Political Idolatry

                                          Political ideology is the idolatry of our day.

                                                                                        James Howell

     James Howell is a Methodist minister in my town. From time to time he sends out little e-mail meditations.  They are loving, thoughtful and thought-provoking.

     Portions of a recent one were unusually pointed:

     

     "I'm interested today in ... false correlation. We presume people buy 100 percent into one political ideology or the other. Many do, of course. So if someone welcomes immigrants, we conclude that person supports abortion. Or if someone likes tax breaks for business, he's against Black Lives Matter. You know the drill, the assumptions.

     "Most people I know are smarter than that. Or we can be.  As I repeat to you repeatedly, and I do so because I love you, political ideology is the idolatry of our day. We get duped into believing my political ideology will deliver, will be the dawn of greatness -- but if the other guys win, civilization will crash and burn.  We see so clearly and know all truth; so how could the other half of the population be so stupid? If we could break with the false correlation habit, and think for ourselves on particular issues, and assume others do the same, we might break out of the stranglehold in which the bogus gods of political ieology are choking the life out of us. 

     "Jesus wasn't a Democrat or a Republican, although you can't name a single issue he wouldn't care about. ...

     "Embarrasingly, the church at large and individual churches have stumbled headlong into society's false correlations. Some clergy and churches invest all they have in a liberal political agenda, propping that agenda up with thin theological and biblical support.  Other clergy and churches invest all they have in a conservative political agenda, propping that agenda up with thin theological and biblical support. ...

     "Friends, let's get really curious. Why do I think what I think? Have I really worked this through -- from God's perspective? Or am I just being blindly led about by politicians? What are the odds that every plank in one political ideology is rock-solid truth, and every plank the other guys stand on is so much foolishness?... "

     

     Howell is a churchman and frames his thoughts accordingly. But his points should matter even among those who think the secular world is enough. Somewhere along the line, we have swallowed the idea that citizenship in a democracy need be no more complicated -- and no more demanding -- than mere side-taking.

     Partisan leaders like this idea. It saves them work. It saves them dealing forthrighly with complexity in policy or merit in views different from their own. Far easier to say, Trust me, the other guys are bums.

     Along these lines, the laziness of calumny has infected larger public discourse. In Howell's phrase, you know the drill, the assumptions. Lyndon Johnson was immoral; the second George Bush was stupid; Barack Obama was a covertly traitorous Muslim. And so on.

     The common element in these echoes of yesteryear?  They have absolutely nothing to do with the substance of public policy. That, partisan voices don't expect us to understand. The worst of them don't want us to. From us, acquiescence is enough.

     The cost to the quality of our democracy is high. And today an especially bitter irony is added. Now that we have a president who is -- quite literally -- corrupt in his dealings, stupid, and personally immoral in his bones, we struggle for language to say it with effect to the core of his support.

     His professed political ideology is attractive to many: lower taxes, smaller government, restrained judiciary. But what about venality and incompetence? 

     Ho hum. Nothing new there.  The same has long been said of other leadership figures. Just one more political food fight.

     We have so carelessly and casually trivialized the vocabulary of values that important words have lost the marrow of their meaning. Calling a president of the United States corrupt and inept has become commonplace. So has the cop-out of imputing moral superiority to our own political opinions.

     We can be rid of bad leadership by bothering to go to the polls. Our larger civic lassitude is likely the harder problem.  

     

     

     

Jim Crow Wants YOU

    

     The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

                                                                                                       Edmund Burke

    The worst lie is a problem wrongly stated.

                                      Variously attributed

      Even those of us who didn't take to the streets have been shocked by the video of Minnesota police officers murdering a black man in full public view. The images are more than merely chilling in their own right. Perhaps, also, they  trouble a cultural stereotype that makes Minnesota -- among other places -- seem an unlikely setting for deadly, institutionalized racism. In what climate of attitude could police be content to have onlookers watch them savage a helpless man?

    Cultural stereotypes, alas, give (white) people too much comfort room on matters of race. For starters, they require of us little acknowledgement that Jim Crow has been widely welcomed across the United States.

