An Open Letter to Democratic Fundraisers

Time, or so I hear every day from an array of Democratic Party glitterati, is running out.  We're getting closer and closer to the election, and my five dollars...or ten dollars...has never been more important.  We're coming up on a critical fundraising deadline.  I need to act now.

Every time I watch a video on Youtube, or mindlessly putter my way through the TikTokified triviality of short-form videos, I see these ads.  

What I don't see are ads making the case.  I don't see anything to encourage me, or to embolden me.  I don't see a brilliant, well-crafted, patriotic ad, something that might persuade an undecided.  Or an ad reminding me of the three hundred thousand Americans who died when Trump botched the pandemic response.  Or when he tried to overthrow the Republic.   Just Money Money Money making the world go round, like I'm listening to Abba or the Cabaret soundtrack.  Harris and Walz and Obama and...for the love of God...Bernie, hitting me up like panhandlers or prosperity gospel preachers.   And honestly, I've listened all the way through a Paula White sermon, Lord help me.  Y'all are worse than a Paula White sermon.  It's getting as welcome as a telemarketing call at midnight.

It's to the point where most of what I hear from Kamala isn't about her leadership, or her vision, or her sense of humor and intelligence, but just the same drab beg for cash, over and over and over.  I tune it out.  I skip over her speaking.  Is that the goal?  Are y'all getting paid by Adelson on the side to make her an annoyance?

You're reminding me of 2016, because back in 2016, there was no deadline.   On November 4, 2016, I was seeing online ads dunning for Hillary.  On the day of the election, you were still asking for campaign funds?  Are we there again?  Is that the feeling you want to evoke?

You crow about how much you've raised, about new records, about unprecedented cash hauls for the campaign.  Hundreds and hundreds of millions.  And you use them to raise more money, which you'll use to raise more money.  Over four hundred million dollars cash in hand, for a campaign that will be over in less than two months.  

Yesterday, I saw my first Trump ad.  It was a fundraiser, natch.  He looked a little haggard, a little washed out, a little sloppy.  But he was trolling you, fundraising on the idea that fundraising is all Democrats can do.  This, from a brazen and shameless huckster.  Wildly hypocritical?  Yes, of course he is.

So to the vast apparatus of Democratic fundraisers, let me say what I now say to every last one of your texts:  STOP.  If you can't win this election with four hundred million dollars in your war chest, something is very, very wrong.

Just STOP.

In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Thirty One

 

Chapter Thirty-One:  My Dearest, Dearest Stewart

Stewart’s slender form and pale, fine-featured face were before me, a delightfully material manifestation of Providence and her bounteous protections.  In his hands was a device of remarkable complexity and evident martial purpose; an intricately wrought weapon of a type I had never before seen.  It was one of the tart fruits of Stewart’s labours with the Royal Society, no doubt, with which he had cast my assailant from this mortal coil.  Of said erstwhile assailant there was scant physical trace: a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke and vapours; a portion of the tip of his raised machete, now glowing red and embedded in the soil, and; a scent like unto burnt copper wiring, which filled my nostrils with a singular medicinal sharpness.

At Stewart’s side strode his ever-trusty series 8, the indefatigable Thomas, who carried a weapon of similar design and evidently equal capacity.  Shouldering his weapon, Stewart rushed to my aid, and as he did so, Thomas discharged his own device once and then again for our protection, each time casting out a blinding golden beam that neatly expunged a hapless fascist from this world.

Now Ernest, too, was with us, having been separated from me in the furor at that importunate moment; with our two servants now acting as impenetrable wards against all harms that our foes might intend us, I had a moment to consider our position.

The tide of battle had now turned completely in our favour, as all around us surged more anarchists; the Caddiganites at the gate had been thoroughly routed, and our whole combined efforts were now turned to pushing back those that had breached the southern wall.  I saw among them Diego, who was fearlessly leading the charge, his fierce cries rallying all of his comrades to victory.  

“Rebecca,” said Stew again, his face now close to mine as he knelt before me.  “Are you…are you…harmed?”  

He set his weapon down, and with eyes bright and brimming gazed with a wordless longing into my own.  His cheeks were blushed with a profound fervour, and as he took my hand in his own, I could not help but notice that his long and graceful fingers trembled ever so slightly when he then reached out and tenderly touched my cheek. 

Stewart, as I have shared, is a man of great thoughtfulness and cerebral preference, a soul blessed with giftedness in matters of reason and precision, whose cool temperament was most ideally suited to laboratories and the arcana of subatomic coding.  

The battlefield, so filled with spatter and entropy?  It was not the field to which he was called, any more than he was blessed with the capacity for small talk at an informal soiree.  Like so many souls who live most fully in the world of concepts, his sensibilities are by necessity quite tender, and he has spoken to me often of how thoroughly he dislikes the hubbub of the world.  It troubles him, wears at him, disquiets his soul with its endless ambiguities and uncertainties.  Science is his sanctuary, his place away from the din and dissonance of our frenetic rushings-about.

And yet there he was, in the very heat of a battle.  For me.

“O, my dearest, I am.” I said, gazing up at him with the utmost affection.  “Bruised, perhaps, but otherwise…”

But before I could finish my thought, he took my face in his trembling hands and kissed me.

I cannot, faithful reader, express the depth of my feeling in that moment.  

It was, in some ways, of a like to the great stirring that rose in my person when on the verge of yielding to an indiscretion with Diego.  I felt the most vital surge of wild and divergent sentiment, such that I felt I might cry out with joy and sob all at once.  

But it was also so very much more.  There was relief at having been snatched from the bony clutches of the Angel of Death, intermingled with the shimmering echo of mortal fear, tossed and leavened with my own losses.  There was still the simmering fury of the recent battle, and my own hand within it.  

But mostly, there was Stewart.  

There was upon Stewart’s face a sublime relief, as complete as if the hell-cast rich man of that well-known parable had received a cup of cool spring water from the hand of Lazarus the beggar, as if Tantalus, in a moment when the gods became distracted from their sadistic torments, had felt the bright sweet burst of a grape upon his palate.  His elation at finding me alive and well radiated from his face as a velveted light; I can imagine no truer proclamation of the reality of his love for me, a love that cast the whole brutish world in the joyful calm of its glow.

I should, had my will been that which governs Providence, have staunched the rushing flow of Chronos, and lingered in that blissful diuturnity for several lifetimes.   

