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All Dressed Up (Spouse’s Guest Post)

My physical therapist and I talked about prom dresses this morning. Her son (in 7th grade) went to the school’s dance over the weekend, and she was surprised at the outfits of the tweenage girls. She described sparkly, tight-fitting dresses ending mid-thigh. But the pièce de résistance was the footwear: white tennis shoes! Whoever heard of such a thing?!?

In my day (and, I remind, it was quite some time ago), we knew how to dress for a formal occasion, and it most assuredly did NOT include white tennis shoes (mostly for me it included high-heeled shoes that were damned uncomfortable). At my 7th grade dance, I wore a white strapless (it must have been very tight around the bodice since I had nothing else holding it up) gown with little flowers around the bustline and a skirt comprising layers of white tulle. So precious; I never liked it much. I went to the dance with a boy I don’t remember. Did we dance? Who knows?

In high school, though, things were different. This was the Jackie Kennedy era, and elegance was the order of the day. Not being able to afford an original Dior (duh), I made (I know! Right?!?) a straight skirt out of white satin. It was lined with Pellon, a stiff interfacing that made it slightly puff-balled at the waist, but it fell straight to the floor. VERY elegant. The mother then found a seamstress who fashioned a halter top covered in bridal lace (that was far beyond my sewing skills). It was lovely and hung gracefully just over the waist of the satin skirt. We had a coral-colored satin cummerbund and a royal blue taffeta cummerbund; different cummerbund for different occasions. White over-the-elbow gloves completed the picture. I wore it; my mother wore it; my sister wore it. We were gorgeous, if I do say so myself.

This was also the 60’s South, and regular cotillions required more than one gown. I don’t remember if the dress code for this particular dance required it or whether I just wanted to wear it, but I borrowed a hoop-skirted gown and learned to sway in it. Mostly I remember the hoop-skirt part, but the dress fabric itself was a wispy white with purple flowers scattered through. Very pretty, very feminine. However, have you ever worn a hoop skirt? Pay attention when you sit down or else the thing will fly up in front of your face and disgrace you. You must reach down and grab the hoop at around knee level, lift it gently, and sit while maintaining your hold on it. It then settles gracefully around your chair. Practice makes perfect, but it’s quite an art.

My wedding gown was also borrowed, this time from a cousin. She and I were exactly the same size, so it made sense. It was a lovely gown, full skirted with a lacy bodice — sort of like that halter top except it had three-quarter sleeves and was attached to the dress. A beaded crown with a long tulle veil completed the picture. I was a beautiful bride, if I do say so myself.

Two gowns complete my most-favorite list. The first was bought in a vintage shop in Brooklyn. It was floor-length, made of black crepe with long sleeves. The bodice was completely plain except for a hint of white circling a rather high neckline. Sounds dismal, right? But…the back, the back! There wasn’t much to the back…at least not until your eyes found the waist where a white organdy ruffle cascaded to the floor. So elegant. It’s just that you had to turn around for people to see how elegant it was. In the bag coming with it from the shop was a postcard with a photograph of a woman wearing that very dress, but you couldn’t tell who she was because she had a lampshade on her head. However, she was clearly a bon vivant who knew how to party.

At one stage in my career, I was required to attend “functions,” mostly fund-raisers, but they were formal affairs, and my black crepe was a bit too outlandish for the stodginess of the crowd. However, I stumbled upon a beauty in JC Penny’s prom section. Form-fitting blue velvet to the floor (I had a form then), it had what I think is called a “portrait collar,” a delicately draped circle of velvet, showing enough neck that I could wear some sort of sparkly necklace (which I had fun finding). A navy blue beaded handbag was found somewhere, and those long white gloves were recalled into service. I looked like a million bucks. Just ask anybody!

My evening gown days are over, but I look back on those dresses fondly. Not as fondly as some coats I’ve owned (see blog of March 14, 2022: “I Get a Kick Out of  . . . Coats”), but fondly nonetheless.

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“It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”

I stumbled on Martin Scorsese’s early Bob Dylan documentary. Then I saw last year’s movie about the singer, “A Complete Unknown.” These experiences had me thinking about the first time I saw Bob Dylan perform live. I had just started college.

I have no ability to perform music. I cannot carry a tune. I don’t play an instrument. Even so, I have always enjoyed music. My earliest musical exposures were limited. Music did not exactly saturate my early childhood home. We did not have a hi-fi or any kind of record player. The local station to which our radio was tuned had eclectic programming from Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club to Paul Harvey and only sometimes played music. Instead, a lot of my musical knowledge came from television variety shows, which, befitting their name, had a wide variety of musical acts.

Glen, my best friend in grade school, also shaped my musical tastes. Unlike me, he was a musician. He would tell me about new songs he had liked and when and where I could find them on the radio because some stations played the same song every day at a similar time. And thus, among many others, I learned about Jody Reynolds and “Endless Sleep,” a teenaged schlock song that still today can get stuck in my head.

