Incredible

He called last week to tell us that the insulation guys would be in, and soon, to replace what got soaked in five feet of river water. We weren't expecting them quite that soon, so we were happy to know that the very first step of the rebuilding process would soon be underway. 

"Oh, yeah," he said, "and I ordered the sheet rock, so it'll come soon. They'll want to store it down there in your basement."

He was right. They showed up ahead of time, shouldered all that sheet rock into our naked basement. 

Today, our rebuilding quarterback dropped by to say that maybe even tomorrow the  bunch would show up.  They'll be done in a day," he said.

We had no idea the whole rebuilding business would get up out of the blocks that fast. We don't know who to thank--or too blame :). (There are many who are more needy than the Schaaps--I can live with that guilt.)

Right now, streaming in the Schaap house--both  up and downstairs--is a half-dozen proud trumpets pushing along in a beat that is impossible not to distinguish. We've got a basement full of guys slapping up the sheet rock, an entire crew, all Hispanic, one of them fluent enough to ask where they were headed when they came to the front door. 

It's not pleasant to sit here and read right now. The drilling and sawing and nailing isn't for the faint of heart. But we're happy as puppies that the job is getting done, and that soon, perhaps, the whole bloody flood experience will just trickle along in innocence.

The insulation crew that stopped in for a few hours last week was also all Hispanic, maybe from different countries, but several of them kind of tender with the use of the English language.

I didn't quiz about their nationality. I should have, and I didn't ask them if they were killers and rapists, dumped out on America's shore to kill and pillage, as so many are, according to the Voice of Truth. Somehow, at first glance, what struck me more than anything was their hustle. "They'll be done in a day, day-and-a-half," the boss says. By the ripping sounds of things right under me, they're right on schedule.

Last night, at Caseys in Hawarden, the shelves looked bare; but a ton of work goes on over there where the Big Sioux took a big mouthful of town out in one fierce gulp. I was the only white guy standing in line. Any stop at WalMart makes it clear that the county sporting the highest percentage of people of Dutch heritage in the nation may lose their dominance. Who really wants to milk cows anyway? How'd you like a life of hanging drywall?--so say the white folks.

I can't help but think that those four guys downstairs--there's eight now, after another crew came by to help--must enjoy their work in the freedom afforded them here, in the unimaginable abundance of a Wal-Mart Super Store, in a place where the only employer around who pays a skimpy ten bucks a hour is Grandpa, shelling it out to his little grandkids.

It is beyond me to understand how so many people here in Iowa's far northwest corner can be followers of Donald Trumps. The plain-and-simple truth is, after the floods, the whole wet region could use a whole lot more. Ask yourself this--even before the floods, where would we be without newest neighbors?

I don't take to their music, and the freaky noise of those wild power tools had the cat under the bed. I'll be okay if they leave at six.

p.s. They left before five. Finished. There they are, top of the page. Not a wooden shoe among 'em. They're finished. Less than three hours.

Three weeks after

 

 

Three long weeks after a flood the likes of which no river rats in the county had ever seen before, there's no missing what the beast left behind. 

Those hydrangea bushes beside the house have accomplished their mission. The white flowers are gone, but what's left is what's always there this time of year, the congregation of greens that'll stay there in emerald beauty 'till fall. 

There's a new roof on the house, a metal roof, bright and shiny, fire station red. Whoever lived there loved its near florescence so much he painted the window frames and the front door to match, must have been proud of it too. 

It's over now, post-flood. One of those red notices adorns the front door. Life in the house with the new red roof just isn't possible anymore. Flood gorged itself on its life, higher water than anyone can remember.

Did in grain bins from the inside, like sabotage. All that water got in these metal walls and swelled up whatever grain the big guy held until its metal walls gave way and left this one and several of its buddies lying sideways like great dead bugs.

It's not a someone's old picket fence here--it's a railroad track. I'm not making this up.

Tore right off its bed, as if it were an affront for those tracks stay there. It looks perfectly helpless now, as  if the flood deliberately wanted to leave more than family dwellings wrecked. Playing havoc with a railroad track, wrestling it off its gravel bed and twisting it into a children's game, leaves yet another flood story. 

Litter is still all around, but work is going forward--lots of trailers parked along the road where they weren't before; more are coming. Everyone who faces the unwelcome streets is deciding whether they'll start over and try to forget what that mega-flood did to them, how it came in the darkness of early morning.

There's nothing welcoming here, nothing at all. The ordinary folks who lived in this place, like many, many others, may have to build "dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear," to paraphrase Martin Luther King. 

Tornado damage is complete. Homes are moved. Cars are tossed around like handfuls of steel. But the silence of flood damage is eerily different, mostly within, almost a secret until what's left inside gets lugged in a mess to the street.

On a dark Saturday morning, every last river in the region swelled up with 15 inches of rain on saturated ground--all of them, the Rock, the Floyd, the Little Sioux, and Big Sioux all angrily altered the lives of thousands.

Us too.

Sunday Morning Meds--King David's Anguish

“be merciful to me and hear my prayer”

It is impossible to know exactly when King David might have written Psalm 4, but it’s not difficult to come up with possibilities because no biblical story, save the gospels, is as complete, as much a great novel, as the story of King David. No Old Testament story has so complete a record of triumphs—but then, no OT story includes so many tales of woe.

No one will ever know, but it could have been sometime around the story of the curse of Shimei, son of Gera (II Samuel 16). Shimei came from King Saul’s tribe, the people of the King whom David had replaced. There remained in him, and probably others, more than a little animosity.

To say that King David is on the skids at the time of Shimei’s cursing is a royal understatement. Running away the way he is, David seems more a buffoon than a king. His rule has turned into disrule because of a flashy charismatic politico with looks to die for. For years, this national idol has stood just outside the palace and pandered to the people, promising them the justice he claimed they’d never get from the dirty rotten King. The Bible says this demi-god wouldn’t let people bow before him; instead, he’d kiss them. “He stole the hearts of the men of Israel”—that’s the Word of God.

Human beings are drawn to beauty like flies to honey. Some things don’t change.

But David is on the run, literally, at the time of Shimei’s curse, hoping simply to save his own hide. It’s not a pretty time in the history of King David’s kingship.

Enter this man Shimei, a bit player really, a loudmouth who becomes the voice of King David’s own horror. Instead of bowing to the King, Shimei hurls insults. “The Lord has repaid you for all the blood you shed in the household of Saul,” he screams. “You have come to ruin because you are a man of blood.”

Must have stood the royal court on edge.

