Recent Past in Village and at Home, In the Midst, and Coming Events

[This post is incomplete

because I'm having problems 

getting the rest of the photos here.]

 

Dinosaurs sighted in Northport

That was a surprise as I was leaving the bank parking lot on Thursday morning, and I had to go back for a better view. Apparently both male and female T-rexes had been at the Leelanau Township Library. The plant-eating dinosaur over by the Depot did not seem fazed by the arrival of carnivorous cousins.

Other of us (non-dinos) were somewhat fazed by commotion on Waukazoo Street a little later. What was going on? It involved shutting off the water for our whole block, which meant closing our block off to vehicular traffic and unanticipated time off for the restaurants. 

Bookstore stayed open, though. We had lights. And now, on Friday morning, everything is back to normal.

Home Life

Life continued busy as we northern Michiganders launched ourselves into August. Raspberries have peaked, however, and rain overnight on Wednesday meant I didn’t have to water gardens on Thursday morning. I also picked what look like the last of the beans for this summer (having failed once more to stagger bean plantings). So a few things are no longer on my daily to-do list.

Purple on the outside,
these beans turn green in hot water.

We had our first August company, as my younger stepdaughter and her husband brought their adorable little camper and set it up in the yard for a couple of nights. 

Her sister drove up from Kalamazoo to join the fun, and we all had an collaborative al fresco dinner at the farm on Tuesday (featuring fresh Kolarik sweet corn, a neighborhood treat), followed by a night out at the new Bluebird on Wednesday (treated by the sisters). Wonderful, all of it! Tree guy pronounced our guests “cool,” and they found him “delightful!” Sunny was even exceptionally good with company in the house and yard—as long as there were plenty of tennis ball tosses and as long as her momma didn’t forget Sunny’s meals. I admit she had to bark a couple times to remind me.

Cherry pie was my contribution from one of the three quarts of fresh tart cherries Carlos Fuentes gave me from his gleaning adventure in a neighborhood orchard where he has known the owner for years. He picked and offered, I pitted. (The end of a potato peeler works great for pitting cherries, by the way.) Result: Yum!

My reading

I continue to make progress in the fascinating saga of the 17th-century life of Roger Williams, having gotten him at last from England to colonial America. Among the many, many fascinating facts and events, I was delighted to learn that before he undertook to act as missionary to the Native Americans, Williams took the time, on his own initiative, to learn the language and the customs of local indigenous peoples. The treatise he wrote at the request of the governor of Plymouth authorities and presented to Governor John Winthrop unfortunately exists no longer, but apparently he ruffled a few feathers when he argued (having learned the law in England under Coke) that the Native Americans did make use of the land on which they lived and therefore had legal ownership of it, that the land was not just lying there unused for the indiscriminate taking by Englishmen! He ruffled even more feathers, however, when he stated baldly that the English king was a liar. I am liking this Roger Williams fellow more and more all the time, but he offered his treatise to be burned when the authorities persuaded him that its existence put him in danger. As had so many others and as is still the case today, he gave in to the pressure of the group. 

Reading more than one book at a time sometimes brings surprises. One such for me is how well The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, dovetails with the life of Roger Williams. Late 17th-century colonial America and the early 21st-century United States of America have more in common than I would have guessed. 

Three years earlier suffrage had been restricted to male church members, but during those three years, three years during which the population grew enormously, church membership became increasingly exclusive. Initially, one had had to do little more than sign the church covenant to become a member. That soon changed: to join a church now, potential members had to prove themselves “visible saints,” had to prove that they were among the precious few whom their Calvinist God would save. This forced potential members through a stringent and arduous process that included standing before the entire congregation and presenting evidence that God had made the seeker a saint…. This was no pro forma ritual. It was an intimidating, difficult, rigorous, and by no means always successful test. In most churches the congregation had to vote unanimously to accept the new member. Those who either did not seek or were rejected from membership could worship in a church—in fact, the law required them to do so. But they could not belong to a church.

As a result, only a minority of the population, and a decreasing minority, were church members and qualified as freemen with voting privileges.

- John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

Who are the “true” Christians? Can a non-Christian be a good person (or a good American)? Should the laws of the community—colony, state, nation—be determined by churchmen? (If so, which churchmen?) What of people who disagreed, whether church members or otherwise? What of those who followed other religions or no religion at all? What gives law its authority? 

Kramer and Alstad argue that Americans today (though not only Americans) have internalized authoritarianism in ways we don’t even recognize. Blind submission to any authority, they say, has its root in self-mistrust, and self-mistrust comes from a psyche divided against itself, with one part labeled ‘good’ and the other part labeled ‘evil.’ They point out that most religions, including Buddhism, consider self-centeredness to be bad, selflessness the ideal good. And so, when we seek a positive good for ourself that does nothing for anyone else, we feel selfish and bad. The divide is embedded in our culture.

Here is an insight I had the other day about their idea: Ayn Rand’s “virtues of selfishness” philosophy does not introduce a new value system at all. It merely flips the good/evil division, insisting that selfishness is good and altruism bad. The “new” morality she offers is just as divisive as the old was, and, like Nietzsche, the “purity” her morality demands can do nothing to integrate what Kramer and Alstad identify as a divided psyche. In the obsession with purity, where someone following a traditional morality would have to twist her reasoning considerably to find altruism in a selfish choice or action, the Randian practitioner has to brand her altruism somehow as selfishness to feel good about herself. 

Kramer and Alstad write (and they are always very clear when stating their opinions that they are doing just that), 

In our framework[,] being self-centered is simply an aspect of being human, as is the capacity to truly care for others. Not only does each have its value and function, they are intertwined rather than totally separate or even separable. Any morality that separates the two, giving much more value to one (the selfless), cannot but deeply divide the psyche of those who accept this frame.

        - Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 

While they do not address Ayn Rand’s philosophy, I find a general parallel in what they say about American society’s double message--the fascination with rule-breaking individuals, the romance of the “lawless” frontier, the American love affair with criminals and with fictional bad boys. 

“Rebellion is bad and dangerous,” on one side; and “Rebellion is not only exciting and exhilarating, it is freedom,” on the other. Double messages from parents have been shown to cause schizophrenia in children. The double messages a society puts out likewise must fragment its members, but here the resulting pathology is disguised by being the social norm.

A fascinating book! I was able to find The Guru Papers still available from my distributor so put two copies on my last order. One sold almost immediately. The other is still available. My own copy was already marked up by a previous reader, and I have marked it up even more. 

I finished reading The Meadow, by James Galvin, and still re-reading Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T.H. White, though I haven’t gotten through many pages of either book the past few mornings or evenings.

Coming bookstore author event

Trying to keep up with myself as summer races by, I managed (just barely) to get a press release to our county newspaper for the bookstore event next Thursday, a reading by and audience conversation with Jennifer Sager, whose book Steph’s Story won my heart. Jenny is a delightful person--read more about her here--and I hope many of my local bookstore friends and summer visitors will find time to come learn about her book and her sister. 

The date is August 13, the time 4 p.m., so you’ll have plenty of time to hear and speak with Jenny and not miss your cocktail hour, let alone dinner. 

Oh, and this very Saturday, August 8, is Northport's annual dog parade! Theme this year is “Pawty Like a Rockstar,” so we anticipate a lot of creative and colorful costumes. Wow! It's summer, and the hits just keep on comin'!