Tortie Tuesday: Post Delayed (Real Post Is Here Now)

First of all I, the writer known as Priscilla King, need to apologize to readers who had to look at this all day: "This is a placeholder post. It will be replaced by the real post when urgent business in town has been transacted."

Yes, someone e-mailed urgent last-business work on Sunday night, so I didn't have time to write a pre-scheduled post. I like to do Petfinder posts on the same day anyway, just in case they allow someone to rescue an animal who's spent only a few hours in a shelter. But the shelters are closed tonight...I am sorry about this.

Anyway, for those who were wondering, the cats got their kibble from a cheerful, but hoarse, deliveryman fresh out of quarantine. 

The Triple Demons of COVID, Cold, and Flu, soon to be joined by dreaded Norwalk Flu, are still very much with us. Though chilled bodies are more vulnerable, mild winters allow virus to spread further faster, and we have had almost all thaw and very little winter this year. Everywhere I went all day I kept hearing that people were ill, were dead, had been in hospitals, or at best were in quarantine with some virus or other. It was a very unpleasant day, though the weather was as fine as weather can be. I called someone who'd gone vegan in 2020, during our brief respite from glyphosate, and stayed vegan after glyphosate returned to the market, and the wan sound of her voice on her answering device was painful to hear.

The news from town is that the Roberts Family Bakery Cafe has been sold; the building was in good condition and should open soon under new management. Mr. Roberts, at least, seemed to be doing well for his age. Also, a new virtual bookstore is open...

https://www.mapletreebookshop.com/

Lots of shiny books including the bowdlerized new editions of Roald Dahl, hiss and spit, but also Beth Moore, David Mamet, Susan Cain, Barbara Kingsolver, Scott Peck, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Atul Gawande, Steven Pinker, Mark Twain, both Billy and Katharine Graham, Colin Powell, Barry Lopez, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rick Warren, Bill Bryson, Tim Cahill, Wallace Stegner, Pat Conroy, Pat Summitt, and A.J. Jacobs.  

Now, in honor of the gray tabby cat in the beauty shop window today, some of the Eastern States' most adorable, adoptable gray tabby cats:

1. Zipcode 10101: Poly D from NYC

His web page is still under construction: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/poly-d-58617978/ny/east-elmhurst/rikers-island-cat-rescue-ny1590/ 

(Yes, although "Poly" sounds like the woman's name "Polly," in this cat's case it merely means "polydactyl." He's a neutered male.) This cat is described as quiet and independent, friendly and gentle, active, even athletic, and fun. 

2. Zipcode 20202: Jeep & Odyssey from Mount Rainier

Their web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/jeep-odyssey-59981669/md/mount-rainier/a-cats-life-rescue-md492/

These sassy half-grown sisters are described as the female version of our unforgettable Bounce and Pounce--always chasing and play-fighting and then making peace and snuggling up together for cat naps. They have car names for their adventurous personalities rather than their purrs. They're described as likely to make friends with other animals more readily than with humans.

3. Zipcode 30303: Peggy from Lawrenceville 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/peggy-59321035/ga/lawrenceville/society-of-humane-friends-of-ga-inc-ga336/

She's described as small, shy, plump, a bit of a couch potato. She is thought to be young enough that, if you can keep her weight down, she might live with you for ten or fifteen more years, but she's not a kitten any more.

(Serena: "Will you stop looking at other cats on that Lap Pooper and bring us our dinner already!")

Book Review: Kirby & Allen Pressure Cooker Instruction Manual and Recipe Book

Title: Kirby & Allen Pressure Cooker Instruction Manual and Recipe Book

Author: Kirby & Allen

Publisher: Kirby & Allen

Date: not shown

ISBN: none

Length: 56 pages

Quote: “Pressure cooking can reduce normal cooking times by as much as half.”

The first twenty pages are about using that specific model of pressure cooker. More recently made pressure cookers are somewhat similar. The rest of the book consists of recipes. Many are dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, soy-free. Only a couple of recipes for sauces are vegan.

I’ve not tested any of these recipes as written. My mother had a pressure cooker; she used it for canning, and cooking beans. I’ve never owned or used one.

Though not dated, this little cookbook has a late 1980s or even 1990s look, with its recipes for elaborate soup stocks and its use of prosciutto and sun-dried tomatoes. It contains lists of cooking times for beans and other vegetables, but no vegetable recipes.

This is a short review, so I'll share a little of the family history...

While Mother's pressure cooker was not made by Kirby & Allen, nor were most of our vacuum cleaners Kirby brand, we had a relative who bought things with the name Kirby on them.

It's a British name, semi-aristocratic; there still is a crumbling ruin of a Kirby Castle in Leicestershire, which was the "shire" Mother's British ancestors claimed as home, though most of them don't seem to have actually lived there. The castle has also been called "Muxloe," probably because, being too close to the moat, it appears to be sinking into a mucky slough. The outer fortification shown, certainly.

Photo courtesy of https://medievalbritain.com/type/medieval-castles/kirby-castle/

But, inbred though the European aristocracy was, this relative had no record of any actual ancestral connection with the Kirby family. She was married to a man I grew up calling Uncle John Kerby, though he was not related to me and his father spelled his name Kerbovic. He was quiet and nice-looking, a veteran, a skilled worker who went to the same job every day for almost forty years after the War. He never quarrelled with anyone, partly because he was so modest people might have imagined he was shy, and partly because anyone looking for trouble very soon realized it would not be a good idea to pick a quarrel with him; he was not shy, exactly, just peaceable. He was the only man on that side of the family my father liked. 

This aunt who had married this honorary uncle always seemed to think she'd made a good choice; they stayed together for about sixty years. Their daughter was the glamorous Slavic-looking cousin who was routinely mistaken for the movie star. But the aunt gently urged her husband to change his name to Kerby so that people wouldn't tease the said daughter about being Polish.

