When Irving Berlin wrote “God Bless America,”

… I wish he had put “bless” into the past tense (“blessed”) and left it right there. So as not to anger the gods through overreach.

By the time Berlin was writing, America/The United States had already garnered an embarrassment of blessings just by geography alone. The United States was buffered by two oceans—making it almost impossible to invade. Right down the middle of the country was a navigable river, the Mississippi, that facilitated trade. West of the Mississippi was some of the most arable, fertile land on the planet. There were deep water ports on both sides of the country. There was abundant clean water, pristine forests, and a list of natural resources that encompassed the periodic chart.

And—poke in the eye—there was also a hard working population, continually refreshed by IMMIGRANTS.

It is only within the last decade that we have had to live with would-be tyrants …

… and, for those of us with a European heritage, also live with the cruelty that people of color have long known as ordinary. (Let this, I hope, be one of the lesson we take from this time. Oh, wait, is that woke? TDB.)

Casting off tyrants is, I hope, still in our bloodstream. (We’ll see.) And when I think of that idea, I think of the people in East Germany—specifically, the East Berliners of 1989. It must have been overpoweringly cathartic to take a hammer or a tong or even a big wooden spoon to that imprisoning Wall. This was forty years of incandescent rage traveling down the arms of ordinary people and landing with a thwang, splitting concrete and rebar into souvenir shards.

I think of this because it defused anger without resulting in violence on people.

We are going to need something of that.

Incandescent rage is, unless very, very narrowly channeled, a dangerous thing. And yet, hardly a day goes by where I don’t feel at least a twinge of it.

And I can’t be the only person who feels this.

II.

I was thirteen when, with my parents and one of my sisters, we visited—it was a pilgrimage, really—the Capitol, Washington D.C. I say “pilgrimage” because it was the April school vacation after the November national nightmare when John Kennedy was shot dead. Visiting the make-shift eternal flame next to his grave was a sort of tourist novena.

I have been fortunate enough to see many of the world’s iconic sites:

… the Pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum, Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, even The World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Kansas (I am not making this up.) And I can tell you that together—yes, together—they do not equal the overpowering sense of awe I felt when I first saw the Capitol building.

It was nighttime, after a 12-hour drive in the family’s ’64 Chevy Nova, and I was, admittedly, a bit delirious. But the site of the Capitol, all lit up, gleaming white, red white and blue flags lazily drifting in the breeze, an orgy of color, is seared into my brain.

I didn’t feel pride or patriotism. I felt something more powerful: awe. I was gazing at something luminously sacred. If it didn’t take my breath away, it certainly made my heart race.

My second visit to Washington D.C., five short years later, had a decidedly different tone. I was there for the March on Washington on November 15, 1969.

This was not the visit-the-cherry-blossoms, pick-up-a-few-souvenirs vibe of my earlier visit. This Washington D.C. was an armed camp, ready for trouble, National Guard soldiers everywhere. (And with good reason: overnight, the city had swelled by 600,000 people.)

The familiar landmarks—The White House, the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, the Reflecting Pool—all took on a different hue: they were still awe-inspiring but in a menacing way. They were symbols of government power: the ability to pluck you out of a college Calculus class, slap an M-16 into your hands, and send you half-way around the world for a cause no one could elucidate.

I wasn’t exactly scared, but I was certainly nervous. Okay, I was a little scared. But then I found out: there’s going to be entertainment as well as speeches!

This was a complete surprise.

The lineup was amazing. Well, amazing is an exaggeration. There were people whom I admired greatly on stage, for their conviction and their willingness to put themselves on the line: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, John Denver (who was already getting in my nerves) and —you can check this out!—Mitch Miller.

I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to their music. I considered folk music to be cotton candy and I was definitely into rock candy.

But there was a problem. When I was first learning guitar, “folk” songs—the ones from what Tom Lehrer called “The Great Folk Music Scare”—were where you cut your teeth on acoustic guitar. “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” were the learner’s repertoire.

The fact that I could sing and play guitar made me a minor celebrity in my extended family and at family gatherings and uncle or an aunt would invariably yell out:

“Hey John, play that hammer song … you know the bell and the oo-oo, or whatever the hell it is. Play that.”

“Play that” was never a request when it came from an adult.

When I bought my first electric guitar and figured out how to play “I Feel Fine,” I really did feel fine because I vowed that I would never play that “hammer” song again. Or any other folk music for that matter. Dylan beat me going electric by a bit; but like Dylan, I didn’t care what the audience thought. I was NOT going back to folk music.

III.

I had managed, almost, to entirely forget the song “If I had A Hammer.” Every once and a while, I’d get a whiff of one of the folks standards, a “mighty wind,” as Christopher Guest so perfectly captured it. “Give Peace a Chance,” John Lennon’s British import to the cause, would pop up now and again. Or the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” which is exactly what I did to the radio dial when that song came on.

However …

As I arrived at my first second-administration demonstration, the “Hands Off’-themed rally in April of 2025, a sound became more and more clear as I made my way from my several-blocks-away parking space toward the Common where the demonstration was taking place, a sound slipped in and out of range. Guitars … yes, voices … yes, a fiddle … yes.

On my last turn, I faced the Common and ... (you’re probably ahead of me here, but I’ll say it anyway,

It was “If I had A Hammer.” The song I had tried to forget was baaaaccckkkk.

Now God bless the people who were on stage —all apparently 34 or 35 of them — singing and playing (in a manner of speaking) on their own time.

And, as I’m getting ready offer a few notes, know that I do this in the spirit of solidarity. Seriously. I mean that.

Here are my notes:

Note #1:

Eleven guitars, no matter what the occasion, are eight or nine too many.

Note #2:

Lose the music stands.

These songs have three, maybe four chords, and the lyrics are repetitive. All those music stands on the stage look like a traffic jam on the Cross-Bronx parkway.

Learn the song at home. Come in prepared. I’m begging you.

IV.

It is hard for Donald Trump to surprise me, here in the tenth year of his omnipresence. But the “Octagon” and “The Claw” on the White House lawn for a UFC fight (doesn’t everybody see Nero’s Rome here?) were a genuine surprise. It turns out that the septic tank he bobs around in is infinitely deep.

Speaking of the $700 million-dollar Ballroom (c’mon, you know it’s going to cost at least that much), DJT said:

“It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself—because no one else will.”

Finally, the man said something that was actually true.

So he gilds the Oval Office in tacky faux-gold leaf appliqué, creates an eyesore of a ballroom, wants to build a Napoleonic arch to himself, stick his name on everything that is not moving, (personally, I’d like to see TRUMP tattooed onto Stephen Miller’s head—in fact, why not use that for all senior-level collaborators? And we shall know them by their deeds.)

Everything he touches, before it dies, takes on the vulgar tackiness of an oily used-car salesman’s office, from the bauble-headed tchotchkes to paper-thin tee-shirts.

Basically, he’s turned Washington D.C. and parts of Florida into a low-rent Disneyland. If it were in Romania.

V.

The idea for this post …

… no doubt originated in one of those moments of incandescent rage I occasionally experience. But I could have just let it go, and probably would have until I saw him trying to crash the picture of the winning team from Spain.

Honestly, that lit me up like a Roman candle. Although I have but passing interest in soccer, I have tremendous respect for what it took for the Spanish team to get to stand on that stage. And then we have gauche, boorish Mr. T crash the picture. Even the Ultimate Toady, Gianni Infantino Pinocchio, knew Mr. T was out of line. But he couldn’t save the picture.

That was a job for Photoshop.

So here’s the deal.

We can’t use hammers or tattoos or virtually any of the things I’ve mentioned here, because violence is unacceptable and tattoos are … well, maybe the tattoo idea is okay.

But we are going to need something with which to release our rage.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Trump Piñata.

Everybody sing!

If I had a hammer

I’d hammer the piñata

I’d hammer the piñata all over the lawn

I’d hammer out lying

I’d hammer out cheating

I’d hammer out the harm he’s done

My brothers and my sisters all over this land.

I am only partly joking here. There has been a collective trauma from which it will take (a) time and (b) excellent strategies to process the grief, disillusionment and—yes—physical violence this period has created.

So, toward that end, let me quote another song:

People, Get Ready.🎶

Here is another piece in the ambient direction in which I’m heading. I hope you like it!

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It’s a blindingly sunny, scorchingly hot early July day in 1962 or 1963 …

… and I’m standing on a curb, under a shade oak, just outside the Cpl. James C. Shea American Legion Post on Hyde Park Avenue in Roslindale, Massachusetts.

It’s the Fourth of July.

I hear the parade before I see it. The marching band has turned the corner from Canterbury Street to Hyde Park Avenue. It’s about a half a mile away and, in the heat, the band members look like a mirage, shimmering and undulating as their instruments reflect gold arcs like lasers. The excitement builds. My heart goes into overdrive.

Not surprising, that. Humans have been using parades for more than 5,000 years to create a shared identity, to express values, to celebrate special days and display power. They are rituals that allow us to participate in shared emotion.

By the time the parade reaches the American Legion post, the onlookers (maybe 500?) are primed.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our National Anthem,” someone invisible says.

The descending opening line begins. I take off my hat, no doubt a Red Sox cap, hold it to my chest. I believe with all my heart we are the greatest country on earth, that we always do good wherever we go and the rest of the world loves us. In addition, I am in the Roman Catholic period of my unbelievably circuitous faith journey— the one, true religion! So, I not only have the absolutely right religion; I not only live in the best place in the world; I am also likely going to heaven. For a kid, this is pretty heady stuff.

No wonder, then, that something starts to well up in my chest, fill it to overflowing, work its way to my throat and even cause my eyes to well up a bit.

This is the emotional power of choreographed ritual and myth: to pass at lightning speed through the cognitive function, head straight for the amygdala, and likely stimulate the release of oxytocin.

II.

If you think I’m going to dismantle these myths (oh, okay, the one true religion is pushing it), I’m not …

On the contrary: there were grains of truth in those national myths: we rebuilt a fair portion of Germany’s infrastructure after World War II; we reacted to the Depression not with austerity but with a Keynesian increase in social spending for the neediest; even the ambitious, socially conscious, New Society lay just on the near horizon. And to this I can absolutely attest: by the time of my first trip to Europe ten years later, I could not buy a drink in any bar I went to in England, Germany, or Italy.

We were loved.

Myths are load-bearing emotional (more) and intellectual (less) ideas that allow cohesion in a society.

The corollaries of those myths spread out like rebar in the construction of the laws and norms of the group. Without working myths, the unity of a country, a society, even a local club is difficult to maintain.

It will careen toward Babel.

But a myth is a hugely broad brush and it covers a lot of inconsistencies, if not outright falsehoods. We were, in 1962 or 1963, still a country of obscene racial disparity. And although there was an “American Dream” for some of us, it was not attainable for many, many people.

(If this sounds “woke,” then you are reading this correctly.)

III.

On September 13, 1970, the New York Times published an op-ed by Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” It became the long-awaited manifesto for “shareholder capitalism.”

Now, shareholder capitalism is not a new idea. The British East India Company, which those of us who studied history have heard quite enough of, thank you, was in the business of shareholder capitalism in 1600. (And they eventually screwed it up, too.)

What shareholder capitalism does is absolve corporations of any social responsibility other than maximizing profits for its stakeholders.

While we think, today: well, of course, this was a wildly radical idea in 1970. I had the “opportunity” to spend countless hours in economic courses in graduate school in the late 1970s. So, trust me when I tell you: they don’t call economics the “dismal” science for nothing, and—no—not everyone had bought into this idea of shareholder capitalism.

With good reason. The last time we let business run the country, we got the Gilded Age and then, a couple of decades later, the Great Depression. Not a great track record.

But memory is short, and the Friedman-ites were playing the long game. And at exactly the right time. There were several nascent movements —environmentalism, consumer rights, equal employment — that were just gaining some traction. Shareholder capitalism could not stop them; but it could hobble them until they became less and less effective—essentially just a nuisance.

And then, we arrive at the Myth-Buster-in-chief, Ronald Reagan. Reagan updated Calvin Coolidge’s “The business of America is business” to “… government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

IV.

Let’s take a breath here, okay?

Anyone who has had to renew a driver’s license in the pre-internet era, served on a jury, or fought to get a new school or library built knows that the wheels of government turn at a glacial pace. Government—governing—is frustrating, often wasteful, agonizingly slow, always imperfect.

To adapt Churchill: government is the worst institution for serving the common good—except for shareholder capitalism.

And while shareholder capitalism is acid on social cohesion, it disingenuously employs the foundational American myths to prop up its case:

If there is an American Dream, it is only working for aging Baby Boomers, like myself, who will soon be shuffling off the stage.

