Culture – Page 31 – Into the Woods

What’s wrong with conservatives?

In my rather long lifetime, the depravity of the conservative mind has never been more on display than it is today. Never in my lifetime has conservatism been more aggressive or used viler tactics in its efforts to remake the world in its own repugnant image. We see it in the vilification of the poor, the glorification of the rich, the rejection of science, the carelessness about the state of our planet, the love of propaganda, the preference for tyrants in politics and bigots as preachers, the racism, the constant need for scapegoats, the irrational fears, the love of hatred.

Now conservatism is learning to be afraid its own children, because it is increasingly difficult to brainwash these values into the young.

Here are some words from Ted Nugent, a member of the board of the National Rifle Association: “The lies from these poor, mushy brained children who have been fed lies and parrot lies, I really feel sorry for them. It’s not only ignorant and dangerously stupid — it’s soulless… I’m afraid to say and it hurts me to say this, but the evidence is irrefutable: They have no soul.”

When I was a child during the Civil Rights era, it was African-Americans who were said by at least some conservatives to have no soul. Now it’s our children, if they dare to be disobedient. Conservatives are making great moral progress, aren’t they?

A group that calls itself United States Parents Involved in Education says: “Government K-12 schools are teaching politically biased social justice values.”

Justice, you see, is a dangerous thing to the conservative mind. Government has no business getting involved in justice. Justice is of no concern to young people. I’ll come back to the matter of justice in a second.

This is a moment in history when the smokes of Auschwitz and the vices of the authoritarian mind still linger in the air. We’re running out of time to call out conservatives for the depravity of their values. We still don’t understand quite how they did it, but they are back in power, in the U.S. and elsewhere. They are choosing as their leaders the type of person they always choose — psychopathic, belligerent miscreants who model everything that is worst about their obedient and fawning followers.

And yet we are being told that conservative values are just a matter of “moral diversity” and that conservative thinking deserves not just respect, but equal respect.

I have in mind, of course, Jonathan Haidt and his “moral foundations theory.” Insofar as Haidt’s theory is merely descriptive, I have no doubt that he’s right. The values most cherished by liberals, according to this theory, are justice, fairness, caring, and the avoidance of harm. Whereas the values most cherished by conservatives are obedience to authority, a respect for hierarchy, loyalty, purity, and the preservation of “in group” traditions.

Haidt, I believe, would deny it if challenged, but he has made it quite clear in his writing and his interviews that we should see liberal and conservative values as equally valid. Haidt is on the board of a well-intentioned organization called Better Angels. “Let’s depolarize America,” they say on their web page. The idea is to “bring together” liberals and conservatives and “have a dialogue.” This is supposed to promote understanding and harmony by helping us to see the other side’s underlying values.

Maybe that works for some people. But it doesn’t work for me.

What conservatives are saying about the activist students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School provides us with a clear example. To the conservative mind, the students are mushy brained, ignorant, dangerously stupid, and soulless. The moral error of these students, to the conservative mind, is a failure to be obedient to conservative authority. (Never mind that the students have the support of their own parents). The conservative mind even goes so far as to openly say that “social justice values” are wrong and dangerous and should not be taught, because to the conservative mind social justice is politically biased. “Government” schools are accused of teaching social justice; their private schools wouldn’t dare. To the conservative mind, obedience to conservative authority is more important than social justice. They demand that their children be just like them.

Notice also the telling nature of the many insults that conservatives threw at the children. Emma Gonzalez was called a “skinhead lesbian” by a Republican politician. That insult expresses the conservative value of purity, which is related to the conservative value of sacralization. That the insult might have done harm or was unfair was secondary. In-group purity and conformity come first.

As a liberal, I certainly recognize that there is a certain value in conservative values. Liberals obey the law, which is a form of authority. In fact we liberals have a sacralized attitude toward the rule of law. Liberals value loyalty — but loyalty doesn’t trump justice, nor does loyalty trump the law. To the liberal mind, justice, fairness, and caring are always primary. John Rawls based an entire theory of justice on “justice as fairness.”

I’m really getting very tired of being told (usually by the people I call radical centrists) that we liberals just don’t understand conservatives and that we are failing to “reach out” to them. But I understand conservatives very well. I have no need to reach out to them, because we couldn’t get away from them (or their propaganda) if we tried. As for radical centrists, I hold them partly responsible. Centrists, with their claim to superior, “nonpartisan” understanding, should have held the line against right-wing radicals rather than putting their fingers in their ears.

