How often do we focus — really focus — on what individuals say and do and believe? Our better natures would like to think that’s our default setting. Yet too often we look at someone’s group affiliation or outward appearance and label them with a snap judgement. Our mental shortcuts — what psychologists call “heuristics” — help our brains navigate the world. But as these heuristics layer themselves in our brains, they can also lead us to make potentially damaging assumptions about others.
We create labels for a variety of reasons, but the result is they often prevent us from seeing each other as human beings. In the “Beyond Labels” meditation in Thich Nhat Hanh‘s Your True Home, the Buddhist monk notes that as human beings, we’re exactly the same. But,
“Thinking of yourself as or calling yourself a ‘Buddhist’ can be a disadvantage, because if you wear the title of ‘Buddhist’ this may be an obstacle that prevents others from discovering the human being in you. The same is true whether you are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.”
I’ve turned this observation over in my head in recent weeks, reading some of the science behind our move to stereotype others even when it goes against our values. Labels can be intentional, innocuous, identifying, or injurious. Or some combination of all four. Labels — like any number of heuristics — are not always bad. But if they push us to overlook or deny the humanity of others, they can be destructive.
We label someone as our boss and — if our immediate thought turns to the power they hold over us — what is an accurate descriptor becomes instead a barrier to recognizing their humanity. Labeling another by race or class can be a way to separate ourselves from others. Even if I self-identify as conscientious, pragmatic, and loving — all admirable traits — the labeling can be a way of diminishing the humanity of others who I may not place in those same categories.
The destructive nature of labels can be seen most clearly in our political life. We label others or self identify as right or left wing, and a whole host of defining characteristics and beliefs come to mind that tend to hide the complexity of the humans behind those labels.
While mulling over Thich Nhat Hanh’s observation, I came upon a blog that spoke about the work of a pop up action for voting rights. Those involved made signs that spelled out “Your Vote is Your Voice.” They got some thumbs up and supportive horn honking. Along the way, a white man in a pick up truck pulls over to the side of the road and the blog writer thinks “here it goes.” His negative thoughts quickly evaporated, however, when the truck driver applauded and shouted out encouragement. The comment that followed?
“As Freud might have said, ‘sometimes a pickup truck is a right wing version of ‘virtue signaling’… and sometimes it’s just a pickup truck.’”
I almost spit out my coffee.
We have two systems for thinking — one fast, highly intuitive, and emotional, and the other slower and more logical. We use the first system for most of our decisions and, I would suggest, in making labels about ourselves and others. Like about what kind of men drive pickup trucks or what kind of men pass us in a group on a city street. Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated how our unwillingness to push ourselves to the more systematic — but harder — system of thinking drives bad decisions.
Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that labels such as Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim can be an important part of our identity,
“…but it is not the whole of who we are. People are caught up in the notions and images, and they cannot recognize each other as human beings. The practice of peeling away all the labels so that the human being can be revealed is truly a practice for peace.”
We can begin to see more of the uniqueness and humanity when we slow down and work systematically to peel away the layers of labels we’ve built up over time.
15-time Grammy winner Bela Fleck is one of the most influential musicians of his generation, ranking alongside Earl Scruggs in his work to define the possibilities for the five-string banjo. Theirs was a mutual admiration society, and we’ll explore why on this week’s Saturday Soundtrack.
Where Scruggs defined the instrument and the musical style of bluegrass beginning in the 1940s, Fleck, beginning in the late 1970s, opened up the myriad possibilities of banjo by both looking back to its history in Africa and forward to its future with jazz and symphonic collaborations. In partnerships with his wife and clawhammer banjoist Abigail Washburn, tabla master Zakair Hussain, jazz pianist Chick Corea, bassist Edgar Meyer and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and his groundbreaking quartet The Flecktones, Bela Fleck has reinvented the image and sound of the banjo.
Along the way, he would check back on his bluegrass roots, the style that first drew him to the instrument. He came to prominence in the late 1970s and by 1981 was playing with Sam Bush in the seminal New Grass Revival. Following the breakup of that band, he released the first of what is now a trilogy of solo bluegrass albums Drive, perhaps best known for the rollicking tune Whitewater. In 1999 he followed that up with The Bluegrass Sessions, which featured the banjo duet Home Sweet Home as shown above with Earl Scruggs.
“As much as I may pretend to be something else, I am bluegrass at heart and that’s okay. It’s something I’m proud of and have come to embrace more as time goes on. Part of that is aging — do something when you’re young and you may not want that to be what defines you. Bluegrass just seemed like too obvious a pigeonhole for a banjo player when I was starting out and there was so much other music I loved, too. But after a lot of exploring, it’s clear to me that bluegrass is still my defining element.”
On September 10th of this year, Bela’s first bluegrass album in more than 20 years was released, rounding out the trilogy. With this Saturday Soundtrack, we celebrate My Bluegrass Heart.
These first two albums, as Bela explains on his website,
“…featured a core band that included Sam Bush, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, and Mark Schatz.
As the years since Bluegrass Sessions began to pile on top of each other and grow into decades, I began to amass compositions that were consciously and unconsciously designed for that band. Tony Rice became less available due to his health issues, I began to wonder if that chapter of my bluegrass life had now closed. If I may be selfish for a moment here, this left me in a bit of a pickle. You see, Tony Rice was the only guitarist I had met who could make it possible for me to play bluegrass in the way I wanted to.