I spent more time in cars as I got older. If a teenager was driving, the radio was inevitably tuned to the top forty station, WOKY, which was pronounced by the DJs to rhyme with its hometown, Milwaukee. (We could get a learner’s permit six months before our sixteenth birthday, and the goal was to pass the driver’s test and get a license on the sixteenth birthday. These were full licenses. Our driving was not limited in geography or to the time of day.) This was the beginning of rock n’ roll. Top forty radio was not just trite and tired music. New songs and new sounds seemed to come weekly. I, and many others my age, fell in love with the innovative music of Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Everley Brothers, the Beach Boys, and on and on. (I first heard Presley when in the car with my father. He was appalled. I knew the world had changed.)

I thought that I had a respectable grounding in modern music, but then I went to college. One of my three freshman roommates came with a collection of records, some of which were by artists unknown to me. There was Josh White, (“You gets no bread with one meatball” still carousels through my head some days.) There was the much different jazzy sound of Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross. There were many others but the most surprising was Bob Dylan, whose songs were not on any radio I listened to. I was fascinated by the lyrics he sang (“And I drove down 42nd Street/In my Cadillac. Good car to drive after a war.”).

College, of course, is a time for new experiences, including music. A new experience was the social life. I was at a non-coed school. For days, maybe sometimes weeks, I hadno interchanges with anyone of the female persuasion, and when one occurred it was usually not with someone of a comparable age. However, on “big” weekends, girls (I did not consider myself a man, and I did not think of them as “women”) came for the weekend. Families in town rented out rooms for the dates, but the girls were allowed in our rooms up to a point. I don’t remember what the regular hours were, but on those big weekends, girls could be in the dorms until midnight. Upperclassman had a place to be at that bewitching hour. They were in clubs where partying went on until three or four o’clock, but freshmen were not club members and would have nothing to do once twelve o’clock struck. To avoid this, the university had midnight concerts, and to my surprise then and now, in November 1963, Bob Dylan was booked.

I don’t have the novelistic ability to capture the bizarreness. The calendar said it was the 60s, and Dylan helped define that time. But while perhaps what we now think of the 60s may have been emerging in the Greenwich Village that helped spawn Dylan, that new decade had not yet hit most of the country. Certainly it had not come to the central New Jersey, Ivy League campus filled with conformist boys who wanted to take their place with bankers and bankers’ lawyers and doctors with upscale practices.

I only knew of Dylan because my roommate had owned The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. A large portion of the audience had never heard of him. They were there, many slightly to extremely drunk (even though underage, no one stopped our campus drinking), because there was nowhere else to go. There was a stark contrast between the Ivy League audience dressed as preppies and preppy wannabes and Dylan, still in his acoustic stage, with his entourage dressed in jeans and leather vests and bandanas and motorcycle caps and cowboy hats. Many were shocked not only by his wardrobe but by his singing.

Dylan just introduced his songs and sang and made no comment about the audience. I still wonder what Dylan was thinking about while performing for us. But my admiration for Dylan increased that night.

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Putin, America, and the Politics of Being (Concluded)

          Putin, coming out of relative obscurity, was elected Russian president in 2000 with 53% of the vote. He consolidated his power quickly and extensively in ways large and small and was reelected in 2004 with a reported 71% of the vote. The Russian constitution then only allowed the president two consecutive four-year terms preventing his run for a third term. Putin endorsed Dmitry Medvedev for the March 2008 election and Medvedev got more than 70% of the votes. He then appointed Putin his prime minister.

          A constitutional change during Medvedev’s term increased the presidential term to six years, and Putin again ran for president in 2012. The election was viewed by many within and without Russia as corrupt. In her book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012), Masha Gessen reports: “Putin declared victory in the first round of the presidential election, with 63 percent of the vote. Holding a virtual monopoly on the ballot, the media, and the polls themselves, he could have claimed any figure, but he opted for a landslide, and a slap in the face to the Movement for Fair Elections.” The Movement had been part of widespread demonstrations that started months before the election. The protestors wore white ribbons, which Putin crudely sexualized by saying the cloth looked like condoms.

          Putin won, but it was clear that a significant portion of Russians were unhappy with him and the direction of their society. Putin had invaded Georgia in 2008, which perhaps was initially popular, but became less so as the war wore on. Privatization of industry had put money into private hands, but little of it went to anyone other than what are now known as the oligarchs. Russians could increasingly see the results of wealth, but few experienced it. Russia became the most economically unequal society in the world. More and more people felt dangerously unsettled. Gessen again: “Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakeable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. Uncertainty made people feel ever poorer.” And people took to the streets in numbers that Putin could not ignore.

