February 8, 2022, Heather Cox Richardson

… it’s odd when a bit of news can seem like a ray of sunshine in anotherwise gloomy landscape…

The fallout over the Republican National Committee’s statement censuring Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” continues to rain down on the Republican Party.

… i still can’t say whether this country will go authoritarian or not, an awful lot of my fellow citizens seem to want that, but it does look like justice could have its way… haven’t felt that way in a while…

20220209-01

NATO Unity Is Put to the Test, Natalie Dowzicky, Reason.com

… my expectation is that as soon as the Winter Olympics conclude Russia will pull the trigger… Putin has too much already invested in the effort… but i am no expert…

President Joe Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the first time today to dissuade American fears that Germany is an “unreliable partner” in the possible Russia-Ukraine conflict. It’s still unclear what role the largest economy in the European Union will play if Russian forces invade Ukraine.

Previously, Germany has received harsh criticism for its “soft treatment” of Russia as its troops gather at the Ukrainian border. Until recently, Chancellor Sholz has been reluctant to clarify what exactly Germany will do if Russia invades Ukraine. Biden attempted to put that doubt to rest in a press conference on Monday by declaring, “Germany is an incredibly reliable ally.”

20220208-05

This Racial Justice Activist Gets Right to the Heart of the Critical Race Theory Mania, Abigail Weinberg, Mother Jones

It can feel hard to understand what the hell is going on. But for activist and author Kimberly Latrice Jones, it’s not all that complicated. She cut through the bullshit when she appeared on The Breakfast Club podcast on Monday, offering what she thinks is the real reason why the anti-CRT craze has taken hold: White parents want to avoid having difficult conversations with their children about race.

… not sure i don’t think there is a little more to it than that, but it probably figures into the equation…

“The truth is, Ruby Bridges, who integrated school, is only in her sixties,” Jones, who co-authored the 2019 book I’m Not Dying With You Tonight, said. “So what it is is that you don’t want your kids, your grandkids, to know that you spit at her. You don’t want your grandkids to know that you witnessed lynching. You don’t want your grandkids to know that some of those family heirlooms that’s in the will are things from atrocities that happened to Black people.”

“We want to be convinced that it was so long ago,” she concluded. “It was last night. It’s today.”1

20220208-04


  1. Kimberly Latrice Jones ↩︎

Charred Sweetheart Cabbage with Prawns and a Pickle Brine Dressing, Helen Graves

… just bookmarked the recipe… doesn’t it look yummy?

2,700 Artists in New York State Will Benefit from New $125M Program… gonna keep an eye on this one… not sure i will be able to make the case for need, but we’ll see…

20220208-02

books: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 📚 … the next book i am taking up is Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse… i have had this book on Kindle for some time… a Paris Review article discussing the Bouef Dabube featured in the narrative pushed it to the top of the list… when i am done with it, on to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which would be a re-read for me…

books: The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto 📚 … just finished reading… the last chapter was rather rambling and seemed an apology against various critiques of ancient Greek character… however, the rest of the book was so interesting and infomrative and, really well written…

233.0 lbs

… hard time with weight… hard to exercise enough… hard not to eat and drink too much…

… H moody…

… we will head out to BI in a few days… looking forward to the change of scenery… trying to figure out what my reading, work routine will be… contemplating a new tablet, basic one for writing and what not, but don’t really have the money… will simplify my working out there…

… a comparatively rich couple of photo days… hope it keeps up…

… E liked Shifting the Silence… a lot…

… i have a feeling that what i am producing is meaningful even if very few people notice it… E said they have given up posting on FB because it is so unrewarding to the very beautiful content they share… i have found the same thing… whereas whinny wearing your heart on your sleeve and pictures of cats and dogs gets all the attention… i am trying to let go of the need for attention but it is hard… we make, at its best, because we can’t not make, but we want to be seen too…

