Blazing Glory

 

April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom… Sounds so romantic, but what about Paris in October? What happens to the chestnut trees then? The leaves get brown around the edges and then they fall. No color, no drama, no romance. No one writes romantic songs about Paris at this time of year. Those chestnut leaves, the way they wrinkle and fade, they simply remind us about endings and getting old.

I moved to France a long time ago, in 1987. Already in the fall of 1986, I was there, scouting for jobs, contemplating a big move to another continent. That means it’s been 40 years since I last saw autumn, a Pennsylvania autumn, I mean.

During this month of October, experiencing autumn for the first time since 1985, I have the feeling the gods are looking down on me and offering me one of the best gifts of my life. “Paris is a moveable feast,” wrote Ernest Hemingway 100 years ago. Today I’d say it’s here in Schuylkill County, day after day, as I feast wherever I go on the blazing colors before my eyes.

In the beginning it creeps up on you. In early October, the hillsides were still lush with summer green, but if you looked closely, it was there: an impatient burst of red or yellow, a startling swash of purple. The colors were pure and bright. I admired them, but in no way did they prepare me for what was to come.

 

 Walking with my cousin in the woods at Locust Lake at midmonth, I asked her if it was like this every year. The question surprised her. She answered yes. For her, this was autumn. For me, a spectacle so bewitching, it seemed uncannily unreal. 

 

Uncanny and bewitching, these words also go with Halloween. When I was a child, like most American children, I went trick-or-treating. In school we learned Halloween poems and sometimes we had to recite them before we received our treat. It wasn’t enough to simply thrust our bag towards an unknown hand and hope some candy would drop in.

At home we carved a pumpkin. In school we put up decorations: black cats, jack-o-lanterns and witches. We even participated in scary painting competitions, decorating the display windows of local stores. I remember dressing like Snow White or Caspar the Ghost. Downtown Pottsville, just like now, had a Halloween parade. All this happened around October 31^st.

Until this year, I did not know Americans began decorating for Halloween in early October. I could never have imagined the bigger-than-life skeletons, the lights, the inflated pumpkins and Halloween characters that I can neither name nor recognize. We used to buy one pumpkin. Now I see mountains of them on display at a single home. When I first noticed a front door covered with yellow tape printed with the words “caution” and “keep out,” I took it for the real thing.

Some things, however, do not change. I see containers of chewy candy pumpkins and Indian corn at the supermarket, and the assortment of candies on sale for Halloween is strangely similar to those I knew as a child.

When I moved to France in 1987, during my first autumn, I lived in the South of France. To my Pennsylvania eye, there was no fall. Neither the cork oaks nor the olive trees lost their gray-green leaves, and the majestic parasol pines offered wide circles of shade all year round. The only tree to rain dead leaves down on us, looking bare and white afterwards, was the plane tree, a cousin of the sycamore.

As for Halloween, when I arrived in France, nobody knew much about it, and certainly children did not celebrate it at school. The big holiday in France was November 1^st, All Saints Day, the French equivalent of Memorial Day. It’s when the French travel to the town or village where their ancestors were born to place pots of chrysanthemums on their tombs.

In many cemeteries, members of “Le Souvenir Français,” a group devoted to keeping alive the memory of soldiers who sacrificed their lives for France, take up collections for the upkeep of the graves of veterans of French wars. 

In 2024 it would be hard to find anyone in France who has never heard of Halloween. Children dress up in costumes and parade around the playground at their schools. On Halloween eve, they trick-or-treat in their neighborhood. Pumpkins, usually used for making soup, are carved to make jack-o-lanterns. Adults organize costume parties and the night of the 31^st can be wild.

How did it happen? I’m not quite sure, but American Halloween has been a very successful export to France. Though I have never seen a single one, the “Halloween” movies have surely played a role.

Meanwhile the October days go by. The green has disappeared. The wild riot of colors of a week ago, a spectacle that truly deserves to be called “awesome,” has lost its insolent éclat but is no less beautiful. The hillsides glow copper.

Now I know what it means to go out in a blaze of glory. Schuylkill County, fall 2024, one of the most beautiful sights of my entire life.  

