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Ode to the backup catcher

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UPDATE: Sometimes you just screw up. When I was writing this post, I really wanted to talk about Strasburg’s retirement and tie it into recent thoughts I’d had on the subject. But I’d also just finished reading The Tao of the Backup Catcher, and since it was about baseball (in a way) I thought I’d just tie the two together. Bad decision. In doing so, I missed the lede on this gem of a book and gave it short shrift. It is really a remarkable tale of servant leadership, a topic I’ve covered before, most fully here. So if you choose to read the book (and I hope you do) remember that it is much more about servant leadership than handling retirement gracefully. As they say, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains. This post as originally written was somewhere in those latter two categories.

The announcement of Stephen Strasburg‘s retirement from baseball was delayed, a fiasco only the Washington Nationals could pull off. Nonetheless, the news has me thinking about the timing, difficulty, joy, and fragility of retirement. All of it.

Strasburg, who spent his entire career with the Nationals and won a World Series MVP award in 2019, was “perhaps the most thrilling pitching prospect in baseball history.” His 2010 debut was electric, a “seminal moment in the arc of baseball in Washington.”

The last-place Nats sold out Nationals Park for what was billed as “Strasmas.” A Tuesday night against the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates became a marquee event, with MLB Network broadcasting the game nationally.

Strasburg delivered. Before that night, no pitcher had struck out as many as 14 hitters without walking any in his big league debut. That’s what Strasburg did against Pittsburgh in a 5-2 victory for the Nationals.

My Strasburg bobblehead and scorebook

During a stellar yet injury-prone career, Strasburg was a three-time All-Star with a 113-62 record. He became the fastest pitcher by innings to strike out 1,500 when he reached the mark in 2019. The stoic Strasburg even started to smile that year.

Group hug: 2019

My hope is that this famously earnest athlete can now find the time and head space to bash into even more joy in the years ahead.

Expressing joy wasn’t a problem for Willie Mays. As I’ve written earlier, the only thing Mays couldn’t do on a baseball field was stay young forever. And therein lies the nub of our human condition. We’re all mortal.

Just as Mays discovered his mortality the hard way, Strasburg retired at age 35 because, “even after removing a rib and two neck muscles,” Joe Posnanski writes, “the doctors couldn’t quite put his body back together this time (as they had so many times before).”

Strasburg and Mays were elite athletes who, when healthy, were at the top of their profession. In other words, very different from 99% of us. And even very different from other teammates. Like the backup catcher.

The Tao of the Backup Catcher: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game (2023) by Tim Brown and Erik Kratz is “a story about a part of the game that hasn’t drifted into a math contest.” A catcher at Eastern Mennonite University who holds the Division III record for doubles, Kratz is discovered by a scout who sees something that suggests he has what it takes to get to the majors. Perhaps not to be a star, but to be the guy who is always there when the star catcher needs a day off from bending down behind home plate, catching 100-mph missiles, and taking foul balls off the left kneecap.

Backup catchers hang on, even if they must play for a variety of teams. When they are really good at what they do they can make a baseball career out of it. They watch and listen and ponder.

There’s a reason why, among other virtues, they caught twenty-three of the sixty-nine no-hitters thrown in the twenty-first century, and before that, why they’d caught six of Nolan Ryan’s seven no-hitters.

The values and competencies of backup catchers are often undefined. They ask: What can I do to help? Perhaps the answer “comes less from an understanding of how the game works and more from a deep familiarity with — and appreciation for — how oneself works.”

It’s not about letting go of your dream “but letting go of the ego.”

Brown begins this gem of a book at Kratz’s retirement. Unlike many backup catchers who are simply let go, Kratz leaves on his own terms.

He wouldn’t again be overlooked, optioned out, sent down, released, traded, waived, designated for assignment, nontendered, benched, ignored, hidden on a disabled list, lied to, pinch-hit for, or promised better.

That step, minus the baseball jargon, is more in tune with how so many leave their professions and move into retirement. No tribute videos before adoring crowds, no future Hall of Fame speeches. If we’re fortunate, the locker room attendants or the IT staff have nice things to say about the way we’ve worked to uphold our part of the team, treated others with kindness, and moved the organization forward.

And it is very hard to know when to let go. A friend told me the story of a colleague who said,

One should retire 1) while you are still enjoying the job and believe you are working at full capacity, 2) before people start wondering why you persist in hanging on, and 3) so that a younger person can have their turn.

I generally agree; however, those suggestions don’t always work. Being in the group of the formerly young, I recognize and appreciate the value of experience. The inequities in our safety net mean some have not had the opportunity to build for a comfortable retirement. My former colleague Nick Kalogeresis wrote an insightful piece about the decline of his beloved Greektown in Chicago due, in part, to retiring business owners who never found a son, daughter, or relative willing to take on running a new restaurant.

As in the rest of life, there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

But we often know instinctively when someone should retire. Several people in my circle of life stayed in their jobs too long because ego got in the way. Who they were was literally wrapped up in their job. The more we can set aside our ego, the more we can live life as it is meant to be lived.

