Morning Thanks--a Gerson op-ed

Michael Gerson is a Washington heavyweight. Long ago, he was recruited by Karl Rove to be a speech-writer for George W. Bush. In that role, he was the workhorse for Bush's inaugural speech, in which the new President called for intervention and nation-building to spread democracy around the world, ideas pooh-poohed by many today, despised by more.

He once served as a ghost writer for Charles Colson, who fell precipitously when Colson's boss, Nixon, skipped town after Watergate, but then rose to prominence once again after a stint in prison to become a powerful voice for Christian cultural action.

Michael Gerson grew up in St. Louis, where he graduated from a Christian high school, then went to Georgetown but transferred and eventually graduated from Wheaton in 1984. Today, he is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post. In my estimation, his politics are neither conservative nor liberal, but Christian, although most in evangelical-dumb today would consider him a lousy RINO.

Gerson's writing is always worth your time, but last week he published a lengthy essay that essentially forwarded Jesus of Galilee as a national role model. "The United States sometimes feels like two nations, divided by adornments defiantly affirming their political and cultural affinities." Just how might we be brought back together? Gerson suggests Jesus.

He doesn't wince when answering today's 64-thousand dollar question. He despises Donald Trump and is, by standard Trumpster definitions, a weak-kneed victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome. His op-ed pieces often rail against the man, in large part because he is flummoxed by the adoration given the ex-President by mobs of people who, impossibly, claim allegiance to Christ. Hence, the title of the essay I so greatly admire:

Trump should fill Christians with rage. 

How come he doesn’t?

What that title makes clear is that he's not looking to convert Trump's evangelicals; none of them would read something so pathetically apostate. His perceived audience is non-Trumpsters, most of whom are not Matt Gaetz types, but who believe, as does Michael Gerson, that democracy is under siege by Trump's special brand of nihilism. His op-ed looks to shape the ideas of free-thinking people, not cultists.

It will take twenty minutes to get through, but anyone who claims the cross really should read it because what it argues--to an audience that isn't evangelical--is the authority of the witness of Jesus Christ as an example of how we as a nation might plot out our own future directions.

Those who think of America as Godless (upper case G) may be shocked to read what could almost be read as a tract. But the power of the piece is in its insistence on seeing Jesus as a crusader for love, for tolerance, for selflessness. There's no talk of salvation or heaven or some dreamy afterlife.

From my point of view, it's a major piece of political writing (political in the best sense of that word). That it appears at all in one of the nation's most respected newspapers is rare. But it's not written for Christians or evangelicals; the piece is written for a nation on the brink of self-destruction, as many claim we are.

You can find it here. It's an amazingly powerful piece of work, for which, this morning I want to give thanks.

The cold waters of the North Sea

Yesterday, I left my camera in the film room of a local museum. On the way home, I discovered it wasn't with me so I doubled back twenty miles or so, only to run up to the gate of the place and find it locked. This morning, I have to call to see if someone there can find it--I think I know where I left it. I'll have to run back again and pick it up. Then I'll have to make the trip back to retrieve it. 

I swear I'm getting more and more irresponsible. Part of yesterday's pain was the extra busyness it's going to cost me to have lost it--that's assuming it's where I'm quite sure it is. But the greater agony is that my forgetfulness is no more than yesterday's; today, there will most certainly be another.

I'm quite sure that yesterday's mindlessness is what attracts me to this one, over a decade old. 

Last week Thursday afternoon, I was packed and ready to go. My students' assignments were all posted and ready for action in my absence, and I'd canceled my commitments elsewhere--several of them, in fact--because I was going to leave for Texas on Friday morning, where a couple of dozen writers meet annually, as we have for quite a long time. It's a wonderful interlude in winter, a little confab that's high on thoughtfulness and intimacy, a good time.

By late afternoon, I was just about ready because we had a commitment at night, and I knew I'd have to leave early to get to the airport. My luggage was open on the dining room table, the Kindle and iPod touch juiced up and ready to go. Everything in place.

I was leaving out of Omaha, and I remembered deliberately not getting too early a departure time--Omaha's airport is, after all, two hours' away. So I went to my files, clicked on the Expedia receipt, then stared at the date--the Texas meeting wasn't last week, it's this week.

Which would be hilarious, if my history didn't include, once upon a time, actually getting on the wrong blasted plane. You read that right. I'm over Lake Michigan, on my way to Detroit, when I realize I should be going west--California. Sheesh.

Which would be hilarious if I wasn't simply forgetting meetings, being late, behaving, most of the time these days, like someone--I'm 62--who is snuggling up to senility or Alzheimers or whatever.

My great-grandfather, a distinguished Dutch dominie and professor, once pulled on his skates and set out for a church where he had to preach that morning. So obsessed he was with the fine points of his sermon, that some sentry out at the end of the canal had to skate up to him and remind him that should he push along much farther, he'd be afloat (maybe) in the cold waters of the North Sea.

Maybe my forgetfulness is a DNA thing.

Whatever the cause, I'm thrilled to be able, once again, to take another shot at life, even at my age. I declared myself determined to write things down three places at least, so recently I ran off an extra calendar of the month of January, then magic-markered the blame thing and hung it up down here in front of sightless eyes.

Yesterday, I called the dentist--check up, teeth-cleaning. Months ago I'd set the appointment, before I knew my teaching schedule. Wednesday afternoon wasn't going to work. "No problem," says the receptionist, happy to have some lead time. I told her a T or TH would be better. "How about this?" she said. It was 3:00, I think.

That all happened just yesterday. This morning, I can't remember the date.

