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Turning back to what matters

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As our emotions ranged from exuberant and poignant highs to harrowing and tragic lows, a wise observer sent out a reminder of how the world works.

“One of the most painful things for me to watch in the frenzy of our life together in recent years was the loss of any capacity to remember that essential contradictions run wild in each of us and are real, too, in whoever our ‘others’ have become. There is a terrible but also a beautiful, and potentially redemptive, complexity at play whenever human beings are involved.”

We have all been through great leaps of emotion just over the past seven days. There was a transition of power in the U.S., although it was less than fully peaceful and featured pettiness and spitefulness right up to the end. Two recent occurrences took me back to last Monday’s More to Come post and thoughts of how far we have to travel to rebuild trust when we have political leaders in one party who are not serious. And yet we also saw historical firsts and great moments of grace and eloquence.

Let’s begin with two events — the firing of a truth-teller and the faux outrage over a decent and moral speech — that show how far we stand from transparency, truth, civility, and trust.

First, Fox News announced that it had fired Chris Stirewalt, the veteran politics editor who was an onscreen face of the network’s election night projection that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in Arizona. Later Fox News’s longtime Washington bureau chief announced his retirement after facing criticism from network executives as well.

Fox — which bills itself as a news network — was the first network to call Arizona for Biden, and they got the call right! But instead of sending kudos to the news division and decision desk, the owners and top executives at the network decided to punish those who told the truth. Their viewers, most especially Donald Trump, didn’t like truth mixed in with their “news.”*

Beyond firing the individual who was right, Fox also responded to this turn of events by cutting more news positions and hiring more opinion pundits. Just one day after Biden was inaugurated Fox had a “Breaking News” chyron that read: “Biden’s Disastrous First Week.” Clearly Fox’s business model of telling lies and tricking its viewers makes more money than telling objective facts and news, which is the point made in last Monday’s post:

“We cannot build a more trusting time…unless we also recognize that there are those who benefit from the discord and distrust, and who will work hard to undermine any efforts to reduce their influence over others. Their role in our society needs to be diminished and controlled.”

That news item was followed by faux outrage to President Biden’s call for national unity. We all expected Biden to urge a coming together in his inaugural address, as he’s been talking about it for two years. What surprised many of us was how he moved beyond feel-good language to note that “our prospects for much-needed ‘unity’ are threatened by various political forces. Among them, he said, are racism, nativism, political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism.”

President Biden looked at the 2017 events in Charlottesville and the insurrection of January 6th and saw what any objective viewer saw.

Unfortunately, objectivity wasn’t the goal in the reaction by the professional political class on the right. As Greg Sargent notes in the Washington Post, “Republican officials and their media allies are now widely condemning these words as an attack on themselves and their voters. The obvious trick,” Sargent noted, “is to game the media into saying Biden is already reneging on his unity promise by being divisive. Republicans,” he added, are also “working to reframe the national debate over how to repair the damage done during Donald Trump’s presidency on terms favorable to them.”

The faux outrage, just like Republicans pretending to care about the deficit again**, was widely anticipated.

The predictability of these responses shows why we need to stop listening to this professional political class on the right as if they are part of a rational, functioning political party that cares about the future of democracy and America. After four years of supporting every whim Donald Trump wanted to inflict on America while turning a blind eye to the unnecessary deaths of 1 in every 1,000 Americans under his mismanaged coronavirus response, they have lost their chance to be taken seriously until they clean house.

I generally do not read the conservative columnist George Will. As noted in other posts, I won’t buy books — even books on baseball — where Will has written a jacket blurb. But part of the title to a recent column grabbed me. The snippet was, “So the people need to grow up.”

When I was a young boy in Tennessee, I would, on occasion, do something foolish or moronic, leading my father to say, “It is time to grow up!” I know that reprimand from personal experience.

Will wrote in his column, “Five days before becoming president, (Biden) spoke five blunt words that would have been discordant in an inaugural address but that the entire nation needs to take to heart. Commenting on Republican members of Congress who refused to wear masks while crowded into protected rooms during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Biden said: ‘It’s time to grow up.'” Charlie Sykes, another conservative who has also had enough, agrees with Will and calls out the GOP as an unserious party.

Writer Anand Giridharadas looks at the events around us and has suggested that we are “living through a revolt against the future. The future,” he insists, “will prevail.”

Which brings me back to hope, potential redemption, and the things that matter. In her weekly note to readers of the On Being project, it was that wise observer Krista Tippett who noted that we all fall short in this life. “This is an uncomfortable truth to take in, a fact not about life as we wish it to be but about life as it is,” she begins. And then she continues with the thought that began this post, a thought that has been turning in my mind since it came across my screen.

“One of the most painful things for me to watch in the frenzy of our life together in recent years was the loss of any capacity to remember that essential contradictions run wild in each of us and are real, too, in whoever our ‘others’ have become.” Yes, we all strive. We all fall short. We are full of contradictions.

And yes, there is “a terrible but also a beautiful, and potentially redemptive, complexity at play whenever human beings are involved.”

There is hope and there is potential redemption. While a great many of these people who need to grow up are middle age or older, many of us met a 22-year-old young woman for the first time last Wednesday who is clearly a grown-up and who speaks in serious, yet lofty language. Amanda Gorman reminds us of what’s at stake if we give in to those who…

“…would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.“

Much has changed for the good. When a woman of Black and Indian parents can be sworn in as the nation’s first female Vice President by the nation’s first female Latina Supreme Court Justice just before hearing another woman of color, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, lift our hearts with her soaring words and images, we know that things have changed. As Amanda Gorman said, “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us but what stands before us.”

The future will prevail.

Young people, women, people of color, immigrants, and many others not in the traditional corridors of power are showing us what matters. How to be our best selves. Yes, we need the public to get serious, recognize what we almost lost on January 6th, and grow up. But that will only happen as we see the essential contradictions in ourselves that we so easily see in others and work toward a reconciliation with those who are willing to be serious about what matters.

It is past time to get to work.

More to come…

DJB

*Here’s the reason why.

