The Professor's Bayonet

https://48bconsulting.com/https://midnightmurmurs.blog/Kevin Enners is like any writer doing his best to promote his work while continuing to generate thoughtful and engaging content.  He is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club and writes for The Kyle Pease Foundation whose stated mission is to “improve the lives of people with disabilities through sports and beyond.”  Enners is prolific.  He has even written a novella, The Crave, and hosts a blog entitled Midnight Murmurs that houses a substantial collection of scary short stories. One of the stories, “Three Knocks at the Cabin Door,” is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  In it, a man, alone in a cabin but for his dog, is tormented by the incessant sound of three sharp knocks.  Mostly, he does not know where they are coming from.  But sometimes, the knocks seem to come from specific places.  The heavy bedroom door.  The closet.  The floor beneath him.  The knocks do not let up.  Duke, the dog, grows uneasy.  The man believes he is losing his mind.  Until he peers down at his hands.  The mud.  The soil packed beneath his fingernails.  The disturbed earth near the porch.  I invite you, dear listeners, to find the February 2026 short story yourself to learn the ending.  You will see how the gothic is, if you will indulge me, alive and well today. The short story is impressive enough.  The fact that Enners penned it by using eye-gazing technology should arouse the interest of anybody used to the battle that is writing.  Kevin Enners, you see, has cerebral palsy. What is particularly noteworthy about Enners is how he champions writers with disabilities, observing that platforms dedicated to supporting the creative endeavors of folks with disabilities are either rare or obscure.  Spotlights shine on the creative works of many so-called marginalized groups, but for individuals like Enners, no such spotlight exists.  At least in the way Enners prefers it to exist.  Allow me to explain. There are many preconceptions about those with disabilities.  They do not need to be articulated here, but suffice it to know that there seems to be one centered on the ability produce creative work.  For whatever reason, there is a disconnection between the immediate impression many get when encountering someone with a disability and that person’s actual ability to do the thing we are all hardwired to do: create.  In Enner’s own words, “The general public doesn't realize that people with disabilities don't have a platform where they can express themselves creatively. I am lucky to have support for my writing. I have had a lot of support from my family and friends to maintain a voice in the creative realm and write stories that I don't think any other author can or is willing to write. There is a misunderstanding between what the public thinks we can do and what we actually can do.”  His writing efforts, thus, are meant to disrupt those assumptions – to correct a way of thinking that has shoved aside the voices of those who happen to have a disability.  To read Enners is not to read an author with cerebral palsy.  It is simply to read an author – and a good one at that. Elsewhere on The Professor’s Bayonet, I have written about how being made in the image of God, the Supreme Creator, means that we were made to create.  It is more an action, a vocation than an image.  In fact, it is far from the latter.  We only need to look at the superficial differences between us to acknowledge what is truly important about us all.  Some of us have darker skin.  Some of us are female.  Some were born with conditions like cerebral palsy.  All of us, though, were gifted in some form or another to create.  We draw.  We paint.  We nurture relationships.  We build families.  We create businesses.  And we write.  Kevin Enners writes.  And more of us should check out his blog.  It’s called Midnight Murmurs.  Just be sure to keep a light on.  You never know who might come knocking. 