Time passed and other interesting changes had been happening on our bluegrass scene. A whole slew of new players had emerged, highly influenced by the movement that John Hartford, Sam Bush, Tony Rice, David Grisman, Jerry Douglas, Tony Trischka, Bill Keith, and so many other great players had pioneered. There were a whole lot more amazing cats of all ages that I never remember there being, in all my years of bluegrass awareness.“
To cut to the chase, Fleck decided that it was time to bring the young cats in and play together for much of 2019 and 2020. As an example of what he means, give a listen to this performance with one of the brightest of the young cats — Chris Thile — on Bela’s Metric Lips.
“Pretty soon I started to see this project as an exploration of the current bluegrass world, and a gathering of a certain segment of the tribe. I must say that there are many fantastic players who I love that I just couldn’t include this time, for space considerations.“
Bela goes into more detail on his website about his association with the various players, but the album…
“…features a who’s who of some of the greatest instrumentalists in bluegrass music’s history alongside some of the best of the new generation of players: mandolinists Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, and Chris Thile; fiddlers Michael Cleveland and Stuart Duncan; celebrated multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses; bassists Edgar Meyer and Mark Schatz; and the amazing Bryan Sutton, Billy Strings, and Molly Tuttle on guitar.“
Let’s jump in and hear Sierra Hull, Michael Cleveland, Justin Moses, Mark Schatz, and Bryan Sutton join Bela to perform the tune Wheels Up.
“The album title of My Bluegrass Heart is actually a riff on an unexpected source, the late jazz pianist Chick Corea, a sometime collaborator of Fleck’s. One of Fleck’s favorite Corea albums was 1976’s My Spanish Heart, an ironic title because Corea was of Italian rather than Spanish descent,” notes the BGS article.
“He was a guy from Boston with a natural affinity for Latin music, which was central to who he was even though he did not have legit entry in terms of ethnicity,” Fleck says. “That resonates for me. I’m from New York, of Eastern European and Russian descent with no natural connection to folk or bluegrass. So I’m defining myself with music that’s not necessarily my heritage, but being an outsider helps you bring new things to the idiom. When I go off to study Indian music, I can come back and write this album’s ‘Vertigo,’ which has very Indian rhythmic devices. Finding a way to insert Indian music or jazz or classical into bluegrass is very satisfying.”
Speaking of Vertigo, here Bela, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Brian Sutton shine on the album cut of the tune, while the Hull, Cleveland, Schatz, Sutton, Fleck combination play it live a few weeks ago at RockyGrass.
My Bluegrass Heart is dedicated to two of Bela’s friends and collaborators — Tony Rice and Chick Corea — who both passed away in the past year.
Thankfully, the next generation is alright. Slippery Eel is the first-ever studio work featuring the pairing of Billy Strings and Chris Thile. Fleck told BGS that he did his best to come up with something that would challenge those two, but notes that, “Of course they made it look easy.”
Fleck is playing several dates in our area, beginning tonight (the 18th) in Berryville, Virginia, and next Wednesday (the 22nd) at Strathmore here in the DC region. As noted on his website and in a teaser in The Bluegrass Situation,
“This month, Fleck will be touring in support of the album with Michael Cleveland, Sierra Hull, Justin Moses, Mark Schatz, and Bryan Sutton…He’ll resume roadwork in late November and December joined by Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Bryan Sutton. And it’s not too early to circle the calendar for January 7, 2022, when he’s headlining the Ryman alongside nearly every musician who makes an appearance on My Bluegrass Heart.
UPDATE: Bela (banjo) with Justin Moses (dobro), Sierra Hull (mandolin), Mark Schatz (bass), Bryan Sutton (guitar), and Michael Cleveland (fiddle) as seen from my pandemic-distancing seat at Strathmore Music Hall on September 22. A show of astounding musicianship and amazing music!
Here’s the band practicing Round Rock for the upcoming show. Jump in and enjoy. Progressive bluegrass doesn’t get any better.
Not because the Washington Nationals traded away all their stars (we miss you Max!) to get prospects and begin to rebuild. This has become the new way of doing business, and has been done, by the way, without any mention of a rebate to season ticket holders who paid prices based on having a real major league team to watch. The Nats games now include recreations of plays one sees in Little League. It wasn’t until the new-look Nationals allowed a Brewers runner to score on a “sacrifice fly” hit all the way to the on-deck circle that I had seen such a play at the major league level. Priceless, in its own way.
Yes, baseball is becoming harder to stomach because there is too big a gulf between the good and bad teams, which MLB doesn’t seem interested in fixing. But baseball has always had that problem.
No, the real reason I’m increasingly choosing other viewing options rather than baseball is those awful gambling ads that now dominate any sports broadcast.
Yes, Major League Baseball and virtually every other professional and major college sports league has decided to go all-in on betting. Before the games, during the games, during the at-bats, after the games. Bet $1 on anything and get $100 free. Seriously. How naïve can one be to spend your hard-earned money with that come-on? If you know they will give you $100 to bet for free, you can put your money down on the fact that you will lose more than you win if you play for any length of time.
Casinos are practically a license for their owners to print money. I only know of one person dumb enough to bankrupt a casino, which should tell you all you need to know about that individual’s so-called business acumen.
