Latest Posts

Five reasons I’m not on Twitter

Published by

Knowing of my interest in politics and public policy, my decision not to be on Twitter may come as a surprise. But it is actually pretty simple. A modicum of self-awareness helped me make that choice and this past week is illustrative of why abstinence is a good idea.

Let me explain.

I began this post with a plan to provide you with all the reasons I don’t participate in the online site preferred by political junkies and former presidents (until they are kicked off). However, I only had time to highlight five because I went down the Twitter rabbit hole, scrolling through feeds and finding examples to illustrate each point (he says with a sheepish smile).

So let’s take a look at those five.

Reason #1: In this day and age, we should choose places to express our political beliefs where we can have more meaningful conversations. Reason #1A: I don’t believe in having online political fights with people I don’t know.

This past week was full of political sound and fury. Also, lots of good news. Heck, Ian Millhiser of Vox said (on Twitter, of course) that he “may be coming down with a case of The Hope.”

I suspected that this week was going to be consequential after Liz Cheney’s comment at the last January 6th hearing that “the dam was breaking.” We need to focus on what is happening in our country. We also need to have real conversations to work through our political differences. When doing research for this post, I saw how easily I was drawn into the tribal nature of the Twitterverse.

Personally, I am not too worried about my ability to stay out of the comments section of online political fights, which since the Trump era now happen with great frequency. Years of working in the nonprofit/nonpartisan world taught me how to apply restraint on my political discussions in public settings. Others clearly have not learned that lesson, as Tjeerd Royaards and Alen Lauzan’s cartoons (on Twitter) suggests.

But in the end, I am of the belief that we should have our serious political discussions in places where we are not always trying to score points. (See: Cruz, Ted during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee (now Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson. Cruz was more interested in checking his Twitter mentions than in listening to Senate colleagues and the nominee.)

Bottom line: Twitter isn’t a good place to have meaningful discussions.

Reason #2: Twitter is designed to make you feel bad, about yourself and others.

There are carefully considered pieces online about why one should avoid Twitter, such as this Cinelle Barnes essay. As someone who once worked inside social media, Barnes reminds us:

The web, my tech friends agree, is designed to exploit our digital, social, and psychic vulnerabilities. Algorithms and systems change all the time, and they do so for one reason: to make it seem like you’ve failed and must do more, get more, be more, be faster. You must run, fight.

I get it. If I were on Twitter, I’d be following Soledad O’Brien‘s every word and thinking about how smart she is and how she captures the essence of the news in fewer words than seems possible. And then — forgetting that she’s a journalist and professional — I would reflect that she can do it, with such seeming ease, in far fewer words than I regularly use, and I would probably be thankful for her but also feel that somehow, I’ve failed.

In under 280 characters in this tweet, she goes right for the jugular and calls out John Robert’s legacy of division and destruction. The same thing goes for Michelle Goldberg‘s feed, writing about just about anything, and Paul Krugman‘s postings on Twitter and his debunking of bad economic myths.

As much as I like pithy proverbs, I’m not very good at pithy observations. Especially when others are going to read them. I tend to be of the “curiously long posts” school of online thought.

Similarly, I would see snappy comments on the Big Lie or other trending topis and feel bad that I didn’t think of them first. Oh, I would delude myself that if I were on Twitter, these earth-shattering insights would just come naturally to me.

But it would be a delusion.

Reason #3: I like my friends. Why should I always be in your face online?

As Robyn Ryle adds in her always insightful and humorous style, why does anyone care what I think? I’ve often said that opinions are like noses … everybody has them. What if we kept more of our thoughts to ourselves?

Still, sometimes multiple times a day, I have a thought. Well, okay, I have more thoughts than that, but not all of them are Tweet-worthy. “Oh, yeah, this is hilarious,” I think to myself. Or deep. Or revelatory. Whatever. This thought must be shared.

But, really, must it? What if I kept more of my thoughts to myself? Especially given that there are only about five people on Twitter who pay attention to anything I tweet. When did I become convinced that my insights or jokes or basic functioning as a human being is wasted unless it’s spread across the interwebs? How would it be to stop feeling that way? How would it feel to keep more of my thoughts to myself? Would it make any difference to my success as a writer? To my happiness as a person?

If Robyn has only five people who care about what she thinks, my number would honestly be one or two. I stay off Twitter because I want to keep the friends I have. I know that I couldn’t wait to retweet, and then share with you, the readers of More to Come, all the terrific political cartoons of the day. Yes, if I were on Twitter, I would be following all types of cartoonists. I love a good political cartoon. And you, dear readers, would be subjected to them all.

To prove my point, here is a sampling of what I ran across today in my “research.” This first one, by the way, is perfect!

And then there are the political cartoons that fit perfectly with other tweets and news stories.

Reason #4: I’m doing a pretty good job managing my blood pressure these days, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Image by Peter Holmes from Pixabay. This is not my blood pressure reading! I’m doing much better.

Oh, and here is another good reason for me to stay off Twitter. I look at some of these reports online and my mind immediately goes to the question “How evil can you be and still get elected in America!” Yes. my blood boils.

Unbelievable. The evil in certain places knows no bottom.

What filmmaker and activist Barbara Malmet leaves out of her tweet is the fact that the Republicans blocked this legislation — which had previously passed the Senate with 84 very bi-partisan votes — for spite, because they were upset that Senator Joe Manchin negotiated with the majority leader of his own party to do something about climate change and taxes. The next day, historian Heather Cox Richardson reported on the widespread outrage Republicans are facing as a result of their hissy fit (my word, not hers). Susan Collins went there as well on Thursday, which is not a good look for a woman who has damaged all her credibility time-and-time again.

And then Rep. Tim Ryan called out his House Republican colleagues for a similar stunt on the CHIPS bill, which their party had previously supported.

Yep, I need to prioritize my blood pressure.

Reason #5: Life’s too short.

Staying off Twitter for me is part of a pattern. Almost a decade ago I deleted my Facebook account and never looked back. Some readers have suggested since then that I become active on Instagram or Twitter to keep up with breaking news and to promote the pieces from More to Come. I have never seriously felt the urge to join that online time suck.

And the last three words of that previous sentence just told you the primary reason why I’m not on Twitter.

I know myself (there’s that morsel of self-awareness again). I don’t have the discipline to turn down French fries for crying out loud, so why would I think I could avoid going down the Twitter rabbit hole. Once on that platform, there is a better than 50-50 chance that I would not come up for air for several hours.

So, yes, the fear of being sucked into useless and unhealthy habits is the major reason I stay completely away.

Bonus reason: I am willing to miss the fun for the greater good (of my mental health)

Don’t look for me on Twitter anytime soon, even though I expect I’m missing some fun. I know myself and understand that in this case at least, if I were in for a penny, I’d be in for a pound.

And I’m not going there.

