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The hero of my own story

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To get an early start on the celebration of Black History Month, I’ll use this Saturday Soundtrack to highlight an Americana, roots, and jazz-influenced musician who is working to be “the hero of my own story.”

Allison Russell — singer, songwriter, poet, and activist — has come through grief, abuse, and despair. “Some of us come, later in life, to find our knees; while others slip young into trauma like a quarry stone gone under, held down by the weight of their own world.” As an abused child she grew into the “brave woman and fierce artist she would become — surviving being one of only two options, and not the most likely.”

Born and raised in Montreal, Russell “imbues her music with the colors of her city — the light, the landscape, the language — but also the trauma that she suffered there.” That music includes both heartbreaking reflection and a powerful reclamation — “asserted from a place of healing, of motherhood, of partnership — and from a new home made in Nashville.” 

In 2022, the Grammy-nominated Russell and Grammy Award-winning Brandi Carlile released a new song together, You’re Not Alone. A version of the song originally appeared on the acclaimed 2019 debut album by Our Native Daughters, a group that features Russell along with MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Amythyst Kiah.

Billboard wrote the following about Russell and Carlile’s performance at the 2022 Americana Music Association Awards.

One of the evening’s most orotund, soul-elevating moments was undoubtedly Russell and Carlile teaming for “You’re Not Alone,” supported by a group of ace musicians.

“Our circle is unbroken. Our circle is whole. None above, none below, all of us equal under the listening sky,” Russell said, a joyous summation of the love in the room that evening.

In addition to performing her new song, Russell also received Album of the Year honors at that awards show for Outside Child, which was produced by guitarist Dan Knobler.

Outside Child is an honest, sometimes raw attempt to tell her story and its ongoing evolution. Part of that story is a childhood of abuse.

When I first went to live with my mother and her new husband, my adoptive father, after the foster home in Verdun — it was in a flat above an audiologist’s shop on Rue St. Catherine in Westmount. He worked for the audiologist and we got subsidized rent. It was there that the abuse began. I was 5. Westmount is a wealthy enclave – and though we were very poor — even the food banks were richer there. And there was the Park. I spent as much time as I could in that Park — to get away from him.

The song 4th Day Prayer from that album references Westmount Park and its meaning to her through the trauma and the reclamation.

One for the hate that loops and loops | Two for the poison at the roots | Three for the children breaking through | Four for the day we’re standing in the sun.

Outside Child has been nominated for 18 awards including three Grammy Awards. In the video notes to Nightflyer, Russell writes that she read The Thunder: Perfect Mind for the first time when she was sixteen.

It’s an exhortatory poem discovered among the Gnostic manuscripts in the Nag Hammadi library in the 40’s. It has never left me. I’ve been meditating on the nature of resilience, endurance, and grace more deeply since becoming a mother. I was trying to bridge the divide and embrace shame and my inner divinity equally with this piece…”

To get a longer introduction to Russell’s music today, enjoy this 2022 Tiny Desk Concert, which opens with her “invocation of the ancestors” in Quasheba, followed by live versions of the three songs featured above.

I first discovered Russell through the group Birds of Chicago, which she and her husband formed in 2012. One reviewer noted that “Birds’ shows attract a mix of indy rockers, jam-kids and Americana/roots lovers, mixing moments of hushed attention with wild, rock and soul abandon.” Here the Birds perform 2016’s Real Midnight.

Russell is a much in-demand collaborator on the Americana/roots/alt country scene. We’ll capture that part of her current work with three songs: the first Black Myself with Our Native Daughters, followed by Georgia Rise with Margo Price, Sheryl Crow, and Brittney Spencer at Farm Aid 2022 in Raleigh, NC, and a nice Margo Price interpretation of the Beatles tune Help, where she joins Price along with Adia Victoria, Kam Franklin, and Kyshona Armstrong.

Singer-songwriter Joe Henry describes Russell’s music as,

(A) triumph: a courageous work ––burnished and bright; unspeakably beautiful as she sings the unspeakable.

Above all, it is an act of remarkable generosity: a cathartic, soulful, buoyant and redeeming gift to us all and, one must believe, to herself as well.

Enjoy the gift.

More to come…

DJB

Press photo of Allison Russell credit Marc Baptiste

Protecting the pearl of the Black Sea

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The historic center of Odesa, the Ukranian city known as the pearl of the Black Sea, was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List on Wednesday. This recognition by the United Nations’ cultural agency was taken at a time when the port city remains under threat from Russia’s invasion of the country.

The UN statement says that it is now “the duty of all humanity” to protect it.

In 2006, I had an unforgettable and life-enriching trip when I visited Odesa (also spelled Odessa), Yalta, Sevastopol, the Ukrainian countryside, the painted churches of Romania, Istanbul, and more on a National Trust Tour. The mix of history and present-day world politics was laid before us, in the places we visited and in the analysis provided by Ambassador Jack Matlock, the U.S. government’s representative at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We climbed the famous “Primorsky Stairs” — better known as the “Potemkin Stairs” (or Odessa Steps) in honor of its significance in cinema history — and walked the streets of the historic city. I made life-long friends among those who joined the tour and came away with a much deeper appreciation for the country’s history and its struggle for independence.

