The commonly accepted story by the Religious Right disingenuously promoted by these dishonest people is that their movement entered the political area in protest of the Roe v Wade abortion decision in January of 1973. This assertion os false. So proves Randall Balmer, a leading religious historian at Dartmouth.
It was the elimination of the text-exempt status of segregated institutions like Bob Jones University that got the Religious Right to get involved politically. This galvanized evangelicalism as a political force. Only later did the movement invent its cover story that they got involved politically because of moral fervor over Roe v. Wade and the abortion issue. Initially Roe v was accepted in evangelical circles. It took fighting for the right to segregate to make abortion a political issue.
A highlight of this book is how Balmer explains the progressive roots of evangelicalism in the 19th Century. Things have changed. we have gone backwards.
In yesterday’s post, I began to show how Jesus is the best attested Palestinian Jew of the first century if we look only at external evidence. Josephus is better attested because we have his own writings. I am also not including Paul because I’m talking only about Jews from Palestine; he was from the Diaspora.
The Gospel Sources
We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive. Jesus was not invented by Mark. He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John).
All of this was within the first century.
Non-New Testament & Non-Gospel Sources – We Have Many!
This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache. Or — need I say it? – every other author of the New Testament (there are sixteen NT authors altogether, so twelve who did not write Gospels), none of whom knew any of the Gospels (except for the author of 1, 2, and 3 John who may have known the fourth Gospel).
By my count that’s something like twenty-five authors, not counting the authors of the sources (another six or seven) on which the Gospels were based (and the sources on which the book of Acts was based, which were different again).
How We Know Jesus Wasn’t “Made Up”
If there had been one source of Christian antiquity that mentioned a historical Jesus (e.g., Mark) and everyone else was based on what that source had to say, then possibly you could argue that this person made Jesus up and everyone else simply took the ball and ran with it.
But …
But how can you make a convincing case if we’re talking about thirty or so independent sources that know there was a man Jesus? These sources are not all living in the same village someplace so that they are egging each other on. They didn’t compare notes. They are independent of one another and are scattered throughout the Mediterranean. They each have heard about the man Jesus from their own sources of information, which heard about him from their own sources of information.
That must mean that there were hundreds of people at the least who were talking about the man Jesus. One of them was the apostle Paul, who was talking about Jesus by at least the year 32 CE, that is, two years after the date of Jesus’ death. Paul, as I will point out, actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother James and his closest disciples Peter and John. That’s more or less a death-knell for the Mythicist position, as some of them admit. I’ll get to Paul in a subsequent note. Here I am simply stressing that the Gospel traditions themselves provide clear evidence that Jesus was being talked about just a few years after his life in Roman Palestine.
Linguistic Evidence
There is more. Good evidence shows that some of the Gospel accounts clearly go back to traditions about Jesus in circulation, originally, in Aramaic, the language of Roman Palestine, where Jesus himself lived. One piece of evidence is that Aramaic words occasionally appear in stories about Jesus, often at the climactic moment. This happens in a variety of stories from a variety of sources. For example, In Mark 5 Jesus raises the daughter of a man named Jairus from the dead. When he comes into her room and raises her, he says to her “Talitha cumi.” The author of Mark translates for us: “Little girl, arise.”
Why would the author leave the key sentence in Aramaic? If you have ever had bi-lingual friends who assume you too know their second language, and have heard them tell a joke about something that happened in the other country, you will know that sometimes they give the punch line in the other language, even though the lead up to the line is in English. That’s because often the punch line packs a better punch in the original. I had a professor who used to do that with us as graduate students about something that had happened to him in Germany. It used to drive us nuts because even though we were able to read German, we weren’t fluent, and half the time we didn’t know what he was saying. We laughed heartily, though, since there’s no way on God’s green earth we were going to let on that we couldn’t follow German…..
This story about Jairus’s daughter, then, was originally told in Aramaic and was later translated into Greek, with the key line left in the original. So too with several stories in a completely different Gospel, the Gospel of John. It happens three times in just 1:35-42. This is a story that circulated in Aramaic-speaking Palestine, the homeland of Jesus and his disciples.
