There's something about the women ...

Since Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, it's been fun for your vacationing campaigners (that's EP and I) to read about an outpouring of enthusiasm, anchored by women. We feared this was going to be a death march against impending MAGA fascism -- ethically necessary, but entirely defensive rather than uplifting.

They met in January as veteran campaigners do. They knew they would have to take up this fight for decency and sanity. I hope most can now share the new hope

Apparently there are plenty of people who are now feeling engaged. 44,000 Black women jammed a zoom call. 40,000 new voter registrations -- most likely young people -- in one day. 

Sure, there will be bumps in the road; many of us will wish Kamala were more able to break free from the inclinations of the administration which brought her here. 

But she gives us a chance. When you've been terrified you were condemned to a MAGA world, the relief is energizing.

Frank Bruni of the NYTimes catches some of this: 

... [Women] still don’t enjoy full equality with men in America, but we sure have been leaning on them lately to save American democracy. The appallingly stymied attempts to hold Trump responsible for his crimes have rested largely on the efforts of women, a few of whom did vanquish him in court, as my Times Opinion colleague Jessica Bennett noted in an essay in April. She did a roll call of his pursuers: “Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days.”

I’d add “crazy Nancy Pelosi” — Trump is still regularly calling her that, unable to purge her from his thoughts — to the list. (Jessica wrote about Pelosi in an essay this week.) Also former Representative Liz Cheney: Nobody on the House panel investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, was more forceful or impassioned than she was in exposing Trump’s actions and inaction on that day. She, too, squats somewhere in Trump’s gray matter, so much so that he recently amplified social media posts that accused her of treason and urged that she be subjected to a televised military tribunal.

... Women’s reproductive rights are in the foreground of this presidential election, Harris is practiced and eloquent in her defense of them, and that could widen a gender gap in a way that works to Democrats’ advantage. Women voters could be the barricade between Trump and that first-day dictatorship.

Also, as my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote recently, and as I discussed with two prominent Democrats in a conversation published on Wednesday, women opponents bring out the ugliest in Trump. Harris will quickly take up residence with Pelosi, Cheney and the gang.

And Trump will have to build an annex, maybe to his frontal or occipital lobe, to accommodate the sorority.

Unless the law gets further twisted to accommodate Trump's crimes, New York State Judge Merchan has now scheduled sentencing in his hush money felonies for September 18. 

It's the crook v. the prosecutor now -- and she's a girl!

*Title borrowed from the 1970s "women's movement" anthem.

Thank you Joe Biden; bring on Kamala Harris. And Nancy delivers again.

So our Democratic leaders have, at length, led. We can now get on with the business of trouncing MAGA. The dis-eased and depleted state of the nation may defeat us, but the majority of us still have a chance to live to struggle another day for hope, justice, civil compassion and government of the people.

Many of us have watched in horror for the past three weeks as the Democratic Party, through whose big tent we are forced to work, has seemed mired in indecision and in desperate need of a generational transition. Well, we've begun one.

In this moment I want to bring forward a bit of almost forgotten San Francisco history. My Congresscritter, the former Speaker and still Party wisewoman Nancy Pelosi, first came into office through a managed generational transition not so different than the one we are seeing now.  She knows how this goes.

In the 1960s and '70s, San Francisco was represented in Congress by Phil Burton, a liberal giant whose legislative efforts included civil rights, environmental protection, disability rights, and the struggle for health care for all. And then, at in 1983 at age 56, a ruptured aortic embolism killed this man on the move. His wife Sala Burton slid into the safe Democratic seat and served two terms, before succumbing to colon cancer in 1987. The shocking Burton transitions left many progressive Californians unmoored.

Nancy Pelosi was a prominent California Democratic leader, a powerhouse fundraiser. But she had not ever held elective office herself. As Sala Burton was dying, Pelosi came away with her death bed endorsement for the San Francisco Congressional seat. Oh, now this Pacific Heights lady wants to be in Congress?

Not all San Franciscans were ready to jump on what seemed an anti-Democratic dynastic transition. The city was then full of left activists, supporters of revolutions in Central America, of affordable housing for all, and particularly of gay and lesbian AIDS campaigners, desperately trying to force the murderous epidemic onto the national agenda. In the special election held to replace Sala Burton, these forces combined behind gay Supervisor Harry Britt. Nancy consolidated the money, the party regulars, and the politically active unions; Nancy wiped the floor with Harry. (I know. I did some door knocking for poor Harry.)

In the end, Pelosi has been a magnificent Democratic Party leader. From her safe seat in San Francisco, she has served her true constituency, her fractious party. Those of us who cast ballots for her are just extras in her Party drama -- but mostly she's been good for the broad progressive project. 

I feel confident that she has had a strong role in the Biden to Harris transition. This sort of thing is her political meat and potatoes and her political genius. Thanks again, Nancy -- I feel sure you have been in the middle of getting us here.

As we try to take in the changes we're riding though ...

... we can enjoy this remarkable art.

I find this creature very soothing. More later.

