Bob Schwartz

Following are all nine parts of Richard Brautigan’s work The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. You do not know that you need Richard Brautigan, this and his other works, but you do. Serious, sentimental, silly and sad, he responded to strange times and a strange life (aren’t they all?) in ways that would do any writer proud. Open hearts are the most vulnerable.

More about these poems and Richard Brautigan here.

---

The Galilee Hitch-Hiker

The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
Part 1

Baudelaire was
driving a Model A
across Galilee.
He picked up a
hitch-hiker named
Jesus who had
been standing among
a school of fish,
feeding them
pieces of bread.
“Where are you
going?” asked
Jesus, getting
into the front
seat.
“Anywhere, anywhere
out of this world!”
shouted
Baudelaire.
“I’ll go with you
as far as
Golgotha,”
said Jesus.
“I have a
concession
at the carnival
there, and I
must not be
late.”

The American Hotel
Part 2

Baudelaire was sitting
in a doorway with a wino
on San Fransisco’s skid row.
The wino was a million
years old and could remember
dinosaurs.
Baudelaire and the wino
were drinking Petri Muscatel.
“One must always be drunk,”
 said Baudelaire.
“I live in the American Hotel,”
said the wino. “And I can
 remember dinosaurs.”
“Be you drunken ceaselessly,”
 said Baudelaire.

1939
Part 3

Baudelaire used to come
to our house and watch
me grind coffee.
That was in 1939
and we lived in the slums
of Tacoma.
My mother would put
the coffee beans in the grinder.
I was a child
and would turn the handle,
pretending that it was
 a hurdy-gurdy,
and Baudelaire would pretend
that he was a monkey,
hopping up and down
and holding out
a tin cup.

The Flowerburgers
Part 4

Baudelaire opened
up a hamburger stand
in San Fransisco,
but he put flowers
between the buns.
People would come in
and say, “Give me a
hamburger with plenty
of onions on it.”
Baudelaire would give
them a flowerburger
instead and the people
would say, “What kind
of a hamburger stand
is this?”

The Hour of Eternity

Part 5

“The Chinese
read the time
in the eyes
of cats,”
said Baudelaire
and went into
a jewelry store
on Market Street.
He came out
a few moments
later carrying
a twenty-one
jewel Siamese
cat that he
wore on the
end of a
golden chain.

Salvador Dali
Part 6

“Are you
or aren’t you
going to eat
your soup,
you bloody odd
cloud merchant?”
Jeanne Duval
shouted,
hitting Baudelaire
on the back
as he sat
daydreaming
out the window.
Baudelaire was
startled.
Then he laughed
like hell,
waving his spoon
in the air
like a wand
changing the room
into a painting
by Salvador
Dali, changing
the room
into a painting
by Van Gogh.

A Baseball Game
Part 7

Baudelaire went
to a baseball game
and bought a hot dog
and lit up a pipe
of opium.
The New York Yankees
were playing
the Detroit Tigers.
In the fourth inning
an angel committed
suicide by jumping
off a low cloud.
The angel landed
on second base,
causing the
whole infield
to crack like
a huge mirror.
The game was
called on
account of
fear.

Insane Asylum
Part 8

Baudelaire went
to the insane asylum
disguised as a
psychiatrist.
He stayed there
for two months
and when he left,
the insane asylum
loved him so much
that it followed
him all over
California,
and Baudelaire
laughed when the
insane asylum
rubbed itself
up against his
leg like a
strange cat.

My Insect Funeral
Part 9

When I was a child
I had a graveyard
where I buried insects
and dead birds under
a rose tree.
I would bury the insects
in tin foil and match boxes.
I would bury the birds
in pieces of red cloth.
It was all very sad
and I would cry
as I scooped the dirt
into their small graves
with a spoon.
Baudelaire would come
and join in
my insect funerals,
saying little prayers
the size of
dead birds.

San Francisco
February 1958

I am interrupting this blog to say: Enough.

I know how important this midterm election is. I’ve already voted and have supported candidates who will start serving as correctives to what is, by all measures, the worst governance America has ever had. That is saying something.

I know from a messaging standpoint that in this case, too much is never enough. Less than a week before the election, with many close critical races, there is no time to let up. There is going to be plenty of time after the election to see where we stand and move forward appropriately. Just a few more days of messages and then….

