Culture – Page 36 – Into the Woods

Staying sane as insanity spreads

After the right-wing media can no longer sustain the delusion, people gradually come to their senses. But by then the damage is done.

In my lifetime, the most terrifying period in American history was early 2003, when the Bush administration was selling the Iraq war to the American people. Those of us who stayed sane during that epidemic of war fever and lust for violence learned several lessons then, all very frightening:

Lesson 1: The Republican Party has no principles. It will lie and deceive to whatever degree is necessary to get its way or to try to swing elections.

Lesson 2: The right-wing media (Fox News and right-wing media stars such as Rush Limbaugh) have made a science of whipping the lowest elements of the American population into a state of rage and delusion that teeters right on the edge of violence.

Lesson 3: When the mass delusion of right-wingers has spread to a certain percentage of the population, the mainstream media are forced to cover it. This amplifies everything.

Lesson 4: If you see 2003 support for, and opposition to, the Iraq war as a good indicator, then about 72 percent of the American population (see chart above) are susceptible to the mass delusions and psychic epidemics that the right-wing media create to gets its way. Only 22 percent of the population are fully capable of remaining sober and rational when the right-wing media pull out all the stops and force the mainstream media to follow along.

It’s 2016, and it’s happening again. The Republican Party is using its rage machine, as we knew it would, in the 2016 election. The mainstream media are following along. A year ago, smart folks on the left and right would have assumed that a ludicrous fringe character like Donald Trump could appeal to not much more than 30 percent of the population. But smart folks were wrong, because they forgot what the right-wing media machine can do. And, as in 2003, the mainstream media are forced to cover the story lines that are required in the right-wing media to get the attention of the right-wing base.

The mass insanity at present is nowhere near the 72 percent level that the right wing achieved in 2003 when Republicans were selling the Iraq war. Trump’s level of support is somewhere around 41 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 46. Still, that is terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. It’s still not over. The epidemic might weaken, but it also could continue to spread.

Each morning I cringe as I go through my daily routine of checking news sites. Trump and the media are still talking about birtherism. Trump’s agenda would add $5.3 trillion to the federal debt. Trump is under “concentrated Satanic attack,” some preacher says. No one including House Republicans cares if Trump uses foundation money to buy himself gifts or to pay bribes. Trump’s entire family proves itself to be morally deranged and psychologically cracked. And yet six more weeks of all this remains before the Nov. 8 election. One of the things that the right-wing media knows is that it must continue to top itself in order to keep attracting attention and keep the hysteria going. I am trying to brace myself for the October surprise.

Rolling coal?

Though I had seen pickup trucks with smokestacks blowing black smoke, I did not know about “rolling coal” until the New York Times wrote about it a week ago.

Here is a new way for useless white guys to strut their hatred, as they are constantly encouraged to do by the right-wing media. Google for “rolling coal,” if you’re not aware of this phenomenon. Don’t miss the article in the right-wing web site Daily Caller: “Here at The Daily Caller, we are going to give you the basics on how to modify your pickup, so every hybrid driven by some guy in a pink Argyle sweater will know exactly where you stand.”

Here’s my question. How did so many Americans get to be this way? Until I know of a better answer, I’d have to say that it’s a combination of appalling ignorance combined with yet another way that the right-wing media teach hatred, aggression, and reckless, unproductive consumption.

I have encountered right-wingers who see it as a kind of moral duty not to recycle and to use incandescent light bulbs.

Months ago, as the rest of America gradually woke up to the fact that Donald Trump actually was going to get the Republican nomination, many articles were written on the disaffected white underclass who were enthusiastically backing Trump. Many of these articles called for sympathy and outreach. Some of the articles shamed both political parties for leaving these people behind. These useless articles have tapered off. Outreach? It’s clear that the angry white underclass cannot be reached except by the right-wing media, which is more than willing to flatter their ignorance and inflame their hatred for political purposes.

A couple of days ago I was having lunch in a fast-food place because I was so busy with my liberal political commitments that I didn’t have time to cook at home. I listened to a white guy at a nearby table explaining to another white guy why Trump was the only hope. “Things are gonna get really bad if Hillary gets in,” he said. It was clear that this guy thought of himself as well informed, as a kind of intellectual, a redneck wonk. He recited a long stream of right-wing talking points, including a list of places that we should bomb. Some of his talking points were deceptive half truths, the rest were pure horse-wash. Putting that stuff into his head is a billion-dollar corporate profit center. I don’t have the slightest idea what can ever be done about it.

I do know this. I’ve got to work my tail off between now and the election to throw Republicans out of office at every level of government. Disempowering the politicians who cater to these deplorables — and they are deplorable — is the necessary first step.

How to become a fugue nerd

Click on image for larger version

Have we had a music post lately? I thought not. Get out your headphones and your thinking cap, and let’s talk a bit about fugues.

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with fugues. Everyone with a nerdly approach to music is obsessed with fugues. Recently I recommended to a friend who is taking up music that he explore this Yale online course on listening to music:

Notice that the instructor devotes an entire lecture, lecture 13, to fugue form. In the lecture, he says that every educated person should understand fugues. Yes!