Lindbergh in Des Moines 9/11/41

I was unaware, totally, of the fact that one of the most important events of the pre-war era in America happened right here in Iowa, in Des Moines, on September 11, 1941, just four months before America's role in World War II was no longer in question.

Charles Lindbergh was an authentic American hero. He'd been the first to fly solo over the Atlantic in his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, which hangs--I believe--in the Twin Cities airport. Named the very first "Man of the Year" by Time magazine in 1928, a year after his epic flight, Lindbergh could not have been more popular, more universally admired. After his epic flight, an American tour brought him and his plane to all 48 states, 82 stops in all. Long before TV or the internet, Lindbergh was a media giant.

At the height of his popularity, a man named German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann stole into the Lindbergh house, kidnapped Charles and Anne Murrow Lindbergh's 20-month-old son, and then murdered the child. It's almost impossible to understand how closely America watched what they could of that tragic story, how deeply sadness reigned, coast to coast, when the little boy's death was announced, how much sympathy the entire nation gave the Lindberghs, who became as close as America would ever get to royalty.

Lindbergh, for reasons all his own, determined to keep the nation who loved him out of a war he claimed was essentially European. Despite news reports that made  clear that Hitler's henchmen were carrying out atrocities against their own Jewish people, Lindbergh famously claimed that night in Des Moines that three powerful forces argued for American intervention in that "European war"--the Brits, the Roosevelt administration, and European Jewry.

These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” Lindbergh had already said a year before. “This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion.”

Although he claimed great admiration for the Jews and horror at what was happening to them, his whole "America First" movement was crystalized that night into the anti-Semitic character of his arguments. If anyone should oppose American intervention, he said, it should be the Jews, who will suffer should such intervention ever occur. Somehow the illogic of that argument became clearly visible that night. It was clear, in Des Moines, Iowa, that Charles Lindbergh did not consider the Jews truly "American."

What he wanted, more than anything, was to keep America out of yet another world war, another "European" war. But his prejudice against Jews that night, in that speech, not only gained no followers, but also turned popular opinion against him eventually and dampened sympathy for the "America First" cause.

The sharply divergent arguments in this country with respect to our participation in the war were suddenly made moot when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a day Roosevelt said, would live in infamy.

Eventually, Lindbergh himself flew combat missions in the South Pacific.

Remembering

Should you fail to recognize the bouncing baby boy, it's me, 73 years ago, and that which has hold of me, as you likely can guess, is my dad's hand. I found the picture yesterday, after stumbling into a whole mess of pictures of me as a child. I've got a new printer, whose mysteries will continue to take some time for me to solve--like how exactly to scan old pictures. But I'm working at it, as this old thing illustrates.

Yesterday for the first time in months, I returned to a big project that I started several years ago, pulling together all kinds of things--blog posts, meditations, short stories, speeches, even chunks of novels--into some kind of chronology of my life. I suppose you could call it a memoir, but it makes no sense for me to write again what I've written already once--and sometimes more than once. 

But I hadn't opened the whole project up since April, so simply finding all the materials took some time. Along the way, I ran into this old blog post and thought I'd put it up again, a dozen years or so later, along with the picture of my dad's hand holding me against his chest. Just fits. Father's Day was long ago, and his birthday, July 26, was two months ago. The two finds just fit. It just happened to be my birthday.

------------------------------- 

If we keep our wits about us, there are likely few chapters of our lives for which we are more well-prepared than old age. Aging happens to all of us; there's no end to the role models. Some do it well. Some don't. We can learn.

In the last ten years, I've learned how to find my way around old folks homes. But my tally of visits is scant when compared to the records my sister and my wife have posted. They both tended aging parents--my parents too-- reverentially, sacrificially, daily. 

And thus, everyone knows what's coming. I can feel it in being less sure of foot, ice or no ice, and by way of a memory growing more and more beleaguered by morning fog that lingers most of the day. Friends of ours admitted that not long ago they drove to a town nearby, only to have forgotten, once there, why. We've not sunk to that level, not yet anyway, but the story is hilarious in part because all of that is just down the pike, and not a whole lot farther than Sioux City. 

Years ago, a friend of ours ran into an old woman wandering aimlessly on the street and asked her if she needed help. She hemmed and hawed a bit, so he asked her if she lived at the Homestead. "Oh, heavens no," she told him. "I'm that far gone."

Truth was, she was, and she did.

I feel it in my knees, my kidneys, and even my reach, and I see it in things that sag and hear it in blurting bellies. I feel it in a heaviness that makes staying at home feel like a blessing. Years ago in South Africa, I sat around a table at a bed-and-breakfast place and listened to another guest wistfully tell our gracious host that she was having a good time so far from home, but that she'd arrived at the age when she couldn't help feel that staying home is its own special joy. I remember thinking someday I'd feel the same way. As I do now. Sometimes. 

Last night I took out the atlas to plot a road trip to old battlefields at Slim Buttes, Little Big Horn, and Rosebud, the Powder River Country, a look at old forts and a visit to Devil's Tower.  See?--"Heavens no, I'm not that far gone."

Like it or not, this morning belongs to Psalm 90. It's only right I should be numbering my days. It's my birthday. Last night my son and daughter-in-law called from Oklahoma, and my daughter and family shared a Pizza Ranch buffet. I got cashews and candy from my grandkids, and a big outdoor clock from my wife so this spring, when the snow melts, I don't have to run in to check the time. Atomic, too. Accurate, even though I'd rather have it lie.

And sometime last night my parents arrived and right now sit here beside me. They're both dead-and-gone, but not so far away really, never so very far in spirit. They're here because my mother wouldn't fail to remember February 17, 1948, not that anyone else has. For some reason I'm thinking about her this morning, probably because on this morning she's thinking about me.

