The Irish Art of Lilting and What it Means For You
Thought some here might be interested in this ...
A 50-year mistake
Although we probably won't see a decision until this summer, the newly dominant conservative members of the Supreme Court appear to be responding well to Mississippi's argument that the issue of abortion should be left to the states:
But rather than painting an ideological argument framed around complex philosophical, ethical and moral considerations, Stewart argued the court should itself simply be neutral. Abortion, he said, should be outside of the court’s jurisdiction entirely, because the constitution places responsibility for these types of issues, which represent the intersection of changing science, theology, morality and medicine, not with judicial fiat, but with the democratic process.
“On hard issue, after hard issue, the people make this country work,” he said. “Abortion is a hard issue. It demands the best from all of us, not a judgment by just a few of us.”
Inclusive Language
Poor old Bernie.
The one commenter says that "It's not hard to use trans-inclusive language," but it really is for those of us born before yesterday. What exactly are you supposed to say here? "If you are a woman -- or a man -- who might be giving birth..."?
This was literally a Monty Python sketch within our lifetimes, kids. They were on your team back when your team recognized physical reality as a relevant factor. This whole thing was a sendup of Christianity, not at all conservative. Bishops came out to protest it. BBC specials were done about whether or not this kind of discourse was acceptable in polite society, and not because it treated women as the only ones who could have babies.
An Advent Calendar
My sister sends this unique calendar, which is also a case of beer.
The first beer describes itself as a “grumpy German helles.”
More puppet scenes
At this rate I may manage to get both puppet stages in the mail in time for Christmas.
Paintings From the Hall
Speaking of paintings, which rarely enter my mind, my wife is having a sale on her fine art paintings. Both her landscapes and her work from life are on sale (and on display, if any of you happen by Asheville, both at the Asheville Gallery of Art and on Woolworth’s Walk).
The latter includes this fellow, which I’ll be sad if she sells because he currently hangs in my stairwell. A soulful hound is a fine companion.
She loves to paint portraits of striking dogs and horses, by the way, so if you have one you’d like painted she does sometimes take commissions for such orders.
Crafty time of year
At Christmas the urge to paint often comes over me. This year I'm working on a couple of puppet stages for a toddler great-niece. I found on Etsy a clever folding stage with wings that open up, which seemed to lend itself toward painting different sets on each panel. I ordered two, thinking I wouldn't have time to paint one before Christmas, so I'd send the blank one for now and follow up later with the other after painting it, but the work is going so quickly that it seems I'll have time to let the first one dry in time to wrap and ship it. The first one has just three panels:
Then it occurred to me that I can paint the back side, too, and she can turn it around. I've just started on the second stage now, having completed the first panel of six.
The Feast of St. Andrew
It is often remarked that Andrew was a strange choice for a patron of Scotland, which has several native saints of her own.
All the same.
A Hopeful Tale
Wretchard writes that all powers may be collapsing, ‘a failure not of this or that hegemony but of hegemony itself.’
Advent
Today being the first Sunday of Advent I got some initial decorating done. The lights at least are hung, and a small tree set up and given a first-pass decoration. We lit a candle at dinner in the Advent wreath.
We are still eating Thanksgiving leftovers -- at this point leftover-leftovers, as the leftovers I made into Turkey chorizo and nachos still had some life in them for dinner tonight. I've got one more meal's worth of turkey on the carcass, which I can turn into a leftovers dish; and then if there are leftovers of that as well, we'll have eaten from Thursday to Tuesday on the same bird.
It occurred to me as I was carving meat from the bird that I did not know if turkeys had a carving word. In the Middle Ages, there were a whole host of these terms for different animals, and carving was considered a sort of Aristotelian science. Turkeys are a New World bird, though, and I don't see one on at least this list. Here are some that are close:
- allay a pheasant
- disfigure a peacock
- display a quail
- fract a chicken
- rear a goose
- sauce a capon
- spoil a hen
- unbrace a mallard
- wing a partridge
I would say that turkeys are probably closer to geese than any of the others, but in our present culture 'to rear a turkey' would inevitably be taken as a euphemism for a despicable practice. Plus it should really have its own name, that being in the spirit of the thing. Perhaps one might 'leftover a turkey.'
Soon I will begin the holiday baking, so that we can send cookies and the like out to all and sundry. Once the Yuletide proper gets here, there will be meat pies to be served in the Hall itself. For now, though, it is only the beginning of the time of preparation.
How the First Amendment works
Seth Barrett Tillman didn't think much of David Frum's recent OpEd arguing that the Russia Hoax wasn't really a hoax:
Frum’s position amounts to this. If you express the wrong political views in public—by which he means, political views he disagrees with—that is a reason for the government to investigate you. Frum is not embarrassed by his position. Millions of Americans agree with Frum. He and they are entirely wrong. And the continuing viability of American and Western democracy depends on changing the hearts and minds of those millions.
Nightingale
Judy Collins is best known for covering songs. Her voice isn't great, but her arrangements were spectacular, and I often forget that she could write a pretty good song herself. Her 1970 release "Whales and Nightingales" included this beautiful "Nightingale" song in two versions, one sung with the lyrics below and the other a very nice instrumental arrangement. (I can't get YouTubes to embed today, so I'm linking.)