If there is a “colorblind society,” as several Supreme Court justices seem to think, I want that pointed out to me on a map.

We never were and certainly are not now, a “shining city on a hill.” Today, we are both terrifyingly hostile and boorishly laughable on the world stage. (This may be an historical first. Ah, “American Ingenuity.”)

V.

The old myths are gone, or going. Not retired, not updated — gone.

A myth cannot be consciously resurrected. It is an organic process. It develops over generations through repeated, unself-conscious behavior, passed down without announcement. You cannot sit down and write a myth any more than you can sit down and grow a forest. What has been dismantled cannot simply be reassembled.

And so we are in a liminal period. The dangerous middle. The old myths have lost their structural function and the new ones have not yet dared to take their place. If you listen carefully you can hear something — a low, persistent sound underneath the noise of the culture.

I want to call it, and I think it is not too dramatic to call it, the groaning of myths that are trying to be born.

I want to be that kid again, feeling the welling up of emotion in my throat at the thought of who we are. Not at the expense of another country, not because we are the “greatest country in the world.” I don’t care if we are the greatest country in the world. I just want a country where we aren’t on the razor’s edge of conflict every single day.

This can be done, but it requires work and the long game. So instead of going to the parade or the fireworks, I’ll be home making notes.

This is a working 4th of July for me.

This week, I watched both Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon on successive nights.
I suppose this was unavoidable:

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While watching the HBO show “Hacks” recently, I heard the song “Is That All There Is?”

Music being the magic teleporter that it is, I was rocketed back into the shotgun seat of 1966 Dodge Dart with my father driving. The car smelled like smoke. He was a Boston Fire Chief and he smelled like smoke a most of the time. I was at Boston University at the time and, when I would go home, I would often meet him at the Egleston Square fire station and bum a ride.

A song was playing on the car radio from some scratchy AM station. Peggy Lee, from my father’s era, had a bona fide hit with “Is That All There Is?”, so I would peg this sometime in the fall of 1969.

I almost always trusted my father’s musical taste. He was a very good singer, with a caramel baritone voice, he played guitar, and always entertained at family get-togethers. I think I had my hand on the radio dial, ready to change the station when he said:

“No, no. Leave it. I like this song.”

“You like this song?”

Instead of replying, he started singing along with the chorus:

Is that all there is?

If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

I thought this was lunacy. I was nineteen. Songs from Abbey Road were hoarding all the top spots on the charts and “Honky Tonk Women” had just been dislodged from owning the #1 position after being there for eight weeks. Who was this washed-up Big Band singer croon-talking what sounded like the last number the band played on the Titanic as the water lapped around their ankles?

To my father’s great credit (he was in his late 40s at the time), he didn’t say anything like “one day you’ll appreciate this song,” or “one day you’ll understand this song.” Because who knew? I could still think that sucked decades later.

I simply remembered that he, inexplicably, liked it. That lodged in my mind. As the inexplicable often does.

The morning after hearing the song …

… I went down to my little studio, fired up the computers, put on the headphones and located the song on Spotify. (Yes, sacrilege.)

I was stunned.

I could not believe how, in the past fifty or so years, this song became so good. Not just good, transcendent. Peggy Lee’s voice is bourbon velvet, a voice aged in oak barrels of disappointment and desire. The string arrangement is by a very young Randy Newman. And the banjo is the best use of the instrument since my next door neighbor swung a 1930s Gibson Mastertone at a would-be burglar.

I listened (and I also watched a live video from 1969) probably four or five times. I felt like I was in Weimar Germany and the Empire Room at the Waldorf Astoria had been re-located to Berlin. Or I was standing in the wings on the opening night of Cabaret. Or I was really hearing “Send in the Clowns” for the first time and recognizing the devastating wound it opens up.

It is world-weary and elegant at the same time. It also just barely threads the line between nihilism, despair, and action in face of hopelessness.

“Is That All There Is?” or translated, “Is This All There Is?” is a question that has followed me around ever since I can remember.

Once this idea enters your consciousness, it only leaves for the briefest of periods. It becomes the hum of the alternating current in your brain.

It becomes a companion, a sidekick. Like Churchill’s black dog.

Nihilism can be a very seductive philosophy. If nothing really matters, you don’t have to risk commitment, which means you don’t have to risk disappointment. And once you stop believing things can be fixed, destruction begins to feel righteous. It is easier to tear down a department, an agency, a university, a newspaper, or a democracy than it is to make one work. If all institutions are corrupt, there isn’t any need to improve them.

I remember looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows of an office overlooking Boston’s Back Bay. I had a good job that paid well. I got to travel to places I would never have seen were it not for that job. I had arrived at the target I had blindly shot my arrow at a decade before. Bullseye!

I would love to say the song “Is That All There Is?” went through my mind as I looked out the window. It didn’t. But an inchoate feeling of what that song conveys did. I was at a fork in the road. I could either ride this and pad my 401(k) for the next couple of decades, dying a little bit every year, or I could take a different road.

That’s how I see “Is That All There Is?” When that question pops up, it usually means that whatever road you’ve been traveling, even if it has been a good road, is ending. You might not see the ending just yet.

But trust me, every road eventually runs out.

Twenty years later, I found myself in an empty church sanctuary, thinking about ways to keep filling up the pews, keeping my fingers in the dike of the unstoppable reservoir of secularism that would eventually drown everything and—no, I didn’t think “Is That All There Is?” I thought: this has been a great road, I’ve had great companions. But I have to find a new road now.

I’m glad this question has black-dogged me all my life. Sure, there’s the occasional afternoon (or month) when nihilism descends like the November fog here in the Berkshires. And each day is a slog. And then, one day, you wake up and you feel a little lighter. The fog turns to mist. The sun starts to shine through the mist.

It is, I know after all the years, a rhythmic, sine-wave kind of thing. Doves don’t fly over the house in the sign of a cross, rainbows don’t start appearing over the Taconic Ridge. Bluebirds of happiness don’t dance on the railing of the deck.

Culturally, politically, spiritually, I believe we are at the trough of the sine wave. We have been battered and bruised for so long we don’t even know which way is up.

So those groans you hear? They’re part pain, but they are also part of the awakening of the human urge for Life, that power to affirm—even in the face of things that don’t seem to have any meaning—that life and creativity eventually wins out over depravity.

I think we may be in one of those “Is That All There Is?” periods right now.

Many of the things we thought were settled are now teeteringly fragile. Character traits we valued—integrity, compassion, truthfulness, kindness—are laughed at as weakness.

So, I’m going to do what my old man did for me. I’m just going to lay it out there. Say: here’s this song. I like it a lot. No other comment on my process, with one caveat:

It’s about beginning again. Not everything falling apart.

So raise a glass to what went before. Do whatever dance you want out on the dance floor.

But, dammit, this is not all there is. And I’m not talking about a heaven or hell or … wait, whatever happened to Limbo?

I mean there is so much more we are capable of. We still have more kindness, more courage, more imagination. More repair.

Tikkun olam.

I won’t have any new releases for a little while.

I’ve signed a distribution agreement with Soothe Sounds in Australia, and I’m excited about what comes next. I’ve been wanting to spend more time exploring both ambient and jazz music, and they’re fully behind that direction.

Over the next few months I’ll be writing, recording, and preparing a series of releases for the fall.

In the meantime, here’s a new ambient piece, The Quiet That Followed. As always, the full track is available as a free download on Bandcamp

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

Share

While watching the HBO show “Hacks” recently, I heard the song “Is That All There Is?”

Music being the magic teleporter that it is, I was rocketed back into the shotgun seat of 1966 Dodge Dart with my father driving. The car smelled like smoke. He was a Boston Fire Chief and he smelled like smoke a most of the time. I was at Boston University at the time and, when I would go home, I would often meet him at the Egleston Square fire station and bum a ride.

A song was playing on the car radio from some scratchy AM station. Peggy Lee, from my father’s era, had a bona fide hit with “Is That All There Is?”, so I would peg this sometime in the fall of 1969.

I almost always trusted my father’s musical taste. He was a very good singer, with a caramel baritone voice, he played guitar, and always entertained at family get-togethers. I think I had my hand on the radio dial, ready to change the station when he said:

“No, no. Leave it. I like this song.”

“You like this song?”

Instead of replying, he started singing along with the chorus:

Is that all there is?

If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

I thought this was lunacy. I was nineteen. Songs from Abbey Road were hoarding all the top spots on the charts and “Honky Tonk Women” had just been dislodged from owning the #1 position after being there for eight weeks. Who was this washed-up Big Band singer croon-talking what sounded like the last number the band played on the Titanic as the water lapped around their ankles?

To my father’s great credit (he was in his late 40s at the time), he didn’t say anything like “one day you’ll appreciate this song,” or “one day you’ll understand this song.” Because who knew? I could still think that sucked decades later.

I simply remembered that he, inexplicably, liked it. That lodged in my mind. As the inexplicable often does.

The morning after hearing the song …

… I went down to my little studio, fired up the computers, put on the headphones and located the song on Spotify. (Yes, sacrilege.)

I was stunned.

I could not believe how, in the past fifty or so years, this song became so good. Not just good, transcendent. Peggy Lee’s voice is bourbon velvet, a voice aged in oak barrels of disappointment and desire. The string arrangement is by a very young Randy Newman. And the banjo is the best use of the instrument since my next door neighbor swung a 1930s Gibson Mastertone at a would-be burglar.

I listened (and I also watched a live video from 1969) probably four or five times. I felt like I was in Weimar Germany and the Empire Room at the Waldorf Astoria had been re-located to Berlin. Or I was standing in the wings on the opening night of Cabaret. Or I was really hearing “Send in the Clowns” for the first time and recognizing the devastating wound it opens up.

It is world-weary and elegant at the same time. It also just barely threads the line between nihilism, despair, and action in face of hopelessness.

“Is That All There Is?” or translated, “Is This All There Is?” is a question that has followed me around ever since I can remember.

Once this idea enters your consciousness, it only leaves for the briefest of periods. It becomes the hum of the alternating current in your brain.

It becomes a companion, a sidekick. Like Churchill’s black dog.

Nihilism can be a very seductive philosophy. If nothing really matters, you don’t have to risk commitment, which means you don’t have to risk disappointment. And once you stop believing things can be fixed, destruction begins to feel righteous. It is easier to tear down a department, an agency, a university, a newspaper, or a democracy than it is to make one work. If all institutions are corrupt, there isn’t any need to improve them.

I remember looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows of an office overlooking Boston’s Back Bay. I had a good job that paid well. I got to travel to places I would never have seen were it not for that job. I had arrived at the target I had blindly shot my arrow at a decade before. Bullseye!

I would love to say the song “Is That All There Is?” went through my mind as I looked out the window. It didn’t. But an inchoate feeling of what that song conveys did. I was at a fork in the road. I could either ride this and pad my 401(k) for the next couple of decades, dying a little bit every year, or I could take a different road.

That’s how I see “Is That All There Is?” When that question pops up, it usually means that whatever road you’ve been traveling, even if it has been a good road, is ending. You might not see the ending just yet.

But trust me, every road eventually runs out.

Twenty years later, I found myself in an empty church sanctuary, thinking about ways to keep filling up the pews, keeping my fingers in the dike of the unstoppable reservoir of secularism that would eventually drown everything and—no, I didn’t think “Is That All There Is?” I thought: this has been a great road, I’ve had great companions. But I have to find a new road now.

I’m glad this question has black-dogged me all my life. Sure, there’s the occasional afternoon (or month) when nihilism descends like the November fog here in the Berkshires. And each day is a slog. And then, one day, you wake up and you feel a little lighter. The fog turns to mist. The sun starts to shine through the mist.

It is, I know after all the years, a rhythmic, sine-wave kind of thing. Doves don’t fly over the house in the sign of a cross, rainbows don’t start appearing over the Taconic Ridge. Bluebirds of happiness don’t dance on the railing of the deck.

Culturally, politically, spiritually, I believe we are at the trough of the sine wave. We have been battered and bruised for so long we don’t even know which way is up.

So those groans you hear? They’re part pain, but they are also part of the awakening of the human urge for Life, that power to affirm—even in the face of things that don’t seem to have any meaning—that life and creativity eventually wins out over depravity.

I think we may be in one of those “Is That All There Is?” periods right now.

Many of the things we thought were settled are now teeteringly fragile. Character traits we valued—integrity, compassion, truthfulness, kindness—are laughed at as weakness.

So, I’m going to do what my old man did for me. I’m just going to lay it out there. Say: here’s this song. I like it a lot. No other comment on my process, with one caveat:

It’s about beginning again. Not everything falling apart.

So raise a glass to what went before. Do whatever dance you want out on the dance floor.