It was centrists who met the rise of right-wing radicalism with the notion of “balance.” Centrists insisted on a left-right symmetry that was never there. To preserve a superior status for centrism, they pretended that partisans on the left were just as bad as partisans on the right. After the 2016 election, some centrists partly came to their senses. But I’m still waiting for centrists to admit how wrong they’ve been and to tell us how they’re going to atone for it. I’m sorry, but “Better Angels” is just another attempt to make a big show of centrist virtue and to present centrism as the solution. Centrism is not the solution. It is part of the problem.

What I’m about to say is the sort of thing that horrifies radical centrists and anyone who believes that our polarization can be bridged by understanding. Notice also that we liberals are scolded for not understanding conservatives, but conservatives are never scolded for not understanding liberals. Frankly I don’t think that conservatives can understand liberals, because they just don’t have the neural wiring. They believe us to be what Rush Limbaugh says we are, so no wonder they hate us.

I understand conservative values. It’s easy to understand conservative values. But conservative values are secondary values. If secondary values become primary values, they become wrong and dangerous. I’ll go even further. Any mind than can value obedience to authority over justice, fairness, or caring is a mind that is diseased, a mind that is morally stunted.

The secondary values that conservatism makes primary (obedience to authority, say) may be very useful if you’re a church or an oligarch and you need for people to think and do as they’re told. The secondary values of conservatism (purity, say) may be very useful if you’re a white majority trying to preserve your privilege and your decaying culture against demands for justice and equality from people you don’t like. The secondary values of conservatism (sacralization, say) may be very useful if your ossified beliefs are incompatible with science and the exigencies of the modern world, but you simply don’t have the wiring to modify those beliefs.

Any world that is fit to live in will put justice, fairness, and caring first. Those are the values that are the keys to human progress. That is what Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King called the arc of justice. At every turn, conservatives and their values have sought to block the arc of justice, and they have called that virtue.

I will not be told that it is wrong of me not to respect the moral values of conservatives. The opposite is true. The misplaced moral values of conservatives are to be condemned. Conservatives can practice their moral values in private all they want (though I pity their children). But once conservatives bring their stunted values into public affairs, then people like me acquire a moral burden. That moral burden is to tell conservatives (it may be necessary to be rude) where they can go, and what they can do with their moral values.

Update 1: Further reading, from an academic.

Update 2: This piece by Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times appeared after I wrote this post. Edsall’s piece is a survey of academic literature on the rise of authoritarianism and the relation to Trump. Edsall writes:

“If an aggressive, domineering authoritarianism is a prime motivator for many Trump supporters, as Smith and Hanley contend, the clash between Republicans and Democrats is likely to become more hostile and warlike.”

Indeed. Count me among those who will not silently and passively sit on the sidelines while an aggressive, domineering authoritarianism tries to see what it can get away with.

Update 3: Madeline Albright in the New York Times: Fascism poses a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II

Update 4: Ted Nugent says Democrats should be shot like coyotes

Celebrity scientists

Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, Rita Levi-Montalcini

One of the healthier elements of our culture, including our media culture, is that we still have celebrity scientists. After the death this week of Stephen Hawking, we are left with a vacuum. To help fill that vacuum, I nominate Roger Penrose.

What are the characteristics that help elevate a scientist to celebrity status? Certainly they need to have discovered something or explained something that captures the public imagination. It helps if their personal stories are intriguing. It also helps if they’re charming and photogenic.

If you read this blog, you’re probably a serious reader. But do you read science? Much of my nonfiction reading is science, particularly physics. If you’re not reading science, then you’re missing a lot of the good stuff about what makes our times so interesting. Despite the steady progress in technology, and despite rapid progress in some of the sciences, physics is stuck and has been stuck for nearly a hundred years. That’s a big deal. It’s also a serious problem. But that doesn’t make physics boring. To the contrary, there is a growing suspense and sense of drama in physics as scientists struggle to unify relativity with quantum theory. Those two theories have been proven valid again and again. And yet they contradict each other in exceedingly mysterious ways. We still have no idea what gravity is — or time, for that matter — though there is tantalizing evidence that, when we finally do have a grand unification theory, an understanding of gravity will come along with it.

I have often said that I would like to live long enough to see two things — the grand unification theory, and the day the extraterrestrials land. I also am seriously open to the possibility that a grand unification theory will reveal that there is simply nothing here, nothing physical anyway, and that that is what has made the investigation so hard. Don’t laugh! Remember that Einstein warned us that we won’t get anywhere without imagination.

Why do I nominate Roger Penrose? I think I won’t even try to explain it, except to say that Penrose tries to tie the mystery of consciousness to the elusive grand unification theory. That’s not a mystical proposition. If you know about the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment, then you know that observation by a conscious observer does seem to have something to do with the missing pieces of a grand unification theory, not to mention the mystery of something vs. nothing, or at the very least the mystery of something vs. bewildering uncertainty. I believe that Penrose is the Einstein of our time, the smartest person alive. You can find his books at Amazon. There also are many Penrose lectures on YouTube.

Science is a healthy antidote to the increasing primitiveness of our media and political culture. To read science is to strike a blow against the Republicans and religionists who are working to roll back the Enlightenment and turn off any lights that aren’t powered by coal. Next time you’re in a bookstore, why not check out the science section? Just pick a book on a subject that interests you. One subject always leads to another.

Roger Penrose

Where have all the fairies gone?

The Enchanted Forest, John Anster Christian Fitzgerald, 1819-1906

Where have all the fairies gone?

We could ask this question two different ways, depending on how you see the world. If you believe that fairies exist (or used to exist), then the question is literal. If you don’t believe in fairies, then there is still a serious question here, a cultural question. Why were fairies once such an important part of human lore? When did we lose interest in fairies? Why?

A friend who lives in France and who knows about (and shares) my interest in the Celts recently sent me a book, The Celtic Twilight, by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. The book was first published in 1893. Yeats was a mystic, and I’m pretty sure he believed in fairies — or at least very much wanted to. In this book, he travels in rural Ireland and asks people to tell him what they know about fairies. Faeries were already fading then. But they were still very much a part of rural life and the Irish belief system.

I am certainly not the only person to wonder where the fairies have gone. I Googled for the words “where have all the fairies gone” and got a number of little articles. Most are like this. Those articles use words such as “spirit,” “vibration,” “devic,” and “plane.” Though it is harmless, this type of credulous, too-magical thinking makes me cringe. But I also found this, a much smarter and more thoughtful piece. The author thinks that we reached peak fairy around 1926. He thinks that it was the automobile that ruined the world for fairies. This is not just because cars are noisy and are made of metal (fairies hate iron), but because we stopped walking. In particular, we stopped walking in quiet places where nature is still unspoiled.

Though it’s bad manners to quote authors’ last paragraphs, I’ll make an exception here, because I think it’s important: “So, I’m pretty sure cars killed off the fairies and reduced the trove of local stories. And I’m also pretty sure of this: these could be revived if only we got out and about by foot more often, especially where the pavement ends.”

Rational as the author is, clearly he wants the fairies back. I do, too.

Often I stand in my upstairs windows, which face into the woods, downhill toward a little stream. Many times from those windows I have seen the white deer. I have seen an owl perched in the huge old beech tree that overhangs the big rock. The owl flew away on enormous wings when it saw me watching. The white deer, I believe, sleeps under the big rock sometimes. I have seen the trees crowded with hundreds of crows. The crows increasingly seem to like those woods — a positive sign, I think, of something. Noisy as the crows are (they come almost every day), I love the sound they make. The crows also nest in the woods. During the spring I watch them gliding in and out to their nests through holes in the heavy green canopy. One year, a mama fox raised two cubs in those woods. Out of the woods come squirrels, who sometimes get onto the roof of the house, and possums, for whom I leave snacks on the deck. In the spring, the bottom of the little valley is densely strewn with May apples. After a heavy rain, the stream almost roars as the water cascades over the rocks. The water, which at times has been cloudy, is remarkably clear and clean at present. These upstairs windows face west. The full moon sets in the woods, early in the morning. The wind in the trees sounds very different in the winter than in the summer. But particularly in the summer, the wind in the leaves sounds remarkably like the sea. The woods go on and on for miles. You’d have to cross some roads, but I’m pretty sure that one could walk all the way to Quebec from here, up the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, without really leaving the woods.

