Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.
- Jon Batiste, musician
I have felt the requirement to show up, set an example, bear witness all my life…
It feels like a spiritual requirement as much as a political one.
-Jorie Graham, poet
And here on earth, walking elegantly and with confidence onto the stage, smiling, sitting down slowly, and then riffing on Beethoven's 5th Symphony, here is the talented young musician Jon Batiste. In both words and music, he has become a sage, an exemplar of what` an artist can do in hard times: continue making art. And he's only 38.
Why am I thinking about him today? I had planned on writing about my fingerprints, if that makes any sense, which it doesn't, but not much does these days. And in the midst of the fingerprint snafu—a futile attempt to retrieve my fingerprints—I asked Pandora to play Jon Batiste. That settled me. Music usually does. So, too, poetry. So, too, sitting down to write, however tentative the effort.
The fingerprint snafu surfaces. I had them "taken" in 2018, for the second or third time since returning from the EU, when I was hired by a New York State educational institution. I had thought they "belonged" to me and I could retrieve them, as needed. But no. I must pay for new prints every time they are required. "Even the FBI has my prints," I say, to no avail.
Definition of bureaucracy, as follows: a system of administration marked by officialism and red tape. In other words, Catch 22 at every turn. I am sure my readers will agree that that such bureaucratic entanglements are commonplace. Consider how many hours we spend talking to health care insurers these days, for example.
"Those who are ignorant naturally consider everything possible," Kafka wrote in his authoritarian dreamscape, The Castle. Which is where we are this week with the nominated cabinet of horrors and the President-Elect's new committee to obliterate bureaucratic inefficiency. This "new" committee is a feint, it's a cover. According to Project 2025, the President-Elect intends to reintroduce Schedule F, an obscure executive order from his first term that allows presidents to fire, at will, any federal bureaucrat who is seen as disloyal or resistant to his will.
To be absolutely clear—because I am an educated and accomplished woman who wears suits—I am annoyed by robotic and/or offshore bureaucracy, but I am not on the President-Elect's page, nor will I visit the Kafkaesque Castle he is building for himself in DC. Far from. And I have no solution other than to write and teach with compassion and insight based on knowledge, if this makes any sense in a week that has challenged common sense.