Category: Culture

Virtual emigration, anyone?


My 20-year-old Sony headphones, well worn but still working

Ken, who is now back in Scotland after being stuck in the U.S. for six months during the Covid-19 lockdown, writes: “I can’t tell you how detoxed I already feel from U.S. politics…. No more Trump signs, no more awful religion, no more right wing madness…. It feels good to be away, honestly.” Luckily for him, Ken has two passports. One of them is a beautiful red British passport, the ones I admire most while standing in the immigration lines. Meanwhile, here I am, with only my useless American passport, unable to breathe the free air of Europe this year, if only for a couple of weeks.

Republicans, while doing such great deeds to make America great again (with generous Russian assistance), say that we liberals would turn America into a flaming hellscape. Actually, what we liberals will do is make America much more like Europe.

We liberal Americans are torn in two directions right now. On the one hand, we’re obsessed with the news, terrified at how far right-wing Americans and their little Hitler will go to get the right-wing dictatorship they crave. And on the other hand we try to preserve our mental health by trying to shut it all out.

This post is about shutting it out.

Technology can bring us all the news (and propaganda) we can eat. But technology also gives us ways to shut out the public madness to protect our mental health. I actually have come to love my Covid-19 masks. I especially love my Covid-19 masks when I’m in a place where right-wingers are maskless. So far, I’ve not been harassed for wearing a mask, but there is a lot of that going on. My mask says to the glowering maskless: I don’t want to be around you. I suspect that’s part of why mask-wearers gall them so badly. It makes them feel low and dirty, when what they want is to feel superior and powerful. I’m considering wearing masks in public for the rest of my life, actually.

Unlike viruses, noise won’t kill you. But too much noise damages our hearing, and too much noise damages our mental health. Noise is not a huge problem for me now, given that I live in the woods. Nor do I find myself in noisy places much anymore. But, partly because I’m so accustomed to silence, I have a low tolerance for noise. I have come to be disgusted by the sound of loudspeakers blaring country music, for example. Once upon a time, country music could express vitality, energy, and optimism. Consider Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” (1958), or the stunning performance of “Cocaine Blues” by Joaquin Phoenix in the film “Walk the Line.” (See footnote for a musical factoid.)

The country music that I’m exposed to in public places these days is always about whining and masochistic suffering. The whining voice, apparently, is supposed to convey emotion. I find myself mocking it and making fun of it behind my mask, or muttering, “Why don’t you just go die and get it over with.” Some cultures are rotting all right, and not the ones in Europe.

Noise was a huge problem when I lived in San Francisco. It was sirens, buses, trains on Market Street, and loud motorcycles. Eventually I refused to go to restaurants, or at least the noisy ones, where the sound level was often over 100 decibels. I also fought the noise with some noise-canceling headphones. I bought headphones that were of poor quality, though, and they didn’t last long. (The headphones in the photo are good headphones, but they don’t do noise canceling.)

I was very excited when I heard that Apple is going to make some over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones. Apparently they’ll be called “Airpods Studio,” and the rumors at present are that they’ll be available in October. The price is said to be $349 or $399. That’s pretty pricey, but my guess is that they’ll be worth it.

Apple has figured out how to get amazing sound quality (and a wide range of frequencies) out of small devices, with low distortion. I’ve never used ear buds, because they don’t fit my ear well, and because buds can’t do noise canceling. For noise canceling, the ears must be covered with sound-suppressing padding. Another virtue of the Apple headphones, I’m sure, is that they’ll integrate well with other Apple devices — iPhones, computers, and watches. The headphones will surely have a microphone. And Apple knows how to make products that are hard to break and don’t wear out.

It’s a sad thing when we have to protect ourselves against the environment we live in. And yet, we don’t fret about protective items such as caps (against sun damage) and gloves (against skin damage). For now, more options are needed. Masks defend against viruses, and, as a bonus, tell maskless right-wingers that you’re not one of them. Noise-cancelling headphones not only keep out the ear-damaging noise and the soul-damaging music, they also help build a virtual bubble, one’s own private Edinburgh.

A musical aside: The Folsom Prison scene from “Walk the Line” contains a fine example of what musicians call “vamping.” Vamping is what accompanists do while they wait for the vocalist to start to sing. The accompanist(s) just keep an eye on the singer and repeats a short musical phrase, maybe only one measure long. In the Folsom Prison scene, the band vamps while Joaquin Phoenix delivers a monologue that sets his audience on fire. Then, at 0:51, he breaks a glass, signaling the band that he’s ready to go. When Phoenix returns to the microphone, a guitar cues the singer with a chromatic sequence of four eighth-notes, dominant to tonic. Then Phoenix proceeds to kill it with “Cocaine Blues.” Hollywood, on the dreaded and liberal West Coast, knows how to do this. Nashville seems to have forgotten how.