I have never been anywhere close to having the technique required for professional musicians. I had a private organ teacher through junior high school and high school, and later, as an adult, I worked on my piano technique in the community music program of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. During those times when I have practiced conscientiously, I’d put myself in the category of “accomplished amateur.” That is nothing to be ashamed of. So often, people who are quite good musicians but who are not professional material feel a kind of shame, because they know enough to compare themselves with professionals. It ought not to be that way. All of us ought to be able to make our own music and share it with friends in the same way that we ought to be able to make our own supper and share it with friends.

Anyway, fugues. The top photo shows the first two pages of J.S. Bach’s Fugue in G major for organ, BWV 577. What does the “BWV” mean? It stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, German for Bach Works Catalog. It’s the system used for specifically identifying all of Bach’s compositions. The BWV 577 fugue is often called the “gigue” fugue, generally pronounced “jig” by English speakers. Why it’s called the jig fugue is pretty obvious. It sounds like a wild country dance.

An important thing to know about fugues is that fugue form is a contrapuntal form. “Contrapuntal” is just a Latinate form of the English word “counterpoint.” In counterpoint, the composition is made up of independent lines, or voices. Each line or voice, heard alone, is much like a complete melody itself. Heard together, the voices blend harmonically and rhythmically into a complex whole.

How should you listen to counterpoint? Unless you concentrate very carefully on following each separate voice, you will hear only the whole. The challenge — and the challenge has everything to do with why nerds love fugues — is to concentrate so intensely that your ear can follow each voice separately and hear the independent voices inside the whole.

A convenient thing about fugue form is that the voices usually enter the composition one at a time. The first voice starts alone (usually but not necessarily the highest voice) and states the main theme of the fugue. And then while the first voice gets involved in a variation on the main theme of the fugue, the second voice comes in. The second voice states the main theme again. Then while voices one and two wind around together and get even more deeply involved in variations on the theme, the third voice comes in and states the main theme of the fugue. And finally the fourth voice. Again and again as the fugue progresses, you’ll hear the main theme repeated, along with many variations and inversions of the main theme.

Part of what makes the BWV 577 organ fugue a good study case is that the main theme of the fugue is incredibly appealing and infectious. You’ll recognize it every time it repeats.

Got your earphones? Let’s listen to three different performances of the BWV 577 fugue. The differences in the performances are very telling. The first performance is by Simon Preston. Preston is organist at Westminster. I’m not the only person who regards Preston as the best living organist, especially for Bach. Preston aims for a clean and highly articulated style of playing. He doesn’t try to dazzle you with how big the organ can sound. Rather, he plays in a way that maximizes the chances that you will actually be able to follow all the voices of the fugue. His recordings are often made on “baroque” style instruments that recreate the type of organs that existed in Bach’s day. Preston doesn’t pull out a lot of stops and make a lot of noise. He uses only a few stops (or families of pipes) that are chosen to clarify the independence of the fugue’s voices.

An aside, but an interesting aside: Organs are of course wind instruments. When the wind first hits the lip of the pipe and the pipe begins to sing, there is a puff of air and white noise that organists and organ builders call “chiff.” Chiff often doesn’t come through well in recordings, but if you stand below a nice chiffy organ, so close that you can feel its breath in your face, the chiff will be quite noticeable. The chiff really helps with contrapuntal music, because it helps the ear distinguish the beginning of each note, the better to follow the lines of counterpoint.

Here is Simon Preston’s restrained and nerdly version of the organ fugue in G major, BWV 577. He has even slowed the tempo a bit to help your brain keep up with the four independent voices of the fugue:

There, then. Did that tax your brain? But it didn’t make you want to get up and dance, did it? The BWV 577 fugue isn’t called the jig fugue for nothing. Here is a very different recording by Diane Bish. Diane Bish does want to make a big noise and impress you with the power of the organ. She’s playing at a slightly faster tempo than Preston. She wants you to get up, clap your hands, and dance. In this version, hearing the separate voices of the fugue is more difficult. Diane Bish is concentrating on the whole:

Did that tucker you out? Need a glass of water?

The third version of the fugue is a novelty. It’s a performance by the Swingle Singers, who were quite a phenomenon in the popular music world when they came on the scene back in the 1960s. They’re going to sing the fugue. They’ve tinkered with the arrangement a bit, but when you hear human voices rather than organ voices singing the voices of the BWV 577 fugue, it’s a little clearer what Bach was up to and just what a genius he was:

Even if you don’t read music, take a look now at the top photo. That’s the first two pages of the organ score for the fugue. The entire fugue is only five pages. One interesting thing about this fugue is that rather than the highest voice (the soprano voice) beginning the fugue, the fugue actually begins with the tenor voice, played with the left hand on the organ. Even if you don’t read music, I bet you can track the main theme of the fugue through the first six measures of the score by observing how the notes move up and down. What’s a measure? Look at the vertical lines that appear between the notes every twelve beats. What’s a beat? I’d rather not try that in English at the moment, but your ear knows.