And so, reading W.B. Yeats’ carefully curated fairy stories from the 19th Century, I ask myself: Shouldn’t there be fairies in those woods? Should I hide the cars up the hill? Would I have to squint and look for them out of the edges of my eyes? Should I try taking naps on the big rock, under the beech tree? Would I have to eat some mushrooms? What sort of fairies might they be? Would they like me? Should I post a little sign, “Fairies welcome here”?

But seriously, the cultural loss is devastating. The 19th Century Irish country people whom Yeats interviewed about fairies were nominally Catholic, but I get the strong impression that Catholicism was a very weak force compared with the ancient folk beliefs. Priests were to be made fun of, but you’d better listen to what the fairies say. Whereas, if I hiked to the north and interviewed some neighbors, they’d know plenty of church talk, but they’d be utterly empty of imagination. And how many of them still walk in the woods?

There was a brilliant piece in last Sunday’s New York Times by E.O. Wilson, the biologist. He is arguing for the Half-Earth project, which he believes is necessary if the human species is to survive. The Half-Earth project calls for setting aside half of the earth as habitat for other species. Humans would keep to their own half, and in a sustainable way. That’s a brilliant idea. Maybe, then, there’d be room enough on earth for the fairies, too. Meanwhile I’ve got a little spot for them to help tide them over, if they’d like to have it.

If E.O. Wilson is right, and if we don’t make room for earth’s other creatures, then we’ll be next. It was just that the fairies went first.

Click here for high-resolution version

Let’s don’t dig the hole deeper

You’d think that radical centrists, whose perpetual wrongness is exceeded only by their perpetual smugness, would give up and go away. But their latest project is harassing the New York Times’ op-ed pages for “lack of opinion diversity.”

We liberals are said to live in a bubble, you see. We are regularly scolded for failing to “reach out” to Trump supporters. We are said not to understand Trump-supporter grievances and Trump-supporter views.

Here I need words for maximum contempt, maximum derision, and a healthy burst of anger. To say what I actually think would be too rude. But the truth of the matter is that I understand Trump supporters perfectly well. There is no need to “reach out” to them, because no bubble could possibly be good enough to prevent us from hearing all about what they think. We are fully immersed in it, even after we clean them out of our Facebook feeds. I know exactly what Republicans are going to say before they say anything. I know all their talking points. Name an issue, and I’ll tell you what Republicans think. And it’s 98.6 percent horsewash, an ugly mix of distortion, denial, fallacy, meanness, corrupt theology, and constantly repeated lies.

The idea, then, is that in the name of “opinion diversity,” the horsewash that saturates the right-wing media and that has warped the minds of about 40 percent of the population should also be allowed into the New York Times. It is alleged that this would somehow improve the minds and politics of we liberals who read the New York Times. It’s medicine we need that the Times ought to give us, an antidote to our lefty “partisan” views.

But this is exactly how we got to where we are today. When Fox News came along 25 years ago and learned how to make a profitable billionaire-owned business out of brainwashing ignorant old white people without a pot to piss in into becoming ever-angry foot soldiers for the billionaire agenda, the mainstream media were caught off guard. Often, those in the mainstream media knew a lie when they saw one, but to say that something was false and intentionally deceptive was not permitted on grounds of “balance.” And so, for 25 years, the mainstream media’s line was “opinions differ on whether the world is flat.” Thus the mainstream media was paralyzed and was unable to report, as a matter of plain fact, that Donald Trump is a corrupt and dangerous madman. Terrified of being accused of lack of balance, the mainstream media remained easily manipulable and thus actually wrote much more about Hillary Clinton’s emails than about Donald Trump’s criminal history and foreign entanglements. A media catastrophe enabled a political catastophe. Now we’re on course for a constitutional crisis and a catastrophe for the American democracy. And yet we’re told that we need yet more of what got us here.

The world is not flat. If an op-ed policy that refuses to coddle lies and distortion makes a bubble, then who would resent that bubble other than those who have lies to sell and those who enable them with their centrist apologetics?

Radical centrists see politics as inherently symmetrical. If there are irrational partisans on the right, then radical centrists assume that there must be equally irrational partisans on the left, in equal numbers. If partisans on the right lie and distort, then partisans on the left must equally lie and distort. Only centrists, they believe, can see things with objectivity and clarity and avoid partisan excess. Yes, there are those on the left who think that we have some sort of religious duty to “reach out” to Trump supporters. Let them alight from their Priuses and actually get some Trump-supporter spit in their faces, rather than sermonizing about it on Facebook, and see what they end up learning from those Trump supporters.