    First, a story:

    When I was a teen, my family moved from the deep South to a New England suburb. Thinking to get a jump on a housing search, my mother phoned ahead to several real estate companies. All told her there were no homes for sale in the town where we wished to live.

    Puzzled, she traveled there. She discovered that houses were plentifully available for sale, and that real estate agencies were only too glad to help her.

    My mother had a southern accent. On the phone, the Realtors assumed she was black and turned her away.

    We lived there for five years, pleasantly so for the most part. I did have to learn to overlook negative suppositions about my racial attitudes because of my southern background. And I learned not to point out that in the town there was not one family of color; in my high school not one student of color. I learned not to comment on a cheerful complacency made doubly obdurate by its utter and terrible sincerity.

    The example is not isolated. The record of racial segregation in America includes, to take just  a few examples:  schools and public accommodations in Delaware and New Jersey; schools employment and housing in Pennsylvania and New York; employment, housing, hotels and dining rooms in New England; employment and housing in Michigan and Wisconsin.

    Until 1926, the constitution of the state of Oregon forbade black people to live there. The Ku Klux Klan was a strong political force in Oregon throughout the 1920s. Lynching and castration were not common. Just one of each, on the historical record. But black men were commonly threatened with both.

    And one of Jim Crow's favorite bugaboos is, of course, sex. At some point in their history, every one of the lower 48 states had anti-miscegenation laws.

    Fast forward to here and now, as white supremacy is brazenly encouraged by the moral degenerate in the Oval Office. Yes, the November elections are crucially important, for the opportunity to get rid of him and some of the bottom-feeders who support him in Congress. But today's high obligation of citizenship doesn't stop there. After election day it will be essential to remain mindful of this central lesson of these times:

     He got elected.

     Millions voted for him, which is bad enough. Millions of others didn't bother to vote against him, even knowing full well what he was. "Good men" did nothing, and here we are.

    Though social change can be awakened by episodes of civil crisis, it is sustained -- if at all -- afterward, in the way ordinary people behave in the day to day. It is sustained in the workplace; school; church; home, family and voting booth by people who bestir themselves to know, specifically, what is actually going on right around them -- and who bestir themselves to deal with what they learn, as citizens, colleagues, neighbors, friends, customers, parents, sons and daughters.

    Jim Crow's staple nourishment is complacent assumption that racism is someone else's doing and remedy someone else's job.

     And to the question,  But what can I personally do? the answer is ...

    More.

    

    

Science And Religion

               ... a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
                                                                                            Francis Bacon
           
          ... the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room ... and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. 'Rum thing,' he went on.  'All that stuff about the dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.'
                                                                                           C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy


     



     Francis Bacon, the father of scientific method, would surely be dismayed that we moderns have made a caricature of it, and then a religion of the caricature. Consider the perennial creation/evolution kerfuffle.
     In our everyday vernacular, the term evolution has acquired talismanic overtones, as if Charles Darwin's theory seamlessly explains all the long emergence of life as we know it. This is a claim that Darwin himself did not make.
     In the obverse are arguments that religious faith necessarily bars acceptance of the central soundness of Darwin's findings. This view is unsupported by sensible reading of Judeo-Christian scripture.
     (We'll stay with Judeo-Christian traditions. I can't presume to speak of other faiths, and don't reject the possibility of their simultaneous validity.)
     This outburst of peeves (mine) is prompted by a chance encounter with the writings of Jerry A. Coyne. He is a biologist, a prolific expounder on the theory of evolution, a professor emeritus at The University of Chicago and an example of a certain type.
     In a Google romp through his shorter works and reviews of his books, this picture emerges: Like a parent declaring Because I say so, he sides with science because it is science and rejects religion because it is not.
   Though Coyne appears to employ this approach with conspicuous  relish, it is not an unusual feature of a science/religion debate. In it, a secular thinker uses the methods of his own discipline to validate the methods of his own discipline; makes his conclusion implicit in his premise; and by circular route marches himself right back to his own starting point.
    If you frame the science/religion question as necessarily being an either-or choice, you haven't forthrightly faced the whole of it.  And you've evaded a truth widely neglected in the world of facts and evidence:  Pooh-poohing religion requires selective evasion of facts and evidence.
     The fact is: The historicity of Jesus' life is every bit as good as other ancient histories we take for granted.
     Evidence says:  The writers of the Christian New Testament knew what they were talking about and meant what they said.
     In its endless iterations, the science/religion debate doesn't reach resolution -- except perhaps to demonstrate that in some instances advanced education is not a barrier to pudding-brained logic.  Also, the cast of characters can remind us that the term science is applied in popular idiom to a variety of enterprise. Some of our scientists are explorers. Some are more nearly catalogers.
       The explorers have the better claim on the term, in my view, and on a spirit of inquiry that would never purport to have settled all answers to ultimate questions.
     The discipline of mathematics  offers the concept of asymptotes. Roughly speaking, this involves side-by-side lines drawing gradually closer together, in such a way that they would meet only at infinity. The image is apt for the work of writers who say that both the highest science and the highest theology rise from the human spirit yearning toward the infinite -- and that, side-by-side, both point there.
     There is a kind of meagerness in attitudes that value only what can be seen, touched, weighed, measured, listed.  A kind of disdain for the very idea that anything of worth might lie beyond the scope of one's own vision.
      We would be harsh to call this a worldview that reveres only itself. Harsh, perhaps, but not by much. It does of course automatically rule out any notions of faith. I think it betrays the spirit of true science as well.