We already decided this -- we don't like kings

David Rothkopf writes a Substack, Need to Know, which is both hilariously funny (follow the link) -- and wise. He offers these reassuring reflections after watching the Republican convention. 

... The GOP, after all, are not just the party of Trump. They are also the party promoting the idea of the “unitary executive,” a monarch-like president around who sits atop a government that answers to him. Democrats on the other hand recognize or should recognize that the senior most position in our system of government is the citizen, the voter. The president works for us. He or she is accountable to us. That is one of the main reasons the Revolutionary War was fought and it is a concept that Americans have defended with their lives for the past nearly 250 years.

... The Democratic Party is therefore not only not all about our president or presidential candidate of the moment. To succeed, it must be about a large group of professionals committed to shared ideals and goals working to serve a much, much larger group of bosses—the public at large. We should not be, must not become, a party that places loyalty to any one individual ahead of the mission that has brought us all together, that has made what we agree on far more important than our disagreements but must also make a respectful hearing of those disagreements a central part of how we serve a profoundly diverse society.

They have taken blended their cult of personality with their authoritarian impulses and brought this country to the brink of autocracy. (Or returned us to it. After all, as I noted before, that was the state we rebelled against in the first place.) We Democrats ultimately offer the better answer for the country precisely because we are not about any one individual, we are not about blind loyalty to one person’s ideas. We are about capturing and embodying the spirit of democracy of finding a way to serve the many by representing, listening to, acting on behalf the many.

What Democrats are going through now is all good. It is just what we should be discussing. It will make us stronger. It is absolutely certain we all share and will work for the goal of defeating Trump. And that brings me to my last point. Which is I believe we will win in November and not just by a little and, just as importantly, I know we will be ready to better serve the people of this country than the alternative offered by the other cult-like party.

We haven't always, or even often, been a good country. But we were founded with a glimmer of hope for something novel and good. Now our "leaders" need to stop dillydallying and we the people need to get to work. No kings here.

Next post will turn to vacation pictures -- when I can get online again.

Before the railroads, there were canals

England's industrial innovations in the 1700s and early 1800s wouldn't have changed the world (and enriched capitalist entrepreneurs much like the tech moguls of today) if moving product had continued to depend on horses and wagons. And so, the country developed a network of small canals. In the mid-1800s, these water ways were rendered obsolete by railways, but many remain intact and boaters navigate them on what are called narrowboats, barely 7 feet wide and as much as 60 feet long.

The Erudite Partner and I have just enjoyed two weeks on the Llangollen, Trent and Mersey, and Bridgewater Canals, accompanying her brother who is moving such a boat north for its owner. Some pictures:

Would that more days were this bright and clear! Fog and wind in San Francisco is good preparation for an English summer. But when the sun breaks through, a glimpse of "England's green and pleasant land."

Along the shore, small business eke out a living from the traffic.

 

Passing through larger towns, the canal can become somewhat crowded.

 

Then back to quiet and solitude.

 

The canals made transport possible by using locks to raise and lower boats over the rises in the terrain.

 

Boaters operate the paddles at each lock, opening and closing off the water, sometimes with advice from local volunteers. These two women were learning the drill. Erudite Partner and I cranked through dozens of locks while Captain Josh drove.

This is what it looks like from the boat while passing inside a lock.

 

Where a canal encountered substantial rises, the builders dug tunnels. Boaters have to approach with caution; the tunnels are only barely wider and higher than a single boat. On long tunnels entry is timed -- first north bound gets 20 minutes, then the south bound boats take their short turn. Here's what a tunnel entrance looks like:

That's a short one. Sometimes there are curves and some are as long as a mile. Here's what this one looks like while inside.

 

A towpath runs along the canal and serves walkers and runners well, though it is largely uncrowded.

 

Let me close with a pic of E.P. taking the helm.

 

The narrowboat made for an easy and enjoyable adventure. We disembarked near Manchester, leaving Josh to finish his journey with a new crew. We are now on to the Lake Country. More when I have connection and thoughts.

No wonder violence came for Donald

Still out of the country for another two weeks, but able to get online for a brief comment.

Again he dominates our heads. 

Donald Trump traffics in delight in violence. A convenient list via Jay Kuo.

• Trump urged supporters at rallies to beat up protestors. 

• He called for Black Lives Matter rioters to be shot.  

• He used racist language to inflame hate and hate-based attacks against Asian American during the pandemic.  

• He made fun of the brutal attack upon Nancy Pelosi’s husband.  

• He mocked the notion that radicals had plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.  

• His words helped inspire racist mass shooters in Buffalo and El Paso.  

• He approved of chants to “Hang Mike Pence.”  And he incited the violent January 6 attack upon the Capitol.

No wonder violence came for him. That's how the world works. We quite often get what we live by.

The MAGAs work to enable every idiot in the country to run around with weapons of war and then wonder why people, including their Orange Totem, get shot.

I guess I'm glad this incident didn't kill him, but if that broken boy's aim had been better, I'd still think Trump got what he asked for.

