Month: August 2020

Not quite what the 2nd Amendment crowd expected


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

A flood of new data about prehistory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The neighbors in the woods

The three sets of neighbors who own land contiguous to mine have sworn to leave the deer alone. One neighbor has spoiled them by feeding them and taming them. There are two bucks in this group. Bucks usually stay deep in hiding during daylight. If you have deer for neighbors, you can forget about such things as day lilies or azaleas. But, after all, it’s their woods, too.

Oxford, Tolkien, and the fair speech


From my visit to Oxford, August 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you a prepper now?


I am 60 miles to the east of the epicenter of this earthquake.

What next? We are in the midst of a pandemic that is getting worse in many areas, including the state I live in. A severe tropical storm just moved up the Atlantic coast. That was only the first blow from what is likely to be a long, and severe, Atlantic hurricane season. The country is on edge, because of the American political situation, which, when it doesn’t create turmoil, creates paralysis and rewards incompetence. And this morning, to remind many of us on the East Coast that nature bats last, North Carolina, where earthquakes are pretty rare, had a 5.1 earthquake that was felt from Atlanta to Washington. It was the strongest earthquake in North Carolina since a 5.2 earthquake in 1916 — not very dangerous, but disturbing. Many times, having living in San Franciso for 18 years, I have felt buildings shake in moderate earthquakes. This was the first time I’ve felt this little house in the Appalachian foothills shake.

I was pretty well prepared for the lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic. But being prepared is an ongoing project. Being prepared costs money, so most people have to go about it incrementally. There are many guides on “prepping” to be found, so there is no need for me to reinvent that wheel here. But let’s think about what we have learned from the Covid-19 lockdown.

For one, there will be shortages as supply lines are disrupted and people begin to hoard things. Whatever was hard to find in your location should now be on your radar screen for future preparedness. Once the hoarding and panic buying begins, it’s too late. It’s necessary to think about these things in advance.

One of the things I’ve learned during the Covid-19 lockdown is how beneficial it can be to coordinate with your neighbors. Many things can be shared, which reduces the expense of being prepared and increases your security. We should all try to establish preparedness pods with our most trusted neighbors. It takes a village. If you have neighbors with lots of tools and know-how, as I do, then you are very lucky. And I can do things that they can’t do, such as handling communications, by Morse code if need be. I have things, and know-how, that they don’t have.

Everyone should be prepared to get by without outside help or outside supplies for at least three weeks or so. We should increase that time at an affordable rate. And we should look at ways of extending our independence for everything that is essential — food, water, and energy, to start.

For years, I’ve considered the greatest risks in the area where I live to be, first, pandemics; and second, widespread or grid-down power failures. Sooner or later, no matter where you live, you’re probably going to lose electricity. Candles, batteries, and flashlights will get you through short outages, such as the outages caused by thunderstorms. For longer outages, you’re going to need a generator, and some solar, if possible. (To be able to get by without electricity other than solar would be ideal, but that would involve some advanced prepping.)

When I built the abbey, I had a house-size, code-compliant transfer switch installed, waiting for the day I acquired a generator. Since then, though, I have soured on the idea of whole-house generators. This is because those generators — except for those that are extremely expensive — don’t put out clean power. Rather than a sine wave, the output will be a “modified” sine wave or even a square wave. There is no way I would expose my refrigerator, heat pump, well pump, etc., not to mention my electronics, to such dirty power. The risk of damage, as I see it, would be too high.

An affordable compromise is an “inverter” generator. These are smaller, but they’re adequate for refrigerators and most appliances. They’re safe for computers and electronics. They contain a small, gasoline-powered engine, an alternator with rectifiers (much like the 12-volt system in your car), an inverter to convert the direct current to 60Hz alternating current, and a capacitor circuit to smooth the wave form into a decent (if not perfect) sine wave. I bought the Westinghouse WH2200iXLT because its specifications are explicit about a promised THD value (total harmonic distortion) of less than 3 percent. As with many prepper items, once you need these things, it’s usually too late to buy them, because they sell out.

If you’re not yet a prepper, now is a good time to think about your situation, and then to get started. A three-week time line is a requirement. Six months is a good goal. I’m a liberal prepper. It’s not about guns. It’s about providing for yourself, and working with your community to be as locally self-sufficient as possible.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

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

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

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

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

Shirer writes, in his afterword to the 1990 edition:

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

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

Germany, redeemed

Germany today: Hamburg, Nov. 12, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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