Posts

On Haggis and Donald Trump

/57 Comments/in /by

Note, please, the face on the 10 pound note.

On this feast day of Robert Burns, less than a week into the second Trump administration, things are not well. ICE is going nuts, the CDC failed to issue its “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” for the first time since 1960 (MMWR is where the medical community first was alerted to what came to be known as AIDS), hundreds of seditionists and insurrectionists were pardoned or had their sentences commuted, Trump seems bent on taking FEMA – an agency whose mission to is to care for neighbors in need – and turn it into a quid-pro-quo program where friends are helped and others left to cry alone, and now the dismissal of 17 inspectors general.

And that’s just for starters.

On this feast day of Robert Burns, one need not wonder what Burns would have to say about Mar-a-Lago and its Lord. In his poem “My Father was a Farmer,” he lays out his own set of values,

My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O,
And carefully he bred me in decency and order, O;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne’er a farthing, O;
For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O.

Hmmm . . . one’s worth is not based on the size of your purse? “Unpossible!” says the Lord of Mar-a-Lago.

Later in the poem, after describing how his efforts to improve his financial situation were less than successful, and unmoved by his lack of money or what society says his values should be, he says this about himself:

But cheerful still, I am as well as a monarch in his palace, O,
Tho’ Fortune’s frown still hunts me down, with all her wonted malice, O:
I make indeed my daily bread, but ne’er can make it farther, O:
But as daily bread is all I need, I do not much regard her, O.

“Unpossible!” says the Lord of Mar-a-Lago. “How can you possibly be cheerful without money?”

The final stanza makes the contrast between Burns and the Trump-like Lords of his day abundantly clear:

All you who follow wealth and power with unremitting ardour, O,
The more in this you look for bliss, you leave your view the farther, O:
Had you the wealth Potosi boasts, or nations to adore you, O,
A cheerful honest-hearted clown I will prefer before you, O.

What is delightful about this poem is that Burns wasn’t speaking metaphorically, but autobiographically. Burns was a working farmer-poet, never wealthy himself, and oft in need of additional income. Writing poetry definitely helped, as various parts of Edinburgh’s High Society oooh-ed and ahhh-ed over his writing and were willing to pay for it.

But even so, Burns had no problem taking aim at their pretentiousness. His famous “Address to a Haggis” (recited far and wide at Burns celebrations each year on this day) is as much a take down and those who adore over-wrought fancy cooking as it is praise of a peasant dish. Burns writes about this sheep’s stomach filled with sheep’s lung, heart, and liver, along with oats, onions, and all manner of spices and herbs, as if it were the finest French cuisine, only to slam those who prefer “fine dining” over hearty fare like the haggis. Haggis, like honest working folks, has substance and nourishment; those who love their fine cuisine he calls devils, as their meal is an inappropriately thin plate of unhealthy trash.

My family roots are German, not Scottish, but “Address to a Haggis” resonates strongly with me. My late grandmother was a delightful baker with a heart of hospitality and always ready to put together a quick coffee cake if guests dropped by. As a daughter of the depression, she had a myriad of ways to stretch her ingredients and her budget. One of the favorite dishes she made that I only ever had at her home was a beef stew using beef heart and tongue, rather than more common cuts of beef. She could get the heart and tongue for next to nothing (or simply for nothing, as cattle-ranching parishioners who knew how badly her pastor-husband was paid would save these for her as an extra gift), and she turned them into a thing of beauty. Alas, she is gone and the recipe with her, though I can still smell it in my mind and taste it in my soul.

On this feast of Robert Burns, in these troubling times when all seems adrift, Burns’ injunction to prefer “a cheerful honest-hearted clown” to folks like the Lord of Mar-a-Lago seems all the more necessary. I invite you to fill your glass with a beverage of your choice, because it’s time to ding.

The roots of dinging at our home go back more than two decades . . .

It started on a Friday when The Kid was not yet two, and we had finally sat down to dinner at the end of a long week for all of us. Mrs. Dr. Peterr raised her glass, I raised mine, and in a quiet, exhausted, but happy voice she smiled at me and said “To the weekend.” “To the weekend,” I echoed, touching my glass lightly against hers. Then, from the high chair, a little voice chimed in loudly and proudly, punctuating each word with a swing of his sippy cup: “To. The. Weekend! Now ding with me!”

And so it is at our house, especially on Fridays: We have to ding.

The beverages vary widely, from glass to glass and from day to day – juice, wine, water, sparkling cider, beer, milk, scotch, etc. – and so do the toasts. Some days, we toast each other; other days we toast something great that has happened. Some days, the toasts bring happy thoughts, and on other days, they carry a note of sadness and loss. Some toasts are short, simply naming the person or thing for which we are grateful. Others are longer, and take on Dr. Seuss-like rhymes and rhythms.

The one thing they have in common, though, is a sense of shared gratitude. Mark Twain put it like this: “To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.” Science fiction writer Spider Robinson takes Twain one step further: “Shared joy is increased; shared pain is lessened.”

It’s Friday, it’s the end of a rollercoaster of a week, it’s five o’clock somewhere, and we’ve got to ding.

Today is Saturday, not Friday, and it has indeed been a long, long week, so we’ve got to ding. With all that has happened in the last seven days, I can’t help but think that Robert Burns is lifting a glass of Scotch Drink with us today. So fill your own glass, raise it high, and join me in a toast.

Ladies and gentlemen,
. . . friends whom I know well and friends I have only just met,
. . . friends who love to chat and silent friends who lurk in the corners,
. . . friends who agree and friends who argue,
. . . friends who challenge my thinking and friends who confirm it,
. . . friends who trust each other with their open, honest ideas,
. . . friends who come here looking for conversation to get their thoughts in order:
To the poet,
. . . the farmer,
. . . the bard of Scotland,
. . . Robert Burns!

*DING*

Please offer your own toasts, your own odes to the foods of your hearts, and your own perspectives on the values of Lord of Mar-a-Lago and his ilk in the comments.

On the Skewering of Self-Promoters Who are Filled with Misplaced Self-Importance

/139 Comments/in , /by

Note, please, the face on the 10 pound note.

I have long loved satirists who skewer those who are filled with themselves and endeavor to look better to the world than they are. It’s not enough for these folks to be themselves, but they must appear to be better than those around them. And happily for me and for the world, there are other folks who are not content to notice them, but who are quite good at holding up a mirror to them, to the delight of the world. Folks like . . .

  • Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.
  • Lily Tomlin.
  • Ben Franklin.
  • Amy Poehler and Tina Fay.
  • Michael Che and Colin Jost.
  • Tom Lehrer.
  • Gracie Allen.
  • Dick Gregory (who consciously chose as the one-word title of his autobiography a word that cannot be spoken these days!)
  • Puck and a host of political cartoonists who followed.
  • Jonathan Swift.
  • Art Buchwald.
  • Mark Twain.
  • The anonymous author of the biblical book of Jonah.
  • Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.
  • Heinrich Hoffmann.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer.

All wonderful folks, and obviously this is a very partial, very personal list. But one more name must be added, a name to whom millions will raise a wee dram tonight (or perhaps tomorrow night, if they intend more than a single wee dram and worry about getting to work on Friday): Robert Burns.

Years ago as a teenager, I took a family trip to Great Britain. We saw castles, abbeys, cathedrals, and ordinary small churches. We viewed museums, monuments, and mausoleums, looking on treasures old and new. We visited Oxford bookshops (from whence I brought home a first edition of The Silmarillion) and sports gear shops (from whence I brought home a pair of Franz Beckenbauer Special football boots). We went to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw various Shakespeare sites.

And then we got to Scotland, and the home of Robert Burns. I brought back a souvenir from there, which gets a lot more use than the now-too-small Beckenbauer Specials and even the oft-read Silmarillion: a well-used leather bookmark, with a short little poem by Burns:

The Book-worms

Through and through th’ inspir’d leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings;
But O respect his lordship’s taste,
And spare his golden bindings.

According to literary scholars, Burns wrote this epigram inside a fancy gold-embossed, leather-bound volume of Shakespeare in a noble’s library. He had pulled the impressive looking book down from the shelf, only to find much of the insides eaten away. Taking out his poet’s pen,  he inscribed the verse above. Four simple lines, neatly skewering “his lordship’s taste” which is clearly of much more importance to his lordship than the inspir’d words of the Bard himself. As Billy Crystal’s Fernando was fond of saying, “It is better to look good than to feel good, and you look mah-vel-ous.” The book may be ruined, but the appearance of the book is what matters.

Makes me think of overly-though out Zoom setups, skewered by Room Rater on the Site Formerly Known as Twitter. There are folks whose Zoom backgrounds fit themselves like a glove (see Michael Beschloss and Claire McCaskill, to name just two well-known examples), and there are . . . others. These are the folks that sit and pontificate in front of shelves lined with impressive looking books, but after hearing what they have to say, you have to wonder whether these folks had actually read those impressive-looking books, or even knew what the basic points of those books are.

