Cat Drama Status Update, Friday Afternoon

The prompt at https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2023/04/friday-writings-74-act-of-paying.html was for writings about paying attention. One of the poems prompted focussed attention on urban despair, the kind of despair induced specifically and merely by being in a crowded, polluted environment for too long; you'll find it, if you click on the links in the link widget, but be warned that it's effective enough to be a painful read.

I started noodling with a poem about love and attention. It was meant to have irregular rime. I didn't pay much attention to rime, and the poem, or draft-of-poem, came out without much of it.

Attention is not quite the same as love

but they connect. They intersect. A child

is happy, in the sense of fortunate,

when all the little things that make it wail

are solved by a form bending form above

to offer food, dry pants, the airy kiss

that's just enough  to take away such pain

as the child knows. Attention to the child

is all it really wants, or needs, for then.

Later come pains that can't be kissed away

and only increase when attention's given.

Sooner or later all of us must come

to know ourselves our only comforters.

The baby teeth first stretch, then split, the gum.

The baby's told: "Stop fussing for attention."

Attention won't relieve the pain. Time will.

The baby learns: some things, no use to mention.

There's a recent, but honorable, tradition of posting unfinished poems on blogs and inviting readers to try finishing them. Although one poet who wrote some successful poems that way described the experience of writing them in terms of "being pebbled," I think I'll put this poem on readers' doorsteps and see if anyone feeds it.

My attention keeps drifting back to the glyphosate-poisoned kittens. The male might survive--unlikely, but possible. The younger female's going through what the hours-older female went through last night. I have to assume she's dead; but though she's not in a box, she's in a Schroedinger's Cat sort of situation at the moment, not dead, not alive. Cats "have nine lives" because they can feel stiff, cold, and dead when they're actually in a coma. I touched the kitten's back, trying to start the intimacy of cleaning a kitten with as little contact as possible, because she's had no chance to build up immunity to any virus or bacteria. Her back was stiff, this morning...but her paws and tail were floppy, and when I touched her again, preparatory to burying the body, the whole body was floppy and even showed some reflexes, though the urinary reflex had shut off. 

I buried a kitten that was in this condition once, during a glyphosate poisoning episode. The next day I went to work, and when I came in the kitten had climbed out of its shallow grave and crawled about fifty yards, back to its original (by then empty) nest, just to die there. 

I kept a kitten that was in this condition in the house once, during another glyphosate poisoning episode. Two litter mates responded to treatment with charcoal and lived--one for another month or so, the other for three years. The comatose kitten, however, showed only reflex movement for four days before the body started to exude a bacterial odor so foul I took it out and buried it, and at least that one stayed buried.

I don't dare hope that Serena's pretty princess kitten will live long enough to accept a name.

I don't want to bury her, yet, either.

Some might say that one thing this unfortunate kitten could be given was a humane, certain death. I've seen Serena smother doomed kittens under layers of paper or fabric, seen Heather snap their spines as if they were rats; cats do understand about euthanasia when kittens are in pain, and when the primary cause of death is glyphosate poisoning they're not tempted to eat the bodies. Maybe I'm a sentimental wimp. For now, I give this kitten attention.

There are a few known cases where cats emerged from comas like this and lived and were healthy. So far as I know those were all adult cats, or at least well grown kittens. 

Book Review: Being Born with a Rusty Spoon in Your Mouth

Title: Being Born with a Rusty Spoon in Your Mouth 

Author: Liz Fe Lifestyle

Date: 2023

Publisher: Amazon

ISBN: none

Length: 76 pages

Illustrations: colorful drawings

Quote: "We hate the Metropolis because we envy it. Those who live there, the Rich, hold the power over us." 

After the collapse of civilization as we know it, a feudal class system appears and the Marxist revolution has a chance to be reenacted. Teen Shay, a middle-class "Helper" (apprentice weapons maker with a special gift for her trade), is drafted to make weapons for an impending attack on the Rich. Teen Tyde, a discontented Rich kid (son of a "Counsel" member--pun repeated, not explained, throughout), will have a crush on Shay when they meet. But this is a tale of war, not love...

It left me cold. Why so primal? Why can't anyone in this story use their human reason? Males have historically been allowed to blame testosterone for driving them to consider fighting ahead of any alternative, but starting and ending the narrative with a girl raises the false hope that a better alternative will at least be proposed...and it's not. I was disappointed by this short young adult novel. 

If, however, you like an easy-reading adventure story that's not sugar-coated for the tots, where the stakes are high, the main characters are in danger, and people they care about die, you might like Being Born with a Rusty Spoon in Your Mouth. 

If you're a girl who's tired of novels where the mention of a boy seems to cue the violins, he's male therefore somebody must fall in love with him, you might appreciate Shay's utterly unromantic attitude toward Tyde. There's a whole genre of romances for adults where the protagonist resolves her feelings about very rich people by marrying one. Shay's resemblance to the first girl Tyde thought he was in love with might give her a chance to do that, but she's made of tougher stuff than to admire a wimpy boy like Tyde, or pretend to do. Yay girls. It might be nice if this novel spun off sequels in which Tyde grows up brave and strong enough to deserve Shay, but it's also nice that, in today's world, publishers no longer insist that that's necessary.

Another thing you'll probably like about the printed book is the pictures. They came through larger than real life and made my digital preview copy hard to read, but they're very good, clear, evocative drawings.

Cat Drama Status Update: Friday

The kittens seemed to be recovering, yesterday. This morning they don't. The one who had seemed like Serena-all-over-again died during the night. The other two seem sicker.

The one I didn't try to help didn't live, either.

Serena has been through this before. More than once. She knows the drill. But she loved these kittens; when we thought they were going to live, yesterday, she trembled all over. 

We need a ban on spraying any chemical outdoors. There may be a chemical somewhere that will kill only the things some people are too lazy to kill for themselves, without harming other people's pets or their gardens or themselves, but it's not been found. What has been confirmed is that the chemical companies are irresponsible and fail to stop marketing chemicals that harm human beings, not to mention their pets and their gardens. 

ETA: I wondered why the kittens had lost so much ground overnight. Had it been too soon for them to eat? Maybe. Were they riddled with internal parasites? Possibly. Then I stepped outside and did not smell, but felt, more glyphosate vapors in the air. It's expected to rain again today but the Bad Neighbor was up here, early, making sure nobody had a chance to enjoy the fresh air after yesterday's rain.

Cat Drama Status Update

Serena's three kittens spent two nights wrapped in an old flannel shirt beside my workbench, which is the hot spot for the house because the desktop computer lives there. They didn't seem to know that Serena looked at them a few times but didn't come close to them. 

At 4 p.m., after 44 hours, I took the kittens out for a visit. 

"My babies!" Serena nonverbally cried, quivering all over with eagerness and wariness. She ran up and sniffed them and me over thoroughly. She licked the male kitten's back end. "Those disgusting scented wet napkins!" She called Silver in for a consultation. "My darling babies! Are you quite well?"

"No, we're starving!" whined the male kitten. 

Serena meowed to Silver several times before she sat down and began cleaning and feeding her kittens. 

They're too little to have names yet, but the color and texture of the male kitten's coat brought "Suede" to mind. I had also thought of a few "trio" names like Treasure, Trophy, and Tripp, or (if they hadn't got better) Trouble, Trial, and Tragedy. 

The two female kittens seem at this point to have very different personalities. The classic calico has black eye patches on a mostly white face, a long thin build, and a lot of energy. She looks like Serena all over again, with slightly different spots. When Serena reclaimed her family, she was the one who turned back to snuggle against me. The pale calico is quiet and lets the other two do things first. The seldom-used saints' names Tryphena and Tryphosa come to mind.

All three definitely do perceive my voice and take turns "speaking" and "listening," though they ignored other sounds and may have been reacting to my voice as vibration in a body they were touching rather than hearing it as a sound. 

