Revolutionary Sunday
walking around the Fort
I’m torn this morning between hubris and humility—or as I like to think of it between cocky and crestfallen. I’ve spent most of my life on the cocky end, I believe, and I recover quite quickly when crestfallen. But true humility is harder to achieve, and as we say, I am a work in progress.
The reason this subject has arisen is that I just returned from my early morning walk to Fort Trumbull, which I’ve discussed before in my post. I have missed seeing the beautiful old buildings and the lovely park, but the thing that pushed me out the door finally this morning was the fact that our City is building a Community Center nearby and I hadn’t checked on the construction progress in a long time. Truth be told, I have not been taking my morning walks for a quite a while. Thanks to slightly older sister Susan and dear BFF Carol I have realized that I cannot give up just yet. I’m very glad that I got out this morning and intend to resume my daily habit (it never used to be a chore but for some reason since I had Covid everything is slightly different. But I just found a journal in which I had started noticing symptoms in November 2022. Time to get over it.)
More hubris on the reading front. I had just finished Brian Tyler Cohen’s book Shameless as it arrived on the NYT’s best seller list for Hardcover Nonfiction as well as Combined Print & E-Book Non-Fiction. There’s a video of him learning the news, and I found out that he had put this achievement on his “vision board” (more shades of Oprah?). [By the way, number two on the combined list is Hillbilly Elegy but not on the hardcover only, so go figure. Count me in the hardcover snob class.] It also seems that size does matter, because Brian’s volume is quite slim compared to the Jonathan Blitzer book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here which addresses Central America and immigration and was published in January of this year. It is extremely well written and follows real people through their struggles. But at more than three times the size of Brian’s book, many of us are still wading through it. Perhaps the arbiters at the NYT are too. Now I realize that I have become enmeshed in categories and lists and actually have no idea what it means to be on any of them. There is definitely too much slicing and dicing going on, and I realize that none of these categories say anything about the quality of the literature—they just arrange the economic results of sales. So let me get the hell out of here before I go bonkers with my researching tendencies.
Back to my other reading, which every week includes The New Yorker (print edition of course), and this week (dated August 26th) there was a disturbing story from Kenya. It is titled “A Cult in the Forest: A pastor led his followers into the woods. Hundreds have since been found dead” by Alexis Okeowo. It tells of Kenyan evangelical Christian pastor Paul Mackenzie who leads people to starve themselves to death, basically. The horror of one charismatic man’s sway is not to be missed. The edition also includes an article about Kamala which I have yet to get to, but it really is hard to keep up with so much great reporting.
My final rambling this morning has to do with something else I had never heard of before—the Overton Window. Brian mentions it briefly in his book, then lo and behold, Mother Jones magazine (September + October 2024 issue) has an explainer. The article by Pablo Calvin has the subhead “How a common concept limits our view of the political landscape.” It turns out that the concept is based on an earlier work by Daniel C. Hallin who analyzed media consumed in the US during the Vietnam War. He published a book called The Uncensored War and an illustration he provided became known as “Hallin’s spheres” which the article’s author believes are helpful. Anyway, I now know a lot more about the whole concept, which in a nutshell is that the original spheres have now become the vertical scale of the Overton Window, and both measure what becomes acceptable. The article’s author says it best and I would love to quote his words directly. But I always worry about copyright laws, so instead I will urge you to follow up and read the article.
And now I have to enjoy my Sunday breakfast. The early walk got me fired up about the Revolution (the original one) and the fight for America in which we are now engaged. TTFN
Yesterday afternoon was the Chicory Lane Farm pig roast which allowed us to interact with people from whom we have become isolated. It was marvelous even if the pork was a little overcooked (probably to satisfy people who don't understand the concept of "done" based on a meat thermometer). But it kept me up later than usual so when Sully the Dawg got me out of bed at 6, I took him out, fed him is breakfast, and napped out on the couch for another 2 hours. It's past noon and we still haven't gone for a walk. But lately, I've been allowing him off the leash and he stays close, doesn't wander off or try to go swimming in the creek. And when I have to attach the leash, he cooperates.