Month: July 2019

Liberals and self-defense: Are things changing?


To qualify for a concealed carry permit in my state, one must get 21 of 30 shots inside the “7” line. That’s not difficult, frankly. The green lines show how my 30 shots were clustered during my shooting trial. Only two of my shots were in the “9” area, and the others were much closer to the bullseye. I tend to shoot slightly to the left because the sights on my gun need adjusting. But I think it would be fair to say that I’m a liberal sharpshooter. Click here for high-resolution version.

For us liberals, guns are a touchy subject. I even hesitate to write here about guns, partly because I know that Europeans see the gun question in a different way than we Americans. I wish that we Americans were more like Europeans in our attitudes toward guns. But, here in the U.S., it’s not just me. There is evidence that American liberals are rethinking the question of guns for their own self-defense. It’s not hard to imagine why. I’m not saying that this is a good thing. I’m only observing that it seems to be happening, and that I’ve gotten on board, though with some doubts and worries.

There have been a number of articles about this recently, including this one at the Guardian: ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.

While Obama was president, right-wingers rushed to buy guns, having been convinced by the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association that Democrats would take their guns away. The “prepper” market also flourished, because racist right-wingers naturally assumed that a black man in the White House could only cause a collapse of society. After Trump took office, gun sales slumped, either because Trump makes his supporters feel safe, or because gun-lovers weren’t as afraid that Democrats would take their guns away. After Trump, the bottom fell out of the prepper market. Right-wingers feel all cuddly and hunky-dory with a criminal lunatic in the White House who incites his supporters to violence. The rest of us don’t.

Among liberals and leftists, new groups are forming. Among them are the Socialist Rifle Association, the Liberal Gun Club, the John Brown Gun Club, and an LGBTQ group, the Pink Panthers.

Though I have owned a pistol for about ten years, it mostly sat in a drawer, unused. A few months ago, with the encouragement of Republican neighbors (with whom I get along great because we focus on our own neighborhood and don’t talk politics), I resolved to get proper training for shooting and to get a concealed carry permit. These neighbors have made a shooting range down in the woods where the road ends. I practiced my shooting for three months and shot several thousand rounds of ammunition to prepare for the concealed-carry process. I learned to shoot a rifle when I was a boy (I was taught by my dad and my older brother). I was a good shot then. I’m even better now, with both rifles and pistols.

My state, North Carolina, has tough requirements for getting a concealed carry permit. You must attend eight hours of safety and legal training, pass a shooting test, go through a background check and mental health check through the State Bureau of Investigation, and have your fingerprints taken. People with shady intentions are not going to apply for concealed carry permits. If you ever do lawfully use a gun to defend yourself (that’s much more rare than gun-lovers would have us believe), then holding a concealed carry permit is the best possible way to demonstrate that you are a responsible gun owner and that you are competent to use a gun.

I did put a lot of thought into the decision, including talking with some of my liberal friends about the ethics involved (they all said go for it), and getting advice from conservative friends who already hold concealed carry permits. I also learned that people who hold concealed carry permits are five to seven times less likely than the general population to be involved in gun crimes.

At this point, I have no plans to carry a concealed weapon. But I like knowing that I could, should I ever feel the need. Am I afraid that right-wing militias will start targeting liberals? No, not at all, though I can imagine a dystopian future, if as a country we don’t have a change of course. In rural areas, the greatest dangers are associated with drug use, drug dealing, and the crime that involves.

Part of my motivation is public relations. I want the local Republican Party to know that the local Democratic chair has a concealed carry permit. That serves two purposes. For one, it lets them know that the Democratic Party is aware of the Second Amendment and is not going to take their guns away, no matter what the NRA says in order to stimulate gun sales and stoke right-wing paranoia. For two, it gets the word out that I may be armed, that I am a crack shot, and that I’m not to be messed with. Crimes against Democrats and liberals in this county have not risen above the level of insults and defacement of our roadside political signs (which is very common). There are a lot of guns in this county, and the vast majority of gun owners are law-abiding and responsible, whatever their politics. We have an excellent sheriff and sheriff’s department.

There are people who carry guns with them illegally. I consider that very dangerous. A month or so ago, there was a story in the news about a woman somewhere in North Carolina who, while putting a pistol into her purse, accidentally shot herself and died. Proper training in gun safety should prevent that sort of thing. It’s highly likely that her pistol was either old or poorly designed, or that she was storing it in an unsafe condition. I would never under any circumstances have a gun near me that is ready to fire. How to safely store a gun is part of what one learns in a concealed carry class. For those who do have a pistol and carry it illegally, I would say: Don’t do that. Get a permit. Carrying illegally exposes oneself and others to risk, not only safety risks, but also legal risks.