Book Review: What Grandpa Learned from the Honeybees

Title: What Grandpa Learned from the Honeybees 

Author: Henry J. Svec (and Mary J. Svec)

Date: 2023

Publisher: Amazon

ISBN: 978-1-989346-97-6

Quote: "Mary and I decided to turn our 50-acre farm back over to nature and create a honeybee sanctuary." 

With an opener like that and a picture of a bee on the cover, I was expecting a book about farming or beekeeping. Well, this isn't one. It's about money, and the Svecs don't claim they made theirs in beekeeping. They assume that the reader, too, has a steady job with a good income, and proceed to discuss the benefits of saving, frugality, and sensible investment strategies. 

Does that make this a book for the privileged? Older people won't think so. The Svecs have not forgotten the stage in life when saving meant walking instead of riding the bus to save two dollars a week (today it'd be more like two dollars a trip), and you could do that, because you were still full of energy, because your body was still growing. What may seem like an assumption of privilege, to the young, is that when we were young anybody could go out and find a steady low-paid, student-labor-type job, if only in food service. Today the young are competing for those jobs with 38-year-old single parents who know that, if they lose this part-time job as a busboy or pool cleaner, they'll lose custody of the children too. And those of us who aren't young, owe our youthful looks and energy to exercise, and would like to get paid for doing that exercise on a student-labor-type job, are lucky if prospective employers are polite enough not to laugh in our faces.

Anyway this book was written by a nice couple of grandparents, for their grandchildren first and the rest of the world afterward, and their grandchildren have jobs and can save a little money by bringing their refreshments for the work day from home instead of buying overpriced coffee and snacks in town, walking instead of riding the bus, and so on. Bee behavior offers analogies to that, and the Svecs go on to draw further analogies from bee behavior to Grandpa's rules for choosing investments, in real estate or in stocks and bonds. The Svecs live in Canada and focus on businesses and real estate in Canada, but their strategy is the sort of thing that could potentially work anywhere.

This book will not teach the reader how to keep bees, but it may offer some tips the reader can use, at least to stay off welfare in between one employer's going out of business and the next employer's being found. And it's a pleasant read, with something of the feel of listening to bees buzz in a prairie abloom with clover.

What Is the Nicest Breed of Dog to Adopt? (Surprise)

Someone seriously asked Google this question, and Google found a post that seriously attempts to answer it. According to a poll taken at a site called Pitpat, the top ten list of dogs perceived as friendly, gentle, lovable, sweet, and nice includes:

1. Golden Retrievers

2. Boston Terriers

3. Labrador Retrievers

4. Poodles

5. Border Collies

6. Beagles

7. Irish Setters

8. Staffordshire Bull Terriers

9. Cavalier King Charles Spaniels

10. Cockapoos

"Cockapoos"? The mind squirbles. Dogs that can stand being called that probably are sweethearts, but what kind of humans can stand being asked what kind of dog they're walking and having to say it's a cockapoo? 

Anyway, they didn't even know about Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, the official animal emblem of Maryland. This breed was created by crossbreeding Labrador and Golden Retrievers, and it's easy to find similar DNA in shelters everywhere. All the Chessies I've ever known were very gentle, friendly, lovable dogs. They were not free from bad habits, such as swimming in filthy water and then shaking that water out of their thick, fluffy, super-absorbent coats all over the nearest human, but if a person didn't like dogs, I would think living around Chessies would just about have to convert the person.

This web site has featured retrievers, poodles, and collies lately, and Irish Setters and spaniels aren't always easy to find in shelters. Terriers are, unfortunately. The phobia-trigger phrase "pit bull" does apply to one of the many breeds of terriers, and other terrier breeds' faces look similar enough to trigger some phobic reactions. If you would consider moving into a new apartment, you might want to look for a smaller dog with a different kind of face. Nevertheless, the huge majority of terriers are well-behaved, quiet, lovable dogs. Their typical bad habit, if they have one, is digging up the lawn. Usually they do that when mice and rats are burrowing close to the house.

They are intelligent animals and need to have "jobs." All pet animals are most likely to misbehave when they're bored. As the gremlins were counting on in the movie of that name, any animal that's always kept at the back of a closet and not given water will either break out and turn into a gremlin, or die. 

I tend to feel that the best looking terriers are the mixed breeds who look more like hounds or spaniels or something. I'll try now to detach from that feeling and pick three of America's most photogenic adoptable terriers.

Zipcode 10101: Mango from Long Beach  

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/mango-47564190/ny/long-beach/posh-pets-rescue-ny615/

One year old and probably close to her full healthy weight at 39 pounds, Mango comes with the warning that she's very energetic. She needs humans who like to walk or jog every day. She's described as very clever, a fast learner of all the basic training skills she's been taught. Because she is so active and always looking for things to learn and do, they recommend keeping her in a crate when nobody's watching her. But she is, according to the rescuing agency, nice to other dogs and children. 

Zipcode 20202: Luna from Fairfax  

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/luna-59958953/va/fairfax-station/homeward-trails-animal-rescue-inc-va210/

She's staying at a foster home, and they don't rave about her wonderful personality. They just say she's cat-friendly and child-friendly. So you know the foster family are getting attached to her wonderful personality. If they refuse to let her go, please notify this web site and we'll have another terrier post.

Zipcode 30303: Barkley from Winder  

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/barkley-60154086/ga/winder/pup-cat-co-ga76/

The shelter staff don't take time to do professional-quality web pages for their animals but it sounds as if there are good reasons. They spend more time taking the animals out to meet potential adopters. About Barkley they say he's a young, playful pup and behaves well with other animals.

Best Films to Watch When You're Having a Bad Day, and Status Update

Some might argue that, if you're free to watch films, it's not all that bad a day...

Anyway, I vote for anything likely to provoke laughter. Laughter works the diaphragm muscle and relieves pain, so it'll make the day less bad.

This post is a stub. Other people's nominations.are linked at LongAndShortReviews. 

I don't have a real favorite, but in case anyone is aggregating replies to this blog question, I'll pick Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep in She-Devil. 

Now the status update. I'm not having a bad day, yet, though there are ominous indicators of a sad day in the near future. Maybe. 

We're having a cold snap; the last two nights' temperatures dropped to or below the freezing mark, depending on your exact location, though at the Cat Sanctuary temperatures didn't stay below freezing long enough to damage any flowers or leaves. Prunus, which react to temperatures, bloomed and leafed out long ago, and are vulnerable. Dogwoods and redbuds, which react to light, have passed their peak. Some people have azaleas in bloom.

Yesterday, on the second day of the cold snap, Serena all but audibly said to me, "Let's do a Tortie Tuesday post."

"No time," I said. "I have three urgent errands to do in town, and I've already posted something."

"On Tortie Tuesday?"

"Yes."

"Well, shame on you!" Serena nonverbally said. "Because News is coming out! My kittens are coming out!"

A tiny calico kitten and a tiny peaches-and-cream kitten were dozing in a corner on the porch. A stack of newspapers had been piled up about a yard away. On inspection, the newspapers had been used to bury a larger kitten, pale calico, dead. I removed it from the porch and proceeded on the way. Serena ran out after me, for the first time in years, meowing as if she were her mother. (Samantha Scaredycat always meowed "Don't leave me alone!" as I left.)

"My babies! Didn't you see my babies?" Serena insisted, pointing back toward the porch and leading me to the corner where they lay.

"Beautiful," I said. 

"Aren't you going to help with them?" Serena insisted, meowing. Then she ran to the kittens and cuddled them. 

"Of course I am," I said. "It'll be warm for a few more hours, so with your kind permission, I'll run into town and do these errands as fast as I can. You can watch them for a few hours, can't you? Then I'll come back and bring them inside when it's dark and cold, if that's all right with you."