More to come…

DJB

P.S. – Careful readers will note that I used 20 Tweets to talk about why I’m not on Twitter…which makes my point. If I were on that platform, you would likely see multiple Tweets in every one of my posts…and I really don’t want to go there, for your sake and mine.

For other More to Come posts on digital clutter, check out:

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Narratives designed to unite rather than divide

Published by

Every generation has to fight to retain our democracy. Every single one. Yes, our country is seriously divided at the moment. But we too often forget the history and believe our situation is the worst America has ever faced. That’s seldom the case.

On Monday, I considered the need to have both smart and accurate narratives if we were going to move beyond this current period of division. We can all contribute to building better stories based on facts and reality, stories that have a compelling, moral, inclusive vision for the future. Similarly, we can all call out the harmful and bad narratives for what they are: attempts to sow discord and divide our country.

That last point is critical. Unscrupulous individuals, seeking to retain power and halt changes toward a more equitable future, are working overtime to tear our country apart with bad stories. Others unknowingly fall into their trap by repeating their lies. In 2018 Steve Almond wrote about this issue and the individuals who embrace these stories. Many have “an unwillingness to take reality seriously.” If bad stories become pervasive enough, “they create a new and darker reality.”

Today, I look at what other writers are saying about the harmful narratives the American public is being fed at this crucial moment in our history, specifically around the topics of:

  • building a narrative to reach a preconceived outcome,
  • narratives that focus on the wrong issues,
  • ignorance of history,
  • the intention to sow discord, and
  • the need for optimism.

(If one of these topics interests you more than the other, be my guest and skip down to that headline.)

An outcome in search of a narrative

John Stoehr‘s recent writing at The Editorial Board pushed me to think in depth about the state of our political narratives. It began when Stoehr discussed “teleological storytelling” — predicting the outcome of a future event, then reading everything happening now through the lens of that prediction. (*)

In this case, that future event is the coming congressional elections. Due to consistent patterns in political history, it’s widely believed among journalists and editors that the Democrats are heading for a wipe-out … So everything happening now — and I mean everything — is being reported through the lens of that prediction of the future.

In Do they get paid when they are wrong? I wrote of the night last November when Democrats actually outperformed the normal expectations for off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia based upon the historical pattern. Because it didn’t fit the baked-in press narrative, we didn’t hear that perspective but instead heard a story of the Democrats’ “surprise losses.” The losses were only a surprise to those who didn’t know their history.

Too many narratives focus on the wrong issues and unwittingly undermine democracy

I don’t reflexively bash Democrats, but some among the party too often trip over the varied policy positions of supporters in our big tent and are unable, as a result, to craft a compelling, outward-focused narrative. Stoehr looked at this problem in The Democrats’ progressives need a new story. He wrote about the outrage focused on West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and the narrative among progressives that “The Democrats would win more elections, and therefore contain the fascism arising from the Republican Party, if the Democrats were more progressive.” Things that fit are included in “The Narrative”. Things that don’t aren’t.

When conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin recently put the kibosh on the president’s climate change bill (he has a virtual veto due to the filibuster rule), the progressives said that once again the party’s centrist instincts undermine action on planetary apocalypse. 

But when Manchin greenlit a bill that would lower prescription drug costs, by allowing Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers directly, and extend Obamacare tax credits, thus stopping an anticipated spike in insurance premiums, The Narrative ran out of room. 

And like many stories that are only partially true (e.g., see Republican redemption after four years of complicity in enabling Donald Trump), this narrative has dangerous consequences. Stoehr writes…

I would guess that the young people most invested in progressive politics don’t know about all the progress being made in this Congress on account of the progressives in the Congress not telling them about all the progress being made. These same young people, however, know all about centrist saboteurs like Joe Manchin. The Narrative about Do-Nothing Democrats — who are in fact doing a lot — generates its own gravity pulling Joe Biden’s ratings downward.

Speaking of those approval ratings, bad stories often forget or ignore our history

Take the bad stories about President Joe Biden’s “historically low” approval ratings. In Today’s Edition, Robert Hubbell notes that the press is being disingenuous or sloppy when it simply follows right-wing talking points.

Yes, President Biden’s favorability ratings are at “historic lows” . . . but only if “historic” refers only to the time between Biden’s election and now. As to the history of presidential approval ratings before Biden’s election, see these two sites: Ballotpedia, Comparison of Opinion Polling during the Trump and Biden Administration, and Wikipedia, United States presidential approval rating.

…you have to go all the way back to John Kennedy to find a president who did not have lower approval rating (at some point in their presidency) than Joe Biden’s lowest rating. (emphasis added)

That doesn’t sound like historically low approval ratings to me.

In History has its eyes on us, I wrote that President Biden and the Democrats have had many accomplishments to celebrate, especially in the face of constant political opposition. But that’s not the narrative that the Republicans, the press, and some Democrats want to use. Instead, the “disastrous” pullout from the endless war in Afghanistan — which wasn’t disastrous — was the point at which the press began its intensely negative coverage of President Biden. As Dan Froomkin wrote last November, Biden’s low approval ratings have a lot to do with media failures.

One is the coverage of the Afghanistan pullout, especially by the visual media, that overhyped the tragic elements of the withdrawal and made Biden look like a loser, when history will record the ending of the Forever Wars as a huge win for the United States and the world.

Stories intended to sow discord, to blunt our moral imaginations, to warp our fears into loathing and our mercy into vengeance

I have long been incredulous that so many Republican voters can see the dangers to democracy and our country that Donald Trump and his ilk hold, yet they can’t imagine working alongside, much less voting for, a Democrat because of socialism, communism, or some such “ism” that is never well defined. As one writer noted, they don’t even have communists in China anymore! What gives?!

The world’s richest men have so completely taken over our right-wing media and messaging platforms that they can drive outrageous narratives of threats we face from our neighbors and friends — people we know — without much effort. Of course, low taxes on the rich and lax-to-non-existent regulations on business are their goals, but to build a large enough minority block to get their way they have to appeal to single-issue voters and pretend to fight against all these “isms” with unsupported narratives about Christian nationalism, control over women’s bodies, and the appropriateness of armed insurrection.

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, called out this bad story about America’s supposed drift towards socialism or worse, which he backs up with facts and data.

Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.

What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.

Krugman states his very persuasive case, then ends by noting:

The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. 

We need more Republicans and former Republicans to put forward narratives that call on their colleagues to work with Democrats to save democracy and upend that apocalyptic vision. We need them to make the strong case for a truly reformed Republican Party, like the op-ed recently in the Washington Post by Max Boot, who stood up and said the quiet part out loud.

(G)iven that the GOP has become “authoritarian to its core,” there are two main ways to save America: Either reform the Republican Party or ensure that it never wields power again. But a MAGA-fied GOP is likely to gain control of at least one chamber of Congress in the fall and could win complete power in 2024.