Traditions Stemming from Aramaic
The other reason for knowing that a tradition was originally in Aramaic is because it makes better sense when translated *back* into Aramaic than it does in the Greek.
My favorite illustration of this is Jesus’ famous saying: “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28). The context: Jesus’ disciples have been eating grain from a field on the Sabbath day; the Pharisees object; and Jesus explains that it is permissible to meet human needs on the Sabbath. Then his clever one-liner. But the one-liner doesn’t make sense. Why would the Son of Man (Jesus) be Lord of the Sabbath BECAUSE Sabbath was made for humans, not the other way around? In other words, when he says “therefore” the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath, what is the “therefore” there for?
The logic doesn’t work in Greek (or English). But it would work in Aramaic. That’s because in Aramaic the word for “man” and the word for “son of man” are the same word: “Bar enash” (could be translated either way). And so what Jesus said was: “Sabbath was made for bar enash, not bar enash for the Sabbath; therefore bar enash is lord of the Sabbath.” Now it makes sense. The saying was originally transmitted in Aramaic, and when translated into Greek, the translator decided to make the final statement about Jesus, not about humans.
Christianity did not make a big impact on Aramaic-speaking Palestine. The vast majority of Jews in the homeland did not accept Christianity or want anything to do with it. There were not thousands of storytellers there passing on Christian traditions. There were some, of course, especially in Jerusalem.
But the fact that these stories based on Aramaic are scattered throughout our sources suggests that they were in circulation relatively early in the tradition. Most of these are thought to go back to the early decade or two (probably the earliest decade) of transmission. You cannot argue that Jesus was made up by some Greek-speaking Christian after Paul’s letters, for example.
Short story:we are not talking about a Jesus figure invented in the year 60. There was widespread information about Jesus from the years after his death. Otherwise, you can’t explain all the literary evidence (dozens of independent sources), some of it based on Aramaic traditions of Jesus’ homeland. But there’s more evidence that clinches the case. I’ll be talking about that in later posts.
As Churchill said, nothing is more thrilling and bracing than to be shot at without getting hit. Bullets whizzing over your head. Everything after that would be cake, wouldn't it? I can only imagine thank goodness. Walter Mitty lives!
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Imagine all of human civilization has been wiped out except for a single copy of the Guinness book of world records. Aliens from another world try to use it to reconstruct life on Earth. They read about people sitting on top of poles for 152 days, eating 77 hamburgers at a single sitting, and talking nonstop for 127 hours (not to mention Rush Limbaugh and Rick & Bubba). What on earth would they think of us?
Ruth noted that the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Tex., that killed 31 people were the work of two 18-year-olds, both of whom purchased their weapons legally. “They can’t purchase alcohol or cigarettes in this country until age 21. But deadly weapons? … If you’re 18 and want a semiautomatic assault rifle? No problem, except for a handful of states with stricter rules — and those are being challenged in court as unconstitutional.”
Post columnist Michael Gerson, meanwhile, wrote that the so-called right of 18-year-olds to buy those weapons has lately come from “originalist” readings of the Constitution.
“What principle of constitutional self-government requires that the permissible age to purchase an AR-15 should be 18 rather than 21? A recent ruling out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed the rightof 18-year-olds to buy what most of us would call ‘assault weapons.’ Its reasoning? ‘America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army.’ In fact, the enlistment age for the Continental Army was 16 — just 15 with parental consent. Some served at age 14. Is this a sufficient legal and historical basis to allow young teens to purchase nearly military-grade weapons in 2022? This type of 'originalism’ is indistinguishable from idiocy.”
Let me know what you think. And thanks for reading.
The Mississippi Delta Was shining like a national guitar I am following the river Down the highway Through the cradle of the Civil War
Paul Simon, Graceland
We didn’t follow the Mississippi, but in early May I drove with my wife and some friends through the cradle of the Civil War, first passing through eastern Maryland before heading to Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Following a visit to the Harriet Tubman Museum in Cambridge, Maryland, located a few miles from where Tubman grew up, we headed to Jefferson’s hill-top plantation in Monticello, Virginia. There, besides the standard “house” visit, we joined the “Slavery at Monticello” tour. We had read about this particular opportunity in Clint Smith’s excellent book, How The Word Is Passed, and looked forward to the chance to experience it for ourselves. We were not disappointed.