That's why she's here--Dad too. She couldn't really forget, even if she tried, just as my wife will never forget our kids' birthdays. Mothers were there enduringly. 

The two of them are sitting down here right now, Dad trying to find Fox News on a TV he doesn't understand, Mom smiling on the other side of the desk, immensely proud that her lamentably liberal son is going on and on about her and giving thanks and honor. Dad sits there beside her, his arm around her as it so often was. He's thinking about her; she's thinking about me. 

And they're both happy I'm remembering my birthday because they won't forget. This morning, even though they no longer need my blessing, nor any kind of indoor or outdoor clock, they deserve my thanks, in abundance, my morning thanks on this morning especially, the morning of my birthday. 

When did we know?

I don't remember the date, but it seems to me that Life magazine published this story either at the very end of World War II, or else after the war had ended. At Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away, a breath-taking exhibition of artifacts, news stories, posters, and photographs from Hitler's most famous death camp, a copy of this story was placed near the end of the exhibit, with the explanation that this story, being published as late as it had been, was actually the very first note and notice in national media of death camps.  

In retrospect, I'm not sure whether this story--or the commentary--was an indictment of the national media's inability to get at the story of the Holocaust, or if its inability wasn't, in fact, a matter of will: America simply didn't want to know. 

We've been watching Ken Burns' new documentary series on PBS, America and the Holocaust lately, and while there has, as yet, been scant mention of the death camps, it's very, very clear that America--way over here, an ocean away--didn't lack knowledge of the evil perpetuated on European Jewry. We knew. We just didn't care enough about the evil to do anything substantive about it, including taking in an entire ship full of Jewish children (the SS St.Louis, a story every American schoolkid should know). 

I know from the testimony of now-departed GIs who, on the road to Berlin, spread out into a woods to be sure the Nazis were out, and then and there discovered horrifying encampments of men, women, and children like the ones pictured on the page above, skeletal, desiccated victims, barely hanging on to life--not to mention flat cars stacked with naked human flesh. They were surprised--horrified!!--by what they unwittingly discovered. 

But Americans knew about anti-Semitism in Germany as early as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Hitler sent his thugs into German cities to destroy synagogues. We knew, but lots of people, lots of praying Christians, would much rather have kept the whole Jewish business in Germany, Poland, anywhere in Europe. 

Isolationist rhetoric was understandable. I'm sure the streets of the nation were still full of shell-shocked doughboys from "the war to end all wars." The Atlantic seemed a broad winter quilt over our anxieties--if we could avoid the horror, of course we should. And German-Americans, I'm sure, could not easily scour their own ethnic sympathies. Their Nazi sympathies are abhorrent but somehow understandable.

But I can't help but wonder how it is that Protestant Christians--my people-- always, always, always are a driving force in conservative politics, Christians who would rather look away from Jews than sin, Christians who simply cannot spread their loving arms wide enough to accept change? Christians who, on January 6th, carried Christian flags into the Capital. Christians who pray with Qanon? Christians who believe the most horrible problem in America is immigration?

There are lots of things I just do not understand.

Sunday Morning Meds--Forever

". . .and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. . .”

“In any story by Edgar Allen Poe,” someone once said, “no one ever eats breakfast.”

That’s a great line. Poe’s characters aren’t really meant to be human. Poe loved characters and worlds that didn’t exist, in part because he found this one so very difficult.

I’ve never been a big Poe fan, but one aspect of his stories I find really appealing, even though silly. If you look closely at many Poe stories—say, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for instance—the physical house itself, and its own walls, seem to breathe, seem to have their own life. They’re hardly inanimate.

Last night I drove through the pick-up lane at a Hardee’s in the neighborhood we used to live and saw, once again, the upstairs window I used to look out of when putting our baby son to sleep. The floor plan of that home will never leave me. On the east side, upstairs, my little daughter used to sleep beneath windows where dawn turned the whole world glorious. In the room between, my wife and I shared intimacies that seem now almost furtive, between our two little kids.

In the basement, south east corner, on a floor covered with second-hand rugs I continuously replaced after basement flooding, I wrote a few books. One of them paid for the furnace, the one that replaced the old oil burner. There’s a wall-sized book rack we made in the family room, and in one of my short stories there’s a description of the way the January sun used to slant through the windows of the living room.

I don’t know who lives there now, but whoever it is knows absolutely nothing about the life the Schaap family invested in that place, our first Iowa home. Maybe that’s why I like Poe’s living houses; their walls seem to breathe, to pulsate. Maybe they have memories. But then, his houses, like his characters, never really eat breakfast.

Any story of King David’s life has to include his deep, life-long passion for building the House of the Lord, his burning desire to want to create an intimate space for God. That was not to be. The Lord God almighty didn’t want David’s hands on the tools. “You are a man of war and have shed blood,” God told him--incredible, for a man who loved God as much as he did, and who was loved as deeply.

That passion—and its rejection—is part of the baggage of this famous last line of what is likely the most famous psalm of all. Here’s a man who couldn’t do what he wanted to. His resolution is the stronger for having been once forbidden.

And that makes the forever-ness of this verse so memorable. King David’s heart nearly explodes when he testifies here that he’s not going to move, that he’s not going to leave anything behind, that there will be no history, only a present, in this forever House of the Lord, the one he’s wanted for so long. There’s an assertion in this final verse of the psalm, an assertion with attitude. “That’s where I’m going to be,” says the rejected builder, “and that’s where I’m going to live forever.”

See him pointing? And he’s smiling. Forever.

What a story. What a line. What a believer.

What's in the neighborhood. . .