But, dammit, this is not all there is. And I’m not talking about a heaven or hell or … wait, whatever happened to Limbo?

I mean there is so much more we are capable of. We still have more kindness, more courage, more imagination. More repair.

Tikkun olam.

I won’t have any new releases for a little while.

I’ve signed a distribution agreement with Soothe Sounds in Australia, and I’m excited about what comes next. I’ve been wanting to spend more time exploring both ambient and jazz music, and they’re fully behind that direction.

Over the next few months I’ll be writing, recording, and preparing a series of releases for the fall.

In the meantime, here’s a new ambient piece, The Quiet That Followed. As always, the full track is available as a free download on Bandcamp

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

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I can’t remember the last time I had the “final exam” dream. You know the one: you show up to the class in your pajamas, carrying your cup of coffee and a slide rule, ready to take the Calculus 101 final but it’s really the Sociology 357 final exam and you haven’t read any of the books or even been to one class and you are totally, royally screwed.

It is a classic anxiety dream. At its center are the single-most powerful fears we frail human beings have: the fear of being judged, evaluated, called out, exposed as the frauds we most certainly think we are.

Now, while I don’t have that dream anymore, I have another one.

The setting is always the same. A three-bedroom cape, 1,300 square feet in a modest, working-class neighborhood where no one ever locked the doors. I lived there from the time I was eight until I was eighteen — my most formative years, the place where my original OS was developed. Here’s what’s strange: we lived for twenty-five years in another house where we raised our family. I loved that house and still miss it. But it never shows up in my dreams. (We have lived in other places longer than I lived in that small Cape and they never make an appearance either.)

The subconscious, apparently, chooses its own real estate.

II. Every night (I think)

Into this small house, an ever-expanding cast of characters gathers nightly. It’s part Broadway production, part enormous cocktail party, part Sunday service, and nobody—especially me—seems entirely clear on what is going on. Songs break out from different parts of the house: “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” competes with “Take Me Or Leave Me” from Rent in the living room (which has somehow expanded to the size of Symphony Hall.) There’s a wedding in the kitchen and a birthday party in the back yard. My high school band, The Oatmeal Bedspread, is playing “Hold On, I’m Comin’” in the pizza-parlor-panelled basement while my Uncle John sings “Mother Machree” out on the porch.

It is Bedlam.

There is also, notably, no audience for this production.

III. And the cast

Oh yes, the cast. Ed — former congregant, novelist, a man who has thought harder about the human condition than most — is deep in conversation with Doug, a bartender from the 70s Rusty Scupper, a man who has seen the human condition from the other side of the bar. They are separated, in my timeline, by thirty years and every conceivable circumstance. In this room they appear to have a great deal to say to each other.

My sister Eileen and my mother-in-law Kay are talking a blue streak. In real life, they never met. The only thing they have in common is Florida. I, meanwhile, appear to have become irrelevant.

And in the corner — I have to look twice — my father is talking with Mark, a seminary professor from whom I learned more than I will ever be able to use. They never met. They couldn’t have. And yet they are deep in something, my father leaning in the way he did when a conversation had his full attention, and I find I don’t want to interrupt.

The dead mingle with the living as if the distinction never mattered much. Immigrant-Irish relatives—barely remembered, just off the boat, carrying whatever they carried across the Atlantic—are having a perfectly good time with the Yuppies I worked with in 1987. Seminary friends are deep in conversation with bartenders from the 70s-80s Allston-Brighton club circuit. Childhood friends who never knew my adult life are entirely comfortable with people who only know me out here in the Berkshires.

Nobody is performing for anyone.

IV. Read the room

For all the lives I have lived in this one life, there is one skill that has been the through-line. I have always known how to read a room. As a child it was survival—you learn early which way the moods are blowing, or there’s trouble. As a musician, reading a room was the difference between a good night and a long, lonely ride home. In advertising it was the whole job: if you could read the room at a presentation, you were golden. And in ministry it was the one thing they never taught in seminary but the one thing you needed when you walked into a sanctuary.

These rooms, I cannot read.

But honestly, it doesn’t really bother me.

By every measure of the anxiety dream, this should be a nightmare. The chaos is total. The cast is enormous and ungovernable. The production changes without notice. I have no script, no cues, no sense of what is being asked of me or whether I am delivering it.

And yet I don’t wake up in a cold sweat. I wake up, when I remember the dream at all, with something closer to wonder. Maybe even something like longing.

Which means this isn’t an anxiety dream wearing a party hat.

It’s something else entirely.

Consider what is actually happening in this room.

V. What I think is really going on

Nobody is performing for anyone. In every room I have ever read, someone was performing. That’s what rooms are — stages with an audience that has opinions. But not this one. In this room, everyone has apparently already passed the exam. The verdict is in, and it was fine, and now they are just here. Together. In a three-bedroom cape on a 5,000 square foot lot that somehow contains all of them.

I have spent considerable energy in my life trying to locate through-lines — in a song, in a campaign, in a sermon. The through-line in this room, the one I couldn’t see at first, is simply this: everyone here was known. By me, yes. But more than that—they were known, period. Seen. The Immigrant-Irish relative who never got a biography. The waitress who never made the obituary page. The childhood friend the world forgot about ten minutes after high school ended.

They are all, in this small house, equally present.

No hierarchy. No pecking order. No one more important than anyone else.

The casting director, whoever that is, got that part exactly right.

Now the official version of heaven doesn’t really work for me.

Not the clouds, not the wings, not the reunion-special sentimentality of it. I spent too many years in too many hospital rooms with the dying and the dead. I don’t see the world celestially. I see it as human and mortal.

And yet.

Every night — or most nights, or at least the nights I remember — my subconscious has been quietly building something. Without my permission. Without my theology. Without asking whether I find the whole enterprise intellectually defensible.

It has been building a place where everyone I ever knew shows up in the same small house. Where the dead and the living have apparently worked out their differences. Where nobody is auditioning, nobody is judging, and nobody — including me — knows exactly what the production is, but everyone seems fine with that. Better than fine.

“Every burden is lifted.” (Isaiah 10:27) Not because the problems were solved. Because the exam is over.

It turns out, we never had to prove anything. We only had to show up.

Maybe the subconscious knows something the waking mind just can’t seem to grasp. And maybe what I have trouble believing, I have already been visiting.

Don’t believe me?

Then I’ll see you in my dreams.

A few words about this, beginning with: yes, I did secure copyright permission to use this song.

Just prior to the pandemic, I had the idea to recreate “Rubber Soul” playing all the instruments and doing all the vocals. Why? I’m not entirely sure.

I think it may have been simply to inhabit the songs, to live inside them for a time.

I read and watched as much as I could about the recording techniques, the guitars that were used, the amps that were used, and even how George Martin recorded the little baroque piece that became the instrumental part of “In My Life.” (Since the part is mildly complex, he slowed the tape down to 50% and then played it at half tempo. Good enough for George, good enough for me. I did the same thing.)

As I was finishing writing this week’s piece, I realized this was the perfect musical accompaniment. I chose these pictures totally randomly.

As happens in my dreams.

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

At a certain point, if one is fortunate to live long enough, time becomes almost physical.

I routinely, in daydreams and night dreams, imagine myself in a rowboat, with no oars, from which I can see the land mass (the Past) from which I am drifting away. Every day, it recedes a little bit more.

That leads to nostalgia, a kind of hollow ache in the heart. It’s right there in the word: Greek nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). You see your home disappearing. You ache to be there.

Nostalgia, like how one arranges one’s sock drawer, is best left to oneself. There is no need to broadcast it; everyone’s “home” is different. It is also a double-sided coin. Since our memories are so faulty, so prone to rewriting us as the protagonist in our own story, nostalgia can conjure up a mythical past, a golden age that never really happened. Or it can overtake the present moment, which is the only real thing we have to hold.

(Who among us hasn’t found themselves retreating to the past after a blast of present-day lunacy?)

Nostalgia lets you return to places that no longer exist but in your heart.

I have this line written in one of my Commonplace books but, as is often the case, without attribution. (Maybe I thought it up? Unlikely.) However it got there, I would now change it to: “in your heart’s imagination.” That has the added benefit of vagueness which is a hallmark of nostalgia.

But however nostalgia is defined, it implies a separation. There is the land and there is the water. There is now and there is then. And as the now becomes compressed, the then continues to expand.

II. Age is exile

The word exile is a loaded word. So, I want to be careful how I frame this. I want to do this with respect for those who have experienced exile from their countries of origin (such as refugees), for those who have suffered emotional exile from families, even those who experience spiritual exile, cut off from meaning or contact with transcendence.

(If this sounds “woke,” then good. It’s about time that word is reclaimed.)

The exile to which I am referring is existential exile.

Exile literally means to be separated from your soil—your ground of being, your homeland. All of the Hebrew Bible, I would argue, is built around exile and return.

I did not have the slightest inkling of this when we moved, now more than a decade ago, more than a hundred miles from where I had grown up. I am a transplant here in the Berkshire hills. The soil here is not my soil.

To be human (from humus, Latin for earth, soil) means acknowledging that the longest relationship we will ever have, the most intertwined we will ever be—far more than with our spouses, friends, children, grandchildren—is with the soil. (Yes, this could be the air or the ocean, but hang with me here.)

In Genesis, God forms Adam from the ground:

Then the Lord God formed האדם (ha-adam, the human) from the dust of the אדמה (adamah, the ground/earth).

- Genesis 2:7

Occasionally, I drive by the cemetery in our little town. And I wonder: is this the soil in which I will dwell? Even though I have no belief in a conscious afterlife, I think: this is terrible. I won’t know anybody here. I will have to make small talk.

(This would be, quite literally, hell for me.)

Until I was 18, I lived in the city of Boston. Not the suburbs which I would later inhabit. The city itself, Roslindale to be precise. I knew the city like the back of my hand. Carl Jung would say the geography—the soil—of that city was imprinted on my mind. Later, I would move, many times, but the map in my head was always the city of Boston. Also, the house I grew up in up in, the soil in that backyard (which regularly traveled into the house on my clothes), that is still my home.

That first house becomes the template. Every other place I’ve lived is a palimpsest — a rewritten version through which the original still faintly appears.

It may be a template, but it is also a mirage. That city no longer exists. I did a book event down at the Seaport a while back and, if I had been dropped in there on a parachute, I would not have had any idea where I was.

So, at a certain age, you may find yourself doubly in exile. This is, of course, wildly irrational. But so is this homesickness, nostalgia, and that is very real.

III. This is an old story.

Kerry and I were at the movies (yes, the theater!) last weekend. In one of the previews, I saw the “The Odyssey” is coming to a theater near you sometime this summer.

The Odyssey is the ur-story of nostalgia, of homesickness.

Odysseus has been away from home for ten years, fighting at Troy, when he begins his 10-year odyssey home. This journey doesn’t progress smoothly, unless you consider encountering a Cyclops, cannibals, and six-headed monsters a smooth journey.

This plot line is perhaps the most well-used in all of storytelling. It is the spine of works as disparate as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to The Wizard of Oz. Take any five fiction books out of your bookcase, and I guarantee at least three of them will utilize this idea in some way.

This homesickness, too, is irrational. The phrase “you can’t go home again” is hardwired into the American psyche. Because it’s true. But also misunderstood. There are two moving parts in that phrase—“home” and “you.”

It’s not just home that changes, it’s you—me—that changes. Even if you could go home again, you are not the same person. We are all scarred and wounded and the way we remember things is, almost certainly, faulty.

Because nostalgia is not about a literal past. It is an ache for coherence, for a world that made meaning. Which is an illusion.

Nostalgia is rarely about a literal past. It is about the ache for coherence. For a time when the world felt whole, meaningful, inhabitable.

This is why the boat has no oars: you cannot go back home again.

IV. Age and (in)visibility.

Being “seen” crops up all over the place. Even in the outrageous, farcical road-rage-driven series “Beef” (well worth watching, if only for the send-up of the American Dream), there is a tender moment between the two antagonists where being “seen” is at the root of healing the relationship.

In Ulysses, in which James Joyce uses the map of the Odyssey, invisibility is at the core of Leopold Bloom, the hero. He moves through the streets of Dublin virtually unnoticed. He walks the streets, goes to a funeral, eats lunch, endures humiliation, and still retains his essential goodness, his essential compassion.

That invisibility is for Bloom, a Jew in early 20^th century Dublin, a form of exile. While Irish, he is not strictly Irish. He may speak with a brogue, but in Ireland, he is still an exile.

When I was younger, a tender and callow fellow, I identified, of course, with Stephen Dedalus. Brash, ironic, intellectual, certain that intelligence was my ticket.