**The Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman sets them straight.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Taking a viscerally emotional journey with guitarist and singer John Smith

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British born and based guitarist, singer, and songwriter John Smith hits so many right notes for me. His guitar work is novel and fresh, yet rooted in the fingerstyle tradition of British folk, while his singing is warm and welcoming. His website tells a bit about his background.

Steeped in the lineage of British folk, taking his cue from Richard Thompson and John Martyn, Smith has evolved a transatlantic blend of fingerstyle and slide guitar techniques. John’s intimate takes on love, loss and the journey we make, combined with his innovative guitar work, have won him a loyal following.  His honey-on-gravel voice and mesmerizing fingerstyle guitar are undeniable. Sometimes using a slide, sometimes with guitar on his lap, sometimes detuning mid-song, Smith’s obsession with the instrument has made a master of him. Whether by way of album or concert, he leads the listener, enthralled in his presence, on a viscerally emotional journey.

Let’s begin this Saturday Soundtrack with an optimistic look ahead. From the 2017 album Headlong comes the tune Far Too Good, heard in the live version from the eTown show. The sentiment that “you’re far too good for keeping down” is one I like to hear these days.

“Tell me your dream
Somewhere you wanna go or someone to be
What of those desires?
What hunger to sate, how high the fire?

Are you gonna make yourself unhappy? 
Are you gonna let it run you around? 
Have a little faith, we can pull it together 
You’re far too good for keeping down“

Salty and sweet from the 2013 album Great Lakes calls upon Smith’s childhood growing up in a seaside village. Here are two versions – a solo one followed by a duet with Irish singer Lisa Hannigan. Both are worth a listen.

Also from the Headlong album, this backstage video of Save My Life gives you the chance to hear Smith in a band setting.

Smith plays electric guitar, but you won’t be surprised to know that I gravitate toward his acoustic work. From the Fretboard Journal You Tube site, Smith performs Hummingbird. This is the title track off his excellent 2018 album.

There is beautiful fingerstyle guitar backing his vocals throughout, but at about the 2:30 mark you can hear a bit without the overlay of the vocals. I believe Smith is playing in a DADGAD tuning — sometimes known as the “grown man’s (or woman’s) tuning” — and it is simply lovely. (Click on the link and learn more about the tuning and how Smith came to live in that space.)

“For this track, John is playing his long-scale Fylde Alexander, an instrument with rosewood back and sides, a highly-figured Sitka spruce top and Yew binding. Though not plugged-in for this session, it’s equipped with a vintage DeArmond soundhole pickup that came to Smith via musician/producer Joe Henry.“

We’ll end with his most recent single, Friends, another tune of optimism for our times.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

The Hill We Climb

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In an inaugural ceremony full of wonderful moments and historic firsts, this was among the best.

Like so many, I was mesmerized by Amanda Gorman‘s six minutes of poetry in The Hill We Climb at the end of the ceremony for the Inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of United States.

“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust.

For while we have our eyes on the future,

History has its eyes on us.“

Yes, history has its eyes on us. But as Gorman ended her powerful call, it requires bravery for “our people diverse and beautiful” to “emerge battered and beautiful.”

“The new dawn blooms as we free it

for there is always light

if only we’re brave enough to see it,

if only we’re brave enough to be it.“

More to come…

DJB

Full text available at Poetry.com.

Weekly Reader: Facing the rising sun

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This Weekly Reader features links to articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy as we move into the beginnings of the Biden Administration. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

Lift Every Voice and Sing is the sine qua non each year in our parish celebration of the life and work of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve written about how I came to respect and, yes, love this song, which is also known as the Black National Anthem. This past Sunday, as I thought about how African Americans turned out to vote in 2020 in ways that saved our democracy, I cried. The song’s second verse — and the thought of the weary feet of millions of voters — especially gripped me. What follows is my favorite 2020 rendition of Lift Every Voice and Sing.

“Stony the road we trod

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died

Yet with a steady beat

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered

Out from the gloomy past

‘Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast“

This Weekly Reader will begin the pivot beyond a singular focus on the atrocities of the past four years. Unfortunately many of the issues that rose to the surface of our civic life during the turmoil will remain for us to grapple with in the years ahead. Several are covered in this week’s post.

Axios has in-depth reporting in a multi-part series entitled Off the rails: Behind Trump’s post-election meltdown that is very much worth a read.

“Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. This Axios special series takes you inside the collapse of a president.“

If you haven’t watched the video put together by Washington Post reporters Dalton Bennett, Emma Brown, Sarah Cahlan, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Meg Kelly, Elyse Samuels, and Jon Swaine entitled 41 minutes of fear: A video timeline from inside the Capitol siege please do so.

“At 2:12 p.m. on Jan. 6, supporters of President Trump began climbing through a window they had smashed on the northwest side of the U.S. Capitol. “Go! Go! Go!” someone shouted as the rioters, some in military gear, streamed in.

It was the start of the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. The mob coursed through the building, enraged that Congress was preparing to make Trump’s electoral defeat official. “Drag them out! … Hang them out!” rioters yelled at one point, as they gathered near the House chamber.“

You will see how close we came to losing our government on January 6th. All because of a premeditated and delusional lie.

Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, writes a thoughtful piece in the New York Times about the idea of multiracial whiteness and how that concept helped support the racism of the past administration.

“Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.”

“In the politics of multiracial whiteness,” writes Beltrán, “anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories.”

Leonard Pitts, Jr., in his column in the Miami Herald, looks at the last four years from the perspective of a person of color and writes that President Trump is one lucky guy. He wasn’t born Black, otherwise, well, you know … 

“As the Trump administration stumbles through its final hours, it seems a proper time to offer a summation of the era just past. Ordinarily, this calls for analytical heavy lifting. One seeks to reconcile a mosaic of accomplishments, failures and compromises into a single coherent portrait.…

Unlike his predecessor, whom (Republicans) so extravagantly loathed, the decent family man who didn’t embarrass himself and his country every time he opened his mouth, Donald Trump had the foresight to not be Black.“

Pitts outlines the many shortcomings of Donald Trump, and then ends with this.