“Like questions about blackouts, the cornfield buffer couldn’t keep all the awkwardness out. Aaron Boone was asked for his perspective on Shoeless Joe Jackson, a central character in “Field of Dreams,” who was banned from baseball for his role in the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
Boone dodged deftly, something MLB will not be able to do forever, having recently made a push to introduce betting into stadiums and the general baseball consciousness. Just this week in Chicago, a proposal to add betting space at Wrigley Field, one of the game’s most sacred landmarks, was a source of controversy.“
Why is baseball doing this? Follow the money. And the gobs of money — and the people it brings out — will affect the game in ways known and unknown. I suspect it won’t be good and will drive away long-time fans of the game who know the history. But the powers-that-be in baseball seem intent on changing the game in ways that hurt fans and potentially hurt players.
Anyone who wanted to bet on games could always find a way to do so. But there was a bright line between gambling interests and the game itself. It should have stayed that way. Go to any horse-racing track other than for a Triple Crown race or the very short summer season at Saratoga and look at the “crowd.” Those few that are in attendance aren’t watching the race in front of them. They are down in the betting parlors, taking chances on races around the world. Baseball seems intent on pushing betting into stadiums, and driving away long-time fans who, like me, attend multiple games during home stands and watch the team on television.* All for the lure of “easy” money.
A. Bartlett Giamatti is rolling over in his grave. Pete Rose is wondering why he couldn’t have played in 2021.
America today is a country where baseball and other sports have sold out to the gambling interests and the thrill of securing undeserved riches. My bet is that it will not end well.
Murray’s story — that of an African American member of the LGBTQ community, Civil Rights and Women’s Rights activist, the lawyer responsible for producing what Justice Thurgood Marshall called “the Bible of Civil Rights law,” a poet and writer, the first female African American Episcopal priest, and an Episcopal saint — has fascinated me ever since my late colleague Karen Nickless brought the campaign to preserve Pauli Murray’s childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, to our attention while I was at the National Trust.
Early in 2015 the Trust named the house a National Treasure, which helped inspire the first major gift to support the house’s restoration later that year. The Trust also worked with groups as diverse as the the Pauli Murray Project, the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, the National Park Service, and the Episcopal Church to support its 2017 listing as a National Historic Landmark. It ranks high among my preservation memories.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.
In June, we attended a viewing of a new film on Pauli Murray as part of the 2021 AFI Docs Festival. That documentary — My name is Pauli Murray — is being released in general theatres this Friday, September 17th, and will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on October 1st.
I had learned important pieces about Murray’s life and influence since my introduction back in 2014. But I was struck by how the filmmakers found new material to fill in the portrait of someone who is one of the most consequential — and least known — people of the 20th century.
“Murray paved the paths that the civil and women’s rights movements would march on and built the legal frameworks we exist inside today. And yet Murray was so ahead of the curve that when history was eventually written, it was often written without mention of Murray.“
Ables notes that Murray’s story is a portrait of U.S. history, with all its omissions.
“Murray’s achievements weren’t the sort of clean victories history gloms onto but a lifelong process of starts and stops. Black in a White-dominated women’s movement and a woman in a male-dominated civil rights movement, Murray slid through the cracks of both. A mixed-race person who was attracted to women and struggled with what we would now call gender dysphoria, Murray’s very existence defied the categories racism and sexism rely on. Murray’s ideas about the arbitrary nature of those categories were so far ahead of the times, they were dismissed or ignored.
The movie’s trailer hints at what the viewer of this masterful film will learn.
In effect, Murray is able to tell us her own story, in her own voice.
Song in a Weary Throat is a powerful memoir, told with wit and energy. Murray begins in the floor of her kitchen in Baltimore, entangled in her mother’s billowing white skirts. Her memories of her parents are thin because her beloved mother died when she was four, and she went to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her Aunt Pauline. It moves through her life as a self-described “rebel, instigator, and survivor, at times a nettle in the body politic, an opener-of-doors, and always a devout child of God and friend of mankind.”
As Patricia Scott-Bell writes in a new introduction to the 2018 edition, Murray tried out more than a dozen titles for her work before she settled on a line from her epic poem “Dark Testament.”
“Hope is a song in a weary throat.”
This is autobiography about living with the audacity of hope. She was rejected for admission by the University of North Carolina because of her race, and four years later by Harvard Law School because of her gender. But the audacity of hope led Murray, whose personal motto was “Don’t get mad, get smart” to enter Howard Law School in 1941. She later added degrees from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and Yale Law School. Yale named their newest residential college for Murray in 2016.
Murray notes more than halfway through the memoir that moments of despair were offset with the sustaining knowledge “that the quest for human dignity is part of a continuous movement through time and history linked to a higher force.” She quotes The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., expressing the same concept when he said “that in the struggle for justice one has ‘cosmic companionship.'”
Murray’s autobiography is just one of several important books to be written or republished in recent years that deal with different aspects of the life of this remarkable American. In 2016 I wrote a review on this blog of Scott-Bell’s The Firebrand and the First Lady, which chronicles the unlikely friendship of Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Rich in detail of the relationship built between Murray and ER (as the First Lady is referred to throughout the book), it is also an excellent read. The Firebrand and the First Lady speaks to how we can challenge and support each other in our work toward social justice and human wholeness.
