65 next October and have been running since my early 20s. For the most part, every other day: Nine marathons, seven finishers (and six of those in a row).

Lately, though, I am thinking about my mental state when I run. Never with headphones, always just me and the road. Much slower and deliberate than I was years ago.

Still, that is. Still running. As in that word definition: deep silence and calm, as in the “still” of the night.

And so I hope it will continue. As it does in my other pursuits: still reading, still writing …

Next: Running for Your Life: Lonely Hearts

Running for Your Life: Alt Right Readies for the MF of All Political Campaigns

OK, so the other day I saw it, the weaponizing of political campaign messaging, a bumper sticker on a truck in my neighborhood, Park Slope, known as one of the most left-wing Democratic neighborhoods in New York City. Usual voting record: 94 percent blue.

The bumper sticker? Get this:

FIGHT FOR TRUTH/PUNCH A JOURNALIST

That, combined with this, from the gut-wrenching nonfiction book by Douglas E. Schoen, called “Putin’s Master Plan,” published 2016 (before Trump) by Encounter Books, page 68, makes for a woolly time ahead, 51 weeks and counting till America Votes 2020.

“RT (formerly known as Russia Today, which Putin started in 2005 and which has expanded substantially since its original English-language-only focus. RT now broadcasts in French, German, Arabic and Spanish; it has dedicated stations in the US and English; and it has styled itself as an alternative news source to Western media. The Kremlin invests $136 million a year in promoting Russian media abroad, with considerable success: RT has close to 1.2 billion views on YouTube, second only to the BBC. RT’s video arm, Ruptly, looks to compete with Reuters and the Associated Press.”

I can hazard a guess that the “journalist” targeted in the bumper stick doesn’t work for RT ….

Buckle up, folks. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Next: Running for Your Life: Still Running

Running for Your Life: Remembrance Day Mood

Remembrance Day stirs different emotions for me from its brother event in the US, Veterans Day.

In Canada, where Remembrance Day is commemorated (never celebrated), on this date, Nov. 11, people pause to reflect on the impact of war on family members.

Growing up in small town Ontario, Canada, I literally didn’t know of a single family who did not suffer significant loss(es) from the horrors of foreign wars.

In my case, my Uncle Earl, whom I never met, died as a young man, leaving his wife and baby children without a husband and father, when the troop ship he was on was attacked and sunk in the North Atlantic.

My childhood memories are of my grandfather, a veteran of the WWI parading on our small city’s main street, wearing his dress war uniform with attached medals. We watched solemnly, silently from street side. Proudly, yes, but also deeply saddened by the grim, resigned look on the faces of all those straight-backed older men and women marching past.

Tis in Remembrance that Canadians gather still in honor of those who served, and in that the day mirrors the respect shown in the United States for those who fought to uphold our way of life.

But it is a deeper “Remembrance” that resonates with me, and it is why, generations later, millions of Canadians wear pins today (Nov. 11) in the colour and shape of red poppies to honor the untold number to those – many of whom were of the age of today’s millennials and Gen Z’ers – who died and are buried in European soil where I’ve been blessed enough to see the poppies growing across fields as vast as the feelings I’m writing about.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Alt Right Readies for the MF of All Political Campaigns

Running for Your Life: Subway Mood

It’s darkly interesting to chart the loss of community consciousness in the subway, where in the past several years of doing this journal (including drawings not seen here, part of a separate work-in-progress project I call, “TRACK WORK”) I’ve noted a marked acceptance of the pocket-computer as self-immersion device.

Kierkegaard has a handle on this, to wit, “the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”  

Got it?

Where is the community of souls I used to ride the subway with? Today (November 5), a conductor makes a humorous announcement and not a eyelash signals awareness. Where is the hope in the wasteland of aloneness, especially given the power of evil forces – Zuck, Trump, Bezos and Putin – who have moved so far beyond market share and stomach share to brain share, and in the case of Putin, absolute power? (Dictators see “share” as a liberal power grab.)

Next: Running for Your Life: “The Testaments” Meets “Motherless Brooklyn”

Running for Your Life: Flanerie Meets NYC Marathon

Here are 3 tips on “Flanerie,” the art of being a flaneur.

1. Slow down

2. No, that's not slow enough

3. Slower. Still

Here’s a thought after watching (and cheering!) along the NYC Marathon route (7-mile mark in Brooklyn)

National characteristics are astonishing in the way they are reflected in the responses of runners who have chosen to wear the equivalent of a name-attached flag in the race, ie, “Italia” and “France.”

Lusty cheers of “Italia” to those patriots pretty much without fail spurred an appreciative response, from fist pump, to smile, to sprightly step, while lusty cheers, to “Viva la France,” stirred but one “Merci” and an hour of too cool nothingness.

Oh, and yes, this runner is bound and determined to run in the 2020 edition of the NYC Marathon. 

Finally, 10 years after resuming this pursuit in Pittsburgh in 2010. It will mark my 10th marathon; so let it be in my hometown. After three decades of living here, a New Yorker to run in New York.

Next: Running for Your Life: Emotional Rescue