Book Review: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, by Mark Follman

Quite by happenstance, I checked this book out of my local library (in TN) on the morning of March 27, 2023. The library wasn’t going out of its way to grab my attention: the book was shelved spine-out (in other words not displayed cover-out) in the “new nonfiction” section. The subtitle struck me: who is it that has a “mission to stop mass shootings in America”? I was aware of numerous groups — e.g. Sandy Hook Promise, Moms Demand Action — which to my knowledge were working the gun-control issue very hard, but however worthwhile their aims, they seemed to be political non-starters in my conservative state. Would this book inform me of a different approach, maybe something with political hope?

Later that same day came the news of another mass shooting, this one at the Covenant School in Nashville, the capital of my conservative state. As I write this review, a month has passed and with it the bizarre parade of horrified reactions from citizens mixed in with the shrugs of politicians saying that nothing can be done. The state legislature wrapped up its work, pointedly refusing to act on an “order of protection” proposal from Governor Bill Lee, but Lee has responded by calling a special session to focus on the issue of guns and public safety.

So it was with heightened interest that I read this book, the “missionaries” of which turned out to be practitioners of a field known as “behavioral threat assessment.” Begun by those within such law enforcement agencies as the Secret Service and the FBI trying to guard against assassinations and acts of domestic terrorism, the research soon got the attention of individuals trying to understand the motivations of school shooters. Regardless of the high public profile of the shootings, the work of those studying them was, in the words of author Follman, “an obscure professional niche, virtually unknown to the general public.” Furthermore, the nature of the field’s case studies “made clear how little the public understood about the behaviors and conditions that led to mass shootings,” which were concerningly on the rise, defying a general decline in the overall US murder rate.

Follman — a national affairs editor for Mother Jones whose presumably progressive views are studiously absent in this admirably journalistic work — follows the field from its inception to the present as it followed in the wake of America’s Columbines, Virginia Techs, and Newtowns in a grim effort to derive lessons of scientific value from those horrific events.

If anything, Follman goes overboard in keeping the broader gun issue out of the book: gun control gets scant mention as something that Australia and Great Britain have done in order to make American-style shootings rare. The reason for this, as Follman gives it, is that “hardly ever during my years of reporting did I observe threat assessment professionals openly discussing gun regulations, an apparent third rail in a field populated by a wide range of political views, often conservative ones. … They know that possession of a firearm is not a meaningful predictor of targeted violence, but they also know that readily available semiautomatic weapons and large-capacity ammunition devices make attacks easy and highly lethal.”

In other words, it’s as if to say, “Nope, can’t do guns. What else we got?”

For starters, profiling is out, because it has no predictive value in determining an individual intent on massively violent action. Follman writes, “Countless young white males partake in graphically violent entertainment, are interested in guns, get angry about problems with school, jobs or personal relationships, and struggle with mental health challenges. But the number among them who might aspire to commit mass murder es exceedingly small.”

Mental illness as a root cause comes in for examination that is particularly important especially given the hand-waving by gun advocates that “mental illness pulls the trigger” (Fellman calls it “the most formidable bogeyman of mass shootings.”) The findings of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) are striking: only a quarter of the shooters studied “were known to have been professionally diagnosed with a mental illness of any kind prior to their attacks. Just three cases involved a psychotic disorder;” of the remaining majority, “many of them clearly would not have qualified for a clinical diagnosis of mental illness” [Fellman’s emphasis]. Insofar as mental illness was involved, it seems to have been an “exacerbating rather than a root cause.”

While this may seem to leave us with nothing of predictive value, behavioral threat experts have over the years sharpened their understanding of the kinds of signals that shooters are known to have sent out or given off, in connection with which the experts have identified something they call “the bystander problem”: the signals were there, but they were ignored. Fellman writes, “People around the shooters, the team found, had notified law enforcement in fewer than half the cases — despite the fact that, in every single case, at least one person in proximity to the shooter had noticed a concerning behavior, and that in many cases, multiple people had noticed.” The shooters, in large part, are neither “alien” nor “undetectable.” According to one of Fellman’s sources, “They have jobs. They’re in school. They do talk to people. They come from all walks of life.”

An important and noticeable pattern appeared: to people close to them, the shooters both leaked their intentions and denied them. But who knows this? Nicole Hockley, the mother of Sandy Hook victim Dylan, asked the BAU why they weren’t doing more to share the results of their research. As Fellman puts it, “In the broadest sense the field had its own version of the silo problem. It was rooted in a certain pragmatism …: threat assessment data are complex and nuanced, and case work requires rigorous training to ensure its fairness and efficacy. However, Hockley had raised a strong and ultimately superseding point, … “If we’re going to catch these early, then we also need the people who are often even better positioned to see the warning behaviors.”

Part of the problem here is that family members in particular may let blind love override any sense that there is danger present. But the BAU concludes that this makes it that much more important to publicize their research: “These are the people who may actually be the most in need of the information about what to look for and where to seek help.” One of BAU’s “guiding principles” has become, “What good is research if it’s not usable?”

It seems clear that the tallest order at this point is to get the word out there. Forensic psychologist Russell Palarea, former president of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, says that “far too few communities even know about the work.…We need to get more people to understand what this work is, that it’s a problem-solving model using components mostly already in place, and that it needs to be community-based.” On the subject of pushback from the ACLU, ever-vigilant for infringements on individual rights, Palarea says that such criticism is off track: “We’re trying to help people who are struggling, before they get arrested or hurt themselves or others. There’s no downside to that.”

In fact, threat-assessment practitioners place a supreme value on public accountability, which as Follman says is “a perspective rooted in ethical pragmatism that could help solve the long-running bystander problem.” One such practitioner, Nebraskan Mario Scalar, says “It’s really important to be sensitive to feelings of vulnerability in people who come forward, their concerns about their own personal safety and privacy. … We have to show by our actions that we aren’t overreacting to these reports but actually tying to get struggling people help, rather than punishing them.”

The book reveals a field determined to find appropriate solutions that, it is hoped, can become known widely enough to be effective. Given the importance and timeliness of this book’s information, I would like to see it on the bookstand of every TN legislator with a deadline of whenever the special session is. They do have bookstands, don’t they?

 

Book Review: The Big Music, by Kirsty Gunn

One of my favorite literary truisms is this: you can render words as music, but you can't render music as words. It has a corollary: if you doubt the veracity of the latter clause, by all means give it a try -- the effort confirms the impossibility.

I've tried it, numerous times (e.g. a novel called Blue Oboe). This book tries it and serves as further testimony to the impossibility of rendering music as words. As such, then, it is a failure -- as it has to be. But it fails delightfully, suggestively, and informatively. Its failure is the failure of everyone to live forever. Yet live we do.

The Big Music is the English translation of the Gaelic term (ceòl mòr) for the "classical" solo music of the Great Highland Bagpipe. It is absolutely and completely a thing apart in Western music: although it can loosely be described as a theme with variations, it lacks the propulsion of a "beat." Yes, some variations do come close to allowing you to tap your foot to them, but even those defer to the piper's internal sense of how that rhythm can be manipulated to keep with the theme of the overall piece -- a lament, a salutation, a challenge to fight. In other words, it apotheosizes the musical principle of rubato applied to the telephone game: play it the way your teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher -- and so on back to the far misty mountains -- felt it.

This novel attempts to render in words this kind of music. It takes the organizing principle of this music -- the statement of a theme and its embellishment -- as its own. The reader sees this at the very outset: the table of contents shows it explicitly.

The result is easily summarized. The fact that it includes spoilers is of no consequence, any more than looking at a written piece of music spoils its actual performance.

The theme is the flight of a dying (demented?) old man up a Highland hillside, with his baby grand-daughter in his arms, in a deranged effort to reach a remote hideaway where he can conclude the composition of a piece of Big Music, a "lament to himself." It is obvious that the baby's life is in the balance, but she is rescued and returned to her mother and grandmother by the prompt actions of the baby's step-grandfather. Subsequent variations broaden the scope of the story. First, the family background is pushed out and back to previous generations, so that -- to give just one example -- the demented old man's fraught relationship with his own father is brought into play (the father is the son's bagpipe teacher, but his pedagogical methods include the infliction of corporal punishment; the son leaves "never to return," but return he does -- after making a success of himself in London -- but only at the funeral of the father, in a kind of inverse (perverse?) retelling of the parable of the prodigal. Next is the elaboration of piping culture itself: the father operates a piping school in the remote Highland house where the entire story takes place; it achieves some prominence in the promotion of Big Music. Finally there's the story of the Highlands, particularly how the family at the center of the story manages to hold on through the Clearances.

Of course this easy summary leaves out a whole, whole, whole lot. Which is one reason why, if any of this piques your interest -- particularly if Scotland or bagpiping interest you (a significant portion of the book is given over to the minutiae of piping) -- you should read the book.

I myself was drawn by the thought of the challenge of rendering "Big Music" as a novel. My own conclusion is that, with its broadening-out narrative, it would better be entitled "Nested Parentheses." Further, in the telling, the successive embellishments overwhelm rather than highlight the theme, which sometimes in the telling can barely be heard. Those embellishments themselves contain too much interest and variety to simulate Big Music, which is hypnotic in its repetitiveness.  

The book, then, is both a noble effort and a complete failure, but in the sense that Roland in the Pass of Roncesvalles succeeded even as he failed. Failure is irrelevant when the effort is redeemed by a legacy.

And the legacy of this book is -- should be -- a deeper understanding of many things: bagpiping and its culture, the history of Scotland and the Highlands, and even such very broad subjects as social structure, with its standardized family, gender, and class roles. Having read some commentary on the book (including an article in the Scottish Literary Review), I would advocate something that so far no one has mentioned: that the book should be read as a symbolic fable of Scottish independence: deep roots are established (by way of piping culture), but economic and social forces spin succeeding generations far away -- even as far as New Zealand, where author Gunn is from. Nonetheless, the pull of identity is so strong that even those -- like the baby-snatchng protagonist -- sucked into the British  sphere (as represented by London) return to their highland home to try to figure out a way forward that is manifestly Scottish. After all, doesn't the big music always, always return to the original theme? Some say that this means the "tune" is cyclical and thus never-ending. I say rather that the tune returns to itself and ends where it began, only all the wiser for its experience.

Book Review: The 1619 Project

The temptation with this book is to wade into the controversy it has stirred and try to knock down or reinforce those tangential arguments that have sprung up from its seeds. A salient example is whether or not the Dunsmore Proclamation -- issued by the British governor of Virginia and promising freedom to slaves who would escape their masters and fight as British soldiers -- was or was not a casus belli for Patriots. That is, did the prospect of Black slaves literally shaking off their chains provide the jolt that blasted into war with Britain the American colonists figuratively shaking off theirs?

Much as I'd love to get into this, this cat is going to pass on the catnip. Such niche controversies are irresistible to historians, the public intellectuals who feed off of them, and so on waaay down the idea chain to the bottom-feeding politicians who have cult minds to feed. But, no matter their relative importance, they tend to take on lives of their own and in doing so not only overshadow, but -- worse -- substitute for the thing itself: the far-ranging "project" that this book represents. 

It feels very much like the controversy around the Dunsmore Proclamation -- which appears right away in the book, in its first essay ("Democracy" by Nikole Hannah-Jones) -- got people sidetracked to the point that they didn't read the whole book. It became the gravity-sucking black hole for the 1619 project as a whole, such that judgment rendered on Dunsmore became judgment rendered on 1619.

This produces a toxic effect well known in the book review world, especially when the book impinges on the political sphere: the loudest judges of a book are most often those who haven't read the book.

A book must be judged as a whole. If a book is on trial, the only jury of peers possible is comprised of those who have read the entire thing. I understand that this is something of a technical point, but it is a cardinal one. It is why public libraries, when considering a challenge to a book that it owns, insist that the challenger check off the box on the challenge form that says "I read the whole book." If that box is not checked, the challenge goes nowhere, and rightfully so.

(The worst offenders against this rule are probably politicians. In my own state of Tennessee they've recently been doing it a lot. Pulling isolated passages out of a book to shock the unwary public is a fool's game that's been getting so much play in TN that the playing field is now a sea of mud. Good for slinging maybe; not so much for clear thinking.)

In the case of The 1619 Project, all of the controversial hoopla obscures the solid weight of the series of essays that comprise it, each one given a chapter and focusing on subjects such as capitalism, citizenship, self-defense, punishment, inheritance, music, healthcare, and progress. The content of the essays generally mixes history with current, statistics-driven economics, criminal justice, and sociology. Taken together, the essays present a family portrait of American Exceptionalism: You Can't Say This Shit About Anybody Else in the Whole Wide World. If I were asked what makes the USA exceptional, I would answer, "Read this book and find out."

So many Americans don't want to look at that entire family portrait. They want to pull the Dunsmore Proclamation out and fuss about it. In so doing they are like Holocaust Deniers who focus on a mere sliver of fact and refuse to consider the entire mountain of evidence.

There is much more to be said about this important book and about how it should prompt a serious discussion of race-based reparations, but how -- for political reasons -- it probably won't. It all makes me lament that I'm not a secondary school American history teacher. I would focus on the core ideals that make for American citizenship. In doing so I would explore how those ideals have been realized -- or not. I would emphasize not the Civil War, but Reconstruction, and show how this was an opportunity to re-start the American Project, how it succeeded up to a point, only ultimately to fail, abandoned by white America. And then again how the Civil Rights movement returned the civic struggle to where it had been cut off, succeeded up to a point, but, oh no, is it failing again? Did it ever really have a chance to get to the heart of these civic matters, which is the lives of people impacted by the economic and cultural forces of capitalism, punishment, inheritance, and healthcare? So where are we, students -- today -- with American Exceptionalism?

It is those questions -- the questions of now -- that The 1619 Project forces us to consider. With its depth and breadth, its comprehensiveness meets the challenge of the time. If only its comprehensiveness will be allowed to be shown. This is very much a live question in "the land of the free," where political forces actively combine to suppress the circulation of the book's ideas, primarily in the context of secondary education, but -- even -- also in publicly-funded higher education.

One possible reason for the white-hate of hysterical blindness is that the book ends -- in a chapter entitled "Justice" -- with a call for reparations. I would guess that the percentage of white Americans supporting reparations today is about the same as the percentage of white Americans who favored emancipation and racial equality in the 1830's: in other words, the single digits. No matter. That will change. More and more white Americans will ground their understanding of American Exceptionalism on the realization that American-style racism is not generic "racism" but a particular disease with particular manifestations that must be fought with specific remedies, that American-style capitalism requires (has always required) governmental intervention if it is to be made humane, and that the "blue line flag" is an out-and-out representation of American police-state, race-war fascism.

But first The 1619 Project's ideas must get out there. And it is to stifle and slander its ideas that have become top priorities of conservative America, which more and more often avowedly and explicitly embraces the anti-democracy that resides at its conservative heart. 

American democracy is still a Future Project. The 1619 Project  will help get us there. It is only a start, particularly concerning reparations -- an exceedingly complex and challenging political issue that, after all, only occupies the final chapter of the book. I only wish I could live long enough to see the Solomonic leader emerge who can solve that issue successfully, but I doubt I can hold on until 2119.

Book Review: Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia

This coffee table artifact seems to have been engineered more as a flotation device for daydreamers than as a book for readers. It is illustrated with a beautiful, effective mix of landscapes painted and photographed, along with reproductions of historic print media (e.g. popular press lithographs, ballad sheets). However, more noticeable to the actual, would-be reader is that, heavily illustrated though the book is, it is even more heavily sidebarred -- to the point that the sidebars occupy or dominate page-spreads, sometimes for pages at a time, leaving the narrative to trickle through, or worse, be dammed. With as many resulting reservoirs of information as there are in this book, you'd think TVA was behind it rather than the UNC Press.

It would be interesting to see how the main narrative -- or, to use the book's language, the "carrying stream" of meaning for the book -- would read if it were read straight through, without the flood control program, as a Book I, leaving the rest to be collected as Book II (The Sidebars).

Much of Book II is taken up with transcriptions of interviews gathered by authors Ritchie (hers is the Caledonian voice of NPR's Thistle and Shamrock) and Orr (college president and organizer of an annual "gathering" of Appalachian musicians in Swannanoa, NC). These interviews deserve better than to be flotsam for interpretation, such as is the result of this book's layout. These are the voices of the thing itself --   Jeannie Ritchie, for example, fount of Cumberland folksong, comes across as entirely and refreshingly open and curious as she is herself accomplished and creative; or Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons, who have reclaimed an African-American banjo tradition. The thing itself shows itself to be as astoundingly inventive and versatile as Doc Watson -- whose musicianship encompassed multitudes -- as it is faithful to a generational inheritance, like seventh generation storyteller Sheila Kay Adams from Sodom Laurel, NC. It takes what it can from what it can get and then gives it back; it keeps, but it also transforms.

It isn't too much of a stretch to say that one's ears perk up for these voices, which speak out of their own lived experiences in music (mostly). And what an array of participants: not only Appalachian farm family scions (as it were) like Ritchie and Adams, but also outsiders both Southern (fiddlencyclopedist Alan Jabbour, a classically trained violinist of Syrian ancestry from Jacksonville, FL) and Not (any of the Seegers). And then there are the Old Country counterparts, some of whom were fired with interest in their own regional musical traditions after hearing it first in its Appalachian echo.

For the most part these voices don't invoke labels. Everyone is folk; everyone is part of the carrying stream. The labels are the job of Book I (The Narrative), which gives an interpretation of the conveyance of music from the Britannic Isles, disguised as "Scotland and Ulster," to North America, disguised as "Appalachia." Along the way others were involved, primarily the Irish, Welsh, English, Germans, native Americans, African-Americans (never the French except back when they were known as troubadours, and that was actually before France, so it's okay), but only in a tangential way that did not sully the bloodline of the actual carrying stream, whose headwaters lie somewhere in Aberdeenshire and flow to Alpharetta, GA (among others) by way of Glasgow, Ulster, Philadelphia, and Sodom Laurel.

But wait a minute. Alpharetta is not in the "north Georgia mountains" as p. 212 would have you believe. Alpharetta is an Atlanta suburb in the radial web that encompasses Marietta. Fiddlin' John Carson country. There's hills enough, and once upon a time you could've been a hillbilly there, but it's not the mountains.

The Scots-Irish did go down there, too, of course. They didn't all wind up in the mountain fastnesses digging ginseng. Some of them even disappeared into urbanity, establishing churches and colleges, but for the most part theirs was a rural, farm life. And in general, back in "settlement" times, what farmers wanted down in Georgia was land, some of it Indian land. If only there was some way to get it. Turns out there was: just clear out the Indians. Just do some Highland Clearances, but over in America, with the Scots-Irish as the lairds and the Indians as the crofters. But who's going to get it done? Why, ol' Scots-Irish Andy Jackson, who turns up in the book with all of one mention as "the seventh president."

But why speak of such depressing times when we have such enlivening music to consider? Well, for one thing there was a documented surge of land-hungry settlers across the frontier between 17oh say60 and 18make it25 who refused to settle for less than the clearing out the native Americans, and these settlers were Scots-Irish, in considerable part.

Which this book admits in a sotto voce sort of way on p. 217: The Scots-Irish, "themselves displaced and migratory over generations … in turn encroached into native lands in the southern Appalachians. They also gained sustenance skills from the Cherokee, circle dance moves and other steps to blend with their own musical traditions, and sometimes life partners. Whether they felt empathy as the Cherokee were deported from their ancestral homelands, we can only imagine." 

We can only imagine?????? Isn't that what, ahem, history is for? The interpretive job of saying not only did the so-called Scots-Irish not care what happened to the Cherokee, they actively militated for the eviction of the native population? Do we not want to follow the Scots-Irish across the Lower South to Texas, feeding their land hunger with African slaves? Apparently not. We want to keep them safely in the mountains (now including Alpharetta), where p. 223 says slaveholding "was much less common than in the eastern coastal areas of the South" -- in other words, no big deal.

Moreover, p. 223 goes on to say, "the Appalachians provided a pathway in the slave's escape to freedom."  Mirabile dictu! The mountains have agency!  No human intervention necessary!

No way you can pin anything as nefarious as race-based chattel slavery on those wily Scots-Irish. They even acquire further innocence-by-association because their kissin' confreres the Highland Scots married into leading Cherokee families often enough to be dignified in these pages as "Scoto-Cherokee" chiefs.

You could write a song. If you do, please don't say that Daniel Boone was a "Scots-Irish adventurer" as this book does on p. 158. In fact Boone came from a family of Quakers from Southwest England (Devon).

I'm starting to think this book has some kind of Ulsterior motive. But what's the membership of this club? Are the non-Ulster Scots in or out? Robert Burns is in it for sure, but didn't his ilk wind up in the Tidewater or the Low Country? As in, not the Appalachians? Not to mention that by Burns's time -- and honorary member Walter Scott's for sure -- the Ulster Scots had already named Goose Pimple Junction in the Wild West of the Holston Territory and were siring dulcimers with German spouses, or they had moved on and were re-enacting jousting scenes from Ivanhoe on their Mississippi plantation grounds while someone played The Last Rose of Summer on the parlor piano.

Which instrument, by the way, seems not to deserve mention in a book that gives pride of place to A.P. Carter of the Carter Family, who was as much a miner as any of coal-focused SWVA neighbors except that his lode was out-of-copyright piano songbooks. Ah, but the presence of songbooks would require literacy on somebody's part, and we know no one among that bardic folk was ever musically literate, right? Except for shape note hymnals, printed music in this book is never the engine of folk music transmission, which must seemingly always be oral or aural (think radio). Rather, insofar as printed music has a connection to folk culture, it must always be a spinoff, such as the publications that accompanied the songcatchers' activities so well-documented by this book.

Seemingly these collections never entered general circulation until the Red-wing Folk Revolution that produced the likes of Pete Seeger, an internationalist who refused to buckle under to the racism shared by those Appalachian musical traditionalists whose cause was, at bottom, the Anglo-Saxon race. Mutatis mutandis (Latin for "hey presto"), now that tradition wants to be labeled Scots-Irish.

Yet this label -- even when limited to the narrower set of people represented by those families responsible for preserving ballads and stories -- obscures an ethnically-more-complicated reality. For example, the book gives plenty of attention to the accomplishments of song-preserving heroine Jane Hicks Gentry of Hot Springs, NC, but never says that she and her kin the Hickses were both Welsh and English. Scots-Irishness is the default. In a region so beset by stereotype, it is important to know the ingredients in the hodgepodge. Otherwise we get the kind of sloppiness that assumes Daniel Boone to be Scots-Irish because he was a "adventurer" in "the Appalachians."  

Speaking of dulcimers, though, the book gives them a cultural significance and a breadth of distribution that they might not in fact have had. Crafting the instrument seems to have been a family-based cottage industry in a few scattered areas -- Galax, VA, or Viper, KY, where Jeannie Ritchie's family lived, her father being one of the widely-scattered craftsmen who earned a few dollars extra selling dulcimers with his produce. But instrument "censuses" of the region show a wide disparity between the ownership of fiddles -- the real musical powerhouse of the region -- compared with dulcimers, rare by comparison. It could both be true that, growing up, Ritchie saw one in everybody's house in her neighborhood and that the instruments were a relative rarity in the region as a whole.

In what is probably an inverse proportion to patterns of popular ownership, the lap dulcimer gets ample discussion, the autoharp gets some, but the harmonica -- in terms of mass distribution one of the most popular instruments ever -- only gets a couple of passing mentions. One of these is in connection with the Bristol Sessions of 1927, the so-called "Big Bang" of country music, at which "harmonica soloists" recorded, but the book is silent on the subject of the music performed. This is a missed opportunity, because it turns out there was a real vogue for harmonica music in the region, due to its unequaled ability to mime animal sounds -- baying dogs, cackling hens, and braying mules -- and its capacity in the right hands (er, mouths) for replacing the fiddle as a duet instrument with the banjo (the fiddle-banjo duo is appropriately characterized in the book as the mainstay of popular music in the region in the pre-radio years). One such banjo-harmonica duo was George Pegram and Red Parham, regulars on the festival stage of Asheville, NC, traditional music impresario Bascom Lamar Lunsford, one of the book's musical heroes.

So much is just plain smoky in this book, just like the Scots-Irish being "embraced by the surrounding mountains" (p. 173) after being whisked down the Wagon Road into their whisky haven. It is all a matter of projection, pointing in the direction of the southern mountains, today's no-less-misty "Appalachia." What about those Scots-Irish who stayed up north in Pennsylvania? Do they not matter anymore because their fiddle hornpipes didn't show up to audition for Country Farm Time? Did they not contribute -- negatively speaking -- one of the formative occasions in the young American republic, the whisky rebellion? Weren't they the ones behind the lyrics "ain't paid no whisky tax since 1792"?

Ah, yes, Copper Kettle, that "old song" (p. 172) and by implication that Scots-Irish one. In fact, Copper Kettle is exactly as old as I am (68), having been composed in 1953 by a Texan whose French last name carries an Anglicized spelling: in other words, hardly old by people standards and a mere stripling by song ones; meanwhile as bastardized in terms of cultural parentage as anything in north America.

They'll catch you by the smoke. Not that anybody cares. After all, it's the music that really counts, and there's enough poetry and musical exaltation in this book to send you soaring into the empyrean while all around is the postmodern swidden of mountaintop removal and drive-through culture, compliments of the local power structure that tolerates it. Dare we call it Scots-Irish? Not me. I take my cue from über-Appalachian Dolly Parton whose foreword (advertised on the cover!) lays out a Parton line that is explicitly English, except for the ones who "may have gone to Scotland." As it happens, there is a perfectly good word available: British. 

In the end, the book assures us that whatever climate catastrophe the future holds for our descendants, there'll be some good songs to be sung as long as they can score at least 19% Scots-Irish on the initial Ancestry mitochondrial DNA test, only to turn up 95% British Isles on subsequent genetic fine-tunings. Regardless, just be sure to call them "Celtic." It is today's "hillbilly," a marketing term with as much credibility as Cocoa Puffs have nutrition. What the hell, it sells!

It's too bad that the many inspirational stories in this book -- and as I mentioned earlier, there is a multitude -- should have to be floated with ballast that uses a glittery "we are the world" flag to wrap an irreducible nugget of ethnic essentialism that is intellectually indistinguishable from racism. It's almost as if UNC Press doesn't have access to historians or anthropologists. Maybe UNC Press is right. What do scholars know about selling books?

The Power of Music, 1872 chromolithograph by Philadelphia lithographer James Fuller Queen, p. 147. Placement in the book implies an 18th-c. Scots-Irish backcountry parlor. The fiddler is African-American.

 

My Ukrainian Lents

 It just occurred to me -- on this last Mardi Gras eve -- that all my Lents are Ukrainian.

At least, they have been for almost as long as I can remember. It seems odd in a way: I have no family connections to Ukraine; I've met maybe one Ukrainian in my entire life; I know very little about Ukrainian culture. So why Ukrainian Lents?

It all has to do with dyeing Easter eggs. Here is the background: My father -- an atheist as only a lapsed-Irish-Creole-Catholic can be -- was also ironically enough an enthusiastic Easter egg artist from the moment that he had a family with whom to create Easter egg art. For a while he experimented with covering eggs with colorful tissue paper or string, but he finally (by my teen years) he hit upon the technique that would dominate the rest of his life, a "wax resist" technique that produces colorful, intricate Easter eggs known as pysanky.

Pysanky as we learned about them were Ukrainian. And the time to make them is Lent. If you wait until Easter, you're too late. The technique requires inscribing designs in melted wax (using a stylus) and preserving those designs in varying colors by sequential washes of dye, until finally the wax is melted off and the colorful design is revealed. The process is painstaking and time-consuming. While it's possible to complete a design in the course of an evening, it's better to stretch the process out over a few days. There are lots of places online where you can learn more and order supplies, which are pretty basic. The stylus is the only really specialized tool; the most basic kind -- a little copper cone tied with twine on the end of a stick about the size of a pencil -- has an archaic, bronze-age vibe. 

One way to think about it: there's no need to give up anything for Lent when you take up something this difficult. It also carries baggage of a sort that contributes to the weight of the season.

The baggage is a Ukrainian folk story that says everyone should do at least one pysanka a year in order to prevent the serpent that encircles the world from squeezing it tighter. I have done my at-least-one pysanka a year for quite some time now. I'm not the artist my father was; nonetheless I find quite enjoyable the lengthy process of conjuring a design, executing it, and reveling in the surprises of the "reveal." Also, doing pysanky enforces patience and encourages a deep, focused meditation on the vast themes of Easter unlike any other activity I know. I never make an egg without hoping that in some small way I'm loosening the serpent.

My Ukrainian Lent feels especially real this year. 

Pedestrian Attempt

 [Dear 1971 Driftwood editor: Please consider the following for publication. Even though it is 50 years late, I think your readers might still enjoy it. It is an essay. "Essay" comes from the French word "try." I'm still trying, as hopefully most of your readers are. Also please note it includes a single but very judicious use of the "f" word, but hey: I made a button with the word on it that my diary tells me I wore to school on Nov. 4, 1970, which was very injudicious. Somehow I didn't get kicked out. So maybe judiciousness improves with age.]

It hurts to walk. It's my feet. Earlier in the summer an apparent combination of new footwear and high trail mileage caused burning knots on the balls of my feet. I've since found ways to deal with it, and it seems to be fading (I've had plantar fasciitis before; it went away). The condition has a name: metatarsalgia. The metatarsals are the bones in the feet behind the toes. "Algia" is the familiar medical suffix for "pain": neuralgia, fibromyalgia.

And nostalgia. Hm. What is painful about nostalgia? Until now, my understanding of nostalgia ran along the lines of contemporary definitions that cast it as a lightweight, whimsical yearning for some halcyon time in the past when things -- seen through the optics of the present -- appear to be happier, simpler, better. Trappings of the time past form the basis for fetishistic revivals (listening to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, say, while wearing paisley bellbottoms, etc.) that amuse the reminiscing elders and puzzled youth alike. However, older definitions of nostalgia, like the one in the Oxford English Dictionary, consider it to be a severe form of homesickness that could cause total breakdowns and even suicide. It turned out that "you can't go home again" could have a steep downside. There was definitely real pain involved; nostalgia was not to be taken lightly.

Opening that door onto the word invites a reconsideration. Edward Francisco's poem "Christmas Eve 2017" invokes, by its title, the supreme example of contemporary, sugar-plum nostalgia. But you won't find that here, as Francisco recounts unblinkingly the private moment he shared with his dying grandson as the clock ticked toward the Christmas-bringing midnight. It is understood that it would be the last such moment for the young man. Francisco's grandson says "To him/being dead/is knowing this/is his last Christmas/with familiar strangers/who can't love him enough/to save him." If that doesn't cause your heart the deepest pain, you are heartless. It amazes me that Francisco summons the courage (which word comes from the French "coeur," meaning "heart") to confront this moment with words. I don't think I could.

Out of it, though, comes a kind of Christmas present from the grandson -- and I mean a Christmas present to me, an absolute, total stranger reading the words of his grandfather years later and miles away. It is this sentiment: "What he says he'll miss most," Francisco writes, "is the chance to make/mistakes he won't live/to regret." Here is another amazement: this self-mocking humor, wise not so much beyond his years as full of them, truncated as they must be, presented to you, unbidden, transformed into a box of dark nostalgia. "Here, have some mistakes you lived to regret!"

Regret: like nostalgia, a word whose meaning we've watered down. Originally Scots, it signified a much more acute emotion, something to be expressed through lamentation, meaning keening and wailing. Not much of that going on these days! Even lite, though, it's a pretty chewy thing, regret. It has an aftertaste that doesn't permit forgetfulness. Even forgiveness doesn't wash it away. It works a number on nostalgia, too, meaning it forces you to re-visit whole series of events you'd really like to avoid. Our response? We try to dodge it with a coping mechanism: applying the knowledge you now have to situations you can never have again.

Regrets? I have them in spades. So I'm going to dodge away. The knowledge I now have is "Fuck you, Yoda. There is too such a thing as try." There is such a thing as try, try again. There is such a thing as keeping on trying. There is such a thing as getting back up after you've been knocked down, in order to go on trying. Jack in the Jack Tales (as I'm reminded when I read to grand-daughters) does it all the time. If you want still more authority than Jack, Yoda, there's Deuteronomy 4:29, where there is "seeking with all they heart and with all thy soul," which sounds a lot like trying to me.

(BTW that box of dark nostalgia has other flavors as well. One of them is wrapped in gold foil and the diagram on the back of the box identifies it as "WTF." It's a right time/wrong place kind of memory: you did the best you could, and actually did something well, but boy was it a disaster. And it has since become the juiciest scab you would ever want to pick, and pick at it you do, because it has all the allure and charisma of disaster. In this case I was at Northside Jr. High; for an Easter week school assembly, my 8th-grade-still-boy-soprano-self sang a solo from Mendelssohn's Elijah that used for its text Deuteronomy 4:29; as soon as I opened my mouth and bestowed my dulcet tones upon the audience, said audience exploded in derisive laughter. My diary simply says the solo went "fairly well;" hindsight says The Sopranos could've gained a cut-rate hit man -- er, boy -- then and there.)  

So then, "trying" being a thing, among the things I wish I'd given more "try" to -- back then -- are piano, French, and running. I did eventually give plenty of "try" to harmonica, dulcimer, and bagpipes, and the results have been good enough to smear in Yoda's ears. But it also turns out that even lackluster trying and eventual failure can have a silver lining. And when I say "failure," I mean "failure."

It was my sophomore year in high school. Never having participated in organized sports, but wanting to try because I enjoyed playing most of them for fun, I took my fun-having self to the practice field a quarter mile down at the bottom of steep "Cardiac Hill" and "tried" out. The first time I tried to run the course -- the first leg of which meant running up Cardia Hill -- I walked more than half of it. Finally, at the end, I remember rounding the bend after Pine Breeze and seeing at the bottom of the hill the whole team stretched across the road at the finish line, waiting for me. I didn't know they would do that. I trotted in, awash in embarrassment. I kept this up for at least a couple more weeks. "Came in last again," moans my diary at one point. It does not record when I quit, but quit I did.

At some point, though (cue the hopeful music, just, please, nothing with a boy soprano) I asked my friend Benton Hood about breathing while running. I haven't seen Benton since high school. As 1971 Driftwood readers know, Benton was a particularly gifted and successful wrestler, but he also ran track and cross country. When I asked him how to breathe while running, Benton said the most important thing was to exhale sharply, to push out the air. After that the lungs just fill back up. You don't so much inhale as the lungs just re-inflate all on their own. When this exhale/re-inflation cycle hits a rhythm, you relax, and that's your "second wind." You just keep it up. You're no longer panting uncontrollably. His advice didn't do me any good in high school -- I gave up trying -- but later on I took up running for (wrestling) coach Morgan's conditioning class at UTC and since then, on as many days as possible, I've tried to get to a second wind and keep it going for a while.

At first I ran, but eventually chronic Achilles tendinitis convinced to shift to walking, well-rewarded by the profile of the ridge I live on. Now metatarsalgia makes my feet hurt, but hey, there's swimming or cycling. I'll work back into walking eventually. I'll keep trying.

Whatever it is, when I get winded, don't you know that my Yoda is Benton Hood, reminding me how to breathe. And I do it. Then, by some miracle, there is no try. I still can't go home again, exactly, but Cardiac Hill's close enough.

Book review: Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, by David French

When 9/11 happened, I felt very much that it was as bad as Pearl Harbor. My father, who volunteered for the Navy soon after Pearl Harbor happened, told me with a knowing smile and shake of the head, "Nowhere close."

So when this book invokes a "secession threat" facing the United States, I feel like shaking my head in this way. And the odd thing is that author French is like me a child of the South. The even odder thing is that French is very well-educated, informed, and accomplished. Aware that the initial American Revolution was as much a secession as the breakaway that produced the Civil War, he somehow fails to see that on both occasions the underlying end was the substitution of a new union (or "confederacy," if you will) for the one that was deemed to have failed: the ironic goal of both American secessions was as much (if not more) joining together as it was breaking apart.

Secession tout court -- if it means going it alone -- seems not to be a very good deal. One doubts that even California wouldn't secede if it came to the kind of insurmountable federal-state conflict that French posits as a possible cause. Consider the case of Scotland: a "secession" from Great Britain is unlikely unless the European Union offers a better set of supports than the "union" that offered the advantage of cohesion in 1704. Consider also that one of the primary, principal arguments for the U.S. Constitution during the ratification season of 1788 was that the compact under question was necessarily stronger than any individual state would be.

Nor is there the kind of unity among today's discontents that there has to be in order to push through secession. The best example of this is French himself, a self-described "former Republican" so repulsed by Trumpcore that he his now looking for a third way (this book seems to be a result of that search). Trumpcore is in fact well-served by federalism. It's concentrated enough in my (and French's) state -- TN -- that it has legislative supermajorities and executive power. At present Trumpcore state houses are focusing on controlling voter turnout to their own advantage and denying healthcare to transgender people. Their power is not absolute, but it is considerable. Will they be limited by national legislation or by the federal courts? It's anybody's guess. Texas, always ready to talk up the secession game, is now a cautionary tale: their power grid seizes up and FEMA suddenly looks like a good thing. It's a long game, and a complicated one. My money is on the same union of discontents that we've alway had.

Which leads to my chief complaint about this book: French's sneaky use of "federalist" and "federalism." He uses them essentially as shorthand for the advocacy of states' rights as against central power. This is obvious: the term doesn't appear except in counterpoint to "nationalization," which seems to have been a process the country had to go through in order to defeat racism and the Nazis, but which it no longer needs because we got through all that and everything's fine, except that it's not, because Ronald Reagan said the federal government had gotten too big.

Actually, French doesn't invoke Reagan at that point in his argument, but to anyone who lived through the Reagan revolution, he doesn't need to. As a curative to French's misuse and misappropriation of the "federalism," I recommend going back to The Federalist to get a sense of how things lay at the time the word came into circulation. There is no absolute, standardized, weighted definition of the distribution of power between the states and the national government. The national government should be adequate to the accomplishment of its purpose, which is in part to stand for the needs of all citizens, particularly when factions in state government stand in the way, now and forever, amen. Federalists are those who believe in the adequacy of that power, even if no one can agree in the absolute terms what they should be (as French implies). 

This seques nicely into the subtitular "how to restore our nation." Here French trots out Founder pabulum about virtue by such as John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." Adams, of course, was not a writer of the Constitution. He was also as old school as George Washington when it came to believing in the necessity of virtue for the survival of the republic. However, this leaves out of the account James Madison, who has always served us as the principal explicator of the theory behind the Constitution. According to him, the Constitution was designed to discount the need for virtue by at once atomizing the power of state-level factions and also balancing them with the weight of a national government capable of sticking up for minorities. It's all right there -- in The Federalist.

Virtue would be nice. But don't count on it. Yes, our division is wide and painful -- as it has always been in a bathtub of faction. There is no Kumbaya. You might even say that division is what unifies us, so you might as well get used to it. Surprisingly, French comes pretty much to the same conclusion. He doesn't seem very happy about it. Nor should he. As French points out, toleration -- in order to be actual toleration, rather than acceptance -- is neither easy nor fun. Nobody shoots off fireworks in praise of toleration.

French's final call for civil courage, with biblical scripture to match, is at best a sermon to determined backsliders. You can feel his lack of confidence, his doubt, his awareness that this just isn't going to work, despite the hortatory rhetoric that it has to work because it's all we have. And that's where he leaves it.

Heaven forbid that we try anything institutional rather than merely volitional. French seems to feel that politics is always downstream of culture. That is certainly not the case during times of change and upheaval, Politics and institutions can help provide cohesiveness and a sense of direction that culture cannot. The lesson of war and economic depression is that organized, shared effort can provide a meaningful, enduring, and influential sense of commonality.

But why wait for war or economic depression? Many of our national needs, from infrastructure to defense, can and should be served by a shared, obligatory pittance of our time. Require national service. Make it a duty.

Believe it or not, the Founders did this very thing. That's what their militia was. It was universal and obligatory. No, it didn't last. The centrifugal forces of American culture -- in the obverse forms of avoidance and volunteer enthusiasm -- killed it, leaving it to the eventualities of war and economic depression to drive us back together again.

But why should we be so heedless and forgetful? Why wait for war and economic depression to force us to do what we can do already if we only put our political will to the task? The spirit of the Founders is to learn from the past and design an institution for the future. It's turned out to be a longer game for us than some of them expected. Re-introducing institutional teamwork has a much better chance of healing divisions (or making the toleration of them less painful) than any number of sermons.