Governments and their institutions can do a lot of things. But one thing they cannot do is create their own legitimacy. That’s the brilliant thing about politics, no matter how fascistic it might be: institutions want to be seen as legitimate. But only the people themselves can bequeath legitimacy on their institutions.

What we are witnessing across the world in the #blacklivesmatter protests following the murder of George Floyd is a massive withdrawal of legitimacy from the police.

An op-ed in today’s New York Times makes this point perfectly. Hahrie Han writes, “Something unthinkable happened in Minneapolis over the past two weeks: The Police Department lost its legitimacy.”

It did not happen overnight, nor just over the past two weeks. “This work was possible only because organizers could build on years of organizing that connected people and built the skills they needed to mobilize a rapid response. As Ms. Fairbanks said: ‘No single person or organization made this happen. It took years of people, especially black women, doing the groundwork of building trust and accountability. It takes years of conversations about what it means to be community. That is what gave us the opportunity to align when we needed to.’”

I am uninspired,
a little broken, a little sad, and
trepidatious, undone by my mother

wondering if I can write poetry,

but I suppose I already am. This
is a long poem,

interrupted by news flashes and news holes.

Barrenness. Grape purpleness, a virus
ravaging people all over the
Earth,

and there’s not much I can do. The
best I can do is nothing.

Don’t leave the house. Maybe
stay in this little nook of the
house, with my microwave and
big white fridge, with my French
press and small jar of sweetener.

Maybe doing nothing is the
best revenge
against a microbial virus with
the fucking gall
to do this to us all

and a moronic president
hoping for full pews on Easter.

That’s not my Easter
you son of a bitch

Take that in your eye, in your
orange morass of hair and
white-rimmed eyeballs.

Not so long ago, epidemiologists said of a new deadly virus, “not if, but when.” Now the answer is “now.” I read all the news all day long, and it seems there is nothing left to say. Then today a friend wrote me with a “chain mail” poetry letter. So I sent a poem to a stranger, one of my favorite Robert Creeley poems, I Know a Man.

So there are words after all. I will start by digging up some poems I wrote half a lifetime ago. And maybe I will start writing some new ones.

Cactus Leaves

I’m getting
used to the idea
of death
he said to her
while she lay
sucking cactus
leaves, occasionally
sitting upright
to pull a thorn
from her teeth,
and  later, when
the glare gave
way, they made
love in the sand
seeking redemption
then talked
smoking about the
lack of things
to dwell on ever
since abandoning
the Cutlass on the
side of I-91
having assumed
it wasn’t carrying
them anywhere
anyhow,
but still neither
of them mentioned
their visions:
the well and the
swelling tide and
drowning

How could it get worse. A president found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors by the US House of Representatives let off the hook by a Senate more willing to look after their own future than the present and future of the country they are supposed to serve.

In my piece last summer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Public Sphere in Dark Times,” I argued that thanks to the robust role of the informal public sphere even Trump could not turn this country into a dictatorship. The events of this past week are put these ideas to the test.

In that piece I distinguish three realms of the public sphere: 1) the formal one of elected bodies, 2) the elite one of leading news media and “opinion leaders,” and 3) the informal one of the street, social media, informal conversations that radiate and connect with each other all over the country and around the world. I argue that all three realms intersect and bounce around and test each others’ ideas.

At this point in time, the formal realm of the public sphere is deeply divided, but enought of it has gained power to legally, if not in any other respect, exonerate Trump. The elite opinion realm is also divided but for the most part highly critical of trump. The informal public sphere, at least as far as Twitter shows, also really critical. The rest of the public sphere, slumbering away in the hinterlands, a sleeping polar bear of apathy? It’s hard to say. Will the informal realms of the public sphere be able to hold the more formal and conservative ones accountable?

My theory is not a crystal ball. Time will tell.

I just quit Facebook today. It wasn’t that big a part of my life but now that I’ve quit it I realize how much of my cyborg life it was. Just like my phone. I might not use it that much but it is always there. And now FB no longer is, not the scores of people from my adolescent years, not the students and colleagues from my 30s, not my more recent friends from greater DC and Boston, not my current philosophy colleagues from all over the world. Facebook made it possible for me to have all these great connections, just as it made it possible for it to scoop up private data from 31 percent of the global population. Yes, 31 percent. And then monetize us, harvest us, market to us, capture us for whatever they want. So I decided finally, after much prodding from a few friends, to say, no. No more. I have found an alternative to Facebook that promises not to sell my data, not to algorithmize my content, to just let me share my news with people I like. Maybe this is a fantasy that somehow I can keep my personal stuff to myself. But I’m okay with better being a good alternative to unacceptable.

What is so curious is that so many of my otherwise principled friends and colleagues are willing to scoop up the benefits of Facebook and turn a blind eye to the harm it is doing.

I just finished watching Ken Burns’ two episodes on Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m left with where I was at the start, with mixed feelings. Yes, Falling Water is one of the most stunning architectural masterpieces of the past century, but for the most part Wright’s architecture focused on creating inner sanctums, not windows to the world. And most of it leaves me cold.

He was a philanderer and a charlatan and a narcissist and an egoist. And there is no “however” to follow to make up for his personality flaws. The man seems to have been totally unbearable.

But there was genius. He knew how architecture could create a richer internal world.

Which makes me think about his mother.

Ken Burns’ documentary makes clear that Wright’s first and ever love was his mother, and he was hers. His father abandoned them, just as he later abandoned his own first family. The man never negotiated the Oedipus complex, because he didn’t have to. So throughout his life he remained the narcissistic omnipotent childish overlord, and demanded that everyone treat him as king.

But maybe in that pre-oedipal refusal of oedipus, in that refusal to succumb to a superego (the heir of the oedipus complex), he was able to retain an inner magical world that could create Falling Water? What does that say about the tradeoffs we all make every day, trading away creativity for civilization?