Culture – Page 27 – Into the Woods

Buffalo: Who knew?

Quorn cutlets in Buffalo sauce with mozzarella

I was Googling for ideas for what to do with Quorn faux-chicken cutlets. I came across chicken breasts in Buffalo sauce with mozzarella. Hmmm. But what the heck is Buffalo sauce?

A little Googling revealed Buffalo sauce to be a zesty sauce served with chicken wings. It originated in Buffalo, New York. I put two and two together and also surmised that “Buffalo wings” must have gotten their name from Buffalo, New York. Googling showed that to be true.

The Quorn faux-chicken cutlets are the most difficult form of Quorn to deal with, I’ve found. It’s hard to overcome Quorn’s dryness and mealy texture. The faux chicken nuggets, and the faux ground beef, are easier to deal with — if nicely sauced.

Except for the Quorn, the supper above is very local. The greens and peppers came from a neighbor’s garden. The sweet potato came from a sweet-potato farm just up the road.

That’s Buffalo china in the photo, in addition to the Buffalo sauce. Buffalo china was made in Buffalo, New York. My post on Buffalo china is the most Googled post I’ve written here in more than ten years of blogging. Buffalo china is simply the best commercial china ever made. The abbey’s everyday dishes, bought piece by piece on eBay, are Buffalo china.

Way to go, Buffalo.

Chicken pot pie, Quorn version

Click here for high-resolution version.

The Quorn chicken nuggets make a very fine chicken pot pie. I previously wrote about Quorn here, and Scottish meat pies here.

I am acquiring the opinion that crusts for pot pies and meat pies don’t need to be flaky, and that lower-fat hot-water crusts work just fine. The 4-inch non-stick spring-form pans work great. The pies come out of the pan free standing and intact.

Seasoning for the chicken pot pie needs a good bit of celery, some peas, and maybe a bit of carrot. I used a white gravy made with olive oil.

I bought the sweet potato this very morning from a local farmer. In fact, I bought five pounds of them. He was selling potatoes at a local fall festival. The Brunswick stew was free. Consequently they made the biggest pot of stew I have ever seen. I used the word “pot,” but “cauldron” would be equally valid. I also wrote recently about what archeology tells us about the prehistoric Celts of the British Isles. We know that cauldrons were a status item, and we know that cauldrons were used for feasts. I strongly suspect that the local tradition of serving chicken stew and Brunswick stew to one’s neighbors at harvest festivals is a very old tradition. That tradition is still very much alive here.

The Democrats’ table at the local harvest festival

Heathen enchantment … and Alexander Borodin

Don’t click to listen yet!

Maybe we could use a little music right now to take our minds off of politics. A few days ago, I was writing here about the project of the re-enchantment of the land. And then tonight, while YouTubing to hear the voice of a Russian mezzo-soprano recently mentioned in a New Yorker article (Anita Rachvelishvili), I ended up listening to parts of Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor,” which Rachvelishvili has sung at the Metropolitan.

Those of you who are my age will be familiar with the song “Stranger in Paradise,” which was very popular in the 1950s. The song came from the Broadway hit “Kismet.” The song’s words are from the Broadway musical. The music is from Borodin’s opera. “Stranger in Paradise” has long been on my list of favorite songs. When I was a child, first hearing Broadway harmonies and Broadway melodies put a spell on me and ruined me forever as a normal Southern boy. Church just didn’t have anything like that. From there it was a slippery slope to Mozart and other heathenry. (The word heathen, an insult word which is found 140 times in the King James Bible, is of course related to the word heath. Heaths are enchanted places. Do you suppose there might be clues there to how disenchantment happened?)

Here are the words to the opening lines of “Stranger in Paradise.” These words occur in the song’s introduction before the main theme of the song begins:

Oh why do the leaves of that mulberry tree
Whisper differently now?
And why is the nightingale singing at noon
On a mulberry bough?
For some most mysterious reason,
This isn’t the garden I know;
No, it’s paradise now that was only a garden
A moment ago!

The answer to these questions, of course, for why a mere garden has turned into a paradise, is that the garden has suddenly become enchanted. Borodin somehow captures that change.