Right now, my Book-worm bookmark sits about halfway through my copy of The 1619 Project, which seems appropriate on this Robert Burns Day. Nikole Hannah-Jones and those with whom she worked on this mammoth project have taken upon themselves the task of tumbling the mighty who oversold themselves and their stories while lifting up the lowly whose lives and stories had been shoved to the margins.

So tonight (or tomorrow), let us raise a glass of Scotch Drink to Robert Burns and those like him who use their literary superpowers for good.

Feel free to add your favorite satirical poets and authors to the comments, and if you feel truly inspired, raise your glass/mug/sippy cup, and offer a toast. But as it’s a Thursday, please toast responsibly.

Photo used under CC by 2.0 deed, from the flikr account of summonedbyfells, who also includes a delightful story behind the photo. I’ll be raising a glass to summonedbyfells, too!

Amanda Gorman Made Silvester Beaman Sad, Joe Biden Happy, and John Lewis Dance

/52 Comments/in , , , , /by

"https://youtu.be/lI1c-Lbd4Bw

The saddest person on the Inaugural stage was not Mike Pence, the outgoing Vice President. Indeed, after what he had to put up with from Trump for the last month, he’s probably relieved if not outright happy. The saddest person was not Amy Klobuchar or other presidential hopefuls who came up short during the primaries, who no doubt imagined themselves as the person taking the oath of office today. The saddest person on the stage today was the Reverend Doctor Silvester Beaman of Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware.

The happiest person on the stage was President Joe Biden, but it’s not because he was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States of America. It’s not because the inauguration went off without more violence. It’s not because he can finally *do* things to address all the problems he and we are facing, which had to have been incredibly frustrating as the transition floundered and foundered and blundered its way to today. It’s not because he accomplished what Beau wanted him to do.

The reason Beaman was so sad and Biden was so happy is this: Biden finished before Amanda Gorman spoke and Beaman had to follow her. Honestly, I half expected Beaman to step up to the microphone, ask “Can I get an Amen?”, and then drop the folder with his prepared benediction and sit down. Don’t get me wrong: Beaman’s words were good, but he had to know that he was following something epic.

When I saw Gorman come down the Capitol steps wearing her yellow power coat, her bold hoop earrings, her bright red wrap around the powerful tight braids atop her head, I just sat back and smiled. Michelle Obama looked great in her purple, but she was a member of the audience today. Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez both made their entrances before they picked up the microphone, and were fine, but Gorman owned those steps in a way that no on else did today. Seeing her enter reminded me of AOC stepping onto the House floor in her power red suit as she prepared to respond to being called a “fucking bitch” by Florida Congressman Ted Yoho. Before Gorman opened her mouth, it was clear that she had Something To Say and it was going to be good.

And make no mistake: she did, and it was.

It was incredibly powerful for three reasons. First, Gorman was unapologetically herself: young, African-American, articulate, and proud of all three. She did not cast herself as Maya Angelou or Robert Frost, two earlier inaugural poets. She spoke with the rhythms of rap that are the language of her generation and her community, embracing the whole heritage of Africans on this continent, and conscious of her power in this moment.

Second, Gorman was unflinchingly honest. She spoke of the ugliness of our history at times, at the tragedies we have been through, and the reality of what is going on right now. There were no pious platitudes to paper over the pain that far too many have had to deal with for far too long.

Most of all, Gorman was unimaginably hopeful. If she owned and possessed the four centuries of pain poured out on the Africans brought to this country in chains and their descendants who lived through slavery, official Jim Crow, and unofficial oppression, she also owned and possessed the strength that carried them through it all, forcing this country to slowly and painfully look at its past, decide to change, and actually make those changes begin to come to be.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.
We feared it at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it, we found the power
to author a new chapter,
to offer hope and laughter
to ourselves so while once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert:
how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was,
but move to what shall be
a country that is bruised, but whole,
benevolent, but bold,
fierce, and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain,
if we merge mercy with might and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

And with these words, I thought immediately of John Lewis, the happiest person *not* on the stage today.

Gorman was not mindlessly repeating the words of an earlier generation of activists, but building on them. Just as the 23 year old John Lewis spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, so the 22 year old Amanda Gorman stood at the other end of the Mall, on the steps of the Capitol in which John Lewis served until he died, and she is taking this nation one more step forward. She isn’t asking permission to do this, or suggesting this be done. She is declaring reality: we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation.

I am glad that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump and Mike Pence. I am relieved that we have made it through the transition between the election and today. I am still shaken by the insurrection of January 6th and what may yet lie ahead on that front. But I am dancing in my living room right now, and am convinced that John Lewis is dancing in heaven today, because in Amanda Gorman we see that the good troublemaking goes on.

How could catastrophe possibly prevail?