David listens to the tirade, and when one of his aids begs permission to lop off Shimei’s head, he won’t hear of it. “Leave him alone,” he says; “let him curse, for the Lord has told him to.”

The charismatic rebel attempting to usurp the throne is, as you know, the King’s own son, Absalom. Everyone knows it. David says that if his own son hates him as much as he does, how much more should this man of the tribe of the former king?

King David’s worrying can make Hamlet’s dilly-dallying seem minor league. He’s a world-class brooder. He’s capable of remarkable bravery, as well a species of intense, selfless faith some might almost call blind. Some modern analysts believe him to be bi-polar because his emotional valleys run fully as deep as his almost perilous highs (remember that wild strip tease when he led the Ark back to Jerusalem?). But right here, with Shimei’s stinging public rebuke still echoing down the walls of the castle, he’s in as dark a place as he’s ever been found. Somewhere reverberating in his soul are the words of Nathan, too—the curse on his house after Uriah and Bathsheba.

I’m speculating, about all of this. Shimei’s screed may not be the point in time when David’s sleeplessness prompted him to write Psalm 4. Lord knows there were other such moments.

But if you want to feel the dislocation so much the pattern of this psalm, think about David, a victim of his own beloved son’s treachery.

“Have mercy on me, Lord,” he says.

That’s no cliché.

Lord, have mercy.

"Lord, Have Mercy" a story -- iii

Pastor Tom wasn’t about to weigh in because after five years at Lakeside Church he’d come to understand the difference between fools rushing in and wise men steering clear. But he couldn’t stay out long, and he knew it.

"What do the Scriptures say?" Elder Swart said, looking right at him.

Pastor Tom took in a deep breath. "The Bible tells us in several places," he explained quietly, "to lift up our hands to the Lord in praise."

"Well, then," Swart said, raising his hands again, as if the case were closed.

"Well, the Bible also says to pour on oil when we visit sick people," Wilmot said, "and it commands the brethren to greet each other with a holy kiss!” He raised a thumb, as if he’d ended the argument. But he was a roll. “And the book of Timothy, I think, says women aren't supposed to speak.” He pointed at Ludinga and Nikki Ferris. “So what on earth does the Bible have to do with this?"

Elder Swart looked back up at the picture of his father’s square jaw and suddenly felt as if the world were falling in on his and everyone else’s head, the whole consistory aboard a toboggan hurtling down some river-valley hill toward an inevitable crash.

Finally, when the silence had dragged on long enough, Pastor Tom nodded his head three or four times, and said, "Tell you what–I’m going to raise my hands myself on Sunday. That's what I've decided.” He raised a preacherly finger. “I'm going to do it myself."

Wilmot threw up his hands. "Now that's Spirit-filled all right," he said. "Go on and plan it ahead of time–write it into the liturgy, the way we do 'Amens,’” he said. "Put an asterisk in the bulletin--'Congregation standing–raise your hands.'"

"I'm serious," Pastor Tom said. "I know what's going on. I know what it's caused. You can't believe all the calls I'm getting. So-and-so's mad at so-and-so . . ."

"If you do it, then we all got to do it?" Wilmot asked.

"No," the pastor said. "What'll happen is that I'll make it legitimate.” He thumbed at his chest. “At least we’ll take the blame off Lizzy and Arn. They won't be black sheep. I mean, I'll make it legit–know what I'm saying?"

Wilmot didn't say a thing.

"I think it's a good idea," Nikki Ferris said.

"You would," Wilmot screamed. "You already raise your hands. Now you got the Reverend on your side."

"Is this a war?" she said. "Are we enemies here?–I mean, aren't we all 'one in the Spirit,' here?--you know, 'they'll know we are Christians by our love?'"

"Pollyanna," Wilmot muttered.

Swart looked down at his watch and saw that it was already past eleven. They'd got on the subject because it came up constantly at family visiting. Item three on the agenda--three out of fourteen. With the point of his pen, he ran down the list--reports to classis, angry overtures, then finally, benevolence, missions. Maybe they'd just quit early, he thought. It was going nowhere. Frustration sat thick as fog.

"Maybe we ought to pray," Jeannette Ludinga said, finally.

"Right now?" Wilmot said.

"Yes, right now," she told him.

He looked up at the clock. "Okay--but do we raise our hands or not?"

"We can do with less sarcasm, Fred," Pastor Tom said, and Wilmot pushed himself away from the table. "Prayer is a good suggestion," the pastor continued quietly. He looked around. Ferris was seething, and Wilmot pouting, jawing that chew. "Gene," the pastor said, pointing at Elder Swart, "Would you lead us?"

Pray, Gene Swart thought, now? He shook his head, then looked down at the missionaries whose photos were pressed beneath the glass of the consistory table. Once, years ago, he'd made profession in this room. He was 44 years old, and he had spent more hours than he could count meeting around this table with elders and deacons . . .

"Gene?" Pastor Andrew asked again, as if he'd not been heard.

“Pray?” he thought. Pray tell, for what? The air was thick with the stench of a battlefield, anger rising from the trenches on either side of the table. Aside from college, Lakeside had been Gene Swart's home church from the time he was twelve. He loved sitting there in silence before the service, waiting and worshiping with the people he'd known for a lifetime.

The council stared, waiting for him to pray.

For whom?--he wondered. For the Sibbelinks? For Elder Wilmot? For Nikki, hands raised. For the whole bunch?

He turned toward each of them, followed their eyes all the way around the circle of the table, holding his hands as he met their anxious eyes. Pray?–he didn’t have a clue to what to say because honestly and truly there was nothing to say but, like King David, let his bones groan. That was the only prayer. How on earth were they going to get out of this? Who on earth was he going to pray for.

He swallowed thickly, sniffed once or twice, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Here in this very room where his father used to hold forth, he came to the judgment that there was only one real prayer really, only one need worth pressing right now, so he smiled, then stood, then raised his hands. He pulled his hands into fists when the rest of them didn't respond, and jerked his hands up again like a maestro until they were all on their feet, every one of them–each of the uppers and every last one of the downers too. And then he prayed, as requested.

"Lord," he said in a tremolo, "have mercy."

That's it.

Three words.

Then silence, and all of them–all twelve of them stood there around the old table, waiting for a blessing, waiting for someone, something to make a move, for someone to be slain in the spirit, all of them, looking from one to another, until, as if on cue, first Nikki, Swart, then Luddinga, then each and every one of those chosen twelve watched voicelessly as their hands were raised by something bigger than any of them had ever imagined could inhabit the room; and there they stood, all of them around that table, their hands raised in silence, until it was Wilmot of all people–until it was Wilmot who finally said it when no one else did, who raised his deep bass voice and said "Amen," with vehemence that even he regarded later as being born-again.

