UPDATE: I thought I might get around to doing a separate post with photos from my time earlier this week in Edinburgh, but that never happened. So I’ve added a few photos, without any comment beyond the captions, to the end of this post. – DJB, October 8, 2022
Recently, I wrote of how one historian delineates between history and heritage. In that piece I quoted Jeffrey Webb as he outlined important distinctions between the two. History, Webb noted, is all that “happened in the past that we find to be meaningful and significant, and it presupposes a ‘warts and all’ approach.” History involves making people feel uncomfortable when their cherished myths are exposed as falsehoods.” Heritage is “something else entirely.” Webb notes that it is the part of history that we in the present “choose to commemorate and celebrate in our communities” with statues, parades, special holidays and the like. As I noted earlier, the head of a prestigious local historical center liked to say that “heritage is history without the hard parts.”
I saw a great example of this earlier this week in Edinburgh.
I’m in Scotland for a conference and spent a day in Edinburgh before catching the train to Dundee (more on that tomorrow). My hotel was on St. Andrew Square, in the heart of the city. And right outside my window, I could see this monument.
As I walked over to get a closer look, I saw this sign.
As you can see at the top, this piece of heritage — something that was erected at a point in time to commemorate Lord Melville — has being updated to recognize his role in delaying the abolition of the slave trade.
In the book I reviewed last month, Professor Webb looked at the issue of the removal of Confederate statues and notes that instead of “destroying” our history, what we are doing is readjusting that part of the past that we are choosing in the present to commemorate and celebrate. “The statues and the public monuments are not history, but heritage, and heritage is constantly changing and shifting as each generation chooses what part of the past it wishes to celebrate in the present.”
The Melville monument in Edinburgh is a perfect example.
History, as I said in the title to my earlier piece, is always under construction.
More to come…
DJB
Some of the historic buildings around St. Andr3ew’s Square in Edinburgh
Edinburgh Street scene
Newly discovered Van Gogh self-portrait at the National Gallery in Edinburgh
Image of Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, Scotland by DJB
One of my wife’s high school friends who happens to be a regular reader of More to Come recently used her Facebook page to post part of a speech the late John C. Bogle, the founder of The Vanguard Group, delivered as the commencement address for MBA graduates at Georgetown University in May 2007. Candice said it sounded like something I would think or say, and I believe she’s right.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.”
Enough. I was stunned by its simple eloquence, to say nothing of its relevance to some of the vital issues arising in American society today. Many of them revolve around money — yes, money — increasingly, in our “bottom line” society, the Great God of prestige, the Great Measure of the Man (and Woman).…
Kurt Vonnegut loved to speak to college students. He believed, if I may paraphrase here, that “we should catch young people before they become CEOs, investment bankers, consultants, and money managers (and especially hedge fund managers), and do our best to poison their minds with humanity.”
Enough. Yes, it is an eloquent word in this context. It also has other meanings, as in I’ve had enough of the billionaires who never have enough money and power and try to run (or is it ruin) our lives.
To be honest, I’m both lucky and privileged (as a white, Christian, male), and — except for that climate denial stuff leading to a much harsher planet on which to live — much of what the ultra-wealthy are trying to accomplish doesn’t harm me directly. Some of it even benefits me. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t see the real harm they are inflicting on the country. Nope, I am a firm believer that we have to change, and soon, or we are going to lose this wonderful experiment called America.
As I’ve written on multiple occasions, I was raised by a New Deal Democrat whose mother taught him that “money flows East” to the hands of the bankers on Wall Street. He had a strong belief in the power of government to work together for the common good and — as a life-long Baptist in the truest sense of that tradition — a keen understanding of the importance of the separation of church and state. Through his nine decades of life, my father became decidedly more progressive, unwilling to look the other way when the rich and powerful used their position to hurt those less fortunate than themselves. He liked to say, “I wouldn’t want to be them on Judgment Day.”
I think I’m on the same trajectory.
So, just what is it that has me agitated at this point in time? Let me count the ways. And here’s a spoiler alert: this is a rant, so stop reading if you aren’t interested in my perspective on the issue.
I’m exhausted by the efforts of some of the world’s richest people — like Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Mathias Döpfner, and Rupert Murdock — to buy up every media platform in sight to parrot their talking points and, in the process, demolish our free press.
I’m tired of individuals such as Peter Thiel, Stephen Schwarzman, Ken Griffin, Steve Wynn, Mike Lindell, and Patrick Byrne thinking that the country will be better off if theyfund insurrection and authoritarians because they want us to believe that unfettered capitalism is the same as democracy, when that’s clearly not true.