But we were, as you no doubt recall, still in the midst of a heated martial action, and the exigencies of our strivings and my contributions thereunto remained my immediate duty.  Taking my Beloved’s hand, I rose again to my feet, feeling the surprising strength of Stewart’s lean arm as he drew me standing to his side.

Again his hand pressed soft to my cheek, again his large and limpid eyes brimmed with scarcely trammelled tears at having found me still gracing this mortal coil. 

A bullet whined past, mere inches from my head, but my attention was only upon him.  Our faces inclined towards one another, the din of battle hushed in our ears.  We did not kiss, but our eyes closed, his face resting with the greatest gentleness against my cheek.  For a long moment of indescribable and delicate intimacy we remained thus, though war and horror roared around us. 

“Oh, my dearest Rebecca,” he sighed, finally withdrawing, his voice as soft as a wind through willows.  “I suppose we must once again cast ourselves into the breach.”

To egress from such an intimacy was, I shall admit, almost physically painful, and I felt rising within me a great and implacable fury at those whose orgulous violence intruded upon our shared happiness.  How dare they threaten our love?  I felt my heart, so recently melted in the refining fires of Stewart’s presence, grow as hard and bright as steel.

“We must, my dearest Stewart.  Again, into the breach.  Might you have something with which I could contribute to the swift conclusion of this sordid assault upon our persons?  I seem to find myself without a weapon.”

“Of course, my love.”  He turned to his servant.  “Thomas?”

“Yes, Milord?”

“Would you be so kind as to give your accelerator to Lady Wexton Hughes?”

“Of course, Milord.”  

With a perfect bow, Thomas offered up the intricately wrought device into my waiting hands.  It was of nontrivial heft, but no more so than the crude and ancient Kalashnikov which had been my most recent implement.  It thrummed potently in my grasp.  Stewart then gave me a very concise primer on the particulars of its operation.  After ensuring that the primary electronic (here) and secondary physical (here and here) safeties were disabled, that the pile output was stable at between eleven and fifteen megawatts, and the microsynchrocyclotron’s K-value meter was reading above four thousand, it was ready to fire.  For that, there was a perfectly weighted trigger and, should one require it, a targeting reticle that could provide up to 15 magnifications.  

For all of its complexity, the accelerator was, in operation, sublimely simple.  One simply needed to point and shoot.

Stewart slid his own weapon back into his delicate hands.   “Are you ready to put an end to this, my love?”

“I am, my dearest.”

And so, with all diligence, we did.

Chapter Thirty Two: (forthcoming)

All God's Creatures

Our dog Norm just loves being outdoors.  If left to his own devices, he'd spend pretty much every waking moment out in our fenced and wooded back yard, where he chases squirrels and chipmunks, sniffs about, and entertains himself by gathering fallen sticks and branches and piling them in the middle of the small lawn.  We try not to leave him out for more than an hour, as the longer he spends out there the more feral he becomes, but it's hard not to indulge the boy.  Given that the first two years of his life were all in shelters, the freedom to run and leap and dig is...well...it's kind of why we got him.  

Having a dog in the house reminds us that we're not the only living things in this world.  It helps remind us that all of God's creatures deserve our care and our love.

Yesterday, as I walked through the basement, I saw him sitting right by the sliding doors to the back yard.  

Around him, in a great swarming cloud, were a host of mosquitoes.  Drawn by his panting exhalations, filled with the carbon dioxide and organics whose scent trail they follow to their prey, there were dozens and dozens of them, both the little whiny-winged natives and the largest and fiercely striped Asian Tigers.  It's been wetter lately, after a long dry summer season, and all of the local subspecies of the Family Culicidae have come roaring back with a vengeance.  Norm looked resigned.

I muttered choice imprecations at the little beasts, and went to get the Swatter, which I bought as a gift for the missus a few years back.  It's one of those plastic racquetball racket shaped paddle thingummies, where in the place of strings are interlaced three layers of metal mesh.  The middle, inmost layer is electrified, drawing a surprising amount of current from a pair of Double A batteries in the handle.  

It is designed for the purpose of destroying flying insects, at which it is remarkably and satisfyingly efficacious.

I slid the door open, at which Norm barreled in and went charging up the stairs, leaving his assailants behind.  Then I waded out into the lingering swarm, safety off, power engaged.

It was a slaughter, as the snap crackle and pop of current frying skeeter after skeeter was nearly continuous.  Sparks flashed like heat lighting across the surface of my weapon, and the air filled with the smell of burning and electrical discharge.  Within moments the ground around me was littered with dozens of tiny lifeless corpses.  I continued for a while, methodically sweeping my thirteen-dollar Chinese plastic Mjolnir through the air, watching for any furtive and shadowy movement that might indicate more of them incoming, then smiting them from the air like a Norse god.  When no more remained, and no more came to replace them, I withdrew.

It wasn't a particularly peaceful interlude in my afternoon, I'll admit.  It was a wee bit asymmetric.  Perhaps a little unfair.  I, a sentient bipedal creature, social and industrialized.  They, little more than self-replicating mechanisms, oblivious of their place in being or my campaign against them.  I mean, they are still living beings, albeit simple and parasitic.  They are remarkably complex, and remarkably rare in the universe.  I generally find that I'm inclined to live in harmony with life around me, which is one of the reasons I choose not to eat other animals.

But then again, mosquitoes are our most implacable nonhuman adversary.  Forget grizzlies and tigers, because mosquitoes, as a disease vector, kill a million human beings every year.  We do not need to tolerate that which destroys us, any more than bees tolerate predatory hornets, or dolphins tolerate sharks.  Life is permitted to protect itself.

And Lord, was it satisfying. 

Travelin' John

The news of John Fain's passing came, as so many things do these days, in a social media post.  

I'd known John for a little over a decade.  I met him in the social hall of my little church, after he arrived one Sunday morning on a bicycle laden for life outdoors.  Folks in my congregation already knew him, or knew of him, and as he sat through worship that day, his lean, grizzled geniality changed the spirit of the morning.  There was, if I am honest, a tiny bit of wariness.  One doesn't ever know, when folks who are wired in radically non-standard ways enter your space, how things are going to go.

It went fine.  He sang our sturdy old hymns and prayed with us and was clearly at ease.  He knew he was welcome in that gentle little sanctuary.