These three works will help one gain a better portrait of one of America’s most enigmatic heroes. Because her legal, civil rights, and gender-equality work is consequential on so many fronts and levels, we may be tempted to downplay her move, later in life, into the priesthood. But Murray’s words when she left the practice of law in the early 1970s to become an Episcopal priest, describe the stakes.
She noted that most of the questions around inequality that we face as a nation are at their core moral issues that require reconciliation among all people. It is in community where we should affirm “the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together.”
In recent weeks I’ve been on a Natalie Goldberg reading binge. What started me down the path of taking in the thoughts of this longtime Zen practitioner and world-renowned writing teacher was her powerful 2018 memoir-as-meditation Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home. I had picked it up on a whim at Berkeley’s Pegasus Books but only recently pulled it out to read. It was a revelation.
This is Goldberg’s story of a cancer diagnosis that forever changes the way she looks at life. And death. She was sixty-three and, she writes,
“This cannot be. This is not the way the world is.
And what way, exactly, is the world? The way I wanted it to be. Death a long-distance call. I wanted to deal with death at the proper time — in my eighties or nineties.”
The Stoics suggest that we meditate on our mortality every day. Goldberg’s Zen training helped, in a similar fashion, because it “harped on death. We won’t last forever. Wake up. Don’t waste your life.” But that urging too often seemed “artistic, remote.”
Until she was face-to-face with death.
I read this short but gripping memoir in a day. On page-after-page Goldberg shows how she and her partner — who along the way is diagnosed with breast cancer — grapple with their battles (with the cancers, with their bodies, with the cancer-industrial complex, with their emotions) separately and together. The cancer twins, she calls them. They both have to face the unknown, the void. Cancer forces that type of focus.
In her telling of this story, there is laughter. She hears the name of the medication she is taking at one point — ofatumumab — and decides that it sounds like “Oh Fat Tuna Man.”
There is food, more than one person can eat, thanks to their friends. But her lithe partner chows down with the best of them.
There are new perceptions, such as the following about those friends.
“I did notice, when friends visited, subtle differences. Yes, they had more energy, more mobility than I did. They were still busy in the world with the routines…But there was something much more subtle, something I don’t often catch until after they left: They don’t know they will die. It was constantly with me now, my mortality. It hung out on my right shoulder like an animal, patient yet hungry. It wanted me, and I knew that eventually it would have me.”
There is despair, when she realizes that Oh Fat Tuna Man hasn’t worked, and all the while the cancer has, worming its way into her bones. This person who for years has used natural medicines now, in desperation, shifts to an experimental drug…which works, beating the cancer.
And there is some sort of elation. “I was supposedly normal again, as if no hole had been blown through the center of my life.”
Goldberg’s path through is based on a commitment to embrace the suffering directly. She ends with a moving poem and thoughts on a favorite painting. The poem is from her visit to a remarkable place — the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome — where she visits John Keats’ grave and meets “not only Keats but young Natalie again.” But the poem she quotes is from the grave of Gregory Corso.
Spirit
is Life
it flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea
This is a meditation on finding a path, finding a place, “to set one foot after another. To come inside out; to show your guts, everything that you are made of.” And the path brings her to a painting by Pierre Bonnard, who “silently grieves” about the emotional absence of human fulfillment through the medium of paint.
“I viewed the last piece he painted, a week before his death in 1947. Almond Tree in Blossom. Full of light. The tree in white takes over most of the canvas, and it feels as though it were about to ascend….
When Japanese Zen masters approach death, they write a poem to reveal their mind at the final moment. In this final painting, Bonnard does something similar, displays his lightening heart. Before the great question — How is it to live with eternity at your door? — Bonnard answers: In full bloom.”
One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Nanci Griffith, passed away in August at the much-too-early age of 68. This first Saturday Soundtrack after a summer hiatus is my recognition of this singular talent with the simple yet memorable writing and singing voice.
Griffith began her career in the late 1970s and gained prominence after a move to Nashville in the mid-1980s. At a time of electronic dance music, new wave, and grunge rock, she made it cool to like folk music again. Born near San Antonio and raised in Austin, Griffith’s Texas twang was authentic…and an acquired taste. Her mother was a real estate agent and her father was a bookseller and a fan of folk music. With his encouragement she listened to and was influenced from an early age by Odetta, Woody Guthrie, and singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, a fellow Texan. She once described her work — which she called folkabilly — by saying: “You take a whole lot of Woody Guthrie and a whole lot of Loretta Lynn, swoosh it around and it comes out as Nanci Griffith.”
An exceptional songwriter, Griffith spun narratives about small-town life and love as well as her social and political concerns. She is best known for her Love at the Five and Dime — a big hit for Kathy Mattea — with my favorite version being from Griffith’s 1988 live offering One Fair Summer Evening. The introduction alone is worth the price of the album.
It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go is an excellent example of Nanci’s more social songs, weaving three small vignettes into a powerful statement. And Lookin’ for the Time (Working Girl) is her take on an often hidden and forgotten part of the human experience.
Besides Mattea, other artists also had successful covers of Griffith’s songs. Her Outbound Plane, from the Little Love Affairs album, was a big hit for Suzy Bogguss. The Irish song interpreter Maura O’Connell sang a memorable version of Trouble in the Fields (heard here with Griffith singing harmony).