Odesa’s monumental Potemkin Stairs, immortalized in “The Battleship Potemkin,” lead down to the waterfront with its Vorontsov Lighthouse.
A 2006 street scene in Odesa

As my dear friend, INTO Secretary-General Catherine Leonard, wrote upon hearing the outcome of the group’s meeting in Paris, the UNESCO recognition is…

Such uplifting news — and a reminder of the importance of global cooperation. Designation as a World Heritage Site recognises Odesa’s universal value and the duty of all to protect it.

UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay also spoke to the global cooperation that will be necessary to save this cultural landmark in a statement:

As the war continues, this inscription embodies our collective determination to ensure that this city, which has always risen from the heartbreak of the world, is preserved from further destruction.

Earlier this week, distinguished professor Timothy Snyder posted the insightful essay Why the world needs Ukrainian victory in his Substack newsletter. I encourage you to click through and read the entire post.

His list of fifteen reasons begins with one of the most important:

1.  To halt atrocity.  Russia’s occupation is genocidal.  Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.

Several of Snyder’s reasons leap off the page in their urgency, while others are more subtle, yet nonetheless crucial to the defense of democracy and the rule of law.

3.  To end an era of empire.  This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist.  But this turning point is reached only if Russia loses. …

7.  To remind us that democracy is the better system.  Ukrainians have internalized the idea that they choose their own leaders.  In taking risks to protect their democracy, they remind us that we all must act to protect ours. …

13.  To guarantee food supplies and prevent future starvation.  Ukraine feeds much of the world.  Russia threatens to use that food as a weapon.  As one Russian propagandist put it, “starvation is our only hope.”  …

15.  To affirm the value of freedom.  Even as they have every reason to define freedom as against something — Russian occupation –, Ukrainians remind us that freedom is actually for something, the right to be the people they wish to be, in a future they can help shape.

Snyder ends with a powerful two paragraphs that should be amplified whenever possible. His core message: we have a real chance to turn this century around … if only we help Ukraine win.

I am a historian of political atrocity, and for me personally number 1 — defeating an ongoing genocidal project — would be more than enough reason to want Ukrainian victory.  But every single one of the other fourteen is hugely significant.  Each presents the kind of opportunity that generations of policy planners wish for, but almost never get.  Much has been done, we have not yet seen and seized the moment.

This is a once-in-lifetime conjuncture, not to be wasted.  The Ukrainians have given us a chance to turn this century around, a chance for freedom and security that we could not have achieved by our own efforts, no matter who we happen to be.  All we have to do is help them win.

More to come…

DJB

Image of Odesa’s Opera Theatre building taken by DJB in 2006.

Bringing a sense of order and clarity in a chaotic world

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If you are of a certain age, you will recall the fascination of flipping through a series of 3 X 5-inch cards looking for just the right book to read in the car on a family road trip. Or to help with that term paper due next week. Or simply to find the author who let you know that at least one other person understood what it meant to be a bookish, sometimes lonely pre-teen with nerdy-looking glasses and a cowlick.

The card catalog, wrote celebrated author of The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, was the “rabbit hole” for generations of children who were searching for their next adventure. Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx remembers the “serendipitous discovery and the thrill of the chase” that came when one flipped through card-after-card in those beautiful oak drawers.

When asked to write an inscription on one of the cards for a library display, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins jotted a poem: “I love card catalogues / but I only wish / my cards were more dog eared!”

The Card Catalog
The Card Catalog

These remembrances are included in The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (2017) by The Library of Congress. Featuring more than 200 images of original catalog cards, first edition book covers, and photographs from the Library’s archives, the book is a love letter to this artifact from an earlier time as well as an “ode to the enduring magic and importance of books.”

The story begins at the Library of Alexandria. When Alexander the Great founded the greatest library of antiquity and his monument to Greek cultural supremacy, his librarians were faced with the challenge of cataloging the scrolls then in use, scrolls with no title page, table of contents, or index. Alexander’s first librarian, Zenodotus, attempted to organize the collection, affixing a tag to each scroll indicating the author, title, and subject. He then compiled his Pinakes, or Tables of Those Who Were Outstanding in Every Phase of Culture and Their Writings. The cornerstone of library cataloging was laid there beside the Nile.

Over time the story moves through Benjamin Franklin, the founder of America’s first public lending library, and Thomas Jefferson, whose book collection famously came to serve as the basis of the Library of Congress (LOC) collection after the British burned the Capitol — and its fledgling library — in 1812. Jefferson’s system of cataloging his books relied on the earlier work of Sir Francis Bacon, and it was a variant of that catalog that the LOC adopted for the first half of the 19th century. But this 18th century organization scheme wasn’t working, leading many university and city libraries to begin developing systems of their own.

The first librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles Coffin Jewett, stepped into the breech when he proposed a “National Union Catalog” with the Smithsonian as the national library. Jewett was prescient and many of his ideas were ultimately adopted, but he also ruffled feathers, leading to his dismissal. Most of us remember Melvil Dewey, widely recognized as the father of modern librarianship with a classification system that bears his name, as the inventor of the card catalog. Dewey also had a difficult personality which finally caught up to him in 2019, when the council of the American Library Association voted to strip Dewey’s name from its highest award, the Melvil Dewey Medal, citing his history of racism, anti-Semitism and sexual harassment.

