“Locals’ Summer” Is Underway

Friends of the heart

Labor Day is past, but for locals who work all summer, it has only just arrived, and I started the season with Sunday and Monday (September 8 & 9) spent mostly outdoors, under alternate cloudy skies and sunshine, when Sunny and I hosted our hiking buddies from Arizona, who now live in southeastern Michigan. The four of us picked up right where we left off with our last visit. 

Auntie Therese is Sunny Juliet’s second mom and young husky Yogi SJ’s best friend. Wrestling in the yard, chasing tossed balls, walking on the beach, wading in Lake Michigan, or just lying down near each other, Sunny and Yogi reunited were in seventh heaven. We left them alone in the house for a couple of hours (first time ever!) and returned to find everything exactly as we’d left it. Happy dogs, happy dog moms!

Lunch without dogs, can you believe it?

Then Tuesday it was back to work for me, refreshed and relaxed, bookstore door open to balmy September air. The giant book purchase and move, all seven or so trips with car loaded down with heavy boxes, was finished before our friends’ visit, so I was able to start my slower season without the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

 

Of course, besides integrating as many as possible of the “new” additions into my preexisting collection, I squirrel away a book here and there for home reading this fall and winter, awaiting a future time when shelf space opens up on Waukazoo Street. One book I took home expecting something very different was an exciting surprise. The cover didn’t look like much, the dust jacket was missing, and the title didn’t tell me anything at all, but a little voice whispered in my ear, and home with me it went. 

Faint pine cone only clue....

How wonderful! Driftwood Valley, far from being the Western novel its title and brown cloth-covered boards seemed to indicate, turned out to be – well, a reissue of the book in 1999 by Oregon State University Press clearly informed potential readers what to expect with a subtitle: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness. 

 

The author, Theodora C. Stanwell-Fletcher, and her husband, Jack, entered the wilds of northern British Columbia in 1937 and lived for a year and a half on an otherwise uninhabited lake (after building a log cabin) hundreds of miles from towns and roads, in country noted on maps only as “unexplored” and “unsurveyed.” Their nearest neighbors were Indian trappers; their work was “collecting” (she generally wrote of “collecting” and avoided calling “killing” by that name) animals to ship skins and skulls to an American museum. They returned in 1941 for another couple of seasons before world war intervened.

 

Prior to their marriage, Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher had accompanied her naturalist father on many of his travels and earned her doctorate in animal ecology from Cornell in 1936, while her husband, John Stanwell-Fletcher, had experience in the Arctic. Their modes of travel including snowshoes, canoe, pack horses, and pack dogs, Teddy and Jack traveled and hiked by themselves at times, other times with Indian guides. They camped outdoors in temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero, when managing to make a fire meant the difference between life and death, as did succeeding in killing a few grouse – better yet, a moose -- for meat to sustain them on the trail. Following the text at the end of the book are lengthy lists of plants and animals the Stanwell-Fletchers collected in the wilds of British Columbia. The lists alone, with genus and species names, is impressive. Four varieties of horsetail alone!

Only the first page of the lists --

 

Driftwood Valley, I learn online, was Wendell Berry’s favorite book during a period of his boyhood in Kentucky, and it's no wonder. Wilderness adventure! I reached the final page on Tuesday morning before breakfast with my company and a long walk with our dogs, drinking in the beauty of Michigan at the same time as we reminisced about our hikes with these same dogs in the mountains of southeastern Arizona. My Michigan country life is tame and domestic compared to northern British Columbia in the 1930s and ’40s or even Cochise County ghost town winters, but I am happy to live where I live. It's a very good place!

Happy dogs off-leash in the yard.

Tomatoes seen behind non blooming (so far) morning glory vine

Tomatoes are ripening at last in my garden, and jalapeno peppers have formed nicely. Okra was a total bust, even though started early from seed, and my friend said hers in southeast Michigan didn’t do anything, either, though she’d had success in warmer Arizona summers, but Japanese anemones have bloomed at last (they need a tomato cage support to keep from falling over) ...

 

... and the brilliance of velvety scarlet snapdragons rewards my decision to introduce a few annuals in pots among the perennials. Only one chrysanthemum blossom so far, and that’s fine, because ’mums need to wait their turn, and it is not their turn yet. Plaintively, however, I cry out, “Where are my purple coneflowers?” Little grey-headed coneflowers in the meadow have been prolific again this year, and asters are coming along nicely, but not a sign of the purple coneflowers do I see. 

