I know more about inflation, 

I know more about everything than anybody in this room. 

Anybody anywhere in the world. 

Well, there's a woman sitting right over there. 

She's a housewife but she's very good. 

She got a natural instinct for business. 

She perhaps knows more than I do but I actually don't think so."

President Donald Trump, yesterday

Honestly, you can't help wondering what planet this man lives on, although we know he probably owns it--the planet is Trump world. 

I've had a suspicion for a long time--no revelations, no crystal ball, no unearthly visions--that he wouldn't make it to the end of these four years, that something would end his Trump 2.0.

Start here--he'll die of natural causes. He so regularly burns the candles at both ends that he's almost certainly going to run out of candles. He may have a staff that types out middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts, but if he has such a squad no one has ever hinted at their identities. He's 79 right now and should be losing it. When he says things like he said yesterday--"he's the smartest man in the universe"--you can't help but think he's carrying burdens no other human being could lift off the floor, and he does it 24/7. No human being can pull that kind of weight.

Just as likely is that some crazed gunman, looking for headlines or whatever, takes him out. I hope that doesn't happen because then we'd have a martyr on our hands, someone who would soon have a national holiday in his honor, not to mention a half-dozen monuments up and down the streets of Washington. Among US presidents, he stands unique as a person who refuses to think about winning converts. He is a master at gunning up his base, but he does it at the expense of voting blocks that, this election season, have never liked him. The number of Trumpsters isn't growing. The opposition is a bunch of dirty, rotten commies when he's the one who's invested in all kinds of businesses. We've never had a Pres who's been so comfy with our oligarchs, who's made billions since Trump 2.0.

Lately, often, he seems bored. Maybe he'll just hang up his spikes and go play golf somewhere far from the madding crowd. Seriously, he seems powerless to stanch the flow of the opposition. The NYT ran with a cover story yesterday about how strong Dem candidates for governor were looking with just three weeks to go, while Trump's trump, huge, pumped rallies, have a wasted look, loads of empty seats. Maybe he'll just suddenly walk away and play golf. 

Don't look for him leaving office soon. I'm saying if it happens, I wouldn't be surprised. Nothing about the Donald has been predictable.

What's much more likely is that he'll be around until 2028, still crusading against the commies, the Dems, in all their hated mutations, while the Dems, now a majority in both the House and the Senate, do their best root out Trump-level corruption, if not the orange one himself. It'll be a really rough two years, crammed full of more lunacy, like yesterday's winner: "I know more about inflation--I know more about everything than anybody in this room. Anybody anywhere in the world. "

Honestly, what other human being you know would say things like that--even think things like that--what other human being than our Commander-in-Chief?

 “. . .and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

                                                        Reinhold Neibuhr

 

            Perhaps the Scarlet Letter is the American classic it is because its central characters—seemingly fallen Hester and her partner in crime, the seemingly self-righteous Arthur Dimmesdale—are so, well, seemingly complex.  Invariably, it seems, first-time readers in my college classrooms, early on, come to love Hester as much as they hate her guilt-wracked lover, a spineless phony.  But I’m not sure Hawthorne intended my students’ sentiments to move so incontestably in those directions.

            I side with those who claim that the trajectories of those two characters, in the novel, appear to move in totally opposite directions.  Hester is clearly central in the early chapters; Hawthorne seems to have fallen in love with her himself, in part because she gains so much heroic strength by accepting her red badge of shame.

            The Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is a sham, a man who receives the accolades of the community in spite of his secret sin, a man who, by refusing what Hester openly accepts, loses our sympathy as quickly and surely as she gains it.

            But slowly on, Hawthorne allows Dimmesdale to take over the novel, giving him greater billing—or so it seems to me. 

            The climactic scene, when he finally and torturously bears his sin to the community and dies, forgiven, rarely engages my students, despite the fact that they are almost all believers themselves.  It’s too little, too late—even though good Christian readers probably should see the eternity of what just occurred:  his sin, like David’s, has been forgiven. 

            I’m really not sure Hawthorne could have done better. It seems to me that while stories—the ones we read or the ones we hear—can map out what it is that happens in forgiveness, those stories cannot give us the experience. No one’s testimony of forgiveness—David’s or Dimmesdale’s or your neighbor’s or mine, can do that. By way of what some call “felt life,” stories bring us as close as anything can to verifiable experience.  But there is, finally, an experiential—an existential—character to forgiveness and faith itself that is beyond my words or Hawthorne’s or even the word of the scriptures.

