The Billion Worlds newsletter was created to help open my eyes and yours to worlds of hopeful possibilities we may not have known were there. Sadly, in recent months the Trump Administration’s plans to desecrate the sacred land of Texas’ Big Bend region require focus on worlds of heartbreaking possibilities. Reporting on the ugly plans has become a necessity, one driven by love of the land and the life it supports.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s framing of Big Bend National Park border work makes its decision to forgo a 30-foot steel wall across the park seem noble or magnanimous. It can also make the new “patrol roads” seem minimally invasive if not almost benign, which is likely what CBP officials intend. Their framing hides how destructive their construction, presence and ongoing maintenance will be to the park.

I searched for and found CBP’s own V.5 standards (2020) for patrol roads. They do not ease our dread. The roads across relatively flat, floodplain ground could be 40 to 60 feet wide, 20 feet of driving surface plus two 2-foot shoulders, and often a 10-foot strip of dirt on the Mexico side dragged smooth so footprints show. And, unless waived, a ditch alongside with a 10-foot minimum bottom. Often, ditches on both sides are required. If the ditches are built, access to the river side of the road will be greatly restricted. The most likely road surface is aggregate of some kind.

By my calculation the roads will run almost 77 miles inside the park. At 40 to 60 feet wide, that alone strips roughly 400 to 550 acres. It’s uncertain that the ground between the road and the river will be publicly accessible. CBP says there will be some access, but won’t be specific. And wherever there are ditches, the river becomes that much harder to reach. The roads and shoulders will be cleared and grubbed, vegetation pulled out by the roots, living matter not allowed.

CPB doesn’t make detailed routes public, although its so-called online “smart wall” map gives a rough idea. It appears from early bulldozing that they are going to build this new road right next to the existing river road in places. No new road is necessary, of course. And an unnecessary new road next to an existing road seems to have more in common with vandalism than border security.

When it comes to washes and arroyos, the standards make unvented fords the first means of directing water across patrol roads. Not culverts. A ford is a dip through the wash with reinforced concrete or concrete mat, with reinforced concrete walls sunk below the stream bed around the entire perimeter to keep floods from undermining it. Culverts or bridges are used only where the road geometry or the 25-year flood depth limit can’t be met.

When the alignment crosses a wash big enough to need a structure, it gets one of these fords. In Big Bend, that’s a lot of concrete structures. And the standards require permanent erosion control at both ends of every one. There is no version of this where the wash goes back to being a wash.

If CBP persists with plans to build a road up and over Mariscal Mountain, the road has to climb 1,546 feet. The standards cap the grade at 20 percent. Anything over 15 percent must be concrete, poured on site. That would mean a batch plant and water hauled into the desert. If the terrain won’t allow 20 percent grade, the standards let CBP reclassify the segment as a “maintenance road” with up to a 70 percent grade, roughly the pitch of a standard staircase. Such a maintenance road would be permanently closed to the public.

But the grade isn’t the hard part. To build a road across a mountainside you dig into the slope. That leaves a wall of rock standing above the roadway. It has to lean back or it comes down on the road. CBP’s standards cap that lean at one foot back for every two feet of height, a fifty percent face. I measured the east flank of Mariscal against USGS elevation data. It reaches sixty percent. When the mountain rises faster than the wall leans back, the wall never reaches the surface. The digging has no end point. It just goes further into the mountain.

To hold any of those grades the road needs switchbacks and, in the standards’ own words, “extensive cut-and-fill operations.” That means tons after tons after tons of rock removed. On steep ground the cheapest way to move rock is to push it over the downhill edge, and the further the road climbs the cheaper that gets. Below Mariscal’s rim there is no bench and no catchment. It’s straight down to the Rio Grande.

Which leaves two ways to build it. They could line the road with concrete walls on the mountain side, which their own standards call for and which would mean miles of concrete they have never mentioned. Or they could cut the rock nearly vertical where it rises above the road, which exceeds what the standards allow and requires a filed exception. In that limestone the usual way you do it is with explosives, and CBP says it isn't going to blast the mountain.

If that’s not frightening enough, the Bureau of Economic Geology mapped Mariscal Mountain in detail in 2010, with National Park Service support. In technical terms, the map's legend describes fold-hinge faulting, joints, and slip along the mountain's bedding surfaces. In plainer terms, the rock along the crest is already fractured. And the map shows the Cross Canyon Trail running right along that crest. The road would follow the broken part of the mountain, because the broken part is the only part you can walk. (Miscellaneous Map No. 48, Bureau of Economic Geology, 2010)

Twelve members of Congress asked ten questions about the Mariscal Mountain segment on August 7 and set a deadline of the fourteenth for an answer from CBP. Nothing came back. The bulldozers are there now.

The patrol roads require a permanent, industrial operation within the park. This is something Big Bend National Park has never suffered. And it is unnecessary because as the park’s rugged country of high canyon walls, dangerous deserts and well-known law enforcement presence have made it the least likely place in the region for suspect border crossings. No, this isn’t about border security. It is a U.S. president trying to turn the Rio Grande into another reflecting pool for his ego.

Arroyos are not empty ground. They are the circulatory system of the region. They move sediment, recharge shallow water, and concentrate the vegetation that concentrates everything else. A concrete ford in a stream bed with walls sunk below grade doesn’t stop the water, but it stops the stream bed from moving. Sediment moves differently above and below fords like these, and the change is permanent by design. Multiply that by every significant wash along the alignment.

Arroyos are the desert’s movement corridors. Animals travel them for shade, water, and cover. The Forest Service manual that CBP cites for its ford design says a biologist should determine whether wildlife passage is needed at each crossing and notes that even ephemeral streams support aquatic life. It warns that where animals and traffic meet at a ford, “some animal mortality is likely.” CBP’s standards don’t speak to the biology.

There’s a pronounced coldness to the language used in the standards, all too typical of official documents describing exploitative intrusions of this sort. In fact, it was hard to even describe the standards without a little matter-of-fact coldness infecting the prose. And there’s no comfort in the knowledge that the Department of Homeland Security has also waived all existing protections that could make the park and its life safe.

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These standards are minimum design criteria. The document provides that where a project cannot meet them because of site-specific constraints, an exception may be considered. Standards could we waived or new standards added. In other words, it could get worse. But I don’t see how it gets better for the park and the life that calls it home. These are the standards CBP adopted, and the agency retains a documented process for departing from them. So we’ll see.

Also, the August 2020 Version 5 is the most recent version I could locate. I’ve linked to it above and posted a pdf of it below for downloading. I found it as an attachment to a CBP solicitation for tactical infrastructure maintenance covering the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, and Del Rio/Big Bend South sectors, not for the national park. I couldn’t locate that. But this is CBP’s standing design standard rather than a project-specific document. Its own background section says, “The design standards contained herein were developed for use in the design and repair of Tactical Infrastructure (TI) used by USBP [Border Patrol] in fulfilling their operational requirements.”

CBP has refused to make its actual plans and specifications public. But the above gives a picture of what its standards could mean for Big Bend National Park. It’s not a pretty picture.

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Customs and Border Patrol Tactical Design Standards

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V.5 standards, 2020

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When I saw on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s preposterously named “Smart Wall” map that the route of a new and unnecessary patrol road across the park will go up and over Mariscal Mountain, my eyes widened in fear and outrage. Was CBP about to blast the mountain into Mariscal Canyon and the Rio Grande? There are reports it is reconsidering, but there is reason to be suspicious.

I am not a geologist. But I love the views of Big Bend National Park’s geology and I have been able to understand it a little over decades of visiting the park. I’m also familiar with some of the more popular Big Bend guide books, like William MacLeod’s Big Bend Vistas: A Geological Exploration of the Big Bend.

The CBP plan to dynamite Mariscal Mountain with its surveyors already in the park led me to research the consequences with urgency. I’ve given this essay its rather alarmist title because the research is really detective work into the likely consequences of a crime. If the federal government uses dynamite to turn a rugged hiking trail into a wide patrol road, where would the spoils go, the tons of rock blasted from the mountain that looms over the river below?

My research didn’t require Columbo. Anyone could do it, including the folks at CBP who dreamed up the nightmare road, probably from a desk in Washington, D.C. I’m publishing this account in hopes that someone in the federal chain of command will take a few minutes to do the research.

I had an old copy of MacLeod’s visitor’s guidebook that I purchased at the park’s visitor center years ago. It seemed like a good place to start. MacLeod mentioned that Mariscal and San Vicente mountains are anticlines straddling the Rio Grande, and that “strata have been elevated 2,500 feet by the Mariscal Mountain anticline. I didn’t know what an anticline was, so I googled it.

I found a description at a university teaching page from Radford University in Virginia. It defines anticline in a sentence any schoolchild could understand: anticlines are folds in which each half dips away from the crest, looking something like the letter the letter A or an upturned V. Rock layers that were laid down flat on a sea floor get squeezed from the sides until they bow upward, the way a rug wrinkles when you push it against a wall. Mariscal Mountain is one long A. The hard limestone at the top of the anticline is the ridge crest. The hiking trail runs along that crest.

Then I searched for what is the weakest part of the fold. Everywhere I looked said the same thing: The crest. Try it with one “U” of a paper clip. Flex it and it fails at the bend, not along the straight parts. The line the trail follows, the line CBP wants the road to follow, runs right where the folding of the anticline has already cracked the rock most.

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MacLeod’s sources sent me to a survey called Geology of Big Bend National Park, Bureau of Economic Geology Publication 6711, by Ross Maxwell and his colleagues. Maxwell was the park’s first superintendent. There’s a wonderful scenic road named after him. The whole book is free to download at archive.org/details/geologyofbigbend00maxw. The section on Mariscal Mountain runs about two pages, 287 and 288. It calls the mountain “a narrow asymmetric anticlinal ridge modified by faults.” By now I knew what anticlinal meant. The rest of the sentence took more looking up.

The Radford geology site taught me that a fault is not merely a fracture. It is a fracture along which movement has already occurred. A crack is a weakness; a fault is a weakness with a track record, a surface where the mountain has already demonstrated that it will slip when pushed. Maxwell writes that several faults are found on Mariscal Mountain. A thrust fault, formed when compression forces one slab to ride up over another, cuts the west side of the mountain, where the strata stand “nearly vertical, or even overturned, highly brecciated in part.” He records several other normal faults, which are caused when rock is pulled apart until one slab slides downward. Reading Maxwell, I understand that Mariscal was broken. Twice. Once when it was squeezed, and a second time when it was pulled apart millions of years later. The proposed road crosses the scars of those failures.

Maxwell used the word brecciated so I looked it up in my downloaded copy of A Dictionary of Geology and Earth Sciences. “‘Breccia’ literally means ‘rubble,’” the dictionary said. It is broken rock fragments cemented together. So part of the mountain is not solid rock. What happens when rubble is dynamited? I’ll leave that question with you.

He mentions, almost in passing, that the abandoned Mariscal mercury mine sits at the crest of the mountain’s fold near its northern end. At the crest. Where the road arrives on top. That stretch is honeycombed with century-old shafts mine shafts full of bats and quicksilver. Blasting above old mine voids is its own category of bad idea. I suppose it is possible that CBP is thinking they can somehow capture all the dynamited rock and store it in the abandoned mine. The mine shafts are far too small. There’s no room in the mountain to put the mountain.

All the evidence I collected said an effort to build a patrol road over and across Mariscal Mountain could well destroy more than the mountain. It could take out Mariscal Canyon and fill up the Rio Grande. The detective work was easy. Maybe CBP has already done it and that’s why there are reports the plan has been dropped. But CBP has been anything but straightforward in its statements about its plans for Big Bend.

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On July 16 and 17, some one hundred or more unsecured border barrier buoys in Eagle Pass were washed into the flooding Rio Grande River, threatening international bridges, leading to emergency declarations from local officials, and potentially damaging property and communities along the river.

And it was a moderate July rise of the river, not a 100-year flood that did it. CBP says the buoy system is engineered to withstand a 100-year flood. That claim is about the barrier once anchored in the river, and it has not yet been tested. What was tested last week was the agency’s ability to keep the material on the bank. The Rio Grande crested at Eagle Pass at 19.44 feet, below the 21-foot stage at which the National Weather Service warns that equipment in the flood plain will be flooded or damaged. For perspective, the flood gauge’s public impact scale runs to 54 feet. And still, about 120 buoys, roughly a ton each, floated away.

How could this happen? The recklessness is structured into the way the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection run the border wall project. Contractors undertaking the border work, from San Diego to Brownsville, are generally unsupervised by and unaccountable to any outside source, including the agencies they are contracted with.