What sort of name was "Kerbovic," anyway, we wondered. Old Mr. Kerbovic, long dead before I was born, had immigrated through Ellis Island and brought no records. From what his children had been told, there were very few Kerbovics and they seemed to have moved around a lot. Polish? Austrian? Czech, or maybe Slovakian? They didn't seem very positive. The story didn't sound very posh, but there was something aristocratic about Uncle John Kerby's quiet decency. He was the proof that a son of poor, pitiful immigrants through Ellis Island could behave like a gentleman.

All the same, Mrs. Kerby was just a tiny bit proud of her own English ancestors and preferred that people think her husband had some connection to the Kirby family rather than to Eastern Europe, even Austria. 

Years passed, during which nothing relevant to this story happened. Mr. and Mrs. Kerby enjoyed a long active "retirement" and died, less than a year apart, in their late eighties. Their daughter, by that time semi-retired and working part-time, had become interested in genealogy and took over the family records. (I wouldn't have minded keeping them, but thought, realistically, that old records would be more easily preserved in the dry Western air where she lives.) 

Turned out, she reported, that although there never were very many Kerbovics, or Krbovics, and they'd been scattered around Europe even before the Germans and Russians started fighting over their homeland, they were aristocrats too. They had a castle too, also renamed and allowed to fall down. (I googled, just now, and found nothing about any Kerbovics or Krbovics or Kerbowitzes in modern Europe--not in a language I can read, anyway--but I'll take her word. I don't know what else the place has been called.) If anything the Kerbovics might have been higher up the feudal hierarchy than the Kirbys.

It's interesting to find our ancestors' names in history books, but it does not make us better people. It was a delight, though, to learn after he was dead that Uncle John Kerby was every bit as much an aristocrat as the relatives who'd fretted about his un-British name.

It would have been altogether unlike him to have mentioned such a fact, if he'd known it, or to have his daughter mention it. If any of the English relatives had said anything, he would just have smiled faintly and let the moment pass.

Morgan Griffith's Year So Far

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9): 

"

Legislation I Have Filed So Far

 

I have hit the ground running in the new legislative session of Congress and will review a part of my agenda today. Obviously, over the two years of this Congress I will introduce more bills to best represent the people of the 9^th Congressional District.

2^nd Amendment

Last month, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) finalized a rule to expand the definition of “short-barreled rifles”, or barrels of less than 16 inches, to include any and every pistol that has an arm brace affixed to it. This arbitrary definition unfairly penalizes competitive shooters and pistol enthusiasts generally. To counteract this invasive final rule, I have introduced the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act, H.R.173, to remove all short-barreled rifle registration requirements under the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934.

 

I have also introduced legislation, H.R.168, to more comprehensively address interstate transportation of firearms or ammunition. My legislation allows individuals to securely transport a firearm or ammunition between two places (e.g., states) where it is legal to possess, carry, or transport a firearm, without fear of being harassed by an anti-second amendment city.

 

Health Care & Public Health

Americans need greater access to life-saving drugs. I have introduced legislation to ensure critical patient access to compounded medications when a drug is facing a shortage. The Patient Access to Urgent-Use Pharmacy Compounding Act, H.R.167, creates a regulatory pathway for certain compounding pharmacies to prepare medications for hospitals and physician offices if there’s an urgent need or the drug is in shortage.

 

The opioid crisis continues to devastate families across the country, made worse by fentanyl and its analogues. I’ve introduced the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of (HALT) Fentanyl Act, H.R.467, to address the permanent scheduling of fentanyl analogues, while also granting researchers the ability to conduct studies on these substances and provide for exemption of individual analogues when evidence demonstrates it is appropriate.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that we can no longer be reliant upon foreign suppliers for personal protective equipment (PPE). Our national security and public health demand that we have a stable domestic supply of this equipment. The Domestic SUPPLY Act, H.R. 170, would direct the federal government to establish a domestic supply of PPE, require eligible domestic manufacturers to be headquartered in the U.S., manufacture in the U.S. 100% of the products they would supply, and be majority owned and operated by American citizens.

  

Environment & Deregulation

In January, the Federal Register published the Biden Administration’s final Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. This rule makes sweeping changes to the federal government’s authority to regulate what’s considered a navigable water, placing enormous burdens on small businesses, manufacturers, farmers, and private property owners. I have co-sponsored a House Joint Resolution, H.J.Res.27, to terminate the Biden WOTUS rulemaking through the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which provides a mechanism for Congress to overturn certain final agency actions. 

Due to burdensome regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the current New Source Review (NSR) program, originally meant to protect against pollution emissions from industrial facilities, discourages facilities from making upgrades that would ultimately lead to lower emissions. My New Source Review Permitting Improvement Act, H.R. 165, would reform these counterproductive rules so manufacturers, power plants, refiners, and others can make pollution-reducing upgrades to their facilities without running afoul of the EPA’s misguided interpretation.

 

Government Reform

Democrats have made recent attempts to make the District of Columbia our nation’s 51^st state, saying residents are not properly represented. However, the Founders intended for our capitol to be on neutral ground, distinct and distinguished from the rest of the states. That’s why I introduced H.R.980 to retrocede D.C. to Maryland, returning the residential areas of D.C. to Maryland, while leaving the National Capitol Service Area, the National Mall and federal buildings like the Capitol, as the District of Columbia. Retrocession would give D.C. residents representation in the federal government, while maintaining an independent federal district to conduct the nation’s business.

There is still ample opportunity to introduce legislation to benefit the constituents of the Ninth District. If you’d like to provide feedback on the work we are doing or talk to us about legislation you’d like us to consider, each month my staff is available at various locations in the district, where constituents can receive help in person. Information on our traveling office hours can be found at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

 

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.

" 

Book Review: Piecework January 1998

Title: Piecework January 1998

Editor: Linda Ligon

Publisher: Interweave Press

Date: 1998

ISBN: none

Length: 80 pages

Quote: “In this issue, we explore the craft traditions of waterbound places.”

For some of the traditional handcrafts—weaving, embroidery, knitting, quilting, basketry—in some years, in our Machine Age, an industry develops. Shops and magazines are devoted entirely to the crafts that are fashionable enough to support these enterprises. Books are published. Clubs, with conventions and even competitions, are organized. Classes are taught for college credit. Meanwhile, other crafts languish in the shadows and receive little attention until the restless currents of fashion move on in search of something “new.” In the 1970s, when weaving was “in,” knitting was derided. In the 1990s, when knitting boomed, Knitter’s magazine sold widely while its publishers’ other venture, Weaver’s magazine, was never in stores. Meanwhile, does anyone else remember macramé?

Piecework magazine was the production of some people who recognized the deep silliness of these fads. If you really enjoy a craft, you continue wanting to do it whether it’s in or out of fashion. Piecework offered something for everybody. It was not a dabbler’s magazine; the articles were too scholarly and the projects too advanced. (While knitting magazines were bowing to the market for thick yarns that knitted up at 3 stitches to the inch, Piecework continued to print patterns to be knitted with traditional yarns and needles that knitted up at 8 or 9 stitches to the inch…and if you were not a specialist with serious money to spend, good luck finding those yarns.) Piecework was a magazine for serious crafters of all kinds. The magazine didn’t have room to feature every craft every month but they had something for everybody in every year.

So, in this issue, what you’ll see are gorgeous full-color photos of museum pieces and prize winners, an occasional landscape, and an occasional face, from Haiti, Australia, Greece, Guam, Wales, the Faroe Islands, the Maritime Provinces, and Japan. In the same order, the crafts featured are beading (“Sequined Flags of Haiti”), embroidery, weaving/embroidery, basketry, quilting, knitting, rug hooking, and kitemaking. What you’ll find detailed instructions for making are embroidered flower motifs, a “whole-cloth quilt” where the focus is on stitching rather than patching, a knitted shawl, and a hooked rug. Beaders, basket makers, and kite makers will have to draw their inspiration from the pictures.

Because the articles focus on craft history—usually specific stories, as, in this issue, the story of two needle artists who signed up for a twenty-year competition and competed so exclusively against each other that others petitioned to have them dropped from the group—they are evergreen. If you like reading stories about a particular craft, looking at pictures of masterpieces, and at least considering a pattern for something in that general style of your craft, you might happily collect as many as two-thirds of all the Piecework magazines ever printed. Like National Geographic or Birds and Blooms, these magazines would be perfect for waiting rooms.

If you’re more of a specialist, you might want to know: The embroidery is “shadow” embroidery, featuring effects produced by carefully stringing colored floss across sheer white fabric so that the shadow of the floss at the back shows between the stitches at the front. The quilt is worked from an elaborate design of flowers, leaves, and hearts, which you copy onto fabric, first with a pencil and then with matching thread; it’s all about textures, in white or one color. The shawl is worked at 5.5 stitches to the inch in Icelandic lace-weight wool; you could get the same gauge with a pound of Bernat “baby” acrylic yarn, and make a nice shawl for someone who refuses to own wool, but at some time in their lives everyone should get a chance to feel the softness of all-natural wool from a brown, black, or gray sheep. The rug must be made with real wool; the hooking technique used, though certainly easy and fast, relies on wool’s natural tendency to mat to hold the rug together. (Latch hooking would be more reliable, and would allow you to use mixed materials if you really wanted to; it would not be traditional, because the traditional rug hookers were turning bags of rags into something to wipe muddy boots on, so who had time to latch the loops? They had wool fabric; they let it mat together.)

The quality of the eye candy in all issues of Piecework was consistently high. The articles always left people wanting to know more…which was the point. Piecework was the bimonthly magazine of a publishing house that specialized in craft books. If you wanted more information, Linda Ligon could always recommend a book. Most books cited in Piecework were advertised in the same issue of Piecework, and some of those books may still be available in libraries or at specialized craft shops.

Ideas This Web Site Classifies as Loony Left: Part 3 of 5

(This post is the part of a series, links to which appear on the right side of the web page, in which we clarify the differences between what we mean by "Left" as distinct from "Loony Left" and "Right" as distinct from "Rabid Right." The Loony Left...)

* Want to let the United Nations rule the world. Do not recognize that the reason that that's what cartoon villains always wanted is that, in order to want to try to rule the world, you have to be thinking like a cartoon villain. 

* Imagine that if socialist government is only fine-tuned in some way or other, rather than leading to a succession of violent takeovers and perpetual chaos until the human population reaches "Golden Age" levels," socialist government might lead to blissful voluntary communism, making the whole world like one big well-run monastery. And every manure pile contains a pony, too.

* Seriously believe mothers (rather than schools) cause emotional problems; think they'd like to live in a world where babies are produced in factories and nobody gives birth, gives milk, or gives full-time attention to the very young. (In their dreams body parts are equally distributed among all people and, because one kind was clearly privileged when socialist theory was laid down as law, nobody has to be a full-time female any more. That's why they're so much more concerned about protecting the emotional sensitivities of "trans folk" than about protecting children from molestation.)

* Want to shut down discourse by quibbling about whether everything anyone says "fairly" represents everyone. In the name of protecting the "feelings" of women and minorities they thus avoid listening to real women and minorities, whose opinions tend to be reality-based rather than politically correct.

