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When Death goes on strike

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Imagine a scenario where a ruthless dictator kills so many people that the Grim Reaper gets fed up and goes on strike. That is the basis of a remarkable opera as well as a new graphic novel which opens the story to new audiences and new generations.

Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Louisville Orchestra production. Photo credit: O’Neil Arnold.

“Faced by the mechanized death on an industrial scale presided over by Emperor Overall of Atlantis, Harlequin and Death—‘life that can no longer laugh and death that can no longer cry’—are reduced to observers of a world ‘which has forgotten how to delight in life and die of death.’ When Overall declares a war of everyone against everyone, Death feels that he has been robbed of all dignity and refuses to serve the Emperor any longer.”

Death and Harlequin in the Louisville Orchestra production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit: O’Neil Arnold.

Der Kaiser von Atlantis is both a tragic and uplifting story.

Viktor Ullmann

Viktor Ullmann was a respected Jewish composer in 1930s Austria. Educated in Vienna, he made “important contributions to both Czech and German cultural life as a composer, conductor, pianist and music critic.” As a young man Ullmann enlisted in the military and was decorated for bravery in World War I. He returned to university, where he became deeply influenced by composer Arnold Schoenberg and later, philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Their work helped him understand the role of art “as central to human spiritual and ethical development.”  

In 1942, Ullmann was imprisoned in the Nazi internment camp Terezin (Theresienstadt in German) in the Czech Republic but was still permitted to compose and stage his self-penned dramas. Terezin was erected as a “model camp” meant to dupe the International Red Cross into thinking the interned were privy to an exceptional quality of life enriched with music, art and a full schedule of relaxed activities, but that was not the case.

“At Theresienstadt, under the auspices of the Freizeitgestaltung (the Administration of Leisure Activities), a cultural organ of the Jewish self–administration in the camp and officially sanctioned by the SS, Ullmann composed twenty–three works. These included three piano sonatas, a string quartet, arrangements of Jewish songs for chorus, incidental music for dramatic productions, his one–act opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis, as well as his final work, a melodrama based on Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, which he completed in 1944.”

Ullmann’s String Quartet No. 3, a piece included on the Dover Quartet’s Voices of Defiance CD, was composed at the camp in 1943.

Franz Peter Kien

While at Terezin, Ullmann met Peter Kien, a young Czech poet and painter, who was also active in the cultural life in the camp. They worked together to produce Der Kaiser von Atlantis, a profound meditation on death that stages a dramatic confrontation between the Emperor of Atlantis and the character of Death. As the story unfolds, the Emperor declares a holy war against evil elements in his empire and seeks “to conscript Death to his cause.”

The Emperor in the Louisville Orchestra production (Teddy Abrams musical director and conductor) of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit O’Neil Arnold.

“Insulted by the Emperor’s effort to involve him in his modernized military campaign, Death—who is already offended by the ‘mechanization of modern life and dying’—refuses to cooperate.  Instead, he decides to teach the Emperor and humanity a lesson that will demonstrate his centrality in regulating existence by making it impossible for anyone to die.” 

One evening during a dress rehearsal of the opera in Terezin, the SS officers in view made the connection between the flamboyant Emperor and Hitler. They halted the production and quickly deported Ullmann and Kien and their families to Auschwitz. There they were murdered two days later, on October 18, 1944.  

When Ullmann was deported to Auschwitz, he left his works in the safekeeping of the philosopher Emil Utitz, who gave them to H. G. Adler in 1945. Adler brought the scores to England in 1947. Prior to his deportation, Kien entrusted a suitcase containing close to 500 artworks and many of his letters to his assistant at the camp, Helga Wolfenstein. “He suggested that Helga hide the suitcase in the ward for infectious diseases where her mother worked, assuming that the Germans wouldn’t conduct searches there for fear of infection. Through her efforts, despite the danger involved, Helga managed to safeguard the artworks until liberation.”

Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Louisville Orchestra production. Photo credit: O’Neil Arnold.

I came to know Der Kaiser Von Atlantis because our son, the tenor Andrew Bearden Brown, sang the role of the Soldier in the recent Louisville Orchestra production of the opera.

What follows is a short video featuring the orchestra’s musical director, Teddy Abrams, who discusses the career of Paul Kling, a Czechoslovakian violin prodigy who was deported to Terezin at just 14 years of age. There he participated in the rehearsals for Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Kling was transported to Auschwitz but managed to escape during a death march in early 1945, rebuilt his career, and eventually found his way to Louisville, where he was the long-time orchestra concertmaster.

The January 25th production honored Paul Kling and took place two days before the commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.

The Louisville Orchestra honors Paul Kling with their January 25, 2025, performance of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit: O’Neil Arnold.
The Emperor declares all-out war in the Louisville Orchestra production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit O’Neil Arnold.
The Soldier and Bubikopf in the Louisville Orchestra production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit O’Neil Arnold.
Andrew Bearden Brown as The Soldier in the Louisville Orchestra production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit O’Neil Arnold.
Death comes for The Soldier and takes his shoes in the Louisville Orchestra production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit O’Neil Arnold.

This trailer for the BBC’s Holocaust—A Musical Memorial Film includes The Emperor’s Farewell from the opera.

Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis (2024) by Dave Maass and Patrick Lay is a new graphic novel that mixes “dystopian sci-fi, mythic fantasy, and zombie horror.” Atlantis did not sink in this alternative universe but instead became a technologically advanced tyranny. The “power-mad buffoonish Emperor declares all-out war—everyone against everyone.” Death, however, has other plans and goes on a labor strike, “creating a hellscape where everyone fights, but no one dies.”

The novel’s illustrations by Patrick Lay are powerful and biting. Lay and Maass participated in the production of the opera in Louisville, and some of the illustrations were used as backdrops. The graphic novel includes drawings of Kien’s designs from the original opera, historical essays (unfortunately, set in the smallest of type), photographs from the prison camp, and more.

Emmett O’Hanlon, Der Kaiser
Erin Wagner, Drummer
Andrew Bearden Brown, Soldier
Emily Albrink, Bubikopf
Ryan McKinny, Death
Dylon Crain, Harlequin

John Mangum has written that Ullmann “found words to live by” in the Goethe aphorism, “Live within the moment, live in eternity” as it “revealed the enigmatic meaning of art.” Ullmann wrote those words in one of his reviews from Terezin. “Der Kaiser von Atlantis is very much a work of the moment,” Mangum adds, “one that cannot be separated from its circumstances. Since its premiere in 1975, it has gradually been finding its way to life in eternity as well.”

As the opera ends, the shoes of the characters—who have all left with Death—are all that remain on the stage. From the Louisville Orchestra production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Photo credit O’Neil Arnold.

Professor Herbert Thomas Mandl, in words shared on the Viktor Ullmann Foundation website, had this to say about the timeliness, and timelessness, of this work.

“The Emperor is—like a number of works of art created in Theresienstadt—proof of the human mind’s ability to remain free under the conditions of perfect slavery. Thus, all the mind’s capacities are concentrated into one focal point and lasting values are created even while the artist is facing annihilation.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Lead image: Peter Kien, watercolor of Terezin, 1944, a place where art and music was made against the dark rise of the Holocaust. All photos from the Louisville Orchestra January 25, 2025, production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis by O’Neil Arnold.

The next four years will be filled with upheaval and uncertainty . . . just look at our history

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With all the recent talk about “canals, Manifest Destiny, and tariffs, you can be forgiven for wondering what century we are in,” note the writers at the online history site Bunk. There are, they suggest, historical roots to Trump’s aggressive nationalism.

Past and present often seem to come together as one in today’s world, as author Ryan Holiday wrote.

“I can’t predict the future, but I feel pretty confident in predicting that the next 4 years are going to be crazy.

For political reasons, sure, but we don’t need to agree about that. I know I am right because you can’t find a four-year period in history that wasn’t filled with chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty. Never forget, Seneca reminds us, Fortune has a habit of behaving exactly as she pleases. Why would the next four years be an exception to this rule? There is no normal in this life…except disruption, change, and surprise.”

Holiday provides examples and follows by noting the critical question facing us is “not how we can avoid these challenges, but how we can prepare for them.”

These essays led me to consider disruptive and history-changing events in the first fifteen years of my life. Would Holiday’s hypothesis of near constant upheaval ring true?

Setting the stage

Photo of Griffith Observatory in LA by Thomas Aeschleman on Unsplash

The Chinese have a saying: “Most of what we see is behind our eyes.” We see what we expect to see, not necessarily what is really there. That’s as true for history as it is for politics, religion, or our taste in friends. We force the world into our preconceptions and because of that we miss a lot.

Given that caveat, I would suggest that one of the most consequential actions of the past 70 years took place less than a year before I was born. When the Supreme Court delivered the unanimous 1954 ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas—finding that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional—it was a turning point in American history. Protests, riots, and attempts to overturn the constitution followed with repercussions that are still being felt. Some actions to change this decision continue until today.

What follows is my very superficial sampling of representative events that impacted me, my family, my community, and the nation at large when I was still a child growing into adulthood. The list barely counts as the tip of the iceberg.

1955-1969

A-bomb Dome
A-Bomb Dome at Hiroshima, Japan

I was born in 1955.