Moonshine, Family Values And Donald Trump

     I got a letter from my Uncle Barlow the other day. He still lives way out in the countryside, where the county is named Barlow and many of the people are, too.
     It's been quite a while since I heard from him, so he had some catching up to do. And as he often does, he wanted my advice about some questions.
     Here's what he had to say.

     "Dear Nephew,
     "I am sorry I have been so long about writing you.  I did some traveling with Millie from over at the library (and that is a whole nother story, let me tell you. Hoo boy). And so I had been neglecting my little beverage business, if you get my meaning, and had to buckle down and fix up my equipment, because some of my customers were starting to grumble about taking their trade elsewhere.
     "Anyhow, I've been busy, and I got overdue to write you, and I do apologize.
     "I guess you might be wondering whatever happened with Scooter and his wife Ida, the folks who run the cafe. You remember they got into a rough patch with each other when Ida got all carried away with operas and started calling herself Dulcinea. She kept dragging Scooter up to Charlotte to see them, and he pretty quick got about all of that he could handle.
     "Well, one day Scooter was complaining to Floyd over at the grain elevator, hardware store and auto repair. He said he'd as soon listen to a bull fart through a bugle as hear another opera. He didn't know that Ida was right over in the next aisle getting some new lids for her Mason jars. And she just clouded up and rained all over Scooter. Threw him out of the house.
     "He started bunking at the cafe. After closing time, he'd pull some tables together and throw a sleeping bag on top. He had a lot of time on his hands every evening, so he started thinking about how he might spruce up the cafe's business a little. Decided he'd add some Mexican stuff, and started practicing on new dishes.
     "Well, one night he got up to go to the privy, and he slipped on a leftover chalupa and gashed his forehead pretty good. He was too proud to go home for help, so he just patched himself up with a bunch of band-aids and opened up as usual the next day. Looked like he was that character in those Frankenstein movies.
     "Some of the customers told Ida, and she got to feeling guilty. Came over at closing to see what she could do for him. They started kissing and making up, and one thing led to another, and they got  pretty noisy about it. The sheriff was passing by, and overheard them, and got concerned about what might be going on, because Ida is a big old girl and Scooter is kind of a runt.
     "Well, the sheriff walked in on them, and things went straight to the dickens. Ida was naked as a jaybird, and that's some bare acreage, let me tell you. She  dove behind the steam table and screamed at the sheriff to get out. Scooter tried to cover his privates with his John Deere cap, because they had kind of thrown their clothes all over the place and it was the only thing he could reach.
     "The sheriff was mortified. He just high-tailed it right out of there, and the next thing anybody knew, Scooter was back home, and everything seems to have quieted down so far.
     "But anyhow, while I'm writing, I sure would like to ask your advice about a fix I'm in. You see, the people who say this fellow Trump has caused a lot of division among folks could be talking about me, if they only knew.
       "It all started when Delia Throckmorton came by my place to buy some of my beverage. Her husband is Elwood Throckmorton, the pastor over at the First Barlow Community Church.  The views there are pretty much over on the right-hand side of things. Family values, pro life, anti gay. That sort of thing.
