Because we both love language, my husband-to-be and I decided that we would use the oldest language we could easily find to make our promises to each other. The priest, who is no spring chicken himself, said that he had never married a couple using the old language. But we decided not only to use it but to memorize it so that the priest would not have to prompt us.

Though they are short, the vows were a little difficult to memorize because the language from the 1928 Episcopal Church prayer book is almost exactly the same language as in the 1549 first edition of the Book of Common Prayer, overseen by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, who was later burned at the stake as a martyr for the Anglican faith by “Bloody Mary,” Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter. In this first prayer book, the marriage rite is called “The Forme of Solemnizacion of Matrimonie.”

The first obviously peculiar thing about the old ritual is the “thee” and “thou” language. For Episcopalians of a certain age, this is not a problem to understand, though we don’t use it. But for those unfamiliar with it, here’s the scoop on those antique pronouns.

“Thou” is a relic of the Old English second-person nominative pronoun, which is still used in Icelandic as þu /thoo/. The accusative equivalent is “thee,” still used in Icelandic as þig, pronounced sort of like /thic/ with a very soft rattle in the throat like the -ch- in Scottish “loch.”

The vows go like this:

“I, ____, take thee, ____, to my wedded husband/wife, to have and to hold [meaning, respectively ‘acquire’ and ‘ keep’], from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, ‘til death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I plight/give thee [the man says “plight” and the woman says “give” for some reason] my troth.”

I had to concentrate on memorizing “‘Til Death us do part” because of the funky grammar, and also because the phrase doesn’t scan if you say “Until Death, etc.”

We had some back-and-forth over the word “troth”—its meaning, which is “fidelity,” and whether to pronounce it with a short “o” as in “bother” or a long “o” as in “betrothed.” Ultimately we settled on the long “o.”

Yes, this is the kind of discussion a practical linguist and a mathematician-turned-musician indulge in.

There was some language that I’d remembered hearing that I wanted to say, but it didn’t appear in the 1928 edition, and I was too pressed, on our 6-day timeline, to look up the 1549 service at the time. Now I know I could have had the pleasure of committing to worshipping him with my body and giving him all my worldly goods. Snap.

The rest of it, the “have and to hold,” etc., are really a miracle of brevity, encompassing pretty much all the joys and sorrows of a life spent together, and they don’t stint: better/worse, rich/poor, sick/healthy, love/cherish, parting (death). Throw in God and fidelity and there isn’t much more to say. I was surprised when after a span of just a few minutes, it was over and yet so much had been said.

Doing such a weighty thing, and having it feel so light and so right, was somehow eased by using language that has been uttered by couples for hundreds of years. As Lori Davis, a podcaster of a show called herhalfofhistory.com wrote in an article on the history of the marriage service, the whole thing takes on a different flavor when you think of all the people who have used these same words:

Anne Hathaway who married William Shakespeare in 1582. Pocahontas (not English) who married John Rolfe (yes, English) in 1614. Martha Custis, who was still an English subject when she married George Washington in 1759. Queen Victoria, who married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. Poet Elizabeth Barrett who married poet Robert Browning in 1846. I could go on with more and more brides up to and including Kate Middleton who married Prince William in 2011.

The well-worn words led us along a path that felt both new and comfortable. I’m glad we chose to do it this way.

Update: Miller and I decided to speed up the schedule and were married on Sunday August 23 at Morgan’s Steep in Sewanee. Beautiful day, beautiful place, beautiful wedding. Our daughters were our attendants.

I’ve been a bit cagey over the past couple of years about why I was traveling so often to Europe. Why? Because life is unpredictable and new love, at this age and stage of life, is rare.

I’m happy to say—very happy to say—perhaps as happy as I’ve ever been in my life to say—that Miller Puckette and I are planning to be married this fall. We knew each other as very young people in Sewanee, fell in love as teenager and post-teenager, went off to live our different lives for decades, and found each other again nearly three years ago. Many trips to Paris on my part and visits to Sewanee on his followed, each one adding more appreciation and depth to the last. The boy I loved 50 years ago is a funny, smart, patient, kind, and accomplished man now.

That he’s also a rock star in the world of electronic music is something that comes with the package, but the package, for me, is personal. I’m profoundly grateful for every minute with the one I was missing all along.

This new existence will involve quite a lot of travel, which I’ve always loved, and meeting many new people. I’ll continue writing about life as I see it and teaching music to small and larger children as long as I can. I’ll continue to live in my beloved hometown, and I’ll continue to live in his 4th floor walkup in Paris. Both places; two lives; one life.

And that’s my news.

Somebody has to be an optimist. I’m volunteering, right here, right now.

I didn’t need much at the store; I live alone and don’t have to provide for a family, but I had to wonder--how are families making it? My suspicion is they’re not.

The other day, the local food pantry ran out of meat, which is what Tennesseans eat a lot of. The freezer shelves marked “Meat” were shiny white and bare. There’s nothing much on the other shelves there, either, and people are coming in every hour. Donations were, the last I volunteered, in June, faltering., though I was reassured today they are rebounding. My conclusion? Those who have are guarding what they have. Those who don’t have are looking at those shelves and wondering what to do about the hungry mouths around the table at home.

Now, let’s connect the dots. We have a Republican supermajority in Tennessee and almost entirely Republican representation in Congress. At the Tennessee state and federal levels, Republicans have what’s called a trifecta. They control the courts, the executive, and the legislature. There’s no place to hide for them. They’re responsible.

So here we are. The president thinks “groceries” is a quaint term from the past and “affordability” is a “Democrat scam,” is destroying Washington to build gilded monuments to himself and trying desperately to end the expensive war he started. Iran is laughing at him. The rest of the world is staring at him, appalled, but they’re also staring at us--the voters--wondering what happened to America.

Hungry kids don’t care about political parties, the one transsexual kid in the state who wants to play on a girl’s team, or the Ten Commandments poster on the classroom wall. They just want to be fed. They just want things to be normal again.

I do too.

There was a lot to see and do along the way—many subway, bus, vaporetto, and train rides, several concerts incorporating electronic music, several art exhibits, a few hikes in the mountains, many museum visits, and a lot of walking city streets in foreign countries. I ate tarte flambée (an extremely fine-crust sort of pizza), had stewed boar served over pasta, extracted garlicky snails from their shells, spread creamy Gorgonzola cheese over airy bread, and speared heavenly razor-thin prosciutto slices to devour with ripe melon slices. I plucked oval-shaped plums from their branches and learned their local name—scosciemonache (nuns’ thighs).

But amazing to say, I saw no civilizational collapse.

Nope, not a bit. Not a hint.

To hear the right-wing politicians in Europe and in the US tell it, as they have been for decades, the white world is on the verge of total destruction. The barbarians are at the gates. Civilizational collapse is here. Something must be done! Anything to stop the hordes of dark people bringing their religions, their barbarian-ness, their skins, into the pristine whiteness of Europe and North America to strip those places of their heritage and traditions.

But that’s not what I saw.

In Paris, in Strasbourg, in Venice, in Siena, all those places, I saw a lot of white people, sure, but I also saw a lot of Muslims, a lot of African black people, a lot of mixed-race people, a lot of Asian-appearing people—from all over the world. While some were clearly tourists, many (at least on the streets and in the working-class subways of Paris) were inhabitants. White, black, of Asian extraction and East Asian extraction. And most of them were tranquilly carrying on their lives in fluent French.

And I didn’t see one fight. I saw few beggars. I saw city streets in order. I saw cathedrals whose façades were clean and shining as if newly scrubbed.

What I’ve loved about being in France and Italy during this marvelous trip is the sense of normalcy, people pushing kids in strollers on city streets, picnicking in parks, riding buses and subways to work, eating and drinking in restaurants, choosing the ripest cherry tomatoes for tonight’s salad.

But coupled with all this is a frank remembrance of the horrors of World War II only 80 or so years ago. They have not forgotten what happens when fascism comes to town.

Near our hotel in Siena, we found these brass markers embedded in the stone sidewalk outside a house; they memorialize Gina, Marcella, and Graziella Nissim, a mother and two daughters, Jewish women who were taken from that house by fascists and deported to Nazi Auschwitz, where they were killed. We had found similar brass plates on sidewalks throughout the city of Cologne, Germany, last summer.

And in Montepulciano, a tourist’s paradise, we found these plaques on a street corner:

The top one reads: “Here, on June 23rd, the Nazi-Fascist noose strangled the twenty-year-old life of patriot Giuseppe Marino from Catania. To the enemy, to traitors, to the cowardly, to the indolent, his name cries out: ‘Liberty more than life.’”

The bottom one reads, “He was a small, emaciated boy, with disheveled hair, trembling and pale. His gaze was vacant, but his eyes sought no one; it was as if he had been paralyzed, while two Germans held him upright with four hands.”

There are two fascist endeavors going on right now in the United States. The wave on which Trump glided into office was a national fear of immigrants pumped up by four decades of Fox News’ daily terror-mongering machine. There are now well over 70,000 people in prisons, a practically unlimited budget for ICE, and a promise from some Republican politicians to deport 100 million people.

The problem is, there are not 100 million immigrants in the country. There are maybe 10 million. Where will they get the rest, the 90 million more to kill, throw into prison, or deport as stateless exiles?

The second fascist movement—the one directly attacking American citizens—is just getting under way now, and it was announced by the September 2025 executive order called NSPM-7, which not only criminalizes but slaps the label of “domestic terrorist” on people who think against the Trump administration: people who under the administration’s definitions are “antifascist,” “anti-traditional American values,” or who support gender equality and freedom—a whole laundry list of enemies that for practical purposes includes all liberals and most independents.

The president’s war on Americans has been declared, but most people are still unaware that they have targets on their backs.

The thing is, all of this is so completely unnecessary. So dumb. The civilizational collapse that Fox News has been peddling for so many years is simply not an actual thing.

What happens when immigrants move to a country? It changes them. They don’t change it. When I saw elegantly attired Muslim women in the subway speaking perfect French, with French mannerisms and French cosmetic perfection, I realized that they, or their parents, had not changed the culture. They had formed themselves to it. They came to France to become France, not to conquer it.

I think the same is true of the US. Immigrants don’t come to America to conquer us. They come to become us—to embrace the liberties and respect for human rights that until the Trump administration were our legacy. We had very little to fear from immigrants, who are so often the very best Americans among us. Think Albert Einstein. Think Bob Hope. Think Sidney Poitier. Think Madeleine Albright. Think the Marx Brothers (sons of immigrants). Think Joni Mitchell.

