"Don't read that stuff, and if you do, don't tell me about it."
Peg assiduously maintains a news prophylaxis around her life, eschewing the pleasures and horrors of reading the New York Times online despite our shiny new subscription. I, on the other hand, feel compelled to go there, starved for ideas and some contact with the world I watch walk past the solarium window while I remotely manage one crisis or another.
But the Times, I must admit, doesn't really satisfy in light of its disciplined messaging that would ring familiar to any Soviet "journalist" of the mid-twentieth century. Brett Stephens is as close as anyone comes on their editorial board to being a conservative, and his is a thoughtful but often insipid approach that avoids confronting the absurdity loose in that building. The rest seem to cram the news into one box or another of identity politics, which produces a dialogue more boring than illuminating.
The Drudge Report, on the other hand, remains a cluttered mishmash of headlines and essays drawn from all over. It is the Red Rider BB Gun of news, fun and surprising and a little dangerous at times.
This morning's offerings left me ruminating on three different themes, which I'll offer here if you continue reading--the meaning of freedom during the current epoch, the consequences of religious decline, and our interactions with the animal world. Try cobbling those together from the front page of the Times.
Freedom. I was already pondering this one after our beloved son-by-different-parents PT, planning his trip up here this weekend for Easter, asked about my plan to wander the circumference of Seneca Lake this coming Friday, visiting wineries and taking in the scenery on what promises to be a lovely spring day.
"Are you taking the day off?" The question, asked over a table filled with wings and homemade pork rinds at the History Brewing Company, drew a puzzled look from me. I have no idea whom I would ask for a day off. I just come and go as I please, more like the wind with each year I practice law. I have no boss. I have no financial constraint that compels squeezing every dollar out of a day. Even here in this lovely solarium cell, I'm a lot more free than most.
My evolving sense of the meaning of freedom these days is anchored in not working for another person or entity, and achieving enough financial independence to avoid the need to do so. I can sit here and peck at my keyboard at 6:23 central time, and not care what anyone thinks of what I have to say. I own me.
This sort of existential, libertarian notion of freedom stands in stark contrast to that of the bullies who've used "freedom" as a rallying cry for all kinds of bad behavior in the MAGA era. They are in debt up to their eyeballs, working for a company that probably requires a plastic nametag or a corporate logo shirt (the poor bastards were seated all around me on my last flight), trapped by life while telling themselves they're still "free" because, well, they can buy an assault rifle without a background check. Or maybe, better yet, they can force their way into a place of business with no mask and no proof they've been vaccinated against Covid, even if the owner of that business doesn't want them there.
Or at least that's now the law in my dumb home state of Florida.
I guess if you're a member of a death cult masquerading as a political party, it's not actual freedom that concerns you; rather, your goal is to continually engage in right-wing agitprop, political theater for the Fox News crowd, as a means of distracting your posse from the actual erosion of liberty woven into the evolving fabric of our daily lives.
Plus, it's a great tool for creating a vast slush fund, drawn from the poorest and most ignorant among us, born of a promise to fight back against, well, whatever, but spent on well, whatever.
A quarter billion collected, $8.8 million spent on anything remotely resembling the stated purpose of the contribution. I guess someone achieved freedom in all that, sitting on a pile of cash and answerable to no one. It suddenly makes perfect sense.
A Quiet Holy Week. Sitting up here on Southside Hill, I hear the church bells ring each midday, this week leading with "All Glory Laud and Honor." If you've spent time in a traditional church, you know the song as the traditional processional on Palm Sunday.
But, it seems, fewer and fewer of you, of us, are finding our way into the pews these days.
A couple things strike me as interesting in these data. First, the numbers held steady for literally sixty-plus years, before beginning a steady decline maybe two decades ago. What happened around the turn of the millennium that produced this downward trend? If you're thinking the churchie oldsters who dotted the congregation like so many Q-tips began to die off about then, you'd run into the second oddity in the numbers---the decline in church membership spans the generations, even though the younger set is particularly affected. Grandma and Grandpa have apparently found something better to do with their Sunday mornings, as well.
