by Brooks Riley

by Katrin Trüstedt

The major “National-Socialist Underground” trial ended this summer in Munich, under the applause of neo-Nazis and with little international attention. A recent US research study found that while white and rightwing terrorists carried out nearly twice as many terrorist attacks as Muslim extremists between 2008 and 2016, terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists receive 357% more press coverage than those committed by non-Muslims.

That’s right: 357%.

In many ways, this massive asymmetry is what the NSU case is about. For more than a decade, the self-declared “National-Socialist Underground” went on a killing spree across the country, assassinating nine “foreigners” (mostly Muslim men with migration background) and a police officer, carried out two bomb attacks and committed 15 armed robberies. Only after they released a video claiming responsibility did the police, the investigators, and the press realize what happened. Instead of considering right-wing terrorist attacks, the police was blaming the victims themselves, suggesting they must have been involved in criminal activities. The press referred to the crimes as the “Döner murders.”

What the trial has brought to light is, among other things, the fantasmatic scenarios of this right wing extremism, attacking the present German state as weak and aiming for a nation state of masculine strength and potency. At the announcement of the verdict, many neo-Nazis were in the audience. Their behaviour was explicitly signaling an attempt to dominate the courtroom. “We are many”, one of them said to a woman entering who expressed surprise at seeing the neo-Nazis in the audience next to Turkish speaking people. To these “foreigners”, to the court, and to the world at large, they aimed to show who’s really “the Man.” Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The danger in being the people’s poet is that the poet may end up being reduced to the limited capacity of his people’s reading, his message shrunken to reflect their superficial grasp of his poetry, his work bent out of shape, and the complexity, depth and subtlety critical to understanding it, utterly lost. While he may remain their beloved representative voice, the people’s poet is ultimately as shallow or enlightened as his people, and no one is less deserving of the punishment of being misconstrued than a poet whose life’s work is to define his people’s angst in all the rawness and refinement due to a poetics honoring both the political truth of the moment as well as the larger forces of history and culture that shape the language in which it is expressed; this is undoubtedly tricky terrain, because he bears the simultaneous (and contradictory) burden of being a singular visionary and having mass appeal. In order to have a reasonable appreciation of such a poet’s message, his people need to step up, and reach for better comprehension.

In recent days, a new rendition of “hum dekhain gay,” a poem by Pakistan’s best loved revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, elicited a strong response on social media, exposing not only political biases but also the extent to which the impassioned debaters understood the poem. Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

When Mrs. William Shakespeare died on this August day in 1623, her family and friends believed they would lay her to eternal rest beside her renowned husband. They did not. They did inter an ordinary wife and mother, but the memory of her went out to become a Frankenstein monster, cut up and reassembled down the centuries. Few of the many makeovers done to Anne Hathaway Shakespeare since her passing have been flattering.

It’s hard to say how Anne came to deserve this cruel fate. Gossips, academics and a myriad of random scribblers have mocked her in many contradictory guises. She is a dumpy, illiterate house wench who clamped herself like an iron ball to the ankle of an unfortunate great man. She is a calculating promiscuous slut having a fine time with young men on the coin of a struggling genius. A dreary drudge, or a vicious vamp – sound familiar, ladies?

In a once common version of her story, 26-year-old Anne Hathaway seduced the boy William, eight years her junior. She became pregnant and forced him to marry her. Poor Will had no choice but to flee from the provincial prison of Stratford to London. There he blossomed as the world’s greatest playwright before returning to Stratford as a tired old gentleman. He never wrote again and was dead within six years. There are many versions of this theme. Some purport to be factual portrayals of Anne Hathaway’s life, some admit to being fictional-but-possible. Facts do not get in the way of the tall tales because there are so few of those – rare brief mentions of Anne in legal documents. In place of the facts, we got the twisted facts and then the fictions. Original documented references to Anne Hathaway are like a few random pencil marks on a blank white canvas. Biographers and faux biographers, mostly men, have each in turn approached the canvas to draw a complete picture. What they have left behind are portraits of their own male fantasies and misogynistic inventions unrelated to any real woman. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’m tempted to describe Marion Milner’s book A Life of One’s Own as the missing manual for owners of a human mind. However, it’s not didactic or prescriptive. In fact, it’s useful mainly because it’s nothing like a manual or a self-help book. The book is more like an insightful travelogue by an articulate and honest observer with a gift for using vivid physical imagery and metaphors to describe her inner world.