What we do have to fear is ourselves—our propensity to panic, our failure to think more deeply than the latest Facebook reel, our inability to treasure and preserve the ideas that our founders wrote about more clearly than they practiced in their lives.

America is not a skin color, nor a religion, but the concept of personal liberty and mutual respect among diverse people following the same laws. The power of that idea—that there aren’t different laws for the rich and the poor, the white and the black—is being eroded before our eyes. There have been no prosecutions for Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators, the ones who passed young girls around like sticks of gum, and who included the president and his friends. There have been prosecutions and harsh sentences of people for merely protesting ICE or being associated with protests.

What’s at stake in the midterms is this: If Republicans keep the lock on power they’ve had now for two (arguably 46) years, there will be nothing to stop their campaign to keep us at war, push the nation’s money into defense contractors’ pockets, impoverish the lower classes, and imprison or exile the 90 million dissidents they have already identified as domestic terrorists.

Italy and France remember what life (or death) was like under fascism. That lesson is waiting for us around the corner. I hope we don’t have to learn it.

Siena is very important to me. In 1982, after my first summer of teaching in Lugano, I heard that a friend was going to make a long bike trip to Italy to see his girlfriend, who was taking a cooking course in Siena. He brought along another male friend, and then I heard about it and I, being 27 and dumb, asked if I could come along.

I bought a little yellow bicycle for I think $50, with 5 gears (compared to the boys’ 21-gear speed machines) and we three set off from Lugano down into Italy. We crossed the Apennine mountain chain five times, rolled into Pisa around Day 8, saw the Leaning Tower, and headed for Siena (Dani was eager to see his girlfriend, whom he later married).

In Siena we stayed in a campground and I remember sitting inside the tent in the pouring rain, weeping with fear because I had no idea what to do after that. I had no job, no money, and a cranky little bike.

I took a train north into Florence, thought, “Hmmm, I’ve heard of Florence, maybe I should see some of it,” and got off the train, again in a heavy rainstorm. By the grace of God, I guess, I found an American church, where I met my dear future landlady, and an American school, where I bonded with the director over our mutual vegetarianism (I was not eating meat at the time). By the end of the day I had a place to stay and a job.

I stayed in Florence for two years after that, learned Italian, discovered the passion for teaching that would be my profession for decades, and became a different person.

Siena is important to me because it was here that I learned an important lesson--no matter how afraid you are, time rolls on and *something* will happen. You don’t know what it is, but you’ll figure it out when it comes. You’ll bring to it what you have to bring. And most often that is sufficient to get you through. So fear, which is essentially about the future, is useless. Caution is often warranted, but fear is useless.

This experience, painful as it was, was reinforced later as I faced challenges that were largely out of my control. Again and again, as losses multiplied, I found that the central tent-pole of resilience that I found in Siena never collapsed. I had learned to go forward, step by step, into a future I couldn’t see but which I could trust to at least…turn into something that I’d deal with when it came, bringing my particular sum of character, education, and temperament to the task.

And that’s why I am glad to see Siena’s beautiful ancient streets again. It gave me myself, a very long time ago.

The algorithms feed me reels on about six topics: herbs and gardening, the current news, the French language, guitar riffs I’ll never play, exercises I’ll never do, the patriarchy, and abortion. My additional guilty pleasures include reels from people who have left MAGA and are talking about it.

Of course, the reels that are about abortion (or the lack of it in states like mine) have to deal with the issue of “rape,” because in many states, no one gets an abortion anymore, not if she’s 10 years old, not if she’s pregnant by a sibling or father, not if she was violently raped.

But apparently you can’t say “rape” anymore on YouTube or Tiktok. If you do, the Almighty Algorithm will catch it and downgrade the reel so no one can see it. So, nonsensically, ‘Tubers are substituting “grape,” which makes me think not of violence, violation, and trauma but juicy purple spheres that I pop into my mouth.

Similarly, the Algorithms will downgrade a reel if the words “murder,” “kill,” or “suicide” are used, so savvy ‘Tubers are using the weird coinage, “unalive.” You can unalive someone. You can be unalived. You can even unalive yourself. This one really makes me shake my head every time I hear it. The powerful word “murder” has been replaced with a milquetoast negation.

References to ”sexual assault” or “child sexual abuse” are now bland acronyms: SA and CSA. Neither of these is immediately clear to me when I hear it. SA was the acronym for my high school, so it takes me a second to recalibrate. CSA recalls the Confederate States of America—which sort of fits, actually, if you think about it.

And maybe weirdest of all, “guns” are now referred to as “pew-pews.”

People are censoring themselves to talk about important things without using the proper words. Why? Because otherwise the algorithms will silence them.

But the censorship doesn’t originate with these folks broadcasting from their kitchen tables. I’m reminded of how President Ronald Reagan told us that if we made the rich richer, money would “trickle down” to the common people. In this case censorship is trickling down from above and the source is, explicitly, the Trump administration.

Take a big breath, now. This is going to take a minute. Here’s how they did it, how they forced a wholesale change in aspects of the English language.

If you want to burn down American science, art, minority culture, and the government itself, as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was designed to do, you start with words. And money.

If you recall, almost the first thing Trump did on getting into office was to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in vicious terms. His January 2025 Executive Order from the presidential desk set the tone for the rest of the administration. It heralded the thundering return of white, male, manly men not only to power, but to exclusive power. And it did this by withdrawing federal financial support from any proposal that used a carefully curated list of words.

For the first time in American history, the fundamental principle of free speech was abandoned by the federal government. If anyone wanted support for a study on Black people, they couldn’t use the word Black. Support for research on gender? Can’t use that word. Support for research on Hispanics? Nope, not that word.

Women? What’s a woman? conservatives famously ask. Turns out there are no women (or even females of any species) allowed in federal research topics. If you want support from the federal government, you cannot use the proper words. This is actually real.

There’s a list. A long list of forbidden concepts that the Trump administration does not want scientists, social scientists, historians, anyone really, to think about.

As you peruse it, let your mind rest for a moment on each item.

From the website GrantWritingandFunding.com, “According to Dr. Darby Saxbe, a professor at the University of Southern California, the following words are considered forbidden or banned and will prompt a review at NSF” [original emphasis]:

• activism

• activists

• advocacy

• advocate

• barrier

• barriers

• biased

• bias

• BIPOC

• Black and Latinx

• community diversity

• community equity

• cultural differences

• cultural heritage

• culturally responsive

• disabilities

• discrimination

• discriminatory

• backgrounds

• groups

• diversified

• diversify

• enhancing

• equal opportunity

• equality

• equitable

• ethnicity

• excluded

• female

• fostering

• gender

• hate speech

• Hispanic minority

• historically

• implicit bias

• inclusion

• inclusive

• increase

• indigenous community

• inequalities

• inequities

• institutional

• LGBTQ

• marginalize

• minorities

• multicultural

• polarization

• political

• prejudice

• privileges

• promoting

• race

• racial

• justice

• sense of belonging

• sexual preferences

• social justice

• sociocultural

• socioeconomic

• status

• stereotypes

• systemic

• trauma

• underappreciated

• underrepresented

• underserved

• victim

• women

Basically, the Trump Administration has declared that we must ask no questions. We cannot perform any research whose grant applications use these words. We cannot plainly write the words for the things we want to investigate.

In April, Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania questioned Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about the sharply higher mortality rates for Black women in childbirth. “How,” she asked, “are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say ‘Black’?”

Kennedy refused to talk about the Black maternal mortality rate. He said, “President Trump is trying to end division in this country, not sow division.” He had no numbers on how a pilot program to reduce maternal mortality affected Black members of the study, if indeed there were any Black members of the study.

So let’s extrapolate. We are no longer allowed the free speech (or the equivalent in science, federal funding) to ask questions about Blacks, about Hispanics, about indigenous people, about LGBTQ people, or any minorities in the US. We can’t talk about inequality. We can’t talk about barriers. Conservatives cram it down our throats that men and women are fundamentally different, cannot change gender, are practically different species. But we can’t study women.

So that leaves, as the only legitimate area of social scientific research, white males. They’re the only ones left who remain in the language of the National Science Foundation. They’re the only ones worthy of research support from the Trump administration.

People who aren’t competing for federal grants are probably not aware of how deeply the censorship is reaching into the scientific community. But people who are trying against all odds to continue the important work they do with money from the federal government are acutely aware of it as they are being forced to get creative with synonyms and workarounds. There are even websites devoted to guiding people in how to write about something when you cannot use the words.

The first Amendment of the Constitution promises us the freedom to say whatever we want. But this administration’s executive branch, through the agencies, has found how to quell freedom of speech: by tying our tax money to a code of silence.

Or maybe we think of the city as the birthplace and eventual home of Marco Polo after his 24-year journey throughout Asia, or then again, we think of St. Mark’s Basilica and Piazza, or of the Doges of Venice and their fabulous palace, or the enlaced stone on the windows of the Bridge of Sighs.

Or we imagine sipping a spritz outside a restaurant on the Via Garibaldi while watching elegantly clad, willowy women gliding by like the gondolas of the city.

Whatever.

As always when I’m overseas, half of my mind is back home and half is where my body is. News from back home was just more outrage fodder, so I was glad to be spending the July 4th weekend instead tottering around Venice to see the sights and hear the sounds of the Venice Biennale Arte 2026, titled “In Minor Keys.”

So here’s some background on the Biennale for those who don’t know (I didn’t).

Every even-numbered year, Venice throws itself an art party, the Biennale Arte. In odd-numbered years, it’s an architecture party, the Biennale Architettura. And every single year, there are “Biennali” of music, theatre, dance, and film, in which those arts also are explored, practiced, and celebrated.

The first one, the original Biennale Arte, was cooked up in 1893, when the Venetian City Council decided to honor the 25th anniversary of Italy’s then king and queen, first cousins Umberto I and Margherita of Savoia. The first celebration opened in 1895 and the purpose was to feature mainly Venetian and Italian artists, but by 1910, other countries were sending exhibitions to Venice; it was transcending Italy.

The Austrian Gustav Klimt of “The Kiss” had an exhibition, as did the French Auguste Renoir. Pablo Picasso’s 1905 picture of an itinerant family of circus performers, the saltimbanques of his Blue period, was taken out of the Spanish exhibit over concerns it might be too controversial.

Over time, and with only one period of interruption during and after World War II, the Venice Biennale has become the world’s premier international art exhibition—imitated by many other cities and nations. The festival this year has exhibitors from 95 countries showcasing their artists; Venice keeps permanent pavilions for 30 of them in the public Giardini della Biennale, the Biennale Gardens, and spreads the rest throughout the city; many are concentrated in the Arsenale, a 1,000-year-old shipbuilding complex that was one of the first industrial production facilities.

This year is unique for several reasons, first that the main curator, a Swiss-Cameroonian woman named Koyo Kouoh, died suddenly last year in the midst of planning for it. She would have been the first African curator. The second is the vision she had for the Biennale, one that her successors and family agreed should prevail despite her loss.

Kouoh’s challenge to the participating nations was the title and theme of this year’s Biennale: In Minor Keys. When I first saw the title, everywhere on posters around the city, I thought of music and the Cumberland Plateau dance tunes I’ve been hearing in my work with the Junior Appalachian Musicians program. Dance tunes are usually upbeat, in major keys, but some of the most durable Appalachian tunes (and pretty much all blues) are in minor keys: “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Shady Grove,” “Wade in the Water.” I love this one: “Kissin’ in the Dark” by Memphis Minnie.

So what is the significance of minor keys—a musical metaphor—for an art show?

In Kouoh’s words,

”The minor key, in music, alludes both to the structure of a song and to its emotional effects. It is a rich idea, so rich that it quickly overflows its technical definition and spills with metaphor. It summons moods, the blues, the call-and-response, the morna, the second line, the lament, the allegory, the whisper.

The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise. The minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return.

The minor keys are also the small islands, worlds amid oceans with distinct and endlessly rich ecosystems, social lives that are articulated, for better and worse, within much larger political forms and ecological stakes. Here, the evocation of the key and the island extends to an archipelago of oases: gardens, courtyards, compounds, lofts, dance floors – the other worlds that artists make, the intimate and convivial universes that refresh and sustain even in terrible times; indeed, especially in terrible times.

I don’t know if Kouoh meant it this way, but to me, In Minor Keys is one of interior life: self-questioning, identity, birth, connection, the quiet attendance on quiet death, the work of mourning rather than conquest, or, as she terms it, bombast. Choosing to listen to the murmuring undercurrents rather than the crash of waves on the shore, you can hear the call of the refugee, the migrant, the woman, the child, the exile.

In Minor Keys, artists are, as they always do, experimenting with modes of perception and technique, but many are also responding to the challenge to interpret the everyday as sacred. What I found throughout a number of countries’ exhibitions was a strong sense, not of melancholy, but of the unfinished, a seeking for something that has been lost or is being brought into being for the first time.

For instance, there was the New Orleans artist Demond Melancon (“Big Chief”), who combines African, native American, and purely New Orleanian themes in his intricately beaded costumes and tableaux. Look carefully at the iconography; none of it is accidental: broken chains, ships to carry slaves, railroads on fire, an African spear. It’s about the road to belonging—and belonging as what? At what cost?

Or the work of Lubaina Himid, born in Zanzibar but brought up all her life in Britain, documenting and imagining the lives of enslaved people imported to Europe in the past and making their living as servants, dancing masters, and a host of other occupations. This portrait of a boy warily looking out from within a drawer I found particularly touching.

And this, also by Lubaina Hamid, asking who can be a part of a nation:

Many works from many countries looked at the theme of becoming, of changing, but they also looked at survival. This painting by South African Johannes Phokela draws from the blue-and-white Chinese/Indian pottery designs of the historical Dutch East India Company but reimagines them as a Breughel-like hellscape, with a pregnant African woman the only survivor.

There are far too many shows to report on here: hundreds of different expositions big and small. But what I kept encountering was that sense of something artists are responding to—something real—something missing in contemporary life.

I didn’t find it in the US pavilion. The US contribution to the Biennale was, according to an article in The Art Newspaper, “unusually fraught,” as Trump administration cuts to the National Endowment of the Arts, plus the administration’s directive to prioritize funding for the July 4th America 250 (eventually the partisan Freedom 250) celebrations, delayed and confused the artist selection process. In the end, Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen was chosen. I liked Allen’s work, myself, and I’m glad to have seen it. The metalwork was interesting, but the sculptures using natural materials were stunning. The layers of stone in a massive stone “apple” danced beautifully with the light hitting them. But the choice had no political valence whatever. I think the Trump administration would not have allowed a political point of view from an artist. We know what artists think of it.

And then I found a key to what was bothering me. In the combined Czech-Slovak pavilion a short film by Jakub Jansa, The Silence of the Mole, was spooling. We sat through it twice to get to the place where the main character, Mr. M., the Mole, has lost his empathy and his way through his burrow, and is told at the end, to “lose your fear…and something else will appear.”

The people of a nation are distinct from its government, so I will not blame Americans—who on a personal level tend to be empathetic—for the near demonization of empathy on the part of the government. Jansa’s film was saying that fear kills empathy.

But what I’m seeing here, and I’ve felt in several places in Europe, is a freedom to play with ideas, with colors, with sounds, with scents—a resolute embrace of empathy and rejection of fear.

In Venice I’m seeing a prismatic city loose-handedly throwing colors everywhere, a city where hundreds of artists are asking questions about our world and life, without fear. Instead, what I saw in news reports from the US on the 4th of July was a country being robbed of its color, its music, its swing— miserably sweating through an oppression that wasn’t only the heat.

Venice feels open. It feels clean and colorful and fearless. And on a wall somewhere in the warren of alleys behind the ducal palace and basilica of San Marco, I found this. It seemed to me to say just about everything about the city, its Biennale, our times, and art.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c0oyeEXwq6vOHoxEnmYM2eUg

As we turned off the old mountain road onto what would become my new neighborhood, each gentle twerk of the steering wheel led to a pretty vista. We passed wild rose vines that would flower in summer, dogwoods, a small pine wood, sassafras shrubs, all set within a mixed forest of oak, tulip poplar, and maple trees (the Cumberland Plateau is a biologist’s playground, with a higher degree of biodiversity than most places on the planet).

But the houses lining the road were a mixed bag. I would definitely not be in the uptown section of the unincorporated community called Jump Off or Jumpoff (spellings vary), but then there is no uptown section. Five miles out from the orderly Oxford-inspired campus, this is Appalachia, after all, the real world, no Elysium, no Xanadu, no Arcadia.

First there was a tilting mailbox on the left with a faded rainbow sticker flag on it. Then a long driveway on the right leading to several log houses down a hill in a family compound that I couldn’t quite see through the trees. Then a large cropped lawn on the right with a neatly maintained double-wide trailer home, at the back of it, then a couple of comfortable looking brown ranch houses on the left, then again on the right a discouragingly rundown house with broken bicycle parts and a disconsolate beagle on a run line moping in the yard outside a white plastic igloo doghouse. Hmmm, I thought.

And then we got to the house I would eventually buy: a newly outfitted hunter’s lodge on two and a half acres, surrounded by tall trees, immaculately clean, and begging for a garden. It had been purchased last year for his son, a reclusive college student, by a television actor in a popular TV series. The actor enjoyed doing handyman work on visits to his son, so the house was in great shape and had a long front room with an expansive polished hardwood floor that seduced me immediately. As it turns out, I have been happier here than at any house since my childhood home (another story entirely).

After some inevitable sturm und drang related to selling my old house and buying this one, I left my Knoxville home in a literal tornado, aided by a stalwart nephew in his pickup truck, and arrived the same day as my furniture did (minus a portable oil heater that the boys on the cut-rate moving team seem to have purloined). In the next days, as I was unpacking boxes inside the house, the neighborhood began to make itself known.

A little glass vase with wildflowers in it left on the porch in front of my door by an old friend.

A welcoming note left in the mailbox by an Anne, whom I didn’t know.

And one day, a riding lawnmower coming down the drive, piloted by an older man who stopped in front of the house to greet me, introduce himself, and offer to mow my overgrown grass. I didn’t have a lawnmower, and I was overwhelmed in general, so I accepted.

John, who I’ve come to think of as the angel of the neighborhood, is a retired engineer type who patrols the road, doing good deeds wherever he sees the need—like my yard. After he’d mowed it, we chatted a bit, and he told me about the feral cats he feeds behind his house.

And then he told me about Phoenix, the disconsolate beagle, who, untended and unwalked and mostly unfed, had been reported to the county authorities by Anne and others multiple times for neglect of an animal. But there is no mechanism in a determinedly hands-off county to get an animal like this removed from its owner if it’s not being actively abused—and maybe even if it is. So the owner kept the dog but paid no attention to it. Instead, every day, faithful John would cross the road to feed and walk his neighbor’s neglected dog.

Another neighbor, the tenderhearted Anne who had left me a welcoming note, lived with her husband a half-mile away in the middle of the forest. Anne agonized about Phoenix, referring to him as “the prisoner” and watching for the times when the owner was absent. She’d been told in shouting terms that she’d better never come on his property about the dog, but she couldn’t stand it; she would watch for the absence of his car, untie the dog, leash it, and take it for a walk down the wooded road. A friend of hers had even attempted to kidnap and adopt Phoenix, but it was a short-lived experiment; Phoenix fought with her own dogs and was impossible to control, so back he went to the igloo.

So there we were, a few neighbors united in deploring the condition of the dog. I didn’t take an active part in efforts to alleviate his plight other than offering my parking lot for various exploits. I have a visceral dislike of dogs, having been bitten as a small child. I’d tried going for a walk with the dog and John one time, but Phoenix was too strong and too wild for me to be able to hold on the leash.

I felt for the dog. I did. I knew it was miserable. I knew the owner didn’t care about it. I knew the whole thing was awful. But I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t take food to the dog or interact with it in any way. I didn’t confront the neglectful neighbor about it, either. I didn’t want anyone to shout at me. I just wasn’t willing to run that risk.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I guess the owner became tired of complaints because he freed the beagle from its tether. Phoenix immediately began promenading along the road and into everyone’s yards, tail wagging with joy but evading anyone’s touching him.

I think everyone was relieved that he was off his tether. Anne offered to adopt him, but the owner refused. I did worry that Phoenix might attack my dotty but dignified old cat, who likes to doze on my front porch, but he didn’t seem interested. It seemed a happy ending.

But we’d all forgotten that at the head of the road, in the first house with the faded rainbow flag, lived two pit bulls who would occasionally be loitering in their yard, usually just one at a time. They’d bitten several people, but again, in this county nothing can be done if someone’s dog bites you. You just don’t walk there. It’s how “live and let live” government in a state like Tennessee works.

Phoenix only had a few weeks of freedom.

It seems the pit bulls got out day before yesterday. Anne texted me as soon as she heard: “Phoenix is dead.”