I listened to many versions of “Stranger in Paradise,” including the original cast version, the movie version, and versions done by many popular singers. But Borodin’s melody is just too sublime to be sung by singers who don’t have operatic training. One needs to stick as closely as possible to the original Borodin. I came across the undiscovered gem above on YouTube. And who knows. Maybe only Russians can sing this song. I settled on the version above. Why don’t you listen now and see what you think…

For extra credit, here is an orchestral version by the Berlin Philharmonic. Oh, if only Borodin had been born a little later, the films he could have scored …

For extra-extra credit, here below, excerpted from the oboe score, is the introduction of the “Stranger in Paradise” main theme by the oboe, accompanied by the harp. The theme is then picked up by the clarinets and bassoons and, at last (and of course), by the strings. Of particular interest, as the oboe introduces the theme, are the ornamental notes. I’ve circled those notes in red to help you follow them in the oboe score as you listen. Also listen for the repeating triangle tings after the strings pick up the theme at 2:07. In orchestration, triangle tings almost always invite enchantment.

Start at point “A” in the score at 0:58 in the video:

More extra credit: Look up the meaning of the word “kismet,” from which the Broadway show got its name.

Privilege and humiliation

The American people are getting some excellent — and I suspect lasting — new insights into the ugliness of unearned privilege. But unearned privilege is only half of the problem that requires fixing. The flip side of that coin is undeserved humiliation. The two things together — the increasing humiliation of the many and the also-increasing privilege of the few — are tearing the country apart.

Paul Krugman’s column today shines a light on privilege: “The Angry White Male Caucus: Trumpism is all about the fear of losing traditional privilege.” Krugman writes: “And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.”

In thinking about this issue, I need to return once again to the “moral foundations” theory of Jonathan Haidt and how the world looks very different to liberals than it does to conservatives. The high value that conservatives place on authority, hierarchy and in-group values blinds conservatives to the humiliation of others while inflaming conservative rage when their privilege, their authority, and their place in the hierarchy are challenged. Whereas, to liberals, with their emphasis on fairness and caring, undeserved humiliation begs for succor, and unearned privilege cries out to be taken down a notch.

Twenty million people, I believe, watched Brett Kavanaugh’s horrifying performance on television last week. Conservatives saw a dangerous assault on their highest values of in-group power, authority, and hierarchy by a threatening rabble of inferior out-group people such as Democrats. Liberals saw how privilege responds with rage and disbelief at the notion that fairness, caring, and justice matter enough to stand in the way of entitled elite power.

It has been sickening to watch the mainstream media, because of the notion of “balance,” trapped into reporting on this spectacle as though what conservatives see is somehow just as legitimate as what liberals see. The real story is the increasing depravity of a conservative minority driven to the last ditch, struggling to use entrenched power to preserve the status quo. The Supreme Court is their last hope to preserve their world a little longer, as the political backlash against right-wing overreach — and an increasing awareness of the ugliness of right-wing intentions — builds.

If you do a little reading on the psychology of humiliation, you’ll soon come across the word revenge. When people are humiliated, they long for revenge.

But there are two kinds of humiliation. There is undeserved humiliation, such as being made to sit at the back of the bus. And there is deserved humiliation (which unfortunately is much more rare), such as the Trumpian thrashing of Brett Kavanaugh’s humiliation as he discovered that there are limits to his entitlements and that questions relating to justice (as with Trump) are questions that (at least in a nation of laws) must be answered. Kavanaugh has earned humiliation, not the revenge he wants. Justice does not contribute to the happiness of the unjust.

Once upon a time in America, humiliation was for the most part a minority experience. Humiliation was reserved for those with dark skin, and for those on the lowest rungs of the economic and social ladder, and for those who would not or could not play their assigned “normal” roles. But, as far as I can tell, humiliation in the workplace is now the rule, almost regardless of the type of work or the level of income. Friends with Ph.D.’s in high-paying jobs sometimes tell me shocking stories of humiliation, powerlessness, and abuse by employers. This workplace humiliation, of course, started with those with more modest educations in more modest jobs. But the culture of humiliation has steadily worked its way upward and outward. Merely being white and playing by the rules is no longer enough to guarantee meaningful work and a life of dignity.

But the humiliation of the newly humiliated — many of them white people who supported Trump — contains an element of justice. If you tolerate (or, worse, participated in) the humiliation of those whom you consider beneath you, then don’t be surprised if the rising tide of humiliation spreads and eventually sucks you in, too. As the truly elite know, there’s not a thing in the world that’s special about white church people, though a great many white church people are having a hard time figuring that out. If the arc of justice does not bend toward justice, then it will bend toward injustice. Or the arc may stall, blocked by those who feel threatened by anything other than the status quo, or by those who believe that any improvement in the lives of out-groups necessarily comes at the expense of in-groups.

Therein is a lesson that conservative minds just can’t seem to learn. The conservative mind always wants to assume that anything threatening comes from beneath them in the hierarchy, or from an out-group. The idea that the very in-group authority they glorify is the source of the threat is unthinkable. The right-wing propaganda machine — always demonizing them and always glorifying us — works constantly to reinforce these ideas. This pattern of delusion in the conservative mind is the key to the power of the Republican Party.

I confess that watching Brett Kavanaugh squirm last week was a beautiful thing, insofar as I could bear to watch it. It felt as good as revenge, but it actually was fairness and justice at work. Still, bringing down the Trumps and Kavanaughs of the world is only a small part of the job, and probably even the easy part. That’s because the wholesale humiliation of the American people will continue — until we have a politics that can do something about it. Look at how long black people have been waiting. If white people insist on clinging to a world view that is exactly ass-backwards, then they may have to wait even longer.

The obliteration of the pagan past

Pagan Britain, by Ronald Hutton. Yale University Press, 2013. 480 pages.

If you plucked this book down off a bookstore shelf to have a closer book, you probably would assume from the cover and the title that the book is a romanticized effort to find magic in Britain’s past. That assumption would be wrong. If anything, the book is the opposite of that. Instead, the book is a thorough analysis, based primarily on archeology, of how any genuine understanding of Britain’s pre-Christian past is impossible.

The author is a professor of history at the University of Bristol. The blurb on the cover of the paperback edition sounds promising, quoting Times Higher Education: “A magisterial synthesis of archeology, history, anthropology, and folklore.” Unfortunately, that is misleading. The book is magisterial, but the book is 99.9 percent archeology, simply because where history and folklore are concerned, almost nothing remains, whereas the archeology is extensive. The author refers to textual classical sources where such sources exist (for example, Caesar’s account of the Gallic wars). But all those classical sources must be taken with a grain of salt because they were often second- or third-hand or were written long after events occurred. Later sources, such as the Venerable Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, was written hundreds of years after events occurred and must be read as hopelessly biased by Bede’s religion. In short, such written records as exist are extremely unhelpful.

It has often been supposed that, during the Middle Ages, the Christian religion was a thin veneer over still-pagan rural cultures in which the old ways were remembered and still practiced. The author tears that idea to shreds. This study begins with the earliest signs of Paleolithic human cultures in the British isles well over 10,000 years ago and continues through the Mesolithic and Neolithic into the Bronze Age and Iron Age. The Romans arrive with their religion. Rome falls, but the Roman religion remains, and the “Dark Ages” begin. The study continues all the way forward to what we would call modernity. Again and again, no matter what the era, the author finds that there is simply no way to reconstruct a picture of how pre-Christian peoples lived and how they saw the world. Instead, the available evidence is much like a Rorschach test: The existing evidence can be interpreted in many different ways, and no particular attempt at reconstruction can be proved, or disproved.

Still, is it useful to know as much as possible about what the archeology can tell us about pagan peoples? Absolutely, though we are left with little but our imaginations to try to make sense of it. The author actually is quite respectful of the use of imagination in interpreting the archeological evidence:

“Since the 1990s, it has been feasible to propose a mutual understanding between them [scholars and the imaginations of neo-Pagans], based on the more or less undoubted fact, strongly argued in the present book, that it is impossible to determine with any precision the nature of the religious beliefs and rites of the prehistoric British. It may fairly be argued, therefore, that present-day groups have a perfect right to re-create their own representations of those, and enact them as a personal religious practice — of the sort now generally given the name Pagan — provided that they remain within the rather broad limits of the material evidence (or, if they choose not to remain there, honestly to acknowledge the fact).”

Personally, I am not interested in religious practice. But I am very interested in the project of “re-enchantment.” There actually is a scholarship of re-enchantment. That scholarship starts with the sociology of disenchantment set out many decades ago by Max Weber, who borrowed the term disenchantment from the philosopher Friedrich Schiller. If you Google for it, you will find YouTube videos of re-enchantment scholars talking to each other at retreats. They’re smart, though to me they come across as gasbags who fell off the earth into an unhelpful New Agey sky of words, abstraction, and conferences. Re-enchantment, it seems to me, is a project that is not so much about words. Rather, re-enchantment wants fresh air, rock, ruins, green things, running water, and a bit of starlight.

Writing about Patrick, who helped to drive the enchantment (if not the snakes) out of Ireland, Hutton writes: “Indeed, he explicitly considered paganism to be dead in his society, its memorials consisting only of the icons of Romano-British deities, still visible within and without the ruined cities. He recalled that his compatriots had once worshipped divine powers inherent in the natural world, but stated proudly that in his time they regarded that world merely as created for the use of humans.” Regular readers of this blog know that, to me, Patrick is one of the worst villains in history, and that I see Patrick’s Augustinian theology as one of the worst inventions, ever, of the human mind.

This book was my reading material for a recent hiking trip in Scotland (photos here). I carried the book on my back for many a mile, and it has taken me almost three weeks since coming home to finish it. The book has been invaluable for giving me a greater appreciation of the mysterious oldness that is so apparent in Scottish landscapes.

But I’m an American, so what about America? Will it ever be possible to enchant, or re-enchant, the American landscape? As I see it, recovering, through re-enchantment, what was destroyed by the Roman religion — a tragedy that played out largely in Gaul and the British Isles — is essential to saving the earth. There are those who blame the Enlightenment — reason and science — for our predicament. But I don’t see it that way at all. The Enlightenment leaves us open to redemption by progress in philosophy, whereas the Roman religion poisoned the world with an ossified theology.

Hutton writes:

“The appearance of the faith of Christ required and produced just such a seismic change, by breaking most of the conventions of religious culture as they had existed in Europe and the Mediterranean basin since history began. It claimed the existence of a single, all-powerful, all-knowing, universally present and totally good deity, who had created the world and directed its fate. It also preached the existence of a force of cosmic evil in the universe, inferior by far to the single god but powerful in worldly affairs and set on subverting the divine plan for the universe. All creation was therefore polarized between those two forces, and human beings were offered the stark choice of salvation, by embracing the worship of the true deity and obeying his rules and commands, or damnation, by ignoring or opposing them and choosing other religious loyalties. The divine beings of other religions were regarded as nonexistent, having the status of lies, deceptions or allegories, or of personifications and servants of the forces of evil: effectively, as demons. The divine will was expressed through sacred writings, which true believers had to understand and expound correctly, creating the new discipline of theology, which replaced philosophy as the main means of understanding the universe and the human place in it.”

We seem to be stranded in a damaged and disenchanted world, but I’d rather not end on a pessimistic note. So I’ll try to hang on to my memories of what persists, in spite of modernity, in parts of the British isles and even in parts of America: fresh air, rock, ruins, green things, running water, and a bit of starlight.

Update: Here is a related review of another book, on how Christianity destroyed classical, as well as pagan, culture.

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

Hiking Scotland’s haunted islands

From JaneAnne’s bothy on the isle of Gometra, looking toward the isle of Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

Mull, Ulva, and Gometra, September 2018

To the regular readers of this blog: Blog posts often have a long life, as people Google for the terms and tags included in the post. Lots of people hike the Scottish isles, so partly this post is structured to be helpful to people who may be doing research for hiking in the Scottish isles.

The hikers

Ken Ilgunas (left) and David Dalton in Edinburgh, September 2018. David is the author of this blog post.

For more than eight years, we have been literary confederates. But this was our first real hike together. Ken is the author of:

Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road From Debt to Freedom (2013)

Trespassing Across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland (2016)

This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back (2018).