          He responded not by trying to distribute wealth more equally, increasing civil liberties, or having fairer elections. Instead, in something that should feel familiar to Americans today, he sought to unite Russians by launching an anti-homosexual crusade. Gessen states, “In the spring of 2012, Putin decided to pick on the gays. In the lead-up to the March 2012 election, faced with mass protests, Putin briefly panicked. . . . And faced with the protest movement, the new Kremlin crew reached for the bluntest instrument it could: it called the protesters queer.” Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America sees Putin as making this an external threat: “Some intractable foreign foe had to be linked to protestors, so that they, rather than Putin himself, could be portrayed as the danger to Russian statehood. Protestors’ actions had to be uncoupled from the very real domestic problem that Putin had created and associated with a fake foreign threat to Russian sovereignty. [The protestors] were mindless agents of global sexual decadence whose actions threatened the innocent national organism.” Putin claimed that these protestors were the tools of a foreign power, a power embodied in the person many American conservatives loathed. “Three days after the protests began, Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for initiating them: ‘she gave the signal.’” A few days later, without providing evidence, he claimed that the protestors had been paid.

          The propaganda maintained that the forces promoting sodomy were not just trying to affect Russia. They were also infiltrating Ukraine. “European integration (of Ukraine) was interpreted by Russian politicians to mean the legalization of same-sex partnership (which was not an element of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU) and thus the spread of homosexuality.” Gessen tells us that a Russian politician “warned that if Ukraine went west, that would lead to ‘a broadening of the sphere of gay culture, which has become the European Union’s official policy.’ Over the next couple of months, the image of the Western threat menacing Ukraine broadened to include not only the gays but also the Americans, for whom the gays were always a stand-in anyway.”

          Whether or not American manifest destiny compares to Russian exceptionalism, Putin’s turn to sexual matters does have American parallels. How American does this sound? Putin announced, Gessen reports, that he was “defending traditional values.” Russia passed legislation “not only banning ‘homosexual propaganda’ but also ‘protecting children from harmful information,’ which meant, first and foremost, any mention of homosexuality, but also mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” (The law was entitled, “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values.” Perhaps it produces a snappy acronym in Russian.) Russian kiddies should not learn of things that might make them uncomfortable. It is clear that a similar agenda is being implemented in an increasing number of American schools.

          Putin has learned a basic political trick: when the topic is about the shortcomings of Russia or of Putin himself, shift the topic. “Putin was enunciating a basic principle of his Eurasian civilization: when the subject is inequality, change it to sexuality.” American conservatives have followed a similar path to avoid confronting American shortcomings. Instead of addressing homelessness, switch the topic to any number of other topics — critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, DEI, or the ever-handy rainbow flag of gaydom and transgenderism. American conservatives and Putin share the goal of wanting to make “politics about being rather than doing.”

          Russia has recently been meddling in the affairs of other countries. For example, when Germany’s Angela Merkel admitted Syrian refugees causing a backlash among some of her constituents, Russia increased its bombing of Syrian targets, thereby creating more refugees. Through Twitter accounts and the media outlets it controls, Russia published false reports about the crime wave in Germany supposedly caused by the refugees. This had me thinking about conservatives who talk about crimes and diseases brought by immigrants to this country. They have little data to back up their claims and seldom mention that almost all who come here expect to work hard to attain a better life. Moreover, they fail to mention that birth rates are dropping in the U.S., and we need those workers.    

          Before the vote on Scottish independence, Russian media, hoping to encourage the disruption of the United Kingdom, rattled on about the terrible consequences for Scotland if it remained in Great Britain. After the referendum failed, Russia cast doubt about the vote’s validity. Internet video suggested vote rigging, and the videos were promoted on Twitter by accounts based in Russia. Timothy Snyder states, “Although no actual irregularities were reported, roughly a third of Scottish voters gained the impression that something fraudulent had taken place.” Sound familiar?

          Russia favored Brexit–anything to disrupt European unity–and over 400 Twitter accounts heavily promoting the “exit” position were traced to Russia. Russian media did not attack the outcome of the referendum. Snyder says, “This time, no Russian voice questioned the result, presumably since the voting had gone the way Moscow had wished. Brexit was a major triumph for Russian foreign policy to weaken the United Kingdom. The margin of the vote was 52% for leaving and 48% for staying.”

          Why should Russia seek to destabilize other countries? There are at least two reasons. Masha Gessen reports that Putin understands strength to mean that “the country is as great as the fear it inspires.” Thus, Russia’s ability to influence the internal affairs of other countries demonstrates its powers. In addition, because Russia has not been able to raise itself up in the world, it has begun to define success “not in terms of prosperity and freedom but in terms of sexuality and culture, and [suggests] that the European Union (and the United States) be defined as threats not because of anything they did but because of the values they supposedly represented.” Russia’s method of moving up in the standings is to tear others down. Snyder points out, “The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way is to make them like Russia.”

          The reasoning would suggest that Russia thinks itself better or, at least, not so bad when people in other countries doubt their institutions and their society’s values. Russia suggested that a Conservative win in the UK was the result of a rigged election. If it can get Britishers to believe that, Russia’s elections appear similar to British ones. Moscow does not try “to project some ideal of their own, only to bring out the worst in the United States.” Under communism, the Soviet Union tried to convince the world that it had a better system than the west — one that would eventually prevail and bring a better life for the Soviets and people around the world. Russia no longer has that ideology. It cannot produce or promise an improving society; it can only tear down others.