The Card Catalog demonstrates that there were a number of cooks in this kitchen, leading the LOC — now at the turn-of-the-century under the direction of Herbert Putnam — to become the nation’s standard-bearer for the classification system we knew throughout the 20th century. This work goes into the detail of how the classification system and cards became standardized, with LOC printing cards for national distribution. When many of us entered libraries anywhere in the U.S. through most of the 1900s, we encountered standardized cards that told volumes in just a few words. This richly illustrated work includes beautiful images not only of rare and well-known books, but of their LOC cards, many with handwritten inscriptions added by those who sought to bring order and clarity to a chaotic world.

This book first came to my attention when my brother Steve sent a link to a 2017 review along with a note to the family.

This story took me back to all those days in libraries…. I spent lots of time at the one in Cookeville where Mom was a one-woman staff for a long time. I would help bind books, glue return card pockets, and watch her type cards for the ubiquitous card catalog. I loved all that. Now I read on my pad and search online, rarely going to an actual library except to find a book old enough to not be available digitally. This article reminded me of how much I’ve lost, and how much I miss Mom.

In the Washington Post review, Michael Lindgren spoke for many who relished this part of the reading experience as he praised the beautifully produced, intelligently written and lavishly illustrated book. “It also sent me into a week-long depression. If you are a book lover of a certain age, it might do the same to you.”

I didn’t go into a depression, but it certainly called up many memories. And I came away agreeing with Constance Grady in Vox that “The Card Catalog makes a persuasive case that cataloging knowledge is fundamental to the acquisition and spread of knowledge.” In some ways it is a basic necessity of civilization.

At a time when libraries and librarians are under attack by the foes of democracy, we should all know the important role they have played, and will continue to play, in educating an informed citizenry. There are books about that. Just look it up!

More to come…

DJB

This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image of card catalog by Viktor Von from Pixabay

Life is what happens as we’re working towards perfection

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It’s January — that dreaded season when the wellness, diet, and personal improvement industries kick into high gear to convince us that we can be perfected. Yes, we may have slipped over the holidays, but the new year promises that if we only “organize ourselves, heal ourselves, budget ourselves, love ourselves, and eat well enough” we can make ourselves whole.

Oh, and did I mention that pigs can fly?

In America, it isn’t only the secular con men you have to avoid. Many of the successful megachurches are led by proponents of the “prosperity gospel” who suggest that virtue and success go hand-in-hand.

In the midst of all this deceit, we need a reminder that it is much easier to count items — calories, experiences on a bucket list, acquisitions, college degrees, church memberships — than to know what counts.

Here’s a good reminder: No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (2021) by Kate Bowler explores how to handle the life you’re given instead of something from an unattainable dream. The toxic positivity of the current advice and prosperity industry — which encourages us to “seize the day, live in the present, work on a bucket list” — asks us to ignore our humanness. Bowler makes the direct, honest, and humorous case that this is bunk.

An associate professor of the history of American Christianity at Duke Divinity School whose personal field of study is the prosperity gospel, Bowler writes that the sustaining myth of the American Dream “rests on a hearty can-do spirit surmounting all obstacles.” But not all problems can be overcome.

Her journey begins in this memoir with the discovery of stage-four colon cancer and her immediate thought that she can’t die, because she’s only thirty-five, has just had a son, and has her dream academic job. Her extended family — where there are a number of Mennonites bringing their propensity for overwork, pacifism, simplicity, “and the foreboding sense that God is very disappointed by naps” — comes to help. There are months-and-months of painful clinical trials, which she later comes to realize puts her and others — who want to live as desperately as she does but are unknowingly added to the control group that isn’t treated — in the position of lab rats. She gets a misdiagnosis and fumes at the impersonal nature of what Natalie Goldberg calls the “cancer-industrial complex.”

While on a visit to the Grand Canyon, she comes upon a small, rural chapel, where she sees walls covered with words.

I miss you every day.

Please let my daughter be the way she was before.

Did you make it to heaven, my love?

Helen, I am weak. But you already knew that.

There are hundreds of slips of paper stuffed into the rafters and seams in the wall written by people undone by life’s tragedies. “People just like me,” Bowler says in a Ted Talk, “who were stumbling around in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.” Her husband, Toban, comes into the space and together they take in the enormity of the need and hurt.

Finally Toban says, “I used to think we were the only ones.”

“Me too,” she agrees.

Bowler’s honest, courageous, and humorous take on what it means to be human is deeply spiritual without being overtly religious. She is examining in a very accessible way how she’s come to terms with her new reality, its limitations, and the knowledge that, actually, not all things are possible.

“Nothing,” she writes, “will exempt me from the pain of being human.”

“Behind a lot of her work is a prophetic critique of American consumerist culture, of American fantasies and our sense of exceptionalism,” her friend, the retired United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, told the Washington Post. “She’s a well-formed Christian in the Mennonite tradition who responds to pain and difficulty and challenges differently than others and she’s so successful at communicating that.”