But now, especially living in the United States, I have grown to appreciate Bloom. His ordinariness (another form of exile in this culture) is so beautifully rendered. It is his compassion that saves Stephen. What saves Bloom—what saves anyone—is the capacity to feel something on behalf of someone else. That capacity requires rich soil. And the soil is changing.

V. Age and exile from country.

Many of the nutrients in the soil that nurtured us have leeched out—honor, respect, compassion, self-deprecating humor, appreciation for community.

Many of my fellow citizens worship a golden fatted calf. And they are down on their knees before it, in their red hats and their righteousness, obnoxious, judgmental, patriarchal smugness.

The Israelites, at least, had the decency to feel ashamed when Moses came down from the mountain.

Real humor, also, has disappeared. This is not a small thing.

Humor requires self-awareness, the ability to stand outside yourself and see the absurdity. It requires, at minimum, a theory of other minds. That is absent.

They have no use for art. Art asks you to feel something on behalf of someone else. This, too, is beyond them. At the University of the Kitchen Table, where I did undergraduate and graduate work among my relatives, that is what made them essentially good people. Their soil was rich, imaginative, creative, and life-giving.

I no longer recognize the country I was born in. The soil is wrong. The air is wrong. I am, in the most literal sense I know, in exile.

And unlike Odysseus, I am not sure there is a home to sail back to.

I released this song, “Gone,” last week. It had a bit of a different vibe then.
But after today’s essay, the interpretation is up to you.

The download is free, below.

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

There are a handful of gigs, out of thousands, that I can remember in vivid detail—almost always because something bizarre or strange or absurd happened before, after, or during the gig.

For two reasons, this is one of those gigs.

First, I met Katherine Hepburn backstage.

By “met,” I mean I was introduced to her. We didn’t dance the foxtrot or do shots together, I simply shook her hand and went about my business.

She must have been in her late 60s at the time, an age that, as a tender and callow fellow, I considered Paleolithic. She did, however, still have that cut-glass patrician voice, cheekbones that could open envelopes, and that indiscernible star “thing” that you can feel but not explain.

But that’s just a minor part of the story. (So you know we’re moving to strange and absurd … bizarre.)

I was living in Allston at the time, about a three hour ride away.

I left Westport to drive home sometime before midnight, imagining I could, maybe, arrive home before three a.m.

Driving long stretches at night, the deep, dark part of the night, went with the territory. I generally didn’t mind it. It gave me time to unwind, let my body return to homeostasis after stage-induced adrenalin was working its way out.

Even with that, three hours was on the outer limits. I did have a cassette player in the car but the last thing I wanted to hear after a gig was music. Mostly, at this time of the night, I listened to the graveyard shift of late-night disc jockeys who took phone calls. The people who called in were border-line crazy, but in a harmless sort of way.

Near Hartford, I somehow missed the turn onto Route 84.

I didn’t realize I was on Route 91 until I was well on my way toward Springfield.

I know what you’re thinking: he must have smoked a joint before he left. That’s an excellent guess and Miss Hepburn did offer, but in this instance it’s unfortunately inaccurate. I did many, many stupid things in those days but I never smoked marijuana on long rides late at night.

So I got off Route 91 somewhere in the Windsors and there was no entry back onto the highway from there.

That section of Connecticut might as well have been Ohio.

I had never been there before. I didn’t know the names of any of the towns. I didn’t recognize any of the highway Route numbers.

Here is where I remind you that this was pre-cell phone, pre-Google Maps. When you were lost, you were LOST. And at 1:30 in the morning, especially on long stretches of dark, narrow back roads, there was no one to offer directions. If I remember correctly, I tried to go in a direction that “felt” north, assuming that would lead me, eventually, to the Mass Pike.

Which it did. About an hour of aimless wandering later. At (the former) Exit 3 in Westfield. The first sign I saw when I arrived on the Pike was “Boston 104 miles.”

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely.

There was barely another car on either side of the Turnpike. All I wanted was to be home. Two, three a.m.—this is the time that all the existential questions of life start picking at your brain like crows on road kill.

When I finally made it to Allston, probably around four in the morning, all the entry lights were shining over the doorways. It didn’t matter that they came on automatically. These were the lights that drew me home. My neighbors lived here. I was safe here.

This story floated up from my subconscious a while back. And I think I know why.

I’ve been having that feeling of being lost, in the middle of the night, with only a vague feeling of where north might be. Only now, it greets me every morning when I read the paper.

Somewhere, this country took a wrong turn, a disastrously wrong turn, that led into the wilderness. Into a place we had never seen or experienced before.

(Or, an even scarier thought: this is who we are, it was just covered over in a kind of performative set of “manners.”)

We are anxious, lonely, and the existential questions of who we are as a people will not leave us alone.

And we are disoriented. No iPhone is going to be of any help. I have to believe that we will, eventually, find the road again. But (and this is a metaphor that just keeps on giving), it’s going to be a long ride home. I’m hoping to make it as far as Worcester.

But for now, we are on winding, dark back roads where the trees look like skeletons, and there is no telling what is around the next turn.

Where we took the wrong turn is important to know. (It was likely more like several wrong turns compounded.) But that is the job of the historians. Seventy-five, one hundred years from now.

Our job now is to get home.

Every once in a while, something brilliant shows up in advertising…

…that taps into—here’s that word again—the subconscious. Here you might think I’m going to mention Nike or Apple—but no, not them. With “Just Do It” and “Think Different” they drew on an aspirational desire not a foundational, human need. (They also had millions of dollars to spend on a media budget.)

I’m thinking of Motel 6.

That tag line, “We’ll leave the light on for you,” was actually ad libbed by Tom Bodett, the voice talent, during a recording session. Now Motel 6 is not a luxury brand. I doubt people who wear $300 Nike Air Zooms or an Apple Watch Hermès Ultra stay there very often. But—and I might be alone in this, but I doubt it—when I hear that line, I hear hospitality, refuge, safety, we’ve-been-waiting-for-you.

The light in the window, the light over the door has been a sign of hope in dark times since ancient times. Inns, taverns, abbeys all used light to offer respite to those who wander.

I would add one twist to this. While it is important to find the light in the darkness, right now, it is even more important to be the light in the darkness. Put your porch light on. For the people out there on a dark road, going in a direction that only feels like north. They need to know that there are still good, compassionate people who have a place they can return to when this is over.

A few weeks back, I began a study in quiet pastels—small, restrained pieces built on tone and space. But as they unfolded, they revealed an arc I hadn’t planned: from memory to presence, from longing to release. Each piece holds a different moment in that passage—what was, what remains, what nearly was, and what has slipped away. Here, melody is intertwined with time, carrying feeling forward even as it fades.

I started with “Once ,” which ted to “Still.” And here is the video for “Almost.” (You can download it for free below.)

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

Remember, we are about this: tikkun olam. How do we repair the world? How do we prepare for what comes next, even if we won’t live to see it?

Social media is a good place to start.

Social media—the concept itself: a digital platform where people can create, share, exchange ideas, post pictures, share funny videos—is neither good nor bad.

Take Facebook, for example.

Pre-algorithmic Facebook (2006–2009) was, mostly, a neutral thing. Enjoyable on occasion. Old friends from grammar school and high school emerged from the woodwork of time. (Sometimes to reinforce why they were in the woodwork of time.)

Oh, how naïve we were. We (I certainly did) handed over personal information, agreed to terms and conditions several hundred pages long, and couldn’t see any possible downside.

The Great Gatsby is more than some of the greatest prose ever written. It is prescient. It is a roadmap for how the United States works—in the 1920s and the 2020s.

After all the carnage at the end (Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson all dead, while Daisy and Tom Buchanan get off scot-free), Nick says of the Buchanans:

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…”

Compare this to Facebook’s early motto:

Move fast and break things.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, in Careless People, describes how Facebook, in its desire to increase engagement (and consequently revenue), found that outrage was the rocket fuel for engagement.

So while we were posting pictures of our pets, our vacations, our dinners, very quietly the (now) superconducting algorithms were pythons wrapping themselves around this formula:

Outrage + Fear + Identity = Virality + Engagement

When I was looking into this, the most horrifying statistic I came across was this:

43% of United States adults regularly turn to Facebook for news. (source: Forbes)

Wait—what???

That’s like saying 4 in 10 Americans get their drinking water straight from the Mississippi River, ingesting fertilizer runoff, industrial waste, treated sewage, and algae blooms.

There are many more things that make Facebook and other social media platforms anti-social, and I will pursue this later.

But let’s wrap this up around a quote from James Madison:

“A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy…”

We can’t force people to read. We can’t force people to be informed. But we can at least change the menu so that large doses of poison and outrage aren’t being served.

That means regulation—and that is already starting.

And it’s one of the things for what comes next.

The music video, here, is of a piece that’ll be coming out tomorrow. It’s called “Still.”

In the 1970s, psychologists gradually came to understand that our memories were not just “little movies.” Some, especially if they were significant, became “snapshot memories.” This piece tries to capture that idea.

If you’d like, stay a moment longer…

As part of my attempt to spread some calming music into the world, I am making most of my “quiet” catalogue, and an occasional uptempo piece, free to download. No strings. All you have to do is click the “download” on the clip, and magically you’ll be transported to my Bandcamp page where you’ll see: “Free Download.”

That’s it.

Here is last week’s piece:

And, while calm is good, so is dancing:

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

Who doesn’t want to close their eyes and just brace for impact?

That’s the first Substack sentence I’ve written in nine months.

Last August, I stepped away from Substack, social media, and the news.

(Though not abandoning the Oxford comma.)

I’d reached the limit of what I could absorb and process coherently.

Underlying it all was a deeper reason: I had nothing to contribute to the “conversation.” The world didn’t need another person talking about how crazy it had become.

I thought I might take a couple of weeks, maybe three, to “recharge.”

August bled into September. Then September bled into autumn, autumn into the holidays, the holidays into the cold, numbing winter.

For a short time, I had some peace.

But the news always tracks you down—even if you don’t seek it out.

At some point, probably in the cold, dark days of that most unbearable of months—February—when the frigid temperatures and the incessant snow kept me indoors near the fire, a very scary thought began to take hold.

The thought was:

This—this chaotic, corrupt, cruel, venal, self-righteous, faux-Christian theater of grievance and power—will not end in my lifetime.

I don’t mean it will go on forever. Only that I will not live to see it end. Even if we reverse course, the damage is going to take not years, but generations to repair.

I am in reasonably good health. But I am at an age where, if I collapse in the frozen food aisle while doing the shopping, the reaction will not be “oh, the unfulfilled promise!”

It will be: “cleanup in Aisle 14.”

So, let’s talk about hope—and the coming moral reckoning.

I have written about “hope” in many places.

There is false hope—little different from wishing.

There is “hard” hope: choosing to act, knowing you might fail.

And then there is what I’ve come to think of as long hope—acting with the full knowledge that you will never see the outcome. There is something beautifully clarifying in that. It asks a different question:

How, then, do we live?

Not as members of any institution, but simply as human beings.

And that’s why I changed the title of my Substack.

When I was writing Dance Steps for the Apocalypse, there was an assumption—never stated, but always there—that if we named what was happening clearly enough, we might reverse it. Flip a switch. Return to something like 2014.

That, I’m afraid, was misguided.

There is no going back. There is only going through.

And that is what “For What Comes Next” is about: what actions do we take now, knowing many of us will never witness the outcome?

That leaves us with moral questions we cannot avoid:

What do we do with the MAGA people in our lives?

Can the damage to the Judeo-Christian “tradition” be undone?

How do we create community? (Community is painstakingly hard to maintain; it is even harder to create.)

I have been drawn to cathedrals all my life.

To walk into a cathedral is to experience, in Mircea Eliade’s words, “the meeting point of heaven and earth.” It should be an overpowering, awe-filled experience. If you’ve ever touched the stone of Notre Dame, Cologne Cathedral, or the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, remember this:

The builders who laid those foundations knew they would never see the completion of their work.

That is sacred work: to build something you will never live to see finished.

What you can expect from “For What Comes Next”:

A kind of hope that is not optimism:

It expects nothing.

It is not a plan. It does not assume progress.

It is not a wish. It does not imagine that things will “turn out well.”

It is about making meaning.

Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, asked a simple question: How do we live in a world that is absurd?

His answer: we make our own meaning.

If I’ve learned anything in the past ten years, it is this:

We are on our own.

An invitation.

I invite you to join me in this. To stand, for a moment, in the same unfinished space. To ask, together: how do we live when we know we will not see the end of what we begin? I welcome your questions, your disagreements, your reflections. This is a conversation, not a verdict.