I have decided not to join any organization for liberal gun owners. That’s not because I think such organizations are a bad thing, but because all of them seem to have some kind of manifesto that I don’t necessarily agree with. I’m also not suggesting that anyone ought to get a gun. But I am saying that anyone who does have a gun should be trained in how to use it and should know and honor the regulations that apply in the state you live in. And though I do not believe that more guns make us all safer, I do believe that we have a natural right to defend ourselves and others.

Catastrophic media failure

It is rare to be an observer at an important event and then to see how the media report on it. I watched the Mueller hearings yesterday, as well as the Democrats’ press conference afterwards. What I saw was not what the media are reporting — at all.

What I saw was a dignified and meticulous accounting of a vast array of damning evidence against Donald Trump. What the media saw was a “flop” and a “fizzle” and “such bad TV” (Politico). The Washington Post wrote, “The Mueller testimony didn’t deliver the spark the Democrats wanted. That puts the onus on House leaders and heightens the stakes for next year’s presidential election.” The New York Times wrote, “For all the dismal reviews of his performance, the day did not end talk of impeachment.”

I learned many things during my years in the newspaper business. For one, I learned that reporters are not the smartest people in the world. They tend to be dim bulbs for thinking in terms of ethics and principle. But in matters of perception and reaction, they are perceptive. They also are a blind herd. They come together as a herd very swiftly to align their narratives, and once they all begin reporting essentially the same thing, they cannot imagine that they might be wrong. Remember the Iraq war?

Our media also have become addicted to spectacle. In many ways, we owe Donald Trump for that. A more ethical, more principled, and more thoughtful media would reject spectacle and focus on substance. Notice the unconsciousness in the words of the New York Times: “dismal reviews,” which reveals more than they mean to reveal about how they evaluated the Mueller hearings. Politico was more conscious of the low standard they were applying, the circus standard: “such bad TV.”

Once again, our mainstream media have become a clueless herd, as when they caught war fever and helped Bush and Cheney deceive the nation into war. Now our mainstream media have caught Trump fever, and we can’t hold Trump accountable for his crimes because it might make bad TV.

A friend sent me a quote from Twitter. I am unable to identify the source, but the quote is spot on: “Who can forget when a flood of Americans responded to the election of a racist wannabe authoritarian by backing the New York Times so it could tell us that the author of the most damning indictment of a president in our history wasn’t good enough on TV.”

As a young editor, I was given special training in media law, and, along with it, responsibility for holding the line against sloppy reporting that could get us sued. I have often said that, to do that, you don’t really need to be able to cite case law such as New York Times v. Sullivan. Rather, you only have to apply some ethical principles, to use the words of a wise old editor I once worked for: Be fair, and don’t lie. I have sometimes walked a story back to a reporter, pointed to a particular passage, and asked: “Is this fair?” Inevitably I would get a blank look. Most reporters don’t think that way. They just write what the rest of the herd is writing.

Was Mueller slow and halting yesterday? Yes he was. He was trying very hard not to make any errors. He knew quite well that many questions would try to lead him to say more than he could say, based on principle, the law, and the authority that was given to him. I also believe that he might have a hearing problem, and that because of noise in the room and his distance from the questioners, he often had to ask for clarification to make sure that he had heard correctly. He wrote the report, but does that mean that we expect him to have it memorized?

Our media long ago stopped caring about Trump’s obvious stupidity, which Trump puts on display for us every day. But a careful slowness on Mueller’s part is big news — “halting and faltering,” according to the Washington Post. The questions from Democrats were meticulously aligned with fact and law. Democrats treated Mueller with great respect, and they also got the answers that they expected and wanted. But the media couldn’t care less, because it “lacked the dramatic moment” (New York Times) that Democrats were assumed to have wanted. That Republicans lied and bullied and demeaned Mueller is not even being reported, based on what I’ve read this morning. Lying and bullying by Republicans is no longer news. It’s just the new normal.

During the Iraq war, I watched virtually the entire newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle catch war fever. The same thing happened in almost every newsroom in America, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. (The McClatchy Washington bureau was the only news organization that did not succumb to war fever.) Once a news person succumbs to one of these psychic epidemics, I have found that it is impossible to get through to them. It was years before most people in the media were able to awake from their madness, admit that the war was a disaster, admit that we had been lied into the war, and admit that the media were grossly guilty of being complicit in misleading the U.S. into war, that the media had been duped and played. As I said above, reporters are not the smartest people in the world.

Once again, we are in a state of media madness. The media have now normalized Trump to such a degree that sober, rational Democrats in House committees leading us through evidence and law is weird, because it’s not a circus. Everyone wants a circus now — except those of us who want to be well governed. I commend the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. History, at least, will be able to see what they did yesterday to try to save us.