  • The Cold War was in full swing and concerns about nuclear annihilation led 52 Nobel laureates to sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons.
  • Racial tensions were escalating at home, as Rosa Parks was arrested for taking a seat in the “whites only” section of the bus. Her resistance set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and scared many white southerners.
  • The following year tensions were high in Egypt, as the Suez Canal crisis escalated and alliances in the always volatile Middle East shifted.
  • While many couldn’t comprehend the impact, my engineer father understood that IBM’s introduction in 1956 of the first commercial computer was going to change the world in ways good and bad.
Troops protect Black students at Litte Rock Central High School
  • In September of 1957, the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard to prevent Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by ordering US troops to support the integration of those nine Black students at Central High. While a large portion of the country was elated, a similarly large faction saw their world crumbling around them.
  • Later that year, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite, into an elliptical low Earth orbit, setting off panic in the U.S. that we were losing the “space race” to the communists.
  • On December 31, 1958, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country, leading to Fidel Castro’s takeover of the island’s government, 90 miles from U.S. shores, in February of 1959. That action would have major impacts on U.S., Cuba, and Soviet relations for generations and lead to the Bay of Pigs fiasco (April 1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). I’m old enough to remember hiding under my desk at school as we waited for the atomic bombs to fall.
  • Birth control pills were introduced in 1960, setting off both a feminist revolution around bodily autonomy and a backlash from the patriarchy.
March on Washington, 1963
Capshaw Elementary School, Cookeville, TN (credit: The Living New Deal)
  • Capshaw Elementary School in Cookeville, Tennessee, where I was a rising third grader in the fall of 1963, was integrated some nine years after Brown v. Board of Education. Mother was the head of the PTA. Years later she would reflect that it was one of the most difficult years of her life. “We never had a problem with the children,” Mom noted. It was always the parents—the alleged adults in the situation—who made her job miserable.
Old City Hall in Dallas, at the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby
  • The November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent killing of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald led to fear, sadness, angst, and turmoil across the nation. For my generation, everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news, much as my parents’ generation could remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed and my children’s generation would never forget the location where they first heard about the attacks of 9/11. All three were turning points in American history that brought upheaval and uncertainty.
  • 1965 saw the first large-scale US Army ground units arrive in South Vietnam. Their number would soon swell.
  • The Soviets beat the U.S. to the moon in 1966, with the first soft landing by the spacecraft Luna 9. Concerns over the impacts of a Soviet presence in space that could attack the U.S. led to an increase in spending on the military-industrial complex that has been as much as 28% of our national budget (1987) and changed our politics forever.
  • Large-scale protests against the U.S. role in Vietnam broke out in 1966, as fights over the war and civil rights began to tear the country apart.
  • The Six-Day War began in June of 1967 between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, reminding us once again of the fragility of peace in the Middle East.
  • Executions and assassinations took center stage in 1968, leading many to wonder if the world was going mad. On February 1st, Saigon police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executed Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém with a pistol shot to the head. The execution was captured by photographer Eddie Adams and became an anti-war icon. April 4th saw the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots followed in over 100 U.S. cities, devastating many historically black neighborhoods for decades. Close on the heels of that murder, Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy on June 5th just moments after he had won the Democratic primary in California.
  • In August of that year, 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring.
  • And in November, Richard Nixon—who used a “Southern Strategy” to bring disaffected white Southerners into the Republican Party with promises of limitations on civil rights—was elected president by a slim margin and began a rightward shift of the party that is now playing out to its logical conclusion with the return of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and threats of mass deportations.
  • In October of 1969, millions took to the streets to protest during Vietnam Moratorium Day as Nixon quietly escalated the war he promised to end during his campaign. It would not be the last time he lied to the American public.

Thus it has always been

Some will say that the 1950s and 1960s were especially turbulent times in the American story, but they don’t know their history.

  • In the 1770s and 1780s, we fought against the world’s strongest imperial power to gain independence and establish a new nation based on the rule of law and not the power of kings. That democratic ideal is now being tested, but not for the first time.
Mass hanging of Dakota Indians in Mankato, MN
  • Consider the more than 500-year perspective of Native Americans, who saw settlers move westward, taking over their land by force and pushing them into smaller and smaller reservations.
During the Tulsa race riots in 1921, more than 1,200 black businesses and homes were destroyed at the hands of white residents
  • African Americans came here involuntarily in 1619 and have been seeking the American Dream ever since. It appears that each step forward is met with resistance, and they are forced to take two steps back.
  • Think of the decades from 1820 until 1860, as slavery and the power of slave-holding oligarchs drove us into a deadly Civil War from 1861-1865. We’re still fighting the meaning and legacy of that war today, as seen in the battle over Confederate monuments.
  • Massive financial panics, the era of the robber barons and the great inequality of wealth, immigration scares, the Spanish flu pandemic, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the overthrow of European colonialism in the global South, and more recently the Covid 19 pandemic, Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation in Ukraine, and the attempted insurrection and overthrow of a legitimately elected government on January 6, 2021, are just other examples of disruptions from history.

The point is not to deny the many achievements of the past 70 years. Rather, this summary can remind us that we have been here before. Speaking soon after 9/11, the eminent historian David McCullough reminded us:

“We think we live in difficult uncertain times. We think we have worries. We think our leaders face difficult decisions. But so it has nearly always been….It is said that everything has changed. But everything has not changed….We have resources beyond imagining, and the greatest of these is our brainpower….And we have a further, all-important, inexhaustible source of strength.  And that source of strength is our story, our history, who we are, how we got to be where we are, and all we have been through, what we have achieved.”

Abraham Lincoln—whose birthday we honored yesterday—delivered his annual message to Congress in December of 1862. He stated that we must rise with the occasion. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.“

In the coming years, we are each going to need to stay rooted to our values but stay open and creative about what forward movement might actually look like. In each of these situations above, brave, creative individuals often let go of what they thought they knew in order to entertain new avenues and creative solutions to old problems.

We all need to decide how we are going to respond in this current crisis. But please don’t say this is unprecedented. History tells us otherwise. It also tells us we can do hard things.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo collage by DJB: From top left clockwise: Tulsa Race Riots, Cotton fields, protestors at Edmund Pettus Bridge, hanging of Dakota Native Americans, Monopoly cartoon, lynching of Black American, Pearl Harbor memorial, January 6th insurrection, attack on Ft. Sumter (center)

Just when I thought it was safe to watch the Super Bowl again . . . *

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Long-time readers will know there was a period when if it was the first Sunday in February, it must be time for my annual Super Bowl rant. The last one of these rants actually came in 2018 and I called it Rant IV, given that Rants I, II, and III had already played out on the virtual pages of MORE TO COME . . .