There is a phrase in Jewish tradition—tikkun olam—“repairing the world.” It is the work of those who know the world will never be fully repaired in their lifetime, and who choose to work on it anyway.

Cathedral work.

Long hope.

If you’d like, stay a moment longer…

No paywall—ever. If this piece speaks to you, share it.

I know enough about Hindu philosophy to know that I shouldn’t be writing about Hindu philosophy. But I came across this idea many, many years ago and jotted it down in a notebook. (This is an argument for the advantages of keeping notebooks and journals.)

🕉️ Sannyasa. 🪷

This is the fourth and final stage of life.

A definition:

At this time of life the only duty is to gather together one’s mind and place it upon the [Eternal]. … to move towards an existence which involves more solitude, to begin in earnest the path of self-discovery. Your worldly relationships and connections are now coming to an end.

Let me remove the ominousness from that last sentence. I am in good health.

I’m not sure if this is temporary or permanent. I do know that it will be at least a few months.

Because …

Over the last ten days, I’ve been unsubscribing like a crazy (I am VERY close to Inbox Zero), started reading literature instead of opinion, stayed off social media. And it felt WONDERFUL.

Also, this will give me a chance to work on the corrupting need to be “relevant” which—for me, anyway—makes me as twitchy as a detoxing squirrel.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for reading.

And, appropriately enough there’s this. I suppose it should have a question mark at the end, like I’ll Be Back?

Listen here:

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“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

— Anne Lamott

“The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding: in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

“Explain to me—if you can—how the same gospel that produced Francis of Assisi produced Joel Osteen.”

— Me, a question I often ask myself in the shower

Let me preface these remarks with a few quick bona fides. I’m not just pulling this material out of thin air. I’ve been a pastor in the United Church of Christ (Congregational) for the past twenty-five years. And while my view of “God” has evolved over that period, my belief in the gospel message has remained unwavering.

🧭 I. Christianity Has Been Hijacked

Many—not all, but many—of the churches that call themselves Christian bear little (if any) resemblance to the Jesus of the gospels.

A. 🧲 Power Attraction

The Jesus of the gospels did not sidle up to power.

Today, power attracts church leaders like a magnet. Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, and Paula White openly support a man who is vulgar, racist, and disdains Christian ethics—all to maintain access to power.

And it’s not just Protestants. Figures like Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Strickland and organizations like the Knights of Columbus openly support the regime, squirming to get closer to power.

B. 📜 Beatitudes Reversed

The Beatitudes—arguably Jesus’ core message—on the poor, the meek, and the persecuted are completely ignored. Worse, they are reversed:

Blessed are the rich.

Blessed are the powerful.

Screw the persecuted.

C. 🚪 From Radical Welcome to Radical Gatekeeping

Jesus’ association with sinners, tax collectors, Samaritans, lepers, and criminals is incontestable. The words are right there in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yet today, that radical welcome has turned to radical exclusion.

And we haven’t even touched on the sexual abuse coverups in both Roman Catholic and Protestant institutions.

🕊️ II. This Has Happened Before — And Rescue Always Comes from the Margins

This is not a new story.

Institutions, absent oversight, drift toward bloated corruption and complicity with empire.

When that happens, resistance rises—sometimes from inside, but more often from the margins. The misfits. The prophets. The holy fools.

For example:

✨ Francis of Assisi

Francis may be the most foolish of holy fools. He renounced wealth, embraced lepers, lived in radical poverty. (See: Jesus) He came dangerously close to incurring the Church’s wrath. After his death, his movement was absorbed, neutered, and silenced by the very institution he challenged.

✊ Martin Luther

Luther was an “insider” who only wanted reform. But his stance, which included resistance to the church’s corrupt practice of taking money for indulgences, was too radical. Luther barely escaped death after he was declared a heretic and excommunicated. Were it not for Frederick, Elector of Saxony’s protection, Luther would surely have perished at the stake.

📚 Liberation Theology

Liberation theology, which sees Jesus’ stance in the gospels as leaning toward the poor and oppressed, emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Since it threatened the wealthy and powerful, quite naturally it drew condemnation.

Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) actively tried to suppress or restrain liberation theology during the 1980s and 1990s. Priests and theologians who espoused liberation theology were censured or pressured into silence.

🩸 Oscar Romero

Though not strictly a liberation theologian, he embodied its ethic:

“A Church that does not unite itself to the poor… is not the true Church of Jesus Christ.”

He was assassinated at the altar in 1980 while saying Mass.

The list goes on: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, all the Catholic priests and nuns killed in El Salvador, Meister Eckhart, Henri Nouwen, Sister Simone Campbell (“Nuns on the Bus”)...

You might ask—justifiably—what did they accomplish? Many of them were killed. All of them were pressured by the Institution. And have things changed?

I think that’s the wrong question. The question should be: How do we model their behavior?

⚠️ III. Why the Institution Can’t Save Itself

It’s not because people inside the Church are evil. It’s because institutions—by nature—preserve themselves. Their first instinct is to protect order, hierarchy, and control.

But the gospel always threatens that order.

It uplifts the last, shames the proud, confronts power, and forgives the unforgivable.

We keep thinking that this time the Church will be different. That this time, the guardrails will hold. But they don’t. And they won’t.

So we must stop waiting for institutional Christianity to rescue us. We must rescue ourselves.

🛟 Three Concrete Steps Toward Rescue

🔁 Reclaim

As I wrote last week, the Bible is an endlessly complex, often contradictory tapestry of humanity encountering the Divine (Sacred, Mystery, Ground of Being). It is a library, not a rulebook.

Can you find a vindictive Jesus? Sure. But his anger is always aimed at the powerful, the hypocrites, the unmerciful.

But let’s take the gospels as a whole. A good faith reading of the gospels can only come away with this theme: the Kingdom of God is here and now if you practice radical love, promote justice, embrace humility, and offer mercy.

Everything else is window dressing.

Let us reclaim that message.

✊ Resist

The Bible has been used to justify:

• Slavery

• Gun ownership

• Polygamy

• Colonialism

• Genocide

• Greed

• White supremacy

• War

At this point, I hope you’re asking: WTF???

These cherry-picked positions strain the Biblical narrative and rely, mainly, on tribal rules created by a people carving out a civilization 2500 to 3000 years ago.

You won’t find them in the gospels.

Resist these interpretations as tools of fear, exclusion, and control.

They are not the gospel.

😂 Ridicule

Some folks may be uncomfortable with this, but I believe ridicule is a sacred tool.

Done with some panache, it holds a mirror up to power and exposes its absurdity. Laughter is not only contagious, it is acid on pomposity. Ridicule also exposes the popsicle-stick scaffolding that these ideologies are built on—flimsy, theatrical, and desperate.

Ridicule has a long history as a tool of resistance:

Elijah vs. the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:27)

“Maybe your god is asleep—or on the toilet?”

Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler in The Great Dictator

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver—modern prophets using satire to reveal hypocrisy

Ridicule unmasks the flimsy scaffolding of authoritarian theology.

🌱 Final Word

We’re probably not going to “fix” institutional Christianity.

But maybe that’s not the point.

Christianity was never meant to be an institution.

Let them have the cathedrals and megachurches. All we need are coffee shops and living rooms.

The gospel may be underground right now, but we can raise it up through reclaiming the message, resisting its perversion, and ridiculing its enemies.

It was always this way.

Thanks for reading.

Every once and a while, if the weather is right and my timing is right, I catch that moment just as the sun disappears behind the Taconic Ridge — five miles or so from our back deck.

I don’t know a word from the visual equivalent of “hush.” Still Point is as close as I can get.

So here is a little more than a minute of complete calm:

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“Dance Steps for the Apocalypse” will always be free. But you can help in two ways. To appease the Algorithm Gods, a simple like (❤️ ) makes this post more visible. And for extra credit, re-stacking this post or sharing with friends would be a great kindness. Thank you for reading.

The Institutional Church will not save us from fascism.

With the flagrant displays of savage brutality, the incessant lying, the unimaginable greed, the bloodthirsty revenge, the unctuous, narcissistic pride exhibited by the current regime, you might think that Christianity—the very same Christianity they espouse—could somehow counterbalance this.

That is, it should be a corrective, a mitigating force, a source of compassion.

You might think that. But you would be wrong.

Spend a minute with the video below. Please. This was posted on X by the Department of Homeland Security. It is an official communication/piece of propaganda. It encapsulates everything about cruelty being the point.

The distortion of the Biblical message (the Isaiah verse is taken completely out of context), Kristi Noem cosplaying Xena the Warrior Princess, the implied hunting down of immigrants, as if they were game isn’t just revolting. It says, in sixty seconds, all we need to know:

These people are Christian Fascists:

The Guardrails Are Gone (and I’m as tired as you of hearing that statement.)

Like almost all the so-called “guardrails,” this one—the core message of Christianity— crumbled early on. It folded like a bad hand. Actually, in the hands of Biblical literalists and evangelicals, the guardrail was ripped off and turned into a sword—and that sword was plunged into the very heart of the gospel message.

Let’s see how this could happen.

What Is the Institutional Church?

If this were 1516—the year before Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg—it would be easy to define: Roman Catholicism. (Yes, there was a Great Schism in 1054, but I am looking here at Western Christianity, not the Orthodox Church.)

But it’s 2025, so the Institutional Church consists of Roman Catholicism, Protestant denominations, and non-denominational bodies. (More or less.)

The Lure of Power

Institutional Christianity—large, unwieldy bureaucratic bodies—has almost always sidled up to power, wealth, and influence.

This is not an opinion. This is history.

Three examples (out of hundreds from which I could choose) just in the twentieth century.

1. The Reichskonkordat. In 1933, the Vatican agreed with Nazi Germany to stay out of politics to protect church property. This effectively legitimized Hitler and silenced Roman Catholic opposition.

2. The Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (Evangelical Church of Germany), the largest combined Protestant denomination, in the 1930s aligned themselves with Nazi ideology and promoted racial purity and nationalism.

3. The Catholic Church in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, publicly blessed his fascist regime in return for state funding and preferential treatment.

I don’t present this to be anti-religion. On the contrary, I am trying to hold these institutions to account. And there were brave individuals who stood up to these despicable actions.

The corrective always comes from individuals and small groups—some toiling faithfully in obscurity, others having a profound impact. (More on them shortly.)

Why Institutional Christianity Can’t Rescue Us

Here are just three reasons why Christianity, as it’s been captured by institutions, can’t come to the rescue:

1. Poisoned by Nationalism

Once the cross gets wrapped in a flag, and the idea of a “chosen people” (or worse, a “chosen person”) enters the frame, we no longer have Christianity. We have a civil religion.

In this version of civil religion, Christianity becomes performative and the “chosen” people are almost always white.

That’s why you see Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt wearing crosses—not as reflections of Jesus’ teachings, but as signals to other power-hungry Christian Nationalists. On them, the cross is no better than a swastika.

Or consider Pete Hegseth, who declared before Congress: “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.” And then, a few weeks later, before that same body, laughed about shooting at protesters.

In this warped theology, Jesus becomes a superhero for the strong.

2. The Idolatry of Power

Power protects itself. It bends truth to suit its narrative.

There is no good-faith reading of the gospels that concludes Jesus was preaching domination, revenge, intimidation, or scapegoating.

Yet in practice, that is exactly what this regime is doing.

“You will know them by their fruits.”
(Matthew 7:16)

3. Biblical Cherry Picking

The Bible is not magic. It is a human record of existential questioning: Who are we? Why are we here? What makes for a good, ethical life?

It was not written by God—no matter how expansively you define “God.” It was written by many people, for many audiences, across many centuries, and reflects changing ethical concerns.

So, not surprisingly, it contains contradictions. For example:

The Bible condones (and occasionally encourages):

• Genocide and ethnic cleansing (Joshua 6–11)

• Retribution (Exodus 21:23–25)

• Capital punishment for minor offenses (disobeying one’s parents!)

• Tribalism (Deuteronomy 7:3–6)

· And yet it also calls for humility, mercy, and compassion.

• “Act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” — Micah 6:8

• “For those who exalt themselves will be humbled.” — Matthew 23:12

• “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” — Luke 6:36

• “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” — Colossians 3:12

• “Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” — Leviticus 19:33–34

• “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” — Matthew 25:35

The Most Radical Idea Ever Conceived

The Bible is endlessly complex, often contradictory, and absolutely not inerrant.

But it also contains what might be the most revolutionary idea in human history: “Love not only your neighbor—but your enemy.” This idea is so radical, so countercultural, it has almost never been practiced institutionally.

As Father Daniel Berrigan put it:

“If you strictly follow Jesus, you’d better look good on wood.”

A Final Word of Hope

And Berrigan leads me to a message of hope: it has always been individuals, not the institution, that have embraced the core message and ultimately brought about change in the institution.