Jacob’s heart bent with fear, like a bow with death for its arrow;In vain he searched for the final truth, to set his soul free of doubt.Over the mountains he walked, with his head bent searching for reasons;Then he called out to God for help, and climbed to the top of a hill.Wind swept the sunlight through the wheat fields,
In the orchard the nightingale sang,
While the plums that she broke with her brown beak,
Tomorrow would turn into songs.Then she flew up through the rain, with the sun silver bright on her feathers,Jacob put back his frowns and sighed and walked back down the hill:"God doesn’t answer me, and He never will."
"Albatross" is a well-written and well-arranged song, too:
Fear in Ethiopia
The government is collapsing in the face of rebels, and the State Department is worried... chiefly about themselves.
The chaos that unfolded as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban and the struggle the U.S. faced when attempting to withdraw Americans and allies from the country reportedly caused a wave of mental health issues in the State Department, Politico reported.The Department of Veterans Affairs reportedly offered its 24-7 support line to help officials work through the strain of the situation, but the State Department turned down the offer, Politico reported. One State Department employee described this decision as “really disturbing” and “a disgrace.”“The mental health ramifications of the Afghanistan evacuation are not over — we expect employees to potentially have adverse mental health in the months and years to come,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said while commenting on the reporting, Politico reported.
The American citizens and allies abandoned in Afghanistan may have had some mental health issues as well, though we don't hear a lot about them for some reason.
A Preposterous Story
Harper's is an old magazine, and I assume one must be a worthy writer to be included in its pages. I really wanted an answer to the question -- excerpted at the excellent Arts & Letters Daily -- that was supposed to be the topic of the essay.
How did a bowdlerized rendering of a marginal psychpathology — trauma theory — come to dominate our culture?
More and more I hear people (especially women) talking about 'healing' their 'trauma' as a necessary part of everyday life. Most of them strike me as more bored than injured, looking for their 'healing' through activities like wine and yoga. Some of the trauma is supposed to have happened in past lives, even, so it must first be remembered somehow before it can be addressed and healed. Yet they talk very earnestly about the need for this healing for wounds of the psyche barely recalled from childhood or from some time during the Middle Ages.
Unfortunately the answer to this question was not forthcoming in the essay, which is ridiculous.
And so we commence our search for the cultural significance of trauma not on the Freudian chaise, but with the nineteenth-century concept of “railway spine.” For it is with the arrival of the train that the phenomenon eventually termed PTSD steams into view.
The essay goes on to theorize that the imposition of 'clock time' on the natural experience of time created a novel sort of alienation and discomfort, one that led to accidents that were traumatic in a new way.
Now clocks were not new in the 19th century. The first mechanical clock was built before the year 1000 by a man who would later become Pope Sylvester II. Church life in the Medieval period was divided into bells, which rang day and night to call people to the appropriate prayers. Wrist watches date to the 1500s, as do clocks accurate to the minute. By 1656, the pendulum clock made them accurate to the second, and gave them the classing grandfather 'tick, tock' sound.
Steam trains were a new technology at one time yet they were hardly the first mode of transportation in which "[c]rucially, passengers felt powerless, confronted with a technology over which they had no obvious means of control." One has a great deal of control over a steam train compared to a ship, even as a passenger who might pull the emergency stop cord. A shipwreck in a storm is as traumatic as anything it is easy to imagine; it is, in art and literature, often the very image of life-altering trauma.
The author is much more interested in those literary treatments of trauma than in the actual victims of real PTSD, for whom he has little sympathy. Describing the American Marines who came down with it after Fallujah, he sniffs, "Performing 'very well'... is reducing a city to rubble using depleted uranium shells and then incinerating enemy combatants and civilians alike." Likewise of Vietnam war veterans he writes, "That the traumas experienced by Vietnam veterans were as much a function of acts they had perpetrated as they were of those inflicted upon them in part explains why contemporary trauma theorists’ conceptions of the malady, and their attendant therapies, collapse [a] fundamental ethical distinction."
Yet the question we began with still needs an answer. Veterans of Vietnam or Fallujah may well have real trauma -- although often it proves to be traumatic brain injury more than anything else -- but what of the way the culture has turned into a celebration and engagement with wine-and-yoga trauma? He does get there, but only for a moment:
This outbreak of mass hysteria shared with trauma theory the underlying conviction that the recall of trauma could be delayed, even by years and decades, and that its authenticity was guaranteed by its own belatedness. Uncorrupted by interlocution (which would necessarily entail confabulation), the victim retained an absolutely reliable memory of whatever satanism they’d been subjected to—such as the bloody pentagram being inscribed and the naked, chanting figures wearing animal masks forming a circle around them. To collapse the Marxian dialectic of premature revolution: this was history simultaneously as tragedy and farce.
Yet then it is back to real trauma -- the Holocaust, and its Remembrance Days. He returns to the anti-industrial critique again: Hiroshima and the Holocaust required technologies. Yes, and the Battle of Towton required different technologies. The crossbow was banned by the Pope at one time because it was thought so traumatic a weapon.