A place for optimism

Boot may be too much of a doomsayer for some, although I feel he is simply being clear-eyed. Nonetheless, Robert Hubbell ended his newsletter yesterday linking to an article by Jane Coaston in the New York Times entitled Try to Resist the Call of the Doomers. In it, Coaston considers the relative merits of “doomsaying” vs. “optimism” as a way of motivating people.

If you want people to do something, they need to be motivated — and impending doom doesn’t seem to do it. Yes, it seems like it would be the equivalent of setting someone’s couch on fire to get them to move, but doomerism seems to have the same effect as depression, bringing about a loss of interest in taking action.

It makes sense. If you believe that your fate is sealed by climate change or the Supreme Court or the Republican Party, well, why would you do anything about it? [D]oomerism causes people to be “led down a path of disengagement.”

We cannot motivate people, Hubbell notes, if our only message is that “the end of democracy is upon us.” He adds:

Yes, we are in perilous times and the fate of democracy hangs in the balance — as it does for every generation. We must be realistic and steely-eyed about the challenges we face, but we have a surfeit of Cassandras who excel at spotting the challenges we face. That is the easy part. Identifying solutions and motivating people to pursue those solutions is the hard part — especially when people criticize you for maintaining your optimism. Ignore them. Do the hard work of defending democracy. Somebody has to. It may as well be us!

We have a role in creating the future. That’s the good story.

More to come…

DJB

*If you want to predict something, Republican votes today are good predictors of how the party will rule if it returns to power. We can look at Republican votes in the current Congress (helpfully supplied by Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey) and understand where they will attempt to take us the next time they control the government.

Citations: HR 7688; HR 5376; HR 1319; HR 1319; HR 1; HR 4; HR 350; HR 8373; HR 8; HR 7790; HR 1620; HR 3967; HR 8404; Roll Call 11 (1/7/21)

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Thinking about narratives

Published by

Last week’s prime time hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has me thinking about narratives.

Those watching have identified multiple narratives at play in the presentations of the committee as well as in the testimony of the witnesses. A majority of Americans believe that the members of the committee have succeeded in setting a narrative that clearly lays the responsibility for the attempted coup d’état at the feet of the former president and his enablers. Likewise, many of the witnesses have told effective stories about the events of that day, none more so than former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

But as Michelle Goldberg wrote in Friday’s New York Times, there is a difference between “a smart narrative and an accurate one.” Like many narratives in today’s political culture, the ones we heard last week are crafted with a specific audience and a specific purpose in mind. In addition to making the case for former President Trump’s leadership of the insurrection, many of the stories, as Goldberg notes, are also designed to pave a path for Republican redemption.

This raises several questions. To save democracy, how important is it that our political narratives be both smart and accurate? And what’s the difference?

Nesrine Malik, who wrote about narratives and myths in We Need New Stories, seems to think both are very important. As to the difference, she argues that while we need new stories to overcome the harmful myths that subvert freedom, facts alone only go so far. The strength of myths is not in facts, but in the narratives. That makes it impossible to fight fake facts solely with other facts. We need the compelling narrative to go along with those facts. Smart and accurate, in other words.

Myths that divide and create a sense of superiority over others “work hard to prevent change from happening. They are powerful. But they are not all-powerful.” Much of the Republican redemption narrative we are hearing in the January 6th hearings is an attempt to prevent real change from happening.

The right questions

Goldberg and others are asking the right questions. In going after Donald Trump’s culpability in the attempted overthrow of our democracy, have the narratives given too much room for others who enabled him for almost four years to evade their responsibility? There is no doubt that Trump is an existential threat to the United States, someone who would destroy our government of the people, by the people, for the people in order to get his way. But he could not have made it as far as he did without the support of the Republican Party and their divisive narratives. For example, when Trump needed Russia to uphold his narrative denying the reality of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Republican Party was there to support that lie.*

We need to look at Donald Trump’s culpability. But we also need to go beyond that narrow focus to think about the narratives that keep driving political divisions and press coverage in the real world, often to the detriment of our democracy.

What is needed are new stories that are not just the correction of old stories but are visions that assert that “for societies to evolve, an old order must change.”

So much of what passes for political narrative now is far from the truth and focused on issues that are not critical to our future. They are undermining our democracy. Let me give you an example. In the midst of a full-blown constitutional crisis, the press is simply pushing Republican talking points that Joe Biden is a failed president. They are saying this of a president who has righted the ship after taking over from his predecessor who spent four years destroying democratic norms and gathering power into his own hands. Biden presided over an 86% drop in Covid deaths, the creation of almost 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate of 3.6%, Medicare bulk purchasing to help lower drug costs, passage of the nation’s largest-ever infrastructure bill … and the list goes on.

The press may be beyond hope at the moment, but commentators like John Stoehr at The Editorial Board says he does expect better narratives from progressives who say they are trying to save democracy. I would go a step further and say that I expect more from all clear-thinking politicians — Democrats and whatever is left of the “Rational Republicans” alike who are fighting the fascists trying to destroy our democracy and our way of life. They need to tell a different story. As it is, the majority of their narratives are more about them than it is about democracy.

So, what do we do?

Franklin Roosevelt may have been the master at setting a compelling, forward-looking narrative. He wasn’t afraid to take on the challenges of his day, asking Americans “to judge me by the enemies I have made.”

But he also found the courage to look boldly ahead. “Courage is not the absence of fear,” FDR said, “but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” And that something?

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

There is a moral purpose to FDR’s vision, just as there was to Abraham Lincoln’s.

Congressman Jamie Raskin at the 2022 Takoma Park July 4th Parade

My Congressman, Jamie Raskin, sent out an email recently that does a great job of framing a forward-looking message. He wrote:

The most important political epiphany I ever had was on the day I announced my first campaign for public office, when I was running for the Maryland State Senate many years ago.

I made a speech setting forth everything I wanted to accomplish: abolish the death penalty in our state, increase the minimum wage, decriminalize marijuana, ban the sale of military-style assault weapons, launch the National Popular Vote interstate compact, and pass marriage equality for our LGBTQ community.

A woman came up to me and said, “Great speech, but one thing — take out everything you have in there about gay marriage. It’s not going to happen, and even gay candidates don’t talk about it. It makes you sound really extreme, like you’re not in the political center.”

I paused because I didn’t want to offend her, but my kids were with me watching, and so I said this:

“Thank you so much for saying that to me, because it makes me realize that it is not my ambition to be in the political center, which blows around with the wind. It is my ambition to be in the moral center. That is why I’m a Democrat and that is why I’m a progressive.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Letter from an American, says that when people write to her feeling hopeless about the future,

I always answer that we change the future by changing the way people think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in our country of late. (emphasis added)

Better stories, based on facts and reality, that have a compelling, moral, inclusive vision for the future. We can all contribute to those stories. We can do this.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE 1: The narratives around the January 6th hearings are not the only ones that need to be examined. I’ll go into more detail on narratives by the press, the Republicans, and the Democrats in Wednesday’s Weekly Reader.