Too many MAGAs have put American democracy, the rule of law, and human decency in their gun sites. Most of us aren't among the gun-obsessed nor do we wish to stomp on the freedoms, and the people themselves, with whom we coexist, however uncomfortably at times. 

We still have the choice to practice diligent voting and compassionate justice activism.

And we can be kind to each other, seeking to sow better fruit and a better future. That is all.

• • •

Meanwhile there were the inadvertent casualties, the spectators killed and maimed as forced participants in a spectacle. The frolics of cruelty leave their victims.

• • •

I came of age in 1968, during the last era of directly political American violence. We've forgotten how good we've had it.

On vacay as the USofA simmers, literally and politically.

Take care of things, folks.

Our once and future king?

So says the Supreme Court majority. 

Are we going to put up with these black-robed partisans anointing a monarch? That's not our tradition.

I will now resume my vacation, writing from London where they set some precedents about what to do about kings who care only for themselves. Doubt that DJT knows about that. That was a messy process... not something anyone wants to live.

Blog and blogger on break for the month of July

Narrowboat, By RHaworth - Own work, Wikipedia

I'll be on one of these on English canals for a couple of weeks with Erudite Partner and her brother, moving it for the owner. We've seen pictures -- it looks pretty cushy. After that, several destinations in the UK.

Unless something earth shattering occurs, I'll try to stay off this blog -- but who knows? We never do know what to expect these difficult days.

Biden fights back

This is running in the battleground states. That's what they do with all that money they keep asking for. Will it help? It might. 

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

The test ahead

George Conway [@gtconway3d] used to be married to Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's ubiquitous liar to media, she of the "alternative facts."

In consequence, he found himself spending time in proximity to the Orange Madman in 2016 and '17 (that was before his divorce.)

He's a surprisingly complicated observer. Here arehis thoughts on our challenge in this season of tough choices: 

Source unknown; someone's Twitter

... Trump embodies the worst in *all* of us. For we are all human.

Trump revels in and glorifies our worst human traits: self-absorption, greed, mendacity, vindictiveness, ignorance, and so much else. He embodies all that we should aspire, and teach our children, not to be.

Worse yet, he gives permission for others to be their worst selves. And that is the ultimate danger he poses. He’s a threat to truth, honor, reason, and decency.

And that’s mostly without regard to policy—remember, Trump’s party is the party without a policy platform—although it does have implications for policy. But those are secondary.

First and foremost, Trump and Trumpism pose a moral test, not a political test. I hope and pray and believe that our nation will pass and survive it.

We know what we have to do; opportunities to work on the election will be many. This soul-trying moment demands our all.

Selfishness in a crisis does not serve

So I watched the debate. For a good bit of it that's more than figuratively true. Seeing that Biden appeared befuddled, I turned the sound off, to see whether Trump's phony gibberish was disorienting me. Nope -- Biden as leader didn't show up. 

I'm sympathetic to the old guy. He's been a good president, achieving far more with less broad support than most in my lifetime. He's got us as far on the climate sustainability path as a very reluctant, oblivious, nation would allow. His projects lean toward better lives and inclusion for all, with necessary attention to those who have least. Not perfect, but on the side of the good. 

I've read bushels of commentary -- what a mountain of anxiety and sometimes pure BS! I'm still prepared to work in the fall at winning the battleground state of Nevada (as I have every cycle since 2018) for the Dems and Biden, if that's where we end up.

But in my heart I'm with Bill McKibben -- environmentalist, founder of the old people's mobilizing group Third Act, and Presbyterian Sunday school teacher. Here's an abbreviated bit of his reaction to the debate. 

Give Joe some room

[With Thursday's debate} ... the tectonic plates shifted. And in ways that open up the possibility not just of decisively defeating Trumpism, but of pulling the country out of the polarized death spiral we’ve fallen into. But it’s going to take a while to play out, I think—time that we should grant Joe Biden, who’s at one of those hard, interesting, decisive points that come in the course of a life and of a nation.

... What happened of course was that Biden looked feeble. Yes, Trump lied with his usual feral energy, and yes the CNN moderators were utterly inept. But both those things were givens. What wasn’t a given was Biden’s performance. He lacked the agility and the poise to handle Trump’s onslaught, and it wasn’t close.

... An ineffective Biden would be a hundred times better (and a hundred times less worse, which might be more important) than any version of Donald Trump.

But again, that’s not enough. Politics is about changing people’s minds, channeling their intuitions, organizing their moods. Communication is the main tool for that. And Biden is no longer a consistently effective communicator. He’s got good people around him, he can and has made wise decisions, I am not worried about the operation of the Republic under his care. But clearly he can no longer count on his ability to rally Americans.

... There’s no shame in that. Most people never have that ability. Biden himself has never been a great speechifier, but across his long career he has always been able to communicate an effective in-your-corner regular-guy I’ve-got-this message. He’s been reassuring. He’s been a father figure, trending towards cool grandfather. But eventually you’re a great grandfather, and your hard-working days are behind you. Which is fine. You still have plenty to contribute, but that contribution is in the form of counsel, not leadership; it’s in the form of support, not of dominance.