* Want censorship. 

* Want to shut down all private enterprise by regulating all productive work to death. Claim to be advocating for poor people while actively working against what poor people most want--opportunities for productive self-employment that stop them being poor.

* Want all food to be mass-produced on centrally planned and regulated factory farms. Ignore the fact that chemicals currently used on thet kind of farms may cause brain damage, which is probably necessary to allow people to cling to this idea.

* Seriously believe that women and minorities would be "happier" if we'd shut up and let rich White men, some of whom feel effeminate, do the thinking for us. 

* Want a big central government to own all the land. Make noise about protecting the "rights" of bears, coyotes, and rattlesnakes, in order to discourage farming so that, after clearing those tiresome little hill farms out of the way, big government can strip-mine the land.

* May seriously believe we'll find another planet we can inhabit, in another solar system, when we've made this one unlivable.

* Don't publicize the fact, but actually like war and want to institute a political system based on endless violent takeovers. Marxist "dialectics" actually mean each totalitarian socialist regime will be violently overthrown until human population is sparse enough that people could, assuming communism were still preached to them as an ideal, live in voluntary communism. 

* Don't understand that other people want to be, and be recognized as, adults since Loony Leftists, themselves, want to be little boys in power. (Power consisting of bossing and bullying, shared or transferred by fighting. Sophisticated though his verbal skills became, Karl Marx's mental age always remained about three.)

* Tend to be aggressive atheists because they hate to be reminded that there is a Higher Power than themselves.

* Tend to come from, and have, broken homes; want to believe that serial divorces and remarriages are normal and having all babies reared in government-run creches would be the ideal.

* Prone to magical thinking about their ability, as little boys in power, to solve everyone's problems--if necessary, just by screaming that the problems have been fixed.

Even if they're women, Loony Lefties think and tend to talk like three-year-old boys.

Book Review: Shame Interrupted

Tiitle: Shame Interrupted

Author: Edward T. Welch

Publisher: New Growth Press

Date: 2012

ISBN: 978-1-935273-98-1

Length: 337 pages including reference material

Quote: “Women can usually identify shame in their lives without much effort.”

Can they? Generally, outside of therapy groups that tend to attract people who have emotional issues in common?

If so, what are we as a society doing wrong? Are women usually emotionally abused? Or are counsellors actively, if not consciously, trying to make people aware of feeling shame, because when what you have is a hammer you’re apt to want everything to be a nail?

There are some peculiarities about Edward T. Welch’s understanding of shame. He describes shame as a feeling of revulsion directed at oneself, but he fails to make clear why he imagines that people’s first experiences of revulsion, with things alien to the self that seem yucky, squishy, prickly, sticky, stinky, etc., seem to him to be connected to shame. That sort of illogical association sometimes identifies the last straggling survivors from an old psychotherapy cult that used to take as a point of doctrine that everything people thought and felt was really “about themselves.” You might observe that it was raining outside, and if these people were in an evangelical mood they’d reply, “And what does rain symbolize for you, and why are you feeling that about yourself?” This kind of conversation is so rarely preserved in nostalgic fiction today that I conclude that there were indeed some things about the 1960s that nobody misses at all, and Psychologically Insightful Conversation was one of them. Especially with that group.

For most of us, I suspect, revulsion is the primal instinct and shame is the learned reaction: we, or some of us, let people tell us that we are like rotten eggs and nastier things. For survivors from 1960s’ and 1970s’ therapy cults, however, boosting people’s self-esteem is the hammer, and searching for evidence that people suffer from low self-esteem—if not positively from shame—is their way of looking for nails.

Welch is one of those Christian counsellors whose strategy is to present conversion as therapy. For some people this approach to emotional problems does in fact work; Welch’s hammer hits their nails on the head. That’s what’s to like about this book.

What’s not to like is that, for other people, the emotional problems they have originate in medical conditions and/or social experience. These people may already be Christians. Just praying or singing with them may get them through emotional hard times, but that’s all it’s likely ever to do. Finding fault with the religious experience they have can do only harm.

Because all groups of people are polluted by human selfishness, though some of the less toxic schools of self-esteem psychology have infiltrated some churches, self-esteem psychology has not served churches particularly well. Welch urges people who have genuinely survived toxic shame that saying “I was wrong” is “part of Kingdom life.” So it undoubtedly will be but church groups in this life are like any other group. If you want to practice humility and believe that anyone else in the group is likely to have something to teach you, you can count the minutes before the social bullies in the group identify you as a public garbage disposal chute and dump all their unpleasantness on you. Welch might have done better to warn people who have survived toxic relationships of emotional abuse, especially if they are less wealthy than some of the congregation, “Don’t feed social bullies.”

Far from being foretastes of God’s Kingdom, many churches are scenes of emotional abuse. For anyone who has been bullied or otherwise abused, any abusive encounter in a church should be taken as an indication that they have not perfected the art of discouraging bullies. They should anticipate more bullying in that church and should practice self-respect by not going back to it. If you are saying “I was wrong” more often than you are hearing it, even if you are a new Christian and don’t completely understand the doctrines the church teaches, you are being bullied and have a moral responsibility before God to withhold your money and support from the group where that bullying occurs. If physical contact occurs, whether you just step away, loudly say “Stand back! Maintain a healthy social distance!”, or go into a full PTSD reaction with screaming, tears, and vomiting, all shame should be directed to the toucher; you should expect to be thanked if you left the offender’s hand attached to per arm, and shown more respect by members of any group you support.

Because of the philosophical background Welch reveals in this book, and the focus on emotions at the expense of the physical and social situations in which emotions may be felt, I’d hesitate to recommend this book to any church or school group.

