In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Of Plunder and Planning

The awkward moment passed, as they are wont to do, and it was then with a shared and singular purpose that I found myself in common cause with Diego and his people. Having considered the information before us, and following a period of intense discussion amongst all parties present, it was decided that a small group should sally forth to reconnoitre the nearest Caddiganite encampment, a forward base established only recently ten miles from our current position.

Getting to that decision, however, was rather more complicated than one might have expected, or perhaps precisely as complicated as one might have expected, depending on how well one understood the People’s Front and their processes for determining to do anything.

“We got a couple of images from one of the four drones, right before they brought it down,” the fierce dark-haired woman had said. Her name, or so she shared before our planning began in earnest, was Lucretia, and she was evidently Acting Chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee. “Not sure what to make of this, exactly, but they’ve recovered a couple of large objects and are trucking them back to their firebase. Rebecca? Any thoughts?”

I peered at her ancient screen, upon which an image was evident, showing a truck bearing an item of cargo; I recognized it immediately, even though the picture of it was blurred.

“This is, by design and profile, what remains of the Firedrake’s primary railgun, which I know in basic form from a schematic Father once showed me. It appears so damaged as to be inoperable, although it is likely to have some parts that can be cannibalised.”

“Great,” said Diego, sarcastically.

Lucretia swiped to the left, and another image appeared. “What about this one?”

The next object had been captured perfectly, although that was of rather less help than I would have hoped. It was a large rectangular solid, perhaps ten by ten by fifteen feet in volume, or so I quickly estimated given its size relative to the truck that bore it. It was wrought of a gloss black alloy, upon which were cast intricate and ornamental patterns in gold and silver, decorative flourishes that highlighted Her Majesty’s Crest, which was proudly emblazoned in the centre of each face of the prism. It was utterly undamaged, having survived the plummet and the fire with nary a scratch, and bore about it a fierce dignity, yet also a sense of menace; what first leapt to my mind was that it had about it the form of a great sarcophagus.

“I do not know what that might be,” I said, honestly. “But I suspect, given that it is of our most sophisticated construction, such that it could survive the crash undamaged, that within that dark object must be the cargo the Firedrake was charged with carrying to Williamsburg. I cannot speak to the nature of it any further, for such information is not known to me, but I fear from what I do know that this is a terrible turn of events for both your people and my own.”

Diego leaned in, carefully regarding the dark image on the screen. “Do we know where this is now, ‘Cretia? Like, it’s for sure in that firebase?”

Lucretia shook her head. “We don’t. Can’t get close enough with standard drones to confirm. Could have been moved deeper into the territory they control.”

“In which case we’d be pretty xxxxed,” Diego rumbled. “We have to know. I propose a quick light recon, get us close enough to overfly them with a Sounder, get the hell out. If it’s there, then we get the word out to the RCC, try to take it down. I ask approval.”

This, evidently, was how the group signified that a conversation and decision point was necessary, and in order to reach the point of action (which did eventually occur), there needed to be a process that established consensus. I had witnessed some of their decisionmaking upon my arrival at the compound, and what ensued was a convoluted ritual that made the proceedings of the Ladies Aid Society feel like a pleasant afternoon frolic.

This is, of course, precisely the blight that so inevitably imperils the earnest efforts of utopian anarchists, for while consensus and procedure are perfectly acceptable in when one is debating the colour of the table linens, times of existential crisis require considerably more expeditious choices. I am convinced, from my studies of the Spanish Civil War of the early twentieth century, that this is why the brutish fascists of that era had overwhelmed the passionate, inchoate republicans.

I would describe what came to pass in all of its peculiar detail, if only as a matter of giving insight into the idiosyncrasies of their society, but if I am to be absolutely honest, I was unable to follow their byzantine and seemingly arbitrary logics. Motions and amendments to the motion, I grasp, and like most members of the Ladies Aid Society, I have more than a passing understanding of Robert’s Rules of Order; what played out before me felt like a non-Euclidian parliament, or perhaps one of those mythic Babylonian debates in which every participant was required to imbibe to the point of drunkenness.

Why was Diego waggling his fingers in the air? Why was Lucretia mimicking his action, but with her fingers pointing downwards? Why were they moving about the room, grouping and ungrouping, rising and sitting? Was this farcical dance intentionally or inadvertently comic? I could not begin to tell you the answer to any of these questions, and therefore I shall not try, for:

“Lorsqu’on se retrouve en compagnie de personnes d’une autre culture et que cette culture se présente d’une manière qui semble absurde à notre sensibilité, il est toujours nécessaire de rappeler qu’ils sont probablement du même avis sur la vôtre.”*

Madame Toussaint’s advices on the matter are rather more extensive than that summary, but her essential principle remains most helpful; at a bare minimum, it helped me refrain from giggling.

After about forty five minutes, the group arrived at the conclusion that they should do the exact thing that Diego had suggested, and, rousing myself from a sense of torpor, I stirred myself to interject.

“Ernest and I shall, of course,” I said, “be accompanying you in this effort.”

It was Lucretia who responded, cutting off what seemed to be another outburst from Diego. “Look, Rebecca, I appreciate that you want to be helpful, and you have been. But this is some serious xxxx we’re heading to do here. It’d be better if you and your bot stayed where you’re safe.”

I smiled. “I do appreciate your concern for my person, Lucretia. I can assure you, however, that our participation in this reconnaissance is necessary to ensure its success. Ernest is, as I’m sure you’ve noted, a remarkably capable and formidable footman, and I am not some hothouse orchid that requires tender care and protection. I am able bodied, capable of defending myself, and the only one in this room who has any knowledge of Peerage machines.”

Diego again began to speak, but I raised my hand to indicate that I was not finished, and he…somewhat surprisingly…did me the courtesy of stilling his voice.

“I am also, more significantly, the only representative of an interested party in this affair, a…how do you say it…a ‘Beautiful One’...and it is essential that I have direct knowledge of any discoveries that might be made. For the furtherance of our alliance, it is imperative that Ernest and I be part of this effort; that decision is mine alone to make, and I have made it.”

“She’s not part of the collective,” Shain pitched in. “We don’t technically have any authority over her, not that’s been ceded.”

“Agreed,” said Raj. “The points are valid, my siblings.”

Lucretia glanced meaningfully at Diego, who shrugged.

“OK. Fair enough. We have consensus. Looks like you’re coming along, then,” said Diego, and to my immeasurable surprise, there was no further discussion on the matter.

Really, sometimes it is as easy as that.

* “When one finds oneself in the company of those of another culture, and said culture presents itself in ways that seem to one’s sensibility preposterous, it is always necessary to recall that they likely are of the same opinion about your own.” Toussaint, p. 137

Chapter Eighteen:  A Vital Reconnaisance (forthcoming)

Splash Mountain and the Strange Arcs of Corporate Intersectionality

Back in 2021, my family took a trip to Disney World, where we rode the soon-to-be-closed Splash Mountain.  It was as I remembered it, from years before.  A little more threadbare, perhaps.

It's been reconceptualized now, as the characters and stories were all removed and replaced with characters from the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog.  Tiana's Bayou Adventure, it's now called.  