I am ashamed of our media. And I am terrified that some very bad things are going to have to happen before we awaken from this mass psychosis.

Update: As pundits and the media continue to blindly expose themselves as fools today, at least one piece gets it right — Lillian Rubin in the Washington Post. The piece is “Mueller didn’t fail, the country did,” and a link is below.

I am increasingly proud of the Democrats in Congress, who displayed yesterday the concern for reason, fairness, and equal justice that are among the defining characteristics of liberals. Those characteristics also happen to be among the founding values of our democracy. The media, having taken leave of its collective mind, somehow expected the Democratic Party to behave toward Donald Trump yesterday the same way that the Republican Party behaved toward the Clintons, including with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Whereas Republicans yesterday put on full display their reliance on distortion, their contempt for law and process, their sheer meanness, and their willingness to embrace and protect criminality and corruption to preserve their power, Democrats showed that we remember who we are and that we remember and respect what America is supposed to be about.

As I have said here before, Republicans who support Trump have lost all claim to being considered decent human beings. They proved that yesterday. Who knows how long justice will take. But at least we liberals showed yesterday that we are not like them.

Mueller didn’t fail. The country did.

Clues to the future in how people talk

https://youtu.be/qUGT30gGtiI

This video has been dubbed so that Trump is speaking with a British accent. His words are the same. How many fans would Trump have if he actually talked like this?

We Americans believe that the British are excessively judgmental about how people talk (and they are). But not only are we Americans just as judgmental, some linguists say that Americans are even more judgmental than the British. Does how people talk affect our politics far more than we realize? Does it shed some light on who will prosper and who will not?

Our reactions to how people talk are largely unconscious. But, as we listen to someone talk, we are rapidly making judgments about how smart they are, how nice they are, how rich or poor they are, how educated they are, and whether they are, or are not, like us. If the way people talk marks them as a member of an out-group, then we apply the stereotypes that we associate with that out-group.

Let’s listen to the Trump supporters in the video below. I don’t think many Trump supporters read this blog. But if they did, they’d recognize the people in the video as members of their own in-group, just like everyone else at a Trump rally. Those of us who despise Trump, however, will have very different responses. We will realize — quite correctly — that the people in the video are not very smart, not very nice, not very rich, not very well educated, and not like us:

After you watch these two videos, it’s easy to see that Trump supporters like Trump because of how he talks to them. Trump comes across as just as stupid, just as mean, just as hardscrabble, and just as ignorant as they are. Thus they see Trump as one of them. Nothing else matters to them, because they don’t know and don’t care what it actually takes to manage and govern a world as complicated as the world we live in. Because they’re enraged and confused, cruelty toward out-groups seems to be their only domestic policy, their only foreign policy, and their only economic policy.

Unfortunately for Trump supporters, their ignorance makes them easy to deceive. Trump is not like them. Trump is a rich guy from New York City whose social set is the global oligarchy, an oligarchy all about money and power and that lives on the shady side of law and ethics. Trump is deceiving and exploiting his supporters for the benefit of people who are like Trump. Trump’s narcissism feeds on their adulation. In return, Trump flatters them with his attention. They believe that someone is finally speaking up for them. He assures them that they will be great again. But that is not going to happen. Trump is, if anything, expediting their obsolescence by convincing them that they don’t have to change, or learn, or be nice, or educate their children, and that it’s the rest of the world that is the problem.

After the catastrophic election of 2016, many liberals were quick to blame themselves. If only we had reached out to them! We must engage them and empathize with them! That is a delusion. Trump supporters are too far gone for liberal reaching-out, because liberals are a demonized out-group. As they see it, only one of them can save them. Trump is quite literally seen as the answer to their prayers.

But back to language. It’s a shame that linguists have had so little to say about the culture war now raging in America, because linguists have a long, long memory, for cultures as well as for languages. Most people who write about American politics invoke American history, and there they stop. But no matter how much one knows about American history, I suspect that American history is a shallow source for understanding this culture war. To my lights, the part of American history most relevant to today’s culture war is not Jefferson vs. Hamilton but the displacement of native Americans and the loss of native American culture.

Linguists have a lot to say about what occurs when one language (or culture) replaces another. It’s always complicated, but the factors tend to be similar, whether the cultural replacement occurred 5,000 years ago (as when the Indo-European languages and cultures became dominant in Europe and parts of Asia), or 2,000 years ago, as when Latin took over in western Europe. (We need to keep in mind that, though English is a Germanic language, about 60 percent of English words derive from Latin.) Among those factors are technology (going all the way back to the wheel), migration, and the kind of economic power that comes from trading, or from political or economic exploitation.

