Another August Winding Down

I have had a new idea (which in itself is refreshing, so many old ones emerging for another go at me most of the time): instead of a traditional book review format, I will try addressing the author of a book directly. My first trial balloon will begin today's post.

Dear Author #1: Jack Myette

 

Dear Mr. Myette,

 

Let me begin by thanking you for your 25 years of service in the Michigan prison system and for holding onto your values during that quarter of a century. There are easier ways to have a regular paycheck, but you did it the hard way.

 

For a while I found the going rough in your book, Prison: The Inside Story. The stories were so bleak! You don’t sugarcoat your experiences or those of the prison inmates, that’s for sure. I was eager to get to the Transforming Lives [as an Officer and Educator] part but didn’t want to skip ahead, so I set the book aside for a few days and then returned to finish it.

 

What I have been thinking about most since reading your book—the question that plague many of us—is why there isn’t more education in prisons, given the clear results shown in lowered rates of recidivism. Let me put the question another way: Why don’t statistics on education and recividism persuade more people that changing lives in prison is a good thing?

 

(Here are some overall statistics on prisons for my other readers, numbers that should give all Americans pause. The graphs are easy to read. Take a look, friends.)

 

Jack, you gave one part of the answer to my question in your book: “the old ‘They ain’t got nothin comin’” attitude that you found among some (many?) prison employees, but I know it is widespread among the general nonincarcerated population, as well. I had community college students who thought that whatever horrible thing happened to prisoners behind bars was in some way “deserved” and part of their punishment; that prisoners should have no rights; that they certainly should have no “privileges,” including education. Of the three aims of incarceration—deterrence, reformation, and retribution—far too many Americans focus solely on retribution. (Not as in a simple “eye for an eye” fashion, either. Is the idea of proportion too subtle to be grasped?)

 

So retribution (however disproportional) is one part of the answer, and saving taxpayer dollars seems a minor concern, as the people intent on causing maximum suffering to criminals don’t care if retribution costs more than reform. They probably don’t care about recidivism, either, since the former inmate who returns to a life of crime only proves to these folks that he was worthless all along. Those who change prisoners’ lives, on the other hand, are a challenge to stubbornly closed minds.

 

But I think there is another, less obvious reason for not addressing recividism in any meaningful way, and that has to do with money. It has to do with capitalism. 

 

I grew up in a town that boasted a maximum security prison. Back in the postwar 1950s, that prison had its own farm and raised its own food. You note that the Traverse City State Hospital also had its own farm, and your solution to overcrowded prisons and also homelessness and mental illness is to “turn back the hands of time,” to make prisons and mental hospitals once again “self-sufficient,” with “strong educational and vocational programs….”

 

The problem I see with the solution you propose is that prisons are a huge market just begging to be captured—a  captive market audience, if you will, that business loves tapping. It’s a little like your prison school principal who didn’t want student inmates graduating, because he “received kudos for the number of students in school,” and every student who graduated was one fewer student in school, so a successful student prisoner took away from his numbers! 

 

How, how sad that music was taken away from your students! Not only did your graduation rate subsequently fall, but the whole calming and basically human aspect of music was lost to the classroom and the students. 

 

Back to my point about numbers, however—. As more and more prison services are privatized, as whole prisons are privatized, why would the businesses making money from incarceration want to see fewer people in the system? A successful prison, a prison that was not a revolving door but that returned reformed criminals to society—that prison, while certainly cutting costs, would also be cutting away its own future profits. 

 

As long as prison populations are seen by for-profit business as fertile ground for investment, and as long as government is willing to relinquish responsibility for those it imprisons and to pay private business to take on the job, I see limited motivation for prisons to reduce recidivism. So step #1 has to be reversing and eliminating privatization of prisons and prison services. 

 

Step #2, then, would be tackling that extremely knotty problem of retribution-only points of view, both among prison employees and among the American public at large. 

 

When my Contemporary Ethical Dilemmas class discussed capital punishment, a number of students voiced the opinion that they would want death for anyone who murdered someone they loved. They imagined themselves as parents of a murder victim. None of them, until prompted by a written assignment, ever imagined themselves as the parent of a murderer. And yet, every murdered had parents and was once a child.

 

There are a lot of shoes we are reluctant to walk a mile in, but you have come closer to doing that than most of us, so thank you for sharing your memories and insights.

 

 

News From the Near Neighborhood

Tiny asters are left of cattail.

 

On Sunday I noticed the season’s first blooming asters (keystone pollinator flowers), tiny pale lavender flowers upstaged by yellow goldenrod (also a keystone pollinator flower), pink Joe Pye-weed, and the startling blue of chicory flowers in the morning sun. Clouds have been spectacular in recent mornings, too.

It's fresh corn and tomato season, back-to-school time, dark coming earlier and daylight coming later. Still, I am not eager to “fall back.” Too much remains to do, indoors and outdoors—more jam to make and get into jars, hummingbirds and bees and goldfinches to watch as they buzz and weave and swoop among the thistles, still grass to mow, dinners with friends on the porch to arrange, always books to read, fun to have with dogs, and on and on and on. 

 

Looking Across the Miles

 

Retributive and preemptive punitive actions continue to be taken by the current administration in Washington, D.C., against Americans who have dared to voice disagreement with the president. Friday it was an FBI raid on John Bolton’s home that the Wall Street Journal (hardly a “pinko” news source) called part of a “vendetta campaign” and “revenge” on the part of the president. It is completely mystifying and outright heartbreaking to see the people who worried so vocally for years and years about “creeping socialism” seemingly unconcerned about galloping fascism, a term I do not throw around lightly. Are these complacent folks just looking the other way? Will they claim later that they were in Iceland and didn’t see it happening?

 

The latest executive order from the White House (as I type these lines on Monday), going against the Supreme Court majority that included conservative Anthony Scalia, calls for a one-year jail sentence for anyone burning an American flag. The president holds the flag sacred as a symbol at the same time that he desecrates and denies American history and values. What, one wonders, does the flag symbolize to him, if not our history and values, freedom and the rule of law? Poor flag! Poor stars and stripes, to be so used! But it is hardly the first time and will not be the last that a scoundrel has wrapped himself in his country's flag.

 

No, I cannot imagine burning the flag myself. I don’t even like to see those little ones on sticks in rows in the ground, because all too frequently they fall over or the wind blows them down, and the flag is never supposed to touch the ground. (If you’re going to display it, do it right.) Do not mistake me! I am not in favor of flag-burning! But I am even less in favor of a lawless executive persecuting those whose views differ from his own. ¿Claro?

 

 

Perspective 

 

Early in the morning, before what can be called “first light” but when dark isn’t quite as deep as it was 30 minutes earlier, I think about the long sweep of history, about nights and days hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and how the coming morning, now almost here, is not so much as the blink of an eye in that vast time canvas. There have been upheavals—movements of land and sea, advancing and retreating glaciers, extinctions and evolutions—that have left their mark in the rocky bones of the earth, but my life will not be such, and neither will the lives of any single person alive today. 

 

At this point, Pompeii comes to mind, and that feels like a lit candle, because it wasn’t the views of those doomed people on law or religion or ethics that survived them but only random mundane moments of their lives, frozen by a tsunami of ash. And so, here I am, in a moment of my life: coffee mug on a table surface next to me, dog in her typical resting croissant shape on my other side, book in my hands. We see the Pompeiians caught in one frozen moment but not in their preceding moments. We don’t hear their conversations or see the daylight or darkening sky they may have seen. Their thoughts, whatever they were thinking before time came to an end for them, were completely erased. 

 

We don’t feel like Pompeiians, though, do we? We write our journals, publish our books, make our movies and podcasts, and hope we can somehow, in some small way, influence the direction of the future, though the unintentional and unthinking ways we daily contribute to that future are much more likely to be effective. But whatever course the future takes, we will all one day be gone.

 

Do you find that long view depressing? Does it seem to illustrate meaninglessness? 

I don’t see it that way. I find the long perspective calming. For me, it makes the present brighter and clearer and more precious—lamplight a pool of miraculous presence against the dark masses of trees outside the window, my dog’s warm, aromatic presence the gift of now, this moment in which we are both alive. The memory of another moment, from only the evening before, comes to mind: a viceroy butterfly motionless on a blackberry vine. And for that moment and this, for the miracle of life, my heart swells in gratitude.

What are you missing? What do you love?

Taking a break from the hurdles--with her beloved tennis ball!

“You haven’t been posting as much about Sunny on your blog lately,” one bookstore browser observed recently.  In the old days of Dog Ears Books and Books in Northport, the Artist and our dog Sarah were the stars. 