Milner held a degree in psychology from University College London and worked as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. In 1926, when she was 26, she began keeping a diary in an attempt to understand herself better. She recorded and interpreted her experiences for seven years; the result is A Life of One’s Own, which was published in 1934 (and reissued by Routledge in 2011). The diary covers a period in which Milner married, conducted research in her field, visited the United States on a Rockefeller scholarship, and had a child. These events, and all the happenings of everyday life, are background material rather than the focus of the book.

Milner wanted to discover what made her truly happy. In a changing world full of conflicting advice on how to live, it would be easy to unthinkingly follow a path laid down by someone else. She also found within herself a confusing variety of wishes and goals; it was hard to know what her true purposes or needs were, and it was no better to be pulled along by fleeting impulses of her own than to automatically follow another’s lead. In addition, she sometimes felt cut off from other people, anxious to please or worried about their opinions rather than truly connecting with them. She felt that life was slipping by unexperienced, going on somewhere other than where she was. Does any of this sound familiar? It certainly did to me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joshua Wilbur 

The 2020s will have a name. In the nursing homes of the future, Millennials’ grandchildren will hear all about the coming decade. Gran will remove her headset, loaded out with VR-entertainment and the latest in biometric tech, and she’ll tell the kids about the world as it was in the third decade of the 21st Century. For now, we look ahead to the Twenties, a decade certain to be charged with meaning, roaring in one way or another.

Our current moment isn’t easy to define. Since the start of the new millennium, there’s been much confusion about what to call the times. First, there’s the period from 2000 to 2009. Was it the “Two Thousands,” the “Zeroes,” the “ohs,” the “aughts,” or the “noughties?” None of the above, it seems: a name never really caught on.  In 2010, looking back on the decade past, a number of commentators remarked on this fact, as will surely happen again in 2020 when retrospectives are faced with a similar semantic problem. Rebecca Mead, writing for the New Yorker in January 2010, noted: “[…] the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.”

The same can and will be said for the current decade, and with a similar feeling of embarrassment. The “Twenty Tens,” the “Tens,” “the Twenty Teens,” the “Teens?” Again, we lack a name with real currency. The “Teens,” like the teenagers of stereotype, resist description and brim with angst.  

Maybe it’s too soon to declare our decade unnamed and unnamable. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the period from 2010 to 2019 will acquire a title and, with it, an identity. History, though, suggests otherwise. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

Grief

by Londiwe Buthelezi

It rips through your body.
Grazing, raking, shaving away all the
protective layers you put up all those years before.
layers you used to cover all the pain
you couldn’t possibly show to others.
Grief exposes you.
shows everyone what you really are like inside.
raw and helpless…

I always thought the term “crossing the rainbow bridge” to describe a pet’s dying sounded goofy. People use it in a non-silly way, so good on them for making that work. When we refer to people who die, we use euphemisms, such as Aunt Gigi “passed” or Uncle Gogo is “gone.” It’s too difficult to say, “Grandpa died.” Go ahead, say it out loud to people, and see what happens. Everyone freezes or turns away or starts to cry. “Dead” is too direct. There’s no escaping its frigid finality.

What is grief? According to this study, it is defined as “a normal, healthy, healing and ultimately transforming response to a significant loss that usually does not require professional help, although it does require ways to heal the broken strands of life and to affirm existing ones.” It is a negative reaction to a loss. At some point, we will all grieve, whether it’s for a parent, sibling, child, spouse, friend, pet, relationship, body part, object, or national figure.

What do we say when we grieve? Some of us clam up and say nothing, processing all that has been lost in whatever way we can manage. We all know the bromides that people, ourselves included, spew. “[Person you love] is in a better place” might be the most odious phrase ever. A runner-up is “Everything happens for a reason.” But we can’t help it. We do not know what to say when confronted by pain, so we say something we would never think of uttering in any other circumstance, lower our eyes, and move on quickly to brush off so much grief-lint. I haven’t been to funerals in other countries, but I imagine it’s relatively universal that everyone is uncomfortable until food or drink is served, until some distraction presents itself. Read more »

by Max Sirak

I’m pretty crappy at taking my own advice.

Back in November of 2016 I wrote a column titled “What To Do With Our Expectations.” In it I wrote about the importance of not judging events by their outcomes and I outlined a strategy for doing so. But it turns out, surprising no one at all, it’s a lot easier to write about things from an abstracted distance than it is to put them into practice in real time.

This summer hasn’t exactly been breezy and light.

A very good friend of mine recently lost his father.

Some of my nearest and dearest had to bid farewell to their doggy-daughter.

As for me…

One of my closest friends and his family moved across the country. Another was killed by a drunk driver. And lastly, I had to let go of the primary source of love, joy, connection, affection, and touch in my life. 