At the level of causes that can be keenly felt by every human individual, there are two factors that are pretty much always involved in cultural displacement: prestige, and its opposite, stigma.

In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, a book about how Indo-European languages swept over Europe during the bronze and iron ages, David Anthony writes:

The pre-Indo-European languages of Europe were abandoned because they were linked to membership in social groups that became stigmatized. How that process of stigmatization happened is a fascinating question, and the possibilities are much more varied than just invasion and conquest…. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no one wants to speak like Grandpa anymore. Language shift and the stigmatization of old identities go hand in hand. [p. 340, sentence order inverted for emphasis]

And:

Usually language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. [p. 341]

As the world relentlessly globalizes (whether for good or for ill), something remarkable is happening with language. It is very rapid, because it has happened in our lifetimes. English is becoming the global lingua franca. Millions of people are learning English. I did not realize until I was Googling for this post that more people today speak English as a second language (more than 1 billion) than speak English as their first language (less than 400 million). Whether as a first or second language, to speak English today (as long as your accent is not stigmatized) is a matter of great prestige.

In the American culture war, what we have is not language displacement but culture displacement, driven by the usual factors — technology, economics, migration, and prestige vs. stigma. Trump’s supporters speak English, but many or most of them speak stigmatized dialects of English. When Trump speaks to his supporters, he speaks to them in a stigmatized dialect — a New York working-class dialect.

In a piece in the Washington Post, “Donald Trump’s accent, explained,” a linguist is quoted: “He wants to sound macho. As part of his whole tough-guy persona, he adopts almost a working-class style of speech.”

I lamented above that linguists haven’t had more to say about American politics and the American culture war. But I would mention two papers by linguists that are relevant:

Talking Donald Trump: A sociolinguistic study, by Jennifer Scalfani

Silencing nonstandard speakers: A content analysis of accent portrayals on American primetime television, by four linguists

What I’m arguing here is that what we are living through is not just a culture war but actually is the rage and death throes of a doomed culture — white, rural, Christian America. At the risk of making it sound facile, I’d have to say that their doom is obvious. They lack the skills, the knowledge, the intelligence, and even the will to adapt to a changing world. They are stigmatized. The world looks down on them, and they know it. Almost all of the social goods required for success and expansion in today’s world belong to the other side. As for the rage of rural white America, that is easy to understand, because, in their lifetimes, they have seen a reversal of prestige vs. stigma, aggravated by economic humiliation. In the glory days of white rural America, black people and gay people were stigmatized. White rural churchgoers had prestige. Now it is the other way around, which is why these changes seem like the end of the world and the work of the devil to them.

Given that Trump supporters do speak English, it would be possible for them to save themselves. They could, through education, better information, better politics, and improvement in their language skills, unload some of the stigma and work to adapt. Many of their children will do that. But the older ones won’t. As they slide into minority status, they could join a coalition, as other minorities do. But they won’t do that either. Part of what Trump and the Republican Party is teaching them is not to join a coalition of, say, working class minorities. White, rural, working-class America has everything in common with black (or Hispanic), rural, working-class America. But the Republican Party has cleverly assured that today’s older Republicans will never, even if it would make them less poor and get them medical care, join a coalition that isn’t all white and waving the Christian flag. The 2016 election, I believe, is the last national election that the Republican Party will ever be able to win, unless it completely re-invents itself. Republicans lost the popular vote. Only by lying, cheating, and relying on Russian help could they pull it off. That won’t happen again. We’re onto them.

I have another suspicion here about what may be going on in the longer scheme of things. The rotting away of white, rural, Christian America is probably just an ordinary, localized event, if you look at it from a global perspective with a timeline of 100 years or so. Theirs is not the only culture that is is dying or that has recently died. But from a 2,000-year perspective, this may also be the last stand of Christian true believers. If the test of true belief is the willingness to go to war with the infidels, then only white, rural, evangelical and fundamentalist Americans are still standing. Europe, and the Catholic church, passed that point long ago. In not too many more years, good-byes may be in order not only for white, rural, Christian Americans, but also for true-believing Christianity.

What do we owe Trump supporters? We owe them what everyone is owed: equal justice, equal rights, equal opportunity, and all the goods that go with a decent society, including public education, medical care, jobs, retirement, and self-respect. Those are the very things that they would deny to others.

I am not a linguist, nor a sociologist, nor a political scientist, nor a historian (though I can read). But I do know these people. Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the church have brought out the very worst in them. Even if it had been otherwise, and if the authority they crave had brought out the best in them, I believe they still would remain in decline, because they are unfit for a changing world and cannot adapt, as a consequence of their own failings. There ought to be a word for it, because it’s something I’ve seen over and over in how dysfunctional people live their lives. They cling, as though for dear life, to the very thing that is pulling them down.