That does not mean it can’t be useful to some individuals. I think it can. For individuals coming out of abusive homes, schools, or cults Welch’s focus on biblical Christianity seems likely to help; it certainly includes plenty of Bible study, and it’s well written, in plain English, without the clunky jargon that typified psychological self-help books in the 1970s.

It’s just my usual warning. Not all Christian books are likely, or even intended, to help every Christian. Most of us can relate to the emotions of Welch’s audience, in some way, but shame is not really a big part of even our emotional lives. If you start reading Shame Interrupted and then start curling up your nose and saying “So Christianity is supposed to be therapy now? What about all the abusers who attend churches?” or “Eww ick, that tone of a huckster peddling ‘Jesus’ as a bottle of Swamp Root & Snake Oil Elixir, good for what ails you…” this probably indicates that it’s not the book for you.

A Story I'd Use at Bianca Alyssa Perez's Workshop, if I Were Doing That, Which I'm Not

Writers may have heard that Belle Point Press is one of the more enterprising small independent publishers out there, that they're specifically dedicated to publishing the best literature of and from the Southern-Midwest States but they publish books from the Southern States and occasionally from other places too. In order to bring out the best work from new writers of real, if raw, talent, they sponsor an occasional writing workshop, like this one: 

https://bellepointpress.com/products/winter-2023-workshop-on-memory?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It costs money. It involves being online on Saturday. It involves Zoom. 

But I will dash off a true story from my memories...this one was provoked by another Southern-interest publisher promoting a song that reverses the traditional carry-me-back motif into "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." For what it's worth, although the songwriter presumably meant that per education and work experience in Harlan County, Kentucky, weren't going to qualify person for a better-paid job somewhere else, I've driven through Harlan County many times and encountered no difficulty leaving it, whatsoever. An anti-nostalgia song may be as refreshing as an anti-romance novel, but that in no way implies that people, generally, no longer want to be in small towns in the Appalachian Mountains.

The writing exercise, in which any number can play, works like this: Each participant writes a short true story of "a family memory." Then each person writes a fictionalized version of someone else's story from the perspective of a different character. 

So, true story:

The last Saturday morning in September, at breakfast, Dad broke the news. "You kids are going to have to vote. All three of you, mind! The question is, do you want to go back to Virginia..."

"Of course we do!" my brother and I shrieked in chorus.

"Don't interrupt. Do you want to go back to Virginia with your old Dad, or stay here and go to your new school that you like so well...without him."

"Is there a catch in that?" I said. "That's like asking if we want both candy and a dollar, or neither."

"Of course we want to go home with our Dad," my brother said. "Tribe must have Chief."

"Think about it," Dad said. "We have to think about what's good for the Baby, too." 

Our new school that we liked so well was operated by the Seventh-Day Adventist church. We went there after breakfast. I had a red paisley maxi-dress, the latest fashion, to wear when the middle grades went up front and sang "Faith of Our Fathers." I had a quarter to put in the collection box in what Adventists call "Sabbath School" and a dollar to put in the plate in the main church service. It wasn't potluck dinner week, so we went home for the afternoon. In the evening we'd go back to be taken to sing at a nursing home. 

Meanwhile, as we changed into shorts and took the Baby out to play, we had a quick try at thinking like the Baby. My natural sister didn't say or understand a lot of words yet. She was just learning to climb up stairs and wanted to climb up and down all the stairs in the project. Each building was a "four-plex" with two staircases. Nobody minded our climbing the stairs but, when we came to an open door where people were moving out, the Baby darted right inside and had to be hauled out. After that we thought it might be a good idea to play in the shade, under the little tree in its enclosure of bare sandy dirt in the back parking lot. 

The year before, we'd rented half of a duplex that was pretty nice, with a big back yard where we each had a rose bush, a camellia bush, and a tomato plant to look after and a swing set to play on. We'd moved to our new apartment in the project in order to be near the church school. It was a mission school, and church, deliberately placed in what everyone called a bad neighborhood. The neighbors did seem pretty bad to us. The project did boast a swimming pool; we'd enjoyed swimming in the motel pool before we'd found the duplex house, but when Dad saw the older kids hanging out at the pool at the project, it became very clear that we were never going to swim there.

What the project offered as a place for us to play was maybe ten square feet of bare dirt around a moribund little tree. I sat on the ground and read my new big fat book (it was Louis Untermeyer's Treasury of Laughter). My brother sat on the ground and made a row of pebbles. The Baby sat on the ground and sifted sand over herself like a bird.

"Mother doesn't like you doing that," my brother reminded her.

"Don't care," said the Baby.

"You know," I observed casually, "it would be different back home on the farm. The dirt there has potatoes in it. This is the time of year when the potatoes get ripe. Kids get to put on old clothes and dig through acres of potatoes."

"And have bonfires to roast the potatoes in," my brother recalled. "Roast hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire, and potatoes in the ashes" 

"And we'd go around the cousins' houses and help dig their potatoes, and they'd come around our house and help dig ours..."

"And instead of being scolded for getting dirty when you didn't have to, because you can't dig potatoes without getting dirty, you'd get money for your share of the potatoes you dug..."

We went indoors. "Enough dirt to clog the drains," Mother said. "There ought to be a way to distract her from doing that."

"We're ready to vote," my brother said. "Baby, do you want to stay here or go back to Virginia?"

"Wanna go Virginia," the Baby said.

"That's three votes to go home," I said. "Majority!"

The parents sighed, but on the whole they seemed pleased.

