So here my cognitive faculties are challenged because, I fear my 84 years on Earth – 84 years I’ve been using this body and this brain, and this hearing apparatus and these seeing apparatus and these vocal cords. But my brain is failing me. See even as I sat on the toilet I was trying to go over that expression, you know the thing about ‘Taking the Mennonite out of Pennsylvania…’ and I can’t even get that straight. Now I’ve got to do it one more time here in front of this audio-journal and you, the listener, tell me whether I am …pathologically neurotic or is this a senior moment, and this is a failing brain that can not think logically anymore. Now I’m a Jew and a Dane. Danes are a man from Denmark. So the way the expression goes which is a kind of a proverb, something supposedly wise about human beings: “You can take the Jew out of Denmark,’ in other words I can emigrate out of Denmark to America, you can take the Jew out of Denmark, “but you can’t take the Dane out of the Jew.” You can take the Jew out of the Dane or Denmark …but you can’t take the Dane out of the Jew. That was the expression that I was trying to formulate yesterday because I felt …I feel uncomfortable here in America in a capitalist society. Denmark is a socialist country. Wealth, education, health-care is socialist; the laws and regulations, the way that society functions, we are on relatively equal footing whether you are a rich man or a poor man, everybody gets health-care, everybody gets free education, everybody …it’s a much more egalitarian society. Here in America, the wealthy are so incredibly wealthy that you cannot imagine what they are capable of buying, and doing, and influencing politically or economically. And …most people, under the 50% mark of the population, struggle to earn a living or to get an education, or to …in other words, a Capitalist Democracy is not an egalitarian society, and so that was what I was trying to say that I feel so sick of the Trump administration. Every day there’s an assault on my upbringing, my Socialist upbringing. Muslims are banned. Blacks are being attacked and killed by the police. Blacks are being imprisoned for small infractions while the rich people never get indicted and never get imprisoned for all the crimes they commit against the society in terms of how they are commercially enriched …are by the way they can rip off …in their tax laws or in their loop-holes, and so on and so forth. So the rich people can hire accountants and lawyers and have ways of enriching themselves constantly, as well as politically for that matter. They can fund a whole political party with their combined fortunes they can buy politicians, they can buy senators and representatives. So America is a slaughterhouse, it’s a cat-house. People are constantly competitive and trying to gain advantage over each other in order to survive. And they step on each other’s toes in order to make it somewhere. Anyway that’s how I feel and it may be an excuse on my part not to deepen the excellence of my own work or deepen the profoundness of my work. I’m kind of throwing my hands up and saying: “There’s no justice in America.” Or my subtle aging wisdom is not valued in America because America is so caught up in its dog-eat-dog fight for survival that people are not interested in the subtleties of the mind, the aging process, and psychoanalytical processes of the brain [aka the psyche]. Michael Moore, in his 2015 documentary film ‘Where To Invade Next’, explores eight or so European societies for how they deal with the safety-net and justice issues of prisons and sentence guidelines. As an European emigrant, the revelations of how those aspects of their societies were dealt with – they were all eye-openers. However, the countries that I am most familiar with from my Danish childhood through my teens, were Norway, Finland and Iceland, three of my former Scandinavian brothers and sisters. And if I may quote Wikipedia’s summary writing on those three: “In Norway: humane prison system, visiting the minimum-security Bostöy Prison and maximum-security Halden Prison.” “In Iceland: women in power, speaking with the world’s first democratically elected female president, the 2008-11 Icelandic financial crisis with criminal investigation and prosecution of bankers.” “In Finland: education policy (no standardized testing, almost no homework); music and poetry classes which Moore notes have been eliminated in the American K-12 education system.”