Another remarkable thing about this fugue is its unusual time signature — 12/8. I’d risk boring you and losing non-musicians if we got too deeply involved in the strangeness of 12/8 time. Musical “time signatures” can only be two-based or three-based. That includes multiples of two and three, like four and six, or eight and twelve. For three-based rhythm, think of the waltz (typically 3/4), in which you will surely count ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three as you learn the steps. A waltz is a three-based time signature. Now think of a march such as a Souza march. Typically a march will be in 2/4 time, and as you march you might count ONE-two, ONE-two, ONE-two, as your two feet strike the ground.

So what’s up with 12/8? It has characteristics of both two-based and three-based rhythm. This is because 12 is divisible by 3 as well as by 2. Over all, 12/8 has the feel of two-based 4/4 or 4/8 rhythm. But twelve can be divided by four three times. So you hear three-based rhythms merging into four-based rhythms. This will blow your mind, if you can hear it. Try it: Listen to the Diane Bish version again, and while she plays, rapidly count ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, keeping up with the fast-moving notes. Now slow down and count at about half that speed. At half speed, your ear will hear ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-three-four.

Now listen to the Swingle Singers performance again. About halfway through, a drum set joins the singers. Listen carefully to the drums. The percussionist is playing a four-based rhythm with one hand and a three-based rhythm with the other. That’s like rubbing your belly with one hand while patting your head with the other.

If you were able to hear the separate voices of the BWV 577 fugue at least some of the time, and if you were able to hear the fugue in three-base as well as four-base time, as though a jig is partly a fast waltz and partly a fast march, then congratulations. You’re on your way to becoming a fugue nerd.

And to my friend who is taking up music as an adult — and to all adults who might want to take up music later in life: I know that it may seem intimidating, but it’s an adventure. Most of all, let’s not let ourselves be intimated by fear of criticism or the hegemony of professionals (as much as we admire them and appreciate them). Music is like air and water, or language. It’s for everyone.

Which performance did you like the best? Were you able to hear the counterpoint at least part of the time? Could you hear both the three-ness and the four-ness of the 12/8 time signature?

Extra credit for advanced nerds: Can you see how we can calculate, mathematically, that the three-beats are occurring three times as fast as the four-beats? Try this as a thought experiment, or with another person:

Have one person, at a slow to moderate speed, count aloud in fours: ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-free four.

Have a second person, counting much faster, count to three in the time it takes for the first person to say just one number: ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three.

Note that they will always both say “ONE” at the same time. What you now have is a three-based rhythm nested inside a four-based rhythm.

Here’s another way of doing the same thought experiment. Get two metronomes. Set the first metronome for a nice allegro tempo, say 120 beats per minute. Set the other metronome for exactly three times faster — 360 beats per minute. Now start both metronomes at exactly the same time. The faster metronome will say 1-2-3 for each click of the slower metronome.

In 12/8 time this odd rhythm is sustained through the whole piece. But three-on-four rhythm also occurs sometimes in passing in, say, 4/4 time, when three notes called “triplets” share the time allocated to one (or even two) 4/4 beats. Brahms is well-known for doing this in his piano pieces, in which one hand is playing a three-based rhythm against the other hand playing a four-based rhythm. In such situations, the pianist would be a fool to try to count it out. Rather, when you know how the piece should sound, the spirit of the music, guided by a disciplined ear, will pull you through.

Here is this rhythmic strangeness in a very different style of music, Brahm’s Intermezzo in A major for piano, opus 118, No. 2. Notice what happens rhythmically at 2:02. The left hand is playing six successive notes in the same time allocated for four successive notes in the right hand. Brahms then relieves the ear by breaking into a kind of four-part hymn at 2:44, with all the notes landing on the beat. Then, at 3:14, the rhythm runs to an even wilder six-against-four rhythm reachable only by the spirit of the music (and not easily by metronomes):

Here’s a single measure from this intermezzo, to show three-against-two, with the threes in the left hand and the twos in the right.

This cannot even be precisely scored. But do note how the middle C, which is attached to both the left hand and the right hand, is precisely on the beat in both lines, even though it’s the fourth note in equal time for the left and the third note for the right hand.

Don’t feel bad if this is hard to follow. It’s a tough problem for even for good musicians who are approaching this piece.

Hollywood’s recurring dreams — about itself

La La Land

Why is it so hard to think of fresh and original premises for a story or movie? Is it that writers don’t have much imagination? Or is it that publishers and filmmakers are wary of stories that deviate too far from the standard themes that have made money in the past?

Sometimes, when browsing for movies on Netflix, while reading those two-line blurbs that are supposed to give you some idea of what a movie is about, I marvel at the tiredness of the themes:

After a public breakup, a once-perfect Texas belle has a hard time going home again. Maybe a hunky old beau will help. (Hope Floats)

Try some ice cream, too.