Individuals, from the wilderness and the margins, have heroically tried to bring the message, pure and undiluted, to the world. We have a name for some of these individuals: martyrs.

We can count Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Franz Jägerstätter (now recently beatified!) in this group.

There is another group, the imprisoned and the harassed: Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Phillip, Chris Hedges, William Sloane Coffin.

The change always comes from the margins.

I’ll talk about this next week. I’ll write more about these individuals—how they resisted power, stayed true to the gospel, and became signs of hope in a dark time.

I’ll also explain why I think this will happen again. In small communities. In local churches.

Until then, thanks for reading.

Yikes. After that screed, I need some calming down.

Here is a languid, soothing piece, called “Amber Afternoon.” I offer this as a corrective to the Department of Homeland Security video you had to watch.

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“Dance Steps for the Apocalypse” will always be free. But you can help in two ways. To appease the Algorithm Gods, a simple like (❤️ ) makes this post more visible. And for extra credit, re-stacking this post or sharing with friends would be a great kindness.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

— Rumi

In this post, we’ll explore three things:
1. How the American middle class became one of the most powerful cultural engines in modern history.
2. How economic contraction and digital provocation turned tribal identity from expressive to existential.
3. Whether it’s still possible to hold the middle—not politically, but spiritually.

A Clip That Stopped Me Cold

I caught a Scott Galloway clip while zipping through my media stream that brought me to a full stop. I watched it three times. In it, he said (I’m paraphrasing here):

The American middle class is the greatest invention in history.

I don’t know if those are his exact words, because even in this age of powerful search engines that can basically perform digital colonoscopies, I could not find it again.

Do you know Pascal Hetzscholdt? (Neither do I.)

However, I did find something from Pascal Hetzscholdt. I have no idea who Pascal is. (His bio says AI strategist.) I had never heard of him before. But he said this, and dammit, I’m going to use it:

“The Middle Class in America is the greatest innovation in history. … It’s the American middle class that beat back fascism in the middle of World War II… financed and built the greatest innovations, whether it’s radar, the internet, vaccines…”

I should point out that neither Pascal nor I are accredited historians. And that the Middle Class in America was closed to a lot of people. That said, intuitively I feel this statement is accurate.

The Cultural Engine of the Middle

If nothing else, this middle class was a monolithic cultural force from post–World War II until just recently. The generation before me stormed the beaches at Normandy, went to college on the GI Bill, built the suburbs, raised three-child (at least) nuclear (often) families, belonged to unions, went to church.

As for my generation, we can get some credit for the expansion of rock ’n’ roll, Motown, NASA, the introduction of the personal computer, Studio 54, and living through the Great Polyester Scare of the ’70s.

Note: Was this a golden age? No, it wasn’t. (Vietnam, anyone?) Why? Because there is no golden age.

From Expression to Survival

I am not saying that we weren’t tribal, that bane of humanity. We were. But the tribes weren’t dangerous. Certainly no more dangerous than the Jets and the Sharks prancing around the stage in West Side Story.

Tribes were neighborhoods, sports teams, music, fashion and—yes—politics. But it wasn’t life-or-death politics.

In the post-war years, the middle class was growing, expanding, attainable. In this atmosphere, tribes were expressive. Your piece of the pie didn’t endanger my piece of the pie.

Are the rise of the culture wars, the re-distribution of wealth upward in the ’80s, the shrinking middle class and the rise of identity politics connected?

It’s hard to say they’re not.

The contraction of wealth placed enormous pressure on the middle class—just to stay where they were. Tribal identity went from being expressive (live-and-let-live) to existential, a matter of survival. Keep your hands off my piece of the pie!

The Last Day of the “American” Tribe

Perhaps this could have been rectified. Perhaps if there were people prescient enough to watch that trend line between middle and wealthy shift right around the year 2000. And think: this is trouble down the road. We’re putting sand in the engine that drove all this.

But no one did.

We didn’t know it at the time, but when George Bush stood on the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001, it was the last day that we, as Americans, were one tribe. And it lasted about 72 hours.

Then Came Social Media

The fracturing of that tribe started almost immediately. It only took one more thing: social media.

It started innocently—reconnecting with high school friends, pictures of sunsets, birthday parties. Those halcyon days lasted about six years. (2007–2013) By 2013, the early algorithms were mini-acetylene torches cutting us right down the middle.

It didn’t take long for Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (YouTube) to realize what Roger Ailes did in 1996. Ailes invented the business model to follow.

When Ailes founded Fox News—not long after his despicable, race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 presidential election—he used his 30-year-old playbook: aggression, anger, and fear SELLS.

Social media executives learned there was money to be made in provocation. The algorithms were tweaked, over and over, to zero in on rage. That’s what creates engagement. And engagement creates $$$.

What could possibly go wrong?

A Personal Test

I experienced a bit of this last week. I spend almost no time on Facebook and I don’t even have an X account. I have a quiet little corner of Facebook, in a private group, where I post music with other musicians.

Perhaps you saw the song/piece I did last week, “America (You Are A Mystery To Me).” I did post that, out in the open, and it received a bit of favorable response. (Picture 1 below.) Then again, this was from my “friends”—a pretty self-selected, well-curated group.

For the first time ever, I decided to “boost” a post. (If you ever thought Facebook was a level playing field, I can disabuse you of that.) For $20, the post/song went out into the world.

Among those reactions was some blowback, which I kind of expected. What I did not expect was the comment-fighting. While I did not engage (honestly, arguing politics on Facebook is like trying to baptize a cat), people went at it hammer and tong in the comments with the usual tropes:
- if you don’t like it, move
- are you really that stupid?
- immigrants are stealing my Social Security
- no more condoms for Uganda
- it’s Democratic politicians

What I Saw Behind the Comments

Fair enough. I put something provocative out there and… well, let’s just say I won’t do that again soon. (Did Stephen Miller see this post?)

And here’s why:

When I went to the pages of those who had the most spite-filled comments, I found that they apparently weren’t as obnoxious in real life. A lot of them were grandparents, like myself. They had pictures of them with their grandchildren. Doing the usual grandparent things: at the beach, at a playground, at a birthday party.

They also, from their pages, did not appear to be wealthy. I could be entirely wrong about this, but these people may be hanging by their fingernails onto the lower middle class. They are the perfect audience for aggression, anxiety and fear. They need an Other to blame.

This is not to excuse them. And there were, I’m sure, some professional haters, racists, and bigots in there.

Bit this is what happens when the squeeze is on.

Can We Stay in the Middle?

If you’re waiting for the answer, you’re not, I’m afraid, going to find it here. The middle is disappearing financially. The middle is gone politically.

But can we hold on to a middle psychologically? Spiritually?

And if so, how do we do this when what we see is so morally repugnant? That goes against every fiber of our being?

For now, I have to stay in this middle: I do not know.

But I’m working on it.

Thanks for reading.

“Drifting Toward Noon” is the second piece in a five-part “summer day” collection of pieces I’m working on.

It comes from a very distinct memory. When I played music for a living, I rarely arrived home before three a.m. I would wake in the morning after everyone had gone to work and, for the first and last period of my life, I could drift up from sleep. Rise like a swimmer from the unconscious to the surface of the day.

No alarm clocks. No appointments. Just the warmth of the sun and the softness of the bed.

Henry James said “summer afternoon” was the most beautiful phrase in the English language. I think “late summer morning” is a close second.

Just a reminder, a simple like (❤️ ) makes this post more visible.

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Dear Friends,

Tomorrow night, we will go to the fireworks.

It will not be a celebratory event. It will be an event of memory, of what once was.

This week, no words. Just this new piece of music (with my Little Room Band) and the accompanying video. This sums up what I’ve been feeling: confusion, anger, embarrassment, shame, grief, and disbelief.

Thanks for listening.

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🥶 Know someone else dancing on the edge of collapse? Send them this piece. Or post it on Bluesky, Facebook(!), or wherever humans still congregate.

“Dance Steps for the Apocalypse” will always be free. But you can help in two ways. To appease the Algorithm Gods, a simple like (❤️ ) makes this post more visible. And for extra credit, re-stacking this post or sharing with friends would be a great kindness. Thank you for reading.

“The spiritual life is not a process of addition but subtraction.”
— Meister Eckhart

I began writing on Substack about a year before my book, Honest to God, was published. It was a heady time. Book contract in hand, final edits nearly finished, the social media plan—which now included Substack—in place.

What could possibly go wrong?

That may have been the original intention, but over time, things morph, don’t they?

The world changed.

The Fall of 2023 seems as long ago, now, as the Fall of Rome. Every single day, there is yet another existential crisis. Every single day, the earth rolls to the edge of yet another precipice. Every single day, there is another act of cruelty so barbaric, so inhuman, so demonic that, if I believed in Christian mythology, I would imagine that archangels must descend and vanquish the masked perpetrators.

They don’t.

But words? A couple of years ago, there was a manageable stream of words on Substack. You could cup your hand in and drink. But then the stream became a river, the river overflowed its banks until it finally reached a cataract where the noise of billions of words, falling into our Inboxes, was thundering and relentless—drowning out the single voice.

Substack, for me at least, became a constant process of adding on:

Reading more people, spending more time writing posts, trying to interact with comments, doing social media posts to promote my work.

Why?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why. But I am entirely sure that it has to stop.

There are three reasons why this cannot continue.

(1) My eyeballs are about to fall out of my head. I just cannot read any more.

Back in the 80s, there was a trendy, bleeding-edge-cool restaurant on East 18th Street in New York called America. I somehow got roped into going there one night. It was enormous, high-ceilinged, and fire-code-breaking crowded. The din was so loud, it erased thought, flatlined consciousness. It was like being stuck inside a jet engine for two hours.

What that was to my ears, Substack is to my eyes now. Ever the good student, I have tried keeping up. I really have. I have printed out articles to read later. I have signed up for “Matter,” a read-later app (which, ironically, feeds me more stuff to read that I haven’t asked for) and saved pieces for later reading. I have tried triaging articles as they come in: Gmail folders with @urgent, @later, and @maybe.

Here is what my mind currently looks like:

Let me please—please—point out this is no reflection on the writing. I have found some stellar writers over the past few months. And they are going into my @keepers Gmail folder.

(2) It is a slow process of ingesting, if not poison, then something mid-level toxic.

I have been blessed with good blood pressure genes. I am generally in the ~115 over ~80 range.

Not after I finish reading! A significant number of the posts I read are the verbal equivalent of an air raid signal. If I were to count the number of times I read these words per day—

crisis, disaster, catastrophe, calamity, peril, unprecedented, tipping point, flashpoint, breakdown, unraveling, etc., etc., etc., oh and NOW, IMMEDIATELY, THIS INSTANT

—it would have to be in the hundreds.

May I remind us: Rats die from this level of anxiety.

I can quite literally feel my body tensing, the need to move, my amygdala on the hair trigger of fight or flight, the blood pulsing behind my eyes.

(3) The cognitive dissonance of what appears in my feed.

Bless you folks who show pictures of flowers in your garden or announce that you have reached X number of followers. Good for you, I really mean that.

But here’s the thing: the way the feed works, your tulips and roses and subscriber numbers are squeezed between end-of-the-world scenarios, masked men beating up people who were unlucky enough not to be born in this country, or the latest fascist power-grab over decision making.

I know you want to brighten people’s day. I know the need for validation. And I don’t have a good answer for this. All I can say is: it seems, because of the feed, tone-deaf.

I am still going to write.

In fact, I have been using this space for serializing a book. If you look back on the posts for the past three months, you will see the skeletal outline of a book on Spirituality in the Age of Social Media.

But I’m not waking up every morning thinking I have to save the world. I am not that important.

Evelyn Underhill, who wrote one of the seminal work Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (1911), and who had a profound influence on a hero on mine, William James, said:

We mostly spend our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing... we are kept in perpetual unrest.

Perpetual unrest is no way to live.

And I’m fully embracing that advice.

Thanks for reading.

For the next couple of months, I’ll be working on a series of pieces that track moments in a perfect summer day. (That is, assuming that a perfect summer day actually happens here. The weather has been weird.)

But anyway, most of these ideas come from early memories—probably all the way back to when I was a child. Because I certainly do not get up at 5:00 a.m. to catch the sun rising.

Here is “Dewlight”:

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🥶 Know someone else dancing on the edge of collapse? Send them this piece. Or post it on Bluesky, Facebook(!), or wherever humans still congregate.

“Dance Steps for the Apocalypse” will always be free. But you can help in two ways. To appease the Algorithm Gods, a simple like (❤️ ) makes this post more visible. And for extra credit, re-stacking this post or sharing with friends would be a great kindness. Thank you for reading.

