All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was our selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. Unfortunately, Covid messed up our meeting plans, so we haven’t discussed it yet. In any case, as is our usual tradition for November, we read the “One Book One Bakersfield” selection. 

All You Can Ever Know is a deeply personal and emotionally raw account. The author was adopted as an infant. Her biological parents were Korean immigrants, and, as she discovered later, there were a lot of factors that went into her being placed for adoption. 

 

Her adoptive parents were white, and raised her in an overwhelmingly white town in central Oregon. As was common back in that time, they had no knowledge or resources on how to raise a non-white child in that situation, so she grew up facing constant racism and unable to talk with her parents about it. 

 

Later in life, after she married and was pregnant with her first child, she decided to find her birth parents. And her older sisters who had no idea she existed. (They were told the baby had died.) 

 

This book is all about the author’s life, and her complicated relationship with her family - all of it. 

 

I was surprised just how much this book emotionally affected me. My situation is very different, and yet, the complexities of family, of rejection, of abuse, and of the emotional ties to our parents that are complicated, are common to our stories in enough ways. 

 

The other thing that this book makes clear is that adoption is not the panacea that the anti-abortion lobby makes it out to be. While an adoption may be an unmitigated good for the parents, this isn’t the case for the child. At the heart of any adoption is a loss, a tragedy, a separation.  This doesn’t mean that adoption itself is bad - far from it in many situations. But it isn’t a simple happy ending, and it isn’t the solution that should be our first choice in every situation. 

 

I want to make clear that I do not mean to denigrate any of the adoptive parents I know (or the ones I don’t.) Most adoptive parents do so from good motives, do the best they know for their children, and are usually good people. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for the most part, the problem isn’t bad intent. 

 

The problem is that in many cases, a child is separated from parents not because those parents are dead or bad people, but because of poverty and the problems that come with poverty. 

 

By the way, I have some experience in this. For the past 22 years, I have represented Indian Tribes in Juvenile Dependency cases pursuant to the Indian Child Welfare Act. This means that I have seen up close which children are removed from homes, what those homes are like, and who the children end up with when adopted. 

 

I can say straight up that there are very few white middle-class children who are adopted out. For the most part, the people in the system are poor. Full stop. Poor. 

 

Yes, of course, drugs and alcohol are factors - but middle-class people have addictions without losing their children. And yes, there are abusive parents - but middle-class abusers usually get to keep their kids. It is poverty that makes the difference. 

 

So, in this book, you have a fairly poor immigrant family. The mother is mentally ill, but has no access to treatment. She gets pregnant, and finds to her dismay that the child is another girl. When she gives birth prematurely, the doctors tell the parents that the child will be profoundly disabled and need lifetime care - care that the parents cannot possibly afford. The father is worried already because the mother is abusive to her younger daughter, and he is concerned that the baby will be abused even more. 

 

And so, the decision to place the child for adoption is made. 

 

It is a decision that neither of the parents truly wants, but one they feel they have to make. In a better world, one where medical and mental health care was available, in a world where income was not so precarious, or even in a world where someone was willing to give some reassurance and encouragement, Nicole would not have been adopted out. 

 

There is an interesting line in the book on that note. 

 

Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption - individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice - in terms of right and wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us. 

 

Later in the book, she discusses the wide range of opinions her fellow adoptees have expressed, from “closed adoptions like ours are little better than child trafficking” to “I never think about my birth family at all.” It is complicated, to put it mildly.

 

I should explain here as well that Nicole had and has a good relationship with her adoptive parents - the ones she considers her “real” parents. They are portrayed very positively in the book, as any errors they made were out of ignorance rather than malevolence, and they take Nicole’s quest for her birth family with incredible grace and encouragement. She is correct in her conclusion that her life was in most ways better because of the adoption. 

 

Her birth father also is portrayed in an empathetic manner. He is a flawed man, but he tries, and as a result, ends up being in Nicole’s life - and indeed, part of her extended family. 

 

Her birth mother, on the other hand, is more problematic. The middle sister was brutally abused by her, and in fact when her parents divorced, she insisted on living with her father. Because Nicole knew about the abuse, and bonded with her sister, she wasn’t really able to build a relationship with her birth mother, who never really took responsibility for that. It is sad, but entirely understandable. 

 

The book, like the relationships, is complicated. It doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff, and Nicole is strikingly open about her messy feelings. 

 

There are a few lines that I wanted to highlight that stood out to me. 

 

Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. In can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world. When tiny, traitorous doubts arose, when I felt lost or alone or confused about all the things I couldn’t know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty. 

 

Man, the family lore in my own family was really strong, and I tried so hard to believe it for so many years. We were different - in a good way. We were accepting and welcoming. We were the nice people. It really wasn’t until it was made clear that my wife was not accepted and would never be accepted that I was able to see that the narrative was straight-up bullshit. A myth to make my parents feel better about themselves, lies to make them comfortable. 

 

All members of a family have their own ways of defining the others. All parents have ways of saying things about their children as if they are indisputable facts, even when the children don’t believe them to be true at all. It’s why so many of us feel alone or unseen, despite the real love we have for our families and they for us. 

 

This was a big part of it. With the “inspiration” from religious charlatans - those authoritarian parenting gurus my parents followed - I was typecast as the rebellious child, the one who needed most to be “fixed,” the one who was in for a rude awakening when I tried to make it in the real world. (And in particular, when I discovered that no woman would want me until I learned to be fully responsible for their emotions.) 

 

And yes, starting in my early teens, I felt alone and unseen by my parents. I still do not fully grasp how they completely failed to understand who I was - a child who was not in fact rebellious, but who had too much integrity to simply comply when I felt things were unfair. 

 

There is another fascinating line in the book, one uttered by Nicole’s adoptive mother when she was a kid. 

 

We weren’t really prepared to have a kid like you, my mother had said once, something she might have regretted if she were in the habit of questioning her words.

 

As Nicole notes, she was a loved member of the family…but still an outsider. I feel this one so much. I’m not even going to try to list all of the similar things I have heard from my parents over the years, but it is very much clear that they were not prepared at all for a child like me. I was not the kind of child they wanted - sickly, needy, emotional, skeptical, a voracious learner. (My sister was the kind of kid they wanted, and that much continues to be made very clear to me.) 

 

I know that none of us parents are prepared for our kids, and we all have to improvise as we go. I am sure I have made many, many mistakes with my kids. I am determined, however, to accept them for who they are, and not consider them defective because they aren’t what I expected. 

 

As a parent herself by the time she wrote this book, she also has plenty of empathy for parents, whether adoptive or otherwise. This line resonated with me regarding the experience of being a parent. 

 

No matter how a child joins your family, their presence changes all the rules; they move into your heart and build new rooms, knock down walls you never knew existed. This is why new parents crave reassurance more than anything else: We tell ourselves, and want others to tell us, that we’re going to be wonderful parents. That our children will be happy. That their suffering will be light - or at least, never of a kind we cannot help them through. We have to believe these things, promise ourselves we’ll meet every challenge, or we’d never be brave enough to begin. 