I don’t like to imagine how they disposed of him. I just hope it was quick. Nothing will be done, of course.

This morning, a June 5 FaceBook post about an immigration court in New York surfaced, posted by my cousin, a Presbyterian minister. In it the author, another minister named Andrea Durocher Steinkamp, described accompanying an immigrant to a court hearing. In front of the court were many other immigrants waiting for their hearings.

Steinkamp describes the scene: “Families, so many families. Children of all ages. Pulled out of their beds and out of school to be counted and photographed and checked against a registration database. Some sat on the concrete, distracted by games on a phone or by one another. Others were in strollers; one rode on an adult's shoulders. Bored teenagers with headphones around their necks or over their ears lounged against the metal barriers. Interruptions of normalcy in a setting that shouldn’t be normalized. A young girl, perhaps high-school age, stood with whom I imagined were her parents and siblings. The fear in her eyes was visceral as she laid her head on the shoulder of the woman beside her. There were silent tears streaming down her cheeks.”

Silent tears. There are a lot of people silently weeping these days. Over 70,000 people are now being detained in prisons across the country. And hundreds of thousands are waiting outside courthouses, unsure whether they’ll leave free or in shackles.

I think of my former student, Issa, taken from his home in Knoxville to the notorious Winn Correctional Facility, a prison in Louisiana where there have been two immigrant deaths in the past two months. I think of his wife with chronic kidney disease, not able to work, struggling to survive without her husband and caregiver.

I think of the chronically ill children with dire medical conditions in Tennessee who must now be reported to ICE before they can receive medical care, according to a new law drafted “with input from the White House.” Frozen in doubt, perplexity, and fear, millions of us are standing by while wealthy authoritarians write a harsh future (see Project 2025) for us in Washington.

And I think of Phoenix trapped on his run line in his careless owner’s yard, and of John, feeding a dog not his own, and of Anne, stealing Phoenix off for brief moments of joy, and of myself, immobilized because I dislike dogs and didn’t want to confront my neighbor.

I’ve been singing harmony most of my life—that is, since I discovered I could. It happened in two episodes. The first was when I was eight or nine, visiting a friend’s house in our hometown.

We had both been to Girl Scout camp, the only time I ever did that, in the countryside somewhere a few hours from my home. I remember the long car ride, the wooden bunkhouse where a few other girls and I slept, the s’mores we learned to make by a campfire, plastic lanyards we made, a lake, and some songs.

After we all returned from that week, I was visiting her one day; we were both perched on a sofa looking out a window at the eventless horizon of the street in front of us, and she began singing a simple round we’d learned, “Barges.” I began singing with her, and as rounds are designed to do, the second iteration added—amazingly to me—harmony. Simply singing the round correctly made me harmonize. So we sang it together, over and over. I had no trouble holding my melody against hers. I’m sure she was sick of it by the time we quit. But for me, it was a thing I could do and it felt right. I didn’t know that this was unusual. I didn’t know that many people can’t hold a harmony against a melody; they collapse into the melody; me, I hear melodies, sure, but what I am impelled to sing (and play) is harmony.

The second episode wasn’t really an episode. It was the 10-year “moment” in American music that gave us the revival of the music of common people—”folk” music—and the second generation of rock music. Both, perhaps, were reactions to the times: our government’s lies about Vietnam; our country’s often violent engagement with social justice and the hangover of slavery and Jim Crow; the reckless capitalism, and the struggles of labor. Then there was the loosening of the straitjackets of gender roles, sexuality, and class hierarchies. Young Americans and Brits had a lot to say, and they said it primarily in music that has proved surprisingly durable.

I’d thought that our music would fade into a shadow of the past, but many of the great bands and songs from that era are common knowledge to young people even today and have become, for them, elevator lullabies, a soundtrack they know as a running backdrop to their lives.

The great rock and folk bands of the time, the great musical artists of that time—had one thing in common that compelled me to lie on our attic floor in the the big house I grew up in, comfortably positioned between two small speakers: close harmony. I’d put a record on the turntable and lie with my head on a pillow, parsing out the harmonies, hearing and following each part mentally, of James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joni Mitchell; Joan Baez and Judy Collins’s, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, the Eagles, Heart, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steely Dan, the Allman Brothers, Leonard Cohen, and others. The list could be very, very long.

I don’t have sophisticated taste in music. I didn’t search out jazz or blues or anything popular with highbrow people. I was really just interested in the vocal harmony. That was it. That was my jam.

I just happened to grow up in a time when the jam was rich.

In my college town, Sewanee, surrounded by woodlands and without much to do, there were others like me. Long-haired college kids littered the lawns strumming and picking their guitar strings and singing the songs that were new then and have become, some at least, apparently deathless. When I, still in high school, edged close, the older ones made room for me and I did what I do—sing harmony.

There was, of course, a student-run coffeehouse. Called the Outside Inn, it was located in a humdrum little building no one else wanted on the edge of campus. Some of us were organizers—writing and printing leaflets, making the lighting and staging happen, setting up the mics and stands, putting out the publicity, negotiating with the powers that were at the university, making sure there were enough chairs, tables, napkins, and mugs. David, not an artist, started it because he didn’t want to be in a fraternity. Chris carried it on. Hank succeeded him—each with their ways of doing things.

But no coffeehouse is just about the coffee. This one was about the artists. And they really were.

In 1969, the previously all-male school had begun to admit young women. Coincidentally, my strong-minded mother had become the doyenne of the Financial Aid department of the college. She had been educated at the state women’s college in Florida and felt that her mission was to find gifted young people who could not afford a Sewanee education and to make it possible for them. And that’s what she did for 10 years.

There was Wendy, pint-sized blues singer with a powerhouse voice. There was tall and beautiful Carol, equally unforgettable on stage as an actor and singer. There was Chris, a handsome devil and compelling actor. There was honey-voiced Jim, guitar wizard. There was Bobby, long dead now, but the leader in four-part harmonies. Robert with a larger-than-life presence and voice. Gary, our out-but-not-out gay member, booming singer and strutting actor. Tica, whose trilling voice delivered Spanish and Portuguese songs. Quiet but precise Margaret, a harmonist like me, but also a songwriter.

As old folks are wont to do (I still remember driving my mother to her 50th college reunion in the early ‘80s; all the ladies looked so…old. I couldn’t imagine them as girls), some of the surviving people from that time still get together.

For a few years, having some impresario types still able and eager to put on shows, we did—with lights and menus and programs. But, as one of the songs, “Landslide,” says, “Time makes you bolder, even children get older/And I’m getting older, too.”

This weekend we gathered, those who are left, in the alumni house on campus, a pretty stone building with a big room and plenty of electrical outlets for our mics and cords.

We came from North Carolina and Missouri and Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee—Sewanee was the University of the South, after all—and did what we still do: we sang. And I did what I still do: harmonize, now on violin too.

There were some songs that came off ragged. No surprise, we’re old. But there were moments that crystallized, locked, into precise parts harmonizing on exactly the right notes at the right time. We can all still hit true notes.

I’ve always thought of my own harmonizing as “finding the empty space” and filling it. To me, in any given place in a song there is a range of notes that will lock into a chord—whether it’s a classic 1-3-5-7 or 1-4-6-8 or whatever, or something more tentative and fugitive, leading to some other more stable resolution. I feel for the empty place and I go there. I listen to the other singers, finding what they’re not covering, and I go there. Sometimes I anticipate the resolution; sometimes I delay it. But finding my way among the other voices to shake the whole into coherence is the point.

When that thing happens, when the whole thing shakes into coherence, something brilliant is born. It’s some kind of trembling, some kind of shimmering. It’s transitory—just the length of the song if we’re lucky, sometimes it’s just one or two phrases.

But when the song is over, a beat after the last beat, we all take a breath and glance at each other, as if we’re lifting glasses of champagne, and nod. That was it.

I live at the attenuated corners of three counties in South Middle (not Central) Tennessee; the counties meet on the Cumberland Plateau, but only one of them lies primarily on the plateau. When I was a child and lived in the richer agricultural county next door, named for Benjamin Franklin, we went to Grundy County only to access the interstate highway, speeding through, not stopping.

I didn’t know what exactly was up with Grundy County when I was a kid. I only knew it was dangerous: there were rumors of contraband corn likker, talk of organized auto theft, repeated incidents of arson. Deep poverty. Peril, hiking into the backcountry to splash in the pure water of the Fiery Gizzard or climb at Foster’s Falls, if you ran afoul of a moonshiner’s setup in the woods. The place had a veil over it.

But it turns out that, when you peek under the veil, the county has had far greater roles in American history than I knew, both of the tragic and heroic varieties. And last Tuesday, it played a new role, that of lighthouse on a dark sea.

The tragedy

The tragedy opens, in a sense, with another sea: a shallow one that existed in this area hundreds of millions of years ago, collecting in its depths organic matter that eventually hardened into limestone, shale, coal, and sandstone deposits. Thanks to geologic action, the former sea rose as a plateau above the surrounding valley; small streams then carved deep caverns, ravines, and coves into the heavily forested mountains, teeming with unparalleled biodiversity on land, in the water, and in the caves. The plateau was primarily used by Native Americans as a hunting ground because the land was too thin and acidic for farming. When European settlers arrived, the same factors led to sparse settlement.

In 1840, two sons of a Ben Wooten were chasing a groundhog under a tree stump when they found a seam of coal close to the surface of the ground. Just at this time, the great expansion of the railroads across the continent was exploding the demand for coal. A New York investor, Samuel Franklin Tracy, organized the Sewanee Mining Company in 1854 as a company-run town, the “earliest example of a pattern of outside, organized, capitalistic exploitation of Tennessee's coal reserves.” [1] The coal mined in and around Tracy City would be turned into coke, which would then be used to fuel the growth of the railroads and other industries throughout the US, as well as enabling the production of iron and steel.

How to get the coal to market was a problem that had been solved by the 1852 completion of the Cumberland Mountain Tunnel, or the Cowan Tunnel as it is known around here, excavated by Black slaves, Irish laborers, and local workers, with supervision by Swiss engineers. [2] A spur led first to Sewanee and then to Tracy City. But the company did not become economically viable immediately. In 1858 the first coal was shipped from the Tracy City site, but the next year, creditors forced its sale and it was reorganized as the Tennessee Coal and Rail Company, later the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Rail Company, or TCI.

