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July 2024

The Art of Selling Lies

Someone once called propaganda the art of selling lies. It’s a catchy summary but obscures the extent to which communication can be used to influence public opinion. Sure, our beliefs can be manipulated with lies, but also with truths, half-truth, loaded language or simple omission of facts. Propaganda seeks to influence us, persuade us, and often drags us into emotional rather than rational reactions.

Now why would I want to muse about propaganda on 1/20/2025, when we should be celebrating Martin Luther King and the lives of Black Americans like Thurgood Marshall, Booker T Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Travon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Kendrick Johnson, George Floyd Emmett, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery? Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Propaganda is, at its best, indeed an art, but it uses art as well. You may remember my recent writings about propaganda art which blossomed in the beginning of the 20th century before WW I and then surged to power in Russia and Germany in the years to come. The mass production capabilities of printing posters and the technical advances in the movie industry made it possible to reach millions of people.

Art On the Road: Imagined Fronts – The Great War and Global Media at LACMA

Of course, visual propaganda had been around for centuries before that, with roughly two messages, still in action today:

“Be part of the struggle! Belong to those fighting for a better future! Join!”

 Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)

-or-

“Resistance is futile! Revolt and you’ll get crushed! Withdraw!”

Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Babylonian captive to grind bones of his family, 7th – 6th c. BCE. From Nineveh palace.

The topic called me again when I came across an enticing painting last week. It was posted on social media as Paul Klee’s An Allegory of Propaganda from 1939, obviously titled about propaganda, not propaganda itself. I was not familiar with it, and puzzled about the imagery in the context of the title. Ok, I thought, what can I make of it? (Screenshot of text and image below.)

Oranges and yellow dominate in a warm color scheme, a golden era upon us, preying on our need for hope? The person’s face looks rather androgynous, but is dressed and bejeweled like a woman. (“Propaganda” was actually a term for the most male of concepts: the name for a congregation of cardinals originally, established in 1622, charged with the management of missions. But in German, the word is female – perhaps because of the stereotypes of seduction and manipulative lying associated with the gender. Just speculating.) She holds a flower, often a symbol of magic (providing mystical powers in fairy tales). Or a symbol of innocence to be taken, the veritable deflowering. The woman’s dress is strangely configured. My first association was court jester costume shapes (they are hired to tell lies, amuse, distract, but ensure allegiance to the king.) Then I thought it could be a hint at rags, in German “Lumpen,” which immediately gave rise to the idea of Lumpenproletariat. The term, coined by Marx, can be roughly translated as the mob, a class of “outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers.” (Ref.) Well, mob and propaganda make a good pairing, as recipients of same, or, racketeers and propaganda, as seen in full view at the time of this writing.

OOPS.

Started to look at the date on the canvas. 1906, not 1939. Checked the title of the work on museum sites. Klee’s Allegory of Propaganda turns out to be an altogether different painting, created the year before he died, namely this:

Paul Klee An Allegory of Propaganda or Voice from the Ether, and you will eat your fill! (1939.)

(Some serious sleuthing revealed the 1906 painting as Klee’s Hesitation, which is a far better match between content and visual imagery. )

So here I was fooled into accepting false information, mentally elaborating on it in perfectly sensible ways to make it work (note, how you can make up an interpretative narrative out of thin air as guided by a presumed title…), and only rescued by an ingrained habit to look closely and to check the facts before I disseminate them to a larger circle of readers.

The true portrait’s subject is obviously salivating at the propaganda from the radio, words promising wealth and “Lebensraum,”( eat your fill!), as the Victoria and Albert Museum describes it, having purchased the painting in 1965. Alongside a matchstick that fronts fiery clouds in the back, his hair resembles barbed wire, his saliva could be mistaken for blood, his ears are open to the SS, and his cheeks flare pink in excitement of a new dawn, and a chilly palette overall, despite the prevalence of reds and browns.

***

The voice from the ether spills words, promising or threatening, dependent on the minute of the day and the target of manipulation. One of the most famous and most reproduced “art” works of the Nazi era, in itself propaganda but also about propaganda, was Hermann Otto Hoyer’s In the Beginning was the Word (1937).

Herman Otto Hoyer In the Beginning was the Word, (1937). United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of U.S. Army Center of Military History.

The painter drew on two sources: the Gospel of John which reads: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Secondly, the word is by Hitler, found in Mein Kampf, “All great, world-shaking events have been brought about, not by written matter, but by the spoken word.”

Hitler, now as the god-like figure, uses oratorial magic that keeps the listeners enthralled. In real life as well, not just an imagined painting.

We will be flooded with words in the coming years from on high, in the form of administration pronouncements, threats, executive orders, legislative proposals, commission summaries, Supreme Court contortions, brown-shirt fashion advice and media reporting that is already bending to the will of the newly empowered (and paying into oligarchic coffers in the meantime).

Flooded with words arriving from social media that spread disinformation far faster, and in higher frequency, than any posters and art reproductions in the history of politics ever could. Words from bots that proliferate like mushrooms, for every blocked one another one popping up in the next dark, moist corner.

Words from a state that, in the wonderfully sarcastic voice of Catherine Rampell, “now owns the memes of production.” Loathsome AI will make it (near) impossible to distinguish the false from the real, creating a sense that reality can no longer be grasped, just as Hannah Arendt predicted in the words I posted at the entry of this blog.

Yet we do not have to surrender to words.

We do not have to buy into propaganda. We do not have to believe every lie, every threat, every hint, every bribe, a tsunami of misinformation to the point where we throw up our hands, withdraw in sheer exhaustion, give up the good fight and quit, walking away fearfully into a steadily hotter sunset.

We still have the power to think and judge, (and check our sources critically, I’ll add, having myself been duped not just once.)

They might win their battle to enshrine inequality and forsake justice, but at least they will have to fight, if we don’t capitulate in advance.

Music on this Martin Luther King Day is chosen to celebrate hope. Let’s be a chorus to Sam Cooke’s “Change is gonna come.”

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The Palestinian Exception

I don’t sleep very well since the L.A. fires broke out. I have this recurrent thought of “One moment you sit in the boat, the next you drown in the water,” an obviously inappropriate metaphor regarding the type of catastrophe, but a perfect one capturing the nature of the suddenness of unexpected disaster.

I try to soothe myself to sleep with thoughts like “The kids are safe, they are physically unharmed. They got out alive, they are physically unharmed.” I try to generate images of an armada of kayaks, canoes, motorboats, rafts, paddle boats circling the displaced and coming to their rescue – so, so many people have reached out, offered and provided help, throwing the metaphoric life preservers. I try to imagine forces that will eventually bring light back to the darkness, for the many thousands of people far more harmed than my own.

Still can’t sleep. I say to myself, “At least my kids aren’t facing death as soldiers or civilians in Ukraine. At least they aren’t bomb and starved in Gaza.” Somehow downward comparison does little during restless nights, when you look at your own family’s photographs of an urban landscape resembling a bombed Hiroshima.

Gaza is, of course, not only coming up in my nightly distress – the hopeful news of a cease fire came out yesterday, reminding us of what is at stake. Here is a link to a collection of experts from different backgrounds discussing the questions raised by the potential ceasefire. As of this morning, the Israeli cabinet has not even been convened to ratify the agreement, since the powers that be are backpedaling.

In this context I thought you might be interested in related issues closer to home, faced by students and academics in this country who protest Israel’s war as well as our participation in it. (If you want to read a hair-raising report on American involvement in the atrocities committed in Gaza, here is the newest in-depth assessment by Pro-Publica.) The academic situation recalls the days of McCarthyism. (Similar if not worse conditions apply to Europe, in particular Germany, I might add.)

Here is the press release of an upcoming documentary film that I very much encourage PNW folks to attend.

Portland, OR – The Palestine Exception, a Portland-based documentary film directed by Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth, will screen at Cinema 21 on January 26, 2025. The screening will be followed by a panel and Q and A moderated by Marlene Eid, producer and Psychology faculty member at Portland Community College, and panelists Stephanie Wahab, professor of Social Work at PSU, Hannah Alzgal, a PSU alum featured in the film, and the film directors.

Here is the link to a trailer, so you can judge for yourself.

The Film

After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that many activists describe as the new McCarthyism. As students across the country organize protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, decades-long taboos in academia around criticism of Israel—the “Palestine exception”—are shattered.

A Palestinian-American PSU student in the film recounts the deeply personal toll of administrative reactions to the protests : “I think the school didn’t ever consider the fact that there are actual people that attend [their] university that are genuinely, and I mean really being affected by what’s going on. They’ve lost land, family members… Approaching me as if I’m deserving of being collectively punished is part of this idea that [they] don’t care about Arab suffering.”

The Palestine Exception features professors and students as they join calls for a ceasefire and divestment from companies doing business with Israel and face waves of crackdowns from administrators, the media, the police and politicians. Scholars from diverse disciplines explain what is at stake in these protests and why so many young people identify with the Palestinian cause. The documentary unfolds as a story of college campuses as sites of both rebellion and repression, where personal and collective histories converge in unexpected ways. 

About the Filmmakers

Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her documentary films focus on work carried out in contested social spaces and sites of political controversy. Haaken has directed nine feature films, including most recently the 2-part Necessity Series: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance and Climate Justice & the Thin Green Line and Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. Jennifer Ruth is a professor in the School of Film and associate dean in the College of the Arts at Portland State University. She writes extensively about academic freedom and higher education. She is the co-editor, with Valerie Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of The Right to Learn; Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom. The producers are Jan Haaken and Marlene Eid, a faculty member at Portland Community College. Eid founded and was the first president of PCRF, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, chapter in Portland, Oregon.

Music today was played by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Ramallah many years back. The orchestra of Arab and Jewish musicians was founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim 25 years ago. Here is the organization’s statement from August of last year (2024)

As we witness and mourn tens of thousands of lives destroyed and communities shattered while political courage remains absent, we, the musicians of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, are horrified and deeply saddened by the extreme escalation of violence in the Middle East, which continues to intensify daily.

The profound humanistic commitment of Maestro Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said stands at the core of our orchestra. In and through our music we seek to model a life of mutual recognition between equals.

We call on the local and the international communities and their leaders to stop procrastinating and put an end to the cycle of violence by effecting a permanent cease-fire, ensuring the safe return of all hostages and unlawfully held detainees. It is imperative to work toward a long-lasting peaceful resolution grounded in equality.

August 2024

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After the Fire.

Here they were, salmons “singing in the street,” in Northern morning light that favored gold and blues. Right out of an Auden poem that stirred in the recesses of my brain, vaguely remembered. Had to dig it out, oddly relevant to our times when Southern light is dimmed by black smoke, or flickers as burning embers. Like all truly meaningful poetry, his poem captures universal truth, models defiance and stirs hope.

Malo Hasselblad Metal Fish Walkway at Washougal, WA waterfront Trail

***

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

by W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

The poem is disguised as a traditional ballad, filled with cliches which altogether take on different meanings when read in the context the poet builds around them. The message is as serious as it gets.

Our narrator is out on an evening stroll amongst the sea of humanity, fields of harvest “wheat,” that might soon meet their reaper. He overhears a lover singing, near a brimming river and the train tracks that could quickly carry one away, looming disaster and flight metaphors in one simple verse.

The lover borrows every available absurdity to express the strength and longevity of his sentiments, with love lasting until the impossible happens, physically, geographically, biologically, metaphorically – in other words, lasting forever. The depth of love is expressed in fertility symbols (said singing salmons and the rabbits.) The allusion to disaster and flight is repeated in the image of the seven stars, squawking like geese. It refers to the Pleiades, a star cluster that played a major role in Greek mythology. Like migrating geese, the seven daughters of Atlas fled from place to place for many years pursued by Orion, until Zeus turned them into a constellation as he did with Orion, who still hunts them across the sky.

The lover’s song expresses the belief of singularity: the first love of the world, flower of the ages. But, more importantly, an unshakable faith in continuity, or even permanence. This is of course, a core belief that keeps us all going. Not just for love, but for life plans, for the existence of what and who we know and hold dear.

An unshakable faith, until it is shaken, or burnt to ashes, as the current case may be.

Such relentless optimism awakens the malevolent clocks: Time will have none of it, our lovers soon be disabused of their notion of eternity. Physical decline, material worries and economic stress (icebergs in the cupboard,) the eventual abating of sexual desire (desert in the bed) all putting cracks in the vessel once thought to last forever. Time manages to put the very notion of fairy tales onto its head: the presumed innocents prove to be lascivious, and relationships revert in unexpected ways. Why should “happily ever after” be the one to survive?

Looks like an inevitable ride downhill towards impermanence or even death. But now Auden rescues us with some strangely placed exhortations that are subtly encouraging.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

Could be washing your hands free from guilt of having been so naive, mistaken about continuity, or unable to live up to the promise of eternal love. But could also be a suggestion that you interrupt the narcissistic admiration of your Self in the basin, by making waves that destroy the image, pushing the focus on something else. That would make sense given how much Auden had embraced Freudian theories. It would also very much explain the next command:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

YOU might have failed in your naive or misdirected optimism, but LIFE remains a blessing. I read this as such an important reminder to be grateful. There is stuff out there, even if not what you hoped for, even if you lack agency, even if you dropped, or were dropped by a lover (a repeated theme in Auden’s personal life, made more complicated by being gay in times where it was illegal.) Even if you incurred unimaginable losses, there is a world out there. (One, I might add, shouting for us to find ways to protect it.)

And significantly:

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

Look out towards the world, no matter how rotten you feel, and remember the commandment to love your neighbor like yourself. They might be crooked, so are you. The whole idea is about goodwill/love towards others, a form that is not necessarily the sexual rush of the lovers we encountered in the first part of the poem, but the notion of Agape, the “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another, “as the dictionary defines it. Reaching out towards humanity as a whole, engaging in brotherly love, might protect from time’s relentless drag.

***

We are experiencing Agape at this very moment. The love and support extended towards the displaced by the Eaton Fire is beyond description. I cannot thank everyone personally, but am deeply grateful for the outpour regarding my kids. From what I hear, mutual aid is generally flourishing in Altadena, trying to soften the blows while everyone is still in a state of shock, where even finding a meal or a change of clothes can become an overwhelming task. The fire is forging an already tight community into a whole, held by concern for each other.

In our personal case, it feels like a small child is at the protected core of concentric rings, reaching ever further outward. Fiercely shielded by parents, who are supported by grandparents, aunts and uncles, then friends, then acquaintances, then friends of the older generations – a whole network of emotional sustenance, physical comfort, shared expertise and financial generosity.

The Greek word apocalypsis actually means not so much doomsday, but revelation or unveiling. The fires reveal humanity’s fragility and the consequences of ecological overshoot – using more than the planet can sustain. But they also reveal something essential: We cannot count on permanence, but we are here and now surrounded by love.

You don’t know how much of a difference that makes at this very moment.

Auden wrote this in 1937, unsettling times in Europe with rising fascism, not unlike our own – he soon after emigrated to the U.S., having had a harrowing time when traveling to Spain to report on the Civil war. I think it is a poem to be bookmarked for the year(s) to come.

Here is Auden reading his poem.

And here is a song cycle by Benjamin Britten. “Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8, was first performed in 1936. Its text, assembled and partly written by W. H. Auden, with a pacifist slant, puzzled audiences at the premiere.”

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Eaton Wildfire: Facing Insurance.

Many people who have lost their homes and all belongings to the LA wildfires are likely overwhelmed by the multitude of tasks demanded of them at a point in time when all they want to do is crawl under a borrowed blanket and cry. I would be. Heck, I am, if under a blanket I own, given that I sit safely at home in PDX while my kids try to navigate the unknown after the Eaton inferno.

How do you find accommodations? Where do you buy a change of clothes, diapers, food? With what do you pay? How do you deal with your employers, how are you even able to work if sitting in cramped quarters or emergency shelters or can’t breathe for the smog? What do you tell your children why they can’t go home, or to school, or see their friends? How do you make it clear to the many well meaning people who inquire, that you have no clue what the immediate, much less far, future will bring?

And, importantly, who do you contact for insurance questions? Do you have even the names and numbers you need?

Here are a few pieces of information that were either handed down to me by people in the know or found on official websites, just my summary from what I gleaned that would be helpful.

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

  • For lots of information about getting help after the Eaton (or any) wildfire go here: the non-profit United Policyholders website guides you through various steps towards recovery and also FEMA applications if you are not insured. They have step by step practical and legal information that is extremely helpful.
  • The California Department of Insurance (DOI) has a website as well. It gives you instructions on how to approach and deal with your insurer.

Their top ten tips include advice how to obtain a copy of your full policy in the first month (they HAVE to give that to you) and answers to your general questions about rebuilding, loss of personal items, and current living expenses (for which they have to give you an advance.)

They remind you to track all your expenses after the fire ( keep receipts!), and to document all the interactions you have: “Record conversations with your insurer/adjuster about your claim and policy limitations in a dedicated claim diary. If your adjuster says something is excluded, limited, or subject to certain conditions, ask the adjuster to point out the specific provision in your policy being cited.”

And this: Get at least one licensed contractor’s estimate or bid on the cost to rebuild your home just to get a reasonable sense of the actual cost as compared to your coverage limits (for more considerations on contractors, view the CDI’s electronic brochure Don’t Get Scammed After a Disaster and check the California’s Contractors State License Board website.) While your insurance company may provide its own estimate, it may contain errors or fail to reflect local conditions or demand surge. Demand surge reflects price increases following a major disaster when contractors and materials are in short supply. (Will be a huge issue in Altadena, no doubt.)

Many more suggestions can be found on their page, including the possibility that you might want to have a public adjuster assess the damage and help you deal with the insurer, rather than the insurers’ own adjuster who knows who they work for. This is a bit of a dilemma – if you hire your own, you have to pay, often a hefty percentage of the reimbursements you eventually receive. Also you need to find one who you can trust, which can be problematic because there are unfortunately scammers out there, lurking at the borders of disaster.

You can, however, look at your insurer’s conduct record to see if they are pretty reliable or if you should have outside help. Here is a website that lists the 50 most frequent insurance companies and their complaint history (the list is conveniently graded from top (best and most reliable) to bottom (worst) by looking a the ratios of justified complaints to number of complaints, as of 2023.

Here is something else to be aware of: The insurer is required to give you their most recent breakdown of their cost estimate for rebuilding your house. Ask for it! You then have to make sure that the info about your house is actually correct.

“Did they ever check with you? Did they ever give you that breakdown to review before now? The breakdown will have a “quality grade”- usually standard, above average, or custom. Above average is supposed to be for tract housing communities. Any house that was built individually and designed by an architect is supposed to be at least “custom.” This one piece of data alone affects your insurance coverage by at least 30%. If they got it wrong, start digging into it NOW. Was your house built on a slope? Increases the cost about 15%. On a long and remote road? Another 15%.”

So what to expect – and bring to – the first interaction with the adjuster?

  • Contact info and description of current stay (friends, airbnb, shelter etc)
  • Basics of the lost property: estimated square footage, type of construction.
  • Try and have a list of all the property you remember in each room ( Oregon folks, for earthquake or fire PREP, it helps to video tape each room slowly with a description of furniture, instruments, artwork, jewelry, library, good china, household appliances, electronics, garage contents, sports equipment like skis or kayaks, clothes etc. Don’t forget ,comforters and linen cost money; so does rain gear and winter boots.) Writing up a list after the fact will be psychologically hard since it makes you remember all that you lost, but it will help to get funds for replacement.
  • Find out which fire department district protected your home
  • Info about additional insurance
  • Bank account number for transfer of funds
  • Info about your mortgage company

In turn, ask them, again, to give you the full policy details and also an advance for the immediate necessities, rent, clothing, food. They might have recommendations about provisional housing and will need to tell you how much your policy allots. Here the demand surge is likely a problem – it will not increase your stipend for expenses. Housing issues, already such a huge problem, will right now explode exponentially. As did the fires. As did the silence, in much of the mass media coverage of the catastrophe, about the role of climate change in generating ever more frequent and more destructive environmental disasters. Zip. Nada. But that we will discuss in another blog.

For now, tackle the loathsome business of dealing with the administrative burden of insurance. Then take your time in making a decision, DO NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING.

Rebuild? Relocate? So many factors need to be evaluated. The longing for familiarity, the place once home, for the community you cherish and want to recreate, is strong. That is why people return to floodplains and fire-prone areas in the first place. But you also have to consider, if the community can be reestablished given the rebuilding obstacles for many who were underinsured or not at all. This is particularly relevant for Altadena that was an unusually diverse and low-income town. (Historically it attracted Blacks because wealthier White folks avoided the local bad air quality due to the geographical trap for smog that the San Gabriels backdrop provided, catching the north- and westward drift.)

Fear of the unknown and inertia when you are trauma stricken are heavy burdens. But there is also the question of toxicity of the environment, for kids in particular, and the issue how schools and childcare availability will be impacted.

Importantly, there is also the looming threat that further insurance will be unavailable in fire zones exposed to future more frequent and intensifying catastrophes, so close to the canyons.

Insurers are leaving disaster-adjacent states like FL and CA in droves, or hiking rates up so they become unaffordable. Being a climate refugee is unimaginably hard, but being among the first still provides you with affordable options. A decade from now that picture will have changed.

I hope some of this will be of help. I’m crawling back under my blanket.

Bluebird photographs from November at Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery where Octavia E. Butler is buried. She was an astute observer of our society and a brilliant analyst of our history, all of which allowed her to write the Parable of the Sower, not mystically prescient, but thinking things logically through to a likely end, deadly fires and fascistic rule, set by her in 2025.

Music: Here is Pärt’s De Profundis.

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Eaton Fire

Since so many of you have inquired, for which I am truly grateful, I want to just answer a few questions.

My son and family in Altadena escaped the fire unharmed, but lost their house and all of their belongings. They are currently staying with a family friend some 20 miles away from the active fires and, importantly, the smog. We have no clue what will come next, and are taking it a day at a time, just mindful of the privilege to remain physically intact and surrounded by a strongly supportive network.

When this is all over and the kids are settled – wherever remains to be seen, I would love to rebuild the little one’s library that was turned to ashes. If any of you want to have an eye on Thriftstore treasures of children’s books, please keep us in mind. I am happy to pick up and/or reimburse and store at our house here in Portland. Age range 3 – 8, she devours everything, particularly nature oriented themes.

I will go silent until l have processed all this a bit more, but hopefully will be back on track next week.

These are apocalyptic times.

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And Now from the Interesting Person Department…

Last week I was looking something up at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. It is a treasure trove for scientists, artists, and really anyone interested in natural history, with hundreds of thousands of manuscripts available to peruse for free. It is a worldwide consortium, seated at the Smithsonian in D.C., with universities and national libraries collaborating to make their collections accessible to all.

What was supposed to be a relatively quick search for quasi-abstract images I wanted to learn from for a new project, turned out be a day of my life when I chanced on the biography of a most impressive naturalist that I simply HAD to read. Here is how I fell into the rabbit hole:

I had come to look at the Naturalist’s Miscellany (1789) by George Shaw, which has images of natural objects drawn from life, with Latin and English text explaining what people knew about them then. (Today’s images that are not mushrooms, are from this book.) Many of the engravings found here are spectacular. (In fact, on really bad days, going to this site and just looking at pictures instead of doomscrolling has been my rescue more than once.) After downloading what I thought were the most interesting prints, I decided to browse a bit for mushrooms, since the last blog had all these photographs I had taken of fungi. This is what popped up.

I had come upon a treatise called Brasilische Pilzblumen, (Brazilian Mushroomflowers) written in 1895 by a mycologist named Alfred Möller for a book Botanical Notes from the Tropics. He spent almost three years in Brazil, visiting his uncle who had emigrated from Germany decades earlier. Möller’s contribution to science was a detailed exploration of leaf cutter ants and their symbiotic relationship with certain fungi, which they literally farm, while living inside of them. The fungal agriculture involves planting, cultivating, and harvesting Basidiomycota for food by the ants. (Attina).

He took the photographs in 1890!

They add nutrients from fresh plant material, remove dead tissue and shelter them from predators, while consuming parts of the fungi as food, exclusively, and using fibers from the fungi to reinforce their nests. Ants contribute to protecting the plant against herbivores, fungal pathogens and competing plants. As the fungi thrive, so do the ants. Before we remain too much in awe of this mutualism, however, let’s note that the defoliating leaf cutter ants inflict widespread forest and agricultural damage in tropical regions due to their abundance. Nowadays, countries use satellite imagery and drones to detect their presence in tropical forests to fight decimated their numbers before they irreparably harm the trees.

Möller, it turns out, eventually got around to writing the biography of this uncle he visited, Fritz Müller (1822 – 1897), and this is where it gets fascinating. Well, for me, anyhow, since this was someone radically true to his beliefs no matter the cost, interested in everything under the sun, and never giving up, no matter how burdened by unimaginable losses. (The full text of the biography (1905) in German can be read here. An American retelling based on the biography is available here.)

Here is the short version. Johann Friedrich Theodor Müller is born into a rectory in Germany, one of many siblings, who develops a talent for science and mathematics and goes to university to become a pharmacist, eventually studying medicine. By the time he is done with his studies, he has joined the revolutionary youths of those years around 1848, and has become a fervent atheist, cutting him off from his religious parents and most of his siblings, as well as a woman he intended to marry. Atheism prevents him from swearing an oath to receive his university diploma, making employment difficult, so he decides to travel to Brazil where a German colony is built near Santa Catarina. He lives with the daughter of a poor farmhand and their first child dies at age three. The second child is one of two (out of 12 infants) who survive the ocean crossing to Brazil threatened by rampant malnutrition and diseases. Another thirteen children die of the measles on this trip as well.

In Brazil, the young family builds a hut in the jungle, loses almost everything to floods, to poisonous snakes, to attacks by pumas and indigenous tribes who the Germans have colonially displaced, with disease taking the lives of several of his 10 children. His most beloved daughter later commits suicide during a visit in Germany as a young adult. Müller relentlessly provides for his family with physical labor, income as a doctor with no access to necessary medicines, and eventual teaching gigs that are at the mercy of the Jesuits and the Brazilian government that is reported to have shafted him multiple times.

All the while he observes, records, analyzes and describes everything under the sun – mollusks and seashells, orchids, butterflies, you name it. He publishes, he corresponds, he reads the scientific literature when his means allow him to order the journals, and he draws exquisite images of what he finds in nature. Soon he gets a reputation in Europe, receives honorary doctorates, and begins a life long correspondence with Darwin, who calls him the “prince of observers” using many of Müller’s suggestions and reports to bolster his arguments about evolutionary processes. In fact, Darwin feels so indebted to him that he offers a substantial sum of money when once again natural disaster has destroyed much of Müller’s household and small library, which the latter politely refuses. He does accept, however, the scientific community’s gift of sending journal and literature for free after the disastrous flood.

In 1878 he publishes his observations on the evolutionary advantage of certain colorations in butterflies: mimicry as a defense mechanism against predators. “Müllerian mimicry is a natural phenomenon in which two or more well-defended species, often foul-tasting and sharing common predators, have come to mimic each other’s honest warning signals, to their mutual benefit.” Not only did he observe the functional advantages of coloration, but he developed one of the first ever mathematical models of frequency-dependent selection in biology. (Ref.) Darwinists ran with it.

So why do I go on about this, other than being happy to share something fascinating? I think it is a good reminder that openness to new ideas can produce amazing results. Ok, we probably all agree on that. But Müller also modeled resistance: his passion for something, the natural world in his case, and his engaging with the puzzle of evolution, enabled him to survive the worst hardships and personal losses someone can face. His correspondence reveals over and over again how the drive to understand the world we live in superseded the grief over what this world had in store for him.

It helps me to get a grip on those bad days where I feel overwhelmed. Pick and engage the things that interest you most, and for a while there will be no room for worry. Or rage. Or fear. Even if it is just a temporary relief, it might produce something that goes beyond just the personal realm, even for the many of us who are not the kind of genius he clearly was. Read an obscure biography! Feel better in no time.

***

After writing this yesterday, this morning I received an essay by Brian Klaas from my subscription list. It picks up on the topic of resilience, resonating with one’s environment (and even ant colonies,) late in the piece, which is generally about the dangers of optimization in contemporary cultures. The perfect long read , spelling out the dynamics of adaptation and the inherent risks. I would have liked though, if the author had discussed how it cannot be the duty of individuals caught in organizations that profit off optimization, to change from the bottom up – it would harm their livelihoods and functioning within the work place. It has to come from the top down, or as a synchronized movement by many like-minded people. But the essay provides a LOT of food for thought for young people trying to balance life and careers.

Music from Brazil. If you want a full album by Pauletti, I recommend (on Spotify) Ritual das Cordas.

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Game On.

Walk with me in this first week of the New Year. Grab your boots, though. My neighborhood park is rain-drenched and muddy – good for sliding, good for fungi, some of which shine with the wetness in reflective beauty, good for the drought-stressed environment.

I had a fun experience this morning even before I entered the woods. During my routine perusal of the news, I got hooked by a Merriam-Webster game asking people to look at a GIF – one of those gimmicks that show things in motion – that displayed words in fast succession. The idea was to take a random screenshot and whatever word you captured would be the lead for the year. Well, folks, I got UPLIFTING.

Screenshot

And just to show how my brain works, I thought “maybe that is the word they trickily provide for everyone to help us enter 2025 a bit more hopefully.” So I played the game again to test my hypothesis, and got – TOXIC.

There you have it – I will report on toxic events this year, but I will do it with the goal to uplift us all by utilizing our grief to be a catalyst for change. Game on.

Of course I’ll report on inherently uplifting things as well, often connected to science and the way activism has managed to protect us and/or our environment. Here are a few highlights from 2024:

Conservation Wins:

Close to home, salmon returned to Klamath river, after dams came down. Gray whale populations rebounded, as evidenced by a 33% increase in migration counts. In Everett, Washington, voters approved a ballot initiative that grants the Snohomish River watershed the rights to exist, regenerate and flourish. City residents, agencies and organizations can now sue on behalf of the watershed, and any recovered damages will be used to restore the ecosystem. Also in Washington, voters upheld the 2021 Climate Commitment Act by voting no on Initiative 2117.

Further East and South: Barbed-wire fences, maiming and killing wildlife, are removed or replaced with friendlier barries for hundred of miles in Wyoming and at the Montana/Idaho border. Wolf populations boom in California, and the first pack has been introduced to Colorado. California has introduced “pop-up” wetlands for migrating birds, by paying central valley rice farmers to flood their fields earlier in the fall and let them stay flooded longer in the spring.

Health Breakthroughs:

Looks like scientists found the next best thing to an HIV vaccine: the new drug Lenacapavir can prevent infection for up to 6 months after receiving the shot. 630.000 people still die of AIDS-related illness every single year. There are also ever more efficient vaccines against malaria and cervical cancer on the market – a child dies every minute of the former and 350.000 women globally every year of the latter. (It remains to be seen how the vaccine battle will unfold under the new administration in the U.S., of course. Anti-vaxxer sentiment is growing.)

Climate Change Modifications:

Solar power is advancing at a brisk clip, across the world. Washers, dryers, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves are becoming more energy efficient and also getting cheaper. Diesel-fuel powered school busses are starting to be dropped for EV busses across the country (there are half a million school busses on the road in this country…) It will not only be better for the environment but also save costs. People are realizing that small personal steps – eating 10% less meat, re-wilding your garden as just 2 examples – can have a cumulative impact.

(Long read for this week about personal contributions: What If We Get it Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. ((Here is an 8 minute listen of an Ari Shapiro interview with the author, that provides the gist.)) Great mix of essays and poetry.)

And then there is “Chonkus.” Researchers isolated a new microorganism, cyanobacterium UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus,” for its ability to consume carbon dioxide. If it could be genetically engineered, “this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system” to fight climate change. More about Chonkus here. A possibility, not yet a reality, but hope for a future.

***

Any toxic part, after these uplifting news?

Unfortunately, yes. Repression of climate and environmental protest is intensifying across the globe. (Climate protests refer to general demands about environmental protection, environmental protest is often the local resistance towards damaging projects.) The details can be read here. But the upshot of research looking at the reaction to global protest movements that have surged over the last years, given the proximal climate catastrophes experienced by so many, is this:

  • A large number of anti-protests laws have been introduced since 2019. “Anti-protest laws may give the police more powers to stop protest, introduce new criminal offences, increase sentence lengths for existing offences, or give policy impunity when harming protesters.”
  • Protest is criminalized and brought to the courts. This includes applying terrorism charges to non-violent, direct action groups. Criminalization also implies that corporations can take out injunctions against protesters.
  • Harsher Policing. “This stretches from stopping and searching to surveillance, arrests, violence, infiltration and threatening activists. The policing of activists is carried out not just by state actors like police and armed forces, but also private actors including private security, organised crime and corporations.”
  • In some countries environmental activists are killed, countries that include Brazil, the Philippines, Peru and India. In Brazil, most murders are carried out by organised crime groups while in Peru, it is the police force.

Seen in the middle of the park. secured in case someone wants to carry a tool heavy box over a mile to the next road?

The clock is ticking, and we are reaching or already have reached tipping points with regard to how our planet and all those living on it can be saved. Change requires political action, which so far, with few exceptions, has been lacking on a grand scale. By criminalizing protesters, you shift the focus from politics to “crime,” allowing you to continue with the old ways, committing irreparable harm.

The canaries in the coal mine? Why, insurance corporations, who are refusing to insure against fires, floods and other climate-related damages in ever larger numbers. They know the danger is real, as is the unwillingness of corporations and governments alike to do the necessary things about it.

“A conservative estimate of the homeowner insurance gap is $1.6 trillion in uncovered risks. That’s mostly being borne by people who are relatively poor or live in acknowledged flood and fire zones. Everyone in the insurance industry expects that gap to grow, as risks metastasize and are priced into policies. Insurance eventually becomes too expensive for many to afford, if it’s even still available. For homeowners, skyrocketing premiums are too high. But insurers worry they can’t charge enough to keep up with increasing risk. The climate crisis is already rendering entire communities and even regions uninsurable.

Uninsurable properties are also often unlendable. A 2023 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the overvaluation of homes measured only by their exposure to floods alone was as high as $237 billion.” And people forcibly or voluntarily moving to safer regions are driving up home prices, driving out those without means to stay in relatively climate stable places. (Ref. This link is actually to one of the most dispiriting essays on climate change I’ve come across recently, discussing the price of potential political (in)action. Be warned.)

Let’s end with something uplifting: the creeks are filling, the common hazel is blossoming and the sparrows are looking for love! And we can still detoxify with music: today Barber’s Adagio for Strings Op.11.

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Connecting the Dots.

Last blog for this year, looks like. I am defying the impulse to offer a balance sheet of a difficult year, or prepare a battle plan for the even more difficult one ahead. Instead, I will write about things that made me intensely happy at one point or another during the last 12 months, in hopes to get the transition into 2025 off to the right start.

Let’s begin with the fact that I am embedded in or adjacent to a ton of people who are highly creative. The range runs from (inter)nationally renowned artists, to successful local ones who can devote their life to making art. From published writers, painters, photographers, ceramicists who have shows, to all those people who pursue their urge to create regardless how unacknowledged their efforts will remain.

People who work 60 hour weeks and then come home to teach themselves how to make lace. People who lovingly and inventively design little flower fairy scenarios in their front rock gardens, enchanting the neighborhood with their creativity. People who make a house a home by determinedly finding the right way to paint the walls and hang the art. People who create native plant gardens that weave and flow from a dusty, dry cement desert. People who fabricate the most imaginative porcelain containers, dainty and elegant, with painted details. People who knit to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome, or embroider little creatures onto grandchildren’s crib blankets. People who weave, and those who quilt, adding new ideas to age-old crafts.

One of them is a friend who spends much of her time writing grants and breathing life into the finances of her organization, dealing with PR and recruiting advertisement, organizing membership drives and donor meetings, never mind keeping the books and making sure everyone gets paid.

Laura Grimes needed a retainer wall in front of her house and decided it had to be more than just cinder blocks. It has become a project that is creative on many levels – constructing themed mosaics from shards, remnants, beads, toys, thrift- and dollar store finds as well as generous donations from the community of the local Buy Nothing web site. I can just envision her sitting night after night in a basement experimenting with the right cement glue, the appropriately sized cinder blocks, the arrangement of a thousand trinkets and marbles, the groupings by shape and color and category membership.

It is not Art with a capital A, and I assume was never meant to be that. It is a desire to fashion something representing joy if not beauty from lots of circles and dots, or to tell a story or two, as all creative endeavors end up doing.

Maybe all these creatives convey the history of a craft, maybe they account for the requirements of a climate zone, maybe they refer to fables in their porcelain work, or maybe they speak of birds, or mermaids, or vegetables embedded in imaginary landscapes. Maybe they depict the hard truths of our time.

All of it, however, is directed at an “other,” the viewer, establishing a connection across time and/or space, letting us “read” what they have to say, or just feel gifted by the expressions they had to bestow. Art or craft engenders curiosity, instills pleasure, perhaps even admiration, linking two minds for a moment, a first step toward community. Giving one’s imagination a creative form is an act of reaching forward, outward, the possibility of forming a bond, no matter how playful or artful the base. Nothing more important in times where loneliness and division are dark clouds threatening to engulf so many. I am so happy to be surrounded by creativity offering connectedness in this way.

***

Fast forward from dotted mosaics to dotted paintings. I have always admired the defiance of African-American painter Howardena Pindell who set herself the life-long task to decry racial segregation by using dots and circles in her art – originating in her childhood experience of red dots glued to the bottom of glasses and silver ware in public restaurants, to be served Blacks only, keeping the unmarked ones for Whites.

But recently I have been completely taken in, without ever seeing it in real life, by the dot-dominated work of a painter who started in her late 70s and whose visions exploded onto the art world horizon soon thereafter. Emily Kam Kngwarray produced about 3000 paintings during the 8 years she still lived after taking up the craft, about one a day. Those of my readers lucky to live in Great Britain will be able to see a retrospective at the Tate Modern, starting July 10th, 2025. What stirs me is not just the movement and exuberance that makes these canvases come alive, but admittedly also the very notion of “late-blooming.”

Kam Kngwarray’s works on show. Photograph: National Gallery of Australia

Installation view of Kim Kngwarray’s Batiks

Kam Kngwarray grew up in a remote area of Australia, with little contact to the outside world until she was 80 years old. She was as Anmatyerre elder, and a lifelong custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.

“Whenever Emily was asked to explain her paintings, regardless of whether the images were a shimmering veil of dots, a field of ‘dump dump’ dots, raw stripes seared across the surface or elegant black lines, her answer was always the same: Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), arlatyeye (pencil yam), arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), ntange (grass seed), tingu (Dreamtime pup), ankerre (emu), intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), atnwerle (green bean), and kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot.” ( Interview with Rodney Gooch, translated by Kathleen Petyarre.)”

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Summer Celebration (1991)

Kam Kngwarray Alhalkere – Old Man Emu with Babies (1989) Photograph: Courtesy of D’Lan Contemporary

The connection to place reveals itself even to the likes of me who are totally ignorant about Aborigine art. The abstracted vision, paralleling Modernism or styles found in Japanese calligraphy, grasps something universal, reverberating with many of us, lightyears removed from the artist’s existence. Universal: the concept that you can embrace place, the very part of the natural (or even built) world where you live, that informs and infuses you, providing a sense of belonging. It is there for all of us, even if Western culture during the last century has tried much to dull our sensitivity to its call.

***

From dotted paintings to pearly music: Y’Y, the new recording by pianist and jazz composer Amaro Freitas makes me goose-bump happy (here is the link). It, too, encapsulates a tribute to a place, a region, the forest and rivers of Northern Brazil, featuring legends, spirits and rhythms from the Amazon and Pernambuco, where the artist grew up. The piano score is ravishing and the way he manipulates the strings by inserting soft objects like seeds, produces a creative new sound, always echoing the water drops and rivulets of the subtropical environment.

For me the album registers on a different level as well, making it special – a link to personal history. As I have mentioned often before, I am not one to spend much time perusing the past and introspecting about how life unfolded. But occasionally some glorious moments deserve to be remembered, and the album delivers the impetus, with its compositions bearing resemblances to Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian, and Egberto Gismonti, the Brazilian musical giant.

I swear I survived adolescence only because I could bang out Khatchaturian’s Toccata (here is the music). And I mean bang out, paying no heed to differences in dynamics, just hitting the keys with rage. And one of the best experiences of my life was a backpacking trip along the Rio Negro in Ecuador, first (and, alas, last) visit to the Amazonian rainforest, captured so well in much of Gismonti’s work, and now Freitas’. Art linking to personal history, then, invites to remember the past, which in turn contains the implication of a future, where I intend to spend my energies to help connect the dots, as best I can. Just keep the creative output coming!

Happy New Year!

And speaking of connecting the dots (since this blog is dedicated to art, nature and politics, after all): I thought we might as well end 2024 on a combination of laughing, crying, screaming, and gasping at the theatre of the absurd upon us: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/eliot-weinberger/incoming – courtesy of the London Review of Books.)

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Fluke

You never know. Here I was planning a quiet walk in one of my favorite places on earth, the place where I go to air out my soul. It reminds me of the landscape of my childhood, flat as a pancake, skies low, agricultural fields and watery flats seamed by alders and willows.

A landscape best caught in black and white for its riches of patterning and contrasts of shadow and light. A reminder, too, that black and white belongs to photography and not thinking, the need to fight rigidity of both, really, thought and feeling. A landscape that has changed across the decades of my visits without losing its essential beauty, a pointer towards aging gracefully. A place you all know by osmosis, given how often I have posted from there throughout the seasons.

Weeping Willows

I meant to contemplate 2024, in all its horrors as well as gifts, its losses and riches, and above all this sense of “What now? How do I meet the challenges before us, without losing a sense of hope and integrity? How to combat the worries that tend to overtake me? The irritability with my uncooperative body? “

It was not to be. The minute I hit the footpath on Monday, usually a solitary walk towards a dike, I saw throngs of people, strangely moving at speed back and forth, as small groups, excitedly chattering. What was going on?

A field sparrow! There’s supposed to be a field sparrow! The chance of a life time to scratch if off a Western birder’s life list, since the bird resides in the Eastern US and must have made a wrong turn. Or two. Is it here, in the blackberry patch? It is there, hiding among the reeds?

What’s a field sparrow, you ask? Beats me. It looks (and I never saw it live, had to look it up in my guide book) like a million other sparrows, even when I learned to watch for the eye rings and the pinkish beak.

But you know what? It completely changed my mood, my outlook that day, this fluke of a bird appearing out of nowhere, this fluke of me arriving at the island at just that time. It was invigorating to see people as a community, whipping out their phones to call birder friends to come on down, people showing each other photos they had taken half an hour earlier, discussing the rarity of the event, people carefully placing their tripods for heavy cameras as not to interfere with their neighbor’s, and a general sense of camaraderie, excitement and passion suffusing the air. Most importantly, regardless of the current fires sweeping the world in all their manifestations, there was this bond to nature and the wonders it offers, the willingness to stand or run in the damp cold for hours on end to catch a glimpse of a TLB (tiny little bird in my “couldn’t identify it for the life of me” vocabulary.) To be free of worry for a small window in time.

The excitement was contagious and I kept smiling for the rest of my walk, long after leaving all of them behind, entering the wetlands and communing with slightly larger birds instead.

Tuesday a library book arrived from the longish wait list, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and why everything we do matters, by Brian Klaas. I had ordered it after reading an essay (today’s Long Read) by him that hooked me, and that you might find thought-provoking. Judging by the first half read so far, the book is interesting, written in ways completely graspable for the layperson, filled with fascinating examples, but also slightly too repetitive for this reader who likes to roar through new information.

Mist in the air

Take a typical example: Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War in 1945, persuaded President Truman not to drop the nuclear bomb on Kyoto, much against the resistance of the military brass who believed it to be the ideal target, not least because its university was the intellectual center of Japan. Why did he care? He had had a wonderful visit there with his wife in the fall of 1926, seeing it in all its historic and seasonal beauty and felt that it needed to be preserved. A total fluke. He fought for the city being spared on multiple occasions until Truman relented. It had to be Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead.

The upshot, so far, is this: we need to revise our thinking about issues of chance, the order of things, and our ability to control the way life unfolds. Infinitely complex systems like our interconnected world can be affected by minute changes, as chaos theory predicted (think butterfly effect). Every one of us should likely take less pride in our accomplishments and feel less guilty about our failures, because pure luck (the very definition of chance) affects any old outcome. It’s hard to accept the notion of random drift – then again, maybe it’s liberating? Just think of the possibility that something completely random could happen that shifts the world’s current embrace of war and authoritarianism…

As the Kirkus Review observed: The book can provoke existential unease, but it also helps explain the cockamamie nature of the way things are, and it’s an always-interesting read.

That about captures it!

And who knows, maybe the fluke of my encounter led to eating less junk food that day since I was feeling more upbeat. That in turn might improve my immune system, leading to more cancer fighting power. A random bird the cause for added years of blogging…. I’ll take it.

Long live the field sparrow!

Music today adheres to the more traditional views of orderly, controlled and willful creation with the representation of chaos at the beginning: Haydn’s Die Schöpfung.

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Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.

This was sent by a friend – I thought I’d share the welcome sentiments.

E. B. White’s Christmas – From the New Yorker 1952
 
From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified
with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of
old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions
in many places.
 
Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have
made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in
judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who
can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who
wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy
mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time.
 
Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities!
 
Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes
don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the
blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly
thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists!
 
Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who
can’t find their rhymes!
 
Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight.
Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How”
(as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in
their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep,
and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths!
 
Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to
people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too,
the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in
Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got
nothing in the mail.
 
Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; Merry
Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction!
Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–
plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners
whose conduct is unworthy of their car!
 
Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; Joy
to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and
most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers  to soldiers and
guardsmen on land and sea and in the air– the young men doing
the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such,
Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the
Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our
new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management!
 
Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas
to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure!
 
Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the
wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is
too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers
who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke.
 
Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon!
 
And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge
of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters!
Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind!
 
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

Man, do I miss NYC at times. The mere memory of the million varieties of sufganiyot make my mouth water. Here are 2024’s recommended bakeries for this greasy dessert.

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