The right-wing media and right-wing politics have dug a very deep hole. With a still-unknown amount of foreign help, we have all fallen into that hole. “Opinion diversity,” which really means tolerating lies and disguised agendas, is not going to get us out. It’s how we dig the hole deeper.

Wholesale salvation, priced to go

Even for those of us who don’t deify Billy Graham, it would still be hard to say anything bad about him. He never preached hatred. In fact he was friends with Martin Luther King and once bailed King out of jail in Alabama. Though he meddled in politics, he was reasonably nonpartisan about it. He refused to join the odious Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” in 1979 and said, “I’m for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice.” How many white preachers have ever talked about social justice? When televangelist Jim Bakker was sent to prison for fraud in 1989, newspapers looked into Graham’s finances the same way they had looked into Bakker’s. Bakker was a con man, but Graham was always found to be squeaky clean. He was married to one woman for almost 64 years.

The Washington Post reports that Graham will lie in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from Feb. 28 to March 1. It will be almost like a state funeral.

And so it’s not surprising that the media have been filled with panegyrics for Billy Graham. I have seen only one piece, in the Guardian, that looks at Billy Graham from another angle. That’s “Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history,” by historian Matthew Avery Sutton. Sutton writes, “Graham had good intentions, as his work desegregating his crusades demonstrated. But when his influence really would have counted, when he could have effected real change, real social transformation, he was too locked into last-days fearmongering to recognize the potential of the state to do good. We are all paying the price.”

Billy Graham’s focus, then, was on “salvation,” and you’d better come and get your salvation quick because the end is near. Saving the earth didn’t much matter. It was saving souls that Billy Graham was into, and he developed methods for doing it wholesale.

Not too long ago, I assumed that the idea of “salvation” must have been a Christian innovation. That is not the case. Max Weber, in his classic The Sociology of Religion, has a good bit to say about the concept of “salvation.” The concept has existed all over the world, in forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Hinduism and Judaism. What we need to be saved from, and the means of attaining salvation, vary greatly. But the demand for salvation, it seems, is perpetually strong. It’s a good business to be in. Most people never stop to think about the ridiculousness of the idea that some magic wand can somehow make the difference between eternal salvation and eternal perdition. The concept of salvation is useful only to those who have something invisible to sell.

In light of Weber’s ideas, one could point out three elements that helped make Billy Graham such a celebrity.

First, Graham represented the Protestant church, which meant that Graham could offer membership in the church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the church there is no salvation. The church is, as Weber writes, seen as “vested with the control of grace.” The church thus has shelves well stocked with fresh salvation. Come and get it.

Second, the price is cheap. Weber writes, “The level of personal ethical accomplishment must therefore be made compatible with average human qualifications, and this in practice means that it can be set quite low.” Easy terms and no credit check, either.

Third, Graham was a “religious virtuoso” who added value and sparkle to the deal, absolutely free. Weber writes, “Whoever can achieve more in the ethical sphere, i.e., the religious virtuoso, may thereby, in addition to insuring his own salvation, accumulate good works for the credit of the institution, which will then distribute them to those in need of good works.”

So that boils down to millions of lost souls “saved,” because the church was seen as a warehouse overflowing with salvation and grace, the price of salvation was cheap, and the bestower of salvation was charismatic and famous to boot. Lost souls know a good deal when they seen one. Basic salvation, no Billy Graham sparkle added, would have cost them a great deal more if they got it from a Jim Bakker, or a Pat Robertson, or a Joel Osteen.

In Billy Graham’s 99 years, has the world gotten any better with all this affordable grace and salvation added to the world? But as Matthew Avery Sutton argues in the Guardian, Graham didn’t much care about the world. If people of little ethical accomplishment can get into heaven so cheaply, then why not let the world burn, and seven billion souls burn in it?

Robots and inequality

Amazon’s new automated store in Seattle. Source: Wikipedia

Trump voters and consumers of Fox News are having the time of their lives these days, glorying in how their big man is sticking it to liberals, immigrants, and brown-skinned people. They actually feel safer, now that a con man is in the White House who feeds them what they want to hear.

