Excerpt from NYT op-ed on Hungary/USA

 I Watched it Happen in Hungary, Now It's Happening Here

David Pressman, Ambassador to Hungary, 2022-2025

After years watching Hungary suffocate under the weight of its democratic collapse, I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.

Take the judiciary. I met leaders of Hungary’s sole independent judicial body in October 2022 to discuss their work. For months afterward, their faces (and mine) were plastered in the papers, branded as traitors and foreign agents, just because they had raised concerns about the rule of law in Hungary. The response from other powerful judges? Silence.

Or take the private sector. Since Mr. Orban became prime minister in 2010, the state has awarded billions in public contracts to his son-in-law and childhood friend, a former plumber named Lorinc Meszaros. What have Hungarian business leaders said? Nothing.

 Last year, when Mr. Orban’s close associates reportedly told a multinational retailer to give the prime minister’s family a cut of its business, did other multinational companies speak up? They did not.

 Hungarians with little power or privilege to lose would occasionally protest. But those with power remained reliably, pliably silent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opinion/hungary-viktor-orban.html

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Regarding the Poems

Most of the poems seem really bad, especially when I go back and look at older ones.  I can sometimes see what poems readers have 'clicked' and I have been editing those a great deal lately. Thank you for your patience! 

It is a dismal world right now.  Genocide is occurring, full screen on the global stage, courtesy of TikTok and Instagram.  Fascism is rising in the USA, under the malignant Trump.  He is attacking and degrading universities and cultural centers ("I love the poorly educated," he boasts), which is leading to the sad conclusion that humanity will do little to nothing to prevent global warming, and no doubt other environmental crises as well.  

Things are likely to get worse, and the situation is sliding fast.  It is a hard time in which to find purchase, in terms of direction or meaning.  The media pretends the evil things all around us, present to our immediate senses, are not occurring.  So does many a zealous citizen, a good portion of whom will viciously attack, if their ignorance is pointed out to them.

The New York Times Magazine just published a piece called "The Trouble With Wanting Men," by Jean Garnett.  She makes good points about how men have low emotional competence.  Most men have "normative male alexithymia" (can't identify let alone talk about what they're feeling).  Recent social awareness of sexism has apparently made men feel awkward at best, for they lack the skills to psychologically deal.  This awkwardness, again, at best, contributes to men wobbling and waffling on simple things, like verifying a date or whether they want to meet again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/magazine/men-heterofatalism-dating-relationships.html

   

The most-liked comments on this article were not positive.  Indeed, they viciously attacked the author.  For some reason, the New York Times chose some of these comments to be featured as a "Times Pick."  One of these is by "Incel Q Lonely," who simply attacks the author over her candid self-disclosures:

lol taking a guy home home on the first date after the legal ending of an open marriage.  Yup the problem is completely and totally with men

This kind of hateful, angry reply is ancient.  It ignores the arguments that are put forward--a complete lack of respect or philosophical skill--and uses a fallacy, formally called an ad hominen, to attack the author's character,.  What's more disturbing is that this comment got over 2500 likes.  More shocking, still, is that the New York Times decided to feature it.

If a Black person wrote a piece discussing how White people have trouble relating to Black people's needs, based on a lack of awareness, I doubt the Times would feature a comment that mocks the author, especially by someone whose screen name plays on a hate group.  

In case anyone doesn't know, "incel" is a word associated with a misogynous movement.

So ... what I'm saying ... is that human stupidity is utterly draining.  And it tends to hog center stage.  Given opportunity, it violently takes over, as we have seen with the fascist movement here in America. 

This kind of draining and stupid behavior, a full capitulation to violence and anger over reason, is something that anyone who wants to promote ethics, that is, the Good, has to face.  When I myself am frustrated and furious, I try to think what it must have been like to be an abolitionist.  Imagine protesting against slavery, only to have slavers mock and jeer you, beat you up, if they have a chance--or tell you things like, 'because of you, I'm going to go home and whip some N--."  

How awful evil is.  And how sad that we have to normalize it and deal with its barbs and cruelties, or worse.  Telling the truth shouldn't be so hard or perilous.  But it is.   

Note well:  By truth, I mean that which does not fly in the face of what is empirically verifiable.  Science should not be dismissed.  I am not, in seeking truth, pitching a religion.  I am talking about global warming.  I am talking about women being as human and capable as men.   It is also a truth that no religion is the best and only religion.  And that any religion that is against equality is going, not only against science, but the dignity and fairness at the core of human rights.

One can embrace god, and there's nothing wrong with that, not necessarily.  As well, it is natural for many of us to celebrate and feel awe for nature and the universe.  To dance in mystic abandon. To rhapsodize and express our awe in variegated personal ways, such as poetry.  But none of that is to necessarily choose a religion.  

Whatever the full complement of reasons for my fixation with poetry, part of why I write is to seek a release valve.  The beauty and depth of poetry provides a means to express painful emotions and moral outrage in a way that is, more or less, healthy.  

It's not quite that simple.  If writing a poem leaves me in tears or full of hate, I still have to deal with it, explore the why, and try not to freak out.  But the beauty, the reach, going deep in the soul, it is like an utterly honest conversation at the most intimate level.  It is soulmate-level stuff, but within yourself, your muses, your inspiration, however you frame it.  It could be god.  Or one of the gods.  It could be your spirit partner, who might be a witch.  Or not.   What is your spirituality?  Your passionate voice has its own unique expresison.