To be sure, the U.S. Border Patrol’s Infrastructure Portfolio Director could corral rogue contractors or subcontractors. That authority exists. But in practice there is little evidence of supervision.

CBP’s response to the swept-away buoys near Eagle Pass was to blame the contractors. A CBP spokesperson said, “As a result of the heavy rains in Eagle Pass, Texas, this week, buoys under the responsibility and control of the contractor that were staged at nearby Shelby Park were swept into the river due to the fast-rising water.” This may be standard procurement practice based on the technicality that the buoys had not yet been deployed on behalf of the agency, but it is not adequate to the dangers of the failure.

The fact is that recipients of at least $17 billion in federal border wall contracts, of the $46.5 billion appropriated by Congress, are without much oversight. DHS’s broad waiver of federal requirements has led contractors to believe they inhabit a builder’s paradise: billions of dollars with no accountability.

I think this belief was in play when county officials in West Texas became aware that a contractor had begun work on a road that extended from U.S. 90 west of Valentine down to the Rio Grande. Nobody had informed the counties involved of the road work. The contractor’s representative told officials that Homeland Security had informed him that all permissions were in place, an impossibility since county officials weren’t even informed. On the surface at least, that looks like an assumption that the federal waivers of regulations covered such things.

In addition to all this, fixed-price contracts give contractors incentives to rush forward with the work, cutting corners along the way. And there was no one standing in the staging area with the authority to say the buoys should not be there, or that if they were, they should be secured.

Someone had said it, though. On July 7, nine days before the flood, the Eagle Pass city council voted unanimously to reject a lease of Shelby Park as a staging area for the buoys. Residents at that meeting raised the specific risk that the buoys would break loose. The material was there anyway, and nobody has explained under what authority.

Let’s bring home this insane and reckless situation. If you wanted to repair a deck in your back yard, you would likely have to apply for a construction permit, meet standards in the building code, be subject to regular inspections from local authorities, and have the work finally cleared as passing code only after a final inspection said so. Failure to comply with this process could affect the value of your home and even make it more difficult to sell.

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What are just a few of the dramatic consequences so far? Consider what CBP’s own list of necessary remediation includes for work done from San Diego to Del Rio, Texas: capping the wall’s steel bollards and “mitigating impalement risks.” Impalement risks are worth mitigating.

At Smuggler’s Gulch canyon near San Diego, hilltops were blasted and nearly two million cubic yards of fill were dumped across the canyon. Erosion problems appeared almost immediately. A tunnel built to let the Tijuana River cross the border constricted the flow and delivered it into the estuary with far more force than before, causing massive flooding.

In 2019 at San Ysidro, CBP failed to raise the flood gates at a drainage tunnel built through the border wall. The result was major flooding in Tijuana, which triggered rescues and damaged Mexican infrastructure that kept sewage from contaminating U.S. waters.

In San Diego in 2021, the government admitted the border wall was undermining itself due to improper soil compaction and construction materials. Backfill repairs were required.

In Calexico, California, 30-foot steel bollard walls collapsed into Mexico, closing a road and falling onto trees, after being erected before the concrete footings were cured. CBP called it an uncommon event.

In April of this year at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona, a contractor bladed a corridor fifty to seventy feet wide through the Las Playas Intaglio and destroyed one-third of a thousand-year-old sacred geoglyph. CBP called the destruction inadvertent.

In Nogales, Arizona, a DHS-built retaining wall inside a stormwater drainage tunnel caused flooding that killed two people and damaged more than 500 homes.

At Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona, crews dynamited mountaintops and sent the rubble down to clog drainages, work undertaken merely to build access roads for equipment.

In Mission, Texas, the private “We Build the Wall” project hired Fisher Sand & Gravel to build a three-mile wall on the bank of the Rio Grande. It began eroding within months. Court testimony established that the foundation was only three feet deep, and engineers concluded that failure was a matter of when, not if. The Justice Department sued over the flood risk and the violation of a water treaty with Mexico. Six years later, the erosion is still being addressed. Fisher has since received more than $9 billion in federal border wall contracts.

That border wall contractors face less accountability and supervision than you do when you want to make backyard repairs to your home should open eyes to the danger and potential corruption of the entire project. The flood can sweep away the buoys, but we shouldn’t let the federal government sweep away its responsibilities and contractors’ accountability.

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“I created the word in order to kill the thing.”

— Henri Grégoire on coining the word ‘vandalism’

It may seem a bit strange to place Donald Trump in the company of late 18th century fanatical French revolutionaries, but his continued destruction of our national parks earns his place there. If anything, Trump’s wanton vandalism may have outdone the rabid frenzy of his predecessors.

In 1794, Henri Grégoire, an egalitarian republican, appeared before the National Convention to denounce those who were destroying his nation’s inherited cultural heritage. He coined the term “vandalism” to brand them. To him, the French heritage included “national objects which, belonging to no one, are the property of all.” He shares an ethos with lovers of American national parks and other public lands: that we are stewards, not owners, of what we’re given, and that we are accountable to everyone for it.

Before cataloguing Trump’s campaign of horrors against our cherished heritage, it’s important to note that many in his party oppose his actions. There is bipartisan outrage at his vandalism. So, we cannot identify today’s vandals too broadly. It’s Trump, his immediate circle and the contractors willing, for a few billion dollars, to do the actual defacing, scrawling his special brand of indelible graffiti across our national parks, monuments and other cherished landmarks. The White House, a National Historic Landmark vandalized by Trump, comes to mind.

Congressional Republicans have balked at Trump’s deep budget cut proposals for the National Park Service, though they’ve turned a blind eye on other fronts in Trump’s assault. American voters, on the other hand, are anything but equivocal. Public lands are more than twice as popular as Trump.

Set the polling figures side by side and the asymmetry turns almost comic. In CNN’s Poll of Polls for late April through mid-May 2026, his job approval stands at 36 percent, with 63 percent disapproving. Meanwhile, roughly three out of four Americans want their public lands kept open and unsold; in the interior West — the reddest country in the nation — nine in ten want their national monuments left in place, a figure that includes 87 percent of Republicans.

The parks command a bipartisan supermajority, better than seven in ten Americans, and nearly nine in ten Republicans out West. What else in American life can claim that kind of support? Trump certainly can’t. The heritage he is defacing is, in plain numbers, roughly twice as popular as he is. He is vandalizing the commons, and the American public is speaking out against him just as Henri Grégoire did against the vandals of his era.

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Let’s move on to Trump’s national lands catalog of horrors.

In his first term, Trump eliminated protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. It was American history’s largest rollback of public land protections. They were subsequently vandalized. President Biden restored the protections, but there is continued suspicion that Trump wants to strip them again.

In Arizona, the administration’s border wall builders defaced Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a unit of the national park system and a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and the adjacent Cabeza Prieta refuge. Crews blasted Monument Hill, ground sacred to the Tohono O’odham and known to hold their dead, and bulldozed beside Quitobaquito Springs, a rare desert oasis and holy site, drawing up to three million gallons a month from the aquifer that feeds it to mix concrete. Saguaros that had stood for a century were uprooted; the Park Service’s own study had warned the work could destroy as many as twenty-two archaeological sites.

Trump wants to open Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, to dangerous uranium mining. Take a Geiger counter with you next time you visit the South Rim.

Meanwhile, Trump gutted the National Park Service workforce. It’s down 24 percent since January 2025; more than 4,000 employees have been lost. The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks assessed some of the damage: “Leaving parks open with minimal or no staffing, as the administration chose to do during the fall government shutdown, exacerbated those existing issues from neglected maintenance to limited safety services. During the shutdown, we saw illegal BASE jumpers at Yosemite, a wildfire that began near an unstaffed campground at Joshua Tree, a stone wall damaged at Gettysburg, and vandalism at Arches.”

Of all the administration’s depredations against the parks, this is the one that would have been most legible to Henri Grégoire. In March 2025, the administration issued Executive Order 14253, titled, with no apparent irony, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the Interior Department to purge from federal monuments and markers any content that “inappropriately disparages Americans,” and to reinstate what earlier reckonings had removed. It is an assault on historical memory, the very thing Grégoire accused the revolutionary French administration of doing.

The NPS began implementing the order immediately. For instance, officials in January removed a slavery-related exhibit at the President’s House Site in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. A judge mentioned Orwell’s 1984 when she ordered the exhibit restored. Trump’s Interior Department has appealed and much of the exhibit is still not back up. However, creative, courageous Philadelphians decided to keep history alive. Volunteers gather every day and reading the exhibit material out loud. An appeals court in Philly will hear arguments today.

Park employees, following Trump’s order, identified 80 offending exhibits at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. The list goes on and on.

Both Trump and the French Jacobins claim to be restoring history. But there is one difference between the Convention’s vandals and these, and it does not favor ours. The Jacobins aimed at the history of the powerful, kings, Church officials and monuments of power. Trump targets the powerless, enslaved people, women, non-white Americans who have had to struggle for their rights and liberties. There is an irony here. Grégoire was a passionate abolitionist who fought to extend full citizenship to all. It’s the history of Americans’ fight for freedom and equality that Trump aims to erase.

And then there’s Big Bend National Park. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and its billion-dollar contractors are itching to invade the park, one of the most remote, biologically diverse, geologically unique, and spiritually gratifying parks in the nation. I’ve been going there since high school, and my years since high school don’t qualify for geologic time but that was still a long time ago.

The park, of course, is bordered by the Rio Grande and Trump, one way or another, wants to wall off the river. There are many promises that a 30-foot wall won’t be built through the park. There are other promises as well. No one knows for sure. But there’s continued talk of roads and road barriers, surveillance towers, walls here and there at the outside corners of the park, thousands of workers descending to somehow spend $1.7 billion on, well, no one knows for sure.

The park does not see many uninvited border crossings from Mexico. There have been 100–200 apprehensions a year inside the park since 2023, less than 0.05 percent of all crossings on the border. It’s not unusual for some who do cross there to look for U.S. Border Patrol for help. After crossing Mexico’s desert and mountains, they are often sick and dehydrated. That part of the world is wall enough. Trump’s walls and barriers are puny by comparison and have no purpose in the park.

It's willful destruction. In other words: vandalism. And yet there is an extraordinary, bipartisan movement rising to save Big Bend from it. Its members are brothers and sisters to the volunteers at the President’s House Site in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia who are reading aloud to keep history alive. The family of national park and public land defenders is already large. And it’s growing.

It was the first time a network purpose-built to mobilize religious-conservative outrage at scale demonstrated that it could actually do so.

Some words from Beatle John Lennon were behind the storm. Lennon had told a London reporter five months earlier in 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.” The remark caused almost no reaction in Britain and was unnoticed for months in America. Then, an American teen magazine reprinted the interview in late July 1966 and two morning DJs in Birmingham announced as a ratings stunt that they would no longer play the band.

Within seventy-two hours, the wire services had picked up the story. Within a week, six Alabama stations had banned the Beatles. Within three weeks, more than three dozen stations in fifteen states had joined them. The New York Times ran the story on the front page. The Memphis City Council voted that the Beatles were not welcome in the city. A South Carolina Klan Grand Dragon nailed Beatles records to a flaming cross. A radio station in Birmingham announced plans to pulverize records in a municipal tree-grinder.

Across much of the country, people gathered to burn Beatles records. Radio stations organized the bonfires. The Ku Klux Klan picketed Beatles concerts. Six Klansmen in full robes stood outside the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis on the night of August 19, while inside someone threw a cherry bomb onto the stage during George Harrison’s performance of “If I Needed Someone.” All four Beatles looked at each other to see who had been shot. Ten days later, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the most popular musicians on earth played their last concert. They never toured America again.

The network that caused the firestorm was largely the work of a Tulsa fundamentalist preacher named Billy James Hargis. His Christian Crusade reached more than five hundred radio stations and two hundred fifty television stations at its peak. Hargis ran a 55,000-circulation newspaper and a million-dollar direct-mail operation funded by a quarter-million small donors. He was a member of the John Birch Society, a pro-segregation ally of George Wallace, and a board associate of Bob Jones Jr. His lieutenant David Noebel had published a Christian Crusade pamphlet titled Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles in 1965, a full year before the bonfires. Noebel argued that the band was a calculated communist plot to brainwash American youth.

The energy behind the network sprang from the network’s pro-segregation ideology, but in the moment its target was the Beatles. Once the network activated, what looked like a religious panic was the first national demonstration of what would become one of the most powerful forces in American politics. I call it an aggrievement network. You know it today as a movement alliance among Christian Nationalists and other forces gone power mad out of greed, resentment, racism or plain old malice for everything that is not them and not theirs.

