Transgressive reading, Part 9: Don't forget about Epstein

 I went to the bookstore this afternoon and found Virginia Roberts Giuffre's book, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. I bought it, of course. I've been waiting for it. It appears to be selling briskly, which is a good thing.

As everybody probably already knows, Ms. Giuffre took her own life, which shows the effect behavior that Trump, Epstein, Maxwell, and former prince Andrew indulged in can have.

Trump, of course, is indulging his own infantile behavior in so many ways lately, and nobody seems to have the will to stop him. President Doo-Doo is tearing down the White House because the East Wing ought to be tackier; he is murdering fishermen in what I'm calling the Gulf of Venezuela today (we can call the Gulf anything we want to, is Baby Donnie's lesson); he is bragging about stopping (how many is it now?) wars that, if they exist outside of his mind, are probably still going; he has apparently brought all of those wars home, since he is waging a war on Blue cities; he is insulting as many foreign dignitaries as he can.

Anyhow, he doesn't seem to fear reprisals for any of these things, but he does seem to fear the Epstein story.

I just got the book home, so I haven't had a chance to read it, but I recommend you buy it. Women's stories need to be told. Epstein's name needs to be kept out there. Trump needs to be ousted.

President Turdbomber: How much embarrassment can Republicans stand?

 The latest bit of news about the infant in the White House is that he has used artificial intelligence to make the fantasyland in his two-year-old's brain real. Yes, baby boy Trump has showered his detractors in AI-generated doo doo. Bad little Donnie!

In a sane world, it would be time to enact the Twenty-fifth Amendment, because the president is not in his right mind. I would suggest to J.D. Vance that if he'd like to be president, now is the time to set the wheels in motion.

Of course, the cabinet being what it is, I don't suppose Vance would be guaranteed success. After all, this is a government in which the press secretary and the White House communications director answered a reporter's question with "Your mother!" So, the maturity level is not high in the White House as a whole.

If J.D. doesn't want to give it a go, the House could try a third impeachment for high embarrassments and misdemeanors. But I really don't think any of this will happen. The Republican Party seems to be willing to suffer any humiliation to retain power.

This is where we are one day after the No Kings rallies.

Transgressive reading, Part 8: Well, we're all thinking about fascism, aren't we?

 Trump is a neighborhood bully who has claimed the United States (and the world, in his fevered imagination) as his neighborhood. He enjoys hurting people, and he's the perfect fascist.

I want to recommend a few books about what it's like living under fascism.

First is cartoonist Art Spiegelman's two-part account (Maus I and MausII) of his parents' lives in the Third Reich and after their survival. These are graphic histories (as in drawings with dialogue), and Spiegelman's parents' stories are wrenching and moving, as Holocaust stories are. This is one family's story, and there are millions more like it, most of them never told.

Bertolt Brecht's Fear and Misery in the Third Reich (aka The Private Life of the Master Race) contains eighteen short scenes of daily life in a country where you have to be careful what you say. Recent events in the USA involving Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert show us that we are getting closer to the day when more and more people will be afraid to speak out against the Trump regime.

Anton Gill's The Journey Back from Hell tells the stories of individual Holocaust survivors over time. They all feel isolated from anyone who did not share their experience, and many had mental breakdowns in the 1960s and 1970s, after they had rebuilt their lives and had some time to think. The memories came flooding back.

The Lost Childhood: The Complete Memoir, by Yehuda Nir, is different from most Holocaust memoirs I've read. Having received false papers, Nir's family spent the war in Poland pretending to be Catholics. Plenty of adventure in this one.

Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Everybody knows about this book, and it's probably the most read of the books I've listed. Anne Frank's family went into hiding in a very clever way, but somebody ratted them out.

How to Spot a Fascist, by Umberto Eco. This is a short one, with three short essays, the first of which lists his fourteen essential components of fascism: Traditionalism; rejection of modernism; irrationalism; refusal to accept criticism; exploitation of the fear of difference; appeals to a frustrated middle class; obsession with conspiracies; a feeling of humiliation by some enemy's wealth and power; the sense of life as a permanent war; the exploitation of people's need for someone to look down on; a cult of heroism/death; a contempt for women and for nonconformist sexual habits; the leader's definition of the "common will"; the use of "Newspeak."

At the Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Jean Amery spent time in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps, and was not sure it could never happen again, correctly noting that antisemitism didn't go away after the war.

Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi. Levi was an Italian Jew who wrote several books and they are all great. How did one survive in Auschwitz? Read his story.

Gitta Sereny wrote on two broad subjects: the Holocaust and children who committed murder. Her three big books on the Nazi era are Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth; Into That Darkness:  An Examination of Conscience; The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001. In the first book, Sereny tries to get Albert Speer to admit his part in the Holocaust, but he was unable to own up to sharing guilt for crimes against humanity. The second book is about the commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, whom she also interviewed. Sereny did a lot of work after the war to help survivors and refugees, and the third book is her summation of her experiences.

All of these books are very readable, some masterpieces of literature. In our current atmosphere, I don't think the availability of these and other books is guaranteed. If you're of a mind to read any of these, get 'em while you can.

I wonder how many people realize how much trouble America is in.

 Jim Wright is certainly worried that too many Americans aren't aware of how dangerous the Trump 47 regime is. He compares the more credulous Americans with Timothy Treadwell, aka Grizzly Man. Treadwell thought that he could live among grizzlies and eventually be accepted by them. It eventually got him and his girlfriend killed, as people who have lived near grizzlies predicted.

For Wright, Trump is our grizzly, and he's getting ready to eat us up. I don't disagree. A social media discussion I was recently part of has convinced me that too many people don't realize that we're in a political situation that is different in kind from the politics we've been used to. Their thinking has not been flexible enough to adapt to Trump, and they're still convinced of "bothsidesism," and that our current political life is business as usual.

A friend of mine who is more conservative than I, and who is not in the habit of spouting off about politics, posted a picture of a National Guardsman patrolling Washington, DC, and opined that this was authoritarianism. Some of his more credulous friends apparently think that Trump's deployment of the Guard in liberal cities is well-intentioned and really aimed at fighting a crime emergency.

One points out that there hasn't been a murder in DC in the ten days that the Guard has been patrolling. That's a rather small sample, time wise. I would counsel waiting a little bit before saying, "problem solved!"

Another asks why we don't want a safer capital.

The first has reservations about using the National Guard, but truly believes that Democrat-controlled cities are really having a crime problem and need Trump's help. This is the kind of credulity I'm thinking of. Nobody who is really paying attention thinks that Trump is a truth-teller. It is as though January 6 never happened. They believe that Trump has America's best interests at heart, despite all evidence to the contrary.

When I pointed out to the first commenter that crime was already down in DC, he took issue, informing me that the House of Representatives has opened an investigation into whether DC Mayor Bowser falsified the numbers. The House of Representatives, under Republican control, is Trump's creature, and their investigations have not been in good faith for many years. This person has not noticed that, and I'm afraid that too many people share his mindset.

The time has long passed since our politics has had two parties who deal in good faith. The Republican Party is divided into two groups, in my opinion: those who approve of one party rule, and those too afraid to speak out for fear of their careers being derailed.

Trump is not occupying Democrat-run American cities for their own good, but for purposes of intimidation. And I would posit that, if these occupations become entrenched, the military will be used to intimidate voters. Trump is already trying to ban voting by mail. If he is successful, anybody who wants to vote will have to brave militarized voting locations.

The second person I've mentioned in this post, still thinking in liberal vs. conservative politics as usual terms, compared Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Democrat-run cities to the federal government in the 1960s sending the Guard to the south, as though the two situations were the same. In the Jim Crow south, white people could, and did, murder Blacks with impunity because no jury would convict a white person for a crime against a Black. In addition, there really was a problem of inequality in education between the races that forced integration was the answer to. The notion that there is any such emergency in today's Blue cities is a figment of Trump's imagination, and too many people still believe him.

People need to realize that things have changed and that Trump, like Jim Wright's grizzly bear, has predictable behavior.

Transgressive reading, part 7: Science as a candle in the dark

 The Trump regime is pressuring the various Smithsonian museums to censor our history and now, our art. I don't believe they have used the Nazi phrase, "degenerate art" yet, but they've gone after certain artists for depicting American life that they don't want anybody to look at. History has to be nicey nicey, and to depict the glory of white Americans.

I was going to list some books about the Nazi attacks on modern art in 1937, but most of them seem to be out of print and rather pricey. You can do your own digging online.

I visited Washington, DC, on Saturday to test Trump's assertion that, now that he's deployed the National Guard, the streets are safe, and "the crowds are back!" He picked a bad time to tout throngs of tourists, seeing that school is back in and people aren't bringing their kids to the Mall. For a lovely Saturday, DC was starkly empty. But I imagine that masses of tourists inhabit Trump's fantasy mind, along with treacherous urban streets.

Now that the museums are being told to dismantle exhibits the regime finds unpleasant, I couldn't bear to go into any of them: the art museums; the Museum of Natural History; the Museum of American History; and, especially, the Museum of African American History. I can't go back until the regime is over.

So, as Trump is trying to shut real history and science and art down, what other t transgressive books can I suggest? Get 'em while you can.

How about some science?

Timothy Ferris wrote a book called The Science of Liberty, in which he posits that most scientific progress is made in a liberal environment. Liberalism holds science in a positive light; reading science makes, or should make, a person more liberal. That seems to be borne out (in a negative way) in today's fascist/religious situation.

How about a few classics? Darwin is quite readable and engaging. The Voyage of the Beagle is an account of his South American adventure, and how the things he saw and samples he collected solidified his views on evolution. Origin of Species lays out his great theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin was a very exacting scientist, and reading about some of his experiments amazed me in how rigorous the science was. I came away from Origin thinking that there was no more to be said after that book. Following Origin, Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Many people may have been fine with the idea of evolution as it pertained to plants and animals, but they were very reluctant to conclude that humans were included in evolution: humans were thought to have been created by God separately from the rest of the animal kingdom. So, Darwin wrote this book to show continuity between humans and animals when it came to emotion. That led him to his doorstopper of a book, Descent of Man. That book plainly shows that evolution also led to homo sapiens. Descent of Man is not particularly readable, but the slog is worth it.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. "Hey, farmer farmer, put away the DDT, man!" as Joni Mitchell sang. Carson waged her campaign against pesticides, and the result of listening to her warnings was, among other things, bringing back the bald eagle.

And how about a little cosmology that shows how the universe could come to be without a creator?

One of the things religious people ask the atheists is, if there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing? The simple answer is the question, "Why does the answer to that question have to be God? Why doesn't 'We don't know yet' suffice?"

Check out Lawrence M. Krauss's A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. For some scientists, there being "something" is more natural and likely than there being "nothing." Lots of cosmology and quantum physics in this book. My mind stretches, partially successfully, to understand the science.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote a true classic, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, in which they argue for better scientific education for the public. What makes science different from other practices? The scientific method is self-correcting. Scientists observe nature, make predictions, and then test those predictions with experiments. They post their findings in scientific journals, and their fellow-scientists do more experiments to see if their results agree or disagree with the original researchers'. The scientific method takes us out of the darkness of superstition, pseudo-science, and anti-science. This book is more urgently needed than ever in the Trump-RFK Jr. era.

Get 'em while you can, before they start policing bookstores.

Trump's takeover of the District of Columbia

 The Wall Street Journal says that Trump will deploy the National Guard in DC, and take over DC's police department.

He claims there's a crime wave, and that DC is one of the most dangerous cities in the world. That, of course, is his lying pretext for this latest power grab.

The only crime wave in the District emanates from the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest. A raid is in order, but I don't know who would do it.

As for Trump ordering the National Guard to DC, WHEN WILL SOMEBODY SAY NO?

The main problem with Project 2025

 Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has claimed that "the left has taken over our institutions." What I think Project 2025 comes down to is that the things people learn in school (especially the public schools) and college undermine the authority of parents. The kids come home with their science homework, which contradicts the beliefs of the Christian authoritarian parent.

And that's the problem in a nutshell.

The Christian right is wrong about science, and insists that only ideas forged 2,000 years ago are true. I say 2,000 years, although it seems to me that the Christian right finds the New Testament inconvenient, so maybe their idea of truth predates Jesus.

Science keeps whittling away at belief in God, and the authoritarian parent is not happy with newfangled ideas that undermine the patriarch's authority.

The Christian right is wrong about science and, therefore, they are wrong about evolution, homosexuality, the age of the earth, sex and gender, morality, climate change, racial equality, women's rights, which bathroom a person should use, and every one of today's various cultural controversies.

Yes, I have included morality. It is often said that science cannot tell a person how to be moral. But in my opinion, the more up-to-date a person is in scientific matters, the more information they have on what helps and what hurts. That's the crux of morality, as I see it. Don't make other people suffer, and try to alleviate suffering when you see it.

So, for example, seeing homosexuality as a sin will cause suffering. Calling homosexuality a "lifestyle" is a mistake. If your child is gay, it's not because some evil person has preyed upon them and "turned" them. Science tells us that your child was born that way. They know who and what they are. Throwing them out of the house, or subjecting them to some kind of "cure" is to treat them cruelly. Respecting your children is as important as their respecting you.

So, you're a man who is a member of the Christian right, and your authority must be respected in your household. The problem is that most of what you believe is wrong.

As a footnote, I would recommend to the reader a book by Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty, in which he argues that scientific progress and liberalism go hand in hand. Liberalism encourages science, and understanding science should make a person more liberal. And we can all see what the Trump regime has done to science.

Transgressive books, Part 6: Slavery

 The Trump regime really doesn't want to acknowledge that there were ever enslaved people in America. He doesn't want to bring any attention to the people the Founding Fathers owned. When George Floyd was murdered, there was a sense that many Americans were ready to have the serious conversation about one of America's two original sins: slavery, and why slavery has so much to do with most of what's wrong in America to this day. But Donald Trump did everything in his power to bury the issue, blaming Black Lives Matter for the problems caused by white supremacy.

To that end, Trump and many red state politicians are doing whatever they can to remove books on America's sins from public view. They want them removed from classrooms and school libraries. And now, they have instructed the National Park Service to remove books on slavery from bookshelves in park visitor centers.

Better get your own while you can.

My suggestions here are not exhaustive. They are selected from among the books I have read.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is indispensable. Edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the book is divided into short sections, each on an aspect of present day American life, showing direct connections between slavery and the modern day. It occurs to me that we often think of 1620 as the beginning of America (although the Virginia colonies predate that). So strange to think that there were enslaved people in America before the arrival of the Mayflower.

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, edited by James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta. The Confederates in the title are the original secessionists who started the Civil War. The Neo-Confederates are the latter day historical revisionists who invented "the lost cause." As all the included secession documents and related writings show, the reason for the southern states leaving the union was slavery. It was slavery and nothing but. The Neo-Confederates tried, and continue to try, to confuse the issue with arguments about "states' rights" and other things that the original Confederates did not have in mind when they seceded.

Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston. As of the year 1808, the importation of new slaves from Africa was illegal. But smuggling continued. One of the last Africans brought to America in secret was a man named Cudjo Lewis (African name Oluala Kossola). Zora Neale Hurston interviewed him between 1927 and 1931, and this book is the result.

The 272, by Rachel L. Swarns. In Maryland, the Jesuits enslaved many human beings. When Georgetown University was facing financial troubles and possible closure, the Jesuits decided to sell their slaves to owners in Arkansas. This is their story.

We Were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I originally thought that this book would be about the Obama years, but the title was taken by a quotation from a Black legislator in the Reconstruction South. Before the end of Reconstruction and the onset of terror attacks by the KKK, several Blacks were elected to public office, and did a very good job. This is another book that dispels American myths about race and history.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi identifies two forms of anti-Black racism: "segregationist," which is summed up by "Blacks are inherently inferior, and no amount of civilizing will change that"; and "assimilationist," "Blacks can be lifted up by civilizing contact with white people." Racist ideas have long been promulgated by people who materially benefit from racism.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith. This is a wonderful book, and you'll learn a lot. Smith visited several sites associated with slavery to find out how each site presents its history. The locations: Monticello; The Whitney Plantation; Angola Prison (Louisiana State Penitentiary); Blandford (Confederate) Cemetery in Petersburg, VA; Galveston Island, TX (where Juneteenth began); New York City (where there were many slaves in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Read the sad story of the origin of Central Park).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, by Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass is a well-known figure who is more than well worth reading. He wrote more than these two titles, but these are all I have read.

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, by Ty Seidule. Seidule is a military man who was educated in a "segregation academy," a private school organized to shield white children from integrated schools. He also attended Washington and Lee University, where the Lee Chapel was more a shrine for worshipping Robert E. Lee than for worshipping God. When Seidule, who once idolized Lee, discovered that there were streets and buildings around West Point named for Lee and other Confederate generals, he began to wonder why generals who fought against the union were so celebrated. Thus began Seidule's education.

As I say, read these while you can.

Transgressive books, Part 5: Books about Donald Trump

 A digression before I start. Today is a good day to read the Declaration of Independence, with its list of grievances against George III. Donald Trump is guilty of some things on that list.

It's also a good day to read Frederick Douglass's What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

Onward.

I normally don't read current books on politics because the subjects are usually so peripheral. But I can't get enough of books criticizing Donald Trump. I feel like a true patriot when I read them.

My very favorite would seem to some rather frivolous, but Rick Reilly's Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump is full of insight and great stories. The title should read How Trump's Golf Game Reveals His Character. Trump, as many, but not enough people know, is a liar and a cheat. For those familiar with the game of golf, Trump is in dire need of the lessons taught to young golfers in "The First Tee." He's got a very fast golf cart, so that he can get to the fairway or the green faster than anyone else, the better to move his ball to a more advantageous lie. At the time the book was written, Trump claimed to have won eighteen club championships at Mar-a-Lago, for all of which Reilly finds evidence to the contrary. The eighteen club championships story was the Big Lie before the January 6 Big Lie.

If you wonder how Trump got the way he is, a good read is Mary L. Trump's Too Much and Never Enough, a book that describes the atmosphere of Fred Trump's household. It was an emotionally cold and dead place, where nobody offered a bit of comfort when a family member was suffering. (I would add, as an aside, Trump's evil nature is in large part genetic, in my opinion.)

Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could, by Adam Schiff, is an account of Trump's first term, the impeachments, and January 6. The subtitle, unfortunately, is proving prophetic. David Crosby was right to say that it appears to be a long time before the dawn.

Timothy Snyder's very short book, On Tyranny, is a warning about how democracy is lost, and how we ought to behave at tyranny's beginnings. He put the book out, of course, because of Donald Trump's success in bamboozling the electorate.

Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward is a bit tepid, but it does say some things about the workings of Trump's mind, and his advisers' struggles during his first term, to keep his worst impulses in check. I believe that it was Larry Kudlow, of all people, who warned Trump against tariffs. This time around, Trump picked cabinet members who are guaranteed not to place any checks on him.

Then there's All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Monique El-Faizy and Barry Levine. It's a bit of a schizophrenic book, because Barry Levine is a rather tabloid-y writer, whereas Monique El-Faizy is a bit more serious about the plight of women in America. Now, Donald Trump would tell you that a rich, famous, and handsome guy like himself would never need to resort to a prostitute (every other woman willing to have him grab their pussy), but this book does find the way to a single example.

Finally, a book by a great American who Donald Trump has libeled many times, putting his life in danger. It is Anthony Fauci's On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. It was a long and distinguished career, fighting plagues from AIDS to COVID. Fauci is an impossibly kind man, keeping the door open for dialogue with his fiercest critics. Only the last part of the book is about Trump's handling of COVID. A less temperate author would throw up his hands and say, "Who is this douchebag?!" but Fauci merely describes his conversations with Trump and expresses a mild bewilderment. The reader is left to call Trump a douchebag. And I have, many times.

The Trump faithful...

 Brace yourself. I'm going to trash religion again.

We're currently in a very irrational time, and some people are likely to believe anything. Probably too many words have been wasted trying to explain the lasting popularity of Donald Trump, but I can't help myself.

I have written before that one thing Trump voters like is that he, by example, says to them that their worst impulses are actually virtues. That's a consoling message, because everybody has a base impulse or two. But that's not all.

One great mystery that people have tried to explain is how Trump fans continue to believe him even after his promises don't come true.

The smarter people, in 2015 or so, heard Trump promise to replace Obamacare with "something terrific." The smarter people noticed that he didn't say what the plan was, and it was plain that nobody on his team was working on it. Jared was in charge of everything in those early days, but seemed not to be working on anything in particular, other than enriching himself.

That was just one example. In his second campaign, Trump again made promises that nobody who has followed politics at all would believe. He'd lower the price of eggs and all other groceries on Day One, while simultaneously ending the Russia/Ukraine War.

What makes a person believe in the promises of a man who has broken most of his promises in the past?

Of course, there are some things going on that are designed to mislead the credulous: Fox News and other media organizations that cater to people who don't trust any other media; and Trump's continuous stream of lies are told with such conviction that they sound great as long as you don't look beneath the surface.

I would say that the Trump voter has certain habits of mind that match those encouraged by religion. Trump voters maintain their faith in him, even when he doesn't come through. He gets excused the same way God does when he doesn't answer prayers. Ever since religion has existed, there have been people who have elected themselves to explain why an all-powerful, loving God can't make things better than they are. These people are the clergy and the theologians. They specialize in explaining why God doesn't come through, and they have historically come up with some wonderfully convoluted explanations.

In the case of prayer, when any of their explanations for the failure of prayer don't explain anything, God gets his final out: "It wasn't God's will."

Anyway, excusing God for what happens or doesn't happen is a practice many thousands of years old. People are encouraged by religious leaders to think that way. Perhaps that's one explanation of why such seemingly good people, the deeply religious people of the right, continue to excuse Trump's never-ending outrageous behavior.

The behavior is what must be suffered for belief in the miracles he promises.

Transgressive books, Part 4: Books that will rile up the Christian Right

 Iowa's Republican Senator, Joni Ernst, followed up some cruel remarks about health care for the poor with an invitation to accept Jesus Christ, Giver of Eternal Life.

I have long maintained that the Christian Republic that the current Republicans in power are trying to achieve would be as miserable a country as any Islamic Republic. Thank you, Senator Ernst, for the preview.

The purpose of this particular essay is not to convert the reader to atheism (I've attempted that before). But for the reader so inclined, I have a list of books that will enrage the religious right, and may well bother some on the religious left.

I have always thought that, once one concludes that there is no God, there's not a lot more to say. Our bodies and minds switch off forever, and there's no soul to travel upwards or downwards. That said, I find that I have read quite a number of books on atheism. Here's a sampling.

Breaking the Spell, by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett wonders why humans are religious if, as he believes, religion confers no biological advantage to a person. It's a highly readable book, containing plenty of science and philosophy.

Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. "I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue." See also Russell's book Religion and Science.

The Missionary Position, by Christopher Hitchens. The subtitle of this book is Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has many problems with Mother Teresa, one being that her stance against birth control is at least partly responsible for the suffering of the people she claims to be helping. There's lots more.

The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens. This is a nice, big fat collection of essays on atheism. Daniel Dennett, whom we've met before, writes a thank you to the doctors, nurses, and medical personnel he thinks are more worthy of thanks than God when there's a good medical outcome. Another essay is simply a list of the names of gods who are no longer worshipped, or even remembered by most people.

Faith vs. Fact, by Jerry A. Coyne. An evolutionary biologist, Coyne points out that science and religion are incompatible. Many people put their faith in both, but I agree with him that that is only possible to those who do not examine their own beliefs seriously. Another great book by Coyne is Why Evolution Is True. I fully recommend both books as classics.

The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg. This one assumes that the reader is already an atheist, but is struggling with the big questions. He attempts to answer the big questions scientifically.

Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists: by Dan Barker. The title speaks for itself. It's a journey many of us atheists have gone through.

The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible, By Ruth Hurmence Green. This is a good companion to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, but delves more deeply into the text of the Bible and how it describes the world.

Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, by Michel Onfray. Onfray takes on the big three monotheist religions. For Michel Onfray, the three big monotheistic religions amount to a collective misguided attempt to hide the fact of our own mortality from ourselves by creating a fictional paradise, and thereby trading away the pleasures of the one life we really have.

From Housewife to Heretic, by Sonia Johnson. This one isn't an atheistic tract, but the story of a Mormon woman who was excommunicated for campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. This is a good book to read when our present democracy is threatened by a severely patriarchal version of Christianity.

OK, I've probably bored the reader enough, but there's lots more where these books come from. (If you go to your local Barnes & Noble, you'll find shelf after shelf on Christianity, other religions, and even Christian fiction, subdivided down as far as Amish fiction. But there's only a shelf or two of books on philosophy, and maybe a dozen or so books on atheism. You've got to go out of your way to find them. After all, they're not the kind of "good news" most people are looking for.)

Transgressive books, part 3: Some Founding Fathers' religious beliefs

 If Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene get their way, the United States will be a sort of Christian Iran. There are many on the political and Christian right who are pushing for this. They have a bogus historian by the name of David Barton whose mission it is to prove that the Founding Fathers wanted a Christian nation. Aside from there being nothing about religion in the main body of the Constitution, and despite the First Amendment's proscription of a state religion, Barton labors on, misrepresenting historical documents to prove his point.

Should the people who want the United States to be a Christian nation get their wish, some books by the Founding Fathers will not be welcome. They might be banned altogether.

The Eighteenth Century was a time of advances in science, and many of the era's thinkers were having second thoughts about the Bible. I present here the views of three of them: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine.

In his autobiography, Franklin presented a recipe for successful living, which he called the Thirteen Virtues. Only one of those virtues comes anywhere close to religious advocacy.

13. Humility: Emulate Jesus and Socrates.

Nothing about worship. Franklin admired Jesus, but that was as far as it went. The Autobiography, by the way, is a good read, and he recounts some of his dealings with people more religious than he: the Quakers and the Dunkers, for two. The Dunkers are not well known these days, perhaps because they didn't leave any literature behind. In Franklin's time, the Dunkers were upset that non-Dunkers accused them of beliefs they didn't hold. Franklin asked one of them why, then, didn't they publish the things they believed. The answer was interesting and surprising. In their view, God occasionally revealed some truth to them; but later revelation sometimes revealed a new truth that superseded the old truth. They didn't write anything down because they didn't want future generations to be hobbled by old beliefs should God reveal something new. If only more religions were this flexible.

Thomas Jefferson, like Franklin, was a man of science, who also admired Jesus, but did not believe in his miracles. Jefferson looked at the four Gospels, and did his best to cobble together the story in chronological order. He left out all the miracles. So, I also recommend to you The Jefferson Bible. (As a personal aside, I found that reading the whole Jesus and his Disciples story chronologically made the group sound like a paranoid cult. Your mileage may vary.)

Finally, I recommend Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, which was never taught in any of my years in public school. Parents would have fussed. Thomas Paine was a Deist, and was no fan of the Bible, Old Testament or New.

The first chapter of The Age of Reason sets forth Paine's religious beliefs. The description is short and simple.

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

"I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

"But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them."

The things Paine did not believe in fill the rest of the book.

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of."

I have to admit to you that Paine's last book was not well-received, even in the Age of Enlightenment. I believe that his funeral was attended by only one person. But I think The Age of Reason is a book that has a lot to recommend it.

So, three more transgressive books. Read them before they're banned.

Transgressive books, Part 2: James Baldwin's essays

 In Part 1 of this series, I said that James Baldwin's essays got me started reading Black literature. That's probably not strictly true. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye probably started the ball rolling, but Baldwin's essays had an electric quality that gave them what is my finest accolade: they are thrilling.

So, here's a list of his collections of essays with a couple of comments on each. It's been a long time since I've read most of these, so I'm getting some information from the blurbs on the covers, and some from the tables of contents.

Nobody Knows My Name. Race relations, naturally, but some literary criticism, too. I've read some Faulkner novels and loved them, but his collected letters put me off him, especially his letters urging the country to take integration slowly. Baldwin's essay on Faulkner's views is a highlight of this volume. There are also essays on Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.

Notes of a Native Son. There is a good deal of autobiography in this collection. Baldwin's upbringing in Harlem, his relationship with his father, and his expatriate life in Paris. Also, thoughts on protest novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular.

The Fire Next Time. The Atlantic called this book "So eloquent in its passion and so scorching in its candor that it is bound to unsettle any reader." Thrill him, in my case.

No Name in the Street. This one was written in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination and the ensuing race riots.

The Devil Finds Work. Baldwin criticizes films. Birth of a Nation. In the Heat of the Night. In This, Our Life. The Defiant Ones. And the unforgettable evisceration of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Lawrence of Arabia. And more.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Baldwin investigates the Atlanta child murders.

Read some of these. If you're a person who is able to be reached, you'll be reached. 

Transgressive books, Part 1

 In these days of book banning, the politicians on the right do not want people exploring history or literature that doesn't cast a rosy glow on America, or rather on white America.

When I started college, I didn't have the intellectual background I needed for many of my courses. As luck would have it, though, I worked in the college bookstore and was exposed to all of the books required for all the courses. Some political science courses dealt with Black politics, then being the age of rebellion against Jim Crow. It was the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his assassination. It was also the time of authors who were considered more "militant." The books required for political science courses on Black topics seemed angry and forbidding to me. It was too soon for me to try reading them.

Years later, I read all of James Baldwin's essay collections, and his writing was electrifying. That's a story for another post, but Baldwin got me started reading Black literature.

The book I want to talk about here is an anthology collected by David Levering Lewis, called The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. I would say that the average white reader might think that all Blacks are on the same page, that they all think in lock step. The Reader shows just how diverse opinions and writing styles among the Harlem literati were. It also demonstrates that, where American literature is concerned, much of the riches are in Black books.

One of the many debates among Black intellectuals concerned just what Black art should be. Should the Black American intellectual emulate white artists and their European style? Or should Black artists assert their Africanness in their art? Or should they do something altogether different? That's just one debate that was going on in Harlem at the time.

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, should you choose to read it, will put you into the middle of those debates and show you the great diversity of Black art.

These riches are something people like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis likely don't know about and couldn't understand. And this book is the kind of collection that your Eurocentric white supremacists will find inconvenient as they peddle the all-white history of the United States.

Trump's will

 Some voters get excited when somebody who's "not a politician" runs for office. It's refreshing to hear someone say that solutions to their problems are easy, or that "government can be run like a business." Normal politicians are very careful what they say, lest they lose voters. So they strike voters as liars, or at least tricky.

But people like Donald Trump make grandiose promises. Everything will be simple. After a while, even some Trump voters will have noticed that he hasn't delivered on much. But there is a subset of Trump voters who will never learn.

Recently, a Trump voter who was fired by DOGE wrote an open letter to Trump on Facebook. It included the following:

    "Each time I voted for you, it was because I knew you'd make things right and you'd fix the wrongs. I'm counting on you to make this right too."

There is a note of childlike faith in the letter. Surely somebody made a mistake, and when Trump finds out, he'll fix it.

Indeed, there are many voters who have unquestioned faith in Trump, like faith in a god. I think I'm correct in predicting that this plea to the president will not end successfully. As with the attitude that praying to God is effective, some Trump voters have come to believe that Trump loves them, and will care for them. This letter to Trump is a prayer.

People with a strong faith in God continue to believe, even if their prayers don't get the result they were hoping for. They make excuses for God. "Maybe I didn't have enough faith." "God has a plan I don't understand." The final copout is that "It's not God's will."

The simple answer is that their prayers don't work because God doesn't exist. In the case of Trump, at least he exists. The problem is that he doesn't love his flock. Getting this woman her job back is, simply, not Trump's will.

The DOGE wrecking crew's methods

 DOGE is advertised as an entity dedicated to making government more efficient. Their first attempt to "cut out the dead wood" is to fire any Civil Servant still under a probationary classification, i.e., all the newest hires. I have thought of their methods as analogous to a brain surgeon using a hatchet.

A person dear to me has just been fired by the DOGE vandals. She had been at her job for nine years, but in a sad example of bad timing, she had decided to leave her nonprofit and enter the Civil Service. So, this senior person with many years of experience got caught in the "probationary" trap.

Instead of the brain surgeon simile, she likened DOGE's method to "a complex math proof taking up a whole blackboard; you ask someone for the solution, and they proceed to simply erase the entire board and walk away."

Elon Musk should not have this kind (or any kind) of power over the federal government. I wish the United States had a mechanism for calling "no confidence" votes. I think civil servants would show up in droves. The Trump regime is only getting away with this stuff because the majority in both houses of Congress are either complicit or cowardly.

Anti-Christian bias? Where? What are we talking about?

 When our founders were writing the Constitution, they made some good choices, some bad. The First Amendment was one of the best things they did.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....

America lucked out when that amendment was written. There were several competing religious beliefs at large in the colonies. The two largest were the Church of England (Anglicans), which held a majority in the colony of Virginia, and the Puritans of Massachusetts. In Britain, the Church of England was officially upheld by the government. The Puritans were persecuted by the Anglicans because their beliefs ran counter to the official dogma.

So, the Puritans went off to find someplace where they could worship unmolested. They chose the Netherlands, where the government was more tolerant of religious differences. It turned out, though, that the Puritans found the Netherlands a bit too tolerant. (When I was in first grade, the teacher told us that the Puritans left Holland because their children were learning Dutch, but I suspect that it was more that their children were learning dangerously liberal ideas.)

So, the Puritans set off on the Mayflower, and started their own colony in Massachusetts. They found this ideal: they knew what the true religion was; they could live together in peace, because, they thought, they all agreed about what the truth was. And other religions need not apply in their colony. There was plenty of room elsewhere.

Fun fact: The Anglicans sent missionaries to Massachusetts to try to lure the Puritans back to Christianity.

But, in the case of religion, there are always disagreements, and that was true in Massachusetts. The Puritans tried to shut upstart religions down. They had no time for what we would call religious freedom, except for themselves.

By the time of the writing of the Constitution, many things had changed. The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment had created a different religious idea that caught on among many of our founders: Deism. Benjamin Franklin was a Deist. Thomas Paine was, famously, a Deist. Aside from the Deists, Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, and Catholics, there were small congregations of evangelicals. The evangelicals, rightly, feared persecution by the larger religious groups, and so they formed a coalition with the Deists, and that is how we got the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

I will stop for a moment and repeat what I have often said: The separation of church and state is the only guarantee of religious freedom. Evangelicals understood this in the Eighteenth Century.

Evangelical religions are much stronger nowadays, and they seem to have forgotten that the Establishment Clause protects the freedom of religion for large churches and small.

----------------------------------

If I seem to have digressed from the title of this piece, I'll dive in now.

In what way, or ways, is there anti-Christian bias in 21st Century America? I look around and see a country where Christians go to church on Sunday without any fear of interruption by government authorities. Churches are not taxed. Churches go about their various activities in the community in perfect freedom from government. Any church can display a nativity scene on its property at Christmas time. Churches can advertise their beliefs with crosses and brightly lit signs. Nobody stops them. The churches are considered to be good for the communities they are in. Individual worshippers may also display their faith on Christian holidays, or at any time of the year in their own yards.

Now, what about the prohibition of religious symbols on public property? Many people will tell you that that is an example of anti-Christian bias. No. That is not the government interfering with your religious rights. That is the government protecting your, and everybody else's, religious rights by not choosing one religion over another. That is the government protecting religious freedom.

No, I'm afraid that what these Christians are looking for is the kind of religious "freedom" the Puritans practiced. Their claim of anti-Christian bias is a stratagem for establishing Christian rule. That is un-American.

Bummed out in Ocean City, Maryland

 I'd heard through the birding grapevine that there were surf scoters to be seen at Ocean City Inlet. I'd never seen any of those, and I fancied some me time by the ocean. Long story short, I saw the scoters, some loons, oystercatchers, sanderlings, mergansers and more. I couldn't stay long; I thought the strong wind would knock me over.

I had to drive a few blocks up the main drag before I could head back inland. This strip is filled with hotels and motels, and I noticed that several hotels had signs saying, "Stop the wind turbines!"

That's what bummed me out. Ocean City is a big tourist draw in the summer, and has been for a long time. But, oh! Those wind turbines! So unsightly! 

Do the hotel owners really think that the sight of wind turbines will keep people from coming? I don't. I've harped on this subject before. The rich folks who own the coal mines, oil fields, and factories have never been concerned with the ugliness of their smokestacks, refineries, and slag heaps which, aside from their ugliness are unhealthy. Why don't the rich care? Because they don't have to live near the blots they put on the landscape. But the poor do, and they suffer.

But with wind turbines, the rich have to see them from their summer beach getaways. Ocean City, and the industrialists, need to grow up. They should see these windmills as a source of pride, as their part in slowing down climate change. I would think they'd realize that the current era's global warming-driven superstorms are worse for a beach town than the sight of windmills.

And speaking of unsightliness, Ocean City is a blight in its own right, as are many beach cities on the east coast.

Campaign promises, kept and not kept

 President Lump has made some of the most over-the-top impossible promises ever made by any candidate. While criticizing the inflation during the Biden administration, he promised to get those grocery prices down pronto when he assumed office. He walked that promise back before his inauguration. As for solving the problems in Ukraine and the Middle East, he promised to do it quickly. He is the deal maker, after all.

Whether any of these positive promises are ever fulfilled, we will have to wait until he fulfills his negative ones to find out. And I have to report that he is without peer in doling out punishment to his political enemies, and in taking actions that will solidify his power, such as firing several inspectors general whom he thought might have some backbone.

But the bug that prompted this little outburst of mine is his discontinuance of a security detail for Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci, as anyone with any scientific understanding and moral character knows, is a national treasure. In addition to having dealt with several disease outbreaks, Dr. Fauci has proved, in his writing, that he is one of the least judgmental people you'll ever meet. In his book, On Call, when he discusses his interactions with President Lump during the COVID pandemic, he does not express anger at the president, as I would have. If I had written such a book, the word egregious would have been used at least once. But Dr. Fauci simply describes Lump's words and actions, and expresses mild puzzlement.

But President Lump, during his first term, managed to tar Dr. Fauci with a brush that caused some of the MAGAs to make threats against him, and to say he belongs in prison. The president has not only discontinued Dr. Fauci's protection, but done so in a very public manner, which may put him in even more danger from Lump's credulous followers. Lump's action is petty and vengeful, which is nothing new for him.

The Supreme Court, to its eternal glory, has ruled that a president is shielded from prosecution for any crime committed as part of his presidential duties. I suppose that the president's fulfillment of his campaign promise to punish his political enemies is covered under that ruling.

To President Plump on the occasion of his second inauguration

Warning: This letter includes sexist language, but keep in mind that I am trying to communicate with Mr. Clump at his own level.

Dear Sir*,

I know you like to speak in superlatives, especially about yourself and your accomplishments. It must be difficult overcoming the knowledge that you're pretty much a loser. Of course, I have to be fair and note that you have won two out of the three elections you've been in. Two out of three. Only you could get superlatives out of an imperfect record.

Let's talk about election number one: You won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, a candidate even many Democrats don't like very much. You lost the popular vote, but I have to admit that, according to America's wackadoodle election rules, you won fair and square.

In election number two, you lost to a candidate called Sleepy Joe. (If you didn't want to lose to Sleepy Joe, you shouldn't have given him that nickname. Losing to Sleepy Joe looks bad, don't you think?) It hurt you so bad losing that election (any election loss goes against the mythology you've created about yourself being the best at everything in the world), that you denied losing and launched a coup attempt that was unsuccessful. I mean, congrats on the poop offensive in the House of Representatives.

In election number three, hallelujah! You finally won the popular vote! Yee haw! But you didn't win it in any superlative-generating way. There being more than two candidates in the race, you didn't even get 50% of the vote. But I suppose that, in your mind, you won in a landslide. Otherwise, I don't suppose you could be as happy as you want to be.

OK, now here's the interesting part, Two out of three elections won, more or less. One loss to Sleepy Joe. Now, we know that you are the best at everything you try, so two out of three isn't that good. And really, how can you feel that good about the two wins? After all, you won against girls. That wouldn't get you much praise on the playground.

Congratulations!

Your friend, Monty

* p.s., I called you Sir because I know you always say people you talk to call you Sir, and I don't like to add unnecessarily to your lie count.

p.g.