Sarah in the bookstore

Now (though not in the bookstore) it’s Sunny who is my blog star, so here she is opening the show today before I go on to my usual bookish meanderings. Sunny Juliet is still a Naughty Barker, nowhere near the almost-perfect bookstore dog that her predecessor, Sarah, was for 13 years, but she and I are pretty bonded, her recall improves steadily, and she is the stronger member of our one-person, one-dog agility team, no question about it.

Gli Etruschi e io

La campagna

“The Etruscans and me”? Not really. Not me, personally. It’s D.H. Lawrence and the Etruscans I encountered in the author’s posthumously published book, Etruscan Places. But the title captured my attention, because whether a book is fiction or nonfiction, place-based literature, stories and experiences anchored in a village or a region, is what I find most compelling. 

Il lago

Etruscan Places, in addition to being very much anchored in place, is also very personal to the author. Unlike his fiction, this book’s style is more like letters written to a friend, with emotional responses accompanying Lawrence’s observations. He doesn’t only write about the Etruscan tombs, either, but includes by name all the wildflowers along the way, which (naturally!) I found charming. Judgments on history and the present day also begin on the very first page:

 

The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

 

Lawrence was not a fan of the Romans. He saw the Etruscans as a people living attuned to Nature (and was instantly drawn to them when he first saw some of their artifacts in a museum),  the Romans as a foe of that sweet life, wanting only to crush and dominate it. Whether he is comparing paintings or architecture, he sees everywhere the same contrast. The “impious pagan duality,” a phrase he uses only in order to reject it, “did not,” he claims, “contain the later pious duality of good and evil.” He sees the Etruscans as a more natural people, more accepting of death—which they saw as a continuation of life on earth, rather than existence in an entirely different kind of realm—and at the same time much more playful than the Romans who came later. 

 

Besides his observations on the tombs and the art in the tombs and his personal judgments on the art and how it compares to Greek and Roman and modern art, Lawrence notes wildflowers he sees along the way, what he and his companion saw in the villages and the countryside, and the different mood called forth by each place.

 

It is very pleasant to go down from the hill on which the present Tarquinia stands, down into the valley and up to the opposite hill, on which the Etruscan Tarquinii surely stood. There are many flowers, the blue grape-hyacinth and the white, the mauve tassel anemone with the red, sore centre—the big-petalled sort. It is curious how the anemone varies. Only in this one place in Tarquinia have I found the whity-pink kind, with the dark, sore-red center. But probably that is just chance. 

 

The town ends really with the wall. At the foot of the wall is wild hillside, and down the slope is only one little farm, with another little house made of straw. The country is clear of houses. The peasants live in the city.

 

Probably in Etruscan days it was much the same….

 

Bellissimi fiori

What Lawrence never states explicitly but what readers in 1932 understood is that the Italy of Lawrence’s investigative travels into history was also the Italy of Benito Mussolini, who had transformed the country into a one-party dictatorship, first by outlawing labor strikes and soon with the use of secret police, eventually allying his Fascist authoritarian state with Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. So when he writes about the “all-conquering Romans,” he is also heaping scorn on the Fascists, for the latter “consider themselves in all things Roman,” and he despises Romans and Fascists alike. 

 

Myself, I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage when we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realize that it is better to keep life fluid and changing than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments.

 

Only a little while later he asks,

 

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buidings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

 

We may well object here. How can anyone reject Michelangelo? But life in the shade of Fascism, along with the tuberculosis that was soon to bring about the author’s death, may have made him impatient. He did love the Italian countryside:

 

Such a pure, uprising, unsullied country, in the greenness of wheat on an April morning!—and the queer complication of hills! There seems nothing of the modern world here—no houses, no contrivances, only a sort of fair wonder and stillness, an openness which has not been violated. 

 

One morning I gave myself a complete vacation from news headlines and enjoyed, before my bookish day, immersion in my own “pure, uprising, unsullied” countryside. Deer in the orchard, ducks and loons on Lake Leelanau, Canada geese overhead, and everywhere the deep, rich, varied greens of summer! 

 

Una bella mattina! E vivo in campagna! Che fortuna!

 

But how long are we going to let ourselves be imposed upon, and how far will we let the impostors impose on us? Where and when is it going to stop?

 

Why we (I and others of my ilk) keep harping on current events

 

The question was asked, Why do Democrats care so much about ICE raids and deportation of immigrants? Why don’t they worry and demonstrate instead about other unsolved problems in our country, such as the plight of the mentally ill or the homeless or people suffering from natural disasters? Years ago, one of my uncles took me to task for donating to the ACLU, arguing that they had done nothing for disaster relief that week. I forget what the specific disaster was, but I explained to my uncle that the mission of the ACLU was not disaster relief and that I had donated to Lutheran World Relief and indicated that my donation was to go to that week’s specific disaster, for which LWR had promised to provide 100% of donations so targeted. 