There are wonderful echoes of, and links to, Natalie Goldberg’s story of surviving cancer as told in her powerful memoir-as-meditation Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home as well as Kathryn Schulz‘s tender Lost & Found. Like Goldberg, Bowler ponders how even long-time friends seem to move along emotionally, either because they are busy with their routines, or, as Goldberg suggests, they don’t know (really know) that they will die. Like Schulz, she sees the balance between good and bad that makes up the world, what Schulz describes as “life is and.” Bowler says in her Ted Talk that “I see that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, gorgeous and tragic. I can’t reconcile the contradiction, except that I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out.”

Life will break your heart. Life may take everything you have and everything you’ve hoped for. But there is one gratifying truth I believe in: I believe that in the darkness, even there, there will be beauty and there will be love. And every now and then, it will feel more than enough.

At the end of this lyrical memoir, Bowler takes a trip to see the Batalha Monastery in Portugal where the Unfinished Chapels, commissioned by King Duarte in 1434, stand with ornate walls and windows, but no ceiling. The project was abandoned and never finished. Bowler meets an old man on-site who asks her excitedly,

Don’t you see? It’s us! I can’t imagine a more perfect expression of this life. We’re never done, dear. Even when we’re done, we’re never done.”

Bowler muses, “We do too much, never enough, and are done before we’ve even started.”

Then, with truths we need to hear, she ends with the observation, “It’s better this way.”

More to come…

DJB

Photo of the Unfinished Chapel by Antonio Sessa on Unsplash

The past and future of one weird rodent

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When we imagine streams in North America, “chances are we envision water rippling over stones as it follows a groove.”

While an accurate description, it is also a sign of an unhealthy riverine system.

For that is a stream without beavers.

Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America (2022) by Leila Philip is a fascinating look at the one animal, besides humans, that has an inordinate impact on their environment. “Only beavers and humans dramatically alter the landscape to create the environment they need (or want).” Philip came to her fascination with the weird rodent that scientists dub “ecosystem engineers” when she discovered a group of beavers in a pond near her home in Connecticut. Day after day she would visit the pond with her dog and observe them as they worked tirelessly to shape the environment that they wanted. When they disappeared, she was crushed by the loss and became determined to find out more about these creatures. We are all the richer for her exploration.

Philip is a delightful storyteller, blending history and science in a way that brings both to life. She quickly makes it clear how important beavers are to a healthy environment. Wetlands are “a soup of life,” and water from beaver-altered streams and wetlands “has been measured to contain fifteen times more plankton and other microbial life than wetlands without beavers.” All kinds of animals visit beaver ponds, building a rich tapestry of biodiversity.

Under Philip’s guidance we learn how John Jacob Astor, arriving as a young immigrant from Germany with the clothes on his back and little else, bought and sold beaver pelt to satisfy Europe’s craving for beaver hats, building a monopoly in the fur trade and becoming America’s first multimillionaire in the process. One of the more delightfully titled books in the growing genre of pro-beaver literature of which Beaverland is only the most recent example is aptly named Once They Were Hats.

Philip takes us on the trapline of a local New England animal trapper and then to fur sales in the U.S. and Canada to help understand the perspective of those who still legally trap, skin, and sell beaver skins. She then moves into explorations of the lives and eccentricities of earlier writers obsessed with nature’s engineers, none more so than Dorothy Richards — the “Beaver Lady” — who established a sanctuary around her home in Little Falls, New York, named Beaversprite. Richards is best known for allowing beavers to live in her house, up to 14 at one time, and being photographed with one of her favorites at a dining room table set with tablecloth and china. But Richards and others kept the story and hope of beavers alive in a time when they were generally seen as nuisances to be exterminated.

It is the chapters with scientists and conservationists that turn Beaverland from mere interesting story to a serious call to consider the opportunity offered by the animal’s role in helping rebuild our broken environment. She tells us that before colonization there were somewhere between 60 million and 400 million beavers in North America. The forests were still being shaped by beavers and the continent was known as Beaverland. Now the estimates are around 6 million in existence in the U.S. and Canada. She shows how beavers exhibit geospatial understanding that allows them to build efficiently and effectively to achieve their purpose, which is to create large, complex water environments where many species can thrive.

Rivers are the hydraulic system that keeps everything on earth alive, and the systems beavers build work with the natural desire of streams of water to shift and change. Which is why if you see water rippling off stones as it trips down a groove, you can know that beavers are not around. Waterways engineered by beavers include ponds, meadows (with water just below the surface), dams (lots of dams), canals between ponds, and so much more. Oh, and engineers in Milwaukee found that beavers can create water storage at least 100 times cheaper than an engineering project. The head of Ecotone, Inc. is quoted by Philip as saying that a project they built for more than $1 million could have been built by beavers for zero dollars…if the client had allowed them to use their preferred approach.

Philip is in the pro-beaver camp but she also covers a number of issues from those who continue to see the animals primarily as a nuisance that cause flooding and cut down trees (very efficiently it turns out) to those who believe in some utopian vision of nature where dams don’t exist. And she quotes scientists, conservationists, and engineers who believe almost all the problems that those who push back against the reintroduction of beavers can — and have, in fact — been solved…except for that one problem of large engineering and wetland restoration contractors losing very lucrative contracts.