          It is more than a little frightening to picture Putin giggling in triumph, but he must be more than a little pleased with recent American trends as conservatives seek to undermine the basic validity of our elections. If, in this bastion of democracy, our votes are rigged, then Russian elections look better. The Russian portrayal of America as a land of sexual decadence is only promoted when conservatives “find” homosexual and transexual groomers hiding in American classrooms. Russia’s own repression of Russians who contest their country’s direction looks sounder when U.S. schools are portrayed as places for racial and woke indoctrination. The conservatives may not be consciously seeking to make Putin stronger, but they are unwittingly playing into his hands. Perhaps when the cameras are off, he runs victory laps around those huge conference tables he often sits behind wearing a MAGA cap. And giggling.

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Putin, America, and the Politics of Being

          The Trump administration is trying to coerce Ukraine into accepting a peace settlement with Russia even though Russia may not want peace. The deal would basically have Ukraine capitulate to Putin. This reminds me of the books The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) by Timothy Snyder and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) by Masha Gessen. Both books were written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our 2020 and 2024 elections, but the two books complement each other in their portraits of Putin and Russia. They present pictures that aid in understanding the present Ukraine situation and illuminate for me aspects of our own politics. Reading them did not lead to a full-blown depression, but it did not improve my mood.

          Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is longstanding. The Soviet Union, founded in 1922, was a federation of national republics that included Ukraine. However, during the 1970s and 1980s every Soviet Republic increasingly felt as though they were being exploited by some other republic. In March 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the USSR, organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as a single entity. Voters in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor of unity, but six republics boycotted the vote. A few weeks later, Georgia held its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR. Two months later, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which had been part of Russia. The latter led to a destructive war with Russia. (In August 1991, President George H.W. Bush went to Kyiv and urged Ukrainians not to leave the Soviet Union, saying “Freedom is not the same as independence.”) More than 90% of the Ukrainians voted for independence.       A coup to remove Gorbachev failed, but in the aftermath, Gorbachev resigned and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, became increasingly popular. He was soon head of the Soviet Union and removed Russia from the USSR ending the federation. Putin followed him as president of Russia in 1999. After a brief hiatus (2008-2012), Putin has been elected president ever since.

          Putin proclaims religious, ethnic, and near mythical connections between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder says Putin sees Ukraine as “an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body” and that Putin has said that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people.” The independent Ukraine that came into being in 1991 may have been tolerable to Putin as long as it remained receptive to Russia’s desires and provided it with oil, food and precious metals. Viktor Yanukovych was elected head of Ukraine in 2010 and, according to Snyder, began his term “by offering Russia essentially everything that Ukraine could give, including basing rights for the Russian navy on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.” At the time it was understood that this installation would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

          The Ukrainian population, however, increasingly looked not to Russia for guidance and inspiration but to the West. When Yanukovych canceled an association agreement with the European Union in 2013, pro-European demonstrations broke out in Ukraine. After several elections, the present government took power, and as we all know, this is not a Ukraine that takes orders from Moscow.

          The westward turn by Ukraine has been especially troubling for those who have “Mother Russia” feelings about Ukraine. While former Soviet satellite countries and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007, the EU had not extended into any territory that had been part of the original Soviet federation of 1922.

          This history and Putin’s viewpoints about Ukraine struck me as quintessentially Russian. The first time I read in Crime and Punishment about Raskolnikov’s kissing the soil at the crossroads, I tried to understand his semi-mystical feeling for Mother Russia. Snyder writes that Russian slavophiles believe “that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before.”

          But as I thought about these aspects of Russian culture, I wondered whether there were counterparts in American history. Putin apparently believes that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, and it is Russia’s destiny to include Ukraine. How much different is that from the nineteenth century American faith in “manifest destiny”? At the time, many felt that it was the express mission of Americans to push onward to the Pacific even though other peoples already lived there. Didn’t the use of the word “destiny” imply that this path was preordained by the Almighty? Putin and others believe that Russia is exceptional, distinct and more holy than other lands. And Americans? Of course, America is exceptional, and just below the surface of that notion is a kind of religious belief. Surely when Jesus returns, he will not go to Galilee, but instead will come to the holiest of holies, America. (That is, if he can navigate our immigration laws, for nothing in them would allow him to enter. He might be able to walk over the river, but what if a border wall keeps him out, and he is consigned to a squalid camp on the Mexican side?)

          Perhaps finding links between Mother Russia, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism is a stretch, but comparing some aspects of recent Russian and American political history is not.

(Concluded April 30)

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First Sentences

“Here’s a book very unlike the others I have written—very much shorter, for one thing, as some readers may notice—but its intention is to share some experiences I’ve had while doing the others, and thoughts I’ve had about what I’ve been trying to do with those books.” Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing.