 

Supporting one cause does not mean ignoring others.

 

There are always ongoing issues we care about and contribute to and work for year after year. Most of us contribute regularly to various nonprofit organizations, each one with a different and important goal. I have a sponsored child through “Save the Children,” donate annually to the Michael J. Fox Foundation (for Parkinson’s Disease), and generally give to disaster relief funds through Save the Children or Lutheran World Relief, besides making annual donations to the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center. Memorial donations are an opportunity to give to specific hospitals or churches or libraries (wherever they may be) or local organizations.

 

The reason to pay so much attention to "this stuff” right now—to pardons for insurrectionists; firings of judges for being impartial rather than partisan; arrests, detainments, and deportations without due process—and to demonstrate and to continue to spread the word about what’s happening is that our country, the country we love, is at a critical crossroads. Democracy is in crisis. Understandably but tragically, many Americans, including the young, have stopped following the news, and this is how authoritarianism takes hold. 

As Eric Holder, the 82nd U.S. Attorney General , wrote recently: 

Right now, core pillars of our democracy are under attack – including a free press and educational institutions that teach independent and critical thinking. This isn’t isolated or random — this is an intentional effort by the far right to weaken the very systems we have in place to ensure the health of our democracy. They are dragging us toward authoritarianism. What’s happening now is NOT normal. 

 

If law enforcement and the judicial system are replaced by authoritarian goon squads of revenge, no one will be safe, and all those people Democrats are accused of ignoring will be among the victims, simply because they are so vulnerable. The fight for American ideals is not choosing to care only about, for instance, immigrants. It is about assuring a future in which everyone in this country is accorded dignity, in which everyone’s humanity is recognized and respected.

 

 

Back to the Books

 

On Wednesday evening, August 13, Dog Ears Books will host Timothy Mulherin, author of This Magnetic North: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan. These conversations with northern Michigan residents from all walks of life (he interviewed over 75 people for the book), explore the topic of “relocation,” how it may be (some think yes, some think no) changing the face and character of northern Michigan, and what different people think of the changes and hope to see in the future. 

 

Do you see our area changing? If so, how do you feel about it? What do you want us to hold onto, and what could be improved upon? Are there things you miss about the Old Days?

Kinda "old days" in Northport

Older days in Leland

We were all young once.

August 13 promises a lively discussion with this author, who splits his life between Indiana and Leelanau County, so mark your calendar and don’t forget! I’ll issue reminders, never fear.

George Orwell Warned Us

In most places and most of the time, liberty is not a product of military action. Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that. 

 - Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Coming to this book on Churchill and Orwell, it didn’t hurt that I had read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia not long ago and still had that story pretty fresh in my mind. Orwell identified as a Leftist all his life, but Catalonia opened his eyes to the true nature of the Communist Party. He quickly realized that the Communists were every bit as totalitarian in their approaches and their aims as were the Fascists and that his real enemy, therefore, wherever it reared its ugly head, was totalitarianism.

He would leave Spain resolved to oppose the abuse of power at both ends of the political spectrum. After Spain, observed the literary critic Hugh Kenner, he would be “a leftist at odds with the official left.” “It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force,” Orwell wrote in 1937.

Churchill, in a strange way, was more a presence in my life as far back as I can remember. “Winston Churchill without the cigar” is how my parents described their first baby (me). But I had never studied his life, so Churchill’s many political setbacks and disappointments (both before and after WWII), as recounted by author Ricks, gave me a new perspective on the British leader’s startling tenacity. Before England’s declaration of war against Germany, Churchill had been unpopular both personally and for his belligerent views.

The leaders of the Tory Party felt [in the 1930s] that as part of keeping Hitler mollified, Churchill must be excluded from a position of leadership.

But in 1940 Hitler began his invasion of Holland and Belgium, bringing Parliament at last to a realization that Chamberlain must go. So Chamberlain would resign, but who would replace him? Lord Halifax, the king’s first choice? Lord Halifax who had requested that the British soccer team give the Nazi salute when playing against the German team in Berlin? No, said Chamberlain, Churchill is the man you want. And so Churchill was appointed rather than elected to serve as Prime Minister.

“I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.”