            We can talk and we can share and we can testify. We can read the Scarlet Letter or Crime and Punishment or the 32^nd Psalm. We can hear the story time and time again.  We can know how forgiveness operates; we can theorize and theologize. But, finally we know forgiveness in our hearts and souls only when we, like King David, know it’s been done to us, within us.  

You have to have been there to know.  In that sense, the 32^nd Psalm is our song, even if I can’t explain it or even describe it, as no one can. 

We really know what David knows only when we too have been forgiven.

Hymn from the Mud

LDS Grand Encampment--Council Bluffs, IA

Lest you wonder, no, I'm not LDS, nor have I ever been, despite the protestations of some of my high school students a half-century ago who would have liked to get me in. But I am something of a fan, at least some aspects of the Mormon story. (Mountain Meadows Massacre, not so.)

Yesterday, I was told, was the birthday of William Clayton, who essentially invented the modern odometer on the long Mormon trek from Illinois to Utah. He did so by actually numbering the revolutions the old wagon took in one mile, then created a gadget to count the miles, thereby making life easier on him.

It's a sweet story, but William Clayton deserves to be remembered for more than numbering his miles, as if they were days. He also  wrote one of the most beloved hymns in the LDS repertoire, "Come, Come Ye Saints." Some years ago, I wrote that story. You can hear it if you click on the url below. 

But in case you would rather read it, here it is. Honestly, it's one my favorites.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Let’s get the objectionable stuff out on the table, okay? William Clayton had nine wives. Not nine lives, like the Tom catting around out back, but nine wives. William Clayton was a Mormon, baptized in his native Great Britain, a man of some rank among the saints, a man who worked alongside none other than Joseph Smith the Prophet.

Some folks like to say that it was Brigham Young who pressed William Clayton’s poetic talents into service, proposing that Clayton, a man well-versed in verse, pen a new hymn the pilgrims on their long, hard trek to the Great Salt Lake could sing in renewed dedication to their arduous task. Some folks like to say that, but fact-checking Mormon historians say it’s likely not true.

What’s more likely is that William Clayton got the news one night right here in Iowa, that back in Illinois, his wife—that would be his fourth wife, history tells us—had given birth back to a healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eventually, he would father—hold on to your chair—43.  

He didn’t take nine wives because he was any more randy than any other mid-19^th saints—Mormons called themselves saints so I’m not being sarcastic; he took nine wives because he listened to the Prophet, who, back then, okayed polygamy and practiced it heartily himself. Clayton was a “recorder,” a church administrator, who lived by every word the prophet ordered.

That’s the objectionable stuff. If, like me, you’re not Mormon, try, as I will, to put it behind you.

Imagine, for a moment, what Omaha, a pioneer village in 1846, must have thought when, as if overnight, a suburb of 800 frame homes went up, an incredible project large enough to house 2500 Mormon pilgrims. There’s nothing there to mark the spot anymore, but a temple and a museum still grace the western hills above the Missouri River, where you can hear the incredible story and pick up a Book of the Mormon at the same time—no charge.

Seriously, this Winter Camp was not to be believed.

But William Clayton sits at the heart of things here, the church Recorder. The Iowa spring in 1846 was anything but—cloudy, rainy, cold, constant wintry mix falling all around as a couple thousand pilgrims, en masse, moved across those rolling prairie hills on their way to the Missour. Mud like you wouldn’t believe. Wagons slipped and slid when they weren’t stuck fast. Handcarts turned the men and women lugging them into beasts of burden for six or seven miles a day at best. Spring blizzards swept discouragement into the entire woebegone enterprise. It’s impossible to imagine the hardship.

Brigham Young had cause to ask Clayton to put his pen to work. The saints were suffering, dying, and Utah was an unimaginable half continent away. Clayton himself was ill with discouragement: "I have been sick again all day especially towards night,” the recorder scribbled in his diary. “I was so distressed with pain it seemed as though I could not live."

But then, this:

This morning Ellen Kimball came to me and wishes me much joy. She said Diantha has a son. I told her I was afraid it was not so, but she said Brother Pond had received a letter. . .he read that she had a fine fat boy on the 30th,. . . but she was very sick with ague and mumps. Truly I feel to rejoice at this intelligence but feel sorry to hear of her sickness. . . .