Of course I want an optimal outcome. I’ve done what I could, which may not have been enough, whatever that means, but I’ve tried. If you are an American voter, and think we need to get back on a better less insane track, please vote and ask other like-minded Americans to vote.

Beyond that, as I’ve said before, I believe the days before, during and after the election are going to be unprecedentedly challenging. Losers, from Trump on down, will do everything to subvert and invalidate outcomes they don’t like and won’t accept. I am expecting that we will be getting messages asking us to help push back on these efforts. I will do what I can, as others will.

But in the meantime, I’m interrupting to say that me, my email mailbox, and my text folder join me in saying that we are exhausted.

On to Election Day.

Remember Covid?

Did you know that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) has a museum and that the museum includes a COVID-19 Timeline?

It is a summary reminder of the calendar of the worst days of the pandemic. At some point that felt like it would never get better or end, even though the worst days took only two years. (“Worst” being relative, since the effects still linger and the disease is now endemic.)

Remember Trump?

When you cross-match Covid and Trump, you find some interesting things.

Trump was first in office during the early days, though even then he demonstrated a known tendency toward absurdity not grounded in reality. For example, his suggestion of injecting bleach as a treatment. We don’t know what would have happened if Trump had been in office during the later worst days, but based on what we know now, we might still be seeing federally-funded bleach injections for a range of diseases.

The big point is that the worst days of Covid are behind us, thanks to scientific advances and to to a large number of citizens willing to treat it as the public health disaster it was. We have used the very human ability to selectively forget and move on, which in proper proportion is a psychically good thing, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of handling the next potential pandemic.

There is no official museum with a Trump Timeline. If the disease of Covid peaked in late 2022, Trump has not peaked yet. He is still with us as a pandemic, though hopefully not endemic. We continue to promote public information and vaccines, which ultimately worked for Covid.

If we had not found a way through the pandemic, the devastation would have been staggering and still ongoing. We will get through this lingering and still uncontrolled disease, if we have the will and find a way.

“Mendacity is the enemy of man, and yet more and more love is lavished on guile and lies. Truth is homeless in our world.”

---

A World of Phantoms

For most of us, life is a series of evasions, pretensions, substitutes, and rationalizations. We do not see the world as it is but as a projection of ourselves, and so we are prisoners of delusions that hold us in their spell even after we become aware of their deceptiveness. Gradually pretensions are converted into certainties, rationalizations become entangled, and madness sets in.

So many people become salesmen of their delusions. So few people are fully conscious of the non-finality of our here-and-now world.

In analyzing and discussing problems of Jewish Law, possible solutions are often advanced in the Talmud with the introductory words, “I might have thought,” “I might have been led to believe.” After proving that these arguments are mere suppositions or hypotheses, a conclusion is usually reached.

One must learn to understand thoroughly the precise meaning of these phrases, Reb Bunam said. For the world in which we live is a mere supposition or hypothesis. The conclusion is still to come. “At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve Him with one accord” (Zephaniah 3:9).

How did the Kotzker, who was consumed with a passion for veracity, for eternity, look at people whose whole life was spent serving spurious goals?

Falsehood is not merely a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. It twists and distorts the basis of a man’s life, deceiving him into believing he lives in a reality that does not exist. A person living a lie and taking it to be the Truth moves in a world of self-delusion.

Falsehood is not just a stigma that sullies man’s thinking. A healthy life consists in knowing what one wants, seeing an ultimate goal ahead, and hoping to reach it by means of clearly understood actions. And mendacity is a disease that binds a man’s entire existence. As a result of it, our perceptions are false. We regard as real what can be measured and controlled; what defies measurement and control we reject as irrational and unreal.

In Jewish mystical literature the world here and now is called “the world of falsehood”; each grain of truth may be surrounded by shells of falsehood. Our truths are often half-truths, acquired piecemeal and preserved precariously, their only refuge being the lips of a few dying men. For so many people die for the sake of a lie. So many who profess truth really shun it. Their solemn proclamations are often veiled deceptions.

This is what Abraham did. He forsook community and deception to live with Truth in solitude.

