June 2022 – Into the Woods

A haul from the farm stand

The vegetable gardens are to the left behind the tractor.

Here in the middle of nowhere where some people consider Dollar General a grocery store, the best thing that has happened in years is the new farm stand. Two years ago, they started with strawberries. This year they expanded to include summer vegetables. Strawberries and vegetables are picked in the morning. The farm stand, which is right beside the fields, opens at 10. They sell all their produce into the local market. People flock in to buy it. By sometime in the afternoon, everything for that day is sold out. The fields are irrigated from a rain-fed farm pond. Vegetables are all $1.50 a pound. The tomato crop should start coming in next week. The produce is not organic, but they promise no pesticides.

The economic model makes so much sense that I don’t understand why it took so long. We have plenty of land here and lots of ponds for irrigation. We have the odd farmer’s market or two, but those are poorly attended, the prices are too high, and with some items such as tomatoes I’m skeptical that the sellers actually grow what they sell. In the past, though most have gone out of business, we used to have produce stands that sold trucked-in commercial produce. The quality was poor, and nothing was ever fresh, partly because it was never refrigerated. A farm stand eliminates all sorts of expenses and impediments to quality. There are no transportation costs and refrigeration costs. When you sell out every day, there is no waste. Everything is fresh. Not only do you meet the farmers, you see the fields. I hope this is a trend that is growing, nationwide.

The farming work here is done by a crew from Mexico, on visas for seasonal farm workers. The farm provides the workers with housing. From the quality of the strawberries, which were perfectly cultivated and perfectly picked back during May, I knew that the summer vegetables would be good, too, because the farm workers know what they are doing, and they work the fields every day. For example, a common mistake in gardening is to pick vegetables such as cucumbers and squash after they’ve gotten a little too big. Late picking increases the weight of the crop, of course. But the vegetables aren’t as good because they start to turn dry and seedy. These vegetables are picked on just the right day for maximum quality in the kitchen.

The blueberries come from a nearby farm. While peaches are in season in South Carolina, they’ve been sending a truck to South Carolina once or twice a week to bring a load of peaches. The peaches, they say, sell out almost immediately. The best peaches in the United States (sorry, California) come from South Carolina and Georgia.

The fall crop will include pumpkins. They assured me that, in addition to those horrid bright-orange pumpkins that people use these days for Halloween, they’ll also have “pie pumpkins.” That’s a huge deal for pumpkin lovers like me. I haven’t had much luck growing them, and besides they need a huge amount of space. For years, it has been difficult to find pie pumpkins in the fall — a terrible cultural failure if there ever was one. Even most country folk these days make pumpkin pies from canned pumpkin. Never in my life have I done that, and I never will.

I still have my garden, but this year I’ve reduced its size, given how much easier it has become to get fresh-picked summer vegetables at a reasonable cost. I’m growing tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers.

If you’re in this area, Manuel Farms in on Stewart Road northwest of Walnut Cove, North Carolina.

My haul, after I got home

First Fiona Hill, now Cassidy Hutchinson

I have written here in the past about Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who worked in the White House and who gave such brilliant testimony during Trump’s second impeachment. Fiona Hill went on to write a beautiful book, There Is Nothing for You Here. Yesterday, during the sixth of the January 6 committee’s televised hearings on the Trump coup attempt, Cassidy Hutchinson gave similarly extraordinary testimony.

Hutchinson is only 25, and as I took note of her perfect poise, her perfect diction, and her unwilting and respectful character when caught in the klieg lights between two hostile centers of political power and between tyranny and justice, I thought about what a privileged background she must have had to find herself as a witness to so much power at such an early age. But I was wrong about the privilege. Rather than a creature of Harvard, as I would have guessed, Hutchinson actually attended a modest public university, Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She is a first-generation college student. Obviously, like Fiona Hill, Cassidy Hutchinson is extremely gifted, and it wasn’t privilege that got her to where she is. We probably will see much more of her in the future, if (a big if) the Republican Party can throw out the Trumpists and choose leaders with integrity. The hearings have shown us that at least a few such Republicans remain.