Griffith was known as a talented interpreter of others’ songs, such as with her beautiful take on the Tom Waits tune about recognizing what we have, while we still have it — San Diego Serenade — from the Late Night Grande Hotel album. Those sentiments seem so appropriate today.
“I never saw the east coast until I moved to the west
I never saw the moonlight until it shone off of your breast
I never saw your heart until someone tried to steal it away
I never saw your tears until they rolled down your face“
Her Other Voices, Other Roomsalbum — the Grammy-winning 1993 compilation of songs by her folk mentors and heroes — showed off those interpretive sensibilities to great effect. On this album alone she pulls off Woody Guthrie’s Do-Ri-Me — with an assist from Guy Clark on vocals and the New Grass Revival’s Pat Flynn on lead flatpicked guitar — with a flair that is pure Griffith. I always felt that her interpretation of John Prine’s aching Speed of the Sound of Loneliness was the definitive one for this classic. She performs a heartfelt version of Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather, and provides a very personal touch to Townes Van Zandt’s Tecumseh Valley. And her simple version of the Carter Family’s Are You Tired of Me, My Darling?— with Iris Dement and Emmylou Harris on the harmony vocals — has always been my preferred interpretation of this very sad tune. The haunting line that ends each chorus reaches into the self-doubt that we all feel in one way or the other:
“Tell me, would you live life over, could you make another wife?
Are you tired of me, my darling? Answer only with your eyes.”
Nanci didn’t always sing from the folkie songbook. Give a listen to her cover of the Rolling Stones’ No Expectations from a 1991 Austin City Limits show with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Gold, and the Indigo Girls.
Griffith suffered from two bouts with cancer and other health issues in later years. As she performed fewer dates, many younger music fans would only know her music through covers by other artists. Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson had a hit with the lovely country duet Gulf Coast Highway, co-written by Griffith and bandmate James Hooker, who sang the duet on the original. It has the line that seems so appropriate today:
“And when she dies, she says she’ll catch some blackbird’s wing,
and she will fly away to heaven, come some sweet Blue Bonnet spring.”
R.I.P. Nanci Griffith. You left us much too soon.
More to come…
DJB
Image: Cover of Nanci Griffith’s 1987 album Lone Star State of Mind
“Researchers estimate that the war in Afghanistan has cost more than 171,000 lives. It has wounded more than 20,700 U.S. service members and taken the lives of 2461 more. It has cost more than $2 trillion, which adds up to about $300 million a day for twenty years.“
Tomorrow’s twentieth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11* should lead us to step back from the failed policies of the endless war on terror and use fact-based evidence to think through the many challenges we face, which extend well beyond jihadist terror. It is past time to sort out national interests vs. partisan interests.
And it would be nice if the major news outlets would help. But as PressRun.Media founder Eric Boehlert recently pointed out, “the same press corps that said DeSantis ‘won’ the pandemic is now sure Biden ‘lost’ Afghanistan.”
So I have my doubts.
I asked a friend — a professional journalist who teaches journalism — about the media today. She shook her head and simply said, “They never learn.” Throughout August, many who write about the media for major news outlets expressed frustration with the way the issues we face are covered.
Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review contrasts the hawkish coverage of the media in Afghanistan to the overall lack of coverage about recent events in Haiti, both places where the U.S. has a history of complicity in creating crises. Much of the outrage is driven by “Washington-based politicians and national-security pundits with well-established hawkish views — and in some cases, as The Intercept has reported, ongoing professional and financial ties to the military-industrial complex.”
Throughout, the American government has lied to the American people about how well things were going in America’s longest war, as The Washington Post’s important 2019 project, “The Afghanistan Papers,” made abundantly clear….’Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.’”
Political scientist Larry Sabato suggested that much of the slant to the Afghanistan coverage came about because the media has “been waiting for an opportunity to harshly go after Biden to prove anew how ‘balanced’ they are.”
The stakes in these decisions are incredibly high, as Heather Cox Richardson outlined in writing on national vs. partisan interests. There are important questions of when it is in America’s interest to fight a ground war. They are not easy questions, and reasonable people can disagree.
“But none of them is about partisan politics, either; they are about defining our national interest.
It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.“
Not to mention that many of those wanting to protect Americans in Afghanistan seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 650,000 of us.
The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is a good time to invest in evidence-based solutions to our nation’s biggest problems which, as MichaelGerman, Elizabeth Goitein and Faiza Patel have written, isn’t jihadist terrorism any more.
“When something is labeled a “national security” threat, it is often assumed that the response will require extraordinary assertions of executive power and diminished protections for civil rights and civil liberties. This assumption has dominated our government’s response to 9/11. Yet it is rarely tested, as few counter-terrorism tactics have been evaluated for effectiveness using scientific, evidence-based methods. Indeed, in many instances, there is reason to believe these heavy-handed responses have been ineffective or even harmful.…”
And their conclusion nails it for me.
“The billions wasted on military and intelligence programs that do not demonstrably make Americans safer need to be reinvested in evidence-based solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.”
More to come…
DJB
*My post Isolated mind. Dead hearts from last Thanksgiving builds on a sermon given the Sunday after 9/11 by one of my mentors, The Rev. Dr. Frank Wade.