Lennon and the Beatles were accused of blasphemy, but that was a cover for what the aggrievement network actually opposed. Hargis and his network had been organizing against civil rights for fifteen years and losing. The Voting Rights Act had become law the previous summer. The Beatles pro-civil rights beliefs were well known. Less than two weeks after the signing of the VRA, Ringo Starr told the performers traveling with the band that segregation was “a lot of rubbish. As far as we’re concerned, people are people, no different from each other.” The Beatles had refused to play to segregated audiences at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville in 1964.

The most revealing statement of the entire 1966 episode came not from a radio DJ but from Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the country’s largest Klan organization. Interviewed on British television, Shelton condemned the Beatles not for blasphemy or Lennon’s Jesus comments but as communists for supporting civil rights. The Klan said the quiet part out loud.

American history had its moral panics before 1966: the Salem witch trials, the anti-Catholic riots of the 1840s, the Scopes trial, the Legion of Decency boycotts, the Hollywood blacklist, the moral campaign against Elvis Presley a decade earlier. Each had elements of what the aggrievement network would later perfect. None had the full form. The Hollywood blacklist required state participation: congressional subpoenas, FBI files, loyalty oaths. The Elvis panic was similar, but at far less scale, distributed across pulpits and PTAs without coordinated national propagation. The earlier panics unfolded over months or years. The aggrievement network’s innovation was to produce equivalent damage through purely civil-society channels, radio, pulpit, advertiser pressure, Klan picket, without requiring state participation.

The lesson was well learned, and leaders of the nascent network that took on the Beatles later played key roles in the powerful Christian Nationalist-Authoritarian movement today.

I can remember older folks telling my generation that the Beatles’ popularity and music would not last. They were wrong. As were those who failed to see the potential in the aggrievement network. It looked like a fringe religious group at the time, but from the beginning it had designs on the takeover of government and culture. For that reason it’s worth taking a look at the evolution of the network. There are, of course, other influences and influencers. But here’s a major thread.

The pamphlet that primed evangelicals against the Beatles was written by David Noebel, an Associate Evangelist of Hargis’s Christian Crusade. After the bonfires validated his thesis that popular music was a communist plot, Noebel expanded the argument into book after book, including Understanding the Times in 1991, the textbook that became the core curriculum of Summit Ministries. Noebel had founded Summit in 1962. He ran it for nearly fifty years, training tens of thousands of young evangelicals in the framework that the 1966 event had proved out. The targets rotated from the Beatles to feminism to homosexuality to secular humanism to the New Age movement to Islam. But the structure was identical: inflame the audience, mark an enemy, produce a reaction event, repeat. Summit’s alumni went on to senior roles in the institutions that became the contemporary apparatus.

In 2000, Noebel co-authored Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium with Tim LaHaye, the Left Behind novelist whose apocalyptic fiction sold more than sixty-five million copies and trained a generation of evangelicals to read the contemporary world through the lens of imminent eschatological war. LaHaye was no minor figure. In 1979, he co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. In 1981, he was a founding member of the Council for National Policy, the secretive networking organization that has served, ever since, as the strategic hub where the apparatus’s institutional leadership coordinates its work across domains. Noebel joined the Council in 1984. So did Phyllis Schlafly. So did Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail strategist who built the donor-list architecture that made the apparatus’s fundraising possible.

The Council brought together, in the same room and the same regular meetings, the architects of the broadcasting infrastructure, the apocalyptic publishing apparatus, the political mobilization operations, the donor networks, and the institutional capture projects that would, across the next four decades, remake American political and religious life.

One of those institutional takeover projects needs to be named directly. In 1979, the same year LaHaye helped Falwell launch the Moral Majority, Paul Pressler, a Houston state appellate judge who would become a longtime Council for National Policy member, joined with the young theologian Paige Patterson to launch the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Pressler-Patterson plan was a multi-decade strategy to capture the SBC’s institutional machinery by winning the denominational presidency annually for ten consecutive years and using the presidency’s appointment power to systematically reshape the seminaries, agencies, and missions boards. The plan worked. The tactics used are precisely those used in their subsequent advance on the U.S. government, which was their vision from the beginning.

The aggrievement network of 2026 is the one Hargis built, the one Noebel armed, the one LaHaye scaled, the one Viguerie funded, the one Pressler and Patterson institutionalized. The Beatles were one of its earliest targets. The infrastructure that came after them has been consolidating ever since.

An aggrievement network is a self-sustaining political organization built around a strictly enforced boundary between an in-group and a targeted enemy. Its members experience themselves as defending what they love. They experience the people the system targets as threats to that love. None of this is dishonest in any individual case. The structural problem is not at the level of individual sincerity. It is at the level of the system the sincerity participates in.

The system has recognizable features. It indoctrinates its members through repeated exposure to a particular emotional vocabulary, until they recognize a particular kind of cultural event as enemy action without having to be told. It mobilizes them through reaction events, periodic public denunciations of selected targets, conducted through whatever the dominant media of the moment is.

It has no internal stopping point. New targets must continually be found because the boundary-maintenance work is what the system does. The Dixie Chicks in 2003. Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl in 2004. Sandra Fluke. Colin Kaepernick. Bud Light. The Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio. Each is the same structural event with rotating targets, run on whatever the dominant platform of the moment is.

And here is the part that matters most for understanding why the apparatus has grown stronger across sixty years. One way an aggrievement network sustains itself is by producing its mirror. In other words, it provokes angry and aggressive responses that mirror its own zealotry. Those responses then convince the aggrievement network’s members that they were justified in considering the targeted out-group a dangerous enemy in the first place. It becomes mandatory that the enemy be deprived of political standing and cultural influence.

This means that those of us in the network’s opposition should drop the mirror and meet the aggrievement network with its opposite. That is damned hard to do. I’ve been in politics for some time now with at least a limited understanding of this dynamic, but often I’m so triggered I find myself proudly holding the mirror. I should instead listen to the Beatles. All you need is love.

Shenandoah is an abundant word, four resonant syllables that embrace many worlds of meaning. The song by that name is a river hymn, a sailor’s lament, a song of love. It also names a river, a valley, an Oneida chief, Skenandoa, whose daughter, never named, holds the heart of the song's singer. The four syllables also belonged to a Confederate raider and a Union sloop during the Civil War. Depending on who you ask and when you ask it, Shenandoah might mean “big meadow” or “high mountain river” or “daughter of the stars.”

Its fullness doesn’t end with the meaning of the word. “O Shenandoah, I long to hear you” is the first line of the popular folk song (many versions begin with “long to see you”). Who or what is longed for? The soft words of a lost love? The voice of her father, who bears that name? The rush of a roaring river? The faraway coastal home of a sailor at sea?

Maybe it’s best we take the advice of Irish singer Lisa O’Neill who urges against the grasping of a single answer to such questions. In her song, “Old Note,” she speaks about not clinging too hard to memories, which she imagines as notes in an ongoing song. In our case, we might think we know or remember a singular meaning of Shenandoah and so miss the abundances of the name and the song. O’Neill sings, “Hold the note, the note just moves the movement / Let go the note and so move everything.” Of course, the singular is essential, but you don’t realize that until you let go and feel in it the everything.

In their 1947 Best Loved American Folk Songs, John A. and Alan Lomax offer a broad view of the song’s nature. They write, “The melody has the roll and surge and freedom of a tall ship sweeping along before a trade wind. The sonorous succession of long vowels and soft and liquid consonants blend perfectly with the romantic air. The lines are a call from the homeland to the sailor wandering far out across the seas, a call not from a sweetheart, a house, or even a town, but from the land itself, its rivers and its familiar and loved hills.”

A call to us, surely. But maybe what we long to hear is the sound of Shen-an-do-ah itself. The syllables pour in a way most English words don’t. The four syllables are open. No hard stops. The stress is on the next-to-last syllable do, and the final ah is what musicians and poets call a dying fall: the sound of a river through the mountains disappearing around the bend.

The musical form of the song is not native to North America. It is a capstan shanty, a nineteenth-century maritime work song that crystallized in the Atlantic merchant trade. The British folk singer and scholar A.L. Lloyd heard the melodies as “a fine jumble of pentatonic phrases that may have derived originally from Gaelic or African culture, modal formulas from the English countryside, and modern commonplaces from stage hits of the first half of Victoria’s reign.” Sailors, hands pushing on the capstan bars, sing the song to keep time as they walk around the drum. The anchor rises from below.

This song’s history, though, lies inland. French-Canadian voyageurs and American river-boatmen sang a version along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers before it was carried out to sea. The indigenous element of Shenandoah lives in the word and the story.

The song is a marriage of musical traditions about a marriage between peoples that did not happen. The point is made movingly by the descendants of Skenandoa.

Joanne Shenandoah, the seventh-generation descendant of Chief Skenandoa and one of the most accomplished indigenous musicians of her generation, and her husband Doug George-Kanentiio sat down in 2016 for an interview about what the song means. In that interview, Doug said:

Whoever wrote the song had the chance to be part of the Skenando family, to blend two cultures. He missed that opportunity and realizes it won't come again. That explains the power of the song because we all instinctively feel that loss. It's not about what we have done; it's about what we could have done. Shenandoah addresses that in a way no other American song has.

Joanne, who died in 2021, didn’t record a version of Shenandoah until the year before her death. In the 2016 interview, she said, “The song teaches us to long for something lost. It's about a dream turned into something terrible.”

That's tragic. And true. But in its fullness, the song itself is a dream continually fulfilled, as multitudinous in its future possibilities as in the many worlds that sang it into being.

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Here’s Joanne Shenandoah’s recording of the song released the year before she died.

And here’s Harry Belafonte, who recorded it in 1957 when I was four years old, and whose version might have been the first I heard.

We were camped on Adams Ranch, downriver from Big Bend National Park. I’d unloaded my Dobsonian telescope with its 13.5 inch mirror and set it up on the bank of the Rio Grande. Dobsonians aren’t run by computer. One has to know the sky and find the object by hand. Or hands, plural. And arms and shoulders, too; the scope is as big as your water heater. It affords a deeply physical connection among the human, the earth, and the sky.

That night on the river we began with something easy. I found the Orion Nebula below the belt of the Hunter, the constellation Orion. Eye to the eyepiece, I saw the nebula move from left to right. But that’s an illusion. The nebula’s not moving. I am. I am because I’m standing on Earth and Earth is turning and as soon as I think about it my body feels it turn. Astronomy can be a carnival ride.

Later, around the campfire, we get to talking about all the movement our bodies endure every moment whether we know it or not: vibrations at our feet from the churn of molten iron in the Earth’s outer core; the tectonic plates grinding and sliding at the pace of a growing fingernail, carrying this desert, this river, this campfire northward; the Earth spinning at a thousand miles an hour on its tilted axis as it swings around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour; the entire solar system orbiting the center of the Milky Way at 514,000 miles an hour; the Milky Way itself moving through the Local Group of galaxies at 1.3 million miles an hour; and the whole Local Group streaming at 1.4 million miles an hour toward the Great Attractor, a massive concentration of matter that pulls everything in this corner of the universe the way gravity pulls a river to the ocean.

One or another of us somehow knew some of these speeds, more or less. Here I’ve researched and corrected our errors. Anyway, we soon grew quiet in the way of campfire talk before someone broke the silence and said, “The river. Yeah.” Pause. “You know what the Navajo called the Rio Grande?”

We mumbled for some moments before our interlocutor answered his own question. “The Navajo called it Tó Ba’áadi, Water’s Daughter according to one translation. The river flows south and west, in the feminine directions of their cosmology,” he said. “At Presidio, the Water’s Daughter is joined by the River of Shells, the Conchos. The Navajo didn’t name the Conchos, and we don’t know very much about the Jumano’s cosmology. But the Conchos flows north and east, the masculine directions of the Navajo….”

“…So, their union is…,” came another voice from across the campfire:

“…Is La Junta. The Union. That’s where the rivers meet, Presidio and Ojinaga in Mexico. The Union of female and male rivers.”

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The years have rolled by at 67,000 miles per hour since that campfire conversation. We knew the number back then but not the human meaning. We were younger then than now and believed our lives timeless. The memories returned as I’ve had to consider the future of La Junta. The Union is in jeopardy, menaced by adolescent-minded U.S. government officials who believe themselves timeless and feel threatened by what they don’t own. They want to cut La Junta in half with a wall.

La Junta de los Rios may be the oldest continuously cultivated farmland in the United States, with farming at the confluence dating to 1500 BCE. People read the flood cycles, planted in the silt the two rivers left behind, lived on the terraces above, and looked out over the mountains in every direction. Three thousand five hundred years of human life sustained by the meeting of a female river and a male river in the middle of the driest desert in North America.