I’ve had it up to here with the ultra-wealthy telling us they are superior human beings who “did it on their own” when six of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to fortunes passed on to them by wealthy ancestors, and others — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk are examples — used their parents’ wealth to build their empires.
I’m tired of billionaires like the Lerner familybuying things that should be public trusts — like baseball teams — and then draining every last dollar they can out of those community assets before selling.
I’m exhausted by having to combat — again-and-again — the billionaires and their totally phony and widelydiscredited myth that their wealth trickles down to the rest of us, a myth most recently debunked by the Congressional Budget Office.
New CBO report: The poorest *half* of America — ~150 million people — hold only *2 percent* of the country's total wealth
Wealth of top 10 percent has grown markedly since 1989
I’m appalled by billionairessetting up phony “public interest law firms”which are little more than scams to use our country’s legal system to file bogus lawsuits to tear down our rights in order to support their interests.
I’m saddened by billionaires, the ultra-wealthy and their political and media enablers preying on the fears of a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed by backing authoritarians who promise to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful, only to find out that they were used as tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.
I’m exasperated by thehypocrisy of wealthy and famous people labeling those in need as welfare cheats, but refusing to call out one of their own, such as Brett Farve, who cheats the welfare system for his or her own gain.
I’m flummoxed that more don’t see that mega philanthropy by billionaires is “too often just another way for wealthy people to flex their muscles and continue to inappropriately exert social and political influence.”
I’ve had enough of billionaires and their corporate judicial system headed by John Robertsdeciding that corporations are people with political rights, opening the floodgates to billions in dark money to change the course of our country from “we the people” to “I, me, mine.”
And I could certainly spend an entire column just ranting aboutfake billionaires who would get in bed (figuratively and probably literally) with a foreign enemy of the U.S. to keep their big lie afloat. But I won’t.
Most of this comes back to the fact that capitalism is not democracy and working for the common good is not socialism…but the rich are increasingly trying to tell us that those two things are true. This one paragraph lays out a pretty devastating attack on those falsehoods.
The Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side is a national treasure. It is always important as a place for telling the story of American immigration. But during times like these, when immigrants are being targeted by right wing politicians, its value increases ten-fold.
Because it is a historic site of the National Trust, I worked with the talented staff at the museum when I was at the Trust and our family has continued to support it financially. That means I get the museum’s e-newsletter, and I was so pleased when the most recent one had information and a link to a musical wake for the late Dr. Michael “Mick” Moloney.
After an evening much like any other, “Mind yourself” were the last words Mick Moloney said to his longtime friend Lenwood Sloan. A sweet send-off meant with the care Mick shared with all he knew – friends, collaborators, and students alike.
Here’s what you’ll find if you click on the video:
Join us for an intimate, musical celebration of the life and work of Dr. Michael “Mick” Moloney with some of his closest collaborators and friends. Moloney was a performer, folklorist, and historian of Irish American music whose work, among many other firsts, helped explore the connections between Irish and African American music and cultural traditions. Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey will be in discussion with Lenwood Sloan, a longtime friend and partner of Moloney’s on Irish and African American traditions. Throughout this Tenement Concert, broadcast live from our recreated 1860s tenement parlor, they will host four musicians for an evening of memory, song, and stories that honor Moloney’s passion for the connections between people and cultures.
After brief introductory remarks, Dr. Grey and Lenwood Sloan have a short conversation. The group music begins around the 11-minute mark with the beautiful Hard Times Come Again No More. Music and conversation flow throughout the hour.
The live musical performances are by Athena Tergis, Daniel Neely, Brenda Castle, Liz Hanley, Brendan Dolan, and Anna Colliton.
Mick Moloney (credit MickMoloney.com)
This program is one of a series of informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking sessions the museum offers online and in person. A few months ago, our family joined in a delightful online program on cooking. Tenement Museum President Annie Polland is the latest in a line of amazing leaders at the museum, beginning with founder Ruth Abram and including President Emeritus Morris Vogel. I’ve been honored to work with — and most importantly learn from — each of them as well as other key members of the staff through the years.
A short article entitled Nothing Stands Alone had me thinking about the relationships that are vital to our lives. Everybody gets lonely. Everybody reaches out for connections. The needs differ, but the impulse is universal.