Fried oysters, and a wandering mind


Fried oysters, French fries, and hushpuppies. The hushpuppies are barely visible, underneath the oysters.

If you can’t find any good escape fiction, then how about some escape food instead? Fried oysters should do the trick.

I had to make a miserable trip out yesterday afternoon in 95-degree heat. I could have just gone to a haircut appointment and then scurried back home, but I try to combine errands as much as possible to minimize travel. So I also went to — no kidding — the mall. (The nearest mall is in Winston-Salem. More about Winston-Salem in the update, below.) I needed a travel shirt for my U.K. trip next month, something that wouldn’t have to be ironed that would be suitable for evensong at the cathedral in Oxford, followed by a nice pub dinner somewhere. After that, it was Fresh Market for a few groceries.

It just so happens that Coronet Seafood at Rural Hall opens at 4 p.m., and it just happened to be 4:04 p.m. when I drove past on the way home. I call that serendipity, because I had been thinking about fried oysters for a couple of months, after a friend who used to live in these parts asked me in a text message if fried oysters are still a thing. The answer is yes. I call them fried fish houses. Some are better than others, but, as a rural genre, they thrive.

Are fried oysters a thing everywhere? — at least, everywhere you can get fresh oysters? Certainly, in California we had them. I’ve had them fried at a little oyster house that perches on a pier over Tomales Bay. I’ve bought them fresh from Hog Island Oyster Co., then shucked them and fried them while vacationing at Inverness, on the other side of Tomales Bay.

I was always alert for opportunities to have oysters while in Scotland last year. In Edinburgh, as I recall, the oyster bar we went to had some fried oysters, but they were a delicacy, very expensive, and they were meant more as an accompaniment to an evening of drinking than they were meant for a feast. The excellent little eatery at the Ulva Ferry had oysters, but only raw. Raw oysters are a little much for me.

The fried oysters in the photo above cost $10.95 and included french fries, hush puppies, and slaw. That’s the small platter. There’s also a large oyster platter for $13.95. For getting there early, before 5 p.m., I got an early-bird 10 percent discount.

If you go out for fried fish (or oysters) in these parts, you’ll be reminded how someone like Donald Trump became president and why his approval rating is 44 percent. I was the first to be seated, and as I waited for my oysters to be fried I glanced around as others came in. Everything about them — how they dress, how they move, their homely manners, how they hold their faces, how they talk and what they say — reveals that they are entirely monocultural. The white people don’t even have any awareness of the African-American culture that is all around them. The smallness of their world is suffocating. This is my culture of origin, and yet I feel culture-shocked when I am exposed to it. I can’t help but think that there go I, had I not been born a heretic and a misfit, equipped to think for myself, sassy enough to tell fools what to stick and where to stick it. After years in San Francisco, I sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to come back. And yet, I don’t get out much. Each year, the woods loom a little closer to the house. My real neighbors are the raccoon family that is harassing the chickens and the creatures that come out of the woods to eat the clover. I should travel more, I tell myself. And I have been traveling more.

The truth is, the Trump people don’t possess this place as fully as they think they do. Any place as unspoiled as this county is going to be discovered. The young people leave, but the retired people who move in were employees of the World Bank, or were reporters for the New York Times, or were university professors or airline pilots. Part of my job as a political operative is to find those people, though I also know people who have lived here for their entire life who identify as democratic socialists.

Much of my reading lately has been focused on prehistoric Europe and the origins of our contemporary Western languages. Cultures, of course, come and go. When one culture is displaced by another culture, there are reasons. When a culture with wheels and wagons, horses, bread, butter, ale and cheese came up against the old foraging cultures of western Europe, which culture might you suppose would win? Which languages would spread, and which would die out?

There really is a culture war. White rural culture really is dying, and now they know it. It’s dying because it is worn out, corrupted, insular, ignorant, obsolete in its skills, and unable to adapt. Its politics and its religion grow ever uglier as it panics, pulling it down that much faster. Theirs once was a culture that could spread across America and overwhelm the natives. A few hundred years later, now it’s payback time and their turn to be overwhelmed. We liberals and Democrats are hated because we represent the next wave. It’s been going on for ten thousand years.

There’s an irony here, too. No culture is ever completely forgotten. Some bits of its DNA linger on in folkways whose sources are lost in the remote past. Are there things in white rural culture that deserve to live on? We can only guess. But my guess would be that Appalachian musical styles will be conserved. Some of the cuisine, no doubt, will be conserved. If those bits of DNA do linger on, then the conservation will not get done by monocultural types who were unfit to engage the next wave. It will be done by those who had a foot in at least two cultures, curating and providing a channel for conservation of the old toward the new. Another irony: The coming next wave of culture speaks English. But it’s Spanish or Chinese that scares the rural white people, because they’re too deceived by political propaganda to understand what’s really sweeping over them.