We had rented houses in our extended family's neighborhood for a few years before. We'd planted vegetables, and the only vegetable we'd ever had enough of to sell were potatoes. The land had been poisoned for so long, Dad said, it hardly even produced a bean. We'd eaten green beans off our own plants but had seen no real proof that our green bean could ripen; there weren't many beans and the beetles ate them if they weren't picked thin and young, like French beans. So Dad had written to people about wanting another job in town. For one year he'd taught a trade school course in agriculture. He might have been happier, and the school might have been happier, if it had been a university course in math. Anyway he wasn't offered another contract. He'd taken a desperation job in a factory that involved working with corrosive chemicals; blistered, he'd said he was going to have to quit, forfeit even the unemployment insurance, and go home. If he deserted Mother, everyone would feel sorry for her and give her enough money to keep us in the church school. But none of this was explained to us children until the Baby was in college.

I put on my maxi-dress and went to the nursing home. They didn't have a piano; we sang "Amazing Grace" and other hymns accompanied by a guitar. I listened to the middle grades' little-kid voices singing in unison and thought how much I loved singing.

Back at the apartment there was a confirmation vote. There were discussions of logistics. Almost everything we had, including family heirlooms from England, had been left behind or lost when we'd moved back to the West Coast. A large part of Dad's salary had been spent on guilty efforts to restock our closets and shelves. In the apartment all of our new cherished books and toys were still in boxes jammed into a closet. Now they'd all have to be sold, or if not sold donated to a charity store, so we could make the trip back by Trailways bus. My Barbies could go, because Mother didn't want to hurt Aunt Dotty's feelings, but the paper dolls I was just learning to dress couldn't go. The suitcase of books for reading on the bus was pathetically small. We'd only just bought encyclopedias and we could take only two volumes of one encyclopedia. We would sing in nursing homes again, but it'd be years before we went to another church meeting. Within two weeks my brother and I would have formed the habit of basically hating school.

It was worth it, I thought, to get back home.

Hip-Hop Fusion

Everyone knows already that I think hip-hop music leans too heavily on obbligato (often pre-recorded) and heavy beats (also subject to being pre-recorded). Don't all aunts think that? The thought pops into the head as the first baby pops out into this world, right? However, thanks to the Gift of Music Tolerance in Middle Age, I enjoy some rap and hip-hop, if the sound is not too angry (or is reasonably angry) and the language is not too foul. Here is an album, I forget who shared the link because it was a long time ago, with a lot of interesting music genre fusion floating above a hip-hop beat, much of which actually sounds more hoppy than hostile:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=KHmJxA4yJj4&list=OLAK5uy_kAun2-FnfGkxqg2dfBnufo52CsXX_KiWA

Dig? Those who dug may be able to get to Asheville on the fifth of April. If these beats make you want to move your feet, as distinct from punching somebody (or their stereo), you can buy tickets to hear the Polish-American hip-hopper live:

https://www.bandsintown.com/t/1027442062

(Full disclosure: Though willing to help musicians track their link activity, I am not affiliated with and will receive no benefits from your using the link above.)

Why We Need to Save or Replace the Word "Racist"

Maybe I should avoid looking things up on Google, but I looked something up and found yet another incidence of abuse of the word "racist," using the very special left-wing belief that, since all of America's "social institutions" (by which they mean cultural ideas like marriage, not just hospitals, schools, research facilities and suchlike) developed in an era of racism, all of our social institutions and all of us who've been shaped by American culture are racist.

Of course, the reason why people would use this idea is obvious. It doesn't help to correct any real abuses. It does make people who don't particularly admire the speaker feel annoyed, and people who do admire the speaker (or who have guilty consciences) feel guilty. 

Gentle Readers, I hope none of you feels guilty of being a racist. Or a sexist, which is the same thing with regard to women. Or an elitist, which is the same thing with regard to people who have less than you, and, unlike the other two, has not been extensively called out and challenged and made into something people are proud of not being and/or feel guilty if others think they might be. Elitism is alive and well in our culture today, and is responsible for most of the non-criminal behavior that is mislabelled as racism and/or sexism. But I hope you are not any of those things. 

It may be helpful to think clearly about what reasonable people call racist, sexist, or elitist:

Racists... 

* Can identify and describe a particular group, or groups, of people they don't like and don't want to treat equally with everyone else. In practice this group may be defined by something other than physical descent from a common ancestor ("race") or physical type ("race"), or sex, or income level. "Racist" necessarily means that the criterion for hate is one definition of "race" or the other. This kind of hate can be based on other criteria; the more subjective and esoteric, the less sympathy the hater is likely to find, but people can adopt a belief that all men called James are subject to some sort of mystical curse causing their granddaughters to be vile human beings, and practice "racist" hate against granddaughters of men called James, if they really want to. (We are such an interesting species that, whatever comes to mind when we try to think of an example of something nobody could possibly do, someone Out There is probably doing it.)

* Are probably "really" reacting to some muddled memory of something in their early childhood, but invent all kinds of rationalizations for hating Group X. These rationalizations can be rational--racist baby-boomers, in the literal sense of White Americans who hate Black Americans and Black Americans who hate White Americans, probably were treated unfairly by someone in the other category during the color wars of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1930s many Germans were poor as a direct result of actions taken by banks, many of which were Jewish-owned, too. What's irrational is the projection of emotions from the person who may have deserved them to the entire group. Instead of wanting to find the banker, strip him down to his shorts, and pay what he owed to those affected by the bank's actions, people wanted to send Anne Frank to prison. We are a very interesting species.

* So they may do dastardly and detestable things, like bombing churches...

* Or petty and tacky things, like making a point of serving customers of a certain type last regardless of who started waiting first...

* Will find ways either to avoid hiring a member of Group X, or to avoid promoting one who's already been hired, or to sabotage the member of Group X and get person to leave the job.

* May be able to like a member of Group X in a racist way: "Tracy's nice, not like the typical member of Group X, I've known Tracy for a long time and enjoyed lots of benefits from our 'friendship,' but really they're all [whatever undesirable way of "being" Group X is blamed for] and in a crisis I wouldn't trust even Tracy."