“After exhorting the rioters to action, he watched the melee on television. Seeing an assault on government, knowing lawmakers from his own party were in harm’s way, he did not send help and later told the rioters he loved them. It was an unspeakable betrayal of his country, his office and his duty. In other words, it was a Wednesday.

Trump leaves behind him an America in chaos, divisions deeper than living eyes have ever seen. But he was not Black. So one presumes you’re satisfied.“

As historians begin to assses the outgoing administration, you may be interested in this long and thoughtful piece by Tim Naftali ,a clinical associate professor of history at NYU who served as the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Natfali writes in The Atlantic that Trump is the worst president in history.

Just in time for Black History Month, Travel + Leisure magazine’s Jessica Poitevien notes that The First-ever Museum Dedicated to African American Music Will Soon Open in Nashville.

“Nashville is already known as a country music destination, but now it’s getting a bit more soul, gospel, and R&B, thanks to the addition of a new museum focusing on African American music. The National Museum of African American Music will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Jan. 18, 2021, with the space officially opening to the public on the 30th of that month.“

What may not be apparent to many is that African American music is not limited to areas we all recognize, such as soul, gospel, and R&B. African Americans were part of early bluegrass and country music, for instance, where their impact is not well known or recognized.

As banjo player Rhiannon Giddens told the International Bluegrass Music Association, “The question isn’t ‘How do we get diversity into bluegrass?’ The question is, ‘How do we get diversity back into bluegrass?’” That’s the challenge for the National Museum of African American Music, which seems to be off to a good start with its dedication to educating, preserving, and celebrating more than “50 music genres and styles that were created, influenced, and/or inspired by African Americans.”

On the same topic, you may wish to check out Margaret Renkl’s piece in Monday’s New York Times, Black music has a new home in Nashville.

And to end with something completely different, Bill Murphy, Jr., writing for Inc.com, suggests that People Who Adopt These 7 Verbal Habits in 2021 Have Very High Emotional Intelligence.

“Did you ever realize the perfect thing to say to somebody — only it’s too late, because you already said something less effective?

I hate when that happens. One way to have it happen less often is not to rush into saying things before you have to. A short pause can be sufficient — even just counting to five before replying. 

I’d recommend saying this quietly to yourself — although if you do it out loud intentionally, you’ll certainly send a message to the other person in your conversation.

In short, silence speaks volumes, and when you’re not talking, you’re most likely thinking or even listening. You’re also not digging rhetorical holes. So the five-second pause can be a powerful tool.“

Enjoy the readings this week.

More to come…

DJB

Sunrise Image by Franz Roos from Pixabay

A more trusting time

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Trust. It is crucial to getting things done. Collaboration moves at the speed of trust.

In his newest book, former South Bend Mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg writes that trust is foundational to the success of American democracy. Speaking to the New York Times last October, Buttigieg said,

“There is unquestionably a crisis of trust and trustworthiness in our country — trust in our institutions, trust in each other, global trust in America as a whole….What I was trying to do was both shine a light on the ways routine cooperation requires trust — whether you’re eating at a restaurant or driving a car — and also show what’s at stake in the biggest public health crisis of our time. I wanted to do it in a way that lets people hear the phrase ‘a more trusting time’ and think about what we’re building instead of what we’ve lost.” (emphasis added)

Buttigieg calls his “modest contribution” a signpost more than a road map, which is a fair assessment. Nonetheless, signposts can be very instructive. It is important to remember in this time of great political discord and paranoid thinking how much we lose when we give up on trust. While often unseen, Buttigieg writes, “trust is indispensable for a healthy, functioning society. And in the absence of trust, nothing that works can work well.”

In this recommended book, Buttigieg, who is President-elect Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Transportation, walks through the necessity of trust, the toxic roots of the recent loss of trust in America, why he believes we are at an inflection point, and ways to rebuild trust. He tells several personal stories about the loss of innocence which comes to all of us when we realize the “tension that exists between the necessity of trust and the reality that people are not always trustworthy.”

There are a number of reasons we are facing a crisis of trust in America, not the least of which is the deliberate and decades-long effort by corporations and wealthy oligarchs to fund politicians who seek power above trust and who will enact policies that favor money over democracy. These are people, as historian Nancy MacLean has shown, who are not trustworthy and who have hidden their true agenda behind a wall of lies. Attacks to destroy the trust and credibility of unions, public schools, climate science, and the very role of government have taken their toll.

“Getting people to trust you through consistent, hard-won credibility is difficult and time consuming,” Buttigieg writes. But, and this is critical, “a shortcut to gaining trust is to simply ask people to join you in distrusting someone else.” (emphasis added)

“And so today we find ourselves in a kind of multi-direction tug-of-war with fellow Americans, all while edging nearer to the cliff. Across fifty years, through a combination of failed policies, amoral technologies, and concerted, deliberate attacks, foreign and domestic, we have lost access to the basic levels of trust that democracy demands.”

This is where we find ourselves two days before the first inauguration in U.S. history that is not based on the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump, after years of spreading baseless lies and being supported by enablers in politics, the media, and technology, will leave office without conceding that he lost the election. This is all based on Trump’s biggest lie to date, claiming that the presidential election was rigged but that the down-ballot races somehow were not rigged. That lie is evil, certainly, but as many have written it is also unbelievably dumb. 

He did lose. In a landslide, no less. His supporters, incited by his words and actions, attacked the citadel of democracy at the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the certification of the vote. Even though the insurrection failed, many enablers of Donald Trump continue to lie about the election outcome and that attack.

Those lies started well before January 6th, of course. Lying, gaslighting, double standards, faux outrage, and projection are all tricks of the trade to build distrust in government and to ask one group of Americans to join in distrusting other Americans. Those political leaders, their financial supporters, and their enablers in technology and the media have been using those tools ever since they decided to try to hold onto power as an extreme-right minority rather than change their positions and expand their base to attract more voters as is generally done in healthy democratic systems.