In that replacement, there's a peculiar irony.  

The Song of the South, the film on which Splash Mountain was based, is just the teensiest bit cringey.  Just the weensiest.  (Cough.)  Zip A Dee Doo Dah isn't...um...the actual feeling one would have gotten in the wildly racist Reconstruction-era South.  That's where the Uncle Remus stories were recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, a journalist and folklorist writing in the postwar period.  Remus is an amalgam character, one who gives voice to the actual narratives of enslaved peoples that were shared with Harris.  

Harris was white, of course, which means the tales were spun through his lens, although there's considerable murkiness about what that lens actually was.  He was understood by his contemporaries... such as Mark Twain... as being solicitous to Black folk, and Remus was read in much the same way that the wisdom fables of fellow-slave Aesop might be read.  Those stories were among those my grandfather would read to me in Georgia when I was a little boy, and that was the context in which they were presented.  

In the late twentieth and early twenty first century, that's been spun differently, as it's seen through the lenses of intersectionality and cultural appropriation, which the fluffy mid-20th century Disneyfication sho nuff exacerbated.  Oof.

But there's a peculiarity about reconceptualizing that ride.  

Again, the stories in Harrises writing were almost entirely the authentic narratives of enslaved African peoples.  That's a known known.  Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox derived their inspiration from West African trickster narratives, in which the weaker or the oppressed use their wits and wiles to overcome those who hold power.  As is so often the case with the disenfranchised, one has to dig through the narratives of their oppressors to find their truths and the tales they told.  For all of the flaws and clumsiness of the Uncle Remus stories, that's the purpose they served for the people who first told them.

The echoes of those stories have now been erased.

In their place, a story that is...different.  The Princess and the Frog isn't an African tale, nor is it a tale told by the African peoples who were brought enslaved to America.  It is also not a narrative with roots in the Black American experience.  It's rooted in a Germanic story, a classic European fairytale.  One that's been reframed to celebrate Creole and Bayou culture, certainly, but still. 

It feels...um...what's the word when you paint over a white thing with blackness to entertain an audience?  It's..uh...yeah.  I mean, how isn't it that?  

So to make amends, you replace the authentic stories of enslaved peoples with...a European fairy tale?  Capitalism is so weird.

If Disney wasn't run by lazy profit-driven execs happy to make bank off of commodified intersectionality, they'd have left the ride alone, and there'd have been a remake of Song of the South instead.  Lord have mercy, if there's ever been a Disney film that needed a hard reboot, it's that one.

It could have been something more...real.  Something that reframed those tales to surface the real and existential challenges facing Black folk in the Klan-dominated Reconstruction era South, and drilled down on the deep African roots of those now cancelled stories.

Maybe Barry Jenkins could have directed.  Ah well.  In another timeline, perhaps.

Of Trump and My Anarcholibertarian Predilections

Last year, I sat in front of a class of undergraduates and talked about my postapocalyptic Amish novel.  At one point, in response to a question from one of them about separatist/quietist movements, I described myself as having "anarcholibertarian predilections," which got a laugh from a couple of bearded young men at the back of the class.  

It's such a silly, self-absorbed, overwrought way to think of yourself, which makes anarcholibertarianism a perfect match for silly, self-absorbed, overwrought me.

I've dabbled with the idea that I might politically self-identify as libertarian over the years, but if I am, I'd have to be of that peculiar variety.  Every time I think I'm there, when my frustration with the rigidities of bureaucratic folderol and the clucking propaganda of twitter pharisees and apparatchiks have me considering going full Ron Swanson, libertarians disabuse me of the notion that I could ever possibly fit within that "movement."  

Not that it's a movement, not really.  It's as incoherent as the language on the AI generated image I prompted for this post.

The news about Libertarianism recently, insofar as there is ever any meaningful news about libertarianism in America, is that the Libertarian Party has invited Donald J. Trump to speak at their convention.

It's yet another reason why any libertarian worthy of the name would steer away from the American party, and a reminder of how neofascist, corporatist, and "strong man" ideologies have devoured the concept of libertarianism in America.  If your libertarianism ends up justifying the power of a despot, an oligarch, or a charlatan, it ain't libertarianism.  

It's monarchism, and honeychild, there is a difference.

My libertarianism doesn't bend the knee to anyone, including myself.  Perhaps that's because it's less a political philosophy and more a question of my theology, which seems a better place for libertarianism to hang its hat.  That is, let it be clear, not me saying it is less relevant.  It's me saying it's more central to my identity as a person, my understanding of how human beings are to live together, and our relationship with our Creator.

There's probably some pre-existing definition of the word anarcholibertarian, one that was argued and fretted over by earnest folks with Germanic surnames a century ago.  I mean, surely there is.  I don't care.  I mean, being anarcholibertarian, why would I?

My libertarianism is "anarcho" because I don't trust human beings with power.  Put the prefix "an" in front of "arch," and that's really all you're saying:  "no power."  Whatever the power structure may be, there is within it moral hazard.  The concentrations of power that manifest in political systems become self-perpetuating, as power seeks to reinforce itself.   There is no form of political system that is immune to this, because political systems are human social constructs, and humans love love love power over one another.  

Which means...because no human community can function without power...that I prefer systems that check and balance the powerful.  Oligarchies and despotisms, being the self-serving things that they are, are the enemy.  Social democracies and liberal republics are invariably frustrating, but they do a far better job of preserving the average soul's liberty than any other system.  This is precisely because they put the brakes on power, because they make the concentration of authority in a single person or group more difficult.  We've forgotten this, we Americans, as we posture and bellow at one another from our position of privilege.

Preserving the liberty of the powerful is and has always been unnecessary.  The wealthy and the social elite have their armies of lawyers...or their actual armies...to ensure that they are free to do as they please.  Rules, like the covenant of marriage or the Constitutional process for the peaceful transfer of power?  These things do not apply to them.

The more someone loves power, revels in it, glories in it?  The less one should trust them with it.

Yet so many of us, once again, howl for a king. 

The First English Language Use of the Word "Multiverse"

"...we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any god of whose character she can be an adequate expression. Truly all we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such of her particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world."

- from William James (Harvard philosopher, brother of Henry James, founder of American psychology), "Is Life Worth Living," 1895, the first English language use of the word #multiverse.

Why I Will Mow In May

Spring has sprung, and that means that the ground cover in my front yard is suddenly growing again. Grasses and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and dandelions, a wild heteroculture suddenly surging upward in a riot of green. That means that it’s mowing season again. 

Some folks don’t like mowing, viewing it as an onerous and pointless chore. But I’ve always liked it. As a teen, I looked forward to mowing the yard, because it was utterly satisfying. Sure, it needs to happen pretty much every week, but it’s one of those things that you do that has a definite result. It’s not abstract, not uncertain. It’s not a Zoom to develop a plan to create a task force to consider writing an overture to the General Assembly, as much as that warms the Presbyterian heart.

You do it, and it’s done. Like a made bed, or a sink emptied of dishes, it's as satisfying as a contented sigh.  

There's been a pushback against mowing lately, of those earnest "well-actually" Newthinks that pop and
meme about in our addled collective subconscious.  

