Thomas Frank's "simple liberal mind" (or: What's the matter with Pennsylvania?)

If the so-called "progressive" left that rallied around and then abandoned Bernie Sanders has a mantra, it is this: the Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt.

In a nutshell (just a little bigger than a mantra), the accusation is that the Democratic party has gone "neoliberal" and left the working man behind by encouraging free trade, globalization, and meritocratic advancement through education. Along comes Donald Trump to snap up the straggling working man with empty, substance-free "promises."

The argument is an application to the Democrats of Thomas Frank's "what's the matter with Kansas" critique. (Here he is applying it himself.) What frustrated Frank about Kansas Republicans was their penchant to vote "right to life" instead of economic self-interest.

To Frank and his progressive confreres "economic self-interest" can be defined as the needs of a 55-year-old laid-off white male factory worker in Pennsylvania (or Kansas, maybe). Those are the voters that Trump's idiosyncratic, non-Republican sales pitch is snapping up. Frank credits Trump with appealing to them by single-handedly "dynamiting" the bipartisan regime of globalization and trade agreements.

So, let me see here: the voters who according to Frank were not voting in their economic self-interest in Kansas are now, in Pennsylvania, voting in their economic self-interest? Is it not possible that Trump is attracting people for other reasons? Racial fear? Islamophobia? THE WALL?

In fact, economic self-interest turns out to be more complex than Frank, with his self-avowed "simple liberal mind," will admit. The laid-off factory worker might talk about PTT, but my bet is that he will more likely talk about immigration. If he is a "Reagan Democrat" (probable), he will also have caught the virulent, anti-government-at-all-levels Tea Party bug: Throw out the bums; the system is rigged. Knee-jerk, amorphously politicized emotional responses to economic stress might be producing that inner, economic self-interest voice that whispers, "Hey, let's blow up the system. It can't be worse than the one we have, right?" Donald Trump is the perfect candidate for these people.

But Frank's simple liberal mind can't tease these things out. With either side, apparently.

If it could, it'd be possible to see how there might be a lot of Democrats out there voting for Hillary because their economic best interests include elements that seem not to penetrate the simple liberal mind.

That white male factory worker? Well, he's male. But what about females? Could it be that there's an economic issue unrelated to globalization or outsourcing that interests them? You don't say: equal pay for equal work! See, it turns out that economic disparity cuts a lot of ways in the USA, and the gender cut may be the unkindest one of all to a certain, um, "class" of voter to whom--I can't imagine why--Hillary appeals.

That white male factory worker? Being white, he probably turns a blind eye to economic issues having to do with race. But what about the African-Americans supporting Clinton? What kind of economic issues might interest them? How about a place at the !@#$%%^&* table? Clinton is certainly far from ideal, but she has a history at least of working with the black community, as do the Democrats. The last time the GOP did anything for black voters was, what, 1872?

I've already said that the white male factory worker probably feels economically threatened by immigrants and is therefore unlikely to favor immigrant-friendly policies. OK, because the disaffected white male in Pennsylvania feels this way, does the simple liberal mind jettison the economic self-interest of Hispanics and Latinos? Apparently, yes, because its very simplicity is unable to handle complex issues like immigration, especially when they combine economics and justice.

Simple liberal mind: welcome to the complex political world of the 21st century. "Economic self-interest" is no longer just a construct of the middle-aged white male factory worker.

Who, by the way, would be much better off with someone who at least nods in the direction of unionization rather than someone who shakes his head furiously and adamantly, "Unions? No! Never!"

And what about health care? Is health care not an economic self-interest issue? What under- or unemployed person under the age of 65 was not positively affected by Obamacare? Unfortunately, however, Tea Party disease produces well-known symptoms that cause some people not to recognize their own economic self-interest.

So, political diagnosis being what it is, at least we know what's the matter with Pennsylvania.

When a good myth goes bad

"When a good myth goes bad." What does that mean?

It doesn't mean "bad" as in "evil." It means "bad" as in the bread in the back of your cupboard that you forgot about and that's been there for 6 months and that if it weren't for the packaging you wouldn't even know what it was. It means "bad" as in the refrigerated, once-used jar of spaghetti sauce with the lovely whitish-green efflorescence growing on the inside. That kind of "bad."

And by "myth" I mean "story that purveys a commonly understood, accepted guiding principle or ideology." Which is by the way, the true meaning of the word. But like so many ideas in this world, the true meaning has gone almost completely "bad." Maybe with this one we can skim off the mold and retrieve it, just this one time. You ok with that?

So (as every explanation in this age must begin) back in 1787 when the USA was codified, there was a good myth. The good myth was that a free people must defend its own freedom; standing armies of professional soldiers--such as the one maintained by the British--were dangerous to liberty. A free people could not outsource the responsibility of the common defense to professionals. To do so would vitiate the virtue of the people. A free people must vote, a free people must serve on juries, and a free people must provide for the common defense. It was not a matter of choice. It was a matter of duty.

So strong was this belief at the time that every state had a statute requiring--requiring--compulsory militia service of all adult citizens. Not only was this a hedge against a standing army, but it was prima facie the ideal for a free people: "A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free State."

These words were composed for the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 by George Mason, who also went on to lead the fight for an amended U.S. Constitution. He was of the opinion that the draft being considered for approval by the people was soft on standing armies. At his insistence, by way of James Madison's leadership in the first Congress, the new Constitution included as its 2nd Amendment verbiage designed to keep the nation ever-reliant on a citizen militia serving as a matter of compulsory duty.

It didn't work out that way. The loaf got stuck way back in the cupboard. Militia service as a matter of duty was just too hard and too unpopular. You had to fine people that didn't turn out for the annual muster. Legislatures allowed an end-around by which people with money could furnish a paid substitute. Plus, there always seemed to be a few gung-ho individuals who were willing to volunteer to do the job. So naturally--eh, naturally--voluntarism replaced duty.

Thus it was by the 1830's, when Tocqueville was taking a deep look at democracy in America, militia service as a matter of duty was already moribund. No, worse than that: it had already rotted away to the point that Tocqueville got the facts wrong, saying that voluntary service was the only kind there had ever been, and that compulsory service was antithetical to the democratic ideal. Whew! Something stinks in here! And don't blame Tocqueville's French cheese!

Simply put, the spirit of '76 militia ideal says that all citizens, as a matter of duty, serve as trained, drilled citizen-soldiers in order to prevent the formation of a standing army. That is what the 2nd Amendment was meant to guarantee. By the 1830's the ideal had already gone bad. The 2nd Amendment was defunct. The institution it was designed to support had been allowed to disappear.

Today? Poor George Mason is doing the tilt-a-whirl in the grave. The USA worships its huge standing army. People have this idea that the 2nd Amendment has to do with personal, individual self-protection rather than about obligatory civic duty. And forget about "well-regulated." Professional policemen charged with civic defense are killing citizens with alarming regularity, while "concealed carry" licenses can be obtained without ever firing a weapon.

What to do when a good myth goes bad?

At least, in the first place, we can understand that it has, so that we can stop following the guidance of people who would stuff moldy loaf into our faces.

We can also stop to think that, if we want to live free in an ordered democracy, we're not supposed to have a choice with some things, like voting and jury service and, yes, militia duty. Those things are supposed to be a citizen's obligations.

Beyond that, I don't know, except to say that Jesus is coming soon. Or was.

Regeneration in three songs

A time of babies: grand-daughters, the first children of my children.

First there is Mirabel. I can hold her while she sleeps. The music from my head is by Thomas Tallis--If ye love me--one of those motets that puts your mind's ear in a cathedral empty but for you, the supplicant hiding behind a massive column, and, way up in front, a choir hiding behind a rood screen. It is late spring in the Shenandoah Valley where the flowers breathe history.