… signed up for a micro.blog member’s newsletter because they signed up for mine… am i starting to generate an audience?… i am thinking that i will write on Friday and edit pictures on Saturday so that my two titled posts are ready to go as we leave for BI…

… i still need to think what our meal is going to be for Valentines Day… maybe lamb?… roast leg of?… then we could share with M and P… hmmm…

… i received my copy of Woman in the Dunes… it’s reputed to be a masterpiece… it features a picture of a man and woman making love on the cover, so of course my libido being in charge of things wanted a copy… artsy eroticism… what could be better?…

… H has their surgery date… end of March… shouldn’t be a big deal… day surgery… there is tension about it none the less… don’t blame them…

… the political crisis in the country gets worse every day… i don’t think anyone can say for sure whether democracy will survive… on my bad days i despair that it won’t… all kinds of nasty thinking people declaring their desire to see democracy end… Peter Thiel, a libertarian billionaire has stepped down from the board of Meta to work on electing Trumpian candidates in 2022… he apparently believes that Democracy is not compatible with freedom anymore, deplores welfare and that women should never have been allowed to vote… seriously?… WTF

20220208-01

A photo pairing from today’s images…

20220207-04

I’ve added a map of flattened cans locations to my project page

Discovery locations of flattened cans in series.

20220207-03

BFF’s

Lies Are the Building Blocks of Trumpian Authoritarianism, William Saletan, The Bulwark

… an extensive article on the lies people, including a large number of independnts, believe about the current state of affairs… facts really do matter, but only if we can get the people to believe them

… excerpts from the article…

These numbers, combined with the corresponding patterns in Trump’s, McCarthy’s, and the RNC’s propaganda, teach an important lesson. We’re in a battle to save democracy, but the battleground isn’t values. It’s facts. We’re up against a party that spreads, condones, excuses, tolerates, and exploits lies—lies about our political process, and lies about an attempt to overthrow our government—in order to make Americans think that the party of authoritarianism is the party of democracy. And we’re in serious danger of losing.

In a country immune to authoritarianism, this campaign of lies would fail. But the campaign isn’t failing. It’s working. Rank-and-file Republicans, joined by many independent voters, believe the lies. They’re ready to put Republicans back in charge of Congress. They’re ready to support McCarthy when he shuts down the Jan. 6th investigation. And many are ready to re-elect Trump.

20220207-02

232.0 lbs

… my weight dropping slowly as i manage what i eat and get out for walks again… looking forward to better walking conditions so i can walk further…

… dinner with D and E last night… so nice to spend time with friends… brought them copies of Etel Ednan’s book Shifting the Silence and Kitto’s book, The Greeks, as well as a nice bottle of wine…

… E and i in similar places about making art, though my advantage is that photography fits mostly on a hard drive… E says their first art focus was photography and they think sometimes about returning to it…

… a lazy day yesterday… spent most of the day laying around watching tv… The Summer of Soul documentary… some Olympics…

… a disappointing response to my posts yesterday… only a couple of likes, no comments… haven’t checked the analytics yet to see if there was action beyond my own… i need to do something about making the analytics such that it doesn’t count my visits to the site…

… just purchased a copy of Bertran Russell’s History of Western Philosophy… before i tackle it i will tackle Virginia Wolf’s To The Lighthouse

20220207-01

Watching The Summer of Soul documentary. 1969 was some kind of year… m.imdb.com/title/tt1…

This looks interesting…

Museum of the Moving Image Launches Screening Series Focused on Extinction & Life as It Might Be

The World, The Flesh and the Devil and The Woman in the Dunes are the first two offerings… both available to stream through Amazon Prime…

20220206-03

Image Poem, Week 05

About the Repeating of History

Winston Churchill (and others it appears) famously said,

Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

I have been studying H. Kitto’s The Greeks, a very good book about ancient Greek civilization. This civilization reached a glorious pinnacle, had a brief 100 years of production worthy of the gods which profoundly impacted the direction of Western civilization, and then quickly came unravelled.

In my ‘Cliff Notes’ version, it boils down to a tale of two city-states, Athens and Sparta. In very broad outline, ancient Greece was a contest between oligarchs and democracies to become the dominant form of government. Sparta was an oligarchic city-state, Athens was a democracy much of the time, at least for men, especially so at the height of its achievements, though it had fits of oligarchy here and there.

Sparta and the oligarchic way won in time, but not before the democratic polis of Athens scaled dizzying civilizational heights, the result of good fortune and its liberal democratic environment. It was, apparently, incessant war that unravelled them, or perhaps, a civilization blazing so bright can last at their pinnacle only so long.

This history is interesting to me because it echos the moment we are at, in the United States and around the Globe. There is an intense struggle between oligarchic/authoritarian actors and democratic actors and the o/a side of the struggle seems to be positioned to seize control of the world order. I can easily imagine them running the table with the United States turning oligarchic or authoritarian in the near future. In the liberal community of the United States there is a five alarm fire going on. The threat to democratic institutions is so clear and present to us.

I am beginning to wonder if there ever could be a learning-from-history sufficient for a civilization to avoid repeating it. It seems to me that there has long been a struggle between oligarchs/authoritarians and the democratic/egalitarian instincts of the people. There is something about the human civilizational psyche that makes this a continuous back and forth struggle. Is it the masculine/feminine thing? Is it the yin/yang thing? Is it the pendulum thing?

We can read about it in histories of past civilizations and recognize the signs of the pendulum swing in our own, but there seems little that humans consciously manage that predictively determines an outcome. Circumstances are favorable or not. Leadership is great or not. A citizenry has a strong and cohesive ethos or not. Luck is on your side or not.

A friend of mine recently told me they were reading about Sparta and that they admired their conservative ideology which also made room for homosexuality, abortion, and education for women (not at all common at the time). An oligarchic society that worked in its own way. I, of course, prefer the Athenian democracy. It will come as no surprise that this friend is a life long conservative and that i am a life long liberal.

From my point of view, the present oligarchic/authoritarian side of things in this country is populated by fanatics who are barely shy of mentally disturbed if shy at all, but, I am coming to realize that this is their revolutionary moment and they are pursuing it with all the determination that one expects revolutionaries to posses. Because they are seeking to undo the world order I believe in, they look crazy and evil to me. The liberal news media keeps trying to assess them as shockingly aberrant in the context of ‘this great democracy,’ but they don’t believe in democracy and will only be aberrant until they are the dominating ideology, which is when those of us who believe in government by, for and of the people will become shockingly aberrant.

I don’t know which way this struggle is going to go. I intend to pull for the democratic side, but history has taught me that the pendulum swings and that I should prepare myself for the possibility of a new civic order.

20220205-01

All ready to make our Pambazos tonight!

Cooking with Virginia Woolf, Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review

One of my favorite features of the Paris Review, Cooking With… Each one is a look at an important literary work with a culinary event of importance to the narrative. In this case, a boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Wolf.

The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive.

The recipe at the end looks well written as is the article on To the Lighthouse. I will pursue both.

20220204-05

Glenn Youngkin Set Up a Tip Line to Snitch on Teachers. It’s Only Gotten Weirder Since., Arianna Coghill, Mother Jones

It’s only been a week since Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched a tip line that allows parents to report any teachers or school administrators teaching “divisive” subjects, like critical race theory, in Virginia schools. Within days, the tip line was spoofed on Saturday Night Live and flooded with fake tips. And now the governor’s office is refusing to make the complaints public.

20220204-04

NASA Unveils Awe-inspiring Image of Galaxy Threesome Gone Wrong, Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic

_ A group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A, imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. (image courtesy NASA)_

20220204-03

Artists Are Embracing the Power of Refusal, Billy Anania, Hyperallergic

Today, cultural institutions leech onto revolutionary movements while making grand public statements about social justice, particularly after the largest anti-police uprising in a decade. Compare this to Occupy, when museums were silent on their affiliations with white-collar criminals like the Koch and Sackler families. Rather than make any material change, they sought to absorb protest art, just as in summer 2020. But artists are now hyper-aware of the contradictions pervading the nonprofit-industrial complex, leading to mass withdrawals from corporate biennials and a resurgent culture of exposing institutional decadence. The art that has propelled political unrest at every stage, as it has since the dawn of civilization, loses its edge the moment it enters a vitrine. As COVID-19 withers away the veneer of capitalist society, artists are once again embracing the power of refusal.

… i have been having my own revolt and protest, mild as it is, considering, how do i refuse the capitalist art complex which serves the artist so poorly?… it’s a somewhat laughable question, because, by and large, that complex has only allowed me at its periphery… so my protest is of necessity a minimal impact on the system and myself… still, in the spirit of the Classical Greek concept of Excellence and the Buddhist Eight Fold Path, i wander at the edges wondering what to do with my compulsion to make photographs?…

… my art itself is not protest… my desire to make it and share it outside the complex perhaps is… my own small refusal…

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20220203-03

Craving Mexican…

… we love Mexican food… we are going to make some tomorrow night while the winds are howling and the snow is coming down… i have Nopalito by Gonzalo Guzman and Stacy Adimando… really nice Mexican cook book… we settled on Tortas Pambazos1 (Chorizo and Potato Sandwiches)… think of it as a sloppy Joe, but way better…

… i bought the needed ingredients yesterday… this morning i made the Jalpeños Curtidos (pickled jalapeños) and the Salsa Guajillo… tomorrow H will make the Teleras, (Mexican Sandwich Rolls)…

… that’s the thing with authentic Mexican… it’s generally a bit complex, involving layers of flavors… cheese, meat, chilies, salsas, concoctions needed to make the salsas… i imagine in Mexico many of these things are made up in quantity and ready to go for the week or month… not in our house… we don’t cook Mexican that often so we make what we need from scratch when we do… it’s what the English might refer to as “a bit of a palaver”… but oh the yum is worth it…


  1. I read that in Mexico the Tortas part of the title is not quite accurate and a little redundant with Pambazo? ↩︎

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February 2, 2022, Heather Cox Richardson

And so we are back to where we were in 2019, when Vindman first reminded us that in America, right matters. At long last, will most of us decide that it does?

… it would be a good sign if it happens… not clear that it will… apparently the January 6 Committee will begin public hearings in April…

20220203-01

231.0 lbs

… not unexpected weight gain… takeout Chinese food last night… too much… fried… etc…

… the thought that when one reads history one becomes aware of great peoples… but great peoples do not remain great across time in the same place… civilizations wax and wan… i wonder if i am living in a country that is waning… i wonder if my misfortune is to live in a country that, at the end of my life, is in the process of collapsing its greatness (if it ever was truly great) like a spent star collapsing in on itself… the signs are there… are we at a moment when the things that would tear us apart will motivate great change, great calamity, great collapse, all three, two of the three, none of the above?…

… reading the history of the Greeks, there are echoes of the distant past in what is happening now…

… last night, i said to H, how is it that we have had so much time to work on the race problem and we have made so little progress?… we could be at a moment of great leaping forwards, or, backwards… the stage is set for a multiarchy to arise… the numbers will be there… but, then again, we have our own Sparta trying to prevail and keep the stratified society going… at the moment they don’t have the numbers, but… they appear to have the upper hand…

… still fretting about H going to the concert… i have worked out a plan that protects me… i need to discuss it with them…

… HCR sounding a note of hope, that we might be at a turning point with 45 and his minions… i am a little too weary and wary to hope… accountability seems a difficult thing in this place and this time…

… last night a news segment discussing the fact that more Americans have died from COVID than in any other advanced economy in the world… a large part of the blame is on our broadly poor health… is this another indicator of a failing civilization?…