 

Man, that is so true. I often wonder if I had known the future, if I would have chosen to have kids. And this is no reflection on my kids, who are great people, or on the experience of being a parent, which I have greatly enjoyed. But without that foolish optimism, would I have done it? 

 

Another passage that was fascinating was Nicole’s description of her own emotional wrestling with the fact of her adoption. In a way, her birth parents abandoned her, and there is trauma from that, even if Nicole’s life was indeed better in her adoptive family. 

 

Back then, the mystery I wondered about more than anything else was why my first parents had given me up. I knew the practical reasons: money, my health - but I did wonder if there were other reasons, too; if something about me had simply failed to move them, command their love or loyalty. 

 

All of us who have been abandoned or rejected by our parents have wondered this. For me, I continue to wonder what it was about me that never really commanded my parents’ love or loyalty. Why it was that when I expressed hurt (at least of that hurt came from my mother or sister), my feelings were dismissed. Why it was that it was okay to hurt my wife, and when I expressed my feelings about that, everything shut down and was never spoken of again. Why does my sister receive their unconditional love and loyalty, but I do not? I guess I wasn’t the child they were prepared for or wanted. 

 

There is another passage that relates to this. Nicole’s anxiety as a parent often is related to her fear that she will be like her birth mother. 

 

Sitting there on my sofa talking to my mother, hugely pregnant and fighting tears, I couldn’t yet understand that my birth mother’s nature would become the invisible thread connecting all my anxieties, my many shortcomings, all my worst moments as a parent. That it would cause me to question my instincts, bring me up short every time I lost my temper with one of my children. Years later, I would think of her when I stopped, mid-argument, to give my tearful daughter permission to challenge me if she ever thought I was being unfair: You can always tell me. You can say, I think you’re being too hard on me right now, and I’ll stop and listen to you. 

 

This is one area I know I fail in, and I do so the same way my parents did. I am trying to be better about listening, but the patterns run deep. This is one area I do want to break the family cycle, because this was - and indeed is - the core problem with my parents: as the authoritarian parenting gurus taught them, a child is to comply first, and only discuss afterwards, and the parent is free to dismiss the complaint. A child should never challenge a parent or that parent’s fairness. Ever. I want my children to be able to do this, which is one reason why my wife and I have chosen not to focus on “talking back” as a bad thing, the way my parents did - and continue to do. 

 

Nicole’s sister Cindy’s story comes into the book as well. Her being left behind with the grandparents in Korea when her parents immigrated, for example. And then, when she reunited, not remembering her mother much, was shocked and horrified to find her angry and abusive. Worse, she, like other abused children, thought that this was just normal - all parents are like this. 

 

Gradually, Cindy realized that the way her mother treated her was not normal. She began to wish for a different life because hers made no sense to her. And even though our reasons were so different and she’d had the worst of it by far, this reminded me so poignantly of how I used to feel too. 

 

Me too. I think it was around puberty that it first started to dawn on me that my mother was not okay, that she was not normal. That she was in a real sense, suffering from untreated mental illness likely due to her childhood trauma. 

 

Later, when we joined Gothard’s cult, despite my best attempts to go along and believe my parents (I told you I was not rebellious), I increasingly wanted a different life, because the one I had was indeed making no sense. I naively believed that when I moved out, married, and had kids, that I would be able to do that and still maintain a relationship with my parents. It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately. 

 

On a much lighter note, I have to mention her account of the birth of her first child. When she went into labor, she didn’t wake her husband up, with the idea that at least one of them should go into the process well rested. My wife definitely fits that approach. She looked great after each delivery, and I looked like hell. She literally sent me home to sleep - after I fetched her some In-n-Out for her postpartum meal. 

 

I’ll end with this passage from the end, which also resonates with me - with Trump’s first election, I decided that I would no longer let racism pass without comment, even if it was family saying crap. 

 

Though I’ve sometimes grieved for absent solidarity, now that I am raising children of color in a starkly divided America I feel, even more strongly, that maintaining my silence with my relatives - pretending my race does not matter - is no longer a choice I can make. It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaching the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love. 

 

Ultimately, this was the issue that led to my parents cutting off contact. (According to them, at least. I think there were other unspoken reasons: my decision to go no-contact with my sister, a child coming out as transgender, their beliefs about the Covid vaccine, and so on…) In the final analysis, their comfort in their beliefs about race mattered more to them than I did. And perhaps, it really was that I was not the kind of child they wanted. 

 

I know this got personal quite a bit, and I don’t want that to detract from the book at all. The book is excellent, and everyone should read it, particularly if they were adopted, have adopted, or know someone who was adopted. I was unprepared for how much emotion this book would touch in me, which is why I ended up talking about my own fraught relationship.

 

However a child came to be abandoned or rejected, those complicated emotions are a universal human experience, and this book spoke to me in that way as a result. 

 

I am glad Nicole Chung chose to speak out about her experience. Too often adoption has been seen in terms of good or bad and not often enough as a complex and diverse experience. Chung’s nuanced and empathetic account of her life reveals many layers of that complexity, and gives all of us insight into the lives of others we share this world with. 

 

Denial: The Unspeakable Truth by Keith Kahn-Harris

Source of book: I own this

 

Well, this is definitely the most depressing book I have read this year, and that is in the face of some significant competition. Unfortunately, it is also far too accurate and explains much of what we have experienced during the Trump Era. 

 

The core idea is this: Denialism is different than denial - all of us are in denial to some benign extent as a cost of living in society (just like lying is a necessary social skill to exist in human society.) Denialism is an entire system of creating justification for believing lies, supported by pseudoscience, and taking on a life of its own. Denialism is a way to keep our darkest desires - the ones it is socially unacceptable to speak openly - hidden. And to legitimate those dark desires.

Kahn-Harris examines a few of these and mentions others. He chooses Holocaust denialism as an obvious one - he is Jewish after all. He also looks at climate change denialism as another. 

 

There are others mentioned, and I am all too familiar with some of them. For example, Young Earth Creationism, which has developed an entire industry to lend plausibility to its beliefs. And the “vaccines cause autism” one. And a number of others. 

 

Some of these are relatively benign, while others - the foundation of the MAGA movement, threaten to destroy democracy and plunge us into another dark ages. 

 

The reason this book is so dark to me is that it can’t really offer solutions except on the margins. A few of us have indeed had a “moral epiphany” and others have walked away once the core darkness of the soul is exposed. But for many - perhaps most - people, what we experience is the unpleasant realization that we and they do not share the same moral values. As the author puts it, “moral diversity.” 

 

This is the most devastating thing that Trump has revealed - he is a symptom, not the cause of our deep soul-sickness as humans, and as Americans. Many of us truly want to see others suffer and die, even if we hurt ourselves in the process. 

 

The book also hit close to home because my parents are increasingly steeped in denialism, to the incredible damage of their relationships with me and my family, and others within my birth family. 