Think of them there around that table, their hands raised with the burden of their own sin. Think of them like the apostles, blessed beyond themselves.

It was a moment they tried to explain forever afterward. But you had to be there, they said. You really had to be there to know for sure what was in that room.

"Lord, Have Mercy" -- a story ii

When Lizzy got back, she went to work almost immediately, searching through every dark corner of the church for potential converts. "I mean," she told people, "what's wrong with expressing your faith like that? "I mean," she said, "how can anybody try to quench the Spirit?" "I mean," she said, "how long has it been since there's been even a glow in ‘First Church of the Ice Box?’"--meaning Lakeside, the consistory understood. Lizzy and Arn Sibbelink came back from their trip up north converted and dedicated their summer to getting Lakeside Church to take a pilgrimage toward righteousness by way of heavenward hands. Renewal was what they called it–and it started just that easily, with the raising of hands.

What the consistory understood was that Arn and Liz Sibbelink are the kind of people who mean well but not the real movers and shakers in Lakeside Church. Nobody’s ever forgotten the time Arn lead a hymn sing with such outrageous zealousness that nobody sang, worried as they were about a public coronary behind the pulpit. The Sibbelinks, the consistory knew, were the kinds of people who want to lead so bad they can’t.

So that night, quite late in fact, the consistory faced a problem: a quarter of the church (estimates varied) wanted to follow the Sibbelinks’ lead and lift their hands on high; what was left thought raising hands the way they did was just fine if somebody’d just kicked a field goal, but as a gesture of joy was better left somewhere close to the 50-yard line.

“What are we going to do?” Wilmot said, although nary a person around that table needed an explanation. “We got the uppers and the downers here,” he said, “and never the twain shall meet.”

Elder Swart didn’t know what to say. He leaned back, looked up at the picture of his father with the former pastors, and wished he could have one of those fat black cigars old-time consistories used to savor in silence right in this room. Of course, now there were women, he thought--but then who knows? Maybe tonight, with this hand-raising business, they'd be frustrated enough to join in a stogie.

"I don't like it," Vander Toppen said, breaking the silence. "It puts people in a swoon. Last week Herman Fry almost passeed out, I swear. There he stood, like he had grown antennae." He tossed his eyes up in the air. "You know, Pastor," he said, "you got to cut down on numbers of verses, or people'll start dropping right in the pews."

“You can't tell people how they can or can't express themselves,” Nikki Ferris said. “If the Spirit's in them, then they're going to raise their hands. We've got no business trying to stanch what the Spirit's up to." Silence.

Of course, everybody knows Ferris and her husband raise their hands.

"What I want to know," Elder Wilmot said finally, "is why the Spirit works like a virus?" He put both elbows up on the table. "We'd never have had a problem here if the Sibbelinks hadn't visited up north." At that moment he raised both hands himself. "Go ahead–tell me it's the Holy Spirit in all of them. Maybe I’ll buy that, but answer me this: how is it the Holy Spirit got to work like a hula hoop. The whole thing smells like a fad to me."

"Whatever the reason," Jeannette Ludinga said, "we can't tell people they can't do it in worship. We have to face that fact." She twisted her pen between her fingers as she spoke. "I'm not excited about it myself," she said, "but we're not about to ask the ushers to remove people who lift their hands."

"Of course not," Wilmot said, and the way he moved his jaw reminded Swart that the old man had a pinch of tobacco tucked behind his lower lip. "But that doesn't mean I like it," he said. "It sets up a hierarchy. That's what we're seeing now. Some do it, some don't. Those that do are blessed–maybe I’ll buy that–but those that don't are either full of guilt because they can't do it or mad as heck at those who do for creating all the stink. We got war, boys," he said, forgetting about the women around the table. "We got war here, and we got to do something about it."

_____________________ 

"Bring an end to such madness," you're saying, and I will. But we need to return one more time to the worship wars at Lakeside Church.

"Lord, have mercy" --- a story i

The Schaaps are moving back home--a one-story version anyway--so I figured I'd run an old story of mine, taken from the pages of Reformed Worship, a magazine that, once upon a time, ran a story of mine with every issue. Most all of us, back then, were engaged in battles that accompanied what people called "the worship wars." This story features such a skirmish, and is, therefore, something of a historical document. 

It's also meant to be silly. Giggling is encouraged, even in church.

 ___________________ 

The council, very much on edge as they talked about it, concluded that the turmoil in the congregation had begun with the Sibbelinks, after they two of them had visited Lizzy’s sister Heather up north and worshiped at Heather's church on Cutler Avenue.

“Cutler Avenue’s not a real wild place either," Elder Swart claimed, remembering his own father's pastorate there when he was a boy. "That church is not known for anything outlandish," he told the others. "It’s a fine place–quite soft-spoken. Not usually on the cutting edge." On that basis they concluded that what the Lizzy Sibbelink and her husband saw and experienced in Cutler Avenue church probably had to be quite widespread already up north.

Here’s what happened. Lizzy had brought her husband along to Heather's this time, and both of them came back carrying such hot blood people considered it something of a fever. What they'd seen at Cutler Street Church, as the consistory already knew, was good Christian people–even men–with their hands raised, during singing especially and sometimes even during prayer.

“You mean they all do it at Cutler Avenue?” Elder Swart said.

"That’s what I heard,” Elder Wilmot said. “A whole church of them-–like Texas longhorns."

“Just a matter of time before it creeps down here,” Wilmot said, “like hoof-and-mouth.”

What had happened was clear: in a church full of arm-raisers, good Christian people like the Sibbelinks started to feel almost apostate if they didn't chuck their own up themselves, so Arn Sibbelink must have looked around and seen what looked like a celebration. Not wanting to be the odd man out, he figured “when-in-Rome,” so he shot ‘em up himself, and, almost immediately, felt an infusion of something right through the tips of his fingers, he said. Now Arn, people say, for years already, has been subject to all manner of spiritual displays. He’s a man, it is said, who’s never seen a church fad he didn’t want to adopt.

The only downside to this was, in joining, Arn made his wife, Lizzy, the odd woman out, not a role she’s ever sought to play. Elder Swart said he heard from others that Lizzy had hesitated for about a minute and a half, looked around at all the others, including Arn, who suddenly took on the brightly-lit face of brand new convert and thereby made Liz feel as if she wasn’t spiritually blessed. Lizzy shifted her weight from foot to foot, but, finally, reluctantly--after two verses of "Our God Reigns" -- jerked her up arms too. Wasn’t so bad once they were up there either, she’d told Arn later, even though she’s been smitten with pain in her lower lumbar for more than a decade.