We still haven’t seen whether the Republican Party has figured out that its only hope is to cut Trump loose and let Trump fall back into hell. Republicans may try to brazen it out until the November election, hoping that they can regain enough power in Congress to throw the country back into Trumpian chaos, and back on the path to theocracy and fascism. And honestly, if the American people choose theocracy and fascism in a fair election, then Americans will have brought on themselves the horror of the years that will surely follow. We must never forget that Trumpist Republicans are a minority, that the party as currently constituted can gain power only by lying and cheating (do we need more proof than what January 6 provided?), and that iron-boot rule by a corrupt minority could never be stable in a country like America. There would be chaos until the majority regained control — Americans who want to live in a democracy under the rule of law, Americans who are better educated, who can distingush truth from lies, who produce most of the country’s wealth, and most important people of character who can see the difference between honorable human beings and lying con men with the maturity of an eight-year-old.

The media coverage of the hearings has been quite good. I haven’t had much to say about it because there’s little I can add. But I do try to connect the dots and look ahead at the probabilities of what might happen next. I’ve been saying for a very long time that Trump will go to prison. I should have said that it will take a while to put him there, but at least now just about everyone can see that Trump is going to prison. Do the leaders of the Republican Party see that now? If they do, how might they change course? And does Trump himself now see that he’s going to prison? Does he have lawyers who are not lunatics like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman? If he does, then Trump has to know what’s going to happen. He could easily lose his freedom once the first indictments are filed, even before he goes on trial. If I were Trump, I’d gas up the family jet and move to Russia. Since Trump kills everything he touches, Trump’s assistance would be invaluable in helping Putin crash and burn, bringing regime change to Russia.

Yesterday’s hearing added something very important above and beyond the testimony about Trump’s legal liability. That was details that help expose Trump’s infantile character to those who have previously refused to see it — smashed dishes, lunch and ketchup thrown against a White House wall, the enraged attempt to throttle a Secret Service agent, the eagerness for violence in demanding that the rioters be allowed to keep their weapons, the apparent approval of allowing a mob to hang his own vice president. That such a man ever got inside the White House is a stain and a shame that this country will have to bear for as long as there is an America. I take some comfort in knowing that, though we’re still living through the chaos, at least history will have the full story of what happened, thanks to the January 6 committee.

Pity the poor witches

A Facebook meme

The day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were stories in the media about an effort in the Scottish Parliament to pardon the thousands of witches who were burned at the stake in Scotland between between 1563 and 1736.

Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, had given a speech in which she said the victims were “accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women.”

There are some interesting — and I think revealing — elements in the history of witch executions in Scotland. For one, there is evidence that Scotland executed five times as many witches per capita as other parts of Europe. For two, most of the witch-burnings occurred in the Lowlands of Scotland, not in the Highlands. Why might that be?

King James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) considered himself an expert on witchcraft. He wrote a book, Daemonologie. According to Wikipedia, “James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches.” Thus it was largely James VI who stirred up the witchcraft hysteria in Scotland. (James VI of Scotland later became James I of England. It is for this monster of a man for whom the King James translation of the Bible is named. They never tell the whole story in church.)

It was in the Lowlands of Scotland (Edinburgh and to the south of Edinburgh) where English-speaking Anglo-Saxons were concentrated, along with — of course — the influence of the church. But the Scottish Highlands remained largely pagan and Gaelic, and thus “witches” were respected — and needed — in the Highlands as wisewomen, herbalists, and healers.

This is yet another example of the moral differences between pagans and the people of the church. Because of the church’s claim to a patent on the moral high ground — one of the greatest frauds of Western civilization — the abiding superior wisdom of the pagans sometimes takes centuries to be acknowledged, which is why the Scottish Parliament is taking up the issue of witchcraft in the year 2022.

Even worse, though, than the church’s lack of moral wisdom — still with us today no less than in 1566 — is its eagerness for persecution and domination, even to the point of genocide. In the past I have written often about early Christianity’s genocides against the pagans of Europe. Canada today, and to a lesser degree the United States, is dealing with the church-state collusion and cruelty toward Native American children in the boarding schools that attempted to strip the children of their native culture — cultural genocide. Many children died in those schools. The Christian religion, like Islam, is a proselytizing religion that believes it has a mandate from God for domination of the world and of everyone in it. There is much we still don’t know about what Christian missionaries have done to powerless poor people all over the world.

There is a straight line, centuries long, from James VI of Scotland to the morally defective church people of today, especially those who are able to acquire and wield the power of the state in the service of their religion. Their purpose, still, is punishment and domination — for example, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone who has seen the hatred and depravity flashing in the eyes of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, or the almost soulless emptiness and stuntedness in the eyes of Amy Coney Barrett, can see that a concern for the unborn is not what motivates them. It is their lust for domination that motivates them. Or, to use Nicola Sturgeon’s words, their hatred for the poor, the different, and the vulnerable.