Our visit was led by a superb guide, Ariel, who was well read in the latest historical research on Monticello, Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the history of many of the 607 enslaved people who worked on, or passed through, the plantation. The tour was disturbing and illuminating, as it needed to be. With care, Ariel walked us through Jefferson’s many contradictions. Here was a man who could at the same time proclaim the equality of all men while selling enslaved people to pay off his mounting debts; a man who wrote, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that “blacks [were] inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” while living a life utterly dependent on the labor and intelligence of his enslaved laborers at Monticello. Ariel’s presentation was deeply informed and historically accurate. Unfortunately, as we commented to each other while heading to our cars, teachers in dozens of states are probably thinking twice about raising similar questions in their classrooms, that is if they want to keep their jobs. Republican-initiated legislation in those states, intended to quash such discussions, is already having its intended chilling effect.
Eston Hemings’s son, Beverly Frederick Jefferson, grandson of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, is pictured on the left with three of his sons, ca. 1900. No pictures of Sally Hemings or her children are known.
History came alive at Monticello, not in the “colonial Williamsburg” fashion where actors in period costume roam buildings and gardens and references to the enslavement of Africans or Native American genocide are erased, but in offering a deeper understanding of how unresolved conflicts and unlearned lessons from the past continue to shape our lives in the present. The insights we gained at Monticello enabled us to better absorb what lay ahead as we continued our trip: from the massive Confederate flag that fluttered in the breeze as we continued south on Rt 29 into North Carolina; to Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where we stood silently before a panel commemorating the nine Black parishioners massacred in 2015; and finally to the news that came our way five days into the trip that a young white man had slaughtered 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo.
If much of the history we learned was bitter, even more was uplifting. We drove to Greensboro, North Carolina, the site of the first civil rights sit-in on February 1, 1960, led by David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (Jibreel Khazan), and Joe McNeilby four brave Black students from North Carolina A&T, at the local Woolworths. After a first day, during which they were refused service, they returned, this time joined by a dozen other students; the next day by 20 more, and then by 40. And when the college students left for the summer, local high school students took their place.
We visited Cambridge, Maryland, which boasted a century of struggle from Harriet Tubman to Gloria Richardson, founder of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee and a moving force behind the 1963 demonstrations for civil rights in that city. In Columbia, South Carolina, we learned of the students from Benedict College, an HBCU, who caught the spark from the Greensboro sit-in and began their own protest one month later, ultimately forcing the integration of downtown businesses.
On to Charleston, where, among other things, we were introduced to the story of Robert Smalls, an enslaved sailor on The Planter, a Confederate ship. Smalls, who spent months surreptitiously learning how to navigate the ship, sailed it out of Charleston harbor on May 12, 1862 when the rest of the crew was ashore, led it through Confederate lines, and ultimately turned it over to Union forces. [Cate Lineberry’s Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero (Picador, 2017), is a good read on this.]
(Photo: Robert Smalls, Library of Congress)
And finally to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, center of Gullah-Geeche culture and home of the Penn School, the first in the South to educate formerly enslaved West Africans.
The trip offered an inspirational narrative of the struggle for civil rights and human dignity that stretched back centuries, a history that revealed the deeply layered organizing and educational work carried out in scores of towns and cities across the South and that, ultimately, relied on thousands of activists. It was this work that built the foundation on which individuals such as Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were later able to stand.
It is this history, as I suggested above, that Republican legislators in more than a dozen states are determined that students should not learn. Their attempt to legislate a whitewashed history in public schools is a particularly aggressive move to control what students can, and cannot, study. But for some years now, libertarian economists have been arguing in a much more “sophisticated” fashion that students shouldn’t bother studying any history. Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, is the latest to declare the “uselessness” of studying the past. In his provocative book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton, 2018), Caplan argues that what this country needs is less, rather than more, education. Too many people are needlessly encouraged to continue their education beyond high school, he contends. Higher education is a “waste of time and money” because much of what is taught doesn’t prepare students for their future employment. All it does is signal certain qualities to employers: intelligence, diligence, and conformity.