*NOTE 2: From Greg Miller’s book The Apprentice, as recounted in What Were We Thinking by Carlos Lozado.

Image of sunrise by franz roos from Pixabay

Molly and Flux play Bluegrass like the founders intended

Published by

There is so much wonderful interplay these days between the established legends of progressive bluegrass and its young practitioners who are setting amazing new standards of musical excellence. Banjo master Bela Fleck, to give just one example, continues to tour with his Bluegrass Heart project that features a host of graybeards like Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas playing incredible music along with young titans of the genre like Billy Strings and Sierra Hull. (*)

In that same spirit, it has been a thrill to hear the recent music of Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway as the band has spent this year releasing new music and touring the country. Tuttle’s newest album, Crooked Tree, was recorded live at Nashville’s Oceanway Studios. The album “simultaneously honors the bluegrass tradition and pushes the genre into new directions, particularly in its lyrical content.”

I’ve featured the inventive guitarist Molly Tuttle and dobro king Jerry “Flux” Douglas individually in previous Soundtracks, but today I’m bringing them together because of a wonderful Paste Studio video of their three-song set this past May at Del McCoury’s Cumberland, Maryland music festival DelFest.

Here’s how The Bluegrass Situation described this gem:

In May, (Tuttle & Golden Highway) were joined at DelFest by none other than Dobro hero Jerry Douglas, who is also the co-producer of their new album. Douglas, Tuttle, and company give not only rip-roaring renditions of Golden Highway’s new songs in this performance for Paste Studio on the Road, but also an interesting and enlightening interview with a Paste host. The songs are presented as the founders of bluegrass intended: the band surrounding one microphone, weaving in and out of one another’s space to be heard. In between the interview portions, the band plays three songs from Golden Highway’s new album, Crooked Tree. For those of us who couldn’t get to DelFest this year, this video is a great way to feel like you didn’t completely miss out.

Yep, just like the founders of bluegrass intended…if they could have envisioned a 29-year-old female guitar phenom leading a band of top-notch pickers with the best dobro player on the planet.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

*Just to be clear, all the graybeards are about my age, plus-or-minus five years. The younger set can be anywhere from teenagers to those musicians in their 40s.

Image: Jerry Douglas, Molly Tuttle, and Shelby Means (l to r) playing for Paste Studio on the Road at DelFest

Working your way out of the holes in life

Published by

Because of a curse put on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather, Stanley Yelnats always finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which is how he ends up at Camp Green Lake digging very large holes, because the adults have told him it will build character and teach him how to be a good citizen.

Oh, and Camp Green Lake is not a camp. It is not green. It doesn’t have a lake. And the holes Stanley digs are not always literal. After he finds something significant in one particular spot, Stanley also digs that hole into his memory. 

We learn the backstory at the beginning of Holes, a 1998 novel by Louis Sachar which takes the reader on a darkly humorous trip as Stanley reckons with his cursed past and his misplaced present. Wrongly accused of stealing the sneakers of Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston, a famous baseball player who got his name from having a foot fungus that made his feet smell bad, the overweight and bullied Stanley is sent to a juvenile detention center in the middle of the Texas desert. There he meets the other boys in his group — X-Ray, Squid, Armpit, Magnet, Zigzag, and Zero. Stanley is quickly given the nickname Caveman. And then there are the adults — Mr. Pendanski, a helping type who the boys call Mom, the perpetually grumpy Mr. Sir, and the Warden. Mr. Pendanski helpfully tells Stanley there is really only one rule at Camp Green Lake.

That rule? “Don’t upset the Warden.”

Written with pre-teens in mind, Holes has won the prestigious Newbery Medal, among more than 30 worldwide awards. It was made into a movie starring Sigourney Weaver as the Warden, Jon Voight as Mr. Sir, and Tim Blake Nelson as Mr. Pendanski. The book was banned by at least one school district, which only increases its cred among young readers. And more than twenty years after its publication, the book continues to delight pre-teens, teenagers, and adults. Family members had read Holes and recommended it as a good selection for my 2022 summer reading list.

Sachar’s story shifts between past and present, and the two are clearly intertwined. It becomes obvious early in the book that the Warden has the boys digging holes for reasons other than building character. She is desperate to find something — desperate enough to have her charges dig five-by-five-by-five-foot holes across a dry desert lake. Stanley decides he wants to know the secret as well. The edgy mystery unfolds in a way that is full of plot twists and danger.

We learn about racist violence in the past and the revenge of outlaw Kissin’ Kate Barlow. There is also cruelty and violence in the present, adding to the suspense. Coincidences between family history and current events keep popping up. A young boy named Zero, who everyone but Stanley dismisses as dumb, is key to unlocking the twisted tale. There’s nail polish made with rattlesnake venom; yellow-spotted lizards that can leap from the bottom of five-foot holes to devour a tarantula; stolen treasure; enough delightfully devilish nicknames to fill up a Barf Bag (yes, that’s the nickname of the boy who left just before Stanley arrives); and stinky feet.

What else could a young reader ask for!

Sachar’s way with words and his inventive storytelling skills captivated me right from the start. In the opening paragraphs he tells the reader that it is ninety-five degrees in the shade at Camp Green Lake. The only shade, however, comes from two old oak trees on the eastern edge of the “lake” that have a hammock stretched between them. The shade and the hammock are owned by the Warden and campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. We can only imagine what might happen if a camper took that risk.

Rattlesnakes and scorpions are abundant, but “usually” you won’t die if one bites you. No, the worst thing that can happen to you at Camp Green Lake is to be bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard.

That’s the worst thing that can happen to you. You will die a slow and painful death.

Always.

If you get bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard, you might as well go into the shade of the oak trees and lie in the hammock.

There is nothing anyone can do to you anymore.

I stayed up late reading this book, laughed out loud when Zero makes an observation that leaves even the Warden speechless, and appreciated the lessons about perseverance, companionship, and overcoming both cruelty and personal history that shine through in Holes. The treasure chest of justice doesn’t always reveal itself easily, but Stanley finds it in the end.

A delightful read … for any age!

More to come…

DJB

Image by Marion from Pixabay

The consequences of complicity in an “I don’t take responsibility” world

Published by

When a president who routinely claimed absolute authority over, well, everything, famously washed his hands of the mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Writer David Frum concluded that those words “are likely to be history’s epitaph on his presidency.”

“And an epitaph for those who nodded in assent”, adds Carlos Lozada.

Lozada’s 2020 book What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020) is the Trump book you didn’t know you needed to read. As the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post since 2015, Lozada read upwards of 150 works on “the Trump era” — a period “suffused with conflict, crudeness, and mistrust” — and then created this wide-ranging, sobering, at times funny, and always insightful work focused not so much on Donald J. Trump, but on how we see ourselves in this moment.