Over the course of those years, I gave readers 14 reasons I wouldn’t be watching the Super Bowl. (And yes, reason #10 is these stupid and pretentious Roman numerals.) 

But reason #11, which I posted two years in a row, related to a certain team in New England, and their intolerable head coach and quarterback. Remember, this was back in 2018.

“11.  It’s the damn Patriots. Again. Is there anyone more insufferable in sports than Bill Belichick/Tom Brady? (Wait, I’ll answer that. Maybe Coach K. But that’s another post. And I know that Belichick and Brady are actually two people, but I’ve grouped them as one because they synch their grating to perfection.) They push rules up to the line and over, and then act like their sainthood has been challenged when they are caught.” 

In recent years I’ve slowly dipped my toe back into the water to watch an occasional NFL game, especially those featuring Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Their last-second “pull it out of the hat” endings are just so exciting. And since Mahomes and the Chiefs were going for the threepeat in this year’s Super Bowl, I thought I’d venture a look.

Oh. My. God. No one told me the insufferable Tom Brady was the “analyst” on the game . . . for the unwatchable Fox network. (See reasons #4, #8, and #12 from the earlier posts. I’ve been calling out Fox’s sins for years.) On Sunday I watched the first half and was thankful it was a blowout, because I felt perfectly fine leaving Tom Brady to simply say out loud what everybody already saw.**

Joe Posnanski, as I expected, had a wonderful take on the boredom that is Tom Brady and he also did a good job of explaining why the game itself was a blowout. Brady, he noted, offered up occasional dry insider terms (“We call that a ‘rub route’”) and would dive into the collection of cliches that were “so useful to him in postgame press conferences (winning the Super Bowl is the ‘highest of highs,’ but losing the Super Bowl, alas, is the ‘lowest of lows'”).

“This is simply who Tom Brady is and has always been. I imagine that while Fox Sports might prefer a few more insights here and there, they had to know that this was more or less what they would be getting. Brady has worked hard at improving—working hard to get better is a defining Brady trait—and he did progress in his first year from an unlistenable sound machine to relatively odorless and harmless background noise.”

I’ll have to take Joe’s word for that. I haven’t been following Brady’s broadcasting career. Per the dozens of comments on Joe’s post, many others feel the same way I do about Tom Brady.

Joe also had a spot-on rant about how “pretty much every Super Bowl commercial this year was basically little more than a star cameo.” For guys my age, the Hellmann’s Mayonnaise commercial—with an aging Harry and Sally—brought a bit of a laugh but also a cringe. As Joe said,

“I remember when Super Bowl commercials were just frogs croaking ‘Bud-weis-er.’”

This serves me right, I suppose. The real reason I don’t really enjoy watching NFL football comes back to concussions. As someone whose spouse fell and suffered a serious concussion in 2011, an injury which took a full year for recovery, I’ve seen firsthand the very real effects of impacts to the head.  I worry a great deal more these days about spills, trips, crashes, and other mishaps that could lead to concussions. So why do I want to watch—and support—a sport where hitting someone as hard as you possibly can is considered great play? And when I read about the stars of my youth—players such as the remarkable Tony Dorsett—having signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition many scientists say is caused by head trauma and linked to depression and dementia, I wonder if I can continue to support a sport that leads to such injuries. I know that concussions occur in all sports, baseball included. But no other sport outside of boxing comes to mind where the play itself puts players in such risky situation on such a regular basis.

So I scratched an old itch and got pretty much what I deserved. Please send me this post next year if I mention that I’m thinking about tuning into the game.

Spring Training
Credit: SpringTrainingCountdown.com

And guess what?! Spring Training Countdown was revised for this year to reflect the Cubs’ announcement of pitchers and catchers reporting on February 9, 2025 (the day OF the Super Bowl and notably earlier than most other teams due to their unique situation of opening the regular season in Tokyo against the Los Angeles Dodgers on March 18.)

Let’s play ball!

More to come . . .

DJB

*This is your official Super Bowl Rant V!

**UPDATE: Another commentator phrased it all this way: “The most insufferable team played against the team with the most insufferable fans in front of the most insufferable person.” I pretty much agree on all points.

I love the pithy proverb — Volume 10

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Five years ago I created a feature on MORE TO COME to capture some of my favorite sayings without having to write an entire post. I labeled it More to Consider. 

I’ve long been a fan of the pithy proverb—a quote or bit of advice that contains truth in 20 words or less. “Social media is an aphorism machine,” notes the New York Times in Your best advice of 2024. “Any bit of marginally useful wisdom has been reproduced in a paintbrush font and shared a million times on Instagram or TikTok.” 

This was news to me as I’m not on platforms like Instagram. My love for the short and to-the-point adage is much more old school, coming from my Grandmother Brown, who was known to say things such as,

“The graveyard is full of people who thought the world couldn’t get along without them.”