Those who care about democracy, the rule of law, fairness, social justice, and truth must understand the situation we are in and respond accordingly. There are ways to build trust back into our system. We can begin by remembering what it feels like to really see people beyond their tribe or ideology. We do that when we “come into the presence of one another” in the words of Whitney Kimbell Coe of the Center for Rural Strategies.

We cannot build a more trusting time, however, unless we also recognize that there are those who benefit from the discord and distrust, and who will work hard to undermine any efforts to reduce their influence over others. Their role in our society needs to be diminished and controlled. We need to realize, in Buttigieg’s words, the “tension that exists between the necessity of trust and the reality that people are not always trustworthy.” In this moment, when those who want to undermine democracy react with more lies, gaslighting, and faux outrage, just remember their now 50-year pattern of deceit and don’t get fooled again. Because they will continue in an attempt to overwhelm the truth.

Why? Because we have a not insignificant group of political elites who stopped caring about good governance and are focused instead on holding onto power using whatever means necessary, including it seems for some of them, openly embracing white supremacy, armed insurrection, and the delusions of a farcically transparent con man.

Very few have taken the courageous step of former Republican operative Stuart Stevens who delivered a blistering mea culpa and admitted his personal role in building the party on racism and lies. When a party stands for nothing, Stevens argues, “it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.”

So why do so many people believe these politicians and their enablers in technology and the media who stand for nothing but maintaining their own power? Because it is the “nature of the human condition” writes Buttigieg “that we are inclined to deny the truth of things that would be painful to face.” Things like our role in supporting white privilege, for instance.

It isn’t clear if these politicians, commentators, and bad actors think Americans are stupid, or if they themselves are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, or if they don’t care. Rudy Giuliani may fall into all three categories. But my larger point is we need to stop listening to these people as if they are part of a rational, functioning political party that cares about the future of democracy and America. After four years of supporting every whim Donald Trump wanted to inflict on America while turning a blind eye to the unnecessary deaths of 1 in every 1,000 Americans under his mismanaged coronavirus response, they have lost their chance to be taken seriously until they clean house.

We need to stop giving them any type of trust, because they have worked overtime to destroy our trust.

Paul Waldman wrote a piece in the Washington Post in October in which he looked into a future with a Democratic president and vice president, House of Representatives, and Senate and predicted the lies we would hear in 2021. And so many of the lies are such tried and true tropes that to those who will be telling them it must feel like the Blues Brothers rescuing their friends from soul-crushing jobs (or four years of supporting Trump) as they put the band back together and play the tunes they really enjoy. What are some of the lies Waldman highlighted?

  • Partisanship is bad or the “it is time for unity'” theme is a lie they can wield “because of the naïve but widespread idea that there are bipartisan solutions just waiting to be had.” The truth is that the two parties simply have “fundamentally different agendas.”
  • All of a sudden we’ll be told that America isn’t a democracy, it is a republic and that we have to worry about the tyranny of the majority over the downtrodden, poor minority. The minority, it turns out, has had an outsized role over the past few decades in telling the majority what to do and in restricting their freedoms.

There are other lies, projections, gaslighting, faux outrage, and double standards that we’ll see.

  • Every member of the party coming into power, down to conservative Joe Manchin of West Virginia, will be called a socialist. Because the right today despises programs to help others who are not like them or which might take one dollar out of the pockets of their financial benefactors (including Social Security and the Post Office). Socialism is their catch-all word to brand people who care about the larger community. Many of those making the charge do this while working at government jobs and/or drawing government pensions.
  • After the most immoral, incompetent, and corrupt administration in history, all of a sudden we’ll be asked to believe that the party that enabled Donald Trump cares about truth, standards, family values, religious freedom, and laws!

Paul Waldman captured the correct response.

(H)ere’s the thing about all these lies: We don’t have to take them seriously. When Republicans start squawking about the deficit, we can dismiss it out of hand. When they start crying about tyranny, we can remind them that when you lose an election, the winning side takes power and does things you oppose (emphasis added).

Now that the January 6th insurrection has painted a stark picture of where so much of the party leadership stands, there is a simple response to the lies, gaslighting, faux outrage, and projection that are sure to come. And that response from the majority should be that we won’t get fooled again.

Yes, there are honest, empathetic and loving Republicans. I am related to some of them. Throughout my career, I set aside partisan differences and worked with both Republicans and Democrats to advance causes for which we all felt passionately. I am old enough to have seen Democrats as the party of racial hatred and to have voted for moderate Republicans. But after the last four years I believe all who care about democracy have to call out the cynicism and the willing destruction of trust and truth. The consequences of staying silent are too serious.

America has lived under the tyranny of minority rule for oligarchs for too long, and it is destroying our country.

No, we won’t listen to the lies, projections, and gaslighting. We will trust those people of any party who act out of good will and who are willing to work to save democracy, support all Americans, and build a future that is a more trusting time. At least right now in this country, elections still have consequences.

Don’t get fooled again.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Geralt from Pixabay

I’m on my way: Music for the MLK weekend

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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend is always a good time to think back and look forward. Here are Saturday Soundtrack thoughts and music to help you do both.

During this time when many feel overwhelmed with grief for where our country stands at the end of four difficult years, I find some strength in recalling an incident that happened just after the 2016 election. I was in a meeting and several white participants were close to apoplectic in their concern over what the country had just done in electing Donald Trump. But two older African American friends had a less emotional reaction. Yes, they were concerned about what was to come but they were not surprised at the white community’s backlash against the nation’s first African American president. They reminded us that their families, and their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers had always dealt with adversity in this land of opportunity. It went along with being black in America. They persevered and they never gave up hope. Their message to us was if they did it in the midst of the oppression they faced, then persevering was the least we could do from our positions of privilege.

Their ancestors had been on the move, part of migrations both involuntary and voluntary. And after involuntary migrations into the cotton plantations of the deep South, some brave ones took a dangerous move north via the Underground Railroad, looking for freedom. I’ve always loved Richie Havens’ version of the 1920s song Follow the Drinking Gourd, the story of the slaves who looked at the Big Dipper and used the North Star to guide them out of captivity to freedom.