Yet when one looks at today’s world, much of the dysfunction comes from our resistance to the idea of our need for strong relationships, to the idea of our inherent oneness as Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher Richard Rohr phrases it. I see that resistance on the personal, the communal and political, and the spiritual levels.
So let’s think briefly about each of those areas.
Personal
As I age, the necessity of relationships and the great harm that results from personal isolation come into sharper focus. We all face reckonings as we get older, and for me part of that reckoning has been an acceptance that I depend on the support and kindness of others much more than I was willing to admit when I was younger.
Kathleen Dowling Singh points to how we should use the time as we age to accept the way things actually exist.
To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly, more than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. That ripening involves, for each of us, many difficult reckonings in the multifaceted, multidimensional understanding that everything that can be lost will be lost. . . .
It was easy when I was younger to take an introverted nature and transform it into a fear of connections. I’ve also had the tendency to go it alone because I didn’t trust others to do something the way I want it done. Collaboration, however, moves at the speed of trust. The poetDavid Wythe has noted that relationships are mostly sustained, and true collaborations built, through holding necessary and courageous conversations. Yet we tend to shy away from these types of conversations.
Singh suggests that being mindful of our impermanence helps us “remain in remembrance of our longing to exist in wisdom and love and compassion.” Gaining a clear-eyed acceptance of the way things are leads us to seek to understand how the world is truly built on relationships. Wisdom, love, and compassion are all wrapped up in an understanding that nothing stands alone.
Communaland Political
Americans are not alone in eschewing relationships, but we may be near the top of the world leaderboard. We have a myth in this country that the true American is a rugged individualist, a trait that has been used to define our freedom. From the colonizers who left family and friends for a new world, to the western cowboy who rides herd on an isolated plain, to the individual genius high-tech inventor, we hear that we make ourselves as people and that any reliance on others takes us into the realm of socialism.
Unfortunately, that myth is rarely true. And it is a story that tears our country apart.
Rich oligarchs tap into the extraordinary strength of the ideology of American freedom, as perpetuated in myths such as the western cowboy, while undermining freedom and liberty for anyone who is not white and male. And the examples are as fresh as today’s headlines. Our banks and government support business interests over labor rather than face this truth and the appalling impact it has on fellow humans, other creatures, and the world in which we live.
In a recent post I suggested that the top 0.1% is working hard to obscure the fact that it is in the best interest of 90% of Americans to seek out what Heather McGhee has called a solidarity dividend that supports workers and those who need a hand. To achieve their goal, those at the top want us to forget that these individuals are human beings: real, breathing, loving people, striving to advance — or just make it — and meet their own American dream.
As much as the oligarchs want us to believe otherwise, we all live in relationship. Nothing stands alone. The late Senator Paul Wellstone once put it so well: “We all do better when we all do better.”
Spiritual
Singh’s writing has been summed up in one sentence: “The process of death is exquisitely calibrated to bring us into the realm of spirit.” With aging, I’m trying to increase my focus on that realm, and especially in the spiritual nature of relationships.
Too much of what is deemed religious in today’s world disregards our relationships and our responsibilities for caring for others. In response to recent actions by political figures who claim to be good Catholics, evangelical leader Jim Wallis has written that “there is nothing faithful, and certainly nothing Catholic, about using people as political props.”
Richard Rohr posits that our present challenges, “from ecological devastation to systemic inequality, stem from one of the primary causes of scapegoating thoughts and actions — forgetting our inherent oneness. What could happen,” he asks, “if we embraced the idea of God as relationship — with ourselves, each other, and the world? Is salvation simply the willingness to remain in loving relationship with all creation?”
Last evening, in the City of Angels, the other-worldly Albert Pujolshit his 699th and 700th career home runs against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
There’s no reason for me to write a post on this, because one of my favorite sportswriters, Joe Posnanski, has written the perfect column celebrating the man and his achievements. It is a free (meaning open to all) post on Joe’s Substack platform and it is titled, appropriately, 700 words on Albert Pujols.
Joe begins with Pujols coming to live in America, knowing only five words of English. When he met his high school baseball coach, that coach only knew five words of Spanish. That’s okay.
“Tell him,” Pujols said to his cousin in Spanish, “that I’m here to play baseball. Let’s go play. I’m not here to talk about anything.”
Here to play baseball. That’s the Albert Pujols story. His senior year at Fort Osage, he was such a fearsome hitter that managers walked him 55 of the 88 times he stepped to the plate. At Maple Woods Community College, he did not strike out a single time all season. In his first big-league spring training — after being drafted in the 13th round by the Cardinals — he was so absurdly good that manager Tony La Russa was already talking about him going to the Hall of Fame.