In the chapter entitled Thinking Like a Watershed, Philip quotes Scott McGill, founder of the visionary environmental restoration company Ecotone whose work is primarily focused on the massive Chesapeake Bay watershed. Proud to be known as the “beaver whisperer,” McGill thinks it is a tragedy that beavers “are part of our history, but not part of our culture.” As Philip shows in this terrific work, we need to work quickly to right that wrong, while we still have time.

More to come…

DJB

This Weekly Reader features Beaverland, which joins a series of mind-expanding and life-enriching books I’ve read over the past few years to help me understand more of the effects of climate change, the deep damage that has come from man’s impact on the earth, and some of the nature-based historical solutions that exist. Books such as

Image by Graham Hobster from Pixabay

The enduring nature of America’s original sin

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The time was just after the 2016 election. I was attending a conference where white progressives were apoplectic in their concern over what the country had just done in electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Two older African American friends, both giants in our field, had a less emotional reaction.

They were, of course, concerned about what was to come. But they were not in the least bit surprised at the white community’s feeling of doom and subsequent backlash against the election of the nation’s first African American president. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacy we celebrate this weekend, 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.”*

The families and ancestors of my two friends had always dealt with adversity in this land of opportunity. It went along with being black in America. They never gave up hope, but they also never sugar-coated the past or expressed giddy optimism about a post-racial future. If they moved forward and kept working in the midst of the sustained historical oppression they faced, then their unspoken message to the white progressives was that persevering was the least we could do from our positions of privilege.

I thought about that moment as well as Dr. King’s never-ending fight for justice as I read The Cruelty is the Point: Why Trump’s America Endures (2022) by journalist Adam Serwer. The past, present, and future of Trump’s America was the original subtitle, because this book is not just about 2016-2021. Instead, Serwer, a biracial Jewish American, takes the reader back through the unvarnished history that made Donald Trump and today’s cruelty possible while looking ahead at where we may go as a nation.

This is a hard book, almost dark at times, that highlights the challenges and failures to live up to our ideals at least as much as it celebrates the progress that has been made. And that’s probably as it should be. An 1894 quote from journalist Ida B. Wells opens the work and sets forward Serwer’s key thesis of the wide gap between our belief in the ideals of racial equality and our support for policies and actions that would put it into practice.

The negro still hopes that some day the United States will become as great intellectually and morally as she is materially, to protect and honor all her citizens regardless of “race, color, or previous condition,” and thus make her professions a living reality.

Many on the right push back against this perspective. While the mainstream media dismisses claims of widespread racism among Trump’s supporters, Serwer notes, “Millions of people of color in the United States live a reality that many white Americans find unfathomable; the unfathomable is not the impossible.”

Fourteen essays that were originally published in The Atlantic, each with a new introduction, make up this powerful book that calls us to remember the history that really happened in place of the one we tell ourselves happened.

Serwer repeatedly shows how white Americans have professed a belief in racial equality while pointedly declining to put the necessary laws and policies in place to see it to fruition, what the social scientists call the “principle-implementation gap.” Perhaps most disturbingly for white readers, he demonstrates time after time how cruelty and violence have been the chosen tools for maintaining our place on the top rung of society’s ladder.

The most-read piece he’s ever written gave the book its name. It was conceived in 2018 after he “saw the President of the United States use a woman who had come forward with an allegation of sexual assault as a laugh line.” Serwer writes that it took him time to wrap his head around the fact that “the president enjoyed hurting people in ways large and small, and that many of his supporters enjoyed it when he hurt people.” As Serwer says many times throughout this book, this is not simply an ethos but a policy decision.

He writes about the pictures and postcards showing grinning white men standing around the half-naked and mutilated bodies of lynching victims in the 20th century and ties that to the spectacle of cruel laughter heard throughout the Trump era. Taking joy in suffering is “more human that most would like to admit,” asserts Serwer.

And it isn’t incoherent.

It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law and, if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim.

White vigilantes burn down the black newspaper in Wilmington, NC, during the 1898 race riots (public domain)

Serwer’s essays on Reconstruction’s real history, including how democratically elected multi-racial governments were violently overthrown with the acquiescence of white Northerners, set the stage for Trump and January 6th. His examinations of the relationships between blacks and Jews are educational and enlightening. He hammers home the many lies we tell ourselves as a country to continue to support a white, male hierarchy.

At the center of today’s history is the former president.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men; and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty.

This cruelty has been around long before Trump. Serwer asserts it will continue to exist in some form well into the future until that time that America comes to support the policies that would protect those Trump and his supporters hate and fear: “immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”

More to come…

DJB

*I recommend Heather Cox Richardson‘s letter on the heroism of Dr. King as well as Hajar Yazdiha writing about conservative revisionism of Dr. King’s words and life work.

(Image: During the Tulsa race riots in 1921, more than 1,200 black businesses and homes were destroyed at the hands of white residents. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Feels like freedom

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Singer-songwriter Ruthie Foster has a voice that can bring down the house, “coupled with a songwriting ability that cuts straight to the truth of life’s big issues.” With her Texas blues-Americana sound, the Austin-based Foster has flown under the radar for many years, but with a string of Grammy nominations and a new album, she’s continuing to inspire fans old and new.