Talking with him over coffee and snacks later that morning was...different.  John was different.  In a less gracious age, we'd have called him mad, or crazy.  Now, mentally ill.  Or better yet, neurodivergent, if we're feeling welcoming.  Having worked with the homeless mentally ill for years at my home church, I was more in that latter camp.  Some neurodivergence runs so deep that it sabotages and fragments the soul.  John's was, for the most part and most of the time, not of that type.  John was just very idiosyncratically himself.  He was "shamanic," or so I decided.

John was fun to talk with.  He was wildly unpredictable, utterly chill and intense all at once, with a mind that flitted from concept to concept in ways that required attention and adaptivity.  I immediately liked him, because he was immediately likeable.  I enjoyed how he made himself at home, receiving and harmonizing with the hospitality he'd been offered.  I enjoyed talking esoteric theology, or of our mutual appreciation for the music of Tom Waits.

John visited us many times over the years.  Some visits, just for a day, as he got provisioned and repaired and did what he needed to do.  Other visits, for longer.  One miserably hot and stormy summer, he camped out on our property for a bit, coming into the fellowship hall to get cool and escape the dank mid Atlantic swampiness.   He stayed with some church members for a while during a bitterly cold early Spring in 2014, when the roads and trails were sheets of ice.  That Sunday, when he came to church, he asked if he could come up to the pulpit and read the scriptures as our liturgist, and after some thought, we said...sure.  He did so ably, and with grace, like he got up and read the Gospel in front of folks every day.

John was a friend of the church, and his arrival was always welcome.  Travelin' John, we called him.

I learned things from John.  As the sort of pastor who is awkward at fundraising, John Fain taught me the art of the ask.  Because John had need, and was utterly unselfconscious about naming it.  He needed food, because he was hungry.  He needed clean clothes, and repairs for his bike and trailer.  He needed a place to stay, because it was smotheringly hot or bitterly cold.  These weren't trivial things for him, and were genuine needs that were within our power to meet.  He asked without shame, but also without any sense of grasping.  If you said no, he'd just nod, and be cool with it.  No hard feelings, but hey, could you maybe do this, instead?  And often you would, because you could, really, without even missing it.

His last years weren't spent travelling, as his discomfort around uniformed law enforcement got translated into getting into the care of the county.  Even so, he'd message me now and again, just to say hey.   I'd found myself thinking a month or so ago, when a different traveler came through looking for provisions, that I'd not heard from him in a while, and wondering how he was.

Not well, evidently.  

I and all the souls at Poolesville Presbyterian will miss his visits, and his presence, and his spirit.  

Godspeed, John.  May the sun light the long road of peace before you, and the wind be at your back.

The Twilight of the Doodle

Over the last week or so, I've been taking a few hours here and there to whittle away at the amassed detritus of decades stored in our home.  Down in the unfinished area of our basement, the shelves that line the walls in the workroom and the utility room are packed full of the residue of life.  An entire box was packed high with stacks of daily preschool paintings produced by my now-adult sons.   Elsewhere were boxes going all the way back to my own childhood.  A drawing of my family that I made in fifth grade.  A painting I made in preschool.  Letters from high school friends, back when we wrote letters to one another that could be kept.  Letters from family members long passed.  That sort of thing.

As I sorted through and discarded well-worn high school papers and faded college course notebooks, I marveled at a time when such things were all done by hand.  When was the last time I wrote an entire page of text, actually wrote it, hand and pen to paper?  Or wrote a letter in my marginally legible cursive?  It's been a bit.

Even more striking than my now mostly unfamiliar penmanship were the margins, because the margins of class-notes and tests and letters alike were awash in doodles.  At a moment of distraction in class, which for scatter-brained-me there were many, I would draw.  There were geometric patterns and abstract sworls of texture.  There were faces, and scenes, and little cartoons drawn to amuse both myself and nearby classmates.  

When the mind wandered, it doodled.  It was just something that one did, and it was hardly idiosyncratic to my own modestly artistic self.  It was a common thing, a nearly universal thing, just part of being a student or a note-taker or a diarist in the late 20th century.  Interspersed in our class notes and our meeting minutes would be the images and patterns.  In that, we were carrying on a tradition that goes back as far as pen and paper, back to times medieval, when marginalia were an integral part of our thinking processes.

And I wondered: does anyone doodle anymore?  I don't, not really.

The shift in media form from notebooks to laptops completely changed the whole dynamic of writing.  I mean, sure, there are touch screens and drawing programs, but honestly?  It's an entirely different world.  If we're distracted, there are casual gaming apps to fill our time, or a bottomless stream of reels to scroll through mindlessly.  Through the "miracle" of bottomless connectivity, most of our fallow moments have been monetized and gamified into functional oblivion, as whimsy and creativity have been supplanted.

Some out there, no doubt, might bring a pad with them for the specific purpose of doodling.  Others have chosen to return to pen and paper, intentionally rediscovering handwriting as a mnemonic device.  But most of us do not.

As with so many of the tradeoffs in this brave new world, it feels like a lessening, as we forget a thing whose value we didn't recognize.

Of Banks and Predators

Yesterday was, as most Tuesdays are, a day for errands.

Mid-day, that meant spending some time with Mom.  We went grocery shopping, and to lunch, because that's what we do on Tuesdays.  We also went by the bank, because we needed to have a conversation there.

Mom and Dad have always kept their day-to-day accounts in the same bank.  It was, for years and years First Virginia Bank.  Then First Virginia was absorbed by BB&T, which was in turn fused with SunTrust to create Truist.  The larger the bank became, the more "efficiencies" and "consolidation" led them to close branch after branch, until the nearby branch where my folks did business for decades was sloughed off.  There's another a few miles further away, and while not as convenient, it's fine.

When Dad died last year, we kept Mom's checking account, and closed Dads', folding that money into a money market account.  There wasn't a point in her having two checking accounts, and getting some interest on that money seemed the prudent thing to do.  Truist was offering a four percent "introductory" yield on their money market, so we put the money there.  

That lasted a couple of months, at which point the rate dropped to just under two percent.  Not great, but not nothing for a liquid asset, and an introductory rate is what it is.  

Last month, as I reviewed Mom's finances, I noted that Truist had lowered that rate again, this time to 0.01 percent.  Zero point zero one.  Or rather, it had "been adjusted, at our discretion, to our standard rate."  