A brick from the McLeod Plantation outside Charleston, SC. The bricks which built all the structures on the plantation, as well as many Charleston buildings, were made by enslaved children as young as 6. You can still see the finger marks on the right, marks which were left when the brick likely slipped out of the child’s hand.
Progressive critiques of schooling have long argued that K-12 education is more about warehousing students and sorting them into laboring or professional slots than about providing them with the tools needed to critically engage with their lives, their communities, and the world. Higher education similarly can be faulted for caring as much about prestige and rankings as about building the knowledge, skills, and dispositions one needs to lead a life of fulfillment on multiple levels, not just on the job.
For Caplan, however, all that matters is whether students are being prepared for a world of work, and only the job market should determine what curriculum should be offered. As he puts it, why bother teaching “higher mathematics, foreign languages, history, or the arts” if they won’t be used “on the job”? Indeed, he finds the “bulk of liberal arts course” to be pointless. Since no one (except English teachers) will ever “use Shakespeare on the job,” the Bard, and most literature, is out. “Foreign languages…are all but useless in the American economy,” he asserts, noting that he studied Spanish for three years and still can’t speak it. And when, he wonders, “will the typical student use history?” Probably never. “Students study history for years, but history teachers are almost the only people alive who use history on the job.”
As a history teacher, perhaps Caplan’s argument hits too close to home to allow for a dispassionate rejoinder. But bloody hell: it is simply appalling for anyone – I’m tempted to say let alone aneducator – to contend that because you don’t “need” history to stock shelves in an Amazon warehouse, be a cardiac surgeon, write computer code, or run Tesla, understanding the past is ipso facto a waste of space.
We are a nation divided, and many of those divisions are rooted in the continued proliferation of false narratives about this country’s past and concerted attempts to prevent the study of history in a truthful and rigorous manner. Erase history, and we cannot understand the persistence of racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism that led to massacres in Buffalo, Charleston, Pittsburgh and El Paso. Remove history from the curriculum and who will be around to notice that the Supreme Court’s (soon-to-come) decision to remove a woman’s right to control her own body is based on the thinking of an 17th century judge who presided over witchcraft trials? Manipulate history, and we lose the ability to declare with certainty who actually won the 2020 election. Every mile of our southern trip taught us this. Every mile magnified the importance of understanding how the long fight for human dignity, led time after time by African Americans and by women, is today threatened by those who deny that history because it will reveal uncomfortable truths, or dismiss it because it won’t make workers more efficient. Every mile reminded us that the imperfect democracy that remains in our grasp (historically less for some than for others) will further slip away if we forget the efforts of so many to obtain the “unalienable Rights” (to return to Jefferson) which have always been promised and which are today are so gravely threatened.
Postscript:
The American Historical Association just announced its Teaching History with Integrity project. Quoting from the announcement: “The AHA, its members, and other historians find ourselves on the front lines of a conflict over America’s past, confronting opponents who are actively promoting ignorance in service of misleading notions of unity. Through Teaching History with Integrity, the AHA leads or participates in several initiatives to provide resources and support for history educators facing intensifying controversies about the teaching of the American past. Historians have a crucial role to play as participants in public deliberations about how to engage students in truthful and rigorous inquiry in history classrooms.” Their website provides a full range of resources and videos that speak to the importance of teaching history with honesty and integrity.
I know to never draw to an inside straight. I know that I love gossip though I will never admit it publicly. I know that mayonaisse doesn't belong on a hamburger. I know how to heal broken hearts. I know why the caged bird sings. These are just a few of the things I know.
To the Royal Geographical Society of Victorian England, it was “the problem of all ages.” Determining the source of the Nile, traditionally regarded as the longest river in the world, had in fact been a common fixation since ancient times, prompting speculation from figures as varied as Herodotus and Alexander the Great (who guessed, oddly, that the African river’s headwaters might be found somewhere in India). By the mid-19th century, the quest had become an obsession with the British in particular. According to Sir Roderick Murchison, one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society, the explorer who ultimately pinpointed the fabled river’s origins would be “justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age.”