“I like to think I know what death is.” Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

“It was no place for a harbor.” James Tejani, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles—and America.

“She never called her mother Mom or Mommy or even Mother.” Ruth Reichl, The Paris Novel.

“On March 18, 1990, the city of Boston—and the world—suffered a profound loss when two men dressed as police officers commandeered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and pulled off the greatest art theft in world history.” Stephen Kurkjian, Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist.

“Day 1,299 of My Captivity: Darkness suits me.” Shelby van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures.

“As the judge banged the gavel, William Dampier hung his head in disgrace.” Sam Kean, The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science.

“The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I’ll be late.” Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Librarian.

“My family’s story is a particular one, but it is also a story that millions of families tell about their past.” David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

“The rainy streets of Dublin on a cold winter’s day were no place for a young boy to dawdle, unless that very same boy had his nose pressed up against the window of the most fascinating bookshop.” Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop.

“The room felt like the bottom of a grave.” Mike Dash, The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia.

“Although I don’t consider myself particularly vain (except perhaps for considering myself more often than I should), I was pleased to have conceived such an expert murder, especially since I had never previously considered committing one.” Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide.

“We tend to think of measurement as something taken from the world: as knowledge extracted from nature by means of scales, gauges, and rulers.” James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.

“When I was 12, I remember holding hands with this girl—I want to say ‘Patty,’ but I am guessing here—and something about the way she held hands was just . . . wrong.” Paul Reiser, Couplehood.

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First Sentences

“Here’s a book very unlike the others I have written—very much shorter, for one thing, as some readers may notice—but its intention is to share some experiences I’ve had while doing the others, and thoughts I’ve had about what I’ve been trying to do with those books.” Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing.

“I like to think I know what death is.” Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

“It was no place for a harbor.” James Tejani, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles—and America.

“She never called her mother Mom or Mommy or even Mother.” Ruth Reichl, The Paris Novel.

“On March 18, 1990, the city of Boston—and the world—suffered a profound loss when two men dressed as police officers commandeered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and pulled off the greatest art theft in world history.” Stephen Kurkjian, Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist.

“Day 1,299 of My Captivity: Darkness suits me.” Shelby van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures.

“As the judge banged the gavel, William Dampier hung his head in disgrace.” Sam Kean, The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science.

“The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I’ll be late.” Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Librarian.

“My family’s story is a particular one, but it is also a story that millions of families tell about their past.” David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

“The rainy streets of Dublin on a cold winter’s day were no place for a young boy to dawdle, unless that very same boy had his nose pressed up against the window of the most fascinating bookshop.” Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop.

“The room felt like the bottom of a grave.” Mike Dash, The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia.

“Although I don’t consider myself particularly vain (except perhaps for considering myself more often than I should), I was pleased to have conceived such an expert murder, especially since I had never previously considered committing one.” Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide.

“We tend to think of measurement as something taken from the world: as knowledge extracted from nature by means of scales, gauges, and rulers.” James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.

“When I was 12, I remember holding hands with this girl—I want to say ‘Patty,’ but I am guessing here—and something about the way she held hands was just . . . wrong.” Paul Reiser, Couplehood.

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Snippets

How is “alack” different from “alas”?

The CVS anniversary card section had five “To My Wife” cards for every “To My Husband” ones. What does that signify?

Trump’s assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion seems to be based on the notion that whites have been discriminated against in hiring and that more whites should be hired in the future. To help accomplish this, grants and contracts have been suspended or canceled at universities and other institutions. In response, universities and other institutions have let people go or suspended hiring. In other words, the war on diversity, equity, and inclusion means that fewer people will have jobs, and therefore fewer whites will have jobs. Who thinks up these policies?

Is the arresting, non-human character in Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby van Pelt right? He says, “Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”

I picked up Trillin on Texas at a flea market. The book depressed me a little. Calvin Trillin is the writer I would like to be and never will be. The stories are dated, but I still loved them.

I gave up on another of my purchases from the flea market, Amish Front Porch Stories. I take a certain perverse pride in being the only person I know who has read several Amish romances. Who knew they even existed? Nevertheless, I learned something about the Amish from them, but perhaps most amazing to me is that there are many Amish romances, and they have sold millions. However, they are written at a sixth-grade level, and this time with Stories, I could not get past that and set the book aside. We have a weekly Amish greenmarket in the country. I was going to give the Amish cashier Annie some of the Amish romances, but I learned that the Amish don’t read them. But if you want to read Amish Front Porch Stories, it’s all yours.

I don’t think our current president ever sang along on the car radio with Buddy Holly, the Rascals, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, the Stones, or any other performers from his youth. If so, isn’t that sad?

“In that moment, silently, we agreed that we were indeed in the presence of an exceptionally delusional white man—which is, of course, one of the most dangerous things in the world.” Mat Jonson, Pym.