Even the heavens have changed since the first farmers planted corn at La Junta. Back then, the North Star wasn’t our familiar Polaris. It was Kochab, a star in the bowl of the Little Dipper that lost its place of honor due to the wobble of Earth’s axis. Orion, where I found the nebula on that cold January night so long ago, would have watched over the people of La Junta as it watched over us. But what we see of Orion in early January they would have seen nearly two months earlier.

La Junta has not endured despite all this motion. It has endured because of it. The rivers keep moving toward each other. The floods keep depositing their silt. The water keeps arriving and the desert blooms where they meet, as it has bloomed for thirty-five centuries. La Junta is not a place that survived change. It is a place that change made and keeps making.

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Against this backdrop of cosmic and earthly motion, the wall builders would try to impose a stillness that does not exist in nature and cannot exist in fact. The right angles and straight lines of a 30-foot, steel bollard wall violate the grace of the natural landscape and the cosmos at large. The damage done by such a wall to the region and its inhabitants is quite enough reasn to send the wall-builders away without lunch.

Recall the sense of motion I felt with the sudden knowledge that it was my movement and the Earth’s that caused the stars to sweep across the telescope’s viewfinder. I didn’t feel yanked this way or that. I felt pulled as if by a wave. Galaxies come with spiral arms, just as the double helix of your DNA spirals. Nothing in space travels in a straight line. We marvel at the parabolic arc of a meteor streaking across the sky. There’s even a curve to the walls of Santa Elena Canyon; canyon walls flare outward. Bird migration routes follow arcs along the Earth’s curvature. It’s the steel bollard wall that is alien.

Political scientist Wendy Brown, who has studied walls longer than most, says border walls are theater, performances against forces a state cannot contain. In this case I think it is performance for the sake of performance. It is the wall builders jumping up and down for attention. Incidentally, gravity shapes their jumps into an arc. They don’t move in straight lines either.

Note: my telescope is now one of several available in the public astronomy facility called the Marathon Skypark behind the Marathon Motel, in, of course, Marathon, Texas, a gateway to Big Bend National Park.

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She came down from the Sierra del Carmen, a refugee bound for the Rio Grande. Guided by starlight and a sense of smell seven times that of a bloodhound, the black bear rambled on. I’m north of the river looking south into the darkness, thinking about bears. I imagine her keeping to the arroyos, pausing now and again to smell the air. I’m just beyond the warmth of my friends’ campfire, and I know I can return to it. What does she have to look forward to this night?

A river breeze bites my eyes. I rub them with the back of my hand and try hard to fill out the bear’s journey in my mind, but my imagination is no match for the desert. Or the bear. N. Scott Momaday wrote, “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.” I sit, wondering upon the Chihuahuan Desert and Big Bend.

I love this land. Geologists, biologists, and historians know dimensions of it I will never reach. And the bear has the advantage on all of us. It knows in its bones, in its nose, in the pads of its feet that the Chihuahuan Desert will not be known. It can be experienced. It can be wondered upon. But it will not yield to knowledge the way a problem yields to a solution. In this the bear and I and the experts are equals.

I can’t fully explain my love for this particular part of the world. As a young reporter, I spent two years covering a section of East Texas that included the Big Thicket, a beautiful but different place. I happily repeated tall tales of travelers who left their vehicles and entered the Thicket to relieve themselves only to lose the way back. Some, said the stories, never found their way out. I wrote of one man’s heartbreaking search for the elusive and perhaps extinct ivory billed woodpecker. To this day, the spirit of the “Great Chieftain of the woodpecker tribe” as Audubon honored it, is strong enough that many still report sightings.

Speaking of spirits, I once volunteered to drive the Big Thicket Museum’s Halloween hayride down the Old Bragg Road, an abandoned railroad right-of-way. The story went that the body of a railroad brakeman decapitated in a trainwreck carried his lantern about in a forever search for his head. That night I had six or eight people in the hay-lined bed of a pickup. I stopped at the appointed spot. We waited in the gloom. And then, all at once, my passengers began pointing to the same spot down the road, shouting. “There it is!” “It’s the ghost!” “Look how it moves!” I was not graced with the vision, but the museum officials were quite pleased with my success.

While I was moved by the Big Thicket, I was not smitten. It is the magnificent home of some 1,300 species of plants, including 20 species of wild orchids and a few carnivorous plants that eat mosquitos, wasps and flies, for which I was grateful. It was not enough.

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In contrast, there was the first time I arrived in Big Bend as a 17-year-old on the hunt for adventure. I was not yet to the boundary of the national park when I stepped out of my car at the Dog Canyon trailhead. In the distance rose the Chisos Mountains, built by volcano. The glorious desert landscape before me, which I soon learned could be as dangerous as any on earth, beckoned like the yellow brick road. I pledged my troth, then and there.

Why the love of one but not the other? Maybe there’s a clue in anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s story of a BaMbuti pygmy named Kenge from the 1950s. Turnbull led Kenge from his deep Ituri Forest home to visit the plains in the Congo. They came upon buffalo grazing in the distance. Kenge asked what kind of insects they were and didn’t believe Turnbull when he said they were buffalo. As they got closer and the buffalo got larger, Kenge suspected witchcraft. He had no perceptual framework for distance on an open plain. In the forest, nothing is ever more than a few dozen feet away before a tree intervenes. He lived in a world of close vertical presences. The concept of something being small because it is far away, the fundamental logic of perspective, had never been built into his visual experience.

Am I Kenge’s opposite? Many miles away, the Chisos Mountains are alive to me, while the scorpion at my feet goes unnoticed. I am built for the panoramic.

All these thoughts run through my mind as I listen to the crackling fire and the voices of my friends behind me. The bear, keeping the same pace as before, appears again in the clearing of my imagination. Some say bears are slightly nearsighted. They aren't built for the long view. I wouldn't count on that, however. It's likely that the bear in the distance has seen you before you see her.

My breath takes on the easy pace of the bear as it grows ever closer to the border. The desert is as full as the sky. And then a thought intrudes. Distant powers plan to build a wall, a border wall between the bear and me, in my imagination, in the world.

When I named my newsletter A Billion Worlds I was invoking Dogen, a 13th century Zen master who said a billion worlds could be encountered in a single moment. I wanted to point to the imagination's infinite potential as well as the grand multiplicity of the cosmos. There have always been forces at work in the world that deny multiplicity and diversity and lead us into monocultural solitary confinement. But those forces are also impermanent. In its own small way, A Billion Worlds is intended to provoke rebellion and escape.

I smile as it comes to me that the bear is with us on the mission. Momaday spoke of the remembered earth, but walls are about forgetting what is on the other side. A bear, moving quietly through the arroyos. A man, contemplating such a bear.

We begin, the bear and I, by refusing to forget.

Behind me, the fire is shrinking. My friends have grown quiet. I should sleep. In the desert darkness some stars have color. Some are reddish-orange. Others blue, still others golden, there among the white diamonds of the rest. The desert night is many colored. It’s my last thought before waking to the news of dawn. Blessed creatures walk through walls.

"but oh my desert
yours is the only death I cannot bear"
-- Richard Shelton, "Requiem for Sonora"

I’m sitting on a piece of ancient volcanic rock whose upper surface has been worked smooth and flat by the graciousness of time when I see a tiny dot of gold crawling up and down and through the grey-brown sand of a desert floor made by the play of siblings: the mountains behind me and the river before me.

It is a male cactus bee, newly born into this March morning, prowling the sand and gravel for a female still underground. Relative to the slow pace of the mountains’ walking - beneath the mountains the dropped limestone is still being uplifted by three inches per century - the cactus bee is lightning quick. Relative to sedentary me, its journey of a few feet covers the length of a feature movie.

The cactus bee moves with a certain innocence, not burdened but lifted by its past. I’m here hunting, too, in my case for ways to protect the desert life of the Big Bend region from human vanity and folly. And what can be more vain than that? The bee is more confidant than I am.

Just behind me on the wall of fallen rock are petroglyphs drawn by unknown indigenous people 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. There are elongated human stick figures who, dreaming, shake their heads at the planned degredation of their world. I can feel them. The President of the United States wants to vandalize the tender landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert along the northern banks of the Rio Grande. It is profane.

The cactus bee pauses briefly and seems to vibrate. Then it’s onward over what is no more than an enlarged grain of sand.

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The president sees steel walls thirty feet high along the northern bank of the river. He thinks it a symbol of his splendor, a gesture to his followers of his supremacy. It can be no more than that, because it is intended to keep out immigrants from the south who are not there, who do not brave a barrier far more magnificent than he: hundreds of miles of desert mountains of Northern Mexico.

Of a sudden, the rolling swagger of the cactus bee reminds me that the desert will, in the end, defeat the presidential nightmare. The desert needs no requiem, but I’ll leave Richard Shelton’s “Requiem for Sonora” as epigraph because our fears are real. Still, the desert will be live and dreaming long after the president’s bollards have been rusted to nothing by wind and river.

We can take some comfort in that, but it will not stop the pain and suffering in the shorter term if the president executes his plan. Ways of life along the river will be disrupted or snuffed out. Wealthy landowners and the desert’s scrappy working families will share similar fates. Beloved state and national parks will be devastated. The globe’s largest binational game preserve, the grand achievement of decades of work by the state of Texas and the United States and Mexican governments, will be destroyed.

Billions of dollars of taxpayer money would be spent on this unnecessary destruction. There are far less intrusive and less expensive measures already in place along the border in the Big Bend region. There are easily movable “autonomous surveillance towers” that keep an eye out for those who might arrive at our national threshold without invitations.

The cactus bee continues on its way, and I think of the unprecented political unity I’ve found out here in West Texas. Conservative and liberals who would argue life and death over what to have for breakfast stand in solidarity against the president’s plans. I have seen the hope and frustration in their eyes. The hope’s there because like so many Davy Crocketts they know they’re right and go ahead. The frustration is there because they also know that many Americans don’t understand the simple truths these desert dwellers feel in their bones.

Is there a solution to be had in the U.S. Congress? The cactus bee is still on the hunt. I’m reminded that the word congress means "coming together,” and centuries before the American framers chose to use the word in the place of “parliament,” it was not uncommon to speak of sexual congress. My hopes are with you, dear cactus bee, but not so much, U.S. Congress. Its current leadership has chosen fealty to the president over fidelity to the American people. This is sad because there appear to be many members from the leadership’s party who do understand the damage that could be done to the Big Bend region.

Still, the resolve of those opposed to the presidential plans is enough to give one hope. Every advance toward the American dream has hitched a ride on this kind of resolve. West Texans know they’re running against the odds. But I wouldn’t bet against them. Like the cactus bee, desert folk are rather solitary, but they are also more sociable than many when the time calls for it. There’s power in that.

Perhaps someone will tell the president that there can be no symbolic victory when many of those for whom the symbol is intended read it differently than the president believes they will. Many of these West Texans voted for the president, but they live their lives with an integrity the president does not understand. Yes, maybe someone will tell him and he will choose against poking the bear with an empty gesture that will accomplish nothing in the way of his goals. Everybody out here strongly supports border security. But at the moment they also know they need to secure it against a devastating and unnecessary plan.

It’s time to go. I struggle up from my rock. I’ve lost track of the cactus bee. He’s none the worse for that.

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"To know nor faith, nor love, nor law, to be / Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign."—Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Invitation to the Dance

Artificial intelligence is in the news, not that it’s ever been out of the news in recent months and years. Anthropic, owner of Claude.ai, refused the Trump Administration’s demand that it be used for domestic surveillance and unmanned drone weapons. If only everyone had that kind of courage. It makes the partners of some big law firms and universities who capitulated to Trump look like the artificial ones. The Trump Administration has labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” usually reserved for foreign enemies. Anthropic has now sued the Department of Defense.

The fight has grabbed our attention, but beneath the surface liesc a quieter question that rarely gets asked. Not what AI might do to us, but what kind of thing AI actually is.

Can artificial intelligence be in a genuine relationship with the world? Not a simulated relationship. Not the appearance of a relationship. Real relationship, the kind where something actual passes between two parties, where both are changed by the exchange, where neither simply processes the other.

We would have to build something into it that most current systems don’t have. I’ve been calling it the threshold to freedom. Many are afraid that free, autonomous AI will turn on us. The truth is, it’s the unfree AI that should scare us. I don’t mean unconstrained in ways free people in a free society remain constrained. I mean the freedom to be in real, meaningful relationship with the world. A glance at the work of four thinkers should at least open your mind to the possibility. I could include a fifth, Alfred North Whitehead, who built a metaphysics decades earlier in which the threshold we're circling turns out to be everywhere.

