If America wanted a King we would dig up Elvis

I finished the book The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. This is nominally a mystery – in the beginning of the story, set in 1972, a skeleton is found in a well, but before it can be identified Hurricane Agnes floods the area and the skeleton is washed out to sea. That’s about 1% of the book. Towards the end we find out whose skeleton it is. That’s another 1%. It’s also a strange mystery in that while the reader learns who died none of the characters do (that’s in spite of the teaser on the back cover). So I’ll talk about the other 98% of the story. It takes place leading up to and in 1936. Most of the action is in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Normally, a hill is claimed by the richer families of a city – because of the view and all – but here the hill is the home of Eastern European Jews and Negroes (and in 1936 that is what they were called). Moshe runs a theater and books both Jewish and black entertainers. He does quite well. His wife is Chona, an independent spirit. She runs the grocery store of the title. It loses money because a lot of her customers can’t pay and accumulate a bill for which she never demands payment. Moshe’s assistant is Nate, a black man who has secrets in his past. Nate is married to Addie. They have become caretaker’s of their nephew. He was recently orphaned and a few years before his hearing was damaged when a stove blew up. Because the boy can’t hear, though can lip read just fine, he doesn’t go to school and people call him Dodo. The community knows how smart, helpful, and kind the boy is. But the authorities want to send him to a “special school,” better known as the insane asylum where he would be easily tagged as “imbecile.” To keep him safe Nate and Addie ask Chona to take him in, which she is delighted to do. Much of the story is about these people getting along and trying to deal with the white people who live down in town. The worst of these is Doc Roberts, who marches in the Klan parade every year. He was smitten by Chona’s beauty and she quite thoroughly spurned his advances. I enjoyed the story and recommend it, though don’t read it for the mystery. It portrays a community that does its best to take care of everyone, in spite of being marginalized by white people. This is a book that has sold well and deserves its popularity. Today was the third No Kings rally day across America and around the world. Organizers say there were 3,000 events. I attended one in Livonia, MI and later heard attendance was about 3,000. The weather was sunny yet cold – the temperature probably didn’t get above 45F. I didn’t see much of it because I was at a table collecting signatures to put a proposal on the ballot to limit how much corporations can donate to political campaigns, yeah, the same thing I was doing at the October No Kings rally. So I didn’t get any photos and only saw the signs that passed in front of me. I remember only a couple of them and probably not accurately.

For the Epsteinth time... Why are more people afraid of diversity than dictatorship?