This illustration was standing proudly in the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, this summer, when we stopped by. I took out my phone and took a picture because the source of the image--it is an illustration--is a book I recognized immediately, a collection of stories by Francis LeFlesche, who grew up on the Omaha Reservation and did incredibly admirable work in documenting the traditional lives of his Omaha people, including their songs.

Francis La Flesche

I'd read Francis LeFlesche's The Middle Five, and read it appreciatively as a contribution to the peculiar American story of kid raised in an era when straddling two cultures--his own Omaha heritage and the powerful colonial interests of the white culture--was a way of life none really could sidestep. Encroaching from every corner of the reservation was a Euro-American world with different values and different sins. Not that long before his birth, the white man had been little more than a rumor. Francis LeFlesche--like his sisters--had attended a Presbyterian boarding school on the reservation, where he'd learned things most Omaha boys hadn't, things about the white man's world, both from curriculum and not at all.

The Middle Five is a collection of interwoven stories that follow the lives of the Native boys who attend that school--not all Omaha boys do.  As such, it sheds light on the whole boarding school experience/phenomenon, although in Francis's case his boarding school education did not move him far, far away from his home, as many Native kids so educated were. What the stories capture--and the best ones are a treasure--is the disconnect all Native kids and their parents went through in the last half of the 19th century particularly, specifically a powerful push to assimilate into the dominant white culture, something they could do, it seemed, only by rejecting traditional tribal ways. 

I snapped the picture only because I'd read the book that contained the illustration. I don't remember that I even read the name of the artist. It was a picture I remembered from the book, from the story of a little Winnebago boy sort of lost on the Omaha reservation. 

Just this week, during a trip around the Omaha and Winnebago reservations, we stopped at the Angel De Cora Museum and Research Center in Winnebago, Nebraska, where I discovered that the woman who had done that illustration in the Heard Museum was from just south of here and that she almost certainly knew Francis LaFlesche, who grew up just down the road, an Omaha. 

What's more, the two of them, contemporaries, struggled, each in their own way, to create a new culture amid the strewn wreckage of what was old and dear, and would or could never return. Both of them effectively made their way in a new world, but never reneged on their belief in and commitments to the old ways. Both worked hard to reclaim a heritage they loved. They were, in a way, cross-cultural operatives, as maybe all of us are, some of us simply strung on far sharper opposites. 

It's less amazing than it is gratifying to know that both of them, long after their respective deaths, continue to bless the cultural heritage of their respective communities in such public ways. 

I want to learn more.

The summer of the hoppers

 

I didn't plant this guy. He did what cottonwoods have done for centuries--he just took root, grew up from a slender little fellow, no bigger than a cone flower. Mijn vrouw and fellow laborer out back didn't much care for him growing up where he did, but I just couldn't drop him, given his honorable dedication.

These days, it's looking downright pitiable. How it is they devour the cottonwood but let the far more exotic red bud alone ("You need to pray for that tree daily," our friend the landscaper said when we put it in.), I'll never understand, but there's no accounting for taste.  Just witness the peaked condition of what should be a healthy cottonwood kid. It's a skeleton of its former self.

Let me show you.

There at it as we speak. I ought to make a game out of it. How many danged hoppers can you find?  

Or how about this?

I know, I know--some claim cottonwoods are little more than weeds on steroids. This youngun' is imminently replaceable. All I've got to do is catch a floater from the other side of the house.

But the grasshoppers this summer have been downright awful. They absolutely loved the marigolds, took care of them before they touched anything else.

It was good of them not to eat muskmelon, although they made holy the plants. 

Amazingly, we had plenty of peppers, even though the plants suffered horrifying desolation.

And, of course, they showed up everywhere, a veritable hoop skirt of hoppers with every step into the prairie out back. There's no escaping them. Wherever you look, the little buggers show up. This one thought himself a goldfinch.

When, Monday, I did the lawn, I rejoiced in the deaths the Toro and I could inflict on the multitudes. That mower of mine must have munched hundreds, really. I'll admit it--I loved it, aimed right at them. Besides, they're really lousy airmen. They fly without any kind of flight plan, and their landings are right out of an old keystone cops movie. If there's a grasshopper flight school, it's a joke.

Anyway, the lawn was thick, so I picked up clippings, dumped them on a bare spot in the garden, where I've already ripped out the ragged tomato plants, just left all those clippings heaped in a pile. A half hour later, when I picked up a rake and intended to spread out that mess, look at what I found.

There's a history here, of course. Once upon a time Henry Hospers himself saw to it that the local CRC pastor (the first in Orange City) got a free ride out of town after he (Hospers) discovered that the dominie had been writing folks in Michigan and in the Netherlands warning them that northwest Iowa wasn't a welcoming place: after all, no one had a crop for three years. Rocky Mountain Locusts (I don't know how they're named in Dutch, but it couldn't be proper) devoured everything, in some places even pitchfork handles. They ate onions and potatoes right out of the ground and in a three-year reign ran a lot of homesteaders right out of the territory.

Hospers wasn't a big believer in transparency. He was furious with the pastor, so furious that if you would like to find that CRC dominie's grave, you've got to drive a couple hours west to the Harrison, SD, cemetery. 

Things were bad back then.

I've got no reason to complain. 

Not much of one anyway. 

NPD in 2003

Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, is a grim study of the life of the Laffertys, fundamentalist Mormons who brutally murdered their sister-in-law and her one-year-old child. Krakhauer spends some significant time looking at the state of mind of Dan Lafferty, who defiantly believed in the peculiar righteousness of the what they'd done, behavior they identified as ordained by an old Mormon teaching called "blood atonement." God told them to do what they did.

