The Casual Blog

October 4, 2021

Visiting Lady Liberty, welcomer of immigrants

We’ve established a temporary base in Jersey City in an Airbnb near our new granddaughter, and are starting to feel less like aliens. Traffic is more intense than we’re used to, and people beep their horns a lot more, but it has its good points. One of those is Liberty Park, which is about a mile from us, and has a great view across the harbor of lower Manhattan and the back of the Statue of Liberty.

Despite years of living in and visiting New York City, we’d never taken the ferry out to visit Lady Liberty or Ellis Island. We picked a clear, mild day last week, bought tickets, waited on line, cleared security (very like an airport), and set sail. There was a sweet breeze, and fluffy clouds.

Immigration to the U.S. peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Ellis Island was the primary intake spot. Millions of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere went through its procedures and began new lives in the states. The large complex of buildings has been partially restored to serve as the National Museum of Immigration.

It was moving to be where so many brave and hopeful people had landed with their dreams. We also learned a lot from the exhibits about the various national groups who eventually became the people of the United States.

Most of the exhibits required some reading, but it was worth it. The curators had made a real effort to give the context of some of the sad realities of our past, including slavery, war with native peoples, and exploitation of workers. We also learned about some of the desperate conditions that led millions of Europeans and others to take their chances in America, including crop failures, discrimination, and overpopulation.

At the same time, there were great success stories, as many immigrants prospered and built a foundation for our prosperity. We were surprised to learn that the largest single group of immigrants prior to 1900 was Germans, followed by Irish. The people known as Pennsylvania Dutch were not Dutch, but rather Deutsch (German). The melting pot apparently melted some letters.

Part of the story of American immigration, in addition to the acceptance and assimilation of millions of immigrants, was constant hostility to immigration. In the 19th and 20th centuries, large political movements organized around the idea that immigrants were threatening to destroy existing American culture.

Panic over a takeover by people with different complexions, languages, and customs, is of course very much with us today. That sort of fear seems to be partly responsible for the Trumpist movement. It was reassuring, in a way, to find that this mass delusion has been around in some form for the last couple of centuries. We got through it then, so perhaps we can do so now.

My main impression of the Statue of Liberty was: she’s big! From base to the tip of her torch, 305 feet. I also learned why she’s green: her copper layer reacted with oxygen and other chemicals in the air, and the resulting oxidation forms a green patina.

Her island had some nice trees and pleasant sidewalks, but otherwise she looked as expected. Even though she’s been a bit over exposed, it was good to see her, and to keep hoping we can hold on to the values of freedom and compassion that she symbolizes.

September 28, 2021

Augusta, our new granddaughter (a first!)

Hail Augusta! Our first grandchild, Augusta Quinn Tiller-DePew, was born this week, amid great excitement.

People say that all newborns look the same, and I’ve even said such things myself. But I’ve changed my view. Little Augusta is especially beautiful, and also talented. She already knows how to eat, sleep, and wiggle. Her heart, lungs, colon, kidneys, and other systems and subsystems clearly know what they need to do, and they’re all hard at work. And she knows how to let everyone know when there’s something she doesn’t like — she cries!

Sally and I drove up to Jersey City to greet the new arrival and try to be helpful. Holding her for the first time was wonderful. I felt hopeful for the future. It also made me think a bit about our responsibility to possible future generations.

When I was in Alaska recently, I talked with a nice woman whose grown children had vowed not to have children, because of concerns that the world was already too awful a place for a new child, and more people would just make it worse. I can understand and even respect this stern view. But I would argue for another position.

The world has no shortage of horrors, but it’s still possible to find a lot of beauty and joy. It all may end badly, with horrific climate change, nuclear apocalypse, or a giant asteroid, but not necessarily. Human activity accounts for a lot of our dire situation, but that also means there’s a possibility that humans will work out rescue plans. At any rate, we’d better give it a shot.

I was cheered this week to learn that a number of megarich people are joining Jeff Bezos to dedicate a very large sum ($5 billion) to an effort to save 30 percent of the earth’s natural areas and prevent the extinction of a large number of species. As the latest IPCC report reminded us again a few weeks back, our climate crisis requires immediate action, and this message is starting to resonate.

This could be the beginning! We may be on the verge of new ways of understanding ourselves, our relationships, and our environment. Some of the problems that have seemed intractable have to do with the way we were educated, and specifically with the way we were trained to think about our relations to each other and nature. Just seeing some new perspectives could make our hard problems easier to solve.

One example, which I mentioned in my post last week, is how we’ve been trained to think about animals as, if not dangerous, always inferior and morally insignificant. Maybe we’ll try understanding them better, dialing down the fear and cultivating respect for them and their communities. It would surely change us for the better.

Similarly, we’ve long been schooled in questionable assumptions about human nature, which make it difficult for us to question social relations based on greed and violence. We even doubt our own eyes when we happen to notice successful communities based on empathy, peaceful cooperation and loving support. With a bit of effort, we may find more such relationships, and learn to cultivate still more.

Changing our thinking at this level may sound impossible, but it’s not. Some people are definitely there already, and their numbers seem to be growing.

September 18, 2021

What animals say

I wasn’t planning on sharing any more of my Alaska brown bear pictures, but changed my mind. Processing the pictures took me to a happy place. I really enjoyed being with these animals (at a respectful distance, of course), and learning a little about their lives.

This has been a particularly sad week in animal news. There was a huge bloody slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands. The U.S. government has authorized hunters selected by lottery to kill some of the few remaining bison at the Grand Canyon. And as usual, with no headlines, hundreds of millions of farm animals were killed to provide human food.

The way we think about non-human animals obviously affects the degree of brutality we’re prepared to inflict on them, but it has less obvious effects on how we think about ourselves. We generally see them as distant and inferior, with no concerns as important as our own, and lacking in our intelligence and cultural achievements. We attach great significance to their lack of human language.

But animals teach us something about human language without needing that language. First, they get along without it just fine. That is, in the wild they manage to do the same things that are our highest priorities — get food, shelter, reproduction, friendship, community — without human language. Indeed, it is likely that homo sapiens got along well enough for many tens of thousands of years without the language abilities that we now think of as setting us apart.

So animals demonstrate that language is not really as fundamental to our lives as we tend to think. Of course, at times language is very useful, and also fun to play with. But while it helps us solve problems, it also creates them. One example is how easily it creates the illusion of a vast divide between humans and other animals, and how easily it justifies human domination of other groups and forms of life.

We often forget that words are only symbols, with no fully reliable connection to objects or actions. No matter how beautifully and elaborately they are grouped together, they can never completely and fully reflect reality. At their very best they are heuristics, practical shortcuts for thinking and getting things done.

This shortcutting utility also accounts for a lot of problems. Our word choices direct focus our attention in one direction, so that we have trouble seeing in another. Once we’ve got firmly in mind the definition of humans as superior creatures, it’s difficult for us to think about the significance of, say, bears to other bears, or chickens to other chickens.

A similar problem occurs with racial categories. Once we’ve concocted a definition of racial characteristics and decided which ones are desirable, we have a hard time not favoring the ones we initially desired. Language around race is part of how we built our racial caste system, and it also makes it very hard to dismantle it.

This is a problem inherent in the way we usually think. But it helps, I think, to recognize that language is flexible, not fixed, and our intuitions can help us modify or work around linguistic limitations. Some part of us already knows, despite the limits of our received language, that our cruelty to animals is wrong, and we have the capacity of finding new ways of communicating and acting on that.

September 11, 2021

Bears and a whale, and where bad ideas come from

I finally finished going through the pictures I took at Katmai National Park and the Alaska coast, and I wanted to share a few more that I liked. Katmai has one of the densest concentrations of brown bears in the world, but there aren’t really very many there — about 2,200. Each one is unique.

Along with bears, I am particularly interested in whales. I’ve had the privilege of seeing them in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and I’ve been learning more about them in recent books by Carl Safina and Rebecca Giggs. Humans have just started understanding the intelligence, social structures, and cultures of whales, but for centuries, we’ve been mindlessly killing them.

So during my Alaska trip, I had mixed feelings about seeing a fin whale that had died from unknown causes and washed up on the beach. The poor creature had been there for a few days, decomposing, and had become food for other animals, including a lot of brown bears. Despite feeling sad for the whale, I was glad it could provide calories for the bears and other creatures.

David Brooks is a NY Times columnist I generally respect without getting particularly excited. He’s a sensible conservative who loathes Trump — a nice but usually predictable guy. However, last week in his column on contemporary currents in neuroscience, he briefly pulled together some powerful ideas that I’ve been mulling over but hadn’t imagined he’d ever entertain.

According to Brooks (and various scholars), we’ve all learned to think of seeing and imagining as entirely separate things. But they aren’t. Neuroscientists are finding that the brain structures and processes involved are much the same for both. That is, from the perspective of the internal physical operation, we can’t reliably distinguish between seeing and imagining. Seeing may be believing, but believing may also be seeing.

Similarly, the distinctions that we draw between brain and body, between memory and experience, and between reason and emotion are nowhere near as clear and clean as most of us have assumed. Indeed, it may not be possible to box off any half of these pairs as independent. Like yin and yang, they are starting to look interdependent.

Even starting to think about these ideas may be disorienting, since we’ve long understood these distinctions to be rock solid. But they may explain some widespread-but-wrong notions. With this new perspective, we can start to understand how some people can truly believe that covid vaccines are dangerous, a newly fertilized egg is fully human, scientists are lying about climate change, and a liberal cabal is trying to take away personal firearms and legalize child abuse.

It’s probable that we all have sincere beliefs that have no basis in reality, though some of us seem to have a bigger collection. When we’re part of communities with extreme views and bombarded with media that confirms our biases, we can dig into some sad and dangerous positions.

There’s no simple solution here, I’m afraid. But I find it helpful to remember that we’ve all got imperfect brains, and even the kookiest of us is not entirely personally responsible for his or her terrible ideas. Also, people do sometimes change, and might one day be grateful for our helping them to change.

September 4, 2021

Alaska natives, more bears, and Safina’s Becoming Wild

These are in many ways dark and difficult times for both humans and other animals. Humans get most of the headlines, so I’m focusing here on other animals. I’m still processing my recent experiences with brown bears in Alaska, and still working my way through their pictures. Some of these moments were shocking, and some were wonderfully peaceful.

Also, when I was in Anchorage, I learned a bit about the native Alaska cultures. I discovered that there’s no single simple story, but a lot of complex and still evolving stories. At the Alaska Native Heritage Center, I took a tour and got an overview of the many distinct indigenous groups with their own languages, customs, and cultures.

At the Center, I got a taste of traditional music and dance, and the various kinds of houses and tools that the different groups used. The music used drums and voices (no other instruments) along with choreographed dance to tell stories. The music was not my preferred style (lots of close repetition), but I was glad to know that native Alaskans made and enjoyed music.

I also enjoyed the Anchorage Museum, which had exhibits of traditional crafts and documentary videos about native village life. It turns out that there were quite a few different strategies for surviving and creating community in pre-industrial Alaska.

In addition to coping with the harsh reality of their climate, when Europeans arrived, the indigenous people got horrific epidemics, violence, and oppression. And native communities have many serious problems today, including poverty and substance abuse. But the fact that these cultures weren’t entirely destroyed is strong proof of their fortitude and resilience.

I’m certain I only scratched the surface of Alaska cultures, and have a lot to learn. But one thing I definitely got: the term Eskimo has a lot of baggage, and is considered by many a nasty slur. As a schoolboy, I was taught that the word referred generally to the native people of Alaska. But like a lot of my early lessons on other cultures, this was both wrong and misleading. Some Alaskan natives still use it to denigrate other Alaskans, but probably the best course is to avoid the term.

Cubs get a swimming lesson at Katmai Preserve

I’ve been reading more of Carl Safina’s new book, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. As in his previous book, Beyond Words, Safina teaches about the abilities and accomplishments of different animal communities. Beyond Words concerned elephants, wolves, and killer whales, while Becoming Wild focuses on humpback whales, macaws, and chimpanzees.

For these various creatures, Safina pulls together recent scholarship as well as his own observations. At times it drags a bit, but there are moments of great beauty and insight. Safina shows that these non-human animals have personalities, communities, and cultures, and their lives have inherent value. This is message is not complicated, but directly contrary to what most of us were taught, and it takes time to get it.

I hope Safina, or someone with similar commitment and talent, does a similar study of brown bears. Even just a few days with them was enough for me to start seeing that they were individuals, with their own personalities and customs. They seemed to have friends, and to be devoted to their children.

These animals have gotten only slightly better PR than sharks. In the popular imagination, they are mindless killing machines, rather than mostly peaceful co-inhabitants of the planet. Even in this sparsely populated area of Alaska with abundant food sources, the bear population has greatly declined, and the bears continue to be threatened by humans.

I was very disturbed to learn that in Katmai Preserve, the government grants licenses to hunt them for pleasure. Humans are twisted in many different ways, but still, it’s hard to understand how people would find such killing to be fun.

It would not be surprising if the bears were angry at humans for taking their territory, food sources, and the lives of friends and children. But I didn’t observe this. Some were leery and careful to keep their distance, while others were curious. A few times they approached us, but speaking to them in a firm voice was enough to direct them away, and they went on with their lives.

August 28, 2021

My first Alaska trip, with brown bears and Emma

My Alaska trip in mid-August was fantastic! True, American Airlines lost my bag on the trip home, but they eventually found it. Also, there was a major Covid outbreak at the lodge where I stayed, but I didn’t get it. There were anxious moments, and as with every adventure some minor disappointments. But all told, it was an amazing, life-changing experience.

Alaska is beautiful and really enormous, and impossible to take in all at once. My prime objective for this trip was to photograph brown bears (sometimes called grizzlies). This time of year they normally feast on migrating salmon and get extra fat for their winter hibernation. My small group of photographers stayed at the village of Iliamna and traveled several times by float plane to Katmai National Park. There we saw dozens of bears fishing in the river, playing on the tundra, and living their lives.

For me, it was quite moving to spend time close to these powerful and resourceful creatures. Their lives made a lot of sense. When they felt hungry they waded into the water and went fishing. When they felt sleepy, they lay down and took a nap. Mothers nursed their new cubs. Young ones playfully sparred with each other.

At some point I’d been taught that bears were solitary animals, but this is not how they seemed when I was there. Some of them seemed to be friends, and played together in groups. Occasionally there were disagreements. A massive bear would warn another to back off by growling and shoving, but I didn’t see any fights that involved bloodshed.

It was a big show, slow at times (such as nap times), but even then heart filling, and I could watch a long time without taking pictures. But I also took a lot of pictures. I’m still working my way through the digital trove, but I thought the ones here were worth sharing, and hope to have more next week.

During the trip I had no internet or other news source. As a long-time news junkie, I felt unsettled at first, but soon adjusted. When I finally got back on line in Anchorage, I found that the world was turning pretty much as before.

During the trip I re-read Emma, by Jane Austen, for the first time since my college days. I remember thinking it was wonderful then, but this time it seemed richer. Austen is often treated as a brilliant rom-com miniaturist. But in addition to her polished and gently humorous surfaces, she unveils darker aspects of an intensely social world. Underneath the careful manners there’s an unremitting struggle for dominance.

We know, or at least could know, a lot more than Austen did about the slavery and imperialism that provided funding for her genteel characters. Her degree of complicity is unknown, but even assuming the worst, she bequeathed to her readers a great gift. Somehow, within her narrow confines, she managed to create an absorbing world and at the same time call that world into question. Emma Woodhouse is undeniably marvelous, but addicted to deception, including self deception. Like stage magic, Austen keeps us absorbed and curious by seeming to reveal emotional secrets, and then letting us see that bigger ones may still be hidden.

August 5, 2021

New York, Showy Florentines, Black Egyptians, and the Ghost Forest

Ghost Forest, Maya Lin, Madison Square, New York City

Last week we visited our old stomping ground, New York City, for the first time since the pandemic. It was a little strange to wear masks for the flight, but not bad, and certainly smart, given the persistence of the clever and dangerous Covid virus. We were pleasantly surprised to arrive at the finally completed Terminal B at LaGuardia, which was full of light, with whimsical tile walls. When we left , we saw a performance there by the new fountain, which made dancing patterns with lasers and thousands of gallons dropping from the ceiling.

The prime objective of our trip was Jocelyn’s baby shower, celebrating with friends the soon-to-arrive little girl. Our old friend Kathryn created a feast with many delicious vegetarian options, and we enjoyed chatting with other friends of the happy couple. It was sunny and mild, a very pleasant day.

We stayed in the West Village, parts of which have not changed much, though we noticed storefronts that had been vacated and graffiti and garbage that had arrived. It was certainly not depopulated! On Friday night the crowds of young folks made it challenging to stroll on the sidewalks. But we managed, and had an excellent Thai meal.

We spent most of Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve spent many happy hours there in years past, and know parts of it well. But the collection is truly gargantuan, and there’s always something new.

We started with the current exhibit on the art of the Medici in Florence in the 1500s. The paintings were mostly portraits of the ruling elite of that period. I could appreciate the craftsmanship, but was more interested in the meta message of the portraits, which was, roughly translated, this person is super successful and powerful, and you’re not.

Art history as taught to me was mainly about aesthetics, but now I’m focussing more on what the art is trying to communicate about its culture, as well as what it conceals, intentionally or unintentionally. I was grateful for the bits of history in the exhibit’s labeling. It gave some helpful background about the ruling Medici princes and Florence’s battles for wealth and dominance.

I also spent some time with the Met’s collection of ancient art. Recently I’ve been listening to lectures from Audible on the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, as well as those of Greece and Rome. We take for granted a lot of the ideas and inventions of these cultures, and sometimes forget that there’s so much that even specialists don’t know about their world. Anyhow, while wreaking havoc on competitors, they left behind a lot of beautiful objects, and it’s fun to try to figure out what they might be saying.

I also visited the Met’s enormous Egyptian collection for the first time in many years. The ancient Egyptians were amazing builders and artists, and created a remarkably powerful and resilient culture. Looking at their art this time, I was struck by something I hadn’t registered before: they looked Black.

Of course, our American ideas of race were not theirs. But once I focussed, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before: the facial features of the ancient Egyptians looked like many of our Black brothers and sisters.

From some quick Google research, I gather there’s vigorous scholarly dispute on the race of ancient Egyptians. My evidence is subjective, and plainly I am no expert. But it would not be surprising in our culture if there was unconscious resistance, even by scholars, to acknowledging that Black people were the creators of this impressive civilization. More research is called for.

Finally, I visited and took some pictures of a thought-provoking art project temporarily in midtown by Maya Lin called Ghost Forest. Lin is best known for her Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. Ghost Forest features 49 cedars that lived in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and died from climate change. Lin brought them to Madison Square Park, which is a green oasis just north of the Flatiron building and south of the Empire State Building, and arranged them into a little forest.

Part of Lin’s message is easily decipherable: humans have heedlessly destroyed entire ecosystems, including beautiful forests, without even noticing. But I was surprised to find other messages. The dead trees made me look at the lush and healthy trees of Madison Square and the life around them with new gratitude and affection.

July 23, 2021

Growing plants, and hopefully, fixing our food system

It’s been hot here in Raleigh, though we haven’t been having massive fires, storms, droughts, or floods, unlike some others. For this I’m grateful, but the heat and humidity have kept me inside more than usual. I did get up to Raulston Arboretum one afternoon, and was happy to see these flowers and insects.

Happily, it’s peach season here, and I got some peaches at the State Farmer’s Market. It was good seeing the farmers and their good looking fruits and vegetables. The peaches were juicy and quite delicious.

Getting satisfying, nourishing food doesn’t have to be complicated, but in fact, for many, it’s not happening. Eating well is surely the most important thing we as individuals can do for our health, and irresponsible food production is among the worst things we as a society do to the planet. But with so many other problems to worry about, food usually doesn’t get much attention.

So I was pleased this week to see a major new report from the Rockefeller Foundation titled True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the U.S. Food System. The Rockefeller report takes a wide-angle view of the costs and benefits of the food system as it stands, and how it could be improved.

The report makes clear that the existing system does a poor job in providing healthy and affordable food, but also fails in other key respects — providing unlivable wages, unsafe working conditions, inequitable treatment of minority communities, wasting natural resources, hastening climate change, and hurting biodiversity.

The Rockefeller researchers found that the out-of-pocket cost Americans pay for food is about a third of the true cost. That is, we spend $1.1 trillion a year directly on food. But the true cost of our food comes to at least $3.2 trillion, once we take account of rising health care costs caused by our food, low wages and lack of benefits, the system’s contribution to climate change and pollution, water and land degradation, and other losses.

The total costs just from diet-related conditions and diseases, including health care for obesity, hypertension, cancer, and diabetes, cost us $1.145 trillion — that is, considerably more than the out-of-pocket cost of our food.

The Rockefeller report effectively brings into view some of the worst problems of our food system, but, as it acknowledges, it does not account for a number of other costs, like impaired military readiness, poor mental health, and lower educational achievement. It also leaves out the cost of animal suffering, which, it says, could not be monetized.

This is worth discussing more. According to the report, more than 10 billion farm animals are killed each year for food. It’s possible to think about this suffering not just in ethical terms, but in monetary terms. For example, for governmental purposes, officials calculate the value of human lives at around $10 million a piece.

If we valued animal suffering at much less — say, .001 percent of a human life for the suffering of a cow, pig, or chicken — the total yearly cost of suffering for each executed animal would be $100. By this measure, the total annual cost of all the animal suffering caused by our food system would be an additional $1 trillion.

However you decide to do the math, our food system causes enormous animal suffering. Faced with the scale of such a horror, it’s easy to lose heart, but the Rockefeller report also reminds us that there are viable ways to start remediation. One is, as it politely puts it, “decreasing animal protein consumption.”

On another hopeful note, there were a couple of worthwhile interviews last week with one of my heroes, Jane Goodall. Goodall, now 87, started her career as a primatologist, making pioneering discoveries about the intellectual abilities and social organizations of chimps which ran contrary to what most scientists then believed. She helped change the boundaries of our thinking about the intelligence and emotional lives of these and other animals, helping us understand that they are not as different from us as we’d thought. There’s a Vox interview in which she talks about some of this here, and a NY Times interview here. I

In recent years her work has focused on conservation efforts. As much as anyone, she understands the dire environmental situation that all living beings now face as a result of human activity. Yet she refuses to give up hope. That’s now a big part of her message: we’re running out of time, but there’s still time for us to make a difference. She has a new book coming out in the fall, and has no plans to retire.

July 9, 2021

Some good soul, and talking about race

This past week we went out to see a movie for the first time since BC (Before Covid). Sally had read about a new documentary, Summer of Soul, playing at the Rialto, our old time neighborhood movie house. There was only one guy there selling tickets, and he also sold drinks and snacks, so it took longer than usual time to get a ticket, popcorn, and a beer.

But it was so worth it! Summer of Soul is about a concert series in the summer of 1969 in a park in Harlem with mostly Black musicians and hundreds of thousands of Black people listening, singing, and dancing.

The musicians included already famous and future legendary performers, including Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Nina Simone, David Ruffin, Max Roach, Ray Baretto, Mahalia Jackson, the Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. That is, some of the very best gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and rock ever made. The musicians seemed to feel the love, and their performances showed it.

It was amazing that it ever happened, and unfortunate that it never became a cultural touchstone, like Woodstock, which happened the same summer. Fortunately, the producers saved the videotapes, and now, 52 years later, we can get a good look at what we missed. It may be just the right moment to discover and cherish this wonderful moment of Black culture. The film is streaming on Hulu.

As you probably already know, race is multi-dimensional issue in the United States, which we haven’t fully worked through. One indicator of this is the odd new moral panic about the teaching of critical race theory. I learned last week that parents in Loudoun County, Va. and other places are harassing and threatening school board members because they believe their young children are being taught this specialized CRT scholarship.

This notion, promoted by fearmongering rabble rousers at Fox News, is almost certainly untrue. But it’s concerning that these parents, who presumably love their children, seem really worried. They apparently think their children may learn some really bad lessons — ones that run contrary to our traditional narrative of progress and harmony.

It isn’t surprising that being clear and direct about race makes some white people uncomfortable. For one thing, it isn’t how we were taught. For another, it may involve unpleasant feelings, like regret, shame, and guilt. For some, there could be a feeling that their position in the hierarchy is indefensible and threatened. And it isn’t surprising that some react to this discomfort defensively, converting it into anger and denial.

But I still find it remarkable that those who want avoid the issue attack those who would like to address our racial history and problems as racists.

Anyhow, for those who aren’t full of that sort of fear and anger, I recommend a recent podcast series from RadioLab: The Vanishing of Harry Pace. It tells what is known of Pace, a highly accomplished businessman who wrote popular songs, started Black Swan records, led a Black insurance company, and then seemed to change his racial identification.

Part of what’s fascinating is how race can seem firmly fixed, and turn out to be highly ambiguous. Similarly, history that we assume must be well settled can turn out to be full of uncertainty.

Along this same line, remember the Alamo? The way I heard the story as a kid, it was a heroic battle for freedom in Texas. This was not true, according to Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. In an interview on Fresh Air, Burrough explained that the battle was part of a struggle mainly about preserving and expanding slavery by white settlers in what was then part of Mexico, where slavery was generally illegal.

The supposed idealism and heroism were Hollywood creations. Burrough noted in the interview that contradicting the traditional accounts of the heroism of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, etc. made some people, including militia types, extremely upset.

Getting back to music, I’ve been reading a biography of Claude Debussy by Stephen Walsh. As is usually or always true with music writing, it doesn’t succeed in conveying anything close to the actual music, but it does suggest perspectives for listening. Debussy’s music, some of which I’m capable of playing on the piano, was highly original, but he also acknowledged being inspired by music from other cultures, including the Javanese gamelan tradition of Indonesia.

Inspired by Walsh’s account, I decided to track down some gamelan music, and found plenty on YouTube. The examples I heard didn’t sound at all like they could be Debussy’s model, and I’m inclined to think he drew more from traditional Japanese music. But with YouTube it was surprisingly fun to dip into Javanese and Japanese music. It inspired me to start exploring other traditional world music through there — from eastern Europe, native Americans, west Africans. There’s a ton!

These photos are from Jordan Lake this week. There weren’t a lot of birds there, and those I saw didn’t perform any spectacular feats, like catching a fish. But I liked this osprey.

June 21, 2021

Bears, happy Juneteenth, and a solution to poverty

On our way back from the Outer Banks, we took a detour through the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. We saw two mother bears, each with two cubs, a barred owl, a flock of white ibises, and various other interesting birds, reptiles, and plants. We were excited, and also worried, to see a rare, critically endangered red wolf standing beside Highway 64 and looking at the traffic. Hope he or she is OK.

I you, like me, have an affectionate interest in wild animals, I recommend Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald. It’s a collection of short personal essays about the natural world. Macdonald explores the thrill and peace that nature can bestow, and helps us appreciate its fragility. The NY Times review is here.

This week Juneteenth became a national holiday. Some Americans are just now learning about the original event, June 19, 1865, when African Americans in Texas first learned that slaves had been declared emancipated. The basic idea of the holiday is to celebrate the end of slavery and beginning of freedom.

Most of us surely agree that this is a good reason for celebration, though not all. As I was practicing my golf swing at the range, I overheard an older golfer speaking disparagingly of the new holiday, and adding that “they” were “taking over.” I wondered how he could have such an ignorant and poisonous idea, and then I remembered: “us” and “them” was the basic framework a lot of us were trained in from birth, and some still are. These ideas have long, hard-to-pull-out roots.

Also, racial segregation is still the rule in most American neighborhoods, schools, and churches. There’s room for discussion about the details of why this is true in 2021, but plainly a lot has to do with the legacy of slavery. One consequence is that it takes effort to get to know people of a different race, which increases the difficulty of dislodging our early training in the caste system.

But there are also other forces at work. This week Thomas Edsall’s NY Times column examined the causes of so-called populism of Trump and similar movements elsewhere. Edsall quoted various thinkers who identified economic forces, including artificial intelligence and other technology, robotics, and globalized outsourcing, that continue to cause job losses and threats to status for many, causing increasing insecurity and fear.

Demagogues whip up these fears and blame minorities and immigrants for these losses. Those with good reasons to feel economically insecure are often latch on to simple solutions to their problems, especially when they resonate with their early racial training.

Why don’t we just eliminate poverty? It sounds like something we could all agree is a good idea. But as Ezra Klein wrote last week, poverty is a well accepted part of our economic system, and eliminating it would threaten some valued privileges of the privileged.

As Klein explains, Americans rely on low wage workers in order to have cheap goods and services. In this light, it makes sense to resist raising the minimum wage above the poverty level, allowing workers freedom to organize, or extending jobless benefits. If low wage workers were less desperate, they might well not take jobs that are mind-numbing or dangerous and pay barely enough to survive. Employers would have to provide better working conditions, and better wages and benefits. They’d lose some profits, and all of us would have to pay higher prices.

This aspect of American-style capitalism is seldom discussed, but worth discussing now. We learned from the covid pandemic that our government can organize massive resources in a hurry to address economic distress. We may have assumed before that there’s nothing we can do to help the mass of people who work at or below the poverty level, but we now have good evidence that that’s just not true.

Klein’s piece discusses a recent study out of the New School proposing a promising approach to mitigating poverty: a guaranteed annual income of $12,500 plus an allowance for children. The payments would phase out for those with incomes above the poverty level. It would require a budget increase of about 20 percent, which could be paid with taxes at about the level of other wealthy nations.

It’s an interesting idea, though it obviously runs hard against the grain of neo-liberalism. Indeed, Republican leaders in several states are currently looking to cut emergency covid relief, including not only money but also food programs, on the theory that workers won’t work as required unless they’re truly desperate. We have here a very dark side of American capitalism. Just as was true before 1865, some are willing to watch people starve, if that’s what it takes to force them to work.

So old questions need to be asked again: how much do we value human life? How much suffering are we willing to inflict in the name of prosperity? What are we willing to sacrifice to move towards a more just society? I’m hopeful, though I wouldn’t say confident, that our better angels are ascendent.

On a completely different subject, I want to recommend a short essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, One Art. The essay in the Times by Dwight Garner and Parul Seghal is beautifully presented, and gets straight to the point. Even if you aren’t much interested in poetry, you might find something of real value.