Yes, it is ironic that a man who never reads and who speaks at the level of a fourth grader has generated so many words and so many volumes that try to define, understand, and address the state in which we now find ourselves. Ironic, weird, and — to use a favorite word of the former president — sad.

Lozado first read the ghost-written Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), which he calls the “foundational text” of Trump Studies. This and other “Trump-authored” books (fake news if ever there was such a thing) offered a preview of “a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random.” But Lozado is primarily interested in the works of journalists, government officials, authors, and scholars who take on the task of figuring out how we got here, and what thinking (or not) went into that journey.

He leads us on his literary journey through ten chapters, with titles such as Heartlandia, Resistible, True Enough, See Some I.D., The Chaos Chronicles, and Russian Lit. In each he considers 10-15 books that address a common theme. A couple of the works are silly; others come very early in, or even predate, the Trump era; most identify the challenges of our times without much thought on solutions. Lozado helpfully identifies books that “challenge entrenched assumptions and shift our vantage points, the books that best help us make sense of this era.”

The most important, often written by historians and scholars, “enable and ennoble a national reexamination … They are the books that show how our current conflicts fit into the nation’s story, that hold fast to the American tradition of always seeing ourselves anew.”

They are the volumes on democracy that identify today’s battles as part of that endless fight to live up to our self-professed, self-evident truths, and that show that striving, while failing, to reach them is not just a feature of our system but its definition.

Lozado tackles each of the key issues of the Trump era with care and thoughtfulness. It isn’t a perfect book, as he sometimes exhibits flashes of the cynicism of the Washington insider. He also tends to read a lot of books by establishment types (e.g., David Frum), although he does introduce us to less-well-known authors as well. Corporations, oligarchs, and their impact in destroying democracy are generally missing in his review (perhaps because Lozado felt the need to thank Jeff Bezos in the acknowledgements for “keeping the lights on” at the Post). Nonetheless, it is book that moves beyond the soul-crushing daily headlines to take a longer look. With its publication coming just before the 2020 election, I quickly found myself hoping that Lozado is already at work on the second edition.

Understanding immigration and gender wars

There are several chapters that, to me, stood out above the others, beginning with Beyond the Wall on immigration. As an immigrant from Lima, Peru, Lozado brings personal insights into the discussion that strike this reader as especially useful. America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by award-winning historian Erika Lee comes in for special praise in showing us how primed the country is for Trump’s message. (It is included among the “twelve books he’ll return to” that Lozado cites at the end of What Were We Thinking.) He also speaks as to how family separation, recounted in countless memoirs, is “already intrinsic to the immigrant experience, occurring long before anyone reaches America’s borders.”

Him, Too — Lozado’s chapter on gender and the Me, Too, movement — begins with the laughable account, told in one of the many sequels to The Art of the Deal, of the time Donald Trump was groped at a dinner party. “(W)omen accosting him with pulp-fiction come-ons are a recurring problem. That’s just life as The Donald.” But the chapter quickly turns serious, and Lozado handles it with appropriate care, in part because he is not a woman and is surprised by what he reads. There is a passage from Soraya Chemaly‘s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger that clearly hit Lozado as hard as it hit me in reading it. “I hadn’t fathomed quite how much time, money, and mental energy women spend avoiding and fearing rape,” Lozado notes. But Chemaly lays it out in a chilling two sentences.

Ask a man what his greatest fear is about serving jail time, and he will almost inevitably say he fears being raped. What can we deduce from the fact that jail is to men what life is to so many women?

Chaos becomes him

In the chapter entitled The Chaos Chronicles Lozado blames Michael Wolff and his early 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury for setting the tone that the chaos in the White House is the true story. As Lozado writes, the trouble with writing about the Trump White House, and reading about it, too, is that “the lunacy is appalling yet unsurprising, wholly unpresidential yet entirely on-brand.”

The larger story, which often gets missed, is what the chaos means and why it matters. I’ve written about The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, which comes in for special praise here (another of his 12 books), as a work that describes the true American carnage wrought by Trump and his White House, including “the decline of America’s preparedness for truly complex crises.” Lewis wrote his book prior to the pandemic but was prescient in foreshadowing its consequences.

Consequences of complicity

The Chaos Chronicles is the first of several chapters that demonstrate the tragedy and consequences that arise when the “adults in the room” are complicit with Trump’s inappropriate and illegal actions. As Lozado notes, “so much is happening in this administration that gets lost in the Trump glare.” In Russian Lit, he reviews Greg Miller‘s The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy. Miller notes that because Trump appears “beyond shame” when it comes to sex or money, Putin’s leverage on Trump is probably not found in the infamous Steele dossier, but in the simple fact that Trump needs Russia to deny the reality of Russian interference in the 2016 election order to keep his “last hold on that lie. Trump, obsessed with safeguarding the legitimacy of his election and his office, needs that story to persist.” Lozado adds: “As always, the scandal with Trump happens out in the open.”

And the Republican Party is complicit in supporting that lie.

The press comes in for harsh criticism as well for — among many other things — their handling of the Clinton email hack by Russia. In her book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, journalism expert and scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson makes the forceful case that foreign interference was indeed a major factor during the 2016 election. “Too often,” she notes, “the press served as a conveyor belt of stolen content instead of a gatekeeper.”

In the chapter In Plain View, Lozado writes,

(T)he authors of the democracy volumes focus on a different group that could have reconsidered Trump long before his name appeared on a ballot. It is a group whose leaders, initially alarmed by a populist and nativist candidate, opted to collude with him rather than shun or restrain him.

That is the Republican Party.

The consequences of complicity are wide-ranging and potentially long-lasting, and they show up with regularity in our daily news reports.

  • When the press is complicit in dancing around the truth, we end up seeing that Trump’s lies were intentional, but we lack reporters who will press him to explain why he was lying.
  • When the country’s so-called leaders are complicit in the never-ending calls for violence, we end up with the cautionary tale of Ray Epps, targeted by the very hate cult he joined.
  • Complicity in not calling out uncivil discourse, the attacking of women, and climate denial can have international implications, as is the case with an acquaintance of mine — a farmer and a smart, passionate, effective environmental activist from Australia who posted a note about how a simple tweet she sent out last week had led to extensive online bullying, harassment, trolling, and cyber stalking. (Strong trigger warning: these images and words are disturbing.)
  • Finally, one reason for the complicity by the wealthy is to avoid paying taxes to support our government. The tale of billionaire Ken Griffin, owner of the hedge fund Citadel, is instructive. He is donating tens of millions of dollars for the midterms in 2022 to avoid taxes and regulations. But in 2008, when his fund had lost 55% of its value and was in danger of going under in the AIG scandal/collapse, Griffin was all too willing to take his part of the $182 billion taxpayer bailout. Corporate bailouts for the “worthy” but with no help for the truly needy are part of our lives, both before and during the Trump era.

