My older daughter, Ellen, gave me a wonderful Mother’s Day gift when she gave me an equally wonderful book, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, A Memoir, by Anonymous, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. I hope all of you take the opportunity to read it and glory in its insights, humor, and understanding of goodness, God, and the human mind. Thank you, Anonymous! Thank you, Ellen!
Anonymous is a literary intellectual who has experienced great personal tragedy, who deals with it in pain, dismay, disassociation, and who gradually begins to emerge from her personal fog through the use of social media and the wonderful fictional personality of Duchess Goldblatt. It is a truly lovely book!
I was advised last week by a good friend in San Saba that he or she appreciated my newspaper comments because they also feel similar concerns and ideas about the current Body Politic. Interestingly, I have had no one that I know express disagreement with my comments because they know me, I guess, and that my concerns are simple expressions of the threat to the beauty of our democracy and the wonderful goodness of most Americans, Republican and Democrat alike.
Interestingly, this San Saba individual cautioned me saying that people who have also taken stands like mine have been threatened in San Saba. That is so sad! What, or rather, who has caused the meanness? And why?
When the American majority selects a new president, shouldn’t we all accept and support the Constitution? Who can believe the Big Lie and the big liar? Where is the goodness? Where is the sense of right and wrong, of the Rule of Law? How could all this happen? I wish I understood.
I know I simply am a wouldbe journalist who comments on government, on our current threatened American Democracy, and the ongoing crisis in our American society. As a book and as a social media personality, Duchess Goldblatt has hopefully helped me to become more philosophical and more gentle in my remonstrations about the current state of affairs since Donald Trump. While I doubt it, I pray so!
I have been accused of being bitter as I indicated in my musings last week. I know I am not bitter but to quote Anonymous, “Everything feels so insidious. Democracy, discourse, civility, empathy, all crumbling” (p.148), and “I want you to have a huge, peaceful, loving heart. And the spark of the divine, your soul, that everlasting spark you can see inside yourself? Everyone else has one too, I’d tell him. Every human person has a soul. Everybody has some measure of goodness inside them” (p. 133).
And the Duchess comments on social media, “Let me just set this here to remind you that truth and beauty are still with us, and goodness is all around” (p. 148). Let us hope that the January 6th insurrectionists, the white supremacists, and those that push for the Big Lie, learn from the Duchess. “Love trumps hate” (p.148). Thank you, Duchess.