A throbbing EDM scene is awash in fateful chance meetings, forking life paths, and six strangers seizing their moments. (XOXO)

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

He defied all his limitations to turn the tide for his college team. Because the heart of a champion won’t be denied. (My All American)

Sounds like a very nice person.

Their environment is vast, deadly, and coursing with passion. A loveless marriage can twist many ways. (The Painted Veil)

And good luck to you both.

A house of grandeur is really a house of delusions, and a hack screenwriter gets in deep. Is he ready for a closeup? (Sunset Boulevard)

Probably not.

A swaggering youth wants out of his blue-collar ‘hood. Can disco dancing be his ticket to a better life? (Saturday Night Fever)

Wow. Let me know how it goes.

They both have careers to think about. It’s too bad that pesky thing called parenting is getting in the way. (What Maisie Knew)

Sounds like an au pair would be just the thing.

But when a Hollywood screenwriter really runs out of ideas, then that’s the perfect time for a movie about Hollywood, or about screenwriters. Here’s a list of the 25 best movies about Hollywood. And here’s a list of some movies about screenwriters.

This week, the online media are all excited about a new film starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. It’s about Hollywood:

An aspiring actress and a dedicated jazz musician are struggling to make ends meet in a city known for crushing hopes and breaking hearts.

Try some dancing and singing. That usually works.

I think that one of the reasons I am so uninterested in here-and-now stories is that, most of the time, they recycle the same old themes. They are set in the same old places, with the same kind of characters. Why do we impose such limits on our imaginations? Hollywood has the means to take us anywhere, if only somebody will come up with the story. And while we’re at it, can we have some new actors and actresses? There must be hundreds of them in a place like L.A., hot and talented, living on credit cards, struggling to survive in noisy neighborhoods. Suspension of disbelief is far easier with faces that we’ve never seen before. You’ll want to keep those shirtless pictures of Ryan Gosling coming, though.

Lots of people complain about stories that are “not realistic.” Is that what this market is about? In my world, to want stories to be “realistic” is to completely miss the point of what stories are for. I don’t know about you, but I want stories that take me away from all this.

The theme song for “La La Land” is “Audition”:

Here’s to the ones who dream
Foolish as they may seem

I’m all for dreaming, but haven’t we had that dream before?

A couple of book reports

The old translation and the new

Plato: The Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, 1997. 1838 pages.

For years, my only volume of Plato was the translation by Benjamin Jowett, first published in 1871. I bought the volume in a used bookstore. It seemed like a good find at the time. From the pencil markings in the front, it appears that I paid $12 for it. Most of my previous reading of Plato was from the Jowett translation. The Phaedrus dialogue, in particular, figures into my Ursa Major novels. One of my two main characters even is named Phaedrus.

Now I know that relying on such an old translation was a huge mistake. An academic friend happened to mention a couple of months ago that the Jowett translation is badly bowdlerized. Instead of Jowett, we now have a new and far superior translation, published in 1997. It’s edited by John Cooper, and it isn’t bowdlerized. It also isn’t cheap. The hardback will cost you over $50.

Benjamin Jowett, by all accounts, was a heck of a scholar. He was at Oxford. But he also was a theologian and a 19th Century evangelical. Do you hear the alarm bells going off? It means that Jowett can’t be trusted not to censor the Greeks. I’ve not spent that much time on side-by-side comparisons of the translations, but it was easy enough to see that where Jowett used the English word “love,” the Cooper translators used the word “sex.” Now that’s a very different thing, isn’t it? And one of the areas in which we most don’t want to misunderstand the Greeks is on the distinction between love and sex. Sex is discussed quite a bit in the Plato dialogues. It’s discussed very casually and without the slightest sign of the squeamishness that is detectable in the Victorian translation. Jowett’s theology prevented him from understanding this. I sometimes wonder how Greek literature even survived the long, dark Christian era. My guess is that it’s only because Christianity required the fetishization of Rome, and along with Rome, Greece. We’re lucky that the squeamish made do with mere bowdlerization, though I have little doubt that some lost texts were lost because it was thought best to copy over something so un-Christian.

There’s another, more subtle, difference in the translations. That is that, in an archaic translation, Plato himself seems archaic. But, in a modern translation, Socrates and his young men seem thoroughly modern. Their wonderful sense of humor seems just the same as ours. Human foibles, it would seem, haven’t changed a bit. And so, reading Plato in a modern translation makes us realize that the distance between (ahem) us smart folk and the Greeks is about a millisecond. They were just like us in a great many ways, and that’s incredibly endearing. There is nothing at all formal about the dialogues. They’re super-casual, just the guys sitting around talking, jesting, and trying their wits against each other. You realize that Socrates was popular not just because he was smart, but also because he was funny, always kind (even to the gym rats with their modest intellects), and fun to be around.

So, as a smart folk and as a reader of this blog, you do keep a volume of Plato by your bed for fill-in reading, don’t you? If you have the Jowett translation, slip a card into it with a warning to the next owner about bowdlerization, sell it to a used bookstore, and get yourself the new Cooper translation.

Don’t fret too much over the The Republic. Utopias as a form of literature are interesting, but their shelf life is terrible. Instead, browse the other dialogues according to your mood.