Mowing is bad.  Don't mow.  Don't mow for the whole month of May!  No Mow May!  Let the pollinators pollinate!  Let the grass grow, man!  Let your freak flag fly!  It's habitat, too, bro, cultivate habitat, for our little crawly friends.

Which it certainly is.  Ever take a long walk through a field of tall grass at the height of summer?  Though I grew up in the urban megaplexes of DC and London and Nairobi, I remember doing that.  One particular afternoon hangs in memory, a hike near the rural Virginia home of a family friend when I was thirteen.  I remember how alive that meadow was, the slow windblown eddies across the surface of it, how the waving grass leapt and whirred with hundreds of grasshoppers.   I remember the brightness of the sun, and how alive everything felt.  I remember the tickle of the grass against my arms, against my bare legs.  

And after we got back, I remember not just the tickle, but the ticks.  The dozen-plus ticks I found clambering on my legs, on my back, in my socks, in my shorts, and squirming their way with thirsty intent towards my tender regions.  Even thinking about that now makes me itchy.  

Tall grass is habitat, without question.

That said, I'm no fan of the synthetic, lifeless monoculture of the American suburban lawn.  It's false life, with all the uncanny valley wrongness of astroturf or a reanimated relative.  It's why my own lawn is speckled with flowers and variety, all of which is evidenced here on this page.  But if you don't mow, you and your children and your dogs and neighborhood chipmunks will suffer.

Because mowing is not merely aesthetic. It serves a purpose.  That purpose, for me, goes well beyond reducing bloodsucking parasite populations.  

I am a gardener.  In my yard, mowing serves my compost piles, which I rely on to hyper-locally produce the earth that fills my nearly 300 square feet of raised beds.  For them, mowing is absolutely vital.

Back in the Fall, every single leaf that fell from the thirty plus trees that shade my back yard went into a pile, because, well, it’s compost. Six months worth of coffee grounds and filters, every peeled carrot shaving and bit of onion skin for half a year, all of it has been blended into that giant pile of dead leaves. It’s easy to look at that brown mound in winter and see nothing. It seems inert, lifeless, just a lump of matter. Which it is, right up until the moment you feed it with mowed greens in the Spring.

Because mowing a lawn is an act of harvest.  It's profoundly and directly useful, and I look forward to it as I look forward to collecting up fallen leaves in November.

All those lush green May clippings are rich with nitrogen, which is a veritable feast for the millions of teensy tinesy little microbes that have been sitting patiently among the leaves in one of the five by eight fenced compost piles in my backyard. Dump a couple of bags of cut ground cover onto the pile, give it a good oxygenating pitchin’ with a pitchfork, and the little microbiome of that pile comes to life. It’s no longer a pile of cold leaves, but teeming with life and the promise of life.

I go out, and I turn it on a wet day, and the pile smells good.  Not of rot and death, but sweet and alive.  It's warm, too, radiating heat as the energies of hundreds of millions of organisms thrive in the cuttings from my efforts.  Steam rises from it, filled with the scent of rich organic earth being birthed.  

My mowing last May is feeding my growing beans and tomatoes, my squash and my potatoes.  It will fill my table this summer.  The excess will go to the Little Free Produce stand of my church, joining with the outputs of other gardeners to feed those who have need.  That cycle of life and generous intent repeats, year by year, tied to the ebb and flow of life and the seasons.

So I will mow this May.  It isn't a drab and dismal duty.  It isn't a mindless, pointless ritual serving the cold demands of a soulless suburban deity.  

It's participating in the joyous bounty of creation.

When Our Science Fiction becomes Our Reality

"At the front of the room, Chang had told the Waterbaby to watch his right hand, which now held a small green cube. Its head tracked the movement, glass eyes tracking in perfect time. Then, Chang wrapped his hand around the cube, hiding it from sight.

“What is in my left hand,” said Chang.

Pause. “There. Is. Nothing in. Your. Left hand.” Chang closed his left hand, and then held left and right hands together in front of him, the green cube neatly hidden.

“Follow the hand with the green cube,” Chang continued. He moved both hands in opposite circles. Waterbaby diligently tracked the hand with the cube.

“Like magic for really stupid people,” Jim snarked.

“Shut up,” Jo muttered back, with a tired smile."

From the table, Chang picked up a mirror, a flat thirty by forty centimeter rectangle, with a hard black plastic backing. He held it up to the crude face, in front of the glazed lenses.

“What do you see in my hand,” Chang asked.

Pause. Pause. “A. Rectangle.” A longer pause.

“And what do you see in the rectangle?”

Silence. Then, “I see. Nothing. In the. Rectangle.”

Jo shook her head. It was more right than it knew.

FROM THE WATER, p 35

-----

The recently circulated video of Figure's new OpenAI powered bot stirred a memory of that snippet in my mind yesterday, for obvious reasons.

I wrote that ten years ago, in what was the first of a trilogy of A.I. novels that never found a publisher.  In FROM THE WATER, I explored two ideas.  First, the idea that AGI...Artificial General Intelligence...would only arrive at the point where we moved beyond language models and into A.I. systems that could connect their semiotics to the material world.  Meaning, simply, that words had meaning.  

When we think the word "water," for example, it doesn't simply inhabit a web of linguistic interrelation.  It is "wet," and we know what that means because we can touch it, and taste it, and see it.  We can hear it dripping and splashing and flowing.  

In order to achieve sentience, or so I argued from the basis of my then-reading of early two-thousands A.I. theorists, a system must be able to perceive itself.  Sentience requires the capacity for self-awareness, not simulated, not virtual, but actual.

Secondly, such a neutral network wouldn't be physical.  It wouldn't be a matter of interlaced hardware and chipsets, but a software construct.  In FROM THE WATER, I'd envisioned a virtual network, in which a complex neutral structure was simulated.  But as it turns out, you don't need that.  The complex and probabilistic interconnections within language itself can be pressed into service for that purpose.  They're already neural.  

The advances in A.I. we're seeing right now have met the terms and conditions of the science fiction of the recent past. 

We're at functional Turing compliance with our LLMs.  We're starting to see those constrained intelligences connect to the real world.  There's no reason to believe we're not on the edge of a epochal shift, one brought to us by the same earnestly blindered quants who were convinced that the internet would bring about world peace, and that smartphones were a great idea.  

It's peculiar watching the fiction you've written become reality.

Hung Out To Dry

When our twenty-year-old dryer punked out last month, I faced something of a conundrum.

On the one hand, I struggled for a bit with the idea that we even needed a dryer.  Our unfinished laundry room already had multiple clotheslines stretched under the ceiling, with enough room for nearly a week's worth of washing.  It takes a full day to get things dry that way, but it does work.

For one weekly wash, and for the next, that was how I rolled, and it was unsurprisingly effective.  Of course, some things...like towels, for pointed instance...dried into hard boards, all of the fluffy softness replaced with a faintly abrasive surface.  My jeans were similarly rigid.  Despite the Laconic appeal of such things, there's just no way my wife was going to tolerate towels so rough they'd annoy a desert mystic.

That, and I knew that once we got into summer, that area of the house gets quite humid, to the point of requiring a dehuey to keep the space from becoming unbearably musty.  Eventually, stuff wouldn't dry down there.