Mirabelation: https://youtu.be/DqjJ36kNJOI

Then there is Edith. I am an ambulatory cradle in the hospital room, wocking (walk/rocking) her to the whispered tune-beat of Wabash Cannonball. It would be embarrassing for anyone to hear besides her. But she is fine with it and sleeps with the understanding that the lonesome one calling is not a hobo but an oboe. It is early summer in Knoxville 101 years after the one that Agee passed through Barber, but the magnolias are the same even if assaulted on all sides by construction as if it were Longstreet.

Edithyramb: https://youtu.be/AahoVpYkcgk

In between Mirabel and Edith is the final departure of my wife's mother. She has been on the decline for a while, and her death is not unexpected. But a mother's death puts a hole in your heart that never heals.

I hear from my son recently that he is singing Gaelic songs to Mirabel. I learn this with Brahms in my head. He is there often; my mother introduced him. I still have her book of 70 songs by him, for low voice and piano, with page dog-eared by her (who schooled me in this heresy) to the lied that most often piques my consciousness.

I could swear it has fragrance--not the page, but the very thought of the melody. Of course this is just my imagination. But isn't that all we have anyway? The sun-fueled yearning--the Brahmsian Sehnsucht--to follow the senses into and beyond whatever eternal quality the womb imparts?

Hearing Mama Singing: https://youtu.be/KYEvGLcOV5s

First Time Ever! You Won't Believe What You're Seeing! (Trump and the Great Public Service Meltdown of 2016)

Take a moment. It won't take long. Go to the Wikipedia page on US presidential elections and look through the table showing the candidates for the major parties. The salient fact, for my purpose here, is that all of the candidates (with a single, arguable exception) from all of the major parties have in every election had some experience in public service.

By public service I mean they had been elected, or they had served as a high-ranking officer in the military, in the judiciary, or in the cabinet. The point is--they had experience working for the people and being paid by the people.

The sole exception was Wendell Wilkie, who ran against FDR in 1940. Wilkie was a lawyer best known for representing electric utilities. So even this one exception is heavily hedged about by the fact of utilities being a market highly regulated by public bodies for broad public benefit.

Which brings us to today and Donald Trump, the presumptive candidate of the GOP in 2016.

Zero public service. For the first time in American history.

I feel like* the climate change is manmade and can be traced back to a gaseous emission: Ronald Reagan's "nine most terrifying words in the English language"--I'm from the government, and I'm here to help. As a result of the buildup of this anti-public-service sentiment in the political atmosphere, the GOP now believes that government is terrifying at every level, for every reason, without exception.

Trump's 2016 candidacy shows that it is time to erase "public service" from the Republican lexicon of American values.




*Sorry, Molly Worthen, but you're wrong.

Myth-busting: "The government does not create jobs"

In an Atlantic article from May, 2015, that just popped up yesterday on my Facebook feed (due to the same algorithmic wrinkle that cause old celebrity death notices, e.g. Percy Sledge, to pop up whenever a fresh one, e.g. Prince, passes on), Delaware governor Jack Markell outlines some approaches to getting more jobs for Americans.

Economically, Markell appears to be a centrist, Clinton-style Democrat: he says we must accept globalization and its challenges. Trade deals like NAFTA and PTT are good. We must enable private enterprise to find and explore the new, post-global, high-tech avenues to employment, because ...  "governments don't create jobs." Governments only "create a nurturing environment where business leaders and entrepreneurs want to locate and expand."

"Governments don't create jobs."

Hmm. I know this is gospel among Republicans, but Democrats? Maybe, when it comes to jobs, the word "create"--for Republicans and for Markell--is code and has a meaning other than the one it actually has.

Do public employees not have jobs? I had a career in taxpayer-funded public libraries; my wife is a public school teacher. Are those not jobs? Created by the government?

More importantly, though, how much does the private sector depend on the government? Markell would do well to read a recent NYT interview with Barack Obama, in which the president "weighs his economic legacy." Part of it recounts just how it was that the US recovered from the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and in quite a short time, considering the depth of the trough. Bailing out the financial sector, saving the auto industry, using Federal funds for infrastructure improvement, keeping interest rates at historically low levels: all of these involved the government. All of these "created" jobs by enabling corporations to hire (or continue to hire) people. Without that government activity, the slough might have become a bottomless sinkhole.

This is just one example, and it might not even be the best one. Did the Tennessee Valley Authority create jobs? Count the marinas at all those lakes and the big-box retail outfitters supplying all those bass fishermen. Did the interstate highway system create jobs? Trucking companies don't seem to be hurting. How about the internet? Jobs, jobs, jobs (including Steve).

It is a false distinction to call all those things simply a "nurturing environment." Not only did every one of them happen as the result of people working in publicly-funded jobs, but those achievements all have become foundational: an essential part of job creation. They point to the economic benefits of a vigorous and creative government such as seem impossible in today's USA because of the spread of Ronald Reagan's anti-government ideology.

Obama addresses this in the Times interview: a "mythology has been built up around the Reagan revolution" that Obama would like to "puncture." The myth is that Reagan "slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts" when in fact it was due to "a shift in interest-rate policy." And of course the consequence for Obama has been the straitjacket of a legislative branch in thrall to the myth.

What about the future? Markell and Obama both note that the profits of the recovery have fueled widening income disparity. Markell basically shrugs his shoulders and does little more than tout education--a tired nostrum if there ever was one.

Obama at least has a clue. The interview finds him at a plant in Florida that was--ahem--created by his Recovery Act. According to the article, if the plant had been built decades ago, it would've employed thousands. Instead, because of advances in robotics and computerization, it employs 300. Job loss is as much due to technology as to globalization. Even if sales remains flat, if a company can reduce overhead by replacing people with robots or automation, it's money in the bank.

This is hardly a revelation. But for some reason the prevailing notion in the US today seems to be that, at a time of historic, disruptive economic change on the same scale as--if not greater than--the Industrial Revolution, the government should just move to the back seat.

I'm in the middle of reading Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was an astoundingly creative force in the formation of the new United States. Not only was he the principal voice of the effort to ratify the Constitution, he was also the person who--as the first head of the Treasury department--breathed economic life into the new central government. His handling of war debt, formation of a customs regime, and foundation of a national bank all showed how a central government might operate "to promote the general welfare."

In this he was bitterly opposed by Jefferson and Madison, who formed a party--the first such in American history--in order to stymie Hamilton's programs. The party was called Republican. It was not the same as today's party, which traces its lineage to Lincoln, but its small-government ideology was very much like the small-government ideology of today's post-Reagan Republican party.

That such an ideology is pro-business or good for jobs is belied by the fact that Alexander Hamilton, that ally of traders and friend of bankers, believed in the value of a strong, active, and creative central government. But he seems not to have thought of it as "governmental" activity in the same way we do. He referred to it as work on behalf of the public.

We in the US face economic changes that will be (already are) as far-reaching and deep as any in history. And we seem to want to do this without the kind of public-spirited activity that has been linked to American prosperity since the very beginning. I call folly.

What should be the official book of Tennessee?

As is being reported nationwide in the US, the Tennessee legislature has declared the Bible to be the state's official book.

Come on, Tennessee. You can do better than that. An official state book should at least mention the state. The Bible fails miserably in this regard, unless "Babylon" is code for "Nashville." Or Gehenna, the trash heap model for Hell? It sorta sounds like Tennessee.

It's obvious to anyone that this is an act of politically correct posturing. Morristown's Sen. Southerland is a stripper on a pole. He just wants you to throw him your vote, or even better, your Jacksons.