Given the depth of this fascination, it’s not surprising that many books have been written about this holy grail of Victorian exploration — notable among them “The White Nile” by Alan Moorehead (1960) and “Explorers of the Nile” by Tim Jeal (2011). Now enter Candice Millard, who has made a specialty of writing about individual episodes in the lives of colorful historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. With her new book, “River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile,” she takes a similar slice-of-the-story approach to the decades-long Nile drama, focusing on the bitter rivalry between explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. And while her book is neither as infectiously readable as Moorehead’s (which is now outdated) nor as comprehensive and deeply researched as Jeal’s, she does add a new dimension to the story. Perhaps as a corrective to the Anglocentrism of earlier accounts, she brings a third figure into the foreground: Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a formerly enslaved African who acted as guide and interpreter for Burton, Speke and several other explorers over the years. It’s a refreshing shift in emphasis and certainly overdue, but since relatively few details about Bombay survive in the historical record, there are limits to how much Millard can tell us.
A lack of documentation is certainly not a problem for the other two members of this triumvirate — especially Burton, who has been the subject of numerous biographies over the years. And little wonder why: Oxford dropout, brilliant scholar and linguist, fearless traveler, and translator of classic books considered obscene by his peers, he was the kind of man who would disguise himself as a Muslim (to the extent of getting circumcised) in order to be the first undercover Englishman to enter Mecca. For a swashbuckler like Burton, finding the source of the Nile was an adventure too challenging to pass up. By the early 1850s, virtually all that was known about the central African region — to Europeans, at least — was that a large body of water lay somewhere in the continent’s interior, along with a group of peaks known as the Mountains of the Moon. So when Burton heard that the Royal Geographical Society was planning an expedition into this enticing terra incognita, his reaction was foreseeable: “I shall strain every nerve to command it.”
Somehow, despite the fact that he had many enemies in high places, Burton secured the job. But when the old friend he had handpicked as the expedition’s botanist and medic died unexpectedly, Burton was forced to choose a stranger as his replacement — namely, Speke, a prim, fair-haired aristocrat six years Burton’s junior who lacked any special knowledge of either botany or medicine. And the two men could hardly have been more different. “Burton was a man of eccentric genius and tastes, orientalised in character and thoroughly Bohemian,” as one of their colleagues later put it. “Speke, on the other hand, was a thorough Briton, conventional, solid, and, resolute.” This was not, in other words, a combination designed for success.
The pair’s incompatibility became immediately obvious once the expedition left Zanzibar. A first try to reach the interior in 1855 had to be aborted when a group of Somalis attacked the travelers early on, leaving one Englishman dead, Speke brutally clubbed and stabbed, and Burton suffering with a spear thrust sideways through his mouth. A second attempt in 1857 proved nearly as disastrous, plagued by bad weather, disappearing supplies and porters, infuriating insects, bizarre illnesses, and internecine conflict among the expedition’s members. The unfailingly good-natured Bombay tried to play peacemaker, but Burton and Speke clashed often, piling up resentments and mutual antipathies that would never be fully resolved.
They did, however, make discoveries — if landmarks known to Arab traders for decades and local people for centuries can be considered “discoveries.” The big body of water at the continent’s heart turned out to be three separate major lakes, and the expedition got a look at two of them. Burton and Speke together reached the one that Europeans would call Lake Tanganyika, but only Speke glimpsed the other — Nyanza, a.k.a. Lake Victoria — as Burton was incapacitated by illness and too weak to make the side trip. Naturally, Burton felt that the lake he saw was the likely source of the Nile; Speke was convinced that the true source must be the lake his rival didn’t see. And although the younger man would ultimately prove correct (more or less, but the question is complex), this fundamental disagreement would poison the remainder of each explorer’s life.
Millard recounts all of these travails with a fluid grace that wears its learning lightly. She leaves some important parts of the story untold but shows a keen sensitivity to aspects that have at times been underplayed, such as the role of slavery and the slave trade in the effort of discovery. Burton and Speke, she points out, although opposed to slavery as an institution, did hire enslaved people as porters (for pay). Even Bombay took along an enslaved servant — a fellow African named Mabruki. Bombay appears to have treated him with a kindness bordering on devotion, but we’ll probably never know how Mabruki felt about the arrangement. Some perspectives on history, unfortunately, can only be surmised.
