Don't we need another one of these today? Some brave doula to help guide the future world through the birth canal and offer them an ethical path? I keep wondering: what new moral being – good or bad – can be born in our time? One way to understand Donald Trump's worst actions and attitudes is to recognize that he is auditioning for just such a role with cold cynicism. Not only does he lie without shame, use violence as a way to maintain power and entertain the depraved crowd, maintain boundless contempt for the poor, weak and lonely, and display pure glee at the sight of other powerful people getting their way – but, just as sinisterly, he is quite brazenly recommends this behavior is for the rest of us. He lights a bomb of hatred and contempt, then looks at us, smiling as the flames consume the cord.
In January, during his second inauguration, an event I keep trying to forget, he constantly grimaced and mugged—smirking as he took the oath of office and making pompous ad-libs as he spoke disingenuously about God. I think he wanted to be seen as light-hearted about serious things, making fun of rituals and feelings that he is glad are disappearing. What it presents, beyond its subtle cultural and economic promises, is a grim anthropology: The time for restraint, honesty and goodwill is over, baby!“, he always says, like a brutal “realist” from a mid-century novel. Get yours or be left behind. He surveyed the scene and saw that the world had finally tilted in his inhuman direction. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize because he wants to redefine peace.
In April, in fact death one of Trump's most persistent and charismatic opponents, Pope FrancisA new pontiff was elected in Rome. Leo XIVan Augustinian priest named Robert Francis Prevost, raised in Chicago and spent much of his ministry in Peru, one of Las Casas' intellectual battlefields in his campaign against conquest. The Prevost, to the surprise of most of the public watching the Pope, entered the loggia with an ornate blood-red papal stole around his neck, which his predecessor had studiously avoided, and with a modest smile on his face. He gave himself a promising name. In 1891, Leo XIII – the man formerly called Vincenzo Gioachino Pecci from Italy, where they used to be popes – wrote the famous encyclical:New thingsor “From new things.” The letter was a response to the dual acceleration of capitalism and industrial power to preserve the dignity of workers in times of uncertainty and upheaval.
The new Leo was entering the fray at the same moment, and early in his papacy he began to acknowledge his anxiety about the development of artificial intelligence. In his address last May, in an understatement that quickly became his signature, he spoke of technology, predicting it would “raise new challenges to the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” He continued to raise the issue to groups of journalists and crowds of Catholic youth, always trying to avoid mechanical predictions, but never downplaying its grave importance. Likewise, in a subtle counterpoint to Trump, he continues to speak out on behalf of the suffering people in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip. ICE detention centers and other theaters of cruelty, expressing the hope that the diapers of the coming era will not have to be spiked. His continued performance, while subtle, is noteworthy.
To worry about the future of human creativity is ultimately to mourn lost artists. Back in June Tricky Stone– the great American genius, in my opinion – left the stage at the age of eighty-two. What has always impressed me about Stone is his interest in combination and synthesis, his strict rejection, heard from song to song, of the idea of ”pure” music, the boundaries of which can be determined by genre, period or, worst of all, race.
Stone, who grew up in the multicultural Bay Area, began playing music at the Church of God in Christ, a large Pentecostal denomination. He played in all sorts of bands and worked as a DJ on a popular radio station. His future band, Family Stone, was racially mixed—a rarity at the time—and shone from the start as a testament to the sophistication and restless ear of its leader. The title of the band's debut album sounded like a warning about an imminent birth: “A Whole New Thing.” My favorite song on this album is “Advice.” I love the menacing nonsense of the opening words:
