Month: July 2024

Art

Louisville

Many years ago, Donna went to Louisville, Kentucky, on a business trip. The company she worked for sponsored a workshop and put them all up in the Brown and she raved about it ever since. We finally got to go together last weekend, in company with friends, and my first reaction is—we need another week.

The Brown Hotel is one of those landmarks that has been kept up to snuff and is redolent with the charm of a past that clings here and there and is easy to miss unless you’re looking. We stayed three nights. We will do this again.

The excuse (as if one is needed) was a distillery tour, the Woodford Distillery, which is in Versailles, near Frankfort. I had not realized that bourbon can only be called bourbon if it comes from Kentucky. Like champagne, it is a regional hallmark. We have long since discovered Woodford and have yet to taste anything better. Comparable, sure.

The place has been there since 1812 and the original buildings are still there and in use. Beth, our guide, gave a great lecture while taking us through the facilities. Old stone, the odor of baking bread, a heady wheat and corn aroma, and in some ways the quiet of a church.

It has only been Woodford since 1996, but the continuity has apparently never been broken. (Not sure what they did during Prohibition, but whatever, lots of old distilleries survived somehow.) At the end of the tour we of course spent far too much on the product, bringing home some specialty bottles which we intend to savor carefully.

The grounds as well are beautiful. I could spend a week there photographing. Picturesque is both accurate and a cliché. The two things that hold the imagination of folks there seem to be bourbon and horses.

After the tour, we drove into Frankfort. Frankfort, along with being the state capitol, is also the public art capitol of Kentucky. Lots of murals and street sculpture. We didn’t have the time to really go through it. (One thing, the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in Kentucky is in Frankfort, but it is privately owned and not open for tours. Still, it would have been cool to see it.)

We returned to Louisville and later had dinner at one of the local “famous” watering holes, Jack Fry’s Bar & Grill. Fry was a boxer and opened the restaurant and it is one those “everyone has eaten here” kind of places. The food was excellent, but it was too loud to really carry on  any kind of conversation. (I had lamb chops, Donna has a pork chop.)

We Ubered. I don’t usually, but it was not my choice. Watching Maia navigate the rides prompts me to rethink my attitude.

A lot of upgrading seems to be going on. The confluence of neglect and revitalization is everywhere, and walking down to the river into the museum and bourbon crawl district was a treat.

We toured the Frazier History Museum. Again, a great deal of display space allocated to bourbon, but there’s a lot of early Republic history there. George Rogers Clarke has a statue overlooking the Ohio, and the Frazier had an elaborate Lewis & Clarke section.

On Saturday we walked around a lot, which only made it obvious, despite the pleasure, that we didn’t have enough time. So clearly a return trip is in the future.

We lucked out with the weather. Mid-80s most of the time and very cool evenings. We ended with dinner at a place called Proof (you can interpret that as you will) which turned out to be attached to a 21C Museum Hotel. So after dinner, we toured their current art show.

All in all, as near perfect a long weekend as could be had.  I’ll add a few more photographs below

 

 

 

 

Community

Root Division

In all the debate and analysis and angst over what those behind Project 2025 are doing and why, it is easy to get lost in the bog of details and motivations. A better question is why do so many people who would suffer under these proposals support them. When you look at the list of things they want to end, it boggles the mind that anyone who has to work for a living, who is dependent on a weekly paycheck, many whose expenses outstrip their income, and those who otherwise would wish to give their children an edge for the future would want any of this.

Let me step back from the details and indulge a little speculation about the deep motivations behind this otherwise bizarre conflation of working class reality and the dreams of oligarchs. What underlies the desire to do this much to destroy entire sets of dreams and undermine the ability of so many people to have something even close to a stable life?

Go back several decades. Look at the 1950s and 1960s, at the almost complete overhaul of social relations. Everything, from the civil rights movement to the counterculture to the sexual revolution to all the spin-off movements all demanding a seat at the table, all shared one basic interest in common. One could reasonably show that all of those movements—those revolutions—were about one thing: freedom of association.

Class boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, educational boundaries—the order of the established norms were all challenged and largely overturned. The common thread was people refusing to be kept in “their place” anymore. All the equal access challenges, the educational reforms, the equal employment opportunities, all of them—freedom of association. For a time, the assumed walls keeping groups of people apart became porous to a degree they had never been before.

Freedom of association. When you think about it, the lack of such freedom underpins the basis of all segregation sentiment. People refusing to have anything to do with people they consider “not my tribe.” People, frankly, frightened of having to interact with strangers.

The entire conservative movement since the Sixties has been a desire to put those barriers back in place, to keep all the disparate groups separated, to somehow prevent the possibility of their children being exposed to those they consider undesirables or bad influences or simply foreign. All the programs that are targeted in Project 2025 are designed to bridge those barriers. Programs that provide a basis and, in some cases, the means to enable people to cross boundaries.

All this upheaval over immigration is nothing more than the same fear of mingling that kept people segregated before the civil rights reforms. People in one corner looking with fear at people in the other and saying “We don’t want to have anything to do with them!” Panicked at the thought of their kids attending school with kids from the “wrong side of town.” The advent of private schools to make sure no mixing happened.

The thing is, such group isolation results in a loss of resources for many groups. It has a physical cost. But it starts there, with an unadmitted (or not) desperation to Keep Them Out.

This is neurotic. 

But this is what has to be recognized and addressed if there is to be any hope of this ever being healed. So many people feel threatened by having to be in the same room as people they don’t know, don’t like, don’t trust, in fact hate because they’re different.

That’s the basis of the economic divide. It drives the cost of higher education, I have no doubt. It informs the absurdities of policy positions which admit to no solution because any solution will not give them what they want, which is to shut those people (whoever they are) out.

Fear.

If civilization is to be saved, if we are to go into a brighter future, we have to end the arbitrary assignation of people into enclaves designed to keep them apart. This is not airy idealism, this is survival. We’re going to destroy ourselves to enable a small group of people to keep themselves apart from those they see as inferior. 

Look at this time and these issues. That is the basis for so much insoluble polarization. But we don’t talk about it, not that way, not so nakedly. Every divisive issue we have, I believe, has its roots in that marrow-deep fear of having to cross the boundary and know about people we think will harm us.

One party right now is doing everything it can to establish the old ghettoes. The other needs to work to end them, but it seems not to be able to articulate it clearly enough. Well, for what it’s worth, there it is.

Keep this is mind when you listen to the rhetoric and good luck.

Community

Take A Breath

The Debate. Capital D. Everyone is undergoing meltdowns about it. Too many people are reacting as if this is the death knell of, well, Everything.

Chill. Firstly, read the transcripts. Right here. Then, for one interpretation, here’s an analysis from The Hill.  And just to round out some of this, here’s some Fact Checking from AP.

(Back in the 1960 presidential campaign—some of you may remember this—Nixon and Kennedy had a debate. At that time, a large segment of the population got most of their information from the radio, but this was the dawn of television, so the debate was both broadcast and televised. Those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had won the debate. Those who watched thought Kennedy had. Style over substance? Despite what Nixon later proved to be, the fact was they were not so terribly far apart on issues, so this was a question of nuance and detail. This time, thought, nuance has nothing to do with it, but people who read will likely have a better grasp of what happened than those who watched.)

Now, one thing to keep in mind: the people who are enthusiastic about a Trump second term care virtually nothing about facts. It has been demonstrated for several years now that Trump holds the record for lies in office of any president and his supporters do not care. Trying to impact his campaign by pointing this out has had very little success because his support has nothing to do with What Is but rather What Is Desired. Going toe-to-toe with one over what the facts are gains virtually nothing because that is not the important thing to them.

Which is to say that we have a situation in which the problem is not so much with the head guy but with the foot soldiers. Our fellow citizens.

As for the rest of us, we should just take a breath and look at our priorities. Biden had a bad night. Yes, he is 81, and he’s been working his ass off and he had a cold and, lest we need reminding again, this is a man with a lifelong struggle with stuttering. So the takeaway here should be on the content of his words, not their delivery. Of course, we have come to accept that performance matters more than reason, and by performance I do not mean how well the job is done but how good one looks while doing it. I’ve been railing against our obsession with this whole “inspiration” thing for years. Stump preachers who bring crowds to a boil and get them rolling around and speaking in tongues are “inspiring” but I wouldn’t want them run anything important. We missed a bet in 2016 by not electing one of the most qualified and competent administrators in our lifetime because she didn’t thrill us with inspiring jeremiads, while the guy with nothing to say and who said it in such a way to make people think he was a leader got the job and proceeded to dismantle—or try to—70 years of progress. Stop it, please. Look at the qualifications and track record.

But these calls for Biden to step down for someone else are ludicrous. Even if you’re not a fan, you must see that this would simply enable Trump. The practicalities and logistics aside, exactly who might be able to pull that off? In four months? The names floated so far carry too little national weight. And we’re talking about a political landscape that presently suggests that RFK Jr is a viable third party candidate. The judgment necessary to switch candidates now, it seems to mean, is a bit lacking.

Which is beside the point. Stick to the issues, the biggest one being the Project 2025. It runs to 900 pages, so let me just link to a synopsis from the BBC (because the BBC is one of the most nonpartisan sources available, for a number of reasons). Read it here.  Among other things, it calls for the destruction of our civil service. Trump tried this in his first term. Pink slips were floating around D.C. like confetti during his first year. He was stripping departments of personnel, rendering them dysfunctional, then claiming they didn’t work. The tax cuts called for are absurd. The entire project, in capsule, is designed to produce a permanent oligarchy. It seeks to curtail if not eliminate social security. Now, whether this could all be done would depend on Congress, but we have close races there, too. Point is, the GOP has become a party seeking to wreck the social programs which most of us depend on because…

Well, I’m not sure anyone has an explanation that doesn’t sound like something from a James Bond spy thriller. Whether it would succeed, as I say depends on Congress, but the fight would be a bloodletting (figuratively) that could lead to a collapse of the thing they claim to want to preserve, restore, or create, depending on who is speaking, which is the tremendous prosperity that is fast becoming national folklore.

Trump has stated his intention to establish an across the board 10% tariff. He claims this would result in foreign countries paying a price to sell goods here, but from the first time he imposed one we know that the direct result is a rising cost on Americans. If you think inflation is bad now, wait for that one.

His whole thing about turning abortion rights back to the states is a dodge.  It is literally the equivalent of saying slavery should be up to the individual states. This is not hyperbole. If we here ascribe to the idea that as Americans, regardless of state, we have rights as people and citizens, then dividing up those rights by state and asserting that some states are more equal than others is an absolute rejection of American rights. For the anti-abortion movement, this is a divide-and-conquer tactic. With a national standard and federal protection, where you live does not diminish your rights. States Rights is one of those shibboleths that sound good to certain people, but only those who would never be directly affected adversely. And it is unfair.

And as to the entire right wing obsession with LGBTQ+ rights, this is where the hypocrisy seems most evident. If as they like to claim they support the principle of Individuality, then why curtail that right when it runs counter to their collective prejudices? It seems obvious that historically for any fascist regime to gain traction they must create and demonize a group of Outsiders with which to frighten everyone else into giving the power to “control” the “subversives.”

Now, as to Biden’s fitness to run, that will be established by his actual campaign. Concerns over his health should he win are, frankly, a lesser concern, because what he brings to the task is what he has already brought, which is a team of people most of whom are presently doing their jobs quite well. They don’t go away. And should he falter over the next four years, they’re still there, and those who are touting Kamala Harris now would get their wish, and the country would have four more years of the major repairs this administration has been doing, regardless. Cold? No, practical. Any president could die in office.

As for those policies of which I speak, we have seen the most remarkable and underappreciated recovery since the end of WWII. Some of this is bounceback from the pandemic, but what matters is the handling of such bouncebacks. George W. Buch inherited a marvelous economy when he took office in 2000 and he mismanaged it, which led to the 2008 crash and burn.

Our standing globally is on the rise. Trump oversaw our lowest period of international reputation. He simply doesn’t know what he’s doing.

But I am concerned about those behind the scene backing him, like the Heritage Foundation, which is a think tank obsessed with strong leaders (as in dictators) and which exhibits a class disdain for ordinary people that makes Scrooge look like a liberal.

A note on economic nonsense. We cannot keep giving money to billionaires expecting results the billionaires are not interested in. Trickle down does not work. And we have seen across the ocean the results of a 14 year experiment with austerity that has caused the fall of the conservative government in Britain. Simple thing: you cannot save your way to prosperity. You have to spend. We’re seeing that at play now here. The conservatives are wrong about that. But that’s not what they’re interested in anyway.

But for the time being, stop panicking. Vote for the administration. Vote for self-interest. For for the people who support the principles you want to see hold sway. Above all, though, I repeat: stop panicking. Keep the oligarchs out of office. These people will only hurt the vulnerable.

What good would it do to secure the borders and then see everything within them crumble to ash?

Lastly, why give the narcissist a chance to once more prove his lack of  redeeming virtue?