And then this: “This morning I composed a new song—'All is well.' I feel to thank my heavenly father for my boy and pray that he will spare and preserve his life and that of his mother and so order it so that we may soon meet again.”

Look, I’m not nominating William Clayton to dethrone Meredith Wilson as the Hawkeye Music Man. But anyone who’s ever listened to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir go through “Come, Come Ye Saints,” in all its regal glory can’t help but believe that what William Clayton created—“recorded”—his boots thick with sticky Iowa mud, can’t help but believe that hymn a miracle and a triumph.

And it was penned in dismal weather and profound discouragement, not all that far from here. Not all that far at all.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Here's the url, if you'd rather listen:

 https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2017-07-26/anthem-from-the-mud 

And should you wish to hear this hymn from the mud, here's the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's "illustrated" version. It's really something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ia3gYSvG8M  

Top Ten Stuff*

My stenosis makes a night like this an impossibility, sadly enough. This is an old one, but it makes my heart swell just to remember.

_____________________________ 

One sweet night last night. An old woman who grew up here used to tell me that Siouxland has just ten glorious days a year--"and you better enjoy 'em." If she's not wrong, then we had one yesterday. Northwest winds carried dry (and cooler) air over this quarter of the plains in a fashion that had everyone smiling. Summer's dog days departed somewhere south, where they belong.

 We took off for Spirit Mound, an old Lewis and Clark stop, where the Native people claimed little tiny humanoids, demonic things, lived atop an odd land formation--a tiny, miniature mountain. It was hot that day--as I remember the tale--so hot that their huge black Newfoundland, Seaman, got a little sick.

Not so last night--perfect weather, top-ten variety. We were mostly alone, just a few other older couples also walking out there to the top. The corn in the neighborhood looked pretty bad from the drought, but the beans are yellowing now, creating a little medley of color in the broad landscape. The Missouri River valley looms south, but otherwise, from the top of Spirit Mound, you can see for miles and miles. There's something about a sweet day in a place like that to steady the soul. No demonic humanoids either, just pilgrims.

We drove south to a place called Mulberry Point, where an overlook offers a very unusual view of the Missouri River. To say the river is wild at that point isn't totally true. The flow of the Missouri is controlled by the dams upstream; it can't flood like it once did, seasonally. But Mulberry Point still offers a view of ye olde Missouri, one that looks far more untamed than the river people see in more familiar crossings. It's braided, thin and rangy, and seemingly unspoiled. Even though it isn't uncontrolled, its wild looks are a reminder of what that river once was, years ago, untamed and gutsy, cutting a new channel wherever and whenever it wanted.

The river is an inspiration at Mulberry Point--it looks to be its own boss, even though it isn't anymore.

We were there at sunset, and my camera's battery was dead as a doornail. The last of the great photographers.

 What a night. Out here in Siouxland, you only get ten of those per year. You better mark 'em. We did. 

Broken Kettle dawn--2003

For years, I've been writing short essays for a local NPR station in Sioux City. It's been great for me and maybe for them as well. These "Small Wonders" air on Mondays during NPR news shows, early morning (7:45) and afternoon (4:45). The story that ran this week, yesterday, is a rerun about being on top of the world at Broken Kettle, a great place to visit early morning or anytime.

Rather than print it out, I'll just put it here. You can listen.

The pictures are from my first trip with a camera to Broken Kettle, memorable for me because I was blown away by the dawn. I'd guessed that I could get some beautiful shots because Broken Kettle Nature Preserve was a drop-dead gorgeous place. What I didn't realize--and what is in the "wonder" of the essay, is just exactly how gorgeous the dawn can be--and was that morning.

A few more shots. I'd never taken landscapes before, and I'm not exactly proud of these files. But they still do bear witness to what suddenly and quickly we witnessed that morning, the morning the essay describes.

Wild West Trans

Look. If what she wore was the standard wardrobe of the hundreds of fighting men in General Crook's huge expedition in the Powder River region of a place that would be known as Montana some years later. If she wore a thick and bulky wool jacket, cut her hair short and wild; boots, of course, and shapeless thick and heavy wool pants, we don't know; if she handled horses better than any of the other staff on the mission; if she swore more or better than men a decade or two or three than she appeared to be, then is it any wonder that no one--not one infantryman of the hundreds in General Crook's army ever guessed that under that disguise-that-was- no disguise lived a woman--young, yes, but a female. 