     "Ordinarily they don't hold with drinking.  But Pastor Elwood allows himself exceptions. People just don't understand the stresses involved in keeping an entire congregation on the straight and narrow, Delia says, and he takes a nip now and then, strictly for medicinal purposes. (Looks to me like he has a lot of medicinal purposes, if you get my meaning.) He doesn't want to risk being seen at my place, so he sends her.
     "Anyhow, while Delia was there, my cousin Jimmy Frank came over to buy a jug for his own self. Now he's a good old boy, but he doesn't have the manners God gave a goat.  Just barged right in and sat down.
     "Delia couldn't let on to why she was really there, so she started rattling on about how much she enjoyed our tea and our chat about the strong leadership President Trump is providing our country. When Jimmy Frank heard that, he got about half bug-eyed and made a noise like he'd swallowed his tobacco plug.  She noticed, and said didn't he agree.
     "Jimmy Frank said hell no, that Trump is a crooked lying bastard. Said if Trump didn't launder money for the Russian mob he'll kiss her backside in the public square at high noon.  She commenced to sputter, but Jimmy Frank plowed right on. Said on top of that, Trump is crazy. Nutty as a truck stop candy bar.
     "She got red in the face and sputtered on about how Trump had surrounded himself with principled people and cultivated strong allies in Congress. Well, Jimmy Frank kept plowing. Said that fellow Pence would have to get ten times smarter to be a wooden Indian, and that fellow McConnell is the kind of grifter who'll hug you so he can pick your pocket.
     "Well, I figure Jimmy Frank has got the better side of this conversation by a country mile, but I don't want to say anything, because several of my better customers are members of that church congregation and I don't want to get on the bad side of Delia and Elwood. I mean, those folks are willing to wink at a little drinking, but they are dead serious about wanting the government to enforce the rest of their religion. They'll side with a snake if it claims to have family values.
     "They both noticed that I was keeping mighty quiet, and they both gave me the stink eye, like a woman who's caught her husband smooching a neighbor lady. And they both stalked out.
     "So you can see, through no fault of my own, I have truly got between a rock and a hard place. Jimmy Frank is family, so I'm pretty sure he won't say anything, but I'm not so sure about Delia. I'm afraid that if I want to keep my moonshine business up to snuff I may have to start going to church. That wouldn't exactly square with the way I really live, but the same is true of a lot of those folks over there, so I guess nobody would downright object. Still, it just doesn't seem right.
     "And that's how things are down here right now. I promise to be better about writing, and I'll let you know how all this turns out. I'll keep you posted about Scooter and Ida, too. There may be more happening there. I dropped into the library the other day to say hello to Millie, and I spied Scooter in the reference section. I asked him what was up, and he said that Ida has gotten all interested in something called haiku. He said he doesn't know what that is or how it works, but Ida has started talking mighty funny sometimes.
     "I told Scooter I thought he should hang on to the sleeping bag.
                                                                         
                                                                              "Sincerely,
                                                                              "Your Uncle Barlow"

After Trump

               Journalism has been overtaken  by a Biblical plague of dickheads.
                                                                                       Richard Ben Cramer
               We have met the enemy, and he is us.     
                                                   Pogo Possum
   