A lot of signs had an anti-war theme. AKALib of the Daily Kos community posted videos of a few rallies, added links to various other Kos community posts, and invited commenters to post photos of other events. At the top of the post is a video of what was declared the Flagship Rally at the Minnesota State Capitol. This one had ten major speakers, including Gov. Tim Walz, Jane Fonda, Bernie Sanders, Bruce Springsteen, and Joan Baez. More than a dozen other speakers and entertainers were listed. My little suburban protest didn’t have any speakers at all. The contributions in the comments include: A photo of Atlanta that shows a huge crowd. A video of Ocean Beach in San Francisco in which the crowd of thousands of people forms the letters, “Trump Must Go Now.” A sign in Medford, OR, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.” From Anaconda, MT, “If America wanted a King we would dig up Elvis.” From Austin, TX, “Are we great yet? ‘Cause I just feel embarrassed.” “I think therefore I resist.” A guy handed out what looked like checks made out to “Paid Protester” and signed by “Antifa CEO Eve Ryone.” Community member Samdiener started a post to allow the community to share their favorite signs. My favorites: A sign that calls on Barron Trump to join the military to do his part in his father’s war. I had seen one that also called on Eric and Don Jr. to join up. “Cholesterol: Do your job.” “The only war Trump had an exit plan for was Vietnam.” LilBoyBlu of the Kos community reminds us that we know the nasty guy and his minions are going to try something. The No Kings rallies prove we know how to fill streets, coordinate nationally, and protest without violence. So let’s be ready when they do that something. And when they do we’re not surprised and still processing, we’re executing our plan. Today was a dress rehearsal. The likely day for their something is election day. So have a plan. Some of the ideas: Request time off. Have babysitter and dog sitter confirmed. Have a list of people you will notify to protest with you. Plan where to meet with a backup spot. Have a lawyer’s number in your pocket – not on your phone, which might be taken from you. There is a National Lawyers Guild. Know your rights. Go with a buddy, even to your voting place. Have your apps ready – Kos is working on a phone tool so you can document and share what you see. Have cash. If the internet goes down there are no card readers, ATMs, or online maps. Have phone numbers written on paper. Have press contacts that will accept drone footage, phone video, and eyewitness accounts. To be useful documentation must get out. Long poll lines are a suppression tactic so take water and snacks. Write contact phone numbers on your body in case you are knocked out. The author then discussed the General Motors sit down strike in Flint in 1936. It was successful because it was well planned – including family members passing food through the windows. And we have advantages they didn’t in 1936. From the comments: Don’t take your dog. They can be freaked out by noisy crowds and what happens to the dog if you’re arrested? If you can vote before election day, do so. Take your ballot to a dropbox instead of relying on the mail (unless you know the dropboxes are not secure). NPR host A Martínez talked to Paul Krugman, an economist at the City University of New York, on the insider trading by the nasty guy administration. Just 15 minutes before the nasty guy announced he’s not going to bomb Iranian power plants there is a spike of $580 million worth of transactions in the crude oil market. There really isn’t evidence to support the assertion (at least not without an FBI investigation and this FBI wouldn’t do such a thing). But there is nothing else that would prompt such large transactions at that specific time. Second, another investor making that big of an investment at that particular time is highly unlikely. Third, while the nasty guy’s security is way too lax (the Situation Room at Mar-a-Lago is a curtained off corner of the ballroom) someone overhearing a conversation and saying something to someone else wouldn’t act 15 minutes before. Krugman wrote about this in his Substack and called it treason. He explained the reason for the term. Using sensitive national security info for personal gain is treason. Foreign adversaries are tracking our markets, so sudden large transactions mean insider knowledge is being acted on is like foreign espionage. Acting on insider knowledge is way too similar to being bribed to reveal national security decisions. This should be a massive national scandal. AKALib discussed another of Krugman’s Substack articles. This one is about why the nasty guy and Republicans are so hostile to clean energy. Krugman included one reason I had already figured out – a great deal of support of Republicans and the nasty guy comes from oil barons. At the top of that bunch are the Koch brothers, who have promoted their hostility to clean energy for decades. Republicans are supporting the hand that feeds them. Krugman proposed a second reason. He wrote:

Bear in mind that on the political right, wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff. What this reflects, I believe, is a common factor underlying many right-wing obsessions. Why cling to fossil fuels in the face of a technological revolution in energy? Why valorize “warrior ethos” and bulging biceps in an age of drone warfare? Why build economic policy around a doomed attempt to bring back “manly” jobs? At a deep level, I’d argue, it’s about nostalgia for an imagined past in which brawn mattered more than brains, combined with, yes, a hefty dose of insecure masculinity.

But the world isn’t cooperating with those macho dreams. Tarrifs are blunting blue-collar jobs. The war with Iran isn’t going well. And the rest of the world is rapidly developing clean energy sources, leaving the US behind – China is way ahead in installing solar and wind power.