"Must you leave us?" Serena meowed. This is not typical of Serena. If she thought the babies were at risk from insects--but it hadn't been warm enough--or bigger predators, she knows how to use storage boxes and their contents to build dens and nests with an ingenuity many humans could only envy.

"Why so clingy?" I said. "Aren't your daughters going to help you?"

"I am," Silver said, by bounding into the corner to curl up beside Serena. "Pastel and Crayola are nice but they're not really our kind of cat."

I went into town. I was late and missed seeing someone. The mail I was looking for had not arrived. When I came home a third tiny kitten, also pale calico, was lying beside the other two on the porch. Silver and Serena reported that all was going well.

Then dicamba vapors drifted past and prickled my throat. Besides making throats raspy and killing the plants people want to keep alive, the other common immediate effect of dicamba vapors is to slow down people's thyroid metabolism. I felt lazy and dozy all last week and had looked forward to not feeling that way this week.

The sun sank low in the west. I went out, as promised, and scooped the kittens into the Serena Box. I set up the old Samantha Box, which was sold as a humane trap, to use the dead kitten as bait to catch anyone that might attack the living kittens. I brought the Serena Box where Serena spent much of her early life into its old place in the office. Serena came in to check on the babies.

But all was not going well. Serena and Silver now refused to cuddle the kittens. They became chilled and began crying. The cats refused to keep them warm. When I came back and felt how cold they were, I scooped them onto an old flannel shirt and set them on the cot beside me. 

"Why are you not nursing and snuggling your babies?" I asked Serena.

"Try it and find out," she nonverbally said. "They are not doing well. That's why I wanted you to look at them sooner."

"They're so little, they can't possibly have any resistance to germs, and I've been in town and probably picked up new ones," I warned.

"If they don't live, they don't," Serena nonverbally said. "If you can keep them alive, do, and if you can't, you just can't."

I dug around for a box of wet napkins. The kittens had had a meal of milk; it was time their back ends were cleaned, they nonverbally said. I cleaned them. Only whey-like liquid came out. I mixed up a charcoal capsule in water for them and gave each kitten a drop.

"Blah! What's this?" the kittens nonverbally said. "Where's the milk?"

"No milk for them," Serena said, "until the curds come out clean."

In the corner near the heater the kittens warmed up and settled down for a four-hour nap.

Four hours later they excreted more whey and took another drop of charcoal. Years ago, after about a week of normal meals of cat's milk, Annie's kittens lived and even grew a little on three weeks of charcoal solution. I don't know whether kittens less than a day old could handle charcoal. It is NOT a "nutritional supplement." It pulls nutrients out of the body along with the poisons and disease germs for which it is an emergency remedy. So far as I know it's safe for adults and children of all mammal species, but I don't know about newborn infants. But Serena said absolutely no milk. I understood why when, after releasing the whey, one kitten--and I'm not positive which--released a curd onto another kitten's fur. It was red with fresh blood, and left a brownish bloodstain on the other kitten. 

Mother cats actually eat the curds-and-whey sort of stuff that comes out when they clean their tiny kittens; it is pure cat's-milk cheese, without the acids and bacteria that make fully digested bodywastes nasty. If bacteria or toxins, or the acids released when kittens start eating solid food, are present the mother cat stops cleaning the kitten in cat fashion. Some kittens survive a few days of apparent abandonment by their mother, shake off infections, and grow up normally. Some conditions seem to aggravate the adult cat's appetite so that she may kill and eat the kitten. Most kittens' chances of survival are not good if their mother stops cleaning them, but seem to be a little better if they are cleaned and given charcoal by a human. But that's kittens who are a few weeks old, not newborns. 

"Am I curing them or killing them?" I said. "Serena, you're their mother! You could help them better than I can."

"No I can't," said Serena. "Don't you smell it? That evil wind blew over them. They all smell like fresh blood. They're all losing blood. Probably they can't be saved."

"Oh, Serena..."  

"You should have brought us all indoors sooner. The evil wind can get inside, but it's not so bad inside. The kittens might have had more of a chance. There may be more. I didn't let any more come out after the evil wind blew. That's what I've been doing at the back of the closet. These may survive. You use your God-given abilities to help the first three kittens, and I'll use mine to help the others."

Serena had a charcoal treatment when she was a kitten, and is a believer. When her kittens have had enteritis or been exposed to chemical poison in the air, she's directed them to report to me and, if I didn't catch on right away, pointed me to where I keep the charcoal. This is, of course, food-grade charcoal, not just grated off briquets from the grill. I mix it with water in the proportion of a teaspoon of powder to a cup. This mixture can be given to animals in the amount they normally drink water. If I'm sick, I drink a cupful. For a sick cow, I'd call a farm vet, but as first aid I might give the same formula by the bucketful. For kittens that have their eyes open the dose is one to two cubic centimeters, as measured in a measuring syringe. For these infants I didn't dare give more than the drop of liquid that clung to the tip of the syringe. 

That mix of glyphosate and dicamba that stupid people use when they've sprayed so much glyphosate that they're no longer seeing any effect on the "weeds" is one thing that can cause internal bleeding in animals or humans. For kittens another possibility is internal parasites. The adult cats had regular meals this winter, but some of those meals consisted of human food, mostly plant-based, which is junkfood for cats, and more consisted of a cheap grade of kibble made with more grain than meat. Sponsors delivered the cheap kibble, and the cats liked it. When mother cats are not well nourished, they may be able to cope with their own internal parasites and maintain a healthy weight, but give birth to tiny sickly kittens who come into the world infected with microscopic but dangerous parasites. Those, like disease germs, can sometimes be starved out if a kitten survives a few days without any kind of food, or with nothing but charcoal. 

Can a newborn kitten survive chemical poisoning and internal parasites? I may find out, this week. I already know that all the vet could offer, or recommend, for that combination is euthanasia.

What I can offer the world today, in the way of information, is that anyone who is still spraying anything but good oldfashioned HOT WATER on "weeds" deserves to be forcibly fed whatever they're spraying. Boiling hot water will reliably kill any kind of "weed." Save the chemicals for use on violent criminals. 

Book Review: Testimony

Title: Testimony 

Author: Jon Ward

Date: 2023

Publisher: Brazos/Baker

ISBN: 978-1-5874-3577-5

Length: my advance review copy was an unpaginated e-file

Quote: "The kingdom of God wasn’t just words to me. But what I was seeing from the American church in 2016 was at odds with what I had been taught."

This is a well written book that should interest everyone who is now, or has ever been, identified with any of the following terms: evangelical Christians; charismatic Christians; nondenominational church; storefront church; startup church; Montgomery County, Maryland; Gaithersburg; Rockville; Wheaton; Silver Spring; Takoma Park; church school; homeschool; Montgomery College; University of Maryland; Republican; Democrat; Donald Trump voter; Hillary Clinton voter; Barack Obama voter; Sarah Palin voter; Yahoo News; Fox Channel; Newsmax; Charles Colson; C.S. Lewis; Keith Green; Phil Keaggy, Amy Grant; 1980s.You will enjoy reading what Ward has to say about these things, whoever you are. The rest of my comments are about the religious and political ideas to which Ward testifies. You may want to see how far it's possible to disagree with a book and still thoroughly enjoy it. You may just want to read the book, which is fine. My comments won't be on the test.

In many churches, Jon Ward explains to those who don't know, part of many church services is time for members of the congregation to tell stories or "testimonies"  of their conversions and other spiritual experiences. In the Yahoo News man's life, spiritual experiences and other life experiences led him away from the church in which he grew up, into the idolatry of Big Government that he perceived would be more useful in his job...

No, really. The "social gospel" that prioritizes helping the poor above other aspects of the Faith is a valid and very appealing part of Christianity, and it's not unreasonable for someone who's always lived in and near Washington, D.C., to accept the claim that the most efficient way to help the poor is to give government agencies whatever they say they need for that purpose. And as a writer I know all about how quickly intelligent people burn out on any trace of the cultlike emotional atmosphere churches acquire when they demand what Ward calls "happy-clappy" celebration at all times, even while one is being verbally abused by the alpha verbal bullies of the pack. That much of Ward's story I beieve.