So a dryer it was.  The challenge, though, was finding a dryer that was just a dryer.  Meaning, it tumbles clothes and blows dry, heated air through them as they tumble, and that's it.  Dryers really don't need to do anything else.

But almost every dryer out there was farkled out the wazoo.  Meaning, they were stuffed full of utterly pointless gimcrackery.  WiFi enabled and with downloadable app connectivity, with chipsets and control screens and dozens of other utterly irrelevant and pricey features.  I could check on my dryer anywhere on the planet!  Why would I want to do so?  What's the use-case for such a thing?  Gosh, say the designers, don't worry your pretty little head about that. 

Almost all dryers were like this.  I found one that wasn't, one that was...as best I could tell...simply a rebadged version of the same decades-old unit that had finally given up the ghost.  No electronic controls, just knobs.  All mechanical.  There we go.  Just what I need.

But there was a challenge:  It wasn't in stock most places.  There were plenty of the overpriced doohickey-laden critters, all of which were selling for hundreds...and in some cases, over a thousand...more.  The most simple, most affordable, functional dryer?  Most places, it was backordered.  

Meaning, people want it.  Every one they make, people buy.  I found one, but it took time.

And here, I see something of a market failure.  Because profit maximization often requires that a manufacturer manufacture not just products, but demand.  And all one wants in an appliance is that it does its job.

Or so I'd think, but I suppose I'm peculiar.  Perhaps we'd all rather pay more for irrelevant features, pointless connectivity, and counterproductive overcomplication.  Perhaps we prefer having our actual needs ignored, and replaced with synthetic desires.

Perhaps we enjoy being hung out to dry. 

On the Partisan Mind

Late last week, I woke early and puttered into southeast DC on my scooter.  I was headed to a formerly industrial area near the DC Navy Yard, where I planned to spend a day amongst members of a different Jesus tribe.

My own tribe is rather particular.  I'm a cradle Presbyterian, the child of a storied old church in downtown Washington.  It's the church of Lincoln, of Eisenhower.  The pastor who baptized me, and who was a regular guest at my house?  He preached the sermon that helped put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Let me note, because history warps weird: that same pastor also marched with Dr. King in Selma, and fiercely opposed our misbegotten war in Vietnam.  

I've been part of the PC(USA) since before the PC(USA) was the PC(USA), and after years of conservative flight, we're now a very uniformly progressive gathering. 

The purpose of my day last week was to attend something called The After Party.  There, I intended to listen to the voices of evangelicals lamenting the toxic direction of American political discourse, and challenging how the partisan mind has seeped into the faith.  Two of the three primary speakers...Russell Moore and David French...have been vigorously outspoken about the poisonous impact of Trumpism on the Christian witness, and their presence was a significant draw.

It was, I will say, a very different experience than attending Presbyterian gatherings.  The event was held in the worship space of an evangelical congregation, which was...as such spaces tend to be...a sleek conversion of a former industrial warehouse.  The seating, theater-style.  The tech, stunningly sophisticated, with a board exceeding the width of my congregation's sanctuary, gimballed cameras, and a primary ultra HD screen that spanned the entire front wall.  To my oldline sensibilities, such spaces parse as functional rather than sacred, but one has to appreciate the depth of the functionality.  

So it didn't look like most progressive Christian events.  Meaning, pastel fabrics wantonly festooned everywhere, like someone set off a grenade in a Michaels.

The attendees were a diverse mix of races and genders, as evangelicals tend to be.  There were also plenty of folks in their twenties and thirties, which was...different.  The oldline, progressive as it has become, remains remarkably and increasingly old.

It was a vigorous, intellectually bracing, remarkably grace-filled day of engagement.

I'm not sure, from my conversations and observations, if there was another mainline liberal in attendance.  

This got me to thinking about the partisan mind and progressivism.  

In this gathering, at least as my frank and remarkably civil conversations at table about queer folk and inclusion were concerned, I felt very liberal.  In mainline gatherings, I almost invariably feel like a conservative.  Decades of reimagining and reframing and deconstructing have created discourse that...to my soul...often wanders from the heart of the narrative.  Justice is a worthy fruit of the Gospel, but when it supplants grace as our purpose, we are no longer telling the same tale.

There is a point, without question, when the partisan mind...the mind that divides, that is motivated by hatred and resentment, that embraces the useful falsehood...infects any movement.  This is true of left and right.  If we understand that Christian faith is not and cannot be a creature of the saeculum, that disciples of Jesus are committed to the Gospel first and foremost, then there are places where we set bounds against our partisanship for that highest principle.

Unlike the bat from Aesop's fable, which claimed allegiance to whatever party held power, the Christian witness is to affirm commonality wherever it can be found, but also to retain integrity of witness to our own tribe when partisan conviction subverts the call to grace and redemption.

The Unhomely House

I’ve got a slightly idiosyncratic sense of what the ideal home looks like. I know that American homes have, over my lifetime, grown considerably in size, as Americans themselves have grown considerably in size.

Back in 1969, when I was birthed, the average American home was roughly 1500 square feet of living space. As of 2022, that number was around 2300 square feet, down from a peak of just about 2500 in 2015.

One can, of course, get larger, sometimes absurdly larger, like a home that's on the market nearby.  It's in McLean, a wealthy Northern Virginia suburb, one bounded by the Potomac.  The closer to the river you get, the more expensive things get, and this is right on the river, all five acres, eight bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms, and thirty three thousand square feet of it. Yours for only thirty two million dollars, discounted from the original thirty nine million!  Such a bargain.

It’s the sort of house that realtors sell by commissioning bespoke videos to stir our champagne dreams. Shooting hoops alone in the indoor basketball court.  Wandering alone down staircases.  Standing alone in walk in closets larger than most New York apartments.  Drifting around richly in empty, immaculate room after room, none of which look lived in.

Honestly, this behemoth gives me the heebie jeebies.  It doesn't feel like a home. It feels like an abandoned museum. It feels as sterile as a mortuary, an anxiety-dream residence one wanders lost in.  

It'd feel...lonely.  It's faintly inhuman.

My general feeling about housing space is simple: I don’t ever want more home than I can clean and keep at least semi-presentable myself.  My understanding of presentable is rather more liberal than most other adults, I'll admit, but it's still a good metric.  

Can you imagine trying to clean 33,000 square feet of home?  Of course not. It'd be insane.  It is insane.

If it's more than you can manage yourself, it's more than you need.  

Of Vocabularies and the Hallowed

I've got another book coming out early next year.  To my great surprise, it's not either of the books I'd been working on recently.  THE YEARS DRAW NEAR, my half-finished manuscript on faith and aging in America?  Nope.  IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY, my two-thirds completed Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance?  Uh uh.  

It's a book I first wrote back in 2015 and self-published for the devotional use of my little congregation.  THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, as it's now called, recenters the Lord's Prayer as part of a personal prayer life.  As the prayer that Jesus explicitly taught, it pushes back against our tendency to approach the Creator with requests for power and prosperity.  It gets us out of our individual and collective solipsisms, which is kinda sorta a prerequisite for being a disciple of Jesus.

As nearly ten years had passed since I wrote the first draft, I had some significant reworking to do, which is why it's helpful to have a competent and thoughtful editor.  Dated references were removed or changed.  Flagrant errors of reasoning or continuity were corrected.

One of those reworkings was a little unexpected.  Ever since I was an undergrad majoring in religious studies at  the University of Virginia o-so-many-moons ago, my go-to Bible translation has been the New Revised Standard Version.  It was my jam during my M.Div. and D.Min. studies.  It's the translation in my pulpit, and in the pew-racks of my little church.  I've commended the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible to numerous folks.

The NRSV was reworked in Twenty Twenty Two, and became the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

Some of those changes were trivial, and many are entirely comprehensible.  But some of the updating seemed less a matter of improvements in linguistic scholarship and new textual resources, and more a matter of taste and nodding to contemporary culture.

Of more significance to my book on the Lord's Prayer: among the changes in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition was a rewording of the teaching of that prayer in the sermon on the Mount.   I had an entire chapter dedicated to reflecting on the underlying meaning of "hallowed be thy name," with a focus on the word "hallowed."  I'd used the NRSV for all scriptural quotations throughout the book, which presented something of a problem.

In both Matthew 6 and Luke 11, it no longer used the word "hallowed," replacing it with the more awkward phrasing "Let your name be revered as holy."   Clumsy though it might be, "be revered as holy" is a conceptually accurate effort to transpose the Greek Ἁγιασθήτω into English. It means the same thing, even if multiple words are used where once there was but one, so it's not a question of mucking with the meaning.  

Rather, I shall surmise, it's because the word "hallowed" is slightly archaic, something we don't say often in day-to-day conversation.  That's a point I reflect upon at length in the chapter, and a fair observation.  

But then again, it's part of the prayer as it's PRAYED IN THE LITURGIES OF ALMOST EVERY ENGLISH SPEAKING CHURCH IN THE WORLD...sorry, all caps got stuck there for a moment.  And there's just no way anyone could figure out the meaning of an uncommon English word they're unfamiliar with, after all.   Oy gevalt.

As it was, it blew a giant hole in that entire chapter.  I had a choice, then.  I could reconceptualize and rewrite it because the translation that I'd used had been changed to no evident purpose.  

Or I could simply change the translation I used.  

With some regret, I chose the latter.  For consistency, I then systematically updated all of the scripture references in my manuscript to the New International Version, which is a perfectly valid and scholarly translation.

Not a big deal, in this cut-and-paste era.  No harm, no foul, and I still use the NRSVue on regular occasion.

But it did get me to thinking:  If in our faith we called to live out a discrete culture that does not conform to the expectations of broken and fractious humanity...must our choice of language be axiomatically governed by that which ain't the Beloved Community? 

And why would we expect contemporary discourse to have words for that which is holy?

We have those words.  And learning unfamiliar words isn't a chore.  It's good for mind and soul.

China, America, and Climate

There are things about the American response to China that make little sense to me.

On the one hand, sure, they're not a republic.  I prefer the liberties of speech, movement, and action that are for now still my birthright as an American.  As frustrating as the squabulous ruckus of democratic process might be, there's still much to be said for the protection of individual liberties.  The forcible suppression of religion and ethnic minorities is morally unworthy.  The silencing of those who hold a society to account for injustices and corruption leads only to rot and failure.

Yet most of America's beef with China seems to be economic, which is simply absurd.  Sure, the Chinese are now a global manufacturing powerhouse, supplanting the vastly weakened American industrial base.  Sure, most of that capacity once belonged to us.  But why did that happen?

Remember in 1992, when the Chinese invaded America and took all of our factories by force?

Of course not.  China didn't steal our industry.  American CEOs did.  Wall Street did.  Eager to plump up profit margins and fatten their own absurd salaries, folks like Tim Cook at Apple simply shipped America's industrial might to China.  The Chinese weren't about to say no.  I mean, why would they?  Can you blame them?  For them, it was all win, because they're playing the long game.

I mean, we know they are.  Chinese leadership isn't thinking about the outrage du jour, third quarter profits, or fretting about vacillations in poll numbers.  I mean, why would they care about poll numbers?   Ahem. 

They're looking to what they feel will benefit China not just ten years from now, or twenty five years from now, but a hundred years from now.

Which is why it's instructive to look at how they're approaching the climate crisis, and engagement with renewable energy.  

We Americans are in a reactionary cycle, pushing back against electric cars and solar and wind.  I'll admit that electric cars are a silly solution.  I mean, sure, they're quiet and fast, but dude.  Efficiency, thy name ain't "car."  Buses and trains and a functioning public transportation infrastructure are exponentially more efficient and sustainable.  Back when America was rising to its mid-twentieth century economic height, that's how we got around.  It was at least a viable option, which it is not now in America.  

The opposition to solar, wind, and other renewables?  It's borderline psychotic, and an ideological dissonance.  If you can draw power from the sun that falls on your own land, why is this a bad thing?  If the wind that rustles through your trees can light your home, why would we have beef with that?  Why would we want less efficient bulbs and toilets?  And why are we so programmed to desire large, energy-hogging homes and cars?  Since when were thrift and ingenuity problems for conservatives?

Yet here we are.

The Chinese aren't on the same course.

The Chinese are building electric cars, sure.  But they're going all in on the whole thing.   Unfettered by legal constraints or...paradoxically...environmental regulations, they're building a vast high speed rail network.  They're turning their newfound industrial might to the mass production of solar panels in unprecedented quantities, so many that industrial concerns in the West are up in arms about anti-competitive practices.  It's a battle they've already won, as 80% of the world's solar is produced in China.  They're preparing for a harsher climate.  They're also preparing for the era when fossil fuel supplies are fading.

They're not competing with us.  At this point, we're not even playing the same game.  

Do certain Americans assume this is because they're "woke?"  They're Marxist, which is why I'd rather not live in China, but the CCP is Chinese first.  China is on many levels deeply conservative, which is why...after some naive initial missteps...the communist party there has survived.

They are preparing, with the vision of a culture that spans millennia, for a future that will come.

And we are not.  

The Gate

How does one create the most gracious and effective threshold for entrance into a community?

The adult ed class in my little church is reading our way through CALLED TO COMMUNITY, a thematically sorted collection of essays that explore what it means for Christians to journey in the faith together.  It's produced by PLOUGH, the publishing wing of the Bruderhof.  

The Bruderhof, if you don't know 'em, are radical Mennonite communists, and if you're a radical Mennonite communist, doing life together well isn't a tangential concern.  When you share everything in common, and expect every member to freely and wholly embrace that ethic, doing community badly means things get real bad real fast.  

The book presents a rich array of perspectives from across the theological gamut of Christian faith, but the focus remains consistent throughout: how do we do this Jesus thing together?  It's designed for a year long study, but I've condensed it into twelve weeks, which means that our conversations are both rich and dense.  We don't touch on every essay, or every concept within every essay.

This last Sunday, the discussion cracked along energetically, but as has been the case in all of my class preparation, there were things I'd prepared to discuss that we didn't get to.