This is not a criticism of the Bible per se: it is an admirable collection of books (important point! Pick one book, Sen. Southerland! Let me guess: Leviticus?) written by people seeking the key to eternity, divining the intent of the divine. In this regard, Tennessee doesn't come out too well, at least when it comes to helping refugees and the poor, an important theme in many of the books in the Bible, including--heads up, Sen. Southerland--Leviticus: e.g. Lev. 25:35, which says "if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee."

(That's King James-speak. I won't even get started on the issue of which translation to use.)

No, the Bible will not do as an official book for Tennessee. If there's going to be an official state book, don't just follow the unreflective path of political correctness. Instead, set some criteria for selection and have a reasoned debate. Isn't that what legislatures are supposed to do?As a native and--except for 3 years in Babylon--lifelong Tennessean, and a career librarian besides, may I suggest the following:

• It should be set in Tennessee, not "Tennessee" (meaning Babylon or Gehenna).

• It should be readable by as many as possible, at least from young adult up. 

• It should be fiction, like the parables of Jesus. 

• It should be primarily about children and/or animals. New York has Make Way for Ducklings as its state book, which is hilarious considering the driving behavior of NYC cabbies. Lucky Minnesota has Little House on the Prairie. What would fit the bill would be an amalgam of Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, and Winnie the Pooh, set on the banks of the Tennessee River.

That's it! So, what's out there that might be considered? Well, in fact there is just such a book : The Signal Mountain Spelling Book of JuliUn Tod. Written by me.

So maybe the TN legislature will take up this proposal and do the right thing. And maybe the title of this blog is Follies O'Barry. And maybe I too am just a stripper on a pole: throw me your Jacksons ... though the paperback is just $13.27 or $11.94 and the pdf e-book? Free.

Babelpype

Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant (1494), translated by Alexander Barclay (1509), t-shirted by the Harmonia early music podcast of Indiana Public Media.

à la guerre comme à la guerre

Yesterday: November 13. Eurostyle: 13/11.

It was one of those articles that, at first, provided further evidence of the continuing folly of my existenc : dementia patients improve when they sing show tunes. My response? I hate show tunes. And because of that I don't know any show tunes. If I were in a nursing home where people sang show tunes, I would become overtly anti-social and consigned to a straitjacket; it would be explained away as a symptom of my illness; but somewhere deep inside my demented self would live a glimmer of fierce desire to explain to these scientists that it's not the show tunes, dammit, it's the blinking singing, you eedjits; which desire to explain would, of course, be folly because I would be too far gone to do anything about it, and because, well: folly: I was born with two heads.

But then I calmed down when I realized that I had cracked the nut and had the answer that the scientists did not have: singing was indeed the key. The scientists were barking all around it and came up with their lame correlation, but that was okay; they were Lamarck and I was Darwin, and I was cool with that.

The next thing was, "what would I sing?" And my instincitive, unthinking response was "La Marseillaise," which I then belted out at the top of my lungs to the alarm and general discomfiture of my dog Lizzie and my daughter's dog Zoey, who was visiting. They joined in, and not--from the looks on their faces--out of a sense of patriotism.

Then the doorbell rang and the dogs' attention was diverted to a more insidious threat: the UPS man, who for some reason didn't stick around. A flatbed scanner had arrived that I was going to employ for archival follies.

Probably because of the power and influence of the singing, I decided to put the scanner to the test with a 3-D object: Lazare, a French revolutionary sans-culotte crocheted by my mother long ago.

Then in the early evening rolled in horror stories from Paris, and today I find myself quite at a loss, feeling very much 9/11. Allons enfants.

Between the World and Me: A letter to Samori Coates

Dear Samori,

Please forgive such a familiar greeting from a total stranger, but I just had the pleasure of "meeting" you, so to speak, by way of the beautiful and demanding book that your father wrote for you.

I can imagine that you're probably both proud and embarrassed to be the object of such a lavishly public paternal heart-to-heart. Maybe at this point you're more embarrassed than you are proud. Believe me when I say that in the future you'll be way prouder and not at all embarrassed. I hope so anyway.

Your father gives a few glimpses of who you are, mostly I think to point up for the reader the different circumstances of your childhood and his; and how, no matter the differences between his Baltimore and your New York, there must always come the point of reckoning for you as a black person in America. That point of reckoning, according to your father, came when nothing was done about the policemen who killed Michael Brown. A flash of understanding; then the dam bursts and swept away is all hope that America can ever possibly offer a black person any reliable expectation of justice, much less belonging.

A lot of your book is how your father has lived with that reality, how he has come to understand and articulate it, and how--denied any sense of belonging by his country--he found where he did in fact belong. This he does for you, I think, at least in part to give you the wherewithal to transform your own point of reckoning from alienation into pride. It's a gift from him, which I hope you're able to accept.

Hope. Funny I should say that, because hope seems to me what your book is all about, even though to the first-time reader it really doesn't seem like it, and even I who have spent some time with it have to kick myself to say that, much less believe it.

It's not so much that I'm a pessimist as that, well, you know the Dream that your father keeps talking about in your book? I live inside of the Dream. I hate to say this: it's worse than he says. About the Dreamers, I mean.

(If anybody's reading this who hasn't read your book, I'm going to go ahead and tell them that it is the "American Dream" that your father floats as a happy-face balloon--"It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake"--only to  puncture: "the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies … the Dream persists by warring with the known world.")

Living inside the Dream comes standard to a white, middle-class male like me, particularly in the South, which is where I have always lived. Fortunately I had a father whose only words of advice that I can remember were "Do not belong." We couldn't belong, anyway, because my family was secular in the Bible Belt.

In any event I have observed Dreamers all my life. And when your father says, relative to the country coming to the aid of the murdered Prince Jones's mother, "Dr. Jones's country did what it does best--it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream," all I can say is that he is being charitable.

And when your father asks you not to struggle for the Dreamers, but to "hope for them. Pray for them if you are so moved," all I can feel is an immense sense of wonder at his forbearance and his willingness to try to move you to hope.

Because, as I say, it's way worse than he says. About the Dreamers, I mean.

Forgetfulness? No, ignorance. At best, ignorance. At worst? It's not hard to see. Especially in the South. Vicious, in-your-face, racist triumphalism borne aloft in a Confederate flag.

But didn't the South lose? No, the South held on bitterly to its slavery-born notions of white supremacy, and it won. It fucking won. The rest of the country not only backed away from bringing African-Americans into the civic composition, but the South would not have it and embarked on a campaign of terror to prevent it. And the would-be liberators? We could say that they just forgot about the African-American. But no. They listened to the South. They agreed with the South. They let popular expressions of the national mind like The Birth of the Nation and Gone With the Wind wash over them and suck them into something that goes beyond forgetfulness.

These days, at best, as I say, it is ignorance. Total, complete, and willful ignorance that begins and ends with a vague and uninformed sense that they know what the Civil War was all about. Well, not only do they willfully not know, but they also have this bizarre notion that somehow the Civil War put paid to this country's obligations to assure citizenship rights across the board. They are intentionally, fiercely uninterested in slavery, the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the great migration, and the civil rights movement. They don't fucking care.

If I had any hope in this area, it would be that somebody, somewhere would be trying to bust up this ignorance, would crank out hugely popular media of all kinds showing the unpitying truth of black history in the New World--mostly America, but take the Haitian Revolution, for example: it should be a paragon of the just struggle. Oh, for someone to make it so with something as wildly popular as was The Birth of the Nation! Oh, for someone to shake it in the face of a country supposedly dedicated to freedom and ask "What about this? What about this?"

And that's just for starters.

The history of black America ought be taught to all Americans from kindergarten on as an essential ingredient of American history. Why? Not so much "lest we forget" as an object lesson of what happens when a country's ideals falter, right out of the gate, but as a questioning counterpoise to the Pledge of Allegiance, one that asks, "Are we delivering on this?"

 

Dreamers want only rote recitation of the pledge and blind faith in the flag, when what we need are more moments like the one in 1968 when, on the Olympic medal stand, during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, black American medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and held up black-gloved fists. If you don't know about this event, you should read about it. White people were generally horrified, saying that they should be stripped of their medals for disrespect to the flag. I always believed they showed great dignity and respect for doing what they did. They, like your father, were trying to get the Dreamers to pay attention to the ideals they pay lip service to, trying to get them to be human and mix some shame in with the pride when they look at the flag. God knows they need to.

(By the way I have to say at some point that your father is doing the country an incredible service right now. The way he wrote about reparations and, after the Charleston massacre, about the Confederate flag. I just wish … yeah, I just wish.)

How to get the Dreamers to understand this about lip service? Dreamers are a notoriously defensive bunch whose defensiveness is like a raincoat that sheds the rain of truth. Besides, lip service seems to be an essential component of the Dream. Many Dreamers claim to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb, but let's just say they towel off quick. Don't ask them to live by the ideals they profess, because they can't, not when those ideals have to do with love, or caring, or respect, or empathy, or fairness. Why can't they? For two reasons: their religious beliefs let them off the hook, and their liberty always, always, always seems to come at someone else's cost. Their coin of liberty is selfishness, and its obverse is oppression.

So I don't have much hope for the Dreamers. I just don't. It was depressing to read recently about leaders of Black Lives Matter meeting with Hilary Clinton and telling her they wanted to change white minds, only to have her say they couldn't do that. They couldn't change white minds. Dammit, Clinton, can't you see that's one of the things you of all people need to take a stab at, at least?

I'm more a wisher than a hoper, I guess. I'm glad to have your book to help me think through all of this, even though I don't know where it leaves me. The whole time that your father talked about the Dream, the thing that welled up inside of me was a different dream that I'm sure you know about: the dream spoken of by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a dream of liberty and justice for all. I wish that was the American Dream. By rights it should be. I wish you and I would be able to meet one another and be able to accept that we share in common both citizenship and humanity, but given the past that leads up to now, why should you accept the humanity of a white American like me? If that's not cause for shame for America, I don't know what is.

Best wishes for the future,

Jud Barry

"You Are Being Lied To!" Yeah, but by whom?

Don't you just love it when a "you are being lied to" meme is itself an exercise in seemingly deliberate prevarication?

For example:

Aside from being a silly quibble (more on that below), it is quite selective with the truth. Yes, the flag on the right is the "first Confederate National Flag," and no, it does not exhibit the "Southern cross."

But what about the second Confederate National Flag (1863-1865)? Or the third one (1865)? Here they are:

The Second Confederate National Flag, a.k.a. the "Stainless Banner."

Look closely at this flag. Do you notice anything that distinguishes it from a standard-issue, plain-vanilla flag of truce? 

The Third Confederate National Flag, a.k.a. the "Bloodstained Banner."

In fact the Second Flag was sometimes mistaken for a flag of truce, so the Third Flag added a distinct element: a red stripe along the edge. Lacking any other distinguishing feature, that could mean that the Confederacy had developed a thirst for Jamaican beer.

But there is of course a distinguishing feature on both of these Confederate National Flags: the Southern Cross.

So the "fact" as reported is less than honest. It is also a silly quibble. The Confederate Battle Flag is the most important emblem of the Confederacy, because it was the flag that most of its soldiers fought and died under. Even if it wasn't the flag of the government, it was for them the flag of The Cause. And what was that Cause? It was to found a nation in which "no bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right to property in negro slaves shall be passed" and in which no dang-blasted Yankee states would be able to practice states' rights by refusing to send fugitive slaves back to their owners.

And if you don't believe me, you can read the Confederate Constitution.

One flag to unite them all (Southerners in the U.S.A., that is)

If the South must have a flag, it seems like it ought to be a flag that doesn't divide people from the get-go. Say what you will about the current, supposed one--whether you're fer it or agin it--I think we can all agree it is divisive.

1. A Southern flag ought to be a flag that represents all residents of the South--old-timers and newcomers, people of every ethnicity, speakers of all languages (but learners of "y'all"). The South has moved on past the past that divided us. Its current identity maintains its distinctiveness even as it welcomes newcomers to participate in it and to belong. The new flag is for everyone who thinks of himself or herself as a Southerner.

2. It ought to be a flag that includes all of the Southern states, not just the ones that seceded in the Civil War--or were counted as "slave" states in sympathy with the secessionists' cause (e.g. Kentucky, which is included in the new flag, and Missouri, which is not). Thus, the new flag includes the traditionally-regarded Southern states of Delaware and Maryland; welcomes West Virginia back into the fold; and includes Oklahoma, where so many native Americans from the old South were relocated.

3. It ought to be a flag whose design confirms and strengthens the understanding that the South is part of the United States of America. The new flag design refer to the Stars and Stripes in a clearly symbolic way.

Here's my idea:

No, it's not upside down: "pole side" is the side with unbroken stripes.

The six stripes are for the six Southern states that ratified the original U.S. constitution and should be read top to bottom in order of ratification: Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina.

The triangular canton is in the lower right because that's like the south/southeast corner of the actual cartographical U.S., get it?

(A rectangular canton in that location would really look like an upside-down Old Glory from some 16-state time past).

The 16 stars represent the actual, real Southern states of (alphabetically) Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

While there are some similarities with the flag of Puerto Rico (which has five stripes and a pole side triangular canton with one star), they are coincidental. I didn't discover them until I'd already had the concept of six stripes and a 16-star triangular canton in the "cartographical south" of the flag. Furthermore, this flag furled or unfurled would have a distinct identity.

(Since writing this I've discovered another proposal for a new flag of the South. It has 15 stars and five stripes--no Delaware--and a design that to me suggests the Confederate "Stars and Bars." I believe that the times require a design that is a more radical break from the past.)

Sine nomine

Quite a few years back, I wrote program notes for the Kingsport Symphony. (Anyone interested in these artifacts can find the surviving series here.) This old penchant for foraging in the echoes struck me pretty hard this week, after April Fools' Day came during Holy Week this year (a fortuitous event for someone like me who treasures his copy of Tomie di Paola's Clown of God) and issued a clear call for a cinematic response from Ballet Pysanka:



(The video is only 1:58; the rest of this will be more interesting if you go ahead and watch it).

"Sine nomine" is the Latin equivalent of "anonymous." In the performance I'm wearing a Guy Fawkes mask associated with the group Anonymous, but for a title I liked the reverberations of "sine nomine," ecclesiastical in the very specific sense that they come from the apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus, chapter 44, which (O lovely coincidence) begins "Let us now praise famous men" but which goes on in verse 9 to praise those worthies who died without fame, i.e. "sine nomine."

But another use of "sine nomine" that is quite particular to this project is its use in library catalogs (usually in its abbreviated form, "s.n.") to show when the identity of an author or publisher is not known. The next-to-last title in the video shows what I knew when I completed the movie: the composer of the soundtrack was sine nomine, at least to me.

The music is an old recorder favorite that I dusted off recently. It comes from a collection of unaccompanied pieces edited by F. J. Giesbert and originally published in 1937 by B. Schott's Söhne, Mainz. The collection is entitled Fifteen Solos by 18th-century Composers, but nowhere are the composers' names given.

Why? Were they truly unknown? Was the publisher trying to hide something?

(Back in the mid-20th century when there was a market for recorder music, publishers seemed to want their buyers to believe that the music was actually written for recorder, when in fact it was usually an arrangement of something originally written for some other instrument(s).)

After putting the movie online I decided to try to find out who wrote the piece. Back in the old days it would've meant digging through catalogs of musical incipits--where the opening handful of notes of a piece are arranged in a searchable fashion--but now I had a multimedia universe at my disposal.

Very quickly, by searching Youtube, I identified 3 likely candidates: J. J. Quantz, J. F. Braun, and J. D. Braun. Further sleuthing ruled out the first two--although the video at 1:50 shows me in the early stages of research when I thought J. F. Braun was the guy. Now, even though I haven't seen the final evidence in the form of a scanned manuscript, I'm convinced that French composer Jean Daniel Braun wrote the music.

Braun wrote a collection of short solo pieces, Pieces sans basse pour la flute traversiere, a pdf of which is available. 

"Sans basse" means there is no continuous bass line, an ordinary feature of baroque music, which formed the basis for any added keyboard harmony. In other words, it's baroque code for "solo."

"Flute traversiere" means "transverse flute," which is the term used in the baroque period to distinguish the true flute from the recorder, which was called "flauto" or "flute douce."

A quick comparison of these pieces with the Schott collection edited by Giesbert reveals the latter to be made up entirely of Braun's Pieces sans basse, transposed to different keys to be more suitable for the alto recorder.

There remains the question of why Schott would do this. My conjecture is that the year 1937 in Mainz, Germany, with the Nazi Gestapo fully unleashed from court control, was not a time when a German publisher would want to put out a collection of music by a Frenchman. The recorder itself was völkisch, quite in favor, and in need of more music. It just had better not be music by a degenerate, epicene French guy.

Just a hunch. The next question for the movie soundtrack is how a piece without bass got a bass. I do know the answer to that.

Appalachian Shibboleth

A FB friend, having gotten wind of my outburst described in the last blog, and no doubt with a wicked grin on her face, posted a status about a national weather person using the dreaded "AppaLAYchian" pronunciation.

To her amazement and mine, quick as wink a corps of doughty defenders of Appalachia appeared to avenge their region's besmirched honor, castigating the "wrong" pronunciation, saying you can tell by the way they say it that they don't live here, carrying the righteous torch of the original Indian pronunciation, etc.

They quietened down a little when a brave fellow from Maine allowed as how he grew up using (of all things) the New England pronunciation, and how when he moved to Kentucky for grad school he was met with "genuine hostility."

But really this phenomenon needs a song, something channeling Tom Lehrer or Randy Newman, except solidly and southernly guitared and feathered, so here 'tis--lyrics anyway.

APPALACHIAN SHIBBOLETH

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

O traveling friends in the American South,
When mountain-bound, heed these words from my mouth:
There's one thing you can do to make the folks down there hate ya
And that's call the place where they live "Appalaychia."

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

It won't do any good if you try to explain
that the famous trail that goes from Georgia to Maine
takes its name from a geological formation
that gazetteers since forever have pronounced "Appalaychian."

I've done the REsearch
I've done the reSEARCH
I've never been to the mountaintop
But I sure have been to church.

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

One thing they say, all the Appalatchkey folk
Is they say it the way that the Indians spoke.
So, first you stole their land, and then you stole their pronunciation?
That's all the more reason to say "Appalaychian."

I'll be your Gilead
I'll be your Ephraim
I'll tell the censor twice
I got some stuff for him.

Shake it out of you
All that intolerance 
Shake it out of you
All that intolerance

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

It won't matter to them if you grew up Massachutian
and saying "Appalaychian" was the down home locution
So this warning to you, if you're Greek, Dane, or Haitian:
When in the mountain south, please don't say "Appalaychian."

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

Lollapalooza
Londonderry air
The censor cometh
with his head up his derrière

Shake it out of you

All that intolerance
Shake it out of you
All that intolerance

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

Pronunciamento, or, The Appalachian Molehill

Fred Sauceman, the newsreader at WETS and enthusiast of such regional haute cuisine as red-dyed hot dogs, has unfriended me.

I don't know Fred that well, but in the superficial ways of Facebook we were "friends." Until I did the unmentionable. I committed an anathema.

I have been shunned. Cast into the outer darkness.

I defended Alex Trebek's pronunciation of "Appalachian."

Fred complained publicly that Jeopardy host Trebek had pronounced it Appa-LAY-shun, which, as all good denizens of the southern mountain area know, is a fightin' pronunciation. If it ain't Appa-LATCH-ian you just might get a mess o' hot soup beans thrown in your face. The post received over 100 "likes" and a number of comments basically urging Fred to invade the Jeopardy studio to set Trebek straight.

I posted a comment to the thread that I knew would be regarded as scalawag, but that I also believed to be germane to the discussion, to wit, that when it comes to the adjective "Appalachian," there are two legitimate pronunciations, because there are native New Englanders living in the Appalachian mountains who say "Appa-LAY-shun." Just like, you know, Indianans pronounce "Lafayette" La-fee-YET and Georgians pronounce it La-FAY-it.

Or, as Alex Trebek might say, vive la difference.

Now, to anyone like my real (I hope) friend Rick Martin, I hasten to say that I made an exception for the noun "Appalachia." Rick has convinced me that Appalachia is a purely southern hinterland, and that therefore the only acceptable pronunciation is the LATCH one. I concede the point.

However, I maintain that the adjective "Appalachian" has two nativist pronunciations remarked more or less by the Mason-Dixon line.

Well, anyway, Fred deleted my comment. Mine alone. Nobody else's. Censored me. What can I say--I'm a librarian. We don't do censorship very well. I had been polite and to the point--not to mention germane. Fred apparently was more interested in rustling up a howling pack of yes-people than he was in having a discussion.

I posted again that New Englanders performing sweat equity on the Appalachian Trail had every right to their pronunciation all the way to Springer Mountain.

And, yeah, I also said that the people who wanted to rain Trebek with t-shirts from the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance to school him on the pronunciation were just confirming our regional reputation for being intolerant rednecks.

Ok, so that was a little harsh. But then again, I'm a librarian and I'd been censored. If you run with the bulls at Pamplona, expect to be gored.

Fred let me know privately that my comment (my initial one--the germane, unprovoked one) had been a personal assault and he was removing the entire thread. I apologized, saying that it certainly wasn't intended as an assault, the apology was accepted … and I was cast into the outer darkness. Without so much as an auto-da-fe.

Here's a little story about pronunciation. In the Appalachian mountains.

I was hiking the Appalachian Trail with my brothers. 1971? We'd had a long day--close to 20 miles--and we were footsore and tired. We plopped our packs down by a road at what we hoped was Tesnatee Gap, unsure that we wanted to tough it on to a shelter (we had little tube tents, so we didn't have to, but sleeping in these tents got you drenched in a rainstorm of condensation).

A pickup truck came along. Three guys got out and offered us some beer. Put yourself in our boots. Not yet drinking age, I'd never had more than a swallow of beer before, nor had my younger brother Charley (as far as I know), so this was an exciting prospect to start with, not to mention that a whole day of hiking in the summer heat had made us really thirsty.

We gratefully accepted the beer and then asked the men if this was Tesnatee Gap. We pronounced it Tez-NAY-tee.

The tolerant, charitable response--given in such a way as not to embarrass our furriner ignorance--was, "I think they pronounce it TEZ-nuh-tee."

That's the way it's done. Love one another … and one another's pronunciations, however much you disagree. Prejudice begets prejudice.

A Halloween story, passed down through the generations

This was told to me by my grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother, to whom it happened.

It was when she was a lass living in Dumbarton near the kirk on the last street next to the water. It was Halloween and time for guisin so she went out with a teacup on her head calling herself the French queen. She met an old woman on the street who, greeting her as once-dead queen to live once-more, handed her a chess king and told her to look at the water.

Out on the water were great large ships o' war flying the flag of France, but there came from them not a sound other than the wind. The crone said it was Bonaparte, arrived to raise the Highlands and marry his sister to a Stuart; and that all remained to happen was for the devil to come sanctify the event, which would happen if the guisin lassie gave away the teacup crown to the crone.