What needed to be determined in a court of law was soundness of mind--could they be judged as innocent by way of insanity? Experts disagreed, some saying the men were incapable of understanding the judgments of the court; others made directly contrary assessments. 

The prosecution asked Dr. Noel Gardner to assess the two of them, and he quite adamantly claimed that Ron Lafferty was unlike any schizophrenics he'd ever known--for instance, he laughed at a good joke, illustrating that he was entirely capable of hearing and understanding others, laughter being "a shared experience." What's more, Dan Lafferty had stacks of books in his cell, books whose ideas he could talk about in significant detail. Dr. Gardner insisted that while the he wasn't certifiably insane, his actions fit a syndrome then becoming better understood--something he called NPD, Narcissitic Personality Disorder*.

NPD, Gardner said, introducing the syndrome, is "a persuasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy. . . .indicated by five (or more) of the following:

1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance.

2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

3. Believes that he or she is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people.

4. Requires excessive admiration.

5. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

6. Has a sense of entitlement

7. Lacks empathy

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

9. Shows arrogance, haughty, patronizing or contemptuous behavior or attitudes.

Bear in mind that Under the Banner of Heaven was first published in 2003. 

I just found all of that really interesting.

______________________ 

*pp. 306-307.

 

Morning Thanks--ex- Representative Rusty Bowers

Just a few weeks ago, Rusty Bowers, who had served as the Republican Speaker of the House in Arizona got himself royally ousted by his party--by thirty points! Warn't a bit close. He was marked for defeat by the Orange Man himself, after Bowers' riveting appearance before the January 6th committee of the House. 

That public testimony outlined how the Trump Administration attempted to alter the outcome of Arizona's 2020 election, in which, contrary to expectation, Trump lost. Conservatism has been a way of life in Arizona, almost ever since statehood. It's the home of the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, but as America moves more and more toward and into the sunbelt, the state's newcomers don't always share a willingness to stand at the state's traditional political walls. Arizona's two senators are both Democratic, and, as unlikely as it seemed, the state went for Biden in 2020. 

When it did, the old guard went loco. For his honesty before the committee, Bowers was formally censured by his party. Subsequently, he got blown out by a opposing candidate who claimed Donald Trump had won the 2020 election "in a landslide," as the boss is want to say. 

Just recently, in an interview with CNN, Bowers repeated his claims about the 2020 election, then sounded an alarm about the direction of his Republican lawmakers, his old and presumably ex-friends, including the bloke who beat him, a man who believes the country is under siege by "a conspiracy headed up by the Devil himself." Don't misinterpret: "the Devil" is not Joe Biden. It's the actual real Satan.

Bowers is a devout Mormon, a BYU grad, a man who gains his trust in doing right from the faith he is not at all afraid of expressing. He told the January 6th committee he could not violate his oath to the Constitution and remain faithful to his beliefs. “I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to with any contrived desire toward deflection of my deep foundational desire to follow God’s will, as I believe he led my conscience to embrace,” Bowers said, reading a passage from his personal journal.

I'm thankful for Rusty Bowers. I needed him to say that because Saturday night at the BYU-Oregon football game, a bunch of Oregonians took up a "F___ the Mormons" chant, at which I all too easily smiled. Brigham Young was no saint, despite his claims to the contrary; and those pioneer Mormons who came across the country in handcarts--you know the story--weren't saints either, even though they called themselves such. 

Holier-than-thou-ism doesn't win friends easily. LDS history in Indiana and Illinois isn't pretty, but neither was their behavior. The anger, the violence committed against Mormons was inexcusable, but sometimes, sadly, understandable. 

But then the Mountain Meadows Massacre was undertaken by the faithful, not some renegades, or the Paiutes the Mormons wanted the world to blame. After it happened, Mormons--Brigham Young himself-- created an campaign of utter silence that lasted nearly a century. 

Mormons aren't saints, no matter what they call themselves, and Utah isn't Zion, even if it does have a national park whose beauty is quite heavenly.

I just finished Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's devastating analysis of the "Blood Atonement" carried out by cold-blooded killers following their radical, fundamentalist reading of the LDS's own wildly manic scriptures. The Laffertys were stark, raving mad, and totally convinced they were the only truly righteous in Utah, a state brim-full of righteousness.

What happened at the Oregon/BYU game was reprehensible, and I am sorry for entertaining the notion for a few seconds that maybe Brigham Young's own brood (the man had 55 wives and 57 children) deserved condemnation. 

I needed Rusty Bowers to tell me that his Mormon faith was directly responsible for his standing firm for the truth in the mess that is Arizona politics these days. I needed to hear that his Mormon faith was at the heart and soul of his strength. This morning I'm thankful for ex-Rep. Rusty Bowers.

It's not just what we believe, but how we practice what we believe that is the real essence of our faith.

Postmodernism 101

Postmodernism is a movement that focuses on the reality of the individual, denies statements that claim to be true for all people and is often expressed in a pared-down style in arts, literature and culture. An example of a thought of postmodernism is the idea that not all people would see stealing as negative.

Which is to say that 

postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it characterizes as the "grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to notions of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. Thus, the postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

All of that has its origins in the post-professorial part of my brain, along with the memory (not a nightmare either) of trying to "teach" post-modernism to undergraduates, not a particularly easy task.

Of course, a decade ago, when I was still in the classroom, what I didn't have was this picture of my granddaughter--isn't she a doll?--in which, you may note, she utterly engages in some healthy epistemological relativism and therewith destroys (deconstructs) prevailing myths about witches and deviltry simply by drinking from her bottle.

POW! a picture worth a thousand words.

She's goofy, isn't she? Smart?--wow. Thoroughly defining post-modernism before her third birthday. 