He’ll be reluctant to admit it, because we all are reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, the things we lose as we age. (One of the odd secrets of aging is that you really don’t feel older from the inside). ...

... And I think Biden will get this. He’s a patriot, he’s spent his life in service, he clearly understands that the country is more important than any person. So he will steel himself to the task of watching the tape of last night’s debate, and he won’t make excuses. And then he may say ‘I’ve done my part well—I rescued America from Trump and from covid. And now I have one great duty left, which is to pass on the reins. So I’m freeing up my delegates to choose someone else.’

That’s not easy to do—save for the sad example of LBJ, no one’s ever really had to. It will take courage, and self-knowledge, and it will take time. But there is some time, thank heaven. Give him some time. It’s not that far from someone deciding that they need to leave their home and move into a retirement community; it’s an admission that one time is past and another coming.

... It’s not like we [would not] have time to adjust to someone new—our current news cycle guarantees we’d know all about a Whitmer or a whoever within days, and we wouldn’t have time to grow tired of her before November. She or someone like her would unleash the energy of the possible, at a moment when in fact we have huge possibilities. On energy, for instance: Biden has done a beautiful job of working the IRA through Congress, but the polling shows he’s never managed to make its importance sink in. He couldn’t explain its power last night, couldn’t summon people to a future that runs on the sun. That’s a crucial task, a way of giving young people hope as they face a daunting future. Not just young people—really, most Americans keep saying they’d like a fresher choice for our future. Suddenly there’s a moment when that could happen.

People keep saying ‘Biden won’t step aside, so we need to support him.’ And if he doesn’t we must.

But the very thing that makes him worth supporting—an old-fashioned commitment to something more than himself—is the thing that may convince him (and his wife, who actually loves him) to do the bold and interesting thing. To do the thing that could mark a new moment in our political life. If Biden chooses to stay in, so be it—I’ll work my heart out for him, and ungrudgingly. But even if he manages to win, we’ll still be stuck in the same poisonous paralysis we inhabit now. Someone sometime has to break us out of this stalemate, and it might as well be that right man for this moment, good old Joe Biden.

Trumpism is selfishness—that is its parts and that is its sum. With a powerful act of selflessness Biden can break the evil spell that selfishness has cast. It would be a remarkable thing for an old man to do, and a hell of a way to cap a career that began in the 1960s. Ask what you can do for your country!

Emphasis in the original.

Friday cat blogging

 

Sometimes it appears as if Mio and Janeway think their job is sitting for a portrait. 

Of course, at any moment, this tableau can turn into a whirl of fluffed tales and flying leaps. But meanwhile, what an appealing posture! Might they be trying to tell a stupid human that it is time to open a can?

Debate anticipation

I'm sitting around, planning to catch the debate between Joe and the Orange Sociopath, and remembering 2016.

Hillary Clinton describes her experience in the arena:

He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather.

Every pundit around has suggestions for how Biden should handle the guy. I don't. I figure Biden will use his years of experience and know what to do.

Remembering the Clinton-Trump debate reminds me of my mother-in-law, since deceased. (After some confusion, she decided that was the right label for our kinship; she needed some label to introduce me as family.)

I was staying with her on Martha's Vineyard that fall, being of some use to help with her increasing challenges. 

She didn't need any convincing that Trump was a bad man -- she'd seen a few. 

She decided we should watch the debate at a community gathering, so off we toodled along in her Mini, wheelchair jammed in the back. At the MV Hebrew Center there were plenty of other watchers, most also old, people she knew or thought she should know. She had superb social skills which helped when she met up with someone she couldn't quite remember. They chatted away

The debate was the one during which Trump stalked Clinton around the stage, using his bulk to loom over his opponent threateningly. The audience gasped at his boorish nonsense.

We all thought Clinton had "won," whatever that meant.

And then Trump managed a victory later that year -- and my life has been about turning back the bad man and MAGA's anti-democratic project ever since. 

Here we go again. Both Erudite Partner and I will be again working to win Nevada for Joe Biden and Senator Jackie Rosen. More to follow.

Good news from Calfornia and a surprising competitor

In this season of anxiety and political discontent, we're quietly chugging along out here on the Left Coast in the direction of a sustainable energy mix.

Here's Bill McKibben:

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy. ...

It would be easy to be all doom and gloom -- but citizen activism and applied science are making this happen.

Meanwhile, sheer economic self-preservation is making renewable energy boom in Texas. Yes, Texas!

Traditionally considered to be "oil country," Texas continues to have a heavy fossil fuel presence in the state. Though it may not seem like the likeliest candidate on the surface, the state is a pioneer of clean and renewable energy production. Texas generated roughly 15% of the country's electricity from all-renewable sources in 2022, according to the Energy Information Association.

While it was wind power that helped blow Texas to the top of the clean energy production charts, increased solar capacity in recent decades has helped its standing. Through 2022, Texas was the second-largest producer of solar energy behind California, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association. ...