* Generally have no friends in Group X, and don't want any.

* Actively reject books and other products they associate with Group X's culture, although they may snap up the products if the products are being retailed by someone who does not belong to Group X.

* If Group X are generally richer and more influential than their own group, may internalize racist beliefs and at least try to convince themselves that Group X are rich because they are evil and their own group are poor because of Group X's collective wrongdoing, in the face of all evidence. The fact that this kind of rhetoric was prevalent in Germany in the 1930s makes it alarming that it has supporters when found among Black Americans today. 

* Are not politically more conservative or more liberal than people whose besetting sins, or cherished errors of thought, are different from theirs. In the mid-twentieth century it was true, for one generation, that "conservative" thinking, questioning the need for any change and wanting to make even desirable changes slowly, clung to segregation in a typically "conservative" way. However, fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with race and appeals to Black Americans who have used fiscally conservative personal discipline to reach some level of wealth and successfulness. 

People Who Absorbed Racist Ideas but Are Not Actively Racists: 

* May hold stereotyped beliefs about Group X. They consciously wish Group X well but they almost fall out of their chair when they hear a member of Group X, who they always thought didn't study foreign languages, speaking a foreign language fluently. It is important, if you know people who still commit this kind of gaffes, to remember at all times that the STEREOTYPES are "racist." The people are trying to practice good will. 

* Are probably not interested in any traditional culture associated with Group X. Typically think their own group's, e.g., music is richly varied and nuanced and beautiful while Group X's musical tradition consists of "monotonous chants" or "elaborate overproduced efforts to reproduce something from the past" or some other wide-sweeping disparagement.

* C.S. Lewis had the fortitude to write about the literature from other cultures that was available to him, and that he couldn't resist trying to read, "so far as I understand them" and "I am not sure that I understand..." Few other people of narrow education but good will have the confidence Lewis had. When he was younger Lewis probably wouldn't have had it either. After writing an official literature book for the leading university in your country, then you can admit that the reason why you didn't enjoy a foreign book was that you're not sure you understand it. I personally did admit that sort of thing even in college, because I was a Lewis fan. Most people won't admit it, although it will be painfully obvious. It is important to remember that, although not admitting you don't understand a work of art shows vanity, it has nothing to do with "race."

* Don't have close friends in Group X. Would like to have such friends, but aren't sure how to begin and probably don't impress the members of Group X they've met. Their good will is showing but so is their nervousness, and there may be no shared passion from which real philia would grow.

* Probably will commit what members of Group X perceive as microaggressions. May or may not be willing to admit that these gaffes build up resentment and prevent friendship. 

* If they are members of "privileged" demographic groups, they don't see themselves as especially privileged, so they don't know how to react to calls to action that address their privilege. This web site tries from time to time to increase understanding: "White privilege" mostly consists of the sort of thing that White people classify as common courtesy, except that stereotyping may cause them not to extend this common courtesy to Group X. "American privilege" means that, even when Americans are unable to pay their bills and feel burdened by a lot of possessions that won't even sell fast enough to pay the said bills, they probably are enjoying (unless they've already thrown away) digital watches and color TV sets and show-off cars and stereo systems and personal computers and so on, and they might at least minimize poor-mouthing in the presence of people from socialist countries whose annual income is less than the Americans pay for monthly rent. Another "White American privilege" is the freedom of association that allows White American millionnaires to hang out mostly with White American billionnaires and feel that they're not especially rich. These things are accidental by-products of belonging to an interesting species, and nobody's fault. Screaming "racist" at the privileged does not increase their consciousness, gratitude, or generosity.

* Are not yet sure, in a solid experiential way, that the racist ideas they absorbed are false.  Don't want to believe that all members of Group X are hostile to them...but if people scream "racist" at them, they are likely to think that the hostility is real all right. Maybe other things their racist grandmother told them about Group X are also true. Maybe segregation, or war, or some other official policy of intolerance, was the right way to deal with Group X.

People of Good Will: 

* Do not accept guilt trips on any demographic basis. Today's men never denied anyone the right to vote, even a hundred years ago in Old China men never bound anybody's feet, and likewise today's White people never owned a slave or violated the treaties under which indigenous Americans allowed North America's oldest White families to immigrate. In some parts of the United States a majority of the White population have ancestors who immigrated after the Civil War and the undeclared war on indigenous Americans. "Move over, share, extend the same privileges to other people" are things that can reasonably said to members of privileged groups. "You are racist or to be blamed for racism" is not such a thing, and should not be said.

* Will, in fact, defend their own side against collective taunts, insults, and accusations. German people of good will could hardly defend Hitler but they will maintain that there are good things about being German. We in these United States were doing most of the world's pollution, which was bad enough, and then we exported the high-polluting technology to poorer nations, which was vile, and we do owe the world--planet and its Maker as well as its people--apologies for that, but apart from that we can still give thanks for the great blessing of being American.

* Groups organized around "White Pride" or "Black Power" or "Gay Pride" or similar themes, to the extent that such groups are organized, may well be platforms for expression of something other than good will. That can happen. The most usual way it happens is that groups are organized for the purpose of transferring money to the pockets of a person or small group who are, on the spectrum between avarice and generosity, probably on the end with avarice. They're not about hate but they are about grift. A demographically based group may, like the place-of-origin clubs at colleges, serve worthy purposes like helping people find and pay for transportation back home on breaks, or it may exist just to line the organizer's pockets. We do well to limit our involvement with all such groups. But "White Pride" is not necessarily about hating non-White people. Although I've seen web sites where groups of highly educated, sophisticated, American leftists insisted that their White families were able to celebrate their ancestral pride in much more specific ways than merely being proud of being White, and although my family's like that too, that is privilege some White families have and others lack. It's a mistake to assume that someone who flaunts his White pride, or his Confederate heritage, or similar, is expressing ill will. In fact, if your basis for making such assumptions is that your White and/or Southern relatives celebrate the ancestors who make great stories by standing out from the masses of White and/or Southern people generally, failing to consider that other White and/or Southern people didn't have the benefit of that kind of ancestors is elitist bigotry. Some people's stories really do start with a mixed bag of ancestors whose stories weren't preserved, from which sprang these individuals or their parents, and their sense of heritage pride starts with a demographic. 

