The Thunder of Butterflies

I'm certain I can't be the only one feeling as if he's living the aftereffects of Ray Bradbury's magnificent story, "A Sound of Thunder," can I? 

 Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind .... 

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed: TYME SEFARI INC. SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT. 

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, "No, it can't be. Not a little thing like that. No!" 

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead. "Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!" cried Eckels. It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. 

Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it? His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who ­ who won the presidential election yesterday?" 

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?" 

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it back, can't we make it alive again? Can't we start over? Can't we­" He did not move. 

Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon. 

There was a sound of thunder.

The Revolution Was Televised

I've been reading books by writers who lived in autocratic countries and this is from Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape. He describes the first indications of Romanian regime change in December 1989.

The first nationwide sign of trouble was booing at a Nicolai Ceausescu speech broadcast over state radio and television, which technicians tried to cover up with canned applause before "going to black." Ceausescu then issued his "shoot to kill" order to local party bosses by closed circuit TV. His regime's public broadcast were limited to two hours per night, and consisted entirely of propaganda; at his trial, Ceausescu said that he didn't want to tire out the people. A few days later, with perfect ironic symmetry that testifies either to the neutrality of the medium or to history's black sense of humor, Ceausescu's own execution was aired over and over on the screens he once controlled...Television literally woke up the country...It was television unlike anything ever seen in the West, an outpouring of images that startled not just Romanians but the world...The extraordinary thing about what Romanians and the world (via CNN and French Television) were seeing on their screens was not just the sudden news and field reports, but the open invitation to the Romanian people to come and speak freely. Consequently, mobs of people milled in front of the tanks outside Studio Four, clamoring to get in with messages ranging from the profoundly serious to the profoundly silly...When the flow of people slowed, the twenty-four-hour station aired things unseen and unheard-of in Romania: MTV videos stolen from satellites, and Italian and German soft porn. Romanians saw bare breasts on television for the first time in history...The National Salvation Front of Romania--prompted by their rapt audience--instituted a series of reforms that often seemed improvised right in the studios: freedom of speech, opening of the borders, release of all political prisoners, five-day work week, landgrants to peasants, abolition of the death penalty, popular elections in the spring...For a time, Romanian television was the central nervous system of the revolution. Gil Scott-Heron was, it seems, wrong when he said, "The revolution will not be televised." This revolution was entirely televised.

 

 

 

 

Lionesses' Teeth

 

This 2nd round of the trumpanista government, while it often leaves me depressed, has also roused in me the sensation about how important my religious faith is to helping people remember they're worthy, they're strong, and they can help. Thus, I'm reposting a sermon from 2013 which is also a reworking of a message from 2 years before that that focuses on those attributes we uniquely have and why they are necessary. (This post is so old that the technology taking people to associated websites will ask if going there is really what you want to do. I have checked them, and yes, they are safe."

   

“Lionesses’ Teeth”

 

Homily presented to the

Dakota UU Church of

Burnsville, MN,

 

            Normally during my celebration of Flower Communion my contribution is a freshly-plucked dandelion.  Taraxacum officinale.  I use it because we all recognize it in its omnipresence, as indestructible as love. 

            We have yet to see them this year because of the incredibly late winter we’ve experienced—only a week ago my wife and I were stranded because our driveway had sixteen inches of snow unceremoniously dumped on it by whatever malevolent snow-god or whatever sleeping spring-god there might be —but I guarantee you they will be coming and they will be everywhere.  The dandelion is the cockroach of flora.  They existed long before our species rose up from the proverbial swamp and after we return to the dust they will continue to be here. 

The name “dandelion,” which I’d always assumed referred to the yellow mane of the flower and its seeming vanity, actually comes from the French dents de lion, “teeth of the lion,” and refers instead to the deeply serrated rosette of leaves that poke up from billions of lawns, in abandoned lots, between the cracks in concrete, in the clefts of mountain crags and skyscrapers, and sometimes tufting out of the useless chimneys of houses where no hearths have burned in decades.  They are perennial and rely on bees and flies to pollinate, and when they’re ready, the wind carries their seeds on tiny parachutes to new places.  Sometimes they fly as much as several hundred meters.  They do not need us at all.

