Kansas Day

 

For Kansas Day, I share with you a family heirloom -- the seal of the State of Kansas, painted by a neighbor who lived across the street from us in the late 1970s. 

There are a couple of possessions that I have that are important to me for no other reason than nostalgia. One is this. Another is a little blue jar-slash-vase my mom kept a couple of pieces of jewelry in. And the last is a big, heavy manual typewriter that belonged to my grandfather.

When I die, those things won't have as much meaning to others as they do to me. And that makes me sad to think about, losing that meaning. But that's life, I guess. For now, they possess the meaning I give them.

The thing I learned in 2020...

 ...is that I'm never going to be an intellectual. But I'll work as hard as I can to be the very best middlebrow I can be.

It's weird...

 ...when I see my reflection while wearing a mask and see my dad's eyes looking back at me.

Writing after Trump

Donald Trump is leaving office tomorrow, and I'll admit to some personal nervousness. What's it going to be like to write opinion pieces in the post-Trump age? 

Over the last four years, there has been a certain clarity to writing left-of-center opinion. It's not that I wanted to reduce everything to "orange man bad" (as conservative commentators like to say) but the truth is that Trump wasn't just bad, but that he provided a prodigious supply of outrages. There was often fresh material, something new to illustrate his badness. 

But he is moving away from the very center of politics, and I fear that the muscles I use when NOT writing from a place of deserved moral outrage have grown atrophied over the last few years. I have criticized Trump for being a purveyor of "pure, refined grievance" but now I worry that I, too, am an addict. 

I'm sure that there will still be things to be mad about. Hunting for those things, seeking out the high of angry righteousness, would be a bad path to go down. 

Back in 2009, when Barack Obama took office, I feared I would run out of things to write about after George W. Bush's presidency so enraged me I made the jump from a straight-news newspaper career into opinion journalism. It turned out there was plenty to write about, even then. Probably, the same will be true now. 

We still have a pandemic to fight, an economy to write right, climate change to try to mitigate and other big issues. 

 And I will have to remind myself that some things are worth writing about even if they don't piss me off.

"Breaking Bread With The Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind" by Alan Jacobs

The writing of Alan Jacobs has proven useful to me over time. In 2011, when I was recovering from multiple surgeries -- and the brain fog that made sustained reading nearly impossible for me -- "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" was both the kind of encouragement I needed, and the first book of any real substance that I was able to complete. A few years ago, when I'd just about abandoned any hope or motivations of bridging ideological divides, his more recent book "How to Think" caused me to reconsider. It's a book, in fact, that I need to revisit -- but his latest, "Breaking Bread With the Dead" is a fine companion to both those earlier books, a guide not on how to think but how to ground your thinking by careful consideration of words written in the far-ago past.

One of Jacobs' central beliefs here is that reading old books -- not just books, but old books -- can remove us from the constant flow of information that washes over us through our social media feeds, that they can take us out of the concerns of the moment so that we can take both a broader view but also a more nuanced view of the times before us. Those old books can also help us encounter diverse and strange ideas in -- to use modern parlance (mine, not Jacobs') a safe space.

"Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is not to make the other identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor," he writes, adding on the next page: "We do not have the same intensity of involvement in the past that we do in the present, and it's precisely that which makes the past most useful to us."

Jacobs worries about a modern tendency to dispose of old books because their authors -- or the times their authors lived in -- held different morals than our own, about race, about gender relations. He doesn't ask us to suspend our judgments, though. Instead, Jacobs suggests we bring our judgments with us in an informed way -- to find the nuggets of beauty and/or truth that might reside in a work -- and provides some examples of how this might be done. And he cautions against an opposite impulse, as well: "To say 'This text offends me, I will read no further' may be shortsighted; but to read a 'great book' from the past with such reverence that you can't see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better."

In "How to Think" Jacobs urges readers to be able to articulate views we disagree with in such a fashion that the persons holding those views would understand and express them, instead of how we might cariacature them. A similar thread flows through this book, a nudge to read stuff that doesn't share our precise viewpoints anyway. And to be generous toward the people who wrote those words. They built the world we inherited; some other people will inherit the world we build on top of that. We may hope they are generous to us, as well.

"When we own our kinship to those people," he writes of old books," they may come alive for us not just as exemplars of narrowness and wickedness that we have overcome, but as neighbors and even teachers. When we acknowledge that even when they go far astray they do so in ways that we surely would have, had we been formed as they were, we extend them not just attention but love, the very love that we hope our descendants will extend to us."