Genuine solitude is the prelude to a new community. However, if you do not withdraw but remain part of “the world,” your supreme effort must be not to deceive yourself. Clearly one of man’s strongest inclinations is to deceive himself.

People do not know whether they are alive and where they are. The world abounds in misrepresentation—lives without design, movement without aim, roofs without walls. They think they dance, yet they are paralyzed. Delusion holds them enraptured. They feel so comfortable in the clutches of their self-deception that when Satan himself embraces them, they think he is in love with them.

Mendacity is the enemy of man, and yet more and more love is lavished on guile and lies. Truth is homeless in our world. We suffocate for lack of honesty. As a result, man dies while yet alive. Who can speak of resurrection when life itself has become death?

Coarse and swaggering, men make insolent speeches and engage in presumptuous dealings. But they are dead, while Truth, though buried in the grave, is alive. Sometimes a voice cries out from underground, and a few isolated individuals sigh and weep.

When a man does not delude himself, he does, at the least, recognize the world’s falsehood. As long as he believes that his delusion is ultimately coherent, that his conceits have final meaning, he lives in a realm of phantoms. Though idle, he is convinced of his achievements. Even as he lies dying, he persuades himself that he is alive.

Each person should wrestle with this question: am I living in a world of phantoms? Is my life, are all my concerns mere delusions?

–Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth

---

At the time of World War II, superhero comic books were growing in popularity. Even more so in the following decades.

A big question emerged: Why didn’t Superman just end the war quickly? He certainly could have.

The answer is obvious, even to those who admire him. He is a comic book character. Like all great characters of myth and fiction, he may exist as an all-powerful ideal in the psyche, spirit and imagination, but not in the real hard world.

We are thankful we do have human heroes in dire situations, and that is exactly how the force of evil was vanquished in World War II. In the overall social and political sphere, once in a while we do find individuals who can help “bend the course of history with their bare hands.” But we shouldn’t count on it.

Instead, as deep into undemocratic evil as we are sinking, what we have are very human politicians, which means that some will try their best, or what they think is best, which may not be enough. If we are waiting for Superman, or superheroes, or just heroes, know this: they are us.

It is worth analyzing this post from five years ago.

Some of it seems right. Republicans back then saw Trump as a way to get the things they wanted but that seemed, in a slowly enlightening America, out of reach.

What I got wrong was this: “They [Republicans] are holding their fire as they wait for the emergence of a smarter, smoother, more attractive demagogue.” What they and we got is an increasingly less attractive and less stable demagogue.

“All they [Republicans] want is a captain to steer the ship of state in the right direction—one who isn’t quite so problematic and crazy. Next stop 2024.” Right direction? Not quite so problematic and crazy? Be careful what you wish for and enable. 2024 happened and the next stop is now.

---

Note: The following was drafted in early January, days after the invasion of the Capitol, days before Trump officially left office. Having just reread the draft, I believe it still has merit.

The conventional analysis of elected Republican politics goes something like this:

---

Most of the elected Republicans stuck with Trump even during his most heinous days—through active support or silence—because they feared the electoral wrath of him and his base. Their prime directive was to stay in office. Not a profile in courage or integrity, but a simple path anyone might understand if not condone: keep your job.

---

The actual story is more like this:

---

Many elected Republicans believe that the only future for America is one in which the forces of progressivism—even moderate moves toward equity and fairness—are turned around. They initially opposed and criticized Trump. But once they had to accept him in power, they saw that he could be useful for that plan. Yes, his behavior in office was extreme and distasteful. But it was a small price to pay for restoring America to its former glory.

---

So while Trump and his conduct are more reprehensible and toxic than ever, we read this headline from the Washington Post, days after the storming of the Capitol:

“Republicans largely silent about consequences of deadly attack and Trump’s role in inciting it.”

Of course they are largely silent. They are holding their fire as they wait for the emergence of a smarter, smoother, more attractive demagogue. Where, for example, is George Wallace when you need him?

So Republicans remain patient and, with some exception, silent or equivocal. They never wanted an invasion of the citadel of American democracy, nor did they want anyone to be killed. All they want is a captain to steer the ship of state in the right direction—one who isn’t quite so problematic and crazy. Next stop 2024.

© 2026 Bob Schwartz