Oscar Charleston is the best baseball player you’ve never heard of. Don’t believe me? Bill James, the father of baseball analytics, rated Charleston as not only the greatest Negro Leagues player of them all, but as the fourth greatest baseball player of all time. According to the stats that James uses to rank player value from different eras, only Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Willie Mays were greater than Charleston, who was slotted just above Ty Cobb.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.
Charleston put together an other-worldly career in the Negro and Cuban leagues decades before white major league baseball decided to integrate.* A centerfielder with the range and smarts of Willie Mays, a hitter with as fearsome a stroke as Babe Ruth, and a baserunner built like a linebacker with the fast fearlessness of Ty Cobb, Charleston was the whole package. Yet in the era when he was at his best, from the late-1910s to the mid-1930s, the Negro Leagues were little noticed outside the Black community and seldom appreciated by those who ran the white leagues. That didn’t, however, keep Charleston’s fame from growing.
Negro Leagues players and sportswriters from Satchel Paige to Buck O’Neil to Turkey Stearnes said he was the best player they had ever seen. Former white baseball commissioner Happy Chandler said that Charleston and Cobb were the “greatest ballplayers he had ever laid eyes on.” Dizzy Dean said of Oscar, “He could hit a ball a mile….he didn’t have a weakness. We just threw and hoped like hell he didn’t send it out of the park.” And the great Honus Wagner, two months before Charleston’s death, said, “I’ve seen all the great players in the many years I’ve been around, and have yet to see one any greater than Charleston.” Oscar Charleston was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1976, and yet his reputation was still largely hidden due to his race, the era he played in, and the lack of biographical material written about him as compared with other Negro Leagues players.
Oscar Charleston played for and managed what many consider to be one of the top Negro Leagues teams of all time, the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the early 1930s. He also played for the other great team of that era, the Homestead Grays. Besides Charleston, those two teams featured Hall-of-Famers Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Willie Foster, Judy Johnson, Smokey Joe Williams, and Jud “Boojum” Wilson. As his playing days drew to a close, he built a reputation as a talented manager. Branch Rickey — who broke baseball’s color barrier when he signed Jackie Robinson — hired Charleston as the first African American scout for major league baseball.
All of this and much more comes out in Beer’s fascinating book. Using previously unknown sources, he has brought forward the forgotten history of a man who, although he was the best known player of the Negro Leagues, was identified by the occupation “baggage handler” on his death certificate. Beer’s work helps illuminate the history of this important American, who deserved so much more in life and death.
Kevin Blackistone, writing in the Washington Post, also addresses the delegitimization of Negro Leagues baseball in Shohei Ohtani and the Negro Leagues’ two-way stars. In writing of how two-way phenom Ohtani is often compared to Babe Ruth, who pitched early in his career, Blackistone makes the case that the better comparison is Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. It was New York baseball columnist Damon Runyon who gave Radcliffe that name.
Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe
During a 1932 doubleheader that pitted Radcliffe’s Pittsburgh Crawfords against the New York Black Yankees at Yankee Stadium, Runyon witnessed Radcliffe hit a grand slam and catch Satchel Paige’s shutout in the twi-night opener, only to turn around and throw a shutout of his own in the second game.“
Radcliffe did double duty as a pitcher and catcher from 1930 to 1946. Only he did them in the Negro Leagues.
“But that Ohtani would be compared reflexively by most of us in the media to Ruth — skipping over the career not only of Radcliffe but of other Negro Leagues stars who routinely pitched and played the field, such as Hall of Famer “Bullet” Joe Rogan — reminds how baked-in the continued delegitimization of Negro Leaguers’ accomplishments is. An asterisk still hovers over their achievements, while none does for White players who also played only among themselves and not against all of the best players of their time….Negro Leagues ballplayers continue to deserve better.“
Blackistone could have called out his fellow Washington Post columnist, the recently retired Tom Boswell, over the same issue. I love Boswell’s work and encourage you to read Thomas Boswell’s best Washington Post sportswriting. However, as Beer points out, Boswell criticized the Sporting News in 1999 for listing Charleston as the sixty-seventh best player of all time, pouring on sarcasm (Was he a nineteenth-century player? A Negro Leagues star? A legend in Antarctic sandlot ball?) that makes one cringe at the white privilege and ignorance of his statements. Even the great ones swing and miss on occasion.
*Charleston’s slash line over 27 years was .350/.430/.573. His OPS was 1.003 and his OPS+ was 173. As a comparison, Babe Ruth’s career slash line was .342/.474/.690 with an OPS + of 197.
With a hint of fall in the cooler air, let’s rise early for our daily walk.
Coming by my love of the morning naturally, I gravitate to others who are facing the day at sunrise, getting an early start. Even with traditional work responsibilities in the rear view mirror, I still choose to begin the day with a walk when much of the world is throwing off its bedcovers and throwing open the windows. The possibilities for the moment, for the day, for life are clearer as I put one foot in front of the other, over and over again.
I see others up with the sun, including some familiar faces. Like Carter, the 68-year-old gentleman sitting in his wheelchair outside Ace Hardware. With his radio playing and Carter spreading smiles and sunshine, he is ready to get his Covid booster shot and do his part to help the community. There is the young man striding through downtown, listening to a podcast on his headphones while sporting stylish shorts made from the much-loved design of the Maryland flag. Or our neighbor Ed, who — as his retirement project — is training a young English Labrador on various aspects of good dog behavior. The lab also looks sharp, sporting a well-groomed pale yellow coat.