I wanted to nourish my soul in retirement while I was still, as Mirabai Starr says, “thirsty for wonder.” To learn how I might live even more in peace with life’s uncontrollability. “We won’t last forever,” Natalie Goldberg writes. “Wake up. Don’t waste your life.”

Letting go can involve disappearance along with a sense of transience and fragility. Disappearance, Kathryn Schulz suggests, reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. “We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”

With eternity always at your door, live all your life — whether star or backup catcher — in full bloom with a thirst for wonder.

More to come …

DJB

Image: Keith Johnston / Pixabay

Bad and broken frames

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Frames help us see and navigate the world. When we tell stories, we often structure or “frame” them in a way to signal what matters. The Frameworks Institute suggests this framing can be positive, negative, or benign.

Basic questions

Much of what we see today in the world of politics, news, and journalism is negative and divisive. To shift our national and individual conversations toward forward-looking views of what is positive and good, informed citizens need to be aware of the frames we are encountering.

Media critic Dan Froomkin suggests journalists ask themselves: “Whose terms are you using? What requires explanation and what doesn’t? What is normal and what is not?” Those aren’t bad questions for us to ask of our news sources as well.

Examples of framing meant to divide rather than unite

James Fallows writes that most media platforms are not transparent about how they choose frames or why they exist.

The simple reality is this: how a story is presented can matter much more than what the story says.

Fallows makes his point using an instance I happened to highlight several weeks ago. It involved the headline and picture in the Times on the day Donald Trump was first arraigned in federal court.

The Times headline was egregious. For those who watched, there clearly wasn’t a “momentous scene” at the arraignment, so why use that term? Did the Times have to include a picture of Trump coming off his private jet with an American flag painted on the tail piece as if it is Air Force One? 

“To put it crudely, would Donald Trump himself have chosen any other layout for that front page?” was Fallows’ summation of the headlines and photos of that day.

Fallows focuses on the Times simply because it is the most influential news organization in the country, driving a great deal of other media reporting. He also focuses there because the paper’s use of frames is so relentless that it has spawned parody sites.

You may want to think about your frame if commentators can have this much fun at your expense

There’s a famous Tweet stream from Doug Balloon (an alias) known as the NYT Pitchbot. Balloon tweets out fake but realistic sounding headlines and Twitter posts built on the standing jokes of

  • the New York Times tendency to play the framing game of bothsiderism (i.e., both parties do this and they’re all bad); and
  • the Times tendency to report that anything that happens can be framed as bad news for Joe Biden and, conversely, good news for Donald Trump.

Here are a few examples:

As the Cascadia Advocate noted,

Doug’s satirical tweets poking at the Times have taken on particular importance during the Biden presidency, owing in part to the Times’ indefensible fixation with relentlessly promoting the Republican Party’s electoral prospects and schemes for taking power. Though the Republican Party has morphed into a political entity that is incompatible with democracy, the Times has inexplicably chosen to regard the party as a legitimate political force and continually award it friendly coverage.

Why can’t the Times say that the economy is strong?

Even though the economy is doing very well, “the downbeat framing continues” at the Times. Fallows provides a few recent examples:

There’s a positive — and I suggest more accurate — way to frame our economic stories. On August 4th, the Washington Post editorial board wrote The economy is in the midst of something wonderful (and unexpected). That something wonderful was a “workforce boom.”

That isn’t so hard.

When politicians try to frame an issue but won’t provide a straight answer, be VERY suspect

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was on Face the Nation recently and spent a great deal of time talking about the potential Third Party group No Labels. Hogan kept pushing the idea that President Biden and his policies were terrible. That’s a misleading frame, because President Biden’s policies are popular with a growing majority of Americans. Their framing also ignores the fact that the polling shows that President Biden is very popular among Democrats, with an 83% favorable, 10% unfavorable rating. But the media has forgotten that Democratic voters matter. As Heather Cox Richardson writes,

We are still getting endless stories about the Republican voter. But who are the Democratic voters? What do they want? They are, after all, a majority.

Also, Hogan refused to say who was funding the No Labels group. That lack of transparency should be a big red flag to journalists and the public. As progressive journalist Markos Moulitsas pointed out on a similar segment on Meet the Press, No Labels is “creating this idea that there’s a mythical unicorn creature that will agree with these people who want something” besides Biden/Trump. It’s a frame we shouldn’t accept.

It isn’t just the headline writers and editors who use bad frames

Reporters also play a key role in this effort. Dan Froomkin was incredulous at the lede by the Chief White House Correspondent at the Times after Donald Trump’s fourth indictment. Peter Baker began with: “Another grand jury, another indictment,” followed closely by, “The novelty of a former leader of the United States being called a felon has somehow worn off.”