Sunday Morning Meds -- My Cup Overflows

 

“You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” Psalm 23

Not long ago on a Sunday morning, I called my mother. She lives in a retirement home—it’s beautiful and spacious, but I’m deeply struck, every time I visit, with the odd depth of its silence. At meal times people gather on the first floor, as some do each morning for exercise time; but otherwise the dark and thickly carpeted hallways are always eerily quiet. So much of our world, outside the walls of that home, is not.

Mom said she was doing as well as could be expected, the usual pains and burdens, and, occasionally, usually at night, more than a little loneliness since my father’s death. Otherwise, things were fine. The food—yeah, well, it could be better, but she has her own stove and refrigerator if the menu looks less than appealing.

Yesterday, in the morning, she said, Ed didn’t show up, and it seemed strange to be missing him at breakfast. Then another resident told her Ed had died the night before, a heart attack probably. Whoever came in to take care of his passing had deliberately avoided disturbing the silence. It was, after all, the middle of the night.

“Well,” she told me, “things like that happen in the world I live in.”

She’s right, of course, not only of her world, but all of ours. But then, few of us awaken so frequently to significantly altered breakfast tables.

“Did you hear Dr. Martin this morning?” she asks, assuming we’re as earnest as she is about TV ministries. “I just love him,” she says. “His messages always bring such a blessing—and Taylor, did you catch his sermon? What a joy that was, huh?”

I’m thankful for Pastors Martin and Taylor—I don’t remember their real names. I’m thankful the Lord uses them and a host of others to channel the Holy Spirit into a room she occupies alone. And I’m thankful—and amazed—at my mother’s joy.

It’s my granddaughter’s fourth birthday this morning. Yesterday, she and her mother made special cupcakes—white frosting—for all the kids at day care. Today, there will be presents galore. Her cup will overflow when she sits in front of her cake and blows out the candles. It’s not quite seven in the morning right now. I’m betting that, somewhere across town, she’s already up and tooling around in her pjs.

Would that we all were as easy to please as my granddaughter and her great-grandmother, as David must have been when he first sang this most famous of his songs.

For me, my granddaughter’s joy is far less difficult to understand. In the confines of her world, darling little cupcakes may well be all she needs to overflow.

My mother’s joy is more inspiring, perhaps because it’s harder to imagine. I’ve not yet come to that point in my life when friends don’t show up for breakfast.

What makes King David sing is his knowing he’s loved by God Almighty. His song echoes through the centuries because so many millions of us know it too—my granddaughter, for one, even though only faintly; and my mother, deeply, for another.

It is a special gift of God to be able to recognize grace for the journey, whether his love comes by way of white frosting or TV preachers, in the silence of a retirement home or the energy of a kid’s birthday party. To be blessed is to know how richly our cups do overflow.

Shuffling

 

Not soon enough, we'll be heading up north for an annual visit. In anticipation, this morning's post is drawn from the well, pretty deep in fact, maybe 2007, fifteen years ago, five years before my last days in the classroom. Isn't that Loon some kind of beautiful?

When I awoke this morning, I stumbled along in the thick darkness of a world without lights here at the cabin, my stiff and sore feet making a sound that suddenly reminded me of the shuffling my grandfather's feet used to make across our kitchen floor when I was a boy, an instant's memory I hadn't thought about since I was six--he died in 1954. The sound of my own slow feet evoked a chilling memory. I've become him; my granddaughter is my age.

It's an odd way to say it, but in my "spare time" up here at the cabin, I've been reading Wallace Stegner, a man I've not read before--The Collected Stories lies here on a coffee table. And while I like him, I can't escape this fatal sense that he is, like all of us, dated. When I read his stories--even though I've never read him before--I read a familiar pattern and approach: his is the kind of writing I've always wanted to do, the kind of writing I guess I do, albeit not nearly as well. 

But I also recognize that it's old-fashioned, as I suppose I am. It's the kind of psychological realism that probes us, each of us. It's nowhere near what a reviewer in the NYTimes called, recently, "Peace Corps fiction," novels about Afghanistan or Niger or Venezuela or anywhere else in the world, just not the American Midwest.

We need wilderness, someplace wild and untamed. When I read Stegner, I read a man who took the outdoors seriously because, in all likelihood, people in the 1940s were still battling it. A car goes off the road in the cold, and danger presents itself vividly. Today, the spaces we don't know are Afghanistan, Niger, or Venezuela. We got where we need to explore, perhaps. But Stegner--and me too--feel there remains a wilderness in all of us that's worth exploring. That's old-fashioned, I guess. At least, it doesn't sell.

I say that because I've received two rejections in the last week, both of them because--or so the editors and my agent says--my writing is too literary and nobody buys literary fiction. Critics and professors love literary fiction but nobody buys it; and book publishing is, first and foremost, a business. There's not much that can be done about that phenomenon, and it's not new. My agent says he's heard that gripe for all of his 25 years in the business. And, at a certain level, those rejections have to be read as rejections; the editors weren't taken with the work. 

Somehow, yesterday I got to a blog that reprinted the President's Column from the summer issue of the Newsletter of the ALSC (Association of Literary Scholars and Critics): Morris Dickstein on "The Critical Landscape Today." The blog belonged to National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors. People who read literary reviews won't be surprised, but upshot of the article was the squeezing being applied to book reviews today in newspapers and magazines. It seems there are simply fewer and fewer column inches to be shared by the literary crowd. You've got to be blind not to see that "the review" is almost exclusively reserved for movies these days, blockbusters, too, no matter how corny or wretched.

Doom and gloom comes easy to a man who just suffered two book rejections and heard the late-in-life sound of his grandfather's feet across the floor when he himself got up to use the john.