If you’re new to Plato, I would offer a warning. It’s sometimes difficult to tell when Socrates is being serious. He sometimes elaborates on arguments that he doesn’t believe, at all. This is certainly true in The Phaedrus. If we were sitting at Socrates’ feet, no doubt he’d wink at us from time to time, and he’d sometimes be interrupted by laughter that isn’t mentioned in the dialogues. It’s like listening to Mozart. Frequently Mozart wants you to laugh at his music, just as Socrates wants you to laugh at some arguments. So one needs to be very careful about taking snippets of Plato out of context. It’s possible to get him exactly backwards.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. By Matthew B. Crawford, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 320 pages.

This is a strange book, difficult to review. I’d call it philosophy, but Crawford says that it’s more a polemic. The author wants you to take control of your own attention instead of allowing your attention to be dominated by the many forces that have such clever ways of usurping your attention for their own purposes. The author also wants you to be less abstract, less concerned with representations of the world (the most extreme of which would be virtual reality) and more concerned with the world right under your nose.

Crawford’s philosophical position naturally leads him to a great respect for skilled practice, both for the way it requires our attention and the way it requires us to pay attention to the real world, the world outside our heads. He mentions many skills — cooking, gardening, motorcycle riding, pretty much anything that requires the use of tools. He talks about how quickly you can get killed if your attention lapses while racing a motorcycle. He detests “drive by wire” automobile engineering, in which the brake pedal isn’t truly connected to the brakes, or the steering wheel barely connected to the steering. This, by the way, made me appreciate once again how much I like the honest Mercedes engineering of my Smart car, in which the driver is truly connected to the road. It helped me realize how good design — for example the design of my Nikon professional cameras — makes the camera feel like a natural extension of the body and the body’s visual system.

Having made his case in the first part of the book, he devotes his last chapter to the art of organ building, as an illustration of his message. As an organist, I found this fascinating. If Crawford himself is a musician, he didn’t say so. But the work and time that he put into understanding the craft of organ building made me realize that he is almost certainly equally diligent about whatever else commands his attention.

I’m appending a couple of paragraphs about the organ, not because it summarizes the book but because it’s funny, and it’s a great piece of writing.

“Pipe organs are to the Baroque era what the Apollo moon rockets were to the 1960s: enormously complex machines that focused the gaze of a people upward. Pushing the envelope of the engineering arts, a finished organ stood as a monument of knowledge and cooperation. Installed in the spiritual center of a town, a pipe organ mimics the human voice on a more powerful scale, and summons a congregation to join their voices to it. The point is to praise something glorious that transcends man’s making. Yet the congregants can’t help but notice that this music of praise, like the instrument that carries it aloft, is itself glorious.

“A big pipe organ thus expresses both humble piety and vaunting pride at once. It can be shockingly indiscreet in this later role; the organ often dwarfs the ostensible altar. But perhaps these tendencies get blurred together in the life of a congregation. When the choir is at full song, the stained glass is rattling loose, and the whole house seems ready to launch, what then? Then the organist pulls out all the stops. He shifts his weight to the right. His left foot is poised over the leftmost pedal, the low C, and now he stomps it, sending a thousand cubic feet of air per minute through massive pipes to blast heaven’s favorite pigeons out of the rafters. Now the very pews transmit joy to women’s loins, and the strongest man in the congregation feels himself reduced to a blushing bride of Christ. Now one feels it is God’s own organ that fills the sacred chamber, and when this happens, praise comes naturally: hallelujah!”

Political insanity and religious insanity

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland

While the 2016 presidential election puts on full display the political insanity of much of the American population — not to mention the insanity of the Republican Party — let’s not fail to point out another insanity that is just as prevalent: religious insanity. Let’s also note how closely the two are connected.

The quote below is attributed to televangelist Kenneth Copeland, in a recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

“If Christians don’t support Trump, they are risking the wrath of God. Trump has been chosen by God, and by rejecting him, they are rejecting God. They could be punished with barrenness, poverty or even having a gay child.”

And the quote below is attributed to Anne Graham Lotz, on the air with right-wing radio host Steve Deace:

“Our nation seems to be shaking its fist in God’s face and telling him to get out of our politics, get out of our schools, get out of our businesses, get out of our marketplace, get off the streets. It’s just stunning to me the way we are basically abandoning God as a culture and as a nation. … I think that’s why God allows bad things to happen. I think that’s why he would allow 9/11 to happen, or the dreadful attack in San Bernardino, or some of these other places, to show us that we need him. We’re desperate without him.”

What a nice god! Though he must be incredibly busy running the universe, he also has time to punish earthlings for not voting Republican. That god also kills people — or at least allows people to be killed — to remind us how much we need such a violent, vindictive god.

