Morning Thoughts: December 17, 2017

Writing ability does not always follow genius like a boxcar follows a locomotive engine. It is refreshing when it does occur, as in Charles Darwin’s case. I had avoided reading The Voyage of the Beagle for decades, fearing that the observations might be too scientifically described for me. Welcome to another surprise.

Long an admirer of Darwin for his monumental contribution to our understanding of the Universe, I’m now addicted to his ability as a writer as well. I had previously found On The Origin Of Species and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex both quite readable. Now I can add “Beagle” to the list. I’ve been listening to an audio version while driving, and even in that format it permits ease of understanding. I can always review particularly interesting passages in free on-line versions.

One passage in particular caught my ear this past week in light of comments made by the candidate of our president’s political party in a U.S. Senate race a week ago. It seems the candidate thought America was “great” during the slavery era.

Yes. You heard right.

Contrast this with a passage from Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin was on the five-year voyage as a companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy, not as the ship’s naturalist as is often, and erroneously, maintained. It seems that captains on British warships were not permitted to interact with the crew on a personal level and often paid someone to accompany them as a companion to counteract the long periods of tedium while at sea. Darwin did engage in almost constant study of the natural world on the cruise, however, and we are all the better for it.

Back to the passage: during a stopover in Rio de Janeiro, Darwin accepted an invitation to travel to an inland estate of a man who had befriended him. Following is a passage from his description of that trip.

"As the moon rose early, we determined to start the same evening for our sleeping-place at the Lagoa Marica. As it was growing dark we passed under one of the massive, bare, and steep hills of granite which are so common in this country. This spot is notorious from having been, for a long time, the residence of some runaway slaves, who, by cultivating a little ground near the top, contrived to eke out a subsistence. At length they were discovered, and a party of soldiers being sent, the whole were seized with the exception of one old woman, who, sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy."

Perhaps it might enlighten Roy Moore to read Darwin.

Probably not, but we can always hope for redemption.

No, Mr. Moore, no country was truly
great when it practiced slavery. 

Morning Thoughts: December 13, 2017

Flipped back and forth last evening between election coverage and a documentary about Nazi invasion of Poland. The latter had some footage I’ve never seen before, and was more than terrifying. What a sore on the soul of humanity is racial hatred. What was particularly unsettling, and I’ve read about his many times before, was the cavalier attitude of the non-Jewish residents of the occupied cities as their neighbors and former friends were dragged from their homes.

I think it was Elie Wiesel who wrote so eloquently about the sin of indifference. It was well-evident in Polish city after Polish city as the Nazis began systematically going about their reign of terror with no protests from the non-victims.

Many stood and watched and others applauded as men, women, and children were beaten down the streets and crowded into ghettos. Some standers-by then took the opportunity to take belongings left behind. As I watched, dots began to connect themselves in my mind.

What kind of species are we? I flipped the channel. There was the smirking image of a man who, just this week, had said that the last time America was great was during slavery. My strongest image from what I have learned of that era, is an account (by Fredrick Law Olmstead I think, in Travels Through the South). The author, whoever it was anyway, recounted watching a slave owner punish a female slave for some infraction or other. She was pregnant, “bigly” pregnant, so her “master” had her dig an indention in the ground to accommodate her swollen belly before he made her lie down to be beaten.

Great? If so, then let’s not make America great like that again. Racism and hatred are no ways to make a country great. The Nazis proved that.

To borrow wording from a much greater American, “It is left for us, the living …” to rise above what may be evolutionary tendencies toward tribalism (now called “nationalism”) and embrace the "better angels of our nature" by embracing our sisters and brothers of all colors and places of origin. We could, I think, achieve greatness by letting love and peace replace bigotry and war.

Why the optimism?

Well, after all, America did become a little greater as recently as yesterday.

Auctioning off what conservative
textbooks call "Guest Workers."

Growing Up Southern: November 12, 2017

There’s a body of water near where I grew up that is of some local interest. It’s Bayou Bartholomew, the longest one in the world. They say it is, anyway. It runs from Pine Bluff, Arkansas all the way to South Louisiana. It’s the meat of legend and song.

I say “runs” with a fair degree of hyperbole, for bayous don’t really run. They merely slug along, catching and preserving whatever flows into them, much like the South itself. But anyway, what’s a Southerner without hyperbole? We feasted on the concept long before it reached the Borough of Queens, in New York. It matches the tendency of our minds to take sharp turns.

Our hyperbole, though, tends to favor the harmless variety. For example, our mosquitoes are so big that they can stand flat-footed and [have sex with] a turkey, or keep a person awake at night as they crack “hikker-nuts” (Hickory nuts) with their beaks. We have snakes that are so mean that one can kill a tree by coiling around it and stinging it with its tail. We had a banker once who was so crooked that it took three grave plots to bury him. And I personally knew a man whose cousin’s postman told him of a fallen woman so attracted to “group sessions,” that she had to buy thank-you notes by the case.

So what if we would, as William Faulkner observed, cut down a 100-year old oak tree to get at a squirrel’s nest? It would be like Joseph and Mary clearing a spot in the manger for the little Galilean baby, wouldn’t it? Well maybe not, but what’s a little exaggeration among friends? Can’t hurt anyone, can it?

What if we are tending more and more toward electing our politicians for their entertainment value rather than potential benefit to humankind? It allows us to say, “Did you hear the one about the one senator that was so mean the other senators started noticing it?” What about funerals? Would one of the Northern Tribesmen, when asked to say something grand about the deceased, ever stand and say, “Well, I always heard his brother was worse?” The South, after all, originated what the late columnist Richard Allin called the act of “filibustering the deceased into Heaven.”

Are there people anywhere other than the American South that are so “hard-featured” that their face would “make a freight train take a dirt road?” It might even be a face that closely resembled a “mule’s ass sewed up with a logging chain.” Such people thrive here, bigly.

But back to Bayou Bartholomew. It was once what they dumped raw sewage into, but they stopped that back in the 1950s, I think it was. We might expect them to start the practice again. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The tornado of 1947 generally followed the course of Bayou Bartholomew as it ravaged a huge area south of the city of Pine Bluff. There were, if I remember correctly, 32 people killed as a result of the damage. Six young men shooting craps of a Sunday afternoon died in the storm. This happened in an abandoned house less than two city blocks distance from our little country grocery store. To the East of us, an entire family died when their house was lifted, turned upside down, and deposited into Bayou Imbeau, a black-water body near Bayou Bartholomew.

The houses on both sides of our house and store were totally destroyed. The store was undamaged. My father gave away its entire inventory to survivors, asked no money, and went bankrupt. The local newspaper suggested erecting a monument to him. They never did. The small town of Lonsdale, Arkansas did send him a check for $45.00.

In 1957, the bayou flooded. I could watch it from our front porch rise a couple of feet above the highway. They built a major “big box” development at that location a few years ago. When it floods, if there is a functioning government then, we’ll all pay for the recovery. Such is life.

I guess one lesson is that the function of a responsible government, including disaster relief, is not a matter for humor, hyperbole, or political aggrandizement. The best we can hope for is to ooze along like a bayou, hope for the best, love our fellow humans, and be thankful when we aren’t targeted for destruction in the meantime. Peace.

There's not a huge demand for "Bayou-side Mansions,"
but it is possessed of a certain charm.