The songs of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s — like the Golden Gospel Singers‘ version of Oh Freedom and the incomparable Mavis Staples singing Freedom Highway — are good reminders of how this land of the free has worked to keep one race of people down for more than four centuries. Yet still they have moved forward; moving forward toward freedom.

Now there are new generations, still singing the old songs, as with Rhiannon Giddens version of Freedom Highway…

…but they are also showing us that they are not only looking back to honor the heroes, but they are moving forward in this place and time. Shortly after the election this fall, I wrote, “People of color saved democracy, so the least white people can do is work to end white supremacy.” That’s even clearer after the special elections in Georgia on January 5th.

President-elect Biden has said that even in those moments when his campaign was at its lowest, the African American community stood up for him. He’s right, of course. But I’d like to respectfully suggest that Black Americans in particular, all people of color in general, and a large younger, multicultural generation of citizens, many casting a ballot for the first time, stepped up to save our democracy. In the process, they helped elect the first woman of color as our nation’s Vice President. They did so by voting overwhelmingly against the racism, misogyny, incompetence, and voter suppression that defines today’s Trump-led Republicans.

If we want to keep moving in the direction of democracy, it is time for white Americans to join with all people of good intentions and fully commit to the hard, antiracist work to repudiate white supremacy and the corresponding minority rule that is a feature of that vile belief system. As Rhiannon Giddens sings in the powerful I’m On My Way, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know what to do.”

On the Throw the Dice & Place Nice website, writer  Kira Grunenberg has this to say about the song:

“This single is straightforward in some respects, like its classic blues chord structure, its verse-verse-chorus-verse flow, and its minimally adorned production approach. But don’t mistake that preference for compositional fundamentals as Giddens or Turrisi presenting disinterest in letting expression flourish. In fact, one could argue that the choice to exercise some restraint around the writing element makes it that much easier for listeners to not have to think about where the song is taking them and to allow for better attention on the two performers at hand – enjoying the journey more than the destination, if you will. And though Giddens says “Don’t know where I’m going,” it’s a statement made with nothing but confidence that shakes any shred of doubt when she leaves off with the declaration, “But I know what to do.”

“I don’t know the hour that finds me in this room

Dust around my feet and still no sugar in my spoon

But I’ve only got the taste for something sweet as time

Not bottled on the table but still hanging on the vine

I don’t know where I’m going But I’m on my way

Lord if you love me Keep me I pray

A little bird is stretching out to the shimmering, shaking blue

Don’t know where I’m going But I know what to do

Don’t know where I’m going But I know what to do“

After a sledgehammer has been taken to our democracy over the past four years, there is much work to be done. Even if we don’t know where we’re going or what we’ll encounter, I think in our hearts we know what to do.

With gratefulness for the life and legacy of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who we honor this weekend.

More to come…

DJB

Image of MLK Memorial by Michael Wilson from Pixabay

A profusion of pithy proverbs

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Late in 2019, a series of pithy proverbs — those bursts of truth in 20 words or so — was highlighted in a new feature on the blog entitled More to Consider.* Six months later, the collection from the first half of 2020 was back, this time labeled A plethora of pithy proverbs. And now here we are with a profusion!

My love for the short and to-the-point adage comes from my Grandmother Brown, who was known to say things such as, “Make do with what you’ve got.” This was the watchword during the depression when the family didn’t have much money. My father recalled that you repaired and just made do with what you had. Good advice as we navigate another economic downturn.

Let’s take a look at the More to Consider proverbs, quotes, adages, and sayings from the last six months, beginning with the one that is on the blog at this moment, by New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein, from the day after a Trump-incited mob stormed the Capitol.

“The problem isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.”

Ezra Klein in the New York Times, January 7, 2021

Those events of January 6th only point more directly to the issue raised by former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg in his book on the need to rebuilt trust in our lives and in our country.

“Our country’s ability to meet this moment depends not only on the wisdom of our policies or the justice of our ideals, but on our ability to cooperate to achieve anything at all. And that will largely depend on our levels of trust.”

Pete Buttigieg in “Trust: America’s Best Chance”

As we have watched the radical right’s efforts to subvert democracy both before and after the election, I posted a review of Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains. The following excerpt from that book highlights the goals of the libertarian oligarchs who have funded this movement to take America back to a time when those with money and power ran the country without much concern for what most of us would describe as freedom.

“The libertarian cause…was never really about freedom as most people would define it. It was about the promotion of crippling division among the people so as to end any interference with what those who held vast power over others believed should be their prerogatives….Calhoun-like liberty for the few – the liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many.”

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains

The Wall Street Journal editorial page “provided an insightful little lesson on the mechanisms of Wingnut Outrage Theatre,” wrote the satirical blogger Shower Cap back in December. The Journal “dug up some crusty old chauvinist” to grouse about Dr. Jill Biden “having the audacity to use the title she earned through years of hard work. Following the entirely predictable (and deliberately provoked) avalanche of pushback, the editorial page gleefully published a non-apology so cynical they surely had it prepped in advance.” The last sentence of Shower Cap’s comment was so perfect, I pulled it out for a More to Consider…

“The tree of conservative victimhood must be refreshed from time to time with the crocodile tears of mediocre white dudes.”

Shower Cap

As was often the case, Frederick Douglass was direct and on the mark in addressing our history of racism in this quote from late in his career. James Baldwin also spoke to the inequity in our country’s race relations in a way that reminds us of how we co-exist in this world.

“Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”

Frederick Douglass

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of humanity and right to exist.

James Baldwin

As the country began to be swamped by false claims of voter fraud by Donald Trump and his enablers, I turned to the prophet Hosea to consider the whirlwind that may result. When I wrote this, I did not anticipate January 6th, that day that will live in infamy, but perhaps I should have. I also brought forward an American patriot — Thomas Paine — to remind us that “what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

Hosea (8:7)

“These are the times that try men’s souls…Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

Thomas Paine in “The Crisis”

During the online National Preservation Conference this fall, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker spoke of the broader scope of the modern historic preservation movement.

“The work of preservation ought to be not just beautification and fixing things up, but ought to be about dignity…recognizing the fundamental humanity of so many others.”