As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has pointed out, this kind of religious delusion and narcissism are prevalent among plenty of people who might see Kenneth Copeland and Anne Graham Lotz as a bit extreme. Harris has beautifully pointed out the narcissism of people who think that God is intimately involved in the details of their lives. Not only does God actually tell them what he’s thinking, it’s remarkable how much these people and their god are alike: pure nasty. While your God was finding you a parking space, Harris says, or answering your prayers for enough money to pay your credit card bill, how many children did that same God allow to die in Africa while their helpless parents watched and prayed? That’s narcissism on top of the nasty.

I’m fully on board with freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But those freedoms also mean that the rest of us are free to tell these people that they’re vile and sickening, and that their god is even worse.

Anne Graham Lotz

Road trip to Green Bank

I’ve made some fine road trips in my day, in several countries. But I believe the road trip that I just returned from was one of the best ever. The trip was mostly on back roads from Stokes County, North Carolina, through the Blue Ridge Mountains into the New River Valley, thence into West Virginia to Green Bank.

My primary mission was to see the Green Bank radio telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. To go see the telescope seemed like a no-brainer, since it’s not that far away and since I’m a space nerd and a radio nerd. Getting there was half the fun.

I am not well traveled in West Virginia. We all know that parts of West Virginia are environmental sacrifice zones, chiefly for coal but also for natural gas. This road trip took me through a very different part of West Virginia — a still-natural and well-preserved countryside, much of it in national forests.

The wildflowers! The trip would have been worthwhile for the wildflowers alone. The roadsides and pastures were dense with wildflowers at the peak of summer. I was green with envy at the rainfall the area has had and how green everything was. In between the mountains, the ridges of which tend to run north to south, are wide valleys, extremely fertile. It’s perfect pasture land. And, judging from the size of the farmhouses, that pastureland made lots of farmers rich. These are not the small subsistence farms that were much more common in the American southeast.

Morning temperatures ranged from 68 to 75 degrees F. Afternoons might have been warmer except that clouds and showers seem to descend on the area pretty much every summer day. There was hardly any traffic on the roads. I drove with the windows down, enjoying that sense of freedom (in my Smart car) that car commercials always try to give — the idea that there’s no one on the road but you. The road trip was almost freeway-free. GPS did the navigating, but when presented with alternate routes I always chose the routes that followed rivers or that avoided populated areas.

The telescope is fascinating. I have been plotting the third book of the Ursa Major series, and in book 3 Jake and Phaedrus actually will find themselves at Green Bank, having gotten there by mule, for some action scenes that require the use of the telescope, though the telescope had been idle since the calamity struck (in the first novel) that wiped out 6 billion of the earth’s population and returned the survivors to the Iron Age.

The telescope is extremely sensitive to radio interference. It’s located inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, and the surrounding mountains also keep out radio interference. I lost my cellular signal 50 miles south of Green Bank. Upon arriving in Green Bank, hoping to find accommodations to spend the night there (there are no such accommodations), I stopped at the public library, hoping to use WIFI. They library staff told me that they’re not permitted to have WIFI because it would interfere with the telescope. If you visit Green Bank, try to arrive early in the day, do the tour, and then leave yourself time to head east toward Charlottesville or south toward Blacksburg, if you want something to eat or a place to sleep — or Internet access.

The tour takes an hour. You’ll start in the auditorium with an undemanding scientific briefing from your tour guide, and then a video. Then you’ll board a bus and be driven to a point near the base of the telescope. The tour guide will explain that the bus uses a diesel engine, because the spark plugs in a gas engine would create radio interference.

It’s hard from photographs to grasp the scale of the telescope. It’s 485 feet tall, 60 percent higher than the Statue of Liberty. The size of the dish is almost three acres. It weighs 8,500 tons, but it can be rotated and tilted (azimuth and elevation) with extreme precision.

There were nine people in the tour group I was in. Six of them were Dutch, two were British, and I was the only American. Why are Americans so incurious? Once again I was reminded why I have so often said that I have much more in common with the average European than with the average American. I returned to Trump country — Wytheville, Virginia, to spend the night.

Driving south toward Wytheville, about an hour from Green Bank, I got cellular service again. A text message arrived from Ken, who was holding down the fort at the abbey: “Four foot long snake has been relocated. Raccoons ate all orchard apples. Lily is well. .15 Inches rain. Hope you’re having fun.”

Wytheville was not much fun, to tell you the truth. Wytheville was once a sleepy place, but major new roads have turned it into a travel hub. Watching an ill-mannered, incredibly unhealthy bunch of Americans descend on a free Ramada Inn breakfast made me want to emigrate to Scotland as quick as I could pack my bags. I was conflicted about where to have dinner in Wytheville. The many restaurants were mostly about “family” food, or they were chain restaurants. I finally settled on the Sagebrush Steakhouse & Saloon. It appeared to be locally owned, and I liked the “saloon” part of the name. I confess that I had a filet mignon with garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli. It was superb. I felt as though I was having supper in a well-run Irish pub. If you ever find yourself in Wytheville, I recommend it.