Update: Even in Edinburgh, noisy restaurants are a problem. From the Scottish newspaper The Herald: We shouldn’t have to wear ear defenders when eating out.

Not quite what the 2nd Amendment crowd expected


Inside a Ruger gun factory, from a Ruger “how it’s made” video

We’re starting to get data on who has been buying so many guns this year in America. Guess what. It’s not just old rural white guys. It’s women and African-Americans and liberals.

A news release on Aug. 24 from the National Shooting Sports Foundation says: “NSSF surveys revealed that 58 percent of firearm purchases were among African American men and women, the largest increase of any demographic group. Women comprised 40 percent of first-time gun purchasers. Retailers noted that they are seeing a 95 percent increase in firearm sales and a 139 percent increase in ammunition sales over the same period in 2019.” Also this month, Outdoor Wire reported on a survey of new gun owners and why they bought guns this year.

The white guys for whom the Second Amendment is the only part of the American Constitution that matters must have thought that they had a patent and a monopoply on owning guns. After all, liberals (or so they thought) not only won’t touch guns, they want to take them all away. And it seems not to have occurred to those white guys that, if they want to refight the Civil War or go around waving their guns at people, then African-Americans have the same rights as everyone else to own guns, to learn to use them, to acquire concealed carry permits, and even to acquire semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15’s that the militias have.

Yes, this is crazy. Let me hasten to say that I don’t want to live in an America in which both sides of the culture war are armed to the teeth, while the occupant of the White House and the Republican Party try to incite division and conflict. But even less do I want to live in an America in which only one side of the culture war is defenseless while the other side starts showing up in caravans of armed militia men, enraged by Republican propaganda, and where the police take sides.

After Barack Obama was elected president, gun sales in the U.S. went way up, because the right wing wanted to raise a bunch of money and stir up rage by telling people that Democrats would take away their guns. After Trump was installed in the White House, gun sales at first went down, because gun lovers felt safe. But that began to turn around as the situation darkened and as those who oppose Trump began to rethink things.

First came the Socialist Rifle Assocation, in October 2018. This group states its purpose as: “[T]o provide an alternate to the mainstream, toxic, right-wing, and non-inclusive gun culture that has dominated the firearms community for decades. We seek to provide a safe, inclusive, and left-leaning platform for talking about gun rights and self defense, free from racist and reactionary prejudices, while providing a platform for the working class to obtain the skills necessary for all aspects of community defense.”

A Reddit group for liberal gun owners seems to have been around since 2012. But its membership has surged under Trump. This group says about itself: “Gun-ownership through a liberal lens. This is a place for liberal gun-owners who want to discuss gun ownership absent the ‘noise’ of most right-leaning pro-gun forums. ‘Liberal’ here is ‘left-of-center,’ in U.S. political terms. Liberal/Leftist/Progressive. This is a place for those who would identify as Democrats, Progressives, Socialists, etc. That does not mean ‘classical liberal’ or libertarians.”

As much as we might wish for an America that is not armed to the teeth, it is not irrational for those who are despised by armed right-wing Americans to start acquiring their own guns. Though I had owned a pistol for ten years that mostly sat in a drawer, I too started rethinking things after Trump. I did a lot of shooting practice, and last year I got a concealed carry permit. I also bought (gasp) a semi-automatic rifle, and I know how to shoot that gun, too. As I see the political situation in which we now find ourselves, the American oligarchy, represented by the likes of Trump and inspired by the likes of Putin, has found its brownshirts. If some Americans seek to intimidate other Americans with guns, it probably was inevitable that those who are being intimidated will start working to level the playing field.

Still, I had a lot of concerns about the ethics involved, not to mention joining in what feels like cultural regression and a dangerous symptom of the erosion of American civic life. But, as I tried to think it through, I came across an article from the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs. The article is written in the usual dense language of philosophy, but I got the gist of it: It would be better if no one owned guns. But, if some people own guns, then others are justified in also owning guns, lest they become subject to domination and control. I concur with that argument. And, speaking only for myself, I don’t tolerate intimidation well.

Incidentally, during this election, I will be working with the voter protection project organized by the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party in my state. Here in my county, we have a history of voter intimidation of Democrats by Republicans outside the voting places. I’m afraid that is likely to be worse this year.


I took this photo in a recent election in the county where I live, outside a voting place. The truck belongs to a militia. That’s the Christian flag on the back.

A flood of new data about prehistory

Who We Are and How We Got Here. By David Reich. Oxford University Press, 2018. 368 pages.

During the past ten years, gene sequencing machines have become available that are thousands of times cheaper to operate than earlier machines. The analysis of human genes can yield an astonishing amount of information about prehistory, an area that until fairly recently could be investigated only through archeology and linguistics. Using these new machines, labs such as David Reich’s lab at Harvard University have been extracting DNA from thousands of bones from all over the world that were contributed to the project by archeologists. New data is becoming available faster than it can be analyzed. The scientists doing this work are publishing papers too fast for even specialists to keep up with them all, and the papers are too technical for non-specialists to follow. David Reich’s book is one of the first, and few, books on this area of research for general readers.