     As an alumnus of the Fourth Estate, I like the story of a lad who dreamed of being a railroad man.  When he came of age, he went straight to the railroad office and applied for work.
     A manager administered an aptitude test, then sat the lad down for mixed news.
     "I'm sorry," the manager said. "The test indicates you have no aptitude for railroad work."
     The boy was crestfallen.
     "But there's good news," the manager said.  "The test says you are perfectly suited to be a journalist."
     "A journalist?" the boy said.
     "Yes. A journalist."
     "How so?"
     "It was in your answer to question 37."
     "I don't remember the numbers," the boy said. "Which question was that?"
     "Question 37 asked, 'If you were at the master controls of a railroad switch yard and you saw two trains speeding toward each other on the same track at 100 miles an hour, what would you do?'  You answered, 'I'd run and get my brother, because he's never seen a train wreck.' "
     The post-Trump era (it's coming sooner or later) will surely include new consideration of the way we speak to each other as a nation, and the way our town criers speak to us. In a phrase from another writer, saying that a certain quality has gone missing from our national conversation is like using imagery of burnt toast to discuss the Chicago fire.
      Discussion would logically begin with the sewer of propaganda issuing daily from the White House. I think my former colleagues in the press stumbled, at first, in reacting to this manifestation of the President's bone-deep corruption and his retainers' glad complicity.  Perhaps raising a train-wreck alarm early on would have seemed the kind of side-taking that journalists are not supposed to do.   But as venality has settled into the bloodstream of our government, we've seen once again that neutrality in the face of outrage is not neutrality at all.
     Meanwhile, the rise of electronic media has tilted news reporting toward stories that can be told in pictures, charts and graphs. In bites of screen time. This new day has raised the profile of journalists whose employability is conditioned by their capacity to perform well in these media -- and especially on camera. Some of them also have other pertinent talents, but some are merely actors or technocrats.
     In this era of bite-sized news, discourse of public affairs has absorbed changed standards -- I would say diminished standards -- of utility for an English sentence. Diminished standards become norms. Even major news outlets may now feature commentators whose grasp of language is so loose that they mistake invective for appraisal and ridicule for wit.
     It would be wrong to say that today's journalism includes no distinguished figures. But extra searching is needed to find one who can approach, say, the eloquence of Walter Lippman:

      When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. 

     A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable or dangerous to do so.

     Or Theodore H. White's combination of reportage and portraiture:
   
     It was invisible, as always.
     They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. ...
     By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country -- in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible ...
     What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world -- the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal -- all committed into the hands of one man.
                                                                                                 The Making Of The President 1960    

     The air these days is heavy with the language of distemper. Political figures urge us to fight with each other. Sectarian voices urge us to condemn each other. Even we who don't want to listen  can't help hearing, being affected and perhaps being infected.
     Should the shallowing of public vocabulary be laid to cause or to effect? Future historians will probably have to answer that one. Either way, they will surely note that,  in the early part of the 21st Century, the constructive expression of disagreement became a neglected art.
     The country will eventually be rid of a president who is, surely, a lifelong white-collar criminal. He can be gone soon if voters will only bother to make it so.
     Cleanup will be an arduous, top-to-bottom chore. Perhaps we could imagine it this way:
     The next president provides a fresh beginning simply by not being a daily disgrace; by returning common decency to behavior and public language.
      Legislators, not only in Congress,  embrace deep reform. They wake to the difference between leading people and herding them. Republicans in particular resolve that party loyalty does not supersede their oath of office, and that systematically frightening and deceiving the electorate is a poisonous kind of corruption.
     We the people -- to borrow another phrase -- resolve to improve our focus on several realities. They are: We get what we demand -- or worse, what we tolerate. Citizenship is work, and politics is not a parlor game. The purpose of a vote is to belly up to a real-life choice of governance, not to make a gesture. A vote not cast is license given to nameless strangers.
      In particular, we resolve to deny demagogues their staple food: The attitude that whoever disagrees with me is immoral or stupid by virtue of that fact.
      The institutional press, which has always been an evolving creature, becomes a little quicker to name fools and scoundrels for what they are. Evolution continues in its influence on the quality of public language, inescapably and not entirely for the better. Yesterday's journalism provided a variety of cultural nourishment. Today's version can be thin soup.
     But those voices of cultural nourishment do not disappear. They explore new outlets, new venues, new methods. And better days come because they can, if we the people -- that telling phrase again -- buckle down to the workaday chores of bringing them on.
   