Good-bye, white rural America, though you gave birth to me. And thanks for all the hushpuppies and fish.

Update 1: While I was writing this, I started getting emails from farflung friends saying that the New York Times has discovered Winston-Salem, which is 25 miles from Acorn Abbey. It happens that I have roots in Winston-Salem. I went to high school there, and my first job was at the Winston-Salem Journal, in 1966. Every retiree needs access to shopping and a medical center. I chose Winston-Salem partly for my roots there, but also because I preferred a second-tier city, with slower growth. Winston-Salem also is an old city, by American standards. The Salem half was on the old colonial Wagon Road from Pennysylvania to Georgia. Because Winston-Salem was settled by technically advanced and well-educated Moravians (from Germany, and they were communists, too) before the American revolution, Winston-Salem also has a leg up culturally compared with the cultural vacuum of Southern cities such as Charlotte or Atlanta. For example, I’d imagine that Winston-Salem has as many excellent church organs per capita as any city in Europe.

From the New York Times:

Why Midsize Cities Struggle to Catch Up to Superstar Cities: For decades, smaller metropolitan areas closed the income gap with bigger, richer ones, but no longer. So places like Winston-Salem, N.C., are trying to lay a new foundation for prosperity.

Update 2: Fried oysters in Edinburgh with seaweed and iceberg lettuce, August 2018:

Please, somebody … just get us out of here


Jason Momoa in Apple’s “See”

The diagnosis, I feel sure, is chiefly Game of Thrones withdrawal. Whether you loved it or were disappointed, Game of Thrones ended, leaving us exposed and defenseless in the here and now.

Europe has been in an oven. The American heartland keeps flooding. Many farmers have been ruined. The water is waist deep in the Louisiana lowlands though hurricane season is just getting started. Wildfires have been raging in the arctic and in Hawaii. It’s summer in California, which means that California will soon have fires to go with its earthquakes. Monsoon flooding in India just killed 90 people and displaced more than a million. It’s too hot to go outside here unless you’re back indoors by 9:30 a.m. “Climate despair” is now a mental health diagnosis. Donald Trump’s approval rating rose a point or two as the scrutiny of his concentration camps intensified. The U.K. seems to want its own version of Donald Trump. The yield curve is inverted. Bees are dying faster than ever, though monster-size snakes and armadillos, like Trump’s base, feast and flourish in broad daylight.

Maintaining one’s sanity requires some escape. But where to? I spend more time surfing the streaming services looking for something fit to watch than I spend actually watching stuff. I have never been able to understand the appeal of stories set in the here and now. Where’s the escape in that? I’ve started a collection of the pathetic little blurbs that one finds in the streaming services while searching desperately for something to watch. Who writes these shows? Who watches them? Why do they bother to make them? For example:

• After a bad breakup, a struggling New York comedy writer tries to don a brave face and care for his dying mother in Sacramento.

• His wife wants out. His son’s a pothead. His rabbi can’t help him. Poor schlub. He could do worse, but not by much.

• What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas … when you can’t remember what the hell happened the night before.

If all stories were that useless, I would not have survived childhood, let alone have made it to my present considerable age.

Maybe Apple will help? Later this year, Apple’s streaming service will start. Lists of the shows that Apple has in production have started appearing, for example, this one. There is the now-obligatory dystopian thriller, “See,” but so far it looks like just another show in which half the budget is spent on body rugs and bad hair. At $15 million per episode, right up there with the last season of Game of Thrones, this series can afford a lot of bad hair. I’m intrigued, though, that Apple is taking on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

Based on this list, I tried to do a rough count of how many of Apple’s new shows are not set in the here and now. I came up with 12, versus 25 shows that are set in the here and now.

Occasionally I do find something that is worth watching all the way to the end. “The Stone of Destiny” (2008) is particularly relevant now that talk of Scottish independence has been renewed because of Scottish exasperation with Brexit. “Crooked House” (2017) got mediocre reviews, but I thought it was a fine production of an Agatha Christie novel, and with a superb cast.

On the other hand, I watched only about two minutes of the Netflix revival of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. I had assumed that it was a proper remake, but instead it appeared to be just a sentimental wallow and a heavy new dose of Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney for those (such as Armistead Maupin) who can’t get enough. I follow Maupin on Facebook (mostly selfies), by the way. He has become a colossal boor with nothing new to say and who hasn’t done anything since Tales of the City other than pursue his climber social life.