Ruthie Foster (credit: RuthieFoster.com)

I’m featuring Foster on the Saturday Soundtrack for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend as she is one of today’s bright stars still building on the traditions of gospel, soul, blues and folk music that fueled the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The MLK holiday is always a good time to think back and look forward.

The Grammy-nominated 2020 album Ruthie Foster’s Big Band Live at the Parmount is a great place to jump into Foster’s more recent work and begin the weekend.

Woke Up This Morning, a freedom song created in 1961 from the old gospel favorite I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus, is one of many similar tunes used during the civil-rights movement. The song was written by The Rev. Robert Wesby of Aurora, Illinois, who sang it in the Hinds County, Mississippi, jail after his arrest and incarceration during the Freedom Rides. Foster takes us to church and to the streets with her powerful version.

Joy Comes Back, which Foster recorded in 2017, is a song by the Staple Singers, who first came to prominence in the civil-rights era. Here are two versions, the first a simple arrangement where her powerful voice rises and falls over an acoustic guitar. Then Joy Comes Back gets the big band treatment from the Paramount performance. Both are superb.

Two additional performances from the Paramount session harken back to the gospel roots that were so important to the music of the movement. Death Came a Knockin’ is one powerful arrangement, with a wild guitar solo stuck in the middle for good measure. Better lace up those shoes! Brand New Day is a Foster original that draws on the gospel sound (and includes an intro from her daughter).

Healing Time is Foster’s newest album, and it seems appropriate after all the trials the nation has gone through over the last several years. This is what she does as an artist.

“I hear fans tell me that the music we make is very spiritually healing,” she says. “The experience of dealing with my own grief after losing a band member a year before the pandemic while navigating around zoom school with my daughter and trying to figure out what to do with myself was tough but necessary. When I look at it as a whole it was all very healing for me which is pretty much how I try to live my life. There’s always time for healing, if you give it time.”

Feels Like Freedom by songwriters Adrianne Gonzalez and Joanna Jones is from the new album.

The sun is comin’ up again
Those winds of change are blowin’ in I know
Yes, I know
It feels like freedom

Been a long and lonely road
But I’m finally comin’ home And oh
Oh yeah
It feels like freedom

The album’s “burst-of-sunshine” title track really rocks while Don’t Want to Give up on You is also a song of commitment and healing from the new album.

Healing Time is ultimately a work that explores such extremes as being human often brings to the surface, reminding listeners that even when we feel like we’re at the top, we’re ultimately still finding our way—a beautiful reflection of the essence of living itself.

Ruthie Foster is also a unique interpreter of well-known songs by other iconic songwriters. Here are four examples: Ring of Fire, the Johnny Cash hit, written by June Carter Cash and Merle Kilgore; Chris Stapleton‘s What are you listening to; Use Me from that leader of the progressive-soul movement Bill Withers; and Stephen Foster‘s Oh Susannah.

I first heard Foster in her duet with Bonnie Raitt on the John Prine tune Angel from Montgomery. Prine wrote this as a 21-year-old and Raitt has been singing the hell out of it for almost half a century. Here she does it “for Molly Ivins, for Ann Richards.”

Foster takes a verse at the 2:50 mark and then adds beautiful harmony — all without ever rehearsing with Raitt or the band. Because, as Bonnie says, “that woman right there’s got the stuff!” Listen to Foster sing the line, “How the hell can a person, go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?” and understand that she connects on so many levels to the blues in this folk classic.

Perfect.

Enjoy the music of Ruthie Foster as you remember the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this weekend.

More to come…

DJB

For other MLK Weekend Saturday Soundtracks see Mavis Staples (2020); I’m on my way (2021); and Live, learn, listen, laugh, love (2022).

Image of freedom singers from the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

In some cases, it is obvious who committed the crime

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I am getting my plot lines and characters mixed up as I binge watch the most recent season of Shetland while reading Agatha Christie.

Blame it on the pandemic.

Not being a big puzzle-person, I was never a fan of murder mysteries. Oh, there was the occasional game of Clue where you move around the board and collect information, all so the winner can eventually identify the killer, the place, and the weapon: “I suspect Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick.” However, I seldom paid attention to detective stories or murder mysteries. Until 2020.

The pandemic affected all of us in various ways, and one of our earliest responses to lockdown was to binge watch British murder mysteries on PBS. In no time at all we were immersed in priest detectives (Father Brown, Grantchester) and female detectives (Miss Fisher, Miss Scarlet & the Duke, Frankie Drake), all playing against cultural norms for their eras. We also sampled others from the genre. It was a small leap to books of crime stories and murder mysteries and last year I stuck my toe in the water, reading Raven Black and Lemon.

Then at Thanksgiving, our friend Oakley Pearson gave our puzzle-loving son Andrew an entire box of Agatha Christie mysteries. I dove in and decided to read at least one murder mystery a month, my self-proclaimed year of reading dangerously. It seemed appropriate, given the national discussions of 2023.

Which is how I came to devour the classic Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None (1939) last week.

What do you say about the best-selling crime novel of all time, and the book that made Christie the best-selling novelist of all time (her books trail only the Bible and Shakespeare in sales)? Not much, other than to suggest that even if you’ve read it before and know the general story line, it holds up on repeated readings.