This isn't an interest rate.  It's functionally nothing.  Given market conditions and money market yields at other institutions, it is, to use the technical financial term, total garbage.  You offer an interest bearing account, then fail to provide anything other than illusory interest.  It's all part of their terms and conditions, of course, which makes clear that Truist can lower your rate to the minimum floor for any reason at all.  

Anything significantly under two percent right now is noncompetitive and substandard, and that interest was providing Mom with a week-worth of groceries every month.  Given that Mom hates to deal with that stuff...we trundled off to talk with a human about it.

The bank branch manager was pleasant enough, and helpful.  A few quick taps on his keyboard, and the rate was changed back to two percent.  I asked, directly: "Why would you randomly apply a substandard rate?"  He gave a clearly rehearsed song and dance about needing to pay staff, to which I said, "So, what you're saying is, it's about profit maximization?"  He assented that this was the case.  

I then asked if the rate would be dropped again.  He said it probably would...there are Truist algorithms that do that for them automatically...but that it could be corrected at any time, and we just need to check our monthly reports diligently.

He then suggested that, if we had other assets we could move into that account, we could guarantee that it didn't ever change, because if we were premium customers we would be immune to ever being adjusted to the "standard rate."

"At what level would that be the case?" I asked.

At $250,000, he said.

We thanked him for his time, and we left.

So, to sum up: Truist, one of the ten largest banks in the country, will randomly penalize customers with less than $250,000 in total assets in order to maximize their profits.  Those customers will be provided with a level of service and return that is both substandard and fundamentally unpredictable.  And sure, you get an out if you're "premium."  But as only 10% of American households have $250,000 in total assets, that means that Truist has chosen to extract the most profit from the 90%, while favoring a small minority of wealthy individuals.  

This was, in a single exchange, everything wrong with modern banking and globalized capitalism.

In reducing the incentive to save, and destroying the capacity of a significant supermajority of Americans to build generational wealth through savings, this sort of corporate policy sabotages a healthy society in the name of quarterly returns.

The Value of Diamonds and the Value of Dirt

I love composting, and the harvesting and distribution of the resulting soil to my raised beds is one of the pleasures of gardening.  As I pitchforked and aerated my large compost pile in the cool of an August morning, feeling the warmth rising and enjoying the sweet fine smell of newly minted soil, my mind turned to the value of my labors. 

I thought, which is worth more: a one carat diamond or forty pounds of compost?  As our human economies would have us understand it, there's no question.  It's the diamond.  

Forty pounds of compost, as of this writing, would set you back about five bucks.  

A one carat, unset diamond, well cut?  That ranges from just over a thousand dollars to around twelve hundred.  

One is valuable, the other, well, it's as cheap as dirt, being dirt and all.  

But humans are shortsighted creatures, and our imagined economies are bizarrely skewed.  Why do we think this?  Why is one thing twenty times more valuable than the other?  What are the metrics we use and assumptions we make to come to this decision?  Let's look at three: utility, rarity, and beauty.

Utility is one measure of value.  How useful and necessary is a thing?  

A diamond, cut in an ornamental manner, isn't all that useful.  If we were to take that carat and use it differently, it does have some real industrial function.  Being a phenomenally hard substance, diamonds make great drill bits and polishing surfaces.  Diamonds also have use in certain computing applications, particularly the development of quantum/qbit processors.  Cool, sure.  But generally speaking, those are pretty specialized applications.

Soil, on the other hand, grows the food we need to eat, every single day.  Without soil, we'd all die in a week.  We are utterly reliant upon it.  From the perspective of usefulness and necessity, there's no comparison.  Soil is infinitely more valuable for human life.

What of rarity?  

Generally speaking, we'd think that diamonds are far more rare.  We see soil everywhere beneath our feet, and diamonds must be mined at great cost, so we think: diamonds are rare and valuable.

But...are they?  Here on the surface of our little planet, sure.  But there are likely one quadrillion tons of diamond (that's a million gigatons) deep under the surface of the earth.  There are only around 116,000 gigatons of arable, fertile organic soil on Earth, (including grasslands, forests, and wetlands) which exists distributed in a meter-thin layer across the surface of the planet.  There's a factor of ten more diamond in and on the Earth than dirt.

In the rest of the solar system, studies suggest that the cores of many planets are comprised of massive diamond deposits.  There seems to be a layer of diamond ten miles thick under the surface of Mercury.  On all four of the gas giants, diamonds may fall from the sky like rain.  

But dirt?  There is no organic soil on any other world in this solar system.  None.  And we have no evidence of it anywhere else in the universe, at least not yet.  Soil is breathtaking rare and almost impossibly precious.

As for beauty?  

Well, beauty is entirely subjective.  Diamonds do catch the light in a lovely way, but why is that objectively more valuable than the warm richness of living earth, the promising pungency of turned biomass beneath your nostrils, the complex richness of soil rolled between your fingers?

It isn't.

So for me, at least, there is no question.  Particularly as I turn the soil in the cool of an August morning. 

Of Trauma and New Growth

I've been growing okra this year, mostly as an experiment to see how it fares in our ever warming Midatlantic climate.  

The answer, much to my surprise, was that it did fine, but underproduced at the height of our record-setting summer.  It's heat tolerant, yes, but once temperatures got up into the high nineties (that's mid-thirties for the rest of the world) growth and production slowed down.  That was compounded by a moderate drought, which stunted growth even more despite my best efforts at watering.  Nothing beats a good soaking rain, and that just wasn't forthcoming for much of the summer.

Yields were less than I expected, but still enough.  The usual territorial incursions of squirrels and chipmunks and wandering deer weren't present, which is often the case when you introduce a new and unfamiliar plant to the garden.  

I harvested and flash-froze dozens of pods for use in curries, where they have proved nutty and toothsome and utterly delicious.  Given that half of my family was from the South, I figured I'd also fry some up with cornmeal batter. 

The plants had great leaf growth, and as temperatures started to moderate a bit and the rains returned on a more regular basis, production ramped up.  Each okra blossomed with multiple flowers and growing pods, and it looked like I'd get that bumper crop I'd been hoping for...enough to start bringing some in to my churches' Little Free Produce Stand.

"Great," I thought to myself.  "This is working exactly according to plan."  Never think that.

Because that's right about when the deer hit.  

That's "deer," singular, or so my neighbor across the street told me.  Just one doe, unusually thin, that spent a good long while uprooting my early fall green bean plantings, and then dove voraciously into the okra.  The neighbor came over to shoo it away, but the deer seemed unphased.  It might, like a skeletal doe I encountered last year, have been suffering from wasting disease, which makes deer both listless, endlessly hungry, and utterly unafraid.

It was a massacre.  

Half of my plants had their flowers, all of their pods, and most of their leaves consumed.  That included my two most productive plants, which I'd hoped to use for seedsaving later in the season.  They were reduced to sad green twigs with short, mostly empty branches, only a few wan leaves hanging off here and there.  

I redoubled my application of anti-deer spray, which seemed to prevent another attack on the few okra that remained.

I turned my attention elsewhere in the garden.  I uprooted spent beans and tomatoes, amended the soil with homegrown compost, and got to replanting for the fall harvest.  

A few days later, I noticed that the ravaged okra was responding to trauma.  Not by withering, not by dying or surrendering to death, but by defiant regrowth.  

From the "elbows" between the main trunk and branches, the cells of the plant had repurposed themselves.  Fresh new leaves, delicate and hopeful, unfurling out of seemingly nothing, ready to catch the rays of the sun.  

From the abundant light of our G type main sequence star and a single minded vitality, the work of life would start again.

Gardens can be such heartening things.

Not Praying for Power

As a Christian, there is, in this political season, a deep and abiding temptation.  I feel it, as others feel it.

It is the danger of conflating the divine intent with my own, and to turn to God to give me power.

I have, without question, certain sociopolitical predilections.  They fall, generally, somewhere in the peculiar Venn diagram of anarcholibertarianism, liberalism, and social democracy.  This means I'm politically a bit on the odd side, but, eh, I'm the sort of weird that isn't afraid to be weird.

This has, generally speaking, meant that my voting falls on the Democratic side of the rigidly binary US political spectrum.

That hasn't lessened, as the political heat has intensified and American conservatism has gone on a drunken bender in Trumpsville.  When you're a faithful person with a great deal on the line, the Tempter whispers in one's ear: pray for power.  Power over them.  Pray for the reins of the Wagon of State.  Pray for the sword.  Ask for dominion.  Manifest the success of your party, and the grovelling, complete demise of your adversaries.  You pray for Gott Mit Uns, as the Germans used to pray it.

That's certainly been the case on the American far right, where the operating assumption is that Trump is God's Perfect Righteous Anointed, chosen for such a time as this, and prayers for God to give power to the One have become the norm.

Beyond the self-evident absurdity of that core premise, that's a terrible way for Christians to pray.  It is, bluntly, an AntiChristian form of prayer.

Over the last six months, and with the help of some fine editors, I've put the finishing touches on an upcoming book about the point and purpose of the Lord's Prayer, which is the beating heart and solid rock of my prayer life.  At the center of that simple prayer is a turning away from all but the most necessary things of this life, and a refutation of the human ego and its grasping for power.  In the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, the only thing we ask to be given is our "daily bread."  Nothing else.  Everything else is about emptying ourselves to make room for God's spirit, and about turning our hearts away from evil and the seductions of the worldly realm: moral decadence, political power, material wealth, social status, all of it.

It's a tough prayer to offer up in a fiercely partisan time, but a necessary one.

It checks the ego against the lie that rises from willfully misrepresenting one's opponent, the Luciferian bargain that Alinsky would have radicals of every persuasion make.  It challenges the partisan unwillingness to show grace and mercy to those who are on an opposing path.  It reminds the one praying it, if they're paying attention, that blind fealty to a party or a leader is a form of idolatry.

As is praying for power, even and especially if you're sure you're right.  Sure, we want power.  But that desire is a broken thing.

And our broken wanting breaks the world.

Making Culture Peace

I am, as the years have gone by, increasingly not of a mind with my progressive denomination.

It's been a subtle thing, a slow shift.  My support for the full spiritual leadership of women remains what it always was, as does my inclination to include queer folk in the life of the church without bias or reservation.  I'm completely convicted that our response to the rising tide of climate change will require significant human adaptation, and that faith is a part of that.  I'm not fundamentalist, not by the longest of shots.  None of that has changed.

And yet I feel like a fish out of water.

It's more a question of mutating language and culture, I think.  The church has changed.  I haven't.  I just don't frame the world in the same way.  I don't think about gender or race or justice in the same way.  I don't articulate my faith in the same way.  I am and have always been more liberal/anarcholibertarian than left-progressive.  I prefer action to discussion.  Heck, I prefer root canals to discussion.  At least root canals have a clear goal and outcome.

When I sit through meetings, or read through policy statements, I feel like a stranger in a strange land.  I understand the language, sure.  But I so often feel like a conservative, where before I'd never have considered myself even faintly in that camp.  Well, I feel conservative until I listen to the fever-dream falseness peddled by the far right, and then I'm aware of the awkwardly liminal space I inhabit.

The question, though, is whether or not this is a bad thing.  

It doesn't have to be.  Why must our engagement with those who view the world differently axiomatically be defined in terms of hostility? 

When spending time in a different land, among a different people, why wouldn't you appreciate what you can about them?  Like, for the good hearted and faithful progs with whom I am acquainted, their openness to the new things God is doing, their welcome of the stranger, their earnest kindness to those on the margins, their commitment to undoing injustices.

Or, for the good hearted conservatives with whom I am acquainted, their honoring of the witness of those who have come before, their ability to be contented with what is, their holding on to the good, their caution about fixing that which ain't broke.

Like Aesop's Bat, I don't fully inhabit either side in the culture war.  But unlike Aesop's Bat, I'm not willing to pretend I'm allied with whichever side is ascendant.  Or loudest.  Or most aggressive.

My primary allegiances lie elsewhere, after all.

In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty: An Unacceptable Risk

My query to Ernest was just rising to my lips when there came a terrific roar immediately overhead, and a dark shadow shrieked across the sky at such a tremendous velocity that I caught but the faintest impression of it.   I startled, flattening even further downwards in reflexive self-protection; an action that was instinctively mirrored by all, friend and foe alike, as the object passed over the treeline so closely that leaves were scattered in its wake.

All of the humans, to clarify, for Ernest remained characteristically unmoved and unperturbed.  His scored, featureless face turned towards me, and with a calm and measured voice, he spoke.

“That was a twinjet bearing the seal of House Montgomery, milady.”  His head cocked slightly to the left, giving the illusion of a quizzicality that was likely constructed for me alone.  

“I believe that your sister has arrived.”