Peter Baker is bored. The chief White House correspondent for the most influential news organization in the world is wearily unimpressed with all these charges against the president … To anyone who cares one whit about accountability, or democracy, there is nothing remotely routine about what’s happening, and not a damn thing has worn off.

In fact, Trump’s (first) impeachment bored him, too! … This man needs a new job.

What’s missing from the bad framing and much of the coverage about the former president is this: “Trump’s lawbreaking was so blatant, so inexcusable, so dangerous, that DOJ had no choice but to indict.” He incited a riot to overturn our election and then to top it off stole our nuclear secrets.

This shouldn’t be so difficult.

Frame the choices in a realistic way

Social Security and Medicare are beloved by many Americans, yet Republicans (most recently Chris Christie) regularly tell us that both programs will soon be bankrupt. That’s absurd in many respects.

What gets left out of the framing by the right is that our federal budget is made up of choices. And the politicians have decided that cutting the ever-growing levels of funding for the military-industrial complex should never be on the table. That’s a choice that affects every other priority.

How can we frame things in a way that unites rather than divides?

Fallows lets us see how the Times framed a recent NATO summit and then offers an alternative:

As someone noted on Twitter, suppose this headline had been reversed: “Despite Divisions, Successes at NATO Summit.” That would convey a quite different message — and, as it happens, would be more in keeping with the story itself.

We have the power to set the story in a way that unites and to reject false frames that divide. Richardson wrote in a recent newsletter, “It would be a shame if the growing legal troubles of the Trump conspirators overshadow the work of the Biden administration on the global stage this week as it seeks to counter the power and influence of China.” She then proceeded to devote the vast majority of her daily newsletter to the background history for the daily news, the work of the administration to reset American prestige abroad, and the implications of President Biden and Vice President Harris’s actions on Americans and the world.

Democracy counts on citizens knowing the facts … not just a false frame.

More to come …

DJB

Images by bluemoonjools, Kerttu and Marcelo from Pixabay

UPDATE: Peter Baker of the NYT continues to demonstrate how much he doesn’t get what’s at stake in this moment. Here’s an update from progressive journalist Laura Clawson:

House Republicans are engaging in a completely partisan, evidence-free impeachment inquiry—but Peter Baker of The New York Times wants to talk about how the White House is treating this as a political issue. And just to get this out of the way right off the bat, the paragraph count before Baker acknowledges that Republicans have no evidence against Biden is seven.

In paragraph eight, he gets around to, “The Republican investigation so far has not produced concrete evidence of a crime by the president, as even some Republicans have conceded.” Even there, the implication is that the Republican investigation has produced some evidence, and they just need to make it concrete. In reality, the Republican investigation has produced no evidence that the president has engaged in any misconduct, let alone a crime.

You’re the One

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The opening paragraph of Rhiannon Giddens website biography perfectly describes the range and force that this unique composer, musician, and historian brings to her every artistic endeavor.

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.

Rhiannon Giddens (photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

With You’re the One, Giddens has released her first album of all original material since she began her post-Carolina Chocolate Drops solo career in the 2010s. The album goes into new territory for Giddens, which is the one constant in the career of this opera-trained, black string band founder, children’s book author, and banjo playing folk music icon. Through all her work comes a deeply American sensibility that aims to recognize people and music that are often forgotten but very important to our country’s story.

You’re The One features electric and upright bass, conga, Cajun and piano accordions, guitars, a Western string section, and Miami horns, among other instruments. “I hope that people just hear American music,” Giddens says. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock — it’s all there. I like to be where it meets organically.”

Way Over Yonder is the one song on the new album that most long-time fans will recognize as coming from her early Chocolate Drops days. It’s a song about “a little bitty joint just out of town; got the best fried chicken for miles around .”

The band is tight they can really play / Would have been famous back in the day / The food is good but the liquor is better / The time flies by in the best night ever / You look at the clock and you make for the door / You should have been at work three hours ago.

Singer/songwriter Jason Isbell joins Giddens in the album’s only duet.

“Yet To Be,” the story of a black woman and an Irish man falling in love in America, is meant to channel some of the optimistic flip side of the brutal, real, and undertold history that Giddens has so effectively brought to the forefront with her work. “Here’s a place, with all its warts, where you and I could meet from different parts of the world and start a family, which is the true future,” Giddens explains. “I think so much about all of the terrible things in our past and present—but things are better than they have been in a lot of ways, and this is a song thinking about that.”

Both the video and the words grab your heart.

She was mopping the floor / He was working the bar / It was a divine collision of the human heart / It was east of her and west of him / They were wishing on the same bright star / And then the baby was a brand new start. 

In the hollow of his hand / The road is rising up to meet them

Hen in the Foxhouse changes the vibe to a feisty, funky tune where Gidden shows she’s not to be trifled with even as a woman in a man’s world. She also channels a bit of Ella Fitzgerald about midway through the song.

I’m just a hen in the foxhouse  / A pigeon set amongst the cats  / I’m just a hen in the foxhouse  / A pigeon set amongst the cats  / A sheep in wolf’s clothing  / And there ain’t no changing that. 