Lozado turns to The Soul of America by historian Jon Meacham to make the point that what we are seeing is normal for America. We feel a daily and constant tension between the pull of “all men are created equal” and the push to restrict life and liberty from others who are deemed undeserving, untrustworthy, and unequal.

Slavery. The Klan. Jim Crow. The Klan again. The internment of Japanese Americans and the expulsion of Mexians and Mexican Americans. Gender discrimination and scientific racism. The Southern Strategy. Mass incarceration. All this leads to a president whom Meacham considers “an heir to the white populist tradition,” a president whose only abnormality is that he manages to embody so many recurring maladies of American public life“ (emphasis added).

Books to help make sense of our times

Of the 150 books Lozado read in five years, he chooses twelve for his final chapter that have helped him make sense of this time. I’ll provide you with five…and encourage you to buy the book and read the whole thing!

We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, by Jennifer Silva. “This book expands my notion of who belongs to the heartland, and of the obstacles to belonging in our national politics.”

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder. “It draws on the author’s scholarship to warn of post-truth, heedless conformity, and institutional abdication.”

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. “(This book) beautifully captures the tensions between individual and group identities, the power of marrying personal turmoil to collective struggle.”

Know My Name: A Memoir, by Chanel Miller. “Miller’s account of pain, law, and daily survival after a sexual assault outside a college dorm party in 2015 stands with the most unforgettable memoirs of trauma and loss.”

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, by Carol Anderson. “Anderson underscores the ‘feigned legal innocence’ that always accompanies voter suppression, as its architects cloak their designs in benign-sounding justifications, especially the always popular crusade to prevent alleged (and largely nonexistent) voter fraud.”

Leaving an abusive relationship

I’ll close with this incredibly prescient section from the end of the chapter entitled Him, Too:

“Nearly everything strange and disquieting about Trump — his punitive response to even mild criticism, his viscerally personal insults disguised as ‘jokes,’ his willingness to spread wild rumors about his targets in order to discredit or shame them, his inability to stop lashing out or degrading certain women years after they’d left his life — was also a commonly reported behavior of domestic abusers,” Sady Doyle writes in Nasty Women. The only difference, she explains, is that Trump deploys those tactics not to wield power over one single person but to manipulate the entire nation.

That’s worth remembering on the eve of the 2020 election. As (Brittney) Cooper writes in Eloquent Rage, “the deadliest time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she decides to leave.”

I cannot image a better, or more chilling description of what we’ve been through over the past six years, and the challenges we face in 2022. In light of that, we do well to remember the words of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

More to come…

DJB

Image of Pilate washing his hands by Hendrick ter Brugghen (credit Shipley Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons). Politicians have “washed their hands” and blamed others since Jesus’s crucifixion.

I love the pithy proverb – Volume 6

Published by

My love for the short and to-the-point adage comes from my grandmother. Known to favor sayings such as “Make yourself useful as well as ornamental,” 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, so let’s look at I love the pithy proverb — Volume 6 to see what made it to the More to Consider segment over the past six months.

Stand for the hard right against the easy wrong

Grandmother was a believer in standing for the “hard right” against the “easy wrong.” She understood that doing what is right comes from what we repeatedly do, so she would have approved of this timeless quote from the ancient Greek philosopher.

“We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act but a habit.”

Aristotle

The world lost one of its moral leaders when Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on the day after Christmas in 2021. His quote about taking a stand seems appropriate in these times.

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

Desmond Tutu

Madeleine K. Albright, whose parents were Czech refugees from the Nazis and the Communists, passed away on March 23rd at the age of 84. Albright served the United States as a diplomat and then as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, the first woman to hold that position. In honor of Dr. Albright’s career, I posted some of her words, which are a great reminder of how to proceed in the midst of darkness and fear.

“The act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”

Madeleine K. Albright

Our congressman, Jamie Raskin, has been in the news over the past year, showing courageous leadership even in the face of deep personal loss. Like many of us, he learned lessons from his elders, in this case his father, Marcus Raskin.

“When a situation seems hopeless, then you are the hope.  When everything looks dark, you must be the light.”

Marcus Raskin, as quoted by his son, Rep. Jamie Raskin

Even if doing right is hard, we have one, precious chance to be kind, as the poet Mary Oliver reminds us.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver

Manage your expectations

I have a friend who likes to say that “low expectations are the key to happiness.” Author Anne Lamott has a slightly different take to remind us that it is much too easy to assume that what we want is what is going to happen.

“Expectations are resentments under construction.”

Anne Lamott

I always appreciated this reminder from Dr. Paul Kalanithi about the interrelatedness of human life and knowledge, especially in the face of uncertainty.

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person.  It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

Paul Kalanithi

Ben Dolnick, in his blog One Sentence, shows his fondness for William James as someone “who belongs to a narrow class of philosophers who refuse to stay put in the philosophy building; he accompanies you to the bar, to the supermarket, to the gym. He writes not for his fellow professors and not for posterity but for you. You know those notes you write to the dog-sitter before you race off to the airport — hurried, candid, useful, brimming with emendations in the margins and multiple postscripts … That’s how William James writes about everything. He’s leaving you in charge of a human body — a human life — and he needs to be sure, before he goes, that you know how this stuff works. … And that final clause ( — or slender!), with its confessionally candid exclamation point, reads like a helpless and live realization. I am not exempt!, James seems always to be reminding us. He gave up recently on being slender, and, after years of unhappy sucking in, it brought him joy.”

“How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, — or slender!”

William James

Get a grip on our real problems

The country has been facing a rash of calls to ban books. Author and bookstore owner Ryan Holiday nails the correct response.

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

Ryan Holiday

Too many commentators spout off on the “problems” facing the country without providing any context. Amy-Jill Levine, a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt,” spoke to the all-important role of context in a variety of settings when she quoted scholar Ben Witherington, III. Hmmm…I wonder if our Supreme Court could use this bit of advice?

“A text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.”

Ben Witherington III

This reminder from the Stoic philosopher Seneca (via Ryan Holiday) helps me think about real problems and real priorities.

“We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”

Seneca

On my morning walk, I usually see two gentlemen — about my age — who have found themselves in tough circumstances, yet still keep a bright outlook on life and the things that matter. Gilbert America Carter (who goes by Carter) and Barrington Harold Fair (who goes by Barry), often have quips to share with those around them. One day Carter and I were talking about the “shoe being on the other foot” in some situation, and Carter came out with a saying that speaks volumes. Remember that you won’t always be on top!

“Ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.”

Gilbert America Carter

Memories and love

I am fond of Marie Howe‘s saying that memory is a poet, not a historian. Author Clint Smith has a similar take.

“Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times.”

Clint Smith
Celebrating birthdays and anniversaries with Candice and the twins in Paris

Finally, Candice and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary earlier this year. In honor of that occasion, I posted this quote from Conrad Aiken as recounted by author Madeleine L’Engle.

“Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread.”