 

Wednesday:

 

I began writing this post on Tuesday before remembering the evening’s scheduled presidential debate. I had no intention of watching (no TV) or streaming (my watching would not affect the outcome), and I didn’t even want to get into the frequent Facebook checking with friends who would be watching and commenting, because Wednesday morning, I assured myself, would be soon enough to hear what happened. Meanwhile, having wrapped up the story of the Stanwell-Fletchers in British Columbia, I chose for Tuesday evening’s bedtime escape reading a John Dunning murder mystery, Booked to Die, something I read long enough ago that I didn’t remember anything about the plot, only that the used and rare book business played a prominent part in the story.  

 

Denver homicide detective Cliff Janeway, a compulsive book collector outside of work hours, finds in the murder of a book scout all the earmarks of the same murderer who has eluded him multiple times. By the middle of the book, Janeway has gone beyond the law to punish the murderer, turned in his badge, and is preparing to open his own shop on Denver’s Book Row.

 

…Bobby [the book scout] had come to Madison Street alone. … He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping, anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. … [He] loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.

        - John Dunning, Booked to Die 

 

The paragraph quoted speaks not of the romance of rare books but of the physical reality of a big book “deal,” the one where you get a good price because, rather than being able to cherry-pick a collection, you agree to take everything. This is the part of a bookseller’s life that does not involve “thinking outside the box” but thinking constantly, obsessively, about boxes: Too small, and they won’t hold enough books; too large, and they’re too heavy to lift. They need to be sturdy. Cartons from the grocery store that held jugs of water or bottles of wine are a good size and appropriately sturdy, but storage boxes for legal files have handholds and lids so are more readily stackable. 

Object of bookseller obsession

.

Too many when you don't need them, too few when you do.

Yes, it’s mundane, but the mundane is often a crucial consideration in any endeavor, and it cuts a lot of ice in bookselling. As a colleague likes to say, “You only get one back.” A good sturdy handcart with tires that won’t go flat is also worth its weight in gold. So it is that the concerns of Janeway’s murdered book scout resonate with my experience, as does advice Janeway’s new colleagues give him. 

 

People often say, “advice is cheap,” because people give it for free usually when you don’t ask for it. Over the years, I’ve learned to smile when people who have never owned or managed a bookstore or any other kind of business tell me what I “should” be doing. Once, though – and I’ve never forgotten it – a seasoned bookseller turned around in my doorway as he was leaving and said, “A word of advice --.” I smiled, and he said, “Good shoes.” That’s all he said. Years later he reappeared in Northport and said, “You probably don’t remember me.” I said, “Yes, I do. ‘Good shoes’! It was the best advice anyone’s ever given me!” Good shoes and a well-cushioned mat behind my desk are my recipe for extending the health of my feet and back, and the shoes also go well with dog walks and agility practice. 

 

Back to Tuesday --. As I say, I figured my watching or not watching the debate wouldn’t change the outcome and that I’d hear all about it the next day. Then Wednesday morning I woke to realize that it was once again 9/11, that infamous date on which our country was attacked. No rush, then, I thought, to post to my blog. What with the debate the night before and the sad anniversary come around again, who could possibly care about the life of one little small-town bookseller, even if she also has a dog whose online face makes strangers smile?

Sunny says, "I'm the cute one."

So now it’s Thursday, and here’s my post for the week, with bits from my reading, my business, and my life with friends and dog, here on a little northern Michigan peninsula, now all-too-thoroughly discovered but still quite beautiful and with protected public shoreline for us all to share. We are so lucky!

 

Read What You Need

Note: I wrote this post over the course of a few days, so as to give mini-reports along the way to make my book-hopping lack of pattern more obvious. And then this morning I took long, leisurely outdoor time to walk with Sarah and photograph today’s beautiful Thursday world around me.

 

Tuesday afternoon

 

Already I have to resort to paraphrase, because I don’t know what I did with the original quote, but it came from another bookseller in another state, who said, as far as recommending or advising people on what books to read these days, that the thing to do right now is to read whatever it is you need. If you need information, read books of information. If it’s escape you need, read escape. I’d amplify that to say specifically that whether you need poetry or history or religious meditations or humorous essays, science fiction or Victorian gardening texts, whatever books you need are the ones you should be reaching for right now.

 

For me, once again, it’s sometimes one and sometimes another, and I go from one kind of reading to another, skipping between often totally unrelated books with no apology whatsoever. Crazy Horse, by Mari Sandoz, is both informative and beautifully written, as was Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s migrants did not find a perfect society in the North, but for the most part they were glad they had made the move, and I devoured that book to the last page quickly, eager to see how their lives turned out. It’s different with Crazy Horse. Since I know there will be no “happy ending” – and there are plenty of tragedies before the end, also – I keep setting that painful saga aside, taking breaks with something easier on the spirit.

Steve Hamilton’s A Cold Day in Paradise, the first of his Alex McKnight mysteries, was a re-reading experience, a little self-indulgence I frequently give myself in the best of times (which these are not). Even when I remember more of a story than I recalled from my first, long-ago reading of A Cold Day in Paradise (first memorably read in a motel in St. Ignace, cover to cover in one night), there is always a lot that I’ve forgotten and that seems fresh and new, whatever the book. 

 

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a children’s book and generously (and beautifully) illustrated, so reading that story took me only very briefly away from the world of challenging reality and challenging reading. Native Tongue, the first volume of Susanne Haden Elgin’s feminist speculative fiction trilogy, interested me without completely fully absorbing my attention. I would call it a novel of ideas rather than a character- or plot-driven work. But it did offer escape from political campaigns and COVID-19 concerns.

Sometimes the way a book falls into my hands is complete serendipity. Such was the case with Jimmy Carter’s Why Not the Best? But I wrote about Why Not the Best? in my last post and won’t repeat myself here.

 

The Uncalled, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, published over a century ago, was something chosen more deliberately. Familiar with Dunbar’s name because of his poetry (Maya Angelou took her title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from a Dunbar poems), I hadn’t realized he also wrote novels. Interestingly, though Dunbar was perhaps the first well-known black American poet, there is nothing of race in the story of The Uncalled – at least, so far. I’m only halfway through this little book.

 

 

And now already I’ve found something else that seems worth reading. My Brilliant Career, by Miles Franklin, made a big splash when its teen-aged author published her novel in Australia in 1901, but then it was out of print until 1966. Despite the book’s initial success, Franklin felt there was no place for her in the new, very male, nationalistic Australian literary world; she was also unhappy with some of the interpretations laid upon her work.

 

Australia – now that’s an escape from my everyday world!

Our brave little reading circle, the one that convened years ago to study James Joyce’s Ulysses together, is now committed to reading and discussing for November William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner will be a stretch for me, as I am in general not a fan, but the book covers the same period as Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, so it will be interesting from that standpoint, and I need to challenge myself, anyway, which was this group’s original mission – to read together books we might not have read on our own. 

 

Some (but not all) of us took on Proust one fall, and I’ve been reading him again recently, in French, a few pages at a time. I’m not sure whether to classify Proust “difficult” or a familiar and comforting refuge. He is probably the latter for me. Not an “easy” read, but his writing is luxurious – especially the opening scenes of childhood, both at the grandparents’ house in Combray and in the parks and streets of Paris. These long-ago, faraway scenes carry me away from the present, away from worry and strife -- and isn’t that how we define escape reading?

 

Wednesday morning

 

I finished The Uncalled last night and fell asleep over early pages of My Brilliant Career. Of the former, I can say it is very much a Victorian novel, with only a couple of places that one might, if informed of the author’s life, see something of his own experience as a black man in [that long-ago] turn-of-the-century America. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s parents, I read, were born in slavery, so he and his siblings were the first generation of the family born free, but as the orphan protagonist of The Uncalled, however, realizes so strongly, there is more to freedom than not being held in bondage. The fictional character longs to break away from his guardian’s very strict religious household (where baseball is considered as great a sin as dancing) and her plans to make him a preacher. Like Dunbar himself, young Brent longs for the freedom of the writing life. When a friend in the seminary warns him of that life’s agonies, Frederick Brent listens with no change of heart.

 

“This is your story,” said Brent; “but men differ and conditions differ. I will accept all the misery, all the pain and defeat you have suffered, to be free to choose my own course.”

 

Besides several volumes of poetry, for which he is chiefly known, Dunbar’s only other published book was Tales from Dixie, a collection of short stories featuring African-Americans before and after emancipation. This may be his least sentimental, most realistic work, and I would like to read it sometime. Sadly, the writer died young, only 33 years old, but he earned success while he lived, which is more than many poets, black or white, can say.

 

Not having more Dunbar on hand last night, I curled up in bed with My Brilliant Career but laid it aside to watch “Dark Waters” with the Artist, taking it up again after the movie and falling asleep before getting very far into the story. And earlier this morning, over the first cup of coffee, somehow I became embroiled in old e-mails, clearing out as many as could be deleted, filing others, re-reading and re-living days COVID and pre-COVID.

 

Here at the bookstore now, I’m pleased to have restocked many of Jim Harrison’s fiction titles; Katey Schultz’s brilliant Still Come Home (which every American should read); and to have some charming new children’s books now in stock. October will be the last full month of the 2020 year for Dog Ears Books (let’s be clear: we do plan to be back in the spring!), but it isn’t too early to get some of that holiday shopping out of the way, and I’ll be glad to help with that. 

 

 

Wednesday afternoon

 

Continuing with My Brilliant Career, I am intrigued by the fact that the adolescent author, while complaining of her own fate when times grew hard for the family, managed to recognize her parents’ difficulties, as well, and even to see their life in the greater national context.

 

…Household drudgery, woodcutting, milking, and gardening soon roughen the hands and dim the outside polish. When the body is wearied with much toil the desire to cultivate the mind, or the cultivation it has already received, is gradually wiped out. Thus it was with my parents. They had dropped from swelldom to peasantism. They were among and of the peasantry. None of their former acquaintances came within their circle now, for the iron ungodly hand of class distinction has settled surely down upon Australian society – Australia’s democracy is only a tradition of the past. 

 

I wonder, is My Brilliant Career considered an Australian classic by now – does it still fall short of the Australian male nationalist literary tradition?

 

Thursday morning

The world forced itself upon me last night. The event was the vice-presidential “debate,” and I steeled myself to listen, confident that it could not sink to the level of the presidential candidates’ horror show circus. Fortunately, I am blessed with generally low blood pressure.

 

Everyone listening (or watching, as more probably did) will have a different impression of the performances. My impression of Pence – a cipher in my mind beforehand – was that he is a very slippery, sneaky little man. He pretended great politeness and respect at the beginning of each two minutes allotted him (“Thank you, Susan”) but then talked on past his limit again and again, while the moderator tried to stop him with “Thank you, Mr. Vice-President” over and over. He also interrupted Senator Harris more than once. In short, he was as determined as the president not to be hemmed in by the rules but maintained a surface demeanor of civility and normality.

 

How many questions asked by the moderator were actually answered by either candidate? Once Pence asked that the record show that Harris had not answered a question – this after he, Pence, had evaded countless previous questions! I wish Harris had challenged him on that hypocritical remark, as well as on his repeated admonition to her, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” This was a fiendish ploy, as the very phrase “alternative facts” was invented in the White House to excuse lies told by the president! The vice-president took the administration’s own guilt and painted the senator with it, and Harris let him get away with it!

 

I still have no clear answer on the Democratic position on fracking. I believe fracking should be banned, for strong scientific reasons, but now it seems both parties have decided that fracking is something holy -- if anything, more sacred than a fertilized human egg. Will people be talking about fracking today? Will that issue get any attention at all? For me, it was the most worrisome take-away, other than the revelation of the vice-president’s character.

And so this morning, waking once again to the political take-over of my brain, I fled to Australia with Miles Franklin, and during the day I will no doubt read a few more poems by Jane Kenyon (because Lord knows I need poetry right now and will probably need it more and more in the less than four weeks ahead!), but before the bookstore I spent time in the beautiful outdoors with my dear old dog.

 

I am not, you see, doing a complete ostrich act and avoiding reality or succumbing to an escape addiction, but neither am I willing to let every waking moment be taken over by those aspects of reality that do nothing but heighten anxiety and/or plunge me into depression. I'm no good to anyone like that. Regular reading of other times and places is part of my life, anyway. The difference now is that I do it for sanity’s sake. 

Measured doses – reality, escape – I seek some kind of mental balance. A beautiful, sunny fall morning doesn’t hurt, either.

 

You Probably Think He Was On YOUR Side, Don't You?

It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable . . .  

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. 

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, quoted in Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens says of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that it remained “an obscure collector’s item of a book throughout Orwell’s lifetime.” Not, in other words, a bestseller or anywhere close. Why would this be so? The answer given by Hitchens, one that makes complete sense to me, is that both the official and the popular views of the war in Spain relied on what I call a “two sides” formula. You know, the way we are told and so often tell each other that it’s so important to hear both sides of any issue or story? As if there are only two versions, the two clearly distinct from each other? That’s certainly the way the war in Spain was framed — as a conflict between conservatives (Catholic Nationalists, they called themselves; others called them Fascists) and communists (although some were grassroots socialists and others Stalin’s forces). Given the frame, which side any particular person saw as good and which as bad depended on that person’s ideological commitments rather than on more complicated facts, let alone whole truth. 

One must close one’s eyes to the virtues of one’s opposition in order to construct an inhuman enemy. 

Orwell was on the ground in Spain, an active fighter on the Left but also a man who saw clearly, first-hand, the way the anti-fascist revolution was betrayed by Stalin’s ruthless subversion of forces fighting for Catalonian independence. What were his options when he realized what was really going on? Stay with a local, independent Left and be tortured, even murdered by Stalinists for not being a loyal Communist? That happened to others he knew. Go with the Stalinists, the internationally recognized Communists, and betray the revolution or switch sides and become a Fascist? Neither of those would have been Eric Arthur Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell.

He chose to escape and tell the story, but it fell on deaf ears. The world had chosen sides, each one saying, “With us or against us!” Thus, one could only be seen — by the “other side” — as Fascist or Communist.

Sound familiar? 

Here’s an irony for you: not only did Orwell back then have those on both the Left and Right who hated him — he also has admirers on both sides today. Today’s liberals are sure he was warning against the dangers of fascism, now imminent, while today’s conservatives say he warned against socialism, their especial bugaboo. Everyone wants to think Orwell was singing their song. Hitchens takes a chapter each show that both groups are wrong and can only turn Orwell into their saint by cherry-picking their quotes, but that’s all more than I am going to try to summarize here. You’ll have to read Why Orwell Matters for yourself— and then go back and read Animal Farm and 1984 again. One thing is certain: Orwell was warning the world about future dystopian possibilities.

One of several things that frustrates me about debate, in general (consequently, also about the adversarial American justice system), is the usually unquestioned assumption that there are always and only two sides to a question and that one one of them — and only one — is true, thus the other false. From the assumption, it follows that positions taken must possess the form of affirmation/negation: I’m right, you’re wrong. To acknowledge that there is anything to be said for one’s opposition is seen as weakening one’s own case, giving “comfort to the enemy. 

Recognizing a much more complicated truth, Orwell in his day was caught in the crossfire. The same thing happens today in our country to many politicians who don’t adhere to a strict party line. Determined to vilify those with whom they disagree, Americans seem willing to give up truth. Why?

"Power is not a means; it is an end. 

"… The object of power is power." 

- George Orwell, 1984

I once had lively discussions on ethics and politics with a graduate school friend who had been the first woman in Ethiopia to graduate from university with a B.A. in philosophy. Our very different undergraduate educations, as well as wildly divergent life experiences, inevitably resulted in very different views at the opening of each discussion. But it was, each time I looked back afterward on the course of our conversation, energizing and delightful to realize what had taken place as we argued. I cannot remember a single time when one of us claimed victory and the other admitted defeat. Instead, by the time we had hashed through our subject for several hours, we always came to a more nuanced understanding of the issue at hand, an acknowledgement that black-and-white could not contain it at all, with the result that the two of us, together, now agreed on and occupied a new, third position not envisioned in our initial disagreement. Such a result would fall far outside the parameters of the rules of debate. It would not have made, for either of us, a big splash in professional academic philosophy circles, either. But we felt satisfied that we had both advanced toward truth in those discussions, as well as finding common ground. While it should not be impossible, in principle, to achieve similar results in the halls of Congress — if Congress were actually functional and all members focused on getting work done — it seems to have become nearly so in recent years. 

Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda.  

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

As far as I’m concerned, that single sentence from the passage that Hitchens quotes is sufficient to establish that Orwell still matters today. His is a warning we would do well to understand and heed.

Let’s Think Carefully, Then Talk to Each Other

Out in the countryside

Friends and strangers stopping in the bookstore the last couple of days have been shocked to see me underlining phrases in a book. With a pen, no less! I explain that it’s an old paperback, spine cracked and pages ready to start falling out, and that some previous studious reader already went through the whole thing with yellow highlighter. One young man asked, “Are you doing a word search? My mother does that.” Seems the whole concept of underlining key ideas in a text had passed him by. But I am of another generation, of course....

The book I’ve been reading is a little anthology of historical writings on the American Revolution with an arresting title: The Ambiguity of the American Revolution. The book’s editor, Jack P. Greene, in his excellent introduction, traces the history of our history, as it were – the different interpretations given over time to the Revolution, starting with contemporary accounts -- because even in the 1770s, there was no unanimity of view. Loyalists saw the conflict one way, patriots another, and their perspectives colored the way they wrote their accounts. John Adams himself said there were as many American Revolutions as there were colonies and perhaps as many as individuals in those colonies. Everyone had a slightly different take on it at the time, and through successive periods of our country’s life new interpretations have emerged in waves, to be supplanted in their turn by others. This diversity of perspective is something we often lose sight of, now that we’ve had two hundred and forty-one years to come -- more or less, in textbooks if nowhere else -- to agreement on a national narrative.

[See continuation of discussion of this book here.]

David Ramsay, a Maryland physician who graduated from the College of New Jersey in the year of the Stamp Act crisis (1765), eventually wrote of the Patriot cause and the newly formed United States of America:

The world has not hitherto exhibited so fair an opportunity for promoting social happiness. It is hoped for the honour of human nature, that the result will prove the fallacy of those theories, which suppose that mankind are incapable of self-government. 

– from his History of the American Revolution, first published in Philadelphia in1789, an excerpt of which appears in The Ambiguity of the American Revolution

President Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, addressing the crowd at Gettysburg, noted that the crowd that day “met on a great battlefield of that war,” a war “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Far short of three hundred years old, our country remains an experiment, its success into the future far from guaranteed.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press: If the “national security” entails restricting those freedoms, what “security” do Americans have? I picked up another book at home this morning, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time, and, opening at random, fell by chance – true story – on a chapter entitled “Journalism and Democracy.” On the first page of that chapter, Bill Moyers (one of my heroes) says that after less than two years as White House press secretary,

It took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. ... 

 I also had to relearn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

The lighter side

Today is the 4^th of July, and Americans are gathering again, all over the country, in crowds large and small. We take time out from our ordinary pursuits to re-read the Declaration of Independence. (In Leelanau County, such readings usually take place in front of a village post office. See below for Northport event.) The mood of Independence Day is celebratory. There are parades and marching bands and flags waving in the breeze and displays of fireworks against the summer night sky.

Patriotic village gathering

While most of us do not see ourselves “met on a battlefield” this July 4, 2017, we are painfully aware that our country is deeply divided. We are divided not only on issues, but on our most basic core value, freedom. What does ‘freedom’ mean, and how is it best protected? Beneath all the posturing and tweets and insults, that is the crucial question.

Coming fast upon the heels of the first question, however, is another: How can the question about freedom be answered in a civilized manner?

If we cannot agree on an answer to the second question, the first becomes moot, because when civil discourse gives way to hate, attacks on freedoms proliferate, and repression ensues, and when hate gives way to violence, life and liberty both fall victim.

Can the current trend of incivility and increasing repression be reversed? Can our freedoms endure? It’s worth taking a few minutes to ponder these questions on this day of air shows and hot dogs and sparklers.

Eternal vigilance!

Did You Just Come Here to Argue, or What?

Morning sun and last ice, Lake Leelanau

When President Obama announced on March 16 his nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, he noted that the nominee, Judge Garland, is well known and widely respected for (and I’ll have to paraphrase here, not having written down the exact words) “understanding before disagreeing” and “disagreeing without being disagreeable.” If you missed what amounted to a fully prepared speech from the president on the occasion of his announcement, it’s worth taking time to catch the whole thing. 

I must admit I’ve been rationing my news listening of late. So little is “new” from one day to the next, and very little encouraging, let alone inspiring. Listening to the president on Wednesday, however, I did feel encouraged. I also felt proud to be an American and to have such a president in office, a man who has had one of the most difficult jobs in the world and has endured acrimonious hostility and partisan opposition at every turn, yet one who continues to believe, despite its shortcomings, in our country and its form of government and to be a model of civility to the nation and the world. I had been happy to read [in Rolling Stone, Oct. 2015] that he understands the “failures” of his administration are not exclusively presidential failures. He could and would have accomplished more with Congressional cooperation. The Congress wouldn’t have had to cave to his every demand, either -- just have been willing to engage constructively and compromise creatively. But “compromise” has become a dirty word to ideologues, both those in political life and all too many of those who elect them, Americans who have convinced themselves (or pretend they have) that political compromise is nothing less surrender to evil.

Really? Angels vs. Devils? Jehovah vs. Satan? Really?

In his essay on “The Future of Tragedy,” Camus wrote that tragedy differs from drama or melodrama in that, “the forces confronting each other in tragedy are equally legitimate, equally justified.” This is what makes tragedy difficult, if not impossible, to grasp in adolescence. In high school I could only see Creon as a tyrant, Antigone as a heroine. And yet, for the playwright and his Greek audience, the entire situation was ambiguous. There was reason, as well as blinding passion, on both sides. Thus,

Antigone is right, but Creon is not wrong. Similarly, Prometheus is both just and unjust, and Zeus, who pitilessly oppresses him, also has right on his side.

Camus gives the formula for tragedy as follows: “All can be justified, [but] no one is just.”

Ah, we keep our little minds so busy, we humans, justifying our lives!