If anyone would care to debate me, I would be willing to defend the proposition that decent human beings are now living through the most disturbing times since April 1945, when Hitler put a gun to his head. As evidence of this, you only have to look around and see who is gloating, and why. The worst among us believe themselves to be back on top again. They also believe that God sent Trump to save the world — not from climate disaster or thermonuclear destruction or another war, but from liberals like us.

Stories about Vegas and Sacramento just aren’t going to cut it for me.

The history you know without knowing you know it

The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams. Oxford University Press, 2006. 732 pages.

I have a standard riddle that I thought of years ago. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten the answer:

Name something that you use every day and that you couldn’t get by without. It has never cost you anything. It was made by humans. It is thousands of years old. What is it?

The answer, of course, is language. We totally take language for granted, like free air, free water, and free cats — all of which we’d be willing to pay huge sums for, if they were scarce. (People are already figuring out how to get us to pay for water. As for cats, mine was free, like all the best things in life. This time of year, you can probably get as many free cats as you want, if you’re in need of some.)

Language is an incredible gift left to us by our ancestors. But even as we use that gift, we quickly forget our ancestors. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony points out that many of us can’t even name all four of our great-grandmothers. That’s how fast we lose knowledge of the past, at least in most western cultures. As an elder, one of the things I’ve noticed about young people — for example my own great-nieces and great-nephews — is that they rarely express any curiosity about now-dead relatives that my generation remembers and could tell them about, if they cared to know. In only three generations, most of us will be forgotten. That’s our payback, I suppose, for forgetting those who came before us.

As I have gotten older, I have become increasingly curious about my ancestors, whose experience probably was very similar to that of your ancestors. My curiosity has been inflamed by the cultural destruction that has occurred during the Christian era, which has made it much more difficult to imagine how our ancestors lived. Those who have read this blog, or my novels, are aware of my rage at the cruelty, and ugliness, and completeness, of Christianization. Except for a very few traditions such as a midwinter pagan festival, which we now call Christmas, our memory of the pre-Christian past is gone, like the memory of our ancestors. One might accuse me of romanticizing the pre-Christian past. Not by any means do I suppose that the pre-Christian past was a utopia. But I do think it’s clear that Christianity systematically demonized and disenchanted the natural world, replacing the collective wisdom of our ancestors with theologies and texts from old cults that are shocking in their poverty and infantility. We are the way we are today because we’ve forgotten any other way to be. I strongly suspect that humanity’s survival depends on whether we can regain an awareness of our dependence on the natural world and find a way to re-enchant and preserve the natural world.

The trajectory of Christianization, unsurprisingly, included the extinction of languages. In the case of the Mayan hieroglyphs, much of the destruction was intentional and was the work of a single Catholic priest. The extinction of Gaulish probably was more a product of Romanization than of Christianization, but in the last years of the empire there was not much difference between Romanization and Christianization.

Still, even robust living languages and their words and grammars are largely fossils, with components that are extremely old. In the last 200 years, historical linguists have developed methods that are remarkably good at tracing a language backward toward its roots. This brings us to the now-extinct language that we call Proto-Indo-European. Though it is a dead language, more than half the people on the planet today speak a language that is descended from Proto-Indo-European. Modern descendants include most of the languages of Europe and some of the languages of Asia, such as Hindi. Classical languages including Greek, Latin, the Germanic languages, the Celtic languages, and Sanskrit are all descended from Proto-Indo-European. Strangely enough, Latin and Celtic are actually close cousins in the Indo-European family tree, because the Romans and the Celts were neighbors in Western Europe. It was not until the 18th Century, as Europeans started encroaching on India, that Europeans discovered that Sanskrit is a relative of Latin and Greek and of the entire Indo-European language family.

Consider the family tree of English. English is a Germanic language brought to Britain by the Saxon people, who came from what is now northern Germany and Denmark. After the Norman Conquest, as elites from what is now France gained power in old England, they brought with them a huge vocabulary of Latin words that were assimilated into English. Today, the 1,000 or so most commonly used words in English are Anglo-Saxon, but as word use expands beyond those 1,000 common words, Latin, French, and Greek start to predominate.

What makes The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European such a fascinating book is that it explains how linguists have actually reconstructed much of the grammar and vocabulary of the now-extinct Proto-Indo-European language. You’ll need to read the book to get a feel for how this is done, but obviously it involves patterns in how languages change, looking at similarities in all the surviving Indo-European languages. (Though classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit are considered dead languages, they are very well preserved and well understood through a large body of surviving literature.) The book actually contains lists of reconstructed words in Proto-Indo-European, with the equivalent English word. These lists run to 100 pages! Can linguists be absolutely sure that they’ve reconstructed these words? Of course not. But confidence is high. One linguist claims to have used the same techniques to reconstruct Latin by working backwards from the Romance languages, claiming to have reconstructed the Latin vocabulary with 95 percent confidence and Latin grammar with 80 percent confidence.