            Dandelions are often used as a medicine, usually involved with blood, the liver, and gall bladder.  Its juices aids detoxification and bile flow, promotes lactation and the immune system, and helps reduce eczema and cough and asthma.  The root can be dried and ground up and added to coffee, like its close relative chicory, and the leaves are often delicious in salads (although I’ll admit I have to add a lot of butter to make them palatable).  And most of us are of an age when we have had dandelion wine.

            Had Jesus been born in, say, Kansas rather than in the Middle East, the Sermon on the Mount might have included the following: 

Consider the [dandelions,] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 

             Now don’t mistake all this information for anything like love for the dandelion.  I relish nothing more this time of year than to walk barefoot among my lawns, swiping the heads off these parasites with a few well-aimed kung fu kicks.  There is a deep, satisfying, bottom-of-the-gut joy that comes with yanking a 3 foot long dandelion root from my gardens.  Few things are as pleasurable as watching the beasts disappear under the deck of my lawnmower.  I do not love the dandelion.  I tolerate the dandelion.

            Because, try as I might to eradicate it, the dandelion remains as much a part of my life as a part of my landscape.  I cannot escape its existence.  I mow and weed and even spray the lawns, and still they come back up.  That is their unique power. 

A story now, a contemporary one, about motherhood that serves to relate how people are like dandelions.  Our relationships with our mothers, with either parent actually, can be pleasant and problematic at best.  I had what I think was a pretty good relationship with my late mother and with my dad, secure at all times in the knowledge that, no matter what, they loved me and wanted nothing but the best for me.  Those among us who are mothers or parents likely have that same assurance that they, too, love their children no matter what. 

            This week we saw the end of a news story that adds a different, more complex concept to this topic.  I refer of course to the story of the three girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted nearly eleven years ago, the last of them nearly nine years ago, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home of their presumed kidnapper. 

            We can have only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus experienced over the past decade.  We should be thankful for that.  Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the six year old daughter of Amanda Barry and her captor, whose name has yet to be released, has experienced.  If she is fortunate she herself will retain little memory of what her life to now has been. 

[Note:  In illustrating this post I purposely chose a photo in which her daughter's face is blurred.  There are many images available where it is not but I think she should be allowed as much privacy as possible.]

            There are so many things to be said about this situation, about the Castro Brothers’ activities and what they hoped to accomplish [update]; about the women’s years in captivity and in physical, emotional and sexual abuse; about how this situation happened in a neighborhood of a major American city and not in some Hills Have Eyes outback; about the unwillingness of police, despite what are supposed to have been multiple reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home; and most especially, there are things yet to say about Charles Ramsay and his willingness to expose his own past—because in this brave new networked world there are no past sins that can’t be found—in order to do the right thing. 

            But what I’d like to talk about is Amanda Berry and her daughter.  And how what little we know might suggest about motherhood and resilience.  The story as it’s come to us is that a week ago today Ariel Castro left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s.  If he did this on a regular basis we don’t know, and if he didn’t why he chose this day to do it, no one apparently knows, but when he did Amanda Berry took the opportunity to scream as near the door as she could until someone responded.  Charles Ramsay did, and it’s a testament to his heroism that this man, who partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around, and after listening to her story that she was being held against her will kicked the bottom panel out of the door.  Berry, carrying her child, squeezed through the broken panel, hugged Ramsay, begged him to take her to his house to use his phone, and then called police.

            Some of us might routinely play a mental game with ourselves in which, if we were caught in a disaster and could save only one thing, what would it be.  To make it more interesting we often presume that there are no people or animals involved, to make it a specifically material question.  What thing would we save?  Amanda Berry did not have the luxury of pretending or of there being no person involved.  The material object she left with was her daughter.