Much has changed over the centuries as the arc of justice moves on. To say that we don’t burn witches anymore is one of the ways we shed light on the idea of the arc of justice. But the minds of morally defective church people have not changed. They are authoritarians, and they continue to crave the legal right to be the cause of domination and punishment in whatever form they can get it. Donald Trump — their King Donald — emboldened them, empowered them, and let them loose. They are on our backs again. As always, women, children, and anyone who is different will pay most heavily. It remains to be seen how long it will take to throw them off our backs, especially given that the U.S. Constitution is so easily weaponized to block human progress.

My claim here is radical, but I believe it to be true. My claim is that authoritarians are not merely benignly different, with different views about what is good and what is wrong. My claim is that they are morally defective, and that they do vast harm and cause great misery in whatever century they live. They fight against the arc of justice because, in a just world, their lust for domination and persecution is thwarted.

“Visit to the Witch,” Edward Frederick Brewtnall, 1882

No basil yet, but pesto season begins

Romaine pesto with walnuts

After weeding the garden this morning and telling the young basil to grow, grow, grow, I couldn’t get pesto out of my head. So I made pesto from Romaine, because Romaine was what I had.

That means that the pesto was still what I would consider a winter pesto. Though the Romaine was surprisingly good, only a basil pesto made from just-cut basil at the height of summer is a proper pesto, to my lights.

This year I have the smallest garden I’ve ever had here at the abbey. My reasoning is that, this year, a nearby farm is going to be selling summer vegetables, all varieties $1.50 a pound, with discounts when you buy in canning quantities. The vegetables will be picked the morning they’re sold from fields within sight of the farm stand. Each morning on Facebook, the farm puts up a post to say what they have that day, and how much of it. Within the next couple of weeks I’ll have photos of my garden and of the farm stand. I’m going to eat well again this summer, and I’ll do some canning, too.

Avoiding (and detecting) fallacies

The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Albert O. Hirschman. Harvard University Press, 1991. 198 pages.

Political discourse is a minefield of fallacy. Whether we are considering the arguments of others, or framing an argument of our own, an undetected fallacy may lead us badly astray. Those who argue in good faith work hard to avoid fallacy. Those who argue in bad faith — and there are a great many of them — knowingly employ fallacy and try to sneak it past us. Sometimes they even seem to believe what they say.

Everyone who is exposed to what we call “the marketplace of ideas” should be familiar with the categories of fallacy. Wikipedia has an excellent and concise list of them: List of fallacies.

Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction is an exploration — partly historical and partly rhetorical — about three categories of fallacy that have repeatedly been employed to block human progress.

The perversity fallacy claims that any attempt to improve the common good will inevitably end up doing the exact opposite of what was intended. An example is the claim that aid to the poor will only make them poorer and further entrap them in poverty.

The futility fallacy claims that any attempt to improve the common good is inevitably useless and will have no effect. An example is the claim that allowing more people to vote (former slaves, say, or women) will not really change anything, because there is some sort of natural law that dictates that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The jeopardy fallacy is even sneakier. The jeopardy fallacy claims that any attempt at new progress will inevitably destroy previous progress. An example is the claim that democracy will destroy liberty.

Hirshman includes a quote from a Briton, Sir Henry Maine, who was arguing in the 19th Century that democracy would destroy economic progress:

“Universal suffrage, which today excludes Free Trade from the United States, would certainly have prohibited the spinning jenny and the power loom; it would certainly have forbidden the threshing machine.”

Historically, the same arguments against progress have been used over and over again. The enemies of progress keep on being wrong, and human progress has been steady, though slow, for hundreds of years.¹

Do progressives ever make fallacious arguments? Of course they do. Hirschman even has a chapter about that. I am going to make a fallacious claim here as an example. That claim is that conservatives are inevitably much more wrong than progressives because of the “arc of justice.” That is, human progress is inevitable, though gradual, and thus attempts to block progress inevitably and eventually fail, ensuring that conservatives are wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

What is the fallacy in that claim? It’s the proposition that progress is inevitable and the proposition that something we could call the “arc of justice” actually exists. There is a great deal of evidence for the arc of justice. We don’t burn witches anymore; we don’t allow people to own slaves anymore; we don’t put gay people in prison anymore. But despite the evidence for ongoing progress, I cannot prove the existence of an arc of justice any more than an argument from futility can prove that things never really change. Still, I can modify that claim and have a better chance of being right. Here is a modified claim: If there is such a thing as the arc of justice, then the opponents of progress are doomed to almost always being wrong.