Ken’s small-press titles include:

The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Magic Bus of the Stampede Trail.

If there is such a thing as a professional hiker and adventurer, then Ken is one. David, two months away from his 70th birthday, trained all summer for the hike. David is the author of two science fiction novels:

Fugue in Ursa Major (2014)

Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016)

About the photos

Looking down toward Lochbuie from the eastern shoulder of Ben Buie. Click here for high-resolution version.

To prevent the page from loading too slowly, all the photos’ resolution has been reduced. For most of the photos, a link is provided to pull up the high-resolution version. The photos are by David unless they are tagged with Ken’s name.

Layers and layers of hauntedness

A ghost village left by the Clearances. The village is near Calgary on the isle of Mull. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Europeans are well aware of their long history on the land, though much of that history has been lost except to archeology. We Americans, on the other hand, are deeply impressed by the oldness. In places such as the Scottish isles, humans have occupied the land for so long that even the ruined castles are relatively new. In Oban, the day before we took the ferry to the isle of Mull, I found just the right reading material in a book store. That was Pagan Britain by Ronald Hutton. It’s an academic book published by Yale University Press. The author is a professor of history at the University of Bristol. The book is a detailed, no-nonsense, unromanticized study of what we know about the earliest inhabitants of the British Isles. Anatomically modern humans, Hutton says, were in northwestern Europe from about 42,000 B.C. From about 10,000 B.C. forward, the findings of archeologists are very rich. But the problem is interpreting those findings.

The prehistoric standing stones and barrows, of which there are a great many in Britain, present mysteries about our ancestors that we probably will never really understand. But in the case of a 15th Century castle, we know much, much more. More recently, in the Scottish isles, the 19th Century Highland Clearances are still a living memory. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, thousands of Highland families were cruelly forced off the land. The land was turned over to aristocrats, largely for sheep farming to feed the wool industry. The cultural loss was devastating. The Highlands have never really recovered from the depopulation, though efforts are now under way to repopulate some of the islands, including Ulva.

If you go for a long hike in Scotland, you probably will feel the ghostly presence of the people who, for thousands of years, have lived on this land. We felt this most strongly on the isle of Gometra, a smallish island with only two permanent residents. We spent three days in a bothy with no electricity, eating food that we carried in (an eight-mile walk across the isle of Ulva is required to get there) and cooked over a camping cooker. In the evening, we sat by a coal fire, with a candle and our headlamps for lighting.

Here are some of our photos.

Standing stones near Lochbuie on the isle of Mull. Click here for high-resolution version.

Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Moy castle (15th Century), near Lochuie on the isle of Mull. Click here for high-resolution version.

JaneAnne’s bothy on the isle of Gometra. Click here for high-resolution version.

JaneAnne’s bothy. Click here for high-resolution version.

Cooking on Gometra. The home-baked bread was a gift from a B&B-keeper near Calgary. Click here for high-resolution version.

Cooking on Gometra. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

The bridge between Ulva and Gometra, at low tide. Click here for high-resolution version.

Island-hoppers, who often put in here in fine weather, call this “the harbor” between Ulva and Gometra. Click here for high-resolution version.

The big house on Gometra. Click here for high-resolution version.

Gometra, looking across the channel from Ulva. JaneAnne’s bothy is a the lower center-right, and the big house is near the top. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

The long hike across Ulva to Gometra. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

From Ulva, looking toward Mull. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

A wary herd of deer on Ulva. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

A fleeing stag on Ulva. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

A haunted evening begins on the isle of Gometra. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Hiking through bracken on Ulva. It was September, and the bracken was turning brown. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ulva has no roads — only narrow tracks that are often muddy or covered with water. Click here for high-resolution version.

Photo by Ken Ilgunas

Crossing Ulva to get to Gometra. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

The ferry between Mull and Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ulva. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ulva, looking toward Mull. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Haunted Ulva. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Sheep on Ulva. Try not to get dizzy. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

The memorial, which he himself built, to the man who brought the Clearances to Ulva. Photo by Ken Ilgunas.

Ken, on Mull.

David, at Oban. Photo by Ken Ilgunas.