Dear Friends,

After the (very positive) emotion of last weekend, I need a bit of a rest. So, this post is somewhat lighter than usual. As is the music.

“They take the god-shaped hole in the heart and try to fill it with things.”

There is an Italian restaurant not far from us which has good food, a friendly waitstaff whom we know by name, and is normally quiet in the middle of the week. It is in a town that is marginally less sleepy than ours, with a slightly higher people-to-cows ratio. (P/C)

So, it was with some surprise when, a couple of months back, we pulled into the parking lot and there was A BIG PARTY BUS. Not one of those sawed-off, get-me-to-the-church-on-time, spilled-champagne-on-the-rugs bridal party jobs, but a 50-seat, blow-the-doors-off, Monster-Bus-Rally kind of bus. It was all white but emitted a weird purple glow from inside, like the Prince and His Resurrection Tour was in town.

I was disabused of my original theory—that someone had parked it there overnight—as soon as we walked in the door. The din was deafening. The bus had obviously disgorged its passengers into the restaurant. Looking past the bar, I could see a long, long table of young women, very well-dressed, very fit, drinking martinis, taking selfies, and emitting the scream that is the verbal corollary of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in social media posts.

I caught the eye of a waiter we know—let’s call him Evan, because that’s his name. He rolled that eye and his other one, too. As if to say: Yeah, I know. Then he grabbed a couple of menus and took us to a corner nook which was as far from the long, long table as possible.

“Influencers,” he said, putting our menus on the table.

I didn’t hear him correctly at first.

“They all work in insurance?”

“I-n-f-l-u-e-n-c-e-r-s,” he repeated. “Like in social media.”

I looked over at the long, long table again. It reminded me of a cast party for Sex and the City, circa 1998.

“Influencers? Out here?”

“Yep,” he said, with that downtrodden, despairing look that the whole waitstaff takes on when the words “party of 50!” are pronounced.

A Parallel Economy

I cannot understate how incongruous 50 young martini-drinking, brand-shilling, emoji-emitting women seemed in this setting. So when I got home, I did a little “research.”

It was like discovering there is a whole other world in the multiverse of which I was unaware.

• Was there a world where influencers were wined and dined?

  Oh yes, there was.

• Are there actual agencies set up to do this?

  Oh yes, there are.

• But it can’t be large, right? I mean, how big can it be?

  $26 BILLION a year, growing by 25% annually.

“For reference, that’s more—by a billion—than the entire budget for what was USAID, the U.S. program of ‘soft’ influence and feeding people.”

Am I Just Out of It?

Man, am I out of it. In the rare times when I dip into my Facebook or Instagram feed, the only “influencers” I run into are people who want to:

• teach me how to play the solo from Stairway to Heaven (already know it),

• help me grow my following (never works), or

• offer me the body of a 25-year-old (this confounds every physical law in the universe, and probably in the multiverse as well).

  

But before I get arrested here for shouting at clouds, let me say: I have no problem with this. That is, with the young women influencers. (Not the stuff that shows up in my feed; that’s still annoying.)

“This is pure, undiluted Adam Smith capitalism.”

It’s based on supply and demand. It doesn’t buy politicians (yet), it doesn’t interfere in elections, and it isn’t a monopoly. It isn’t hell-bent on turning the rest of us into serfs.

And I imagine, apart from the martini-swilling and the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, being an influencer is probably hard work. I mean that. As someone who creates content, I know how much time it takes. And that amount of time, measured in Internet Units (IU), is: a LOT.

The Flow of Meaning

In writing this piece, I looked up the word “influence” in the OED. So many times, the etymology of a word can create a whole new level of meaning to its use.

Here is where that ol’ time Latin comes in “handy.” In Latin, “in” means “in” (what are the odds?) and, as you can probably guess, “flu” is pretty close to “flow.”

Influence: an effect that flows into an audience.

But here’s the strange part. As the word passed through the Middle Ages, it came to mean “emanation from the stars that acts upon one’s character and destiny.” Aquinas would have thought of it this way. It was astrological—something like a “flu-id” from the heavens that shaped human behavior.

The Sacred is Substituted

I talked a bit last week about Charles Taylor and the “disenchanted” world. And I agree with him. The world is de-wondered, de-mystified, de-sacralized.

Influencers are a symptom of that. They are the priestesses and priests who mediate between the real, nine-to-five, workaday world and the world where all desires can be fulfilled. They take the god-shaped hole in the heart and try to fill it with things.

“Advertising is the religion of consumption. It replaces transcendence with lifestyle, and mystery with the brand.”

—Jean Baudrillard

So, in the end, while I wish them well (hey, enjoy the hell out of your 20s—you only spin around that decade once), I hope they see, one day, that they are only selling substitutes for meaning.

And that never ends well.

Thanks for reading.

Art is resistance. Music is resistance.

And music that makes one smile is a resistance superpower.

The Little Room Band, which is a sometime real thing — like on Spotify and everything, but more often a narcissistic way for me to control every single aspect of the recording process — will be recording Songs That Make Me Smile.

And what better place to start than those innocent, joy-filled, care-free, wide-eyed-wonder-filled songs that broke the sound barrier and made us happy just to be alive.

That is, the early Beatles. This will be released (all applicable copyrights secured) on Spotify this Friday. And available as a free download on my Bandcamp page.

Hope this makes you smile.

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In today’s piece:

• Why “sacred” has vanished from daily language

• How commercialism destroys transcendence

• How to regain the sacred

Where did “sacred” go?

The word “sacred” rarely pops up in conversation. It’s one of those words that kind of hangs out there, occasionally showing up in a commencement address or in reference to your grandmother’s Irish Bread recipe. But as a descriptive adjective for behavior, morals, or places, it has all but disappeared.

The word “sacred” implies a particular world view which allows for a distinction between the ordinary and the holy, the commercial and the consecrated, the temporal and the eternal.

And by “eternal,” I am not referring to an afterlife but rather to Deep Time—the incomprehensible time of the universe as measured in light years, the birth of galaxies, the death of stars.

I write from a little corner of New England.

Tom Nichols, who writes for The Atlantic, said yesterday that New England is “basically northern Europe.” I’m not entirely sure what countries comprise “northern Europe,” but I suspect he was referring to secularization.

We might want to spend a little time on this word “secular.” On the surface, it may appear anti-spiritual. In fact, the OED second definition is “not connected with religious or spiritual matters.” But how does secularity arise? And is it, in practice rather than by definition, anti-spiritual or anti-religious?

I’m going to argue that it’s not. I think it’s possible to be secular and spiritual, and recognize the sacred and the holy.

What is secular?

Church and State

There are many entry points to defining the secular. Let’s start with the disentangling of church and state as found in the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause in the First Amendment.

I don’t care how many snake-handling, Bible-thumping, flat-earth-believing people claim this is unclear or open to interpretation. It was precisely because of people who would make this kind of argument that the Amendment was written.

People who would make this argument would love to impose their beliefs on us. And no thank you, I don’t want that ol’ time religion. I do not want the Ten Commandments hanging in courtrooms or etched into monuments on public spaces. That is not a sacred act, it is a performative act. It is an expression of power.

Science

And in the process, it abrogates the “sacredness” of individual belief.

Another obvious entry point to secularism is the rise of science. But here, again, there is a problem. Simply because we no longer believe in the miasma theory of disease, or that bloodletting is the go-to treatment for pneumonia, or that masturbation causes insanity, or that flies can be generated spontaneously from mud only means that superstitions have been removed.

Science and the sacred are not in conflict. Superstition is a rotting bridge over the abyss of ignorance.

If anything, advances in science create more reasons to view life as sacred, to see the world around us as sacred.

The true lesson of science is not how much we know, how much smarter we are than people in the Middle Ages; but rather how little we know when faced with the vastness of creation.

We still have no idea how we got here (that is, on this planet), what we’re doing here (should I be writing on Substack or starting a Victory garden?), why we’re here (what does this all mean, is it just sound and fury or something more?)

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Commercialism

But if we’re going to get at secularism, true secularism, something that truly sucks all the sacredness out of life, let’s look at commercialism.

Commercialism hides under the word secularism, rarely poking its head out. But if there is anything in opposition to the sacred, it is commercialism and commodification, capitalism.

If you have a year or two, may I recommend Charles Taylor’s doorstop-of-a-book The Secular Age? You don’t have a year? Well, let me sum up a few of Taylor’s main points.

Taylor comes at this as a Roman Catholic but checks most of that at the door. The first of Taylor’s points I’d like to point out:

(There is) a wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world, a sense of it as flat, empty, a multiform search for something within, or beyond it, which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence.

I am in complete agreement with Taylor on this. The world I see is “disenchanted.” And what a wonderfully resonant word disenchanted is. Etymologically, it can mean “without a song.” Where is the music, the poetry, the art in this country?

Probably being covered in 14 karat gold foil.

The metaphorical music of the world has been drowned out by incessant news, incessant connectivity, incessant commercialism. This is why “transcendence” is so difficult to attain.

We are tethered to a structure that craves—and hijacks—our attention every waking moment. Noise, all forms of noise, disrupts our ability to “transcend,” to achieve that ego-less state where we can feel absorbed into the mystery.

Taylor’s next point:

(We) have moved a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.

This, I have a few problems with.

First, and most obvious: whose God?

This is why I find the argument about whether the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” country laughable. I don’t want to go full-on-Karl Marx here, but let’s be honest. From my little corner of this vast land to sea to shining sea, the real god here is The Market. Mammon. Unbridled capitalism.

(For the record, I believe in a regulated capitalism. For further reading on this, see John Calvin and humanity’s predisposition toward greed.)

You know the old Kierkegaardian expression, “Don’t tell me what you believe—show me how you live”? Let me present that as Exhibit A:

Do we feed the hungry? No.

Do we hang on our 401(k)s? (Fill in the blank.)

(In a further essay, I’ll look at how these two can possibly work together.)

Strangely, we have an opportunity—right now—to revive sacredness. To bring a song back into the world. But it has to be intentional. It’s not going to happen by itself.

Here are three intentional things we can do right now:

• Recognize the sacred in each other. We are all one-of-a-kind miracles, not cogs in a commercial machine.

• Recognize the sacred in silence. Turning down the volume—or even better, turning off the volume—is one of the most effective ways of re-enchanting the world

• Recognize the sacred in the ordinary. This takes re-orientation, drastic re-orientation from our over-scheduled, over-stimulated lives. Make the decision because the act itself is so simple: you can start with savoring a cup of coffee.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Thanks for reading.

This is the fourth, and last, piece in a series about “absence.”

(I’ll be putting these together in an EP soon.)

This particular piece — “In the Quiet, After” is an interpretation of the stillness that follows any kind of powerful event—the rupture of a relationship, the death of a loved one, the parting of a dear friend.

There is always that moment when it gets quiet.

Out this Friday on Spotify.

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Awe is the beginning of wisdom.

We live in a time of confusion, disorientation. Bewilderment. The unravelling of the English language. The death throes of capital “T” Truth.

But there is a strange gift buried in the chaos: the opportunity to do some very basic thinking. What are the values we hold dear? What qualifies as truth? Is capitalism redeemable? Is this way of living sustainable?

At the heart of this lies a single, often overlooked word: awe. Or, for this piece, wonder.

Awe is only three letters, but it holds a universe of meaning. And it's been hijacked.

Let’s start with a story.

A few weeks ago, we went to see Big Yellow Taxi, a Joni Mitchell tribute band. While I generally avoid any kind of tribute band as a matter of principle—the blend of nostalgia and ersatz can be so cloying—the opportunity to hear Joni Mitchell’s songs, in any kind of venue, tipped the scale.

It proved a surprisingly entertaining night. Yes, the refugees-from-Woodstock audience clapped on one and three instead of two and four, sang along with “Big Yellow Taxi,” possibly my least favorite Joni Michell song, and—major disappointment— “A Case of You” was not on the set list.

However, the band was road-hardened pros, multi-instrumentalists who could really play. (There’s nowhere to hide in these tribute bands.) And the woman who, for the night, was Joni Mitchell had an outstanding voice and Joni-like range. For a “cover” band, I would absolutely give them an A.

I was entertained. But I was not awed.

And in fairness, I couldn’t have been. Awe cannot be replicated. The whole premise of a tribute act is to recreate something that already exists. Awe only arrives when something breaks through the familiar. It catches you off guard, surprises you, astounds you.

Real awe.

Rudolph Otto, the German theologian, described awe as mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a feeling of mystery, a touch of fear, and fascination. Real awe suspends time. You don’t check your phone in a moment of awe. Although you might forget to breathe.