The ancestor lass was all ready to hand over the teacup when there was music. Two guisers came marching down the street, one a hoboy and the other a jingling johnny contraption, and the song was Devil in the Kitchen.

Then came shooting out of the kirk a massive red carriage, which went lumbering up and around the street, clattering and clanking and making a great noise that was joined by booming from the ships o'war. The street filled with pikemen and horsemen, and the massive red carriage played them all like skittles amid the noise.

Then as soon as it began it was all gone and quiet, all except the jingling johnnyer, who took the lass aside and said that she had done right by not giving the teacup crown to the crone; that it was just as he had dreamed it; so that now none of it would ever happen; that he would himself never even know of it; and that all she should remember was his name, which name was Jonathan Strange; even though the actual Jonathan Strange himself was asleep and dreaming in a bed far away, employed unbeknownst by the gentleman with the thistle-down hair to stifle the military plans of Bonaparte by preventing the best ideas from occurring to him.

My grandmother and her grandmother before and her grandmother before remembered more than just his name and said it was thanks to this that Bonaparte never invaded Britain.

Red, Whitewash, and Black

I didn't fly a flag this last Memorial Day because I hadn't gotten around to replacing the old one, which had to be honorably discharged after flying away from the pole last November. The flag was attached to the pole with couple of thin plastic loops. Time and wind, apparently, had weakened them to the point that my flag flew free. Flag-freedom is inconsistent with the whole point of flags.

Anyway, I spent the day under a light cloud of citizen-guilt for not showing my pride. Entirely self-induced (I don't fly the flag on holidays to prove something to the neighborhood), I missed the the little ceremony of putting it out--the mute interrogation of its symbolism and the random associations it produces.

It wasn't a comfortable Memorial Day for national symbolism, however: I spent it reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's article about reparations in The Atlantic.

Reading about America's shameful history of racial prejudice, my mind kept hitting back at that pop patriotic slogan "Freedom Isn't Free" with such snide rejoinders as, "Yeah, it also requires slavery and theft." Coates's article had nothing to do with native Americans, but it didn't take much for the moral arithmetic of nation-building to amend the formula.

Even sadder, I kept thinking how all those we seek to remember on Memorial Day had died in vain because we the living couldn't figure out a way to live up to the ideals the flag represents.

And the flag, too, in and of itself.  I found myself going even further than Coates, in a way. He at one point in the article writes that "reparations would mean the end of yelling 'patriotism' while waving a Confederate flag." My reaction was: wrong flag, Mr. Coates. Most of what you write about - slavery up until the Civil War, Jim Crow, redlining - happened under the star-spangled banner. Maybe we shouldn't be yelling "patriotism" while waving the American flag until we face the reality that the effects of its long history of civic abuse thrive in ways that are injurious to our future as a nation.

It is, I realize, the height of folly for me to believe that there is any hope for any attempt at a moral reckoning, so the fantasy that the owners of Monticello would tithe the proceeds of their ill-gotten plantation tourist dollars into a fund for minority business incubation will always remain such. Too many people will point to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and say "mission accomplished" or "heckuva job, Brown vs. Board of Ed."

To anyone who thinks I've somehow joined the ranks of the "Blame America First" crowd (whoever they are), you're wrong. My shame and disappointment come from the fact that I'm practically religious about the nature of Americanism, its ideals, and its promises.

Every religion claims that its tenets are true, yet no religion can verify those truths except on the basis of faith and belief. My American religion believes that every American citizen is bound to every other American citizen by our common citizenship. The U.S. Constitution is our Torah; the Declaration of Independence is our Sermon on the Mount; our history provides our Chronicles and Epistles; our Constitutional history provides our Talmud.

If doubts have begun to bedevil me to the point that they drown out the apologists with their evidence of progress, some of it comes from my own immersion in American scripture:

• An obvious one: the Constitutional three-fifths clause that, for the purposes of tax assessment, distinguishes between "free persons" and "other persons." Slavery was euphemized into the Constitution. Four score and some-odd years and hundreds of thousands of slave-and soldier-deaths later, it was removed. But the taint was not. It's the kind of taint that turns the lofty ideals of Jefferson into the empty rhetoric of a political windbag.
• Federalist Papers #51: James Madison theorized that the Constitutional structure, through its deft balancing of powers and by its ability to act on individual citizens, would protect the rights of minorities in the states. Except the ones who had no rights to start with and who've had to fight every step of the way to get them in the first place and to keep fighting just to hold on to them.

But, believe it or no, it gets worse. I read Coates at the same time as I was reading a slim volume by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah called Lines of Descent: W.E.B. DuBois and the Emergence of Identity. DuBois was one of the giants of Africa-America. A cofounder of the NAACP, he spoke out loudly on the subject of American racial discrimination when it was at its worst. The book details DuBois's education, particularly his years at the University of Berlin, at that time the pre-eminent institution of advanced historical and social thought, and as such provides a sort of intellectual history of DuBois's lifelong efforts to nail down the concept of race. More vividly, Appiah describes race identity for DuBois as "the angel he wrestled with his entire life."

DuBois understood early on that race had no validity as a physical construct, but he was powerfully drawn to the possibility of a Negro race as a cultural construct that would be found to be a positive force in human affairs. For example, he found in Negro spirituals an expression of Herderian Volksgeist, a striving of a corporate body toward a unique formulation of the human experience. 

Ultimately, however, the positive aspect of DuBois's definitional project foundered, even if DuBois himself "never left the world of idealistic ethical nationalism," according to Appiah. The project was sunk to the level of the white supremacist. Asked what it is that makes someone a black man, DuBois's most enduring answer, the one that seems to have had most resonance with him, was "the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia."

Or, he might have added, suffered whatever such "daily cruelties" and "public insults" of racism that attended his childhood in Massachusetts. Because they were certainly there. It was only in Germany that DuBois was able to live life beyond the artificial distinction of race. "In the days of my Sturm und Drang," he wrote, "this was the land where I first met white folk who treated me as a human being." And, in turn, the Negro came to see white folks beyond the prism of race: "I met men and women as I had never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks but folks.”

But no matter his kaiserlich handlebar mustache or his marriage proposal from the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, DuBois could not hold on to the sense that all people were just "folks." He - like the returning black American soldiers from every overseas conflict - had to return to a country where folks weren't just folks. They were white folks or black folks. And it made a difference.

It made a difference to DuBois by galvanizing his identity as "a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia." It gave him a cause and a struggle. He recognized that its source was tainted: “The race pride of Negroes is not an antidote to the race pride of white people; it is simply the other side of a hateful thing.” But there was no way he could turn his face on the overwhelming injustice and hypocrisy of the phenomenon: “If in the hey-day of the greatest of the world’s civilizations, it is possible for one people ruthlessly to steal another, drag them helpless across the water, enslave them, debauch them, and then slowly murder them by economic and social exclusion until they disappear from the face of the earth—if the consummation of such a crime be possible in the 20^th century, then our civilization is vain and the republic is a mockery and a farce.”

Can we say we are past all of that, finally, thanks to the civil rights movement? Are we at the point sought by DuBois, where he could be, as he wrote, "both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face”? Are we past the experience of the spiritual--the unique formulation that branded an entire people with the sense that only death would bring release from unyielding oppression--because it has faded in the sunlight of a here and now Promised Land?

I don't believe we are, partly because the healthiest, most robust plant in the conservatory of American culture is the racial one. It is watered and fertilized on all sides. Look at Barack Obama--black or white? White mother, right? So he's definitely white. What do you mean, he's black? Whatever happened to the mother tongue? Matrilineal identity is a strong, binding practice in many cultures; what do you mean, it's not available? Well, it just isn't: it's not available to an American whose skin is the same color as a slave's. The American mind is still riding Jim Crow in Georgia.