Meanwhile, their world is about to go even deeper down the rat hole. The right-wing media will see to it that they won’t know what hit them.

For decades now, the 1 percent have been raking in most of the gains, while working people’s share of wealth and income shrink. Working people really don’t understand just how rich the global rich really are. Still, inequality has reached politically dangerous levels. The rich know that the political danger is rising, but so far the rich have been successful at using their media and their political control to misdirect the growing economic discontent. The rich would much rather have fascism in America than European-style democratic socialism. The Trump era, with its demonization of government, its propagandization of the population, and its packaging of the rich people’s agenda as heartland populism, reveals to us how the rich intend to keep their gains and keep on bamboozling the losers.

Meanwhile, the liberal media are trying to warn us that a new wave of economic upward redistribution is about to hit working people: robots. In the New Yorker, we have “Amazon’s New Supermarket Could Be Grim News for Human Workers.” The Guardian writes: “Robots will take our jobs. We’d better plan now, before it’s too late.” Even a business-oriented industry publication writes: “From robots to smart mirrors, the world of retail will look like a very different place in 2030.”

While robots take jobs from humans at an accelerating pace, the intent of the Republican Party is to go right on cutting the safety net for working people, while cutting taxes on the rich and shifting taxes to lower-income people.

Republicans can’t say they weren’t warned. Policy think tanks such as the Brookings Institution have published report after report about where inequality is leading and how inequality endangers democracy. But Republicans don’t care about policy (or democracy) anymore. The Republican project is simply to enact the rich people agenda.

With the right kind of enlightened public policy, this country might be able to survive the coming wave of jobs lost to robots. But I have no hope of that ever happening unless justice catches up with Donald Trump and a whole lot of Republicans go to prison for their crimes. We’re still seeing only the shark’s fin above the surface of the water, but leak by leak it’s becoming pretty clear who those criminals are. The guilty are using increasingly dangerous and desperate tactics to evade justice. What blows my mind is that about 35 percent of the American population — economic losers, almost all of them — feel safer than ever during one of the most dangerous times in American history.

Britannia season 1

I am five episodes into Britannia season 1. This was a must-watch for me, since I am particularly interested in the history of the Romans’ clash with the Celtic world.

As for the history, the writers of Britannia seem to have stuck to the basic outline of what Roman history recorded. Everything else is imagined. The year is 43 A.D., 17 years before Queen Boudica’s uprising against the Roman occupation in 60 A.D.

The series has not been getting very good reviews. One reviewer said that it is “crazy as a box of frogs.” There is much to be said for that. My own view is that the Celts and druids were not nearly as wild and barbaric as they are depicted here. Celtic art, for example, and Celtic technology including ships, wagons, and chariots, were plenty sophisticated. Many of the druids spoke Greek. When the Gaulish druid Divitiacus went to Rome and spoke to the Senate around 60 B.C., by no means did he make a fool of himself. Cicero was impressed by Divitiacus’ knowledge of astronomy and natural philosophy. But in Britannia, the druids are half-mad, drugged-out bone-rattlers. They are sinister and ugly, as opposed to the kind of elite caste who left us the Brehon laws. And nothing has been said so far about Celtic music. How could they leave that out?

In many ways, this series defames the Celts and druids. Whether it lionizes Rome remains to be seen.

Still, the series is very pretty to watch, with great locations (though many locations, filmed in the Czech Republic, don’t look much like southern England). The scripts and dialogue are smart. The situations are unpredictable. Except for the Kerra character, all the Celts have bad hair, which I suspect is a trend started by the Vikings series.

I’m not exactly recommending this series, but if you have Amazon Prime, it’s worth streaming an episode or two and checking it out.

Ursula Le Guin

After the death of Ursula K. Le Guin this week, it was heartwarming to see so many beautiful eulogies and obituaries. Rarely is a fantasy and science fiction writer accorded so much respect in the mainstream. I can add very little, except to say that in addition to her fiction, she was a fine essayist and advocate for the science fiction and fantasy genres. It’s out of print now (and expensive), but I highly recommend her 1982 book The Language Of The Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

On a more personal note, Amazon sales of my novels spiked yesterday and today. I had a busy day, and I didn’t have time until this evening to try to figure out what might have caused the spike in sales. Then I figured it out. I owe it to Ursula Le Guin. I run ads for my books on Amazon. The ads are displayed when someone searches for certain terms. For each of my books, I have 100 to 200 search terms. For as long as I’ve been running Amazon ads (going on two years), by far the search term that sells the most books for me is “Ursula Le Guin.” People who read Le Guin seem to like my books. Obviously many people have been buying Le Guin’s books this week. In searching for her books, they came across mine. I don’t claim to be in Le Guin’s league, but I do think we are kindred spirits — heretics, take us or leave us.

