Tired of Cursing the Darkness

 

I'm beginning a series of posts here analogous to my annual "Any Good News?" offerings, a series in which I introduce or describe organizations that are actually trying to make good news. Some of these entries will discuss sensitive subjects like suicide or abortion, but it is hard to be a helper while avoiding the hard facts of life. Your humble narrator will provide donation links for those willing to lend a hand, financially speaking.

 

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Herewith the obligatory PSA: if you or someone you know is in dire distress, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800/273-8255.

 

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One of my writing instructors in college admonished me never to joke about two subjects: AIDS, and suicide. Neither, he said, was ever funny. I think he was almost entirely right, but also that he had never seen the movie Heathers (1988), probably the best teen-angst picture of the 1980s. Michael Lehmann’s film mocked not suicide itself but the risible culture of suicide prevention, which in the Reagan era seemed to consist of empty admonitions masking adult indifference to young people’s suffering.

Among the laudable goals of Active Minds, a Philadelphia-based foundation with 1,000 local chapters around the United States, is to change the culture that Heathers effectively (if excessively) satirized. In the 2020s we are far likelier to recognize self-harm and suicide, particularly in young people, as signs not of spoiled self-indulgence but of treatable illness. The founders of Active Minds want to normalize conversations about mental illness, particularly on college and high-school campuses, using peer advocates, displays of empty backpacks (symbolizing the devastating impact of suicide on social networks), and a slogan, “The World Needs You Here,” that is far less vapid that “Teenage Suicide - Don’t Do It!” 

 

It is certainly a healthier and more constructive approach than that of my alma mater and other so-called elite institutions: identifying badly depressed students and turfing them out before they become a potential legal liability. If we believe that a university or high school is the sum of its students, and not the details of its balance sheet, then Active Minds’ mission - making sure that students stay alive both in and out of school - is more consistent with the purpose of higher education.    

 

Image via the Harvard Crimson, ironically enough.

Active Minds' donations page is here.

Any Good News in 2021?

As the days (in the Northern Hemisphere) grow shorter, coronavirus continues to ravage large parts of the world, the United States slouches toward fascism, and climate disasters grow ever more regular, it is easy to despair. The early months of winter are thus a good time to review the positive news stories of the year, via  Future Crunch. Few of these items made it to American newspapers or cable news services; all remind us that optimism is not an unrealistic outlook.

* Argentina legalized and Mexico decriminalized abortion, while Switzerland and several Mexican states legalized same-sex marriage.

* Suicide rates fell by 5 percent in the United States last year, despite the pandemic. American cancer death rates reportedly fell by 30 percent from 1990 to 2018. Europe also experienced declines. The World Health Organization approved for use the first malaria vaccine. Haiti brought its cholera epidemic under control - there have been no reported cases there since January 2019.

* New York and New Mexico legalized marijuana. Oregon decriminalized possession of all illegal drugs.

* Banks and governments pledged 14 billion dollars to fight deforestation in northern Africa. South Korea promised to plant 3 billion trees by 2050. Pakistan went ahead and planted 1.5 billion trees this year.

* Audi, Mercedes, and Volvo announced they will switch to all-electric car production by the end of the decade. Ford announced it will stop selling gas-powered cars in Europe by 2030. Barcelona began giving free three-year public-transit passes to residents who agreed to give up their cars.

* As of Fall 2021, endowment, pension, and sovereign-wealth funds worth 40 trillion dollars agreed partially or wholly to divest from fossil fuel production. China ended its funding of foreign coal-fired power plants and reduced the share of coal in its electricity budget below 50 percent. In the United States, the Biden administration ended support for the Keystone XL pipeline.

* The Canadian Mik'maq recovered their sovereign fishing rights. The Dakotas recovered sacred lands in Minneapolis; the Passamaquoddies bought back some of their ancestral land in Maine. Bison were reintroduced to the Salish-Kootenai reservation in Montana.

Even misspellings yielded some nice results this year. The image here shows what happens when you try to google "Santa hat" and instead type "Santa bat." (Image courtesy of Jo Jorgensen, via Twitter.com.)

The Establishment Wears a Red Dress

 

To be an independent woman in Georgian England one needed a solid layer of money between oneself and the world. In this regard, Mary Edwards (1705-43) enjoyed the equivalent of steel armor plate. From her Anglo-Dutch parents she inherited realty investments worth 60,000 pounds per annum (eight million pounds sterling today). She held her property free and clear until her marriage, then shared her income with her spendthrift partner until she repudiated him in her thirties. Like many wealthy Georgians, Mary became a patron of the arts, and one of her beneficiaries, William Hogarth, immortalized her and her self-image in a 1742 portrait.  

 

Edwards chose to emphasize her independence and the wealth that supported it. She and Hogarth thus de-emphasized or left out images and themes that suggested traditional femininity. Mary gazes directly at the viewer, her hair pulled back tightly from a high forehead, suggesting a cerebral nature. She wears not subdued pastels or virginal blue, but an eye-catching red damask gown trimmed with copious white lace, accessorized with enough diamonds to make Liz Taylor die of jealousy. A hunting dog, symbolizing the gentry's hunting privileges, sits at her feet in place of the submissive gentlewoman's lapdog. Her surroundings are those of a successful landowner or rentier (she was both): a dark-paneled office adorned with busts of King Alfred and Elizabeth I. Both monarchs the Georgian aristocracy considered defenders of English liberty, which is to say, their own privileges. The open page on the desk, containing a quote on liberty (again, patrician liberty) from Addison’s Cato, strengthens this symbolic point. Mary sees herself not merely as an independent woman, but as a pillar of the political establishment, a steward of the landed wealth that helped England’s aristocracy defend themselves and their institutions against monarchical tyranny.

 

I don’t know if Edwards ever became actively engaged in electioneering, as some eighteenth-century noblewomen did. Likely she did not have time for it. She died only a year after Hogarth, more famous for his acerbic political cartoons, helped her define herself for posterity as a full member of the establishment.

Deep Time: A One-Sentence Summary

 

John McPhee, with his characteristic elegance, once observed (in Annals of the Former World) that he could summarize Earth’s geological history - or, at least, the processes that drove it - with a single sentence: “The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.” The highest single point on the Earth’s surface once lay below the Tethys Ocean, where 400 million years ago the remains of tiny creatures drifted to the sea bottom and cemented together. A third of a billion years later, in the Eocene Epoch, the Indian tectonic plate pushed northward into the Eurasian Plate. It moved with such force that it drove the collision zone, including Everest’s limestone, toward the stratosphere, and formed the highest mountain chain in the world.

 

The former Tethys seabed. (Source: Wikimedia)

The resulting Himalayan Mountains are so voluminous, massive and full of heat-generating isotopes that they are, in fact, melting.

 

Some of my readers might observe that this is old news to them. I dare say it is, since I’m describing events that are more than 40 million years old, but I present it as my beau ideal of summarizing one’s own work.

Polypotamia and the Ochethi Sakowin

 

Fleeing the Axe of Progress.

Your humble narrator began last fall a new job as editor of the Indiana Magazine of History. My statement of editorial and historical philosophy appeared in the March 2021 issue, free of paywall. The essay's title, "The View from Polypotamia," evokes an uncomfortable truth about the Hoosier state and the Midwest generally: white policy makers viewed Indiana as tabula rasa, as a featureless "flyover country," long before it became a place most Americans flew over or drove through. Officials imposed new names on the landscape and divided up the land and resources as they pleased, in pursuit of their own vision of socioeconomic development, and woe betide anyone they considered incompatible with that vision, like Native Americans or white subsistence farmers. To replace this blank-slate assumption with a view of the state as a mosaic of stories, what Lakota activist Mary Crow Dog would call "one vast winter count," is to pursue a more human course of scholarly inquiry and social development.

 

Apropos of Lakotas, my review of Pekka Hamalainen’s Lakota America (2019) appeared in the online journal Reviews in History at the end of April. Modern Lakota writers and NAIS scholars aren’t terribly happy with Professor Hamalainen’s book, and there’s much in it to make one unhappy. The book valorizes an expansionist, high-consumption warrior elite without fully accounting for the ecological and social damage they wrought, both within and outside the Lakota homeland. Nor does it consider the alternative paths of survival and survivance that Lakotas and their neighbors created in the twentieth century. Conceptually, it is also a somewhat lazy book. The author is a gifted researcher and writer, but at bottom his thesis is “Remember what I wrote about the Comanches in Comanche Empire (2008)? Well, the Lakotas were just like that.” I guess there’s a market for familiar stories.

Slouching Past the End of the World

 

"In many other places, too...the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously...and the result was something not unlike relief." (Mohsin Hamid, Exit West [2017], p. 217)

 

The pandemic is not over, but spring has arrived, and life goes on, and some desirable futures appear more visible now than in 2020, even though so many people, perhaps most of us, merely want to return to the way things were Before. If it would bring back the dead, I might even think that was a good idea.

No Love for Rhode Island

 

In the 1780s it was fair to describe York, Pennsylvania as a Federalist town. On Independence Day of 1788, the community’s notables celebrated with a parade honoring the states that had sent delegates to the previous year’s Federal Convention. They selected from the York Academy twelve white children, all prospective members of the American elite, to carry flags with the represented states’ names. The inherent message was clear: the proper inheritors of the Revolution, and guardians of the republic’s future, were the citizens, well-to-do and otherwise, who supported the federal Constitution.

Political cartoon, celebrating New Hampshire's ratification, 6.21.1788

That document's future still remained in some doubt. As of July 1788 ten states, including Pennsylvania, had ratified the Constitution, but New York had not yet done so and was in the middle of a contentious state convention. North Carolina's convention had not yet met, and when it did so it voted to defer rather than approve ratification. The York parade's organizers still believed, apparently, that these two states would ratify and sent representatives to the new Congress. They turned their fears for the Federalist movement's future into anger at one state which had not even sent delegates to Philadelphia: Rhode Island.

“Rogue’s Island” had earlier angered elite proponents of a stronger national Union by vetoing a tariff amendment to the Articles of Confederation, and by passing a paper money law perceived as unfavorable to creditors in other states. York’s leaders denigrated the Ocean State with a black flag, carried behind the other states' flags by an African-American boy "in crepe." On the banner were sewn or painted these words:

 

I will divide her among the nations

I will take away her name

For her iniquity hath abounded

Her unrighteousness hath vexed the land.

 

Strong words, adapted from Scripture (though your author has not yet been able to locate the book, chapter, or verse). Rhode Islanders, as far as these Pennsylvania Federalists were concerned, could not consider themselves part of the chosen people. Indeed, God would surely cast them down for separating themselves from the rest of the Elect, for worshiping the false idol of paper currency, and for failing to pay their tithe to the national regime. When in 1790 the new U.S. government voted to embargo trade with Rhode Island unless it ratified the Constitution, York's leaders doubtless supported this act of coercion. One could only negotiate with the unrighteous for so long.

Modern readers like myself are struck, of course, by the cruel detail of the young Black flag-bearer. The implicit message in his placement within the parade was that African Americans, too, belonged with the nameless and despoliated peoples who had defied God's word. At best the parade organizers intended the child, who may have been enslaved,* to play the role of a jester, a comic outsider employed to deride those his masters also considered their inferiors. Probably the parents of the twelve young pupils who marched in the ranks of the righteous thought that associating Rhode Island with a bondsman or outsider was funny. Some people get their laughs from punching down.

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Source: Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2020), 75.

 

 *Pennsylvania's legislature passed a gradual emancipation act in 1780, but slavery remained legal in the state for several more decade.