Listening to: An explanation

I'm going to make this an occasional series, I think, about whatever album I happen to be listening to when the mood strikes. I can't really write about music -- it's like dancing about math -- but I can describe how music intersected with my life and made me feel, so that's what I'll do. It's my blog! Would love to hear your own experiences with the artists I mention. 

Listening to: Sharon Jones

 

I never quite made my life match up to getting the full Sharon Jones experience.

My friend Josh Powers told me about her back in the mid-aughts, had been to a couple of her shows in Lawrence, Kansas and said they were amazing. I found my to to one of her albums and could not believe her albums had been made during this century.

When the time came that she visited Lawrence again, my wife and I got tickets. But Jo was pregnant, battling pretty severe morning sickness that lasted all day long. We made an attempt to go to and enjoy the show -- I remember Jones was wearing a skimpy dress, and worked the stage hard, shimmying and shaking all over the stage, and even then I knew I'd never have that much energy again -- but Jo was miserably ill, so we left after a half-dozen songs or so.

I remember being cranky that Amy Winehouse got famous using Jones' backup band.

There was one other opportunity to listen to Sharon Jones for me. It was Philly, 2011, and we were broke and barely employed. But Jones was playing a free show on Broad Street that spring -- it would've been a huge crowd, we probably would've been miserable. But as it happened, we didn't get to go. I was in the hospital, septic with infection and vomiting green bile. The next day I had a surgery that saved my life -- the first of three I would have that year. I've been broken since then. But I lived and got to see my son grow up.

And another opportunity to go see Sharon Jones live -- in what, I gather, was her element -- never presented itself before she died. 

Right now, I'm listening to her album, "Naturally," and ... I still can't believe it was made during this century.

Listening to: Lou Reed

I first really encountered Lou Reed in high school, about the time he released the "New York" album. A friend -- a Spanish exchange student -- lent me the cassette tape, so I took home and listened on my miniature boom box (known at the time, somewhat egregiously, as a "ghetto blaster" because we didn't quite realize how racist that was) and decided the album wasn't really for me. But Reed's use of the term "Statue of Bigotry" in the song "Dirty Boulevard" stuck in my head for years after.

(Actually, I didn't know it at the time, but my FIRST first encounter with Reed was the Honda scooter commercial in 1985 that used "Walk on the Wild Side," which is a really weird song for a commercial.) 

I gave Lou a second chance in the late 1990s, thanks to the BMG music club -- and discovered I really loved his 70s stuff. (For music snobs of a certain age, "best of" compilations are thought of as belonging to the newbs and amateurs. Guilty as charged, I suppose.) I heard songs like "Satellite of Love" and "Perfect Day" for the first time and was blown the hell away.

The CD got lost somewhere along the way. But a couple of years ago I found another "best of" collection featuring a lot of the same songs -- I mean, they really were his best songs -- on vinyl. I am listening to it now and I'm feeling kind of content.

What both sides need to understand about Amy Coney Barrett's quote about faith

 So I keep seeing this quote from possible Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett being bandied about the Twitters:

For my friends on the left: This quote, in and of itself, is not proof that Amy Coney Barrett intends to establish a theocracy. It's pretty standard stuff for many practicing Christians! Even people who do their jobs in completely normal ways will talk about how they try to do their best for the glory of God. The better tactic is to focus on her actual legal philosophy -- she has a track record of rulings you know -- and talk about how that might be at odds with the American common good.

For my friends on the right: People being afraid of this quote doesn't mean they're "bigoted" against faith, per se. They're worried about how that faith will manifest itself in her rulings -- just as, presumably, people like Robert George are hopeful that her faith will manifest itself in her rulings. Clothing yourself in the garments of bigotry victim might feel good, but it's not all that accurate.

I'm no fan of Barrett, precisely because of how I think she will rule as a judge. And it's impossible at this point for everybody not to assume that the other side is acting in bad faith, I realize. But that assumption becomes its own kind of bad faith.

Coronavirus Diary: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

My big regret from the last decade or so of my life is that I've spent too much time living in my head and in cyberspace and not enough in real life with real people, and now that it's better to live in cyberspace than in real places, I find I'm going a bit stir-crazy. I miss tangible experiences.

"I don't see race": Living in a bubble of whiteness

 I've been thinking about this, from Roger Marshall, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kansas:

"I don't see race" is a line that has become a punch line, but it occurred to me that for Kansans, it is literally true: They think they don't see race because so often they don't actually see Black people: 13.4 percent of the U.S. population is Black, according to the U.S. Census, but just 6.1 percent of the Kansas population is. In Great Bend, where Marshall lives, the number is less than 2 percent.

I went to a central Kansas high school where (reputedly) one Black person had ever graduated in the entire history, and that was before my era. For many rural or rural-ish Kansans who live outside the cities of Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, it is pretty easy to go about your life -- work, education, church, everything -- and only occasionally, if ever, encounter a Black person.* That means your primary source of understanding comes from media sources instead of anything remotely resembling real life. 

*There's a related but also separate discussion to be had about the state's Latino population, but Marshall's quote comes in the context of Black Lives Matter.

Which is how you can start a sentence saying that you don't see race and finish it by talking about "the ghetto."

As a political matter, it's pretty easy to vote for somebody like Marshall, then, because -- even though he's going to go and caucus with a party that do esso much, for example, to gut the Voting Rights Act, and which supports a president who is plainly racist -- you don't see the ramifications of that party's acts in your real life. The color line is a theory, and not one that bears much thinking about in one's politics. A lot of us in Kansas "don't see race" because -- all to often -- we don't have to see Black people. I suspect that makes a difference. 

These folks are in a bubble of whiteness, and it's no less pernicious than any other bubble we've talked about in recent years. Maybe even more so: As Nate Silver notes, America's rural areas get 2.5 times the representation in the U.S. Senate than do urban areas. It probably goes without saying that those rural areas are considerably whiter than America as a whole. Some of the folks who live in those areas are surely racist. But a lot of people are probably comfortable with the racially disparate impact of their votes because they think they don't see race -- and in a very real sense, they don't.

Updated with some copyedits.

Bag O' Books: FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM

This has been, for many white Americans, the summer of anti-racism reading. I guess that my dive into David Blight's FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM counts in that category. I can't tell other people how to try and figure out how to do their own thinking about race -- but I don't have much patience for "how to" books like "White Fragility." I'd rather read histories and current books by and about people who have lived the struggle. I've re-read James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" this summer, as well as Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Next up on my reading list is Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste." In between all of these books, I'm getting in a chapter or two of "Moby Dick" now and again.

Among the lessons to be learned from Blight's book is that discerning the One True Way to battle the evil of racism may not be so easy, or even possible. Douglass evolved over time from a "moral suasionist" form of abolition to a fiery advocate of righteous, cleansing violence. He moved from being a radical outsider to a Republican "party man." He struggled with human foibles. 

The two through-lines in his life, though, are this: He always fought for the advancement of his race. And he often did so by telling his own story -- a biography in which he escaped slavery and rose to become a preeminent orator, writer and (three times!) autobiographer.

The other through line, perhaps, is that the struggle never ends. Douglass started his fight against slavery and ended it an enemy of lynching. Evil never subsides. It just takes on new-- and, sometimes, not-so-new -- forms to be opposed.