Conrad Aiken

More to come…

DJB

*To capture some of my favorite sayings without having to write an entire blog post, 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 ones I highlight, 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.

Image of Proverbs from Pixabay

Expertise, curiosity, mistakes … and teamwork

Published by

I am gobsmacked by all the NASA scientists are showing us with the first set of pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. Mind-blowing is not an overstatement.

The initial JWST Deep Field Image

As the news has rippled through our consciousness, I’ve also read the reactions of others on social media, blogs, and mass media sites. I watched last evening’s extraordinary NOVA documentary on PBS, Ultimate Space Telescope, which took the story of the telescope, nicknamed JWST, from inception up until the first release of images earlier this week on Tuesday, July 12th.

While the NOVA documentary featured NASA engineers who could explain complicated scientific concepts for the layperson, many of the descriptions and stories I read are more technical than my brain can handle at the moment. But my friend — innovation consultant and author Alan Gregerman — hit the nail on the head for me with his short LinkedIn post on what struck him as extraordinary about JWST. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought I’d just share Alan’s thoughts.

Like many of you I am in awe of the pictures coming from the James Webb telescope. The development of the telescope itself is a lesson in the importance of expertise, curiosity, open-mindedness, learning from tests and mistakes, and teamwork. And the new discoveries are already providing a remarkable source of data for improving our understanding of the universe, its history, and our place in it. As an innovation consultant it also reinforces the importance of exploring worlds near and far as a key to learning and creating breakthroughs in the things that matter most. Let’s hope that this positive and inspiring news can energize all of us, and especially young people, in these challenging times to stretch our thinking about what is possible and to never stop exploring.

Alan’s thoughts on teamwork reminded me of the 2018 Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk, and the comment in that work that has stuck with me to this day:

The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.

Simple on its face yet it captures so much of the spirit that is needed today in America, from our leaders and from us, as citizens. Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space and later the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), heard the “start of a good idea” line once and it stayed with her. The message she took from it was that exchanges of information from “odd groups, outsiders to the program under study,” were how people learn, adapt, and build exciting new tools and programs to serve humankind. Individuals seldom add value when they come into those conversations with strong agendas built on furthering their professional practice, a rigid ideology, or personal greed.

JWST was the result, in many ways, of a compact underpinned by strong bipartisan support in government that worked for the good of the community. The absolute necessity of our need to nurture and maintain the social compact for a country built on ideas and ideals is among my core beliefs.

Stephan’s Quintet captured by the James Webb Space Telescope and released on Tuesday.

Alan’s thoughts on the possibilities that come from wonder and exploration are very much in line with those expressed by Kathryn Sullivan. In these challenging times, I celebrate Alan’s optimism and look for the energy that results from this innovation. Expertise, curiosity, open-mindedness, learning from tests and mistakes, and teamwork among friends and strangers really does lead to brilliance and genius.

More to come…

DJB

All images from the James Webb Space Telescope (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.) The landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars in the top image is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.

When the dog catches the car

Published by

In some tellings, the old phrase “when the dog catches the car” refers to situations where people work so hard to achieve a goal that they don’t know what to do next once they’ve acquired their trophy. But as a young child growing up on the fringes of rural America, I heard people end that phrase with, “the car always wins.” Early in my life we had a few dogs that chased cars. That latter interpretation is, sadly, accurate.

There is another old saying, this one made popular by American actor and social commentator Will Rogers: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

Both of those short bursts of truth have been on my mind as I have considered our turbulent life in America in 2022.

First, some background

As I’ve written before, a minority of Americans have sought for decades to turn back the clock, frustrated that their traditional vision for the country was slipping further into the rearview mirror as the rising immigration supporting the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century, the New Deal of the 1930s, and the Civil Rights advances of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s shaped a nation headed in a new direction. Historians have written of how the oligarchs in America, beginning with John C. Calhoun and working forward to Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others, have made the case throughout history that they should be the ones with the power to decide where the government spends what little money they agree to provide in taxes for the maintenance of order and the public defense. And as Anthea Butler has so powerfully written, for a number of reasons they found a willing partner in their efforts in America’s evangelical tradition.

Those supporting a modern vision sought, with some success, to build an America that was more economically and socially equitable and just. New opportunities for those traditionally on the margins of American life meant that women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and immigrants could contribute more substantially to our common life.

The power of myths

Yet that minority which benefits from a centuries-old hierarchy that is paying dividends for fewer and fewer people has looked for ways to divide the majority of Americans. As journalist Nesrine Malik wrote in the 2021 U.S. edition of her powerful first book We Need New Stories: The Myths that Subvert Freedom, this minority used a malignant thread of myths to achieve its purpose.

These are not myths that animate believers into a shared sense of camaraderie and direction. They are myths that divide and instill a sense of superiority over others.

Those myths were put to use in support of an ideological “stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation,” as documented by historian Nancy MacLean.

Working to divide, not unite

Race always plays a factor in American history, but these oligarchs also worked hard to find wedge issues where they could use their myths to divide Americans. Three issues where they have been the most effective revolve around:

  • Who gets to control those who have long been on the margins of society — A rouge Supreme Court, using bad history and worse logic, took away a constitutional right for American women, stripping them of their bodily autonomy. Forgoing precedent, that same court is going after other rights of women and marginalized communities in America, using the same fact-free analysis to reach a pre-determined conclusion.

Those oligarchs, along with many who have led corporations over the past half century (*), have paid to enlist and support the foot soldiers in their efforts, small minorities that have been single-minded in pursuing their own goals: enshrining white Christian male rule in a country that is growing in diversity, outlawing abortion while making the actions of those who support it illegal, and equating gun ownership with freedom at the expense of all other freedoms, including life itself.

Now that the dog has caught the car, is there a way forward?

This is where those two old sayings become relevant. In an insightful article in The Atlantic entitled Roe is the New Prohibition David Frum suggests that the minority that has focused on outlawing abortion so fervently should be careful of what they wish for. Looking at the history of prohibition during the Industrial Revolution, he sees parallels with our times. In this analysis, Frum envisions a hopeful outcome as people across the political spectrum realize what they have lost through minority rule and come together to reassert their rights. Frum even uses the language of the dog catching the car when he compares our time to the tumult of the 1880s through the 1930s.

So welcome to the Roaring Twenties. The pro-life dog has at last caught up with the Roe v. Wade car. Now it has to chew on its prey. And it’s about to discover that the prey in its jaws is a lot bigger and stronger than it looked when the dog started its chase.

Frum makes the point that while those focused on turning back democracy through fights over abortion, or voter suppression, or gun rights have been singularly focused, the opposition — largely today’s Democratic Party — has been much less organized. Which is where Will Rogers’ insight comes into play. Democrats aren’t generally as organized as Republicans because they represent a much wider ideological swath of the American population.