 

In the introduction, the author mentions his childhood flirtation with conspiracy theories - this was pre-internet, so we weren’t as openly awash in denialism as we are now. He even considered forming a Jewish metal band that pretended to espouse Holocaust denial. (Ha ha we’re so funny, amirite?) 

 

Today, it’s harder for me to see the fun in all this. The breezy insouciance with which I consumed ‘alternative’ scholarship was based on the assumption that none of it really mattered. In my cynical, self-absorbed late teens and twenties during the smug 1990s there was no reason to think that neo-Nazis were anything other than marginal idiots; alternate histories and conspiracy theories similarly appeared to pose no threat to anyone. 

 

I should have looked harder. It wasn’t just neo-Nazis and fringe cranks who were constructing alternative scholarship; big business and conservative politics were doing it too. 

 

The first chapter lays the foundation quite well, and had some lines that have really caused me to think more deeply. For example, he does a deep dive on desire and why it is so complicated for humans. 

 

Human life also requires that we suppress open expressions of desire. The range of circumstances in which this suppression is necessary may be greater than for other forms of life - hiding signs of sexual arousal, hiding envy, hiding dislike - but the principle remains the same: if we desire things, we may have to dissemble in order to gratify that desire or simply in order to be able to continue living alongside others. 

 

Denial is just one form of the lying we need to do in order to function in society - we lie to ourselves about our desires. This is often benign, but it can cross the line into destructive. He also explains the difference between benign denial and denialism.

 

Denialism is more than just another manifestation of humdrum deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a new way of seeing the world and - most importantly to this book - a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth; denialism builds a new and better truth. 

 

He then mentions some of the denialisms that the book will examine. 

 

In recent years, the term denialism has come to be applied to a strange field of ‘scholarship.’ The scholars in this field engage in an audacious project: to hold back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of research. They argue that the Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened, that anthropogenic (caused by humans) climate change is a myth, that AIDS either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, that evolution is a scientific impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected. 

 

With the exception of Holocaust denial, every single one of those other denialisms either are or have been believed by my parents. (At least I think they no longer believe in AIDS denialism, but I’m not 100% sure…) And, unfortunately, many others. Covid vaccines will kill you eventually and actually spread the disease. LGBTQ people are living in sin and/or are caused by bad parenting. Trickle Down Economics works. And on and on it goes. 

 

Denialism is not stupidity, ignorance, mendacity, or psychological pathology. Nor is it the same as lying. Of course, denialists can be stupid, ignorant liars, but so can we all. 

 

The author then looks at what is behind these denialisms. 

 

Nor is denialism simply a desperate attempt to avoid facing an incontrovertible moral truth. I do not believe that, if only I could find the key to ‘make them understand,’ denialsists would think just like me. A global warming denialist is not an environmentalist who cannot accept s/he is really an environmentalist, a Holocaust denier is not someone who cannot face the inescapable obligation to commemorate the Holocaust, an AIDS denialist is not an AIDS activist who won’t acknowledge the necessity for Western medicine in combatting the disease, and so on. If denialists were to stop denying, we cannot assume that we would then have a shared moral foundation on which we could make progress as a species.

 

Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation, it as a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. 

 

And therein lies the horror. As I have come to realize, many of my fellow Americans (and most of my former Evangelical tribe) do not share my morality. At all. And that includes my parents, unfortunately. We have profound moral differences that cannot and thus will not be resolved. 

 

The author does make a good point that it is important to understand that humans all have some vulnerability to this - none of us are as moral as we want to think we are, and he can understand the “why” of denialism to a degree. 

 

Even if I may have difficulty in putting myself in the position of people who believe profoundly different things to me, I can certainly empathize with the predicament that denialists find themselves in. Denialism arises from being in an impossible bind: holding to desires, values, ideologies and morals that cannot be openly spoken of. 

 

Kahn-Harris also quotes Michael Specter (a debunker of denialism) with an interesting insight that really explains both MAGA and my parents well:

 

“We have all been in denial at some point in our lives; faced with truths too painful to accept, rejection often seems the only way to cope. Under those circumstances, facts, no matter how detailed or irrefutable, rarely make a difference. Denialism is denial writ large - when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable life.”

 

And the author expands on that idea a bit:

 

Denialism can usually be traced back to a kind of founding trauma, a shocking explosion of knowledge that directly threatens something fundamental to oneself or to a group of which one is a part. 

 

As a result of this knowledge, it is necessary to make a choice.  

 

In these moments, the future opens up into a number of possible paths. The main path leads where it should lead, where it has to lead to remain a decent person: towards accepting the conclusions that the evidence demands. Yet taking this path might mean sabotaging one’s economic interests, repudiating one’s life’s work, or struggling to reconcile one’s deepest beliefs with irrefutable contrary evidence. 

 

Oh yes, all three of those apply to my parents in different ways. Definitely financial interest (and that applies to us all, probably), my mom’s sense of identity as a stay-at-home mom, and the fundamentalist religious beliefs that are threatened by any evidence against them. With LGBTQ grandchildren, this particularly requires a pernicious form of denialism. As the author points out:

 

In any case, all denialists share a burning desire to continue to appear decent while rejecting the path of decency. It is motivated by a yearning to carry on as one is, without conceding that one was ever on the wrong path. 

 

Unfortunately, denialism is pretty much impervious to any refutation. It just grows stronger the more you fight it. Which is an unsolvable dilemma for those of us living in reality. 

 

To a degree then, denialism always wins. To present itself as a viable option, denialism can adopt scholarly or polemical styles according to what will work best with a target audience. Those who attempt to counter denialism can lose when they position themselves as scholarly experts and lose when they present themselves as clear communicators. 

 

I guess on the plus side is that for people who are committed to thinking and a healthy skepticism (my wife and I have noted that we both have active bullshit detectors, something our parents seem to have mostly lacked, which is why they fell hard for religious batshittery) is that it really isn’t that difficult to identify denialism. 

 

You can make a good or bad argument to demonstrate anthropogenic global warming, the historical reality of the Holocaust, or the reality of evolution; denialists can only make bad arguments against them. In this respect, denialism is defined by absence as much as presence. This is another reason why it is wise to judge arguments by their best proponents. If you search for the best argument for a position and find only denialist techniques, then you are looking at denialism. 

 

This turned out to be true for me. I have rejected a lot of denialist ideas that I was taught, both at home and at church - and in my former political affiliation that I was raised in - because I made the “mistake” of actually reading their best arguments. I came to believe in evolution in significant part because I started actually reading the “best” arguments for creationism and realized they were both bad and dishonest. Ditto for “alternative medicine,” trickle-down economics, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and more. 

 

A later chapter talks about the gap - the gap between our desires and what we feel free to say about them. Unsurprisingly, the chapter opens with a quotation from the Hebrew scriptures commanding genocide. 

 

And this really is the reality that Trump has unveiled. In the past, humans proudly celebrated the commission of genocide. Openly. But culture has changed. At least somewhat. 

 

Earlier despots had a language through which their bloodthirsty deeds could be proclaimed. They had much else too: systems of belief that legitimized and even sacralized the looting of wealth from their own and others’ lands, the rampant inequalities that resulted from it, and systems of government, knowledge and social order based on faith rather than evidence. 

 

And now? Now what could once be spoken of, even celebrated, is officially denied. It’s not just genocide: the bad things that are done today by governments, by powerful corporations, by religions and other systems of belief can rarely be openly admitted, let alone justified. Today’s denialists are the wretched descendants of the proud propagandists of the past. 

 

This gap causes hypocrisy, naturally. The gap between what we humans want to believe we are and what we actually are. 

 

A gap has opened up between private desires and the public language of values…Almost anything is privately thinkable, but many things are publicly unspeakable. 

 

Of course, there is nothing new about a gap between public values and private desires. The very existence of a ‘public sphere’ presupposes a realm of civil virtue that is greater than the private realm of the individual. In fact, the very existence of publicly shared notions of ‘the good’ implies that not everyone can live up to it all the time. Only in a society without any kind of collective organization and norms would it be possible for there to be no conflict between public and private. 

 

The author later talks about how denialism doesn’t always mean a true desire to do evil (although in some cases it does), but more a desire to avoid the consequences of pursuing desires. 

 

How, then, does one square the not-always-unspeakable outcomes that denialists desire with my argument that denialism is driven by the gap between what people desire and what is speakable? My answer is that it is the consequences of pursuing these desires that is unspeakable. A successful fight for inaction on global warming as part of a desire to preserve untrammelled carbon-based free market capitalism will inevitably cause the suffering of millions, if not billions…Denialism allows these visions to be pursued as if they were cost-free. Desire is preserved from the reality of its consequences.

 

As he points out, even genocide denialism is a desire to avoid consequences. 

 

Even genocide denialism is driven by a similar fear of consequences. The Holocaust and other genocides inevitably involved dirty work - bodies that needed to be herded, killed, and disposed of - that only appeals to a small minority of even the most ideologically driven genocidaires. Denialism preserves genocide as a beautiful, spotless dream; as the cost-free removal of a hated class of persons from the world.

 

This is what Trump promises, by the way. A cost-free ethnic cleansing, a sanitary way to make America white again that we don’t have to actually watch, or even acknowledge. 

 

There is another line that I think is truly profound, and particularly reflects my parents’ embrace of denialism. 

 

The personal reasons behind the desires that leads to denialism may be various, but what denialists do share is the common, collective effort to reshape the world as they would like it to appear. For that reason, the specter haunting denialism is the disappointing, maybe even embarrassing, reality that we cannot mold the world as easily as we would like. 

 

Unsurprisingly, this leads denialists to increasing doses of cognitive dissonance. Which is, alas, as likely to be resolved by selective denial of reality as by positive change. Again, something I see in my parents, who have decided to blame me for the consequences of their actions in rejecting my wife and children. 

 

Like the author, I do genuinely feel for denialists - it is a terrible way to live. 

 

My quasi-religious, quasi-medical (and fully patronizing) use of the word ‘saving’ is deliberate, not because I consider denialists to be somehow fallen and corrupted, but because denialism is shot through with desperation and anxiety that shows it to be a kind of predicament; a burden, for all the bluster and defiance. 

 

The book gets particularly dark, though, when it looks at the alternative to denialism for the denialist. And that is something we are seeing increasingly in what the author calls our “post-denialism” future and present. And that is openly stating those dark desires. 

 

And that really is what Trump has done: made evil great again. A man like my father can now openly praise ethnic cleansing: “I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem…” Bigots can openly admit to wanting to murder LGBTQ people. Neo-Nazi groups can openly post racist fliers in my neighborhood. 

 

One unexpected thing in this chapter was the source of many of the quotes - those that do in fact state the desires openly. On the issue of global warming, the most pernicious came either directly from Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, or from the organizations dedicated to their ideas. 

 

Never heard of them? I haven’t talked about them much on the blog, but they are essentially the godfathers of the modern Social Darwinist movement in economics, the ideas that Ayn Rand eventually put in her poorly-written novels. And they boil down to the idea that it is morally wrong to use government to restrain the rich and powerful, who should be allowed to exploit, pillage, and even murder as they see fit. Because evolution or something. Unsurprisingly, these are the people willing to say that it is morally appropriate to destroy the planet no matter what the suffering for others, as long as we can get rich doing it. Saying the unspeakable out loud. 

 

And this leads to the problem many of us have in our new post-denialist age:

 

Can we handle a world of radical moral diversity? Can we live with other human beings when the profound differences that divide us are out in the open? What would it be like to live next door to someone who can openly proclaim his wish for millions of people to die? 

 

And later:

 

This possibility means that there is now no avoiding a reckoning with the discomfiting issues that those who fight denialism prefer to avoid: how do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals to our own? How do we respond to people who delight in or are indifferent to genocide, to the suffering of millions, to venality and greed? We cannot assume that if people ‘knew the truth’ they would be like us. Denialism has hidden this moral diversity from us, but increasingly there is no hiding place. 

 

And therein lies the problem for me. A deeply distressing realization over the last decade or so has been that most of the people I grew up with, most of those I went to church with, most of those in my neighborhood, do not in fact share my core moral values. And that unfortunately includes my parents. Both on the grand scale of “those people” and whether they have value, but even on the question of whether I matter to them. The answer, by the way, is “definitely not.” They threw me away as soon as I challenged their ideology and politics. And, unfortunately, looking back, I think that my mother has never actually wanted the best for me. Rather, she wanted me to suffer in recompense for how the other firstborn males in her life made her suffer, and as proof that she was right all along. That’s an unspeakable truth, but it is no longer tenable to believe the opposite. 

 

For the author, what limited hope there is is contained in the idea that at least some people, once the mask of denialism comes off, will back away from the abyss. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen - I’m deeply skeptical myself, having found that even family relationships were not enough to change people. But maybe once the consequences become apparent, some will change their mind? We will see. 

 

In any case, this book does at least help one understand the dynamics of denialism, and the dark disease of the soul it conceals. Kahn-Harris makes his case well, and even though it is uncomfortable to consider that he may be right, I think it is something many of us will have to confront in the coming days. Whether we like it or not, many of the people we live among are not merely indifferent to the suffering of others, but actively seek to create it. That’s who we are as a species, unfortunately. 

 

For those of us who seek to transcend those tendencies toward violence and hate, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and we will need to stick together to protect the targets of that violence to the degree we can. At least now the mask is off. 

 

I have no answer for exactly how we handle living among people with profound moral differences. I can say that for myself, I cannot ever be close friends with them. That’s a bridge too far for me. In a weird sort of way, I feel like I understand better what it must have been like being an early Christian, weirdly devoted to the idea of loving your neighbor in a world where that was considered laughable. It’s just a shame that the people using Christ’s name are overwhelmingly on the opposite side than that of the early Christians. 

Building a Team Versus Firing the Coach

I am a moderate sports fan. Meaning, I enjoy sports, but don’t really order my life around them or let them dictate my mood. 