Ken, near Calgary on Mull. Click here for high-resolution version.

Near Calgary on Mull. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Heather, near Calgary on Mull. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

It his said that the last resident of his village, now a ghost village near Calgary, hanged himself on this tree after the Clearances of the 19th Century. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ken, near Calgary.

Oban. Photo by Ken Ilgunas.

Oban. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Oban.

From the ferry, near Oban. Click here for high-resolution version.

From the ferry, near Oban.

Tobermory. Click here for high-resolution version.

Tobermory. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Lockbuie, from the side of Ben Buie. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Lockbuie, from the side of Ben Buie. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ben Buie (altitude 717 meters, 2,352 feet) from near Lochbuie. We climbed it, ascending along the long ridge of the shoulder to the right, and descending by the steep rock face and bog land facing the camera. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ken at the crest of Ben Buie. We started at sea level and gained this altitude on foot. At times there were sheep tracks on the way up Ben Buie, but rarely was there anything that looked like a trail. Click here for high-resolution version.

Lochbuie from the crest of Ben Buie. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

David on the ascent of Ben Buie. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Working my way up the long ridge toward the crest of Ben Buie. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

David on the descent from Ben Buie. I’ve cleared the worst of the rocks, but at least 2,000 feet of scree and bog are still below me. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

If you hike the Scottish isles, you will be walking in bogs. The bogs are everywhere, whether you are high or low. Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Those who live here

If you stay in bed and breakfasts, and if you get out and about, you will meet many of the people who live here (and the creatures they keep). I often wondered how they maintain such a good attitude toward visitors, because the pressure of tourism must be stressful at times.

Still, living in such an old land, and with such long memories, I suspect that those who live in these haunted islands are very much aware that we are all just passing through. And, especially with Americans, I think that the locals often assume (and correctly so) that many visitors come to Scotland to seek their family roots. The diaspora caused by the Highland Clearances has a way of coming home. Those whose ancestors were forced to leave have an enduring claim on this land. The local respects that.

Most of the readers of this blog, like me, are not particularly young. The day will come when the young will leave us behind, and soon enough even the young will have their turn at being old. Until then, keep up with the young for as long as you can. Make sure that they know your stories. Prepare them for being haunted. Hauntedness is a good thing.

Roc Sandford, who owns the haunted isle of Gometra, wrote a little book that you can buy in the honesty store there. He closes his book with these lines:

“And I have not spoken of Gometra’s subconscious, which can be felt distinctly by the unearthly and unearthed, an alluvial mix of misery and enchantment, laid down by all those who lived here once and are now gone, and to whom we too shall soon be joined.”

Photo by Ken Ilgunas

A few notes

I was in a bit of a rush to get these photos on line. During the next week or two, there probably will be updates, additions, and corrections.

A note on our accommodations: We used Airbnb. We spent three days at Mornish Schoolhouse near Calgary, three days at JaneAnne’s bothy on Gometra, and three days at the Laggan Farm annex near Lochbuie. All three of these places were fantastic. If you’re off the beaten track on Mull, be sure to have a plan for where you’ll eat or buy groceries.

Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Click here for high-resolution version.

Scotland

Click here for high-resolution version.

I’m home after two fantastic weeks in Scotland. I’m going to need a few days to console the cat, sort through my photos, get some groceries, and figure out which way a hurricane is going to go. I’ll have a post soon.

Catholicism in Ireland, R.I.P.

Saint Patrick, Wikipedia

One of the newspapers that I check each morning is the Irish Times. Today’s paper has a very fine essay by Fintan O’Toole. It’s an obituary for Catholicism in Ireland:

It’s too late. Not even Pope Francis can resurrect Catholic Ireland

Catholicism in Ireland had a long run — from the 5th Century to around 2000, after the many atrocities of the church were exposed starting in the 1990s. Now that Catholicism is dead in Ireland, it’s fair to ask the question: What did Catholicism ever do for Ireland? If newspapers are the first draft of history, then O’Toole’s essay suggests that history will take a dim view of Catholicism in Ireland. It’s a question for historians. I’m not a historian, but for what it’s worth, I have an opinion. That opinion is that Catholicism in Ireland, during its 1,500-year run, did very little good and a great deal of harm.