That's where the problem began, the consistory determined. Arn Sibbelink they could have dealt with, coming as he did from a family given to outlandish displays of things, the kind of people who pray well in public and shed tears the way some people do dandruff. But once Lizzy raised her hands--something no one could believe, Lizzy being Lizzy--she started to like it. That's right. Arn smiled at her and pointed two fingers in the air as if, in tandem, the two of them had just linked up for a Cotton Bowl touchdown. There they stood, armpits exposed, a picture, people figured, of praise and piety.

____________________ 

Tomorrow: And so the Sibbelinks bring spiritual enrichment back home with them.

A unique political moment

It's difficult to deny what seems obvious--President Biden didn't want to do what he did, but he came to understand that putting national interest above his own determinations was the morally right thing to do. Such selflessness is rare. This letter to the nation comes as close to true patriotism as one might ever see or read.

Me and you and one unbelievable story

Once upon a time long ago, I signed up to be on Kamala's team. I'm not lying.  I did, in Des Moines, Iowa, at a 2019 shindig that featured every last one of the Democratic candidates, but one--Biden. 

I'll tell you why I liked her--I liked her laugh. It's a bit of a thin motivation, I suppose, but back then I thought it was an admirable quality in a presidential candidate; besides, as I remember, there were umpteen more that day in Des Moines, and it was hard to choose. 

The Sioux County Democrats were being cited as the upstart county Dems of the year. They'd done some heavy-duty recruiting and dragged what was once a near-death experience of a party into something living and breathing. A woman I know very well was an officer. She and her cohorts took the stage, got wild acclamation, then got out of the way for a rapid-fire, five-minutes-and-your-done showdown at OK Corral. I thought Kamala handled herself well and smiled a lot. We were right up front--great seats.

I liked her and went home with two Kamala t-shirts and some other campaign gimmickry. A tray stood on the right hand corner of the desk in my downstairs study. That desk is setting out back right now, has to be hauled away, and that black plastic tray was long ago garbaged. You'll have to take my word for it; that tray had a six-inch sticker on it that said "Kamala," in delightful lettering. Sadly enough, every last thing that tray held is long gone. But there was a sticker there--I'm not lying.

The truth is, six weeks later I wasn't so proud of being on Kamala's team; her candidacy went up like a roman candle and came down like one too. Hers was a quickly aborted run; she wiped out for not being particularly substantive, even though her 10-gauge assault on Joe Biden (for not opposing bussing) during one of the 2019 Presidential debates was much ballyhooed. Many considered Kamala Harris the most progressive of the lineup. In the long list of speakers that Sunday in Des Moines, it was Kamala who walked away with my favor. 

It wasn't a position I broadcast back then. Her campaign fizzled. But for a moment in time, she had my vote.

No one could have possibly written a script of what's gone on during this campaign season, and there are still 100 or so days to go.  First, there were the candidates--one of them an 80-year-old man who, sadly enough, looked like it. The other a 78-year-old crook whose propensity for lying begins when, step 1, he tells himself what he believes to be the truth. Then, step 2, he simply believes it is.

Both candidates tobogganed through the campaign season as if the opposition is gorgeous hill of snow. The Democrats shunned debates altogether; the Republicans held them but whatever happens therein meant absolutely nothing. Long, long ago, the candidates for the 2024 Presidential election are set in stone. Long, long ago, it was the old man Biden vs. the criminal Trump.

Or so it seems. Then, in a debate forum no Democrat would ever choose to relive, President Biden looked all too ready for the Home. He was an embarrassment. He himself says he never looked at his so-called performance. The Democrats begin to do what they do well--dysfunction. 

Then a 20-year old misfit takes out the ex-President's ear, could have killed him easily if the bullet had soared an inch to the right. It's high drama, as well it should be. Focus moves massively toward the Republican Party's coronation of the man who would be king during the convention which begins before the ex-President's ear heals. 

The nation holds its breath last Thursday night, as Trump walks everyone through what happened and seems to be conciliatory in a fashion he never seemed to before. Then he goes off-script and speaks in tongues, vintage Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Biden swears he just had a cold, and then, yesterday, over social media, tells the world he's not running. The Dems, like me, say he turned his back on himself and his dreams for the sake of a nation and, yesterday at least, begin to canonize him. Meanwhile, in the scrum to come, he gives the advantage to a woman of color, who will break all kinds of boundaries should she get the nod and win the election.

Momentum, a week after the Republican Convention's coronation and two weeks after an assassination attempt on the life of the ex-President, has turned its tail on Mayor of Mar-a-logo; suddenly, no one's talking about Trump or his odd sidekick, a man who wrote a book excoriating the strongman he's running beside.

Fruit basket upset. The 2024 Presidential race is like nothing I've ever seen. Who knows where it'll go this week? Nobody. Who could have predicted the story line I've just outlined? Nobody.

Stay tuned. This run is like none other. 

And nothing's changed: both candidates (should Kamala grab the appointment) are like none other: a woman-of-color vs. God's own chosen criminal.

Dang flood took my Kamala sticker (the t-shirts wore out long ago). Once upon a time, she was my choice. Right now, she still is. 

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 4

 

“thou hast enlarged me” Psalm 4:1

 It was always a little tough for us, having to return from week-long treks we took annually through the big-shouldered Missouri River Valley, following the two-hundred year-old route of Lewis and Clark through South Dakota. 

 We means an ecologist friend of mine and me, as well as a delightful tour hostess for the nearly fifty souls who, with us, filled up a bus.  The first Great Plains pilgrimage, I remember, was a rip-roaring successes for three stooges like us, who’d never pulled off a stunt like that before.  People on the bus loved it, really. 

 And all three of us live in awe of the country we explored.  It’s so big and so beautiful. 

 But the Great Plains continues to hemorrhage its populace, something it’s done since the late 19^th century, when European immigrants and restless Eastern palefaces flooded the place, cock-sure that a few newly planted cottonwoods, some elbow grease, and a good mule would create a home and a way of life on 160-acres.  Simply put, that was a lie.

 Homesteaders discovered that the Great Plains were despairingly fickle.  While we were in Pierre, South Dakota, the whole region was almost flooded.  Four inches of rain fell in one night.  The prairie looked royal in an emerald robe.  Next year, the place could have been a dust bowl. 