https://www.jannaherron.com/serviceshttps://48bconsulting.com/Janna Herron’s brief memoir of her struggles with mental health is timely to say the very least.  Entitled Brokenness Restored: The Path to Recovery is a Healing Journey, Herron’s open rumination on what it took to come back from the brink of mental collapse is as raw as it is insightful.  She joins the chorus of so many young folks who, sadly, do battle against mental and spiritual snares alone, shining a light on the despair that goes unnoticed.  If anything, hers is a needed voice in today’s society – a voice with which to empathize, a voice to identify as a friend, someone who knows. Herron’s ideas on loneliness, for example, are sure to land well with those in her generation who are becoming or have already become disaffected with the narrative that social media unites.  One does not have to look very far to see how isolation has become an epidemic in and of itself – how lonely people really are despite having access to the world, as it were, at their fingertips.  Herron writes that “isolation merely increases the symptoms of depression and anxiety.”  She is correct.  Indeed, she adroitly points out that so many instances of depression are cyclical: depression leads to isolation, and isolation leads to a deeper depression. Interestingly, Herron shares that her father was once a correctional officer in a prison and that this experience served as the impetus for growing feelings of distrust.  She admits to not knowing how his experiences as an authority figure behind bars affected him internally, and she certainly extends an impressive level of grace when she recognizes how his time as a correctional officer negatively impacted his relationships at home; however, she does not excuse him from inadvertently setting a tone that would eventually engulf her, resulting in her own scuffle with weighty and unpleasant thoughts. I would submit with Herron’s book, however, that an analysis couched in her relationship with her father – something she mentions from the very beginning – might be deeply relevant.  It is no small detail, in other words – a bit of information that could provide helpful context for how her struggle played out.  She admits, after all, that she does not “overlook the pain and hurt that he has caused.”  Could this have been the catalyst for something bigger?Herron writes that soon after arriving at Texas Woman’s University, the conviction of being unsafe persisted.  The change in location did little to ameliorate her anxiety.  To be sure, she soon found out that those feelings were justified, which led to a downward spiral that left her considering the unthinkable.  She overdosed on some medication.  Herron writes that she wanted to go home – not where she was from but heaven, her celestial home.  What many tuck away in the recesses of their psyche, Herron puts on full display for her readers to consider.  In doing so, I would argue that she names it for what it is (attempting to take one’s own life) thereby neutralizing the ideation.  What is hidden is more dangerous – she makes that clear throughout the book – so exposing it defangs it considerably, making her story more approachable and, as a result, the path toward healing clearer to those facing similar challenges. Herron’s road to recover is circuitous.  It is not a direct shot.  Like ivy that winds itself up a tree trunk, her indirect route only made her stronger and more resilient.  God wants resilient people, and just like He did with Herron, He assures us that we were, in effect, built for the trials in which we find ourselves. Toward the end, Herron reminds us that suppressing our emotions is no good for anybody and that what God desires is for the truth to come to light.  It will oftentimes take great effort for that truth to emerge, but, Herron writes, the endeavor is worth it.  Because you are worth it, the child of God that you are. 

www.48bconsulting.comIn the hustle and bustle of the current day, it is easy to forget that many in the not-too-distant past resorted to solitude and silence to work through their struggles.  It was a monastic approach to facing one’s troubles, and to those living today who cannot imagine a time without cellphones and instant access, that approach is unimaginable.  We are in the midst of a social crisis where gazing absentmindedly into glowing rectangles is the norm, but rest assured that this terrible habit will come back to haunt us if it has not already done so.  The solution?  I submit, dear listeners, that we need to harken back to a time when stillness was not to intimidating – when it was welcomed, even sought out.  As it is, we have traded healthy tranquility for convenience, and as a result, the neurosis only grows bigger.  I look out at my students before class.  All of them, everyone, is glued to their phones, and the battle only continues when I start class.  The temptation to look down is just too great. I have mentioned before in other episodes that both sets of my grandparents suffered the loss of their oldest child.  I watched how my dad’s parents grieved his passing, and I did the same with my mom’s parents.  It was difficult not to compare and contrast – not to carefully and respectfully observe differences in coping mechanisms.  All of it was sad.  Each of my grandparents handled it uniquely. Granny, my dad’s mom, threw herself into work as a realtor.  Her husband, my grandfather, told and retold the stories.  My gramma, my mom’s mother, sealed herself off in a little room and painted.  My grampa, her husband, retired to the woodshed.  I remember him being in that woodshed until past dark.  Summer.  Fall.  Winter.  It may have been an escape.  The grandkids were oftentimes rambunctious.  It may have been something else – something wholly unplugged, to put it in modern day parlance.  It may have even been something sacred.  He would run the fixed circular saw to make kindling for the fire.  What else he did I do not know. Here in Georgia we have a monastery - The Monastery of the Holy Spirit – located in Conyers, about a half hour or so east of Atlanta.  The brothers take their silence reverently.  Many retreats are silent retreats, and those who participate are expected to keep mum.  It is difficult for me to drive out to the monastery, so I make do with a walk to Simpsonwood Park with my dog, Arrow.  As a general rule, I extinguish all devices upon entering the trail.  Out come the earbuds, and I take my walk through the woods with nothing but the sounds of birds should they choose to utter a peep.  It is in the silence that I am better able to hear God.  Nothing is forced.  Nothing coerced.  I simply allow the conversation to unfold as it will, discovering, at times, that the thing I wanted to pray about was not the thing that took center stage. In short, I get it.  I get the need for silence.  I get the desire for disconnection.  I can never know what he was thinking or feeling, but I wonder if his nightly retreat to the woodshed amounted to a form of prayer. What did grampa do but go to a familiar place back behind the house on the hill and do what he had been doing for years: cut kindling, stack wood, all to heat a house now occupied by two, the voices of his six daughters calling out for daddy from years past. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Requiem An old man sits in a dark shed on a winter’s eve, and he is surrounded by cord wood packed tight, knots out and up against the aged frame. He is doused in the pale yellow light of a naked bulb, and he is thinking, not about the fixed circular saw before him or the kindling he is making with each screaming pass, but of something else: his alone.  The dog is warm inside the house.  The sky is black and deep.  The old man fills his wheelbarrow, rises, hoists, and pushes, his only utterance, the soft crunch of icy snow. 