But there was still the question of labor. To get labor at the lowest cost, rather than hiring local white people, beginning in 1871 and for another 25 years, TCI leased—rented—African-American prisoners from the state of Tennessee. The laborers would arrive on trains from Nashville and be set to work mining the coal, burning it into coke, and putting the coke back onto trains headed for market. If they didn’t complete their tasks on time, they would be whipped. They died at a rate of approximately 10% per year; those who died were buried on a ridge above the coke ovens, pictured below and located at the Grundy Lakes State Park in Tracy City.

In August of 1892, white men from Tracy City who wanted the jobs that the Black men were doing broke into and burned the stockade where the prisoners were being kept and put the Black men on trains back to Nashville. From that point on, labor strikes were common and by 1904, TCI moved its administration to Birmingham, Alabama, where convict labor was available, and was absorbed into US Steel in 1907. However, under the Tennessee Consolidated Coal Company, mining continued in Grundy County until the 1990s. A rare photo below, from the collection of William Ray Turner and Travis Turner, depicts white guards with their rifles in front of the stockade where the prisoners were confined.

The bitter racial history of Grundy County did not stop with the expulsion of the Black prisoners in the 1890s. Grundy became a “sunset county” for African Americans, as I was told by my friend Helen Shedd, aged about 70 at the time, in about 1980. It was not safe for a Black person to sleep there. The economy declined. The county became known for “chop shops,” where stolen vehicles would be disassembled, parts would be switched out, and the resulting unidentifiable vehicles would be sold. A common cash crop was moonshine whiskey produced on the densely forested mountainous plateau and sold to city dwellers “down the valley” or in the affluent neighboring college town of Sewanee.

The heroism

In the depths of the Great Depression, in 1932, a retired University of Tennessee teacher and advocate for rural reform and civil rights, Lilian Wyckoff Johnson, gave her home in Summerfield, a community between Monteagle and Tracy City, to educator and civil rights activist Myles Horton.

Horton wanted to create a school modeled on Danish folk schools to empower people to learn collectively and find solutions to their own problems. The result was the Highlander Folk School, which operated from 1932 to 1959, when it was shut down by the state of Tennessee on inconsequential technical grounds; however, it moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and survives as the Highlander Research and Education Center, now located in New Market in East Tennessee.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Highlander Folk School’s main focus was on training and organizing Southern textile and industrial workers, but in the 1950s, the focus moved to the crisis of racial inequality, lack of voting rights among Black Americans, and school integration. Workshops were held in tactics to resist the Jim Crow racial suppression system, train organizers in peaceful protest methods, and prepare African Americans to overcome institutionalized barriers to their constitutional right to vote.

Luminaries such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Septima Clark, Andrew Young, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, Marion Barry, Diane Nash, and James Beville trained and taught at the center, along with Myles and Zilphia Horton, Pete Seeger, Guy and Candie Carawan, and many others. Their work and that of courageous activists in and outside of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It took 50 years for white reactionaries to build their response to the democratization of America, starting with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and the 1987 destruction of the Fairness Doctrine in media. But on April 29, 2026, a 6-3 conservative majority on the US Supreme Court upheld a racial gerrymander that Louisiana legislators had created in order to erase two Democratic (Black) seats in the US Congress. Like dominoes, most of the South has fallen in line. In Nashville last week, white legislators voted to divide Black- and Democrat-dominated Memphis into three outlandishly shaped Republican voting districts, eliminating any minority or Democratic representation in Congress. Tennessee has effectively nullified the Voting Rights Act.

Blacks and Democrats in the state can still vote, but their votes no longer count. We have returned to a new era of unapologetic, unConstitutional, white supremacy.

The lighthouse

Because of its complex history, Grundy County—even Tennessee—might seem a strange place to bring an unabashedly progressive show, which Nicholas Ma’s American Revival certainly is. But it’s the perfect place, actually, precisely because of that complex history.

Even though Tennessee has been gerrymandered to have solid red representation in Congress and a red supermajority in Nashville, there are a lot of thoughtful independents and liberals here—together, liberals and independents are more than 50% of the population. If we could find common ground, we could stop the radical march toward the down-home versions of oligarchy and white nationalism that we’re experiencing.

Music is one way to find that common ground.

The Revival is billed as “a new traveling festival of hope and connection, created by filmmaker Nicholas Ma, that brings people together across divides political, cultural, and spiritual.”

Grundy County’s version was a one-day event that brought together an audience of about 1200 people in the Caverns’ space.

The evening "revival" opened with local children aged 6-15 or so—fiddlers, guitarists, banjo-pickers, singers, and a celloist (!) who have been learning traditional music by ear, coached by old-time fiddler Bob Townsend, banjo picker Denis Marlowe, and others under the direction of Grundy Area JAMkids impresario Cara Kitzrow.

The opening was followed by a sort-of sermon by filmmaker Nicholas Ma that acknowledged the pain and confusion of this national moment, but pointed the way toward hope and confidence that we can emerge from it through the power of art and connection. The various sets included hip-hop by Arrested Development, banjo tunes from Bela Fleck, old-time tunes from Abigail Washburn and Yo-Yo Ma, native American chant and drumming from Martha Redbone, songs from T Bone Burnett, an appearance by a pair of Chinese dragons, and Yo-Yo Ma's solo set with a medley of American tunes so sensitively performed that they still ring in my head, ending with a pensive rendition of "Over the Rainbow."

As Nicholas Ma communicated to us during his “sermon (the following wording is from the website, but he said the same thing): “every Revival shares one purpose: to move people from curiosity to commitment, through purpose, relationships, and service.” He was calling people to actively respond to the pain we’re seeing daily; to help the person we see needing food, needing shelter, needing comfort. To organize. To challenge injustice. To persist. And to follow the beam of hope that music provides in dark times.

[1] Jones, James. “Coal Mining on the Cumberland Plateau” https://npshistory.com/publications/appalachian/sec9.htm

[2] Smith, Gerald. (2010). Sewanee Places. The University of the South. ISBN 978-0-918769-57-2.

[3] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/highlander-folk-school

[4] Tennessee State Library and Archives site, “Highlander Folk School.” https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/customizations/global/pages/collections/highlander/highlander.html

[5] Hall, Alex. “Highlander Folk School in Monteagle: Labor Education and Civil Rights Organizing on the Cumberland Plateau.” Appalachianhistorian.org https://appalachianhistorian.org/highlander-folk-school-in-monteagle-labor-education-and-civil-rights-organizing-on-the-cumberland-plateau/

I taught a boy English for a time. He arrived in this country not speaking a word of our language, but I knew enough French to speak to him in words he knew from former colonial schools. He had the biggest smile when he heard words he could understand. And slowly, he learned the words he needed to ask people the common things: how they were, how he could help, what he could do to work together.

He had the gentle courtesy of people of his native land. He wanted to learn English; probably he also wanted to stay here. He believed in the promise of America. He believed the lie that it was a place where virtue and hard work were rewarded.

He had made the decision to leave his own native land, where (at the time) religious fanatics weren’t trying to force the whole society to comply with a rigid, cruel version of Islam. How could he know he was coming to a place where religious fanatics were trying to force the whole society to comply with a rigid, cruel version of Christianity?

He married an American woman who loved his gentle nature and abundant kindness. He found a job, got a work visa, applied for the treasured “green card.” He followed all the steps to bring him to legal immigration.

He was here legally. He had come on a student visa, and eventually he found work and stayed on a work visa. He reported for his appointments.

He married a woman who loved him. He was ready to live a life. Generous and gentle by nature, he took care of other people, found them apartments, found them what they needed. He believed in the promise of America.

Ten days ago, ICE captured him.

First they took him to a local jail in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Then they told his wife that he was in Alabama. That was a lie. The agent refused to tell her his name, but by end of day, he was actually in Alabama, headed to darkest Louisiana (the state that caused the Supreme Court a few days ago to dismember the right of representation for Black people in this country).

And now? He’s in a prison there. A prison. Not a jail. There’s a difference.

I think of him there in that prison, and I remember him: a man who is not afraid to be kind, helping everyone he knows. He is what men should be: kind and generous and strong.

Right now, he is on a conveyor belt, a mass-production machine. It only understands the “process” part of “due process.” It executes remorselessly.

He is fearful. His wife is even more so. “I just need him to come home,” she says to me.

They keep the temperature very low in those prisons, probably both to avoid contagion and to torture the prisoners. He has one thin blanket and a sheet. His neck hurts. He doesn’t have a pillow. One of the other inmates has two. He doesn’t know why.

The food is bad, just a serving of rice and beans and one slice of bread. He feels cold chills. When he asked to see a prison nurse, she said she doesn’t have a thermometer. A nurse doesn’t have a thermometer?

That’s how cruelty happens. When you refuse to measure pain. When you don’t keep handy the tools to feel.

The Greek word for the mask itself, prosopon, didn’t survive into English, but a Latin one did as persona, deriving from the verb per-sonare, meaning “to sound through,” as in the sound coming through a theatrical mask’s mouth opening. Our words “person” and “personality” come, thus, from the word for “mask.”

The Greek word kharaktēr, on the other hand, seems to have derived from something like the “engraving” on a soul—the pure essence of a person. Character is what lies beneath the mask.

Personality and character intersect in the word “hypocrisy,” which entered the English language as Norman French ipocrisie around 1200 AD. The term goes back to classical Greek hypokrisis: hypo, “under” and krinein, “to discriminate or distinguish.”

In modern usage, hypocrite can mean a person who falsely pretends to be virtuous or religious, like, say, Paula Cain-White, the “Christian” who can tenderly embrace her god-du-jour, the president, but evinces no interest in imitating the kindness or charity of Jesus. She is only one of hundreds of dangerously hypocritical and blasphemous religious leaders preaching today, particularly in the evangelical Republican churches of our country.

The word can even more dangerously refer to those who accuse others of doing something unspeakably vile that they actually do themselves, for example preachers who inveigh against homosexuality or feminism but behind the scenes engage in the sexual abuse of women and children. This is a phenomenon so common that it’s become a trope. As a perceptive friend pointed out when I discussed this essay with him, this second kind probably does more harm.

Either way, hypocrisy is extraordinarily confusing to the average bear. You always have to try to peer through the eyeholes of the hypocrite’s mask to find out what’s underneath. You may be able to see something that’s true, or you may not.

In the Information Age, bits and bytes of news are as thick as oak pollen in spring. There is information, but there’s also Misinformation (incorrect information) and Disinformation (a deliberate lie for some particular end). All three are part of our digital environment now, but the last two make it absurdly easy for hypocrites.

If you’re prominent, you can fire off a tweet (or “Truth”) or two and the world goes scurrying after it, only to find two days later that a new “truth” is in place as if the first one had never been.