Roulette russe

 

In October 2013 I was in Sochi, just a few months before the 2014 Winter Olympics opened in that Russian city. It was a beautiful autumn day and my strongest visual memories are of construction everywhere and bright orange persimmons glistening in the sun.

While there I visited the dacha of Joseph Stalin in a pine forest overlooking the Black Sea. Vladimir Putin’s vast compound-estate on a wooded peninsula nearby was off limits. Paid for by the money of Russian taxpayers, this lavish residence was brought to their attention by dissident politician Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in February of this year. Three weeks ago, Putin had the palace razed because he feared for his life while in residence there.

 

Coincidentally, my visit to southern Russia and the Crimean peninsula, still a part of Ukraine at the time, overlapped with a visit to Russia by Donald Trump, who checked into the Ritz Carlton in Moscow on November 8, 2013. He was there ostensibly to organize the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, Moscow, the same event center that was the scene of a deadly shooting and fire on March 22, 2024.

In 2022 the Miss Universe franchise, bought by Trump in 1996, was sold to a Thai media magnate, Anne Jakaphong Jakrajutatip, a transgender businesswoman, for 20 million US dollars. This is the exact sum Donald Trump received in 2013 for simply showing up in Moscow. In a tweet, Trump wondered, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow? If so will he become my new best friend?”

The Russian Federation is a failed republic and a successful oligarchy. This word, with roots in Greek, means government by the few. In the Russian context, as defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary, the few are “a class of individuals who through private acquisition of state assets amassed great wealth that is stored especially in foreign accounts and properties and who typically maintain close links to the highest government circles.” In this system, easy money is handed out to potential allies, but it always comes with a price, never fixed at the outset.

In the case of Donald Trump, it is Russian money, the money of oligarchs and of the Russian mafia, that saved his real estate business from going under. Since the 1990’s, Russian gangsters had been laundering illegal gains by buying and selling apartments in Trump Towers in New York. In 2006 former citizens of the Soviet Union financed the construction of Trump SoHo, giving Trump 18% of the profits though he did not invest money himself. In 2008, Donald Jr. stated, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets.”

In 2015 Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant who at one time acted as a broker for the Trump organization, wrote to former Trump fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.” Sater promised more than he could deliver. The Trump Tower in Moscow fell through, but there is little doubt that during the past 30 years, Donald Trump has racked up many debts to Russian interests. Soon, I believe, his Russian friends will be calling them in.

Donald Trump has resisted releasing tax documents and income statements. He also brags that if elected president, he could wrap up the war provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 24 hours. I think we all know who he is rooting for and who will come out on top. How else can the man pay his debts? And we all know what happens in Russia when you don’t pay up.

In 10 days, Americans will be voting for their next president. It is a neck-and-neck race and its outcome may determine the fate of American democracy—or plutocracy, as some critics say, government by the wealthy, be they Republicans or Democrats. Federal Reserve data for the 4^th quarter of 2021 reveals that the top 1% of households holds 30.9% of the country’s wealth whereas the bottom 50%, a mere 2.6%.

This very month, Elon Musk contributed 75 million dollars to the Trump campaign. Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir Technologies and longtime supporter of JD Vance, and venture capitalist David O. Sacks have also been big donors. Kamala Harris has brought in a record number of small-dollar donors but, to rake in a billion in campaign donations, she also has some tech giants on her side.

Yet men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have an agenda. These billionaires, who pay little in taxes and benefit mightily from government investment in their tech empires, see liberal democracy as over. How could it be otherwise with women voting and too many Americans on welfare? These men favor greater inequality and a weakened middle class, a potential "enemy from within.” Thiel has written that “freedom and democracy are not compatible.” Elon Musk, father to 12 children, really wants “smart people to have kids,” says his current partner Shivon Zilis, summing up a perfect recipe for eugenics.

In a 1947 speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill said, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”

In his inaugural speech in January 1961, Kennedy exhorted his fellow Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

In 2024, this all sounds quaint. Have we, as some historians claim, entered the century of oligarchy? Reason, truth, an understanding of history could save us. Political fiction and fake news will surely bring us down.