In offering us ideas about to read and wrestle with old and difficult books, then, Jacobs also points a way toward a way we can live and think morally in a world that often seems immoral, as well. He uses the word "love" -- I might offer the word "generous." Call it a literary Golden Rule: "Read unto others as you would have them read unto you."

Thinking globally, acting locally in 2021

Over the last year or so, I have found my mind returning to an essay the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker, "What If We Stopped Pretending?" which posits that the climate apocalypse is inevitable and the real question is how to live in the meantime with that knowledge.

The essay produced angry reactions because a lot of people think the apocalypse is not, in fact, inevitable -- though I think Franzen's underlying reason for thinking so, that our leaders just won't get around to taking the action needed, seems pretty solid to me. But I was fascinated with what he suggested we do with the knowledge.

"If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for."

I found -- and continue to find -- this line of thought compelling. A shorter way of saying this might be: "Think Globally, Act Locally." It's a slogan that was popular, if I remember correctly, with environmentally minded people back in the 1990s. And as 2021 starts,it feels like a good idea for me to recommit to.

A lot of the writing I do publicly is about national issues. And national, international issues, were of supreme importance in 2020 -- the pandemic, the vote over whether Donald Trump would stay president. But the hope I found didn't come at the national level, but in my community. Ladybird Diner shut down early, before the official lockdowns, out of concern for the health of customers -- and then began providing a free carryout lunch to my town's needy people, no questions asked, a mission it continues to carry out these nine months later. Raven Bookstore sold copies of a book of essays by Ladybird's owner -- we have a copy in our home -- with proceeds going to that effort. When we had sufficient funds, our family probably gave more to local charities in 2020 than we ever had before.

We couldn't make Donald Trump be a good president during the pandemic. We could help feed our neighbors.

I don't know if 2021 is the end of the disaster that was 2020, or if 2020 is the beginning of an era of disaster. I am apocalyptically minded, so I suspect the latter. I suspect that to be resilient, I need to rebalance my commitments somewhat. Oh, I'll keep arguing and writing about national politics. But as it becomes safer to move about, I hope to re-engage and newly engage my community, to take joy and comfort in here, the place that I am, instead of concentrating my energies in the social media cloud. I suspect more good may come from encountering my neighbors -- even ones that I heartily disagree with, even ones I heartily dislike -- in real life, than shouting at faceless trolls (or being a faceless troll).

So I am rededicating myself to Lawrence. Some of that might mean going to church again, and figuring out how to reconcile my un-churchiness with my love of the church community. Some of that might mean spending Saturday mornings at the Farmer's Market again. I'm not sure, frankly, everything it might mean. I just know I want to be open to it.

It might not save the world. It might not even save my community. But this, I suspect, is where I can best make my own small contribution to trying. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.

"Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own," by Eddie Glaude Jr.

Just under the wire, I have finished my last book of 2020: "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own," by Eddie Glaude Jr. One of the central themes is one I have long felt -- that the triumphalist narrative of American history is a lie, that we fail to truly grapple with the sins of the real history in favor of a myth that comforts us even as it works to cement the results of those sins in place.

This is a passage I have highlighted in my own copy of Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," and Glaude excerpts it in this book:

"To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedented price demanded--and at this embattled hour of the world's history--is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

Glaude echoes that notion in his reflections on Baldwin.

"We have to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this belief that white people matter more than others," he writes, "or we're doomed to repeat the cycles of our ugly history over and over again." He calls for "a world and a society that reflect the value that all human life, no matter the color of your skin, your zip code, your gender, or who you love, is sacred."

But, he also says, as an aside: "My understanding of history suggests that we will probably fail trying."

That, unfortunately, is also my understanding of history. We humans are fallen creatures, prone to drawing lines that pit us -- however we define "us" in any given moment -- against "them." It seems inherent to us as a species.

And yet: We need people like Baldwin, like Glaude, to continue to insist that we reach for that impossible world, the "New Jerusalem" as Baldwin calls it, and a new American founding as Glaude calls it. It is only by striving to rise above that that we ever do any rising -- even if we fall short of the heights we're aiming for.

Update: Coincidentally, after posting this, I ended up listening to this podcast on my walk ... featuring Glaude speaking about the book. It's a good overview, if you don't want to read the entire (short) work. It opens with a Baldwin quote I'd forgotten: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” That says what I was getting at, but better of course.