I lost a good deal of sleep after Trump’s vulgar Easter Sunday demand to “open the fuckin’ Strait” and his terrifyingly precise Easter Monday threat to destroy the entire “civilization” of Iran by Tuesday at 8 pm. I spent that Tuesday morning walking a quiet mountain trail with a friend, wondering if the new leaves would be ashes by tomorrow. On that Wednesday, Trump announced a ceasefire. The stock market jumped.

But then Thursday gave us the shock of hundreds of Lebanese people killed in a 10-minute Israeli missile barrage that we’ve already forgotten.

On! Off! Yes! No! Shoot! Stop! This was not mere confusion, though I was certainly confused. It was something deeper. It was a comedy headlined by a gibbering chimpanzee. It was a tragedy played by giant cobras. It was a satire performed in a den of tarantulas. It was suspense, it was fury, it was terror. We were looking at a stage filled with masks, appearances, but we didn’t know what the real game was.

When, a few days later, there was an incursion at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and an “assassin” was tackled on the floor above the room where the president actually was, my first reaction was an unconcerned “Nope” and the first image in my mind was the gigantic bandage on the president’s ear after the Butler “assassination” attempt, followed within a week by photos of an unbandaged, flawless ear. My default is to assume that I’m being lied to.

And that’s the trouble. In the realm of theatre, what’s true? When all we can see are masks, over time, we begin to loosen our hold on the notion of truth itself.

So if a “Truth” is fungible, as easily changed out as a coffee filter or a drama mask, what about the political actors who are striding our common stage? What do they feel when they act? Are they like theatre actors, temporarily feeling something so that they can mimic the real emotion, but always aware that they will lay the feeling aside the moment they’re off the stage?

I don’t think so.

I think the actors, the powerful players in our government and beyond, are removed from the consequences of their actions, sitting in distant rooms sipping Diet Cokes while bombing targets in Lebanon or Iran or the ocean from afar. I think Trump and Netanyahu and Hegseth and all the people who do their bidding feel nothing, or at least nothing that normal people would feel.

And that prompts a question: When some people choose to put on a mask, do they also choose to erase their humanity? And when the mask comes off, is a face still there at all?

Take erstwhile DHS head Kristi Noem. Like many of the Trump women and some Trump men, Noem sports the Mar-a-Lago mask, based closely on former model Melania Trump’s look: surgically created high cheekbones, inflated lips, darkly made-up eyes, narrow jaws, and thick tresses of hair reaching nearly to the waist. The look plus the Rolex watches, cosplay uniforms, and deeply disturbing background choices combined to create Noem’s curated appearance of wealth, privilege, menace, cruelty, and indifference.

Her mask, like those of Laura Loomer, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz, and countless others in the ambit of Mar-a-Lago, is the price of admission to power. When she got the surgery, she was choosing not only her mask but her role.

But while masks can be decorative, they don’t protect the wearer from disaster. As we’ve seen since her precipitous fall from grace, Noem did everything her masters asked: sent the ICE army out into American streets, had them conduct mass brutal extractions of legal and illegal immigrants, terrorized cities, and killed American protesters. She carried out the mission with the energy of a rabid bitch. But it wasn’t enough. Overnight, she was gone.

It was the same with former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who did everything Trump asked on the Epstein matter: stonewall, lie, distract, attack, conceal. With rows of Epstein victims behind her, you could almost see Bondi holding her iron mask to her face when offered the chance to apologize—or even speak—to them. She held firm. But it wasn’t enough. With a flick of Trump’s contemptuous finger, she was gone. Same with Matt Gaetz. Flick, gone. Same with Kimberly Guilfoyle. Flick, gone.

As CS Lewis long ago noted of hypocrites: there are masks that, once you put them on, you can’t take them off again: “they hold their masks to their faces so closely and for so long that sooner or later their faces grow to fit them.” What happens, then, when the scene is over? What happens when there is no further use for the mask?

I’d hate to be a bathroom mirror wherever Noem and Bondi are now brooding (I’d like to think they’re in cheap hotels with ragged carpets). Those mirrors aren’t reflecting success anymore. Their careers have been nuked. What’s left after you sacrifice your character to put on a mask? Empty eyeholes that no one cares to peer into. Empty mouths saying nothing anyone wants to hear.

Now, what does this all have to do with the April 29, 2026 Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais?

The case originated in the 2020 Census report that Louisiana’s Black voters constituted 33% of the population, but only one of six districts was majority Black. After a challenge from Black voters, a new Black-majority district was created in 2024, bringing the racial representation in Congress in line with the population.

Alarmed, the state took the case to the Supreme Court, which voted along ideological lines 6-3 to reverse the previous decision. This will eliminate the new district and return Louisiana’s congressional representation to an unbreakable Republican majority of 5-1. If other Southern states such as Florida and Tennessee follow, as they’re already doing, this decision will potentially increase Republican seats in the House of Representatives by perhaps as many as 12 seats, fitting in with the unpopular president’s efforts to rig the 2024 midterms.

The new decision has undone much of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Conveniently, it will limit the predicted bloodbath to the GOP by letting states redraw or eliminate minority-majority districts just in time for the 2026 election.

Where’s the hypocrisy? I think this decision was only possible because of a pervasive hypocrisy infecting the conservative majority of the Supreme Court and the larger GOP.

Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that the Voting Rights Act violates the 14th and 15th amendments, enacted just after the end of the Civil War to establish the citizenship and protect the rights of African Americans.

As Alito wrote piously, “Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context….The state’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling…was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” [See The Guardian.]

So a law written to protect Black citizens actually violates constitutional amendments to protect them? Huh?

By dismantling the racial gerrymandering that enforced Voting Rights Act in Southern states, the Supreme Court has set aside the one tool that Black voters had to be represented in Congress by members of their community. One-sixth of voters in a given non-gerrymandered district will never be able to prevail over the other five-sixths if everybody votes according to their interests.

Roberts has been pretending for two decades, against any evidence, that white people are just as likely to vote for Black interests as they are for their own. That there is no more racism in America, so the Civil Rights movement no longer applies.

His statement in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” is a tautology so simplistic that it rivals another Republican’s on a serious social problem: Nancy Reagan’s 1980s-era solution to the problem of drug addiction, “Just Say No!” Or a minister’s admonishment to a teenage boy who’s troubled about masturbating: Just stop thinking about sex.

Right.

In accordance with his pretense, Roberts has systematically dismantled racial protections in a country that adamantly practiced Black chattel slavery and then Black suppression for 350 years, a mere 61 years after the latter system was legally but not universally abandoned.

The reality is that erasing majority-minority districts in the South and elsewhere will bleach the House of Representatives. Roberts is too smart not to know this.

So, I return to my question, What happens when a person puts on a mask? Does the face underneath disappear? Or does it harden and become the mask itself?

I don’t know the state of Roberts’ character underneath the mask, but my suspicion is that it now fits his pretense. He may sincerely believe that there is no need for racial protections—or for diversity—in this country. But he’s lying to himself.

“People hiding under tables!”

“The would-be assassin has been killed!” (He hadn’t.)

Poor schmuck, I thought, and went on shoveling dirt to plant my tiny new pink crepe myrtle sapling in the front yard. It will look nice when the tree flowers for the first time next year.

I’m truly not feeling concerned about this supposed assassination attempt following the one at Butler, Pennsylvania, which produced no investigation and an oversize ear bandage that disappeared within a week, leaving no trace on the president’s auditory apparatus. If Trump is assassinated, I will shed no tears. I don’t think he is in charge, anyway.

But I do have questions.

There doesn’t appear to have been any actual danger to the president. The guy was caught on the floor above the basement-level ballroom. So why the panic inside the ballroom? How were those loud shots heard in the ballroom from the floor above, anyway?

Video of the guy rushing into the foyer on the floor above the ballroom shows him dressed in black, but the still picture immediately sent out by the president shows him half undressed, with a shoulder that is either AI-manipulated or out of joint. People are not actually made this way. If he was supposed to have all these weapons on him, why aren’t they visible in the video? And who undressed him?

Ever since Obama humiliated Trump in 2011 at this event, Trump has avoided attending it. Why did he show up this time with almost his entire Constitutional line of succession in tow?

Why was the shooter able to run past at least 10 Secret Service agents who were lounging in the foyer?

Why did Kash Patel sit at his table and watch his phone, not even bothering to get up?

From the videos, it looks as if Melania Trump was truly frightened at the sound of the shots, but Dodo Brain was not. Why not?

So sure, I have questions. This shooting attempt might have been for real, or it might not. But it scarcely matters.

My attention was drawn by Trump’s almost immediately posting a plea to Truth Social that he be allowed to build the ballroom over which the National Trust for Historic Preservation has him in litigation.

Among his other efforts to make sure that no one ever has the luxury of forgetting that he ever existed, Trump plans to build an immense, gaudy ballroom in the style of Mar-a-Lago, with a heavily fortified bunker underneath it. Minutes after the attempted shooting, Trump wailed that he had to have that ballroom, and today his administration demanded that the lawsuit be withdrawn so that the First Family didn’t have to venture outside the White House grounds to attend large gatherings. “Generations” of future presidents would be safer if it were built.

It seems to me that this ballroom-cum-bunker is only necessary if you have a president who is so unpopular that 70% of the people oppose his rule—which is the case right now.

If you need a bunker that badly, you’re not doing a very good job.

In fact, you suck.

Unfortunately, we are in a time when belief is permanently suspended. No one trusts anything anymore, and we’re right not to since the very principle of truth has been repeatedly turned inside out, slapped against rocks, scalded in boiling water, and hung out to dry.

I don’t think this purported assassination attempt changes that. As we say in the South, none of this passes the smell test.

I was curious because in recent weeks, Trump’s highest-profile online conservative cheerleaders, including Carlson, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and Megyn Kelly, have all left the Trump train. In different ways, each of them is plodding along adjacent to the main line, uncertain about what comes next, as the Trump engine chugs into the smoking ruins of the American dream.

This post is about the second half of the conversation, where the brothers Carlson leave the happy realm of Trump I and move toward the heartbreak of Trump II. The conversation was relatively unguarded—clearly filmed for internet circulation, but full of the inside jokes and references that siblings share when they let their hair down. They have the same social circle, go to the same clubs (for which they have inside acronyms), attend the same parties, and seem to share much of the same view of the world.

Buck ‘n’ Tuck (I’m going to refer to Buckley and Tucker as Buck ‘n’ Tuck here for brevity and for a cheap rhyme) are discussing the Trump era and why, in 2026, they have jumped off the train.