Mary Dixie Bearden Brown (among others).
Mary Dixie Bearden Brown and George A. Brown—my grandparents as young newlyweds

I admit I might have heard that particular one when she thought I was getting too big for my britches. Grandmother, who passed away in January of 1981, was definitely not a social media influencer, although her life had a great impact on mine.

After posting these pithy proverbs on MTC and collecting them in summaries every six months, I decided to use 2024 to reprise some of my favorites from the first five years. * So, as one of those favorites instructs us . . .

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

Mary Oliver

BE USEFUL AS WELL AS ORNAMENTAL

Unsplash

Grandmother admonished me to get up off the couch and get to work with what became, in later life, one of my favorite bits of advice.

“Make yourself useful as well as ornamental.”

Mary Dixie Bearden Brown

Getting there may be difficult, but I find myself drawn to these calls to reach for your potential, as the effort is worth it.

“Our potential is one thing, what we do with it is quite another.”

Angela Duckworth, from “Grit”

“Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.”

Rebecca Solnit

“Hope is hearing the music of the future; belief is dancing to it.”

The Rev. Dr. Francis Wade

“On occasion we write a sentence that isn’t, in fact, correct, but it sings. And the question is: Would you rather be the ornithologist or the bird?”

Colum McCann

“The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so we might listen more and talk less.”

Zeno

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Following the simple Biblical admonition to love your neighbor has never been easy, but our retreat into tribes and social media rabbit holes seems to have made it worse in recent decades. Several of my favorite adages speak to this challenge, from finding loveliness in the world around us, to watching what you say about others.

“To live with ugliness, we must hallow loveliness / the more, remembering that it often springs / from mud into light-filled air.”

Judith Farr from “What Lies Beyond”

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Fannie Lou Hamer

“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.”

Mark Twain

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

Susan B. Anthony

FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. Photograph by Carol Highsmith.

It is clear that America is in a fight to save democracy. Some of my favorite aphorisms from the past five years speak to this time of trial.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Desmund Tutu

“Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.”

Robert Caro

“To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.”

Octavia Butler

“A sense of history is an antidote to self-pity and self-importance.”

David McCullough

“The assault on 2024 is a crock-pot coup, simmering low and slow, under cover, breaking down the fibers of our electoral system, until one day democracy itself is cooked.“

Anand Giridharadas

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

“America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them.”

Ryan Holiday

REMEMBER WHAT MATTERS

Two of my favorites from the first five years have at least a tangential relationship to sports, the first from an article about robo-umpires in baseball, and the second a classic quote from Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy about what’s really important.

“The strike zone is a fretless bass. Historically, a certain discretion has been appreciated.”

Zach Helfand in a New Yorker article on robo-umpires

“No game is a must-win. World War II was a must-win.”

Marv Levy

WHATEVER ELSE STRIKES MY FANCY

The final set of favorites cover a grab bag of topics and truth.

“The edge of things is a liminal space—a holy place or, as the Celts called it, ‘a thin place.’ Most of us have to be taught how to live there.”

Richard Rohr

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”

Anne Lamott

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

James Baldwin

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Groucho Marx

“The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”

J.B. Pritzker

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Mary Oliver

We can all do much worse than to follow the “instructions for life” by Mary Oliver.

More to come . . .

DJB

* After the initial More to Consider post pulling together the first group highlighted, I brought out Volume 2: A plethora of pithy proverbs followed with Volume 3: A profusion of pithy proverbs and Volume 4: A plentitude of pithy proverbs. I finally turned to the Super Bowl system (minus the pretentious Roman numerals) with I love the pithy proverb — Volume 5, Volume 6, Volume 7, Volume 8, and Volume 9. For this 10th volume, I highlighted some personal favorites from the first nine editions. This post was originally titled “Best of five years of More to Consider” but then I decided to keep the numbered editions going.

Photo of pithy proverbs from Pixabay

What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow

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Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson are two of the world’s preeminent experts on Black contributions to folk, old-time, and string band traditions. They have announced they are reuniting on a new album in April, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, that will feature 18 traditional North Carolina fiddle and banjo tunes tracked live and in remarkably simple settings, “captured entirely outdoors and accompanied only by the wind, the rustle of the foliage, and the singing of nearby birds.” The Bluegrass Situation picks up the story:

“With the announcement, the pair have released a live performance video of ‘Hook and Line’ (watch below) that was recorded at the home of Joe Thompson, their late mentor and a vital roots music forebear in the Black string band tradition’s modern iteration. What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow was tracked in meaningful locations such as this, tying this body of music directly back to the land, the locales, and the people that birthed it.”

Giddens is a MacArthur “Genius” and two-time GRAMMY Award winner and 11-time nominee. Robinson is also a fellow GRAMMY winner, thought leader, botanist, and ethnomusicologist. Both were founding members of the incredibly important supergroup the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “The string band would end up defining the early 2000s era of old-time music, making a huge mark in Americana circles and spawning multiple generations of Black roots-and-folk musicians after them.”

Here’s an old video of the Chocolate Drops singing and playing Cornbread and Butterbeans, followed by a video from 2007 of the group playing on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Giddens & Robinson will be on tour with Dirk Powell and more beginning in April 2025. And for friends in the Carolinas, make plans now to attend Giddens’ inaugural Biscuits & Banjos festival to be held in Durham, North Carolina, at the end of April.

More to come . . .