 We're smarter big apes than we sometimes realize.

The Biden-Trump debate doesn't matter

It's not going to determine who is elected in November. 

Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone but himself. He certainly doesn't care about you. Well. maybe if you gave him a million bucks, and then only until he goes on to the next useful idiot.

This is not the sort of person most of us want around and we're going to prove that in the fall.

Michael Tomasky has a glimmer: 

... So, a theory for you: Maybe, just maybe, there is an army of Americans out there who may not call themselves liberal or progressive but who are anywhere from sort of turned off to massively repulsed by MAGA. And while Trump and Fox News and Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all the rest of them spend their days fulminating about America dying and hyping the authoritarian tsunami coming—talk that the mainstream media picks up and that dominates our discourse—there are in fact millions of Americans sitting quietly at home who detest these histrionic harbingers of hatemongering (a Safire-esque turn of phrase for you, since I mentioned Agnew).

They are out there. And they, I submit, are your new Silent Majority.

They’re not all liberal. But they definitely support abortion rights. They’re not rushing to join trans rights groups. But they want people to be treated with empathy and tolerance. They’re not reading gender-bending young adult fiction. But they recoil against censorship. They’re not socialists. But they want the government to do more for working- and middle-class people. They’re not Earth Firsters. But they believe climate change is real. They may still tell pollsters they’re wary of “big government.” But new interstates and bridges, and airport expansions, and new light-rail tracks, and expanded broadband access? They’re great with all that.

And most of all: They, just like Nixon’s old Silent Majority, seek normalcy, law and order, and someone to save the country from extremism. ...

... I would love to see the Democrats run with this idea that they are the new Silent Majority. It would infuriate the Republicans, who have assumed for 50 years that it is they who represent “regular America.” But with their slavish embrace of a sexual assaulting, classified document stealing, insurrection leading, twice impeached, quadruply indicted, and once (so far) convicted felon, they have waved goodbye to all that. They’re a noisy minority, and they’re alienating Americans by the millions.

Our task, as usual, is to find these folks and make sure they can and do vote.  So simple, so laborious.

I can't believe we have to go through this again

But we do.

On this 2-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, handing control over women's bodies to crackpot legislators and political hypocrites, this political ad seems about right to me. 

Bizarre and hurt-filled: white evangelical culture lived

Louisiana's new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments reminded me of an anecdote from NPR reporter Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

Raised in an insular mid-American white evangelical home and community, McCammon recounts a visit by a Holocaust survivor to her communications class at her Christian college.

Many of us in Dr. M's [Dr. Mendoza's] class were moved by [Felicia] Brenner's story of the horror her family endured after the Nazis marched into their home town in central Poland, forcing them into a ghetto. Near the end of the war, they were taken to Auschwitz, where her parents would die in the gas chambers. Out of a family of six brothers and sisters, only Brenner would survive the war ...

... Dr. M confided in me one day after class, some of her evangelical students seemed fixated on the fact that Brenner was Jewish and, therefore, according to our theology, not saved. Why invite her to speak to us as all, a student in one of the classes had later asked, if Jews were all going to Hell anyway? ... Dr. M watched in horror as other students chimed in to agree ...

... Brenner spent the last three decades of her life telling her story about the Holocaust and raising alarms about the dangers of antisemitism. In a grainy oral history video recorded in 1985, an interviewer asks her how she reflected on her experiences after many years. She's bitter, she says, not only at the Nazis but at the rest of the world who'd abandoned the Jewish people.

And she points to the Christians who've enabled and participated in those evils.

"We gave them the Ten Commandments. We gave them their Jesus. What do they want from us?" Brenner asks. "[They say], 'You killed Jesus,' which is wrong; we did not. But they crucify us and crucify us and crucify us, over and over again."

As Dr. M told me this story about my peers, I could feel that something had permanently shifted inside me. ...

Maybe force feeding kids the Ten Commandments might have, in a round about way, have taught this young evangelical some deep moral lessons, but this seems a vicious way to get there.

McCammon's Exvangelicals is a very intimate portrait of what it is like to grow up deep within the culture of white American evangelical Christianity. The author emerged to become a respected professional political and social journalist; she combines wide ranging interviews and sociological research with a memoir of her own experience of "unraveling." 

Her story is fascinating, as foreign to me as anthropologists' accounts of "primitive" cultures.

But, of course, the culture from which McCammon sprang is not at all foreign. It is very much a contemporary segment of this nation within which we live and in which we struggle to develop in competing directions.

Another anecdote from one of her interviewees:

Sheila Janca grew up as an "evangelical preacher's daughter" in what she describes as an abusive home in the Midwest in the 1960s and '70s. Any questions that bubbled up to the surface had to be quickly suppressed in favor of "blind faith." ... Janca remembers the humiliation of finally discovering, during a nursing school class, that men weren't actually missing a rib. Taking her cues from the creation story in Genesis, she'd believed that because God made Eve from Adam's rib, men had a different anatomy ...

That's pretty out there -- and still manifests itself all too often when red state legislators try to explain anything about female anatomy while prohibiting reproductive choice.