 

This year was a great year for my beloved Dodgers. I grew up in Los Angeles, and have rooted for the Dodgers since I was a kid. I remember watching Gibson hit it out on television in 1988, as any kid fan of my age probably can. 

 

In thinking about this last election, I was reminded of a phenomenon in sports that I think is applicable here, and mentioned it on a friend’s post. He is a thoughtful guy, and when he agreed that it worked as an analogy, I decided to think a bit more and maybe write about it. 

 

 

Any casual sports fan knows that, while there is only one champion each year, there are other teams that we call “contenders.” They may not have won this year, but they could have, given a bit better execution, a few fewer mistakes, or even (and this is more common than we admit) a few bounces of the ball. 

 

To put it clearly, winning a championship usually requires a bit of luck. But having a chance at a championship is anything but a matter of luck. Thus, the goal of a team should be to put itself in position to win, and then hope for that bit of luck to be the best. 

 

That said, there are teams - like the Dodgers - who are in that position to win every year. And there are teams that….are not. And many of these teams seem to perpetually lose, year in and year out, and no matter what they do, they continue to lose. 

 

Why is that? 

 

It isn’t merely a matter of money - although money certainly helps. It is easier to build a good team if you can pay good players to play for you, but you need more than that. 

 

As an example, the Rangers and the Blue Jays missed the playoffs despite having the 6th and 7th highest payrolls, respectively. The Orioles and the Brewers made the playoffs comfortably despite having the 4th and 8th lowest payrolls, respectively. 

 

Meanwhile, with a mid-level payroll, the White Sox were historically terrible and have been flat-out unwatchable for years. 

 

If you want to switch sports to football, take a look at a team like the Browns, who throw money around wantonly, make bold trades, have high draft picks (because of their terribleness) and yet seem to suck year after year after year. 

 

So why is that? 

 

And, switching to politics: why does the United States currently struggle (and fail) to build a true first-world society? During the New Deal era, through the early 1970s, the United States was a world leader in building a better society, so we have been able to do this in the past. Why can’t we do that now?

 

I believe the same phenomenon is at play in both sports and politics.

 

In order to build a successful team in sports - and a successful society - you have to use long-term thinking. This is what successful teams do, and unsuccessful teams do not do. And this likewise is what successful societies do (and we Americans actually have done in the past), and what failing societies fail to do. 

 

The reason the Dodgers have had long-term success is that they look at the big picture and the long term - and then invest in building the organization.

 

Ever since the days of the O’Malley family ownership, and Branch Rickey, the Dodgers have a tradition and culture of investing in player development combined with looking outside of traditional markets. [Ignore for now the Fox and McCourt eras, when the Dodgers lost their way.] 

 

It is no accident that it was the Dodgers who broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is no accident that Fernando Valenzuela, Chan Ho Park, and Hideo Nomo all signed with the Dodgers. 

 

It is no accident that the Dodgers seem to develop prospect after prospect. 

 

All of this takes a commitment to long-term and big-picture thinking. You have to invest in scouting. You have to invest in minor-league coaching, in medical staff (Again, no accident that it is the Dodgers’ team physicians that pioneered and continue to perform surgeries on players from every team), in analytics, in marketing, and every other facet of the team. The Dodgers do that. 

 

Teams that fail tend to fall back on short-sighted solutions. If you are the Browns, this means throwing millions of guaranteed money at a quarterback with a buttload of sexual assault accusations and a bad attitude. And panic-trade good players. And draft poorly. In a 25 year period, the Browns went through 38 quarterbacks. THIRTY-EIGHT!!!

 

And a lot of coaches too. 

 

If I were to reduce this to a soundbite, here it is:

 

Good organizations build teams. Bad organizations fire the coach.

 

Your team sucks? Just fire the coach. Surely that will turn things around. 

 

There is a tendency to think this way among Americans. I remember after each season where the Dodgers lost in the playoffs, there were calls to fire Dave Roberts. Never mind his successes. Never mind that his players love and respect him. Never mind that the Dodger coaching staff seems to be able to get more out of less with players over and over. 

 

I mean, Roberts looks like a sure-fire hall of famer, and in the conversation for the best coach of the 21st Century so far. 

 

But fire the coach, right?

 

Well, the Dodgers don’t appear to be in a hurry to fire the coach, and even some inveterate media critics had to admit that winning the world series with only three starting pitchers was quite a feat of coaching. 

 

What has also come out is that the scouting did a great job of finding weaknesses to exploit, and the Dodgers were better prepared than their opponents. 

 

See, good organization. 

 

***

 

Coming back (at long last) to this election, some things really stood out to me. 

 

There is a theory that presidential elections in the United States aren’t really about issues. At least for the middle 20% that we call “swing voters.” 

 

Rather, presidential elections are a referendum on how swing voters feel about the economy. 

 

There was a Democrat in the White House, inflation happened and people didn’t like that, so….

 

Fire the coach!

 

This was supported by some real evidence, by the way. A significant number of voters, for example, voted for both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Il Toupee. What? Well, she did some asking, and found that these voters viewed both her and Il Toupee as outsiders looking out for the good of the working class. 

 

Hmm. Well, I’ll save the question of perception versus reality for a future post - nothing the GOP intends to do would help inflation or lower prices - but this sounds very much like a “fire the coach” situation. 

 

Things got more expensive, and I felt poorer, so let’s fire the coach. 

 

Just like in sports, firing the coach may sometimes be the correct decision - some coaches aren’t very good, for example. (Mike Singletary comes to mind…) But firing the coach because the team sucks isn’t going to change the fact that….the team sucks.

 

America’s economic issues aren’t the result of recent decisions so much as decades of bad policy.

 

Our current inequality stems from decisions made when I was a child (mostly by Reagan): tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, stagnant minimum wage, free trade without a plan to ease the hardships on workers, lack of universal health care, and so on. 

 

Our more recent inflation was caused by factors that were never in the control of the president. Covid, followed by supply shortages. If anything, the US weathered these better than other countries. 

 

But fire the coach. 

 

This is the result of short-term thinking. This idea that if we just put in a new coach, all of the sucky things about our economic system would solve themselves. Of course they won’t. It took decades to build in the problems, and it will take hard work - and the investment of tax dollars - to build a more equitable system. 

 

You can apply this to literally every significant social problem in our country or any country. If there were a magic fix, well, someone would have already tried it and the problem would have been solved. 

 

Rather, difficult problems require hard work, investment, and patience to wait for the harvest. If one thinks of it like farming, an economy isn’t like an annual row crop - it is like an orchard that takes years to bear fruit. You have to think long term, and invest now for the future. 

 

Just like we did during the New Deal. 

 

You can’t just fire the coach. You need to build the team. 

 

Obviously, this isn’t the only issue at stake in the election. I have written extensively about the roles that racism, sexism, and xenophobia play in our politics. The opposition to social programs mostly is driven by white people who don’t want black people to have the same access they have. The fear of change in general drives a lot of voters. 

 

But there does seem to be a certain segment for whom issues of policy do not seem to really matter. For those, the mantra holds: Fire the coach.