             To put this decision in perspective, consider what myriad complications must have been involved over the past six years.  Berry was just under seventeen when she was abducted.  After years of sex with her abductor and probably his brothers—we presume the middle brother, Ariel, is the abductor because it’s his house the women were found in but the abductor could be any of the brothers[see update above] or, worse yet, someone we’re not even aware of—she is pregnant at twenty and delivers a daughter into the dark, airless, sunless existence she’s come to figure will be her future.  We don’t know if she wanted this girl or feared for her existence, born into the same situation she’d been held captive in, and it’s likely it was a combination of both sensations and any number of others.  She may have wanted to abort the fetus, although we have heard suggestions from one of the the other women that Castro beat her when she was pregnant to spontaneously miscarry.  So what we are left to guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that Ariel, who DNA tests have proved to be the father, had a change of heart over this pregnancy and decided to allow it to be brought to term. 

            This girl, born into a situation her mother was abducted into, and raised only in the company of the other two abducted women and the Castro brothers—what can be going through her head?  She is six years old, she has known only these six people in her life.  Two of them are her parents.  One of them carried her out of her world into the unknown, into what she can’t possibly know.  So while we can’t know what Michelle, Gina or Amanda has gone through we can, with some certainty, know what Amanda’s daughter is experiencing now:  Absolute, unqualified, quaking fear.

              It seems to me, as an outsider looking in on parenthood, that this is one extreme part of what it means to be a mother:  To deliver your child into great uncertainty and, when the time comes, to help her escape into greater uncertainty.  But that is what you must do. 

            It’s well known that among lions it’s the female, the lioness, who hunts and who is really the fiercer of the species so it may be that the distinctive feature about dandelions—their serrated leaves, the dents de lion—may more accurately be termed the dents de lioness.  Perhaps the natural reaction as mothers, as parents, even as proponents of religious liberalism, is to emulate the dandelion—stubbornly resistive to any attempt to root us out, to burn us out, and even to the natural tendency of entropy to crumble us from within. 

            Our message, the message of religious liberalism, the message of people who see great complexity to parenthood—that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that to treat anyone as less than the glorious being that he or she is is itself an evil, that children and the people we’re responsible for need safe food and safe water and safe places to live, and that these are not starry-eyed ideals but necessities—must be heard.  We must endure for these messages to be heard.  We must become ubiquitous and obnoxious, unwilling to be pressed from our perch.  We must be willing to grow quietly beside the more beautiful and cozened strawberry and rose and lily so to suck up some of their excess nutrient and water until we can elbow those more popular petals aside to take the place we’ve earned.  To endure as a faith and as a people we need to be as tough, as resilient, and as uncompromising as the common dandelion. 

What It Means to Become American

 

Because the only other of her books I'm familiar with is "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, I picked up The Education of an Idealist, the memoir of former UN Ambassador and recently replaced USAID director Samantha Power, because anyone who could write about the things she has witnessed and still call herself an idealist is on a wavelength I want to invest time in. 

Early on, she describes her becoming an American citizen (she was born and raised in Ireland) and what that meant to her. 

During high school, I had failed the driver's test several times (hitting various cones), and I still felt the sting of humiliation...I was determined to avoid a similar embarrassment on my citizenship test, and wildly overprepared, using a Barron's citizenship guide to create flash cards with every conceivable question I might be asked about American government and civics. Unlike many of those applying, English was my first language, and I had the benefit of learning US history in school. Still, I felt relived when, in the fall of 1993, I learned I had passed. 

...I didn't think to invite [my mom and stepfather] to the courthouse in Brooklyn to see [my naturalization ceremony, as they had made no fuss about having been sworn in the year before.] However, the other new Americans participating treated the day like the momentous event that it was, donning their finest suits and dresses and surrounding themselves with family.