Crook's army was just a few days from a big fight with Crazy Horse and hundreds of the Lakota and Cheyenne Washington wanted wrestled back to the reservations where treaties demanded they were supposed to be, planting potatoes and raspberries and just staying out of the way of the thousands of white folk parading into the Black Hills or bound for Utah, Oregon, or California. 

What no one could have bet would happen did when her horse threw her down and two or three of her buddies helped her get her boots beneath her again. Somehow, one of those doughboys determined that the body they were lugging belonged to a female, a little one--she stood no more than 5'5"--and a super lightweight.

The rest of them--cavalry, infantry, stock handlers, camp cooks, the whole works--never one guessed that the kid was a she, that the twirp with the king-sized dirty mouth was nothing but a girl.  And here they were in the middle of nowhere, hunting hostiles with a dang girl along.

Word spread like wildfire. Soon enough the General heard-tell about this woman they'd uncovered in the ranks. He went to look--and sure enough if the gossip wasn't actual. "What you want us to do, sir?" the other staff said.

He gave them a clear answer. "If she can pull her weight, who cares?" he must have said, or something similar, because she stayed on for a while, long enough to tell the tale of her days as General Crook's scout, which she never was. But you can bet she loved the story because she told it a thousand times, part of her repertoire whenever she entertained in seedy joints just as overrun with men--bars and brothels all across the west. She could ride better than all of 'em, shoot straighter, and cuss like some half-potted muleskinner.

For some time she rode with Crook's army in the Great Sioux War, only woman any of them knew of. Right about then, nobody knew her name exactly. But it she wasn't snookered or just plain stubborn, she'd tell men just right out what her name was--maybe you've heard of it--Martha Canary.

A year before she had been with another company, the Jenner expedition, a foray with the frontier whose significant purpose was to do nothing more than find gold. 

The kid General George Crook let stay with the expedition had begun already then to identify herself by the name she appropriated and used throughout her life in the West. You may have heard of her?--Calamity Jane. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’

—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

I never committed adultery—per se. I guess I may have to confess, like Jimmy Carter, that I’ve sometimes ogled a bit too sumptuously; but I’ve have not blazed my way through some tawdry affair.

I’ve not murdered anyone. When I was a boy, I stole cigarettes—we used to call it “hocking,” as in “let’s go hock cigarettes.” But I haven’t hocked a thing in close to 70 years.

I’ve eaten too much—just two nights ago, in fact. It started with the smooth guacamole. . . But that’s another story. I’m in a perpetual battle with love handles.

I love a beer now and then, but I’m light years from alcoholism. The love of money may well be the root of all evil, but greed or avarice has never been a weakness of mine. Ask my wife.

I’ve come to that point in my life where covetousness isn’t much of problem either. Here I sit in a little office space, surrounded by books I’m can’t get rid of, file drawers full of stuff I can’t toss, and a collection of flim-flam filling every shelf, every last bit of it worthless beyond anything but sweet sentimental value. Even though a flood swallowed half of what I’ve saved through the years, I could use a couple healthy trips to Goodwill.

I don’t think I’m crochety, although my wife might argue. I’m not bitter. I love a good story, and I’ve become convinced that humor is, as the Readers Digest has long insisted, the very best medicine for the soul.

The 78-year path of my life—check it for yourself—contains no spectacular sin or reprehensible acts. I was in Vegas once, but I was ten. All I remember is sudden bright lights.

My biography would never sell. A fourteen-year-old with an eating disorder makes a better chapel speaker than I do. There are no bank heists or car chases. Thank the Lord, there never was a Bathsheba, nor Uriah.

For the most part, mine are sins of omission—and they are legion.

I wonder if, through my life, I worshipped the task I’m at right now, if I placed a god before me that obscured the one who forgives. I often wonder if I neglected to love my children or spouse because of my love of writing, if my profession of faith had more to do with the letters appearing on this screen than it did with the Lord God Almighty.

I wonder, as I never have before in my life, if I’ve done the best I could with what I’ve been given. I really do. When I look back, I wonder whether I did it right at all.

I don’t wonder, not really. I have no doubt that in many important ways I’ve failed.

I doubt my confession would be easier if I could point at a Bathsheba or too much bourbon or some kind of abuse and say, “there—that’s the sin for which I need forgiveness.” I’m thankful there are no such lurid misdeeds.

But I’m old enough to know that, just like the wanton King, I can stand only if I’ve been on my knees.

For what I didn’t do, Lord—for what I didn’t do right and for my idolatry, my pride—please, forgive.