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin, not only for your books, but for having helped my sales. I’m not sure how to return the favor, but I think the least I can do is to write your publisher begging them to reprint The Language of the Night.

If you haven’t read Le Guin, I’d recommend starting with The Left Hand of Darkness. It was outrageously head of its time, first published in 1969.

Delhi, 1993

I’ve had some distractions and haven’t posted for more than a week, but I’ll be back soon.

One of my distractions has been getting myself set up for 120-format film photography. That included buying a film scanner. Having a film scanner enabled me to scan some of my slides from a trip to India in 1993.

⬆︎ Dutch friends who looked after me and helped me manage my culture shock. They had been in India before.

Mysteries of the upper Dan River

⬆︎ The Dan River along Kibler Valley Road, Claudville, Virginia

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to go on more photo-taking and hiking expeditions. Yesterday I explored the upper Dan River, on a quest to figure out where the river comes down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains into the foothills.

The Dan River is part of the Roanoke River basin, one of the river basins of the water-rich Blue Ridge Mountains. The river meanders down out of the Virginia mountains into Stokes County, North Carolina, and flows about two miles south of Acorn Abbey. The river meanders back into Virginia again (near Danville), then back into North Carolina again. It reaches the Atlantic Ocean through Albemarle Sound. Though Acorn Abbey, altitude about 1,000 feet, lies just south of the mountains, the fact that this area is in the same river basin really makes Acorn Abbey a part of the Blue Ridge. If you’ve heard Joan Baez sing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” then you’ve heard of the area, when she sings, “Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train.”

Though I know this area very well, recently I realized that I had no idea where the Dan River comes down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains (altitude about 3,000 feet at that point) into the foothills (altitude about 1,500 feet at that point). With a rapid 1,500-foot fall, shouldn’t there be some drama there worth seeing? What I learned is that the falls are no longer in their natural state. There are two dams on the mountain that hold back the water, sending part of the river’s water down a large conduit to a small hydroelectric plant built in 1938. The plant still supplies electricity to Danville, Virginia, which owns it.

⬆︎ The red dot shows the location of Acorn Abbey

⬆︎ Low-water bridge — no guard rails!

⬆︎ The headwaters of the Dan River lie in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. I know where roads cross the river, but I lost the river among the hills and valleys. So I stopped to ask at the Mayberry Trading Post where the river lies and where it falls toward the foothills. Speaking of Mayberry, if you’ve seen the Andy Griffith show, you might assume that the name “Mayberry” started with the television show. That is not the case. Andy Griffith grew up in Mount Airy, North Carolina. I believe he was descended from the Mayberry (shortened to Mabry) family of Carroll and Patrick counties, Virginia. Griffith chose the name “Mayberry” for the television show because of its local history and local color. My great-grandmother was a Mayberry/Mabry. This is where my roots are in old Virginia.

⬆︎ Peggy Barkley runs the Trading Post. She told me where to find the dams, and she told me how to get to the hydroelectric plant (which is far from obvious). Peggy is a great fan of science fiction. She was sitting at the counter reading when I went into the store. I asked her to hold up the book and show us what she’s reading.

⬆︎ I couldn’t get to the dam, when lies about a mile below this gate. So I headed down the mountain via Squirrel Spur Road.

⬆︎ Looking south from Squirrel Spur Road

⬆︎ Mayberry Presbyterian Church

⬆︎ Along the road to the lower dam

⬆︎ Mayberry Presbyterian Church is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The church was built by an intinerant preacher.

⬆︎ Looking down into Kibler Valley from Squirrel Spur Road

⬆︎ Squirrel Spur Road

⬆︎ Squirrel Spur Road near Meadows of Dan, Virginia, looking down into Stokes County, North Carolina. The low mountains are the Saura mountain range. That’s Pilot Mountain on the right, which Andy Griffith called “Mount Pilot.”