Ascertainment

& Thanksgiving

I planned to begin this message the same way I began November 7th’s entry, The New Not Normal, relating to when the news media called the election for Biden: “exactly one year ago on this date.”

That is because exactly one year ago on this date the U.S. General Services Administration ascertained the election to Biden and allowed the transition to begin. It was a long two weeks and two days. GSA administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, took seriously the idea that the results of the election were in dispute (as seen in her “Letter of Ascertainment”) and delayed providing the resources and governmental access necessary for a safe, smooth transition. Precious time was lost and it seemed as if Trump - refusing to concede - was in control of the process.

Originally, I thought I’d dwell on how that in-between time felt to people reasonably fearing a coup and ready to take to the streets: the tension, the suspense - the suspicions.

Instead, in the last couple of days, I’ve become fixated on the notion of “ascertainment.”

In the case of the GSA, there is no legal standard for how its administrator is to ascertain the “apparent successful candidate” (Sec. 3c Presidential Transition Act of 1963) in the U.S. general election. Murphy claims that her delay was independent of any pressure from the Trump administration and, as well, she states she came to her decision independently of public pressure. I don’t know her truth, I don’t know her soul. Her delay - again, based on the premise of a questionable outcome - continued more than a week after the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under Homeland Security issued its its statement on November 12th, 2020 declaring the election “the most secure in American history.” She ignored her own government, former norms, and the validity of experts only to legitimize baseless assertions of fraud and miscounts - actions continued by the Republican party to this day. This is how the pretense of demanding scrutiny for the purposes of free and fair elections while generating distrust in the results of a proven free and fair election undermines free and fair elections.

It was left to one person to make this ascertainment regarding the presidential transition. So, that’s where I’m dwelling today. “Ascertainment” - through a single person. As an individual issue, as a process - a verb - what is at work when one ascertains?

Let’s leave this Murphy. I prefer Beckett’s Murphy anyways - and it’s opening line (to put me in the ever-shining permanence of the Now, this day): “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

Without rigor, for your entertainment, Ascertainment! Entrainment’s a problem, as are all of the hindrances and limits on one’s faculties, glitches in human faculties in general, societal constraints, systemic inequalities, everything that gets in the way - self-interest, open bigotries, subconscious biases, etc., etc. Indeed, education in critical thinking is - critical. (But what do we do with the uneducated and the miseducated?) Here, I’ll put up front the minding of all qualifications, all caveats, whatever they may be, before I venture my own unproven assertion based on - I don’t know, who knows? - another way or part of knowing, another aspect of the apparatus of percipience.

Please be assured, I’m not dealing with the word (or pursuit) of “certainty,” not quite there at the epistemological root yet; but touching on “ascertainment” in its practical function, the mode and moment of ascertaining, while noting in our era corruption of a general - or better to say, prevailing - level of ascertainment, of assessing what is true. Experts or leading lights or responsible authorities no longer prevail in creating unity of assessment, consensual agreement on “reality”; meanwhile, everybody counts on their opinions - two cents, best left in pocket, the minting costs more than their worth.

All that wasted brain power! How often do people ask themselves, am I judging this person or this matter correctly? There’s where to begin. If it isn’t a tingling of conscience, then it’s like conscience, a sense of right or wrong in assessment of a situation - emotions, instincts, and motives aside. Ascertainment of facts and the truth of a matter is a spiritual as well as a mental/perceptual issue; and it’s inclusive of the matter of justice. Is my thinking just?

For the creator, poetic license is a given; perhaps, yet, there can be a poetics of the accurate, out of the Romantic aesthetic that the beautiful is the true (it’s always been more difficult to assert that the true is the beautiful). In any case, if ascertainment has to do with a kind of conscience - as I believe it does - accuracy becomes a moral imperative.

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Did you know the astounding poet of ARK, Ronald Johnson, wrote a quintessentially American cookbook?

Hurry you to the feast! It's getting late!
Rift pokes the embers of the hearth.  

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I’m truly thankful that you’ve come along with me this far into the project: it’s a start - we’ll see how it evolves. You can find out more about what I intend from the original announcement and from the about page: What is Poetry, Thought, Word Magick? I expect to vary between 3-5 entries per month - sometimes more, sometime less. Likely, I’ll begin soon a post with “exactly one year ago on this date” when we get to the day the electoral college met to cast their votes based on the state-certified election results. Hopefully, the term “certification” won’t stop me short the way “ascertainment” did today.

It’s been lovely to reconnect with people from the past as well as to make new acquaintances. Something about the social media ecosystem and interactivity of Substack’s platform combined with intimacy of one-to-one communication by email slides engagement into a new realm. Such offers a shifted awareness of readership and of the reader specifically, you the reader. For a writer who writes impelled by an inner vision, there’s the nagging question of reader or audience - publication to publication, performance to performance - and the spectral presence of the ideal reader, the imagined reader. Here the ideal, the imagined, overlap in continuity with real readers, however responsive, however private, and more or less active. This practice of newsletter writing has kept me recurrently attuned to the day-to-day and to the real, thanks to you. Please accept my deepest gratitude.