I met a man last Sunday / Thought he had me at hello / And wasn’t he surprised  / When I looked at him and said no  / He kept on coming at me  / The answer to his every wish / Wasn’t he surprised / when he walked into my fist. 

Here’s a live version recorded just a few days ago.

You’re The One, Giddens’ third studio solo album, was released on August 18 on Nonesuch Records. As she launched the album, she appeared on CBS Saturday Morning where she performed two songs.

Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad opens the album. This “R&B blast . . . takes a titan for inspiration.” She had listened to a bunch of Aretha Franklin, “and then turned to fellow Aretha-nut Dirk Powell and said, ‘Let’s write a song she might have sung!'”

The album’s title track was written about her children. As she notes on her website, the song was “inspired by a moment Giddens had with her son not long after he was born (he’s now ten years old, and she has a fourteen-year-old daughter as well).”

“Your life has changed forever, and you don’t know it until you’re in the middle of it and it hits you,” Giddens says. “I held his little cheek up to my face, and was just reminded, ‘Oh my God, my children—they have every bit of my heart.'”

This is a terrific new album by an artist who has proven that she’s willing to break boundaries in order to explore the past and future together. As The Bluegrass Situation notes, You’re the One is “further establishing — and complicating — her unique and indelible voice and once again highlighting the diverse and representative lineages that gave rise to all American roots music forms, with joy and love centered in every note.”

Enjoy!

More to come …

DJB

For other posts on Rhiannon Giddens on More to Come, check out:

Photo of Rhiannon Giddens by Wondrium courtesy of RhiannonGiddens.com

At the break of day

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During these final days of summer the sunlight — both at the break and at the eve of the day — is something I hold close. My early morning walks are now coinciding with sunrise. Afternoon strolls take place a little earlier each day to avoid stumbling around in darkness.

The joy and wonder of memorable sunrises and sunsets are part of the experience of travel for me. I thought it would be fun to go back to old travel posts on More to Come and bring together some memories of sunlight I’ve treasured over the years. Almost all I’ve included here were captured with an iPhone (there are a few old 35mm digital camera photos mixed in), and all are mine, with the exception of the beautiful light at the Mohonk Mountain House (taken by Claire) and the sunset over the Tappen Zee Bridge in Tarrytown, NY (taken by Andrew).

These are not the exquisite quality of a Carol Highsmith photograph, but they do capture wonder-filled memories for me. I hope you’ll find one or two to enjoy.

Sunrise on a memorable trip to the high temple mount of the late 9th century Phnom Bakheng Temple in Greater Angkor, Cambodia
Another view from the high temple mount
View through the temple
Sunrise over the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Asheville, NC
O’Donovan Rossa Bridge (1816) in Dublin just after sunrise

John Renbourn has a lovely solo acoustic guitar version of the old Irish tune which came to mind and inspired the title as I was gathering these photographs. Each verse ends with a variation of:

Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray, Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.

And now, for some wonder-filled sunsets.

Sunset along the Inside Passage in Alaska
The sun sinks low over our river home in Cambodia
The Grand Canyon glows in the late afternoon sun
Late afternoon sunlight streams through the windows at the Washington National Cathedral
Afternoon light at the National Cathedral becomes part of the 2021 Les Colomes art installation.
Sun sinking over the Dutch Caribbean at Bonaire aboard the Sea Cloud II
A spectacular view of the Mario Cuomo (Tappen Zee) bridge in 2022 (credit: Andrew Bearden Brown)
Mohonk Mountain House (credit: Claire Holsey Brown)
Patuxent River sunset
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, at Sunset

Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.

More to come …

DJB

Header photo of a sunrise over the high temple mount of the late 9th century Phnom Bakheng Temple at Greater Angkor in Cambodia by DJB

From the bookshelf: August 2023

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Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in August 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022) by Imani Perry is a revelatory journey by a Black daughter of the South that both recognizes and comes to grips with the complexity of the Southern experience, history, and culture. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, Perry grew up the daughter of Southern freedom movement leaders of the Civil Rights era and now teaches at Princeton. In South to America Perry is traveling home to “help the reader dig deep enough to discover the truth.” By reframing our understanding of the South, “we gain a more honest rendering of the country.”

Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past (2022) — edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer — tackles many of the most dangerous myths about our nation’s past. There have always been lies in our public discourse but in the introduction the editors assert that “in the last few years the floodgates have opened wide.” Yet as many of these top historians demonstrate in a series of illuminating essays, the war against truth in America has been fought over a much longer period of time. Claims about what happened in the past can be “misleading and even malignant.” And yes, historians are influenced by their context and will sometimes disagree; however, “It is quite another thing to ignore the facts altogether.”

Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey grew out of the only single-content edition of The New Yorker in the history of that publication. The initial report was serialized in some 70+ newspapers, turned into this book (never out-of-print), produced as a national radio reading, and became a touchstone for the nuclear non-proliferation movement. Hersey’s reporting was so powerful that it led the U.S. government to revise its narrative about why dropping the bomb was necessary. The author later said, “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, as much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction (2023) by Lynne Olson is the true-life story of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the remarkable French archaeologist, WWII resistance fighter, and Louvre Egyptologist who played a key role in saving the temples at Abu Simbel. After Egyptian President Nasser announced plans for the Aswan dam, Desroches-Noblecourt — the head of a UNESCO mission in Egypt — began a years-long effort to move them out of the path of the rising waters of Lake Nasser. She pulled strings, twisted arms, called in favors, and would not let the misogynistic men’s club of Egyptian archaeology stop her from achieving her goals. This one earned her the nickname “Umm Simbel” — Arabic for “Mother of Simbel.”

Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last (2020) by Wright Thompson is the story of how Julian Van Winkle III saved the bourbon business his grandfather had founded on the mission statement: “We make fine bourbon — at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon.” That grandfather was the now famous Pappy Van Winkle. In tracing the story of a grandson’s determination to resurrect his grandfather’s dream, Thompson has written a beautiful and warm reflection that goes well beyond the basic story, blending together “biography, autobiography, philosophy, Kentucky history, the story of bourbon’s origins and an insider’s look at how the Van Winkle whiskey is made and marketed.”

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John le Carré has been described as “the greatest spy novel of all time” written by “the world’s greatest fictional spymaster.” The Cold War is heating up, and the Berlin Wall has just been erected. Alec Leamas, the head of the West Berlin Station for British Intelligence, watches as his last undercover agent is shot down trying to cross that divide by East German sentries. He is recalled to London where he is given `a chance for revenge: he can assume the guise of an embittered ex-agent in order to trap the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service. At the end of a number of twists and turns Leamas has a choice to make, one where following his heart means certain death.

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

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in July of 2023 and to see the books I read in 2022. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

A date with history

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We are exactly six months away from March 4th, a significant date in U.S. history.

Until 1936, March 4th was when presidential inaugurations were held. Lawmakers chose that date because it was the one on which, in 1789, the Constitution went into effect.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains why March 4th may soon become historically significant for a new set of reasons:

After making it clear that she would run her courtroom in the interests of justice without reference to the 2024 presidential election, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has set March 4, 2024, as the start date for former president Trump’s trial on four criminal counts for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

“Overturn the results of the president election” equals “overthrow the Constitution.” The same Constitution that went into effect on March 4, 1789.

Let that sink in a bit. Irony is sometimes too wonderful for words.

Trump’s lawyers, of course, had asked for a very long lead time before the trial, setting their preferred date as April 2026. Judge Chutkan “wasn’t having any of Trump’s histrionics about the trial date,” notes former United States Attorney Joyce Vance. “And, she took his lawyer to task for inaccuracies in the arguments that were made in the pleadings,” including using one example misleadingly where SHE is overseeing the case.

Judge Chutkan was not misled, “one of the many virtues of putting experienced lawyers on the bench.”

With the trial of US vs. Donald J. Trump officially on the court’s docket, we all have time to read the indictment and educate ourselves so that we’re informed and can enter into conversations with the facts. And there will be plenty of misleading statements to sort through, including the prevalent one that the trial is about the former president’s First Amendment right to free speech. Richardson sets that straight.

Those charges are not about anything Trump said. The 45-page indictment acknowledges Trump’s right to speak about the election and even to lie that he had won, and the Department of Justice did not charge him with incitement. The indictment charges Trump with being part of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States by “using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to stop the lawful government function of determining the results of a presidential election, a second conspiracy to obstruct the lawful January 6 congressional proceeding to count and certify the results of the presidential election, and a third conspiracy to take away from other Americans “a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States — that is, the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”  

Trial docket for March 4, 2024

March 4th is also my birthday.

Next year promises to bring me a birthday like no other. Donald Trump, “who seemed to endlessly escape responsibility and accountability for even the worst misconduct while in office will face a jury of his peers on charges that he tried to steal the 2020 election.”

As someone who cares about the fragility of our democracy, I’ll take this show of strength by the rule of law as a birthday gift. Vance has added, “It’s fitting justice, even though it has taken a long time to get here.”

More to come …

DJB

UPDATE: A good friend told me that John F. Kennedy said that “March 4th is the only date that is also a command!” Another historical reference. And if you Google this on the internet, you’ll find a lot of posts like this which encourage us to use the day to do something you have always wanted to do or to do something that you know needs to be done.

“Gavel” by Andrew F. Scott is a 31 foot steel gavel and sound block located in the south reflecting pool outside the Supreme Court of Ohio. The sculpture is constructed entirely from stainless steel and it is the largest gavel in the world. Image by timokefoto from Pixabay.

Searching for the right word

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A recent lunch with a friend brought an issue that has been rummaging around in the deep recesses of my mind for years to the top of the pile. George is an avid and intelligent reader, and he includes MORE TO COME in the rotation of works he reads. He’s the best type of reader in that he talks with me about his perspective on the books, authors, and issues I discuss here.