Nearly 90% of American students attend public secondary schools. Only three of the present nine Supreme Court justices did. None of the justices attended a public college, university, or law school.

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.” George Bernard Shaw.

I am not proud that in scanning the obituaries I feel some satisfaction when I find that a vegan has died of cancer.

In a pseudonymous essay written as the American colonies moved towards independence, John Adams wrote that a republic is a “government of laws, not of men.” He was contrasting a system with a despotic emperor who is “bound by no law or limitation but his own will.” In contrast, Adams wrote, a republic “is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making.”

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Eggs, Bonnets, and the Crucifixion

The resurrection of Jesus is at the core of Christianity. For most Christians their religion would not exist without the concept of life after death. It is important that this particular death, the death of Jesus, did not come from “natural” causes, from cancer or a heart attack or a liver disease or from what sometimes is labeled an Act of God–an earthquake or a flood or a tornado. It seems essential that the resurrection, the new life, came after a death caused by man. It was brought about not by an individual; it was not merely a murder or an accident. It was a death exacted by society. It was, in fact, an execution. If the resurrection is at the core of Christianity, at the core of the drama is also a state-enforced death penalty. Is there meaning in the fact that Christianity flows from capital punishment? As far as I am aware, the role of the death penalty in the Easter story is under-played. On the other hand, the method of carrying out the execution, the crucifixion, which by definition required a cross, has a central role in the symbols of the religion.

Although not all denominations fetishize the stations of the cross, nearly all Christians have an image of a beaten, yet still heroic Jesus struggling to carry the cross to Calvary. And every follower of Christ has looked in wonder at representations of Him on the cross, which, whoever the artist, are strikingly similar. He no longer can keep his head erect; it slumps to the side. He bears a crown of thrones and a wound in His rib cage. Stripped of all but a loin cloth (where did that come from?), He is dead or nearly so, but still powerful with a muscular torso and manly shoulders. Even in death, He is majestic.

Sermons and hymns almost rhapsodize over the agonies of the cross. Nails pounded through flesh, muscle, and bone into the wood. Hanging by the outstretched arms until death (mercifully) came. And this suffering, we are told, was for us, for our redemption, because of our sinfulness, so that we can have everlasting life.

As a boy, I felt that if this suffering were for me and my salvation, Jesus’ agonies had to be unique. How else could His crucifixion work this wondrous change in the future of mankind if that pain and torture were commonplace?  I knew, of course, that two others had been crucified with Him and must have suffered similarly, but these deaths were merely an accompaniment to Jesus’ crucifixion. It was confusing, then, when I learned that this mode of execution was not unusual and saw depictions of legions of men nailed to crosses. Many others, I realized, encountered a physical pain that had to be identical to that which Jesus endured. If the agony of Jesus was supposed to mean something to me, did the agony of these countless others have special meaning, too?

Although I do not (fully) understand the ecclesiastical reasons for it, Jesus had to be executed for His resurrection to lead to the belief in Jesus’ redemptive power. The crucifixion, however, was not unique to Jesus and many suffered it; therefore, His death did not have to occur on a cross. But would it matter to Christian belief if a different form of capital punishment had been used? Perhaps it is important that the form was slow and agonizing so that we can grasp His pain and sacrifice, but Jesus apparently died a relatively quick death for a crucifixion, as indicated by the centurions’ surprise that He was no longer still alive. But if prolonged agony was important, even a quick form of execution like beheading or a less gruesome form like poisoning could have been preceded by lengthy flagellation and mutilations. And, of course, other horrific execution methods were also used then, such as stoning, impalement, starving, crushing under rocks, burying alive. My question: What if crucifixion had not been used, but a different form of execution was? Certainly powerful symbols of Christianity would be different. Would that make any difference to Christianity itself? Is belief actually influenced by iconography, and if so, how?

Posted on by rjonakait

Bach, the Antisemite

I picked up a program on my way to find an empty seat. As usual for the “Bach at One” series at Trinity Church, the left side of the page contained the libretto in the original German and the right the English translation. However, this program for a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion also contained an Explanatory Note, which informed me that portions of the libretto “continually harp on the responsibility of ‘the Jews’ and Judaism for the crucifixion of Jesus.” It continued. “There is, unfortunately, no escaping Luther’s embrace of John’s view of Jewish culpability for Jesus’s death. . . . To avoid giving unnecessary offense . . . we have eliminated references to ‘the Jews’ even in passages where such wording could reasonably be taken to be neutral or positive, given the sensitivity of the topic today.” It noted that changes were indicated by underlining, but my program did not have this.

This Note later sent me scurrying to my favorite Bible, the one given to me on my tenth birthday when I attended Sunday School, to read again John’s version of the Easter story. And yes, it contains references to “the Jews,” but I had not thought that this meant that the Jews as an ethnic group or a religion were responsible for the death of Jesus. The Gospel also refers separately to “Caiaphas the high priest” and “the chief priests.” Thus, when John refers to the Jews, I believed he was referring to those chief priests who were advocating for Jesus’ death: “When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no crime in him.’ The Jews answered, ‘We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself Son of God.’” The Jews being referred to, I had thought, were the chief priests and officers, not all Jews everywhere.