And then this. Some young lady--she's holding a darling baby on her Facebook page--decides to name me as a friend, goes to my Facebook page, spots the pictures from a class at Highland, and tells me--the "message" came early this morning--that taking that class was just terrific, a great memory. Just tells me I'm okay.

So here I sit, writing it all out, a whole story, my morning thanks by six o'clock.

Outside the window, the lake and sky are perfectly black. It's our last day up here, and leaving tomorrow won't be fun. But even if, like yesterday, the sky never clears and light rain falls most of the day, I swear I can be happy as a toad, reading what's left of my students' papers, drinking coffee and tea, and reading Wallace Stegner.

Life is good, my grandfather's footfalls notwithstanding.

Our Queens and Kings

If you're going to have a monarch, you couldn't do better than Queen Elizabeth II, who never got in the way, took the world's vicissitudes forever in stride, and offered, always, a lovely warm smile. Despite her incredible reign, she was--as King Charles III will be-- an anachronism. No really substantive reason exists for having a monarchy anymore, the royals, in point of fact, having no substantive power. Yet, even as we speak, England waits in huge lines to say goodbye to their beloved queen. It's an amazing thing.

We've been reading, slowly, through the early David stories, stories as much about his predecessor, King Saul, who was impossibly hard to understand. Some scholars of holy writ believe he carried an undiagnosed mental illness. Of course, from the get-go God almighty didn't want him--He, God almighty, was the only King his people needed. But the people wanted to be normal. They looked around at all the Amelkites and Hittites and Jebuzites and assumed they needed a king too. So the Lord God took pity on them and had Samuel (what a life he had!) do the honors of naming this tall, dark, and handsome Israelite to be the very first Jewish king. 

That didn't turn out well, but it did usher in a new monarch, a boy with a sling, the Bible says, the man closest to God's own heart, the fabled King David, poet and a musician, a man savvy enough to know when he needed top-shelf advisors like General Joab to run things he had trouble running, like wars and the military.

In our house, the television is on for news in the morning, then again at lunch and supper, and at ten. Sometimes it plays as background noise, as it was yesterday when suddenly the Queen's body was brought into Westminster Hall, where the sheer beauty of the place was royally enhanced by the stunning voices of the choir. Take a minute and listen in.   

It's all akin to King David, really, who had his most poignant moments in prayers the world will never stop praying--like Psalm 23 or 100, or the pageant of nature in 104. But, good Lord, the man suffered too--"Absalom, Absalom. . 

But then the news is full of royalty these days. When it doesn't feature something from or in Great Britain, it's down at Mara Lago or somewhere in the Ukraine, where two men fiercely want to be king. There's a war on--and, if you listen to the news at someplace other than FOX, Putin seems not to be doing well right now, which is not difficult to understand, given the odd reason he's given for Russia's being there--his romance with 19th century Russian history, a weird dream that spends lives like plugged nickels. It's mad. It's insane. Talk about anachronism.

The other would-be king, the Donald, has no sense of history, and the purposeful dignity of a bully. What he cares about is power, his. Even though there's not a thing about him that's royal, he wants to be King because people bowing to him is somehow comforting. He threw a temper tantrum when someone with a camera caught him on the golf course, zombie-like, without his royal orange makeup.

The dramatic arts include only two genres--comedy and tragedy. Well, maybe three: we should mention farce. 

What's what? Go ahead. You call it. 

Ministry of Presence at Old Dutch Fred's

Let me show you the way. Take Hwy 10 east and south out of Sutherland, dip into the river valley, then turn left at the top of the hill and follow the signs to the Prairie Center, a sweet place worth a visit. There’s a postage-stamp cemetery there, but that’s not it. Say hello to the Center's little bunch of buffalo.

We’re looking for Dutch Fred’s grave , so head back to 10, turn right, descend the hill, cross the river, then take the first left--you're on gravel, going south. When the road turns west, then south again, stay with it. Now it gets tricky.

A plush carpet of old prairie runs in and over the hills created long ago by the Little Sioux river. When you start climbing, stop the car and look east. Look hard. Keep looking until you spot a stone, the only marker in all that bushy prairie grass. That stone marks what remains of Old Dutch Fred, who wasn't Dutch, but German, a single-minded guy who left his wife and daughter in Prussia, divorced her in fact, gave her her freedom, but never gave up the dream of having the two of them join him once he grabbed his dream from a place called America.

In 1856, the trip over the brine just about killed him. It was awful, worse than that. Some passengers got together, wrote a letter, slipped it into a bottle, then tossed it into the sea. That letter listed the horrors on the ship, then offered this: "We want to deter immigration through any agent," it said. "We regret having made the decision to travel to America."

Wasn't easy, coming over, but Dutch Fred was undeterred. He arrived in New York jobless, just a few coins in his pocket. "I am a farmer, and I will find land to till and grow crops," he'd tell people. "That is all I know." Literally, that was. He couldn't read, spoke broken English, and had no idea what a map was. "I am a farmer, and I will find land to till and grow crops," he'd say.

He discovered there was a war on. He'd left Prussia to avoid one. In Philly, he worked at a brewery, got the job by stopping a fight in a bar. He became a good friend of the working girls because he refused to let them come to harm.

Inched west. In Cleveland, he watched a man nail up a poster, a man who told him out west there was free land if you lived on it for five years--place called Iowa.

"Where is Iowa?" Fred said. Man with the hammer pointed west.

The railroad ended at Cedar Falls, where Dutch Fred bought a wagon, a yoke of feisty red oxen, and supplies.

But he made it there--which is to say "here," and tilled land in the northwest quarter of section 34, Waterman Township, O'Brien County. That's what he was, a farmer.