Churchill never sugar-coated the truth when he spoke to the English people, and they trusted him for that, almost instinctively it would seem. Neither Churchill nor Orwell was willing to forsake truth for a party line, and both at times suffered for their inflexibility when it came to truth-telling. For instance, largely because the U.S.S.R. had been an important wartime ally of Britain and the United States, Orwell had a hard time finding a publisher for Animal Farm -- surprising difficulty considering publishing track record up to that time.

Both men also had strong opinions and made sure they had facts to back up their viewpoints. Orwell especially proved a ready willingness to change his mind when faced with facts repudiating his earlier position. It must be admitted, however, that either would have been a difficult life companion. 

Churchill was as relentless as a terrier in his pursuit of facts but at dinner parties would launch into monologue, showing so little interest in other people’s lives and stories that he would even recite memorized poems to ensure his ability to hold the floor. He always knew more than anyone else about the topics that interested him, and he had no patience for any other topics. Then there was the drinking. All in all, difficult!

Orwell, unpretentious in dress and manner, comfortable with and sympathetic in general to common people, was overly sensitive to smells, but worse – the real deal-breaker for me – was the lack of self-awareness he showed in what Ricks calls his quick and casual prejudice against the Jews.

The fact of the matter is that Orwell was always tin eared about Jews. During World War II, Orwell would write extensively against anti-Semitism, but in the course of doing so he failed to reexamine his own writings of the previous decade. After the war, he had surprisingly little to say about the Holocaust....”

It is easier to find excuses for his anti-Zionism, since he was suspicious of all nationalisms, but was this particular nationalism more distasteful to him than others? One cannot help but wonder.

Churchill’s genius lay in seeing the Nazi threat for the world danger it was; his virtue was believing in the courage and perseverance of the English people, despite the many strikes against them at the outset of the war. Heaven only knows where Western civilization – and one uses the word with some trepidation in this context – might have gone without Churchill holding out against Hitler and against all the appeasers in the British aristocracy and government.

Orwell’s intellectual gift was his ability to see through party propaganda and cant to the dangers of totalitarianism on both ends of the political spectrum, and his artistic gift, in a spare style very different from Churchill’s oratorical writing, enabled him to bring that clear-sightedness to life in dramatic popular fiction.

What would Orwell make of our world today? Ricks notes that the question is often asked. Notably, individuals living under repressive regimes the world over recognize in 1984 the way their governments twist truth and relentlessly curtail freedom. Also, ironically, apologists from both the right and left eager to claim him as their own.

In 1984, protagonist Winston Smith lives under constant state surveillance. Fear of Big Brother and Communist repression of individuals dominated political discussions in the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century, explaining why so many agreed with the slogan, “Better dead than Red.” Big government, regardless of party, was the enemy to be feared. Ricks points out that today’s surveillance in our own country is done more often by business than by government. It is not “the State” but “the Corporation” that follows Americans through every step of their day, noting what products they buy and use, which entertainments they most enjoy, and how they interact with family and friends.

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere. He would no doubt have been a powerful critic of such things.

And so, once again, two political extremes face Americans. This time the dilemma popularly posed (i.e., in misleadingly simplistic terms) is not between Fascism and Communism but between unrestrained “predatory capitalism” (the leftist view) and what has been called a “nanny state” (the rightist view). But as was the case with the twentieth-century dilemma posed between Fascism and Communism, I would argue that today’s debate too begins with a false premise. There are avenues and choices beyond simply a “nanny state” and unrestrained “predatory capitalism”), and we should, in the name of freedom, reject both extremes.

Unhappily for the present moment in our country, the State and the Corporation have joined forces, with the State holding onto its authority over citizens at the same time that it grants the Corporation, now legally recognized as a “person,” huge unfair advantage over us. Our own Congress! Over and over, they purport to be “saving” us from a "nanny state" by stripping us of legal, environmental, and other health protections rightly the role and responsibility of government. (We may be moving toward a “police state,” but at the moment we are definitely galloping away from anything that could remotely be called a “nanny state”!) At the federal level (and in many states), executive, legislative, and judicial branches appear to have agreed to sacrifice the interests of American citizen to rich and powerful corporate interests. The latest such legislative move protects financial institutions against citizens’ class-action suits. Anyone who is surprised, however, hasn't been paying attention. Farmers have had to pay attention, because their oxen are being gored, outrageously, on a regular basis. 

This is a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into! Where is an Orwell to show clearly of the dangers we face? Where is a Churchill to lead us back toward freedom?