Fate

Fate, the prime mover of history, works in mysterious ways, has a plan for everybody, a penchant for grotesque humor and a relish for disrespecting human pretensions and pricking the cast-iron bubbles of our conceit. It's got a raucous laugh that prayers cannot stifle, and the compassion of an earthquake, leveling the frail structures of human aspiration and self-importance.

Most of the wreckage it has wrought is lost to ancestral memory. Perhaps, like matter, according to the scientific law of conservation, it will always remain with us, but in repurposed form.

Nobody knows the scope of Fate's screwing up what might have been, there having been trillions of replications.  

Fate is never impressed and certainly not bound by the artifice of our concepts of justice and entitlement. Neither is it impressed by human yearnings or genius.

There is, however, such a thing as "cosmic justice."

Give it credit, even though it's arbitrary and probably imaginary. Sometimes it's the "karma" we witness as thrilled spectators to the downfall of the targets of our envy, who even when they've done wrong, are beyond our reach, or society's capacity or desire for retribution.

It's impossible to tell what's on fate's mind, assuming it's more than merely anarchistic energy mucking up the universe. But it clearly doesn't honor the territory of human ego.

The music composer Jean-Baptiste Lully's name doesn't ring a bell for most of us.  He was the darling of King Louis XIV of France, the seventeenth century "Sun King" who reigned for 72 years, and whose claim to fame, in addition to reportedly being Taylor Swift's 8th cousin, 11 times removed, includes vastly expanding his colonial empire, constructing a 150-mile canal, consolidating absolute royal authority and being the patron of writers like Racine and Moliere.

Lully's music, with its spectacular trumpets and drums that glorified his enthroned benefactor, was the kind of career move that remains popular today.   

Its sound sweeps listeners away, so that even working-class radicals will believe in kingship, at least until the music fades out. A similar phenomenon is the religious conversion of gazers on the Sistine Chapel, until they're replaced by the next wave of tourists.

Lully was something of a pompous ass who was marinated in privilege because he had a friend in an extremely high place. It still happens in modern workplaces, sometimes even when there are labor unions.

Some things never change.

Louis XIV was so enamored of Lully's euphonious flattery, that he scarcely chastised the composer for suspected homosexual activity, which at the time was normally treated harshly. Nor did the King bother even giving Lully an earful for having kicked a chorister in the stomach to cause her a miscarriage, so that she wouldn't have to multitask child-rearing and opera performing.

Lully, whose contemporary biographer said, "brought music to the peak of perfection" and was "showered with benefits in a most generous way," was treated by the astral imp and grand-spoofer fate, as ideally cut out for earthly humiliation.

While vigorously conducting an orchestra in a composition exalting the lord on an otherwise inauspicious occasion, using a heavy wooden stick that was more like a truncheon than a modern baton, he accidentally banged his foot, causing injury and subsequent infection. 

It got gangrene, and he refused amputation, perishing in agony. It may not have been karma, but it certainly qualified as comeuppance from "the Great Beyond."

May the lesson of Lully be visited upon the tyrants in our present workplaces, legislative chambers and palaces!

Maybe it served the maestro right. Sometimes fate is an avenger, or it just seems that way because it acted as an anarchist which by chance left us celebrating the outcome.

But more typically it leaves us helplessly cursing it for denying us forever enormous drafts of beauty that may not have saved the world but would have consoled civilization been had fate permitted its full bloom and not only a partial birth. Fate's infernal tease is maddening, and the defining design of the universe, bar none.

Mozart, who was born twenty-four years after George Washington and died eight years before the President did, was the greatest natural genius in the history of music. He died at the peak of productivity at 35 years old.  He had a strep infection that likely would have been cured by a visit to CityMD and a Z-Pac prescription.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a television series called "Naked City." It was a police drama that ended with the voice-over, "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."

That's a reasonable estimate of what the census would show are being toyed-with by fate, sometimes abetted by political whores. 

If we could somehow lasso and snare fate, who could we trust to put in charge of it?  Who could bring the poles of our divided nation together in relative amity? 

Late last summer we got the answer: Dolly Parton.

I checked dozens of prominent media sites with positions from extreme to extreme and in-between on the ideological spectrum, and every one of them hailed and lionized her without reservation, from Common Dreams and Mother Jones to Breitbart and National Review. Vox called her "a secular saint."

Dolly Parton kept her politics to herself, which is essential to anyone who simply wants, without distraction or deterrence, to quash conjecture about the purity of their motives and just get on with the business of being a decent person. There's no other way to avoid malicious mischaracterizations. 

Even the embrace of humanity can be an empty gesture if it's done as a political act or expression. Or an ambitious and calculated bid to enhance one's stature and ingratiate oneself with one's ideological base among the electorate. 

Dolly Parton was too pristine by half to have been a mayor or governor or president.

In late August, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is dead set on liquidating Rikers Island, couldn't resist capitalizing upon the death of an inmate without bothering to first determine the circumstances and if there was any culpability among the officers and administration there. His default characterization in such cases is that the victim was "killed."

Not by a disease, or suicide, or accidental overdose, but by systemic neglect or abuse.

Mamdani personally and publicly comforted the family of the murderer, whose rap sheet included a finding of guilt for using a meat cleaver to butcher a stranger in a laundromat. We are taught that all human life is sacred and of course we are not responsible for the sins of our relatives, whose suffering is no less real for their relationship.

Mamdani said he was "deeply saddened" by the death and said his "thoughts are with his loved ones as they grieve this loss."

But the Mayor had nothing to say to the survivors of the deceased murderer's victims.  His silence outspokenly conveyed exploitation and a moral indictment which to him is like water off a duck's back. 

He used the ploy of pity as a prop.

The deceased Rikers occupant had been judged and found guilty. There are instances when even such a verdict should not be accepted at face value, but this does not appear to be one of those times.  But in our casual encounters with total strangers, it would suit us well and make for a more pristine society, if we withheld judgment pending actual experience and interaction.

I've been working on that myself.

Recently, I had to pick up someone at JFK Airport very early.  I was on the road at 3 a.m.  Got lost because one of the main highways was closed for construction and I don't have a GPS. 

Drove down a large, seedy-looking street that was almost deserted except for some menacing looking vagrants. 

I was far from my destination and there were no signs for it. I didn't want to get out of my car and expose myself to what I assumed would be mortal danger, but I had no choice.

I pulled up to the only fast-food joint in sight. The guy who appeared at the window looked like an emotionally disturbed person out of hell. I figured the best-case scenario for me would be to escape intact.

Did he bear out my instinctive judgment? He researched all routes, gave me the number of a JFK-bound city bus a few blocks away, found out its schedule, and suggested that I follow that bus, but not to get out of the car while awaiting its arrival. 

Foregone conclusions can be deceiving and are often at the route of social conflict and disintegration.