A Christian Owl Sanctuary?

Photo by Sierra NiCole Narvaeth on Unsplash

This is ridiculous. Two weeks ago I turned eighty-freaking-three, which really means I’m in year eighty-four. Who does this? I certainly never intended to, but here it is. Oldness. Jeez.

It was a great birthday, exactly meeting the requirements of my renegade personality. No parties, no sheet cakes with awful icing instead of real buttercream, no people I’ve been avoiding for months that somebody invited because I should get to know them. Instead, a friend fought our way through Boston’s homicidal traffic to a splendid hike at an isolated, parklike promontory of four glacial drumlins, called “World’s End” https://thetrustees.org/place/worlds-end-hingham/ and then seafood dinner in Hull at a restaurant whose espresso martinis are so big they come in two glasses. Heaven.

But there’s always a morning after, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to be an old person in a fascist state. I mean, seriously. It’s already here; the American people have chosen, by a slim but legitimate vote, to live under an irrational, anti-intellectual, white masculist, racial and religious nationalistic, authoritarian regime. It’s a done deal and meets the requirements of the term, “fascism,” although by this point, who cares? Whatever this nightmare is called, we’re in it.

Old ladies in fascist states are typically depicted hunched in shabby cloth coats and kerchiefs as they wait in line for borscht or something. The no-longer-productive old have no value and are just a burden on fascism. So they wisely hang around at the periphery of things, demanding little. I don’t have a shabby cloth coat and haven’t worn a kerchief since 1949, but “the periphery of things” is in my view Bre’r Rabbit’s briar patch, an excellent place to be. Nobody’s paying any attention and you can do whatever you want. But do what?

We all talk about this all the time as if the mad juggernaut can be stopped, reversed, obliterated if somebody just does something. But short of a coup d’etat or civil war, the juggernaut won’t stop. Both coup and war involve violence, anathema to our side, and thus won’t happen. This leaves a significant demographic of people too old to be influenced by propaganda and social media standing around watching it all go to hell and dying to do something.

Ann Elwood, my writer friend back in San Diego, and I analyze everything every day in emails. Yesterday Ann said, “Lately I've been wondering why I am writing novels as if I'm living in the world of pre-January 2025.” She decided to start writing daily about “…what it's like to be living now and remembering what it was like Before.” I love that capitalized “Before” and think this is the answer.

We, the very old, are the last who embody the realities/myths that comprised our country at its zenith. We know civilizations rise and fall and are particularly positioned to react as the one we lived, falls. We know where the historical bodies are buried and which idea wielded the knife. In a hundred years intellectual inquiry may again exist, and our ideas about the current ruin as it happens will be invaluable. But where to archive those ideas?

Nowhere is safe at the moment. Universities are being gutted and colonized by ideological parasites, so their archives will hold only fascist propaganda. What’s needed is a repository so obscure and acceptable that it will be overlooked for a century. Ann and I are reading a book about owls by British author Miriam Darlington, The Wise Hours https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Hours-Journey-Secret-World/dp/195353483X. So I conjured up a fake repository that would be called an owl sanctuary. Something benign and apolitical, right? Then to make it conform to the Project 2025 aspect of the current fascism, I decided to call it The Christian Owl Sanctuary.

Think that’ll work?