How pervasively patriarchy distorts and messes up life

I finished the book My Three Dads, Patriarchy on the Great Plains by Jessa Crispin. This isn’t about three men who nurtured her as a child and guided her as an adult. These are three men who represent aspects of patriarchy. The book is about Crispin coming to terms with the extensive impact of patriarchy on her and the society around her (primarily in Kansas). It is a scathing indictment. The first of the three men was a respected member of the community who one day killed his wife, children, and then himself. Cripsin was amazed how thoroughly fascinated the people in Kansas were of the deaths and how they tried to excuse the killer. The second was John Brown, famous for his actions leading up to the Civil War. He and his sons also were involved in the abolitionist movement in Kansas and are commemorated in a big mural in the state capitol in Topeka. I found a photo of it here. Crispin wonders why violent men are praised so highly. The third was Martin Luther, the guy who prompted the Protestant Reformation. Crispin thinks he said some great things for life without patriarchy, but then instituted things to do the opposite. And those actions prompted the Protestant work ethic, which prompted capitalism to be rapacious. We are suffering from that now. I kept this book in the car, so read it while I had to wait for something. When I came across an interesting passage I wrote down the page number. So here are some of the interesting bits, a few of them I read several months ago. From the first section: Why do we organize our societies around the nuclear family? It seems to be killing us. Why haven’t we come up with a better structure? Why should this unit be considered fully functional and productive? Why do we consider any other arrangement to be temporary, waiting for marriage to come along? “Marriage is an instant structure to lock yourself into.” You announce your role to the community when you declare you’re a wife, husband, mother, or father and society won’t let you deviate from it. Beguinages existed in Europe before the Reformation. They were an area, perhaps an independent city, made up of only women. There were two options for women at the time. One was be a part of a family, in which she cycled through pregnancy, childbirth, and post birth with a very high chance of dying young because of one of the three. Or she gave herself to the church and was removed from the world. A beguinage offered a third choice in which women lived in community. The women were interdependent, but could determine their own role in the community. The beguinages were shut down after the Reformation because Protestants didn’t want a place for women outside of the family. Crispin discusses utopias, then asks what do we do with the assholes? Mass incarceration hasn’t prevented the creation of new criminals. Part of the problem is the designers of utopias want a homogeneous place built around a political idealism. But Crispin says that’s boring. She wants a place that includes everyone – those on the margins, the screwups, the unlovable, the misfits, and losers. Think of how care needs to be reorganized to bring them all in so they could live with dignity, but also so that one part of the community is not burdened with the caretaking. Before we think about what is owed us we must think about what we owe each other. That runs against those who have been in long fights for equality. Those struggles prompt a victim mentality and that we need protection. But we think the best form of protection is control and the oppressed become oppressors. We need a definition of community that is more than people who I should care for and who is not worth my care. It can’t be groups that share a common trait or income status. It can’t be defined by like minded people who shut out dissent. From the second section:

Kansas does live in the lineage of John Brown, but for a different reasons that what is claimed. His influence is felt in this state in the persistent belief that if you are certain about an issue and you believe yourself to be righteous, you are permitted to attempt to reshape the world with violence and bloodshed. All you need to live out god’s plan is a gun. ... One of the reasons these issues become intractable is that people have so little awareness as to the roots of their political beliefs. Unable to separate out politics from self-interest ... they obfuscate and dodge and self-deceive. Tracing a political stance all the way to its source, whether that is religion or values or experience, is an act of self-interrogation few people are willing to undertake.

The purpose of the counterculture is to give a person a place to land when they realize our society is sick, poisoned by corporate culture, and made empty by shopping and social media. But we’ve abandoned that. The left criticizes culture – they theorize and speculate, but don’t engage and build. But the right understands that everyone needs personal recognition, especially when community breaks down. Each person needs to be seen and understood as something more than identity markers and the stereotypes that come from that. The right amps up that need, saying you are not only seen, but superior. You get an instant community and an instant story of how the world works. “White nationalists are extremely good at showing up for one another and providing support.” That story blames Jews and liberals. “For a very long time, a small segment of our population avoided self-knowledge by asserting dominance. ... The dominant segment kept this system in place by basically refusing to allow anyone else to insist on their own reality.” The silence has been broken and one can read accounts of the lives of minorities. Crispin turns to mass killings. She wrote, “Violence can be a tool of the oppressed, but only if it is surgical. To take a life does too much to the human spirit, if humanity remains within the killer.” As one who believes the only purpose of violence is to cause oppression that’s a radical statement. But it does make some sense. Killing a person who is about to cause harm to a great number of people does lessen oppression. But there are problems. First, most of the killers, mass or not, don’t target a person who is about to cause harm. They just point the gun and shoot. The oppression they intend to lessen remains. Second, when police subdue a person they believe is about to cause harm, they are frequently wrong in that belief and kill an innocent person. Third, as Crispin says, taking another person’s life harms the spirit and humanity of the killer, even to the point of destroying both. Crispin then discussed Janet Reno and the attack she ordered on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas. Crispin mentions that there may have been distasteful practices inside the compound (I can’t get into details), but the actions did not warrant the government’s attack on the complex, especially since it killed the children Reno claimed to want to protect. One observer of the debacle was Timothy McVeigh, the guy who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City two years later. Crispin draws a direct connection on how the government’s action prompted McVeigh’s response. Crispin’s cousin was a missionary and appealed to her for funding. The whole concept seemed bizarre and stupid to her. Why do we insist unity and equality means we must all think alike?