DJB

From the bookshelf: January 2025

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Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in January 2025. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) by Becky Chambers takes place on a small moon called Panga, centuries after the Awakening at the end of the Factory Age, when the robots “employed” by humans decided they wanted to depart for the wilderness to observe “that which has no design.” They had long ago faded into myth and legend until Sibling Dex takes a turn off the paved road, heads into the wilderness, and meets Mosscap, a 7-foot tall, metal-plated, boxy-headed, wild-built robot who is on their own mission. This lovely story is for anyone who could use a break.

In the Beginning was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality (2012) by Diarmuid O’Murchu takes a broad look at what many know as the third member of the Christian Trinity. In place of anthropocentric traditional approaches to Christianity which tend to place the spirit in a type of little brother relationship to the creator (God) and savior (Jesus), O’Murchu wants us to look at the creative act described in Genesis and recognize the Spirit as that which breathed over the formless void. The Spirit, in O’Murchu’s telling, “is the force behind the recurring words ‘Let there be . . .’”

The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (2024) by Marietje Schaake is an extraordinarily frightening and important new work on how the tech giants of Silicon Valley have become “too big to fail and thus too big to regulate, causing harm to all of us.” With a subject that is large and technically complex, Schaake has written a book that is both engaging and readable, even for the non-expert. Which is a good thing, because what she describes affects each one of us. The ultimate result of this coup is “the fundamental erosion of personal freedom and democratic norms” all for the benefit of American oligarchs.

Troubled Waters: A Sea Story (2024) by Syd Stapleton is a tale about an environmental disaster and cover-up wrapped in a whodunit. Our hero, Frank Tomasini, is a 47-year-old marine surveyor who lives comfortably on the Molly B, a 1937 salmon troller, which has been lovingly refurbished by its former owner who also happens to be Frank’s best friend. Frank is asked to unofficially survey the damage to an abandoned and adrift boat that belongs to Arthur Middleton, a “rich and holier-than-thou environmental warrior.” It turns out very few people, including Arthur’s brother, a high-powered Seattle business shark, seem too eager for Frank to find out what happened. I discuss the work with Stapleton in my most recent Author Q&A.

Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) by Howard Thurman is the work that inspired The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless other advocates for peace and justice. Rev. Otis Moss, III highlighted the uniqueness of Thurman’s book when he wrote, “No other publication in the twentieth century has upended antiquated theological notions, truncated political ideas, and socially constructed racial fallacies like Jesus and the Disinherited.” In this seminal work, Thurman stresses that Jesus “recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win that victory of the spirit against them.”

What’s on the nightstand for February (subject to change at the whims of the reader)

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in December of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2024. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

Photo from Pixabay.

Our real work

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The news that our country is being taken over by oligarchs intent on theft and destruction leaves the average citizen puzzled and baffled at best; worried, scared, and angry at worst. Hope can be difficult to find. But as Parker J. Palmer notes,

“Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two.”

Even without doomscrolling and regularly checking online news sources, one can—and should—follow what is happening to our democracy and then do what we can individually and in community to narrow that distance between what is and what should be.

Timothy Snyder is, for me, one of the voices I trust to provide clear-eyed analysis. In the model of his small pamphlet On Tyranny, he recently laid out steps for different groups to take in this moment: for those who voted Republican but not for the takeover and destruction of government by oligarchs, for members of Congress, for mayors and governors, for federal workers. And he also suggests what the rest of us can do:

“Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of ‘move fast and break things,’ like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.”

Those who have gone before, like Baltimore native Virginia Hall, the most feared Allied spy of World War II and the linchpin of the French Resistance, have shown us why solidarity in the fight against oligarchical autocracy is crucial. Building back a sense of community as Americans will help us find our way.

Poet Wendell Berry wrote a short poem about what is truly happening when we find ourselves no longer knowing what to do. I first found a portion of it online as a meme.

Here’s the full poem, and the last two lines are critical in this day.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Wendell Berry

We’re in this together. We can do this hard work. Snyder’s last paragraph reminds us of the stakes and requirements of freedom.

“What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.”

More to come . . .

DJB

*I continue to believe that we should stop, pause and be intentional about how we frame our thoughts, opinions and actions, and to select carefully the media we read or consume. I begin each morning with a meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation. These are reminders that interior grounding is important as a prelude to external action. I also look to the poets and writers who see the world from a wider perspective than just politics. Historians like Snyder are also some of the voices I turn to, especially the daily newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson. I have a few other newsletters that arrive in my in-box, but what no longer comes is the Washington Post where I’ve cancelled my long-term subscription. The Post has both a publisher problem and an owner problem. I do not watch any television news.

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

Everything is unfolding, emerging, becoming

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Uncertainty, like tragedy, is part of the human experience. It is easy to try and ignore what we don’t understand, but we can also choose to engage more deeply, allowing our spirits to be captivated by the mystery of this uncertainty.

“The true nature of reality is far more complex, subtle, and illusive than we care to admit. Beyond our capacity for human observation and the rigorous research of science lies a more mysterious but real world. Religion has known this for several millennia, but religion itself has failed to honor the mysterious depths.”

We are called to focus on and engage in this mystery. To do so may help us see our role in the act of creation that is always unfolding, emerging, and becoming.

