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Given the events of the Republican Convention, I’m going to drop Mark Johnson’s embodiment thought for the day and go to a blog called “Delancyplace” that I’ve subscribed to for a few years.    The editors say:  “Delanceyplace is very simply a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context.  There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.”  (delancyplace.com)

On their website there is an archive of past quotes but I end up saving some of them on my own computer for months.  I’m afraid that if I went back looking for relevant quotes to a party nominating a clown or madman or charlatan for President of the United States, I would find altogether too many of them.  At least they help to put things in perspective and support confidence that we will survive because we’ve survived worse.  Except sometimes with major damage.

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/18/the-long-sad-corrupted-devolution-of-the-gop-from-eisenhower-to-donald-trump/

When I was little I was aware that my paternal grandparents, who lived in Canada for years, thought highly of politics and were open to socialism, co-ops, and progressive elements of culture — almost to the level of prairie humanism being a religion.  I asked my mother what party we were and since Eisenhower was the respected president and a Republican, I was reassured to hear that we were also Republicans in the terms of the times.

(Bernie Sanders makes a comparison between then and now at his website:  http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/the-eisenhower-republican-party-vs-todays-tea-party-republicans)

In later decades my parents became confused about what party they belonged to.  I’ve always stuck to the idea of Independent, voting for the person rather than the party.  When the UUA began to be synonymous with the Democratic Party (Adlai Stevenson was a UU.), it weakened my denominational allegiance.

Politics in Valier are up close and personal.  We had our own “Mini-Trump” a few years ago when a man used attacks on the town council and unproven gossip against individuals to get elected mayor.  He lasted a few weeks, until the first council meeting where it became clear he knew neither the Pledge of Allegiance nor Robert’s Rules of Order and was so insulted by the audience’s failure to admire him that he quit.

That pattern has repeated in nearby communities.  People run for office on a platform of scandal and accusation and then turn out to be flatly unqualified.  It is fertile ground for racism, sexism, and old family feuds.  (I’m glad I’m not having breakfast with the Bush family this morning.)

In fairness, efforts to make society nicer by imposing political correctness have turned out to be simply enabling because they suppressed the fever but not the disease which fulminated along until it was intense enough to break through again.

One of my more useful realizations is that when a person becomes very powerful and well-known, he or she cannot operate without staff and soon the staff has become an institution whose primary goal is self-perpetuation rather than effective instruments.  Donald Trump may like us to think that he’s the one who is throwing the levers, pushing the buttons, and making the decisions, but the fact is that his staff is telling him what to do.  Every big shot needs a show-runner.  Even Oprah’s staff tells her what to do.)  

Staff are not accountable to Trump because he doesn’t have time to manage all the things he’s invested in.  No wonder he seems erratic and shallow:  he’s a committee, but not even as unified as shareholders in a conglomerate.  The staff hands him what to read as a speech about his platform.  When it’s late at night, they’re exhausted, they look for inspiration and . . .  you already know.  He doesn't even read it himself.

Not that Clinton is so much different except that she has decades of argument about the relevant issues under her belt, not issues of wealth and popularity.  Her staff was not hired to make her look good, though some suspect a few are purposed with keeping her husband out of the room.

Today the most interesting reflection on the mess comes from “Religion Dispatches”, another blog I follow which is mostly about the institutions of churches, denominations, and the machinery that supports and defines them.  Today’s post including a piece by Elijah Siegler, “Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at The College of Charleston. He is editor of the forthcoming book “Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order.”

Siegler calls on Frazer’s “Golden Bough” for enlightenment.”  http://religiondispatches.org/author/elijah_siegler/

“According to Frazer’s anthropological history, magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings because of their ability to deceive and manipulate the masses.

“But Frazer’s theory comes with a warning. Magicians, he argues, gain power by playing on people’s superstitions. When “the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king,” he wrote in The Golden Bough, the best of them “perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him.”

“The savviest magician-king, in other words, tells the people what they want to hear, and truly believes that he is the best, the greatest, fantastic, unbelievable.

“We should beware magicians, Frazer argued, because they subvert democracy. “So far as the public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society,” he wrote, “it tended to place the control of affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy.”

I would put it far more pejoratively — it substitutes childhood for maturity, so that citizenship is abandoned for the sake of comfortable dependency.  Which might be okay if it didn’t mean vulnerability and the abandonment of all control.  There’s more to it.  I wonder if Trump can make trains run on time.

GET REAL!

If I were to do my education all over again from grade school on, I would get a list of the books Delancy Place.com draws from and read them all.  

The “mother ship” for this daily automatic email quote, short but pithy, is self-described as follows:  “The Governor’s Woods Foundation is a private, not-for-profit philanthropic organization based in Philadelphia. Our interests and commitments are primarily focused in two areas: cultural development and progressive realism in government policy.”  I suppose it’s a little like the website Aeon, except that it’s specifically American and deals with history of government and culture, including pop culture.

The trouble is that I could NOT read all these books in the Fifties because not only had some of the events not happened yet, but also the point of view had not developed and couldn’t until another decade or so and the Vietnam War had broken up the WWII solid front.  Until war was truly over, we could not afford to give up all the “great men” and triumphalism that was the focus of history — still is out here in the Montana boonies.  The idea is a source of courage.   

“A People's History Of The United States” by Howard Zinn is not generally read or taught here except in the university towns.  Ken Burns’ television histories are well-loved because of the photos, even though it may support a focus on conflict.

Ken Burns

When I was in high school, the subject of history was taught by the coaches because they were really there to coach sports with the goal of winning and had to teach something.  They continued the triumphalism, the mono-focus on only Brit/white history, which was seen as “our” history.  All dates of battles we won and names of people who succeeded.  In Montana a law had to be passed to force the teachers to include Native American history in spite of the many NA people in the state.  White people thought it had nothing to do with them. 

With that as my sympathy, one might think an article by Paul Mason in the Guardian, which also comes to me as email excerpts, would appeal to me, but it does.  The header says, “The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed.”  It hasn’t just been NA kids, though they are not addressed in this article, but most rural white kids have had their culture damaged as well.  Black kids are separated.  Red kids are ignored.  Yellow kids prevail.  ("Yellow" has too many connotations -- let's call them "golden kids.")

Paul Mason

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/the-problem-for-poor-white-kids-is-that-a-part-of-their-culture-has-been-destroyed.

Long ago (eighties?)  I attended a conference at the College of Great Falls where Wendell Berry spoke, mourning the loss of the rural relationship to land and family.  At the end when there was time for questions, Darrell Kipp stood up and said, “Ranchers and farmers had better pay close attention to what happens to Indians, because they are tomorrow’s Indians.”  Exactly what he meant is probably what Denise Juneau needs to address in her campaign for the US Senate.  The loss of culture is a poverty.  

Mason was addressing Thatcherism, which is the British version of Reaganism, which I am just figuring out is Neoliberalism, deliberately misnamed for something quite like Oligarchy.  The idea is the same old smug self-congratulation of those who have it made, trying to promote it as due to their natural talents and energy in a laissez-faire environment.  In fact, it has been a matter of withdrawing all the necessary features of the Commons, like infrastructure, of which education is a part.  The bridges, the pipelines, the highways go down, and so do the kids.  Health support, service regulation, investment in public systems, all go down.

In his article Mason was remarking on the failure of poor and working class white kids (esp. boys, I think, though he didn’t say so) to do well in school.  Specifically, he’s reflecting on a study by CentreForum, “An independent, liberal think tank seeking to develop evidence based, long term policy solutions to the problems facing Britain. . .  CentreForum's driving principle is to promote opportunity for all and particularly for those in disadvantaged circumstances.”

At first the kids are okay, but then they begin to fail and drift so that they slide away from school or ordinary jobs or even their families.  Unless they see themselves as part of the winning classes, or at least the honored classes -- which working classes once were when they were pulled into service as the backbone of a working army.  Or when they organized in labor unions and progressive groups.

Montana is not so mixed as England, but here’s how the cards come down for English groups:  “The detailed ethnic breakdown in the report makes for depressing reading. The worst performers are white Irish traveller children, then “white gypsy/Roma” children – both of which school fails by a long chalk. They are followed by mixed-race children with Caribbean backgrounds, then white British. These are the only groups who collectively go backwards in the two years researchers have been crunching the numbers. By contrast, black Caribbean, and white Irish children go forward a bit, and Chinese and [East] Indian children a lot.”  The recent wave of immigrants was evidently not included because this is a study over years.

Mason says,  “It’s 30 years since I taught in the school system – at a high school and then a special unit for behaviourally disruptive teenagers in Leicestershire. So the only relevant first-hand knowledge I can bring to this debate is that the same problems were apparent then. By the late-1980s people from a white, working-class background already knew we had a problem.”. . . “It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.  It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.”  

Valier and the other High-line ag and resource towns are struggling with the same issues now.  In Mason’s words: “To put right the injustice . . . requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.

“If these metrics are right, the present school system is failing to boost social mobility among white working-class kids. But educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story.”

Mason pins his story on a lovely little movie called "Kez" about a boy and a sparrowhawk he trains.  In the cruelest Arab dictatorships not only are racing pigeons -- kept with as much tradition and pride as hawks -- forbidden and killed, but also their owners even if they are boys who had little else.  The world is more bitter and deadly than it used to be.  There was a nasty little story in one of my feeds today about how it was human sacrifice that enabled the shift from hunter-gathering to hierarchical town life.  I'll have to search that further.

Ancient breeds of Bagdad pigeons

http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com

The problem has been to find a counter story.  What counts?  What are the abilities and attitudes that will support growing individuals?   How can they stay in their communities and still make a living — not just a minimum income but enough to support marriage and children?  What are the rural stories as opposed to the bi-coastal television series lives that dominate the media?  Is the answer in the Internet?  Is it in the priorities of the schools?  Can populations like the Rez maintain their identity without leaving the larger world?  How can the mourning for a world now gone finally be completed or at least fortified by a new vision?  Is war the only way to achieve solidarity?  Human sacrifice?

Reading "Delancy Place" quotes every morning gives me perspective that is world-based with an American focus.  It suggests many stories, some of them revisionist, that are NOT pinned to conflict and the need to have heroes.  Maybe that will suggest a story we can share.