One of those things came in an essay by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an advocate for/participant in intentional communities and the new-monastic life.  I'd read him a few years back as part of my doctoral work, and enjoyed encountering his voice again.  What struck me were his reflections on how an individual enters a monastic or intentional community.  

Such communities aren't unwelcoming, and frequently have robust ministries of hospitality.  They're open to strangers.  They're friendly and kind and active in the world.

But they are also, by design, hard to join.  There's no hard sell, no effort at bait-and-switch to suck the curious into their common life.  Entering into membership requires significant work.  In order to join, there are substantial expectations of the seeker.

“Only if these seekers are persistent should they be invited into the community..." as Wilson-Hartgrove puts it.

Which, if one is interested in "growing an organization," can seem a little counterintuitive. "All are Welcome," or so the mantra goes in my dying oldline denomination, and you'd think that'd bring 'em in.

On its own, it does not.  Low thresholds for entry produce low levels of commitment.  Low levels of commitment produce a weak shared culture, and a weak shared culture lacks collective resilience.  Monastic communities being the fiercely focused things that they are, demands on the curious are frequently placed early.  

Some Zen Buddhist orders, in particular instance, often make a very pointy point about not being welcoming, in a Fight Club sort of way.  You've got to prove you are worthy, prove you're not a dilletante, prove that you're willing to sit out in the cold and endure being yelled at to go away.

Which, as I consider it in the context of my genuinely friendly little church, isn't at all how we roll.  Nor would we want to.  Visitors are genuinely welcome.  All of them.  We like talking with new folks.  I mean, really.  I hear some pastors lament that their congregations are a circle of backs, and visitors drift alone and ignored through fellowship hours.  My little church is not that way.  At all.

People are welcome to worship, and to join us in fellowship.  They can get their hands dirty in our gardens.  They can help us feed the hungry.  They are, in that place, genuinely our friends, and beloved.  They can stay in that place as long as they like.

When it comes to joining...which isn't that hard, truth be told...I find myself increasingly not pressing the matter.  Just welcome, include, accept, and befriend.  Show interest.  Visit. 

But don't rush it.  Don't grasp, or be anxious.  Let God give the growth.

A Thicket of Spears

Three years ago, I put bare-root asparagus into a four by eight plot in my front yard.  

I've always enjoyed asparagus, and when my wife suggested one evening that she thought it'd be fun if we grew it, I needed little further encouragement.  While you can grow asparagus from seed, the best way to get it going is transplantable rootstock, and so that's what I ordered.  The little brown tangles arrived in the mail, looking...as bare root plants often do...like nothing more than yard detritus.  Into the ground they went, and the waiting began.

Lots of waiting.

Asparagus are sturdy, long-yielding perennial fernish critters, cousins of the lily, and a well-established plot can provide a few tasty weeks of early spring sweetness for decades.  But like so many good things, they require patience.  The roots need years to establish, and if you harvest the spears in the first couple of years, you'll cripple or kill the plants.

So I've been waiting, these last two years, gently weeding in spring and summer, cutting back the dead stems in fall.  In winter, I've tucked the roots under a blanket of leaf-mulch from my yard, and fed the soil with the wood-ash from my fireplace.  Those years have flew, as years are wont to do when one gets older.  This year, I sampled my first harvest.

When the first spears stabbed up through the mulch in early spring, I snapped them at their base, and munched on them right there in the garden.  They were, as all who advised me suggested, quite delicious.  

For three and a half weeks in early spring, we ate all of the produce of that modest little patch.  Every effort of those roots, devoured.  I could have pushed for a week more, but after returning from a short family trip to Texas, the spears had explosively regrown.  

After weeks of being cut back, every growth devoured, every effort stymied, the plants were stronger than I'd ever seen them.  Spears as thick as my thumb had shot up a foot in a matter of days, growth so vigorous and rapid that it felt like one could almost see it.  I'd been so concerned about weakening the plants in the years of their childhood and adolescence that I was surprised at their vitality.

Weeks of traumatizing and retraumatizing them had done nothing more than piss them off.  Their growth felt a little defiant, a little fierce, as living things so often can be when we face a challenge from a position of resilience. 

"Respect," I may have muttered to them, as I weeded around the phalanx of green.

It was time to back off, and let them grow.

A Spoonful of Singing

It was a bright spring morning, still a little crisp, but with the promise of warmth.  As the morning light spilled into my little neighborhood, I heard the sound of singing.  

It wasn't, truth be told, the most tuneful noise.  It rode in with the arrival of a garbage truck, and the vocalist wasn't particularly concerned with either tonal or lyrical accuracy.  His voice, a baritono alto, was belting out bits and bobs of some popular Latino music, and what it lacked in precision and consistency it made up for in exuberance.  

As the truck rumbled down the hill towards our house, the singer came into view.

They weren't stopping at every house, as this was evidently a garden waste pickup, and so the truck was booking along at a healthy pace.  He was young and eager and wearing headphones, hanging as far off the back of the truck as he could, one arm extended out to catch the breeze.  It slowed as it approached the house of a neighbor who'd set out the correct materials.

As they approached the bins, he leapt off, still singing along to whatever he was listening to.  Grabbing a can, he dumped it rhythmically into the maw of the crusher, clearly timing his motions with the music.

He returned the bin to the curb with a playful flick, then ran to his place on the truck.  He leapt up to grab the rear bar with all the pleasure of a child jumping aboard a merry-go-round, and as the truck pulled away, he leaned again into the wind.  He extended his arm and open hand to play through the rush of air as he disappeared down the street, still serenading the morning like a trash truck Julie Andrews.

It's amazing how an attitude can change the flavor of our day.

Front Yard Gardening

It's been a good spring, because it's been spring this spring.

The last four or five years, late March and early April have been inordinately warm.  Temperatures in the high seventies, sometimes kissing eighty.  The soil has heated early, and in response I've gotten my garden going early.

This year, though, it has felt as it once regularly felt.  The air still has a wet chill about it most mornings.  The vaunted April showers have come, and the wild admixture of fescue and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and creeping Charlie that comprise my front "lawn" are fat with green growth.

And so the work of the garden has begun.  The asparagus are rising, sweet and tender and tasty, particularly snapped and eaten right there by their plot.  The overwintered garlic looks robust, although I'm a solid month from digging for the bulbs.  The beets were planted into a four by eight section in the week before Easter, and potatoes went into their half barrels.  The blueberries are beginning to flower, as is one of the two little apple trees I put in two years ago.  I spade-turned and reseeded the sidewalk-adjacent patch of sunflowers from seed I'd saved last year.

I've added another 64 square feet of raised bed space for this season, which brings me to just under three hundred square feet of bed space.  That's right at the edge of what I can manage without spending every waking moment in my yard...not that I'd mind that, particularly.  All of that takes place in my front yard, right out there with the sidewalk and the street.

We Americans tend towards backyard gardening, bustling away in compartmentalized isolation, but I prefer gardening out front, for two reasons.

First and most practically, it's where the sun is.  Our back yard is blessed with dozens of trees, which means light falls only sparsely on the small section of moss and grass between the patio and the woods.  It'd make for a terrible garden, because there's no point in trying to grow things if you don't give them light.  It's also low and prone to getting more than a little swampy, as it's where...absent the storm drains...a stream would naturally flow.  That treed area produces a lovely harvest of fallen leaves for the compost pile, and makes for a great location for said compost, but otherwise, its function is as a place to sit and relax while the dog romps about.

