“I ain’t marching anymore….”

Or, the gift of rage……

So, about 3.5 million Americans gathered yesterday in various cities around the country (and the world) to take a nice walk together in protest of the Trump administration. There were wonderful people marching with vigor, carrying clever signs with uplifting slogans in support of Big D Democracy and opposing Bad T Trump.

New York, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco. Copenhagen. Wait, what, Copenhagen? Yup.

The marches were covered on main stream media, for a few minutes here and there. YouTube commentators, of course, being a hundred years ahead of the curve compared to CNN and MSNBC (I don’t even count the networks as serious sources of news any longer), had real reporting about the size, focus and attitude of the crowds.

Commendable, I’m sure. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there.

And these marches were marching, why, exactly? To condemn Trump, I guess. To upbraid this moronic sociopath disguised as a man, and his policies of punishment, hatred and racism, I assume. Good for them. Happy to see them out and about.

But, what were they feeling, exactly? Concerned? — yeah, big deal: Susan Collins was concerned and what’d that get us; Roe v Wade tossed in the scrap bin. Upset? — take a Pepto to settle your stomach and get back in your Tesla and drive home. Scared? — you should be. Angry? — now yer talkin’.

Anger. I like that word. Almost the right word for the time.

Almost.

Let me explain why it misses the mark, ever so slightly.

So, first, I am Greek-American. I was brought up with the Greek myths, I could almost feel the reality of the gods fighting and struggling, as my Grandmother told me the stories. I knew the Greek National Anthem. I marched in Greek Independence Day. I am, then, a proud descendant of a culture that is one of several that contributed a foundational building block of Western thought, one aspect of which may be just what is called for at the moment.

So….

The Arabs gave us math and astronomy, a dedication to science and rational thought. The Jews gave us the greatest underpinnings of our modern society: monotheism, morality, a love of thought, a fervent desire to know and the notion of guilt. The Greeks gave us philosophy, drama, comedy, satire and perhaps their greatest gift, the gift of rage.

It is woven into their fiber, a part of their cultural DNA. Trust me, I know. Just ask anybody in my family and they will likely provide an example of the exhibition of indignation-risen-to-the-level-of-rage at the dinner table, or coffee table, or evening glass of wine on the porch. Indeed, among my earliest memories are those of my uncles and aunts arguing with great passion, maybe even rage, about the junior senator from California, Nixon, who was “not to be trusted.”

Rage. Yeah.

Just open The Iliad and read the first line of the greatest literary treasures of man: “Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of Great Achilles….” Ok, I know it doesn’t use the word rage, but this particular line is from Emily Wilson’s recent masterpiece of a translation, and when I asked the good doctor why wrath and not rage, as it is usually translated, she explained to me her choice of the word ‘wrath’ to describe Achilles, the greatest of all the Greek warriors joined together to attack Troy: she said it was required because Achilles was the son of a minor deity, his mother, Thetis, noting that the phrase ‘wrath of god’ is more consistent with his breeding.

Thanks, Dr. Wilson, but we mere mortals are going to have to get by with common rage.

Which brings me back to yesterday’s marches and back more than sixty years into the past, to the time of the great protest marches, and Phil Ochs, the late, great folk singer who wrote, in perhaps his most famous song, that he would no longer march off to war. Not like Achilles whose wrath or rage stemmed from a slight — real or imagined — by the leader of the Greek forces, Agamemnon, and whose rage (see what I did there; jettisoned ‘wrath’) kept him in his tents, refusing to fight, although he desired nothing more than battle and slaughter and plunder.

Ochs’ song of that same name was an ode to his decision not to participate in war in any form. Anymore.

But I claim and corrupt Ochs’ line to attest that I am done marching in protest.

I marched in protest of the Vietnam War. I marched to stop Nixon. I marched for civil rights. I marched to protest Ronal Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and his numbskull son, W. I marched in the great Women’s March to protest the first Trump administration.

Were those marches, those protests, useful? Efficacious? Successful? To quote Mao to Henry Kissinger, when the latter asked the former for his considered thoughts on the impact of the French Revolution: “it is too soon to tell.”

But for me, it no longer matters whether those marches were the right or effective means to combat the plague of corruption, or bigotry, or illegality, because Trump is worse than Nixon — Watergate is to January 6 what a firecracker is to a nuclear device — and the jeopardy is existential, and, so, in my humble, outraged opinion, the era of peaceful protest, of joining together to march, is behind us.

The time for righteous rage and action is NOW.

And, so, “I ain’t marching any more.”