Indeed, no sooner had he said this than our swiftest and nimblest craft returned, materialising again at the treeline, then effectuating such an abrupt and precipitous descent that, had not I been sure that the faultless Joao were at the controls, I might have cried out in alarm.

It swept down upon the centre of the Caddiganite position, where Joao executed a perfect powered short rolling landing; the canopy slid back, and to the surprise of both our foes and myself, out leapt Suzanna, springing to the ground with the grace of a cougar.

Her purpose, as best it could be ascertained, was not to join us in our various redoubts and foxholes, but rather to place herself in the very midst of our adversaries, a tactic of such rash and brazen directness that even the fascists seemed at first unable to grasp it.  

They goggled for a moment at the arrival of this fierce eyed Bodicea, her hair wild and untamed, her boldness so impossible it seemed a fever dream or a moment of comedy. 

But this was to be no amusement, or even a sparring match in the confines of the gymnase; she was in deadly earnest, the weapon in her hand no bamboo implement, but a starkly elegant and razor-edged katana that was one of a set of daisho gifted to Father during the visit of the Nipponese legation last Fall.  

Suzanna was armoured, too, wearing a suit of interlocking plates inspired by their ancient warrior class, plates that were wrought not of tempered steel, but an alloy of the very highest advancement, lightness and resilience, one whose construction she had personally overseen in the modest manufactorium of our country estate.  It was of even greater stoutness than Grandmama’s dress, although it was for obvious reasons rather less useful at formal affairs.

For some reason that defied logic, she was not wearing the helmet that she herself had designed, instead choosing to present her face and head as a target for the startled fascists in whose company she now stood; whether this was some peculiar vanity of my sister’s, a heedlessness of danger, or something that she believed aided her in her martial task, I could not ascertain.

I was proud of her, as any of us might be proud of the fierce will of our own flesh and blood, yet I found my pride intermingled with a tinge of righteous approbation.  Here we were, the only heirs of the House Montgomery, simultaneously locked in mortal combat with a foe that might, should Providence not smile upon us, snuff out the aspirations of our lineage in a single horrid blow. Suzanna had taken a terrible and impetuous risk, one inconsiderate of our future, and I solemnly resolved to speak with her about this lapse in most definitive terms should the fates deign to bless us with the opportunity.

There was not even a moment for such thoughts to be uttered before she leapt forward, her blade neatly separating a fascist’s head from their torso, then plunging through another’s midsection in a blinding flash of surgical evisceration. This was without pause or reflection, an action performed without flinching; I knew that for my dearest sister, this was the first time she had ever taken a life, just as I myself had recently washed my hands in the bloody basin of Mars.

A lifetime of training and a most profound diligence in one’s duty certainly make such terrible deeds seem less insurmountable; reflecting back upon them now from the vantage of relative safety and leisure, I still am filled with gratitude that we of the Peerage have such capacity.  One might erroneously presume that our comforts and our genteel society render us timorous and incapable; indeed, history teaches that decadence has softened the spine of many indolent, spoiled aristocrats and timorous bourgeois in times past.  Such rot has been the downfall of many a privileged class, and many a formerly proud nation; any study of the collapse of Rome, the French monarchy, or the fractious and short lived American republic bears witness to this truth.   

But we know, you and I, that we are cut of a different cloth, that we have learned from the errors of our history even as we claim the best graces of our forebears.  For that, we owe the very deepest debt to the timeless wisdom and example of Her Majesty, whose unerring guidance and regnant intentions are the veritable rock upon which we have built our security.  

Driven by that pure certainty, Suzanna was fearless in the midst of them, moving with terrible purpose, and though their guns chattered futile hatred, she was as the wind, or as the shadow of the wings of the angel of Death.  

In this, she was not alone, for Joao was at her side, having himself made haste from the controls of the twinjet to join the fray.  He fought with his ferroceramic hands and feet, striking terrible blows with fist and kick, attending most mercilessly to those who posed the most direct threat to his mistress.

Our enemy was now in disarray, and the opportunity that arose was unmistakable; I turned to Ernest with a questioning look, and he returned my regard with his usual calm and featureless attentiveness.  

“Yes,” he said, intuiting my meaning.  “We should engage, milady.  I shall take point.”

I took a deep breath through my nose, and steeled my nerves.  “Very well.”

We leapt up from the shelter of that great steel tractor, and as we rushed forward into the melee, Ernest remaining on foot to serve as a shield before me, emitting from his speakers the rousing tan-tara of war trumpets calling a people to battle; the anarchists, heartened and eager, joined us in the mad charge, both stirred by our actions and aware that the Caddiganite line was weakening.

What followed was a blur of blows and bullets, a paradoxically eternal instant, wild and close and stained with the most intimate and desperate violence.  All around me men and women cried out and fell in shattered ruin, Caddiganites and anarchists alike.  Suzanna, another deathstroke accomplished, glanced for but an instant at me; our eyes met, and the smile on her face was of a near feral glee.  Had she not been my beloved younger sister, my heart might have been chilled by her murderous bloodlust.

Then, with a great rush, she was back into the fray, and I found that my attentions were wholly engaged in the task of remaining alive and unmolested by our vile and brutal foes.

One rough burst from my rifle tore through a nearby fascist, then another, until I found that I had finally discharged the last of my ammunition.  A bullet struck my arm, and my dress ably warded it away, but the blow was enough to cause me to drop my rifle to the ground.  I was, at that perilous juncture, momentarily without any means of striking at our adversaries; for all of Ernest’s attentions, my person was in considerable jeopardy.

It was at that very instant that a large, dark-haired ruffian was upon me.  He was two and a half metres tall if he was a centimetre, thick and unshaven, his face scarred, his eyes glazed over with a berserker fury.  A crude but lethal machete was grasped in each of his hands, his face spattered with the blood they had already shed.  His intent was most terrible, and as his first blade swept down upon me, I raised my arm to ward away the blow. Grandmama’s dress went rigid against the immense force of his strike, saving me the loss of my arm, but…oh!  The beast had accounted for my parry, for in his cunning he must have witnessed me so protect myself before.  With one great trunklike leg, he smote out at me with a hobnailed boot, and with my dress still momentarily frozen, I toppled like a felled tree.  

His other arm rose, a bloodstained blade raised high, and it was clear that it would be brought down upon my exposed head.  I could still not yet move, for though the refractory period of the viscoelastics is but a matter of a second, that was time I did not have.  