 But sparse population in a landscape that immense isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Today, the whole place seems an open-air museum; if you come anywhere close to the Missouri River, even the imaginatively-challenged can hear the sounds of the Corps of Discovery making their way north and west.  Almost anywhere on the Missouri’s big glacial banks, you can stand in the yawning openness and watch your dog run away for three days, nary a Burger King in sight.  That’s nice.

 That first trip didn’t go exactly as planned.  We had three days of rain, and the whole event was much more, well, meditative, sweetly meditative, than I’d guessed it was going to be. I’d like to tell you that the devotions we had together each morning were greatly appreciated because they were so meticulously planned, but that would be as big a fib as fertility of the land. 

 Our devotions were memorable because of the sheer grandeur that surrounded us every day, the immensity of a land where it’s as hard to be arrogant and as it is easy to be on your knees. 

For centuries, translators have changed what’s really there in verse one of Psalm 4, and I think it’s a mistake.  “Thou hast enlarged me” really says something to this effect:  “thou hast set me in a large place.”  What David is asking God to remember are the times when He delivered the shepherd/king by bringing him out to the Great Plains. Not literally, of course.  King David didn’t know South Dakota from Schnectady. 

But I understand what he means.  You’ve done it before, Lord, he says; you’ve brought me out to the glorious openness of the spacious skies. 

 “Do it again,” he’s going to say.  “Please, Lord, do it one more time.”

 I get that.  Really, I do.

A review of three books -- finale

But Arnade’s Dignity does something neither of the other books do: it features the role of faith, the Christian faith, within the cultures of his subjects. Faith, of course, is not incidental to the story of Donald Trump; even today, a year after he has left office, the ex-President would be nowhere without his loyal evangelical following.

What many still do not fully understand is how so many passionate evangelicals gave their hearts and souls to a man with his past, a man who today wanders Lear-like through life, speaking of nothing but what others call “the big lie.” It seems Arnade may have been interested in the same target, an investigation into what makes the subjects he decided to quiz, most of them “down and out” but ardent followers of a billionaire who knows nothing about the blues. 

If that was his original goal, he soon enough wandered from his mission when he discovered that his subjects, quite clearly, didn’t want or need to go there. Their stories don’t really have time or patience for politics. They are too often working hard at just staying alive. 

What I found most fascinating and blessed in Chris Arnade’s Dignity is the up-close attention he pays to faith in the lives of his subjects, not as an attribute of Trump’s cultic following but for purposes of describing the vital and even redemptive role the Christian faith plays in the lives of people from whom it is easy to look away—sex workers, drug addicts, petty criminals, people literally and figuratively “on the street.” Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America locates its central characters among those who sit in “the back row.” “Front row/ back row” is pervasive throughout. He’s describing a kind of church—front row folks, as you can imagine, are those who’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom, who know the rules, whose lives have been greatly improved by education. I am in the front row. 

Arnade, like Vance, ambles along closer to personal memoir than does Osnos. He confesses himself to be the child of cradle Catholics who did not take their faith with particular seriousness. Whatever faith he had as a child fell away in college, he says, a victim of what he calls “science,” as if the two were opposites. 

It’s difficult to find similar studies that analyze the effects of the Christian faith in people’s lives, but Arnade casts no doubt: he didn’t look for it, but what he discovered in all those interviews is how important the Christian faith is to the dignity we all deeply need and search for. One place he finds it is in church. The “back row” includes those who barely make it into church at all, men and women who do not play starring rules in our lives or anyone else’s— except perhaps in the headline-grabbing crimes they commit. They try—and most often fail—to get clean. They turn tricks. They wear black fishnet and ply themselves on street corners. The imbibe drugs, have for years, and occasionally turn to sales if they need cash. 

If your seat is in the front row, you’ve got to turn all the way around and look away from what’s happening up front to realize that folks are even back there. But what he comes to learn is that the Christian faith sustains them. The church, their faith in God and the risen Christ, is a significant source of their dignity. It’s all there: The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have life under control. You cannot ignore death there. You cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is moral. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that “we don’t and never will have this under control.” It is far easier to see religion not just as useful but as true. 

Dignity is not about Donald Trump, although the pathways it creates into our times inevitably lead us into the neighborhood of the ex-President’s following. Dignity is all about its title, how some of us, even the ones in the back row, seek to find it by way of the Christian faith. 

“We need everyone—those in the back row, those in the front row—to listen to one another,” Arnade says, “and try to understand one another and understand what they value and try to be less judgmental.” 

Chris Arnade is trying to understand where people who seemingly have very little, find their dignity. The unavoidable question I had when following the seamy lives Arnade explores is, “Is my religious sensibility big enough, wide enough, to admit even Arnade’s people, to love men and women who so easily make themselves unlovable?” 

I was raised on the Beatitudes. I cut my teeth on the tale of the Good Samaritan. I wrote a book about grace. The most radical direction Arnade shows us is old-line biblical truth: “to love God above all and my neighbor as myself. On these two commandments…” well, you know. 

Dignity isn’t primarily about our church, our congregation, our confession, or our immediate faith family. And yet it is. It’s about me, and maybe you too, about how I judge others, or condemn them, about who I consider to be children of God and who I may consider to be beyond the pale. And who the Creator of Heaven and Earth may not.

_____________

This review appeared originally in the March 2022 issue of Pro Rege.

A review of three books. . . 2 of 3

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, published already in 2016, got a running start on what has become since a familiar path. Vance used his own childhood— even his mother and his grandmother—and “the hillbilly culture” in which he was reared, to help readers understand how a mega-millionaire who never knew an hour of poverty drew extraordinary appeal from men and women, mostly white, who’d lost everything when coal mines and factories closed up and left for greener, foreign pastures. J. D. Vance began an explanation of the grievance politics that now characterize so much of Trump’s continuing appeal. 

Vance’s people were left behind by the “elites.” When they were, there was nowhere left for them to turn for dignity but escape; hence, the rush of opioids. Vance showed readers forgotten men and women totally abandoned by academia, by government, by politics, by the media, but highlighted by Donald E. Trump. 

Oddly enough, J. D. Vance is presently running for a U. S. Senate seat from Ohio [make that Vice President of the country] and has become almost exactly the kind of politician Trump himself appears able to clone. Whatever he is today, he was the first to alert the public to Trump’s beloved reception among those men and women aggrieved by tribal politics and the virtual disappearance of jobs that pay enough to raise a family. They were left behind, and Trump knew it. They became his people.

Evan Osnos’s Wildland: the Making of America’s Fury travels much farther and deeper into our national saga. Osnos’s book is bigger and broader in its judgments and research than anything in J. D. Vance. It’s an encyclopedia of our time, specifically the focus which ex-President Trump has brought into all of our lives.