I have tried to avoid polemic here, because Hirschman’s book is certainly not a polemic. He does say, though, in his final chapter, that conservatives have effectively used ridicule and a mocking attitude against progressives, while progressives have remained “mired in earnestness.” So here I will indulge in a bit of un-earnest ridicule: Show me a conservative, and I will show you a mean, wrong, wrongheaded person who knows next to nothing but thinks he knows quite a lot. It may be possible to prove me wrong, but it may not be easy.

1. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality.

Fountain pens

What was I thinking? I don’t think I had owned a fountain pen since high school. I used to always have a fountain pen, though it always was an inexpensive one. Strangely enough, it was a practical rather than an aesthetic matter that led me to buy a fountain pen. It was that my roller-ball pens generally refuse to write when I try to sign a typewritten letter on good paper.

When I checked Amazon for fountain pens, I was greatly surprised to see a pen that looked quite decent for $12.99. It’s a Beiluner pen with a stainless steel body and gold nib. It can use either ink cartridges (it comes with six), or a reservoir that you can fill yourself from an ink bottle. It writes — no joke — more smoothly than the roller-ball pens I’ve been using. And those roller-ball pens aren’t cheap.

Nothing on the box or the printed material in the box says where the pen was made. Some sources say that Beiluner pens are made in Germany. I am skeptical that German pens of such quality can be sold so cheaply.

Typewriters and fountain pens are a natural (or at least retro) dyad.

Speaking of typewriters, here are some recent photos of Tom Hanks visiting a typewriter shop in Nashville.

Update: I retrieved the box from the recycling bin. The box (as opposed to the display case) clearly says that the pen was made in China.

The justice we’ve been waiting for

For years, our televisions brought us the horror story that was Donald Trump. Last night, our televisions brought us something completely different: an end to the despair that Trump and the Republican Party would inevitably get away with everything. It should now be clear to all that Donald Trump and many others are going to prison. There will be many charges from the U.S. Department of Justice, the most damning of which will be seditious conspiracy.

I believe that Liz Cheney was speaking to history when she said this:

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” To decent human beings, it is appalling that the Republican Party even continues to exist.

On Fox News last night, Tucker Carlson said, “They are lying, and we will not let them do it.” There is not much that we can do for those who still believe Tucker Carlson. But they are a minority, not more than 25 to 30 percent of the voting population. They do not have the power to prevent justice from being done. The events of January 6, 2021, were their Hail Mary effort to retain that power. That effort not only failed, it also made things much worse for them. The lies of Fox News cannot prevent the justice that is coming. More lies will only darken the stain that they carry into history. Among other things, the hearings will make sure that history has the full story of what happened during the Trump administration and on January 6, 2021.

The greatest danger now is that Republicans could regain a majority in the U.S. House or Senate after the November election. If they do, they will do everything possible to throw the country back into chaos. But, without control of the U.S. Department of Justice, which is out of Republican reach until January 2025, there is nothing that Republicans can do to stop Donald Trump and those who aided him from being put on trial.

If the Republican Party can raise up a whole new set of dangerous people who did not commit crimes for Trump and thus won’t go down with him, then we are not out of the woods. But Trump himself, and those who aided him, are history. They now have no power other than the power of their lies. The danger to the American republic now is not Donald Trump. It is the Republican Party.

A surprising new study on older drinkers

This is — no lie — the first martini I’ve ever made. Wine and ale suit me better.

Several European newspapers have had stories this week about a new German study which says that older people who are “heavy drinkers” are leaner, healthier, and have a better quality of life. Here’s a version of the story in a Scottish newspaper: “Heavy drinking over-60s have a better quality of life says new study.”

Is this too good to be true? This also comes along during a time in which I’ve been making an effort to drink less because of my age.

My guess is that — as doctors point out in the story — it’s not a causal relationship. That is, it’s not that drinking more causes older people to be leaner, healthier, and to have a better quality of life. Rather, it seems more likely that older people who are healthy, more sociable, and who are not fussbudget old prudes are likely to drink more, and it does them no harm. The story quotes the author of the study: “One explanation may be that higher alcohol consumption may lead to elevated mood, enhanced sociability and reduced stress.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. Now I think I’ll go make the first margarita I’ve ever made in my life, if that can be done with gin.

Update: Gin, lemon juice, and Cointreau, because that’s what I had. I don’t know if it was a margarita, but it was good.