Another Week: Number 153

The last slice of beautiful fall weather was served on Sunday, so I went walking in the 53-degree sunshine at Petrifying Springs with some ancient technology in my ears — my tiny Sony Walkman radio. The Steelers @ Bears game was not carried here, and my TV antenna does not pull in CBS 2 Chicago, so I was forced to listen to the game on WMVP-AM through all the static and distant whirring noises. It was another satisfying Bears win.

It’s that time of year when we start scurrying around to make preparations and secure provisions. I got my Thanksgiving shopping done on Monday — some Serious Beans, some LaBrea sourdough, some sliced ham, a couple cans of cranberry sauce, boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and, of course, a lemon.

Tuesday morning in the 3 o’clock hour, I stumbled across an interesting talk on the BBC by Rutger Bregman — episode 1 of 4 in the 2025 BBC Reith Lectures, “A Time of Monsters.” He’s championing a “moral revolution,” and some of the things he said hit me the way other people might experience a church sermon. Now I need to listen to the other three episodes. It may be a foreign broadcast in the middle of the night, but at least someone is attempting to address these issues instead of just shrugging.

Update: Cowering to Donald Trump, the once-revered BBC edited out Bregman’s line about Trump being “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” These days, irony is tying itself in double knots.

As our foggy atmosphere of moderate (yellow) air quality turned colder, I watched hundreds of bits of paper fall from one of my junipers. A squirrel had gathered this insulation from a neighbor’s yard, hauled it up to his crib in my shrub, and shredded it — but now the brisk wind was blowing it back out to the ground below.

Wednesday was cold and extremely windy. My sister Maria and her husband Wayne were in town from Ohio to visit our mom, and we all chatted at Mom’s apartment. Thursday was Thanksgiving Day. I watched the first two of the three football games — then bailed on the third and finished my book instead.

On Black Friday, in a game that had loomed with dread, the Chicago Bears beat the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles by using the wind to their advantage and relentlessly running the ball. It was their fifth straight win. Now the Bears’ next game looms in Green Bay.

Our second big snowstorm of the season arrived early on Saturday morning and continued all day and all night. It officially dropped 12.5 inches in Racine, but looked more like 9 inches on my sidewalk.

I walked 9.45 miles this week.

Two National Guard members shot in Washington, DC

The notifications started popping up on my phone Wednesday afternoon while I visited with my sister and brother-in-law at my mom’s apartment: Two West Virginia National Guard members deployed to Washington, D.C. had been shot just a few blocks from the White House.

No one brought it up during my family visit, but I listened to the coverage as I drove home to Racine, and already on cable news, an expert was describing how the alleged shooter — an Afghan national resettled here after the U.S. withdrawal from his country — was likely “radicalized” by strangers befriending him online. This whole scenario was just lazy speculation, but that’s what a lot of our news coverage amounts to now.

What nobody would say was the obvious fact: Donald J. Trump had gotten what he wanted by unlawfully deploying armed troops to a U.S. city. Immediately, Trump ordered 500 more National Guard members to D.C.

The next morning, one of the two victims — 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom — died, and Trump, revealing her death during a Thanksgiving Day phone call with U.S. troops, called her “outstanding in every way” — then bragged that “I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”

He knew nothing about Sarah Beckstrom and couldn’t care less. She and Andrew Wolfe were pawns in his gambit to impose force and trample laws. Trump fetishizes brutality. By Friday, he was leveraging the tragedy to announce all sorts of new immigration crackdowns, using the shooting as justification.

As someone with a niece in the military, I feel like throwing up.

Light in August, by William Faulkner

Thursday night, I finally finished reading Light in August, the 1932 novel by William Faulkner. I started the book at the end of September and finished the narrative in mid-October — but my Norton Critical Edition includes plenty of supplementary material, which made for very slow going.

Part of my interest in Faulkner was a desire to gain a better understanding of the culture of the American South. In this story, he digs deep into those values like someone unabashedly picking his nose until it gushes with blood.

The novel is centered on Joe Christmas, an orphan of undetermined race now in his early 30s. His painful past sent him running aimlessly around the nation for years, finally returning to work in a planing mill at the fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, in sullen alienation.

Bookending this story is the tale of Lena Grove, a young white woman from Alabama who has hitchhiked to Jefferson to find the scoundrel who made her pregnant. Possibly, the guy works at the local planing mill.

Faulker’s technique is interesting and struck me as cinematic. He keeps his characters at a distance — mostly long shots — and he employs montage, long takes, flashbacks, narration, etc. to make his words unspool like a movie. You get a good sense of the landscape, but the people remain at arm’s length.

His subject matter, however, is more twisted than Quentin Tarantino’s. You can already sense the author’s alcoholism as he chases demons — societal, regional, and personal — down rabbit holes to tear at them in the dark. Faulkner clearly has deep internal conflicts — a combination of care and disgust — involving both race and women/sex. These subjects evoke disagreeable smells and play out in horrific violence. Also, there is some humor.

This edition’s supplemental texts are a series of deep dives.

Some brought keen insights to my attention: George Hutchinson writes about Faulkner’s dread of miscegenation, which strikes me as the central issue in the book, and likely in our whole nation. Toni Morrison describes “Excising the political from the life of the mind” as “a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery” — an exquisite analogy, especially now as families in our newly fascist deportation nation carve turkeys and struggle to find neutral topics for conversation.

Other essays were so far over my head that they might as well have been written in Latin. I read some paragraphs over three or four times, but still could not decipher them. The selected poems were completely lost on me.

Overall, though, the volume was rich and rewarding — however, I think I’ll take a break from Faulkner before I consider his next title.

The American Revolution (2025)

Back in 1990, I was working at Kenosha’s public radio station when The Civil War first aired on PBS. I already knew Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty, but this new 11.5-hour, 9-episode history documentary took my workplace by storm. My co-workers were discussing Stonewall Jackson with the kind of enthusiasm that would later be triggered by shows like The Sopranos or Succession.

Now, after decades exploring Baseball, Jazz, The National Parks, and Country Music, filmmaker Ken Burns has finally tackled America’s founding. The fiddle music and the portraits, the letters and the battlefields are back, baby!

Watching the news has been pathetic and heartbreaking this year, and sporting events as a mindless distraction have been hit or miss — so I was happy to have a diverting 6-episode, 12-hour feast to dig into over the past couple of weeks. I consumed The American Revolution carefully, sometimes in 20-minute chunks. I frequently backed up to repeat a passage after my mind wandered. There are a lot of dates and place names packed into Peter Coyote’s placid narration and celebrities‘ questionable inflections.

Overall, it was an outstanding piece of work despite its familiar technique. I did not previously understand the war’s vast expanse, nor the years-long string of defeats that eventually brought about the patriots‘ victory.

Burns pays attention to the participation of Native Americans and Blacks on both sides of the conflict, and he adds great depth and shading to our one-dollar image of George Washington — accentuating both the general’s wisdom and fairness as well as his slave-owning and land-grabbing. The role of women in the war is also highlighted; among other tasks, they get to deal with the many dead and wounded after each bloody battle.

Also, while most Americans have some vague distaste for the name “Benedict Arnold,” this film parcels out the major general’s story little by little — before finally dishing on his stunning betrayal. Sonofabitch!

This series was great.  Now I want another.