   

A Life Gift

     The people who most care already know, but I want to write this anyway. I want to do it because some things just need to be said, or sung, or written down.
     It's about teachers. The good ones, in school and in life. The ones who know that some lessons can change you; who recognize these when they come along; who bear down on you when one does come along, because they know that you may not see it for yourself, and they don't want you to miss the nourishment of it.
      Also, it's about friends. Real friends. The ones you can turn to, and who can turn to you. The ones whose friendship never wanes, no matter time or distance.
      If you are hugely blessed in this life you may have one person who is both a friend and a teacher.
      I've been blessed.
     For his privacy I'll just call him R.C.  He was my first boss. I was fresh out of college, a rookie on a good local newspaper. (It was not an oxymoron in those days.) Conditioned by the intellectual caste systems that academe likes both to foster and deny, I was flustered by the open-ended simplicity of his very first question.
     Him: What do you like to read?
     Me, apologetically: Uh, well, actually, I love to read, but my reading habits are pretty undisciplined. I'll read just about anything.
     Him: Oh, good.
     It was an auspicious beginning. The two of us had to fill a whole page, every day, with our own work and that of others. We could afford to have no limits on what we read and wrote about, thought and talked about. It was postgraduate education in a sink-or-swim school with a skilled and patient mentor right at hand.
     The strains of workload were leavened with salty humor (Spencer, you have fucked up this word so badly nobody will ever be able to spell it again.) Also  with strategic breaks. To hell with this, he would exclaim, bolting up from his chair. Let's go to the movies.
     And go we would, to the critics' latest favorite, or to new trash at the naughty movie house uptown.  Sometimes we'd duck out to shoot a little pool at the beer and burger joint down the street.
     The learning side of life was filled with politics, history, literature, drama, art and music. On the fun side we got into some mischief, he and I and a circle of friends.  Once, when a drunken party notion turned into a dare, we smuggled a bogus sketch into an exhibit at the local art museum and then had nervous fun betting each other that the lifted-pinkie crowd wouldn't spot it. (They didn't.)
     I learned about writing, because R.C. has the gift and cared enough to teach. And I learned about the power of story.
     Several deep-thinker types and even a few theologians will tell you that storytelling is a primary human drive -- right up there with sex and hunger. We trade stories, they say, from in inborn need to make sense of life, and to tell each other what kind of sense it makes.
     R.C. didn't need deep thinkers to tell him that a proper story is a treasure. He knew that some things can be said through no other means, and that the most important writers are first good storytellers.
     So he was not being entirely facetious, I think, in our later conversation about a memoir he'd written for his grandchildren.
     Me: Wow. You've led an interesting life.  There are a lot of good stories in here.
     Him (grinning): Yes. And most of them are true.
     We are old men now, both of us, and he has touched many more lives than mine. He has also touched the lives of people he never met or even heard of, for it became my privilege through the years to bear down on a youngster who seemed to be missing a life lesson, or to tell a story that made something click into focus for others.
     The people who care most about R.C. would not be surprised by anything here. They already understand. But I think they would also understand that some things -- even things you already know -- just need to be said. Or sung. Or written down.
   
 

 
   

Love Is Elemental

                                                        If I don't love you
                                                       Grits ain't groceries
                                                       Eggs ain't poultry
                                                      And Mona Lisa was a man
                                                                               Blues Lyric