In the Beginning was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality (2012) by Diarmuid O’Murchu takes a broad look at what many know as the third member of the Christian Trinity. O’Murchu’s ambitious work broadens the analysis to include science (specifically Quantum Physics) and Indigenous spirituality. For many readers it will be both eye-opening and difficult to fully comprehend. To some it may seem heretical.

In place of anthropocentric traditional approaches to Christianity which tend to place the spirit in a type of little brother relationship to the creator (God) and savior (Jesus), O’Murchu wants us to look at the creative act described in Genesis, as well as the insight of indigenous people who see the Great Spirit inhabiting the whole of creation from time immemorial, and recognize the Spirit as that which breathed over the formless void. The Spirit, in O’Murchu’s telling, “is the force behind the recurring words ‘Let there be . . .'”

O’Murchu notes that the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible goes back to the Hebrew to suggest that “God did not create the world from nothing” but worked on the chaos. The divine is calling forth order, or potential. This foundational creativity may be what some theologians conceive of as divine eros, which “lures life into greater being.” This “originating work” of the Spirit, O’Murchu asserts, is “always based on a lure from the future.”

Images from the Webb telescope

Many commentators, from J.B. Phillips to Stephen Hawking, have declared that “your God is too small.” O’Murchu adds that the God of formal religion is “too anthropocentric and ‘ecclesiastical’ to be relevant for new scientific vision.”

“(S)cience rather than religion is recovering the mystical and spiritual depths of the creation that surrounds us. Religion for the greater part still seems wedded to the idea that the human comes first, and everything else in creation is there for human use and benefit.”

In another of his books, O’Murchu calls on the reader “to embrace the grandeur, complexity, and paradox that characterize evolution at every stage.” The strategies of this divine spirit “always have, and always will, outwit our human and religious desire for neat, predictable outcomes.”

“Deep down is an intelligence, a source of meaning and possibility that defies all our rational theories, and indeed all our theological dogmas as well. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is the Great Spirit so long cherished by the world’s indigenous peoples, ancient and modern alike.”

Rather than embrace and engage with this mystery, O’Murchu notes that it is so much easier to divide the world into a battle between good and evil, and to place ourselves on the side of the good. “Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right,” asserts the priest Richard Rohr, “which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history.”

Mystery is hard. But O’Murchu helps the reader see that the energy of creation, of the spirit, “is not random, but unfolds in patterns and relationships, indicating a guiding wisdom that indigenous peoples call the Great Spirit.” How do we approach and begin to understand the “rational and compelling logic” to this process of unfolding? It requires the “contemplative gaze to access its greater depths.” Yet we can all see this spirit of creation at work when we see affirmations of “life over against death, liberation over against oppression, justice over against injustice . . . To live by the Spirit is to affirm life unambiguously.”

As the publisher describes it, “Poets knew it. Mystics knew it. Indigenous people knew it.” I, however, did not begin to understand all of In the Beginning Was the Spirit. What O’Murchu is doing—sometimes in prose that goes down too many rabbit holes and challenged my ability to comprehend—is to explore what religion has often forgotten or ignored: the power and presence of this sacred spirit “in our lives and in the breath of all things.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Let my people go . . . speaking truth to power

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As attacks on history ramp up and many on the right threaten a bishop who dared to speak truth to power, it seemed appropriate to kick off Black History Month this Saturday with a musical reminder that the bishop is following the lead of Moses who “mixed religion and politics” when he told Pharoah to “let my people go.”

Moses before the Pharaoh, a 6th-century miniature from the Syriac Bible of Paris (Wikimedia)

Go Down Moses, sung here by the Harlem Gospel Singers, is one of the great spirituals of the Civil Rights Movement, and it helped galvanize a generation.

Politics, religion, and the fight for freedom have always been intertwined. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around calls out several political actors and policies of the day.

“Ain’t gonna let segregation turn me ’round,
turn me ’round,
Ain’t gonna let segregation turn me ’round,
I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’,
Marching up to freedom land.”

Mavis Staples takes a similar stance in We Shall Not Be Moved.

The bishop called for mercy, which is as fundamental a belief as there is in the Christian faith. As one commentator noted, however, decency and kindness and mercy and truth are just signs of weakness to many of today’s so-called political leaders. “Blaming is not leading. Sticking to your bash-the-other-side talking points is marketing, not leadership. We deserve better.”

As seen in the 2015 movie Selma, the Civil Rights Movement—and American resistence—has long seen a mixing of politics and religion. Ledisi’s solo rendition of Take My Hand, Precious Lord captures “the soul, the spirit, the love, the prayer” of the song that has uplifted and encouraged so many fighting for freedom.

We are in for four years of gaslighting, lies, and hypocrisy. After conservative weaponizing of religion for centuries, we’ll hear now that progressive spiritual voices should be quiet. But Sweet Honey in the Rock knows better. As the old spiritual says, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.”

“I got my hand on the gospel plow
Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on”

We can do this hard thing. So many before us have shown the way.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of March on Washington by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Observations from . . . January 2025

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A summary of the January posts from the MORE TO COME newsletter.

Earlier this week I saw three dads with about a dozen children all riding their bikes on their way to the neighborhood school. I smiled. The next generation is picking up the torch, eager to learn. We can do this!