In writing about this book, I first should confess that my interests are Eurocentric. My own Y-DNA shows that I am descended from Celts and that my paternal ancestors were almost certainly in Ireland centuries ago. In fact I have the genetic marker for descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages, a semi-historical Irish king who seems to have left almost as many descendants as Genghis Khan. Reich actually mentions Niall of the Nine Hostages in this book as an example of inequality — how genetic research shows that powerful men were able to leave far more descendants than less powerful men. What is frustrating to me, though, is that when my Celtic ancestors first appear in history, it’s a history written by Romans, whose treatment of the Celts actually was a genocide in Gaul, and a cultural genocide elsewhere. The Celts make a brief and surely distorted appearance in ancient imperial histories, and then the trail goes cold.

Until geneticists got into the study of prehistory, our sources were archeology and linguistics. Those fields have done a remarkably good job of throwing a light on Iron Age and Neolithic prehistory in Europe. But many mysteries remained. Not long ago, I wrote here about two important works in this area — David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language; and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World.

By merging what we have learned from genetics, archeology, and linguistics, we now have a pretty good overview of the migrations and innovations that shaped Europe. That story is of course too complicated to get into here. But briefly: The story of European prehistory goes back to the times when modern humans, as we call them, lived alongside Neanderthals, tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, many Europeans have up to 2 percent or a little less of Neanderthal genes. But it was the two most recent waves of migration that mostly made Europe what it is today. The first recent wave was about 10,000 years ago, as glaciers receded and Europe grew warmer. That wave of migration brought farming to Europe. The second wave was about 5,000 years ago. That wave brought the wheel, wagons, horses, and the Proto-Indo-European language. Europeans today are largely of two genetic haplotypes — R1a in the east, more toward Poland, and R1b in the west, peaking in Ireland and the west of Britain.

Though the archeologist Marija Gimbutas had found strong feminine influences in parts of Paleolithic and Neolithic Europe, there is strong evidence from genetics that the migration that brought the wheel to Europe was male-oriented, hierarchical, and often violent — little different from the Europe of recorded history into the 20th Century. Still, evidence is strong that, around 50,000 years ago, humans developed the capacity for complex behaviors and conceptual language. And here we are today, still struggling between enlightened and primitive behavior, cooperation and competition, caring and cruelty.

Though I am Eurocentric, David Reich is less so. There are interesting chapters on India, as well as Native Americans. And there is a fascinating chapter on inequality.

Reich’s book was not well received by some scholars. The book gets too close to hot-button issues such as racial differences or the lack of them, and the concerns of marginalized people. There are those who would shut down this kind of research. Reich’s book contains an extended argument for the necessity of accepting hard science, wherever it leads. There is no doubt that this area of research is being mined by thugs such as white supremacists. Reich very much acknowledges the projects of those thugs and shoots down many of their fallacies. But anyone interested in this area should be very wary in particular of what turns up in Google searches. It’s an area infested by crackpots who troll each other with crackpot theories.

So far, we have only scratched the surface of what we stand to learn. When I was halfway through this book, I already was feeling a frustration that no scholarship is available that seeks to connect written ancient history with what we know about prehistory from archeology, linguistics, and genetics. Near the end of this book, Reich clearly describes the work that needs to be done to write precisely that book. Many scholars are working in that direction. Within the next ten years, I expect such a book from — who else — the Oxford University Press.

Oxford, Tolkien, and the fair speech


From my visit to Oxford, August 2019

A few days ago I finished my third reading of The Two Towers, and now I’m on book 3. The landscapes of Middle-earth are lucid in my imagination. And yet I find myself thinking again and again about Oxford. This story (the best story, I believe, in English literature) was born out of the imagination and knowledge of J.R.R. Tolkien. But Tolkien’s imaginary world could never have existed if our real world did not have the University of Oxford in it.

Yes, Oxford is one of the greatest seats of privilege in the world. Oxford has drawn heavily on the power and wealth of the British Empire. But that shows us, I believe, that no empire can sustain itself century after century — at least in any form that can do some good in the world along with the harm that empires do — unless it invests in all the things that the University of Oxford stands for.

Part of what I marvel at and am extremely grateful for is that it has been my privilege that the language of Oxford is my mother tongue. That is one thing that I can share with Oxford, though otherwise I have never had scrap nor morsel of its privilege. No matter how many languages a person may learn to speak later in life, it is the mother tongue that is connected most intimately with our minds and emotions. For years I have said, partly as a joke, that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings would be impossible to translate into French. Tolkien’s story, and Tolkien’s language, are Anglo-Saxon to the bone, alien, like oil and water, to Latin.