-Gary Krist in the WaPost
They found the source of the Nile — and became lifelong enemies
Review by Gary Krist
Somewhere along the way distances became shorter and time speeded up. Ten miles used to be ten miles. Now it's like crossing the street. A week was a long time but now Christmas was yesterday and it's almost June today. Somewhere along the way we stopped talking to each other. I've forgotten how to have a real conversation. After about two sentences I have nothing left to say. Somewhere along the way the past ceased to matter. It is almost as if the past never happened. All that matters is right now. Somewhere along the way things changed. I used to sort of know where things stood. Now I'm not much sure of anything.
Thursday, May 26, 2022
The last time someone asked me, "What makes you laugh?" was 42 years ago when a Macon, Georgia, man hired me out for Wadsworth Publishing.I answered honestly, "Clever use of language.I love sarcasm.Puns.Wit.In particular literary wit."
My answer wouldn't change today. Why do job interviewers ask this question? Or was it just my interview? A trick question?
Noted book critic Kakutani shares her enthusiasm for more than 100 books and novels with brief comments. The book is a good review for the ones I have read and a good introduction to the ones I haven't read.
****Published in 1951, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is the classic modern treatment of fascism, which is based on the destruction of objective truth. We are living it today.The dead of truth means people are susceptible to lies and propaganda. The distinction between fact and fiction is gone. Standards for true and false are lost.
Arendt's words ring true today in our country,
Good government employees are replaced by people whose only purpose is loyalty to the leader or the party.
New enemies are continually invoked.
Lying becomes accepted.
Demagogues arise. Tribal hatreds undermine the pillars of democracy. No longer do we have a shared sense of humanity.
****Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale. I need to read this book.
****Robert Caro is the preeminent biographer of Lyndon Johnson. He has published four volumes so far with one more to go. Caro is at his best describing how LBJ seized the presidency after JFK's death and led the country thru the country's hardest time in my lifetime.
****Christopher Clark The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914. The carnage of WWI defies understanding. Exactly how it happened defies understanding. WWI set the stage for the 20th Century unfortunately.
****Joan Didiion is the modern master of the essay. I need to read Slouching and The White Album.
****Joseph Ellis is my favorite early American historian. He reminds his readers of how improbable was the outcome of the Revolutionary War. He reminds uf the willful racism and hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson. The reader is further reminded that the so-called Founders were men of their time and place with their biases and limited abilities. Jefferson in my opinion deserves eternal condemnation for not doing more to put slavery on a clear path to extinction. That fireball in the night wasn't loud enough for him.
****Somehow Gatsby has endured and rightly so. The last word will never be said about this 20's slim novel. I have always been intrigued with Daisy Buchanan. Like Zelda?
****I wish I had the patience and the interest in reading and learning more about Homer.
****Victor Klemperer The Language of the Third Reich. I am not familiar with this book, but it sounds interesting in that it focuses on the fascist language of the Third Reich.
****Timothy Snyder On Tyranny. Americans today are no wiser that Europeans who saw fascism, Nazism, and communism. We can only learn from their experience. Like Europe we see globalism lead to inequality and resentment. Democracy seems helpless to deal with it.
****For sure Lincoln had a way with words. I need to read Garry Wills. He claims that in his Gettysburg Address Lincoln called for "a new founding of the nation" harkening back to the Declaration of Independence. Quite a trick play, Mr. Lincoln. I think Joseph Ellis would disagree.
****President Obama takes a long vision of history as do I. Scarred by the original sin of slavery, but able to overcome it by persistent work and dedication. I do not share his optimism. America is not yet finished. That's for sure. Obama could have chosen literature as a profession he is such a fluid writer both empathetic but objective. He casts himself in his dream as an Odysseus looking for a home
****In January of 2017 as Trump was being inaugurated 1984 shot to the top of bestseller lists. We certainly live now in Orwellian times. This dystopian novel rings true in our Trumpean time. Shameless appeals to fear and resentment like Orwell's Two Minutes of Hate sessions. Deliberate attempts to rewrite history. Denouncing mainstream news as "fake news." Downplaying science, facts, and evidence. Believing what Trump says regardless of the observable facts and evidence.The party's truth is truth even if it insists that 2 + 2 + 5. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. 1984 is all too real. "What you're seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening." It's terrifying.