Darren Walker, President, Ford Foundation

That was followed by three quotes — a famous one from the late Civil Rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer which I posted to honor her birthday, a second anonymous quote about courage and the need to face fear, and a third about how cynicism is a choice…that we don’t have to make.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Fannie Lou Hamer

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the strength to do what is right in the face of it.”

Anonymous

“Cynicism isn’t the only response to humanity’s inadequacies and limitations. Cynicism is a choice. It is just as much a choice as service to others or commitment to a worthy cause. As my old boss taught me, cynicism is just as much of a choice as hope.”

Jon Favreau (speechwriter for President Barack Obama)

And we’ll end with two poets — William Stafford and Octavia Butler — because no one thinks more about each and every word than poets.

“Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”

William Stafford

“To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.”

Octavia Butler

More to come…

DJB

Image of Proverbs from Pixabay

*As a reminder, to capture some of my favorite sayings without having to write an entire blog post about them, I created a feature on More to Come that I labeled “More to Consider.” Every other week or so I update these quick bursts of truth. This section of the website is easiest to see on a laptop, where it resides near the bottom of the home page or in the right hand column as you read individual posts. But most people read from their phones, where you have to scroll almost to the bottom before finding the saying for the week.

Weekly Reader: Let’s learn from experience

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This Weekly Reader features links to articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy as we navigate our way through the last days of the Trump administration. I usually write that I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. Laughter is probably in short supply this week.

This edition of Weekly Reader was headed in a different direction…then January 6th happened. So now it is bifurcated, much like our country at the moment. The first part has articles on the Trump-led riot and insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, while the second part — beginning with a wonderful story by the novelist Ann Patchett — covers articles of resilience and the need to address the grief that comes before the grief. If you have read enough about January 6th, jump down to the image of the helping hands.

Frank Rich has been covering Donald Trump and his crimes for years. In New York magazine he writes of The Trashing of the Republic with thoughts on the events of January 6th coupled with the historic election of Senator-elect Raphael Warnock in Georgia the day before.

“There are 74 million Americans who voted for the crime boss in the White House, who spent his entire time in office ginning up that mob. Seven of Warnock’s soon-to-be colleagues in the Senate continued to support Trump’s effort to overturn a free and honest presidential election even after his stormtroopers trashed the place. To believe that any of them will abandon Trumpism after Trump is gone is a fantasy.

So what is to be done? I’d say for starters let’s not forgive, let’s not forget, and let’s not delude ourselves. Let’s stop saying, “This is not America” every time “rogue” white cops kill a George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, or when white supremacists foment violence, whether in Charlottesville or Kenosha or Washington.“

Rich walks through Trump’s sordid past and his four years of being enabled by wild-eyed believers, cynical opportunists, Vichy Republicans, and yes, some Never-Trumpers who “with the conspicuous exceptions of Stuart Stevens and Joe Scarborough” have never owned up to their “complicity in some of this history even as they rebrand themselves on MSNBC.”

“Let’s stop taking seriously Never Trumpers like David Brooks who as recently as August enthused about the “intellectual ferment” in the Republican party and touted to Times readers four senators who embody the “post-2020, post-Trump Republican future”: Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Ben Sasse. (No Black men need apply, of course.)“

But Rich doesn’t see all gloom in the events last week. He also recognizes the historic election of The Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, to the U.S. Senate. Warnock won, Rich rightly notes…

“…because of Black voters and a remarkable Black political organizer, Stacey Abrams, who defied the systemic efforts of both local officials and the John Roberts Supreme Court to suppress and vitiate minority voting rights….”

“As the old saw has it, it can take a century (or two) to build an institution, but only a day to raze it to the ground. That’s what America flirted with this week. It was heartbreaking, but it should be galvanizing. Let’s be clearheaded: Those who were part of the problem are not part of the solution. Most of them are traitors. Let’s join hands with Senator-elect Warnock and those of good will like him to try to save a country that has for some time now been on the brink of its second civil war.”

One of the best summations of where we stand as a country at this moment comes from Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including Bloodlands and Black Earth, as well as the book On Tyranny, on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. Writing in the New York Times, Snyder’s essay The American Abyss is a look at Trump, the big lie, the mob, and what comes next.

As Snyder notes in his book On Tyranny,

“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.“

I highly recommend the essay in The Times. You may also be interested in this list of the 14 characteristics of fascism and the post in Medium about the list’s history and its author Laurence W. Britt.

Another long but informative piece comes from The Religion Dispatches, where Mark Juergensmeyer writes about The Three Qualities Marking the Capitol Assault as Terrorism.

“Though it’s true that the reasons for insurrections are different—supporters of the Islamic State are not the same as militant Buddhists in Myanmar, for example—all the violent extra-legal acts of force aimed against public order that I’ve studied have some common features, including symbolic empowerment, performance violence, and cosmic war.“

Speaking of religion, if you wonder where some of the anger on the right comes from, I suggest you read Katherine Stewart‘s New York Times opinion piece The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage.

As someone who writes about the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for political power and domination, her piece — like so many these days — is sobering.

“Christian nationalists’ acceptance of President Trump’s spectacular turpitude these past four years was a good measure of just how dire they think our situation is. Even a corrupt sociopath was better, in their eyes, than the horrifying freedom that religious moderates and liberals, along with the many Americans who don’t happen to be religious, offer the world.

That this neo-medieval vision is incompatible with constitutional democracy is clear. But in case you’re in doubt, consider where some of the most militant and coordinated support for Mr. Trump’s postelection assault on the American constitutional system has come from. The Conservative Action Project, a group associated with the Council for National Policy, which serves as a networking organization for America’s religious and economic right-wing elite, made its position clear in a statement issued a week before the insurrection.…”

“…Mr. Hawley isn’t against elites per se. He is all for an elite, provided that it is a religiously righteous elite. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School and he clerked for John Roberts, the chief justice. Mr. Hawley, in other words, is a successful meritocrat of the Federalist Society variety. His greatest rival in that department is the Princeton debater Ted Cruz. They are résumé jockeys in a system that rewards those who do the best job of mobilizing fear and irrationalism. They are what happens when callow ambition meets the grotesque inequalities and injustices of our age.” (emphasis added)

Our last Weekly Reader included an interview with my friend Anthea Hartig, Director of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, who spoke about dealing in a historical moment such as we are experiencing now. The timing was fortuitous, as seen in the Washington Post story by reporters Maura Judkis and Ellen McCarthy entitled The Capitol mob desecrated a historical workplace — and left behind some disturbing artifacts.