“Democrats in disarray” is a cheap, easy catchphrase often used by the media, even when the story isn’t true. And when the media writes about Biden’s leadership weakness, they seldom compare it to the alternative. It may help to recall that only one Republican president has won the popular vote in the last 30 years, yet Republican presidents have appointed six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. (Thank you, Electoral College, for that bit of minority rule, as well as Mitch McConnell’s willingness to lie to achieve and maintain power.)

But when the majority is aroused and sees their rights disappearing because a minority wants to control how we live, watch out. Frum shows how swiftly things changed after national prohibition. FDR through his New Deal showed how significant change can come quickly when people are pushed to the edge economically. We forget about the large, bipartisan majorities in Congress who came to support voting rights until Chief Justice John Roberts achieved his life-long goal of eviscerating the Voting Rights Act with a dishonest grab at power as an unelected jurist with lifetime tenure.

When the minority over-reaches, as they are doing now, the majority will push back. It takes work. It won’t be easy. The oligarchs, the racists, the authoritarians, the Christian nationalists, the politicians who benefit from minority rule (**) will all cling to power in any way possible. As historians have been writing throughout the Trump era, we’ve seen this all before. But we have also seen that democracy can prevail.

In his short but vital book On Tyranny, historian of the Holocaust Timothy Snyder has given us twenty lessons as to how to fight back against authoritarianism. There are lessons dealing with the need to defend institutions, think for ourselves, and take responsibility for our actions in the civic sphere. Other lessons and suggestions are focused more on the individual choices we make to stay active and alive in a civil society, such as joining and supporting causes; reading more books and spending less time on the internet; making eye contact and small talk. He ends with the critical need to study history. He notes that “the habit of dwelling on victimhood,” the province of the nationalist, “dulls the impulse of self-correction.” History, on the other hand, “gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”

Muscular hope

Krista Tippett, of the On Being project, spoke about the muscular hope we will need in the coming years during a recent New York Times interview.

Part of my role is drawing out voices that deserve to be heard and shedding light on generative possibilities and robust goodness. Not goodness on a pedestal but the messy drama of goodness that makes it riveting and also means it’s not just for saints. I talk about hope being a muscle. It’s not wishful thinking, and it’s not idealism. It’s not even a belief that everything will turn out OK. It’s an imaginative leap, which is what I’ve seen in people like John Lewis and Jane Goodall. These are people who said: “I refuse to accept that the world has to be this way. I am going to throw my life and my pragmatism and my intelligence at this insistence that it could be different and put that into practice.” That’s a muscular hope. 

Early voting center in Silver Spring. Elections remain an important way for the majority to combat the tyranny of the minority.

Now that the dog has caught the car, we need to demonstrate how organized and powerful the majority can be in America through hard work, voting in every election, focus on what really matters, and muscular hope that says, “I refuse to accept that the world has to be this way.“

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. To read the other More to Come posts cited here, click on:

*Judd Legum at Popular Information has an interesting interview with the New York Times business reporter David Gelles on his new book The Man Who Broke Capitalism, about Jack Welch. It is worth a read.

**Also, if you can get past the paywall, please read Mark Lebovitch’s article in The Atlantic entitled The Most Pathetic Men in America, which is an excerpt from his new book Thank You for Your Servitude. If you cannot get through, Diane Ravitch has a good summary on her blog.

Image of dog running by Audrius Vizbaras from Pixabay

The lessons of the road

Published by

Stories about road trips are found throughout history. Many book sites highlight more recent autobiographical examples of the genre, such as On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. However, the most recent novel by Amor Towles brings not only those works to mind, but also more historical examples, classics like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, yes, perhaps even Homer’s Odyssey, which has a role in a subplot in this new work.

Road trip books are not solely American in nature, but they have been part of our culture for a long time, probably beginning with the stories of wagon trains heading west. The typical road trip narrative is built around a character or characters trying to figure themselves out, on a personal quest, or seeking to discover something about the country. Those aims are all relevant in the third decade of the twenty-first century, which may have led me to pull this book out of the TBR pile for some summer reading. (*)

The Lincoln Highway (2021), the most recent book by Amor Towles, has many features of the American road trip novel, but it doesn’t become mired in the expectations of the genre. Set in ten days in 1954, it begins when eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm in Salina, Kansas, where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett and his precocious eight-year-old brother Billy are the two characters who set out on the road, with the intention of going to California to begin their lives over after their mother deserted her husband and children, their father’s recent death, and the bank’s foreclosure on the family farm. But other characters quickly insert themselves into the trip, each providing a different perspective as to its purpose and its effect on those involved.

Unbeknownst to the warden, two of Emmett’s friends from the work farm have tagged along in the trunk, “the wily, charismatic Duchess and earnest, offbeat Woolly.” They have a different destination in mind for their road trip and “enlist” Emmett and Billy in their plans…by “borrowing” Emmett’s car while he steps away for a few minutes. Duchess and Woolly head to New York in Emmett’s light blue Studebaker that he had planned to take west, and so he and Billy hop a freight train to New York to reclaim their car, the money that his father left in the trunk as a token inheritance, and their trip. We also meet the Watson’s hard-working neighbor Sally, who has cared for Billy in his brother’s absence and who has a fondness for Emmett; Pastor John, a con man riding the rails who attempts to steal Billy’s silver coin collection; a former veteran, Ulysses, who is wandering the country like his Greek namesake looking for home; and more.

Towles is a superb writer who fills in the characters with style and wisdom. Early on Sally recounts the Biblical story of Martha (the worker) and Mary (the dreamer) when Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better way.” Sally states simply that “if you ever needed proof that the Bible was written by a man, there you have it.” All of a sudden, you understand who Sally is and what she is seeking to leave. Towles also knows how to bring the reader forward. No one writes a better last sentence in a chapter than Amor Towles.

You simply have to turn the page.

The Lincoln Highway, Towles’ third novel, is a self-described “multilayered tale of misadventure and self-discovery.” The characters end up going in the opposite direction from Emmett’s original intentions, finding themselves in New York City and the Adirondacks. Towles’ much-beloved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, demonstrated his writing and storytelling skills, but I was disappointed in his avoidance of real tension and tragedy in that book. That is not a problem with this newest work. The tension is real, and the story takes something of a dark turn near the end.

Even at a hefty 600 pages, I found The Lincoln Highway to be a very satisfying read. Multiple reviewers have noted that Towles once again explores how “evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder.” We learn how a single wrong turn on the highway of life can set you off course for years, but that this misdirection doesn’t have to be forever. We also learn that balancing accounts can be a messy business.

One favorable reviewer makes the following observation:

“How easily we forget — we in the business of storytelling — that life was the point all along,” Towles’ oldest character comments as he heads off on an unexpected adventure. It’s something Towles never forgets.

All of the main characters discover truths about themselves and the world that ring true. What more can you ask of an American road trip novel.

A terrific summer reading choice!

More to come…

DJB

Check out these More to Come blog posts on other road trips.

*TBR = To be read

Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay.