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Working our way through the darkness

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“The point of all these changes was not to make government run better,” Anne Applebaum writes in the opening pages of her sobering Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). “The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party.”

Applebaum is explaining the true motivations — the point — behind the moves of the nativist Law and Justice party in 2015 Poland shortly after taking power in a narrow electoral win. Moves that included the improper appointment of judges; writing laws to punish judges whose verdicts contradict party policy; firing thousands of civil servants, army generals, and diplomats with decades of experience; replacing experts with incompetent political loyalists; and wrecking cultural institutions. Because they did this without a mandate, they stopped using ordinary political arguments and began identifying existential enemies instead.

She was describing the direction taken by a majority of what used to be the center-right party in Poland. But as Applebaum takes us through changes in the decades since the end of the Cold War, she could just as easily have been describing life in Hungary, Spain, France, Italy, and — with some differences — Britain and the United States. Different countries. Same playbook. In this work, she covers them all.

The people leading these changes in these various countries — some of whom used to be friends with Applebaum and her husband Radek Sikorski, who served as a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government before the ascension of the Law and Justice party — are a combination of individuals driven by resentment and envy, true believers in the righteousness of a moral system that elevates them while punishing those they do not like, grifters looking to make a quick buck, and elite intellectuals who are seeking to maintain their power and will launch a war against their fellow educated elites to do so. To see those who buy the seductive lure of authoritarianism — the people who elect and then support these leaders — she turns to behavioral economist Karn Stenner’s description of the individual with an authoritarian predisposition: one who favors homogeneity and order. People who “cannot tolerate complexity.”

Without stating it so directly, Applebaum makes the compelling case that many of the people leading these changes are morally blind. They have no empathy when others get in the way of what they want. And they are preaching to a crowd that often uses the moral language of Christianity and national pride to justify crushing those who are different.

When the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch. *

There is much to recommend in this important book. Applebaum is, first and foremost, a compelling narrator. She brings context for those who only become attuned to European affairs at times when an authoritarian bully attacks a freely elected democratic state. She also has a way of synthesizing history over centuries into digestible portions. The Future of Nostalgia — her chapter describing the lead up to, and reasons for, Brexit — is simply the clearest I’ve ever read on the topic.

That chapter title comes from a book by Russian essayist and artist Svetlana Boym, where she describes two types of people who deal in nostalgia:

  • Reflective nostalgics are people who miss the past and dream about the past, but they really do not want the past back.
  • Radically different are the restorative nostalgics, the mythmakers and architects who do not “want to merely contemplate or learn from the past.” Instead, “they want to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” Applebaum adds, “They want to behave as they think their ancestors did, without irony.”

Believing that something essential about England was dead and gone in the move to be part of the European Union, the “Leave” campaigners were willing to cheat in the Brexit election, lie about the impacts, and throw away long-held democratic norms because they saw the stakes of hanging on to what made England so special as worth any price. Other chapters on Spain and Hungary are also compelling and clear.

It is in the description of the rise of Donald Trump and today’s authoritarian (some would say fascist) Republican Party that some of my quibbles with Applebaum’s work came forth. She makes no secret of the fact that she is a right-center “John McCain” type of Republican. As such, she can’t quite let go of grousing about “authoritarians” on the left in the U.S. and how bad their actions are. I get that there are authoritarians on both the left and right. But her argument may have been more persuasive had she not relied on the 1970s radical fringe group the Weather Underground as one of her chief foils, her description of their work giving them undue influence. She also has a difficult time admitting that conservatives have long been on the wrong side of civil rights, and she never suggests that the policies of the New Deal and the Civil Rights era were enormously popular — which they were — until Republicans spent fifty years hammering home the coordinated message that Americans should hate these things they appreciated and wanted.

Nonetheless, there is much of value to take away from Applebaum’s book. Most importantly, democracy is fragile. No system of government will last without continued work to keep it fresh and serving a new generation. Her final two paragraphs hit at what is critical. The precariousness of the current moment seems frightening, but it has always been there. Our checks and balances never guaranteed stability. Liberal democracies always demand some tolerance for cacophony and chaos, “as well as some willingness to push back at the people who create cacophony and chaos.” History could — and probably will — “reach into our private lives and change them.”

We always knew, or should have known, that alternative visions of our nations would try to draw us in. But maybe, picking our way through the darkness, we will find that together we can resist them.

For other recent essays and articles on various aspects of the threat to democracy, you may wish to read:

  • Ukrainians are consoling us (Thinking About, March 14, 2022) — Historian Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, writes that “Because Ukrainians are resisting, not just on the battlefield but as a society, they console us all.  Every day they act is one when we can reflect, and hope. People do have values. The world is not empty.  People do find courage. There are things worth taking risks for.”
  • It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network (The Guardian, March 2, 2022) — Rebecca Solnit‘s take on how Russia has staged a military attack on the west for the past eight years.
  • The right targets queer theory (The Nation, April 19, 2022) — Candace Bond-Theriault takes a look at how the person who propped up the conservative white Christian nationalist crusade against critical race theory (CRT) is now rallying his base to oppose yet another fabricated foe: queer theory. 
  • Letters from an American by historian Heather Cox Richardson on April 22, 2022, where Richardson describes Republican lies and the need for accountability, and this especially powerful one from April 23, 2022:

Let’s be clear: the people working to keep Trump in office by overturning the will of the people were trying to destroy our democracy. Not one of them, or any of those who plotted with them, called out the illegal attempt to destroy our government.

To what end did they seek to overthrow our democracy?

The current Republican Party has two wings: one eager to get rid of any regulation of business, and one that wants to get rid of the civil rights protections that the Supreme Court and Congress began to put into place in the 1950s. Business regulation is actually quite popular in the U.S., so to build a political following, in the 1980s, leaders of the anti-regulation wing of the Republican Party promised racists and the religious right that they would stomp out the civil rights legislation that since the 1950s has tried to make all Americans equal before the law.

But even this marriage has not been enough to win elections, since most Americans like business regulation and the protection of things like the right to use birth control. So, to put its vision into place, the Republican Party has now abandoned democracy. Its leaders have concluded that any Democratic victory is illegitimate, even if voters have clearly chosen a Democrat, as they did with Biden in 2020, by more than 7 million votes.

Former speechwriter for George W. Bush David Frum wrote in 2018: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” And here we are.

More to come…

DJB

*Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 15:14).

Image by Zelle Duda on Unsplash

Being there for the everyday

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For much of my life, I have felt the day was incomplete if I walked out of the house without making the bed. I wasn’t sure how that habit came to be deeply imbedded into my life or why it was so important. I just knew that it was.

Then I read the following:

Plumping the pillow. Pulling on the sheets. The bed reminds me that I am creating my future every moment.

If I leave a mess, I will find what I left sooner or later. I will not be exonerated from any of my actions — though knowing Your love, I will be forgiven much.

Those few sentences to open a meditation on making the bed are part of Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday (1991) by Gunilla Norris. These simple words are typical of how Norris looks at the tasks we do — from awakening in the morning to locking the door at nightfall — and puts them in the context of living in place. For “how we hold the simplest of our tasks speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.”

All of us have daily routines, and Norris posits that “as human beings we have a strong intuition that deep within our dailiness lies meaning, a huge dimension.” Her search is for how best to speak of that sense of the sacred, especially when it is both fundamental and beyond knowing. This book is an invitation to a process. It is also an invitation to realize that our memories and our prayers change over time.

Standing at the bottom of a stairway…

I remember going down the stairs on my bottom as a toddler. Thud…thud…thud… It was energizing. I want to reclaim bumping along again…

But life intrudes as an adult, seen every day in reading the paper.

The terrible fascinates. This reading the paper trains my fear. I can feel it. I want to know the disaster even as I recoil. I am not separate from the deaths, the demands, and the dealings, the disasters, the deceits, the demagogues, and the diplomats.

This is our incompleteness, our separation, our greed at work. Let me own my part. The world’s hunger is mine. The world’s helplessness is mine. The world’s failure to love is mine. Sober me to this connection in my life. Let the news be printed on my conscience. Help me bear it.

There is a pulse and rhythm to Norris’s words, just as there is to the locking and unlocking of the door each day. And those words speak to many on so many levels. When Bishop Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Henri Nouwen, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Joanna Macy, Anne Bancroft, Brother David Steindl-Rast, and Madeleine L’Engle write your jacket blurbs, it suggests you have something profound, no matter how simple, to say. I am glad I chose to read Being Home. It was a crossing the threshold moment.

Many times today I will cross over a threshold. I hope I will catch a few of those times. I need to remember that my life is, in fact, a continuous series of thresholds: from one moment to the next, from one thought to the next, from one action to the next….

On the threshold the entire past and the endless future rush to meet one another….

Let me live on the threshold as threshold.

Life teaches us that not every threshold we cross leads to success, not every choice we make is a winner. There are instances when we step across and fall.

And sometimes your book group picks a dud.

I turned to Being Home for refreshment after slogging through a dud of a book.

Being There by Peter Keese is a short book of stories that came from the author’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) career. Our third stage group chose to read it with the hope that the stories would help us in expanding our knowledge of how to “be there” with others in our changing circumstances. Several in the group have left executive positions and moved into semi- or full retirement, with the changes in relationships that move can bring.

The book did stimulate conversations among us around being there for others. One of our members talks about his work toward being a “non-anxious presence” in others’ lives, which I find a worthy goal. There are snippets of good suggestions along that line in some of the stories, but not enough to recommend it. And the author’s approach to personal relationships — especially with women — made me think I was living again in the 1950s with a well-meaning but paternalistic father.

Simply put, there are much better works on the topic of “being there.” Such as Being Home.

For a sampling of other thoughts on the topic on More to Come, see:

More to come…

DJB

Image of threshold from Pixabay

All that we owe our teachers

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We were delighted when our son, Andrew Bearden Brown, announced that he will be attending the Boston University Opera Institute beginning this September. Andrew will be pursuing a Performance Diploma in Opera and is certainly excited about what the next two years holds in store.

One of the key reasons Andrew chose the BU program is the chance to study under Dr. Lynn Eustis, a professional soprano and the author of The Singer’s Ego: Finding Balance Between Music and Life, among other works. Andrew was fortunate to attend her master classes during his years at the Royal College of Music in London. (BU and RCM have a reciprocal arrangement between faculty.)

When we see accomplished artists, writers, doctors, and business leaders, we so often forget that they usually stand on the shoulders of giants: their teachers. Dr. Eustis will be among the latest of an amazing group of teachers who have directed and nurtured Andrew’s musical career since he and his twin sister Claire were four-year-olds in the children’s choir at Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, Virginia. I am reminded everyday of what these educators have brought to Andrew’s life and to the world around them, and I want to take the time to recognize and thank them.

Carol Taylor — An award-winning choral director and organist at McGill University, Carol fell in love with the sound of tracker organs and then fell in love with George Taylor, who happened to build world-class tracker organs (with his partner John Boody) in little Staunton, Virginia. She was the choirmaster who was Andrew’s first teacher.

Bert Wirth — Bert was Andrew’s inspiring grade school music teacher at Christ Episcopal School in Rockville. Broadway star Brandon Victor Dixon, also a CES alumni, credits Bert with his start in musical theatre.

Head choristers: Andrew and Margaret (Max) Potter in 2006
Christine Buras, Max Potter, Andrew, and Mike McCarthy following the WNC’s Elijah, 2022

Canon Michael McCarthy — Andrew began his career as a treble at the Washington National Cathedral (WNC) in Mike’s very first class in 2003. That began a 20-year relationship as teacher, mentor, supporter, and colleague. Andrew currently works as a staff tenor at the Cathedral under Mike’s direction and most recently sang tenor solos in WNC’s production of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where three of the soloists (Christine Buras, Max Potter, and Andrew) were alumni of the boy/girl chorister program of the cathedral.

Andrew in 2005
Andrew with Leonard Slatkin in November 2005 after singing the treble solo in the Chichester Psalms

Sarah Hoover — Now the Associate Dean for Innovation, Interdisciplinary Partnerships and Community Initiatives at Peabody Institute in Baltimore and one of Musical America’s 30 Music Professionals of 2019, Sarah taught Andrew voice lessons during his days as a treble at the Cathedral and has been an ongoing champion of his career.

Rosa Lamoreaux — Rosa has a “flawless sense of style and incandescent presence” when singing on stages around the world in opera, oratorio, chamber music and as a recitalist. She was another of Andrew’s voice teachers at WNC, and she helped Andrew not only with his vocal techniques but with his stage presence.

Diane Atherton — Another wonderful performer who has graced our lives and become a good family friend, Diane has sung to acclaim across the U.S. and throughout the U.K. and Europe. Diane was one of Andrew’s voice teachers who helped him transition from his treble to his tenor voice, not always an easy road to navigate.

Andrew as Corny Collins in Hairspray (credit: St. Albans School)

Benjamin Hutto — Ben was a very dear teacher, mentor, and friend of Andrew’s who passed away in 2015. This is the same Ben Hutto who was given a shout out by Stephen Colbert on one of his first Late Night shows. In addition to casting Andrew in lead singing roles in several musicals during his high school years at St. Albans School, Ben hired Andrew while still in high school for his first professional job as a paid singer in the choir at St. John’s Lafayette Square.

Rosanne Conway, accompanying Andrew at his STA Voice Recital

Rosanne Conway — While piano was not Andrew’s first love, Rosanne taught both Andrew and Claire so much about music and life as their piano teacher during the middle and high school years. Rosanne is so dedicated to her students that she joined our family for an afternoon at Rick Jones piano to play dozens of instruments and help us pick out one that still graces our home.

Fred Jodry — Fred is the Director of Choral Activities at Brown University where he took a special interest in our Urban Studies major who also wanted to sing and learn as much as possible. Over the years Fred has become more than a teacher, but a supporter and mentor to Andrew, most recently giving him his first opportunity to sing the role of the Evangelist in the St. John Passion with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and the Providence Baroque Orchestra.

Andrew with Arlene Cole
Andrew with his Advanced Music professor, Arlene Cole

Arlene Cole — Recently retired after 50+ years teaching at Brown University, her Advanced Musicianship class ranked as Andrew’s favorite and most challenging class in the music department. She was consistently ranked among the top professors across the entire university.

Brad Fugate — Andrew’s voice teacher during his years at Brown, Dr. Fugate is also a musical scholar whose work has included study on the theoretical underpinnings of listeners’ reception of the singing voice (particularly that of the countertenor) and its relationship to cultural norms of gender and sexuality in three countries with distinctly different cultures—Britain, USA, and Japan. 

Elizabeth Daniels — Liz has been the vocal coach extraordinaire who has worked closely with Andrew during his early professional career here in DC. She is lauded as one of the region’s top teachers of vocal technique, and we see her often at Andrew’s local performances, giving real-time feedback and encouragement.

Andrew in Robinson Crusoe
Andrew in his Act II costume for RCM’s production of Offenbach’s Robinson Crusoe

Justin Lavender — Andrew was under Justin’s tutelage as vocal coach during his two years at the Royal College of Music in London. Justin — who was persuaded by none other than Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten to abandon nuclear engineering for music — has had an impressive career in opera and teaching.

Every single one of these teachers is part of Andrew today. Enjoy his rendition of Tu vivi, e punito from Handel’s Ariodante (HWV 33) opera and give thanks for all these amazing musicians contribute to so many students like Andrew, helping make our world a bit more beautiful.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Andrew Bearden Brown (© 2015 | Kristina Sherk Photography | https://www.kristinasherk.com

The power of stories

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While many of the world’s citizens are observing Passover, Ramadan, and Easter, it seemed an appropriate time to consider the work of a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” *

Short Stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine ** is the highly praised study of the parables of Jesus. I’ve been reading this insightful book during this particular time of spiritual convergence.

Levine writes in an easy-to-read style spiced with humor. But she is serious in wanting all her readers — Christians, Jews, and anyone who cares about what ultimately matters — to understand the parables in the same way their original audiences heard and understood them. Too many of the parables have been turned into Christian allegories (or “domesticated” as she terms it), beginning with the evangelists (Luke comes in for special criticism here) and continuing through present-day commentators. In her mind, these interpretations smooth out the parts that may be difficult to hear and recasts them in ways that Jesus and other first century Jews would not recognize.

We look for these easy interpretations, Levine asserts, for many reasons. Among them:

  • in many churches, parables function as children’s stories,
  • many priests and pastors are not comfortable challenging their congregations with the real message of the parables, and
  • it is safer to assure the faithful “that our souls are saved through divine grace rather than to suggest that our societies are saved through personal and corporate aid to the poor.”

Parables should reframe our vision. Levine notes that these stories are less about revealing something new and more about tapping into “our memories, our values, and our deepest longings, and so they resurrect what is very old, and very wise, and very precious. And often, very unsettling.”

Religion has been described as being “designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting.” Driving home the point, Levine continues. “Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, ‘I really like that’ or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.”

Levine also sets out to correct current-day misunderstandings about Jews and Jewish customs and religious thought at the time of Jesus. Much of what is misconstrued comes from a perspective of antisemitism, and more than one reviewer has read her thoughtful — but not chiding — criticism and seen themselves reflected in the mirror. Along the way Levine also takes aim at sexist and homophobic theologies.

She begins the book with a very effective examination of the triple parables about “The Lost” from the Gospel of Luke. Lost sheep, lost coin, lost son. She explores the way in which the evangelists — in this case specifically Matthew and Luke — treat the same stories in different fashions and have different interpretations. To my mind this bolsters her overall point that parables are meant to be understood and interpreted in different ways. She helps us see what or who is the main point of the parable, noting that titles matter. We often get that wrong. (Nowhere in the parable does Jesus mention a prodigal son, for instance.) But she also repeatedly notes that we must understand the historical context before we can truly consider the parables for our time. She quotes New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, III, to make this point. “A text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.”

After all of her examinations of context, Jewish life in the first century, historical and current misinterpretations, and more, Levine then closes each chapter with her short but powerful perspective on one or more possible interpretations. She asks in the parable of the lost sheep when was the last time we took stock, or counted up who was present rather than simply counted on their presence. Do we follow the example of the woman who lost the coin and take responsibility for the loss? In the case of the father who had two sons, Levine suggests that the scriptures of Israel (the context) can give us hope for our own reconciliations, from the personal to the international. As is true in each of these parables, finding and acting on what ultimately matters requires an effort on our part.

How does a writer come to this perspective? Levine notes that she was raised in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts and grew up knowing and loving many aspects of the Christian tradition — although she is herself an Orthodox Jew. She completed her undergraduate work at Smith College and earned her doctorate at Duke University. According to one profile, Levine accepts the Orthodox Jewish tenet of the afterlife but “is often quite unorthodox” overall.

In looking at these eleven parables, Levine asserts that Jesus told parables because they serve…

…as keys that can unlock the mysteries we face by helping us ask the right questions: how to live in community; how to determine what ultimately matters; how to live the life God wants us to live.

The best teaching comes not from “spoon-fed data” but from narratives — the all-powerful stories — that remind us of what we already know but are resistant to recall. The best teaching comes from “stories that community members can share with each other, with each of us assessing the conclusions others draw, and so reassessing our own.”

A powerful — and recommended — book.

More to come…

DJB

*On Friday, April 15th, Jews began the celebration of Passover to mark the exodus of Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. On the same day, Christians observed Good Friday to commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus before celebrating Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead. Over the weekend, Muslims continued observing Ramadan, a month of prayers and fasting to memorialize the transmission of the Koran. The rare overlap on the calendar of the three observances occurs about every 33 years.

**Levine’s official title is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Whew — what a mouthful! I can see why she developed her own moniker.

Image by Frantisek Krejci from Pixabay.

The quest for contentment

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In the document announcing our independence as a country, we put our national aspirations out for all to see.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Much has been written about all three rights, as Thomas Jefferson described them. I most recently focused on that pursuit of happiness.

Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (2021) by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey — a husband and wife team who direct the Tocqueville Program at Furman University — makes an interesting, sometimes compelling, but ultimately unsatisfactory case as to why our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. While the book made unexamined assumptions and left important questions unaddressed, I am still glad that I discovered it on my recent visit to Books, Inc. in Alameda.

To understand how the modern sense of happiness developed, the Storeys examine the writings of four French philosophers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Each is studied in-depth in separate chapters.

  • As described by the authors in The Art of the Ordinary Life, the first — Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) — wrote in the midst of France’s religious wars and spoke of new ways to “loyally enjoy” the human condition as something inherent to our being.
  • That is followed by The Inhumanity of Immanence which examines the writing and life of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who criticizes Montaigne’s thesis and points instead to the need for “an anguished but clear-eyed search for God.”
  • The third in their quartet — Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) — is profiled in The Tragedy of Nature’s Redemer, where his efforts, from the perspective of the authors, to “reconcile Montaignean immanence with Pascalian depth” ultimately fails.
  • The fourth chapter, Democracy and the Naked Soul, studies Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who arrives for his famous visit to America and observes a people “restless in the midst of their well-being.”

These four chapters are, in many ways, fascinating. I’m no expert on French philosophers but I found much here to appreciate. The writing, however, goes from fluid and clear to dense and academic, sometimes in the same paragraph. Much of the dense writing was unnecessary from my perspective, as it seemed to be inserted as a way for the authors to prove their academic chops. At times I felt I was reading an extended George Will column, but then perhaps I’m not the intended audience.

The introduction on the four French thinkers and the four profiles are followed by a concluding chapter entitled Liberal Education and the Art of Choosing.

The introduction and conclusion discuss how today’s students (the Storeys both teach) cannot make choices because they are afraid of missing out on other things that could (in some unrealized world) make them happy. The opportunity loss, if you will. I found this framing to be unsatisfying and indicative of the conservative “get over yourself and make a choice” tone that came out the more I read this work. Why can’t their 21-year-old charges just make up their minds to be a doctor or lawyer for crying out loud! I happen to know many individuals who have had incredibly satisfying, meaningful, and — yes, dare I say — happy lives who didn’t decide what they were going “to be” at age 21. And the Storeys don’t provide many solutions for how to deal with this quest for happiness that leads to unhappiness except to suggest one go back and understand the historical sources that led to this situation, make a choice, and get in the field.

Why We Are Restless is in many ways an attack on liberalism, although one handled with more care and with nuance seldom seen in today’s discourse. Liberalism is not perfect and should certainly be held up for examination. But in stating their case, the authors seem to understand intellectually that much of our modern quest for individual happiness came as a result of excessive authoritarian and religious rule over individuals, churches, communities, and nations. In my reading of the Storeys’ work there was not a great deal of criticism of the destructive power of those forces of control that seem to animate conservatives today.

The authors fret that in a democratic society, “the restlessness that grows in the shadow of the ideal of immanent contentment” becomes a politically destructive phenomenon with “ritualistic idol smashing.” However, there is little or no recognition that much of this breaking up of norms of appropriate human behavior today is coming from the libertarian and conservative branches of our communities. Like the trashing of the rule of law. This was an interesting book to read in the midst of a time when an authoritarian government is leveling cities, committing war crimes against civilian populations, and doing so while claiming to be carrying out a holy war. Too many on the right today don’t understand that democracy is a moral position.

Defending the right of human beings to control their own lives is a moral position. Treating everyone equally before the law is a moral position. Insisting that everyone has a right to have a say in their government is a moral position.

Heather Cox Richardson

This is an important topic. I believe strongly in the value of community. I also believe, in the words of Susan B. Anthony, that one does well to “distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” In my experience, happiness grows when we take the time to be grateful for others. When we interact with community.

Yes, there is a balance to be struck between individual happiness and community good. But not all is solved by a pointed quest and the making of decisions just to “move into the field.” Those choices are often forced on individuals by a community that does not see the humanity in individuals, especially those who differ from the prescribed norms.

And there are many in the world who have found happiness without that anguished search for God. Perhaps they have attended college somewhere other than where the Storeys and their supporters teach.

For other thoughts on happiness, joy, gratefulness, and community, see:

More to come…

DJB

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Lincoln’s Funeral Train

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Early in the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. The night before, he and his wife had gone to see a play—a comedy. One of the last men to talk to him before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The bullet that killed Lincoln had been delivered by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor poisoned by the belief that Lincoln’s use of the federal government to end human enslavement as a central part of the nation’s economy was tyranny. 

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, April 15, 2022

Democracy remains under attack today. As Dr. Richardson notes in her letter, the fear of democracy has brought us to the edge of losing our government. We learned yesterday in an exclusive story on CNN about 100 text messages between Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, and Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The messages were obtained by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

These text messages show elected members of our government eager to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election in which a national majority of 7 million people had chosen Democrat Joe Biden as president.

On the day I cast my ballot in that 2020 election, I wrote about Senator Lee’s fear of democracy in a long post entitled History tells us democracy is the objective. It was prompted by this quote from Senator Lee:

Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.

Utah Senator Mike Lee *

Little did I know back in October of 2020 what was still to come.

In 1990, on the album Norman Blake & Tony Rice 2, Norman sang one of his songs, a mournful ballad entitled Lincoln’s Funeral Train (The Sad Journey to Springfield). In 2017, Greg Graffin — punk rocker, evolutionary biologist, and lead singer for the band Bad Religion — released a powerful cover of Blake’s tune on his solo album Millport with images of what we lost and what was at stake in the fight to save democracy.

The entire song is powerful, but Blake’s refrain nails the essence of the fight against modernity and democracy by traitors to our country.

With the portrait of a martyred man
Shot down by a traitor
Now toll the bell and bid farewell
To the great emancipator

I have written a great deal about the threat to democracy in our times. Here are links to some of those posts:

More to come…

DJB

*Senator Lee was also recently in the news for mansplaining the constitution to Judge (soon to be Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court. Spoiler alert: he was wrong.

Image: Lincoln’s Funeral Train in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Credit: the University of Illinois collection.

The books I read in March 2022

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Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in March 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016) is a fascinating and controversial work by German forester Peter Wohlleben. For those who want to criticize his science, there are experts available to make that case. Others simply appreciate how much Wohlleben’s love for the forest comes through this work as he explains his observations on the processes of life, death, and regeneration. Wohlleben uses his gifts for storytelling to help build new metaphors to inspire a public that too-easily forgets what every schoolchild knows: plants are living beings.

Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms (1998) by Perilla Kinchin is an engaging and lovely look at women’s history, tea culture, and design in turn-of-the-century Glasgow. The book is filled with beautiful historic and contemporary photographs of tea rooms, furniture, and paintings designed by preeminent Scottish architect Charles Rennie Macintosh and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald. But beyond the design eye candy, I was especially taken with the story of Catherine (Kate) Cranston, the owner of a chain of Glasgow tea rooms. Kinchin uses the backdrop of the temperance movement and the suffragette-influenced culture of the tea rooms to paint the intriguing story of how Cranston built a business empire by serving both men and women in spaces designed by leading-edge architects and designers of the period.

Raven Black (2006) is the first in the Shetland Island mystery series of author Ann Cleeves. I was quickly brought into this story of lonely outcast Magnus Tait, who stays home on New Year’s Eve and becomes the prime suspect when the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby the next morning. Inspector Jimmy Perez has his doubts about how quickly the community comes together to point the finger at Magnus, and in his work to unravel the true tale we find out a great deal about the Shetland Islands and this small, isolated community. The ending was certainly a surprise and Cleeves cleverly wraps up this story by pointing to future mysteries to come.

American Dialogue: The Founders and Us (2018) is an insightful work by historian Joseph J. Ellis. I returned to read the sections on the law and James Madison during the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Madison’s greatest achievement was recognizing that the Constitution presented a “framework for debate” and that “argument itself became the abiding solution,” an understanding — supported strongly by Thomas Jefferson — that provides the springboard for Ellis’s strong and sustained attack against the misconception of “originalism” as most proudly practiced by Antonin Scalia and described by Justice William Brennan as “arrogance cloaked as humility.”

Jesus the Forgiving Victim (2013) by priest, theologian, and author James Alison is a fascinating book, unlike almost any other I’ve come across on faith. It flows from the insight into desire associated with the great French historian and philosopher René Girard and focuses on the non-moralistic nature of Christianity. Grace, not laws or morals, is the theme that he explores through twelve insightful essays. Alison is best known these days for his firm but patient insistence on truthfulness in matters gay as an ordinary part of basic Christianity in the Catholic church and beyond, and for his pastoral outreach in that sphere.

Enjoy reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: For blurbs on the books I read in January and February, click on the links.

Image: Open book by lil foot from Pixabay.

Celebrating women’s history, tea culture, and design

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Our host on a recent visit to California loaned me an engaging and lovely book of women’s history, tea culture, and design in turn-of-the-century Glasgow. With his background in Arts-and-Crafts and Mission style furniture, John knew that I would find this work fascinating as I was preparing lectures for an upcoming tour of Glasgow and the Inner Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland islands. He was right.

Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms (1998) by Perilla Kinchin is, first of all, a delight to the eyes. It is filled with beautiful pictures — historic and contemporary — of tea rooms, furniture, and paintings designed and executed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald.

But what really grabbed my attention was the story of Catherine (Kate) Cranston, the owner of a chain of tea rooms in the bustling city of Glasgow. Kinchin uses the backdrop of the temperance movement and the suffragette-influenced culture of the tea rooms to paint the intriguing story of how Cranston built a business empire by serving both men and women in spaces designed by leading-edge architects and designers of the period to provide gathering places for those engaged in the city’s growing business and industrial sectors.

Chief among those architects was Mackintosh —- best known for his Glasgow School of Art building (subsequently damaged by several fires). Owner and designers were perfectionists, and over the course of several years as the century turned over to greet the 1900s, they created several stunning places that opened up a unique, avant-garde artistic world to thousands of ordinary people.

Mackintosh — perhaps Scotland’s most famous architect — was born in Glasgow in 1868. A pioneer of modernism the architect, artist and designer created his own aesthetic by blending numerous influences from art nouveau to Asian painting.

As summed up in a recent work on the Argyle tea chair design in dezeen:

…Mackintosh had only a small number of buildings realised, with the majority of his major projects including the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House and Willow Tea Rooms all being built before he turned forty.

In later life he stopped practicing architecture altogether due to a lack of commissions, and concentrated on painting. Mackintosh died of cancer aged 60 in 1928.

Cranston proved to be the perfect patron for Mackintosh, providing commissions even when times were tough and always supporting his artistic vision. Kinchin moves through this story with skill, weaving in elements of women’s history, tea culture, design, and cooking. Sixteen period recipes from the Cranston tea rooms fill out this delightful work, making the reader’s palate ready for Scottish teatime.

More to come…

DJB

Image: The front salon of the original Willow Tea Rooms (credit: Willow Tea Rooms Trust)

BGS X 10: A celebration of women in bluegrass

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The Bluegrass Situation is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2022, and this essential online community for bluegrass, roots, and folk music is pulling out all the stops. Over the next few months I’m going to link to some of their anniversary features, beginning with their list (from 2017) of the 50 greatest bluegrass albums made by women.

There’s not a false note in this list, which is too extensive to cover here. Just a handful of videos will have to suffice to whet your appetite and encourage you to explore their full list.

Claire Lynch and DJB at a 2014 Institute of Musical Traditions concert

Claire Lynch has two albums on the list — Moonlighter and 2016’s North by South — the latter a tribute to her favorite Canadian songwriters. From that album, take in Black Flowers, a haunting, evocative ballad by Lynn Miles.

Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick (Credit: Olympus Digital Camera)

Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick are two West Coast musicians who have blazed their own trails through the bluegrass world, helping form the Good Ol’ Persons band and then leaving to headline their own groups. The Lewis and Kallick 1991 album Together features a version of the Delmore Brothers tune Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar dedicated to two other women pioneers — Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard — with thanks for “breaking trail.” 

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi (credit: rhiannongiddens.com)

Rhiannon Giddens should be included, as BGS notes, on any list of the best fifty albums by women. She’s that impressive. Her Freedom Highway is an amazing work that travels the outskirts of bluegrass yet brings forward the African American influences in roots music. Take a listen to the title track.

Molly Tuttle
Molly Tuttle

Molly Tuttle is one of the bright spots for the future of bluegrass. Her 2017 album Rise showcases her amazing talents on guitar and vocal skills, as seen in the song Save This Heart.

There you have a small sample of four out of fifty. Of course, I could just as easily have chosen the Alisons (Brown and Krauss), Missy, Dale Ann, Dolly, Emmylou, Leyla, Lynn, Patty, Rhonda, Rose, Sara, Sierra…and the musicians who would jump on this list with albums released in the last five years!

Oh, I just have to include Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten and the classic Freight Train.

Now I’ll stop. Just enjoy.

More to come…

DJB

Eric Boehlert, R.I.P.

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I never met Eric Boehlert, the journalist and renowned media critic who died in a tragic bicycle accident last Monday evening after being hit by a New Jersey transit train. But as a regular reader of Press Run, I knew — when the news came — that the country had lost a staunch defender of freedom and democracy who also happened to have great music sensibilities and a fun, fair outlook on life.

Boehlert — who wrote about music and the music industry for Rolling Stone and Billboard before beginning a career in political journalism with five years as a staff writer at Salon, followed by 10 years as a senior fellow at Media Matters for America — was a “fierce and fearless defender of journalism” according to his wife, Tracy Breslin. Journalist Soledad O’Brien wrote that Boehlert’s death was “A terrible loss. We’ve lost an awesome human being, handsome/cool/witty dude who kicked ass on our behalf.” She added that he had a “crazy devotion to facts, context and good reporting,” who was an “enemy of BS, fake news.”

His final piece for Press Run — Why is the press rooting against Biden? — is typical. It is brilliant: on point and full of key facts that showcase how broken our media coverage of politics has become. As always, he leads with an admonition to stay healthy and be kind, followed by his main story.

Like clockwork, the first Friday of the month brought another blockbuster jobs report. The U.S. economy under President Joe Biden added another 400,000-plus new jobs in March, it was announced last week.

Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.

Yet the press shrugs off the good news, determined to keep Biden pinned down. “The reality is that one strong jobs report does not snap the administration out of its current circumstances,” Politico stressed Friday afternoon. How about 11 straight strong job reports, would that do the trick? Because the U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.  

The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)

Boehlert notes that the press is obsessed with the story about inflation, and bends over backwards to take good news from the administration and make it seem terrible.

The home-run report itself was often depicted as a mixed bag. These were some of the glass-half-empty headlines that appeared in the wake of the latest runaway numbers:

• “America’s Job Market Is On Fire. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel Like It” (CNN)

• “Booming Job Growth Is a Double-Edged Sword For Joe Biden” (CNN)

• “Why a Great Jobs Report Can’t Save Joe Biden” (CNN)

• “Unemployment Hits Pandemic Low in March, But Uncertainty Looms Ahead” (Washington Post)

• “Biden Gets a Strong Jobs Report, But a Sour Mood Still Prevails” (Washington Post)

Totally normal journalism, right? The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news.

Here’s how he ends his final piece, posted on the day of his death.

Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.

Biden is facing not just one organized opposition in the form of the GOP, but another in the form of the Beltway press corps.

Last week, they hit Biden with 14 separate questions at a press briefing over the supposed “gaffe” he made, expressing his moral outrage over the mass killings Russian President Vladimir Putin has unleashed in Ukraine. So focused on trying to trip up Biden, the press didn’t ask a single question about the state of the Ukraine war.  

And remember all winter how the press treated Covid as the most important “crisis” Biden faced and hung the pandemic around his neck? Today, the topic has vanished, the press has given the White House no credit for steering the country back to normalcy, and instead has latched onto gas prices as being a defining issue under Biden. The buried Covid coverage represents a telling example of how an issue that the press itself claimed would define the Biden administration gets translated into no news when it turns towards positive territory.

The Beltway press needs to take its thumb off the Biden scale.

The Beltway press could undertake no better tribute to Boehlert’s work than to take his criticisms to heart and change their focus.

I also liked to read Press Run because each newsletter followed the main story with a short piece entitled Good Stuff — the April 4th edition focused on yet another Republican losing a defamation suit against the media — and then ended with my favorite section: Fun Stuff — Because we all need a break. I’ll leave you with his final musical offering:

Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Black Summer”

It’s been 16 years since LA’s RHCP recorded with the band’s early ‘90’s guitarist John Frusciante. The results, thanks to his signature slide work, sound like the clock never stopped. Especially when the song takes flight at the 1:35 mark.

It’s been a long time since I made a new friend
Waitin’ on another black summer to end
It’s been a long time and you never know when
Waitin’ on another black summer to end

Do yourself a favor. Set aside some time and look through the recent stories on Press Run. Here are some of my favorites:

You’ll come away much better informed than similar time spent watching cable news or reading Beltway pundits.

Rest in peace, Eric Boehlert. Your voice in these mixed-up times will be deeply missed.

More to come…

DJB

And here is another musical memory, posted by Charles Pierce in his remembrance in Esquire.

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

Image: Eric Boehlert (credit: Press Run)