During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged [to support and defend the Constitution and US laws.] Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren't giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now. 

Listen to what she says. She's not faking the emotion in her words or overstating those of the people around her. These are genuine sentiments from people for whom getting to the US has been an arduous and, in many cases, dangerous trek. To deny them the sanctity and sanctuary of their success, as the rethuglican administration has threatened to do and in some cases has done already, is to deny the dream and hope that citizenship holds for people. It is, plainly, wrong.

Nous Sommes les Lapins

 The first heavy casualties of the French Revolution were rabbits. On March 10 and 11, 1789, the villagers of Neuville formed themselves into platoons, armed with clubs and sickles, and searched meadows and woods for their prolific little enemies. What dogs they had accompanied them, and the shout of "Hou, hou" signified to the rest of the hunting party a satisfactory kill...Disregarding the game laws that had protected birds and animals, and the brutal "captaincies" that enforced them, hobnail boots trampled through forbidden forests or climbed over fences and stone walls. Grass was mown in grain fields to reveal the nests of partridge and pheasant, snipe and woodcock; eggs were smashed or fledglings left to the dogs. Warrens were staved in, hares rooted out from behind rocks. In daring villages, pit traps were even set for the most prized game, which was also the most voracious consumer of green shoots: roe deer. The most spectacular assaults were on those chateaux in miniature: dovecotes, from which the peasantry had seen aerial raiding parties launched against their seed, returning in absolute safety to their seigneurial compound. They were, said one cahier, "flying thieves."...It could hardly be called poaching since there was nothing furtive about the onslaught. In some cases, the slaughtered game was hung from poles like trophies and paraded about the village...[There] were simply too many determined peasants who, with their winter crop destroyed by the climate, were not prepared to see their spring crop turn into rabbit fodder. In some places...villagers simply ignored the laws and hunted at will. When they ran into gamekeepers...they shot them dead on the spot.

From Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

Think carefully on this. At first, it is almost comical, the notion that the Revolution began in earnest with the killing of previously protected game. It may even seem justified, said game having been allegedly responsible for depleting the stores of the farmers. This description occurs on pages 322 and 323 after Schama has spent considerable time explaining the economics behind what became the bloodiest revolution in modern history, and it is not hard, after all that, to mentally cheer on the proto-citizens as they explode in violence after so long being oppressed. 

But it doesn't take long to see a problem here. After all, soon (Schama dates it to less than 3 weeks) the rampant killing moves from birds and game to the gamekeepers. These people were, after all, not only keeping the law but their families fed and cared for.

In little time one of the cahiers (meaning "a list of grievances" but better understood today as a broadsheet explaining actions to the general public and written by pamphleteers) "insisted that it was 'the general will of the Nation that game should be destroyed...and this is the intention of our good King who watches over the common good of his people and who loves them.'" 

Most of us think of the French Revolution as breaking the backs of the monarchy and nobility, and there's justification to it as they were the people who famously paid with their lives. The King referred to here as being the motivator of the uprising is the selfsame Louis XVI guillotined with his wife, Marie Antoinette, just a few years later. 

But while we think of the Revolution as being an anti-elite whirlwind force that swiftly swept up innocents and guilty alike, robbing all of them of their most basic rights, it began with people who thought they were doing the (unacknowledged) will of the King. When I began reading Schama's book I did not expect to identify the initiators of the Terror with the followers of trump; in fact, I assumed contemporary Neuville villagers would be the ones stamping out, not woodcocks and rabbits, but rethuglicans. 

But instead, as we often find, history doesn't quite repeat as it slant rhymes. The contemporary Neuvillier is likelier to see immigrants as the doves of today, the "aerial raiding parties launched against their seed" (metaphorical today, given the far right conspiracy of replacement both in citizenship and jobs) and more than happy to smash eggs, stave in warrens, set the dogs on fledglings because it is what their King expects them to do. In Schama's words, "It was as though...the people had produced the assumption that the King now licensed what had been unlawful...Killing game [and gamekeepers] was not only an act of desperation, it was, by the lights of 1789, Patriotic." 