And this is beside my point, too, but as Camus understands tragedy, the present American political scene may well be tragic, although Congress and the American public in general lack the basic insight of the Greek playwrights and audience. In all too many minds, we do not have tragic conflict but a morality play. If you see where I’m coming from. But that was an aside....

Slowly, in roundabout fashion, I am coming to my topic for the day, which is not tragedy but rhetoric. How the two may be related (if they are) will perhaps emerge before the end of this exploratory foray.

What is Rhetoric?

Before agreeing or disagreeing with any social practice it’s important to get clear on just what the practice is, so before I ask if rhetoric is good or bad, I need to be clear on what I take the term to mean. It helps to look at the origin of the practice. Then, does the term carry nonstandard but legitimate meanings, or are there nonstandard but legitimate ways of understanding the practice? Finally, has rhetoric changed (improved or degraded) over the course of history?

So tedious! I know! But what is the point of speaking or writing at all, if not to understand and be understood?

Well, the term is Greek, and so, like tragedy, rhetoric has Western European origins. More important in the context of present-day American politics is the fact that rhetoric grew up alongside Greek democracy. In the fifth century BCE, when ordinary citizens first had the opportunity to argue legal claims against other citizens, teachers of oratory offered their services for hire. They were not lawyers but speech coaches for citizens acting as their own lawyers. These teachers then devised theories about what made for successful speech. Finally philosophers got into the act, with concerns for truth and morality that went beyond having a winning argument. Perhaps we should note that all this was taking place in the early days of the decline of “the glory that was Greece.” 

Roman rhetoric (Romans copying everything Greek for their own purposes) broke down the process of rhetoric into five components: analysis and research (the marshalling of facts); arranging of the material; putting the argument into effective language; delivering the speech (the performance); and committing its ideas to memory (for, one presumes, future use).

Having flowered in the Greek polis and law courts, it is hardly surprising that rhetoric became nearly synonymous with debate. The idea that truth emerges from adversarial verbal combat continues in our American courts and political campaigns today.

As Americans with differing perspectives, some of us may believe strongly in justice and politics as competition while others hold a modified or even entirely different view. For now, my point is simply that rhetoric and debate, like it or not, are

1)  adversarial in nature;

2)  closely allied historically, if not almost identical; and

3)  serve a function in American society much like the function they served in ancient Greece.

One course required of all first-year undergraduates back when I was a freshman at the University of Illinois was Rhetoric. In that class we learned to take and argue for controversial positions, although, as I recall, our arguments were handed in as written papers rather than delivered to the class as speeches, so there was never an opposition ready to jump up with objections. The instructor, however, assigned positions to each of us, often not the positions we would have chosen for ourselves, and so to do the job we necessarily had not only to give support for our assigned position but also to imagine, anticipate, and respond to potential serious objections. That was rhetoric as it was taught to me – not debate, as such, but the clear statement of a position and solid supporting argument for holding the position.

This, in fact, is how I continue to understand the term “argument” -- as a reasoned exchange. Shouting, name-calling, high-horse refusals to explain with a patronizing “Trust me!” – none of that is argument, as I see it. Argument demands accepting one’s opponent as a moral equal, deserving of respect.

But is “rhetoric,” my stalking horse, something else? Is it something more – or (gulp!) less?

I can’t get the question out of my head because voices on the radio keep using the term “rhetoric” in a way to suggest that the practice is less than desirable in the political arena – ironically, the very arena that gave it birth. Rhetoric, they imply, is obfuscation at best, and inflammatory bombast at its present-day worst.

Suspicions of rhetoric are as old as rhetoric itself. John Ralston Saul, in The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, presents under his heading “Sophists” the following description (his own opinions apparent in the other bold-faced terms he defines elsewhere in his book):

SOPHISTS       The original model for the twentieth-century TECHNOCRAT; more precisely for the BUSINESS SCHOOL graduate and the ACADEMIC CONSULTANT.  

       These fifth-century BC teachers wandered around Greece selling their talents to whomever would hire them. Their primary talent was rhetoric. They were not concerned by ethics or the search for truth. Long-term consequences, indeed reality in most forms, did not interest them. What mattered was their ability to create illusions of reality which would permit people to get what they wanted.

Clearly, reservations about rhetoric today are nothing new. Back at the root of reasoning’s public practice, rhetoric was used by the Sophists for gain, their own as well as that of their clients, and victory was the sole relevant measure of rhetorical quality. Serious examples of debate today (in my opinion, American political campaign matches hardly merit the term, although they certainly employ rhetoric), e.g., the “Oxford-style” debates we hear on public radio, while neither monetary award nor political office is at stake, are still concluded with winners and losers, as decided by audience vote.