At once point, contemplating evangelicals' embrace of racism, Trump, and homophobia, McCammon finds herself wondering:

That made me think about my own parents, and [other] parents... How do you weigh someone's "good intentions" against the pain their actions cause? And when is it okay to be furious?

She sees child abuse in the strict parenting enjoined by evangelical leaders. She meets people who've left these faith byways -- the exvangelicals of the title -- who are recovering from religious trauma arising from apocalyptic vistas of Hell and a Last Judgment. Therapists report that an upbringing in this religious culture results in people who can never feel safe. However

... leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life's most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of "answers" -- about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you're sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It's often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve the community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world.

In this "wilderness," she finds new community among other exvangelicals. She reports that many reach a sort of truce with parents and other relatives who think they are going to Hell: they just avoid conversation.

There's a lot my own parents and I don't talk about, that we can't talk about. When we have tried over the years, the conversations inevitably end in misunderstandings, tears, and an everwidening distance. They spent years building a world for me that was intended to protect my spiritual safety and warning me not to leave it, only for me to feel anything but safe inside.

She goes on:

... Like so many exvangelicals I've spent much of my adult life slowly crawling away, trying to hang on to something for dear life, often feeling like a wrecked -- or shipwrecked -- soul, swimming for solid ground. Even now in middle age, nearly two decades out of that world, the nightmares still haunt me, as they do so many others. ...

... the evangelical impulse -- the idea that "people need the Lord," that we have been given a unique understanding of the Truth about the most complex questions about reality, and which we must impose through persuasion or coercion -- has never made much sense to me when I survey the complexities of the world, and the diversity of experiences and points of view. Even worse, that way of thinking seems to be at the root of so many evils that have been perpetuated throughout human history by religious fundamentalists and other extremist ideologues. I fear the same impulse is currently laying the groundwork for irreparable harm in our country and the world, and I fear that some of the people I have known and loved, and who've loved me, are being persuaded to aid and abet that evil.

... what mission can I subscribe to in good conscience, as an exvangelical? ... Grandpa noted that the purpose of life was something Jesus had also worried about. His advice was simple, even biblical: help others.

I'll give a plot point away here: it helps to have a gay non-believing grandfather.

This is a complicated, horrifying, and impressive book; highly recommended.

Humans might be smarter than we often seem

We have, I think, gotten to where we don't have to be told that the climate is changing -- warming and also becoming more unpredictably wild.

But perhaps more than we recognize, the human species -- subset United State-ians -- is finally doing something about reducing fossil fuel use by adding renewable energy sources.

Click on images to see more

Renewables are taking off -- the curve is escalating fast.

 

Solar and wind, enhanced by batteries, are beating the costs of old-fashioned oil and coal energy. As the graph highlights, we may have unthinkingly unbalanced the climate with older fuels, but human science is coming to our undeserved rescue.

 

That particularly means solar energy installations; the number just goes up and up.

 

The energy transition is hard and disruptive, but we seem capable of achieving it. And the transition in China, which matters even more than we do in the US of A, seems on a strong path.

 

All graphs snagged from the economist/curmudgeon Noah Smith.

Recognition where recognition is due

From the Washington Post:

Vice President Harris on Friday credited hospitality workers who mobilized supporters in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona with helping Democrats win the White House in 2020.

“It is because of your work and your support that Joe Biden is president of the United States and I am the first woman elected vice president,” Harris told members of Unite Here, which represents hospitality workers. “I’m really clear about how we got here.”

Harris made the remarks during a speech at Unite Here gathering in New York. The union recently elected Gwen Mills as their new president, the first woman to hold that position in the organization’s 130-year history.

Harris told the group that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and his allies work from a playbook to “make people feel alone, to make people feel small.

“But in the face of these attacks,” Harris said, “we here know the power of the collective.”

Truth! Four years later, the union will be there ditching Donnie again.

Friday cat blogging

This is where Janeway and Mio landed after a vigorous bout of chasing. He could get up to the lookout, but given his girth, he's more likely to hide underneath. If he emerges unwarily, she might yet jump him.

Might as well also show their favorite activity which gives a good sense of the sizes.

Dykes to watch out for -- Ukraine style

The Washington Post published a sweet feature [gift link] centering young Ukrainians, one of whom has been defending her country from Russian invaders in the army for nine years now.

Ukraine does not recognize these women's relationship. But in a country struggling for national freedom, they can at least take a role in agitation for LGBT+ freedoms. 

Mariia Volia, 31, a radio specialist now serving in the 47th Brigade in the Donetsk region near the eastern front, has spent nine years fighting for her country. She believes so strongly in Ukraine’s survival that she legally changed her last name to the Ukrainian word for liberty.

But as a lesbian, she — and other LGBTQ+ soldiers — doesn’t qualify for the same rights and benefits as heterosexual troops. ...

Russia’s war has propelled Ukraine ever closer to Europe. Ukraine’s survival depends on its ties to the West — and its image as a bastion of democracy at total odds with Russia’s authoritarianism and conservative social values. But for LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, the reality is more complicated.