Not that the fruit of the racial plant is necessarily poisonous. Look, for example, at the development of the blues as an outsider phenomenon, as a way for a downtrodden, black minstrel to live a life free from The Man.

But nobody bargained on the overwhelming influence of the blues. Nobody figured that white boys like Hank Williams and Elvis Presley would sing 'em. Think how delicious it must be - the poison going down - that The Southern Man has made blues music part and parcel of his own identification as he follows his Rebellious course, imagining that his treason is patriotism, toward the destruction of a civic project that he can only identify as Yankee, even though its champions were mostly Virginians. Join him to ghetto gangsterism in all its misogynist, steroid, blinging, FUCK Y'ALL, 1-in-3-imprisoned-black-baby-boy rage, and we get the culture we deserve: the consummation of the union of hatreds in the big revival tent of the Whisky Rebellion, where Original Sin isn't just heritable, it's your birthday suit, and they ain't no changing it.

People who think the problem of reparations is a problem of who gets paid don't understand that reparations isn't about money. It's about repair. It's about fixing what has been broken from the very beginning.

Nor is it about amending the Constitution. The Constitution, through the process of ongoing juridical interpretation, is continuously morphing, even if, technically, the changes don't qualify as amendments. The changes surely have meaning, though, and they sure have effect. It isn't possible to think of a single "constitutional" issue and not realize that.

What the Constitution cannot do is to instill within us a sense of what it means to be a citizen. For example, it is obvious that the current argument about the Second Amendment rests, on both sides, on the individualistic side of the equation--on the right of the individual to own a firearm. What it entirely ignores is the civic aspect of the Second Amendment, which states rather baldly that a militia is essential to freedom. And yet where is the militia today? Where is the civic component of the Second Amendment? It does not exist.

So the project of reparations is a project of identity. It is a project to enable the notion of citizenship to form the core of one's American identity. It is as much a project of internal improvements as anything Alexander Hamilton or Henry Clay or Dwight Eisenhower ever imagined--and I use those names advisedly to show that something like this is as much a Republican thing as a Democratic thing. It is as much a technical endeavor as the space program or the Strategic Defense Initiative, and it will pay way more dividends.

Think of it as a huge flag project. I don't worship the flag per se. I revere it for what I believe it means. I identify myself with those meanings. I am one thread in the flag.

The thing about being a thread in a flag is that no one can be forced to be part of it. You have to choose to be part of it. Now what if the fact of the American flag today is that large numbers of people choose not to be part of it? The weave is coming apart; it's fraying; it's full of holes. It looks like the flag could use some …

I think I heard you say "repair." And why not? In the whole time it's been there, it's never been done.

Let's Talk about (Recorder) Love, part 2

Nested within the week leading up to the performance of Noye’s Fludde, unforeseen by fortune cookie or horoscope or Nostradamus, was a massively random second recorder event also involving a ship.

First of all, really, I don’t do that much recorder playing. And secondly, I never ever play recorder about ships. So when it happens twice in the space of seven days, you’d better believe I’m either the Most Interesting Man in the World, or I’m God, resting.

Anyway, the second event—which, temporally, was the first event (nesting! nesting!)—was this: I performed on the soprano recorder, epically, the epic 8-bar pennywhistle solo from the epic Celine Dion song My Heart Must Go On from the soundtrack of the epic movie Titanic. This was done in an epic concert by an epic middle school choir conducted by my epic wife.

But what really made it all seem like an epic voyage to the epicenter of the earth is that I was in the middle of a book written by a music critic, Carl Wilson, about his efforts to come to terms with Celine Dion; or more accurately, to come to terms with the fact that, while he can’t stand her music, millions of people around the world adore it. So, I was getting to play the epic music at the same time as I was reading about an epic effort to not hate it that, along the way, said some things that led me to ponder why Titanic is so epic and (nesting! nesting!) Noye’s Fludde is so not.

Odysseus, do you hear sirens? What? They’re singing Nearer My God to Thee? My God! (resting! resting!)

Given all this epicness—which I’d love to spice up if only I had an épicerie—I must first admit that using the soprano recorder for the pennywhistle was a massively uncool thing to do. Also, “massively” is the adverb of choice for qualifying descriptors connected with such epicity.

But, about the uncoolness. Carl Wilson believes in cool, or, rather in the power of cool. In his book Let’s Talk about Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, Wilson has this to say: “In early 21^st century terms, for most people under fifty, distinction boils down to cool.[Wilson’s italics] Cool confers status—symbolic power. It incorporates both cultural capital and social capital, and it’s a clear potential route to economic capital. Corporations and culture-makers pursue it as much as individuals do. … As much as we avow otherwise, few of us are truly indifferent to cool, not a little anxious about whether we have enough, and Bourdieu’s theory may illustrate why that’s not merely shallow: being uncool has material consequences. Sexual opportunity, career advancement and respect, even elementary security can ride on it. To ignore cool may mean risking downward mobility at a time when many people are falling out of the middle class.”

Bourdieu is Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist whose ideas of the derivation and dependence of taste upon social position are what’s left after Wilson boils down a brew of argumentation about aesthetics that also includes Kant and Hume as ingredients until they get vaporized. Gotta boil down to something.

If it seems like I’m boiling this down to dismissiveness (in massively epic fashion), it’s a shame, because I really did enjoy the book. I read it twice, and I re-read books as much as I play recorder about ships. I will give it four stars on Goodreads. Wilson’s dogged pursuit of “an experiment in taste, in stepping deliberately outside one’s own aesthetics” in order to answer the question “What is the real substance of the dislike I … have for Celine Dion” is indeed exemplary. The world could use more such exercises in empathy.

But, “distinction boils down to cool”? I can only register that with a wince.

Regardless of what people think about Dion, when it comes to “her” music, she is just the voice. She does not write the lyrics or the music. She doesn’t do the arrangements. So—making distinctions here, which I know is probably a different sense of “distinction” than the one Wilson uses, but it is the original, essential one—there are many aspects of a song like My Heart Will Go On that people may or may not like, and when it comes to the first 8-bar instrumental introduction, which sets the tone for the rest of the song, to use a recorder instead of a pennywhistle is massively uncool.

If you think like Wilson, you might assume I mean that the soprano recorder—due no doubt to its association with classrooms full of children using it to butcher Hot Cross Buns with such fervidness that John Wayne Gacy starts to look like Francis of Assisi—possesses some kind of downward mobility unpossessed by the pennywhistle, and that, as a result of using it, I’m going to fall out of the middle class. Outraged purists of epic pennywhistle solos, players of Cards Against Humanity, blue-faced Wallaceites, Celtomanes, fans of the Pogues and the Dropkick Murphys: all will rise up and prevent me from pursuing a career as a performer at epic middle school choir concerts, and I will be left to play for pennies on interstate off-ramps.

[A class of recorders in a gym. My ears bleed at the very idea.]

While I’m prepared to face that (more in a bit), that isn’t what I meant. I meant it is musically uncool because, well, it boils down to fingering.

It's not easy to explain if you're not familiar with how woodwind instruments work, but it's sort of like the difference between a fitted wrench and an adjustable one: the fitted wrench only works on one size of nut, but it works perfectly on that nut. The adjustable wrench, on the other hand, can be made to work on all sizes of nuts, but imperfectly so (slipping, etc.).

In musical terms, while both instruments are basically just whistles on a tube perforated with holes, an F pennywhistle matches the song key with a simple fingering pattern well suited to accomplish the slides and finger vibrato that a truly distinctive (meaning excellent) rendering of the music demands. The soprano recorder, on the other hand, can play the notes, but has to use harder, more awkward finger patterns and combinations to do so. These so-called "forked" fingerings can't provide as many of the characteristic stylings, so it doesn't sound quite the same.