Osnos, who spent a decade abroad as a writer for the New Yorker, is well-positioned to do the work he’s done in Wildland. Using his significant journalistic powers (an earlier book, The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the National Book Award) examines in persistent detail how life has changed, during his absence, in Greenwich, Connecticut, his hometown; in Clarksville, West Virginia, where he worked at a newspaper, his first job after college; and in Chicago, where he worked later, for the Tribune. 

What Osnos mines from each of these locales is as comprehensive as his arguments are convincing. By his analysis, Donald Trump didn’t really create Donald Trump. Cultural movements he identifies and examines in detail combined to deliver the ex-President to a segment of the American public who were happy to have a Donald Trump lead them into the future. 

As the title suggests, Evan Osnos is not taken with American society at this moment. His compendium of facts and cultural analysis paints a picture of a nation under siege by a variety of ills, piloted along by a government that is, as we all can see, mired down by divisions all but impossible to transcend. If hope appears anywhere on the national landscape, for Osnos it appears only in little, private worlds created by individuals of courage and will, who work hard and work stubbornly at doing little things to make the world a better place.

Chris Arnade is a journalist/photographer, which means his Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America doubles as an album of photographs of the men and women he’s interviewed, most of them set within the worlds in which they have their being. Aiming a camera at the men and women who appear on his pages—people with issues and often at the bottom of economic and social registers—is risky business because such portraits can feel like exploitation. Maybe that’s just me—I don’t know; but I couldn’t help assessing the gallery of stunning photographs in Dignity to be of marginal benefit to the book. I listened to much of it, and when I did, I didn’t miss not seeing the pictures. Evan Osnos’s Wildland is far more comprehensive, by design, than either Elegy or Dignity. Osnos lays out an encyclopedia of the last several years—right up to and including January 6, 2020. If you’re going to read one such book this year, Wildland’s comprehensive look at the state of our union today is most helpful.

_______________

Conclusion tomorrow

A review of three books--including Vance's Hillbilly Elegy

The rocket-like ascendency of J. D. Vance to political power in Trump's Republican Party is, to many, astonishing. I knew, somewhere along the line, that I'd written and published a review of Vance's best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, a masterful study of Donald Trump's own ascent to power, a book that opened the floodgates (I've used that cliche often lately!) for all kinds of writers and pundits to try their own hands at understanding the bizarre popularity of a man who'd been little more than a thug--a billionaire, too, of course, but grifter. 

What I could find was a larger review of two other books I compared to Hillbilly Elegy. It appeared in the March, 2022, issue of Pro Rege. You can read the whole article here, or wait for it to come out on the blog in three pieces.

No one makes more news right now than J. D. Vance. I thought I'd add my own two-cents worth.

_____________________ 

It’s not difficult to look up at Dignity, South Dakota’s most recent gigantic sculpture (a la Rushmore and Crazy Horse) and register more than a little snobbishness, despite her remarkable size and beauty. Historically at least, white folks haven’t shown all that much respect to Native Americans, women especially, some might argue. 

If crime figures tally anything, yet today indigenous women don’t command much respect. Still, there she stands, far above the northern end of Lake Francis Case, a gorgeous, fifty-foot Indian princess looking down at once was the Missouri River but is now one of a series of reservoirs that, ironically, collectively drowned a substantial historical record of Native history and culture forever. 

Dignity? Sure. Anyway, there she stands in her diamond-studded raiment, like the royalty Indian women rarely have been, perfectly beautiful as she receives a dazzling star quilt. Night or day, she’s impressive—she really is. 

Still, it’s difficult to be enthralled. South Dakota’s Dignity can perhaps too easily be seen as yet another iteration of the white man’s desire to romanticize Native life. Dignity may well be the latest version of the “noble savage.” 

I couldn’t help thinking of Dignity, that fine sculpture, when I read Chris Arnade’s Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back-Row America, because in it, Arnade does everything he can to feature fellow human beings (of all races, by the way) who in the common mind may least express what most of us believe to be dignity. It’s a precious task he’s up to. 

“The image of God” is not a phrase you’ll find in Arnade’s Dignity, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t on the trail of the foundational, Christian truth. He wants to know society’s most unloved, so he hangs out at McDonalds, attends shaky Pentecostal fellowships and smoky strip clubs on seamy streets all over the country, rural areas as well as urban, looking for dignity among those we too easily assume have none. In Dignity, he ends up looking to find something of the image of God. 

Arnade’s Dignity is one of a shelf full of roughly similar books. Oddly enough, J. D. Vance is presently running for a U. S. Senate seat from Ohio and has become almost exactly the kind of politician Trump himself appears able to clone. Whatever he is today, he was the first to alert the public to Trump’s beloved reception among those men and women aggrieved by tribal politics and the virtual disappearance of jobs that pay enough to raise a family. They were left behind, and Trump knew it.

more of the review tomorrow. . .

Cotton candy skies

It doesn't seem that long ago, but the dates on the pictures say April 10. Honestly, seems like yesterday. I was out at the pond south of town, pretty much all by my lonesome, waiting for Mother Goose (not the Mother Goose) lead out a string of goslings I was only half conscious of being hatched. I just sat there, reminding myself that I was retired, had been for a dozen years already, and had never just sat there and looked out at a view I thought was absolutely lovely.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I know, and, to some, calling the scene above, or this one below, "absolutely lovely" strains good sense. Stick with me here, even if you were looking for the Grand Tetons. This is what I saw that fair afternoon, a country scene in northwest Iowa, with gorgeous chunks of frosting, a sky full of bright, white cotton candy. It was lovely, all right. And I knew I was telling myself it was because I'd actually taken the time to sit and watch, to listen, to see.

The real blessing of that afternoon, months ago now, is that I was free to look and free to see. 

 The two of us live in a post-diluvian world now, a world after the flood; even though that drenching is behind us, it dominates our lives, our time, our sensibilities. The bottom floor of our house is bare naked, stripped clean like stored succession of store mannikins. The insulators are coming soon to do their thing, and the dry wall is ordered, soon to arrive. 

We're going to live on one floor for a while, at least through my recovery from back surgery in August. It'll be interesting, but we'll be a one-story couple, living upstairs where things look pretty much the same as they did before the river came to visit. 

Nonetheless, we're still suffering from homesickness, for which there is no immediate cure, at least nothing in a month or two. There's a deathly ambience to saying, aloud, "things will never be the same," but they won't, not until there's a brand new normal, which seems, well, out of reach.