First, let’s be clear. Despite his deep country-club tan, WASP uniform, chiseled features, and confidence, Buck has swallowed whole nearly every conspiracy theory vomited out by the right over the past 10 years.

He is sure that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump.

He dismisses the Russia thing in the 2016 election as a hoax, echoing Trump’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with his win. [While it seems true that Russia didn’t succeed in affecting the vote, it did try to affect the vote by spreading disinformation, and Trump appears to have solicited Russia’s aid.]

He believes that George Floyd was not murdered by a police officer but that he died of a fentanyl overdose (Snopes and other factchecking organizations point out that although Floyd had drugs in his system, they were not enough to cause his death, which was due to asphyxiation by the police officer). He believes that in 2020, “Antifa” rampaged throughout the country (he lives in a comfortable DC neighborhood, so I’m doubting that he didn’t see any such thing except on his news sources).

Tuck is not explicitly agreeing, but he’s not disagreeing either, keeping the bemused face that has served him to such effect. That’s why I think Tuck has been smarter than his brother. He’s only asking questions, after all. Just asking.

But to review, Tuck lost his job at Fox News in 2023 in the wake of the network’s being forced to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over Fox’s false election claims. The settlement cost Fox $787.5 million, quite a chunk of change. Tuck had amplified the claims of election fraud without firmly endorsing them. Apparently Fox higher-ups decided they needed to throw Tuck off a bridge. But then he defied the laws of gravity, falling upwards to a podcast empire whose reach seems to be second only to that of Joe Rogan. That took some doing.

So why have the brothers abandoned Trump? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Trump’s policies, most of which they still support.

There is a kettleful of grievances that had been simmering for a while.

First, they both feel that conservatives have paid a terribly stiff social price for their Trump support. People avoid them, don’t invite them to parties, turn their backs on them, are mean to them. They’re too manly to admit it, but their feelings have been hurt. Similarly, they’re deeply disillusioned by Trump’s lack of loyalty to his January 6 army. Buck feels Trump should have better “articulated” what the January 6 protesters were angry about. He doesn’t think any of the protesters should have spent time in jail and feels Trump could have done something about it during the Biden administration and didn’t.

Still, both of them firmly supported Trump in the 2024 election. After all, they giggle, with a high-school gibe, “Cackling Cameltoe [Kamala Harris], really?”

But in the Trump II term, there have been three breaking points for Buck and presumably Tuck. And here is where I find myself in horrified alignment with them.

First was the attack on Iran last summer. I’m assuming that the reason they didn’t like this was that Trump was breaking his campaign promise of “no foreign wars.” Of course, I never expect Trump to keep any promise because he’s a salesman and that’s what salesmen do: make promises they never intend to keep. But that sweet trusting nature of beta males must have come to the fore. They believed him. And now they’re sad.

Then, there were Trump’s failures to display sympathy over the killing of Charlie Kirk or aggressively investigate the murder. In fact, it is odd that a scapegoat was quickly found and then there was the weird press conference by Kash Patel (Buck calls him the “supposed FBI director) after Kirk’s murder. Buck doesn’t seem to believe that the purported killer Tyler Robinson actually did the deed. He mentions the surveillance and law enforcement in America today; why didn’t Trump use that capability to find Kirk’s killer? Indeed.

Finally, the last outrage for Buck is the hiding of the Epstein files at the same time that Trump began to say that MAGA was anything he said it was and anyone who said differently was a kook. The nature of Epstein’s crimes doesn’t seem to bother them as much as Trump’s telling MAGA that it is his toy, nothing more. After that, Buck began to get a sneaking suspicion that Trump was a megalomaniac, a narcissist, and unfit for office. Whoa, Nellie.

The Carlson universe is still full of old resentments and conspiracy theories; all of the following were briefly mentioned in the interview.

• The COVID vaccine, in Buck’s telling, was a bioweapon aimed at the American people. Buck blames Trump for encouraging the development of the vaccines and taking credit for them to this day.

• Both believe that American doctors are forced to do abortions to pass their exams (an odd belief, as abortions are now illegal in many states).

• Both snicker when one remarks that Kamala Harris is “on the other team,” I guess meaning either male or transgender or lesbian or something. Clearly not the girly-girls’ team.

• Both feel it’s impossible in today’s America to find “a jury of [our] peers.” I think they mean that most juries are not composed exclusively of wealthy white “heritage” Americans.

• Buck was bothered to see Trump turn on Marjorie Taylor Greene, a strong supporter after she resisted letting the Epstein case go.

• Buck wants the days to come back when the President was “Daddy.” He feels that if the country weren’t so effeminate, Trump wouldn’t be such a narcissist and his administration wouldn’t be filled with cowards to need to “sack up” (this was a new verb for me; it seems to mean something like “man up”).

• Buck questions Israeli-American Miriam Adelson’s gift of $250 million to Trump for his 2024 campaign. The one person Trump will never attack, Tuck says, is Rebbe Schneerson, the purported Jewish messiah. Tuck wants an answer.

So there are many points of friction with Trump, but throughout the interview, the one thing that keeps coming up for both brothers is Trump’s betrayal, his lack of affection and love for the people who have given so much to him—his lack of loyalty to the Carlson class. And that’s the dealbreaker.

At this point, Tucker issues his now-famous apology for supporting Trump and misleading people. He says he will be tormented for a long time.

“So where does this go?” Tucker asks. Buck says he doesn’t know: “People are upset, man. I’ve never seen anything like it.” “Is that true?” asks Tucker. “Oh, people are outraged,” Buckley replies.

“You’re not a liberal….You don’t have a lot of friends who are Starbucks baristas, do you?” says Tucker. “No!” his brother exclaims. “Though I do share…I mean, I kind of wish I’d listened. The evidence was there that Trump didn’t have a stable footing, and wasn’t….”

Tucker cuts him off and changes the subject.

And in a cloud of smoke, the interview concludes.

I’m about a third of the way through, and I’m struck by the honesty of the conversation. It reminds me of conversations I had many years ago with my own brothers. We had a common ground of familial, social, cultural, and historical understanding that these Carlson brothers also share. So they’re not on guard with each other; they say what they think because they know the other one will check them if they aren’t forthright. I no longer have these kinds of discussions with what remains of my nuclear family, but I remember the dynamic.

Fifty minutes in, they’re reviewing in delicious detail what they loved about Trump in 2015 and 2016. What I’ve heard so far reminds me forcefully of conversations I’ve heard on revanchist Old South sites, some associated with alumni of my own alma mater. There’s a lot of concern about the loss of WASP power. A tremendous admiration for Trump’s manly “strength” and delight in his vulgarity as being something WASPs want to do but don’t feel they can. Not a lot of concern or conversation about women, except the feeling that women belong in their place, nonpolitical and nice to everyone (I remember a friend of my father’s always admonishing me to “stay sweet” as he left our house--as if I was ever sweet, which I’m not). And a strong feeling that America is “degraded” from what it used to be. The brothers nod their heads together when discussing this “degradation,” but they understand each other too well to define it for an audience.

I think “degradation” probably means that they really hate multiculturalism. They don’t like things that stray from the WASP way of life: funky food, loud music, eccentric dress, rebellious women, the rise of educated and articulate members of minority groups. In that sense, they really hate America as it has become. When they say they love America, they love their America, the one where they feel safe.

Tomorrow I’ll keep listening through to the part where they discuss why they’ve parted ways with Trump, as both have. I’ll be interested to hear it, but I think it’s mainly over the war in Iran. That seems to be the breaking point. His history as a serial adulterer, a liar, a cheat, a multiple bankrupt, all those things didn’t bother them. On the Access Hollywood tape, the “grab ‘em by the pussy” admission, the brothers Carlson think Americans missed the point: It was *women’s* fault for “letting” men grab them by the pussy. All women’s fault. *Women* have let society down by not preventing their own rapes.

It’s an interesting glimpse into a world where of course, white men rule and America is degraded without them at the top.

More to follow as I listen to the whole thing.

I saw a Facebook video today which neatly summarized five common logical fallacies that people use (almost certainly without being aware of their long history) to subvert political arguments about the Trump administration. I’ve seen and experienced versions of these fallacies almost every time I’ve engaged in a debate with a Trump supporter. Sadly, although I took notes on this clear presentation, I scrolled away from it before copying the source, so … whoever you are, thank you. If I find it again I will link to it.

Em’s Language Shop is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s what the presenter had to say. I have summarized the main points below and added some of my own.

How Trump supporters evade actual arguments: Five strategies.

1. Straw man –

You: “Trump started a war without going through Congress.”

Trump supporter: “You hate America and want to see it destroyed.”

They replace your point with a simpler and more frightening one which you now waste your time defending, to making sure your argument is never heard. The straw man is put up for you to knock down; the original point is forgotten.

Why this works: The brain doesn’t look for truth. It looks for the fastest way to protect what it already believes.

How to counter it: Identify the distraction and pull the argument back to the main point.

2. Whataboutism –

You: “Trump fired all his career military.”

Trump supporter: “What about Biden?”

This turns the conversation to a completely different topic. They drag a completely different issue in to make you forget what you were talking about.

Why this works: The brain can only track a limited number of ideas; if more than one is brought in, the brain splits its attention. It’s a weak person’s response when they know they have no argument.

How to counter it: Again, refuse to be distracted. Say, “We’re not talking about Biden. We’re talking about Trump.”

3. Ad hominem –

You: “Trump is breaking the law.”

Trump supporter: “You have Trump Derangement Syndrome; you’re so stupid.”

When you say something, they insult your intelligence or character.

Why this works: People decide whether to listen based on who is talking. If they insult you immediately, the conversation is now about you, not the argument.

How to counter it: Identify the distraction and drag the argument back to the subject. “This isn’t about me. It’s about Trump breaking the law.”

4. Slippery slope –

You: “I want due process for deportations.”

Trump supporter: “You want to let criminals flood into the country.”

You said nothing about criminals. They take an idea to the most extreme outcome imaginable.

Why this works: It creates fear. Fear overrides rational thought more than any other emotion. When the brain feels a threat, it looks for a way out of the argument.

How to counter it: Identify the slippery slope, define your terms, and pull the argument back to your point. “I didn’t say anything about criminals. I’m talking about due process. Do you know what that is?”

5. Flipping the burden of proof –

Charlie Kirk’s career-making strategy. Choosing his audiences of college and high-school students without sufficient preparation or knowledge background, he would make claims such as “Black women in administrative positions were only hired because of DEI” with no evidence. Rather than prove his own arguments, he would demand unprepared students to “Prove me wrong.”