Subconscious forces--maybe I should call them spells--are at the helm when I write.  Where they take me, I can't fully know.  It's difficult, scary, dangerous, wonderful and exhilarating.  It can be sublime, this mutuality.  It can feel good.  And it is good to break out of the denialism of evil.

===================================== 

  

Poem: Actual

 

Actual 

 

please leave

whatever excuse at the tone,

and i will fly somehow like a shred

in a flutter over a mountain of trash

 

in search somewhere of that furious ant

we call ‘free time,’  and i will

hop on its back, despite the worries

in my brain being so much larger and

 

then your machine can prioritize my voice

like mine didn’t yours.  however,

if this is an emergency or

a brief bit of warmth,

 

you can evade my device by

taking a step back to count to

ten and do it until your shoulders relax 

and

 

you remember that i

decided the touch of another person,

you actually, is all i want,

even if it is just a gaze,

 

or the actual hum of your throat.

 

======================================

7/22/25 mods

7/21/25 ... eds  ,,, changed poem title etc.

Poem: Cookbook

 

Cookbook

 

her mind was a poached

egg because she had never been

able to perfect a poached egg and

the problem had never let go stuck

in the cast iron of her thoughts.

 

the space behind her fixation

suffered heavily from

an oatmeal of mouthfuls

too thick to eat through all of them

and so earned a slap across the face--

 

or used to, specifically

that would be her father

but the man was a time-logged

logger of a corpse now somewhere

below the poached egg.

 

her mother still insisted the universe

was a cosmic egg and yet

all those light years could never

find peace from the self-serving

circular saw of sinful neighbors.

 

yes round and round the merry-go-

round of light years ever went never

able to get under a blanket in 

the dark curled away from the

cookbook of mirrors.

 

 

 

 

==================================

7/18/25 ... mods all day, off and on... 

I volunteered on a crisis hotline for over ten years, long ago.

Poem: Melt Down

 

Melt Down

 

joy loped and raged

up high and low.

tesseracts in the sky.

a shirivasta of dolphins.

 

there were answers.

but to say which angle

gleamed on what contour

was an impossible appendix.

 

hyacinth breathed

and swallowtails praised

the storms of blossoms

in my wept eyes.

 

curves of petal and

moon-stippled grass

shelved to trellis

as brave as the first touch

 

i ever felt.

and all those years of fear fear fear

dwindled like rain.

 

there was no hope to calm

this jambalaya of pang and furor

borne on the secrets, the lack-

of-fabric, in all aroused things.

 

i laughed to feel a somehow shy kiss

from within and around

the mysterious consequence

of so much melting.

 

 

 

 

 

 =============================

7/22/25 ... added an 's' to blossom

Quote: Omar Bartov (genocide scholar at Brown)

 

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

 

This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html 

Poem: Sanctuary

 

Sanctuary

 

each patch of bark

the flank of a beast

which had lived before winchesters:

 

auroch and bison

stampeding up a loblolly

in a vast single herd.

 

i hugged tight

their revelrous snort and scent,

felt the pulse of their hooves

 

across my sternum,

 

my tears not enough

to loose their bellowing wanderlust,

consigned to the trunk of a pine--

 

exiled from those gone prairies

when peregrine vigor

ran muscled and wild.

 

this their sanctuary now, the tree,

where no primate of my greedy ilk

could roam.

 

 

 

 

 

==================================

7/14/25 ... changed a word

Poem: Almost Out

 

Almost Out

 

each breath a foresight

of shivers before an avalanche,

scared.

 

joy was the problem

 

and fear and fury

and how they invited flight,

while calm and smile and peace

were the enemy of containment,

 

for they could not.

 

and it was all going to come apart,

exposed in shock as a head of lettuce

which turned out to be

a numb, hiding, traumatized child--

and under the leafy green, frail shields

 

a mad mad wasp nest

 

and the masquerade of it all

this balancing act,

a seesaw of lungful angst

between the exhales and inhales and

avalanches and hurricanes and

 

this is what emotions were,

it seemed,

 

when they felt so right

and why everyone had to hide from them,

as if the heart had decided

justice could only erupt in bouts,

before it succumbed, once again,

to the fatalism of earth.

 

 

 

 

=======================================

7/18 ... flipped word order... 

7/15/25 ... some mods

Poem: Keep It Up

 

Keep It Up

 

prouder than putty,

we break not bend into smiles,

primped yet grim

in herringbone and trench coat,

bobbing along

in our crowded currents,

sometimes eaten by trap doors

on the sides of cars,

or sucked into mouths

of giant marble facades.  but

we keep it up,

up and down the busy streets,

allotted our place to troll:

whale or swordfish,

eel, squid or shark,

halibuts, flounders, groupers, sunfish,

alewives and the multiplicitous minnows,

all fated to be digested in towers, 

each a morsel for a cube.

one by one, sometimes in gulps,

we get picked off, gone--

into the monstrous guts

of the machinations of the city.  but

we keep it up.

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7/3/25... mods after posting... off and on all day