He made no enemies, but the hoppers ruined his few first and final years on the land he always wanted.

You'll honor his memory if you take a winding road that slumbers between the hills to a place his gravestone stands mightily and alone in the prairie grass. Some wayward meadow lark may pipe out the melody old Dutch Fred used to hear, and maybe still does.




Sit there for a while--nobody's around. Give him your ministry of presence. He was a kind man who cared for his yoke of oxen no less than his neighbors, but he died alone, half the world away from the only woman and child he ever loved.

Get there early morning. When the sun puts some space between itself and the horizon, it lays a Midas touch over every thing, the whole world around Dutch Fred's grave buttery and golden. Seems to me that's when you'll see him.

__________________________


I am indebted to Carolyn Rohrbaugh's Dutch Fred: Immigrant, as well as the trip she took me on to find the old man's grave.

Passing the Unworked Field--Mary Oliver

            Passing the Unworked Field

           Queen Anne's lace

                a hardly

                    prized but

            all the same it isn't

                     idle look

                                    how it

                    stands straight on its

            thin stems how it 

                    scrubs its white faces

                        with the

            rays of the sun how it

                                makes all the

                                        loveliness

                                                it can.

Is it a poem? I don't know, but this little Mary Oliver verse joyfully honors a countryside weed, Queen Anne's Lace. The same way sunflowers and, well, dandelions brandish beauty, Queen Anne's Lace can't but help but be noticed, even when they're all over, abundantly invasive, and barely tolerated, "hardly prized," Oliver says-- deliberate understatement. 

But then, without motion or intent or our regard, the stuff prospers, even here in this "unworked field": "Look/how it/stands straight/on its thin stems. . ." Despised by some, perhaps, but firm in some mysterious inner resolve.

Three functions she celebrates: its rigor, its clean white faces, its sheer loveliness, despite its, well, weediness. Its charm is revealed in its insistence on being beautiful. Doggone it--Queen Anne's Lace is a weed, a curse, brome grass with a splashy, phony crown. As if it understands its own meagerness however, Queen Anne's Lace refuses to retreat: "look.  . .how it. . ./makes all the/loveliness/it can."

Mary Oliver isn't telling you or me to work hard at being good or gorgeous. She's allowing Queen Anne's Lace to inspire whoever cares to bother to admire what's here, even in an "unworked field." Beauty is all around us, even in our ditches. Call it a pest, call it a weed, call it somehow noxious, it stands tall and straight and bright and beautiful. "Consider the lilies," the Bible says somewhere, "they toil not, neither do they spin."

 

In this fresh, little poem of hers, Mary Oliver returns to the fields she frequently works herself by doing nothing less or more than considering the Queen Anne's Lace--and then smiling, something that really shouldn't be so hard to do. 

What's really scary

So it turns out that Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, prayed specifically for a rejection of the results of the 2020 Presidential elections right before the January 6th debacle at the nation's Capital, which he and his wife attended.

"God, I ask you that you help us roll in these dark times, that we fear not the darkness," he prayed in a video just located last Friday. "I pray that we'll take responsibility — we'll seize the power that we had given to us by the Constitution, and as well by You, providentially. I pray for the leaders also in the federal government, God, on the 6th of January that they will rise up with boldness."

Mastriano may be the boldest torch-carrier for Christian nationalism these days, at a moment in time when "Christian nationalism" is soaring among white evangelicals as a foundation for political action. Behind that popularity is a presentment among believers that God speaks plainly to them and to us, and that we can and should rely on that voice, sometimes still and small, and sometime booming, for determining our actions in this world. "The Lord told me on Tuesday morning to vote for Joe Biden"--that kind of thing, although most visions, most prophets, or so it appears, are granted politically conservative visions from a politically conservative god.

To me, that's scary.

As is David Clements, a handsome professorial type who is traveling into small town America preaching the terrors of a coming apocalypse with the specific message or application that voting machines can be manipulated and that, let's be sure, Donald Trump was, unequivocally, the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, "in a landslide," as Trump loves to repeat. Clements is among those who the Washington Post calls "self-appointed election fraud evangelists," in part because they lace their presentations with incantations to God/god.

Clements' own testimony includes the story of a visitation he experienced from the Almighty when he, distraught over what seemed to him to be a Biden victory in the last election. Beaten, he ran outside of the New Mexico cabin where he and his family were staying, fell to his knees before a campfire and said, "God save us, please, please save our country," or so he told an audience in Michigan. “Something happened. My heart filled … and I heard, ‘We are going to win.’ ”

Presumably, that was God talking. 

To me, that too is scary.

At least, that's what David Clements heard. What God/god told him that night is to take the good news of evil voting machines to the people in small towns across the nation and explain to them how the manipulation of voting tallies led to a disastrous result and must be reversed to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.  

I'm not hot on those men's political views--I'll admit that. But what scares me is that they're consider themselves prophets, what scares me is the way they employ the Creator of Heaven and Earth to buttress their politics.  They consider themselves recipients of God's own directions. They receive God's wisdom through His Word, but what's there in the book isn't enough. Instead, they listen to what they hear in the echo chambers of their minds and souls. "God told me this would happen." "God told me what to say." God told me what to sing." 

To me, that's just scary. 

But then, we just finished Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which a ton of Christians perhaps shouldn't view or read because in Krakauer's story--as in real life--god told Utah's Lafferty brothers, fundamentalist LDS subscribers, to administer "blood atonement," according to old LDS doctrine, so they did--because god told them to. They murdered their own sister-in-law, as well as her baby, and actually did so proudly because god told them to.

That's very, very scary.