If you’re at all familiar with what’s been going on in the Buffalo Niagara region lately, you probably already know why I took an unplanned hiatus from blogging this week: Lake Erie decided this was a good time to remind people in this area of its presence.
Cue…the lake-effect snowstorm.
And then…the next lake-effect snowstorm.
As storms go, this one was not as bad as some of the more famous ones we’ve suffered lately…but that’s like saying “I dropped a brick on two of my toes, which isn’t as bad as when I dropped one on my entire foot.”
Plus, for several days I was literally home completely alone, except for Carla and the two cats (Remy and Rosa). This is because The Wife and The Daughter had to take Hobbes (the greyhound) to a specialty vet in Pittsburgh. (No, I haven’t written about this yet, I don’t think. I’ll get to it. He’s OK, but it’s a process.)
So there was lots of shoveling at home, and then I’d get to work, where, as The Store’s resident facilities coordinator, I…got to shovel more. I don’t write much about my day job here, but this photo is representative of the day I had on Thursday (after missing Wednesday completely due to a driving ban and The Store being closed):
And that was just one of the many shoveling tasks I had to do. This is not a complaint: it’s the job I signed up for, and this was an unusual event, even if the rest of the world thinks that this is just what Buffalo Niagara is like every year from October 15 to June 1. For all my complaining, whining, and shouting at the clouds that I did this week, I would still take this over worrying about earthquakes and annual wildfires. I would still take this over having to plywood up my house’s doors and windows in advance of the approaching hurricane. I would still take this over enduring rolling blackouts in very cold months and in very hot ones because my state’s electrical grid is basically a bunch of extension cords patched together and nobody is fixing it because my state keeps electing governors who want to punish brown people, trans people, and women before doing anything productive like modernizing the state’s infrastructure. (Yes, I am calling out Texas.)
(By the way, I did have help in getting all of this done! This was not a case of “Wow, we got several feet of snow, off you go, dude! Let us know when you’re done!” And yes, liberal use of a snowblower was involved.)
So, things were hectic and demanding this week, and in a way that left me with very little mental energy for posting here. Or edditing. Or writing at all. Or doing photography, beyond the occasional cellphone pic of “Holy shit, look at all the snow.”
Because seriously…Holy shit, look at all the snow!
Taken this morning as we were driving about doing errands.
Chinese composer Tan Dun always interests me, and yet I always feel like I haven’t heard enough of his music! Here’s a fascinating tone poem, based on a three-note motif. And where does the motif come from? Well:
Imagine if someone was preparing a surprise birthday party for you, and they asked a Grammy Award-winning composer to compose a new piece for you. That’s exactly what happened when Symphonic Poem of 3 Notes was written. The Teatro Real Opera in Madrid invited Tan Dun to write a piece for Placido Domingo while they were planning his 70th birthday celebration. Because of the similar sound of Placido’s name and the music notes la-si-do, Tan Dun decided to use these three notes as the musical theme of this piece. The composer says that these three notes remind him of “the ABC phenomenon—the meaning of things starting, of beginning and the origin of everything.”
The Music For me, the opening percussion reminds me of morning bells inside the temple. Along with the high pitches that are played by all the strings, it draws an image of a breezy morning with birds migrating in the air. The beginning of a new day, or even new life, is well portrayed. Tan Dun uses a variety of sounds and textures to develop the theme la-si-do after it’s played by the brass. The sound of stones and of the woodwinds’ mouthpieces keep interfering while the theme is being evolved into an intensive climax. The most fascinating part of this piece, to me, is the vocal part toward the end. The simple yet powerful shouting functions as an eraser, wiping out all the stresses in life, and brings us back to the hopeful chanting—like beginning, a new beginning of life.
This is a re-post that generally reflects my frustration with the American approach to teaching and thinking about its own history. It’s not specifically about Martin Luther King Jr., but I think it applies, particularly when MLK Jr. is treated by many on the right as a source of exactly one quote. For content specifically about Rev. King, see Roger’s post.
No subject is more eternally disappointing to see discussed in America than race, because a great many of us simply don’t have any inclination to engage in anything remotely resembling an honest discussion of race at all.
This is not the least bit new. All that’s changed, in recent months, is the wording. White people have been finding ways to dodge discussions of racism probably since the beginning of time, but the most prominent version in my personal experience has been simple dismissal of the subject as soon as it is brought up: some version of “There they go again, playing the Race Card,” usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.
What is signaled by saying “Playing the Race Card” is itself a rhetorical strategy that has several goals: it’s a granting of permission to oneself to ignore anything the other person is saying, as well as a signal to that person that their words are falling on ears that have been rendered deaf before the fact. It’s a neutering of conversation, and saying it is a metaphorical hanging of the “CLOSED” sign on the mind.
The racism-denialist side has become a bit more sophisticated of late, which you can see in the way they have cynically elevated something called “Critical Race Theory” to the status of Bogeyman Supreme in this country. For a good summation of this, I strongly recommend the summation John Oliver did on this season’s opening episode of Last Week Tonight:
Of special interest is the fact that not one of the people shrieking most loudly about “Critical Race Theory” can tell you the first factual thing about “Critical Race Theory”, and that the American right-wing has become so divorced from any factual basis for its constant drum-beating about nonexistent grievances that now their entire debate can be shaped by dishonest actors like Christopher Rufo, who will publicly and openly admit the dishonest nature of their rhetorical framing as they watch their preferred framing of the debate happen anyway. These people are deeply sophisticated in their knowledge of how American media will follow a bouncing ball to the end of the Earth, so long as the ball is set bouncing by the right wing.
I personally do not know much at all about Critical Race Theory, but I am at least aware that my willingness to admit this puts me in an unfortunate minority among white people. Weird irony, that.
What catches me so much about the rhetoric around the thing that right-wingers have crafted in their increasingly fever-minded, fact-deprived heads about “Critical Race Theory” is one objection I hear over and over and over again. You’ll hear it in the Oliver segment above, and I also saw it this past week in comments on a post to my local Nextdoor forum.
(Yes, I’m on Nextdoor, mainly because it’s useful for stuff like “Hey, anybody know what all those sirens were last night” and “Anybody know a good roofer?” But the site is very obnoxious in a lot of other ways, and I’ve imposed a personal rule of never posting at all on it. One good example is the thread from a few weeks ago–and I am not making this up–of a person breathlessly posting about the suspicious-looking ‘colored’ person in the pickup truck who was obviously casing local houses…until someone else on that same street said, “Yeah, that’s Bob. He’s a meter-reader for the power company.” If I had commented on that, I probably would have been banned.)
(UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I closed out my NextDoor account. It just got to be too much idiotic racism.)
A person posted about “Critical Race Theory” being taught! in the local elementary schools!!! Now, this is BS, obviously, and to their credit, a few folks did point out that this is total BS. But equally obviously, “Critical Race Theory” is just a catch-phrase for these people that has come to refer to any mention of race at all, in any context. (Which is what Rufo et al. intended the entire time–again, see Mr. Oliver.) And that framing leads to this specific talking point:
“I do not want my children being taught to feel bad about their country!”
Or:
“I do not want my child being made to feel BAD about their history!”
Or:
“I don’t want my kid being made to feel like they have to answer for things they didn’t do!”
And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit tempting. I never owned any slaves! Why do I have to feel bad about it? Why do I have to atone for that? It was 150 years ago! Leave me alone! Lemme be! Get over it!
When you really start digging into this, you realize quickly that these people don’t want history taught as a factual discipline from which we can learn valuable lessons for the future and in which we come to see the flaws as well as the strengths in the generations that preceded us. No, these people want a feel-good story, a hegemonic tale whose purpose is to shape young minds so they get obediently tearful in the presence of a flag (and, maybe just maybe, the creepy politician literally hugging it). They want the Hero’s Epic version of history, with an honesty-obsessed George Washington admitting chopping down the tree years before he stood proud and tall in that boat as he crossed the Delaware. They want a tale of lantern-jawed heroes, always driven forward by God and goodness, with their women at their backs (always, always that) as they hew their destinies from the land itself.
These people want all the feel-good stuff from history, and that’s it. They want heroic inspiration from the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy and writings, and none of the frankly horrific caution of Thomas Jefferson’s forced relations with his own slaves. It’s this feel-good cherrypicking approach to history that gives me particular pause, because it’s borne of the same lack of curiosity and honesty that leads these same people to embrace nonsense across the board, including rejecting vaccines in favor of some random medication pushed by some random doctor Joe Rogan had on the podcast this week.
“I don’t want my kid to feel bad about their history!”
Look, here’s the thing, for all those people who complain that they don’t want their children being made to feel bad about their history, or to feel like they are being blamed for awful things their ancestors did:
If you’re not going to let the evils in our past make you feel bad, then you don’t get to turn about and let the triumphs in that same past make you feel good.
If you don’t want to feel bad about slavery, or Jim Crow, or red-lining, or the KKK, or resistance to Civil Rights, then you also don’t get to feel good about defeating fascism in World War II, or triumphing over the East in the Cold War, or landing on the Moon. History is not a buffet where you can choose what things you like and which you don’t.
And this isn’t about “feeling bad” in the proper context to “feel good” about the good stuff, either. History isn’t about feeling bad or feeling good. History is about learning what we’ve done, the good and the bad, so we can make better decisions later.
But we don’t want that…or too few of us want that. We don’t want to talk or even hear about race. If we do, we want to pretend that ending officially-sanctioned slavery and quoting a single sentence from a single speech by Martin Luther King is all the discussion race ever needed. I don’t know how we get White America to even come to the table to have the discussion much less honestly engage it in the first place, but I do know that if something in history makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t avoid that topic but interrogate it even harder, because if something your ancestors did a few dozen or a few hundred years ago makes you feel bad, maybe it’s relevant to something going on now.
As I write this, we are nearing the second 24 hours of this winter’s first big lake-effect snow event. (Or we might be actually into the second 24 hours, as I’m not entirely sure when the snow began falling yesterday.) We got a bit of a break overnight when the snow band moved north, but this morning it moved right back south again and despite assurances from the Local Weather Folk that the snow bands would be “oscillating” a lot (this apparently being their new Word of the Day), from where I sit right now, I’m not seeing a whole damn lot of “oscillating”. I see a whole damn lot of the band sitting stationary right where it is.
It’s weird how the Local Weather Folk (some of whom get kinda pissy if you try asking them for specifics) never seem to get their models wrong in a way that does not translate to the Buffalo Southtowns getting the shit kicked out of them.
But anyway, that’s just the way it is. The snow is supposed to shift north tonight and then again to us tomorrow, but it will weaken as it does. Unfortunately this snow event is not going to be followed by a nice warm-up that will melt some of it off; instead we’re going into a deep-freeze for a few days, so much of this is going to stay right where it is.
Meanwhile, there was supposed to be an NFL playoff game in town today as the Bills are hosting the Steelers. After much hemming and hawing, the game was postponed to tomorrow afternoon around 4pm (right during my after-work commute, so, yay!), which is clearly the right call as the last thing we need right now is thousands of Bills fans clogging the snow-choked roadways, especially with last winter’s disastrous Christmas blizzard still in the memory banks. Nobody wants a repeat of finding dead people still in their cars, so the County Executive, after consultation with locals and with the governor, announced a full county-wide driving ban until further notice.
The effect, judging by reactions on social media, seems to me yet another data point in how car-centric a society we’ve become, because since the driving ban was announced, every post of the County Executives has been followed by comments by the dozen, all with the exact same whine:
“But when can we DRIIIIIIIVE???”
Seriously, the degree to which people in this society simply can’t fathom not getting in their cars and driving someplace is reaching absurd levels. Sure, maybe some of these people have jobs to get to, but many workplaces closed as this storm approached, and most retail locations have shut down as well, so the question naturally arises, “Just where do all you think you just have to drive today?” I posed a variation on that question and some guy huffed at me along the lines of “Some of us want to get out and be productive.” Doing what? Unless you’re operating a plow, the likelihood is that you’re just going to be getting in the way of people who are productive. I’d bet real cash money that “being productive” for this guy meant just…drivin’ around, doin’ errands, pickin’ shit up. I’d bet real cash money that not one “productive” thing he wanted to do couldn’t, you know, wait a freaking day.
“When can we DRIIIIIIIIVE???”
The question seems related to a similar one that arises any time a new construction project is announced pretty much anywhere, but especially in downtown Buffalo: “Where will we PARRRRRRRK???” Because the automobile is the most important thing in society, and any curtailing of our use of our precious automobiles is one of the most grievous affronts upon our sacred freedoms that exists. So now we live in a time when the very idea of “Hey, weather’s bad and the roads are treacherous, maybe just stay home for a day or two” is turned into a cause against which we must take up arms and mount the barricades.
In fact, “When can we DRIIIIIIIIIVE???” isn’t just about car culture, is it? It’s also about the very idea of belonging to a civilization where individual desires aren’t the only thing that matters. In a way it goes back to the meme that’s been circulating for several years now, particular since COVID and masking: “I really don’t know how to make you care about other people.”
We sure have come a long way from the old Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin who famously told citizens during a blizzard to just grab a six-pack and wait it out at home.
“I cannot help but be touched. I, of course, remember you.” –Khan Noonian Singh, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
I’m thinking of that quote because after several weeks of a very mild start to our winter, this week winter decided to show up. It began with a big storm that barreled by us the other day, in such a way as to give us very strong winds from the southeast, which is extremely unusual here. That storm, on Wednesday, knocked out our power at home for eight hours.
And now, as I write this (about 5:40pm on Saturday), another storm system is blasting past us, with more traditional 716 winter effects: high winds again (because we always seem to have high winds nowadays) and lake effect snow that may result in three feet of snow “in the most persistent snow areas”. Will Casa Jaquandor be in the most persistent snow areas? As always, there’s really no predicting specifically what the snow bands will do…but also as always, I like our chances to get a poundin’. This storm is already shutting things down all over the region. The County Executive has instituted a full driving ban starting at 9pm, the Governor pre-declared the State of Emergency yesterday, and the grocery stores all got rocked yesterday.
Oh, and the NFL actually postponed the Bills-Steelers playoff game scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, to Monday at 4:30pm. Most people are applauding this decision, but as always, a small chorus of very strange people think the game should somehow still go on. I’m trying not to see this as another data point in our society’s long descent into irrational selfishness, but make of that what you will.
This makes me wonder: If God gave me a choice, would I take three feet or more of snow but the power stays on the whole time, or would I take a ten hour power outage, but only one foot of snow? In honesty, I have to say that I’d take the snow and the power. Snow doesn’t bother me nearly as much as powerlessness does.
Years ago I somehow wound up engaging a Lunar Landing Denialist–you know, one of those strange folks who insisted that there was no way anyone actually went to the moon, the whole thing was faked, it was a soundstage, yada yada yada. I tend to have zero patience for such nonsense and I shut it down pretty much as soon as the question “If we were there, why doesn’t the Hubble Space Telescope take pictures of the landing site!” came up. I might have provided a link to someplace somewhere explaining why that’s not possible, but I don’t remember.
Luckily, though, Randall Munroe of xkcd is on the job!
Yesterday saw a big storm push through…well, lots of places. I have to be honest, I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to this one, beyond what its forecast effects in Western New York were going to be. In this case, the storm did something very strange: it hit WNY with very strong winds from the southeast. When we get high winds around here, it’s almost always west or northwest winds that pound us…or even southwest winds that come up the lake. This was different. I’m used to how things sound at work when there are high winds outside, but yesterday the place sounded very different. There were moans and creaks from parts of the building that I didn’t know could make those sounds.
And there were, of course, power outages galore, including one that affected Casa Jaquandor for about eight hours. I got home to a dark house and proceeded to light up more candles and settle in for a dark evening. This meant…holing up on the couch and reading. I actually got through two shorter books and started a third, and it was actually a peaceful night in a time that hasn’t had a lot of peaceful nights lately. Even the back-up sump pump kept up with what was feeding it.
The power went out at home around 1:30pm yesterday, and finally came back on about 9:30pm. Hardly disastrous, and honestly, not much of an inconvenience. We got lucky, though; some folks are still waiting for power to come back. A friend of mine just got power restored a few hours ago, after being without power for more than 22 hours. At one point, one of our local power companies announced a distribution of free packs of water and dry ice for keeping food cold.
And I noted, yet again, that despite what the movies show you, candles put out a lot less light than you expect.
We started 2024 in the usual fashion: with the Vienna Philharmonic. Here is the delightful and traditional end to that concert: On the Beautiful Blue Danube followed by the Radetzy March. Note our conductor, Christian Thielemann, directing the audience’s rhythmic clapping. That is an important job!
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Tone Poem Tuesday
History is not a feel-good story
This is a re-post that generally reflects my frustration with the American approach to teaching and thinking about its own history. It’s not specifically about Martin Luther King Jr., but I think it applies, particularly when MLK Jr. is treated by many on the right as a source of exactly one quote. For content specifically about Rev. King, see Roger’s post.
No subject is more eternally disappointing to see discussed in America than race, because a great many of us simply don’t have any inclination to engage in anything remotely resembling an honest discussion of race at all.
This is not the least bit new. All that’s changed, in recent months, is the wording. White people have been finding ways to dodge discussions of racism probably since the beginning of time, but the most prominent version in my personal experience has been simple dismissal of the subject as soon as it is brought up: some version of “There they go again, playing the Race Card,” usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.
What is signaled by saying “Playing the Race Card” is itself a rhetorical strategy that has several goals: it’s a granting of permission to oneself to ignore anything the other person is saying, as well as a signal to that person that their words are falling on ears that have been rendered deaf before the fact. It’s a neutering of conversation, and saying it is a metaphorical hanging of the “CLOSED” sign on the mind.
The racism-denialist side has become a bit more sophisticated of late, which you can see in the way they have cynically elevated something called “Critical Race Theory” to the status of Bogeyman Supreme in this country. For a good summation of this, I strongly recommend the summation John Oliver did on this season’s opening episode of Last Week Tonight:
Of special interest is the fact that not one of the people shrieking most loudly about “Critical Race Theory” can tell you the first factual thing about “Critical Race Theory”, and that the American right-wing has become so divorced from any factual basis for its constant drum-beating about nonexistent grievances that now their entire debate can be shaped by dishonest actors like Christopher Rufo, who will publicly and openly admit the dishonest nature of their rhetorical framing as they watch their preferred framing of the debate happen anyway. These people are deeply sophisticated in their knowledge of how American media will follow a bouncing ball to the end of the Earth, so long as the ball is set bouncing by the right wing.
I personally do not know much at all about Critical Race Theory, but I am at least aware that my willingness to admit this puts me in an unfortunate minority among white people. Weird irony, that.
What catches me so much about the rhetoric around the thing that right-wingers have crafted in their increasingly fever-minded, fact-deprived heads about “Critical Race Theory” is one objection I hear over and over and over again. You’ll hear it in the Oliver segment above, and I also saw it this past week in comments on a post to my local Nextdoor forum.
(Yes, I’m on Nextdoor, mainly because it’s useful for stuff like “Hey, anybody know what all those sirens were last night” and “Anybody know a good roofer?” But the site is very obnoxious in a lot of other ways, and I’ve imposed a personal rule of never posting at all on it. One good example is the thread from a few weeks ago–and I am not making this up–of a person breathlessly posting about the suspicious-looking ‘colored’ person in the pickup truck who was obviously casing local houses…until someone else on that same street said, “Yeah, that’s Bob. He’s a meter-reader for the power company.” If I had commented on that, I probably would have been banned.)
(UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I closed out my NextDoor account. It just got to be too much idiotic racism.)
A person posted about “Critical Race Theory” being taught! in the local elementary schools!!! Now, this is BS, obviously, and to their credit, a few folks did point out that this is total BS. But equally obviously, “Critical Race Theory” is just a catch-phrase for these people that has come to refer to any mention of race at all, in any context. (Which is what Rufo et al. intended the entire time–again, see Mr. Oliver.) And that framing leads to this specific talking point:
“I do not want my children being taught to feel bad about their country!”
Or:
“I do not want my child being made to feel BAD about their history!”
Or:
“I don’t want my kid being made to feel like they have to answer for things they didn’t do!”
And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit tempting. I never owned any slaves! Why do I have to feel bad about it? Why do I have to atone for that? It was 150 years ago! Leave me alone! Lemme be! Get over it!
When you really start digging into this, you realize quickly that these people don’t want history taught as a factual discipline from which we can learn valuable lessons for the future and in which we come to see the flaws as well as the strengths in the generations that preceded us. No, these people want a feel-good story, a hegemonic tale whose purpose is to shape young minds so they get obediently tearful in the presence of a flag (and, maybe just maybe, the creepy politician literally hugging it). They want the Hero’s Epic version of history, with an honesty-obsessed George Washington admitting chopping down the tree years before he stood proud and tall in that boat as he crossed the Delaware. They want a tale of lantern-jawed heroes, always driven forward by God and goodness, with their women at their backs (always, always that) as they hew their destinies from the land itself.
These people want all the feel-good stuff from history, and that’s it. They want heroic inspiration from the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy and writings, and none of the frankly horrific caution of Thomas Jefferson’s forced relations with his own slaves. It’s this feel-good cherrypicking approach to history that gives me particular pause, because it’s borne of the same lack of curiosity and honesty that leads these same people to embrace nonsense across the board, including rejecting vaccines in favor of some random medication pushed by some random doctor Joe Rogan had on the podcast this week.
“I don’t want my kid to feel bad about their history!”
Look, here’s the thing, for all those people who complain that they don’t want their children being made to feel bad about their history, or to feel like they are being blamed for awful things their ancestors did:
If you’re not going to let the evils in our past make you feel bad, then you don’t get to turn about and let the triumphs in that same past make you feel good.
If you don’t want to feel bad about slavery, or Jim Crow, or red-lining, or the KKK, or resistance to Civil Rights, then you also don’t get to feel good about defeating fascism in World War II, or triumphing over the East in the Cold War, or landing on the Moon. History is not a buffet where you can choose what things you like and which you don’t.
And this isn’t about “feeling bad” in the proper context to “feel good” about the good stuff, either. History isn’t about feeling bad or feeling good. History is about learning what we’ve done, the good and the bad, so we can make better decisions later.
But we don’t want that…or too few of us want that. We don’t want to talk or even hear about race. If we do, we want to pretend that ending officially-sanctioned slavery and quoting a single sentence from a single speech by Martin Luther King is all the discussion race ever needed. I don’t know how we get White America to even come to the table to have the discussion much less honestly engage it in the first place, but I do know that if something in history makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t avoid that topic but interrogate it even harder, because if something your ancestors did a few dozen or a few hundred years ago makes you feel bad, maybe it’s relevant to something going on now.
Maybe.
(Comments are closed on this post.)