You grow in the light.

Second, it's more public.  More social.  It's friendlier.  As an introvert, this might seem like a peculiar thing to take pleasure in, but I do.  When I'm out planting or weeding or harvesting, I see my neighbors.  There they are, walking by, with their dogs or with tiny people in strollers.  I say hello.  Sometimes, they stop and chat for a bit, or ask about what's coming up this year.  Often, they'll share what they're growing, or talk about how they'd like to start a garden themselves.  I get to know faces and voices.

Yesterday, as I was harvesting asparagus, a little family I've talked with several times before meandered by on their regular early evening constitutional.  We chatted, and they asked what I was doing, and then I offered them newly sprouted spears from the wet earth.

"So sweet," he said.  "Really tender," said she.  It was a lovely little moment.

Growing out where it can be seen makes a difference.  It shifts and shapes our expectations of how we connect with both neighbor and creation.  We grow in the light, after all.

All The Things My Watch Does Not Do

I've begun wearing a watch again.  I stopped, two decades ago, because I could no longer see the point to wearing a watch.  As all folks did at the time, I had gotten myself one-a-them newfangled cellphones, and my phone told time.  Right there on the front of my Nokia, there was the time.  So I had a pocket watch, and it also made calls.

And then texts.  And then, my phone started to be able to do everything.  Photos, videos, and apps upon apps upon apps.  

The idea of a straightforward timepiece...or even one of the chunky multifunction Casios that geeked along on my wrist during the eighties and nineties?  Why bother?  A watch had never seemed more superfluous.  I stopped wearing it.

Then, back in August, my father died.  On that day, sitting by his cooling body and waiting for the mortuary folks to arrive, my eyes lit upon his watch. 

"Oh," I thought. "I should hang on to that."  So before they arrived to take his remains away, I took his old Timex, and placed it upon my wrist.  It has remained there since.

What it does is tell the time, and remind me of Dad.  It has one control, a little twisty knob on the side.  Push it in, and the watchface illuminates in soft green light.  Pull it out, give a twist, and you can set the time.  It ticks, a high gentle percussion of metal on metal, as tiny cogs and gears do their work.  That's about it.

But there are lots of things it does not do.

It does not nudge me with haptics to notify me of texts, or of news, or to get me to think about anything some semi-sentient algorithm thinks I should be thinking about right now.

It does not track my heart rate, or my blood pressure, or my biorhythms, and does not report said data to a large corporation.

It does not know my location, nor can it report said location to a large corporation. 

It does not need charging, not ever, although the little battery within does need to be replaced every year or so.

It does not require me to have anything else.  It does not require WiFi, or a signal, or a connection. It is complete, in and of itself.

It does not require me to lie about having read terms of service.

It does not ever need an update, unless by "update" you mean twiddling that little knob to correct the time.

It does not distract me from the world around me.

It does not encourage me to take out my phone, or make me think about my phone, or add in the slightest to the gnawing Skinnerian itch that we all now feel. 

Again, all it does is tell the time. I find there's a pleasure in that simpleness, and a deeper pleasure still in being a little freer from the chattering, inescapable distractions that are inexorably driving us all a little insane.   

Sometimes, the greater joy lies in what is not done.

The Fiction of American Fiction

So.  I watched American Fiction last night, as it was movie night with Mom, and both Rache and I had wanted to see it.  As a writer and author with four traditionally published books and three agents (fic/nonfic/book-to-film), this spoke right into my existence...and to the peculiar place intersectional orthodoxies inhabit in the contemporary publishing world. 

There were some excellent performances, some early moments of real feeling, and it was often entertaining.   But at other points it felt...off.  It frequently pulled punches, drifted into intermittent bathos, and had a logically incoherent ending.

As a satire of the publishing industry, it just didn't feel like it cut close enough to the mark.  For readers of fiction with a surface-level grasp of what it means to publish and be published, perhaps.  But for me, the satire didn't cut deep, and the further we got past the premise, the more shallow it felt.  

Much of that came from the "authors life" that was presented in the film.  Our protagonist is purportedly a "struggling writer," meaning his books are excellent but unsuccessful.  When he presents on a panel at a conference, his panel is attended by fewer than a dozen extras who have clearly been told to look like they'd rather be anywhere else.  He's rejected, over and over again.  His whole schtick is supposed to be that he's barely making it.

Yet when he arbitrarily goes into a franchise bookstore, there are a solid dozen of his books on the shelves.  The "black" shelves, which troubles him, but shelves nonetheless.  If you can walk into a random bookstore and it stocks multiple copies of several of your books, you're not struggling, honeychild.

He meets with his agent in a big shiny downtown office, because that's how all agents are, right?  I've got three, and while my LA-based book-to-film agent might have an office, I wouldn't know.  I've never met him in person.  My fiction agent...London-based, a successful and reputable agency...works from home.  We Skype.  My Austin-based nonfic agent?  Works from home.  We talk on the phone.  We Zoom.  We've met once in the last ten years.  Again, if you're a mid-list author, it's not 1997.  You don't get flown places or spend the money to do so unless you're in the very tippy top of the list.  Publishing doesn't work that way.

A substantial subplot thread involves the author asserting control over the title of the book, to the point where they can pitch a hissy and get it changed late in the pre-production process.  If you're a name, maybe.  But if this is your debut novel, ain't no way that's happening.  Just no way.  In the same way that you're not gonna be writing the screenplay for your novel, particularly if you don't have a clue how screenplays work.  Because screenwriting is an art in and of itself, as I've learned in conversation with the gifted show runner/screenwriter who optioned my own novel.  

And if your books are scraping by, is anyone you randomly meet...like the attractive and recently single public defender who lives across the street of your beautiful Hamptons-Vineyard beach house...likely to ever have read them?  O Lord no.  With three thousand new titles burping out of tradpub, POD, and self-pub outlets every single day?  Not gonna happen.  That space is too supersaturated.

Other things bugged me.  Like, does he even have an editor?  AN EDITOR?  Apparently not.  I mean, books don't have editors, right?  Or copy editors.  You just write it, and rich white publisher ladies publish it and give you tons of money. 

Then there's the money involved.  Seven hundred thousand dollars for an unknown author is a preposterous advance, a fantasy advance.  Yeah, it's satire, but c'mon.  And four million for the immediate purchase...not option, but purchase...of film rights?  The industry usual and customaries on that number are a set percentage of total production budget.  Four mil assumes, what, a final production budget in the hundred million dollar range?  Given the current market, and the nature of the film that would be made, that's preposterous.  You'd take a bath.  Maybe if it's a write-off, but jeez louise.  And the film gets made IMMEDIATELY?  

There's more, particularly around what actually happens to a book and movie deal if an author fundamentally misrepresents their identity.  Which, er, isn't what happens in the film.

Much of the dissonance in the film may be a factor of the vintage of the book upon which the film is based.  Percival Everett published ERASURE back in 2001, which means that the narrative was conceptualized, constructed and written in the late 1990s or very early 2000s.  That was, obviously, a very different time in the life of the publishing industry. 