Joe writes — correctly — that Pujols was “the best player in baseball and the most underrated player in baseball at exactly the same time. In his first 11 seasons in the big leagues, he finished top five in the MVP voting every single year but one.”
And even after leaving St. Louis and going for the big bucks, only to find himself in the baseball wilderness of Anaheim (we could have told you so, Anthony Rendon), he still found the skill to come back, at age 42, with his original team the Cardinals and after a slow start end up with a half-season for the ages.
(O)nly those who saw Albert Pujols play every day fully understood the staggering depths of his brilliance. He decided after his rookie year to stop striking out (he whiffed 93 times that season). So he stopped striking out. He decided in his mid-20s to improve his defense. So he became one of the great defensive first basemen. He decided that even though he wasn’t blessed with much speed, he should become a dangerous baserunner. Over the next few years, he stole bases at roughly an 80% clip.
He was Superman.
Take a look at the full at-bats for numbers 699 and 700, and then go read all of Joe’s post. Like the home run, it is one for the ages.
By now, regular readers can easily see my love of political cartoons. This is the fourth in a regular series during this mid-term election season. And yes, I “borrowed” the title for this week’s look at those cartoons from the comments section of a site I visit often. With all the craziness going on this week, the pens and pencils have been working overtime!
If you want to see the earlier editions of ‘toons from this political season, visit here, here, and here.
Now, let’s get to it. Not much editorial explanation needed.
The man to whom the entire Republican Party is beholden is a liar, a thief, a criminal and and a traitor, and he has awful lawyers. If he doesn‘t go to prison it’s an indictment of our system of justice. If he is ever elected again it‘s an indictment of the very idea of the USA. pic.twitter.com/Dr6l0vKhWr
Maybe if we went back to calling #PuertoRico a colony Americans would think that was cooler, and we would feel some of the royal largesse we‘ve been celebrating non-stop. Probably not. @courierjournalpic.twitter.com/fTcRbfTmFE
The sign at Muir Woods National Monument in California is as surprising to many as it is accurate in what it says about the past and our evolving understanding of the past. It reads simply, “Alert: History Under Construction.”
History is always under construction. History is messy. The facts that we know now may be accurate, but incomplete. As we learn more, the way we tell the stories of our history and the way we preserve the physical reminders of the past changes. As I wrote yesterday, our memories are shaped by forces outside ourselves which are often not recognized or acknowledged. But I think we need to try.
One of the key American freedom stories is of Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator. The man who ended slavery. That story has a tie to this day. It is also a story that is misunderstood and constantly under construction.
On September 22, 1862, the following was issued by the White House in the name of the president of the United States of America:
A Proclamation.
Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.…”
But as Christopher R. Fee and Jeffrey B. Webb describe in History Myths Exploded: How Some of History’s Biggest Ideas are Wrong (2019), much of what the general public knows about Abraham Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves is at best incomplete and at worst wrong. Why is that? Professors Fee and Webb explain that “although most of us recognize the value of good history, we often find truthful accounts of the past, frankly, less than inspiring.”
What really excites us? A tale well told.
Lincoln Memorial
So in the case of Lincoln and the “myth” of the Great Emancipator, we find it easier to buy into the tale of Lincoln pushing against great odds to singlehandedly end slavery than to recognize that there was a great deal of work in this arena that was done before Lincoln became president; that many people collaborated and contributed to the freeing of the slaves, that Lincoln himself went back-and-forth during his term on the political benefit of emancipation; that he personally waffled on what to do with slaves once they were freed; that the Emancipation Proclamation was a tightly drawn, lawyerly document that did not free all the slaves at the time; and that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — with its simple two sentences which did abolish slavery and which Lincoln pushed through the Congress just months before his assassination — well, even that document included an out.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander brilliantly described how that out was used historically and to the present day to keep people of color in servitude based on false and trumped-up charges. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
I’ve been thinking a great deal about disputed and difficult history recently in preparing for an upcoming tour of Southeast Asia. Professors Fee and Webb do a good job of explaining the challenges of getting history “right.” In fact, Dr. Webb says early in the work that he “trolls” his students by suggesting that “there are no facts in history, only sources.” There’s a great deal of truth in that statement.