****Binx Boling is detached from the world and intellectualizes every part of his life. Movies and books are more real to him than his own experiences. He embarks on a "search," but what is he searching for? He is today's observer with technology insulating us from reality. We check our phones for texts and emails rather than paying attention to the people around us. His lofty philosophical talk expresses his detachment from the world. He moves to change when he falls in love with Kate.
****Frankenstein is mostly talked about in terms of commentary on technology run amok and as a foundation of science fiction. I think of it in terms of the creature and how sad it would be to be the only creature of his kind in the world.
To the graduates of 2013: Congratulations and best of luck as you go forth. You'll need it. Please remember your manners and send thank you notes to those who grudgingly favored you with graduation presents. You'll face trials & tribulations as you proceed down life's post-graduation road. Tribulations are better than trials because legal bills are so darn high in these litigious days. Yes, who you know can be important, but what you know will ultimately pay the bills especially if you expect to buy a house before you're 45. You are not bullet-proof. If you ever find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, good luck is all I can say. Sneak out quietly and go home. You'll muddle your way thru most things and learn as you go especially as you're on your 4th job in three years starting out. Your parents love you but they're probably already thinking about redoing your room so don't even think about returning home. A final word to the wise: stay off Facebook late at night. Nothing good happens on Facebook after midnight or if you're in a drunken stupor.
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Even the Depp/Heard trial is being heavily politicized. Which "side" you're on can have huge political implications. It's all politics now in this country. By the way, how is the weather? How's your Momma and them? Are you having a good graduation season? Off the top of my head the only questions that come immediately to mind that aren't overtly political.
Say what you will-----Dylan lives. Dylan endures. Out here on Highway 61 let us endure with him. He doesn't have to explain himself. There is nothing more he needs to say. Four score plus one years old today Dylan lives. In the jingle, jangle morning I will always be following you, Bob.
Monday, May 23, 2022
There are advantages to having a droll sense of humor. You can wear corduroy and no one will think you are eccentric. You can quote Twain selectively and no one will think you are showboating. You can have just the right touch for mocking mudsills without appearing politically incorrect. You can hang with fellow Southerners and after a long night of lies and booze around 2 a.m.after someone says we could move back to Mobile or Charleson someone else will say you can't go tome again and someone else will conclude the night with the past isn't over it isn't even past. The Southerners will then sigh as only Southerners can sigh remembering those old cotton fields back home and grandpa plowing with a mule. even if's only imaginary.
Maybe by the time the cows come home, the chickens come home to roost, Godot shows up, and Bill Bailey comes home, we'll have it all figured out. At least we can have a party and a bonfire, hear some testimonies and sing spiritual songs. Maybe.
Sunday, May 22, 2022
May22,2014
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There will be peace in the valley some day, but I will probably be living in the mountains by then, everyone enjoying their Second Amendment rights, shooting and killing one another. The Rapture will occur any day now, which could interrupt my vacation in Costa Rica, the hiking and lying on the beach. When my ship comes in I will probably be at the airport, TSA searching my luggage. The doctor will make his diagnosis, but by then my mind will be so far gone it won't register. Somebody please lock up and turn out the lights. I am always a day late and a dollar short.
Saturday, May 21, 2022
My life is the Hegelian dialectic in action. For every action I take there is an equal or greater reaction trying to thwart me, and the synthesis is these anonymous phone calls I keep getting telling me "I'd better watch it." The heavy breathing and the caller quacking like a duck on the phone is an added bonus. Like Nick Carraway my father used to remind me that I've had advantages that other men haven't had. I can't help it if I'm lucky.
Friday, May 20, 2022
In an unequaled search for perfect tautologies:
It is no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.
Our nation must come together to unite.
It's deja vu all over again." - Yogi Berra
We are going to have to score more points than the other team to win the game.