LGBTQ+ individuals can serve openly in Ukraine’s armed forces. But several laws that would advance LGBTQ+ rights in Ukraine, including one that would expand hate crimes definitions to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and another that would allow same-sex civil partnerships, have stalled in parliament. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on the unequal treatment of soldiers, saying it was an issue for parliament. A spokeswoman for the ministry said that the ministry created an office for protection of servicemen’s rights to manage alleged cases of human rights violations in the armed forces. ...

The way forward is hard and will be bumpy, but you never know where folks might end up once a vista of freedom, however distant, comes into view.

Juneteenth: what we need to know

 The History Channel offers an accessible story:

"An attack on liberty for the sake of power ..."

For those of us unmoved by the supposed attractions of the MAGA movement and its felonious leader, it's all too easy to keep coming back to the question: what's wrong with these people? Why do they recoil from the possibility of a more humane, more just, more diverse country for all of us in order to latch on to a con man?

As in most broad movements, there are certainly multiple individual answers. Greed is not the only one. I think conservative New York Times pundit David French, who has been ejected from that set for rejecting MAGA, sees an additional explanation all too clearly:

... So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty. Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights. Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power. An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) — of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control. It’s not just that Catholics and Protestants have equal rights (a relatively recent development), it’s that Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

That last seems a fine, uncomfortable, contribution from a right wing Christian to Pride month! 

It's all too easy for me to see in French's description all too many local mid-American elites (like the kind I grew up around) who find MAGA so attractive.

Looking for their strong man

There has always been a cohort of highbrow Americans who were certain they are too smart, too important, too well educated to have to accommodate themselves to a messy, noisy, sometimes smelly democratic and popular system of government. Jacob Heilbrunn offers a survey of the type in America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Yes, Donald Trump's admiring Putin apologists and intellectual sycophants are nothing new.

In fact, autocrats and fascists have long been attractive to some Americans. As we lurched toward engaging in the Great War (World War I, 1917-18) on the side of the Brits and French, plenty of intellectuals thought we'd do better siding with the German Kaiser.

... intellectuals on the Right displayed an unease with mass democracy that manifested itself in a hankering for authoritarian leaders abroad. In the 1920s and 1930s, this set of beliefs or habit of mind, became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American devotees, including the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the aviator Charles Lindbergh ... Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet ... Today, a Hungarian strongman who is peddling volkisch ethnonational thought as a replacement pan-European ideology ... is the latest object of the Right's dictator worship ...

... they denounce "cancel culture," but are busily canceling anything that nettles them, from books to beer. They define freedom as the ability to suppress the views and beliefs, ranging from transgender rights to an independent media, that they revile. At bottom, they are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.

As Heilbronn points out, it has usually been the Left which has been charged in this country with admiring foreign authoritarian autocracies -- and sometimes we have. But we did so in the belief and hope that a different, anti-capitalist, organization of society would more completely promote the general welfare, in the words of the preamble to our country's Constitution. Sometimes we've been quite wrong in the foreign movements in which we located hope. But unlike these sad and despicable Right figures that Heilbrunn chronicles, we mostly didn't err out of snobbery, bigotry, racism, and injured self-importance. We wanted the greatest good for the greatest number. The Right wingers seem to me to have just wanted more goods and unearned respect for themselves.

America Last is not a book for everyone, but it sure captures a slice of our intellectual and political history that a lot of conservatives would prefer to see swept under a rug. This is one bit of a necessary history of the U.S. in the twentieth century.

Soul, empathy, and sport

I used to have no doubt about the unifying superpower of sports — how they turn strangers into teammates and teammates into family, how they make community out of motley spectators, how they raise the curtains for societal progress. I used to believe it was an imperishable kind of magic. I don’t anymore. Or rather, I can’t. Division has seized too much control. -- Jerry Brewer, Washington Post sports columnist

Mr. Brewer offers what is, so far, a four part series -- Grievance Games -- which illustrates why sometimes sports journalism is some of the most insightful social commentary around. 

“The first part of the project centered on exclusivity: who gets to play and who gets to lead,” [Arizona State sports historian Victoria] Jackson said. “In America, so many of the origins go back to White males controlling the access. The second part, and it’s still going, is inclusivity — people of color and women gaining access on the field and behind the scenes.

“That’s how sport reflects society, and the way it handles its own issues of exclusion and inclusion has a great influence.”

 ... For more than a century, American sports have manipulated politics for their benefit.

The most prominent leagues didn’t become lucrative entertainment giants because they kept the nation’s problems and politics from eating away at them. They succeeded precisely because they swallowed politics whole, turning the public craving for diversion into negotiating tactics to receive government subsidies and influence lawmakers to champion their most ambitious profit-boosting ideas, all under the guise of bringing people together.

When pressured to change, the gatekeepers return to where they have always gone in times of need, expecting the politicians and traditionalists to help them maintain their systems — while claiming to be apolitical. One group gets mocked and ordered to stick to sports. The other attempts, without apology, to stick it to sports.