In book 2, The Two Towers, I found myself re-reading and savoring the passages in which Faramir interrogates Frodo, and in which trust develops between them as Faramir decides to give Frodo as much help as he can, though they both are far from home. Faramir speaks “the fair speech.” Others in the story speak the fair speech, too. The elves for example. But though hobbits are to some degree hicks, Frodo acquired the fair speech, from his mentors.

This dialogue between Faramir and Frodo is some of the most perfect dialogue in the story. Tolkien polished every word and phrase. Consider what Tolkien as an Oxford professor was able to draw on, all products of Oxford: the long history of the English language all the way back to German and beyond; the refinements of English diplomacy; the conventions by which the privileged (Faramir was a steward’s son) expressed (or displayed) their noblesse and fine breeding. I’ll make another joke at the expense of the French. To be polite in French, one must double the number of words. It’s difficult in French to be both courteous and concise. Whereas in English a high rhetorical tone can get straight to the point.

On the train from Edinburgh to Oxford, as the train approached Oxford, a Ph.D. student whom I had talked with on the train said, “I speak acquired English.” I replied, “I understand that, because I speak acquired American.” It was not just language that we had in common. It also was a kind of language that we had in common, an echo of the “fair speech.” Americans are quite capable of the fair speech, scarce as it is these days in our public discourse.

I have heard it said about us American Southerners — at least a kind of Southerner in short supply hereabouts — that, when there is conflict, whoever is most polite wins. If that is true, then I suspect it is something we learned from the English. Pray that we all can keep it, even though, as with many Southerners who have an aptitude for language, I will cut a person to shreds with my tongue when I think they need it. Too many do. And you can get shot for mere words, these days more than ever.

Even if we have to turn to literature to hear the fair speech, it’s something we ought to do from time to time. In dark times such as these, there is something that is encouraging and healing about it.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer. Simon & Schuster, 1959. 1,252 pages.

If I had read this book five years ago, I would have read it pretty much purely as history. Barack Obama was still president of the United States. Having elected its first black president and experienced eight years of economic recovery with competent, scandal-free government, America seemed to have outgrown its worst vices. Now we know that America has not outgrown its worst vices.

In writing this post, three times I’ve written something angry, and three times I’ve deleted it. Instead of venting my anger over the ugly turn in American history that we are now living through, I think I’ll just say this: There is no better time to read this book than now. Adolf Hitler, of course, was character number 1 in this history. Just behind him were Hermann Goering (who cheated the hangman with suicide by cyanide) and the others who had great power who were hanged at Nuremberg. There were hundreds more with lesser roles whose names are on the historical record. And there were the millions of nameless Germans who should have known better but didn’t. If you read this book now, you will recognize these people, because today people just like them are still with us. That these people today have not acquired the power to do the damage the Nazis did, or that they’d be satisfied with domination and oligarchy and anti-democracy tyranny rather than genocide, says little about their character. They are the same people.

We are fortunate that so many records survived to document this history: the secret government records captured in Berlin, the diaries, the letters, and the Nuremberg interrogations, depositions, and testimony. Those are the sources that Shirer used to write this history.

Shirer writes, in his afterword to the 1990 edition:

“Perhaps it will help too if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”

If only the worst people among us could recognize what they are and how eager they are to be misled. But, because of what they are, I doubt that they ever will.

Germany, redeemed

Germany today: Hamburg, Nov. 12, 2017

I have only about 150 pages to go in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I just finished reading the horrifying chapter on the atrocities of the Nazis. Shirer also describes what the Nazis had in mind, had they won the war. They would have established a vast slave empire and police state reaching all the way from France and Great Britain to Russia. Having already exterminated millions during the war, millions more would have been exterminated. Everyone who survived, including the French and the British, would have been enslaved to the Germans, given enough only to subsist, with no rights to speak of.

But consider Germany today. While the American democracy is hanging by a thread under the depraved Donald Trump and the now-dangerous Republican Party, Germany is a model of how the world could be. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, is now often referred to as the leader of the free world. Trump and the Republican Party literally are trying to turn the United States into Russia — authoritarian, lawless except for police in the streets, looted by, owned by, and run by, the extremely rich.

We Americans need to study Germany. First, we need to study what Germany was at its worst. There probably is no better single source than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Then we need to study what Germany is today. There we will find a roadmap for what we Americans must do once the Republican Party is put out of power.