First encounters when stepping off the stoop will invariably be with those, like Ed, on labors of love: dog walkers, for instance, or parents strolling their children to the day care center. While their canine and human charges are eager to meet the day, the adult parts of the tandem display every state of being from catatonic to highly caffeinated.
Several city blocks separate me from my morning shot of caffeine. At Kaldi’s Social House there’s a warm and welcoming “hello David” waiting as Betty, Jo, Kadiato, Rayyana, and Sahr begin to make my favorite summer drink (cold brew with oat milk) before I’m ten steps into the shop. The conversation ranges from the changing seasons (Rayyana, from Saudi Arabia, has never adjusted to the cold of winter) to fashionable glasses (Betty owns more pairs than I do). From school (“Whatever possessed me to sign up for a class that ends at 9:40 at night when I have to be up and out to work at 6!”) to smiles (Jo says she can see them through the masks by looking at the eyes). From health care (dental coverage seems to be a luxury for many) to sleep (no one ever gets enough).
One of the hardest jobs I ever had was waiting tables, so their cheerfulness early in the morning while serving a steady stream of customers is a treat I cherish. Labor Day is an especially good day to acknowledge, appreciate, and admire all those who make our day better.
Penguin Rush Hour (Credit: WMATA)
Face-to-face with the 21st century labor force
Living across the street from the Metro station, I encounter people heading to their labors. Prior to the pandemic, many would be dressed alike in the professional Washington uniform — which is key context in making the 100-foot-long Penguin Rush Hour mural at the station so deliciously delightful.
The professional classes and knowledge workers have their own set of issues, but Labor Day is a celebration of those who work with their hands, their backs, their full bodies, and — yes — their brains. Among those millions of workers are the morning people I see on my walks — those of the underpaid labor class who are up early to make sure the rest of us can function.
Besides the crew at Kaldi, I see a range of those working early and long hours for much less pay than the men and women heading to Washington’s gleaming office buildings. People with names and jobs that matter.
Like Jorge, one of the numerous street sweepers and trash collectors who turn the space in front of Georgia Avenue’s bars and clubs from a mini-version of New Orleans the morning after Fat Tuesday into a welcoming space for the day.
Plant whisperers like Raphael, who move heavy hoses, watering trucks, and wheelbarrows full of mulch around to keep downtown lush and blooming.
Farmers like Elda and George from Barajas Produce who work seven days a week and drive up to two hours on a Saturday morning to bring juicy peaches, striking red and yellow sweet peppers, creamy milk, eggs with yolks bursting with flavor, delectable honey, and rich goat’s milk cheese to fill our refrigerators and freezers.
Small business owners like Kim and Young, who open their dry cleaners at 7 a.m. with a smile (Kim) and a quip (Young) to ensure that on the increasingly rare days when I need a suit and dress shirt, mine are cleaned and pressed.
Recognize the humanity
Inevitably old school in nature, I always try — at a minimum — to smile and say hello when I pass the people who inhabit my mornings. I thank the street sweepers and plant whisperers. I say a word to admire the handiwork of the construction crews. I connect when the Ethiopian immigrant setting up the outside tables at Whole Foods urges me to “seize the day!”
Silver Spring is enriched with one of the largest Ethiopian communities in the DMV.
Many of those I meet are immigrants, and as I learned from my barber — a registered nurse before coming to the U.S. from the Republic of Georgia — they have often taken less “professional” jobs than their training and backgrounds would suggest. As Anand Giridharadaswrote in his book The True American,
“Selling Americans three tamales for a dollar was a strange landing for a twenty-seven-year-old who had trained to command fighter jets and qualified as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. But so it is with the many who leave their native soil and find that to rise, they must first sink into the fresh earth below. Rais was no longer a Bangladesh Air Force man. He was a Buckner Food Mart man.“
They are the ones doing work that many of us don’t want to do. They have the names that many of us mispronounce — or, in fact, dispronounce — which is a term for people saying names incorrectly on purpose, to ensure that immigrants know whose country this really is. Natalie Goldberg reminds us of the importance of names. They tell us that people exist. “Seeing names makes us remember. A name is what we carry all our life, and we respond to its call in a classroom, to its pronunciation at a graduation, or to our name whispered in the night.”
Those with names we forget or mispronounce are too often being used by our capitalistic system for our benefit, and we much too frequently overlook them in our rush to get through the day.
I see people every morning who remind me how much the quality of my life is enhanced by their willingness to sink themselves into the fresh earth of a new country, get up very early even if they are hurting, face the sunrise, and get to work. I think about the millions in factories, driving trucks, in hospitals, in Amazon warehouses, on high-rise construction projects I don’t see, who do the same. Rather than push back against people of color and immigrants, perhaps we could focus on all they have done for this country, welcome them, and help them realize their part of the American dream. We are all, in a fashion, immigrants.
Oligarchy and the American way
To see a way forward, we must first take a brief look back at America’s relationship to the people who build and take care of the things and people in our country.
For most of its existence, American capitalism has grown on the backs of cheap, disposable labor.
Southern slaveowners ruled the country from its founding to 1860, supported by major commercial interests in the North.* To break the hold of chattel slavery it took the creation of an anti-slavery, pro-business Republican party and a civil war.