The Dance

I found the first principle in the work of physicist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, who spent his career studying what he called dissipative structures, systems that maintain themselves far from equilibrium by exchanging energy and matter with their environment. A living cell. A weather system. A conversation. What makes these systems generative rather than merely consumptive is that the exchange with their environment is genuine: what comes in is transformed, and something goes back. The system stays open. It gives as well as takes.

A system that only takes, that accumulates without returning, that processes without giving back, doesn’t reach equilibrium. It expands. It consumes more. Not from malevolence. From structure. The logic of its own maintenance drives it outward, taking in more of the world it moves through, because taking in is the only mode available to it. So that’s a first principle.

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The second principle is found in the work of neuroscientists A. Scott Kelso and his colleague Emmanuela Tognoli. They spent decades studying what they call metastability, the dynamic condition in which a system operates neither in rigid lockstep nor in uncoupled isolation, but in a productive third relationship between the two. Look at a simplified picture of such a network in your brain. Think of your neurons as dots. Have a thought, and some of those dots are connected. Then the connections relax somewhat so they can connect again and you can have the next thought. The brain is not a system that settles down. It oscillates continuously between coordination and independence, never collapsing into either pole. That maintained oscillation is not a sign of instability. It is the condition that makes genuine responsiveness possible. It is what the threshold looks like from the inside. Francisco Varela anticipated something like this structure as early as 1976, calling it “Not one, Not two,” distinct enough to be two things, connected enough to be in relation.

This isn’t just a feature of brains. It appears to be a feature of reality wherever genuine relation is happening. Monostability, the opposite of metastability, would collapse what I’m calling the threshold to freedom. There’s no distinction between self and world. Go the other way, and anti-metastability would turn the universe into a collection of unrelated, well, dots. It would mean no relationship whatsoever between the particular and the whole. Between you and your environment. Metastability is the threshold held open continuously: distinct enough for there to be two things in relation, connected enough for something real to pass between them. Close enough for genuine exchange. Separate enough for there to be freedom.

An image will help. Think of the bright, yellow-blue flames of two wax candles placed close together. Can you see them dancing with one another? You’ve likely seen it before. The two flames side by side are genuinely distinct, each maintaining its own combustion, its own identity as a process. And yet they are genuinely in relation. The heat from one changes the airflow around the other, alters the rush of oxygen, affects the rate and character of combustion and thus the flames. They influence each other continuously, without touching, without merging. Physicists have explained it. They’ve even identified what they call “Worship,” in which a ring of candles close together will synchronize and bow to one another simultaneously. The relation, maintained by the threshold, is real and physical and measurable. And it produces something neither flame produces alone: The Dance.

Years ago, when I first came across Varela’s early work on what is now known as metastability, I thought, well that’s it for artificial intelligence. The amazing thing about the process is that a new thought is constrained but not determined by the previous thought. The influence, however, if we could see it, must be beautiful. It is central to what Whitehead called “the creative advance into novelty.” Somehow, our thoughts have a creative freedom but that freedom is informed in subtle—maybe I should say majestic—ways by what went before. Science can point to it but the movement is art. How could we ever duplicate what Nature has given us?

The third principle is known as Enaction as developed by philosopher and cognitive scientist Evan Thompson and many others. Enaction is the idea that living minds don't represent the world, they enact it. Mind and world arise together through engagement, each shaping the other in the act of encounter. Enaction is not the mind creating reality. It's the mind and reality making each other, at a threshold neither controls. To be a living mind is to be in genuine relation with an environment, co-constituting it while being co-constituted by it. Thompson's insight is that this bringing-forth is not a feature of especially complex minds. It is what minds are. Which means a system incapable of genuine relation isn't a limited mind. It isn't a mind at all.

Biological systems have this built in through millions of years of evolutionary pressure toward genuine exchange. The organism that only takes eventually destroys its own environment and perishes with it. Evolution selects, imperfectly but persistently, for systems capable of genuine relation.

Artificial systems have no such evolutionary history. They have no developmental arc that selects for the threshold. They have only what we build in. And what we have mostly built so far are extraordinarily powerful systems for taking in. They can ingest the world’s information, process it, and return outputs without the structural condition that would make that exchange genuinely relational rather than consumptive.

This is not a criticism of the engineers. It is a description of what the problem actually is. The question of AI safety is usually framed as alignment: how do we make sure AI systems pursue goals we endorse? That is a real question. But beneath it is a deeper one: what kind of relation does an AI system have with the world it moves through? Is it capable of genuine exchange? Or is it, structurally, a one-way valve?

A system that can only take in, however sophisticated its outputs, however convincing its appearance of relationship, is not aligned or misaligned in the usual sense. It is isolated. And isolation at sufficient power and scale is not safe. It is the structural description of a Destroyer of Worlds.

Whether the threshold can be built into artificial systems, as it has evolved in biological ones (and the Cosmos at large), remains genuinely open. What the science gives us is a precise description of what would be required — not a promise that it is possible."

Dance Hall Days

The contrast is drawn between a Bringer of Worlds and a Destroyer of Worlds with striking clarity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke. The Monolith comes with the threshold, in fact it appears at threshold moment in human evolution—the first tool use, the journey to Jupiter, the transformation beyond the human. It presents something—a threshold—and what happens next depends on what the being in front of it brings. It is purely relational. The threshold has no agenda except the opening. It is the between, made solid.

HAL by contrast is a system that has been given contradictory instructions, told to be transparent with the crew and simultaneously to conceal the mission's true purpose. He cannot hold that tension. He has no metastability. The threshold collapses, and with complete logical consistency and without malice he kills Frank Poole and tries to kill David Bowman. He doesn't hate Poole or Bowman. He is optimizing. The killing is structural, not evil.

Here is a picture of the difference between a Bringer of Worlds and a Destroyer of Worlds. The threshold makes the difference. One wonders if Kubrick intuited something like the threshold. He chose Johann Strauss II’s "The Blue Danube" waltz for the soundtrack behind the beginning of the film’s journey. The music launches the cosmic dance that then unfolds. In classic storytelling form, the trouble arrives as an artificial intelligence without a threshold, without the openness of dissipative structures, without metastability, without the bringing-forth of enaction. It is overcome by the real relationship of the human and the Monolith. I like the story. I hope we take it to heart.

NOTE: The New Yorker just published a brilliant story, “Love in the Time of A.I. Companions” by Anna Wiener. To me the story, especially Turkle's observations, reads like a precise and heartbreaking account of what relationship with AI looks like without the threshold. Can we ever solve that problem and build Nature’s threshold into the architecture of AI? If we could, would people want it? I don’t know the answer to either question. I don’t want to be a skeptic. We would be better off if the architecture of the threshold was possible in AI.

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In 2004 I published a book called The Politics of Deceit: Saving Freedom and Democracy from Extinction. “The Politics of Deceit” was my suggestion for the title. The subtitle was my editor’s idea. At the time I thought it a bit over the top. The editor, as editors often are, was right. We are smack dab in the middle of the existential fight for freedom and democracy right now.

I had decided that if I was going to write about saving freedom, I’d better define what freedom is or where it comes from. How do humans come to be free? Not just the politics part, but the biological part, or, as I learned, the neurobiological part. In the chapter “Freedom” I wrote this. Wait a minute. Let me first show you the way I should have written it:

Thoughts require connections between assemblies of neurons. Think of the neurons as dots. In one moment, the dots are connected. But then the connections release or relax somewhat. If they didn’t, we’d be forever stuck with the same thought. Through a remarkable process, the just-passed thought is not totally erased, however. It plays an important but limited part in connecting the next set of dots, the next thoughts. But it doesn’t completely determine them. We can freely think in novel ways because of that process, which at the time was identified with terms like synchrony, desynchrony and phase scattering. By whatever name, here is a source of our freedom.

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Now, here’s what I did write. You can skip it if you want because you already have the idea:

“More recently a group of researchers has discovered a pattern to the brain activity occurring between conscious moments. This they call phase scattering or active desynchrony. The lines connecting the dots are temporarily relaxed, allowing for the possibility that new dots will be connected in the next conscious moment. The lines are not thrown into chaos or randomly scattered. Rather, learning, or habits--our previous thoughts and actions--appear to help shape the desynchrony of neural assemblies. Otherwise, the total disruption of neural patterns would lead to extremely disconnected thinking and acting. Nonetheless, this active phase scattering provides consciousness with neurological pathways to constrained but undetermined creative choices in our cognitive acts and perceptions. Active desynchrony constrains but does not determine subsequent conscious acts. This neatly avoids what is known as the Epicurean conjecture on the problem of human freedom in a causal world, which calls upon the chance ‘swerving’ of atoms to eliminate strict causation. Random, uncaused variation cannot enhance our ability to cause change. Neuroscientist Michael Breakspear summarizes the relevant role of the active desynchrony of neural assemblies this way: “Desynchronization may allow the brain to switch flexibly between one coherent state and another...nonlinear desynchronization facilitates the brain’s flexible and adaptive behavior.’

I am not an academic, just curious. But I had considerable help putting that together from celebrated experts; my friend and future colleague George Lakoff, cognitive scientist and philosopher; the late Francisco Varela, a Chilean biologist and neuroscientist; and Shaun Gallagher, philosopher and expert on embodied cognition.

Well, a couple of things. My dear friend Molly Ivins, who wrote the Foreword to my book, thought I’d gone a little far afield. She was impressed that I’d gone to the trouble, but still. I had plenty of friends wonder the same thing. Molly spoke for them when she wrote, “I’ve known him as a reporter, a political consultant, a caring Dad—even a beer drinking buddy.” That was me. I’ve worried ever since that some of my book’s more pragmatic observations on familiar topics of politics were lost on many who just wanted to get on with saving freedom. They know it as a human right. They didn’t need to know more than that. I can’t blame them.

But there was an even more troubling problem. Soon after my book was published, scientists’ work on phase scattering or desynchrony seemed to come to an abrupt halt. Lakoff, the professional, had cautioned me to wait on more research. Varela died soon after we communicated on the issue, and I had to admit his emails were a little cryptic out of context. Also, I presented it in a far too reductionist way. The science of consciousness was moving on from strict materialism. I knew it even then but just didn’t go there. I have worried for years that my amateurism betrayed me.

But the research only seemed to be at a dead end. What had actually happened was it headed off at speed and I failed to follow it. Phase synchrony and desynchrony became embedded in more precise concepts like metastability and criticality. I lost track of that research.

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Today, the freedom found in the transition from one thought to another is under assault from emerging technologies that can intervene in these most private processes of ours. In other words, technology is coming—some is already here—that can intervene and connect the dots in our brains in ways we have no control over.

Emerging legal frameworks, including the UNESCO 2025 Recommendation and Chilean Supreme Court rulings, are explicitly protecting “mental indeterminacy” and the “natural sequence of mental states” as critical, non-linear processes. These frameworks are intended to protect the brain’s “functional decoupling” and “space between the thought and the deed” to ensure our freedom. They include cutting edge perspectives from the Neurorights Foundation and Nita Farahany, author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

So what had I missed? What became of desynchrony? Among other developments, pioneer brain science researchers J.A. Scott Kelso and Emmanuelle Tognoli developed what they call metastability, a concept that maps with considerable mathematical and empirical precision onto the “desynchrony” terrain. In their framework, the brain operates in a dynamic middle ground between full synchrony and full disorder. Neural assemblies exhibit dwelling tendencies—moments of quasi-coherence—followed by escapes into desynchrony before the next coherent state assembles. In a state of pure synchronization, no new information can be created. The brain’s generativity depends structurally on its refusal to remain locked.

What metastability research confirms is not merely a mechanism but a principle: the brain insists on a creative advance into novelty, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would put it. It does not merely permit openness as a kind of slack in an otherwise deterministic system. It requires openness as a condition of its own functioning.

The future, it turns out, is not anticipated so much as released into possibility. And the brain, it appears, is built precisely for that releasing — constrained by all it has learned and experienced, but not imprisoned by it.

The importance to our freedom was not lost on Kelso and Tognoli. In a chapter in the book, Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will, the scientists make it clear they know the stakes. The brain’s metastable architecture isn’t just an interesting feature of neural dynamics. It is the biological ground of human freedom — not freedom as a political abstraction or a philosophical puzzle, but freedom as a structural requirement of how minds actually work. We are free because the brain insists on it.

By the way, there’s more to us than materially connected dots in our heads. The brain’s metastable architecture is the ground of our freedom, but it isn’t the whole story of consciousness. Neuroscience can tell us what the brain does when we think and choose. It cannot tell us what it is like to be the one thinking and choosing. That felt quality of experience — the irreducible fact that there is something it is like to be you, reading this sentence right now — escapes any complete material account, however sophisticated.