As I see it, Germany’s case affirms what I as a liberal American see as the object of our political struggle. That is that the answer to America’s biggest problems — whether inequality, poverty, poor health, racism, appalling ignorance, and even gun violence — is the same single answer. That is the enactment of the entire liberal project, in which the destination is democratic socialism, equality under the law, the redistribution of wealth downward instead of upward, a highly regulated economy that emphasizes shared prosperity rather than elite profit, a real commitment to real (and free or affordable) education from childhood to university, and fixes in our laws and Constitution that have allowed corrupt, oligarchic, anti-democracy forces to gain control. That we as Americans can’t afford these things is one of the many lies that prevent our having them. America is outrageously rich, and that wealth is produced by all Americans, not by our untaxed lords-of-the-universe CEOs. All must share in that wealth. Germany and the other socialist democracies prove the case. When polls ask Americans what they want, once you strip away all the loaded words such as “socialist,” what Americans want is to be like Denmark. Or Germany.

Had Hitler won the war and established his vast slave empire and police state, it could not have lasted. The people of Europe, including the Germans, would not have put up with it for long.

Having almost finished this history of Germany (from about 1930 to 1946), I find that I very much want to know what happened next in Germany. I know that it was bleak in Germany for many years after Hitler, not least because I lived through the Cold War. Russia went one way, of course, and the NATO allies went another. I used to listen to Soviet propaganda from Radio Moscow on shortwave radio. I also listened to Radio Deutsche Welle. (Both Radio Moscow and Deutsche Welle broadcast in English, with stations aimed at the United States.) And there was the BBC World Service, as there is now. I knew as a young American who would have been sent to Vietnam, had my date of birth not drawn a high number in the lottery, that what had happened, and was happening, in Europe mattered. But it was all so complicated, and I knew far too little history. But I was learning.

I have never been to Germany. After this book, I now find that I would like to see the rebuilt Berlin. As a old pagan, I wouldn’t give two pfennigs for all the churches in the world (except for the Gothic cathedrals). Rather, it’s to the concert halls that one goes to be immersed in what is best in European culture, and Germany has a fine new one, at Hamburg. I’m guessing that Germans today might have a lot of interesting advice for us Americans, if we Americans care to go there and get it. I am guessing that Germans are quite rightly proud of what they have accomplished, not only since Hitler, but also since they pulled down the wall.

In any case, I find that I feel that I don’t greatly blame the Germans for Hitler. They should have known better, certainly, and some resisted, though they were cowed. But there are just two many examples from all over the world of what happens when a certain kind of people gain power, as Trump and his base have done in the United States. It would seem to be a way of being to which all human societies everywhere are susceptible. It is authoritarianism, the will to dominate, the need to scapegoat, a strange tolerance for — even an attraction to — cruelty and violence, an uncaring attitude toward unfairness and injustice, a worshipful devotion to the purity of ideologies (or theologies), a susceptibility to being deceived and for deceiving oneself. The degree of fanaticism varies, as does the level of power these people acquire. But they are the same people, and today they are 25 to 30 percent of the American population. There are still such people in Europe, to be sure. But they are outnumbered. They usually are outnumbered. But the defects of their character leads them to play dirty. Part of the purpose of laws and constitutions is to keep such people out of power as the minority they are. If the time ever comes when the majority of people truly want to subsist in a slave empire and police state, then by all means let’s have it. But that won’t happen, because a democracy with the support of the majority doesn’t have to be a police state, just as a failed democracy without the support of the majority has to be a police state, if there is to be the law and order that authoritarians love so much: lawlessness and loot for them in their palaces, à la Putin and Trump, and law and order for the rest of us, with jackboots in the streets.

How strange — and encouraging — it is that, having almost finished with this book about Germany, the Germany of today is something very different. I’d pack my bags for a visit today, but Americans aren’t allowed in, owing to authoritarian, ideological, know-nothing misgovernance. And anyway my cat wouldn’t let me go. But I will get there.

Update: As a minority, these crazies will always be with us. Just this morning, the New York Times posted this story on far-right activities in Germany. Note the references not only to Trump, but also to Russia.

The long history of hiding in the forest


Deer in the Forest. Painting by Eugen Krüger, Germany, 1832-1876. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

I’m about three quarters done with William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

On April 9, 1940, Hitler’s armed forces started their attack on Denmark and Norway. Tiny Denmark fell quickly. Norway had the means to fight, and forests in which to hide. With Oslo under attack, the King of Norway and the members of Parliament left Oslo on a special train for Hamar, 80 miles to the north. Twenty trucks headed north with the gold of the Bank of Norway, and three more trucks with the secret papers of the Foreign Office. “Thus,” writes Shirer, “the gallant action of the garrison at Oskarsborg had foiled Hitler’s plans to get his hands on the Norwegian King, government and gold.”

The Norwegian Parliament actually met at Hamar, with only five of its two hundred members missing, writes Shirer. But when they heard that German troops were approaching, they moved again, this time to Elverum, a few miles from the Swedish border. The Germans sent a negotiator to talk with King Haakon VII. The king received the negotiator, but the negotiator was told, “Resistance will continue as long as possible.” Hitler was angry. On April 11, the German air force was sent “to give the village of Nybergsund [where the king was hiding] the full treatment.”