Now it's fair to say that long before the Floyd chose to flood us out, we'd been in a rainy season. Just about every day storm clouds would threaten, and we'd get some rain--never a ton, just some. The water table, I'm sure, was really high and the sky was full of the drama that forecasts trouble and often brings it. 

Yesterday, I decided to go back home (to our apartment, from our home) a different way, just to have a look at the river, thusly--

Here 'tis. Doesn't look like a disaster waiting to happen. Here's the Floyd River, a river named for Sgt. Floyd, who died where this sweet thing flows into the Missouri. Here's the monster river that crept up five feet (five feet!) above the previous record for flooding. Five feet. This entire scene was a lake.

I stopped for a minute to snap this picture with my phone (my camera is a casualty), and I couldn't help notice that those blobs of cotton candy I'd loved a couple of months ago were here again. I had to stop to notice, to see. I hadn't noticed.

Look at 'em. They're gorgeous, even if they're not the Grand Tetons.

Seems to me I have to take the time to look. It's always that way with beauty, always that way with us.

Well, me anyway.

A madman's bullet

 

The greatly famous shot above features--you have to squint to see it--one of the bullets shot at the ex-President when he was speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania. Graphically, it tells the whole story. An inch or two difference, and the 2024 Presidential race would be written anew.

For months already, pundits have described the uniqueness of the 2024 race. There is, after all, the ages of the candidates. Biden is older than any one else who ever ran for the office, while his opponent is barely any younger. Biden, as an incumbent, virtually skipped the primaries, at least walked through them without taking a hit. Trump did likewise, never walked into or out of a debate, simply allowed the erstwhile opponents to slug themselves out, walking away with the nomination before the fireworks ever started.

So we have two aged candidates lined up and beating on each other for months before the November election. Odd--and more than a little unhealthy. Those oddities brought about great speculation that perhaps, come November, the ticket would actually include neither of the obvious candidates, or, more certainly, the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election would be, like no other, impossible to predict. In fact, 68% of the American public don't particularly care for either of the men.

Huge stories arise. First, Biden stumbles so horribly through the first debate that most every one of his loyalists couldn't look away fast enough. President Biden claims he hasn't looked at that rotten performance; perhaps he should. It was sheer misery to watch. 

The question raised by that awful appearance was simple: should Biden stay in? Drudge had him out; others did too. The President simply couldn't sustain what thin support he had after that woebegone performance.

And now an assassination. After I'd seen the footage of the attempt a dozen times, I'd seen enough, so I'm not sure what the networks showed all day long yesterday, but I'd certainly expect that it was the assassination--the first we've all suffered in 40 years. It was awful, a deep stain on American history.

But no one speculated on Biden's candidacy yesterday--that simply wasn't the topic at hand. What was front-and-center was the near-miss on the life of Donald Trump.

Yesterday's New York Times featured a moving op-ed by Patti Davis, who was, some might remember, the often estranged daughter of President Ronald Reagan, our most recent assassination target. Reagan was fired upon outside the Washington Hilton, by a man who'd determined that the actress Jodi Foster would take a shining to him if he offed the President.

Patti Davis's essay opens the curtain on her own and her family's reactions to the shock of the shooting. 

For all of the apparatus around a president or a presidential candidate, for all the planning, the security, it still comes down to this: They are flesh and blood, they are human beings just like the rest of us, and their lives can change in a split second. It takes only one bullet to bring that fact home.

As Davis remembers, nothing was the same after she and her family almost lost their father.

Last night, Biden, as might be expected, tried to speak to a nation shocked by the attempt on his opponent's life, tried to maintain that, as a people, we're better than we looked on Saturday. "It's time to cool it down," he said. "We all have a responsibility to do this."

Just last week, a University of Chicago poll revealed what most us knew already: the political climate in the U. S. A. could hardly be more toxic. 

Ex-President Donald Trump is the next thing to a martyr today, having narrowly missed the murderous shots of another possessed would-be assassin. He's looking at a national audience this week in Milwaukee with little more than a bandage on his ear. Everyone--even his sworn enemies--will tune in to his acceptance speech.

What will he say? Will he unleash another belligerent rant, or will he tone it down? If Patti Davis is right, nothing is the same the day after. Will he have to be what he's always been, or will he change?

How does the old line go?--"nothing stills the heart like a date with the hangman." Patti Davis claims the attempt on his life changed all of them, his family and her father. Will it do the same to Donald Trump? Can he be someone other than the man he's always been? 

Right now, it's all on him. 

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 4

 

“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness”

 Charles Spurgeon says this particular descriptive phrase (“God of my righteousness”) doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Psalms, or in the Bible itself, for that matter. The KJV has it, of course, as do plenty of contemporary translations, but the NIV translates the phrase into a single adjective and then gives it to God (“righteous God”), a rendition that seems to me to suggest a significantly different idea.

 I was born and reared in the Calvinist tradition of the Christian faith, and for better or for worse I’ve stayed—stubbornly, perhaps—within that fold.  Maybe that’s why I like the KJV’s phrasing better.  The psalmist isn’t mincing words; instead, he’s giving total credit for his righteousness to the author thereof. I’m not interested in polemics, but it seems to me he’s doing the Calvinist thing.

I once knew an old man named Harry, perfectly bald, only a quarter of a lung left in his ribs. He’d lost the rest to cancer, been a smoker all his life. He was very much alone in Arizona. His wife was gone, but then she hadn’t been at his side since he’d treated her in the same, sad way he’d treated anything else in his life of real value, including his kids.

He wore a beret and drove an ancient VW beetle, looked for all the world like the eccentric he was.  In his spare time, which he had plenty of after his retirement, he loved to spin poems, little aphoristic lines that rose in his mind and soul from all kinds of varied sources—some of them devotional, some of them sort of wild, like John Donne. Maybe that’s a stretch.

I’ll never forget him crying, something he used to do at the drop of a hat—well, beret.  In a restaurant, outside of church, inside church, just about anywhere, if he was given to consider the shadowy mistakes of his eighty-some years, he’d shed tears profusely.  I used to worry about his being able to get his breath, in fact.

And then he’d look at me, a young man at the time, and raise a crooked finger.  “Jim,” he’d say, “if I had one lousy thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.”  Amazing line.

The poet in Psalm 4 is not pointing. He’s not trying to convince you and me to curb our appetites or line up back on the straight and narrow. Neither is he driven half-mad by the sin of his early life. I’m not sure he’s crying at all.

But the intent of the line—“God of my righteousness”—seems pretty much the same as my old friend Harry’s appraisal of his life’s destiny. It seems to me that what the Psalmist is suggesting is that without God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he’d be at ground zero when it comes to righteousness and salvation. 