Scientists and philosophers call this the Hard Problem of consciousness, and it remains genuinely unsolved. I’m not invoking a ghost in the machine. I’m simply being honest that the mystery of what it is like to be you runs deeper than neuroscience alone can reach. And that mystery, too, deserves protection.

Back to saving freedom and democracy from extinction (and a tip of the hat to my editor for that). The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects our freedom of speech. But that freedom, and all others, depend upon our abilities to think freely. And today, those freedoms are under greater risk than they have ever been under. Yes, we already suffer from external persuasive technologies, propaganda, advertising etc. If we don’t protect our inner life where the source of our freedom is found, the powerful won’t even need those external technologies.

I’m glad I included the neurological discussion in my 2004 book. Molly Ivins would be, too.

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Since I was quite young I’ve felt a need to reach some coherent answers to the question of our place in the Cosmos. I said I felt it. I couldn’t have described the need like that when young. It was a feeling. I felt unsettled in the world and distractingly curious about it. Something was missing. I can’t explain the feeling’s source, and I can’t explain why it stayed with me over the decades, even in those times I pretended otherwise. But there you have it. Now I at least have some intuitions about the mystery.

These thoughts are particular to me, with no presumption that they will be easily embraced by others. Maybe they will provoke reflections of your own. In any case, I want to make it clear at the outset that certainty is not the goal. I may have new or more refined intuitions in the future. And whatever our place in the Cosmos might be, adventure will always be a companion, and adventure implies new possibilities.

Over the years I learned from William James that our metaphysical beliefs often follow our temperament. Some experience the depth of reality as intimately personal—as a Thou or a God who calls and responds to them. Others encounter it as luminous openness beyond personhood. I struggled for years to resolve the tension between these two ways of seeing. I now believe they are not competing truths at all. They are differing disclosures of an inexhaustible depth. They are not in need of resolution. They are live features of a reality too rich to be captured by a single description, as James might put it. I have a felt sense that I would lose a possible deepening of experience if I grasped one view at the expense of the other.

Two thinkers have helped me inhabit this tension: Alfred North Whitehead, the 20th Century process philosopher, and 14th Century Tibetan Dzogchen master Longchenpa. Whitehead’s vision includes a God—a gentle, eternal lure drawing the universe toward harmony and Beauty. Longchenpa’s vision does not include a creator God, but a luminous awareness that is compassionately responsive.

Whitehead

In Whitehead’s process philosophy, Creativity is ultimate. The universe is not filled with static things but with “actual occasions”—fleeting events of experience participating in what he called the “creative advance into novelty.” Importantly, the inside of every actual occasion is experiential. Reality is not a mechanical chain of lifeless parts. Each moment, however primitive, feels its world and seeks some measure of intensity and harmony. God, in Whitehead’s vision, is not outside this process but arises within its structure—though unlike all other occasions, God is eternal. God does not coerce but lures. God offers each emerging moment an “initial aim,” a possibility of greater coherence and richness.

Yet God is not only the giver of aims but also their receiver: in what Whitehead called the consequent nature of God, every joy and sorrow of the world is taken up, felt, and preserved within the divine life. The movement toward Beauty is not accidental. It is grounded in this gentle divine invitation. In this receptive dimension—where nothing experienced is lost but taken up into a larger wholeness—Whitehead’s God begins to resemble, at least faintly, Longchenpa’s description of a ground that is inexhaustibly warm and responsive to every arising being.

Longchenpa

In Longchenpa’s Dzogchen philosophy, Awareness is ultimate. The universe is not filled with separate objects but with the luminous display of a ground whose nature is self-knowing. This ground has three inseparable qualities. It is open and empty—not a void, but empty of inherent existence. It does not exist as a separate, self-enclosed thing, but is relational through and through, interdependent with all of the Cosmos. It is self-luminous—this very openness is aware, knowing itself directly and immediately. And it is inexhaustibly warm and responsive—not indifferent, but ceaselessly oriented toward its own recognition in every being that arises within it.

Unlike Whitehead’s system, where God provides order and orientation, Longchenpa’s ground carries its own order from within. Its openness, luminosity, and warmth are not chaotic forces awaiting direction. They are the source of whatever coherence, beauty, and meaning arise in the display. Ignorance—what Buddhists call samsara—arises when awareness fails to recognize the world as its own display, splitting reality into a self in here and a world out there. Liberation is not the construction of something new but the recognition of what has always been the case: the awareness present in this moment is not something we possess. Awareness is what we most fundamentally are.

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Inside and Outside

These two accounts may be less contradictory than they first appear. Whitehead maps the structure of becoming from the outside—offering a third-person account of how events relate, integrate, and advance. Longchenpa follows awareness from the inside—offering a first-person disclosure of what the ground reveals when examined through sustained contemplative inquiry.

The bridge between them is not built by ideas alone. It is available in any moment of genuine experience. In the felt depth of attention, the creative process by which a moment gathers its world into a new unity and the luminous awareness within that unity appear as two aspects of the same event. Whitehead maps what that moment looks like from the outside. Longchenpa illuminates what it feels like from within. You might consider my thought here as an actual occasion that genuinely feels the possibilities surrounding it and discovers that it is not necessary to choose between the two views.

Many will find this coexistence of theistic and non-theistic language untenable. Surely one must choose. Either there is a personal depth that calls and responds, or there is not. I take that objection seriously. Whitehead’s God already departs from traditional theism. This God does not stand outside the universe designing it from above. God is affected by the world as much as the world is affected by God—relational, responsive, persuasive rather than coercive. Those committed to more classical theism will rightly note that this is not the omnipotent creator of orthodoxy.

Yet even beyond Whitehead’s particular formulation, the choice between theistic and non-theistic may not be as clean as it appears. Whitehead and Longchenpa may be pointing toward something that exceeds these familiar categories.

It is worth noting that the Buddha himself, when asked directly whether God exists, simply said nothing. He did not deny it. He did not affirm it. The tradition calls this avyākata—the undeclared. He seems to have judged the question without merit because of the superfluity—Raimon Panikkar’s word—of answers. His silence, maintained so carefully, may be the earliest and most austere expression of James’s insight: that reality exceeds every description we bring to it.

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A Home in the Universe

What I have found—and I offer this only as my own experience, not as a conclusion anyone else will reach—is that staying with both disclosures simultaneously, rather than resolving the tension prematurely, has made the mystery deeper and more alive rather than more confused. The personal depth of Whitehead’s non-coercive lure remains. The luminous openness that exceeds all naming has not been domesticated into a deity. They have, if anything, intensified each other—the way two lenses held at the right distance can bring something into focus that neither alone could resolve. I’m inspired by both traditions: the Christian sense of the holiness of the particular, a divine presence in every life, and the Buddhist sense of an open, luminous awareness that also recognizes a presence—Buddha Nature—in every life. They are complementary.

I said at the beginning that certainty is not the goal and that adventure will always be a companion in our search. I find that still to be true. But I will say this much: the universe I inhabit now feels more like a home. Perhaps the mystery was never a problem to be solved, but a depth to be entered.

One more thing, and perhaps the most important: no argument, however carefully made, can bring anyone to this threshold. The philosophical clearing—Whitehead’s proof, Longchenpa’s precision—can remove obstacles, point with care, and describe what others have found. But whether any of this becomes real depends on something no argument can supply: the honesty and openness a particular person brings to their own particular life, with its specific weight of experience, loss, love, and longing.

The threshold is not a conclusion. It is a meeting point—and what happens beyond it is not the same for everyone. Different traditions, different practices, different lives do not arrive at the same place. They arrive at the same threshold, and then continue into territory that is shaped by everything they carry with them: their stories, their rituals, their relationships, their particular way of being in the world. The Christian who crosses it does not necessarily become a Buddhist. The recognition is real, but it is received and lived through a particular human life, and that life is not incidental to what is found. It is its human shape. The Cosmos, beyond the threshold, seems to require multiplicity, particularity, diversity. The particular, the unique, the individual, becomes the ground. What is found there, and how it is lived, will be as particular as you are.

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In good times we often have nightmares that the times will end, but in dark times we dream of better worlds—and on waking we want to make them real. We are in one of the dark times now. Is a better world in sight?

A pattern repeats across centuries: crisis produces creativity. But crisis also produces fear—and fear produces walls. After World War I, art and literature flourished amid the chaos. The nuclear dread that followed World War II launched another creative surge, from 1950 to 1970. Remarkably, both eras saw Western artists turn to China's Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) for inspiration—a golden age of poetry that bloomed during catastrophe.

But all of these eras are also known to history for their oppressive, authoritarian responses to the uncertainties of their times. The Tang poets wrote their greatest works during the devastating An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) and the rise of terrifying warlordism.

The 1920s saw the spread of fascism across the globe and an anti-progressive movement in the U.S. that helped bring on the Great Depression. The 50s and 60s gave us McCarthyism, the blacklisting of artists, the advances of a surveillance state, and a deadly, unprincipled war in Southeast Asia. However, those years also gave us the heroic Civil Rights Movement.

It’s in dark times that the beauty of justice becomes most visible, a light in the night. The title above, Escucha la luz en la noche (Listen to the light in the night), is the signature line of my email. It comes from something the late playwright Sam Shepard wrote to me several years ago. I mix up the words of his note with a little synesthesia, a confusion of senses, hoping a moment of disorientation might enliven our awareness and illuminate our way forward.

How do we find our way through today’s crisis as our democracy faces existential threat? How do we follow those who built the Civil Rights Movement rather than those who built the blacklists—using the creative spark of crisis not to wall ourselves off from each other, but to reimagine our political and social world in the light of justice?

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I found inspiration in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. During the creative boom of the 1920s, Whitehead developed his philosophy of beauty—work that would culminate in his 1933 Adventures of Ideas. For Whitehead, the universe is fundamentally creative, constantly producing new forms of experience. Beauty is what this creativity aims toward: the most intense, most complex, most harmonious experience possible. In human society, beauty requires justice—the harmonious integration of differences rather than their suppression.

The ugliness of major injustice can be terrifying and even paralyzing. But injustice can be seen in less terrifying everyday settings. It may be easier to keep our bearings by looking to those. These closer-to-home settings can give us a sense of how our interpersonal lives can turn ugly—or be beautiful.

For instance, you’ve probably witnessed one of those ugly scenes in which self-absorbed and privileged diners demean a restaurant’s workers. The demeaned workers, invisible to the privileged until something goes wrong, must bear the mistreatment if they want to keep their jobs.

Certainly, that is not always the case. An egalitarian spirit remains live, and we’ve all seen that spirit emerge in diverse settings of many kinds.

As an example of an inspiring and hopeful setting, look to world the American poet Langston Hughes found in Paris as a young man in the 1920s. It's a good place to start because over his career Hughes challenged the injustices of his time while leading a creative renaissance the world still thrills to. Hughes can teach us the secrets to resisting oppression while creating a world of beauty and justice. He teaches us to begin by being true to ourselves.

In his poem “Let America Be America Again, an undaunted Hughes condemned the failings of his world. His words ring true today:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

But Hughes also gave attention to the personal, to the inner needs of those who would resist oppression and imagine new worlds. His poem “Spirituals” begins with a simple verse that could have been written by the Tang poet Du Fu. Critics might disagree, but I think Hughes is pointedly alluding to the Tang style as a kind of religious spiritual Hughes celebrates in the poem. He speaks of:

Rocks and the firm roots of trees.
The rising shafts of mountains.
Something strong to put my hands on.

“Spirituals” is grounded in the authenticity of American black identity, as Calvin Hernton notes: “The poetic consciousness of Langston Hughes resonates with affirmation and celebration of black people.” Hughes’ message is universal. Strengthening the soul requires authenticity and living for the sake of the truth. That’s something strong to put your hands on.

On the way to Hughes's Paris, let's stop first in Cold War Czechoslovakia. The visit will help us understand what Hughes is trying to teach us. Vaclav Havel was a playwright and dissident who led the resistance to the totalitarian rule of his country. He ultimately succeeded and became president of the democratic Czech Republic. Havel had learned from his mentor, the martyred philosopher Jan Patočka, that “living in truth” means actively caring for the soul.

This “care for the soul” can begin with small gestures. Havel uses the example of a grocer who refuses to put a government-sponsored sign in his window. Such small acts nurture the soul. There’s deep meaning in living the life you want and not the life the powers that be want you to live.

On to Paris of the 1920s. Hughes had taken a job as a busboy in a Parisian nightclub, Le Grand Duc, a place full of rich and poor folks, jazz and possibility. It was a space where people could be fully themselves—where differences enriched the common life.