 

As we are about to find out, firing the coach and hiring back the guy who fucked things up last time isn’t going to magically make everything better. 

 

The Future of this Blog

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” 

 

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)

 

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” 

 

~ Various attributions, but probably a Danish proverb

 

“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

 

~Theodor Reik

 

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.  You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is.”

 

~Rebecca Solnit

 

***

 

Well, here we go. A slim majority of American voters have chosen to elect a textbook fascist. Where we go from here is a matter of speculation, which is rather pointless compared to preparation for a variety of bad scenarios. 

 

I am not going to get into the issues that face various marginalized groups in this post. I will merely at this point note that I have the skin of family and friends in this, so it is not merely academic to me. 

 

I will mention that the day after the election my wife found a poster up from a neo-Nazi group with “America is for Americans Only” on it - in our neighborhood. And there are already gravy seal sorts out in flak jackets with quasi-military patches on them. Shit just got real. 

 

I also am not going to be giving away specific plans or ideas - all of us who still believe in basic human decency are going to have to find each other and work to preserve whatever we can. 

 

I do want to talk about this blog, however. When I started it in 2011, it was merely a porting of my year-old Facebook notes about the books I was reading. And the blog still remains mostly an ongoing diary of my reading life, which is an important part of who I am. 

 

Eventually, as the result of an argument with a former acquaintance over Doug Wilson (who appears more and more to be a Nazi), I wrote a viral post on the roots of Christian Patriarchy (and Christian Nationalism) in the white supremacist movement. 

 

Soon after Il Toupee’s first election, I and my family left organized religion, and have not returned. While politics and religion are a relatively small part of my blog, my posts on those topics have resonated with a number of people. A small number - I am a tiny minnow when it comes to readership - or maybe a plankton. 

 

In any case, if Il Toupee and the American Fascist Party (as the Republican Party has become) is looking for enemies or dissenters, I have already put a target on my back. Nearly 1500 posts over the last 13 years are ample evidence of who I am and what I believe. 

 

Although, to be honest, there are over a hundred million of us who have at one time or another spoken out online. If there is strength in numbers, we have that, as long as we do not capitulate. 

 

As the quotes above hint, while we can certainly see possible futures, we do not know precisely what will happen. 

 

For one thing, Fascism isn’t just Hitler. It is Franco, and Pinochet, and Mussolini, and Bolsonaro, and Putin, among many others. While there are similarities, the way things played out has been different given different circumstances. Umberto Eco’s excellent long essay is very much on point. 

 

Our particular situation is different from any other which has come before. For one thing, the US is deeply divided, unlike post-WWI Germany. We lefties (or who are considered lefties in comparison to the far right) have the benefit of hindsight in a way Germany never had. 

 

This means we have a better opportunity to resist. 

 

There is also the fact that enforcing widely unpopular laws is nearly impossible. Case in point is our failed war on drugs. Drugs have been winning that one since the beginning, and anyone who wishes to obtain them can easily do so despite our mass incarceration and broad criminalization. 

 

If we hang together and refuse to do what the fascists want, and do what they do not want us to do, we have more power than we think. 

 

Likewise, there is a difference between targeting roughly one percent of the population, and targeting essentially half of it. Or possibly more, given the intended war on women. The greater the number and percentage of people you have to oppress and conquer, the greater the costs of conquest, and the even greater cost of continued subjugation. As every empire ever has discovered. 

 

As Solzhenitsyn notes, and Solnit confirms, the greatest weapon we all have is to refuse to accept the lie, to refuse to go along with the hate, to refuse to roll over and comply. The more of us do this, the more we can preserve, and the better our eventual chance of turning around this moment of collective denialism and delusion. 

 

***

 

The future of this blog will largely depend on what happens in the future. Specifically, how far down the fascist hole we go. At minimum, I expect that free speech as the Founding Fathers intended (the right to express political dissent) will be limited, given the packing of the Supreme Court. How much right any of us have to criticize the Dear Leader and the Party is very much in doubt. 

 

The easiest way, of course, is simply for Il Toupee to pressure his billionaire tech buddies to deplatform dissenters like me. This would not even violate the First Amendment, as it would be private action. 

 

If we go to the extreme, we could see dissenters imprisoned or murdered, as Putin does in Russia. 

 

On the hopeful side, the fact that I am too small of a blogger to matter - most of my posts are read by less than 100 readers, and even my most popular reach less than 1000 - may mean that irrelevance will insulate me. 

 

***

 

I’m not much of a revolutionary. I’m not athletic enough to make a good soldier or guerilla. I’m not going to be literally punching Nazis - that would be either hilarious or a disaster…or both. I’m terrible at lying. I’m not good at conspiracy. I am not a natural leader. I wear my heart on my sleeve and say what I feel. I’m stubborn - just ask my parents.

 

My skills mostly include being organized, thinking things through (maybe overthinking?), working hard, and knowing a bunch of random stuff. 

 

I guess I am the kind of man that women choose instead of the bear, but not yet sure how that translates to troubled times. 

 

Really, the most I can do as one person to resist is not that much, although I intend to do what I can with the opportunities I have. What I do have is words. I am pretty good with words, if I flatter myself. I love teaching, and have generally been successful at that. More than anything, this blog is about education using words. 

 

With my words I will refuse to participate in the lie. The lie that some people (particularly white American males) are inherently more valuable than others. The lie that humanity needs authoritarian power. The lie that hierarchy is necessary. The lie that we can continue to commit ecocide without it becoming suicide. The lie that what God wants is for us to murder each other over our differences. The lie that our problems are caused by the existence of “those people.” 

 

My intent is to continue to write this blog as long as I can. 

 

I may try to use euphemisms a bit more to make it harder for the algorithms to target me. (I already have had to do this with references to male genitalia and sexual slang.) 

 

I intend to download the entire blog and keep it backed up on a hard drive rather than just the cloud. 

 

If for some reason I am deplatformed, I am willing to keep readers updated. (You can email me if you want to be on the list.) 

 

But one thing I do not intend to do is pre-comply. If all of us small voices insist on speaking, the resources required to silence all of us will be vast, and the ability of the fascists to silence us all more doubtful. 

 

Do not take part in the lie. Do not be silent about evil. Care for the vulnerable. Everything we can save is worth saving. 

 

Anyone know where they hand out the “Antifa” cards? 

 

***

 

My suggested anti-fascism reading list:

 

They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer

The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus

We Need New Stories by Nesrine Malik

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill

 

(I’m sure I’ll think of more later.) 

 

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Sometimes I can’t remember exactly how a book ended up on my “to read” list. I think this one might have come from a review in The Guardian, but I really am not sure. The book is from 2003, hardly new, so I guess I must have run across something about it somewhere. 

 

As with many of my audiobooks, I end up with whatever is currently available off my list. This one happened to be, and I needed something to cover some driving. Also, I am always working to include the voices of women and minorities in my reading - those voices are under attack by the right wing right now (the overwhelming majority of challenged books are by women, minorities, and LGBTQ people.) 

Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh (which was then East Pakistan) to a Bengali father and an English mother. The family moved to Britain when she was a toddler, so she was raised there, and eventually studied (of all things) philosophy at Oxford. 

 

In addition to her writing, she has done significant charitable work, worked with PEN, and even ended up modeling for Mark’s and Spencer’s. An interesting resume to be sure. 

 

Brick Lane is the story of a Bangladeshi immigrant to London, set in the 20 years leading up to and immediately after the 9/11 attacks. 

 

Nazneen is a young woman of barely 18, who is sent by her parents to marry Chanu, a 40 year old man who has immigrated to London. This is precipitated by the fact that her younger sister, Hasina, has eloped with her lover. Best to preserve the virtue of the other daughter. 

 

But there is some emotional backstory here. Nazneen appears to be dead when she is born, and, rather than seek medical attention, they just leave her to live or die as she chooses. She lives. 

 

From there, we see Nazneen’s life unfold. She settles into marriage with Chanu, who is a complicated, deeply human character. The good news is, he isn’t abusive - at heart he’s a pretty decent guy. But he also has a lot of patriarchal baggage, is overeducated for his opportunities (and is thus a bit insufferably snobbish), and is incapable of parenting without screaming and threats. 

 

This naturally causes incredible friction between Chanu and his oldest daughter, who at one point runs away rather than move back to Bangladesh. 

 

The book is a bit all over the place, because it is a messy account of a complicated life. Chanu hopes for advancement, but as an immigrant (even an educated one with good English skills), he refused promotion while less qualified white men are moved up. Nazneen has to make friends, learn English, raise two daughters, and eventually, support the family by taking on sewing. 

 

The couple loses an infant to illness, flirts with bankruptcy multiple times, falls in debt to the local loan shark (who is a great character and a most excellent villain), and eventually separate when Nazneen choses to stay behind when Chanu moves back home. 

 

Nazneen, stuck in a loveless marriage, has a torrid affair with a younger man, but eventually chooses to send him away. 

 

And, while all this is going on, a neo-Nazi group, the Lionhearts, engages in a hate campaign against the immigrant population, and is countered by an Islamic group, the Bengal Tigers, leading to some clashes, but mostly pamphlet wars. 

 

My least favorite part of the book was the meetings of the Bengal Tigers. While Ali does take the time to illuminate all of the internal conflicts and divisions and questions of priorities and tactics, these go on far too long, and stopped the pace of the narrative. 

 

At its core, though, the story is of Nazneen growing up. From a little girl who took from the trauma of her birth and virtual abandonment to fate a belief that one must simply passively accept fate, to a woman who takes control and ownership of her own life and decisions. This is a great story arc, and Ali makes it compelling. 

 

The characters are memorable and well drawn, familiar and foreign at the same time. And, to be honest, a good bit of the foreign feel stems from the setting in Britain. I mean, poor people can just get free health care? What socialist nightmare is this? 

 

I will also note that Ayesha Dharker did a great job narrating - the characters were clear and distinguishable, and she brought out the differences in language the characters use in the book very well. 

 

I may have to check out Ali’s other books as well. 

 

When the Light of the World was Subdued (Part 2)

Source of book: I own this

 

[I am intentionally not yet posting anything about the election. I will eventually, as it may have an effect on this blog going forward. Stay tuned.] 

 

This is the second installment of posts about this collection of Native Nations poetry. You can read the first one here. As I noted in the first post, the book is divided into section based on geography. The first section was the northeast and midwest. This one is the plains and mountains. Within the section, the poems are arranged in chronological order based on the date of birth of the poet. 

 

The Plains nations are ones that are often familiar to us white folk, although often for the wrong reasons. We may know the names of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the defeat of Custer, the massacre at Wounded Knee. Some of the nations have made it into our vernacular, such as Dakota, Omaha, Cheyenne, Muscogee. Others are familiar: Crow, Blackfoot, Kiowa, Sioux, Shoshone, Comanche. And a few are less so: Ihanktonwa, Kootenai, Anishinaabe, Assiniboine. 

 

Our American mythology often centers around the Plains and Mountains tribes, with white people cast as the heroes fighting off the murderous subhuman savages. Forgotten - or more accurately intentionally suppressed - are the stories of genocide, ethnic cleansing, land theft, broken treaties, and the murder of women and children that are a more accurate characterization of the American government toward the nations of our continent’s heartland. 

 

As with the previous section, this one contains poems about a wide variety of subjects. Certainly there is reckoning with the past, but also hope for the future, and the universal human themes that inspire all humans of good will. 

 

Like the other part, I struggled to select a modest number of poems to feature. So many were outstanding and meaningful, and all I can do is pick the ones that spoke to me the most this time through, and encourage my readers to purchase this book and immerse themselves in it. 

 

Joy Harjo and her contributing editors again did a fantastic job of choosing a wide variety of poems and authors. Women are well represented, as are the many nations. 

 

The first poet featured is Elsie Fuller, born sometime in the 1870s, with an unknown life span. She was from the Omaha nation, and was one of many Native children stolen from their families and forced to learn English and white culture at boarding schools. Oh, and she also was sent to “work” for white families in New England during her summers rather than seeing her family. In another context, we would call this slavery. 

 

In any case, this poem packs a punch. 

 

A New Citizen

 

Now I am a citizen!

            They’ve given us new laws,

Just as were made

            By Senator Dawes.

 

We need not live on rations,

            Why? There is no cause,

For “Indians are citizens,”

            Said Senator Dawes.

 

Just give us a chance,

            We never will pause.

Till we are good citizens

            Like Senator Dawes.

 

Now we are citizens,

            We all give him applause-

So three cheers, my friends,

For Senator Dawes!

 

Shostakovich would perhaps approve of that sarcasm. 

 

Next up is D’Arcy McNickle, of the Metis and Confederated Salish and Kootenai nations. He is probably best known for his work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraging greater autonomy for tribes. He also taught and wrote in a variety of genres. 

 

Man Hesitates but Life Urges

 

There is this shifting, endless film

And I have followed it down the valleys

And over the hills, -

Pointing with wavering finger

When it disappeared in purple forest-patches

With its ruffle and wave to the slightest-breathing wind-god.

 

There is this film

Seen suddenly, far off

When the sun, walking to his setting,

Turns back for a last look,

And out there on the far, far prairie

A lonely drowsing cabin catches and holds a glint,

For one how endless moment,

In a staring window the fire and song of the martyrs!

 

There is this film

That has passed to my fingers

And I have trembled,

Afraid to touch.

 

And in the eyes of one

Who had wanted to give what I had asked

But hesitated - tried - and then

Came with a weary, aged, “Not quite,”

I could but see that single realmless point of time,

All that is sad, and tired, and old -

And endless, shifting film.

 

And I went again

Down the valleys and over the hills,

Pointing with wavering finger;

Ever reaching to touch, trembling,

Ever fearful to touch. 

 

That’s a truly beautiful poem. 

 

I have previously posted about N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), who I really love. There are several of his poems in this collection, which is no surprise, as he is one of the premier Native poets of our time. I chose this one to feature in this post. 