     Two of our dearest friends are getting married. We are watching the wedding preparations with eager anticipation -- from a comfortable distance.
     Perhaps some day the lords of irony will explain why weddings may be a test of mettle. Who should be invited? Who will understand that not everyone can be? Will a thousand details fall into place? If they don't, what is Plan B?
     Meanwhile, out of earshot but known full well to the couple, friends take it upon themselves to meddle vicariously. Do they "approve"?  Did the couple make an impulsive decision? Are the  particulars of the ceremony appealing? Is it scheduled  too soon? Not soon enough?
     At our house, "approval" of this wedding is hearty and heartfelt.  We have watched these two with fingers crossed. We thought they were right for each other.
     They reached their  decision about that in their own time and way. They have been in  a relationship for several years, and have lived together for several of those. They have worked at learning how to be good for and to each other. They have not rushed or jumped to their conclusion. In my view they have built, piece by careful piece, a model of loving commitment.
     Some would argue that it's not a valid model, because both partners in the relationship are men.  This prejudice, I hope, is on its way to being erased from the public norms of our country. Above the personal and private detail of their gender, the marriage our friends are building fits every value held by healthy societies.
     They will have to weather yet awhile the pandering of some politicians to zealous factions. (Most recently, the Trump administration has stacked a so-called human rights commission with anti-gay activists. Of course the Trump administration befouls everything it touches, but others have  also been willing to exploit innocent American citizens, even from the White House. The second President Bush abased himself with a pose of support for an anti-gay constitutional amendment that he knew could never pass.)
    This brand of cold-hearted cynicism will not prevail in the long term against the larger public's rapid embrace of gay marriage. Across the arc of human years, love has transcended boundaries of age, race, religion, ethnicity and more. Now we come to gender, and once again to the life lesson that love validates itself beyond the power of others to ban.
     Or, as the blues-man might phrase it: Love is love. Period. And if that ain't so, grits ain't groceries.

Gravy And Virginity

     A friend has given me a special gift: A breakfast of biscuits, pork sausage and white country gravy. He knows my background among yeomen of small towns and countryside.  And so he knows that this breakfast was a meal of memories.
    Life for me now has become citified and gentrified, a far cry from times when breakfast gravy could be a staple. In this universe, people can make  a much wider variety of  lifestyle  choices.  They are vegetarians, paleo-dieters, yoga buffs, joggers. They eat at restaurants whose menus carry heart-healthy and gluten-free symbols. They go faithfully to the gym. They are wary of processed food.
      The outer me conforms. When in Rome. If social conversation turns to the latest advice from diet gurus, I want to be appropriately attentive. If someone mentions Downward Dog, I don't want to ask about pet training.
     But with it all my inner contrarian remains restless. And though he can be a grouch,  he does make a point from time to time.
     He reminds me that even in the realm of hard science, today's revealed truth may become tomorrow's revised theory.  At the mundane juncture where nutrition science meets daily life, he favors the example of the long-maligned egg, which has now returned to the better graces of the experts.
     As I listen to a friend declaiming upon a new exercise routine, my contrarian may whisper to me of Jim Fixx, the fitness pioneer of the '70s.
     Who died young.
     Of  a heart attack.
     While jogging.
     My contrarian sees elements of trend-mongering in these matters -- a certain desire to be among those In The Know, and a certain attitude toward those who aren't. He clucks over gluten-free regimens touted by people who don't really need them. And he dares me to enthuse widely over my gravy breakfast. He says I'd soon be admonished in the tones used by parents on children who didn't finish their spinach.
     He can safely afford to be a lifestyle Luddite. The outer me cannot, however.  In the real world, non-conformity -- like virginity -- is admired more in the abstract.  I prefer to get along. Which is to say, about the gravy breakfast, he's probably right. Anyhow, I don't mention it.
    I've learned to pronounce quinoa; to smile through Fitbit reports; to agree that I really should get around to trying yoga; to get along by going along. And for those times when my inner contrarian simply will not be ignored, I have a fallback resource. My friend knows a great place to get country ham biscuits.

Fear of Flying

             


            I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
                                                                            Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