The theory that technology and technological change produces trauma leads to a conclusion that the real reason our culture is so focused on trauma is things like Instagram.
Into the crepuscular realm of social media, for example. If we understand trauma to be a function of technologies that engender in us a sense of profound security underscored by high anxiety, then platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok would seem purpose-built for its manufacture, offering as they do the coziness of Marshall McLuhan’s global village and its inevitable social problems: global gossip, global reviling, and global abuse. A recent article in Slate pointed out that on TikTok, any number of behaviors are now dubbed “trauma responses” by the self-styled “coaches” who post videos on the app telling their followers how to identify the trauma within themselves. Many thousands of people are becoming convinced that perfectly ordinary reactions to such commonplace problems as overbearing bosses or perfidious friends are, in fact, reflex responses seared into their psyches by the white heat of trauma, which suggests to me that this medium is indeed its own message.
I'm open to the idea that Instagram can be a traumatizing experience -- or any social media that can leave one open to receiving the hate or anger or lust of all of humanity at once. That technology really might be inhumane in that it strips us of our ability to relate to others on a human scale; though again it is not fully novel. It might be why celebrities of an earlier era often fared badly, now available at least potentially to everyone with a cell phone.
Yet I don't think the issue is that people are really more traumatized, so much as they have come to think and talk as if trauma were a ubiquitous experience that is at the center of human life and meaning. They clearly like the idea; maybe because it justifies them focusing on themselves instead of others. That is certainly not novel in human history either.
Sea pirates
Matt Taibbi on enjoying Thanksgiving like a grownup:
How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks?... How? Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game?
* * *
We’ve lost touch with our real story, which is about us, not the centuries-old adventures of toffs in wigs. The Founding Fathers may have been scum, but they didn’t just steal a continent from the indigenous residents, they stole one from a British King, which is, come on, hilarious....
Almost none of us are related to Pilgrims or Founders. Nearly all of us descended from those subsequent waves of weirdos and refugees who came from all over, some not by choice, and forged the real character of our stolen nation. Many of our ancestors had their hands forced elsewhere, from Jews in the Pale fleeing pogroms to Irish escaping famines to Armenians running from Ottoman genocides. Once they got here, they happily planted Sea Pirate flags on their front doors and set about inventing everything from cat litter to alternating current, while mostly refraining from murdering one another. It was an insane setup, but they made the whole thing work, which is a pretty amazing story even figuring in the horribleness, and really what we’re celebrating every November. You have to reduce the American experience to a few ridiculously grim variables, and remove everything from movies to rock n’ roll to monster dunks, to spend today sulking.
... On Thanksgiving one year, I told [a Swedish friend] I was going to the consulate for dinner. “Thanksgiving,” he said. “That’s the one where you killed all the Indians, right?”
“Not me personally, but yes.”
“Bring back leftovers,” he answered.
Don't worry about what color you're acting
We rarely go wrong when we remember not to be preoccupied by skin color. Ammo Grrrll is in serious mode again today:
Let me spell out the Left’s advice to blacks: Every attitude and behavior that can possibly assure a healthy and productive future is “white” and, therefore, off limits. But that’s OK. Because everything you need to know about yourself is the color of your skin. That’s not only your “hole” card, but your entire hand, your All-Areas Backstage Pass.
* * *
Well, most of the Confederate statues are gone now. Did that convince the 70 percent of unwed fathers to marry one of the mothers of their offspring? Did it inspire some young black man to aspire to dental school or a plumber’s apprenticeship instead of joining a drug gang? The sad truth is that if a magic wand could be waved over the land to erase any and all negative or “racist” thoughts in the minds of white people, not one thing would change. We aren’t the problem; so we can’t be the solution.I never wasted much time worrying about whether I was "acting masculine." I just wanted to be able to make a good living and retire in comfort. It's less the fashion today, but when I was young it was still quite the cultural thing to warn women that the path to success in dating and marriage, with all its benefits in terms of freebies, ran through a territory I can only describe as "acting feminine," including dumbing down and camouflaging any hint of assertiveness or self-sufficiency. If you want a guy who wants that kind of thing, and you're looking for an economic sinecure, it's probably reasonably good advice. In fact, it's about like the advice that would lead a black teenager today to wreck his life in service of finding a permanent spot in a system of government dependency. As an alternative, I recommend learning to act like a grownup. If your peers don't like it, find better peers.
Colonel Maggie
About the same time as Arlo was writing his song about Thanksgiving, a woman who didn’t have to face a draft was willingly in Vietnam.
...just before Thanksgiving ’67 and we were ferrying dead and wounded from a large GRF west of Pleiku. We had run out of body bags by noon, so the Hook ( *CH-47 CHINOOK*) was pretty rough in the back. All of a sudden, we heard a ‘take-charge’ woman’s voice in the rear.There was the singer and actress, Martha Raye, with a Special Forces beret and jungle fatigues, with subdued markings, helping the wounded into the Chinook, and carrying the dead aboard.
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