Over our trout* he asked me, “What do you call MORE TO COME? A blog?” We then proceeded to have a discussion about how the sound of that word — blog — is just so unpleasant to the ear. It is awkward, clunky, and unappealing. It also just sounds outdated. I’ve thought about this off and on for years, but never acted on it. Until now.

Blog came, of course, from a shortening of the word weblog: a term that was coined for “a website that contains a log or diary of information, specific topics or opinions.” MTC certainly fits that description. But we can do better.

I’ve noticed that other writers on the web have also moved away from the term. Never one to be a trendsetter, it was time to finally take some action … indecisive as it may have been.

So MORE TO COME is now my newsletter. That’s the term that many writers on Substack use, and I think it fits my purpose just fine. In practical terms, all I’ve done to banish “blog” is changed my email electronic signatures to reflect the new moniker. (See, not all old-fashioned terms are bad!) I’ll also go back and update some items on the site, such as the About DJB and MORE TO COME post.

You’ll see me refer to the MTC newsletter going forward. I haven’t stopped writing and posting those thoughts online. Nothing has really changed. I’m just through with cringing when I hear the word blog!

More to come …

DJB

UPDATE: One of my regular editors saw this after it was posted. They said that while they agreed with dropping the name “blog” they weren’t sure that “newsletter” was the best new term to use. I encouraged them to give me alternative suggestions, and I’m doing the same to others if you have a perspective on this. Thanks!

*The Trout Meunière Arc-en-ciel at La Piquette is just sublime. Photo of the dining room from LaPiquette.com.

Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash

Observations from . . . August 2023

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A summary of posts included on MORE TO COME in August 2023.

For those of us in the Washington region, August largely maintains the “everyone leaves town” vibe that it has had for decades. Yes, the Washington Nationals are still here and playing well above my expectations, which is delightful. Except for the tourists, the streets and restaurants are less crowded. This year the courts remain busy … but that’s a subject for another time.

There was still much to cover in this month’s MORE TO COME newsletter, however, so let’s jump in.

OPPENHEIMER BLEW UP THE SCREEN

The film Oppenheimer was one of two big summer blockbusters. My post Genius, hubris, tragedy was the MTC blockbuster as well, topping the reader-views list for the month. After watching the movie, I went back and read John Hersey seminal Hiroshima to be reminded of the tragedy that followed the creation of the world’s first atomic bomb.

A LATE POST BECAME ANOTHER READER FAVORITE

© 2015 | Kristina Sherk Photography | http://www.Kristinasherk.com

On Sunday I posted A memorable evening of Handel with two videos of our son ― the tenor Andrew Bearden Brown ― singing at the 10th annual Handel Aria Competition where he took second prize. We are so proud of his accomplishments. I think you’ll enjoy it.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

I ended up covering a lot of ground this month. Besides Hersey’s sobering work, I also dove into the following:

  • Imani Perry’s National Book Award-winning work South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation was one of the most important and moving books I tackled in August. A revelatory journey to find the nation’s soul examines Perry’s meditation on the work to be done to gain a more honest rendering of the country.
  • Greece, Egypt, and Jordan are on my fall travel schedule for National Trust Tours. In preparation, I read Lynne Olson’s fascinating new book Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction. My review of this true-life story of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt can be found in Mother of Simbel. Added bonus: Olson includes a good bit of material about First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s role in building the historic preservation movement in the U.S.
  • The power of mythology is a story about myth that involves brown water. Perhaps over ice. Sometimes with a twist. Wright Thompson’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last was — like a fine bourbon — very satisfying.
  • For the monthly entry into my “year of reading dangerously” (i.e., murder mysteries) I dove into The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré. Yes, I am rather Late to the party in reading “the greatest spy novel of all time.”
  • The book’s title says it all. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About our Past was something I just had to read. You can see my take in The long shelf life of legends and lies.

MUSIC FOR THE (OLD AND NEW) TIMES

I had some fun with the Saturday Soundtracks in August.

  • As I read about how the former president and his loyal employees at Mar-a-Lago (aka indicted co-conspirators) were not being truthful about the locks and surveillance video in the stolen classified documents case, I was reminded of Somebody changed the locks. Dr. John knew about changed locks: “Somebody changed the lock on my door … And I know, something is definitely going on wrong.”
  • City of Gold celebrates the terrific new album by one of my favorite young bluegrass artists, Molly Tuttle. Down Home Dispensary ― co-written by Tuttle and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor ― can be easily explained with this line directed at the Tennessee legislature: “Hello legislators the voters have spoken / there’s too much politicking and not enough tokin’”
  • Sam Bush pays tribute to his musical mentor and friend, John Hartford, on Radio John. Since this was a pandemic project, it’s probably appropriate to point out that Bush is playing virtually every instrument on this album — guitar, mandolin, fiddle, bass and banjo, as well as doing the vocals. Just wow!
  • And last evening we had the second full moon in the month of August, which brought to mind the singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith’s beautiful ode to love lost, Once in a Very Blue Moon.