“Write about what you know,” they say. Right now, it seems, endings are all I know. So endings are what I’ll write. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

As a child, I feared dogs. A neighbor kept his German Shepherds, Heidi and Sarge, in a large pen along the alley. The yard and house, his parents’, were the biggest for many blocks. On the alley side, the chain link fence stood 10 feet. The dogs would charge out of their houses silently and hurl their bodies at the fence snarling and barking. I was caught unaware at the fence a few times. My stomach curdled and legs buckled. My mother’s family are dog people. My grandparents cared for a series of large overfed dogs who cavorted in the swamps surrounding their Massachusetts home and otherwise slumped under the kitchen table waiting for my grandmother to put together meals of breakfast scraps bound with maple syrup or for treats from a cookie jar on her counter. My uncles had shambling dogs who would leap into rough water off Cape Cod to retrieve balls from seaweed choked waves. As their fur dried, they smelled of sour salt water and general funk. At the rented house, they showed a gentle deference to humans and lolled on the grass or carpet while my cousins and I ate and talked.

My wife brought her dog Tangles, a whippet mix, with her when we moved in together. Tangles’ jaws and teeth rattled for no apparent reason. Her bony head was easy to rub. I told her I would “cook her brain” with the friction generated as I stroked her skull. She lived sixteen sweet years as my wife’s constant companion and then two more after we spent a small fortune on tumor surgery. After Tangles passed, we fostered a few dogs, each different in size and personality. We got involved in a Brooklyn shelter run by a group of animal-loving, human-hating misanthropes. After my work setting up their facility, the animals they cared for suffered unspeakably and thousands of dollars disappeared in a haze of prescription drugs and acrimony. Luckily, we rescued and placed with family a small, quirky dog named Big Man. He is the one light of that weird, sad time. Read more »

by Joan Harvey

When the bobbling, babbling, unhinged conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, warned of a second Civil War starting on the 4th of July, most of us laughed, people marked themselves “Safe,” and we enjoyed the holiday. But one thing we’ve learned in these times is that both the Civil War and WWII are still underway. Not the second Civil War, but a continuation of the first. While both wars seemed to have had clear endings, in reality they continue, but until now mostly buried underground. How could we have been so oblivious? So complacent? I think of Freud and the unconscious, Jung and the shadow. Psycho-history.

Our country is mentally ill.

Politicians, it seems, think the answer is in being led by the nose by the Russian government. Oh, that and arming toddlers.

But America is changing. Across the West on the 4th of July this year fireworks displays were cancelled. Fire danger was too high. Every year is like this now. And every year, we too act mentally ill, behaving as if this year were aberrant. We get through fire season crossing our fingers, a fire season that extends for more months every year. Every year we hope a fire won’t burn too close to us, we hope it won’t force us out, we hope it won’t destroy our homes. Wiser politicians talk of turning to green energy to slow climate change, while the others push for more fossil fuel development. But no one addresses the fact that we’re past the tipping point. Even if we’re able to slow climate change, it’s still too late. Every year we burn. Then the floods come to finish the job. Read more »

by Shawn Crawford

For a Baptist, the Bible exists like gravity. Not believing in gravity will not change the outcome if you step off a building; not believing the Bible will not change the consequences if you ignore its precepts and commands. Both are laws of nature, fixed and unchanging.

To really understand what it means to be Baptist, you must understand the unique place the Bible holds in every facet of life. The central reality of existence is not God but rather the words he left behind to guide our decisions, our relationships, and our behavior. Baptists create a world that revolves around The Book to a degree that can easily be termed idolatry. In a religion that shuns all iconography, the Bible becomes the one object that can be revered. But not because it symbolizes the presence of God’s word among us: it is God’s Word, infallible and unchangeable. The Southern Baptist statement of beliefs, The Baptist Faith and Message, begins with the Bible, not God. It states in part, “[The Bible] has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.”

The close reading of scripture allowed you to extract the meaning God intended. That meaning could be discovered, not interpreted, and it could be agreed upon and then applied to how you lived your daily life: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and light unto my path” (Psalm 119.105). The Book of Psalms is in the middle of the Bible, and can best be translated “praises” or “songs” from the Hebrew. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter of the Bible, clocking in at 176 verses. Writers of Psalms often used an acrostic method employing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Psalm 119 is a tour de force, with each of eight verses in a stanza opening with the same letter, moving through all twenty-two letters of the alphabet.

As you might have guessed, I spent a lot of time with the Bible. Read more »