Shirer writes:

“The Nazi flyers demolished it with explosive and incendiary bombs and then machine-gunned those who tried to escape the burning ruins. The Germans apparently believed at first that they had succeeded in massacring the King and the members of the government. The diary of a German airman, later captured in northern Norway, had this entry for April 11: ‘Nybergsund. Oslo Regierung. Alles vernichtet.’ (Oslo government. Completely wiped out.)

“The village had been, but not the King and the government. With the approach of the Nazi bombers, they had taken refuge in a nearby wood. Standing in snow up to their knees, they had watched the Luftwaffe reduce the modest cottages of the hamlet to ruins. They now faced a choice of either moving on to the nearby Swedish border and asylum in neutral Sweden or pushing north into their own mountains, still deep in the spring snow. They decided to move on up the rugged Gudbrands Valley, which led past Hamar and Lillehammer and through the mountains to Andalsnes to the northwest coast, a hundred miles southwest of Trondheim. Along the route they might organize the still dazed and scattered Norwegians forces for further resistance. And there was some hope that British troops might eventually arrive to help them.”

On April 29, Shirer writes, they were taken aboard a British cruiser and were moved to Tromsö, far above the Arctic Circle, where they set up a provisional capital. Eventually German troops got to them, though, and on June 7 King Haakon and his government were taken to London, where they remained in exile until the end of the war.

I wonder if there is a movie about this. If not, there ought to be. The idea of a King and a parliament hiding in the woods to escape a burning village, then fleeing through a rugged valley and mountains, is exceedingly dramatic. These images stuck in my head for days, and, as I thought about it, I realized that there is a long history of hiding in the forest.

Sometimes it is good guys hiding from bad guys. Sometimes it is bad guys hiding from good guys. In reality as well as in stories, forests are a refuge and redoubt (think Robin Hood). But also in reality and in stories, forests are a dark place of danger (think Mirkwood, or Hansel and Gretel). This polar tension between forests as refuge and forests as dark and dangerous places makes them a powerful idea in the human psyche.

Very few newspaper articles stick in my mind for years, but this one did. It’s from the New York Times, with the headline “Why We Fed the Bomber.” The bomber the headline refers to is Eric Rudolph, a North Carolina (!) terrorist (anti-gay and anti-abortion) who planted a lot of bombs between 1996 and 1998. For years, he hid out in North Carolina’s Nantahala Forest, by, according to Wikipedia, “gathering acorns and salamanders, pilfering vegetables from gardens, stealing grain from a grain silo, and raiding dumpsters in Murphy, North Carolina.”

Or consider the Russian family that lived in the wilds of Siberia for 40 years, unaware of World War II. Or consider the Vietnamese soldier who hid in the jungle for 40 years. Or Barry Prudom, a murderer who hid in Dalby Forest in northern England.

In Googling for this post, I found a huge amount of material — more than enough for a book, a book that I would very much like to read, if someone would write it. It seems that the Germans, in particular, have preserved a fascination with the forest. This article, “The Myth of the Wild German Forest,” contains some excellent bits of history:

“Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a famous Roman senator and historian, was the first to write about the forests in the land of the ancient Teutons, a Germanic tribe. His brief study Germania founded the myth of the eerie forest that housed barbarians and robbers alike — a forest so dense that it helped the Teutons keep the Romans off their backs…. The forest is still today regarded as a symbol of German identity, celebrated over the centuries by poets, writers and painters. Other European cultures that also have dense forests have a more distanced relationship to their woodlands.”

I would quickly become disheartened if I wrote here about the American attitude toward its forests. But certainly we do still have them, if we can keep them. A book that I reviewed here a few years ago, Ramp Hollow: the Ordeal of Appalachia, mentions that the early subsistence settlers of the Appalachian Mountains very much depended on the forests for their survival. From that book I learned that you don’t necessarily have to have a pasture to keep a cow. You can keep a cow in the woods. In fact, this article from Cornell University recommends keeping cows, sheep, and ducks in the forest. The article calls this “silvopasturing.”

When I was looking for land, before I bought the abbey’s five acres of woodland, I did not at first realize how much I wanted woodland. Anyone who has had supper with me out on the rear deck, when the wind is blowing, has heard me say: “Just listen. The wind in the trees sounds just like the sea.” The sea and the forest — both deep, dark, vast, mysterious, and dangerous — are closely connected ideas in the human psyche. Think of the magic of a path in the woods, especially if you don’t know who or what made the path, and you don’t know where the path is going. Tolkien invokes this idea, with great effect. I don’t think I’d be able to live in a place without either the sea or the woods.