More to the point when considering disputed and difficult history, Webb spends time outlining the important distinction between history and heritage. History is all that “happened in the past that we find to be meaningful and significant, and it presupposes a ‘warts and all’ approach.” History, he suggests, is “the work of the archives, and the manuscript review process with books, and the classroom. And it involves making people feel uncomfortable when their cherished myths are exposed as falsehoods.” Heritage is “something else entirely.” Webb notes that it is the part of history that we in the present “choose to commemorate and celebrate in our communities” with statues, parades, special holidays and the like. I worked with the head of a prestigious local historical center who liked to say that “heritage is history without the hard parts.”
Webb looks at the issue of the removal of Confederate statues and notes that instead of “destroying” our history, what we are doing is readjusting that part of the past that we are choosing in the present to commemorate and celebrate. “The statues and the public monuments are not history, but heritage, and heritage is constantly changing and shifting as each generation chooses what part of the past it wishes to celebrate in the present.”
History Myths Exploded (available in audiobook format) begins with the myth of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and ends in 1960s America looking at the myth of the radical 60s. It is a good reminder that history is always under construction.
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
This powerful sentence helps open an important work on war, memory and one-sided accounts of conflict by a prize-winning writer who pushes us to recognize the humanity — and the inhumanity — that is in each of us. It is a bracing reminder of the power of our remembrances and the responsibilities we share in crafting and consuming unjust and unethical memories.
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer, examines the many ways we remember wars and how those memories are shaped through the years. This is a comprehensive look at one particular war — what Americans call the Vietnam War and what the Vietnamese call the American War — that pushes the reader to think beyond simple frames, self-serving myths, and established timelines. The naming of this war is an immediate challenge for both sides that the author confronts. Nguyen suggests that what we call the war encourages selective memory in how we remember the violence that spread beyond Vietnam’s borders; a violence which was administered not only by the Americans and their allies but also by the Vietnamese people against each other and to Cambodia and Laos, and which led to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975-1979 after the “Vietnam War” was “officially” over.
Nguyen considers the ethics of memory in the book’s first section, a thoughtful view of war memorial sites in both Vietnam and the U.S. Most of these sites are established and maintained to showcase the humanity of the winning sides’ fallen soldiers and population while excluding a remembrance of those deceased and exiled people who fought for the losing side. But the author suggests that realizing our own inhumanity is necessary for us to be fully human. We all have the capacity for victimizing others and “disremembering” those on the opposite side.
To create what he calls “Just” or “Ethical” memories, Nguyen calls for a process of commemoration which remembers one’s own as well as remembers others in a way beyond simply identifying them as “The Other.” The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington begins to move in this direction, notes Nguyen, but there is more that can be done. And yet, the challenges, especially in an asymmetrical war and world, are daunting, as one reviewer notes.
The difficulty of ethical recognition in an unequal conflict is compounded by the more powerful culture’s ability to create designated memories and understandings about the war. Nguyen suggests that the US industry of memory includes the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memories.
What Nguyen calls the Industry of Memory includes film, television, museums, literature, and more. The Vietnamese may have “liberated” their homeland from foreign invaders, but they have less power establishing memories globally against the intertwined War Industrial Complex / Movie Industrial Complex in the U.S., in part because this war is not being fought on their home turf. The U.S. industry of memory is so strong that it can take a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — “Freedom is not free” — and strip it of its original context so that it becomes a trite patriotic cliche. But the context is important. In 1959, Dr. King said,
“I am afraid that too many of us want the fruits of integration but are not willing to courageously challenge the roots of segregation. But let me assure you that it does not come this way. Freedom is not free. It is always purchased with the high price of sacrifice and suffering.” (Noting that Black soldiers have long fought in America’s wars, he adds:) “America, we are simply asking you to guarantee our freedom.”
King was saying that “America wages wars overseas in the name of protecting the freedom of others, but is reluctant to wage war against racism at home.” Memory has become weaponized.
Nguyen blends ideas with family history in a compelling way. His MacArthur Fellow citation speaks to how he brings the various elements together in this work.
Nguyen weaves together personal narratives, philosophical meditations, and analyses of literature, cinema, photography, cemeteries, and monuments — not only from the United States and Vietnam, but from Cambodia, Laos, and South Korea, as well. The juxtaposition of this range of sources throws into relief how America’s war stories have been perpetuated as global historical memories that obscure the experiences of populations that suffered far greater devastation and casualties, both combatant and civilian.