“We don’t see the politics of the privileged,” Jackson said. “We only see the politics of those challenging privileged authority.”

A statue of Jackie Robinson was cut off at the feet by a White man who claimed he'd "stolen it for scrap metal" in Wichita in 2024

At the beginning of the modern era of there was Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947: The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?

How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.

[Robinson] wrote: “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Brewer calls contemporary sports media to account: The media’s role in fracturing sports: As societal grievance divides sports fans, will media members meet this moment or get trampled by it?  Brewer has much to say about the enterprise of which is he is part.

... The pursuit of truth now competes with the desire for attention. It’s no contest, sadly. Instead of reporting, instead of wondering and scrutinizing, instead of building trust and gaining insight and providing context, we exhaust too many diminishing resources to facilitate screaming. There is seldom enough fresh information to react to, so we regurgitate arguments, only louder, all in the name of provocation. ...

... At worst, it creates “a grievance industry for fans who love sports but hate the people who play them.” That’s the perspective of Dave Zirin, a journalist and author who lives at the intersection of sports and politics [at the Nation.] ...

... “In some ways, I think the evil empire has kind of won,” [ESPN commentator Robert] Lipsyte said. “I think sportswriting has gotten a lot better, but I think there’s no real call for it anymore. Fans don’t really want real journalism. They don’t want to read the truth about their entertainers. They really don’t want to read the truth about how predatory everything around sports can be. They used to have to listen, but there are institutions happy to give them exactly what they want.”

Brewer's struggle with sports journalism's infirmities moves naturally on to the hot topic of the moment: The panic over trans sports inclusion: In the fight over transgender participation in U.S. sports, the right to play is simply an opening act. In this extraordinary installment, Brewer cuts to the heart of what competiton means to any athlete, a struggle to be one's best self.

Before the hate, she changed in peace, transforming out of her body and into herself. She started to look the way she felt. She saw it in her breasts, hair, skin, muscles, fat, bones. She knew the person in the mirror.

Then she would go to the track — her refuge — and experience a different reality. As she ran, her legs would not fire the way they once did. She could not shift gears. She did a standard 150-meter acceleration drill, progressing from jog to stride to sprint every 50 meters. Her calf muscles begged her to stop. After the workout, she struggled to walk. She did not know this person.

“I could feel how abysmally slow I was,” she said. “It started to take a mental toll.”

So she did what athletes do. She spent more than a year adjusting to the effects of the gender-affirming hormone therapy. She relearned her body — every movement, every twitch — amending a lifetime of instincts. She dared to compete again. In December, at a college invitational, she had the nerve to win again.

Immediately, the success thrust her into the fiercest political battle in American sports. Sadie Schreiner became the latest exception made to seem like a widespread threat: a transgender women’s sports standout. ...

Brewer doesn't claim to know what it means that some people who've been born with one set of anatomy might feel themselves fully alive only when identifying with a different or even apparently constrasting gender. But he's not going to claim they don't exist among athletes and try to throw them out of the human family. He can see them as humans -- such a little thing -- and so huge too.

The links in the article are all gift links -- read Grievance Games for yourself.

Father's Day

When my father retired -- semi-voluntarily because the little company that had employed him for decades was sold -- my mother convinced him to join her on a trip to Ireland. She had done most of her traveling as an adult without him. He liked to stay home. But now he had no excuse; he would have to go along to the country of some of his ancestors.

This was his passport photo from the early 1970s..

He didn't much like Ireland: "They should put a roof over that country."

He was glad enough to stay home thereafter when she wandered. He was somewhat prickly, but funny. I  loved him very much.

Travel was not his thing; I fortunately inherited my mother's yen to see the world.

Happy Flag Day

Never was much for this pseudo-holiday, perhaps in part because it didn't get me a day off in grade school. But some people are into flags. We were already released for the season ... Via: @Out5p0ken

Friday cat blogging

I have an overseer. Yes, I do worry that all 20 pounds of Mio might arrive precipitously. But fortunately he's a pretty cautious boy.

Info-graphic palooza

An occasional  post featuring visual presentations of data that I found interesting. Sorry -- all too much of this about MAGA and its Orange-headed cult leader, but that is our fate.

On all of these, click for a larger image.

There's apparently a direct correlation between consuming newspapers and traditional TV news and supporting Joe Biden. If you get your news via social media or cable, you might like Mr. Trump. If you get no news at all, Trump's your guy. 

Yes -- winning in November is going to require a lot of unwilling conversations ...

The Daily Mail created a word cloud out of Trump's ravings.

 

If you are wondering what MAGA is so unhappy about, this might be it.

I don't see the media much reporting this, but evidently favorable opinions of Kamala Harris are increasing. 

 

What else is on the rise? Child labor in red states which have relaxed prohibitions on employing young people. Now there's a good capitalist response to a labor market where it is hard to hire ...

 

Belonging to a union sure makes a difference in your well-being. States which hinder labor organizing (RTW States) lag behind states where unionization is more common.