CHRONICLING THESE DAYS

In the midst of a lazy summer, two issues in present-day America caught my attention on MTC.

  • Authoritarians fight against modern America is as old as our nation. In Fighting the future I look at how citizens are responding to these anti-democratic moves.

And apropos of nothing other than my desire to make you smile, It was a dark and stormy night highlights the 2023 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where participants are challenged to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. You’ll groan, laugh, and perhaps cry.

CONCLUSION

Thanks, as always, for reading. As you travel life’s highways be open to love, undertake some mindful 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.

Bash into some joy along the way.

And finally, try to be nice. Always be kind.

More to come . . .

DJB

You can follow MORE TO COME by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right-hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.

For the July 2023 summary, click here.

Image by Steve Bidmead from Pixabay

The long shelf life of legends and lies

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How often have you heard that America is exceptional? Would it surprise you to know that citizens of other countries also hear that their homeland possesses desirable qualities that others lack? French nationalists “tout the elegance and sophistication of their ‘civilization.'” Serbians “have traditionally considered themselves the shield of Christianity.” Haitians take pride in being “the first country whose people freed themselves from slavery.”

Protestants coming to America in the 1600s imagined themselves as creating a new Israel. But early colonists imagined themselves as Romans “at least as often as they saw themselves as Israelites.” The people of an “endless frontier” became popular in the nineteenth century. Madeleine Albright called the U.S. “the indispensable nation” in guaranteeing global security.

Historians don’t find much about British and Japanese exceptionalism in the literature, but that “may derive simply from the fact that scholars of both countries take the exceptional status of each so utterly for granted.”

The idea of “American exceptionalism,” in other words, falls squarely into an entirely common pattern. There is nothing exceptional about it.

American exceptionalism, like so many other myths, has warped our ability to understand the past in a constructive way. In today’s age of disinformation, the line between fact and fiction has become “increasingly blurred if not completely erased.”

Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past (2022) — edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer — tackles many of the most dangerous myths about our nation’s past. There have always been lies in our public discourse but in the introduction the editors assert that “in the last few years the floodgates have opened wide.” They cite the political campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump, the creation of the conservative media ecosystem, and the “devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth” as the major causes. Yet as many of these top historians demonstrate in a series of illuminating essays, the war against truth in America has been fought over a much longer timeframe.

Claims about what happened in the past can be “misleading and even malignant.” Unfortunately for the country, the results can cause long and deep damage. Karen L. Cox writes that the evolution of the more than 150-year-old “Lost Cause” falsehood “offers proof that it was never tied to a factual history but was always about an alternate reality.”

Historians are influenced by their context and will sometimes disagree. “It is quite another thing to ignore the facts altogether.”

The historians take on myths including those around vanishing Indians, immigration, the border, family values, the impact of the New Deal, and voter fraud. Because there has been such a robust debate over “the role of slavery in America’s political development” especially out of the 1619 project, the editors turned their focus elsewhere.

While the twenty essays are not uniform in quality, all are insightful and enlightening. Several tackle myths that burrow deep into our subconscious.

  • Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar takes on the widely held belief that James Madison was the “father of the Constitution.” He argues that “The Convention that ensued (at Philadelphia) was Washington’s convention, not Madison’s; likewise, the proposed Constitution that emerged was emphatically Washington’s,” knocking down four other myths in the process, including the old chestnut that “a republic is not a democracy.”
  • Daniel Immerwahr breaks down the enduring myth that America is not an empire-building nation. Empires, of course, have territories. And as early as 1791, 45 percent of our land was composed of territories. Oklahoma (i.e., Indian Territory) was a U.S. territory for more than 100 years, longer than the French held Indochina or the Belgians held the Congo. Today we have five overseas territories, over 500 tribal nations within our boarders, hundreds of foreign bases, and the world’s largest military. Understanding that, it becomes hard to agree with those who put forward the myth that there is nothing imperial about our country.
  • Glenda Gilmore — the Peter V. & C. Vann Woodward Professor Emeritus of History at Yale — takes on another deeply held belief: while the right to protest is enshrined in the First Amendment, only a “good protest” is legal and effective. Based on the “passive resistance” of the civil rights movement that began with the Montgomery bus boycott and continued until Martin Luther King’s assassination, it suggests that if current-day supporters of issues such as Black Lives Matters do not conform to this myth of orderly marches in the face of violence, then they aren’t engaged in “good” protests. That false narrative rests on four misconceptions: “that the demonstrations from 1955 to 1968 were the first of their kind, that most Americans gave their support to the protests and their leaders, that they quickly exposed and vanquished hatred, and that they ended happily by bringing racial equality to America.” None of those are remotely true.
  • In considering the mythology around white backlashes, Lawrence Glickman notes that blaming the victims of racial discrimination for the “inevitable” response tracks a largely continuous thread across US history that ignores agency, responsibility, and causation. Backlashes are long-term political projects that should be seen as “counterrevolutions” to progress.
  • Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway join to take down the myth of the unfettered marketplace as better governance. Millions of Americans believe the best way to solve problems is to leave them to the workings of the marketplace thanks to a decades-long effort led by business leaders in the 1930s to undermine government regulation and support unfettered capitalism. They argued that any compromises to business freedom threatened the fabric of American life. That’s not remotely true either.