It’s necessary to start with some historical questions and to try to answer those questions as best we can: What did Christianity displace in Ireland? Was the church better than what it displaced? The church, everywhere it goes, destroys what it displaces. So we know much less about early pagan Ireland than we ought to know. But some evidence remains. For example, there was the Brehon Law, which gives us a pretty good picture of pre-Christian pagan ethics in Ireland. The pagan Irish were doing just fine before the church took over. I’d take a Brehon over a bishop any day. So would most of the Irish, but ultimately the Irish weren’t given a choice — until now. And the church lost.

While the church has been dying, Ireland has been undergoing a powerful cultural (and economic) renewal. The Irish Times has regular features about the reversal of the Irish diaspora and the Irish returning to their homeland.

Again, I’m no historian, and weighing the record of the church in Ireland is above my pay grade. But insofar as I know anything about the Irish, and insofar as I know anything about the church, my view is that the Irish people would have been much better off if the church had never existed. One of the greatest skills of the church is, and was, making white people (and their cultures) dull, dumb, and despicable. I don’t think that “despicable” is too strong a word, given the crimes of the church in Ireland that have now been exposed and which surely went on for centuries.

Now if only I live long enough to read the obituary of white fundamentalism in the American South.

A simple case study: How propaganda works

There are very few exceptions: Right-wingers and the Republican Party cannot win elections or have their way without lying and cheating. Without a sophisticated propaganda system (and, increasingly under Trumpism, the demonization of the responsible media), the right wing would be exposed as what it truly is: A radical minority with a highly unpopular agenda, and no principles, that gets its way only insofar as it can get away with lying and cheating.

This is an interesting case study, because Ken recently had an article in High Country News (a newspaper for the western U.S.) that explains what is really going on. The article is here:

‘No trespassing’ laws create personal playgrounds for the wealthy

The video above shows how right-wingers and Republicans use lies to enact laws that benefit the rich while pretending the opposite. This video — unlike more sophisticated right-wing propaganda with more subtle or hard-to-detect lies — actually is an example of bad propaganda because it’s relatively easy to detect the deception and the attempt to use fear to manipulate people.

In the video, we have a typical American family of three going about their morning routine in a typical American home. Clueless hippies and hikers are encamped on their front lawn, even though there’s a white picket fence. Sheila is out in the yard cooking hot dogs on someone else’s Coleman stove. A man is fishing in their swimming pool. We are given to understand that this is what will happen to typical Idaho families unless the Idaho legislature approves what may now be the most radical trespassing laws in the country.

But the easy-to-see truth is that a typical suburban Idaho family (are there even suburbs in Idaho?) is at no risk. Existing laws already have got them covered. The real story (as Ken shows in the article) is that this is a billionaire’s law.

There are more subtle messages in the video that are very disturbing. One is that nice people don’t camp and fish. Those who do camp and fish (that is, if they’re liberals) are careless and clueless and utterly disrespectful. Nice people, of course, stay in their atomized suburban homes and see the world only on their televisions, or maybe through a window if they ever open their shutters and curtains. The young daughter of the family raises her hand and starts to wave to the fisherman. But her dad pushes her hand down and says, “No; no, no.” The message is that nice people don’t even associate with people like that. That is probably the ugliest and most subtle message contained in this 47 seconds of propaganda: Civility can be dangerous if extended to the wrong people. Civic involvement is one of the last things Republicans want (unless its done through an organization controlled and financed by right-wing money, such as the Tea Party). Nice people stay home, watch television, believe what they’re told, and don’t get involved. Liberals are not only clueless, they’re also a threat to nice normal people. Why doesn’t the dad of the family just go out and ask the campers to leave, or call the police? Because the ad wants people to believe that, unless a new law is passed, the dad has no right to do that — a rather blatant falsehood.

Contrast this with how progressive political elements try to get their message out. This propaganda video is a nice contrast with something I posted two days ago, Environmental justice: The people fight back. The method used in that case was to leverage the media power of famous people to tell the stories of poor people who otherwise are ignored. The most important part of the news conference that I wrote about was not the speechifying by Al Gore and the Rev. William J. Barber (though they gave great speeches). The most important part, rather, was the parade of ordinary people who told true and verifiable stories of devastating illnesses and early deaths caused by living in proximity to coal ash.