Perhaps that's why American Fiction felt rather more...fictional...than I'd expected.

Bad Family Businesses

Having a family business can be a good thing.

Like, say, the humble hole-in-the-wall strip mall Chinese restaurant my own family has been ordering from for nearly two decades.  The food is classic American Takeout Chinese, cheap and abundant and generically tasty.  We've been their regular customers as management has passed among and between members of an extended Chinese family over those years.  We've watched extended family arrive from China, folded into community through the business.  We've watched the children of the family grow up, first diligently doing homework in the restaurant while their parents worked, and then helping with the business while juggling school and life.

Family farms and restaurants and businesses of almost all ilks can be a cross-generational blessing.  The bonds of blood and trust that unite extended families can add to the sense of purpose that rises from a shared labor.

But there are some lines of work that lend themselves poorly to that connection, where the expectations that rule family life and expectation clash with the reality of the vocation.

Pastoring, for pointed example.

Just because your Daddy was a preacher doesn't mean that you are, kid.  Call is a fiercely particular thing, and while it can run in your blood, it operates on a different plane from the logics of lineage.  When it becomes the family business, faith often goes awry, becoming less about being a servant of the divine encounter and more about social position and renumeration.

Because that works socially...human beings get attached to a name, to the story of a brand...it too easily loses authenticity, as the self-serving necessities of nepotism take precedence over all other considerations.  In churches, it creates a willingness to raise up too many of Eli's sons, too many of Samuel's sons, those who see the power that comes from that position, and who are eager to milk unearned social authority for their own benefit.

Church becomes a place of falseness, of self-serving plunder and profit.  But there's a place where social power plays even more freely.

Politics, if one believes in republican virtues, is another place where familial expectations are poorly applied.  I've always looked a wee bit askance at the various political dynasties that have arisen over the course of the short history of our republic, because dynastic thinking is antithetical to constitutional principles.

It's difficult to avoid, because political systems are systems of relationship and social influence.  Those connections inhere within family networks, in ways that must be warily watched. 

The more deeply a single family weaves its name and its brand into the political life of a constitutional democracy, the more danger there is that we will slide back into a functional monarchism.  I mean, sure, it was romantic and young back in the day, but Camelot wasn't the capital of a republic, eh?  

When we see leaders promoting family members to positions of power, approaching both party and nation as if they were the family business?  It's a red flag for a republic, a warning light on the dashboard of democracy, an alarm ringing in the ears, no matter what the party.

Dad's Garden

When my family returned to the States from London back in 1982, my father planted a garden.  

A five-by-ten patch of grass on the southeastern side of our back yard was dug up, soil amendments added, and every year in the late spring, he'd set tomato seedlings into the earth.  Better Boys, generally speaking, because they were the perfect complement to BLTs and burgers.

Dad was a single generation removed from actual farming-stock, as my paternal grandfather grew up on several hundred acres of family farm in upstate New York.  Hops were the primary yield of the family farm just outside of the little village of Chuckery Corners, but there we Williams grew everything, as most Americans once did.  

Connecting with the soil was a thing for Dad.  Not as important as music and performance, but still something that gave a sense of heritage.  It was part of his story.

Every summer from middle school onward, the tomatoes at home were fresh picked.  Rows were set out on our screened-in porch to sun-redden to ripeness, safe from the depredations of deer and squirrels and the occasional enterprising turtle.

As the years progressed, the tomatoes kept coming.  Eventually, gardening got harder.  Dad's knees started to go.  Then his hip.  Then, bit by bit, his heart.  By the time he was in congestive heart failure, the garden was too much for him.  My brother and I pitched in to help keep it going, and as the CHF progressed, we managed to keep a few tomatoes coming.  Dad took pleasure knowing they were there, as my brother tended the plants during the summers he spent caring for my folks.

When Dad died early last fall after a hard season, the garden sat fallow. With spring coming on, Mom asked that I pull the fence I'd put in a few years back, and take up the pavers that once sat between rows of plants.

So this last week, I did.  The fence, gone.  The paving stones, dug from earth. 

What had been a garden is now returned to grass.

The pavers, I took for my own gardens. 

They took their place in my eight by eight raised beds, where they will provide stepping stones between tomatoes and garlic and greenbeans, between the garden that is present and the garden that has passed.

Falun Dafa, Swastikas, and Fascism

Falun Gong...or Falun Dafa...is such an odd thing.  In the United States, they're perhaps best known for the inescapable Shen Yun show, a relentlessly hypermarketed spectacle of music and dance that retells Chinese history from their religious perspective.

Over the past several years, I've seen the adherents of that religious movement making their presence known at large, open social events.  They march in local parades, their floats festooned with signs proclaiming peace and love.   They're consistently present in the annual parade in the little town where my church resides.  They're there in my hometown Annandale Parade, as they were this last fall.

It was at that hometown parade that I accepted a flyer pressed into my hand, neatly produced and earnest.  Peace and Love, proclaimed the cover.  I opened it up, and there they were.  The symbols of their movement:

Swastikas.  Oof.

I'm not ignorant of the history of that symbol.  As an image, the swastika had a long history before it was co-opted by Hitler's National Socialist movement.  For millennia, it had none of the connotations of brutal, genocidal nationalism that now hang around it like a cloud in the West.  When someone from Asia or Southeast Asia uses it, I think rather differently about it than I might were I to see it flying alongside a Let's Go Brandon flag in rural America.

Still and all, there's a clumsiness to putting that front and center, an awkward failure to acknowledge the context you inhabit, like walking into a mosque with your shoes on and wearing a t-shirt that asserts that everything goes better with bacon.  "Hey, it's just my culture, get over it" doesn't quite cut the mustard.

And there's another, peculiar level to this story.

Falun Gong has been systematically and often brutally oppressed in their native China, with adherents subject to imprisonment, "re-education," and exile.  Because of this, they are vehemently opposed to the Communist party in China.  Like Sun Myung Moon's "Moonie" Reunification Church back in the 1960s and 1970s, their vociferous anticommunism overcompensates into something peculiar.

In addition the the ubiquity of Shen Yun, Falun Dafa is also responsible for the media content produced by The Epoch Times, which they own.  

That outlet, if you're not aware of it, is a "fair and balanced" news organization that aggressively promoted claims of election fraud in 2020, that sees communist influence everywhere, and that routinely casts doubt on the efficacy and safety of vaccines.  They're purveyors of "hard-hitting documentaries" produced by entirely "neutral and reflective" folks like Dinesh D'Souza, and proudly highlight the endorsements of thoughtful moderates like Sebastian Gorka, Pete Navarro, and Paul Gosar.

For entirely comprehensible reasons, they're pro-Trump, because Trump is performatively anti-China.  This position mirrors that of the Moon's Reunification Church, which purchased the Washington Times back in the day to both promote themselves and align with far right wing causes.

Which brings us back, in the deepest of ironies, to their use of swastikas.

Saying "the swastika is just our cultural sign of peace and love" feels a little off when your media outlet is championing the messages of the far right, and amplifying authoritarian voices that would overturn the constitutional foundations of this republic.