I’ve just been living my life.

Someone to walk with...

Except for a letter or two, I haven’t been writing. More astonishingly, I’ve hardly been reading. 

 

Still having coffee every morning, getting outdoors with my dog, going to my bookshop four days a week (Wednesday through Saturday) for four hours a day, then back home and outside with the dog again before supper, but it’s been different for the past week because, in addition to Sunny Juliet, I have had a constant human companion. I have slept better and have awakened happy, despite  continuing corruption and chaos abroad in the land. 

 

Oh, my country! Cry, the beloved country! 

 

I need to read Alan Paton’s novel again, set in the era of racial tension that directly preceded the 1948 election of the National Party government. The party's appeal to white fear and white supremacy, as well as strong anti-British sentiment (subsequent to the Boer War) and promises to improve the economy for farmers and (white) laborers, put them in power and inaugurated apartheid in South Africa. Their rule lasted for 46 years, with apartheid the law of the land. 

Paton’s book, because a novel, focuses on individuals affected by conditions in their country rather than the more abstract march of history, and I have been thinking of how easy it can be to ignore issues not part of our immediate daily lives, events that do not touch us personally. Almost every life is touched by tragedy sooner or later. But it is the specific nature of the tragedy touching any particular person that usually dictates the cause or causes that that person finds urgent, while other people’s tragedies and other people’s causes never feel as desperately compelling.

 

Thus it is that the large group of people who care deeply about something, whether mental illness or abused children or cancer research or autism treatment or whatever (and a majority of people in any country, I feel sure, care about at least one issue and usually more than one) can accuse one another, because their cares and concerns are different, of not caring. 

 

For instance, ICE raids continue in Minneapolis and elsewhere, abducting first and asking questions later, with families and whole communities living in emotionally crippling anxiety day after day. Although we haven’t heard as much about it in the past week, because ICE hasn’t murdered anyone in the streets in the past week, a family member in the Twin Cities tells me nothing is better there and that the daily stress and anxiety continue, along with volunteer operations to help the terrified. 

 

But if no one in your family or group of friends has dark skin or was born in another country or is of a “nonconforming” gender or practices a faith tradition outside of Christianity, perhaps you don't consider the current administration dangerous. And so it is with every heartbreaking issue. As for immigration raids far, far from the border, even when American citizens are picked up and held without being charged, perhaps it's still easy to look away and say that, well, of course a few mistakes will be made, but ICE troopers, after all, are “just doing their job.” It shouldn’t be easy to look away and dismiss concerns, I keep thinking. If you’re at all concerned about legal vs. illegal (as ICE supporters insist they are), then you ought to care, I fervently believe, for little aspects of American law such as probable cause and due process. But maybe some people haven’t followed those events too closely, because other issues that do touch their own personal lives take all their attention. Or because they don't want to know?

 

Can people be persuaded to care? How? 

My life has been more peaceful during the last two weeks, not because various horrible conflict situations in our country have been resolved or even improved but because I have stopped trying to make people care who have not yet seen the horror. I have not given up all hope that their eyes will eventually be opened—if only when they are personally touched, at last, by some aspect of it—but I have given up the hope that any information and opinions I might share will make a difference to them. When their eyes are opened, they will see, and not before, and when they see, good people will care.

There are always, of course, a minority of people (I feel certain they are the minority of human beings on earth) who care only for themselves and whose “care” for themselves is so fixed on money and what it can buy that they are willing to sell their very souls to see their worldly wealth increase, and unfortunately, those presently in power in Washington seem to belong to that don’t-care-for-others group, their greed and aggressive natures giving them outsized visibility on the national and world scene. —Perhaps you say not all in that highly visible cabal are motivated by money? Some are afraid! Ah, but what do they fear? Losing their jobs? Doesn’t that come down to sacrificing integrity in order to hold onto wealth and position?

 

Read my friend Dawn’s pithy summary of the Gordie Howe Bridge brouhaha, written before the news came out that it isn’t about “Canada” or “respect” or “fairness” at all but—surprise!—the old billionaire club protecting one another’s interests, and to hell with American (and Canadian) workers! Grift and corruption, old political allies. 

 

Another current issue, one bound to affect generations of Americans yet unborn (think about it, you who advocate tirelessly for the “unborn,” with nary a thought for living children and their families), is the threat to the “endangerment finding.” (Update: More than a threat.) The name alone may not tell you much, but the endangerment finding has to do with environmental pollution and public harm. In 2007 SCOTUS recognized the responsibility of the EPA to limit greenhouse gases, citing public harm. Now in February 2026, the current administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, a 46-year-old Republican from New York State and father of two, appointed in January of 2025 by then-incoming president DJT, is poised to stop protecting the American public. Pollute, baby, pollute! Your investment portfolio will love it!

 

(But of course! In department after department of the federal government, the current administration’s strategy has been to find someone not to direct valuable operations but to gut said department of its budget, expertise, and the ability to fulfill its mission, with the overall goal of eliminating government services and turning them all over to the highest bidder, i.e., to those who can guarantee squeezing the last dollar out of the American public for private profit.)

 

Threats to free elections? Don't even get me started. Anyone who isn't concerned is just not paying attention.

Midday Thursday, Northport

So I come back to Alan Paton’s novel, which begins with a contrast between green, grassy land and overgrazed bare earth, a contrast of human wealth and poverty mirrored by the land itself, and I think of aquifers in North America depleted by CAFOs, wells polluted by mining and other industry, water made undrinkable and air made unbreathable by industrial and automotive effluents and emissions. I think also of the deepened and still deepening divisions in this country of ours, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, racial divides that I had hoped were healing back when President Obama was elected, splits political, dogmatic, religious, and also (because the issues have to do with our most dearly held values) deeply personal, such that it seems the legacy of the current administration will, for the remainder of my life, be a tragically divided national landscape. 

 

“Cry, the beloved country,” wrote Alan Paton of South Africa in 1948, a country he loved deeply and gave generously of himself to try to heal.

 

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, not stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, not give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

 

-      - Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)

- 

Will the legacy of our time on earth be a Divided, Poisoned, Polluted and Hate-Filled States of America? Will those of us who have loved our country “too deeply” have our hearts broken over and over before we die? And if that happens, if we do not live to see our country turn back from fascism and oligarchy, will a future generation yet be able to regain the betrayed ideals our parents lived by and some died for? Will American children not yet born have another chance to find healing and to make of this country a shining city on a hill? Or will America go the way of so many former empires, a story of the dead past for history books written and read in a few surviving free nations? 

My father, WWII

“You May Quote Me”

No peepers peeping yet on Tuesday....

The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faultering step, and slow; but this lingering pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring. In the one case you are about to part with a friend, who is becoming more gentle and agreeable at every step, and such steps can hardly be made too slowly; but in the other you have been shut up with black frost and biting blasts, and where your best consolation was being smoke-dried.

 

-      Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

 

Ah, spring, you are such a tease!

The sun shone in Leelanau on Easter! All day long! We couldn’t call it a warm day, but it was lovely. Even though the daffodils hadn’t opened yet, the little blue squills were cheery in the sunlight.

Monday was a day of rain. Shrug! “April showers”— you know the rest. On that rainy day I drove south of Traverse City on an errand that had been postponed long enough but on the way stopped at a thrift shop to look through music CDs for something to combat the dreariness of the day and give me voices in the car that were not battering me with current events. What I found was the original cast recording of “The Phantom of the Opera.” It more than fulfilled my requirements: I was in another world all afternoon! The mood of the rain … memories along every mile of road … images of the Paris Opera … the lyrics and the music!!! “Wishing I could hear your voice again….” Oh, yes! And, of course, "The Music of the Night"! I was ecstatic and miserable and floating on air and drowned in sorrow. When I got home, I told Sunny, “I’ve been breaking my heart in Paris. It will take me a while to come back to you.”

From the previous century's bulbs 

Tuesday the sun returned, and the “wild” daffodils at my place began to open (the ones that I planted not quite ready but getting close), and with another day of sun in the forecast, I hung towels out on the line. Sunny and I played in the yard, I worked at outdoor tasks, and we made it to the dog park and met with friends there. 

No more snow!!! Airborne puppy!

Mrs. Trollope said it first.

The passage quoted at the beginning of today’s post is the first paragraph of Chapter XIV in Mrs. Trollope’s book (I call her “Mrs. Trollope” because that’s how she was referred to at the time her book made such a sensation), and I used it today because it captures so well the feelings of most of my fellow northern Michigan residents. But naturally, most of the book is given over to subjects other than climate and weather. It was after reading both the Rev. Isaac Fidler’s and James Stuart, Esquire’s accounts of visiting the young United States, comparing them, and musing over the difference in the two gentlemen’s impressions, that I decided the time had come for me to read the famous account, read by both Fidler and Stuart, of American life written by Englishwoman Frances Trollope, whose visit began in the last days of 1828 and extended into 1832. 

 

Look again at those dates above. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont made their nine-month visit to “America” (i.e., the United States of) in 1831-32, so their time here would have overlapped with that of Mrs. Trollope, but I can find no evidence that the three ever met. The latter expressly says in the preface to her book (speaking of herself in the first person in the preface but in the first person in the main text):

 

She leaves to abler pens the more ambitious task of commenting on the democratic form of the American government; while, by describing, faithfully, the daily aspect of ordinary life, she has endeavored to shew how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many.

 

In other words, she isn’t going to get into politics, but it’s obvious to her, after over three years in the U.S. that England, with its monarch and aristocracy and established national Church, has the better form of government for all concerned. That, of course, is her opinion. Her observations and the conversations she committed to paper as quickly as possible so as not to lose either the words or the tone—those cannot be as easily dismissed as her opinions, if one does not share or appreciate them. 

 

Fidler and Stuart, men, along with Monsieur de Tocqueville, focusing on politics, had little to say of the life of American women, and Fanny Trollope gives detailed observations on that topic. 

 

In general, she sees the two sexes mixing very rarely. In public gatherings (mostly religious but occasionally a lecture), the norm is for men and women to sit separately. Men do their drinking at night, away from home, in places where women are not welcome (probably not allowed), and even in the home, the midday dinner meal lasts only about ten minutes, with husband and wife separating as soon as they leave the table, while at breakfast the husband reads his newspaper until he leaves for his office or shop. Boarding house meals are similarly silent and rushed.

 

As dancing and theatre-going are mostly out of bounds for 1830s Americans, young people meet at preachings or are introduced in the homes of friends. “Refined” young American ladies in this time period would never dream of allowing so much as an elbow to come into contact with any part of the body of a man or boy at a dinner table or on a staircase! When Fanny proposed a “pic-nic,” she was advised by a very proper young lady that it would be very improper for men and women to sit together on the ground. In cities, there are occasional balls. When refreshments are offered, men and women go to separate rooms. (How, though, I wonder, did they dance without touching?)

 

Mrs. Trollope gives it as her opinion that American manners would be much improved if there were more mixing of ladies and gentlemen. For one thing, she suspects the men would do much less chewing of tobacco and spitting on the floor, which was one of her constant complaints. This spitting occurred even in the House of Representatives, although the Senate, she allowed, was more dignified: its members sat up straight, rather than lounging and putting up their feet, and there was very little spitting. From the gallery, she was unable to hear much of the discussion on the floor.

 

Everywhere in the country, however, she found conversation among men almost exclusively political, while the women, in their limited sphere, gossiped among themselves and spoke of dress. Mrs. Trollope was frequently bored to tears and wondered how the women could stand the tedium of their lives. She hoped to find literary conversation in her American travels, but this hope was dashed again and again. Americans of the merchant class were not conversant even with Shakespeare and could hardly imagine they were missing anything. Their ambition was all financial, getting ahead the focus and aim of their lives.

 

Despite fierce denials met with in the United States, and despite James Stuart’s suspicion that Mrs. Trollope exaggerated or invented much of what she reported, I found her observations quite believable and calmly expressed. As to the narrow American focus on getting ahead financially, this is confirmed in de Tocqueville’s writings. Mrs. Trollope finds confirmation of her impression given by an Englishman she met.

I heard an Englishman … declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffeehouse, or at home, he had never heard Americans conversing [this would be American men] without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest.

I have read elsewhere (perhaps in Dickens?) about the constant spitting of chewing tobacco and the haste with which Americans rapidly gulped down meals in silence. Could Mrs. Trollope return today, she would find Americans enjoying more leisurely meals but snacking and sipping and gulping throughout the day, too. She would find conversation of men and women to include lively discussion of professional sports, books, films, and more, along with politics and financial matters. 

 

Our own pictures of American life in that period, whether in the North or the South, in cities or plantations or on the frontier, is generally oversimplified to the point of falsehood. Seeing our country not through history textbooks or hagiographies of famous men but through the eyes of visitors from overseas, making contemporary observations firsthand, makes for eye-opening reading. And if those observers sometimes disagree on specifics, don’t we do the same now, in the present? It’s a reason not to read only one account and think you have gotten a complete picture.

 

***

 

Well! After writing the paragraph above, I picked up the book again to continue my reading, and what did I come upon?

 

While reading and transcribing my notes, I underwent a strict self-examination. I passed in review all I had seen, all I had felt, and scrupulously challenged every expression of disapprobation; the result was, that I omitted in transcription much that I had written, as containing unnecessary details of things which had displeased me; yet, as I did so, I felt strongly that there was no exaggeration in them; but such details, though true, might be ill-natured, and I retained no more than were necessary to convey the general impressions I received.

 

Further along, near the end of her book, she devotes an entire chapter to the American reception of another English visitor’s writings following his visit to the U.S. Travels in North America, by Captain Basil Hall, was met with exactly the kind of angry denial that was to greet Mrs. Trollope’s own work, although when she finally procured her own copy of his Travels, she found that this visitor of goodwill ”earnestly sought out things to admire and commend” in America.

When he praises, it is with evident pleasure, and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint….

Both Captain Hall and Mrs. Trollope (and the captain had traveled all over the world) found it more difficult to be understood by Americans than by men and women of any other nation, which Mrs. T imputed to the exceedingly thin skin of Americans, who wanted to hear nothing but praise. I do think we have improved in this regard since the 1830s and realize that our way of life is not perfect.

The subject was metaphor, the teacher said.

 

Here is one of those silly, unimportant little issues that turn me unreasonably peevish. I was reading a book review online, and the writer of the review, a teacher of writing, praised the book author’s use of metaphor, proceeding to give half a dozen examples—all of which were similes, not metaphors! This would probably not matter to me at all, except that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on theories of metaphor, and metaphor is a puzzle for those who wrestle with literal meaning. Simile is no problem. Something is like something else. Fill in ‘something’ and ‘something’ with two different things, and you’ve got a simile. A metaphor, on the other hand, says that the first something is the second something. 

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.” Fine.

 

“Juliet is the sun.” A different kettle of fish!

 

Simile, I’m thinking, is a pretty easy case to make, because, at least for a philosopher, any two things are alike in some way or other, however remote. Persuading someone of identity, merely by stating it, requires a skillful writer and a reader who trusts that writer. 

 

At least, so seems to me. Your thoughts?

Blue sky over blue water

REMINDER --

Banning, Protecting, Supporting, and Curating Books

 

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) is wrestling with an unwieldy and difficult issue these days, and, like any other ‘community,’ finds itself short of clear consensus. Let’s start with the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: 

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

Recently a decision was made by the ABA Board (I hope I have the correct attribution here) to qualify the organization’s support of free expression as follows:

 

ABA does not favor the protection of free expression when it comes to speech that violates our commitment to equity and antiracism, i.e., racist speech, anti-Semitic speech, homophobic speech, transphobic speech, etc.

 

Response from members has been strong and mixed. I should mention here that I am not an ABA member only because my bookstore’s inventory is tipped more in the direction of used than of new books, and I found myself during the year I was an ABA member drowning in shipments of brochures, posters, banners, and other promotional material for new books, almost all of it designed for larger, new-only bookstores with dozens of employees. That being the case, I let my membership lapse with the explanation given here but have continued to follow in my daily e-mail Shelf Awareness newsletter news of the bookselling and publishing world, including political issues impinging on that world.

 

I have written on the subject of censorship before and have given: my general position; my response to one very specific brouhaha; and my take on what has been called  

“financially-induced self-censorship,” or what I called in my post “indirect” censorship. 

In response to ABA’s recent qualification on protection of free expression, one bookseller from Utah, Betsy Burton, is horrified. She writes: 

 

Who decides which books to protect and which books not to? What standards do they employ to decide? What does the ABA intend to do with books that they have deemed unfit?

a. Ban them?
b. Burn them?

This might seem an Orwellian sort of reductio ad absurdum. And in one way it is. Because there is no rational answer, at least if one believes in the First Amendment. Either protect all books or throw the First Amendment out the window. 

 

Forgive me for repeating myself here, but I am not a member of Congress. I am a bookseller. When I choose not to stock a particular title, I am not calling down U.S. (or even state) law to forbid the publishing, selling, buying, or owning of that title. Constitutional protection remains in place.

 

What, though, about the bookselling organization’s statement? Had I been on the board and required to vote on the substitution of a qualified statement for the First Amendment statement, I honestly don’t know how I would have voted, but what is clear to me is that the ABA statement has no force of law behind it. Even members of the organization -- and, as I have explained, I am not a member, for purely nonpolitical reasons -- certainly retain Constitutional rights to order, stock, support, publicize, and sell whatever books they choose.

 

The owner of any bookstore (and this would apply to large chains, as well) must always make choices, because no bookstore can stock every existing title. The smaller the bookstore, the more carefully such choices must be made. And, generally speaking, the more personal such choices will be. 

 

My bookstore is a reflection of my values, which doesn’t mean that every book on my shelves is a reflection of my own opinion, because yes, I do value a diversity of opinion, but no, I do not feel obligated to support within my doors opinions that I find morally offensive. A bookstore is, of necessity, either a curated collection or an impersonal hodge-podge, and I like to think that mine is the former. I have, for instance, more books on agriculture and natural sciences than I have science fiction and fantasy, and that is solely a reflection of my personal interests, not a decision made on principle, but every new book I order is a choice I make. For me, it’s personal, and as long as I’m in business my choices will be mine to make, and they will continue to be personal.

Tiny Bookseller Claims Title

(This was just to lure you in!)

One of the occasional hazards of baring one’s soul passionately on serious subjects is that it can invite hostile comment. After I allowed myself a blogging outburst recently – sick and tired of holding back diplomatically in the face of continual and repeated public outrages, I should add – a hostile comment came my way from an anonymous source. In that first comment from Anonymous, I was called an “agitator” and a “nihilist leftist.” Anonymous also called me a “book enthusiast,” which would not be my own chosen self-descriptor but one I don’t find offensive. “Nihilist leftist,” though? That's just plain not who I am. A little left of center, maybe. Nihilist, never! As for agitating, maybe I should do more, but generally I try to be take a diplomatic route. The post in question was a departure from my usual public persona. It was a cry of anguish. 

That’s all background to what I want to say today. Because today Anonymous came back with a second comment, which in a roundabout way seems to imply that I am a “slave” to some kind of “circular rhetoric” promulgated by some unnamed group of “masters.” 

Anonymous is difficult to answer – impossible to respond to directly, as s/he makes only unsupported assertions, not arguments, and does not make clear any of the connections vaguely implied. And why would Anonymous bother to argue with me, since s/he clearly believes I am not an independent thinker but a mental “slave”? Okay, so Anonymous doesn’t argue. More to the point, though, why does Anonymous bother with me at all? Perhaps the idea is to convince my handful of readers to throw me overboard? We few, we happy few!

Well, the best events in my sequestered, self-quarantined life this past week have been a few private, personal, honest, heartfelt and respectful exchanges with people whose views are very different from my own. We spoke to each other. We heard each other. We felt respected by each other. As different from potshots from an anonymous source as June is from January. 

But it isn’t the anonymity that’s so bothersome, because some people don’t have Google accounts and don’t want Google accounts, and I don't have a problem with people who comment as Anonymous. What’s so troubling is the lack of context, absence of argument, and omission of any citations or examples to help me make sense of the accusations against me, so that what could be genuine dialogue remains instead a hollow mockery. And surely, I think helplessly, the fog of name-calling from Anonymous hides some deep hurt. There is a person behind the veil of anonymity, after all, someone who is hurt and afraid and angry, as well as someone who doesn’t know me at all. Someone I cannot reach, don't know how to connect with. That is the sad part, the part that troubles me.

One little laugh brightened the gloom, however. Anonymous referred to me as a “tiny book seller.” Tiny! Not as tiny as I used to be, many long years ago! Now in my eighth decade of life, I might just as well be called a “little old lady bookseller.” Perhaps, though, “tiny” refers to my business rather than to my person, and it’s true that I have never been able to afford paid employees and have struggled along for years with a single part-time volunteer. Yeah, that’s pretty tiny. 

Tiny but independent! Not subject to a corporate straitjacket, not held back by a board of directors, not burdened with business debt (although offers to plunge into debt have never been lacking), and certainly not shackled to any particular viewpoint other than my own, which has shifted and evolved over the decades and may yet enlarge and mature as long as I have my marbles. 

Once a customer from France asked me the secret of my success (i.e., survival) in the age of the online behemoth’s world domination. I told him I am stubborn. 

So let me claim, here and now, the title that Anonymous has foisted on me and declare myself to the world as the Tiny Bookseller! Tiny -- and fiercely, stubbornly independent. As a little third-grader I tutored once in reading said to me once, so memorably, “That’s what I am, and I’m proud of it!”

Stubbornly, independently yours, 

The Tiny Bookseller of Northport, Michigan

Please Explain It To Me

Good morning. I've had some thoughts percolating since December and have decided today is the day —

Letter To My Conservative Friends: 

Or should I say “To Those of My Friends Who Call Themselves ‘Conservative’”? Because I’m having a hard time understanding what you believe and what you want. Maybe it will help if I tell you what I see as “conservatism,” and you tell me where I’m wrong. This is how I see it -- not a definition, by any means, but some important features:

True conservatism defends freedom. Conservatism worthy of the name would stand firm against tyrants around the world, not roll over for them, wiggling and peeing and showing a soft underbelly. I’m not talking about aggressive empire-building — going out and taking over other people’s lands — but standing against those who would do so to others. Are we on the same page here or not? If not, what am I missing?

I also see true conservatism as fiscally responsible. So conservatism would invest in and maintain a strong military but would not send them on pointless, expensive domestic maneuvers or half-heartedly pursue unwinnable, endless foreign wars, squandering public investment and digging an ever-deeper national deficit to prop up private (perhaps unwise) corporate investments. Or do you see protection of private corporate investment overseas and defense of freedom — our own and others’ — not only compatible but inextricably intertwined? Please explain. What policies would you have our country pursue, and how do you see them fall under the umbrella of conservatism?

True conservatism builds for the future. It respects precedent and draws lessons from the past but never forgets that the object of government policy is long-term stability and security and prosperity in the future. In short, a true conservative is not a gambler, and true conservatism would not take foolish risks with our national future for short-term gain, either financial or political. Perhaps this relates to my paragraph above, and one answer will serve to explain my confusion on both points.

True American conservatism stands by the Constitution and the rule of law. Thus conservatism would respect not only a partisan interpretation of the Second Amendment but the entire Constitution. Furthermore, a conservative president would respect (not demean) the office of president, as well as Congress and the judiciary, and would respect freedom of speech and freedom of the press, however violently he might disagree with opinions sometimes expressed. One-man rule would not be conservative, would it? Would it?

(“The law is no respecter of persons” does not mean disrespect: it means that no one person, even the president, is above the law.)

True conservatism is not anarchy. Does this need to be said? Apparently it does. The current Administration in Washington, D.C., would do away with government protections for ordinary citizens at every level and in every department by appointing to office the least-qualified individuals with the strongest short-term self-interest in destroying rather than fulfilling the trust those offices require for their continued operation. The only way I can understand this as part of a conservative agenda is if conservatism believes the missions of these departments is illegitimate exercise of government’s power. That these departments should never have been established. But then, where does conservative respect for precedent begin and end? Is there some historic line in the sand, before which precedents are respected, after which they are undeserving of respect? Or — as I fear — is the label ‘conservative’ merely shorthand for a party line? If your party does it, it’s good; if the other party does it, it’s bad? Respect and conserve the one, disrespect and destroy the other? Can you understand why it’s hard for me not to see what’s happening as essentially partisan?

True conservatism is honest and proud. It is not built on lies and name-calling, blaming, shouting, bullying, and whining. William F. Buckley represented a conservatism I could understand. He did not rely on urging mobs to shout three-word chants but engaged intellectually with opponents and articulated his own views with careful arguments and defense. 

This is why, as I see it, conservatism is moribund in our country today: dying if not dead. Can it be resuscitated? Only, it seems to me, if more than a brave handful of conservatives with spines will once again stand up for its principles. So where do you stand? And where do you think I fail to understand you?

A lot of political mileage has been made of the simplistic and short-sighted idea that government is at the root of every social problem. Is that what you think? Is that how you define conservatism? Think about life in this country without government. Would you really, for the sake of anarchical “freedom,” give up the rule of law and hand over your fortunes and your sacred honor to predatory, unregulated private corporations? Because — follow the money to the power — and you’ll find corporations in the driver’s seat. Where can you see any future security in that scenario? And where, in that picture, is any recognizable conservatism worthy of the name? 

Libertarianism is not conservatism. This, at least, is my opinion, based on considerable reading. Libertarians will tell you that private individuals and corporations will do the right thing because only in that way can they protect their investments and future profits. But the investments of any individual — and thus of any corporation — must be made in the short term for profits to benefit that individual (or those stockholders) directly. In the long run, after all, our generation — like all those before it — will be dead! So if governments around the world do not step into the breach to protect air and water and soil quality, woe betide future generations! Or do you see human nature and the natural human life span differently?

I really want to hear from you. Since I’m opening the conversation, though, I’ll lay my cards on the table and reveal my conclusions here at the start:

Conservatism and progressivism need not be enemy camps. One parent in a family may be stricter and the other more obviously nurturing, but that does not mean children would be better off if both parents always took the same approach or if one’s approach did not temper the other, and it certainly doesn’t mean two parents must engage in continual tug-of-war to raise their children! I’ll go further: sometimes it’s important to listen to grandparents, too, and even the children may have perspectives their elders need to take into account. 

Democracy rests on a faith that something similar is true of government, that we will be better off making decisions together, with more guiding us than the will of a king, more protecting us than the goodwill of the wealthy and powerful. We need justice, and we need understanding and mercy. We need to stand on our own, and a helping hand is sometimes necessary to get us there. 

(If a winner-take-all, Hobbesian “law of the jungle” is your view of freedom, you are an anarchist, not a conservative, as I see it.) 

In any political party, when ideological purity is demanded, ideology gets in the way of practical solutions, but “compromise” does not have to be a dirty word. It doesn’t having no principles. After all, the best way to a given goal may well be a path neither side initially envisioned on its own.

True conservatism looks to its legacy, as does true progressivism. I’m certainly not saying that conservatism and progressivism are “the same” — far from it — but neither wants to leave the country in smoking ruins! So if that isn’t a call for mutual respect and bipartisanship, I’m afraid the danger we face is not to conservatism or progressivism alone but to the very soul and future of our nation. 

We were once the light of the world. American policies were not always right, and I think we all know that. (Don’t we?) Native Americans were massacred and held in concentration camps. Black Africans were enslaved, bought, sold, and treated as less than human. The United States has intervened in the internal events of other countries, sometimes for the good, other times with terrible consequences. Citizens have been denied the right to vote or to have their votes count, and innocent people have been deprived of life and liberty. Through all these blunders and sins, our country espoused right ideals. Have Americans been nothing but hypocrites? I’m not saying that and don’t want to argue the point.

I would say, rather, that from its inception and over its history our country has made periodic and halting efforts to realize its ideals, at times making partial progress and at other times backsliding seriously — as does any human endeavor, individual or group. Acknowledging our national shortcomings is not being unpatriotic, in my book, and certainly I cannot see holding up lies and calling them truths as conservative. Can you?

The conservative may think I am too critical of our history (do you think so?), while the radical will see my picture as too rosy-hued.  The more important question I would put to you is: How does the world see us today? How does it view our national leadership and those who support it? Is a man who shows no respect for the dignity and honor of his own high office conservative? Does “respect” mean nothing more than agreeing with and applauding one man as “the greatest,” even when he forgets he is the highest-ranking servant of the people — all the people — those who voted for him, those who voted against him, and those who didn’t vote at all; those who cheer him and those who criticize him?

My heart has been heavy for over two years now, and that heaviness weighs on me daily. This is very personal. I feel estranged from too many friends on both sides of the political divide. 

I don’t understand my polite conservative friends because I don’t understand how they can call themselves conservative and continue to see the current president (or speaker of the House, when you come right down to it) as a conservative leader. But there are also the not-so-polite ones, people I thought for years were my friends but who have now cast me into a camp they identify as “left-leaning liberal fascists.” I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, but it doesn’t matter, because no conversation is possible against chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up! Build the wall! Build the wall!” Places that once felt welcoming and homelike no longer feel that way to me.

Both sides, I said, though, and I mean it. There are some men and women with whom I agree politically, to a large extent, some of them friends of long standing, whose company I now avoid because they operate these days on a permanent setting of high dudgeon, their rage matching that of the chanters on the other side. They follow bad news (and there’s plenty of it) minute-by-minute and eagerly pass along each latest outrageous tweet. The worst part I see in this, what breaks my heart, is the wall they, my political allies, are in the process of building against anyone on the other side of the divide. Some of these friends are politically active in productive ways, also, and that I applaud, but others seem to be doing nothing but shouting. 

Then there are those who studiously avoid any discussion of politics. You might think I would be comfortable with that, but no, that avoidance feels so false to everything I know we are all feeling that I can hardly stand it, even as I politely keep my own observations on life’s surface with strangers until and unless receiving a sign that, whatever our politics, we share present heartbreak. Otherwise, while I go about my public business with my public face, emotionally I tend to draw into my shell, my little world. So yes, I avoid, too, and I feel false when I do it, and how many of us are doing it, and how long can we keep it up? I ask not only my friends who call themselves conservative but all my friends and also anyone I’ve never met who may be reading these words. 

This is about so much more than which party won or lost some particular election or office. It goes so much deeper. It is a plague on our historical moment, played out in public but experienced also in private, in sleepless nights and silent, lonely days. 

Every new year brings fresh opportunities to reach out, to touch, to love, to give, to be grateful for the life we have. But I am untrue to myself if I pretend I’m not feeling the deep sadness that has been the emotional background for me of the past year and that now accompanies me into the present. So if you are feeling it, too, whatever your political beliefs and allegiances, please know that you are not alone. In the end (and yes, I’m finally coming to it), that may be the most important thing I can say: If you are sad, you are not alone. Many of us are hiding sadness and depression, some with angry shouting, some with light small talk, some by withdrawing into silence and isolation.

In this new year already underway (as it’s taken me weeks to decide to make these thoughts public), I wish us all calmer, brighter times, opportunities to look at one another with love and respect, and as many occasions as possible to open our hearts and minds to one another. Because we can’t leave everything to the younger, rising generation. As long as we’re here, age 20 or age 90, we have work to do. Together. 

On the World Stage, Opinions Are All Over the Map

Years ago I heard for the first time, so memorable it never afterward left me, on Interlochen Public Radio’s Saturday morning call-in request segment, the tenor and baritone duet from Bizet’s opera “Les pêcheurs de perles” (“The Pearl Fishers”). For only the second time in my life (the first was a violin piece by Paganini), music on the radio stopped me in my tracks so that I had to sit down and do nothing but listen, with tears in my eyes. I knew nothing of the opera’s story. Subsequently I borrowed a CD from the library with music from “The Pearl Fishers” and listened to it over and over. Of all the operas in the world, this is the one I most wanted to see and hear live.

The New York Metropolitan last staged “The Pearl Fishers” in 1906. Even before I had any idea it had been such a long time since they’d done it, when I heard that the Met was mounted a production this month, I had to see it. That dream made possible by the fact that the production would be available to patrons of the State Theatre in Traverse City through HD simulcast (as well as by a good friend who, unlike me, doesn’t mind ordering tickets online). Many people we know regularly attend the opera simulcasts at the State Theatre. It would be our first time David and I had gone.

Were my expectations impossibly high? Was disappointment inevitable?

Saturday became increasingly complicated. I had already planned to take care of fairly urgent banking business in Traverse City when David got word of a friend’s funeral to be held that morning in town. We drove in early, and I dropped him off at the church, going on to credit union and bank by myself. It was a snowy winter day.

On Division Street (U.S. 31 South) another driver insisted on following practically on my rear bumper. The highway was snow-covered and slippery. Apprehensively glancing between windshield view and rearview mirror, I missed my turn and had to circle around, crabbier by the minute.

Driving back into town along West Front Street, not far from my old (as in “long ago”) neighborhood, I thought about driving on snowy Traverse City streets back in 1970-71 and how much has changed since then, the “City” part of the town’s name much more appropriate now. And yet, back then all streets, sidewalks, and alleys, not only downtown but throughout residential neighborhoods, were plowed 24 hours a day, much to my initial astonishment that first winter. “I miss it the way it used to be,” a friend said to me last spring. Sometimes I do, too.

But heaven forbid that irritability should ruin a day so long anticipated! Back in the 1970s, after all, the struggling State Theatre had a very outdated sound system and didn’t show many movies I wanted to see. Once again, “Something’s lost, and something’s gained,” as Jonie Mitchell sang in “Both Sides Now.”

I was still nervous about picking David up at the church, getting downtown in time, parking the car, and meeting the friend who had booked our tickets, but all went well, and once we found our seats I could relax and look around in good spirits. So many friends in the audience! And soon we were transported to New York City (where the people in the audience at the Met looked pretty much the same as the one in Traverse City). David and I tried to think of people we knew in New York to look for them in the audience. Later I heard that one of the couples we’d thought of had been in the audience, though we couldn't spot them onscreen. The wife told me they found it “amazing.” Same here!

The opening sequence of the opera was a spectacular technical tour de force, lyrical and captivating, but I was impatient for the full stage and the appearance of the singers. For me, there were no disappointments.

I loved the opening set with rickety wooden seaside docks and pilings, the ensemble of singers (villagers from the little pearl-fishing community) and the way they moved onstage with the music, the colorful but down-to-earth costumes, the mix of traditional and modern elements that felt like such a realistic portrayal of life in that part of the world, but always – above everything else – the beautiful music and exquisite singing. Not for a single moment did I feel the slightest hint of tedium. The voices of tenor Matthew Polenzani and baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, singing Nadir and Zurga, seemed made for their lyrical duet, and soprano Diana Damrau’s delicate, soft seemingly effortless trills made me hold my breath. We were also impressed by Nicolas Testé and the way he inhabited the role of the high priest, Nourabad. Throughout, the music swept me up, held me, and carried me away. In fact, days later, the magic is still with me. A couple friends from our group spoke of similar responses.

So imagine my shock when I looked online for a review, in hopes of finding someone in the larger world who shared our delight, and found one of the most negative opera reviews I’ve ever read, in which the reviewer actually calls the production “tawdry”! He liked almost nothing, from the composer’s music to the work of the set designer. I could only imagine what terrible things must have been going on in his personal life. Another reviewer, the second I found, raved about the singing and acting and the sets (thank God!) but faulted the story of the opera for its thin plot and contrived ending.

Okay, I'll admit it straight out – I am a naive opera-goer. My parents’ love of opera failed to capture me at an early age. I’ve never studied the musical genre and have attended very few performances in my life. But others in our group of ten greatly surpass me in musical sophistication, and we all loved what we saw and heard, so I hardly think my enjoyment can be chalked up to nothing more than naiveté.

As for “contrived”? Opera is contrived! The artificiality of it is the main reason I was immune to its charm for so long! Accepting contrivance now as part of the package, why would I be disappointed in a thin plot or an unrealistic ending? It’s the music, the music, the music, the voices, the voices, the singing -- and I was enraptured by the music of these voices from start to finish.

Told the New York Times had a positive review, I went over to read it. Thank heavens! Someone who saw and heard the same opera that thrilled me!

I still feel sorry for that poor Spectator reviewer, for whatever prevented him from feeling the magic, and as for history’s opinion, cited by the Guardian, that the promise of this opera of Bizet is “unrealized,” I can only be grateful to the Met for ignoring history’s opinion and staging their triumphant production in spite of it.

Bravo, les artistes! Et merci mille fois mille fois!