But in the digital economy, awe has been systematically co-opted. In fact, co-opting awe was the Holy Grail of the digital economy. Because if awe could be captured, it could be monetized. And if it could be monetized, it could be controlled.

The first step was on-demand everything. But real awe doesn’t show up on command. It must be unexpected. Unfiltered. A little terrifying. You can’t schedule astonishment.

It’s one thing to see photos of the Eiffel Tower. It’s another to stand beneath it, dwarfed, disoriented, stunned into silence by its scale and grace. Real awe shakes you. You can’t get that from a screen.

Side note, another little story.

Overheard conversation heard in a locker room years ago:

“So the wife and I are going to France,” one man says.

“Why the f—k would you do that?” his friend replies.

“I don’t know, Paris. Museums. Eiffel Tower...”

“Seen it.”

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“F—k no. I’ve been to Vegas. Saw it there.”

I am not making this up.

Then came curation—the social media aesthetic of manufactured awe. With our iPhones, we get perfect lighting. Perfect sunsets. Everyone, in their feed, is living The Good Life. So we get an endless scroll of beauty detached from meaning. Awe has become branded and flattened into content.

The apotheosis of awe’s hijacking is not just digital. It’s political.

In our current age, cruelty has been rebranded as spectacle, as if we were living in the Middle Ages. Suffering is used as moral pornography. Where awe once responded to mystery and transcendence, it’s been replaced by sheer vulgarity—gold-plated everything, fake marble, fake hair.

The White House has the aesthetic of a casino lobby repurposed for statecraft. All noise, no soul, no art, no music. Just money.

This is not awe. It’s intimidation dressed in awe’s clothing. The oldest trick in the tyrant’s book: make the people afraid, and call it reverence.

Historically, awe was often tied to violence—public beheadings, bodies broken in the public square, apostates being burned at the stake. Today, it’s still violence, just dressed up in policy and performance. Masked paramilitary ICE agents pulling people out of cars. Up is down, down is up.

Every new act of cruelty is wrapped in a flag and dripping with gold trim.

The result is a kind of spiritual damage.

Our innate capacity for awe—our ability to feel wonder, mystery, terror, and beauty—is dulled. Overstimulated by spectacle, we grow numb. Everything has become BREAKING NEWS. We become consumers of faux-transcendence, always chasing the next high.

Even the ancient texts knew this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10)

Not fear as terror, but the Hebrew yirah—awe, reverence, the trembling awareness of something greater. The ancients understood what we’ve forgotten: that true wisdom begins not with certainty, but with wonder. With humility in the face of the vast.

And here begins resistance: the reclamation of real awe.

Not awe as content. Not awe as political spectacle. But awe as encounter, as the sacred breaking through.

I recently had a rare moment of true, unmediated, out-of-the-blue awe. I was preaching at the closing service for the small Congregational Church in the town where I live. Being the preacher is a lot like being the emcee. You need to make sure people know the page the hymn is on, that the lay readers get up to the lectern in time, that the collection goes off smoothly, and—not a small point, I suppose—that the sermon lands.

Little secret: awe almost never occurs, for me, during a service. My mind is too pre-occupied with the show.

But this day, as part of the closing service, the church bell, the big steeple bell, was rung once for the last time. This church was founded in 1765, so this is the bell (or a later version) that would have been rung to call the militia to Bunker Hill in 1775, Ticonderoga in 1777, to announce the end of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and John F. Kennedy’s burial. It also accompanied married couples down the aisle, underscored coffins wheeled through the front doors.

The overtones extended for a long time before finally being absorbed into the silence, connecting the past with the present moment.

Out of the blue, I felt wonder—awe. It snuck up, took me by surprise, brought me to that ego-less state where all is connected.

Awe is always a surprise.

Awe doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t advertise. It is the hush in a forest when the snow begins to fall. The moment a voice sings what you didn’t know your heart had been waiting to hear. The catch in your breath when beauty finds you unprepared.

Otto was right. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. That which terrifies and attracts, overwhelms and draws you in. Awe changes you, if only briefly, for the better.

To reclaim awe is not to return to superstition or sentimentality. It is to return to the real. To defend the fragile places where mystery still dwells. To sit with the unanswerable—and allow it to undo you.

While the abominable polish their thrones, let us find other places to gather.

In sanctuaries, in forests, at dinner tables, under the night sky overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe.

In times like these, you have to wonder. It’s a matter of survival.

Thanks for reading.

This piece will drop on Friday, so here’s a little preview.

“The Far Side of Goodbye”—this idea of “absence” has proven to be particularly fertile for me. I’m working on the last piece now, “In the Quiet, After.”

But then, I have some Beatles in the works. Stay tuned.

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Good? Bad?

In the debate between the essential goodness or essential “not-goodness”* of people, I have mostly played on the “people are good” team.

(*There isn’t a good word, that is the opposite of good, that is not loaded down with all kinds of baggage. If you don’t trust me, then trust Roget and his Thesaurus.)

I wouldn’t say that people, as a group, are great or truly outstanding. And I have certainly run into my share of people who were just not good people.

But until now, they were the outliers. Overall, I would have given humanity a C+ or a B-. A passing grade—but needs improvement. Needs to work well with others better. Really needs work on that silent reading.

Against a lot of evidence to the contrary, I have tried to maintain this belief. I have done this for a couple of reasons.

Christianity and goodness.

I think the Christian thinkers who viewed humanity as flawed (Augustine, Luther) or depraved (Calvin and Hobbes—not joking, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes) injected a strain of guilt and a stain of sin into the bloodstream of Western Civilization which, while very good for psychotherapists, was very bad for the rest of us.

Second, I saw good people all around me. To then make the claim that there were “good” people and “bad” people would be to divide humanity, to make one group “the other.”

This, in the moral life, is very dangerous territory. As soon as there is an “other,” as soon as there is a group that becomes “the enemy,” even good people start doing bad things.

But it is very hard not to slip into this.

Not just because I’ve seen more bad people. But because I’ve started to wonder how goodness survives in a system that seems so thoroughly tilted against it.

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Let’s have breakfast!

On a recent cold, gray, May morning—early for me (8:00 am)—I sat in a crowded ballroom, with a couple of hundred other people, drinking coffee while those at the table around me ate breakfast.

The event: The Non-Profit Awards for the county in which I live. That is, recognition for those who had done outstanding work in the community that benefited people.

There were no luminaries in this room, no celebrity presenters, no influencers angling for Instagram-worthy shots. Just ordinary folks who work in the community doing things that make people’s lives better.

There were directors of shelters, tutors from literacy programs, translators, folks who help people become American citizens, people who coordinate food banks. No spotlight. No venture capital backing them up.

Very few people in this room did this on a paid basis. And those who did, if you know anything about the non-profit sector, were doing it for peanuts. The rest were volunteers who gave that most precious thing we can give away: time.

Soul. And Woody.

They hold communities together with dignity and determination. In fact, they are the soul of a community.

They step in where the government has stepped back, and do that most important of human acts: they show up.

Woody Allen is, I know, way out of style. So I even hesitate to mention him. But his line, “80% of life is just showing up” (or some variation on that), still holds true.

In fact, I’d say almost 100% of life, now, is showing up.

To show up, now, means to hold on to your moral center and help out where you are needed. We are well past the point where sharing memes is political resistance. Now is the time to show up in person.

There is a group of people in power who lie brazenly, have no shame, take pleasure in inflicting cruelty, worship money.

They can, and have already, destroyed many things.

We cannot let them destroy our essential goodness.

Thanks for reading.

——

The subject of absence has occupied me lately. Life gets smaller with time, things disappear.

Are there missed chances? In the end, probably not. But still, we like to think there are.

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Until now, the most patriotic I have ever felt was not in this country. It wasn’t at a parade, or fireworks, or—God forbid—listening to the cannons go off at the end of the 1812 Overture.

I have generally found those experiences boozy, crowded, rowdy—and, worst of all, the parking is always bad.

The place where I felt this full-throated gulp, this skip-a-heartbeat, tears-in-my-eyes welling up of patriotism was in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

We arrived in the village by way of Omaha Beach. Ever since I can remember, it had been a place I wanted to see. How could it not be? The images from The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers were seared into my memory.

Omaha Beach

I even had a father/son connection here: though twenty miles offshore, in relative safety, my father had been a 22-year-old sailor aboard a supply ship off Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

Omaha Beach was not a disappointment—but it was compromised. There was still a hallowedness to be found there, but for me, at least, I had to rely on imagination, on memory from movies. Just as the waves continue to wash against that shore, time has washed away some of its sacredness. The blood spilled has seeped so far into the sand that it has become part of the terrain. Where German pillboxes once dotted the heights above the beach, there are now vacation condos.

The bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach are a steep climb, though there are boardwalks to ease the ascent. We arrived at the top, winded, crossed a small lane—and then we were there.

The American Cemetery.

If you haven’t been, trust me: nothing can prepare you for what you will see. And if you have, then you know exactly what I mean.

At first, it is like a vision, a mirage: a sea of white crosses fading into infinity on a background as green as anything you might see in Ireland. Before your eyes can even adjust to this sight, the sanctuary offers up its most otherworldly quality: complete silence—except for birdsong. Silence so deep it feels like you, too, are sinking into the earth.

As you walk among the rows of crosses, two long-forgotten grammar school skills return: mental arithmetic and geography. There are no birth dates—only names, ranks, units, home states, and dates of death. So you do the imaginary math, with probable birth years. 1944 minus 1921, 1918, 1924... and you get: 23, 26, 20, even 19 years of age. Nineteen! And places you’ve heard of but never seen: Joplin, Missouri; Blue Ridge, Georgia; Julian, California; Bangor, Maine. The ages—almost all early twenties—and the hometowns—almost all unfamiliar—go on for row after row after row.

Imagine being on a landing craft.

I tried to imagine what those buried here must have felt as they left the relative safety of the ships, boarded the landing craft, and slammed over the waves toward a blizzard of bullets: the paralyzing fear, the yearning for home and family, the futile hope that they might be the one to survive.

I am not trying to valorize war. Quite the opposite. Anyone buried here experienced carnage (from the Latin: caro, flesh), blood, severed limbs, slaughter, and bowel-evacuating terror. Anyone who survived carried that trauma for the rest of their lives.

America is not the only country founded on an idea—Israel and the Soviet Union also began as ideas. America is not the only country built by immigrants—so were Australia and Canada.

But we are, by far, the largest country ever founded on an idea and built by immigrants.

No other country comes close.

The idea—that all men (sic) are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed—has always been flawed in execution and riddled with paradox.

But nevertheless, despite all the flaws and failures, the cruelty and the crassness, this idea remains revolutionary. And painful as it has been, generations of clear-eyed moralists, reluctant prophets, and brave truth-tellers have scratched and clawed and struggled and bled to make this idea “more perfect.”

The paradox.

The paradox at the heart of the American idea—the one all those striving for a more perfect union eventually confront—is this: the tension between the individual and the commonwealth. It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence. Its opening lines, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are directed at the individual; its closing lines, “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” are directed at the community.

This American Exceptionalism.

This is the American exceptionalism I fully embrace: not the chest-thumping kind, but the revolutionary idea of mutually pledging our belief in the right of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But—as it seems to happen cyclically—venal, corrupt, mendacious, dishonest, and treacherous people have wormed their way into positions of power.

Just look:

Donald Trump in his gold-plated Oval Office; Pam Bondi, Qatar lobbyist at $100K a month, ruling that bribes from Qatar are perfectly fine; Katherine Leavitt’s mind-numbing ignorance of basic facts; Kristi Noem’s pornography of punishment; J.D. Vance’s delusional, arcane Catholicism; Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education who cannot spell; the venomous Elon Musk...

I could go on, but you get the point.

It is these people—and those like them—who are a threat to American exceptionalism: the exceptional idea that a country built by immigrants can strive toward equality, ensure personal freedom, and mutually create community.

There is no way to calculate how many of the hallowed dead at the American Cemetery were immigrants. But it is likely—very likely— that a good percentage of them, if not actual immigrants, were first and second generation sons (and daughters) of immigrants. And it was their blood that kept the idea of American exceptionalism (NOT America First) alive.

I hope none of the gaudiest, vulgar, immoral, unethical, unqualified, bought-off administration in the history of this country EVER set foot in the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer.

We will honor those soldiers in a few short days. And know that they stand for everything that is good about America.

Simply writing these words makes me feel patriotic.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve been going through some old letters.

What a strange form of communication it now seems. The time it took to put pen to paper! The time it took to recount events, express thoughts.

It also struck me that I have no idea where many (most) of these “letter-writers” are, whether they are still alive, whether they have/had happy lives.

It led to this, which sort of came out as a show tune.

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