For progressives, the challenge is how to draw attention to the truth. That’s what Ken was doing with his op-ed in a Western newspaper, on a subject on which he has done a great deal of research and written a book. For right-wingers, the challenge is designing effective lies, connecting those lies to an emotion such as prejudice or fear, and pumping those lies into the propaganda system.

I propose a game. The Nov. 6 election is coming up. Soon, television screens all over the country will be full of right-wing political ads. Analyze the ads as propaganda. Look for the lies. Were the lies obvious, or was some research required to expose them? Keep your list of fallacies handy. How many fallacies can you identify? What does the propaganda assume that people don’t know, so that it can take advantage of ignorance? What emotions does the propaganda try to stimulate? Whom does it demonize? What is the propaganda’s overt intention? Are there also disguised intentions? Is divisiveness intended? If so, who is being played against whom, based on what element of distrust or fear? Who paid for the ad? Whose interests does it serve? Google them and see if you can follow the money (that may be hard!). Feel free to apply the same checks to ads for liberals, and do your best to apply the same methods to scoring liberal vs. right-wing political ads.

Environmental justice: The people fight back

Al Gore

This is a rather long photo essay. I hope you’ll bear with me.

People sometimes ask me why I choose to live in a rural and seemingly backward place like Stokes County, North Carolina, after 18 years in an urbane place like San Francisco. Stokes is a poor county in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s mostly white, and it’s mostly Republican. But it’s also a beautiful, green, un-suburbanized place with mountains, a river, and forests that — as far as I can tell — reach all the way up the Appalachian chain to Quebec. It is an unspoiled — and also very livable — piece of rural America. I love rural America and refuse to cede rural America to Trump deplorables, because rural America can be better than that.

I also learned pretty quickly that I am needed here. The progressive people in this county are greatly outnumbered. But we are fierce, and we stand up for ourselves. We have become so effectively organized that we caught the attention a few years ago of progressive forces outside our little county. That’s why Al Gore and the Rev. William Barber were here today. For the Rev. Barber, it was his second time in Stokes County.

Many of the readers of this blog are in Europe, so you may need to be reminded that Al Gore was vice president of the United States from 1993 until 2001, with President Bill Clinton. Gore ran for president in 2000 and won the popular vote nationwide by half a million votes. But because of peculiarities in the American constitutional system and a disputed vote count in the state of Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the presidency to George W. Bush. Gore, a true statesman, said in his concession speech, “[F]or the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.” Since then, Gore has made environmental activism an important part of his life.

Readers in Europe, and some American readers as well, may need to be reminded that the Rev. William J. Barber II has been president of North Carolina’s NAACP since 2006. He is a theologian with degrees from Duke University and Drew University. I consider him the Martin Luther King Jr. of our day. With his “Moral Monday” resistance tactics in North Carolina, he has become a thorn in the flesh of the right-wing and utterly despicable North Carolina legislature. If rich people want it, the North Carolina legislature is for it. The rest of us don’t matter, except insofar as we can be made to pay for the things that rich people want, such as tax cuts.

The environmental justice issue here in Stokes County is a huge coal ash impoundment at a coal-fired electricity-generating plant operated by Duke Energy. The pollution of ground water, and the air, near this plant have sickened many people and caused many premature deaths. Most of those people are poor and black. They still are fighting for clean water. But they have gotten organized. (There is little need to worry about the residents of the abbey. Luckily we are some miles from this problem, and we are both upstream and upwind. But we care about our neighbors downstream and downwind.)

But this is a photo essay, not a political post.

Photojournalism is in my DNA. So I am very mindful of how photographs can be used to tell a story. I love taking photographs of people, so public events are a great excuse for pointing my camera at people’s faces and getting away with it. I shot 932 photos today, but I selected those that I thought told the story best, those that represent the main characters, and, hopefully, those that contain a bit of emotion.

This is my county. And I love it.

Karenna Gore (daughter of Al Gore) with one of our local activists