Places like Fries, Virginia, are depressing. Fries is a classic example of a textile town that is now poor, culturally and otherwise. In other words, Trump country. In 1940, its population was 1,555. It’s now 469. Years ago, most of the people worked in the cotton mill, which was powered by a hydroelectric dam on the New River. The dam is still there; the old mill has been demolished. The mill closed in 1989 and put 1,700 people out of work. The roads around Fries are a classic, and depressing, example of Trump-supporter impoverishment. The housing is dilapidated, with junk in the yards and dogs on chains. The nasty little churches seem to be the few remaining businesses. One of the churches even seemed aware of the fact that it’s just a business selling heavenly comfort into the squalor. “Under same management for over 2,000 years,” said the church’s sign out front. Harrumph.

But how different the economy of West Virginia used to be! Not only were there prosperous farmers living on fertile land, there were many resorts, most having to do with springs. The grandest resort I saw was Sweet Springs, designed by Thomas Jefferson and once a hangout of the rich and famous.

Upon arriving home, I said to Ken that the road trip put me in mind of thoughts he describes in Trespassing Across America. Ken uses much more refined and nuanced language, but this road trip made me both love and hate America. Wonders such as the Green Bank Telescope are a reminder of what Americans have accomplished. Sweet Springs — not to mention those beautiful farms and the national forest — is a reminder of what America once was and promised to be. But now there are Trump signs amid the ruins of our old economy. As for the new economy in places this remote, it appears mostly to have to do with big highways and the sublimely ugly service and retail development that springs up along those highways. A brush with Europeans is a reminder of just how ignorant and culturally impoverished most Americans are.

You know what I think would make this country great again? An educated and informed population, the opposite of what Donald Trump and his political party stand for. I got the heck out of Fries and Wytheville and hurried back to the abbey, a tiny Fox-free bubble of books and imagination in the foothills.

So why will Jake and Phaedrus find themselves at Green Bank in book 3 of the Ursa Major series? A calamity threatens — an act of sabotage that would destroy an incoming ship loaded with E.T. VIP’s from the galactic federation. Unless Jake and Phaedrus can succeed in transmitting a radio signal out to the vicinity of Neptune to prevent the detonation, earth will get itself into yet another deep pickle, as earth is wont to do.

The tour guide uses a Faraday cage and a spectrum analyzer to show how even a digital camera can create radio interference.

The nicest of the many churches I passed

What else is new? Outside money is always seeking to turn what’s left of natural America into a sacrifice zone.

Sagebrush Steakhouse & Saloon at Wytheville

“Where to Invade Next”

It’s easy to dislike Michael Moore. He’s rude, and he looks like a slob. But his documentaries fill an important need, because he tells us what we otherwise wouldn’t hear.

In this blog, I’ve often mentioned the Overton window. That’s the window of allowable discourse, the range of ideas that the mainstream media will talk about because it’s assumed to be the range of ideas that the public will accept.

For years, the Overton window has been pulled hard to the right. It was assumed that European-style socialism was something that the American people just didn’t want to talk about until Bernie Sanders proved otherwise. With “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore shows that Europe is not the decaying freedomless hell hole that the right-wing media say it is. The American people are deeply immersed in their delusion of American exceptionalism and rarely question the notion that we Americans are the best at everything, that the whole world envies us.

In “Where to Invade Next,” we are reminded that, in many ways, the civilized world feels sorry for us Americans. Even Tunisians feel sorry for us. Moore doesn’t whitewash Europe’s history or Europe’s problems. He sheds a lot of light, actually, on how Germans deal with the shame of their history and how even peaceful Norway has to grapple with right-wing terrorism and mass murder.

And you will definitely want to know what French schoolchildren have for lunch.

Taboos, truth-telling, and an F-word

For as long as I have been politically conscious, there has been a strong taboo against using certain words in public discourse. One of those words is the H-word — Hitler. (Nice people lower their voices when they say the name.) That taboo led to what we call Godwin’s law, which posits that if any online political discussion goes on for long enough, it becomes almost a certainty that someone will use the H-word. Another one of those words is the F-word — fascism. Again, I lower my voice. These are words that nice people don’t use.

The moment one uses either of these words — I like to call them rhetorical bludgeons — he is deemed guilty of rhetorical excess and automatically loses the argument. The assumption underlying the taboo is that this is America, we’re better than that, and that American democracy could not possibly ever fall into fascism or produce a demagogue like, you know, the H-guy.

But, just as a thought experiment, what would happen if the F-word ever became the right word? Our public discourse and therefore the front line of our defenses would be paralyzed until we came to our senses.

And so I am encouraged to see the F-word increasingly finding its way into print as the Trump phenomenon grows. Andrew Sullivan used the F-word in a long article in the May issue of New York magazine. Yesterday, Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, used the F-word in an op-ed in the Washington Post, “This is how fascism comes to America.”

We have always known that, if fascism ever did come to America, religion would be right in the middle of it. From the very first colonists, American religion has always had a strong stink of evil in it.

For far, far too long — decades, actually — Republican politicians and the vilest of preachers have gotten away with incendiary rhetoric. Older Republicans have been imbibing this rhetoric for almost 40 years now. Who are these people? Matthew MacWilliams, an academic who studies authoritarianism, published an article back in February that said:

“A voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump. Neither, despite predictions to the contrary, did evangelicalism.