It’s difficult for me to understand how any believing earthling could say anything different. But then, I’m a Calvinist, I guess. And retired as I am, looking back over a life that has some miles on it, I find it impossible not to say, with the poet of Psalm 4, that this God I worship, this God who loves me, is anything less than the “God of my righteousness.”

 It's all on Him.

Nancy loves Ronnie

 

In November of 1980, I was a graduate student in hallowed halls, where most of my colleagues and professors judged the end of the world was upon us. Ronald Reagan--remember that picture of him and the chimp?--had just been elected President of these United States, a former Hollywood movie star with unimpeachable. conservative credentials. Fire, pestilence and certain doom threatened all around. People talked of Canada.

We all lived through the next eight years and, in retrospect, did quite well. Some consider Reagan's two terms the finest years of the 20th century; then again, some aren't as worshipful. Iran-Contra was messy horror, and air traffic controllers found themselves out of work; but Reagan pulled off some wonders and made a hefty portion of America once more proud of being American.

If you liked Reagan, you probably liked Nancy too, always cow-eyed there beside him, the perfect helpmeet, who, as it turns out, did substantially more than pick out her husband's ties. Today, some call her the most powerful First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, more immediately influential than Hillary. Flaky?--well, maybe, consulting horror-scopes and other divines to determine the national course of action. But always there, maybe the most trusted adviser.

I met a woman from Tampico, Illinois, the birthplace of a the President, the man she insisted on calling "Ronnie," as if he was still in the swings in the city park. In the second floor apartment (above the bank) where Ronnie was born, there's something of museum today, nothing like the Reagan library, but something little Tampico is proud of.

And there, beneath a lamp on a table, stands a picture of Jane Wyman, Ronnie's first wife. His marriage to that Hollywood star is part of Ronnie's story, so that framed picture has a rightful place in Tampico's little museum. But locals claim that when Ronnie and Nancy toured the little upstairs apartment, Nancy made it very clear that she did not care for Wyman's picture. She hurried her husband out of there quickly--or so the story goes.

I'll have you know that Jane Wyman's starlet pic is still there on the table. Tampico doesn't have to listen to Nancy Reagan.

In 1992, the Reagans returned to Tampico, two years after he'd completed his second term. On the streets of town, the word is that Ronnie was clearly showing signs of senility--that was two years before his Alzheimer's was made public. Everyone knew, it is said, because Nancy commandeered the whole event, made all the decisions. Nancy was at the helm of the Reagan ship, Ronnie something akin to a smiling passenger.

If you wade through some of the memories, the stories, the reminiscences, it's not hard to forgo all the old politics. Nancy loved Tampico's Ronnie. She cared for him. Selflessly. 

That whole trip back to his boyhood home, I was told, was awkward in the way the presence of Alzheimer's creates discomfort, especially if it's not acknowledged. What may have looked bossy and pushy was behavior that arose from a heart full of love and respect, and a determination not to injure the President or his love for those he loved and who loved him in Tampico and all around this country.

That little upstairs Ronald Reagan museum has a copy of letter Ronnie himself wrote when, in 1994, he himself acknowledged what Tampico awkwardly witnessed but didn't mention two years earlier. 

I confess--for years I thought of Nancy as cloying. She made me sneer. 

But today I can't help think of how difficult it must have been for her to take care of Ronnie on a trip to his old hometown, to the upstairs apartment where he was born--how much she must have worried, how hard she had to work to try to make it all work smoothly. He was, after all, "Mr. President."

More than that, he was the man she loved.

It might not hurt to consider that an infirm President, even an unfit head of state, is not new. I'm with those who say Biden should withdraw, but it needs to be said that we've worked with such problems before.

Taking the Mound

JD on the mound

Look, truth be told, I'd vote for the guy even if he was (shudder!) a Republican. 

Okay, that's stretching it a bit, but not far. We've known of J D Scholten, son of a legendary Morningside baseball coach, for years already. He was, after all, the candidate who just about knocked off the legendary Steve King (R-Iowa), who didn't really say nasty things to get headlines; he did it the honest-and-true way: because he believed them. 

Old Steve King would have been a moderate in the MAGA crowd. Marjorie Taylor Green would have made him look like Rip Van Winkle; but Steve King, by and large, was the face of bigotry back in the day when Donald Trump was selling scholarships to his university. Out here in the nw corner of Iowa, we loved JD Scholten because he almost tipped over the loudmouth King. Almost. Right here in the most Republican region of the state, the guy was a hero.

When Scholten tried to run again, this time against state Rep. Randy Feenstra, he got left behind, and some--me included--just sort of assumed JD's political career had drawn, whimpering, to a close. But he went on to win a seat in the Iowa Legislature, as a Democrat no less, from Sioux City.

Long, long ago, Barbara and I attended a Democratic meet-the-candidates night in LeMars, where JD and a gaggle of others showed up. Barbara had seen the bunch before and was left thoroughly unimpressed by this immensely tall, bald guy who said his vitae included loads of stints with minor league baseball teams--and, well, that's about all. "He's kind of pathetic really," she warned me as Scholten came up to the podium. "Someone has to teach him to speak," she said.

Clearly, someone did. Maybe it was low expectations, but I thought the guy did pretty darn well. "I thought you told me he was a mistake," I said to her. 

She was aghast. "I cannot believe that was the same guy."

JD Scholten went to lose to Steve King, but he and the dying motor home he drove to every last town in the district, found a place in the hearts of the people he wanted to serve. After all, he'd done the impossible, just about toppled the King.

Here's last week's lead story. J D Scholten was at a rock concert downtown, pressing the flesh like a good pol, when he got a call from the manager of the Sioux City Explorers, a kind of minor-league baseball club. The manager called Scholten to say the Explorers were pitcher-less, given more than a few extra innings from his staff. "I need you to pitch," he told JD.

You got to love this. Scholten had never really lost his taste for the game. Still at 44, he could lose an arm by winging too many fastballs, but he must have said something akin to "no guts, no glory," and, a few warm-up tosses later, took to the stadium mound, gave up a couple of hits and a run, then got deadly serious with 87-mph fastballs, and pulled the Explorers back from sure defeat. Get this: they won, 11-2, over the Milwaukee Milkmen (or something). 11-2 with a state rep on the mound. Ought to be a tv movie.

JD was a star. 

I'm guessing that fastball got him another job in Des Moines. If it didn't, shame on Sioux City. There he was, out on the mound, to save the day.

And he's a Democrat. Best story of the weekend.