      I must fly this summer.  A special occasion requires it.
      I would as soon be beaten with a broom handle. On a scale of personal gratification this would rank with the experience of commercial air travel, and it would save money at the same time. But it would not, alas, get me to my destination. I must fly.
     I suppose that Saint-Exupery, the poet-aviator who found beauty and wonder in flying, would be disappointed with those of us who dread it. Statisticians surely are. They assert year after year that I am safer in an airplane than in my automobile.
     Statisticians may say things that are accurate but not useful.  They could tell you that the statistical chances of surviving Russian roulette are actually pretty good. However, the downside of this model is so bad that prudent people are not guided by it.
     In the matter of flying, the statisticians' implacable numbers cannot change certain facts. If my automobile's engine fails, I will coast to the side of the road and languish there until the tow truck arrives. If my airplane's engine fails, I will die a fiery death.
     The possibility of fiery death -- however small -- is a flaw in the quality of my travel experience.
      In earlier America, one form of community punishment required a miscreant to sit astride a fence rail. The rail was then hoisted to the shoulders of  men who carried it through town for the purpose of exposing the victim to public mockery. The victim's physical pain might be magnified through the attachment of weights to the ankles.
     Reference sources do not clearly say which person first imagined this form of torture. Nonetheless, we may reasonably wonder if a descendant designed the modern commercial airline seat.
     Occupancy of this perch does not require me to undergo public mockery.  It does require a certain willingness to grovel. I am not allowed to know, forthrightly, how much I must pay. (What's the fare to Keokuk? It depends.) Down to the last  minute, I cannot know if I'm actually going to get what I paid for. (Flight 911 has been delayed/canceled/rescheduled/moved to gate 4,792.)
      And under penalty of ejection or even arrest, I must reconcile to the possibility of being treated as a hostage.   
     Perhaps some future item of business school curriculum will explain how an entire industry came to a business model based on the essentials of mugging and extortion. Meanwhile, we must take things as they come.
      Thus I will arrive at this summer's occasion mildly addled by a mixture of anxiety, anger and resentment. People will inquire about my trip. I will offer a game smile and say something noncommittal.
     They will smile back in implicit understanding of what one travel expert notes: We define a successful airline flight in negatives. The plane was not late; luggage was not lost; there was no screaming infant two rows back; the passenger in the next seat was not a boor.
     The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus said that adversity contributes to learning.
     That has been true of me in the matter of flying.
     I've learned to suspect that statisticians don't actually do much flying themselves.
   
 
          

Scotch or Bourbon?

     My forebears were Scots. For reasons lost to memory they came long ago to scatter across the mid-South, some as farmers, some as tradesmen.
     I don't know if they were active in the Celtic tradition of whiskey-making. I do know that some were inclined to take a drop. Among these was a distant uncle, one of my grandmother's elders. Once a year, borne down by the labor and borderline poverty of small family farming, he would take a shotgun and a jug of moonshine into the attic for a solitary toot.
    The gun was his sign that he would not brook interference. The family did not believe that he would actually shoot, but they were mindful of accidental possibilities if he were provoked into waving it.  When they decided he'd been up there long enough, they sent my grandmother -- then a girl -- to coax him down. She was a favorite and had a way with him.
     I wonder what he would make of tippling's entry among today's great cultural divides:
     -- Morning people versus night owls.
     -- Neatniks versus slobs.
     -- Punctual people versus those who run blithely on their own time.
     And ...
     -- Scotch drinkers versus the bourbon folks.
     I've always been a scotch man, for no valid reason. When I approached drinking age, the older guys said this was the sophisticated choice.
     The novelist Walker Percy would not agree. In an essay years ago he celebrated "the hot bosky bite" of bourbon. In comparison, he wrote, "drinking scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward."
     In a differing essay, another writer declared that she enjoyed Noel Coward, and she imputed to scotch drinkers the added merit of being inclusive. She reported a finding that 42 percent of scotch drinkers will also drink bourbon, while only 20 percent of bourbon drinkers will drink scotch.
     Once upon a time, as I recall, bourbon was a boots-and-denim kind of snort, while scotch drinkers might be imagined in ascots. But nowadays, cousins of wine snobs may be found in either camp. In a stratospheric remove from  bourbon's origins in the corn whiskey of the yeomanry, one brand sells for more than $2,000 a bottle. My distant uncle might say, That whiskey has got above its raisin's.
     A distillery in my town makes a very nice single malt.  The owner is a big, bluff Irishman who'll take you on a personal tour if you catch him at the right time. Then he'll take you to the tasting room.
     On my visit, he offered a sample of his poteen -- Irish moonshine. Cradling the bottle he said, as much to himself as to us: My grandfather was the first one in our family to make this, and he got arrested for it.
     We Celts try not to get above our raisin's.  I think I may visit him again.