But I suspect him of hamming it up. I've never seriously believed that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would have a reporter murdered outright. Both are smart enough and rich enough to have more efficient ways of shutting up the reporter. I have heard credible claims that Vince Foster had some help committing suicide, but I'm more inclined to suspect the co-workers against whom he was starting to throw accusations about more than I do his old school friend Hillary, and by all accounts it sounds as if he had Prozac Dementia, which in 1993 would have looked just like paranoid schizophrenia, which is incurable, in any case. But if, as a reporter, I were seriously afraid of having my career ruined by one of the two, I'd be more afraid of Clinton. Trump generates enough hate to create a backlash of sympathy for anyone he bullies. Clinton's trademark combination of genuine Background, genuine myopia, and the blonde mystique would allow her to twirl a metaphorical knife slowly in your metaphorical wound while everyone thought she was being nice. And I don't believe a grown man ever seriously suffered from physical fear that Trump was going to morph into Hitler and have the grown man machine-gunned, either. Trump comes across as far more likely to use up his angry energy yelling at a reporter he disliked, posting a few mean tweets, and moving on.

Ward's memoirs sound credible enough when he's talking about growing up inside a nondenominational local church in Maryland. He'd be very close to my sisters' age. I heard some of the speakers and read some of the books that he says influenced his father's more charismatic and dominating friend's takeover of what started out to be his father's church. This friend, whose name I think I would have recognized if it hadn't been one of the names Ward mentions having changed, was later accused of abusing other members of the church in several ways that amounted to crimes. 

The situation he describes is pathetic. Ward doesn't claim to have been abused; he says only good things about his parents, who he says were more victims than emotional abusers in a church that gradually grew into a bit of a personality cult around his father's friend. But he was sent to a "Christian" school in Rockville, the Devil's Town, where fears that any exposure to non-church-members' kids might lead him into the Church of Satan were not, in fact, exaggerated. There really was a Church of Satan. Anton LaVey said it was supposed to be about rebellion in a responsible way, not evildoing; that crowd accomplished more than their reasonable share of evildoing, anyway. My heart aches for the poor little stifled-while-endangered boy who was Jon Ward. 

Mr. Ward's story was the one my father refused to live out. A sincere and independent Christian, he launched a "storefront church" that attracted many people who'd turned against one denomination or other. They were charismatic Christians, very sincere in their emotional displays. Jon Ward came to feel that education, and closer ties to historic Christianity, would have improved the emotional experience of having a church that was based on the vagaries of emotion, which of course soon became forced displays of emotion not felt, frantic efforts to manipulate God into keeping the emotions miraculously flowing beyond the normal ninety-second half-life of an emotional mood. Joshua Harris's popular, since retracted, book I Kissed Dating Goodbye generated a new fad in which people who hadn't been doing too well in the dating game anyway decided all their relationships would be either friendship or courtship, which Ward seems to think made his adolescent social life more awkward than average, though he falls short of convincing me that that's possible. (It actually worked for him; he was apparently able to be a virgin bridegroom and have been happily married since.) There was a strange combination, he says, of contempt for jobs other than evangelism, distrust of books other than church material, and real fear of music and pop culture, which he found stultifying to his creative, writerly mind. And also, because the church was too new, small, and underfunded to have much of an active ministry, there was a tendency to blame poor people and very little effort to help them. Mr. Ward loved Jesus and wanted to help his flock, but he didn't have the connections to do all that he wanted to do. He let his flock down, and his more extroverted, less scrupulous friend stepped in to fill in the gaps with cultlike emotional abuse, brainwashing, and exploitation. 

The Ward children got out, Jon Ward says  Could they be blamed? He carefully avoids saying whether all of them got out unscathed by the alleged sexual abuse of some children in the church. He sticks to his own story, telling how he wanted to be a "creative" writer but, when he did not immediately sell a novel, was sent to journalism school instead. There he would have learned about the other storefront churches in Washington that had very active urban missions. There, too, he would have learned that advocating smaller government in Washington is downright un-neighborly. If you want to publish your writing under your own name, in the city, it's prudent to accept an ever-expanding government as a fact of life, like climate change, and all those Republicans whose real religion is racism, and other myths circulated in support of ever-expanding government.

But consider the facts. Ward was not at Yahoo when Yahoo was cheating me out of money, but did his concern for the poor ever lead him to do some investigative reporting on the Associated Content writers to whom Yahoo still owes money? And what's he done about glyphosate, anyway? And does he really suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome in anything like the way he claims? 

I don't know that it's a mortal sin to join the political party to which most of the people with whom you work belong. Certainly it's neither a sin, nor even an unpopular act, to say "I disliked President Trump personally, for good and sufficient reasons well known to everyone in Washington." There were reasons why Trump was able to campaign as a so-called outsider; lack of money or connections were not among them. He could afford to hang out where Washington's leading socialites were, and he did, and he was detested. He ruined Alexandria's waterfront, for mercy's sake. He was blamed for the more-than-a-mile of shame along Route 1 in Baltimore. There's an ancient Washington tradition of stereotyping New York as tacky, and Trump was a walking definition of New York tacky. 

But if you really understand how our government is supposed to work, you understand that it's designed to incorporate people like Trump into the system...to minimize the effect individuals' tackiness can have on the government as a whole. And if you're going to get into situations where shaking someone's hand is expected, a flat refusal to shake hands makes a big bold statement of contempt, and a warm handshake makes a big bold statement of Christian willingness to imagine that the person's professed religious conversion may have been sincere, but saying that at least it was a frigid, grudging handshake sounds flat-out childish.

Ward is correct in saying that some Christians' personal loyalty to Trump goes beyond what is either their Christian duty or Trump's due. Yes, economically a lot of people did benefit from the Trump Administration as a much needed relief in between Obama's economic mess and Biden's economic trainwreck. Yes, some R's do have the fortitude to say that, and some D's should only have the fortitude to hear them. 

And when D's talk about the Trumpist "insurrection," by no means the biggest or deadliest riot Washington has survived while Ward and I were there, it really spoils the whole effect for them to assert, as if able to know, that "the elections were fair and honest." Very likely some of them were, but nobody can possibly say that all of them were. 

How much blame does Ward deserve for hamming up emotions that come straight out of a partisan playbook? Is it possible that he does sincerely feel these emotions, even though some of them are based on outright lies? 

Is it possible that a forty-year-old newsman still believes one party holds any monopoly on outright lies?

I don't know. I enjoyed this book for the nostalgia and gossip, but I think Christian readers should distrust, if not altogether discard, its main political argument. 

Ward found that there are churches (not only in Washington) where it's perfectly acceptable to be a Democrat. Cheers. And now that the left-wingnuts have decided to sacrifice women in favor of the "trans women" and their campaign donations, to try a last-ditch effort to get young women into baby-factory mode in hopes of saving Social Security (as if all those babies would be able to get jobs!) and prioritize getting rid of any acknowledgment of a "right to privacy" even above pampering the men who want to start babies and let women endure abortions, the Religious Right can stop screaming and hissing that anyone who votes for any D is a "baby" killer. In fact I'd agree with Ward that it would be a very good thing if people on both sides reclaimed the art of discussing ideas, with detachment, rather than pitching battles (if only babble-battles) about whose candidate is an angel and whose is the Devil. 