I very much feel here that tension between the two faces of the forest: the forest as an eerie, dangerous place; and the forest as a place of refuge, where one can even find food and water. I confess that, those few times that I’ve had to venture into the woods alone at night (to look for a chicken who didn’t show up at bedtime, for example), I’m scared, and I have to buck myself up for it. Even inside the house, the nighttime noises can be scary: the alien hooting of a barred owl, or a pack of coyotes on the ridge, the snorting of a buck, or — worse — the sounds you can’t identify. My friend Ken, who doesn’t like herds of cows much more than he likes grizzly bears, has written about the primal importance of living in a place where there are things that are a bit scary. And yet, in the light of day here, when the birds are singing, I’m like the raccoons and deer: the woods make me feel safe.

It took me a while to realize that, because of my last and very difficult year in San Francisco, I developed a genuine case of post traumatic stress. It was a number things: a house fire in an old Victorian (the San Francisco fire department saved my dog, and I subsequently moved), some middle-sized earthquakes, the lingering uneasiness of feeling that cities were under attack after 9/11, the backstabbing and dirty dealing that accompanied the merging of the staffs of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, and, probably worst of all, a water accident that occurred in my fancy fifth-floor apartment that flooded the apartments below me all the way to the basement. There was a huge fight over insurance, and not until the statute of limitations ran out did I finally feel safe from the threat of having my retirement destroyed by lawsuits (and probably bankruptcy). During that last year I had a recurring dream in which I had to cross the entire United States from west to east, skulking through the woods — always the woods — traveling only at night, and keeping away from the yellow lights of settlements and barking dogs. Eventually, in those dreams, I came to an abandoned house deep in the forest. Sometimes the place was almost grand; sometimes it was a hovel with a rotting roof and rotting floors. It was the refuge that I was looking for.

And now, this is that place.

If I built enough fence to surround four acres of woods, I could even have a cow.

Update: Ken has emailed me with the names of two movies, one about the King’s flight through the forests of Norway, and the other about a similar winter journey during the same period.

The King’s Choice (2017)

The Twelfth Man (2018)

The other pandemic: Trumper psychosis


Hitler in Nuremberg, 1935. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Two pandemics are at present raging across the United States. Both are particularly severe in the West and South, where, for similar reasons, people are particularly likely to be infected. One pandemic, of course, is a biological pandemic, Covid-19. The other is what Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee has called “the mental health pandemic.”

Lee published a book about this in 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She also has an article this week at Salon:

Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s psychosis has infected his followers. Here’s how to get them better

I think it must have been Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who originated the concept of psychic epidemics. Jung frequently mentions psychic epidemics in his writings, and, as I recall, Freud and Jung frequently discussed psychic epidemics in their letters. I’m aware that everything about Freud and Jung is now in dispute among the intelligentsia. But even if you dispute whether Freud’s and Jung’s psychological theories are good science, there is no disputing the fact that both of them were brilliant and well-placed cultural observers, at a dangerous time in world history. Jung is famous for having said (in 1936), “I saw it coming. I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant…” [See footnote at end.]

What Jung was referring to was what he called an archetype. Jung was claiming that his psychoanalysis of German patients in 1918 found similar, and pathological, stirrings in his patients’ minds. He called that “the blond beast.” If that was true in 1918, then surely today, I would argue, Donald Trump is feeding a similar archetype in the minds of his “base.” I thought for a while about what we might call it, and the term I ended up with is “the white barbarian.” The American white barbarian is way beyond stirring in its sleep, though. It’s in the streets. This morning I was shocked by the news that a Democratic Party headquarters in Arizona was destroyed in an arson attack. If you’re on Facebook and haven’t removed all the right-wingers from your feed, then it’s easy to see that Facebook is a key trolling ground for white barbarians. Images from Trump rallies have captured white barbarian faces for history. Hordes are their most hospitable habitat, but they also operate individually, as in the photo below, or as with the pathetic “pizzagate” gunman who fired his AR-15 inside the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, where he was told that Democrats were holding children as sex slaves. He subsequently was sentenced to four years. White barbarians in a state of psychosis seem capable of believing anything they’re told.

In her Salon article, Bandy Lee says that, to keep their followers psychotic, an “influential figure” with his “severe pathology” must create and maintain an atmosphere of psychological contagion. Hitler used rallies for that, as does Trump. One of Trump’s biggest political problems at present is that he can’t hold his rallies because of Covid-19. Covid-19 also has forced the Republican Party to cancel its national convention, which Trump desperately needed to keep his base of white barbarians in a state of psychosis. During the Bush-Cheney administration, Bush and Cheney brilliantly and diabolically deceived the media into getting almost the entire country into a state of war fever, as preparation for invading Iraq. In March 2003, only 17 percent of Americans strongly opposed invading Iraq. I was among the 17 percent. It is a terrifying thing to see such a large majority of one’s country deceived into a state of madness in support of violence. Republican politics is now completely dependent on public psychosis to achieve its ends — and has been since Newt Gingrich (1995) and Fox News (1996). An irrational, uncaring, authoritarian and anti-democracy politics that provides no benefits to its voters but only to its richest contributors can’t do things any other way.

A big topic with the rational intelligentsia at present is whether conditions will get better after Trump goes down. Many argue that things will not get better, that the Republican Party will just find new ways to keep its base in a state of rage and psychosis. At present, I’m more optimistic. I think that the period between now and Nov. 3 may be very dangerous, but if Trump goes down in a landslide — as it appears he would if the election were held today — then I think the Republican Party will have to conclude that its politics of rage and deception and keeping its base mentally ill won’t work anymore, as demographic change leaves them behind and as people see through their deceptions. Still, it’s a very dangerous party machinery that can lie and deceive its way to war with only 17 percent (of very well-informed people, I might add) resisting the contagion. Why are some of us immune? Why are some so susceptible? What can be done to improve the odds of recovery for those who have gone mad? There is much to think about there, but it will have to be a post for some other day, after Trump is turned out of the White House.


These two white barbarians, by the way, have been charged with felonies for pointing their guns at dark-skinned protesters. Note that her finger is on the trigger, an absolute no-no for anyone who has been trained to use guns.

Note: The quote from Jung comes, I believe, from the Tavistock lectures a year before World War II. I believe the quote is accurate, and much has been written about it. The “blond beast” probably refers to Nietzsche. See more here.

Update: For a long time, no matter what the right wing in America was up to, comparisons to Germany were out of bounds in public discourse. That taboo has fallen. Here is yet another piece in the New York Times drawing comparisons between Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s America:

American Catastrophe Through German Eyes: Trump says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens. In 1933, Hitler issued his ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.’

I wore out my first copy

It was 1976, I believe, when I bought a copy of the 1943 edition of Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking at a junk shop. I am not hard on books, so I’m sure that the book was in fairly rough condition when I bought it. Over the years, though, the fabric peeled off the spine, and the covers came loose. Recently I found another copy of the 1943 edition on eBay and bought it for $28.

Why the 1943 edition? The 1943 edition is the wartime edition, which emphasized frugality and cooking from scratch. There have been many editions of The Joy of Cooking (see the Wikipedia article). According to Wikipedia, the 1936 edition emphasized meals that could be made in 30 minutes or less, using frozen and canned foods (yuck). The 1951 edition sounds interesting, though I have never seen a copy. Later editions, as far as I’m concerned, are probably poor references for truly traditional home cooking in America, which is what this book is good for.

In the 2009 film “Julie & Julia,” there is a funny scene in which Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) encounters Irma Rombauer in a publisher’s office. Rombauer is presented as dowdy and a bit of a hick. Compared with Julia Child, no doubt she was. But, in my opinion, though learning to cook other nations’ cuisines competently is a skill greatly to be desired, there is no shame in honoring, loving, and preserving one’s native cuisine. The 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the best reference I have ever seen for traditional American cooking.

I rarely follow any recipe exactly. But I do consult many, many recipes, just to get a concept before making my own version. My modifications are usually about making things healthier, with a bias toward California cuisine and Mediterranean cuisine. Though just about every recipe in The Joy of Cooking 1943 is made from scratch, she does use pantry staples that we all still use — tinned tomatoes, tinned salmon, and cracker crumbs, for example. (I don’t keep crackers in the house because I like them too much, but I recently bought some Ritz crackers — for the first time in my life, as far as I can recall — to make a traditional squash casserole.)

Part of the value of The Joy of Cooking 1943 is its completeness. You’ll find a reference for just about everything your grandmother (or great-grandmother) used to make. I was shocked a few months ago, though, when I discovered that there is no recipe for pimento cheese, which is an American classic.


Click here for high-resolution version


Click here for high-resolution version

Cucumber sandwiches

Here in the U.S., cucumber sandwiches are thought to be an English thing. I’m not sure if that’s true, though it sounds reasonable, and stores here sometimes sell what we call “English cucumbers.”

In any case, when I was a boy in rural North Carolina, cucumbers were plentiful, but I had never heard of a cucumber sandwich. Tomato sandwiches were the only kind of garden sandwiches we knew. I probably first got the idea of cucumber sandwiches from literature. For years they’ve been staple when good cucumbers are to be had and if I’ve bought store-bought bread in a moment of weakness. The cucumber in the photo was picked yesterday at dusk. It went straight into the refrigerator and spent the night there.

The tomatoes are coming along, but I’m still some days away from the first tomato sandwich. I’ll have to buy another loaf of bread.

Several varieties of cucumber are grown in these parts, but I grow only old-fashioned pickling cucumbers. I haven’t pickled any for several years, but if the cucumber harvest exceeds what I can eat fresh, then I’ll make some refrigerator pickles.