There are a great many reconstructed words from Proto-Indo-European that speakers of English will recognize, such as mūs for mouse, or werĝ for work. If you speak a modern Romance language, then you will recognize many more.

So, what do the fossils in our language tell us about our ancestors? We can learn a great deal, obviously, from what they did or did not have words for. We know that the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European, from about 4000 BC to about 2500 BC, had words for horses, for farming equipment such as plows, for oxen and sheep, for wool, for milk, for weapons, for barley, for beer and mead, and for wheels, axles, wagons, and for all sorts of wild plants and animals. Archeologists tell us that Europeans before 8000 or so BC were foragers. It is safe to assume that the Proto-Indo-European language spread across Europe and parts of Asia as farming and herding spread and as people stopped foraging for a living. Still, even as people settled down to farm, there was still a good deal of travel. There are Proto-Indo-European words for roads, wandering, going astray, and hospitality. As the people settled into agrarian lifestyles, and as cities developed along the rivers and coasts, the Proto-Indo-European language began to divide into Germanic, Greek, Latin, Celtic, and so on. The process must have been very similar to how Latin divided into the Romance languages after the fall of Rome.

Linguistics, then, can tell us much more about our ancestors than we might at first think. There are some questions, though, to which linguistics cannot provide a definite answer. One of those questions is where the Proto-Indo-European language originated and what the migration routes were. As far as I can tell, scholarship that combined linguistics and archeology to shed light on the lives of early Europeans was fairly late to develop. As of now, the best book I know of on this subject is from 2007: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. I’ve just started reading this book and will plan to review it later. But I want to mention four books here that I have chosen to help me get a feel for how the English we speak today can be traced backwards to the lives that our European ancestors lived up to 8000 years ago, and the languages they spoke. The other three books are listed below.

J.R.R. Tolkien, you will recall, was an Oxford philologist. It is very easy to romanticize prehistoric Europe as being a lot like Tolkien’s Shire, with the land of Rohan and its horse lords being a lot like the plains (or steppes) of eastern Europe and western Asia.

Despite its length and the technicalities of linguistics, this book is surprisingly easy to read. The only thing that stumped me — the same way that the math in books on physics stumps me — is that I mostly cannot follow the marks that linguists use to indicate pronunciation, or all the terms that linguists use for different types of vocalizations, such as labials, dentals, palatals, velars, labiovelars, sibilants, laryngeals, nasals, semi-vowels, etc. You’ll be able to follow the gist of this easily enough, though. I recommend watching some YouTube lectures on Proto-Indo-European, in which the speakers are linguists who have an incredible ability to produce the sounds that occur in human languages.

⬆︎ The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. David W. Anthony. Princeton University Press, 2007. 554 pages.

I’ve just started reading this book and will have a report later.

⬆︎ The Blackwell History of the Latin Language. James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. 324 pages.

I will read this book after The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. I’m curious to know how Latin differs from Proto-Indo-European, and maybe why. We do know that Proto-Indo-European had a complex case system, like Latin. But what puzzles me is why speakers of languages such as Latin put up with such complexity. We know that the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) started out as dumbed-down Latin. All, or least most, of the Romance languages trashed or greatly simplified Latin’s six cases of nouns — nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative. It makes me dizzy just to list them.

⬆︎ The French Language. Alfred Ewert. Faber and Faber, 1933. 440 pages.

I’ve had this book for a good many years. After I learned to read French, I became curious about how French had developed from Latin. For example, where did those weird nasal vowels in French come from? Ewert attributes such things to “the persistence of linguistic habits of the Celtic population,” which is hardly surprising. But you can see that I am trying to work backward on the English branch of the language tree: English -> French -> Latin -> Proto-Indo-European. I wish I could read German. Alas, I cannot.

Here’s a little puzzle for you if you’ve read this far. Do you know the meaning of the English word adumbrate? If you do, you can give yourself an “A” and skip the next paragraph. Otherwise, let’s puzzle out how you can figure out what adumbrate means without having to go look it up.

To figure it out, you don’t even need to know the meaning of the Latin infinitive adumbrare. Nor do you need to know that the Latin word adumbrate (it’s four syllables in Latin, ah-doom-brrah-tay, I think) is the masculine participle of the verb adumbrare in the vocative case. All that is good to know. But a language-lover will see the three parts of the English adumbrate without even slowing down in reading. There is the prefix ad-, the root umbra, and the suffix –ate. I bet you’re onto it already, because you know what an umbra is — that which an umbrella has underneath it. The Latinate prefix ad– means to go toward or to draw to. The root umbra means shadow. The suffix –ate turns the word into a verb. So, adumbrate means to throw something into shadow.