The plot is a delicious puzzle that begins as ten strangers arrive on an island invited by the mysterious U.N. Owen (or is that UNKNOWN). Each — including a reckless playboy, a troubled doctor, an elderly yet formidable judge, a detective, an unscrupulous mercenary, a God-fearing spinster, two servants, a highly decorated general, and an anxious secretary — has a dark secret and a crime to hide. One by one they are picked off, with copies of an ominous nursery rhyme hanging in each room suggesting the awful fates of those who are left. There is no one else on the island, so who, exactly, is the murderer?

In 1972, Agatha Christie was asked to name her top ten books. The response as to the top choice is telling but not surprising:

And Then There Were None — a difficult technique which was a challenge and so I enjoyed it, and I think dealt with it satisfactorily.

One reason that Christie’s famous novel works is the focus on accountability for unsolved crimes. That makes crime novels perfect reading given the landscape we face in 2023.

Accountability — if we are fortunate — will be an important theme this year.

Not all blockbuster crime stories are fiction, of course. Many are based on true cases. With that in mind, one other book I’ll be reading may end up being the most influential work of the genre: Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

For those who don’t want to wade through 800+ pages, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance has prepared a useful summary to help readers understand the report, with comments around accountability, transcripts, and witness tampering. And distinguished historian Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) has helpfully listed the key facts arising from the report, including the damning 15th and last in his list:

Even had Trump believed that he had won the 2020 election, which he did not, his coup attempt would remain a coup attempt, and his crimes would remain crimes. 

All of a sudden it hit me. The January 6th’s committee report, organized as a narrative to address each major step that eventually led to the attack, makes the compelling case that the crimes — including the killing of Capitol police officers — were led by the lifetime con man, while he was in the Oval Office, using his bully pulpit.

The old Clue structure works pretty well in this instance.

We’re going to be dealing with the implications of these crimes well beyond 2023. Might as well read up and get ready for it.

More to come…

DJB

This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Photo of Agatha Christie novels by Jeremy Horvatin on Unsplash. Photo of U.S. Capitol from Pixabay.

I love the pithy proverb – Volume 7

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My love for the short and to-the-point adage comes from my grandmother, who died 42 years ago on this week. Known to favor sayings such as “The graveyard is full of folks who thought the world couldn’t get along without them,” Grandmother Brown had a big influence on my life as well as my love for words.

Late in 2019, a series of pithy proverbs — those bursts of truth in 20 words or so — debuted on the blog and were brought together in a post entitled More to Consider.* Four years later I’m still at it. Let’s look at I love the pithy proverb — Volume 7 to see what made it to the More to Consider segment over the past six months.

Remember what’s really important

Omaha Beach, Normandy
Omaha Beach, Normandy

The horrific and life-threatening injury to pro-football player Damar Hamlin last week pointed to the many problems plaguing today’s NFL, not the least of which is that the NFL apparently wanted to restart the game after a five-minute break but was stopped by players acting in solidarity.

I don’t watch pro football (see here, here, and here). Nonetheless, it is a good time to for all of us to recall the great reminder from longtime Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy:

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

Marv Levy

Look to the past to understand the present and build a better future

David McCullough at work from his Facebook page.

Besides a fondness for words, Grandmother nurtured my love of history and reading. She would have agreed with David McCullough — the esteemed historian who died in August — on why history is important.

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

David McCullough

Not all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers.

Harry S Truman

Of course, not every story in our memory — especially those we tell on ourselves — is historic. Or even true!

Some of those stories might be true, but most of them probably aren’t. I get better every year. That’s the one good part about getting old.

Football legend Otto Graham

Do what you say and love what you do

Tool by free pictures from Pixabay

Many people — obscure and famous alike — have commented on the importance of a meaningful vocation in our lives.

What one does is what counts, not what one had the intention of doing.

Pablo Picasso

It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.

Joseph R. Biden, Sr., father to President Joe Biden

A vocation is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations.

David Whyte

Our human task is to acknowledge the fullness of things

This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324, captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: (NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

The fullness of life is something that philosophers, theologians, and queens (apparently) think about all the time.

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

We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.

An Aboriginal proverb quoted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2011

Life is about discovering the right questions more than having the right answers.

Richard Rohr

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Crossed fingers by Peter Timmerhuse at Pixabay

Maya Angelou famously suggested that people will show us who they are, if we only pay attention. In today’s world we have seen too many on the political right who are showing us again-and-again that they simply don’t want to try and understand the truth, whether it be because of power, money, fear, or the convenience of a crutch.

There is none so blind as those who will not see.

John Heywood

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

Upton Sinclair

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

[Humanity’s] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but [humanity’s] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Reinhold Niebuhr

There is a better way. The late Senator Paul Wellstone lived his life showing us of his belief in the power of democracy to support the common good.

We all do better when we all do better.

Paul Wellstone

An attitude of gratitude

Grandmother and Granddaddy Brown on their wedding day (Brown family archives)

Grandmother believed in saying thank you, as it helped instill an attitude of gratitude, understanding that we all depend on others. And as a Bible-believing Baptist, she certainly quoted Jesus of Nazareth just about every day.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jesus of Nazareth

Gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of all others.

Cicero

I’ll leave you with my personal pithy proverb, which is life rule #1:

Be grateful. Be thankful. Be compassionate. Every day.