Is it difficult to see that trump's blanket pardon of nearly every January 6th offender is in that same line of thinking, at least to those who follow him? Do I exaggerate? I hope so. But Schama's recitation of greater and greater chaos finally devolving into blood does not encourage me. But for the immediate future, I fear we are the rabbits.

 

 

Home

 About a week and a half ago the message at my church centered on one's return home, especially to a home town where one doesn't feel welcomed. That's had me thinking about it since. 

I've returned at different times to the area where I grew up, and sometimes it's been good and sometimes not. I think that's most people's experience. I'm a part of the estimated 25% of men who have moved far away from their hometown and I have been for a lot of years. There were periods when I stayed at my parents home or even lived in a cabin at the end of the road I grew up on. But I knew in each case I wouldn't remain there.

Which when I look back seems strange. I grew up thinking my area was a reasonably all right place and I would remain in its environs for life. I mean, it had access to nearly everything I wanted: a big city (NYC, where a lot of my friends moved to), lots of bookstores and schools (including my alma mater), deep woods and nearby mountains (the Berkshires and one end of the Appalachian Trail), good local music I could listen to for free when I wanted, even one of the best art collections in the country (the Clark Art). 

Still, I left early in my late teens, and I've stayed away as far as I can for what's probably the rest of my life. On occasion I imagine it's because of the potential me that might have been if I'd remained: a conservative rednecked mouth-breathing rethuglican. That image warms me for my decision to stay away.

But I really know that's not true. A lot of my friends who are still in the area are not that way at all (especially of course the ones who moved south to The City but even a fair number who stayed in nearby counties). I suspect the truth is it's not the environment that makes you but your reaction to it.

Besides, if stultifying right wingery is what I'd hoped to avoid, I wouldn't have spent the bulk of 30 years living in the central midwest and a few years ago having retired to the deep south. It should seem the opposite.

There's where a part of the paradox may lay, that having grown up in the bastion of red state behavior in one of the bluest states I find myself in adulthood more comfortable in the bluer segments of some of the reddest states. 

I'm well aware it's a privilege to live somewhere one is comfortable, not afforded to everyone. When I was younger and I found where I was staying didn't fulfill me, I'd leave. It was a comfort, knowing I was a step away from being gone if I wanted to be. That's how I disappeared from a lot of people's lives too and as I grow older I wonder where and how they are. The internet and Facebook have been great for catching up and I'm glad for that. But I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to watch the people I knew age and change, both for the better and worse. 

I Just Like It: Walk Humbly Together

 

Like many millions of you, I could not bring myself to watch trump's second inauguration, with its political overreach and underhandedness. But like also many millions of you, I have watched the now-famous inaugural prayer service from the following morning by The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of Washington, DC, at the Washington National Cathedral. You should also watch it. It is inspiring. 

Her sermon, preached to the nation, gave voice to the hopes and fears so many of us face as we enter a second phase of rule by That Felon Guy, and her final words, delivered directly to him, resound with compassion. 

In a tone both measured yet commanding, she reminds us not only of the ideals of the American Experiment but of the best of our ideals that lead to unity, dignity, honesty, and humility. She asks for mercy. 

(I've heard some of my queer friends and others complain about her last word choice, that they would not ask for mercy from trump and it's a fair point; my own tradition might have used "compassion" rather than "mercy," but in her Episcopal tradition mercy is an important idea, reverberating as it does down the ages and translations, and I honor that). 

She is not strident, she is not placating, she does not harass, she does not deliver a Jeremiad denouncing the king before her. But she is a teacher and a shepherd, guiding the thoughts and behaviors of the faithful who would follow her. 

We would all do well to live by her words to trump.