One discriminator that emerges is political affiliation--the more one identifies as conservative (whatever that means these days), the more one is likely to state an affiliation with a church. No real surprise there. And these mostly evangelical churches have learned an important lesson from the antics of the political right--the more you keep folks riled up about political nonsense and social issues conspicuously unaddressed in the Gospels, the better your attendance and your plate. It is a despicable bargain, taking the beatitudes and twisting them into a message of hate directed at some cartoonish "them", and my gut tells me this hypocrisy is the reason none of our boys wants anything to do with church.
Although I do love and miss my church. I can't help it. A high church Episcopal service in a beautiful space, with a thundering organ and incense in the air, brings me closer to God than I feel while I'm "trying to find Jesus on my own," to quote John Prine. But I have to acknowledge none of that has anything to do with the beatitudes either. So who's the hypocrite now, Donk?
An inevitable consequence of our current meander through the spiritual wilderness without the theological map of twenty centuries of Christian thought is the proliferation of 1960s style, self-revelatory spirituality that seems to fill the void for some. The surprise, I guess, is that this soft-headed, Iron John nonsense has found a fertile field in the manure of the radical right.
"Conspirituality." Remember the term, because it seems to describe accurately what we are seeing over there in MAGA-land. A belief in a worldwide conspiracy that controls seemingly random world events, coupled with a faith in spiritual enlightenment that allows one to see it for what it is, and recapture something lost in modernity, particularly for men.
We may roll our eyes, but let's face it--Christianity at its core has always required its devotees to swallow a few real whoppers that fly in the face of everything we see around us. Virgin births. Resurrected bodies. Grandpa fishing with Jesus in an afterlife created for us by a loving God, after gasping, agonal breathing during his last minutes on earth drowning from Covid. Once we're convinced to live in this fairy tale land, how much weirder is the buffet of beliefs held by many who stormed the Capitol? A lifetime of conditioning got those folks there, created the anti-intellectual millieu that was weaponized once it became de-coupled from traditional organized religion.
As for me, the best I can say is that there's a hell of a lot I don't and can't know, and I just try to remain humbly open to a few surprises in this existence. It's not a posture that leads to much social mischief.
Critters. Finally, my scroll through Drudge led me back to thinking of our relationship with the animal kingdom.
Here at the apartment, I watch with concern Slane's descent into madness as Spring explodes into blossoms and robins and squirrels right outside the window. He loved his time at Wyldswood, scrambling up and down through the resurrection ferns carpeting the long, horizontal branches of the huge live oak out front. He now sits at the window, tail wagging furiously, longing for the chance to enter the scene rather than watch it. I sort of understand.
Slane's frustration has recently led to vandalism, the only form of civil disobedience available to a neutered Maine Coon Cat. This morning he leapt up and swung from those curtains in the photo. A few days ago he knocked over the nut bowl in the middle of the night, leaving a spray pattern of filberts and walnuts all over the family room. Yesterday he escalated his uncivil disobedience even further, throwing himself at a planter perched precariously on a stand right next to me as I worked, leading to a crashing explosion of shattered ceramic and flying potting soil.
Seeing as how he and Dean are my only source of in-person, sentient contact most days before about five when P gets home, I've choked back my anger at all this and tried to use the news to explain to Slaniac that the world out there is a dangerous place. For instance, you might find yourself swarmed by 15,000 bees.
I also reminded him of the dangers lurking back there at his halcion of Wyldswood, where hawks, coyotes, and foxes would still consider him a fine meal.
Of course, this article, besides doing nothing to change Slane's mind about making the best of his predicament, also left me sort of sad.
Developing an emotional bond with a bunch of chickens, then one day hearing the news that a heifer pushed the door to the chicken house open during the night, and now Mange, Blackie, Alpha, and Beta would be gone from our lives forever--I am a little embarrassed for myself at the emotional pain that caused, and the lingering pall it casts over a place that was Eden right up until then. We'll do better next time, and take the protective measures described in this article, but the loss of innocence in that moment is irretrievable. And we let our birds down, left them to get eaten while we were up here. I know it probably would've happened that way even if we had been back on the farm, but I've always been hard-wired for guilt, and this has been a trigger.
Speaking of guilt, there's a pile of work calling my name, bills to pay, folks who are counting on me to brush off the dust and charge into the breach one more time.
What was I saying about freedom?
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