Winter, which can be difficult, is also the crucible of the life cycle, a metaphor for the idea of retreat and renourishment. We need this reminder especially in trying times. Yes, January brought savage wildfires, a polar vortex, and that thing that happened at noon on the 20th. Throughout the month the “Winter is coming” warning of House Stark in Game of Thrones—a message often heard in the series when someone wanted to scare the bejesus out of another character or simply keep them in line—kept running through my head.

When we had a blizzard in New Orleans earlier this month I begin to think that perhaps we’re not heeding that admonition.

Jackson Square in New Orleans (credit Nicholas Gerbo, Garden & Gun)

But . . . I keep coming back to this mantra: You can do this hard thing. My post, which followed Bishop Mariann Budde’s speaking truth to power at the National Prayer Service, builds off a song of the same title by singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer. It calls on us to acknowledge the difficulties in life while affirming that we have everything needed to move forward.

Let’s jump in and see what else caught my eye in January.

TOP READER FAVORITES

Wooden Salmon Troller taken in 1955 from NOAA Historic Fishers Collection (via Wikimedia)

Two posts topped the list of reader views for January.

  • In my first Author Q&A of the year, Syd Stapleton answers my questions about his novel, Troubled Waters: A Sea Story (available here), which is an environmental disaster cloaked as a whodunit. In Fiction as a pathway to the truth we discuss the impacts of rapid change on the environment of the San Juan Islands, the building of wooden boats and ships, and how—in an age filled with disinformation—sometimes the use of fiction in literature is the best way to discover the truth. Syd has an interesting background: he studied at Berkeley in the 1960s and became a leader of the Free Speech Movement; debated William Colby, former Director of the CIA; ran for Congress as a socialist in 1970 (and lost); and has been a former ferry captain, landing craft relief skipper, and tugboat worker. Plus, he’s a regular reader of MORE TO COME. I enjoyed our conversation and hope you’ll take a look at it as well.
  • In 2013 I established eight rules of how I want to live day-to-day. I highlighted them on January 1st in Rules for the road of life. “Don’t be a Grumpy Old Man. Enjoy life!” (#8) is my reminder to “just say ‘no’ to negativity.” 

READINGS FOR A TIME OF CHALLENGE

So many comments and emails this month begin or end with some variation of “here’s hoping 2025 will be a better year than I expect.” Living through this period is going to be a challenge. Reading helps.

  • The questions we ask about the facts of history is a bit of a grab bag, touching on the 50th anniversary of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, history lessons from a horror film writer, a link to the best online history writing of 2024, and thoughts on the eulogies at President Carter’s funeral. Steve Ford’s words to the Carter children—“God did a good thing when he made your dad”—deserves a hearty amen.
Credit: Tennessee Holler

MUSIC OF PERSEVERANCE AND HOPE

Music of perseverance. Music of hope. Music for the MLK Weekend. is just what the title suggests: a celebration of the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Bitter Southerner had a listing of the top 20 Southern albums of 2024. I look at six of them in Joy, dreams, faith, honesty, melancholy . . . and riff raff.

LAUGHTER, GENTLENESS, AND FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION

Several posts turned toward the theme of following your passion.

  • Put your best cup forward—an appreciation written for a new coffee shop/micro-roaster that opened around the corner—has helped me realign with another of my rules of the road.
  • Savor life’s gentle moments is a meditation about how, in the midst of an angry world, we can respond from a different place. In the words of Marv and Nancy Hiles, “We do not build our souls as much as we find them along the way. We discover them by accident as much as by intention. There is a time to take our lives in hand, but there is also a time to take our hands off our lives, and to leave what seems apparent and trust ourselves to the hidden.”
  • For anybody who could use a break looks at an optimistic, charming, and contemplative novella. I don’t usually read science fiction, but this one came along just when I needed it.
  • Rest in Peace, Mr. Baseball is my appreciation for Bob Uecker, whose humor and self-deprecating style earned him fame and affection far beyond his .200 batting average.

FEATURED COMMENT

The Uecker appreciation generated a number of comments. Brilliant reader Bob Stephenson wrote to say that “the Niekro knuckleball story” was also his favorite. Uecker had famously said that the best way to catch Phil Niekro’s knuckleball was “to wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.” I replied that I’d seen Niekro pitch live when I lived in Atlanta in the early 80s and chasing after passed balls was something any catcher did. Bob replied:

“Ryne Duren was the only uncatchable pitcher I saw in person when he came to Savannah for a Yankees-Senators exhibition. Coke-bottle glasses made his blazing fastball even scarier. Stengel famously said, ‘If he ever hit you in the head you’d be in the past tense.’ Glad that Uecker didn’t have that misfortune!”

Baseball stories are the best!

CONCLUSION

Thanks, as always, for reading. Your support and feedback mean more than I can ever express.

As you travel life’s highways be open to love; thirst for wonder; undertake some mindful, transformative walking every day. Recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.

When times get rough, let your memories wander back to some wonderful place with remembrances of family and friends. But don’t be too hard on yourself if a few of the facts slip. Just get the poetry right.

Remember that “we are here to keep watch, not to keep.” Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. And bash into some joy along the way.

Finally, try to be nice. Always be kind.

More to come . . .

DJB

For the December 2024 summary, click here.

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Photo of winter from the Unsplash community.