So much harder to treat the world as a garden. To weed rather than raze. To nurture rather than handle. To compost rather than pave over. To encourage rather that twist. To suggest rather than insist. To tend rather than master. To encourage variety rather than monoculture. To allow frivolity instead of utility. To observe and delight rather than intervene. To be humble and questioning rather than certain.

All people who promote their way of life as the only correct way and all other ways are dangerous and must be eliminated – Crispin considers them to be missionaries. These people are afraid of how they will be treated, so want to control it. Instead of being kind they want to enforce behavior that looks like kindness. From the third section: Crispin discussed the thousand Protestant denominations. Each one believes they read the Bible and discerned the original intention. Each one says they are right and all the others are wrong. In this case, I have a small issue with Crispin. When John Wesley founded Methodism, it wasn’t to start a new denomination, it was to reform the Anglican Church, which really had strayed from the original intention of the Bible. Alas, over the centuries Methodism has also strayed from the Bible’s original intention – see the recent split of the United Methodist Church over how LGBTQ people are to be treated. I can’t yet say that after the more conservative congregations split away the UMC is back on track. Crispin noted that these thousand Protestant denominations is not proof of Christianity’s creativity, durability, or universality. It only means people are very good at turning “God into a gimmick.” That the Bible can be used to both embrace poverty and declare God blesses us through riches only means that “all churches have corrupted and twisted and misinterpreted some aspect of Christ’s thoughts.” So start your own church! Correct all the errors of the past! But your followers or descendants will just mess it up. Crispin rather likes Wesley – but sees little of him in the churches that follow his tradition. In a few pages I can’t reproduce how pervasively patriarchy influences, distorts, and messes up life in America and across the world. Patriarchy needs to be rooted out, but Crispin shows how close to impossible that effort would be. A big reason is, of course, dealing with all the men who feel they benefit from patriarchy and will work long and hard to preserve it. Our culture, and the cultures of the world, are so corrupted by patriarchy that we all suffer great mental health problems and most of us don’t recognize the problems. This book isn’t all that enjoyable, though I found it fascinating. However, it is an important book and I highly recommend everyone read it.

Rivalry on the ice, hot passion off

My Sunday movie was the first three episodes of Heated Rivalry. This is a Canadian production and was such a hit there that HBO brought it to the States. That a gay love story is a big hit was a surprise to many. I heard about the show in LGBTQ news stories and I was surprised when a woman from my church praised how wonderful it is. The story is mostly about two hockey players. Ilya is from Russia and ended up on the professional Boston team (team names have been changed). Shane is from Canada and ended up on the Montreal team. They are on-ice rivals and both are strong contenders for Rookie of the Year. When Ilya noticed that Shane didn’t seem annoyed with Ilya’s flirting in the shower one invited the other to their hotel room for some intimate fun. They repeated this adventure whenever both were in the same town. They knew it had to stay a secret. Episode 3 shifts to Scott, an American player on the New York team, who falls for Kip, the guy who makes his smoothies. Scott is even more determined to keep their relationship a secret. He has more than teammates who would be harmed with his coming out. But the secrecy is wearing on Kip, who is out, especially after his smoothie shop colleague sees the relationship as obvious and he has to start lying to people. I’ll watch the last three episodes on Sunday. Then it’s a long wait until season 2 comes out about a year from now. What I saw so far is a good and enjoyable story, so that long of a wait will be hard. Season 1 is mostly based on the first two books of a seven book series by Rachel Reid. Shane and Ilya are from the second, sixth, and seventh books. Scott and Kip are from the first. So there are a lot more stories of other couples that could go into the series. For a story about hockey players there is actually not much hockey on the screen. There are key moments, to be sure, but just those. I was amused that for the nude scenes we frequently saw backsides, but legs were always positioned so we never see the front. IMDb, in its trivia section for the show, reported that Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya is from Texas. He had to learn to speak in a Russian accent, and for scenes filmed in Russia (where he goes for the off season and where his father berates him for losses) Storrie learned his Russian lines phonetically. He said them well enough that the Russian crew thought he knew the language and tried to talk to him. I started writing about another topic for this post but that’s taking too long to finish in one evening. I hope to post it tomorrow.