On Superman, Sentimentality, and Citizenship (or, What Gunn's Superman Knows About America that J.D. Vance Apparently Can't Comprehend)

Daniel McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response, but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.

McCarthy’s argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian” has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in today.

McCarthy sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence, as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak (McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.

I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words to Lex Luthor—

I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength.

—could, I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.

More importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition. It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American republicanism as well.

So now let’s turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech, one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

That social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural, and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it, making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later study that the difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Presumably, Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change America  away from being an immigrant society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think, theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in his speech, he claims:

If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Some of the reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So, you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of it worryingly strange. (As John Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.

The republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse oblige. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy (whether spatially or temporally).

No one actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture. But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:

What does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

The Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his actions were stirring up the continent’s native inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view, becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular, especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he put it in one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or] put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious conceptual loss.

Fortunately, the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by, was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole understanding of her adopted country began with her appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed) Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community” that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of, with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani, the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4^th, he posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Well, for one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA base depends upon his performative anger.

A better answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.

Did the Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian, after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman) tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course, when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the Claremont Institute, apparently.

Defending Superman's Sentimentality

[Note: Spoilers follow.]

I’ve seen James Gunn’s Superman, and I’ve written up my take on it on social media: I thought it was absolutely wonderful, one of the very best super-hero movies I’ve ever seen, on the same level as—or maybe exceeding—such movies as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, even Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. Some disagree with that assessment, which is fine; there are all sorts of ways, both stylistic and substantive, to judge big pop entertainments like these, and I’m not inclined to argue (much) with folks whose takes differ from mine.

But a politico-theological argument? That I can absolutely get into.

Given that Superman, no matter how one tells his story, is by definition a hero of the underdog, someone who saves lives, stops disasters, and fights those who oppress and terrorize, it’s always going to be easy to fit him into a particular political narrative, and certainly there’s been plenty of that in the wake of the visuals and narrative choices which Gunn employed in making Superman. (As one of my friends said regarding Vasil Ghurkos, the evil ruler of Boravia who is central to Lex Luthor’s scheme to destroy Superman, Gunn made him look like Benjamin Netanyahu, but sound like Vladimir Putin.) From what I can tell, the lazy political attack on the movie—that it’s “woke” and therefore nothing but progressive propaganda—doesn’t seem to have legs; multiple conservative, Trump-supporting friends of mine have loved the movie, loved the humor and action and heroism the film contains. Another, slightly different attack caught my eye, though, and I want to say why I think it’s completely wrong.

It's an attack made by Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, a rather idiosyncratic conservative journal. In a column titled “What Trump Knows About ‘Superman’ That Hollywood Can’t Comprehend,” McCarthy writes that attempts to hate on Superman because of its presumed (and I think actually quite obvious and accurate) messages regarding immigration and respect for civil rights and the rule of law are side issues, at best; the real problem with Superman is its “bland and demoralizing vision” of an America without values. He describes the film’s Jonathan and Martha Kent at “ludicrously folksy stereotypes”; he condemns the fact that this Superman “doesn’t utter a word about ‘the American way,’” but instead “when he confronts Luthor at the film’s climax…insists his failings are what makes him human”; and that Superman’s core replaces patriotism with sentimentality: “Superman hasn’t assimilated to America, but to an unplaceable idea of niceness and self-affirmation.”

Well, as Jules Winnfield once said, allow me to retort.

I called this a politico-theological argument, because it is: it is an argument which is built out of assumptions about the moral importance, perhaps even the moral centrality, of being a part of a national community, a community that itself posits its own character—its own “way”—as reflecting, perhaps even instantiating, something unique and higher. Without being attached to a people and place, moral positions become bland: “niceness” is a characteristic which anyone can possess, and it betokens no sense of strength or specialness. Superman is, McCarthy is saying, just this guy with powers; he does not inspire, unlike Trump, who understands that the point of national leadership is to never be humiliated, to be “so strong” he doesn’t need to engage in violence (unless he chooses to, of course).

Thankfully there are at least some conservative Christians who still haven’t forgotten that the theology which actually emerged from the stories of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, and in contrast to the idolatry which motivates so much of the MAGA cult, isn’t at all about strength but rather is all about acceptance: acceptance of individual choice and accountability, acceptance of one’s common and flawed mortality, acceptance of the equal dignity of all persons, good or bad, weak or strong, journeying through this earthly life. On that reading, Gunn’s Superman is a deeply religious film, telling the story of the struggles and the triumph—for the moment!—of a tremendously gifted man who cares deeply about his fellow beings (regarding Krypto: “He’s not even a very good dog—but he’s out there alone, and he’s probably scared”), despite his own many limitations (his final words in the movie, after Mr. Terrific leaves Superman in a huff: “I am such a jerk sometimes”). But I think we can go even deeper than that.

Long ago, back when the Blogosphere was a name that was actually recognized by many, I was part of a long discussion over what some scholars of religious belief and practice had terms “Moral Therapeutic Deism.” My engagement in that debate touched on Barak Obama, Rod Dreher, civil religion, and more, but I’d like to draw out just one element of it: the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if McCarthy had been actually subtly signaling to all the Rousseau-haters out there when he described the “sentimentality” of Gunn’s Superman as consisting of “niceness and self-affirmation,” because that’s just a step or two away from one of Rousseau’s key claims: that modern morality is built, first, upon pity or compassion for others, and second, upon amour de soi, a concept usually translated as “self-love,” but which really connotes a positive sense of dignity, self-care, and accountability.

In any case, for Rousseau, modernity has robbed us of the possibility of a genuinely organic connection to a national community, or really any community identity at all; to take its place, there is the need to educate people in a religious sensibility that arguably is a direct ancestor of MTD. “The Creed of the Savoyard Priest” is a central text here; its ideas were foundational for much 19^th-century liberal Christian theology, and frankly, that theology is as American as apple pie: God loves you. God has given you an inner sense of decency; don’t allow learned rationalizations to distract you from it. On the contrary, God wants you to follow your conscience, as that will allow you to best respect and serve and build community with others. As the Priest writes: “Feeling precedes knowledge. Since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our amour de soi.”

I don’t deny for a moment that there is a potential for moral individualism here that can be, and in some ways absolutely has been, devastating to the moral conditions of modernity. And yet, modernity means more than just the worst aspects of individualism; it also means (as I wrote in that blog post 16 years ago) “the global regime of human rights, worldwide activism on behalf of the indebted and the poor, volunteerism and service in tens of thousands of places across the globe,” etc., etc., etc. How much are all the undeniably limited but nonetheless still real ways in which the world has improved, at least insofar as slavery, coverture, torture, and genocide, over the past two hundred years the result of “people absorbing anemic liberal doctrines about not shooting people who just want to get a better job or to express themselves, about recognizing the need to actually sit down and speak with and learn from those whom you had previously oppressed”? To connect this back to Superman, our hero’s defense of his involvement in the Boravian attack on Jarhanpur ultimately comes down to—and his contentious interview with Lois Lane makes this clear—one simple moral reality: “People were going to die!” Using super-powers to stop (again, for the moment!) a conflict because you don’t want people to die is, surely, pretty simplistic, pretty basic. It is also, well, compassionate; it is sentimental, it is nice.

And this, really, takes us back to the people, the community, that Gunn’s Superman does belong to: his parents in Smallville. As has been noted, past comic and cinematic incarnations of Jonathan and Martha Kent have tended to present them as “paragons of a certain kind of Americana nobility; strong, proud farmers from the heartland,” teaching their adopted son “all the right values and the responsibilities that come with his incredible abilities.” But Gunn makes them “normies” (by the way, this was something, as a Kansan, I recognized from the very first trailer; far from the stereotypical red barn with windmill and grain elevator, miles and miles from town, these are two far more typical rural residents of small-town Kansas in 2025, where the grain fields are overwhelmingly owned by large corporate actors: the Kents have a suburban ranch home and run cattle, and probably both have jobs in town on the side). Are they church-goers? One would guess. But churchgoing in small-town Kansas in the 21^st-century isn’t and can’t be imagined as being what it was when Glenn Ford’s Jonathan Kent clapped young Clark on the shoulder just before dying of a heart attack in Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie. For better and for worse, that stoic, American Gothic image of the heartland has now all but disappeared. What’s in its place? A lot of good people (even if they are Trump votes, as Jonathan and Martha Kent almost certainly are), who go to church and embrace a message of Christian decency and sentiment—the sort of message that would lead Pa Kent to say, it what was clearly the moral center of the Superman, whatever anyone else might say later:

Parents aren’t for telling their children who they’re supposed to be. We are here to give y’all tools to help you make fools of yourselves all on your own. Your choices, Clark. Your actions. That’s what makes you who you are. Let me tell you something, son, I couldn’t be more proud of you.

Right there, we have parental love, we have tolerance, we have individual responsibility, we have dignity and respect. Perhaps theologically those virtues are “bland” enough, in McCarthy’s words, to not provide a foundation for strength; on the level of philosophy, I’m open to that argument. But insofar as actually lived lives are concerned—particularly the lived lives of Kansans that I know, including many whose politics I think are appalling, but whose support for families and friends and civic work are rock solid—I think this kind of morality, Superman’s morality, a morality that saves dogs and squirrels, a morality that refuses to cause harm to others, fails to prevent all possible harm, but then keeps on trying again and again anyway, is a damn good one. Sentimental yes, but inspiring too, I think. (And from all the memes that are apparently out there celebrating the wonderful, stupid, absolutely Superman-ish line "Kindness, maybe that's the new punk rock," maybe there are more people out there who agree with me, rather than McCarthy.)

Stella, My Dear

Martha my dear, / Though I spend my days in conversation, / Please remember me.

At roughly 12:30am this morning, the fog and pain and confusion and frustration that Stella, our pet for over 9 ½ years, has been moving through since at least last October was taken away. She’s gone.

I have an old and dear friend, who is both far more adept at all things technological than I (I mean, he builds robots for a living), but also far more adept at connecting with the flora and fauna of God’s creation than I am as well (despite my pretension to being an actually skilled gardener). Not long ago, he and his family lost a beloved family pet to cancer, an English Sheepdog named Mieka. (Martha, the nominal inspiration for Paul McCartney’s composition “Martha My Dear,” was also an English Sheepdog, who lived to the ripe old age of 15.) Mieka, my friend wrote, despite her pain and weakness in her final days, would still try to lick the hands of those who sat beside her, “reaching across vast distances of brain architecture and genetic selection to make a direct emotional connection.” Mieka, my friend wrote, “is teaching me how to die....We were created to leave our mark on the hearts of others and for them to leave their marks on us....When my time comes, I hope I'll be strong enough to follow her example.”

Stella, unfortunately, was not blessed with a death that allowed her the cognitive power to follow through on whatever buried instinct, the fruit of perhaps 40,000 years of social selection and evolution, had previous impelled her to love and want to connect with her humans. She was a rescue dog, so we never knew for certain how old she was; when we brought her home on December 4, 2015, her handlers put her age at 2 or 3 years old. So when her end came very early this morning, she was perhaps around 12 years old. She’d been slowing down some for a few years; she couldn’t jump up on our bed any longer, and her hearing may have been far enough gone that the summer fireworks no longer terrified her as they had every year before. But she was still mostly the same animal we’d known and made part of our lives for most of a decade. 

But then came her first seizure last September, which terrified us. Then came another, and then came the anti-seizure medication (phenobarbital) which dulled her senses even further and completely changed her personality. She became a dog that slept frequently, didn’t respond well, and wandered the house, following the same circular path over and over; she still ate, but she couldn’t control her bowels very well any longer, and when we’d get her to take walks outside–once her favorite thing, but increasingly harder as the months went by–she’d often be listless, leaning to one side and going in circles if we didn’t pull her along. The last walk of her life, last Sunday, she moved so slowly, her hindquarters often giving out underneath her, with even stepping up on a curb posing a challenge. And then yesterday afternoon, when I helped her outside to do her business after work, it was almost impossible to get her to move; she seemed to have no sense of her location, and she tumbled down steps and walked into walls as though she could no longer see. In a single evening, she had three seizures, and her breathing was labored. She struggled to stand, and couldn’t; she had no interest in food. We decided it was time, and called the emergency hospital after 10pm. We waited until Kristen returned from work, and then off we went, after first allowing our other children, in Wisconsin and New Mexico, to Facetime with her; I hope she could at least hear their voices. In the end, at the hospital, she lifted her head and turned toward us as we hugged her goodbye; I want to believe she knew we were there.

She was, from the beginning, a hyper-territorial and defensive dog. We didn’t know what breed she was until one day when she–after I foolishly left the backyard gate unrepaired and capable to being pushed open by a strong 60lb. animal–heard a lawnmower in the field behind our house, jumped against the gate barking furiously (her barking was always furious!), pushed through to the field, and attacked (though, I suspect, never actually broke the skin of) the man on the mower, which resulted in a visit from animal control and Stella having to spend a week in the city pound, during which she got a genetic test. A Pointer and Australian Cattle Dog mix, it turns out, which explains some of the aggressiveness. What a hysterical, overflowing creature she often was back then! Her licks, her insistence on getting the right number of pets, her ability to go completely still and focus entirely on whatever squirrels or bicyclists or dangers lurked right outside our living room window, ready to explode in deafening barks if any human being or rabbit or loud car or, sometimes, anything, came into her sight. Having guests over to the house was all but impossible for years. 

Perhaps in retrospect we should have always suspected that something just wasn’t quite right with the poor creature’s brain. We would laugh at and take delight in her strange way of thinking (or unthinking, as the case may often have been). If we had been a different family–a wealthier one, perhaps, or a more disciplined one, or one that managed our time better, or a dozen other things–maybe our too often desultory efforts at discipline and training in her early years with us might have stuck better. But then again, perhaps not. She quickly figured out a job–protecting the house from intruders, meaning everyone who wasn’t us–and sometimes including us, as Caitlyn, who slept in the downstairs bedroom during these years, discovered; she was convinced Stella forgot who she was overnight and accordingly responded defensively whenever she came upstairs in the morning. When we’d load her in the car to take her on walks or expeditions elsewhere–Buffalo Park, Swanson Park, Pawnee Prairie Park, even El Dorado Lake–she’d calm down slightly, but only slightly. Holding on to her leash tightly, to prevent her from leaping out at passing cars or charging other dogs (or, of course, any other small mammals) became necessary, both for her own safety and to save us from lawsuits. When we first brought her home and Kristen was the one who most often held her leash, there were times when Stella would win out, and nine-year-old Kristen would be dragged along behind her.

Stella was always, first and foremost, Kristen’s dog. She had begged for some sort of pet for years; it really almost didn’t matter what (at different times, she was infatuated with gerbils, rats, ferrets, and more). Once Megan had moved out, Melissa and I became a lot more receptive to the idea that the family had passed its peak in size, and as it shrank the youngest, Kristen, would always be tagging along behind her older sisters. So one December, despite our resistance–mostly because of the expense–we finally responded to her pleas; we would get a dog. And Kristen was (mostly) great as Stella’s companion; she was responsible for her food, and she and I would walk her together around the neighborhood, twice a day, so regular that on a couple of occasions folks whom we didn’t know would call us out while driving by the house or seeing us walking home from church, complementing us on how good we treated Stella. Kristen attempted to teach Stella tricks, with very moderate success (she would put together obstacle courses for Stella to navigate in the backyard; with the appropriate treat incentives, she would). She stayed in Kristen's room for years, frequently joining her on her bed (in some ways a frustrating choice, since Stella, when she spread out, could take up a lot of space, and Kristen got used to sleeping curled up in a ball).

Time changes everything, of course. The Covid-19 pandemic upended our household, and then changes in daily schedules–Melissa working full-time, Kristen in high school and then working herself–upended them further. In later years, it was far more common that she’s sleep on our bed, especially if there were a storm or people blowing off fireworks or anything else that made her nervous or concerned or scared. Stella truly became a family dog, one more of our children, rather than, as she had been originally, something of an appendage to our youngest. Melissa had always been the Alpha, the one most capable of getting Stella to respond and obey, particularly when her behavior got really egregious. Stella mostly respected that (though getting her to stay behind an invisible line and not enter the kitchen or dining area until we were finished eating was a constant struggle, one that, for some years, resulted in a successful detente between Melissa and our garbage dog, though even then her waiting behind the line or beneath the table, staring at us, waiting for permission–or for us to waver in our attention, which was really the same thing–to start eating any scraps she could find on the floor or, when we weren’t looking, on the table or counters themselves, was a constant as well.

Over the last few years, it was basically I that was walking Stella once a day, feeding her, taking her to the vet. I actually don’t think I was ever her favorite, assuming she even had one, but we got along well. I was the goofy male in the household–well, the only male, actually, which I guess allowed me to be ridiculous with her whenever I could. She was relaxed around me. When we walked, she no longer pulled at the leash to chase squirrels or threaten to leap into traffic to confront some noisy garbage truck or innocent cyclist; instead we would just walk together, wandering all around our neighborhood, following the Cowskin Creek runoff or intruding on the Rolling Hills County Club’s golf course. It came to be an important part of my routine, in humid summer heat and bitter winter cold. Like I did with the cows I milked long ago, I would talk to Stella, run through whole conversations with her as we walked. I could never tell if she was listening, but the whole arrangement felt agreeable to me. I hope she felt the same.

Sitting here, writing this, almost exactly 12 hours after we’d decided that the time had come to ease her out of her misery, I’m sad, as I think everyone in the family is, but also content knowing that her life, which had been irreparably changed by a tumor or synapse or congenital defect that could only be controlled by medication that could calm her mind, but not prevent the continued deterioration of her body, had run its course. It was terribly, terribly hard last night, as anyone who has ever put a pet down knows. But this morning, after waking with a headache, and feeling drained from our late night, I wandered the neighborhood, following some of the same paths that Stella and I (and Kristen, and Melissa, and at one point or another everyone in the family) had walked hundreds of times before. I was listening to some somber music, when to my surprise Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” came on, with its long, slow, mellow sax intro. And though the songs have nothing to do with each other, I thought of McCartney’s simple ode: 

Hold your hand out, / You silly girl, / See what you've done. / When you find yourself in the thick of it, / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl. 

Stella was a silly girl, a dog who, when she was in the thick of her life, would happily, aggressively, determinedly, with a complete lack of guile or reservation, leap in to help herself of some of it. For nearly 10 years, we were able to give her a home to live that life in. She may not have been as brave or kind or wise as some dogs, like Mieka, have been. But she was ours, and we were hers, and for a good long time, that arrangement felt just great. Everyone needs a silly dog; thank God we had this one. I hope somewhere, while chasing a squirrel, she agrees.

 

Listening to Lennon #2: Imagine

By the spring of 1971, Lennon's confused mess of anger, resentment, and frustration had a focus: his oldest and truest friend, Paul McCartney. Macca's own frustrations had led him to sue the Beatles as an organization in order to force a break-up of the legal entanglements that were, in his view, preventing any of them from moving forward either artistically or financially. This had, obviously, infuriated the other Beatles, with his formal announcement that The Beatles were no more--something that Lennon had made clear nearly a year and half earlier but which the band had agreed to keep quiet--compounding the (not inaccurate) controlling image they'd developed of Paul. And then there was the release of McCartney's second solo album, Ram which (deservedly) enjoyed much more commercial success than did his first, and which (undeservedly) generated immense ire on the part of John, mostly due to "Too Many People," a song with a couple of Lennon-aimed snarks that was, as I wrote before about this slight but enjoyable album, "probably about as close as McCartney can ever get to building up righteous indignation." So as Lennon went into the studio, similarly determined to make his second solo album less artistic and more accessible, he did so with at least one additional goal--give it to Paul McCartney but good. But he didn't get around to that until most of the way through the album.

Imagine is most famous, of course, for its masterful title track, which opens the album. Some people will go to their deathbeds insisting that they hate "Imagine" or at least find it vapid or saccharine or somehow quasi-totalitarian, but I think these people are being driven political hang-ups, whether they acknowledge them or not. Yes, lyrically the song is ponderous and self-important--and this is where the Yoko Ono haters note her influence on the song--but its melody is sweet, its piano gorgeous, and its overall vibe, weighted by over a half-century of invocations, is exactly what album producer Phil Spector aimed for it to be: anthemic. Steve Martin has gotten 15 years worth of laughs out of his gag number "Atheists Don't Have No Songs," but of course Lennon proved him wrong decades before. "Imagine" is a damn hymn, a reverent paean to a worldview that has moved tens of millions, and must be respected as such.

It's not, I think, the best or most beautiful song on the album though. For that, I would nominate "Jealous Guy," which is just an astonishing gem, one I'd never really listened to over all the decades (the decision not to release it as a single was a crime). I can see the argument that the song's lush, haunting arrangement is overproduced, but to my ear the strings and percussion are properly placed in the background of Lennon's vocal, which is, in my opinion, equal to any of his best Beatles ballads, like "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" or "Dear Prudence." And lyrically it's fascinating: obviously autobiographical, yet also open-ended. Ian Leslie, writing in John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, is convinced (mostly by the whistling break in the song; he sees that as a give-away) that while Lennon was, thanks to the intensive therapy he'd subjected himself to, plainly thinking about Yoko, he was probably also thinking about Paul. McCartney himself agrees, or at least did at one time; Leslie quotes him in his book: "In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say 'Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.' He wrote 'I'm Just a Jealous Guy,' and he said that the song was about me." I don't know if I believe that, but I want to.

So two absolutely great, and eminently listenable songs on this album; what else? "Crippled Inside," another obvious product of Lennon's therapy, is to my mind a spiritual cousin to McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," a song with lyrics spelling out interior ugliness while being accompanied by a delightfully jaunty--in this case rockabilly rather than musical hall--tune. "It's So Hard" is a short, solid blues song, perhaps a little too prettified by the album's production, but worth listening to a time or three. The propulsive beat of  "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't Want to Die" hides the fact that the song is as underdeveloped as any of Macca's lazier tunes; Lennon's just vamping here. The same can be said for "Gimme Some Truth." "How" is a perfectly fine love ballad, though after listening to it over and over, I'm convinced McCartney stole from it for "So Bad" on Pipes of Peace. By contrast "Oh My Love," which Lennon co-wrote with Yoko (he actually acknowledged her contribution on this song, unlike on others), is a genuinely searching and loving song, with George Harrison's gentle guitar accenting Lennon's voice wonderfully. And the final track, "Oh Yoko!," is a head-popping, hand-clapping charmer, a bright and hopeful tune with a harmonica finale that finishes off the album excellently.

What did I skip? "How Do You Sleep?," of course. What do say about this musically compelling, lyrically embarrassing song? It's a huge, burning, sweeping number, funky and intense in its groove; with a better subject matter it might have been one of Lennon's greatest recordings. But as it is, this awesome musical set-up just perversely provides listeners with a bunch of cheap shots. Some of the lines are admittedly quite sharp ("The sound you make is Muzak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years"), but mostly what Lennon spilled out about his former songwriting partner was childish and mean. (It's not to George Harrison's credit that he got into the recording with such gusto; one the other hand, it is to Ringo Starr's credit that, when he stopped by the studio, he was nonplussed by it all, and told John it was time to stop.) John later dismissed the song, and apparently Paul was able to get past it as well. Again, Leslie situates the song in John and Paul's long, complicated relationship, quoting Lennon as simply stating that "How Do You Sleep?" actually "isn't about Paul. It's about me."

How to rank Imagine? It's better than Plastic Ono Band, though not by leaps and bounds. The best stuff on it is some truly world-class pop music; the worst stuff on it drags it down. I give it an A-; a genuinely great album, but not quite as great as it could have been.

Listening to Lennon #1: Plastic Ono Band

So, as promised, my review of Lennon's solo albums begins.

By January of 1970, the last time the Beatles ever worked together as "The Beatles" was more than four months in the past. Lennon had been divorced from his first wife Cynthia for over a year, and he'd been married to Yoko for nearly one; he'd also recorded and released two big solo hit records, "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey," and was working on a third, "Instant Karma," which would do even better on the charts than either of the previous two. He'd cut his hair short, he and Yoko had (for the moment) quit heroin, and he'd long since privately told his fellow Beatles that the band was over, though they'd all agreed not to make any public announcement. Through all this, it's not clear what the end of the Beatles meant for John; in interviews while he and Yoko were traveling Europe and then again when "Instant Karma" came out, he'd talk about how what was ending wasn't so much a band as an "image," and that the current confusion as to the direction of the band might easily be a "rebirth." Lennon seemed happy--which was always a difficult thing to determine with him, but the signs were there.

But then the spring of 1970 brought Paul's release of his first solo album, McCartney (honestly, I don't think it's very good), triggering John's defensive, jealous spirit; Paul's incredibly ill-conceived (however frustratingly justified) promotional interview which was taken as a public declaration that the Beatles were finished, which John saw as a presumptuous betrayal; the release of both Let It Be the album and Let It Be the documentary film, with its (incorrectly!) depressing take on the "Get Back" sessions that produced both of the above, and the latter of which reduced John to tears when he saw it; and, finally, John's discovery, in March, of the psychotherapist and wanna-be guru Arthur Janov, whose book The Primal Scream convinced Lennon--a man who, as Rob Sheffield put in in Dreaming the Beatles, had always been "deeply attracted to conversion experiences and renunciation scenes"--that he desperately needed to scream his way out of his problems, his frustrations, his abiding and confusing hates and regrets. He and Ono spent four months, in London and Los Angeles, going through Janov's therapy. In the meantime, Yoko miscarried, Lennon turned 30, and had a terrible row with the father who had abandoned him as a child, whom he never saw again after his birthday. I'm hardly the first to say that you can't make sense of Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (his name for the floating line-up of musicians that played with him and Yoko) without considering all of this.

So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe.

That just leaves Plastic Ono Band's bookends, "Mother" and "God" (leaving aside the creepy, brief, monotone "My Mummy's Dead" ditty at the album's conclusion). "Mother" is the fullest artistic work on Plastic Ono Band, I think, and really is kind of a masterpiece of raw, musically expressed pain; his repeated, increasing hoarse cries at the end--"Mama don't go; Daddy come home!"--deepen and propel the song towards its conclusion. "God," though, is odd. It's an artfully arranged but sing-songy incantation, a kind of anti-mantra; if it wasn't for the tremendous combination of Billy Preston's gorgeous piano and Ringo's furiously controlled drumming, the whole thing would sound kind of petulant. Or at least I think that--but then, I've never been famous, and there's basically no chance I or anyone else who reads this will ever be remotely as famous as Lennon was. So maybe I've no place to say that his plaintive concluding lines--"I don't believe in Beatles....I was the walrus / but now I'm John. / And so, dear friends, / you'll just have to carry on. / The dream is over."--don't deserve the ponderousness he delivered them with. Like I said before, the end of the Beatles was huge--and to the extent that John was considered by many the Beatles' wounded artistic muse--thanks in no small part to John spending the first years after the break-up constantly telling himself and everyone else that--his pronouncements in "God" perhaps deserve all the respect they received. (As far as I'm concerned, though, the best thing about "God" is that it inspired Bono to write "God Part II," a mostly forgotten track from Rattle and Hum which is, I think, the best rock tune U2 ever recorded.)

I give Plastic Ono Band a solid B, maybe even a B+; it's better as a personal artistic document than as an album of popular music, but it's not entirely lacking in the latter. It'll be interesting to see if I decide that Lennon ever did better than this dark but mostly compelling first solo album of his.