Even when memory is just, it is nonetheless a poet and not a historian. Nguyen points to the many ways this is true in this powerful work, which also includes provocative chapters looking at the Korean involvement in Vietnam, the way the voices of victims are raised or — more often — silenced, and the telling of “true” war stories. He quotes the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in stating that “memory is presence that evokes absence.” While memory is present in our minds, it inevitably points to what is no longer there. And it is shaped, and reshaped, in thousands of ways we seldom recognize or acknowledge.
Nothing Ever Dies is Nguyen’s effort to help us construct just war memories that move beyond our simplified and one-sided way of remembrance. This work is as current and important as today’s headlines in the U.S. over who owns and who sets the narrative of American history. His powerful final chapter looks beyond just memories to consider just forgetting. “We must remember in order to live, but we must also forget,” he writes. Too much of either is fatal. And unjust ways of forgetting certainly exist, usually involving our “leaving behind a past that we have not dealt with in adequate ways.”
Just memory, on the other hand, involves the ethical awareness of our simultaneous humanity and inhumanity, equal access to the industry of memory, and “the ability to imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared.” That requires an imagination that can see beyond the present, as our ancestors have done for millennia. To continue to rely on unjust memory and unjust forgetting leads to perpetual war, eternal war, Forever War.
Jiachen Zhang suggests that Nguyen’s book itself “might tell us another effective way to present the humanities and inhumanities from multiple perspectives.” It is through Nguyen’s “visits to those unvisited graveyards and monuments, provocative meditation over the torture scenes in the death camp and convincing analysis on cinematic representation” which show us ways to approach “forgotten war memories that are ‘impossible to forget but difficult to remember’ in intersectional and individualistic manners.”
His epilogue ends with a powerful personal story of the time when he returned to the region of his birth in Vietnam and visited the grave of his father’s father, only to find that his grandfather was not buried in the family mausoleum, but in a nearby field.
I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.
Like the fighting of a war, this tradition of the burial of the dead involves dealing with the death when it happens and then later — when we can face them — bringing the memories back into our lives.
Nothing Ever Dies was a National Book Award finalist. It is highly recommended.
Early each morning I walk the streets of downtown Silver Spring. Like other pedestrians in town, I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the traffic lights if I see that I can cross safely. Traffic is not very heavy at that time of day, and I do know the general patterns after observing them for several years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fool. I don’t step into the middle of traffic. I keep a special eye out for bicyclists using our cycling lanes. If there are children present, I wait for the appropriate traffic light as I don’t want to assume that their parents would want me to model my beliefs for their children. I generally don’t wear ear buds.
Unlike most of my fellow citizens (including some police officers), I actually know the general law for pedestrian crossings in Maryland. But I step out wanting to make my own little protest against the criminalization of walking.
Yes, sometimes it is a crime to cross the street, should you not follow the prescribed rules. You may not know this, but there is a long-forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking.” It is an early example of the privatization of public space, and that’s what frustrates me.
A hundred years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: You walked across it.
Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.
Fail to do so, and you’re committing a crime: jaywalking. In some cities — Los Angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with fines of up to $250.
To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But it’s actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city streets.
So, there is that whole criminalization of walking thing. But to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie shortly after the seven-minute mark in Alice’s Restaurant, I didn’t come here primarily to tell you about the criminalization of walking. No, I came here after thinking about privilege.
You see, I also cross mid-street or against the light because even if I am stopped, I doubt I am going to be hassled by the police. That’s where the privilege part comes in. I’m white. I’m not a threat.
A recent article in Westword, a place for independent journalism in Denver, included information on who gets citations when a local government criminalizes jaywalking. It resonates with my experience here in Silver Spring.
Advocates for pedestrians and bicycles are working to change Denver’s laws, with much of the impetus for decriminalization coming from a concern over social justice. Between 2017 and 2020, 40 percent of the citations for jaywalking were given to Black individuals, despite the fact that only 10 percent of Denver’s population is Black.
And 25 percent of the jaywalking citations were issued to individuals experiencing homelessness, which is a massive overrepresentation of homeless individuals in Denver’s population.
When I cross, I’ve noticed that many people of color wait for the light to change. I suspect that the experience in Denver is one in which they have firsthand knowledge. Why do anything to call attention to yourself?
So many who share the privilege of being born white and male in America are pretty clueless when it comes to the advantages of that privilege. They are the ones “born on third base who think they hit a triple.” In today’s world, those highly privileged individuals are the ones leading the grievance-fest that is tearing our country apart. They have received unacknowledged perks since the day they were born and have come to believe that they earned it.
