Prairie Fires and Prairie Romances

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Caroline Fraser's wonderful Prairie Fires is many things. Primarily it's a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the justly famous Little House books, and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. But it's also an impressionistic study of several key moments in the history of the United States, from the 1870s through the 1940s. And it includes multiple extended observations regarding agricultural economics, environmental science, women's issues in pre-WWII America, free-lance writing and publishing during and after the "yellow journalism" era, and most of all, thoughtful considerations of the intellectual milieus that gave rise to political perspectives ranging from the populism of the People's Party to the proto-libertarianism of critics of the New Deal. It does all of those things, and more, very, very well. The result is a terrific book, one that any thoughtful reader can learn from.

The primary cause of the book's success, it must be said, isn't Fraser's writing, research, and analysis, good as they are. (I think she sometimes leans too heavily on or reaches too far for psychological explanations, but only sometimes; usually her reasoning about the motives and mental states of the two complicated women she writes about is both careful and well-supported.) No, the real source of the brilliance of this book is the fact that Wilder and her daughter were compulsive diary-keepers, notebook recorders, and letter-writers (and letter-keepers!). The fact that Wilder's fictionalized recreation of her pioneer childhood resulted in not only one of the great classics of children's literature, but was a major contributor to late 20th-century America's romanticizing of its late 19th-century history is, of course, the cause of the enormous amount of research, recovery, and preservation that has attended the life of these long-departed people. But if they were not the sort of people who wrote almost everything down in the first place, all that work--including Fraser's fine biography--wouldn't have had so much raw material to work with. They were, no doubt about it, two rather amazing individuals; of that there can be no doubt.

Truth be told, I also strongly doubt that, going off the detailed and fascinating portraits of them that Fraser provides, they were the sort of individuals I would have enjoyed spending time time with, or that would have enjoyed spending time with me. Wilder was a defensive and temperamental person, frequently suspicious, judgmental, and narrow-minded; as for her admittedly brilliant daughter, the kindest thing that can probably be said about Lane, what with her flirtations with fascism, her trail of betrayed friendships, and her self-aggrandizing paranoia, was that she was mentally troubled soul. (By contrast, Laura's husband of 64 years, Almanzo, seems to have had a quiet equanimity and good humor which allowed him to get along with and see the best side of just about anyone.) But you don't have to like an artist, or imagine being liked by them, to be captivated by the art they create. And over a long period of time, Wilder and Lane worked in tandem--sometimes willingly, sometimes not, sometimes with the mother taking the lead, and sometimes the daughter--to create out of Laura's memories a beautiful work of art, a myth of the pioneering and the settling of the recently conquered Great Plains, which has delighted and influenced millions of people. I was one of them; I read all of the Little House books as a child (and no, I don't remember being put off by having to follow the story of a female protagonist), and I read many of them, multiple times, to our four daughters.

So what, then, does this book add to what we take from the Little House myth? Fraser suggests that seeing clearly the cycle of deprivation, courage, failure, and resourcefulness that lay behind Wilder's stories, and appreciating the emotionally taxing labor which characterized Wilder's re-telling of those stories, as well as Lane's editorial engagement with them, presents us with a deeply American tale: a will to re-invent oneself, but at the same time to create in and through that re-invention a meaningful continuity with the past. In the same way that Laura's stories--by preserving her father's struggles and songs, his love for his children and his abiding optimism--in essence "saved" her father from the desperate and difficult legacy he left his posterity, so do we all seek to create out of the memory of each individual life a means to preserve that which we wish to be, and maybe really do feel to be, true about those lives. But perhaps that's not so much American as simply human.

More specifically American, I think, is the way Wilder's whole story conveys the confusion and ambivalence which America's transformation from a decentralized agrarian society to a centralized industrial one brought into the lives of the poor, white settlers who followed false promises of plenty during the late 19th century to Minnesota, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, and attempted, almost always without success, to homestead the Great Plains into productive single-family farms. No serious study of my own state of Kansas should elide that environmental and economic reality; Fraser's work reveals, through Wilder's and Lane's personal reflections and travels, how that reality transformed those on the Plains, engendering both a romance of hard-won triumph and, much more frequently, a barely sublimated sense of shame, anger, and denial. This is where the Populist movement took root, with its railing against banks and railroads (Charles Ingalls joined the party in 1892, and a relative of Laura's and Almanzo's old friend Cap Garland spoke at the party's Omaha convention--p. 165), but a "profoundly, painfully, and ineradicably personal" mix of "guilt and resentment" took root as well, which continued from the devastating Panic of 1893 all the way through the to Great Depression and beyond, and probably still gives life to much reflexive, rural anti-government feeling to this day (pp. 392, 454).

In retrospect it seems clear that this country made a terrible mistake in collectively grafting--whether intentionally or otherwise--the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of the citizen-farmer to a natural and social context where "virtually all the land best suited to small-scale agriculture in the United States had already been taken." Moreover, the marginal farming land which remained was essentially given away for free (thanks to federal military action taken against the indigenous inhabitants of the land, and thanks to an infrastructure mostly built by railroad monopolies benefiting from British money), usually to disconnected, often impractical individuals--"Pa was no businessman," Wilder once admitted; "he was a hunter and trapper, a musician and poet"--who were themselves usually without the sort of cooperative and familial connections that were essential to the few actually successful farming homesteads of the late 19th century Great Plains. The result...well, as Fraser concludes, the result for over a million white immigrants and settlers during the first 30 years of the 1862 Homestead Act who failed and fled--as Laura and Almanzo eventually had to, relocating to Missouri after a new catastrophic years as newlyweds in the Dakota Territory--was that "they were bound to fail" (pp. 163-164, 186, 391). All of this has had, I think, an almost entirely negative contributing effect on the ability of many of us Americans to understand and thus govern ourselves.

"Almost entirely negative"--but not absolutely so. Because it was, for all its costs, the luring of unprepared people out into what was, through much of the 19th century, widely derided as The Great American Desert, which gave many Americans, as part of our received memories, a stark vision of this spare, flowing, expansive part of North America as both strange and beautiful, alienating and entrancing at the same time. It is that vision--and, perhaps most importantly, the realization of the vision's passing, its conceptual (if not literal) closing with the arrival of the white settler--which does connect at least some of us together, as well as connect us with an occasionally usable past. Willa Cather is one of these connectors, as is the aforementioned Hamlin Garland--and, of course, Wilder herself. Fraser underscores repeatedly that Laura's memories of the Great Plains inspired and haunted her until the day she died. Fraser discusses my favorite Little House volume, By the Shores of Silver Lake, which re-imagines the Ingalls's move to the new settlement of De Smet, North Dakota, as "Wilder's adolescent book":

She had been trying to recapture that evanescent time in Dakota Territory her whole adult life. An account of her family's isolated first winter on Silver Lake figures among the earliest surviving fragments of her writing, perhaps dating back to 1903. She had never forgotten the sight and sound of wild birds migrating across its marshes or the image of wolves on its shores. She had felt in her core the last of the wilderness passing into oblivion and mourned its disappearance, making the loss a leitmotif of her books as it had been in her father's life. She labored over her drafts of the "Wings Over Silver Lake" chapter, her farewell to the soul of a place that would be erased by railroads, towns, and agricultural development (p. 408).

Well said--and yet, my favorite passage from By the Shores of Silver Lake, the one I can remember recognizing decades ago as the work of an author trying to recreate the dawning of a deep realization, the grasping of an insight, by a child, has a subject matter pretty much antithetical to that rapture of wilderness. Having read Fraser's biography, I wonder where Lane's (by then rather dogmatic) individualism ends and Wilder's actual memories begin in this passage which stuck with me. Still, whoever ultimately put the words together, the power they contain, their narrative of a 15-year-old girl seeing, for the first time, her species as capable of changing the world, still rings out strongly. It's from the earlier chapter "The Wonderful Afternoon," in which the young Laura is taken by her father, against her mother's wishes (which apparently was primarily due to the fact that "the workmen relieved themselves in the open air"--p. 406), to watch the railroad built:

The whole afternoon had gone while Pa and Laura watched those circles moving, making the railroad grade. It was time to go back to the store and the shanty. Laura took one last, long look....

First, someone thought of a railroad. Then the surveyors had come out to that empty country, and they had marked and measured a railroad that was not there at all; it was only a railroad that someone had thought of. Then the plowmen came to tear up the prairie grass, and the scraper-men to dig up the dirt, and the teamsters with their wagons to haul it. And all of them said they were working on the railroad, but the railroad wasn't there. Nothing was there yet but cuts through the prairie swells, pieces of the railroad grade that were really only narrow, short ridges of earth, all pointing westward across the enormous grassy land....

There was no railroad there now, but someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed. The tracks and the trains were not there now, but Laura could see them almost as if they were there.

Suddenly she asked, "Pa, was that what made the very first railroad?"

"What are you talking about?" Pa asked.

"Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren't there?"

Pa thought for a minute. "That's right," he said. "Yes, that's what makes things happen, people think of them first. If enough people think of a thin and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting." (Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake [HarperTrophy, 1971], pp. 104-106)

Fraser's tremendous documentation and synthesis of Wilder's journey, both internal and external, makes it pretty clear that "wind and weather," and much else besides, are far less "permitting" than we who are moved by the Little House myth usually allow ourselves to admit. These were men and women and children, whole families, that too often arrived without any local "knowledge of the place," as Wendell Berry would put it. The results were usually sad, and frequently appalling in their costs. Yet somehow, sometimes, a few of them really did actually manage to change the face of the land in a way which endured, creating through their efforts a place, a home...though usually only for those who followed them, not for themselves.

For example, the centerpiece of my university, and the building in which I teach and work, is the Davis Administration Building. It was built to hold the entirety of a proposed Garfield University from 1886-1888; at the time of its completion, it was the largest educational edifice in the United States west of the Mississippi River. Garfield University was bankrupt by 1890 though, and through the following decade this monument to something a group of dedicated Kansas settlers had "thought could happen" stood abandoned on the flat scrub plain west of Wichita. But then came a wealthy philanthropist from St. Louis, who purchased the whole lot and gave it to the Kansas Society of Friends, which opened Friends University in 1898. So all is well that ends well, right?

Well, my judgment differs depending on if you ask me as a political theorist, a Kansan, an educator, a husband and father, or more--we all, like Walt Whitman, contain multitudes after all. So in conclusion, let me say that I can't recommend Prairie Fires, whatever its small limitations, strongly enough; it presents the life and perspectives of an exceptionally multitudinous woman, and her perhaps even more varying daughter, in a way that helps one see through all their losses, reversals, and denials, to grasp the dreams and aspirations which animated them through all of the above. Not all dreams and aspirations are equally defensible, to be sure, and taking seriously what community and place and economic and environmental (to say nothing of psychological!) limits really mean ought to give all of us pause as we contemplate our attraction to the Little House myth. But the attraction remains, if only because the world Laura Ingalls Wilder saw and remembered is a world continuous with our own present moment. Wilder herself, with her daughter's essential help, made sure of that continuity. She made a myth, and that myth--of pioneers and privation, of "the grasses waving and blowing in the wind, the violets blooming in the buffalo wallows, the setting sun sending streamers through the sky" (p. 515)--belongs to us all. Or at least, every time I take my bike out on a long, straight summertime ride towards that abiding, waving, prairie horizon which reaches all around me, it belongs to me.

Songs from '78: "Follow You Follow Me"

For the second time--and not for the last--my memories of the pop music world of 1978 are shaped in part by the detritus of progressive rock, as it was reconfigured and reconstituted in the wake of punk and disco by talented musicians who realized that the audience simply wasn't there any longer--and, frankly, they themselves simply didn't have the patience any longer--for intricate, artistic, and often admittedly indulgent musical statements. The English band Genesis is a perfect example--there's not a shred of punk or disco to be found in any of their recordings, and yet, by the late 1970s, they were internalizing the solid rock and roll reminders which those very different movements communicated quite well: figure out what you want to say, say it succinctly, say it with passion and fun, and then move on to something else.

"Follow You Follow Me" is a wonderful love song, a Mike Rutherford composition, and a great example of this lesson: it has synthesized hints of Genesis's by-then patented expansive artistry, but was nicely packaged into less than 4 minutes nonetheless. It was the first single from And Then There Were Three, the band's first real step in an overtly pop direction. It wouldn't be until their subsequent albums--Duke, Abacab, and Genesis--that their departure from the progressive rock world became complete; for this recording, released 40 years ago today, what we're hearing is some skilled artists learning how to first put their talents to work in a different, tighter, more accessible direction. And you know what? Sure, I like "Firth of Fifth": it's a deliriously cool 10 minutes of music. But am I bothered by the change Genesis began, 40 years ago today? To slightly misquote Phil Collins: no, I don't mind at all.

The Joyful, and Mournful, Journey of Lent

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This year my employer, Friends University, a non-denomination Christian liberal arts college in Wichita, KS, decided to develop, in conjunction with our regular chapel observances, a calendar of Lenten devotionals, and they asked for students, faculty, staff, and others to contribute. Some of those who contributed were Roman Catholic or from other high church Protestant traditions, and thus the language and rituals of Lent were familiar to them. For Mormons like me, obviously, that isn't the case. Still, this is my contribution; hopefully it fits the spirit of the occasion well.

Sometimes, when I read one of the Psalms, I can’t get out of my head the image of an ancient gathering of people, speaking (or singing) in a language I do not know, in a time and place I can barely imagine, conveying sentiments that are pretty much exactly my own. Jews of twenty-five hundred or three thousand years ago, writing down the pleadings, the hopes, the fears, the longings, the demands, and the celebrations of their hearts, and the spiritual language they used sometimes manages to express something that strikes my modern, Christian self to the very core.

One such Psalm is 105. It is a psalm that surveys the history of the Jewish people, as they understood it at the time--and it also, from our Christian perspective, helps us see that history as pointing towards something else, something greater. “Give thanks to the Lord,” it begins (v. 1). “Invoke him by name, make known his deeds among the peoples.” And what great deeds they were! In 45 verses, the psalm reminds us of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Aaron. The Abrahamic covenant, which began with a single family—“A small company it was, few in number, strangers in that land” (v. 12)—is unfolded all the way through the Exodus and the arrival of the children of Israel in the land which was promised to them. “He opened a rock and water gushed out, flowing in a stream through a parched land; for he was mindful of his solemn promise to his servant Abraham” (v. 41-42).

Lent can be productively understood, I think, as time of wandering. Through fasting, prayer, and selective attempts at change (this year, once again, I'm attempting a Facebook break), I put myself, as much as possible, outside my daily routine, and attempt to see in myself not someone perfectly at home in this fallen world, but a pilgrim, an exile, a stranger, one who is wandering through the desert of preparation, waiting on God’s promise of Living Water. Turning to these ancient words--these songs, these poems, these heartfelt pleadings and hopes--is thus appropriate, I think. Abraham and the world of those who honored him in psalms is unimaginably distant from us today--yet we are part of that story nonetheless. It is a story which weighs us down with its length--but also lifts us up, with its promises of what awaits us at the end. Perhaps being reminded of this great distance, this immense journey, all encompassed by God’s reach, and all of it encompassing us as well, is exactly why we are invited, as Christians, to wait and wander through Lent every year.

Songs from '78: "Night Fever"

"Night Fever," released today in 1978, was the sixth and final single released--four of which had been written by the Bee Gees--from Saturday Night Fever, the monster soundtrack which accompanied the okay (but thoroughly dated) movie by the same name. They both came out in 1977, but the former stayed on top of the charts for half a year, and stands today as the first or second best-selling film soundtrack of all time (it depends on how you calculate these things). Was "Night Fever" my favorite song off that album (which my older sister had and treasured)?  Probably not; I might have to choose the disco ballad "If I Can't Have You," sung by Yvonne Elliman. But, honestly, if you were alive in 1978, it was the Bee Gees you heard, everywhere, all the time, and whether you found disco music (which, I later learned, was already dying out as a style in the clubs at the time when John Badham, John Travolta, Hollywood money, and, of course, Polydor Records took a mostly fictional story and gave the scene a massive shot in the arm) appalling or loved it, you did buy the album, and your head does bounce along with this groovy little dance number. Don't deny it.

Thoughts on Friendship

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of 'Mormonism'; [it is designed] to revolutionize and civilize the world, and cause wars and contentions to cease and men to become friends and brothers....Friendship is like Brother [Theodore] Turley in his blacksmith shop welding iron to iron; it unites the human family with its happy influence.

Or so Joseph Smith, the founder of my religious tradition, was recorded as saying on July 23, 1843. To my mind, it's heavy doctrine--and the fact that I take his claims about friendship so seriously has been on my mind lately, for a variety of reasons.

For starters, I would bet that just about everyone who happens to read this is likely connected to a particular web of online associations which, thanks to the power of capitalist branding, has gotten away with labeling everyone involved in its operations as "friends" (and we keep using that term, even though some research shows that most of your Facebook friends are anything but). The influence of this technologically enabled shift in our social perspective is so great that the Powers That Be behind it can just make up "Friend Day" holidays, one of which probably popped up on your FB page just yesterday, like it did mine--and based on clicks, people appear willing to go along with it.

Of course, some of you have escaped the tentacles of Facebook. If so, you have my admiration. But Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and so much more (blogs included!) inundate us nonetheless. And all of it, no matter what the honest exchange of information or entertainment or empathy or interest they enable, nonetheless depending upon a virtual simulacrum of friendship, as a substitute (and, sometimes, a replacement) of the real thing.

This semester, I'm teaching an honors seminar focusing on technology, and I started out the class by giving my students three open-ended questions that relate to various technology-related issues, one having to do with jobs, one having to do with teaching, and one having to do with social media. Nearly every student chose the social media topic, and nearly every one of them said the same thing--that while they'd never give up their phones, they were pretty certain technology had made them more frustrated, more lonely, and more isolated. (A couple of students went so far as to describe themselves as "trapped" by their phones and all the attendant expectations and norms that come with them.)

As it happened, a cool, off-beat, local Christian organization here in Wichita, the Eighth Day Institute, hosted just this past weekend a symposium titled "Friendship in a Fractured Age"; the keynote speaker was Ken Myers, of Mars Hill Audio, and the main theme of his address was  "Social Media and the Commodification of Friendship." I shared with him the anecdote from my class, and in response he shared some other research and surveys he had access to which showed such attitudes aren't rare. The kids aren't dumb, my fellow Gen Xers and Baby-Boomers and even older folks; they know that, at least in some ways, at least some of the time, they are relying upon social media platforms and tech companies and buzz phrases to create the sort of memorable, personal, intimate, tactile connections and friendships which they've learned all about from us, from their parents, from television programs and movies and books, all of which celebrated friendships...and are often finding, unfortunately, that the commodified substitutes of the day just don't do the trick.

Don't believe these weird, Wendell-Berry-reading conservative Christians? Well, then how about former president Barack Obama? In the first episode of David Letterman's new Netflix show, Obama talked for a while about social media, which his 2008 campaign for the White House depended heavily upon, but which has now shown us not only how the increasingly sophisticated algorithms those social media platforms employ can easily generate and entrench "completely different information universes," but also how "people in power, special interests, foreign governments, etc." can essentially set the terms for how so many of us judge what to believe and whom to trust. I suppose one could argue that this sort of prostitution and manipulation of the human desire for knowledge and belonging and friendship has been going on as long as any kind of print or electronic media has existed; it's not like fake news or the pre-internet versions of catfishing and bullying and all the rest didn't exist before the invention of phones that we can carry around in our pockets. But all the same, to assume that if one can point out antecedents to contemporary distrust, tribalism, and alienation, that therefore there is no reason to think contemporary complaints about such can possibly represent something genuinely new and threatening to what Joseph Smith was talking about is, I suspect, profoundly wrong.

At the very least, the fact that friendship, its range or quality or absence, is something much talked about today is undeniable. (Within my own Mormon tribe, the discussion has been near constant for a while now.) Ken Myers, at the conclusion to his presentation, reminded us all of the promise of scripture that someday we would see God and one another "face to face," and that the friendship Jesus Himself offers all His disciples is tied to "speaking plainly, and using no figure of speech"--which, I would warrant, doesn't include emojis. Myers expressed his fear that our overwhelmingly--and, increasingly, our economically mandated--networked and wired world would lead those who move through it (namely, all of us) to form their hopes, their expectations, and their faith completely separate from that beautiful vision. In a small way, I suspect that endless the social media-driven arguments I mentioned above over who can be a friend to whom are at least partly shaped by this loss of the face-to-face.

Count yourself lucky if you don't know what I'm talking about. The FB friend, the Tweet responder, the anonymous e-mailer, all of whom wonder how you could possibly support that cause, or forward that article, or agree with that comment, when this other perspective on that cause, or this other reading of that article, or this other context for that comment, clearly shows its ugliness, its violence, its self-loathing, its incoherence, its immorality, its Trump-supporting awfulness. Can't you see this is anti-Christian? Can't you see this is racist? Can't you see this targets that group, this undermines that principle, this excludes that obvious and necessary truth? How can you call yourself a Mormon/an American/a leftist/a decent human being while you tolerate such nonsense? What kind of monster are you anyway?

In my experience, in the midst of such faceless back-and-forths (which, I state for the record, I actually kind of like, because I dig arguments, and because I usually fail to recognize if something has become poisonous until long after it became such), saying that you know the author or the situation personally, that you've talked with them face-to-face, that you've spent time and sweat into engaging with these issues, that you've broken bread and been silly and personal and private with all of the above, and thus can't quite accept the reductive accusations about these individuals and movements being tossed around, rarely makes much difference. And, of course, maybe it shouldn't (the curt "so what if they're nice people? Hitler liked puppies too"-style of response is kind of silly, but not without a point). But more than I fear for the loneliness of my students, or for the stress of juggling multiple Facebook friends groups, I fear that the absence of the personal, the intimate, the tactile, the face-to-face in our friendships is resulting in a shrinking and contorting of our ability to feel love for our fellow human beings. When the first thing we learn about a person, or the thing about them which most consistently comes through our algorithms and screens, is that they participated in the Women's March (and therefore are pink-hat-wearing, religion-hating, exclusionary SJWs) or that they like some Republican candidate (and therefore are gay-bashing, theocracy-building, white supremacist Trump supporters), the narrowing and maximizing and personal-difference-and-nuance-crushing logic of our electronic tribes is only strengthens.

It isn't uncommon, I think, for people who hold to Christian teachings to insist that you can keep these different tracks separate, and hence that our ability to exercise love--meaning charity or agape--towards all our fellow human beings isn't undermined when we also willingly cultivate (or passively allow our commodified arts of "friendship" to cultivate for us) a complete loathing of everything this particular segment (or segments) of our fellow human beings say or do or affirm. Call it just the latest iteration of the whole deceptively simple "hate the sin, love the sinner" nonsense. It is nonsense with a long pedigree in Christian thinking. Kierkegaard, among others, said Christians shouldn't be bothered by mere friendship, or presumably or the lack of it; in his view philia, that form of love which is fundamentally characterized by freedom and partiality (we choose to be friends with this person, but not that one; we choose to be loyal to our friend; if the friendship comes to an end, it's because we choose it), was essentially pagan, and an unworthy companion to the rigorous (and admittedly, sometimes de-humanizing) universality of Christian charity.

At the Eighth Day symposium, there was also a presentation given by Protopresbyter Paul D. O'Callaghan, from St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral here in Wichita. He's written a short, fine little book, The Feast of Friendship, which makes a solid case--drawing upon Bible stories, the Patristic tradition, personal observations, and a great deal of philosophy and psychology--for seeing in our human ability to choose to make and maintain particular, partial friendships, even (perhaps even especially) in the midst of great differences, something holy. He writes:

Fundamentally, genuine friends grant us access to the most creative dimensions of our souls by receiving us and reflecting us back to ourselves. In this way, we are able to see what could not be seen before. We encounter our own identity and possibilities in fresh and dynamic ways. We can act in a manner previously unthinkable to us. Friends liberate our own inner resources for God's disposal, and thus are channels for the mediation of his grace to us (p. 96).

And also:

To answer Kierkegaard: yes, in this world, the practice of unrequited agape is essential to the Christian life. But one cannot survive on agape alone. We share vital loves within our families, and in addition to that, the philia between friends deepens and enriches love's place in our lives. It does not matter if it is experienced within the confines of the fixed social hierarchies of traditional societies or in the fluid and free associations characteristic of modern Western culture. Friendships realize the vital communion of love given and received (p. 125).

O'Callaghan's modified defense of modernity in that last passage should indicate that it's not as though the only sort of friendship which he thinks ought to be considered acceptable to concerned Christians is one untouched by technological tools of connection. (Both he and Ken Myers, when I saw them at the conference, both had smartphones, for whatever that's worth.) The more important point, I think, is that the freedom which characterizes real--not fake--friendship, can withstand all sorts of diversions and differences. (Even, I should note, gender differences; while O'Callaghan is quite traditional in his thinking about sexuality and sexual morality, and appropriately so, he has little sympathy for the "fundamentalist" notion that women and men can't choose to be friends; he writes that such rigidity denies "the essential primacy of the person, created in the image and likeness of God"--p. 109.) To confront those differences, to see and know and come to enjoy the association with the actual human being or the actual living organization that generates those perspectives from which we differ or experience challenges or even suffer embarrassment is part, I think, of the process by which God opens up ourselves to ourselves, thus teaching us better just what our capacity to feel charity both towards our friends and our enemies (and, I suppose, our frenemies in between) really is. But it must be a real friendship, I think, one grounded in, or at the very least characterized by, our lived-in, and not wholly mediated, materiality.

Like every good Generation Xer, I was taught by They Might Be Giants that, at some point, the racism--or the anti-Mormonism, or the homophobia, or the classicism, or the Trump-defending, or the insistence upon any number of other perceived slights and/or genuine evils--might become so explicit, so indicting, that you need to rethink the partiality by which you choose to view the person or cause or idea that you feel affection for. "Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding" isn't wrong. But note, in closing, that the context of that song, and the point of decision it describes, the realization that one's friend really is a devil, is an actual, bodily experienced party. Not a chat room, not an FB group, not an e-mail chain, not a Tweetstorm, but an actual, face-to-face encounter, with actual "bobbing and pretending," hearing words actually spoken complete with their whole history and their body language and their social cues along with them. The friendship Smith praises was liked to welding iron to iron--which means a real physical unity, a real handling of the different shapes of iron in hand, with real heat applied to see if their edges can come together. Nothing virtual there. Maybe if we kept ideal as our rule of thumb, and sought for such whenever and however we can, if only as a necessary supplement to all the other wired connections in our lives, then perhaps the twin poles of alienation and extremism might lessen in force, and our confusion over the holiness of simple friendships could be a little lessened as well.

Songs from '78: "Baker Street"

Forty years ago today, the first single from Gerry Rafferty brilliant--and criminally forgotten among even many serious pop listeners--album City to City began to make its way up the charts. That single, which for nearly every casual pop listener in America who happens to know Gerry Rafferty's name (and for a long time, I wasn't one of them) pretty much defines the man is, of course, "Baker Street." He cranked out multiple great pop songs in the late 70s and early 80s, songs marked by lyrical wit, a wonderful balance of jazz, blues, and folk instrumentation and straight-ahead guitar-based rock, and a subtle tone that fit his retiring, introspective, distrustful approach to the pop world as a whole--"Night Owl," "Right Down the Line," "Get it Right Next Time," etc. But "Baker Street" is the song that took root in my skull and never left. I'd forget the tune or lyrics months or years at a time, and then I'd catch a moment of it on the radio, and it would all come back. Apparently, for Rafferty the song is an expression of finding new hope in the midst of the frustrating urban banality of the lawyers and studios of the music business, but to me it's always been a song of the summertime and outdoors. Not the hopeful beginning of summer, but late summer, when the vacations are over and everyone is tired of swimming and school is about to start and it's time to get back to work...and yet, maybe, just maybe, the good times aren't quite over yet. And out into the late, hot (but finally cooling down!) sunset-colored world you go.

Can Wichita Elect a Governor?

[The Wichita Eagle ran a shortened version of this argument this morning; he's my fuller piece. And yes, I've already handicapped the governor's race as I see it today; consider this an addendum.]

Wichita is the largest single city in Kansas; more than a fifth of the state’s total population resides in our metropolitan area. It’s the regional economic center for over half the state. Its media outlets have greater penetration across the breadth of Kansas than those from any other city. And yet, for all that, it’s been a century since a Wichitan was elected to live in the governor's mansion in Topeka. Why?

True, Mark Parkinson (who was governor from 2009 to 2011), was born in Wichita–but he lived his adult life, and built his political career, in Overland Park and Olathe. And it's true that Edward Arn (1951 to 1955) came to Wichita and had a law practice here–yet he left for his military career, and when he got involved in politics he relocated to Wyandotte County, only returning to Wichita later in his life.

No, the only real example of a Wichitan in the Kansas governor’s mansion was Henry J. Allen (1919 to 1923), a newspaperman from Clay County who came to Wichita as a young man and built a small publishing empire here before being elected governor, then later returning to live the rest of his life in our city. (You can visit his historic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home, the Allen-Lambe House, in College Hill.)

There’s no law mandating where governors come from, obviously. If you look through the list of Kansas’s 46 governors, dozens of Kansas cities, towns, and rural counties are represented. Still, there are some commonalities among nearly all of them, especially over the past half-century: namely, some strong connection to the University of Kansas, to the state capital in Topeka, or to the cross-border urban agglomeration of Kansas City.  Given the way in which politics is often a function of path-dependency–people making use of the connections, both personal and financial, that others have already established, thus deepening them–maybe it isn’t surprising that Wichita, despite its large population and economic base, should go a century without providing a successful gubernatorial candidate.

Will 2018 break the streak? Among the serious candidates there are multiple Wichitans running: Republicans Wink Hartman and Mark Hutton (and maybe we could claim Ed O’Malley as an adopted son), and Democrats Carl Brewer and Jim Ward. Since this a year--thanks to the deep divisions in the state Republican party caused by Brownback’s great unpopularity, as well as the increased fired-up enthusiasm one sees on the Democratic side--in which state politics may be rather unpredictable, perhaps this will be Wichita’s chance.

But then again, perhaps not. I was recently asked, during a presentation I was giving to a local civic group here in the city, if I thought both parties coordinated to maintain the political dominance of the Topeka-Lawrence-KC corridor. I seriously doubt that--I’m not a conspiracy theorist by nature. But when one compares the positioning taking place in our state parties, and adds to that a close look at the campaign finance analysis provided by the Wichita Eagle, one may begin to wonder.

Kris Kobach, thanks to his name recognition and his small core of ideologically committed followers, is widely--and, I think, rightly--considered the favorite to win the Republican nomination, with Lt. Governor Jeff Colyer, seen as his most plausible rival. Yet this is despite the fact that Hartman has more money to spend on his campaign than both of them combined, and that O’Malley and Hutton both have had more individual donors here in Kansas than either of the front-runners as well.

Similarly, on the Democratic side, the late entrance of Topeka-based state senator Laura Kelly into the race was surely at least partly the result of a panicked party establishment convinced that, in this year of opportunity, they needed a better connected candidate than a couple of politicians from Wichita. Yet this despite the fact that their level of state-wide name recognition (Brewer’s in particular) dwarfs hers. That Kelly’s fund-raising has quickly outpaced (if not entirely overtaken) all of the other Democratic candidates might reflect the reality of this judgment–maybe it’s just another reminder that the entrenched political connections of northeast Kansas are self-reinforcing.

I suspect that Wichitans running for governor today face challenges similar to our city’s social and economic prospects as a whole: namely, we often seem stuck in the middle, too big not to be considered a major player, but not big enough to compete with the major players who came before us. We clearly have the people (look at those candidates!) and the money (Wichita-area donors max out their possible contributions more frequently than those anywhere else in the state). But is that enough to convince political operatives and party establishments to take us seriously? Not to mention the voters in the primary contests in August?

As always, success breed success. So if any of those Wichita candidates break through--and if course, there are many other variables at play here than just location--they’ll be doing more than ending a long political drought: they may also open the doors to a political change in our state parties which is long overdue.

Songs from '78: "Dust in the Wind"

This week, 40 years ago, "Dust in the Wind," the second single released from Kansas's fifth studio album, Point of Know Return, starting climbing up the charts. It would take months, but eventually it achieved the omnipresence which it was perhaps fated to enjoy. (Oh, don't lie: you started humming this song the moment you read the title of the post.) True, progressive rock was probably on its last legs by 1978, but its makers, like the band Kansas, still hung around, wondering what was going to come next, incorporating power pop hooks into their elongated symphonic-hard rock compositions, as well as throwing some folky art-rock into the mix. Like pretty much every other outfit grounded in rock and roll who ever turned, for whatever reason, however briefly, to poetry, the results were, as one delightful review put it, a "wan and ridiculous rehash of bargain-basement exoticism," which really sounds more like something that ought to have been said about The Moody Blues (of course, it probably was). Still, I don't care. Is this one of my favorite songs? Not nearly. Was it very much a part of the zeitgeist of 1978--and, for that matter (thanks, I suppose, significantly to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), probably still part of today's as well? Damn straight.

How to Stop This Man?

[Long, and of interest to only three people. You've been warned.]

Donald Trump has been President of the United States for a year. He shouldn't be. Completely aside from his utterly changeable--and I think most bad--policy preferences, he's not remotely qualified, he doesn't have the minimum level of responsibility, empathy, or basic competency which the presidency ought to presume, and on top of that he's an obviously incurious, narcissistic, vindictive, demagogic, and paranoid human being. Also, he may be mentally ill, and at the very, very, very least, he showed basically no civic allegiance whatsoever to the laws of the country he pledged to enforce in his utterly casual attitude toward offers from various Russian actors, including possibly the Russian government itself, to help him attack his opponent in the general election. So, in short, he's a horrible president and public servant. What do we do about it?

(Is there any new insights in this post? Not really. Is it worth reading anyway? You decide.)

The goal is to get Trump out of the presidency. (There are other goals, but that's the goal I'm talking about in this post.) Setting aside any violent, non-constitutional options, we have about three serious possibilities: impeaching him, having the Republicans drop him as their presidential candidate in 2020 (thus either forcing Trump to run as an incumbent independent president, or obliging him to retire once the election takes place), or defeating him in the general election (this would have to happen even if the Republicans didn't re-nominate him, should he choose to run as an independent, which he very well might). True, there's also the "25th amendment option," but I'm going to lump that in with impeachment, since in both cases it would require, at the present time, members of Trump's own party, either in Congress or in his Cabinet, turning on him.

Of course, given the way the major political parties currently operate, and have operated for nearly a half-century (or really, even longer; the last time it took either the Republicans or Democrats more than a single vote to "decide" who their presidential nominee would be was 1952, and the last time any party refused to re-nominate an actual sitting president was a full century before that), I actually think impeachment or a 25th amendment-style coup is more likely over the next two years than the Republican party going into 2020 with any plan up their collective sleeves besides backing their president in the general election. But since this is an post addressed to political enemies of Trump, let's set that aside, and settle on focus on politics: what political strategies might be employed to convince Republicans to dump Trump, or failing that, convince Republicans not to vote for him in the 2020 general election?

A few friends of mine and I got into an argument about this after Senator Jeff Flake attacked Trump on the Senate floor. There were those who praised Flake, and saw such attacks as crucial: what was needed more than anything else, they thought, was for more Republicans like Flake, Republicans who otherwise agreed with Trump's agenda nonetheless recognizing, and speaking out about, what a corrupt, despicable person he is. But others (including me) disagreed. It's not like we dismissed Flake's speech, but we didn't see what was so useful about him giving it. Was he prepared to oppose Trump's agenda in the Senate? Was he going to actually turn against the Trump administration with the only and best tool he had: his votes? It seemed to us that the most important things was to use every tool available to us--money, organizing, protests, mockery, whatever--to try to convince Republicans that Trump was a drag on their own agenda, and thus that getting Republicans to betray their own president would be a great success--while anything less than that, while certainly not worth condemning, isn't particularly worthy of praise.

The argument made by those in the former camp was that, should we get our wish and Flake and other Republicans start voting--sometimes, strategically, with clearly broadcast talking points explaining the anti-Trump reasons why they are so voting--along with Democrats, then it would be likely that Trump would simply frame such acts as coming from a bunch of RINOs who had joined up with Democrats and liberals, aiming to bring down Trump for partisan reasons, and that would only help him--because nothing serves to fire up Trump's base more than giving him a partisan enemy to beat up in front of his supporters.

It's not a bad argument. It builds upon the idea that Trump's demagoguery, though it relied upon partisan structures and partisan expectations to come to power (that is, the Republican party, much as many of them didn't like Trump, fell in line behind him in order to protect their agenda), is now operating free of the partisan realities which shape the incentives of Washington DC, and is a sui generis threat in the history of America's constitutional order. As such, political suggestions are short-sighted, because our strategy should be focused solely on demonstrating Trump's unfitness for office (as one of my interlocutors put it "talk about his Tweetstorms and not his policies"). A political strategy which attempts to break apart the Republican agenda that enabled his rise to power, by disrupting, blocking, and interfering with the goals of those who allowed Trump to be nominated, perhaps particularly by goading Republicans to stymie their own party in Congress, is all, from this way of seeing things, so much crying over a horse that has left the barn, because now that Trump is in office, convincing Republicans they made a bad choice by working to make Trump and them, collectively, ineffective will only rebound to Trump's benefit. Essentially, since he doesn't really care about the Republican party which he leads, striving to knee-cap it will only give Trump something else he can rant about...maybe all the way back to the White House.

It's persuasive case, but I disagree with it. Sure, party tribalism runs deep for all sorts of psychological reasons. But Republican-thinking voters vote for the Republican party because it does Republican things. If some Republicans helped stop their own party from being able to do Republican things, well sure, Trump would denounce them as traitors. But would it really have no affect on the thinking of all the other Republicans, the ones who want to see Republican things get done, the ones who had "fallen in line" behind Trump? I find that hard to believe. Rather, it seems to me that if Republicans like Flake were to start sabotaging their own party's agenda through their votes, demonstrating to the Republican leadership that the continued presence of Trump at the top of their party is actually making it harder for the party to get anything done, it would be an obvious call to all those Republicans who fell in line that there's no incentive for them to remain in that line any longer. In which case, impeachment or no re-nomination at at least lots of Republican voters staying home in 2020 becomes an even greater possibility than it already is.

I'm not mocking Flake, or saying his words have no significance. Such attacks on Trump are needed so as to build understandings that others may be persuaded by. But insisting that the threat posed by Trump is so sui generis that it is actually hurtful to urge those in a position to do so to hurt him an a partisan, political way, and to affirm instead the need that the attacks on Trump, to be successful, must not be sullied by partisan politics, but instead be expressed in non-partisan expressions about Trump's constitutional unfitness, seems wrong to me. Perhaps that's because I'm simply unable to see a way of talking about politics in a way that 1) actually addresses the realities of power as it is being exercised by a dangerous individual in our country at this moment, and 2) doesn't involve engaging with the partisan realities and seeking partisan leverage. Maybe, in some sense, Trump really is beyond party, because perhaps the real base of his power structure is his Twitter cult and not the Republican party. But even if that is so, it is still a fact of our system of government that his power and influence, whatever it rests upon, is wielded through the aegis of the Republican party, and thus undermining that--through votes!--is fundamental to stopping his reign.

The U.S. Constitution wasn't written with parties in mind. The rise of political parties--which was necessary, if you're going to have a mass democracy; at least, no one has yet seriously proposed any way of running such a polity without them--fundamentally changed how its internal levers of power operate. While it is appealing--and I'm speaking here as someone who likes much of the civic republican rhetoric which shaped those early, non-partisan understandings of democratic government!--to think that Trump ought to be taken down as Trump, the bad president, rather than as Trump, the bad Republican president, I just don't see any reason to believe that such is possible--and I am unconvinced that Trump is so separated from any need for a political party to enable to him to reach those aforementioned levers that doing the latter (I think inevitable thing) will backfire. Maybe it'll turn out that I'm wrong; maybe later I'll change my mind. But for now, it seems to me that, for better or worse, stopping Trump means electorally defeating him everywhere possible--and not simply expressing constitutional sorrow over what a creep he is. If nothing else, it give me a game plan to attempt, in whatever small and local ways I can: and no, as decent a fellow Flake may be, he's not planning, to my mind, the right anti-Trump game.

Songs from '78: "Werewolves of London"

For much of last year, I got caught up in just how fine a year I thought 1987 was, at least insofar as the pop/rock radio I tuned into was concerned. I ended up celebrating ten different albums from 1987, all of which I still regularly listen to 30 years on. I was kicking around doing something similar for this year when an FB friend of mine pointed out this fine blog, which is going to be looking at all sorts of albums that are hitting their 50th anniversary throughout the year. Well, 1968 was an important year--in additional to everything else, it was the year I was born, for whatever that's worth--but I can't reach back 50 years in my musical memories. But 40 years? I could do that. After all, it was 40 years ago, 1978, the year I turned 10 years old, that really first started to listen to the radio, or at least so I remember.

Moreover, the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that I loved and still love much of the music of 1978. Yes, there was a ton of crap on the radio--but there's always a ton of crap for every ounce of good pop; it's always been that way, and always will be. More importantly, I think back to what I was listening to in 1978, and I'm remembering a tremendous amount of solid rock and roll--shaped as it was by the rise of funk, the rise and (relative) decline of both punk and disco, and the decline and (almost total) fall of progressive rock. All those influences, ebbing and flowing, flooding and retreating (but sometimes enduring), making a pop sludge that spread across the airwaves in a late 70s world. Why shouldn't radio have been loud and mixed-up and filled with little discoveries in such a cultural environment? The late 70s were a moment when almost no one could successfully lie to themselves and pretend that the post-WII dominance of the supposed American Century wasn't collapsing all around us, but no one (yet) had any idea of what was going to come next. The twin forces of global finance capitalism and the personal computer and internet revolutions were still just glimmers in the eyes of a few bankers and geeks, and the death gasps of the old studio system was allowing a bunch of film and art school graduates to make some of the finest films that had ever come out of Hollywood, and probably ever will. And pop music? Well, I'm here to tell you: if you're willing to search for it, it was a very, very, very good year.

So I've picked out 30 or so songs that were released in 1978, or that achieved prominence in 1978, or that--in a couple of instances--I just strongly associate with 1978, my first year as a radio listener, and I'm going to share them here, usually as close as possible to their actual listed release dates. Get ready for a lot of fine rock and roll, everyone; I'll be here at all year.

******

Warren Zevon was a terrifically talented songwriter and musician, and he wrote and recorded a lot of wonderful, cool, catchy songs. But "Werewolves of London"--released on January 18, 1978, the first single from his marvelous album Excitable Boy, the only fully realized work of his whole musical career--was the big one, a lean, driving rock tune and a monster hit, with a bluesy rhythm (provided by half of the original Fleetwood Mac line-up) and lyrics that are just winking and clever and ridiculous enough that their macbre nihilism--are we singing to the werewolf? do we admire him? what's the deal?--becomes part of the whole song's outrageous charm. How many times have all of us sung along with it (even though we probably don't get all the lyrics quite right)? Hundreds, I'm sure. From the dirty, glorious, decadent yet still solid underbelly of 1978, this is the right song to start us out.