* People of good will generally want to be polite in public, but when they see efforts toward politeness pushed to the point of absurdity, they do laugh. Songs specifically written in opposition to racism, for example, contained the lines "Red, Brown, Yellow, Black, or White, all are precious in God's sight" and "Who knows the color of God? Black or White or Yellow or Red, all or any or none of the above?" Considering that the difference between what used to be called the Yellow and Red "races" never was literal skin color, and in fact the list of genetic quirks thought to distinguish those groups overlaps considerably--and yet the typical profile of Asian immigrants in North America remains very different from the typical profile of indigenous North Americans--most people of good will, most of the time, seem to prefer to identify specific nations rather than the old color labels. But that does not mean anyone of good will would ever want to censor those songs. Write better ones, if they can. People of good will don't censor.

* People of good will do care, and get involved, when they hear of real injustice toward some person, whether it was based on "race" or income or something else. Their standards for whom they're willing to defend may differ, and not always satisfy everyone. People of good will are perturbed by reports of police brutality, but such reports lose their impact when people like Rodney King or Breonna Taylor turn out to be guilty. That does not stop people of good will continuing to practice good will as best they can.  

* People of good will tend to be wary of tokenism, and don't usually go out of their way to talk to people for the sake of demographic diversity alone. If they happen to be biracial themselves they might be attracted to multiethnic city neighborhoods. If they have a single solid ethnic identity that matches their physical type, they might be attracted to places where that group is in the majority. Physical traits are not the primary bases of their identities; they're more likely to identify with jobs or hobbies or religious traditions. They may or may not want to preserve their physical looks by having children with spouses who look like them. That's the standard psychological explanation for two facts about this web site: (1) my circles of acquaintance, friends, and chosen family members are madly multiethnic, and (2) I don't expect that yours needs to be, in order to prove good will. It's not all that big a deal. 

* People of good will do at least read about different cultures...though how much time they spend reading anything may depend on what else they do with their lives. Not all White Americans of good will have had the experience of voting for a presidential candidate from a different "race" category. Most have been fans of entertainers from different categories, though, and most read books written by authors from different categories.\And when they discover a literary heir to Thomas Sowell or Amy Tan, they spread the good news far and wide.

* People of good will are open to the possibility of friendship when they do meet people from different demographic groups. While recognizing that the civil rights movement and the color wars that went on in its wake are over, they do take claims of ongoing racist abuse seriously. They're up for a round of the Equal Opportunity Enforcer game. They'll walk with people who feel the need for an escort in their neighborhoods. 

* People of good will don't pad grades or promote workers for the sake of "diversity." But they do coach people who need and deserve it. 

* People of good will have probably consulted health care providers of different ethnic types than their own, probably do business with other service providers of different types than their own, and, when they can, they recommend those businesses to others. They're as likely to go to India for medical treatment as to go to Europe to see the ruins or the Galapagos to watch the birds.

* People of good will give thanks for whatever privileges they've inherited. They can properly be proud of being born in one of the English-speaking countries that have generally been so much better off, largely because more Protestant, than the rest of the world. They can give thanks for the blessings of knowing about the ancestors who did and didn't make good stories. of living where their ancestors have lived (however small the house or acreage may be), of having had books at home, having gone to university, having had parents who stayed married to each other. They're not ashamed of wherever their ancestors came from, however monotonously homogeneous or wildly mixed their ancestors were. They do like to share the blessings. Even if they're poor relations who have very little but "background," they share the benefits of their background when they can.

* People of good will don't become racists because left-wing rhetoric calls them racists. They do recognize the insult, though, and they repay it as it deserves...by thinking a little longer and harder on each occasion before they vote for Democrats. The D Party does need to call a halt to the offensive rhetoric. If their own positive arguments are weak, Ds need to look for ways to build stronger ones rather than screaming "racism" every time they encounter ideas different from their own. 

It seems to me that I've written most of the content on this web site in such a way that this web site is read only by people of good will. 

Racism still exists in the way some individuals treat others, although a person reading publishers' specifications for what they do and don't want to see could be excused for thinking that its primary victim group is heterosexual White men. Give enough White men enough reason to feel that way and, no doubt, they'll get defensive and want to persecute some other group of people. We need to end the insanity by practicing good will both within and across demographic boundaries. 

That will not be accomplished by using "racism" to mean anything and everything about any country with a history of racism. It will not be accomplished even by using "racism" to describe elitism, even when there is some overlap (as when Jeff Hobbs documented more severe sentencing for children of poor families as being the reason why reform schools were majority-minority). We need a word that means, specifically and exclusively, intentionally treating all people of some "race" category less well than people of some other "race" category. That word is going to amount to an ugly accusation when applied to people, and should be used with care even when applied to things and ideas. We need to make sure that word can be published only cautiously, after fact-checking; we need to know that, while all sorts of ethics questions may be part of election mudslinging, calling a candidate a racist (or whatever word we adopt to replace "racist") is like calling the candidate a thief  We need to hold editors to a very firm rule that the word for "ideas that don't conform to the current Democratic Party platform" is most likely to be merely "Republican."