Hogwash.
I know that at a minimum I was born on second base, but I sure didn’t get there because I hit a double off the left field wall. Nope, I was born there because my parents were Christian, white, straight Americans who delivered a healthy baby boy into the world in the 1950s. If they’d had a bit more money, I would have found myself on third, but at least I was in scoring position!
And throughout my life, I’ve been the beneficiary of rules — sometimes written down but often unspoken — that gave me a certain confidence as I navigated life. A confidence that was often undeserved and unearned, especially when compared to those who woke up at birth and were staring at an 0-2 count with Max Scherzer on the mound. (*)
Jacob Smith, a community organizer and the Denver-based senior director for National Organizations for Youth Safety, spoke to the challenge for people of color in dealing with the city’s laws. He told Westword that “For me, as someone who is Black, queer and disabled, (decriminalization) would just allow a breath of fresh air for me to be able to walk as someone who doesn’t drive and know that because my built environment isn’t protecting me, that I won’t be criminalized.”
This is but one very small example of the privilege I see in my life. I can cross where I see fit and know that I’m not going to end up being stopped because some cop wants to “check my parole status,” as one reader noted on another site where the issue was discussed. Should I stop exercising this privilege? Perhaps. Better yet, let’s treat everyone the same and stop using minor traffic and pedestrian interactions to hassle people of color.
The next time something comes easily to you, stop and think about how others who are different have to approach the same situation. Is your action “normal” because you are white, but would raise issues if you were a different gender or a person of color?
Food for thought as you go on your morning walk.
More to come…
DJB
*If you are confused by all the baseball references, there are three bases on the field, with third being the closest to home. When a batter gets to second, he (or she) is said to be in “scoring position” because they can usually get home, and score a run, on a single (where the batter gets to first base). Baseball gives each batter four balls and three strikes, so if you are facing an 0-2 count, you are down to your last strike without much hope for getting four balls and drawing a walk, or free pass, to first base. Max Scherzer is the great pitcher who is sure to be a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer. Max helped lead my Washington Nationals to the 2019 World Series championship. We miss having him out there on our mound.
And in case you missed the Alice’s Restaurant reference, the song is a deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft, which Arlo only gets to seven minutes after beginning a comically exaggerated but largely true story from Guthrie’s own life: he is arrested and convicted of dumping trash illegally, which later endangers his suitability for the military draft. The video below begins shortly before the seven-minute mark:
Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Today’s authoritarian, Christian nationalist Republican party is showing us over-and-over again exactly who they are. As one satirist/blogger put it, “You’re not supposed to spend your life running around, screaming at people and kicking them. And I feel like that used to be a fairly non-controversial idea, but MAGA culture seems to have diverged here.”
I posted a selection of political cartoons several weeks ago on More to Come entitled The ‘toons. Shortly thereafter I followed up with the second in the series — More ‘toons. As the election approaches and the craziness rises, the cartoons just keep on coming. (You could almost say they draw themselves…until you realize how difficult it must be to capture the essence of an issue in one drawing and under 20 words, while being funny.)
Here are a few of my recent favorites that show us what the Republican party today is telling us, along with a bit of commentary to go along with the images.
Cruelty is the point
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared to be worried that the Texas and Arizona governors were getting ahead of him in the “use poor immigrants to score political points with the right-wing base of voters” sweepstakes.
Rallying voters with threats of “aliens” swamping traditional society is a common tactic of right-wing politicians; it was the central argument that brought Hungary’s Viktor Orbán into his current authoritarian position. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have been bussing migrants to Washington — about 10,000 of them — saying they would bring the immigrant issue to the doorsteps of Democrats. Now DeSantis is in on the trick.
Finding himself in need of a response to Abbott and Ducey, DeSantis used taxpayer-provided state funds to gather up some desperate migrants who were inTexas, notFlorida, lure them onto a plane under false pretenses just so they could be dumped in a small community, different from the destination they were promised, “all as part of a scheme to allow a politician to smirk at a press conference the next day.”
Rachel Self, a Boston immigration attorney assisting with the migrants’ cases, held a press conference from Martha’s Vineyard, fleshing out additional lies the Venezuelans were told at multiple steps. She described their treatment as “sadistic.”
If there’s a moral defense for such cruelty, I can’t think of it.