 

The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee

 

I am a feather on the bright sky.

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain.

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water. 

I am the shadow that follows a child.

I am the evening light, the luster of meadows.

I am an eagle playing with the wind.

I am a cluster of bright beads.

I am the farthest star.

I am the cold of dawn.

I am the roaring of the rain.

I am the glitter on the crust of the snow.

I am the long track of the moon in a lake.

I am a flame of four colors.

I am a deer standing away in the dusk.

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche.

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky.

I am the hunger of a young wolf. 

I am the whole dream of these things.

You see, I am alive, I am alive.

I stand in good relation to the earth.

I stand in good relation to the gods.

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful.

I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte.

You see, I am alive, I am alive. 

 

The next one is by Lance Henson (Southern Cheyenne). 

 

Anniversary Poem for Cheyennes Who Died at Sand Creek

 

when we have come this long way

past cold grey fields

past the stone markers etched with the

names they left us

 

we will speak for the first time to the season

to the ponds

 

touching the dead grass

 

our voices the color of watching

 

This one, by John Trudell (Santee Dakota), seems relevant today. 

 

Diablo Canyon

 

Today I challenged the nukes

The soldiers of the state

Placed me in captivity

Or so they thought

They bound my wrists in their

Plastic handcuffs

Surrounding me with their

Plastic minds and faces

They ridiculed me

But I could see through 

To the ridicule they brought

On themselves

They told me to squat over there

By the trash

They left a soldier to guard me

I was the Vietcong

I was Crazy Horse

 

Little did they understand

Squatting down in the earth

They placed me with my power

My power to laugh

Laugh at their righteous wrong

Their sneers and their taunts

Gave me clarity

To see their powerlessness

 

It was in the way they dressed

And in the way they acted

They viewed me as an enemy

A threat to their rationalizations

I felt pity for them

Knowing they will never be free

 

I was their captive

But my heart was racing

Through the generations

The memories of eternity

 

It was beyond their reach

I would be brought to the 

Internment camps 

To share my time with allies

 

This time I almost wanted to believe you

When you spoke of peace and love and

Caring and duty and god and destiny

But somehow the death in your eyes and 

Your bombs and your taxes and your

Greed and your face-life told me

 

This time I cannot afford to believe you

 

I want to send the last two stanzas out to my parents, who I wanted to believe for so long, but have turned out to have lied about all that shit about peace and love and caring and duty and god - it was all just lies they didn’t believe. In the end, it was all just greed and racism and hate, and they threw me away as soon as I stopped validating them. Kind of like Evangelicalism did. 

 

This next poem is by Nila Northsun (Shoshone and Anishinaabe). As someone who has enjoyed cooking since childhood, and who has eaten commodity cheese, this poem resonated with me. 

 

Cooking Class

 

when you’ve starved most of your life

when commodities

the metalling instant potatoes

the hold your nose canned pork

the pineapple juice that never dies

the i didn’t soak them long enough pinto beans

the even the dog won’t eat this potted meat

potted as in should have been buried

in a potter’s field

when the wonderful commodity cheese 

or terrible commodity cheese

that winos tuck ‘neath their pits

and knock on your door

trying to sell it for $5

but taking $3

is all stored in the basdement

or in closets

or left in the original boxes

lining hallways

of your hud house

cause there’s just no more room

you wonder

how can anyone starve

with so much food

but there are other starvations

like developing the taste for

lard sandwiches

or mustard and commodity cheese sandwiches

just cut the mold off the crusts of bread

and boil the tomato juice until it’s usable as

a spaghetti sauce

certainly don’t use the tomato sauce for

your Sunday morning bloody mary

to accompany your blueberry blintzes

or smoked salmon quiche

unless 

you have a major change in attitude

cause the dried egg product can quiche

with the flour

and the powdered milk

and if you’re a northwest coast tribe

salmon or whatever fish

thing is possible

if not

some rich people pay good money

for the antelope or elk you can knock off

in your back yard

why bother with just goose liver pate

when you can have the whole damn canadian honker

blasted from its migratory path?

pheasants and quail are roadkill all the time

it’s just tenderized

it’s all in the attitude

and the presentation

parsley does wonders

for aesthetic contrast to

macaroni and cheese

again

and again

and again

 

I have to include this one, by Heid E. Erdrich (Anisinaabe - Turtle Mountain Band), who is the sister of Louise Erdrich, whose books I have written about several times. Heid also wrote the introduction to this section, which is excellent. As regular readers know, I am a huge fan of Robert Frost, and have been since childhood. That said, his poem “The Gift Outright” is a bunch of Manifest Destiny horseshit, which deserves this response. 

 

The Theft Outright

                        after Frost

 

We were the land’s before we were.

 

Or the land was ours before you were a land.

Or this land was our land, it was not your land.

 

We were the land before we were people,

loamy roamers rising, so the stories go,

or formed of clay, spit into with breath reeking soul -

 

What’s America, but the legend of Rock ‘n’ Roll?

 

Red rocks, blood clots bearing boys, blood sands

swimming being from women’s hands, we originate,

originally, spontaneous as hemorrhage. 

 

Unpossessing of what we still are possessed by,

possessed by what we now no more possess.

 

We were the land before we were people,

dreamy sunbeams where sun don’t shine, so the stories go,

or pulled up a hole, clawing past ants and roots - 

 

Dineh in documentaries scoff DNA evidence off.

They landed late, but canyons spoke them home.

Nomadic Turkish horse tribes they don’t know.

 

What’s America, but the legend of Stop ‘n’ Go?

 

Could be cousins, left on the land bridge,

contrary to popular belief, that was a two-way toll.

In any case we’d claim them, give them someplace to stay.

 

Such as we were we gave most things outright

(the deed of the theft was many deeds and leases and claim stakes

and tenure disputes and moved plat markers stolen still today…)

 

We were the land before we were a people,

earthdivers, her darling mudpuppies, so the stories go,

or emerging, fully forming from flesh of earth - 

 

The land, not the least vaguely, realizing in all four directions,

still storied, art-filled, fully enhanced.

Such as she is, such as she wills us to become. 

 

I’ll end with this one, by Tevino L. Brings Plenty (Minneconjou Lakota). 

 

Ghost River

 

I’m mostly water.

There has been family swept under by raw currents.

 

I’m from planters from the river.

We dredged riverbed bones.

 

Water is faces lined blue.

Red horses bay bodies hooked from fish line.

 

And what was sown, brown hands dug free.

I’m mostly other people. 

 

Family is pulled pail full from source.

I’m from river people. 

 

We prep the light from matted hair.

Water catches flame.

 

The black horses hoof rock, halving them like thin, infant skulls.

And what was sown, brown hands dug free. 

 

In these troubled times, it will be increasingly necessary for those of us who still retain basic human decency to pull together, and keep the voices of the marginalized alive. I strongly recommend purchasing books like this both to encourage publishers to keep publishing them despite pressure from the bigots, and also because there is a significant risk that publishers will cave to the fascists and end their attempts to print books by those other voices.