“Because of the historic nature of the Capitol riot, the mob not only destroyed historically important artifacts but created them. As cleanup crews tended to the Capitol’s exterior on Thursday, another type of worker was sifting through the mess for salvageable items. Frank Blazich, a curator from the National Museum of American History collected signs and other ephemera from the scene outside. Among the objects: a sign that read, “Off with their heads: Stop the steal.” Other leavings, including pro-insurrection stickers and flags found inside the Capitol, will be preserved along with artifacts like the speaker’s damaged name plate in the House and Senate collections and shared with national museums, including the Smithsonian’s, said the Committee on House Administration spokesperson.“

Maybe I spoke too soon about not finding any laughter, because little did I know that the infamous Zip-Tie Guy — who is, of course, from Tennessee and who, of course, worked at Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ’n’ Roll Steakhouse until he was fired a few months ago — brought his mother with him to assault democracy at the U.S. Capitol. Monica Hesse, writing in the Washington Post, explains the details in Trumpist masculinity reaches its high water mark. I hate to say it, but I grew up around people like Zip Tie Guy and his mom.

These final pieces that come out of the events of January 6th examine future options in response to authorianism. Historians including Eric Foner speak to the Washington Post about how Section 3 of the 14th Amendment could be applied to Donald Trump. In looking forward at what the Biden Administration and the Congress can do to help rebuild our democratic institutions, Richard L. Hasen in Slate outlines his ideas in The only way to save American democracy now. In Mother Jones, Bill Gifford writes of progressive policy wins in Utah in the article Red State Rebellion.

Helping hands (photo credit: James Chan from Pixabay)

This is the point where I originally intended to begin this week’s post, before January 6th intervened. Novelist Ann Patchett has a moving story in Harper’s Magazine entitled These Precious Days that I found pitch perfect for these times.

As Maria Browning, the editor of Chapter 16 says, this is a riveting story that “considers the nature of hope, courage, friendship, and storytelling itself. Do yourself a favor and set aside some time to read These Precious Days as we enter the new year.” The story is long (like 45 minutes-long) so make a cup of coffee or tea when you sit down with this one.

If you don’t know about Chapter 16, it is a “A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby“ and I highly recommend you sign up for the newsletter on their website.

It was the same issue of Chapter 16 that reminded me to look at Margaret Renkl‘s recent op-ed in the New York Times, The Bomb That Struck the Heart of Nashville.

“If years were musical genres, 2020 would be a country song — or maybe a blues album, or possibly gospel. It’s hard to know, in the midst of sorrow, exactly which brand of anguish is lodged in the human soul. I do know this, though: It’s been a miserable year here (in Nashville), a year that tore our hearts to pieces even before a bomb reduced a historic part of this city to rubble on Christmas Day.“

Renkl writes thoughtfully about the anguish and grief that is such a part of 2020. While grieving about what the bomber did to her city, Renkl notes that…

“…I am also thinking of the weight we’ve all carried this hard year, in Nashville and everywhere. There are times when it feels too heavy, no matter how resilient we are determined to be.

Pressed into service unrelentingly, resilience can develop into a carapace that grows too hard, a scab that closes off a festering desperation. And if any good is to emerge from all this grief, it will only be because we have learned not to ignore the suffering that came first. If we finally address the grief that came before the grief.“

As I’ve written before, Renkl is someone who refuses to settle into ignorance, but instead looks at the world with open eyes. You may also be interested in her piece in Monday’s New York Times on the changing nature of Southern politics in Lies, Damn Lies, and Georgia. She is worthy of following.

If we are to turn things around during these tumultuous times, there are a range of lessons we need to take from the past and apply them to the way we live in the future. On his Life Advice that Doesn’t Suck blog, Mark Manson asked his readers for suggestions in 1,273 People Share Their Best Life Lessons from 2020.

Two spoke directly about the challenges of living in difficult times:

  • “A crisis doesn’t change people; it amplifies who they already are. Adversity seems to bring out not necessarily the worst in people, but the essence of people.
  • Fear is dangerous. (F)ear drives people to be highly selfish, capable of only thinking of themselves, their own health and convenience.

These are difficult times requiring resilience. But as Renkl writes we can’t ignore the suffering that is leading to so much desperation in the country today. We also can’t ignore how desperately some people — including some smart individuals with “callow ambition” — want to destroy our democracy for their own selfish gains. That requires ever-vigilant resistance.

More to come…

DJB

Image by USA-Reiseblogger from Pixabay

Heartbreaking and galvanizing

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Two things happened this week, both of historic proportions.

On Tuesday night during a special election, Raphael Warnock was chosen by the voters of Georgia to be the first African-American to represent the state in the U.S. Senate and the first African-American Democrat elected to a senate seat by a former state of the Confederacy. His victory was shared with Jon Ossoff, who will become the first Jewish Senator elected from Georgia. The wins by Warnock and Ossoff mean that with a 50-50 tie in the Senate, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s vote will give Democrats the effective majority. It was an uplifting moment for democracy after a bitter 2020 election season.

On Wednesday, a mob of white supporters of Donald Trump, incited by the sitting president, marched and overran the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to disrupt government and overturn the certification of the presidential election by Congress. Writing in the New York Times, the historian of fascism Timothy Snyder outlined how we got here:

“In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a ‘Rigged (for President) Election.’”