This limitation made sense to me. The powerful and the rich did not condone Jesus’ preaching because His teachings often undercut the rich, the powerful, and the self-righteous. Thus, the whole eye-of-the-needle thing; the moneychangers-in-the-temple thing; the cast-the-first-stone thing. In short, the rich, the powerful, the chief priests and officers were threatened by Jesus. He upended the religious status quo. He also criticized Jewish dietary restrictions. As recorded in Mark 7, Jesus averred that food did not make a person unholy. (“Thus he declared all foods clean.”) Instead, people were defiled by their evil thoughts and actions. Jesus was undermining the religion espoused by religious leaders, and they did not like that. And, thus, when Pilate asked, “‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’” And Jesus’ fate was sealed not by Jews generally, but by those threatened chief priests.

The Gospel according to John says that Pilate placed a title on the cross that proclaimed Jesus as King of the Jews. According to John, “[M]any of the Jews read this title,” but then John becomes more specific and writes, “The chief priests of the Jews” asked Pilate to amend this to read, “’This man said, I am the King of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ’What I have written I have written.’”

However, the libretto at the performance I attended had altered “King of the Jews” to “King of the nation” (des Landes König). This bothered me for it changed the theology of the gospel, or at least the theology I wanted from John. The title “King of the Jews” perhaps mocked Jesus, but it also mocked the chief priests and other high officials. In my mind, the Jewish elite did not want any suggestion that theirs was not the final word about God and religion. They could not admit that there might be a revelation that superseded their own teaching. Even the hint that Jesus was King of the Jews threatened their powerful positions, which they wanted to remain inviolate.

The libretto’s change also undercuts the meaning of an interchange between Pilate and Jesus. Pilate had asked him whether he was King of the Jews, and according to John, Jesus answered, “’My kingship is not of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world.’” “King of the nation,” as the new libretto had it, would seem to indicate that Jesus was claiming dominion over land, which might have been threatening to the Romans, but not necessarily to the Jews. “King of the Jews,” however, is more ambiguous. It may indicate dominion over a people, but it can also indicate a leader of a religion that emphasizes how to worship and live. “King of the Jews” did not threaten the Romans, but it did threaten the high priests.

But there is still another reason not to sanitize John’s Gospel. We should remember that many have used the Easter story to justify antisemitism. Of course, others have read John differently from the way I have. I wanted Jesus and Christianity to stand for love, the Golden Rule, and the Beatitudes. Perhaps sometimes it is about those things, but others have fastened on John to justify discrimination and persecution of Jews. The sad truth is that religion, including Christianity, often has been as much about hate as love. To combat that hate we have to be aware of it and its supposed justifications. We may want religion to be about charity, goodwill, altruism, and benevolence, but if we ignore the prejudice religion has fostered, evil too often takes over.

Posted on by rjonakait

You Think I’d Crumble . . . That’s Me in the Corner

With Holy Week coming and nearly constant news about Gaza, I have been thinking about my one trip to Israel. It was a couple decades ago, and it was an an unusual junket—all expenses paid to study terrorism from an Israeli perspective. My reactions were all over the map.

As a kid, shekels was a slang term for money, but now I was buying chewing gum with that decidedly non-biblical currency. Back then I had often looked at the pictures and maps in my Thomas Nelson Revised Standard Version Bible during the boring parts of church, but only when I went to Israel, did I realize how small the country is.  (Bethlehem is six miles from Jerusalem.)  More than once on the trip, I was told that Israel is about the same size as New Jersey.  (Is there any other way that New Jersey is like the Holy Land?)

Of course, especially on this trip, there were constant reminders of terrorism—the disco across from our Tel Aviv hotel where partygoers were bombed waiting to enter; the Gaza checkpoint where soldiers had been killed; the meeting with the man disfigured by an incendiary device tossed into his car. These reminders of terrorism made it hard to remember that someone in Israel is more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a terrorist and that per capita more people are killed by guns in America than by terrorists in Israel even though guns are everywhere in Israel.  Soldiers carrying guns are a common sight.  (My favorite—a soldier in sandals carrying a gun slung over one shoulder and the biggest, reddest purse I’d ever seen balancing on her other side.)

One image of Israel: security, security, security.  Searches to get into the hotel; lengthy interrogations and more to get into the Knesset.  Sometimes I wondered about the efficacy of these measures.  The first time I went to a Czech restaurant the guard controlling admission did a cursory search. The second time, he simply said, “Have you got a gun?”  I said no and was nodded in.  Would a terrorist tell him he had a gun?  By the third day at the hotel, our group was generally waved around the security check point.  Does that mean a terrorist committed to staying at the hotel for at least three days could then avoid security?  Or is it that I and the rest of the group did not look Palestinian? 

My northern European looks did not stop El Al from subjecting me to rigorous scrutiny.  Going I was pulled aside from the other passengers, interrogated, and my suitcase thoroughly, I say thoroughly, inspected.  Returning it happened again, but then I had a touch of turista, and the experience seemed to take even longer.  I did get on the plane even though I had fudged the truth.  On the day of departure, it was market day near the hotel.  I went to poke around and ended up buying some gifts of Dead Sea mud and some bee products.  I did not give much thought about these casual purchases until I was asked at the airport whether my items came from the stall in the market, or whether the seller had gone into the back to get the facial mask and pollen rejuvenator.  Sick I may have been, but the mind quickly decided the right answer for getting on board—I picked them off the shelf, handed them to the proprietor, and then paid for them.  Everything was in my sight.  But as soon as I said that I was not absolutely sure that I really knew how the transaction went.  Wanting to get home, I did not voice this little doubt.  I was a bit nervous on most of the flight home.

We were exposed to many intriguing people—terrorism experts in academic institutions; drone pilots; agents who were incredible marksmen and, as indicated by a film of an actual incident, could snatch a suspected terrorist off the street, throw him in a van, and drive off in a matter of seconds.  Perhaps most striking was the professional interrogator for one of the intelligence agencies.  He entered the room, and his bearing, his aura, was such that I would have told him anything he asked me.  He maintained that a professional interrogator almost never needed to use physical force, implying that Americans did not have professional interrogators, but he also went on to discuss whether shaking a subject should be considered torture.

I also saw more usual tourist sights—the cars haphazardly parked; the Tel Aviv waterfront; Caesarea being set for a beautiful evening, seaside wedding reception; the I-would-not-believe-it-if-I-had-not-seen-it rest stop in homage to the King, not David or Solomon, but Elvis Presley.

We spent a few hours touring Jerusalem.  Our guide impressed me when, for reasons no longer remembered, he talked about the obverse of a coin.  Note, not the obverse side of a coin, which would have been incorrect. I was unsure if I had ever heard a native English speaker use obverse, and my admiration increased when I found out he was certified to give tours in many languages in addition to English.  He took us in and out of many religious places, and of course, it was important to remember whether the place was Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, or Muslim in order to put a hat on or take it off.   I think the Upper Room was pointed out, but then another place was said to be perhaps the site of the Last Supper.  Mary’s burial place was there, but, then again, a location in Turkey is venerated as the place where her Assumption took place, and of course, it is not clear to Assumption believers whether she actually died. (And I think that some believe she died in India.)

We passed stations of the cross and the crucifixion and burial places.  I wondered how people could be so sure that these were the right locations and why there was no marker for the doorway where the Wandering Jew refused aid.  Perhaps these doubts about authenticity led me to blasphemous thoughts.  I was told to plunge my arm through a hole so that I could feel the rock on which the True Cross stood.  As I did, my mind returned to the sixth grade Halloween parties where, blindfolded, we put our hands into bowls of grapes and spaghetti and told we were feeling eyeballs and guts.  Of course, many of these now revered sites were “authenticated” centuries after the events by, I believe, Constantine’s mother, who also collected many relics, perhaps the relics that Mark Twain later saw, and amusingly mocked, in his travels to the Continent and the Holy Land.  Even if they are in the places where the events happened, I wondered why they are regarded as holy sites.  If a religion is universal, then no place could be more sacred than another.

But the most striking part of the Jerusalem trip was its beginning and end. Before we entered, the obverse-coin guide brought us to a place that overlooked Jerusalem. He pointed out things in the old city; where Bethlehem was and is; the Palestinian-controlled territory; the wall marking the boundary (although Israelis called it a fence, not a wall); and the mural-painted wall (this was called a wall) behind us, which prevented Palestinians down below from shooting into Israeli apartments up above.

Our location was a parking lot, and a nearby food van was, like many other Israeli places, playing old American rock and roll.  The third song I noticed was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.  I almost laughed at the remarkable fortuity.  I know that the song is about a woman’s strength in rejecting a lover who walked out, but what better chorus could there be as I looked out over Israel and Jerusalem than I WILL SURVIVE.

During this trip because of the sensitive places we visited—military and intelligence facilities—we were accompanied by heavily armed, young men, and in Jerusalem I fell into step with such an escort. A few moments later, some men rounded a corner shouting and elbowing others aside.  I asked the escort, born and raised in Israel, what that was about, and he replied, “Just some Arabs showing off.”  He and I exited the old city together, and I was visually assaulted by a row of tacky tourist shops.  American rock and roll came from them, too, and the first song I heard outside the old city was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion.  I smiled and said to the escort, “That doesn’t seem right for Jerusalem.”  He stopped, paused a beat, and thoughtfully said, “I think that is the only way.”

Is that right?  Can there only be peace if we lose our religion?