I just don't think it helps when D's go into full crybully mode about how silly it was to be afraid of their candidate and how sensible to be afraid of the R candidate. Even if they genuinely had those emotional reactions, they have to know they were reacting to some combination of party rhetoric and personal memories. And those reactions don't make the rest of their arguments more convincing. We do need the intellectual rigor that makes it possible to understand the rational reasons why people don't agree with us. For example, people in our nation's capital need to understand that people in the rest of the country want to reverse the overgrowth of the federal government for exactly the same kind of reasons that people in Washington want...well...not to make it a main talking point, anyway. Nowhere in his book does Ward acknowledge the existence of fiscal conservatives who, far from being obsessed with abortion, may actually be pro-choice on the grounds that aborting unwanted babies is cheaper than making them wards of the state. It helps to begin by admitting that people on both sides tend to vote for their interests.

Word for Wednesday: Uppity Nation

Only recently I discovered a Live Journal blog post from 2008: 

https://ravan.livejournal.com/2008/09/12/

This is normal. LJ is such a glitchy site that it’s a chore for me to maintain my own blog, let alone explore all those of other people whose comments interested me. On LJ I fail to visit blogs I follow for a year or two after they’ve ceased to exist. This in spite of the fact that keeping up with other people’s blogs—even if they don’t blog about glyphosate—is definitely part of any activist’s job description. Even if your purpose in using the Internet is just to sell things, communication needs to work in both directions.

Anyway: In 2008 we had the unprecedentd phenomnon of a presidential election featuring not one but two candidates who...

1…were extremely young by White House standards. The Presidency is generally regarded as the peak of a long successful career, which, however successful people’s early lives have been, generally happens after age 60. Younger Presidents are problematic. Their children are so young it’s cruel to subject them to White House life, they’re still subject to hormonal distractions, and if they’ve served two terms and still have thirty or forty years ahead of them, what do they have to look forward to? So it’s not ageism or generational prejudice that makes me say: Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are about my age, and in 2008 neither of them should have been a presidential candidate. (Palin was not technically a presidential candidate but, in view of McCain’s age, was consistently considered as one.) Yes, one of them won; he may regret that now.

2…were, to our national shame and my regret, “historic firsts” because one wasn’t male and the other was less than 50% White. We’ve had other Presidents of whose ancestry Hitler would not have approved, but they’ve all, except Obama, been legally White.

3…were, let us face it, high-powered, hard-charging individuals who obviously had to make an effort to seem “non-threatening” to TV watchers, and it didn’t always work. Classic Cholerics, though Obama can pass as Phlegmatic for short periods of time. People who like to look busy while taking a lot of breaks and keeping the office social life going would not want to work with either one of them. In among the legitimate concerns about their age could be heard all of the code phrases for “…works too hard and makes me look bad, so I haaate him/her.” Both Obama and Palin embodied our age group’s preppy ideal of sailing through life looking as unruffled as a swan, while, like the swan, working furiously below the surface and prepared to knock any challengers flat with one blow.

Some poor idjit was obviously feeling that kind of discomfort about Obama because, of all the things it was possible for reasonable people to have called Obama, he chose “uppity.”I’m not going to mention his name here, in case he has children.

He claimed he was using this word in its dictionary meaning. I’ve never owned a printed dictionary that acknowledged “uppity” as a word. If they had included “uppity” they would have flagged it as “slang” or “dialect,” but afaik none of them included it even as that.

But “uppity” is another word like “ain’t” and “ort.” They may not be in the dictionary but nobody has to look them up anyway. Everyone who hears them used knows what they mean.

“Ort,” in written English, is a word meaning a leftover piece of food. I tried reviving it in college. Nobody picked it up. However Americans feel about the food, they're comfortable with the word "leftovers," and recognize “ort” in spoken US English as a variant form of “ought.”

“Ain’t” started out as a variant form of “aren’t” but it stretched to include “isn’t” and “haven’t.” All of these contractions were considered slang, "incorrect" in written English, into the early twentieth century. "Aren't," "isn't," and "haven't" were then accepted as standard, while "ain't" continued to be disparaged as nonstandard. So does "amn't." It became "correct" to ask "Wasn't I?" and "Haven't I?" but grammarians still insist that we ask "Am I not?" where many people feel that "Ain't I?" would be more appropriate. I personally have no problem with "Aren't I?", and if the definition of correct English is based on what our best writers and speakers say, I'd accept "Ain't I?" on the authority of Sojourner Truth--but your teacher or editor may not.

And “uppity” means “I believe in a rigid social hierarchy, and I believe that person belongs on a lower level of it than I think person is acting appropriately for.” That’s not a thing Americans can comfortably say, so “uppity” is mostly printed as used in a sarcastic way, as in Vicki Leon’s studies of female achievers as Uppity Women of [insert historical era]. 

If and when we use "uppity" we probably should understand it to describe someone who understands that, philosophically speaking, the whole idea of a human hierarchy being anything more than a short-term way to organize a specific job is pretty ridiculous, but, if a hierarchy is formed, it should be based on merit, talent, achievement. And who then proceeds to demonstrate that per place in the hierarchy of a "meritocracy" is well above per critic's. Probably the best response to being criticized as "uppity" is to go out and get yourself elected President of the United States. 

To use “uppity” to describe an undesirable quality of personality or charactr is to confsss, and prove, that you have that quality in abundance. By the barrel, by the yard, almost certainly much more than the other person may have.

This pollie said it, apparently with a straight face, about Obama. Glumph. I do believe that comment deserved some kind of trophy for tackiness.

“Uppity,” when it’s not clearly used to express admiration of achievement-against-all-odds, is a word that says much more to disparage the person saying it than it says about the person so described. In the United States, a politician who says it, or thinks it, needs to go home. The best thing to be said for that one is that he was probably thinking "uppity young man" more than "uppity Black man." 

More people publicly made more purely nasty, purely personal comments about Palin but, in public at last, none of them called her “uppity.” Palin and her backers might have used that word in a snarky, Leon-referenced way. The blogger known as Ravan used it in a fine, American way.

President Obama's greatest achievement may have been surviving eight years of drivel about being "the first African-American President" without publicly cracking his bland, "No Drama Obama" mask, but his doing that was an achievement against odds and a thoroughly American thing. We as a nation were, and still are, regarded by the decaying nations of the Old World as an Uppity Nation. And should we not be proud of it!

Book Review: Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush

(Reclaimed from Blogjob, but revised and updated...)

Title: Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush

Author: Jim Hightower

Date: 2004

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: 0-670-03354-5

Length: 227 pages, plus index

Quote: “The Bushites are—let me put this as politely as I can—NUTS!…and it’s time we stopped beating around the bush about it.”

It's always good to read both sides. Now that the reelection of W Bush is no longer a current issue, this bit of radio comedy reprinted as a book has historical interest.

In this book, Jim Hightower demonstrates his skill at a specific genre of comedy: Pick a successful politician, find some statistics about what he’s done, and exaggerate the bad effects for which the politician can in some way be blamed. Extrapolate from every statistic the most outrageous ramifications: “If Bush is elected, you’ll soon be able to surf in Asheville.” “American will reach that long-sought utopian ideal of a nation based on 100% pure consumerism.” “You’ll soon be able to eat [B]russels sprouts that not only taste like bonbons but also will have your heartburn medicine and erectile dysfunction pills genetically spliced into every bite.”

It was funny but perhaps frightening when it was new. W Bush’s second term came and went, and we still had the same coastline, some of us were still working, and Brussels sprouts still tasted like leafy green vegetables. Any time people try to project today’s facts into the future, they’re likely to come up with things as absurd as Brussels sprouts tasting like bonbons. That’s the nature of the game. So people trying to draw attention to today’s facts can be excused for going all the way into comédie noire. What’s inexcusable is ignoring the facts.

The sad part is that so many of the facts in Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush are still true. “Having blasted off the top third or so of a mountain—along with its forests and animals—the coal companies then bulldoze the rubble (which used to be the mountaintop) into the valleys and streams below, burying them hundreds of feet deep with what the companies call ‘spoil.’” This has happened. And the alleged opposition party has done little to reverse the process.

Republicans started displaying messages like “If you think coal is ugly, look at poverty.” I am looking at poverty, and I can say that I would literally starve before I’d strip-mine my land…but then I don’t have children. 

Possibly as a reward for buying a real book instead of trying to read Hightower on a computer, we’re told, “Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and the other pooh-bahs of high-techery…brag that theirs is a ‘clean industry.’…They might try selling that…[claim] to the people around Guiya, China. This is one of the low-wage hellholes that America’s high-tech executives use as a dumping ground for their electronics waste, which includes some 45 million computers that are discarded annually…Computers are loaded with toxins…Poor Asians are paid a pittance to scavenge various metals and other resalable compounds out of these machines. Indeed, about 100,000 people, including thousands of children, in Guiya toil in the midst of piles of electronic trash, using acid to extract traces of gold, dumping cathode-ray tubs filled with lead, opening toner cartridges by hand…Guiya’s groundwater is now so polluted that the people have to truck in water for human use.”

Think about this the next time you call the repair shop and they say, “It would be cheaper to buy a new computer.” For you, maybe…but think about the human beings stuck with the horrible job of “recycling” your old computer. Maybe secondhand parts will serve your needs until you can move back to a clean, Green, non-electric and fully recyclable metal typewriter, or until the industry invents a less toxic way to build computers, after all.

And let’s hope none of the male readers of this book is still buying herbicides to give his lawn that Astroturf look that went out of style approximately five minutes after Astroturf was invented. “Atrazine is the most commonly used weed killer…Atrazine residue runs off into our waterways, and it’s now found in our drinking water, groundwater, streams, snow runoff, etc.—even rain…Atrazine causes male frog cells to produce an enzyme that converts their testosterone to estrogen, perverting their sexuality and destroying their reproductivity…The Environmental Protection Agency allows three parts per billion of atrazine in our drinking water. Yet the frog mutation is taking place in water with only one tenth of one part per billion.” And some people are still looking for a genetic cause for homosexuality?

Hightower is a full-time professional Democrat who would probably like to be called his party’s answer to Rush Limbaugh. He wrote this book as a campaign document, a bit of Bush-bashing. The facts are, however, bipartisan. The real enemy is selfish greed, which affects Democrats and Republicans in similar ways. “Just when you start to cheer for these Democrats, their leader gets caught…In 2001, on the night of December 20…Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle [was] slipping a little ol’ provision into the ‘miscellaneous’ section of the Pentagon’s appropriation bill. Tom’s amendment had been written…on behalf of Barrick Gold…one of the biggest mining corporations in the world…Barrick owns a massive gold mine in Tom’s state of South Dakota…[T]his mine is in line to become another Superfund site, potentially costing the company $40 million to clean up…Daschle’s little ol’ amendment…exempts Barrick Gold from ‘any and all liability relating to the mine’! It exonerates this corporation for all ‘damages to natural resources or the environment.’”

Facts, Gentle Readers. You could read’em and weep. Or, with Hightower’s help, you can read them with a smile…if only the kind of peculiar twisted grin George H.W. Bush wore while declaring the Gulf War. Why agonize when you can strategize? Satire can be a good source of ideas. Fact-packed satires are the best. Check the facts! Use them! Don’t let them be forgotten, merely because the election’s over and the predictions went the way of last week’s weather forecast. Hightower hands us names, and since you’re reading this review on a computer you can type in the names and use the Internet to update the numbers. This book has remained surprisingly relevant.

Hightower is alive and writing at http://www.jimhightower.com/ 

Posted on October 1, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, History, HumorTags George W Bush, male sexuality, political satire, pollution, recycling, strip mining, toxic waste, U.S. political history

Butterfly of the Week: Laos Windmill

This week's butterfly is another one of the Swallowtails whose long thin wings can be spread out in a way that suggests a four-bladed windmill. Originally classified in the genus Papilio, these black-winged Swallowtails were later moved to the genus Atrophaneura, and more recently the Windmill group were given their own genus name, Byasa. 

Photo from gbif.org.

Byasa laos is one of the more recently identified species in this genus, because more seldom seen. You can tell it's a relatively late addition to the list because it's prosaically named after the place where it was found instead of being identified with a character in literature. It took so long to be identified as a distinctive species because it's not common. Google finds more lists that include this species than actual articles about it. Not much is known about it--not even how rare it may be, or whether it's endangered. It is thought to be "near threatened" just because it's rare. In the right time and place, some authors observe, it can be fairly common; a Mr. Nishimura counted 68 males and 17 females visiting one tree on one morning. But its native habitat is a rather small rural area in Laos and might be made unlivable for these butterflies by the proposed development of new towns. The impact on the butterflies of a wildflower in the genus Bidens, an invasive nuisance the butterflies apparently like and pollinate, remains to be seen.

In a paper on "The Papilionidae of Laos," Adam Miles Cotton and Tommaso Racheli describe their work in Laos near these butterflies' habitat. While attention was attracted to the area when someone found a rare species of rodent living there, the authors were impressed by the area's scenic beauty and suggest that, rather than being built up in towns, it could be "developed" for wildlife tourism. They observe that three distinct generations of Byasa laos show distinct, weather-related behavior each year; the August generation are attracted both to roadside Bidens and to dew on paved roads, and are at risk from motor traffic. 

Wingspans are about three inches, females slightly larger than males. Males are more likely to have black wings with four pink or red spots on each hindwing. Females can look brown or sepia. The inside edge of the hind wings is pale yellow or white. The body is black above, red below. The Funet.fi index site quotes a 1921 article in a scientific journal saying that the species was "known" to the authors only from a single museum specimen. The scientists agreed that it was different from Papilio alcinous or P. plutonius, though confusible. 

  

Too many web pages for Byasa laos merely prove that peopleare still buying and selling dead bodies. While butterflies' lives are short and anyone who observes butterflies regularly will find bodies, the position of this web site is that we should never pay for dead bodies. A species as rare as this one seems to be could be wiped out by cash-strapped students in a year.

Morgan Griffith Addresses High School Concerns

Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletter arrived on Friday. I wasn't at the computer. Two separate concerns of high school students and their parents here: (1) keeping boys out of girls' sports even if they think they're "transitioning," those poor atrazine victims who don't need lawsuits for acting like guys on girls' teams in any case; and (2) helping students who want to get into the U.S. military academies that require a recommendation by a member of Congress. 

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

"

Protecting Girls in Sports; Service Academy Day

On April 20^th, I voted to pass H.R. 734, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023, legislation to ensure that women and girls have a fair playing field in sports by guaranteeing that schools adhere to Title IX’s recognition of biology and genetics of an individual at birth.

Title IX was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 to prohibit sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.

This means that when it came to sports, schools were now required to provide equal participation opportunities, athletic scholarships, and benefits and services (facilities, equipment, transportation) for men and women.

Over the past few years, the left has pushed the notion that biological men that have begun transitioning to women are the same as biological women and so they cannot be excluded from participating in women’s sports. We must be inclusive of all, they say, no matter what.

But this trend only does a disservice to women and House Republicans have sought to protect their rights with H.R. 734. To me, this bill is not controversial. In fact, I am an original cosponsored of the bill.

This bill is about fairness. Women fought for years for equal opportunities in sports. Before Title IX, women’s athletic scholarships were basically nonexistent. Now those scholarships and other opportunities are at risk again because they are being given to biological men in the name of inclusiveness.

But why should women have to sacrifice what they deserve?

This bill is also about safety and accepting the reality of biology and genetics. There is a reason there are separate men’s sports and women’s sports. The biological differences between men and women cannot be ignored.

Genetically, men have a clear advantage. For example, they have a higher ratio of muscle mass to body weight, which allows for greater acceleration and speed. They also have larger and longer bones to support more muscle. This is true in most cases even if they have begun transitioning to a woman.