After 30+ years of marriage, Fred's sense of humor still amazes me and makes me shake my head! I always wonder what goes through his head and makes him just sit there and laugh out loud to himself! He's a happy person!
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
I write not because I know anything or have anything to say to anybody else. I write to find how how I feel.I write to learn new things.I write to talk to myself.I write because I have to to stay alive.
The central fact about boom societies is that eventually they go bust as Texas did in 1986.Was Andrew Jackson the founder of the Democratic Party?Amazingly the Houston's Astrodome still stands. Houston has no escape route in the case of a major hurricane.H-E-B represents enlightened capitalism.Texas has always had a sense of its own 'apartness.'There are steak houses in Texas that haven't changed their menu since the introduction of bacon bits on baked potatoes. :)
Nothing gets Republicans like Rep. Elise Stefanik angrier than reciting their own words back to them at a politically inconvenient moment. So it is that the New York lawmaker is lashing out at critics who have noted her flirtation with “great replacement theory” in the wake of the horrific racist shooting in her home state.
The online screed of alleged Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron posits a conspiracy to exterminate and replace native-born Whites in Western nations. He explicitly labels this a planned “genocide."
Stefanik, meanwhile, declared in ads last September that Democrats would legalize undocumented immigrants in a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” That’s a vile replacement trope pushed by the No. 3 in the House GOP leadership.
Confronted by this in the wake of Gendron’s alleged mass murder of mostly Black victims, a Stefanik adviser insisted she has “never advocated for any racist position,” while raging against “sickening” reporting and a “disgusting low for the left.”
Actually, the “disgusting low” was committed by Stefanik herself. Because in this episode we see how Republicans like Stefanik launder and sanitize these ideas in ways that insinuate them ever deeper into mainstream discourse.
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The extent to which “great replacement” ideas have migrated from the fringe into something more routine among Republican lawmakers appears new. As many have noted, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has relentlessly promoted versions of the idea, and numerous Republican officials have done the same.
What’s different is the careful mainstreaming of fantasies about a deliberate plot to replace native-born Americans. That puts a new spin on garden-variety nativism or even on various forms of racial nationalism that envision Whiteness as central to American identity, notes Yale professor Philip Gorski, an expert in these movements.
“It’s been gradually moving from the fringes into the mainstream,” Gorski told me. “First it was the entertainment wing of the GOP. Now it’s the political wing as well.”
Buffalo supermarket shooting renews call for gun control legislation, social media accountability
Let’s note that this doesn’t mean Republicans are to blame for the shooting. The point is that “great replacement” ideas — which apparently inspired other racist mass shootings in Pittsburgh, El Paso and elsewhere — have gained diffusion beyond the fringes via various processes, and Republicans like Stefanik have played a part in them.
How does this mainstreaming happen? Experts have described several mechanisms.
Case in point: A speaker floats “great replacement” ideas — then claims it is intended as racially neutral. Carlson is an expert at this ruse: Oozing with phony piety, he insists he’s just disinterestedly observing what Democrats, in supporting immigration, actually want to happen.
Of course, Democrats support immigration for many reasons utterly unconnected to electoral politics. What’s more, given that Latinos may be shifting Republican — and that gaining citizenship takes many years — Carlson cannot even claim with any certainty that this will electorally benefit Democrats in the immediate or long term.
So his motive for railing about this cannot be chalked up to a mere disinterested observation about Democrats’ political incentives. What exactly is the true nature of his warning to native-born Americans? What is he trying to get them to fear?
Stefanik also plays this sanctimonious game: How dare anyone discern any racial overtones in her warning that native-born Americans should fear permanent subjugation from the largely non-White immigrants in their midst! What an absolutely outrageous suggestion!
Similarly, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has declared that Democrats would effect a “silent revolution” by “allowing” an “invasion” of migrants. Patrick carefully couched this as a warning about “millions of voters” set to impose their will on the current population, and we’ve heard talk about imported voters from other Republicans, including Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Or take J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee from Ohio. He recently claimed that President Biden’s “open border” will ensure “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
But once again, for the same reasons that Carlson and Stefanik cannot be permitted to get away with this scam of feigning racial neutrality, none of these Republicans can pretend to be warning only of electoralconsequences.
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