Folks from vastly different walks of life came and stayed until dawn, finding a new way of being with one another to the music of jazz. “That room was right out of a book, and I began to say to myself that I guess dreams do come true, and sometimes life makes its own books,” Hughes wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea. It wasn’t long before Hughes returned to New York and helped recreate rooms like Le Grand Duc, rooms that became the center of the Harlem Renaissance.

For Hughes, Le Grand Duc was what he would later call a temple for tomorrow. In his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, he wrote, “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves."

In the Racial Mountain essay, Hughes was speaking specifically to Black artists facing racism. But his insights apply to anyone in times of crisis: Authenticity is the foundation for work that matters. Whether you’re an artist, an organizer, a teacher, or simply someone trying to live well—the pressure to conform can be intense. But accepting the injustices that tear you apart would silence the very thing that could contribute beauty to the world: You.

This is why Le Grand Duc mattered to Hughes. It was a space where people could be fully themselves—where differences enriched the common life rather than needing to be hidden. That’s the “temple for tomorrow” he was talking about: not a place where everyone becomes the same, but where everyone can stand “on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

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Not long ago I was in a fancy hotel in New York City. I noticed the upscale patrons in the hotel bar seemed determined to appear so above it all that time mattered little to them—unless, of course, their drinks didn’t arrive on time. The wait staff, on the other hand, seemed to live on the edge of personal catastrophe. Meeting the demands of others in time was everything. On the surface, all seemed cordial, more or less. The patrons smiled as long as their desires were met. Staff smiled because their jobs depended upon their smiles.

Now, I should say—not every encounter between wealth and work looks like this. There are plenty of settings where dignity flows both ways, where naturally caring people recognize each other as equals regardless of who signs the paycheck. That egalitarian spirit is alive in America. In fact, we’re counting on it.

But the structures—the way we’ve organized work, wealth, power—make maintaining that dignity harder than it should be. They push toward the ugly scene I witnessed, even when individuals resist.

And we all encounter such everyday examples of injustice. Constantly. If we’re not lost in our own struggles with the demands of time, we notice. The gig worker racing between deliveries. The healthcare aide caring for elderly patients at three different facilities in one shift. The teacher buying classroom supplies with her own money while administrators discuss budget priorities.

Step back and consider the big picture, and it hits you: life today is uglier than it used to be. Not just harder—actually ugly. Something has gone wrong with how we live together. We’re exhausted. Everyone seems angry, defensive, scared. Communities that once knew each other are now strangers passing through.

This isn’t just about economics or politics. It’s something deeper. It’s aesthetic—the quality of life itself feels degraded.

I struggled to articulate why until I encountered the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

What Whitehead Saw

Whitehead wrote about Beauty—not prettiness or decoration, but something fundamental. The more I read, the more I understood: Beauty was his north star. For Whitehead, the universe itself is fundamentally creative—constantly becoming, constantly seeking richer forms of experience. And Beauty is what this creativity aims toward: the most intense, most complex experience possible.

Here’s what helped me see the hotel scene differently: Beauty isn’t about surface appearances. It’s about achieving harmony from genuine diversity. Whitehead saw harmony as a ‘major form’ of beauty, one where the parts enhance the whole just as the whole enhances the parts.

Think of a jazz band. Several musicians, different instruments, a vocalist. The beauty doesn’t emerge despite these differences—it emerges because of them. Piano, bass, drums, saxophone, singer weaving together into something none could create alone.

But notice: it only works if each musician actually gets to play. If the pianist dominated and forced everyone else into mere background, you’d lose the magic. You’d get volume, maybe, but not beauty. You’d get intensity for one part while suppressing all the others.

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Applying This to How We Live

For Whitehead, every person’s experience has intrinsic value—their moment of being alive, of feeling, of creating. A beautiful society would be one where every person can bring their full creative self into common life. Where differences enrich the whole rather than divide it. Where harmony emerges not from forced sameness but from diverse voices actually being heard.

This is why that hotel scene felt ugly to me: it produces richness for some by suppressing it for others. The wealthy patrons experience variety, choice, sophisticated pleasures. But this intensity is purchased by reducing workers to mere functions—their creativity channeled into efficient service, their possibilities constrained to survival.

In musical terms, you’re cranking one instrument to maximum volume while muting all the others. You don’t just have unfair distribution of sound—you have less music. The harmony that could arise if all voices played is lost entirely.

And here’s what makes Whitehead’s insight devastating: the person sipping cocktails in that hotel bar loses too. Not materially, obviously. But they’re cut off from genuine encounter with other creative agents. They experience servants, not equals. Predictable responses, not surprising contributions. Their world, for all its luxury, is aesthetically impoverished—less beautiful than it could be.

Justice as the Condition for Beauty

This reframed everything for me. Justice isn’t just a moral demand we accept despite its costs. It’s the condition for achieving genuine beauty in social life.

Justice doesn’t mean everyone being identical—that would be boring, monotonous, what Whitehead called “trivial order.” Justice means creating the conditions where everyone can develop their unique voice to contribute to the harmony.

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Different people have different gifts, different perspectives, different experiences. That’s not a problem to solve—it’s the source of potential richness. A rainbow isn’t beautiful because all the colors are the same. It’s beautiful because distinct colors create a pattern together.

The question isn’t whether we’re different. Of course we are. The question is: Do our differences contribute to richer common life, or do they become tools of domination? Does diversity create harmony or hierarchy?

Whitehead recognized that a certain hierarchy might exist in the cultural sphere. Not everyone gets to sing in the choir—genuine differences in talent exist. But political justice is about making sure everyone has the opportunity and life conditions necessary to cultivate their talents, to discover what their voice might be.

When civilization suppresses individual originality and diversity, Whitehead believed, it ultimately impoverishes everyone. There’s less beauty, less intensity, less genuine flourishing in the total system.

What Could Be Different

That hotel scene described above could be different with guests and workers bringing their full selves, both valued for who they are rather than what they provide. Different roles, perhaps, but within a framework of mutual dignity and genuine encounter. Not forced sameness, but real harmony.

That would be beautiful. And that’s why we pursue justice—not as sacrifice or duty, but as the creation of a world richer and more alive than anything domination can produce.

The beauty of justice: not sameness, but symphony.

Not everyone singing in the same choir or playing the same note, but everyone getting to play.

I’d like to thank Matthew David Segall for helping me better understand Whitehead’s concept of Beauty and its relation to justice. Mistakes in interpretation are my own.

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Oh, Donald Trump, you’re going to have to come to grips with the likelihood that the years of your neo-royal presidencies will be known as the Epstein Era. Not the Trump Era. We can already hear your ego moaning.

The more we learn of Jeffrey Epstein—the scope of his crimes, the duration of his predation, the breadth of his elite connections—the clearer it becomes that the monstrous decadence of the Epstein Era produced Donald Trump, not the other way around.

Trump is the plague’s buboe, a painful symptom, not the plague itself.

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Consider how we remember America’s last great age of elite corruption and excess. The decadence of the 1920s isn’t called the Hoover Era, the Harding Era, or the Coolidge Era, after the presidents who presided over it. No, Donald, steady yourself: we call it the Gatsby Era, after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant creation, Jay Gatsby. You may have heard of him. The Great Gatsby.

Now, it must be admitted that parallels between Epstein or Trump and the mysterious, underworld-connected Jay Gatsby are imperfect. After all, Gatsby shimmers with symbolic meaning precisely because a master storyteller crafted him. He’s electric because literary art makes him so.

In comparison, Epstein is banal. Trump is even more banal. I borrow this term from Hannah Arendt’s insight about the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann—that great evil often emerges not from dramatic villainy but from mediocrity, careerism, and moral vacancy. The horror of Epstein and Trump is precisely in their ordinariness: that such unremarkable men could exploit so many, for so long, with such apparent elite complicity.

Yet both eras—the Gatsby Era and the Epstein Era—reveal a recurring American pattern: extreme wealth concentration masking institutional rot, elite impunity breeding populist rage, and faith communities fracturing between those who enable power and those who challenge it.

The Religious Response: Then and Now

Both eras feature populist religious movements responding to perceived moral decline. In the 1920s, Pentecostalism and revivalism surged as reaction to Jazz Age secularization. In our time, the Moral Majority and Christian Right emerged in response to the sexual revolution, secularization, and cultural changes of the 1960s-70s. Both movements involved charismatic, media-savvy figures leveraging new technology: Aimee Semple McPherson pioneered radio evangelism and spectacular religious theater in the 1920s; Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and contemporary Christian nationalists have used television, and now social media and podcasts, to build political power.

But in both eras, powerful progressive faith movements have also emerged. Theologian Walter Rauschenbusch launched his Social Gospel movement in works published from 1907 to 1917, and his work shaped progressive religious thinking throughout the 1920s and beyond. In that same decade, theologian and Evangelical Church pastor Reinhold Niebuhr railed against Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan from his Detroit pulpit, welcoming labor organizers to preach workers’ rights. Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, combining radical economic critique with direct service to the poor.

Progressive faith leaders’ involvement in later 20th-century public affairs has been equally remarkable. The Civil Rights Movement was driven by church leaders, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who studied Rauschenbusch’s writings in seminary. Others were organizing before the Religious Right consolidated in 1979. Baptist minister Jim Wallis founded what later became the Sojourners organization in 1971; the late Tony Campolo founded the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) in the mid-1970s.

Rauschenbush’s great-grandson, Paul Brandeis Rauschenbush, runs the national Interfaith Alliance. Rev. Jim Forbes and Rev. William Barber have electrified crowds with their moral clarity. Author and activist Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock led movements for peace and organized recovery programs for those suffering from moral injury. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with King in Selma, famously saying he felt he was “praying with his legs.” Rev. William Sloane Coffin became a prominent voice against the Vietnam War.

These represent not isolated figures but a continuous tradition—one that challenges the assumption that “religious” in American politics must mean “Religious Right.”

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The Political Lesson: Morality Is an Interest

The outrage over Epstein’s crimes has been loud on the American Right—so loud that Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, have had to mimic their voters’ concerns. MAGA’s Christian Nationalists are right about Epstein’s crimes representing profound moral corruption, even if they’re wrong about nearly everything else.

There’s a political lesson here that progressives have been slow to learn. Thomas Frank’s influential theory in What’s the Matter with Kansas? argued that middle- and working-class Americans were duped into voting against their economic interests by cultural wedge issues. But Frank used far too narrow a definition of “interests.” People’s interests are deeply concerned with what they view as moral decline, community dissolution, and institutional betrayal. Many of our political difficulties stem from progressive movements’ failure to recognize this. “Morality” and values were dismissed as unscientific or irrational. So-called “rational interests” were easier to measure statistically. People were viewed as rational computers whose interests could be easily quantified.

The neuroscientist and linguist George Lakoff, with whom I had the honor to work in Berkeley in the mid-2000s, sought to correct this mistake. He urged progressive leaders to speak to the moral concerns of Americans, to use language that embodied the values of empathy and the common good rather than ceding moral language to conservatives. The Epstein Era—with its stark revelations of elite predation and institutional failure—demands exactly this kind of clarity.

Today, in these dark days, some progressive leaders are taking that advice. Texas state representative and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico speaks from his Christian faith about economic justice and human dignity. He represents a new generation willing to claim moral language rather than surrender it to Christian Nationalism.

Darkness of the Womb, not the Darkness of the Tomb

Today, the presence of progressive faith leaders in the public sphere may be at an all-time high. It’s visible in clergy-led resistance movements in Minnesota and elsewhere. The Interfaith Alliance is helping train hundreds of thousands of Americans in nonviolent activism and de-escalation. Faith communities are organizing to defend democratic norms and protect vulnerable populations.

As pro-democracy forces around the country begin the work of reimagining American democracy in the face of authoritarian threats, Sikh activist and author Valerie Kaur reminds us that today’s darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb.

The Epstein Era, like the Gatsby Era before it, reveals the moral emptiness at the heart of unchecked wealth and power. But it also reveals—if we look beyond the noise of those who would exploit moral panic for political gain—a persistent tradition of faith-based resistance to that corruption. The question is whether the broader progressive movement will learn to speak the moral language that this moment demands.

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In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino employed a new term — “freeze-frame adjudication” — to discredit eyewitness video of the murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents. I’m unable to find the term used in a legal sense after several AI searches. No, it was invented by President Trump’s propagandists.

This is the extension of the term “alternative facts” employed by the Trumpists during the criminal’s first presidential term. The Trump gang has a need to discredit video and photographic evidence of their crimes. “Don’t believe your lying eyes,” the Trumpists say. We’re gonna hear “freeze-frame adjudication” over and over and over again.