The dress is, after all, primarily intended as a formal gown.  

Thus rendered helpless by the very habiliment that had saved me so ably before, I resigned myself to my inevitable fate.  I had given my all for my God and my Regent, and closing my eyes against the dire sight of my own end, I proffered my soul to the embrace of Heaven.

Through the lids of my eyes, I perceived a flash of brilliant light, which I first understood to be the moment of my passing.  

But another moment passed; I remained where I lay upon the rough ground, rather than finding myself floating amongst the welcoming angels, and soon realised that I must not have perished.

“Rebecca!”

I opened my eyes.  

There, as the moon peering through the clouds following a storm, filling the night with a calm and gracious light, was the alabaster visage of my dearest, dearest, Stewart.

Chapter Thirty One: My Dearest, Dearest Stewart

This is My Rifle

We still know so little about Thomas Matthew Crooks.  Almost nothing.  Not that we care, not really.  Who was he, again?  That was, what, whole weeks ago now?  Who even remembers that?

Still, as Crooks enters the dismal company of American presidential assassins, attempted and actual, it would seem that we'd know something about him.  But we don't.  Not his motivations, not his precise state of mind, nothing about what drove him up onto that sloping rooftop.  He'd have no lines to sing in a dark Sondheim musical.  

But we do know a great deal about his rifle.

It's an "AR Style 556 rifle," or so the reports told us, which is a fairly vague description.  That type of rifle is produced by scores and scores of manufacturers.    There are hundreds of variants.  Saying you were shot with an AR is like saying you were hit by an SUV.  It could mean a whole range of things.  It's almost meaningless.

What the AR is is the universal American rifle.  It's utterly generic, the domestic equivalent of the Russian AK.  

So we know that.

We also know, more significantly, when and why the specific rifle Crooks used was purchased.  We know what makes that rifle unique.  

That particular AR is just over a decade old, and was purchased by Thomas Matthew Crooks' father in 2013.  Why was it purchased then?  It was purchased then because, after the Sandy Hook massacre, there was a real push to ban such weapons.   Sandy Hook was the massacre of twenty children between the ages of six and seven, along with six of their teachers, in the event you've forgotten.  A mother, observing that her son was increasingly insane and obsessed with violence, decided that the best thing to do was purchase him a gun and take him to the range.  She was the first to die.  Then he went to his old elementary school.

In American gun culture, that horror did not cause a rethinking.  It caused two things instead: first, denial, as the far-right refused to accept that such a thing could happen, and came up with an array of wildly false conspiracy theories, and; second, a panicked rush to buy ARs "before it was too late."  Before they were banned.  Before that right was well-regulated.  The rifle used by Thomas Matthew Crooks that day in Pennsylvania was one of those rifles, purchased by a father of a then elementary-aged child.  The ban, thanks to the Republican party and American gun culture, never happened.

So what does that rifle tell us?  It doesn't speak, of course.  It's just an inanimate object.  But human cultures, idolatrous as they are, imbue such objects with totemic significance.  

That specific rifle represents a particular type of mindset, and a particular spirit in our age.  It's the spirit that sees a weapon used to butcher elementary school children, and says: "I must own that.  I feel threatened unless I have that."  It represents a spirit of fear, and a spirit of retributive violence, and a seductive spirit of pathological selfishness masquerading as liberty.

Following the assassination attempt, there was much rumbling on the far right about how "they" had tried to kill Trump.  But as is so often the case when someone makes vague and ominous statements about "they" saying this or "they" doing that, what that person means is "I."

The through line from right-wing ideology and gun culture to that rifle is as bright and clear as a summer day in Pennsylvania.  

A Vote to Save Trump's Soul

Unlike most of the earnestly progressive siblings in my denomination, I have a rather vigorous sense of Hell.  I've expounded on that elsewhere, so I won't get into that here, other than to say that I make no distinctions between God's love, God's wrath, and God's justice.  The cup we pour out is the cup we receive, after all, and against that measure, the current Republican candidate is in a world of trouble.

Donald J. Trump has already made American Christian discourse harsher, crueler, and more selfish, stripping grace, kindness, and wisdom from countless churches.   The crass brassy transaction of his relationship with evangelicalism has driven millions from the faith, as empty platitudes, flagrant lies, and the naked hunger for power have supplanted the Gospel.  

He has undercut the most fundamental blessing of our republic, subverting the Founder's intent for a nation in which leaders are freely elected, and where where power changes hands peaceably.

His anti-Christian nationalism has slandered millions of Latino migrants, 80% of whom are hermanos y hermanas en Christo.  He would turn America into a walled Jericho, into an inhospitable Sodom.  His misbegotten Abraham Accords "fixed" the Middle East by conveniently pretending the Israel/Palestine issue didn't exist, setting the stage for the unprecedented chaos and bloodshed of this last year.  Well, to be fair, it's precedented by millennia of strife in that benighted region, but you know what I mean.

But my deepest concern, honestly, are the tens or hundreds of millions who will suffer if he is elected again.  These are the souls that will starve, suffer, or be forced from their homes and lands because of his refusal to acknowledge our rapidly changing climate.  His flagrant quid pro quo with the oil and gas industries, coupled with his bizarre demonization of everything that would both allow us to adapt and become more energy self-reliant?  They've become pseudo-religious dogma on the far-right now, a bitter, unbiblical, and demonic creed-of-greed that will contribute to actually unprecedented human suffering.

Donald is aware of exactly none of this.  It doesn't even register.

He's a worldly man, after all, utterly unspiritual, as one would be as a Child of Mammon.  A little boy raised in a temple of gold will grow into a big man who couldn't care less about heavenly or eternal things.  And sure, yes, there's grace for all, but grace has to be freely received.  It is for all who repent.  He's great at doubling down, and has no use for repentance.  Repentance implies you were wrong, after all, and he is never ever wrong.

Yet despite all of this, Donald J. Trump is a child of God.  He knows not what he's doing.  I do not desire to maximize his suffering.  I do not wish him harm.  Though he is my enemy, I love him, because I do what Jesus tells me to do.

If he wins the upcoming election, he will receive the worldly power he desires.  But he will also reap the fruits of his actions once given power, and that...insofar as I can honestly see it...imperils his immortal soul.  It's the dark bargain of all who lead, of all who take on the mantle of worldly power, but for Donald, it's a particularly dangerous thing.  