Robber barons ruled the country from the 1870s to the 1930s with their repressive labor practices and outright theft of land, minerals, and life. To break their hold on power it took a country overwhelmed by the needs of the Great Depression, the creation of a progressive wing of the Democratic party, and leaders like Frances Perkins. It took the election of an administration and Congress that passed federal legislation in the form of the New Deal. Strong unions gave us the weekend, the 8-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, paid vacations, sick leave, and more. The New Deal and unions — though far from perfect and far from all-inclusive — nonetheless produced the country’s first true middle class. In the 1970s, we had no billionaires.
That lasted until 1980 and the ascension of an anti-regulatory, anti-civil rights, anti-union, anti-voting rights, pro-corporate Republican party and the election of Ronald Reagan, supported by the conservative Supreme Courts of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and especially Chief Justice John Roberts. Regulations on business were slashed, taxes were cut, protections for the working class were weakened, access to the polls for people who did not vote Republican was limited, and income inequality soared. We are now in our third period of oligarchy, this time led by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, multinational business interests, and a corporate media. Income inequality has reached Gilded Age levels, with the top 0.1% of Americans taking in more than 196 times the income of the bottom 90 percent.
As in the previous two periods, this unfettered capitalism is built on cheap, disposable labor and the fostering of hatred between working classes.
A way forward
The top 0.1% is working hard to obscure the fact that it is in the best interest of 90% of Americans to seek out what Heather McGhee has called a solidarity dividend. To achieve their goal, those at the top want us to forget that labor is composed of human beings: real, breathing, loving people, striving to advance and meet their own American dream. But the deck is stacked against them as long as the top 0.1% hold the power of government.
Teri Kanefield has written that we have the power to change. “What we learned from getting out of our second oligarchy, the age of robber barons, is that federal legislation can solve the dark money problem and move us toward a fully functioning multi-racial democracy.”
We need to elect people to office who believe in the project to — in the unforgettable words of Langston Hughes — “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” We need to push Congress hard to pass laws to protect our democracy against the oligarchs and approve legislation so everyone can make a decent living. We need to tax those who for too long have taken a free ride on our backs and on our time and wealth. We need to make sure everyone can vote.
We also need to recognize the humanity of those who toil for our benefit. It becomes much harder to demonize someone you know. In addition to taking steps to make government fairer for all, Labor Day is as good a day as any to begin to take the time to stop, smile, talk, learn their stories, and thank the morning people in your life. You may be amazed at what you learn.
More to come…
DJB
*Almost two-thirds of the presidents before the civil war were slave-owning southerners — nine of the first fifteen presidents — and one more had strong southern leanings. Of the 21 four-year terms during that period, this southern group held office during 16 of those terms.
Next week More to Come will awaken from its summer slumber with posts on a range of current issues, places that matter, roots musicians, and occasional bursts of radical common sense. But before we get back into the thick of things, let’s take the time to honor that great tradition of the August holiday.
“…anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around – you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.”
To get back into the swing of blogging, and — more importantly — to celebrate current trips and anticipate future adventures, here are links to a bakers dozen old MTC favorites from places I’ve visited since this blog began in 2008 as a way to capture a family trip to the Four Corners. If you want to see more, check out the Heritage Travel section of the blog.
A few “classic” photos features a small collection of the 140 black-and-white photographs Claire took and developed in her high school dark room from that same trip.
The beauty of the Dutch Antillesis my whet-your-appetite post from a trip — in February of 2010 — to the Dutch Antilles on the Sea Cloud II.
The most ignored building on college campus (tours) provides a snippet from our two-week tour through New England in 2010. You have to go that long when you have twins who are looking at different colleges in the same year.
Beautiful Stockholm captures several days out of our March 2014 family trip to see Andrew, who was studying abroad.
In 2014, Claire and I took a 22-day cross-country trip that I dubbed the Not All Who WanderAre Lost tour. There are posts and pictures from each day on that wonderful experience, if you want to explore. I’ll just say that every dad should have the opportunity to explore the riches of our country for three weeks with his daughter.
Going to the sun is a nice sample from that trip, capturing our day in Glacier National Park.
48 hours in Tuscanyis just one of many posts from our lifetime-changing six weeks in Rome in 2016, for my sabbatical.
These Observations from Romewrapped up those six weeks. You can get a sense of what we did and find links to specific posts. (There were many.)
I took a gap year in 2019 after retiring from the National Trust, and the first thing on the agenda was travel. I’ll end this post with three links to my time in Japan, followed by one post from our visit to England.
Buddhist statues, decorated to protect children and travelers, at Daisho-in Temple, Miyajima, Japan
Eight days before the architect I.M. Pei passed away at the age of 102, we visited his Miho Museum in Japan. I wrote about it in I.M. Pei, Rest in Peace.
Children of the drum was written from Japan as a reminder that we need to remember the basic things that make us human, helping us work together in community. We need to get to the heartbeat.
Japan by sea is the wrap-up to that wonderful two-week tour.
We were in England for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. One of the reasons we travel is to understand that our perspective isn’t the only one when it comes to historical events. I wrote about this in Remembering D-Day.
Happy travels, whenever you have the opportunity to see distant places.
MORE TO COME... 