These and other essays in Myth America encourage Americans to “see the past closely in order to understand where we stand now and where we might go in the future.” It is a helpful guide.

More to come …

DJB

Other myth-busting books on More to Come:

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed.

Photo from Pixabay

Refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt

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August 28th is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The 1963 march is remembered today primarily because it was the occasion when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered what became known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.

As I often do on these anniversaries, I turn to our historians for their perspective.

Knowing that others would be attempting to shape their own self-serving narratives about the March, Kevin M. Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton University, wrote that with the anniversary upon us …

… we’re going to be treated to another round of comments from politicians and pundits who think that the entire event was encapsulated by the Only MLK Quote They Know™ and nothing else. I’ve already ranted about this before, on this site and elsewhere, but I’ll say one more time that all of those people need to read the rest of King’s speech, which laid out some stark criticisms of structural racism, police brutality, and endemic poverty, all issues we’re still grappling with today.

Michael Eric Dyson in his 2019 book Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, argues that America has “washed the grit from (King’s) rhetoric” in order to get to a place where he can be seen and admired by the country at large. Yet it was King who said that the country’s race problem “grows out of the … need that some people have to feel superior. A need that some people have to feel … that their white skin ordained them to be first.” Difficult words for many to hear, yet Dr. King “spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.”

King, of course, wasn’t the only speaker at the event. Far from it. Here’s a more complete list.

  • A. Philip Randolph, socialist labor leader who organized the 1941 March on Washington Movement
  • Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers
  • Archbishop Patrick O’Doyle, of the Catholic archdiocese of Washington
  • Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, National Council of Churches
  • Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress
  • Floyd McKissick, on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), read a speech written by James Farmer, who was locked up in a Louisiana jail
  • Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League
  • Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP
  • Josephine Baker, an American-born Parisian entertainer, civil rights activist, and former agent for the French Resistance
  • John Lewis, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
  • Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

The presence of A. Philip Randolph, who had organized the 1941 March to force Franklin Roosevelt to take action against discrimination in defense industries, “was a reminder of the continuities of activists engaged in a long struggle for black equality.”

The 74-year-old labor leader said. “Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.”

Some things never change.

Those Dixiecrats became Republicans, and a large majority of Republicans in public office today are reactionary, still fighting against those programs and more.

Kruse notes that Dr. Prinz, who had been forced to flee Germany in 1937 due to his early opposition to the Nazis, pointed out parallels. “Under the Hitler regime, I learned many things,” he noted. “The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not ‘the most urgent problem.’ The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence. A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder.”

The March on Washington had implications for many groups beyond Black Americans. Baker — who was called upon at the last minute to fill time while the organizers worked to edit John Lewis’s fiery speech — spoke for two minutes and had the longest speaking role of any woman.

Women were conspicuously absent from the formal program. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the lone woman on the event’s administrative committee, wrote that women “were not yet adequately included in man’s journey toward humanity.” At an after-meeting of activists, lawyer Pauli Murray delivered remarks criticizing the exclusion of women from the Lincoln Memorial program. “The group reached a consensus that future activism needed to focus on both gender and racial equality, heightening momentum for the women’s empowerment movement to come.”

Rather than a concern about how individuals thought about race, the march focused on economic discrimination and the lack of decent jobs for Black Americans. Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:

King acknowledged the economic focus of the march when he centered his speech around the idea that Black Americans had received “a promissory note” that had become “a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” “But,” he said, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

“It’s impossible,” Krause argues, “to take a complex event like the March on Washington, with multiple speeches from a varied lineup of speakers, and boil it down to one single sentence.”

“The message of the March, in the end,” Kruse asserts, “isn’t that we shouldn’t pay attention to race.”

No, the consistent message of the March was that in our present moment — in 1963, but 2023 too — all Americans needed to understand that their fates and fortunes are thoroughly intertwined with those of the most marginalized and powerless in the nation, that they had to work together in common cause and demand their representatives in Washington truly represent their needs and address them directly.

As the Reverend Dr. King’s son Martin Luther King III said on Saturday during a commemoration of the March, the message is about Americans. “It’s about creating a climate for America to fulfill its true promise for all of its citizens.”

More to come …

DJB

UPDATE: Distinguished historian Eric Foner had a timely and important article on the March at 60 in The Nation, which is worth your time.

Images of the March on Washington by Library of Congress from Unsplash.