It meant I'd basically be faking it. And fake it I did. Epically, of course.

But what you must know—and here’s the “more in a bit,” all you Cropdick Celtomanes—I tried to buy an F pennywhistle the weekend before the concert, but the local music store only had the usual selection of D’s, which works for 95% of Celtic music, so why stock an F? For all those people who make a living playing the first 8 bars of My Heart Will Go On with middle school choirs?

So, now you know: if I fall out of the middle class as a result of faking an epic pennywhistle solo on the soprano recorder, I fall advisedly.

It all boils down to massive épiceries.

Let's Talk about (Recorder) Love, part 1

I peaked last Sunday morning, 18 May, 2014. My whole life, in one respect, led up to that day’s hour between 11 a.m. and noon.

It wasn’t peaking at the same level that getting married is, or having children is, or having children get married is. Those are the Himalayas of life geography, to me anyway.

No, this was a lesser peak, but still a significant one. Let’s just call it my Ararat, for an obvious reason: Last Sunday I peaked as a recorder player by performing the solo treble (alto) part in my church’s production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde.

Britten composed his setting of the Noah story designedly to accommodate the varied abilities of amateur and professional musicians. Thus, the treble recorder part calls for a solo player and ripieno players. Ripieno recorders? I knew the term from its association with violin family members in the Baroque concerto grosso, which alternates between sections of the whole orchestra playing together—the ripieno passages—and sections when just the soloists play. As one who’s been in a roomful of people learning to play recorder at the same time, I had to question the wisdom of this particular aspect of Britten’s orchestration.

Happily for the musical quality of the production (I like to think), there were no ripieno treble recorders. It was just myself along with two descant (soprano) recorders, both played tastefully and in tune by my wife and one of my daughters. Three is a good number of recorders. More than that, and the warbling starts to move along the timbrometer in the direction of shrieking.

Three is an even better number of recorders if it’s two parents and an offspring. It was the second time for me—so that I now realize with no small bemusement that maybe the peaking was indeed of an Himalayan scale.

I’ve been a recorder player since I was a child. My parents played recorder. My mother taught me to play; my father set a rigorous performance standard. Occasionally we performed as a trio—The Barry Consort—in churches or at the occasional downtown arts festival in Chattanooga.

I still have the books we played from. Most of the music consists of keyboard or string pieces transcribed—in a peculiar mid-20^th century variation of Tin Pan Alley—by arrangers who seem to have lived off the ravenous hunger for something, anything for recorder demanded by participants in the great recorder revival (the recorder having gone extinct in the 19^th century).

The picture above show the cover of an exceptional case: a recorder trio actually composed for recorders in the early 1700's. My mother's handwriting shows that its 5 movements--minus the Overture, which her handwriting says to "skip"--took 10 minutes to perform. (Notice the stamps: House of Music on 732 Cherry St., Chattanooga--back then music stores had music, meaning sheet music; and my father's handmade recorder name stamp.)

At less than 2 minutes per, our selections were generally very short—often, in the case of the up-tempo ones, less than a minute. These tunes were originally written to be danced to, and as such, originally, would have been repeated 3 or 4 times, then followed by other tunes, similarly repeated, to form a long enough set to make the dancers require a break to refresh themselves with perry, flip, or shrub.

Here's the first page from a two-page piece from the Faber book shown above. I just timed a "performance" of the whole thing in my head, with repeats as marked. It took 44 seconds.

These pieces The Barry Consort played one time through. There was no dancing to recorder music at downtown arts festivals in Chattanooga. This meant my father did a lot of talking to pad the program, which was fine, really, because nobody knew what continent recorders came from or what they ate or why anybody would want to consort with them. With that level of not knowing, everyone seemed okay with letting my father be the ranger in a musical Jurassic Park.

Among the first things you learn about these creatures is that there are two sets of fingerings, which go by the names of the pitches that sound when you cover all the holes: C and F. At first I played the C-fingered instruments, the soprano and tenor. In the trios played by The Barry Consort the soprano generally had the prominent part—the “lead” or the “melody” or whatever label best says “here be flash.” Naturally that was the part I wanted to play, but I would’ve had to assassinate my father to have it, so I settled for the backup quarterback role: I could scrimmage by myself with the soprano part, but in performance I played tenor. Functioning musically as the bass voice of the ensemble, it was the largest of the three instruments, and it was being played by the smallest person in the trio. Thus, quite early on, I became aware of the many ways that size does and does not matter.

In The Barry Consort my mother played the F-fingered alto recorder, which, sounding the inner voice, is analogous to the viola in a string ensemble. I think it was the Bohemian composer Dvorak who said the viola is the most important instrument in the orchestra. The viola is also the butt of most instrument jokes. It must’ve been these I was channeling in my musically preconscious recorder trio days: alto equals viola does not equal flash.

Except, as I was soon to learn, alto does not necessarily equal viola. In Baroque music, it turns out, alto equals rock star. When J. S. Bach writes a part for “flauto,” he doesn’t mean flute like we think of flute. He’s using the term as shorthand for “flauto dolce,” which was Baroque music’s term for the alto recorder, one of its pre-eminent solo voices. I hadn’t ever been a real lover of Baroque music until I went to college and began playing Bach on the oboe. I was hooked. So badly did I want to learn F fingering and play Bach’s Brandenburg flauto parts that I dreamed myself into it: I had a dream that mapped out the alto’s F-fingering for me. I’d gone to bed unable to read alto recorder music; when I woke up the ability was there.

I learned those Brandenburg parts; I learned a whole book of alto recorder parts from the Bach cantatas; I never performed them, but I scrimmaged them. I coulda been a contenda.

(The music above is one of my favorites: the recorder part to the aria Bestelle dein Haus from Cantata 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit.)

I did go on to work out a folk-rock improvisational style on the recorder that my friend Lawson Garrett let me use in some of his songs.

But at the age of 60, while I didn’t think about it much, I would’ve told anyone that my recorder glory days had happened back when I was playing tenor with The Barry Consort in a big tent out in front of the Tivoli Theatre in Chattanooga and questioning the appeal of 50-second one-off tunes.

When the church music director asked me a couple of months ago if I knew any recorder players who’d help with a performance of Noye’s Fludde, I told him I’d try to find some (I know a few musicians). I wasn’t eager to play—I had the idea that Britten’s use of recorders would be infantile, along the lines of Carl Orff. Nothing against Carl Orff at all. I just didn’t want to tootle rudiments. While I was procrastinating on finding any other recorder players, the music director got the music to me.

Holy spit.

This wasn’t Orff. This was a real alto recorder part. It ran the gamut from the lowest notes to the highest ones. It had difficult keys. It had some demanding passage-work. It had … flutter tonguing. Flutter tonguing! That’s when you roll your r’s while blowing. I could do it, but I’d never ever performed a flutter tongue. More than a part, the alto recorder had a role: as the voice of the dove in the Noah story, it’s the recorder that delivers the musical news of dry land to the passengers of the ark.

Even so, I can’t say I jumped at the opportunity. Could a church choir pull this off? There would be one rehearsal of the entire production. Just one?  Just one rehearsal for a Britten opera? Those are long odds. Even if the story has the ark making it through the flood unscathed, there was no guarantee that we would. I practiced my part and hoped for the best.

As it happened, the choir’s core soloists—vocal majors at ETSU, along with a couple of others in their cohort—carried the main parts with aplomb, and, with them leading the way, Britten’s crafted involvement of choir, children,  instruments, and a hymn-singing congregation worked its magic.

While somewhere in the orchestra, helping the ark to Ararat, a recorder player wound up high and dry on a peak of his own.