As one resident of the island wrote in a highly viral post on social media,
What kind of a depraved individual loads up 50 people onto a plane and then dumps them in a strange place without even notifying anyone that they are coming? These are “leaders”? These are “Christians”? I’ll tell you what this is. It’s a disgusting political stunt — at the expense of human beings just wanting to work and provide for their families. But you know what? On this island we treated them with dignity, we fed them, we gave them medical attention and we will give them a warm and safe place to sleep. Tomorrow, we will give them breakfast and help them figure out what’s next. Because on Martha’s Vineyard, we don’t turn our backs on people in need who are being abused by extremist Republican governors for some cheap soundbite on Fox News. Thank you to all the volunteers who were there — it restores my faith in humanity that we came together to help people in need.
Many religious leaders are rightly pointing out that these actions are antithetical to Christian beliefs.
DeSantis likes to play the part of a proud Christian on the campaign trail, even commandeering Bible verses in stump speeches. But apparently, when it comes to the Bible’s repeated commands along the lines of “do not mistreat or oppress an immigrant,” he’s willing to make some compromises.…
No one will deny that America’s immigration system is overburdened and in need of serious reform. And Southern states are carrying more of the burden of that broken system by the mere fact of geography. But misleading migrants and sending them where resources to help them are both in shorter supply and less readily obtained is impossible to reconcile with the basic tenets of the Christian faith, which demand that all humans be treated with respect and compassion regardless of their nationality or citizenship.
Of course, there are some in the target audience for DeSantis’s stunt who don’t have a clue about Martha’s Vineyard, but still feel free to comment. Here’s a tip: read a bit on the history of Oak Bluffs before you embarrass yourself.
(When you’re young and stupid and have no clue about Martha’s Vineyard) https://t.co/0VnllCmTx0
Panorama of Union Chapel, built in 1870 as a non-sectarian worship space on Oak Bluffs
Oak Bluffs
If you are truly interested in a summary to understand the problems with DeSantis’s stunt, the facts about immigrants in places such as Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere in the US, and the history of how our government has dealt with immigration, especially in recent years, you could do much worse than read Heather Cox Richardson‘s Letters from an American for last Friday evening.
Be careful who you worship
Thou shall not worship false idols. I read that in a book once -can't remember which one. Maybe it was Harry Potter… https://t.co/mMt8wcqr6c
By the way, back when he was President*, seems Tangerine Idi Amin offered the West Bank to the King of Jordan, and it’s amazing how not surprised you were to hear that, isn’t it? “Well, naturally he thought he could do that, remember when he tried to swap Puerto Rico for Greenland?” It’s the kind of diplomacy you only get with a genuine cognitive-test-passer in charge.
From abortion to guns to same-sex marriage, the leaders and would-be leaders of today’s Republican party have shown where they really stand, even when they lie about it (either before they come clean, like Lindsey Graham, or after, when they’ve told the truth for years and then try and clean up their mess, like Don Bolduc in New Hampshire).
It’s almost adorable, the way they think they can just change hats and smile blankly and make everyone forget a half-decade of extremism. Like, everybody’s mad at Lindsey Graham for his proposed nationwide abortion ban, as though there’s any chance whatsoever at bamboozling all the women registering to vote post-Dobbs. “Oh, it’s up to the STATES? Well, golly, what was I even mad about? Back to the kitchen, I suppose, tee hee!”
Congressman Jamie Raskin has called Donald Trump a one-man crime wave. That seems to be a pretty apt description, especially since Fox host Sean Hannity conveniently listed them all for his viewers — an attempt to show a smear that backfired pretty spectacularly.
Given that we know Trump will do anything for (1) money and (2) power, are we surprised that he found a judge who would write an option so bad that it was panned by Bill (Presidents can do whatever they want) Barr!
Harry Litman, the legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, asks and answers his own question.
Respected and generally sober legal analysts have called it an atrocity, “legally and practically incoherent,” “dangerous garbage,” and declared Cannon “a partisan hack.” “No honest and competent legal analyst could have ruled as she did,” tweeted Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe.
UPDATE: The first reading in today’s lectionary at church was from the Book of Amos, chapter 8, verses 4-7. It begins:
“Here this, you that trample on the needy. and bring to ruin the poor of the land.” The reading then goes on to talk about how the rich take advantage of the poor, practicing “deceit with false balances.” It ends with: “The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.”
Seems very clear about how a Godly person is to act.
Image: Revenge of the Librarians book cover by Tom Gauld. The book is out now in the U.K. and will be available in the U.S. in mid-October. Buy this book! Here’s another of Gauld’s cartoon:
MORE TO COME... 