More to come…

DJB

*To capture some of my favorite sayings I created a feature on More to Come that I labeled “More to Consider.” I update these quick bursts of truth every couple of weeks. 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 and Volume 6.

Image of drinking glasses from Pixabay.

Thoughtful and inclusive leadership

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Thoughtfulness, inclusion, and kindness are traits we too often dismiss when searching for leaders. Aggressive command-and-control types, pushing forward with a singular vision for the future, fit the leadership stereotype we’ve been taught to admire.

In fact, life’s path is seldom so simple.

Sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you’re farthest away when you’re closest, sometimes the only way is the long one.  After the careful walking and looking down [at the labyrinth], the stillness of arrival was deeply moving.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

Certain rules and morals of undertaking the symbolic walking of a labyrinth came to mind during a December trip to Wilmington, Delaware. I’ve reflected on those truths over the past few weeks in a variety of contexts, but especially in terms of leadership.

We were in Wilmington for a family trip which took us to Christ Church Christiana Hundred for an afternoon concert of Handel’s Messiah. As is our custom, we arose on Sunday morning to attend church, and it was there, in what is clearly a lively and engaged faith community, that I saw thoughtful servant leadership in action.

The winter sun glistens off the steeple at Christ Church Christiana Hundred

The buildings, grounds, gardens, and labyrinth at Christ Church are lovely, as befits the rich history and frequent references to this place as the church of the du Ponts. The interior spaces are warm and inspiring. Two beautiful tracker organs — Opus 32 by John Brombaugh & Associates (1990), and the C. B. Fisk Opus 164 (2022)* — grace the main church and chapel respectively, supporting a robust and exciting music ministry.

Altar at Christ Church Christiana Hundred
Brombough Opus 32
The center pipes on Fisk Opus 164, crafted in part by our good friend Kate Harrington

Rather than highlight the beautiful architecture or music, I want to focus instead on tenants of leadership as I saw them play out that day in Wilmington. Specifically, I want to consider inclusion, servanthood, and kindness.

Robert K. Greenleaf, in his 1977 book Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, suggests that “The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” Google’s famous Project Aristotle led it to conclude that in the best teams, inclusivity matters. Members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs. In the face of authoritarian backlash, multiple authors have seen a different path, writing that the future of leadership is kindness. These habits of servanthood, inclusion, and kindness apply to religious organizations, businesses, nonprofits, and governments.

We only met the rector of Christ Church, The Rev. Ruth Beresford, twice on that Sunday, but it was immediately clear that this was someone who understood the basics of thoughtful leadership in the 21st century.

A few examples will suffice.

Leaders have the power to make everyone feel welcome and secure, no matter how lofty their position or prestigious the event.

Christ Church could easily present a stuffy and intellectual facade to keep newcomers at arm’s length. Instead, the very first thing that happened, even before the procession, was Ruth coming to the front of the church to ask everyone to stand and introduce themselves to others. Instantly all walls crumbled between long-time parishioners and newcomers, young and old, families and singles. With a simple one-minute gesture, the church, under Ruth’s leadership, made everyone feel welcome and part of the community.

Leaders support and uplift people, giving them the opportunity to shine. Leaders create other leaders.

We saw this happen in multiple ways. In conversations with Ruth, she was quick to recognize the contributions of her staff, directing praise in their direction. We mentioned our backgrounds and she made connections both old and new, especially calling out one of our long-time friends who was a mentor to her. She followed up in a couple of notes later that week, seeking to connect us to one of her former associates. Leaders network for the benefit of their teams.

Leaders, as part of the community, don’t just consume, they contribute.

Following both the morning service and the afternoon concert, Ruth stayed until the last person left. She didn’t just take up time and space, but she contributed to those conversations, connecting on multiple levels with long-time parishioners and visitors alike.

Too many times people in positions of leadership walk into spaces and put themselves on a pedestal. They take credit for work in ways that diminishes the team. The ineffective leader doesn’t make the hard investment in the community.

I’ve seen churches, nonprofits, and nations make really bad choices for leaders, decisions that can take decades to overcome if they are ever completely addressed. True leadership is hard. Without really understanding community or organizational needs, we too often look for individuals who fit preconceived notions without giving real consideration to the abilities that matter. Many of those seeking leadership positions attempt to portray personas that fit the stereotype without internalizing the fundamental commitment to service.

Poor leadership selection has played out on our televisions this week in the comical yet very sad process of choosing a new Speaker of the House. The eventual winner seems to have had lifelong ambitions to hold the position but no true principles. The contrast with the thoughtful, empathetic, and effective leadership of Joe Biden could not be starker.

As was the case in Wilmington, one can usually spot true leaders. They are the individuals who are welcoming, uplifting, and invested in their communities. They may not fit the traditional mold of a leader, but they may have just the abilities needed.

To get the leaders we need, we only have to summon the courage to select and support thoughtful, inclusive, kind, servant leaders everywhere we can.

More to come…

DJB

*Our dear friend Kate Harrington, daughter of long-time friends Constance and Jim Harrington of Staunton, was one of the pipe builders on the Fisk organ. Her handicraft can be seen in the pictures above.

See also

Image of labyrinth at Christ Church Christiana Hundred in Wilmington, along with all other images by DJB