Given power, Trump will pour out a cup of bitterness for himself, a cup as deep as the oceans, as deep as the night sky.

Don't vote against him because you hate him.  

Vote against him because you love him.  Because if he wins?  And God is just?

Lord have mercy on his soul.

In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Twenty Nine

 

Chapter Twenty Nine:  A Most Welcome Arrival

I do not doubt, dear reader, that you had been musing as to when precisely aid from the Crown would arrive, given Ernest’s activation of Level One Messaging.  

There had never been any question, of course, as to our location.  Every mechanical servant of the Crown dating back to the first Series One has been geotraceable by every other mechanical servant of the Crown, and so my whereabouts had been known with considerable precision since the first moment Ernest and I became guests of the anarcholibertarians; this is, of course, what you and I expect as the natural course of things.  So long as such a servant is in our presence, we of the Peerage can take comfort in the knowledge that we are never lost to the supports and sustenance of our Society; in this rare time of crisis, I can witness to you that such interconnection was as present and effective as we have been taught since we were children.

Yet as the Collapse taught us, interconnection has a terrible cost.  It is both a paradox and an absolute imperative that human beings must remain at an intentional remove from one another if we are to thrive together.  Unlike our mechanised brethren, we of flesh and blood simply cannot tolerate an endless flow of information and social exchange; like the unfortunate rodents in Calhoun’s notorious mouse utopias, such an unrelenting torrent of hypersociality leads to frenzy, madness, and the disintegration of our essential God-given sociability.  This was, of all of the factors leading to the Collapse, perhaps the most insidious and unexpected; I would, as always, direct any reader that might feel insufficiently familiar with the impact of such media on the fall of the former global order to read The Most Rev. Chatterham’s classic and definitive monograph on the subject.

As members of the Peerage, we commonly understand that sanity is best maintained through our intricate dance of manners and formality.  All of us know the means by which this is best effectuated: Messages are sent physically, either handwritten or conveyed verbally by servants; information is processed slowly and with intent, through physical media such as this very issue of the Post in your hands, or through personable conversations at various soirees, salons, and meetings.  Does this prioritise rapidity and volume?  No.  Of course it does not; rapidity and volume have never been measures of quality, and in our short span of days, it is quality that is of greatest value.

Such is the refined pace of life for you and I, and we are grateful for it.  It is not a luxury, but a fundamental necessity of higher civilization; it permits us to retain our essential personhood and our integrity; without it, we are of no value to Her Majesty or the Crown, indeed, we would be of no value to one another, or even ourselves.

Yet we of the Peerage are not the only servants of the Crown, and we acknowledge that there are times that our fellow servants must avail themselves of their unique abilities and the full capacities of their construction.

I had never in my years (few though they admittedly may be) experienced an emergent eventuality in which Level One Messaging was required; indeed, I would not have hoped to ever find myself in such a trying circumstance.  In opening himself to nonlocal processing, Ernest was of course taking full advantage of his quantum processor, which allows immediate and complete transfer of information and awareness without any mediating system of transmission.  The particulars of this have always been beyond my ken, despite Stewart’s best efforts to explain the queer functionality of subatomic data transfer and management.  Suffice it to say that, given the engagement of this protocol, all of the Ministries of the Peerage were fully aware of our predicament, and indeed had prestaged resources to support my diplomatic efforts should any need arise.

The need had arisen, and the Finch had come.

Observing the sleek form of the cutter as it swept silent down towards us, I felt both joy and trepidation.  Joy, in that I knew that help was at hand; trepidation, in that the sight of a descending airship now stirred in my heart a terrible reminiscence, fear that just as Father had been taken from me, so too now might I lose my intended.

The Finch, being a research cutter, was swifter by far than airships of the line, even fleeter of wing than fast frigates such as the Dagger and Weasel.  I was later to learn that Stewart and crew had been standing off at a near remove, such that they could be at our side in a mere quarter of an hour; given the rapidity at which our situation deteriorated, I am to this day grateful that it was no further.

The Finch moved downwards with grace, but also with stern purpose, and whilst it lacked the missile batteries, railguns, and other weaponry of combat vessels, it was far from helpless; though it was primarily intended for research, I knew it to possess within itself an small arsenal of the very most advanced and experimental armaments, yet fully tested by the Royal Society.

As if to affirm that knowledge, there came a tremendous crack of thunder, as from a protuberance beneath the prow of the Finch leapt a great bolt of shimmering, dancing lightning; it smote the tank squarely, and instantly all of those sheltering around it collapsed as one to the ground, the very breath driven from their frames and their hearts stilled by the impossible voltages carried in that forked, brilliant blow.

The tank itself continued forward haltingly, being grounded as it was; the turret seemed frozen, as the energies of the bolt must have short circuited the motors upon which it relied.  Those Caddiganites who had survived the strike scattered and fell back to cover, pressing back towards the yawning opening they had so rudely created in the outer wall; they realised, for it was obvious to all, that the tables had again turned, and that they were now very likely outmatched.

To punctuate this new reality, there was a second clap of thunder, a moment of blinding brilliance, and the tank was stilled and smoking; the scent of storm-singed air and an unsettlingly pork-like odour filled my nostrils.

Even so, two score of the Caddiganites stubbornly remained, and they continued to fire upon us from distributed cover near and around the southern wall; their numbers were still sufficient to pose a threat, like a wild dog cornered and without easy egress, they were not to be trifled with or confronted without due caution.

With Diego and his band of anarchists now fighting fiercely and making progress against the incursion at the gate, I began to consider how those of us who were gathered might best push out this rabble of barbarous ruffians: we were numerically overmatched on the ground, which spoke against a direct assault; we had the use of one remaining armoured truck, the others having been crippled or rendered unusable by the tank, which limited our advantage; and despite the Finch giving us a decided advantage in firepower, it was unclear if it would be able to engage effectively against those who remained without critically damaging the settlement.  That, and I was unclear who, if anyone, was providing orders and discipline to the dozen or so anarchists who were engaging with me on our southern front; they were unquestionably brave, to the point of foolhardiness, but they seemed not to have any coordination amongst themselves beyond shouts and rallying cries.

Command and control are not, after all, concepts particularly amenable to the anarchist temperament.

I was on the very verge of engaging Ernest’s insights into this tactical quandary when events took yet another, entirely unexpected turn.

Chapter Thirty: An Unacceptable Risk