Women athletes have already gotten hurt competing against biological males. Just a few days prior to this column, a North Carolina high school volleyball player spoke at a press conference about suffering long-term physical and mental injuries when she was spiked by a ball in the face by a transgender athlete.

This bill does not even address the other issue of women in some places now being required to share their locker rooms with biological males.

Where does it end?

H.R. 734 is important legislation to protect woman and girls. Will the Senate agree? I don’t know. Ask your Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.

Academy Day

On May 6^th, I am hosting my annual Service Academy Day in Wytheville. This event gives high school students, their parents, and any school staff interested a chance to learn more about the Service Academies and the military.

The event will feature representatives from each of the U.S. Service Academies – U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and U.S. Merchant Marine – the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, the Virginia Military Institute, and other Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs.

I encourage all students who may be interested in serving in our military to come on the 6^th as attending of one of these institutions it is a fantastic way to both serve your country and further your education after high school. 

I am also welcoming interested students and parents located in surrounding counties, outside of the Ninth District, to attend so they may also receive information. Though students must be nominated by their own Member of Congress or Senators to the Service Academies, I know that my event’s location may be more convenient for folks in neighboring counties, such as those just over the state line in West Virginia and North Carolina.

For those students in the Ninth District who attend, my staff will also be available to answer questions regarding our process for congressional nominations.

Serving our country in the Armed Forces is an honorable calling. I hope to see you all there.

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 at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. 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.

[signed: Morgan Griffith]

" 

Book Review: The Merchant's Son

Title: The Merchant's Son 

Author: Wade Lewellyn-Hughes

Date: 2021

Publisher: Wisdom Wonder & Whimsy

ISBN: 978-1-976513-97-7

Quote:  "Young Master Fuchs. That's what all the servants called him...in his father's company."

Despite his prematurely grey hair, Teague Fuchs is a young man, still defining his identity as distinct from his father's, resentful of his father for that reason. On page one we find him in the "naked embrace" of one of Daddy's connections' adult children. This time it's a female, but sometimes it's male. He jumps out of bed, drawing the bed-curtains together to conceal the woman, to receive a message. He tells his bedmate it's about his wife having killed his "mistress," but he doesn't have a wife and the message is actually from an unexplained acquaintance, Elanis, who turns out to be a fellow student of wizardry only much more competent at it, who is a lesbian...

This seems to be terribly important in the "Lamentation's End Series" to which this short novel is an introduction. We don't know how the odds and ends of Eurasian folklore that make up this fictive world have come together, or why, but we will be told about everybody's sexual kinks, even though the characters are summoned together as a test for a magical quest--the test consisting of challenges and adventures--that seems physical enough to take their minds off the said kinks. 

If an author and editor don't have the wisdom to know what fantasy readers prefer to be left to wonder about, that places this book in the publishers' "whimsy" category. The story--your basic story of the young protagonist getting acquainted with colleagues, doing tasks that establish his fitness for a job, feeling more mature and less resentful of his parents' adult status at the end--might deserve four stars for whimsical imagination if it had clarified what this fictive world is all about instead of tailing off, pun intended, into the "sexual identities" garbage that does not belong in this kind of fantasy. A lot of people and creatures in magical worlds have always been described in ways that don't leave much room for the standard reproductive process of warm-blooded Earth creatures. If there's only one of a creature in the world and it lays one fertile egg that hatches out of a fire that consumes the nest and the parent bird, obviously it doesn't mate in the usual way. But fantasy readers have traditionally preferred to keep any speculation about what else such a bird may do with its energy off the pages.

We cannot all be Tolkien but, if you like fantasy and don't mind a bit of unnecessary smut, you might enjoy The Merchant's Son and its sequels...so it's my painful duty to inform you that my review copy arrived in the e-mail with spam content. The spam seems to have been easy to sweep away but it did pop into my in-box. I don't want to encourage that so I'd say, definitely, wait for the printed edition. 

Is Country Music Dead? (Linkfest)

There were those for whom country music died, in 1979, with Sara and Maybelle Carter. Not that you don't still hear the music. Much of it's even been digitized for Youtube. Still, I laughed out loud, somewhat bitterly, when the young writer and singer of a recent #1 country song hit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6tOAafAJCA) lamented that "there's nobody like Waylon Jennings or Loretta Lynn any more." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zqmQAjv0wM

Child. There's been nobody like the Carter Family, like Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Jim & Jesse McGlothlin, The Browns, Johnny Cash, Hank Snow, Doc Watson, Roy Drusky, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Marty Robbins, Jimmy Dean, Rufus Thibodeau, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Patsy Cline, Dwain Reed, Bill Monroe, or Ernest Tubb, for a long time. There will never be another Dolly Parton (whom my parents considered an early sellout) or John McCutcheon (who never sold out, but whose sound wasn't Southern country), either. 

When I was young there was a sharp dividing line between Real Country Music and "rockabilly." Not only Elvis Presley and Jackson Browne but Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and The Judds were rockabilly. Dolly Parton's first super-hits were country but, after that, she was considered to have sold out and gone to the rockabilly side. Loretta Lynn was country but her unconvincing claim to be unable to read, even if it was true when understood to mean "in this light," was tacky anyway. Crystal Gayle was rockabilly. 

Real Country Music was at least based on the music people learned in rural areas and small towns. Everybody in Panola County, Texas, didn't sing like Jim Reeves--no one did--but his elders sang his general kind of songs, even if he had gone to university and learned crisp clear enunciation. The Carters learned most of their songs from people in the point of Virginia. Bill Monroe learned from people in Kentucky. Their music was commercialized and copyrighted but it was basically folk music.

Rockabilly, some of which I liked, was not folk music. The Grand Ole Opry used drums as the dividing point, but there was more to it than that. Topics were one thing. Country music could be "topical" in the sense of being about news items, and songs could be snarky, like "Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat" or "Elecatricity and All" or "Old Age Pension Checks," but some attitudes were understood to be too divisive to discuss down the old-time country store, and some just did not exist in the country, so if you heard some opinions you knew it was not a Real Country Song. "I'm proud to be an Okie, from Muscogee" was a country song. "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" was not because it was understood to be anti-war, and if a real country person did vent anti-war feelings in front of people who had sent their children to fight the said war, they would've been looking for trouble.

More often, songs that were Not Real Country were the ones that showed no understanding of real country people's attitudes toward things. There are parts of the South where nice people might drink wine with meals, as Europeans do, at least before Coca-Cola was invented. Mine is not one. There were people who drank alcohol and places where alcohol was drunk, in my part of the world, in my grandparents' time, but that was a social problem--it wasn't even funny. There are all kinds of country songs about people drinking alcohol when they're deeply depressed, but the understanding is that these people are committing suicide slowly. Jim Reeves could sing a grim, semi-funny little song about a barroom brawl, "Take your drink to the end of the bar, buddy...he's sure a quick-tempered jealous man. What's that you say? I guess you're right. It's nothing to me," and so on, up to "Here they come to take him off to jail, buddy, and tomorrow someone will bury you. Oh well, that's life, or it was. It's nothing to me." That was country; the people who sold alcohol were hard, mean people, friendless, with no compassion for the heavy drinkers in a place where most people are alcohol-intolerant. A country song could portray a boozy, woozy loser drooling over a bar girl, "I didn't know God made honky-tonk angels," or rebuke him, "It wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels!" There are lots of country songs about the death of people involved with alcohol in any business--running "moonshine, moonshine to quench the Devil's thirst. The law they swore they'd get him, but the Devil got him first" or "Pour the wine, dim the lights, and play the jukebox...what's the difference if you die in this or that place?"--and the sad plight of their orphans: "My father died a drunkard, Sir, I've heard my mother say. I am helping Mother as I journey on my way." There are a few songs about the manic phase of Taking to Drink, "We'll go honky-tonkin'" or "Fill up my jug with that good ol' mountain dew"; they're still sad, cautionary songs. 