Those lonely minds on social media took him up on his request to come to Washington on January 6th for a “wild time” that would stop the certification of the election of President-elect Biden and VP-elect Harris. And they did stop if for a few hours. We all watched in horror as the Capitol was overrun for only the second time in history, the first being in 1814 by the British army. Within minutes of realizing how bad this riot at the capitol was playing to the country and world at large, Republican politicians and their media enablers were saying this attack on U.S. democracy was infiltrated by Antifa (the right’s boogeyman of choice these days) and other left-wing radical groups.

No. That did not happen. In fact, many of the mob were upset that they were not getting credit for their attempted coup. At least they were upset until the F.B.I. came calling with arrest warrants, due to the stupidity of live-streaming the coup attempt on social media.

Some Trump-appointed officials at the Pentagon have decided that what happened on Wednesday was not an insurrection, assault, or even attempted overthrow of the American government by white supremacist forces organized, inspired, and directed by Donald Trump. So now the Pentagon is calling Wednesday’s events “First Amendment Protests.”

No. At least five people died in those “First Amendment Protests” which were ginned up by baseless claims of election fraud.

Mark Juergensmeyer, Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes the three qualities marking the capitol assault as terrorism:

  • symbolic empowerment (people without power asserting that they have it),
  • performance violence (the intention of terrorism is to terrorize), and
  • cosmic war (warfare provides an alternative worldview to normal public order).

Historian Snyder notes that twisting the truth with different names like “First Amendment Protests” is one step on the road to fascism.

“Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.”

I have thought a great deal all week about these two historical events. Like most of you, I am still processing what it means for our country. I have also written, and rewritten, and rewritten again about those thoughts. But for now I will turn to a long-time favorite, critic Frank Rich, who wrote a stirring essay in New York magazine entitled The Trashing of the Republic. He closed it with the following:

“As the old saw has it, it can take a century (or two) to build an institution, but only a day to raze it to the ground. That’s what America flirted with this week. It was heartbreaking, but it should be galvanizing. Let’s be clearheaded: Those who were part of the problem are not part of the solution. Most of them are traitors. Let’s join hands with Senator-elect Warnock and those of good will like him to try to save a country that has for some time now been on the brink of its second civil war.”

Heartbreaking and galvanizing. That certainly describes the emotions of so many Americans at this moment. We have now seen — in stark relief — that a large segment of one party is not serious about democracy and has stopped caring about good governance. Instead the leaders of that party are focused on holding onto power using whatever means necessary. Including, now it seems for some of them, armed insurrection, following the delusions of a farcically transparent con man. Heartbreaking.

But when the Black voters of Georgia — people who have been denied so much of what comes without question to whites in America — turned out in droves to ensure that democracy worked, now that was galvanizing. These were people who didn’t throw away their chance to change the world. Now it is up to the rest of us to make sure we’ll have that democracy and that country those voters, and their children, and their children’s children deserve.

More to come…

DJB

Image: “The Bridge” cartoon by Mike Luckovich that hangs in the office of Senator-elect Jon Ossoff of Georgia.

The darkest hour is just before dawn

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After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th — in which there was a riot incited by our sitting president — there is great despair for our country. Despair and concern that is appropriate. We face many dangers to our democracy, especially over the last two weeks of his term, if he makes it that long.

But there was also hope that the winds of change were blowing. Hope grounded in the memory of what those ordinary citizens who came before have shown us is possible. Hope as attempts at voter suppression failed, and the people used their voice to stand up for democracy, walking across the bridges built by past heroes like John Lewis.

“The Bridge” cartoon by Mike Luckovich that hangs in the office of Senator-elect Jon Ossoff

In considering what to feature on this week’s Saturday Soundtrack, a simple country refrain from a gospel song written by the great Ralph Stanley in 1960 kept playing on a loop in my head. The first line of the chorus is pure country poetry: The darkest hour is just before dawn.

“The sun is slowly sinking
The day is almost gone
Still darkness falls around us
And we must journey on

The darkest hour is just before dawn…”

One doesn’t have to believe in the gospel context of the song to understand and appreciate the meaning of trial, loss, and rebirth. This week we saw the inevitable culmination of our trial of four years; a period of lies, hatred, and division. As we came face-to-face with the fact of the fragility of the American ideal, our loss was clear. But in the special elections in Georgia, in the coming back of Congress after the insurrection to certify the will of the people, and in the beginning of the difficult discussions around what American democracy means, we see the glimmer of dawn and rebirth.

The definitive version of The Darkest Hour is undoubtedly by Emmylou Harris, with Ricky Skaggs singing harmony, from her 1980 Roses in the Snow album. When Skaggs comes in at the 2:00 mark to take the lead, it sends chills down your back.

Emmylou Harris, with Sam Bush on fiddle, at Merlefest.

This live version from 2007 by Emmylou is a treasure in many ways, not the least of which is the band. The late Mike Auldridge is on the dobro, while his former Seldom Scene bandmate Tom Gray is playing bass.* Ricky Simpkins on the fiddle and Keith Little on the mandolin round out the players. Plus her heartfelt introduction about how there is a comfort in the grim fact of loss that makes us embrace life even more is a reminder, if we needed one, that Harris can both choose and sing the most meaningful songs from the country music canon like nobody else.

There is also a lovely live version by the band I’m With Her. Sara Watkins takes the lead, but the harmonies are what make this worth a listen.

And because the last line of the first verse speaks to the fact that even while darkness falls we must journey on, this 1997 version of Bob Dylan’s classic The Times They Are A-Changin’ by Bruce Springsteen, with his moving introduction of the times in the 1960s when the song was written, and the times in 1997 when he sang this tribute, and — I’m sure he would agree — the times in 2021 when we face challenges to all that is best about America, seems oh so appropriate.

Keep journeying forward, with hope and work for a better world.

More to come…
DJB

*Personal Note: Tom Gray is a friend that I came to know from his years where he was helping out his daughter Julie at the Silver Spring farmers market. Tom was always ready to stop selling the best eggs on the planet to talk some music, so I had to make sure I wasn’t taking him away when Julie was busy. Since she has scaled down her operation, we don’t see Tom in person anymore, although he has a robust online friends group. A member of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame for his work with the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene, Tom is one of the kindest “stars” you’ll ever want to meet. It is great to see him in this video.