I ran across this (slightly poorly cropped) photo of the reaction of Chicago’s two newspapers. I only ever worked at papers that took the Tribune’s approach — proper, sober, respectful, matter-of-fact. A bit of local pride expressed, but cool about it.
And that’s still the way for me.
But I got a kick out of The Sun-Times approach.
Too bad Chris Farley is no longer with us. SNL could have had some fun with the news. “Da Bears!”…
On prominent display at All Good Books.
Over the weekend, my wife and I were browsing at All Good Books in Five Points — which you should definitely visit often, because Good Books are the only kind you find there — and ran across the volume you see above: America, América, by Greg Grandin.
From the jacket blurb:
The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other…
Intriguing. Given my background, I want to read this book. I’ll put it on my Gimme List for Father’s Day, etc. I know many of the ways influence has flowed from the U.S. to the South, but I’m very interesting to see how he backs up the claim that it flows strongly the other way.
Since I lived in Ecuador longer than in any other one place in my childhood, Latin America had a huge effect in forming me. But I’ve been looking around me ever since, and the lack of consciousness of the rest of the hemisphere that I see in my fellow gringos continues to shock, after all these years. And of course, the foolishness that led to the results in our recent election has sunk us as a nation to new depths in that regard.
But until I read it, I can’t say much about the book. It reminds me, however, of something else I’ve been meaning to mention: Our new American pope — who was born in Chicago, to be sure, but has spent so much of his adult life in Peru — even to the point of dual citizenship. (Which I suppose drives the MAGA types who claim to be Catholic nuts. I mean the people who complained that he spoke no English in his first papal greeting.)
No doubt, Pope Leo XIV spent way more time in Peru than I spent in Ecuador. But hey, those were adult years. Kid years are like dog years, if not more so. A year is like an eon. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, those two years, four-and-a-half months (from the ages of 9-11) seemed far longer than any one of the recent decades of my life.
You can tell as soon as he opens his mouth — in Spanish, that is. Also, when it comes to knowing a place and a people, I’m sure his time as a shepherd in Peru gave him an exponentially greater understanding and affinity than I gained goofing around in the streets of Guayaquil.
But still, I feel an affinity. Sort of the way I did with both John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008. I wrote columns about that at the time (and ahem, I headlined the one about Obama “Barack Like Me,” a not-so-subtle literary reference that I have played upon again above).
He’s my kinda pope, so far. He’s also my kind of American — the kind who can think in languages other than English (alas, my own Spanish is in sad shape today), and cares about the rest of the world. This is the kind of leader the Church needs. It’s also the kind of leader America needs, more desperately than at any time in our chauvinistic history. I look forward to him being able to influence the course of events back in his own native country, which is no longer what it was when he and I were kids.
Of course, the parallels with Pope Francis are enormously sharper than any shared characteristics I can claim. Leo is an American who spent his ministry until recently in Peru. He was elevated to cardinal, and carefully placed in a pivotal position) by a son of Italian immigrants who spent his pre-papal life in Argentina.
My man Joe Biden failed rather spectacularly to set up some other sane, qualified person with the electoral appeal to succeed him. And as much as I love Joe, that’s what got us into our current disastrous predicament. (All I can say in Joe’s defense is that the Church offered more material to work with than the Democratic Party has lately.)
It appears that Francis succeeded just as spectacularly, setting up a seemingly ideal successor — who (while it remains to be seen for sure) seems to be like him in more meaningful ways than coming from South America. I pray that impression proves to be accurate.
Of course, Francis didn’t do it alone. I told y’all, during that brief hour or two between the white smoke and learning the new pope’s identity, that I was “trusting the Holy Spirit on this.”
I still am. And I’m very eager to see what happens next…
POSTSCRIPT:
Speaking of Black Like Me (parenthetically, several grafs above), when one applies the “one-drop” rule, Leo is also our first black pope. Well, I can’t claim to touch him in that category. Ancestry keeps going back and forth on just how Scottish I am, but it never wavers on the idea of me being totally, unforgiveably, European.
(Mind you, 23andMe says I’m .1 percent Somali. And Helix — the service MUSC used to analyze my DNA — has somehow discovered I am .3 East Asian! “Austronesian-Filipino,” to be exact. But as a white boy who routinely shifts by 10 or 20 percent on Scottishness, depending on how Ancestry is reading the data that day, I suspect those tiny fractions are well within the margin of error. I will make no extragagant claims to possessing “color.”)
The Holy Father just keeps getting more cosmopolitan every moment! Especially since that part of his heritage came through New Orleans, the most cosmopolitan place I ever lived (that was right after Ecuador).
This is great, and very much as it should be. Remember above when I referred to “the MAGA types who claim to be Catholic?” I put it that way because “catholic” most assuredly does not mean “America First,” or America Only.
It means “universal.” And that’s what the Church, and all believers, must be…
You can still see the thin spots in the lawn, but overall, I mainly see GREEN.
Actually, I’m thinking perhaps I laid on my stereotypical idioms a bit thick there… but to move on…
Ireland from the air, the green a bit dulled by the haze.
The landscape seems transformed on this third day of rain. I haven’t seen this much green since we were in Ireland in 2019. (That was a cliche I was delighted to find confirmed — from the air before we landed, and everywhere we rode or walked across the land. “Emerald” is no exaggeration.)
There’s a piece of our yard that always looks green — having been regularly irrigated since we had sod laid last year in place of a bunch of runaway juniper that I suspected of harboring copperheads — but this is not that part. Yet now it’s almost lush.
How’s it going where you are? I sincerely hope you have not washed away, in spite of the apocalyptic flood warnings Alexa keeps issuing. I wonder whether Amazon would let me change her name to Cassandra?…
The view out back. I need to replace those couple of loose deck boards. If it ever stops raining.
Congratulations to my diocese — as far as I’m concerned, Bishop Jacques Fabre-Jeune just scooped the world. I received first a text, then an email, from his office without having heard a word ere that.
Which is a bit surprising. I must have turned off more notifications from news sources than I thought.
Anyway, I then looked, and sure enough:
VATICAN CITY (AP) — White smoke pours from the Sistine Chapel chimney, signalling a pope has been elected to lead the Catholic Church
— Meg Kinnard (@MegKinnardAP) May 8, 2025
So now, everybody can pack up and go home, and stop trying so hard to predict who the new pope is. Or at least, they can when we actually know who he is.
I don’t remember this kind of blanket coverage in the past — when we lost John Paul II, or when Benedict retired. It has seemed, well, unseemly.
Some things should be done in private, without the jostling elbows of the world intruding. This is one of those things.
That may sound odd coming from an old newspaperman, but I’m also a (sort of, dating to my conversion in 1981) old Catholic. And I’ve got this archaic thing of trusting the Holy Spirit on this.
Oh, I may complain now and again about the new Holy Father — hey, no mortal is perfect — but I assure you I’m quite at peace on this as we receive the news…
Gail Collins and Bret Stephens enjoy each other’s company, before a cardboard dummy.
A couple of days back I tried to improve your moods by giving you some good news — although it was only good, I suppose, to me.
So back to bad news. Here’s some that should matter to everyone, but most people are probably entirely unaware of it:
That’s a depressing thing I listened to on Tuesday, a thing that told me that after almost a decade (80 percent is “almost,” right? or at least almost almost) of setting an example for us all, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens were going to stop doing their weekly Conversation feature in The New York Times.
You’ve heard me praise it before. Here’s one example of the hagiography I’ve heaped upon it.
But if you’ve somehow missed it, here’s a brief explanation of what it was (you can read a longer one at that last link above): A weekly demonstration of how intelligent, civilized people discuss things about which they disagree.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but such things are rare as hen’s teeth. Encountering such a feature is like finding a flawless diamond buried in a trash heap — the trash heap that is current political discourse in America.
Our world in the Year of Our Lord 2025 is desperately short of intelligent people (or at least, they’re very quiet and hard to find). And almost no one has any idea how to engage in civil discourse. So when you find two people who possess both those qualities demonstrating an exercise in the amicable, mutually respectful exchange of ideas, you’ve found a seam of gold.
And folks, this is not just about being nice to one’s neighbor, although in truth there’s nothing finer than that. This sort of sharing of thoughts is a necessity in this country — or at least it was, when the system our Framers gave us was functioning.
Ours is a deliberative form of government. For it to work, people with different ideas have to listen to each other, and learn from each other, so that they can come up with solutions that may thrill no one, but that address the issue before them effectively, and in a way that makes the country better.
The way this system is made to function, it is the precise opposite of tribalism. It is the opposite of huddling into groups, and never speaking to people in other groups except to tell them how much you despise them.
I started this blog long ago to provide a place where people could come together and converse in the way Bret Stephens and Gail Collins have been doing these last few years. You may think that was overly ambitious, or at least overly hopeful, of me. But not really. When I started in 2005, such things were still possible, and we had a lot of really good exchanges. Oh, there were a few people who came to win battles, to demonstrate how much smarter they were than everyone else, or simply to shout insults.
But most participants weren’t like that. It was normal for a post to have 100 comments, or 200, or even 300 on rare occasions. I was startled when I realized that I was getting more comments in a day than The State got letters in a week.
At first, the trolls were very few, and I simply ignored them. But then, some of the very best commenters — the ones most like Gail and Bret — started falling away. Frequently, they would say that what caused them to quit was the rising tide of negativity. And we were starting to get more. So I tried various approaches to a civility policy. But the tide just grew higher. Something quite corrosive was destroying the collective American mind. And now, we live in a country and a world that is shockingly different from what we had in 2005.
I got discouraged myself, and eventually spent less and less time here. The days when I quite normally posted 10 times and more are long gone, and hard to imagine now. I’ve posted a couple of times this week, but it’s been a few days since I’ve glanced at the pending comments, and I see that there are 18 of them (what a sad harvest after the 300 a day of years gone by!). I know that a number of them will be of the unpleasant sort. Hear me when I say that I will not approve any of those. If they don’t show at least a hint of the attitude I find in one of those NYT Conversations, they’re gone.
As for Collins and Stephens themselves, what’s their excuse for stopping this constructive collaboration? They’re not discouraged. So why? Well, it’s the usual answer we get when favorite columnists go away for awhile — they’re writing books! Well, these are fine folks, and I’m sure these will be fine books.
But I don’t see how they’ll do the country nearly as much good as The Conversation…
If there was an SNL Golden Age, when was it?
I know that’s a bit of a cliche thing to say. People have been saying it for decades now, and it’s often been untrue, or at least misleading. The standard form is to say that these skits and actors today are a pale shadow compared to that first group — Belushi, Akroyd, etc.
In fact, even though I was the perfect age for the first-cast’s demographic, and enjoyed it very much at the time, I think the height of the show may been about 10-15 years later, with a stream of such bright lights as Eddie Murphy, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and on and on. I think the slide started sometime after that.
By the turn of the century, most of the magic was gone. Most, but not all, by any means. When Tina Fey came back to do Sarah Palin (especially in the skit with Jason Sudeikis as Joe Biden) in 2008, we saw comic commentary reach the show’s highest peak ever. There were a few other funny bits in those couple of decades, but you had to wait for them, and the waits were long and sad.
Very sad.
I was reminded of this a couple of times today. I sort of forgot it after the first instance, but then a few minutes ago I saw this headline:
… which of course brings up the main problem with doing political comedy in the age of Trump. How do you parody a guy who exceeds the comic sense of the absurd with everything he says and does.
Which took me back to the first thing, which I saw this morning on YouTube while working out:
My first thought when the still image appeared on my screen was, That guy again! The same guy who was such an awful Joe Biden!
I had to Google him to find out that he is James Austin Johnson. He might be acceptable in the role if I’d never seen anyone else do Biden or Trump, and actually be funny doing it — such as Sudeikis, or even Alec Baldwin.
Sudeikis was brilliant, and while his performance was chock full of flaws (and, if you’re a Trump admirer, unfair), it was still funny. And he didn’t even need the wig or makeup — if he started doing it on the street without such embellishments, you’d get it, and you’d laugh (unless you were one of those poor Trump admirers).
The thing is, the material in the skit embedded above wasn’t bad — some pretty good gags there. But the delivery was just so distractingly awful. It wasn’t the wig or the makeup. Think about Chevy Chase doing Gerald Ford — there was no wig or makeup, and he didn’t even try to sound like him. But it was funny. Which, I think, should be the point on a comedy show.
Maybe Mr. Johnson wrote some of those decent gags. If so, he should probably stick to that, and leave the funny to funny people.
And he’s not the only one that this could be said about, but I’ll stop with the meanness now…
There’s so much bad news out there — pretty much nothing but — that I thought I’d share with you a bit of good.
Remember when I worried that I might have killed my fig trees when I pruned them a couple of months back?
Well, I didn’t. And I’m very glad, because one of those trees — the one you see at right — was given to me as a sapling by my uncle who died in 2016, and was therefore irreplaceable, at least on a personal level. Not only that, but as small as it still is — I’ve kept it from spreading like the other one — it bears more figs each year than the other one.
The other one, at top, is one I bought at the farmers’ market — the good old farmers’ market, located where people could find it — quite a few years ago. While my uncle’s tree is a reliable brown turkey, this one is… well, I forget the name that was on the label. Something Greek, I think. Anyway, it’s brilliant at producing leaves in great abundance (as you can see), but a slacker at yielding fruit. When it does force itself to do something useful, the fig is quite large, and never turns color. When it’s ripe, it’s still green, and you have to tell by touch whether it’s ready. But it’s very sweet, which is great. But we never get more than a handful in a season, if that.
Meanwhile, remember those four other trees I’m trying to propagate from cuttings I got from our friend Scout? Well, two of them are definitely among the living, but nowhere near ready for the ground. (See below.) The life seemed to have left the other two… but one of them is still showing a bit of green here and there. So I’m not giving up yet on either of the laggards.
Dum Spiro Spero.
Or perhaps in this case, that should be:
Dum Ramus Viridis Est Spero.
As least, that’s what Google Translate says…
I’ve put them in slightly roomier pots, but they still have a lot of growing to do.
Peggy Noonan dubbed John Paul II “John Paul the Great,” and who can argue with that? Not I. He certainly fit the description.
From the beginning, Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not seek to be great, in the coarser senses of the term. He signaled that by the first thing he did after his surprise election as pope — deciding to be the first pontiff in our time named “Francis,” after the man who chose a life of poverty, becoming a plain-robed itinerant preacher, a beggar in a time of particularly worldly clericalism.
If you wish to be a cynic (and too many do), you can call Pope Francis’ gestures — living outside the imperial quarters reserved for the pope, riding in a Ford Focus instead of a limo, saying “Who am I to judge?” — a theatrical form of PR if you like. The point, though, is that he chose to display thoughts and behavior consistent with being, first and foremost, a follower of the carpenter from Nazareth.
From the moment he came out on that balcony and said “Buon giorno” to the crowd, he was humble. He was kind. He bestowed his blessings and his love upon the poor, the suffering, the marginalized. He lived the Great Commandment: He loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and he loved his neighbor as himself. Or more than himself.
He lived his life as an example, one that the world in our time sorely needed, and still needs. And as our pope, he expected us to do the same.
And now, as badly as we need him, he’s gone.
There’s a lot of simplistic conjecture about whether his successor will be a liberal or conservative — reducing the choice of a Supreme Pontiff to the same gross, ones-and-zeroes foolishness that we allow to destroy our politics in this century.
As I grew to love Francis, I listened to those who deprecated him from both the “right” and the “left” — the kind of Catholics who would vote for Trump, and the Culture Warriors who kept saying he didn’t go “far enough,” as though his purpose was to please them by granting all their fondest wishes.
All of them helped me see that this good man was my kind of pope. And we need another just like him — except maybe younger, so he can stay with us longer.
James Earl Jones in the film version of Cry, the Beloved Country.
By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist
Alan Paton’s 1948 novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, explores the South African apartheid system, which was formally instituted in the year of its publication. The protagonist, Stephen Kumalo, is a black minister of a rural congregation whose son commits a murder in a robbery gone wrong. The white man he kills, Arthur Jarvis, is, ironically, one of the few white people who is actively opposing the new apartheid regime.
Paton’s book was formative for me. It heightened my awareness of racial injustice in South Africa, America, and around the world. Recently, I have returned to the book with a different perspective, as I reflect on the changes in my country since Donald Trump was elected. The current injustices are different from those dealt with in the novel, but have been profoundly disquieting. My previous readings have been empathetic, finding my way into Kumalo’s sorrow and anger with a reader’s detachment. However, watching our new administration operate, my detachment is gone. I have become Kumalo.
In the decade since Trump entered presidential politics, I have, despite my grave misgivings about his character and rhetoric, tried to be generous in my view of him. Some of his policies make sense and align with my own. I think his border policy is more sensible than Biden’s was. He is correct to treat China as an existential threat. I agree with him that biological men should not be in women’s sports or other women-only spaces.
But, to my Republican friends I say, you could have had those policies with dozens of other candidates. None of them would have done to our country what Trump has done. For years his defenders chided his opponents for being worried about “a few mean tweets.” I don’t like trash-talking in politics. It simply makes compromising more difficult, and every piece of significant legislation involves compromise. Since it has become an accepted part of the American dialogue, I doubt there will be any turning back. Nevertheless, calling out other world leaders, especially the presidents of Canada and Mexico, our closest neighbors and two of our closest allies, is gratuitous and counterproductive.
However, the deep, agonizing cry that is silently reverberating in many Americans’ hearts is for Ukraine. This is exactly the kind of country that America should be supporting. I’m not a war monger. I have no interest in the U.S. starting or prolonging a war. I grieve for the dead and wounded on both sides and their families. As a physician, I have seen how tragedies affect patients and loved ones. It is impossible for a person to experience war and come away better for the experience.
Ukraine had no choice but to enter this war. They were invaded without provocation by a much larger country run by a murderous dictator. They responded just as America would, with searing rage and all the firepower they could muster. Most analysts expected the war to be over in weeks. Instead the Ukrainians have bravery held off the Russians for three years. Their democratically-elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, showed commendable courage when he chose to stay rather than flee (as opposed to Trump, who dodged the draft, or his minion Josh Hawley, who ran for his life during the attack on the Capitol). Zelenskyy has made it easy for America to support him, asking only for weapons and ammunition. No American soldier will die in Ukraine.
I suspect we will recover quickly from much of the stupidity and vanity emanating from the White House, e.g., the Gulf of America, the turning of the South Lawn into a Tesla lot, or the threats to take over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. However, Trump’s choice to forsake Zelenskyy for Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian who censors free media, jails and kills his opponents, and rules by fear, will stain our flag for years to come. The simple question is “Which of these countries aspires to be more like America?” That was, until recently, the way we chose allies. America is the best and brightest hope for the planet. Our democratic system, as fractious and flawed as it is, and our political discourse, as polluted as it is, are still the envy of the world. We are free to say and do everything we want as long as it does not infringe on the rights of our fellow citizens. We will only remain free if we support other countries trying to become like us.
I have had my share of disagreements with past presidents, both those I voted for and those I didn’t. I have been angry before, but I have never felt that the president was trying to contort the United States into a country we don’t recognize and don’t want to be. In the novel, Kumalo says of his son Absalom after he has committed the murder, “Who knows if he ever thought of what he did, of what it meant to his mother and father, to the people of his village, to the white man he had killed, to the wife and children that were left desolate. Who knows if he had remorse, or if he wept for his broken country?”
When I read Kumalo’s last question over forty years ago at the University of Virginia, I never thought I would be asking it of my president.
A version of this column appeared in the March 19th, 2025 edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.
My brother-in-law checking over the Nativity in 2019.
A brief Easter reflection. And no, it’s not too late. The Easter Season just started Sunday, and lasts until June 8…
My wife told me this one yesterday. Her youngest brother has had the same Nativity set on his lawn every Christmas season of his life — first at his parents’ home growing up, now at his own. It consists of several hollow plastic figures that I think were once lit from within, but are now illuminated with a spotlight. It’s getting a bit worn out — Mary had to be replaced a year or so ago — but it’s still something everybody in the family looks forward to, especially the kids.
His boys are grown now, and he has no grandchildren yet, so he’s been letting his older brothers’ grandchildren — who are all in the Memphis area — take turns each year with the honor of placing the baby Jesus on the manger.
This past season it was the year for the younger grandson of his oldest brother (whom we lost in 2020). Unfortunately, he didn’t get to do it on account of illness, from which he has fully recovered.
Time has passed, and the boy has gotten older — he turned 5 last month — but he hasn’t forgotten missing out.
So on Sunday, he approached his uncle and reminded him he had not gotten his chance to place the baby in the crèche. And he asked whether he could do it now.
My brother-in-law said well, no. The Nativity had been put away, because it was a Christmas/Epiphany thing. And now, it’s Easter.
So the boy thought for a moment, and tried a different angle. He asked:
“Well, have you got a tomb?”
There are plenty out there to choose from.
At the end of my previous post, I tried to offer hope in spite of the situation I was describing. I said there are still “plenty of smart people out there,” suggesting that even though I haven’t figured out a fix, some of them might. I could have named names, but as incredible as it may sound, I was restraining myself with all my might, trying to keep the post from being any longer than the 2,899 words I ended up with.
One of the names I might have mentioned is that of David Brooks. But y’all know I admire that guy’s work; I’ve said so often enough.
I mention him now because of his most recent column, which was blessedly shorter than mine, but eloquently addressed an important aspect of what I was on about. The headline is “Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime.”
You should read the whole thing (after all, his point is that kids — and adults — today need to be reading something. I’ve tried to make it available by using the “share full article” link, but I’m still not sure whether that words for everybody if you post it on a blog, or is only meant for sharing by text or email with one or two friends).
If you can’t (or, being a person of the 21st century, simply won’t) read it all, here’s an excerpt from the top:
You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.
Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade…
Later, he quotes from a book by Jim Mattis and Bing West:
If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you…
Amen to that, warrior monk.
He doesn’t get to current news until the end:
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence…
But as I say, that comes at the end. As I said in that last post, the larger point isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the rest of us, and our own avoidance of reading, to the point that a majority of us were willing to vote for someone like Trump.
He ends with the words, “Civilization was fun while it lasted.”
Yeah. As I said…
So Brooks is one of those smart people I was talking about, and he’s offered a solution: Go out and read a book. And then read a few hundred more. I would add that they should be history books, but hey, almost anything would be an improvement….
As a kid, I thought of societal collapse in terms of the fall of Rome.
As you know, I’ve been fascinated by history my whole life (and I still fail to understand why everyone else isn’t). Not as a profession, more of an avocation. I’m into it the way some people are into football. I earned a second major in it at Memphis State, completely by accident — I just took that many elective courses in the subject. (I had time for them for a number of reasons, including the fact that I didn’t go to football games.)
And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been somewhat morbidly interested in one of history’s most ominous questions: What would it be like to live in a great, thriving civilization that you deeply loved, and you were seeing it falling apart all around you?
I generally framed it in terms of Rome. It ruled the known world for centuries (despite a form of government that seems unstable at every point at which I’ve studied it), and then it was just gone. Suddenly, Rome is in the hands of barbarians, the last legion has pulled out of Britain, and all of Western Europe has sunk into chaotic darkness, ruled by local warlords of one sort or another.
But lately, I’ve gotten interested more in other collapses of great cultures, such as, say, the British Empire. It exceeded the Roman in geographic breadth and possibly global cultural hegemony (the adoption of English as the current lingua franca, for instance), so its collapse from what it was in Victoria’s day is pretty remarkable. But it still isn’t as complete or as crushing as the Roman fall (I was there last summer, and London still seemed to be thriving), and when I was in school my teachers didn’t cover it. Too recent, I suppose. And no barbarians have yet succeeded the Windsors.
At the moment, though, I’ve been fascinated by an earlier event on that sceptered isle. I’ve been listening to a wonderful (not only informative, but entertaining) podcast called The Rest is History, and I’ve been entralled by several episodes dealing with the events of 1066 (“the most important year in English history”), including what led up to it, and the details of the final erasure of real English (that is to say, Anglo-Saxon) rule. The last episode was the denouement, “The Battle of Hastings.” (But wait! I see there’s a fourth episode after that: “The Norman Conquest.” What joy. Unless, of course, you’re a Saxon.)
And remember last year when I suddenly discovered, to my great embarrassment, the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Well, I’m digging deeper into that now by reading a book about it, titled 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Not that all of it — the attacks of the Sea Peoples, havoc caused by global warming, etc. — happened in that one year. It took awhile. I’m simultaneously studying the same period, or a bit later, from a different angle through James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. (Turns out those Philistines who keep coming up in the Old Testament were actually Sea People. Who knew?)
You’ll notice I’m looking into collapses a bit more intently recently. You can probably figure out why. I haven’t paid all that much attention lately to stuff that’s happened since about a millennium ago. And considering what’s happening now, I haven’t missed too much that would give me joy.
When I was a kid, past collapses were an idle interest, and not very threatening — compared to, say, nuclear annihilation. In the 1950s and ’60s, I was growing up in a country and a period that was more firmly stable than anything I could see in the past. We were at the peak of an arc that started, as many reckoned it, with the Magna Carta in 1215. Several centuries later the process soared to previously unknown heights with the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution — which was almost immediately a success, but would go through another two centuries of gradual perfection, with particularly big leaps during the presidential tenures of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and yes, Lyndon Johnson. The strains and splits that emerged in the 1960s were to me dramatic demonstrations of how resilient this rational and humane rule of, by and for the people really was. We carried on, and saw our Cold War adversaries do the collapsing.
We didn’t have an empire in the usual historical sense (despite all that nattering you heard in the ’60s), but since 1945 our global influence — and responsibility (that thing that so many on both the left and right now spit upon) — exceeded that of any emperor who ever sat upon a throne. I continue to love those stories of the incomparable Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era, but Lords Nelson and Cochrane, and my fictional hero Jack Aubrey, would have had to cut and run in the face of the Service in which my father served.
I read a lot of Mad magazines in the mid-’60s, and that’s fitting. If anyone had mentioned societal collapse to me in 1965, I’d have said, “What, me worry?”
And now, this. All this stuff going on around us, in this beautiful country and throughout the West — in fact, throughout all the developed countries that a reasonable person might have wrongly, but reasonably, assumed were beyond such societal pratfalls as we read about in history books.
Do I have to detail all the evidence of collapse all around us as our liberal republican-democracy just goes “poof” in practically an instant? That shouldn’t be necessary. I take it most of you are paying more attention than I am to the daily nightmare.
Just last week, Donald the Unready destroyed $10 trillion in weath in this country and others, on an idiotic whim (idiotic whims being the only kind for which he possesses a certain genius). A lot of people had voted for him with one of the favorite slogans of people who understand neither government nor business on their lips: “Run Government Like a Business.” I saw a crack about that on social media in recent days. I can’t remember who said it, but it doesn’t matter, because the observation was so obvious that attribution seems unnecessary. (Actually, quite a few said it on Twitter.) Something like “They didn’t know he was going to run it like one of HIS businesses.” Of course, they had no excuse for not knowing, since they’d been warned a million times since 2016 — they just disregarded anyone who told them, because it didn’t fit within the fantasy in which they so fervently believed.
Of course, a few days back, Trump did his Emily Litella routine — “Never mind!” So everything’s OK, right? Well, no. There’s this thing that a functioning society needs leaders not only to project, but embody: stability. In the business world, “uncertainty” is a scary word. It keeps businesses from planning, growing, creating jobs, and all the rest.
Expect more surprise attacks on global financial growth and stability. Just as a garnish on top of his usual shtick of abandoning allies and hugging bad guys abroad, and pouring gasoline on ANY fire that serves to divide us at home.
Now let me pause to say what it’s always necessary to keep in mind, if we can stand to be that depressed: Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is that a majority of people in this country have so lost sight of what has always made America great (not just that — they’ve simply lost common sense) that they would actually vote for someone like that — repeatedly.
And just to make sure I tick off everybody, no one on the left should be nodding smugly at this point. If we had a Democratic Party capable of projecting an image of a strong, unified movement committed to principles and causes with broad appeal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I cite that book Sapiens a lot — not because I agree with everything Yuval Noah Harari says, but because when he’s right about something, he explains it well. And one thing he makes plain about what separates humans from other creatures and has enabled us to work together to advance to an extraordinary extent is the ability to coalesce around unifying ideas. We don’t have to all agree, but we need to embrace a consensus about certain basic principles. All successful human endeavors involving groups larger than, say, a troop of chimpanzees (somewhere between a couple of dozen individuals and a hundred) depends on that ability. It is in fact the one major thing that separates us from those other apes.
But quite suddenly, we have lost that special gift. Now we can’t even agree on what facts are, much less work together effectively to change and shape a commonly perceived reality.
(At this point, I should point out to you that I’ve been thinking about writing this post since sometime last summer but have not for a reason that should by now be evident to you: It just takes too much time, and too many words. After about 1,500 of them, I’m really just getting into the meat of the problem. And I’ve been writing it, in short bursts at a time, for two or three days. I’ll redouble my efforts to get to the end as quickly as possible…)
How do we pull out of this nose dive? I have no idea, which is one reason I haven’t written much on our current plight, and have spent more and more time on the distant past.
As elusive as solutions might be, it’s somewhat easier to diagnose the problem. I refer you back to every post I’ve written in the last couple of years that uses the term “Rabbit Hole.” You should probably start with this one.
Of course, now some of you are warming up your intense objections to the Rabbit Hole thesis. Some of your fave arguments are:
So, those objections having been dealt with, I’ll get back to my premise…
The thing is, evolution grinds slowly — very slowly. It took many tens of thousand of years after humans got clever before they settled down to farm life, which led to the development of cities, kingdoms, empires, money, and writing, along with a gazillion other things. That started about 12,000 years ago, and we haven’t fully adjusted well to the changes. This very recent development is a big reason obesity is such a problem. Any hunter-gatherer with initiative stuffed himself with as many calories as he could, whenever he could. He had to. Now that most folks in developed countries can gorge themselves on sweets and other carbs without limit, our brains still haven’t completely evoved to the point that we understand that we shouldn’t. (Other creatures have to mutate for big things to happen. It is both the great advantage and flaw of humans that we just go ahead and change, and don’t wait around for new hardware and software to be installed.)
So consider what happens if you live in a modern liberal democracy with a deliberative system built to allow people to engage in lively disagreements, but do so in a manner that still allows for, even encourages, effective, amicable solutions. And then, all of a sudden, practically no one seems to believe in the abstractions necessary to such a system — the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, pluralism, Voltaire’s “I disagree with what you say…” principle, liberal democracy itself, all of it. They’ve all suddenly gone “poof,” in what amounts to a microsecond in evolutionary terms. (Of course, despite the words that follow, it wasn’t just our beloved technology that did this to us. There’s the classic American attitude that history is, as Henry Ford said, bunk. We are not a grounded people, in terms of internalizing the most important principles we have inherited.)
The internet, and a decade later social media, made it possible for the first time in human history for a sad, maladjusted person (and there are millions who fit this description on the planet; it’s not just that one guy) to communicate instantaneously with thousands (out of billions, a statistical fact in which we once could take comfort) of other people just as deluded as he is, and he and they become instantly convinced that they must not be crazy, because so many people agree! He, and every one of those thousands, now possess greater power to publish their musings than anyone previously in the history of written communication — and to do so instantly, and to the entire planet at once.
Consider the case of RFK Jr. In previous decades, he would simply have been (and I suppose was, up until recently) the embarrassing secret of a great American family. But today, he can in short order find himself leading an army of anti-vaxxers, and eventually become United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. In what previous time, since the U.S. Constitution was drafted, was such a thing possible? (Sure, the sadly lacking, even demented, son of a prince might once have raised an army and taken the throne, but isn’t one of the main points of this country the fact that we’ve put that sort of thing behind us? We had, and now suddenly it’s back.)
As a people, we have by and large simply turned our backs on the great American experiment. We were not overrun by Sea Peoples or other enemies. No Vesuvius went off and buried our cities in ash. We did it as whimsically, and unnecessarily, as Trump erased that $10 trillion in market value. We didn’t even do it consciously, near as I can tell. We just did it. And to the extent we’re conscious of the damage wrought, we’ve blamed it on those other guys (who used to be our fellow Americans).
How long will it take for our species to find its way through this unforeseen shock? How long will it take us to adapt, if we do?
I do not know. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, it was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Europe would not see another republic for 1,000 years. And that didn’t involve a new technological development that outstripped the human capacity to think clearly.
Am I saying things are hopeless? Nope. I’m not giving up. It’s not in my nature. Remember, I’m the guy who set aside everything he was doing to try to unseat an incumbent white Republican in South Carolina in 2018 — two years after that ominous date mentioned above.
But at the moment, I’m sort of out of ideas as to how we pull out of this. I suppose I’ll come up with something — that is, we’ll come up with something. I’m just describing the situation: that technology and our weaker tendencies have already done something to our cognitive abilities that we were not ready for. And mind you, AI hasn’t even gotten warmed up. Anyway, that’s my diagnosis over the last few months. Beyond that, I’m hearing a paucity of ideas regarding effective remedies.
But I’ll keep listening. There are plenty of smart people out there, even though it’s often hard to tell at the moment. And if I think of something myself, I’ll give you a heads-up. You know me.
In the meantime, maybe some of y’all have an idea, one that has so far escaped notice, for how we can return to building a rational civilization together. But don’t waste your breaths, as some tend to do, telling me I’m wrong. I’m not. Boy, do I wish I were…
Running across that Jeannie Gaffigan column reminded me of a hilarious movie I rewatched part of while on the elliptical this morning.
I’m talking about “Unfrosted,” in which her husband co-starred with Jerry Seinfeld. Both were great, as were the rest of the ensemble cast. So was the film itself, which you might find surprising if you just saw or heard a description of the premise when it came out last year. It’s “Loosely based on the true story of the creation of Pop-Tarts toaster pastries.”
For that reason, I had ignored it on Netflix for some time before giving in and checking it out. But you know, sometimes the things that sound the dumbest when you first hear about them turn out to be the greatest discoveries. (I’m thinking, apparently irrelevantly, of the 1992 alternative-history novel The Guns of the South, which Wikipedia summarizes thusly: “The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) from an imagined 21st-century South Africa, who supply Robert E. Lee‘s Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence.” See what I mean? But it’s awesome.)
So I enjoyed every one of those 10 minutes on the elliptical (I’ll walk some more later, I promise!).
But, as I did the time or two that I saw it before, I couldn’t help wondering: Could anyone but a Baby Boomer get it? So much of the comedy comes from lampooning cultural touchstones of the early-to-mid ’60s, or shortly thereafter (such as the “Godfather” references). Some examples:
Milkmen. Actually this is less a thing we all experienced in the ’60s — of all the places I lived growing up as a Navy brat, I think there was only one place where milk was delivered to our doorstep. But it was still an standard cultural reference that everyone still recognized. And we could understand how they might have resisted the milkless Pop-Tart.
The Schwinn Stingray bike. They had to reach to pull this into a comedy about breakfast cereal, but they made it work.
Artificial sweeteners. My most vivid memory regarding this phenomenon comes from 1965. I’ve written about that period when we had just returned from Ecuador and I was happily mainlining television every second of the day, and I just had to have everything touted in a commercial. The Diet Pepsi ads were particularly successful in convincing me the product actually tasted better than regular cola that I begged my Mom to buy a six-pack, and she did, and I’ve regretted it ever since.
The ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lifestyle. I mean Jerry Seinfeld as an executive stepping out of his front door each morning in his suit and tie, after a bowl of Kelloggs, and smugly taking a kiss on the cheek from his lovely wife before setting out with his briefcase to win the Wonder bread for his fam. Sure, my Dad was in the Navy and was often at sea for months at a time, but I was pretty sure that civilians lived just like that. Because, you know, TV doesn’t lie. Except about Diet Pepsi.
Jack Lalanne. Yes, I also faithfully watched his show during that period of addiction, and was convinced I, too, could be that fit. Of course, that didn’t work out much better than the Diet Pepsi.
The Space Program. Most specifically, the satirical restaging of the famous press conference in which the original Seven Mercury Astronauts were unveiled to an admiring, applauding public. Actually, it was a restaging of a previous satirical restaging in “The Right Stuff,” which was a great scene. But Wolfeian overstatement aside, the Right Stuff version wasn’t that far from the original event. And it inspired a warm-but-sad nostalgia for me. It evoked a time when we all knew that if Americans worked together, we could do anything. And none of us were embarrassed about applauding heroes.
So lots of chuckles — some rueful, but all quite warm. For me, and for people my age.
But did kids get it at all? I dunno. That just hit me this morning when I mentioned it to my daughter, but stopped myself and admitted that she might not find it nearly as funny.
Of course, kids do like to laugh at anything that regards Boomers. And they might have had these cultural references crammed down their throats enough to see the jokes. But they can’t possibly appreciate them fully…
Here’s another thing Brad’s been doing (for the last few days, at least) instead of blogging: Trying to get through all that email that has been piling up since we went to Europe last summer.
In fits an starts the last week or so, I’ve managed to get back to Nov. 1. Which is like digging back a thousand years — to a time when at least a few people in our country could still think straight, and a decent human being who was not trying to destroy human civilization was president of the United States.
And that’s how I ran into this piece in America magazine by Jeannie Gaffigan. Y’all remember Jeannie. I wrote, with enthusiastic approval, about a previous column of hers back in 2020. Here’s a snippet from that earlier Gaffigan column:
As much as some of my well-intended fellow Catholics will hate to hear this, it is crystal clear to me that the right thing to do is vote for Joe Biden. I believe it will be impossible to tackle these other issues with a president who is working overtime to sow division and hatred in this county through insults, intimidation, fear and blatant racism. This venomous “us against them” mentality is trickling down, seeping into our churches and poisoning our pulpits. To a culture of life, vipers are deadly….
Amen, amen, amen!, said I.
Of course, Jeannie had more to work with at that time — our fellow Catholic Joe Biden, the only qualified candidate to run for our nation’s highest office in the last two election cycles. And, of course, the aforementioned decent human being, which is probably his most defining characteristic.
Jeannie Gaffigan
But Joe had been hounded into doing something I’d thought he would never do: he quit. Up until then, he was willing to spend his last breath struggling to save our country, and doing a fine job of it. But it became too hard for him to focus on the mission when the whole country — including people who should know better — were screaming “QUIT, JOE, QUIT!!!” 24 hours a day.
This put Jeannie, and me, and many others, into the uncomfortable position of urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, who tried hard — you’ve gotta give her that — but was still what she had been in 2020: unready. (And I don’t use that term lightly.)
The only advantage Kamala Harris — and those who would advance her bid — had was that her opponent was Donald Trump, for whom no one could possibly justify voting. And no one did. Justification was something these folks didn’t even attempt. Having gone substantially madder since 2020, they just voted for him anyway.
They ignored Jeannie. They ignored me, too, but I have no room to complain, because now we see that I also ignored Jeannie.
But not intentionally. Anyway, in case America will let you read it, here’s her column of Nov. 1. And if the Jesuits are wanting you to subscribe, here’s an excerpt:
An appeal to the moms out there: If you think parenting temper-tantrum toddlers or rebellious teenagers is nearly impossible, try letting them run your government! What would that look like? It’s a chilling thought but one that we can’t afford to ignore…
Amen again. And right now, a bunch of people on Wall Street who may have ignored you and me in November are now seeing exactly what you were talking about…
Just a bit of something for the day. Over our corned beef and cabbage this evening, I got to looking at some of the images I shot during our trip to Ireland in 2019.
This was taken a couple of days before St. Patrick’s, in the great brewery in Dublin itself.
I was taking a class in the art of pulling a pint of Guinness, which of course is far more complex and important that pulling a pint of anyt’ing else.
The best part is, after we passed the class, we got our own pint for free…
Enjoy watching…
Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.
— Timeline, by Michael Crichton
The book being quoted is no great work of literature. But I found the idea of a novel about historians who have the opportunity to go back in time irresistible, and I’ve read it more than once. And at least the book was way less lame than the movie it inspired.
But whatever the book’s shortcomings, that’s a great way of summarizing our nation’s greatest problem. Nothing could be truer than the idea being set forth with that analogy. Tragically, we live in a world densely crowded with such trees, bearing such leaves. And since the leaves have no idea they are part of a tree, they don’t have the slightest indication that the forest exists, or what maintains it and has caused it to flourish to this point.
Only in a world like this could a man like Donald Trump be taken seriously for any position. But whatever his shortcomings, his emergence as a perceived leader in the minds of millions points to the larger problem — the sickness of ignorance that has infested the whole tree. Because only people who have no notion of the origins of this country and the principles that made it great, people who have no idea how important this liberal democracy is to the entire world (and don’t care), could possibly turn this precious country over to him.
But don’t those of you on the “left” read that last paragraph with smugness in your hearts. You’ve got serious perceptive issues yourselves. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be just as eager as the Trumpistas to elect a majority plus one so you can cram your agenda down the throats of the despised other side. That’s because you’d understand that this is supposed to be a deliberative republic in which we sit down with people who disagree with us, speak and listen respectfully, and grow wiser as we work to achieve things together.
I learned about the faults of right and left during all those decades as a newspaper editor. Mike Burgess — remenber Mike from the last post? — learns it every day in an even harsher environment. And he’s pretty sick of being battered constantly by the left and right, both wanting history taught in ways that advance their agendas.
Our nation is dying because it is awash in ignorance and apathy. Mike’s trying to address that with all his might. When he’s not teaching the kids at River Bluff High School, he’s traveling around our state addressing adults on the subject he spoke on today at Richland Library. This would be an uphill fight even if everyone were required to attend and listen, and do that rare and magical thing: think.
Which is why I say in the headline, I hope you saw and heard the video. Our turnout today was respectable, but not what it needed to be. However, our videographer came up to me as the event ended and said something like 300 people had watched on Facebook Live.
That’s very good news. They couldn’t ask questions, which Mike had saved half his time to allow them to do — and the folks present took full advantage of that. But it’s still very good. I wasn’t sure I had heard the number right, because of my hearing problems, and the fact that the program was over and a lot of people were talking at the same time.
But I checked on Facebook, and it appears that at least part of it has been seen now by 596 people. I hope some of y’all were among them. If not, here’s your chance:
(The little clip you see at the top of this post just shows a couple of random moments when I happened to turn my phone to video. It’s not a highlight or anything like that; I just figured it was better than a still picture.)
If you prefer to read, here’s a version of his speech, which he gives regularly.
Watch, or read, and let’s discuss it…
This was right at the beginning; a few more folks came in after this.
History teacher Mike Burgess speaking at the museum last year.
What does Brad do when he’s not blogging? Well, lots of stuff. Some of it involves work for ADCO‘s clients, one of which is the Relic Room.
For the past year I’ve been particularly wrapped up in a project I particularly enjoy, which is arranging, coordinating and publicizing the frequent live programs on military history that we call Noon Debriefs (they used to be called “Lunch and Learns,” but there was no actual lunch, so it was changed).
They are free lectures featuring such speakers as veterans, historians and others about some aspect of military history bearing on South Carolina. This is one of my favorite things to work on, because I always learn from them. They’ve been a bit of a challenge, though, since last June, since the room usually used for lectures at the museum has been tied up by renovations.
But that’s been an opportunity to reach out to the wider community, and Richland Library has generously let us use the Theater room at their main location, which is a fantastic venue for such programs. To simplify the transition, we relied at first on museum staff as speakers, but we’ve recently resumed our usual practice of having quest speakers from outside. There, we’ve presented such lectures as:
We’ve got another great guest speaker tomorrow at noon. Mike Burgess, who has in recent years been dubbed the best history teacher in the state more than once, will talk about the increasing difficulty of teaching the subject in public schools amid America’s roaring political battles over our past.
Mike addresses the subject quite fearlessly, as I can tell you based on the similar lecture he gave at the museum last year. And the past year, of course, has only made his job more difficult, as the Kulturkampf flames have been fanned ever higher.
Anyway, since his topic is the very nature of history itself, and why it is essential in a functioning republic, I figured this would be a good time to give y’all a heads-up on these programs. I assure you it will be an informative one.
We’ll continue to present such fascinating programs at Richland Library in the coming months, and perhaps even after we get the Education Room at the museum back. And in May, we’ll branch out further, with a couple of programs at the Cayce/West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Libary.
If you want to learn, as I have been doing, come on out. Oh, and we’ve started offering something extra the last few times — a free tour of the Relic Room itself, following the program. If you haven’t been to the museum before, you should definitely take advantage of that. I particularly urge you to check out the Vietnam exhibit in the Cistern Gallery (which is one reason so many of our recent programs have emphasized the experiences of South Carolina veterans in the conflict)….
Moss Blachman spoke at the library Feb. 14 about serving as an intelligence officer in Vietnam.
Screenshot
I’m having my annual physical next Monday, so yesterday I went in to have blood drawn. You know, the standard “fasting lab.”
The fun thing about having medical tests done these days is that you don’t have to wait to learn the results. You can diagnose yourself, and make bets whether it will turn out you were right when you see the medico. I could have seen them last night, but I forgot to look until I was eating lunch today.
I like the way they inform you if any of the results are just a bit off. Off course, it would seize my attention even more effectively if the “ABNORMAL” were in a red box rather than plain buff, and it flashed, and was accompanied by a loud klaxon sound.
It would cause one to respond, “I say: What’s all this then?” And you might even click and look at the results. In my case, I’d have opened it without the warning sign, because I’m always curious about a couple of the data points. And yes, it turns out I am still low on both sodium and choride (“abnormally” so on the chloride), so I can keep having all the salt I want. In fact, I’d best get right to it.
As for the “ABNORMAL” bits, well, they’re kinda dull when you look at them. Oh, maybe one day one of them will be something bad, but you can’t tell by looking at them. Or I can’t.
Anyway, the point of this post was that it gave me an excuse to share one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies.
Enjoy.
And now, today, behold — leaves!
Well, the jury is still out on whether I properly pruned (or destroyed), the two fig trees in my yard.
But while I’ll be very sorry if I killed them, particularly the one my uncle gave me not long before his passing, some small comfort is on its way — thanks to our friend Scout.
OK, you can probably see the leaf structure better here…
You’ll recall I ran into Scout at the recent demonstration. I mentioned to her the recent pruning incident and my concerns about it, and she said she would be glad to let me have some cuttings from the trees in her yard. Which was welcome news, because I’d seen those trees in the summertime, and they were just exploding with figs.
Whereas my trees produce barely a dozen figs each per year. You can’t feast on them, or make fig preserves, which I love. (Although in their defense, they do provide a nice, moderate snack now and then.)
So I went over last weekend, and Scout and her husband not only let me take some cuttings, but gave me a container of root accelerant they had in their garage.
I only took four, but I researched rather carefully how to turn cuttings into trees, and amazingly, I think maybe I did it right (with my wife’s careful guidance).
Take a look at this grove, this plantation, this forest of growth I’ve got going on. I put four sticks, with a slight greenness at the tips, into the soil, on Ash Wednesday. See below. The image at the top is a mere four days later, and you can see identifiable leaves coming out at the top.
At this rate, before long, I’ll have enough fig leaves to open a clothing boutique in the Garden of Eden. Can fig preserves be far behind?
Ash Wednesday: Mere sticks, with the slightest bulge of green at their ends…
By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist
I’m no foreign policy expert, but I have an advantage over most Americans trying to understand the shutdown of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I have seen its work overseas. In February 2020, I was part of a small group of doctors and medical students from the University of South Carolina who traveled to Tanzania to work in one of the nation’s major referral hospitals.
In my two weeks there, I discovered that Tanzania’s health system is decades behind ours. Due to the lack of medical infrastructure, Tanzanians suffer and die of diseases like HIV and TB at much higher rates than Americans. I met an American couple, both doctors, who had chosen to work for several years in a clinic run by Baylor University dedicated to the prevention of HIV and the care of children and families already infected. Baylor had built a welcoming, modern clinic on the campus of the hospital. One of the funders of the clinic was USAID.
This young couple and their small children were not part of a “criminal organization” as Elon Musk posted on Twitter on February 2nd, nor were they working for one that was run by “radical lunatics” as Donald Trump said the next day. These were exemplary, highly trained Americans serving sacrificially far from home, in a way that should make us all proud.
It is Trump’s prerogative to shape agencies according to his governing philosophy. It is reasonable for him to roll back programs that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion as he said we would in his campaign. I may disagree with the hysteria over transgender Americans that Trump was glad to stoke. I may support the simple idea that diverse groups are usually stronger and more productive than homogeneous ones. But Trump won the election, and I respect his right to make changes that will perturb me.
What I object to is a purge of an organization that is so important to America’s standing in the world. USAID has more than 80 missions in approximately 130 countries. As of this writing, all of them have been closed. USAID workers, both those devoting a few years like my friends in Tanzania, and others who have spent their careers overseas, are now locked out of their offices, unsure of their next paycheck, and trying to make contingency plans thousands of miles from home.
There is a sensible way to reform USAID. Conservatives have long complained that USAID is too autonomous and that some programs, such as funding for Palestinian NGOs, were not aligned with American interests. This is a legitimate policy dispute. Some would argue that we should provide humanitarian assistance to families ravaged by a war they had no part in making, others would argue that too much of the aid would end up in the hands of Hamas.
Let’s have those debates. Let’s consider the pros and cons of putting USAID under the control of the State Department. But let’s do it without upending the lives of American citizens abroad or putting the lives of our allies at risk.
Endangering the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is particularly egregious. PEPFAR was created in 2003 by George W. Bush and has been the most successful anti-HIV effort on the planet, saving millions of lives and preventing untold numbers of cases of HIV, including the most devastating, maternal to infant transmission.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued waivers for critical humanitarian assistance, but there is much confusion about what the waivers will cover and how the new funding streams will operate. It is certain that many patients’ daily HIV medication supply will be disrupted.
Any interruption in PEPFAR services could be disastrous. One of the weaknesses of current HIV therapy is that when patients stop taking their medication, the virus can become resistant and much more difficult to treat, resulting in complications and even death.
HIV has, thankfully, been reduced to a controllable chronic disease here at home. Most people who are diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. can live a normal lifespan. I have about a dozen HIV-positive patients in my practice. All of them have their HIV controlled with a simple daily regimen. Many of us have forgotten what it was like at the peak of the epidemic in the 1990s when thousands of young people were dying, emaciated and terrified. But HIV is still poorly controlled in some of the developing world such as sub-Saharan Africa and India, where USAID is doing lifesaving work.
I’m disappointed by my evangelical Christian brethren, most of whom voted for Trump. Churches usually ask for a 10% tithe. USAID’s budget is less than 1% of the total budget of the United States. The vast majority goes to work that Jesus asks us to do in the 25th chapter of Matthew – feeding the hungry, inviting in the stranger, caring for the sick. So much for Christian nationalism when it comes to how we treat our neighbors around the world.
All of this was easily predictable and preventable. But that’s no concern for Trump and Musk, who seem locked in a battle for who can demonstrate the least empathy. The shutdown of USAID exposes the current administration as incompetent and cruel.
A version of this column appeared in the February 19th, 2025 edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.
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