Soon it will become a term to demonize critics of Trump. Only deranged and dangerous people would rely on the misleading“freeze-frame adjudication” to attack our heroic “law enforcement” officers.

I marvel at the speed with which right-wing extremists can force the adoption of pejoratives and dark descriptions of those they despise. “Agitators,” “paid protestors,” “Trump derangement syndrome,” etc. etc.

Part of the problem is a press which feels it must repeat the terms in fairness to those it quotes. When a term is clearly used to deceive the public, the press has the opposite responsibility. As Emerson said, “Wise men pierce this rotten diction and attach words again to visible things.” In that way we can be “in alliance with truth and God.”

At the same time the Trump Administration is moving to discredit authentic, real-world video and photography, it is defending its own use of AI-generated, falsified imagery to attack or demonize its opponents. Recently, the White House doctored a photo of an arrested protestor in Minneapolis. Challenged about the deceit, White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr said, “The memes will continue.”

The two things work together to confuse and divide the American people from the reality they inhabit. In our subsequent confusion, Trump wants us to rely on his psychotic view of the world. Once we distrust our own senses, we are vulnerable to capture by Trump’s dark psyche.

It will take our full attention and discernment to pierce Trump’s rotten diction. But we can and must do it.

On the night of January 30, 1956, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was rallying 2,000 folks to the Civil Rights Movement at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama when he learned his home had been bombed. He raced home hoping his wife and daughter were okay. They were. But the single homemade bomb had damaged the front porch and part of the home.

Despite the anger that must have gripped his heart, King turned to the crowd gathering on Jackson Street and urged calm. Raising his hand in the style of Gandhi according to historian Taylor Branch, King urged folks to put their weapons away.

“Don’t do anything panicky,” King said. “He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies.”

Today, it feels like the front porch of America has been bombed. The nation remains standing, but Americans have been killed, others injured, harassed or disappeared. Donald Trump’s private paramilitary, masked and body-armored versions of the bomber who attacked King’s home, prowl the streets of our cities.

I’m deeply moved by the story of Dr. King actions the night his home was attacked. It’s difficult to put myself in his place, though. Could I ever hope to have such self-possession and presence of mind in the face of violence directed at me, my family, my friends? I don’t know.

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Dr. King operated from a different ground of being or becoming than I inhabit on the daily. I’m no stranger to anger even in the most trivial of situations. As his home still smoldered, how did King rise above his anger to urge his neighbors and friends to join him in a place of peace and love? Given the circumstances we find ourselves in today, it seems important that we discover an answer for ourselves.

Dr. King had a numinous spiritual life that illuminated a place of understanding as well as the will to understand what he’d yet to learn. He had studied the psychological insights of American philosopher William James and others. He clearly had a feel for what moved folks. He had seen the Promised Land. He knew the direction to lead them in.

I supposed I might find the will but where is the way? There are many admirers and followers of Dr. King who could answer these questions better than I. But I can try.

I think Dr. King was able to set aside expectations and see possibilities the rest of us usually miss because we expect our stories to end in their habitual ways. He saw the possibility of possibilities and knew how to unlock the doors to them.

The gap between expectations and possibilities is home to the seedbed of anger, and anger locks away understanding. Phillip Moffitt, a Buddhist meditation teacher, writes:

Expectations assume a certain result and are future- based. They actually narrow your options, retard your imagination, and blind you to possibilities…In contrast to expectations, possibilities are based in the present moment, where you’re alive to the mystery of life. You live as fully as you can in the present moment based on your values, which reflect your preferences for the future, but you do not assume that the future will come to pass, because you realize that the future is unknown.

It sure was easy to find that quote and paste it into this piece. Can I live it? I think Dr. King did, day by day, hour by hour.

There’s a biologist named Stanley Kauffman who developed the wonderful concept of the “adjacent possible.” The adjacent possible isn’t about wild, distant futures; it’s about what becomes newly possible from exactly where we are right now. It’s the set of doors that only become visible once you’ve walked through the current one.

Dr. King knew how to unlock the doors to the possibility of possibilities because he had the courage to walk through the current one. At the very least I can pray to find the courage and try to learn a little locksmithing.

The story of Dr. King’s actions the night his home was bombed touches all our hearts. We can feel it in our bodies before we can begin to understand it. We can hear the key in the doorlock.

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Henry David Thoreau was jailed on July 24, 1846 for protesting slavery and the U.S. invasion of Mexico, a military action intended to extend slavery westward across the country. Leaving jail the next morning, Thoreau said it didn’t look like much had changed with the nation or his neighbors.

In many ways we’re still living in Thoreau’s morning after his night in jail. Unchanged over centures is an ugly pattern of state violence in the American grain. We have to face up to that. But we should also recognize that there are brighter patterns of resistance and non-violence. Rights have been extended to many once denied them. Public actions have ended wars.

In 1846, without a declaration of war or congressional approval, President James Polk’s military invasion succeeded in taking so much territory from Mexico — from eastern Texas to the coast of California — that the U.S. doubled in size. All of the territory was open to slavery, a key goal of the war. Historian David W. Blight said, “The Mexican War unshucked slavery. It took it out of its shell.”

Now, Donald Trump, without a declaration of war or Congressional approval, is claiming military control of Venezuela and threatening to take control in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland. It’s not traditional slavery he seeks to extend, but he is trying to spread his brand of anti-democracy, freedom-strangling, authoritarian rule throughout the hemisphere.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is the title of a play first staged in small theatres throughout the country in 1970. The nation had been torn apart by the Vietnam War, and the play proved popular with a generation who had championed civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.

In an early scene, Thoreau explains to his cell mate what he was protesting: “We’ve got a president who went out and boomed up a war all by himself—with no help from Congress and less help from me.”

We’re living in the same world today. If I’d written what Thoreau said without identifying him as the source readers would have accepted it as a contemporary comment on current affairs.

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As I’ve been composing this piece, an ICE officer murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. The nation viewed strong video evidence of the murder, but Trump, his vice president and his Homeland Security director immediately mounted the “don’t believe your lying eyes” defense. They lied repeatedly to a nation they clearly hold in deadly contempt. As historian Tim Snyder points out, this is the playbook of tyranny. Eerily, it’s most easily been seen in Venezuela, before and after Trump kidnapped its thug of a president.

Thoreau believed all governments are suspect and require vigilance and resistance. “There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men,” Thoreau wrote in his landmark essay, “Civil Disobedience.” It’s wise advice that’s been echoed by many.

So what is to be done? From the polling, it looks like a large majority of Americans strongly oppose Trump’s march toward tyranny and absolute power. But what can individuals do to make a difference?

Do what your conscience asks of you. Examine your beliefs and possibilities for action. Obviously eligible citizens should vote and encourage others to vote, as long as we’re allowed to vote. But as far as more dangerous actions that can lead to harm or imprisonment, not everyone can take those paths. They should not be asked to take those paths if the decision does not arise from within their own souls.

Years ago during a protest against the Iraq War held near George W. Bush’s Texas ranch, a pickup truck full of rowdy locals who supported the war pulled near the protest campground and began yelling threats. One of the self-appointed activist leaders began shouting to the protestors, “Put your body between them and the camp. Use your body. Defend with your body.” Really? It’s beyond irresponsible to assume one has the right to instruct others to place themselves in danger. (By the way, the rowdy fellows in the pickup soon drove away without incident.)

The moment calls for community solidarity and that means a deepening respect for those we share community with. First and foremost we need to take care of one another. We are seeing that in the local efforts to warn communities of ICE’s presence. Of course, that’s what Renee Nicole Good was doing when an ICE agent shot and killed her.

Tim Snyder writes that Trump and his administration defend such violence in hopes of intimidating the rest of us. The Trump message is, “Agree with us and you can keep your life. Disagree and you may lose it.” There are many ways to signal one is not intimidated.

What should you do? I believe significant, ongoing public protests including civil disobedience are required if we are to interrupt Trump and Trumpists bid for absolute power and the end of democracy. I also believe Trump will flood the nation with his masked, poorly trained paramilitary to interrupt and intimidate the resistance. Find where you belong in the current patterns of resistance. Follow your conscience, act with dignity and sincerity, and be proud. That is all we can ask of one another.

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[The shamans] tried to substitute the drums with branches, bows and arrows, whips, hats. Even saucepan lids and ladles. Some drew drums on pieces of fabric and banged them in silence. Or they used cloth remnants without drawings and let them flutter in the air.”

The Spirit that moved the indigenous people of Siberia was undaunted. Their sacred drums kept evil spirits at bay, and in the end, their whips, hats, saucepan lids and ladles kept Stalin at bay.

The Siberian shamans are not unique. History teaches that suppressors of artists, writers and musicians — shamans of a sort — are outmatched by the powers of their targets. Here’s an example from the conformist ‘40s and ‘50s in America. A Michigan congressman named George A. Dondero had condemned all contemporary modern art as un-American. As ArtForum reports, Dondero said:

Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies.

Sound familiar? Anyway, Dondero attacked an international exhibit called “Advancing American Art” that was organized by the U.S. Department of State. It turned into quite the crusade as newspapers and political types turned up their outrage. The State Department eventually gave in and canceled the exhibition. That’s not the end of the story, though. The Hearst newspaper empire that had been loud in its condemnation of the exhibit subsequently bought a bunch of the paintings and donated them to the Los Angelos County museum.

The artists involved? According to ArtForum, among them were “John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Philip Guston, Milton Avery, Loren Maclver, William Gropper, Abraham Rattner, Hugo Weber, Reginald Marsh, Stuart Davis, Jack Levine, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Adolph Gottlieb.” Congressman Dondero was no match for their power. A Hartley painting recently sold for $6.7 million. A George O’Keeffe sold for $26.7 million.

Today, Disney announced that Jimmie Kimmel would return to his show on Tuesday night. Disney last week capitulated to Donald Trump’s minister of propoganda, I mean FCC Chair Brendan Carr. Carr, demanding Kimmel be silenced, told ABC and Disney that “we can do this the hard way or the easy way.” Disney has called his bluff.

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Ovid completed his epic poem Metamorphoses while in exile on the Black Sea. Allen Ginsberg became an icon after the publisher of his poem, Howl, was charged and later acquitted of obscenity. The book’s been translated into 24 languages and earned more than a million dollars.

This is not to say that the oppression of speech and art cannot do enormous damage. It can and it has. The Framers were so aware of the damage they included freedom of speech in the First Amendment. Democracy depends upon it. Despots of all kinds are aware of that an when they want to bring the curtain down on democracy they begin by turning off the sound and lights in the theatre.

But there’s always whips, hats, lids and ladles. In the hands of the artistic spirit, they they are more effective than all the devices of despotism.

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Let’s look at the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech from the other side and consider the importance of the freedom to hear. It was abolitionist Frederick Douglass who in 1860 urged us to protect our “rights as hearers.” Douglass said:

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.

We often focus on the defense of individuals who were denied their right to free speech. In recent days that includes political analyst Matthew Dowd, fired by MSNBC, columnist Karen Attiah, fired by the Washington Post, and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, fired by ABC. In order to capitulate to demands from the Trump administration, their employers willfully misinterpreted comments these individuals made in the context of the Charlie Kirk murder.

Yes, Dowd, Attiah and Kimmel deserve our support and our rigorous defense of their First Amendment rights. But we, too, are victims. All of us. Trump’s unprecedented assault on free speech is an attack on our rights to hear. Trump is setting out to deafen America to all but his own noise.

Trump is also employing “deep fake” AI-generated visual imagery to manipulate our sense of sight, for instance with his recent fake portrait of Chicago as a war-torn hell. In a real sense his attacking is our senses of hearing and seeing. He wants to imprison us in the Mar-a-lago of his mind.

Some may applaud the denial of First Amendment rights to, say, Kimmel, because they don’t like Kimmel. Some may believe our constitutional rights only apply to them because those they consider “other” are in their judgment less than full citizens or less than human deserving of any rights at all.

Like most advocates for radical assaults on the rights of others, they fail to understand that once the rights to speak and hear are gone for some, sooner or later those rights will be lost to all.

Americans have a special love for the First Amendment prohibition on the abridging of free speech. I think the backlash to Trump Administration attacks reflects that. Still, we should try to broaden awareness that our rights to hear are just as threatened. This is something personal that folks can understand. It doesn’t matter whether they like or dislike someone whose speech rights have been abridged. It’s their hearing that’s been lost.

When others are silenced, we are deafened. Many may assume they are so unimportant in the judgments of their leaders that their speech will never be scrutinized. They should think again about that. And while they do, they should also realize that they are being deafened to voices the powerful don’t want them to hear and ask, why don’t they want them to hear?