Why this works: Normally if you make a claim, you need to prove it. Charlie Kirk would instead demand that the student DISprove his claim, sparing himself the trouble of affirmatively proving it. Flipping the burden of proof is a fast way to avoid honest argumentation.

How to counter it: Insist that the person prove their point with verifiable examples or laws. “Do you have any proof of that? What is it?”

The single most useful thing you can do with any of these deflections is insisting on returning to the main point of argument, insisting on the speaker proving the argument, and identifying the deflection as many times as you need to.

When you know what a dishonest interlocutor is up to, you can more easily stick to your own points and guide the discussion away from distractions.

“Hi, Jee, You don’t mind if I call you Jee? Well, y’know Norman Rockwell, I like him, so I just ordered up one like that but with me as You, and I stuck it up there where the rubes could really get an eyeful. It’s fantastic, the greatest ever. It’s gonna pull me up in the midterms for sure.”

“You’re not running in the midterms.”

“Yeah, I know. If my name was on the ballot I’d win, in a landslide. A landslide. But I gotta keep the Demonrats—like that? The Demonrats? The rubes came up with that. Yeah, I’ve got to keep the Demonrats down or they’ll impeach me again. Man, you think being crucified was bad? This was worse. Much worse. You have no idea.”

“So tell me about the picture.”

“The best thing was the hair. I’ve gone back to blond, did you notice?”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“And the eagles, gotta have the eagles and then I thought about jets, you know, reigning bombs.”

“You know how to spell ‘raining,’ don’t you, Donald?”

“Yeah, with a ‘g’. Like reigning in Heaven. Yeah, so I got the eagles and the giant flag and the Iraq vet with the beard and the soldier, I think he looks a lot like Pete, you know, square jaw. He’s got “whale dick” written all over him. And the virgin praying. You know I like the virgins. I like ‘em a lot.

“And I thought I’d stick in a nurse, and a bunch of little American-looking people in the background. Everyone in it looks very American. You know what I mean, I don’t have to say it. Very America First, whatever Margie says. Oh yeah, and the Statue of Liberty—she looks like she’s drowning, and the ballroom. I didn’t put a door. It doesn’t need one. Hey, did you like that ball of light in my hand?”

“I noticed that, Donald. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“My polls are great, Jesus. 100%. The people love me. It’s almost a bore how much they love me. So the ball of light means anything I touch gets fixed. Instantly. I fix everything. Everybody knows it, I’ve said it before. I alone can fix it.”

“You gave yourself a facelift, didn’t you? And a smile? You don’t smile. Why’d you do that?”

“Well, I thought it would be a nice touch to be healing Jon Stewart. He likes me, I think, even if he’s Jewish. I figure the rubes would like it if I touch his head and he’s instantly converted, you know, healed. That’s why the little smile. I’m doing him a favor.”

“So tell me about that figure at the very top, the one with the giant head and the iron crown?”

“Oh that? That’s the big guy I’m working for, you know, the Antichrist? The Beast? I have him up there with all the dead people I’ve sent your way. He’s marching, marching. Y’know, sometimes I wake up in the morning and he’s been in my dreams, marching toward me. But then I get my first Diet Coke and I forget all about it.

“By the way, Jesus, have you ever thought of switching up your name? Like ‘Donald.’ It has a nice ring to it: Donald J. Christ.”

“No, I actually hadn’t thought about that.”

“Well, you should. You’d get much more publicity with a better trade name, I’m telling you. Slap “Donald J. Trump” on anything and it turns to gold. Like magic.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“So, Jee, great chat. I’ll be seeing you around, what do they say, in the sweet by and by?”

“No, Donald.”

“What?”

“You won’t be seeing Me. I have something much more appropriate in mind for you.”

“Will there be gold?”

“Well, fire’s kind of gold, so sure.”

“Great. Ciao, man. Talk to you soon.”

“Very soon.”

[Click.]

That and the lingering scent of his association with Jeffrey Epstein seem to have angered these new detractors (welcome to Tucker, Megyn, Candace, Marjorie, and Alex, by the way), and they’ve been criticizing him.

He’s vewy mad. However, Trump has only a very small basket of words. So he’s reaching into it to hurl his limp banana peels of insults at the wall of the internet.

On Thursday he lashed out on his social network in a loooong screed. But just when he needed to really let it rip, he could only come up with the stale staples that stock his word pantry. Here is his post, annotated by me. (I didn’t even note his onanistic use of capital letters, spilled like incels’ seed upon the ground and too many to count. A girl gets tired.)

Enjoy.

From our esteemed Commander in Chief:

I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years [they supported you for years], especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon [it doesn’t]— Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. [Yawn. Normally you reserve “Low IQ” for brown people and women, but Carlson and Jones must have been hitting the tanning bed.] They’re stupid people [Yawn. No, Donald, you don’t need to tell us that ‘Low IQ’ means ‘stupid.’], they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! [Yawn. This is one of your more common tropes: “Everyone knows it,” village gossip.] Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did! [Yawn: this schoolyard taunt is an odd thing to say of the most popular and wealthy podcasters in the nation.] They’ve all been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV [Nobody watches TV anymore. And did I mention millions of online followers?], they’re NUT JOBS [Yawn. Everyone who crosses you is a nut job.] TROUBLEMAKERS [this one’s actually new; sounds a little Stalinist to me], and will say anything necessary for some “free” and cheap publicity [Oh, quit with the self-owns]. Now they think they get some “clicks” because they have Third Rate [Yawn: third-rate is the last circle in your Hell] Podcasts, but nobody’s talking about them, and their views are the opposite of MAGA — Or I wouldn’t have won the Presidential Election in a LANDSLIDE. [It wasn’t a landslide.] MAGA agrees with me [MAGA is starting to peel off], and just gave CNN a 100% Approval Rating of “TRUMP,” [this is a total flaming lie/delusion] not Hand Flailing Fools [Yawn.] like Tucker Carlson, who couldn’t even finish College [much of MAGA didn’t finish college either], he was a broken man when he got fired from Fox, [Yawn. Everybody’s retroactively broken when they leave MAGA] and he’s never been the same — Perhaps he should see a good psychiatrist [Self-own #2]! Or Megyn Kelly, who nastily [you only use “nasty” for women, apparently because of blood from their ‘wherevers’] asked me the now famous, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” question, or “Crazy” Candace [you sure love you some alliterating consonants: C-C, so cute!] Owens, who accuses the Highly Respected First Lady of France of being a man, when she is not, and will hopefully win lots of money in the ongoing lawsuit. Actually, to me, the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace [women you dislike are always ugly], in fact, it’s not even close! Or Bankrupt Alex Jones, who says some of the dumbest things [Yawn.], and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims [What? You noticed the murder of 20-odd children in 2012? Fancy that!], ridiculously claiming it was a hoax [set us straight, O king of hoaxes]. These so-called “pundits” are LOSERS [Yawn.], and they always will be! Now Fake News CNN [Yawn.], The Failing New York Times [Yawn.], and all of the other Radical Left [Yawn.] “News” Organizations, are “hailing” them, and giving them “positive” press for the first time in their lives. They’re not “MAGA,” they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA. As President, I could get them on my side anytime I want to [you tell yourself that, sweetie], but when they call, I don’t return their calls [They aren’t calling these days.] because I’m too busy on World and Country Affairs [on the golf course] and, after a few times, they go “nasty,” just like Marjorie “Traitor” Brown [are you perhaps referring to ‘brown-nosing’? The name’s Greene], but I no longer care [you always say that when you’re losing] about that stuff, I only care about doing right for our Country. [Ya, right]. MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH [and belonging to the He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club, Alfalfa] in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons [which your Director of National Intelligence just told us they didn’t have]. MAGA is about MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and these people have no idea how to do that, BUT I DO, because THE UNITED STATES IS NOW THE “HOTTEST” [your meaning is unclear here; hottest inflation? hottest incineration of jobs? most quickly vaporized world reputation? hottest circle of hell?] COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD! President [not for long, big guy.] DONALD J. TRUMP.

Deliciously, his targets are returning fire.

Tucker Carlson earlier had some things to say about Trump’s insane and profane Easter message. Now he is responding to Trump’s attack on himself by suggesting Trump may being blackmailed by Israel.

Candace Owens has a long and rather rational-sounding podcast about Trump, Iran, and Epstein. Also, she notes in an X post, “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home.”

Alex Jones sez: “Say one more thing…and I’m going to show you how the cow ate the cabbage…I’m not looking for a fight but if you want one you came to the right place…I’m going to politically throw you down the reactor shaft.”

Marjorie “Traitor” “Brown” feels sorry for him.

And Megyn Kelly is sticking it to him on the Iran War, though not responding to his personal attack as yet.

There’s only one word to describe my reaction to what’s going on, and it’s German: schadenfreude. Deep, deep joy.

But an item in today’s article in the Tennessee Lookout (an excellent outlet, by the way) forced a gasp from my throat.

The administration released its 2027 budget request last Friday. Weeks into a war that Americans didn’t ask for and don’t support, the administration asks for $445 billion MORE for the Defense Department, which calls itself, far more accurately now, the Department of War. The total would now be $1.5 trillion. That’s $1,500,000,000,000 for making war. My eyes glazed over at the second set of zeroes.

The budget also asks for increases to the Energy Department, the Justice Department, and the Veterans’ Affairs Department, and $63 billion for the Department of Homeland Repression, er, Security.

But it proposes shrinking funding to a slew of other departments, sometimes by startling amounts.

Agriculture? Down by nearly 20% to $20.8 billion. Is the administration deliberately trying to reduce support for our food supply? Trump has already hit farmers hard with tariffs, and then again with his war on Iran, which has closed the Strait of Hormuz and strangled farmers’ supply of fertilizer just at the moment they need it for spring planting.

The Environmental Protection Agency? Down 52% to $4.2 billion. The administration is, then, cutting our attempts to slow climate change in half.

The Labor Department? Down 26% to $9.9 billion. Cutting support for fair workplaces, fair wages, and business development.

The Small Business Administration? Down 67% to $35.6 billion. Cutting support for small businesses, presumably in favor of big ones or monopolies.

State Department and other international programs? Down 30% to $35.6 billion, further isolating the United States from the rest of the world, not to mention continuing our abandonment of the world’s poorest.

Most of our taxes are not going to help ourselves or anyone else. They’re going to bombing and taking over other countries to steal their natural resources.

That’s us now.

Of course, this is Trump’s ask from Congress, his wish list. Much of it may not happen. But written in the numbers is a portrait of the man: a bully, a thief, and a fool.