Sample question: Has religion contributed, over the course of history, more good or evil to human society? Two teams argue, each taking a side of the question. In the end, the audience votes for one team or the other. Truth decided by vote: a strange Western notion.

And there’s the sorry truth of it: outside a classroom led by a instructor with high standards of argument, rhetoric as persuasive reasoning can include just as many straw men, bandwagon appeals, camels’ noses, and other informal logical fallacies as can be put over on an audience. And that’s not all. Innuendo, empty claims, and outright falsehoods, if said with sufficient conviction and repeated often enough, can be – and here we must sigh over having to use a perfectly inoffensive word in such a ghastly context – effective.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Because argument presupposes an attempt to influence, if not an outright conflict of opinion, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether or not there’s yelling involved. But can we imagine a human society that made no attempt to influence the thinking of its members? Fear and force are one way to urge social conformity. Reason, which presupposes freedom and works through argument, is another.

But suppose you are not comfortable with conflict, perhaps also fearful of “losing” – what are your options if you decline to engage in debate?

Here’s one possibility: Refuse to listen. Walk away. Get on your high horse and take what you see as the high road. Follow the example of Senate Republicans, who say to the president, “We don’t care who you nominate for the Supreme Court. We will not meet with your nominee, and we will not hold hearings.”

Am I the only one reminded by this strategy of fifth-grade girls? “Come on, let’s walk away. We’ll just ignore her!” Did we really elect people to Congress to play this game instead of doing their job? Well, perhaps we can be thankful Senate Republicans are not acting like fifth-grade boys, slugging it out (wordlessly, of course) on the playground after school!

Other options?

Sometimes people are yelling because they think no one is listening. Listening could be a course of action taken in place of debate. I say “in place of” deliberately, because although in a true debate only one person can speak at a time, we have all seen the others making notes and preparing their rebuttal during the other side’s speeches. Understanding is not the goal in debate, much less working together – only “winning.”

I’ve said that reason -- that is, argument -- demands and presupposes freedom and equality. I’m thinking now about listening and wondering what, if anything, it presupposes. There is, unfortunately, a frequent perception, shared by speaker and listener, that the speaker is in a superior, one-up position (see Tannen reference at the bottom of this post). Can a listener take a different perspective on the relationship? If so, might the speaker’s perception also shift? Not necessarily. But possibly?

I haven’t found a wide, clear path yet but am searching through the forest.

Judge Garland’s way, as President Obama characterized it, of “understanding before disagreeing” tells me that the judge must be a good listener. I can psychologize and/or demonize an opponent, based on his or her positions, but I can’t understand the reasoning that led to those positions unless (1) the other person is willing to explain his or her reasoning, and (2) I am willing to listen. Possibilities that follow listening are multiple rather than binary:

o    I may find I agree with the speaker, after all. Perhaps we were simply using different language and not realizing we were aiming in the same direction.

o    I may agree with some of the speaker’s reasons but don’t see that they entail the conclusion the speaker has drawn. Maybe we can talk this through together.

o    Our positions may be incompatible but not marked by enormous pragmatic distance. Perhaps we can each move a little closer.

o    I disagree more strongly than ever and now understand more clearly where our disagreement lies. Understanding allows me to aim my own explanation to the heart of the matter, in hopes of changing the speaker’s mind or modifying her or his position.

o    I might change my mind!

These are possibilities that immediately occur to me, not a list I see as exhaustive. Do you see other possible outcomes?

Maybe, as Bergson says of the future, the path to bring us together isn’t lying somewhere in the woods, waiting for us to stumble upon it. Maybe we have to clear that path ourselves. 

As for the Senate blocking the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court, the following idea comes from my friend Michael Roth:

"Recent history suggests there are no adverse consequences for this style of political maneuvering. So perhaps an alternate form of questioning might be to investigate what the opposition's options are.

"Suppose the president could get a federal court somewhere to find that the submitting the name is sufficient for fulfilling his constitutional duty and since the Senate has chosen not to weigh in, he can go ahead an seat his nominee.

"The senate might then chose to appeal this to the supreme court. Assuming the appeal results in a 4-4 tie, the lower court's ruling would hold and the Justice would be seated.

"Is that possible. What are the next steps for getting it done?"

That Michael! He was definitely one of the smartest of our graduate school philosophy cohort!

Suggested reading: The Argument Culture: Working from Debate to Dialogue, by Deborah Tannen; The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, by John Ralston Saul