“Here is what did: authoritarianism, by which I mean Americans’ inclination to authoritarian behavior. When political scientists use the term authoritarianism, we are not talking about dictatorships but about a worldview. People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.”

Yep. We all know these people, the authoritarians, pretty much synonymous with the word Republican. Preachers and Republican operatives have made sure that the authoritarians among us always feel threatened. But now the Republican Party has lost control of the machinery it created to angrify and harness authoritarians for political purposes. A rogue moved in and took over. It’s really that simple. And there’s a word for it.

Update:

The New Yorker uses the F-word, the H-word, and the A-word — fascism, Hitler, authoritarian.

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump

The white working class is lost. Let’s move on.

Mark Storms, accused of killing a man in church (with a gun) over who would sit where

As a liberal and as a Democrat, I am predisposed to being sympathetic to the plight of the white working class. But I’ve just about gotten over it.

While the low-end media that serve low-information white voters carry on with the usual anger and distraction, the media followed by more-intelligent Americans is trying to grapple with a serious issue. How did Donald Trump happen? Andrew Sullivan worries that America has never been more ripe for fascism. Many intellectuals have accused the Democratic Party of abandoning the white working class. In the elite right-wing media, the problems of the white working class are attributed to moral failure — white working folks just aren’t honoring anymore the “moral” regimen that the high church and their social betters have rammed down their throats for so long.

Like many liberals, I was appalled at the right-wing media blaming white working people — blaming the victim — for global factors that are shutting them out of the economy and robbing them of their pride and dignity.

But a friend pushed back. They did bring it on themselves in many ways, he said. The more I have thought about it, the more I think my friend is right. The white working class has become mired in hatred and racism. It is proud of its ignorance. Its preferred religion — the low-church glorification of the rich, glorification of the military and war, vilification of the poor, gun worship, overt hatred of anyone who isn’t just like them, its dreams of theocracy with crushing power over the rest of us — this religion is so vile that I don’t hesitate to call it evil. Don’t miss this recent piece in the Washington Post which says that there have been 626 violent deaths in “houses of worship” since 1999. Most of those deaths occur in Baptist churches. Yet white losers are so deluded about the nature of the real world that their terror-de-jour is fear of transsexuals in bathrooms. That is moral insanity. I do believe that, as a whole, the white working class has become morally insane.

I am chairman of the Democratic Party in my county. Of course I have asked myself whether we have abandoned these white working class voters and whether there is anything we can do to win them back. But now I am pretty much persuaded that such a thing would be completely impossible. Nor is this the fault of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party thought that it could go on harnessing white resentment. Elite Republicans thought they could control white losers and inflame white losers with the right-wing propaganda system and keep on using white losers and their hatreds to win elections. But white so-called conservatives (I don’t think they’re conservatives at all — I call them right-wingers, or losers) were smart enough (though just barely) to catch on to the bait and switch. They figured out (or Donald Trump explained it to them with one-syllable and a few two-syllable words) that the Republican Party was only bilking them for votes while screwing them economically with the true agenda of the Republican Party, the billionaire agenda.

If the Republican Party couldn’t contain these people and actually is being destroyed by them, then who is crazy enough to think that the Democratic Party could do any better? White haters have simply become unfit for the modern world. They know nothing. Their skills are mostly obsolete. They lack the intelligence to adapt. They’d rather go down in angry flames and celebrate their hatreds than join the rest of us in the pluralistic modern world, with our arc toward justice.

Republicans are pretty much all alike, except that a very few of them are rich. Whereas we Democrats are a diverse coalition. Could any coalition possibly contain the white working class? No. They don’t do coalitions anymore. It took them 35 years to destroy the Republican Party. But the fragile Democratic coalition wouldn’t be able to handle these holy folks for even a single election cycle. They truly believe, from their trashed enclaves in the interior of America, that their god hates the same people they hate, that God is on their side, and that they are entitled to dominate the world, even though they and their preachers don’t know a thing about the world and the nature of the change that is destroying them.

Let’s admit it. White working people think very highly of themselves and their morals, but the truth is that they are morally degenerate and dangerous. The right-wing propaganda system, with its hate radio and fake news, which bilked them for decades to win elections by pumping up their anger and hatred, made these people far worse than they already were. Remember how nice they were during the Civil Rights era?

I don’t see a solution. We just have to hope that the United States of America can survive these people without the tyranny and fascism that Andrew Sullivan describes in the link above. We need to do everything possible to save their children from becoming just like their parents and grandparents. But all we can do now is try to contain them, anesthetize them with bread and circuses, and wait for them to die off — which they are doing at an accelerating rate, not least because of their own self-destructive behavior.

Further reading:

God tells tow truck driver to leave woman stranded on the highway because of her Bernie Sanders sticker. “The conservative Christian, 51, from Travelers Rest, South Carolina, said he felt proud that he ‘finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.’ ”