Lewis Hyde's latest book

The Biden phenomena of 2020 is just as weird as the Trump phenomena of 2016 in its unexpectedness. When one looks at the situation on the ground and its mock inevitability, one thinks, it just had to end this way, as determined by the oligarchically respected opinions of liberal thought leaders (the monsieur's and madame's of The NY Times and the political wing of inclusion, the Democratic Party) so that Biden's resurrection would appear to make him the presidential candidate of destiny, replicating in a very real way Trump's unexpectedness, as the future king rode down the elevator of the Trump Tower to announce his unlikely candidacy in 2016 and as Biden now rises from the dead in 2020.

Us little old dot-connectors see a strange symmetry. But we have to let it go and rely on the ancients who went through all this stuff long ago. "The real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself", as Heraclitus put it. 

btw I'm grateful to the new Lewis Hyde book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)  for the Heraclitus.

My presidential dream team of Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson--the pragmatist and the romantic--went up in smoke early, in that it was never meant to be. And Bernie's shelf-life has now been determined to have an expiration date of July, 2020 when The Dems gather in Milwaukee, WI.

How the past works out is always remarkable. For instance, it now looks probable that the real damage the threat of Communism did to the USA wasn't Communism at all but the propaganda about Communism created by the ruling class of the USA that turned into public policy.

Reading the Lewis Hyde book late last night, enjoying everything about it--the elegant construction of its short entries, the survey it provides of human history and the role of myth in that history--I am grateful for the permission it grants me to forget almost everything, and to draw my own simple conclusions about the present from the past.