Cheating on marriage, even to the extent of dancing with someone else's partner, was another thing rockabilly music got just exactly wrong. Country songs were full of broken hearts. Country people believed that "for every boy and girl there's just one love in this whole world." In Virginia they didn't actually say beshert, probably because using German words was considered a Pennsylvania thing, but they believed in that idea. In the old songs couples often ruined their lives by leaping to conclusions when they saw their One And Only laughing and talking with some long-lost relative. Real Country singers did, of course, divorce and remarry. but that was a source of shame. People would move to a different state or country after a divorce. "You can't love two and still be true." There are "blended families" in country music, but there aren't happy "blended families." 

Some early country songs actually preserved the perspective of people who didn't buy into the motorcar fad. "I've been wagoning for over twenty years...I'll be here when the trucks are gone." (Last song on the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3uVfkCBv9g.) Before about 1945 the means of transportation most mentioned in country songs was trains, though there were also songs about wagons, horses, mules, and of course walking. Later country songs mentioned cars and buses because country people started riding those. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was not a country song, and while a few older country songs mentioned ships and "sailing far over the sea," Real Country Songs were for and about landlocked people whose travels were usually day trips to a nearby town.

Country music was mostly about people who led wholesome Christian lives but it did include cautionary songs about bad decisions that put people in prison. Almost as bad were decisions that left people in cities. There are pre-country songs of love and pride in American cities, but country songs were about people for whom cities were places to visit, not places to live. "Memphis" was where the speaker wanted to call somebody. "Jackson" was where foolish people wanted to "go and make a big fool of yourself." "It's a Long Road Up to Atlanta" because the speaker was going there to serve time in prison. Even tiny little settlements were mentioned as places people might have visited: "I left someone there that I might lose...the one I left back in Maces Springs." Country music had a sort of default assumption that people lived on farms, unless they were renting places in cities and singing about "oh, how I want to go home." 

Some other things that, if mentioned in a song, generally indicate that no matter who is singing it, or in what style, it's not a Real Country song:

* Religious differences (we may talk about them, but we don't sing about them)

* Any other country, except Mexico

* Any technology "higher" than tractors

* Department stores

* Any kind or expression of "sexuality" other than monogamous, heterosexual "falling in love" and marriage

* Welfare (if everybody lives on a farm, everybody has food)

* Drugs or medications

* Credit card debt ("In God we trust, all others pay cash")

* Selling land, viewed as anything but a tragedy (if you wanted to move into town, you're not country)

* Television (country people got their news from the radio)

* Abortion (if a country woman couldn't keep a baby, she knew which friend or relative adopted it)

* Big businesses, including professional sports 

* Real mental illness 

On the other hand, country songs could be pretty frank about:

* Snobs, and contempt for them

* Money, from any point of view, including that of someone who has just recently acquired a lot of it

* Any legitimate job, and some questionable ones like moonshining, that farmers did for extra money

* Travel, originally train trips, later road trips in cars

* Advice and philosophical reflections, especially as attributed to old people

* Stupidity--the choice

* Symptoms/effects of alcohol intolerance

* Man's inhumanity to man

* Love, and despite the 1950s' obsession with romance, country music was more likely to focus on sex-free kinds of love

* Pollution and desecration of land

* Being "crazy" in the sense of "lovesick"

* Any form of homesickness, nostalgia, the rather pleasant sadness people feel when remembering good things in the past

* Above all, contempt for the idea that "Progress" was pushing people to move into cities

And they could draw very sharp distinctions between silly fantasies about everyone being "equal" and real abuses of the poor, too. Country music was the music of people who had little use for Communism because they had a better ideal, of Christian charity.

Also, country music is accompanied by stringed instruments only, no drums and no winds. The Grand Ole Opry did allow a piano, and harmonicas have occasionally been sneaked into country music performances, but basically country music is accompanied by guitars. Fiddles, banjos, mandolins, Maybelle Carter's autoharps, and Alisa Jones' dulcimers, were country music before Nashville became the home of the industry built on exploiting it, but even those instruments never became part of That Nashville Sound. Other instruments are not country.

Country music is of course part of the Anglo-American musical tradition, and when it started being performed by union members in Nashville it was largely restricted to the four chords all of those people could play, so it's a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator form of Anglo-American music. That said, country music has never been exclusive. If you like it, well, it's easy to learn to perform. Some performers of Real Country Music were neither White nor American. Why Canadians or Black Americans or Icelanders wanted to perform country music, I don't know. Some of them did it well. 

And, speaking of the dumbed-down chord progressions, of course country music is known for memorably idiotic refrains. I think it has that feature in common with Bad Poetry. If you can write something great, that's good. If not, maybe you can write something funny, a self-parody of your own efforts and their shortcomings. 

Youtube pulled up a 1982 version of this early protest against so-called country music radio stations allowing rockabilly to displace the real thing. It was not a new song in 1982. I looked it up because I couldn't remember whether Justin Tubb started singing it in 1977, 1978, or 1979. I started singing it in 1979. It was like the national anthem of people who, when they chose to listen to country music, liked the real thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR0OV4BG7i0

Considering how narrow the definition of Real Country Songs is, I think it's fair to mention that even country music stars have always listened to, and often performed, songs that don't quality. There's nothing wrong with that. The traditional LP format pushed studios to produce albums of ten to fifteen songs that all sounded pretty much alike. Now that Youtube allows people to mix their own playlists, does anyone you know have a playlist that always sticks to one genre? Knowing the difference between an apple and an orange does not mean loving apples and hating oranges.

But some local radio stations are losing audiences because first the Rabbit and then the Possum shows tried to "update" their content, and the local listeners just don't like the results. "But we can't play all oldies all the time. The old song hits may still be subject to copyright, and anyway it's discouraging to young people if radio stations only ever play songs by people who are retired or dead." They have a point there. Young people have talent and deserve to be heard. If they want to be heard by people who listen to country music on the radio, day after day, they need to stick to the rules of the country music genre. 

Including, but not limited to...

* Country music is deeply conservative in the sense of conserving and preserving traditions. If you want to sing about "social change," country music is not your genre. 

* It's possible that some country people are found in bars in towns, but since it means they're deeply, in most cases suicidally, depressed, this should not be the theme of the majority of songs broadcast in an hour. One song about that horrible situation is more than plenty.

* As with all other forms of entertainment and communication, the corporate sponsors don't have to like what the individual listeners are telling them--they have to "Just do it." 

* Country music is family-friendly. That means you don't say "sexuality"; you say "fell in love," "courted," or "married." If those aren't what you're talking about, country music is not your genre. 

* Country music is not sympathetic to hate. It is sympathetic to sarcastic expressions of disdain for the stupid things people do. It isn't even forgiving about expressions of contempt toward whole groups of people. The country music attitude toward people different from oneself is more of a good-natured "Whatever." A song, for example, about how evil same-sex marriage is would not be country. A song about the possible absurdities of a same-sex marriage, like the spoof of cross-generation marriage, "I'm My Own Grandpa," might be considered country if the words were family-friendly and the overall attitude was "What a mess these people did make for themselves."

* But country music is not p.c., either. I receive e-mail, regularly and by choice, from someone who'd like to change this...Country music is heterosexual. Homosexuality seems to be a biological reaction to crowded living conditions, partly because very little of it exists in rural areas. Even if Dolly Parton writes and sings a song in support of her "gay" men fans, it's nice that she appreciates her fans, but that is not a country song. And all country music has to say about "apartments" is how much some people regret having taken jobs that oblige them to live in such horrid places, and how much they want to go home. And if there are country songs about "climate change," they'd be silly ones about the poor fool still waiting to get the use of his beachfront property in Atlanta.

* In the country music worldview, if you want "social change" other than perhaps changing back to the way things were fifty years ago, you need to understand, you are the joke. 

That is something a lot of country music fans like about country music. It's not going to change because country music is and always was the music of people who resist being pushed into "social change."