My grandfather – my dad’s dad – had many titles.  He was a physician in a small Kentucky town, so everywhere we went, he was greeted with a hearty “Hello, there, Dr. Dew!”  He liked to joke that he had delivered about half of them.  He was also a Catholic deacon, so if it wasn’t Dr. Dew, it was Deacon Dew.  The heartiness would be the same.  He was also an Army officer and a pilot, an elected official and a Kentucky Colonel, but, of course, he was simply Grandfather to me.  My younger cousins called him Fafa, but that monicker never really appealed to me.  I preferred the original, more dignified title. To be with Grandfather was to be under his tutelage.  He was always teaching – always finding an occasion to impart some bit of knowledge, some morsel of wisdom.  He had a lot of it, and the truth of the matter was that it was hard-earned.  He spent his boyhood in and out of orphanages until he eventually lied about his age and joined the service.  Little Orphan Annie had nothing on Grandfather, for his was truly a hard knocks life.  Eventually, he made his way to the University of Louisville, undergrad then medical school, and settled in the town of Vine Grove where he was known to make house calls with his little black bag and accept as payment baked goods and a chicken or two.  He practiced medicine during its golden age when insurance companies and Big Pharma did not have their noses in the exam room, and to a young man who acted as his sidekick, it was hard not to be impressed by how this little, portly man was regarded by the townsfolk. So I listened.  I asked questions.  I was teachable.  Beyond the facts and the minute details, I sought to understand how it all fit together.  Grandfather’s medical mind laid out the framework but his Deacon mind – the one who understood deep down that everything we know, everything we see and experience has just one Author – but that framework in its proper context.  His lectures were both informative and catechismal.  They massaged the brain and awakened the heart.  The intensity was appropriate because he knew and I came to know what was at stake.  We only have a few short years to get it together as best we can, so it is good and proper to get busy and get serious.  He had buried a son.  Grandfather knew firsthand what we were all up against, but he also knew there was only one way forward.  Jesus Christ.  The Way.  The Truth.  The Life. What I did not know then was that I was being conditioned to enter into my own spiritual battles.  If we are lucky, and I am first to admit that I was with my Grandfather, we are given a mentor to show us how to walk in the faith despite the evil that surrounds us.  He was my role model.  He showed me what a warrior can look like, and let me hasten to say, dear listeners, it is nothing like what Hollywood would have us believe.  Grandfather was the real deal.  Authentic.  Unwavering in his faith.  Steadfast in his love. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Casing the Joint The Class Six at Fort Knox was a  favorite destination for me and Grandfather; we’d case the joint, he, slowly pushing a cart up and down each aisle as he pontificated about booze: the generic brand of bourbon being just as good as Beam, the wine, the beer, where it was from, how it was made. Inevitably, a couple of bottles would find themselves in the cart, and Grandfather would always pay – this little man in flannel and Old Spice who pontificated about pretty much anything – then we’d make our way back to the house, me at the wheel, he in the seat next to mine, carrying on with the lesson I had heard a thousand times before and wish now I could hear as many more, his casing long done, his last bottle bought, and me, walking this long aisle without a lookout. 

I did not believe it when I learned that Chuck, the man who would become my stepdad, had never served in the military.  All the men in my life since then had served -- grampa, uncles, my own father, now deceased – and the notion that a man could grow to maturity without ever having been in uniform confounded me, to say the least.  I did not know it was possible.  I had no idea that it was even an option.  Since I could remember, I was raised on a mythology of masculinity that was inexorably framed by service to the country.  It was simply what one did as a male.  To meet a guy who somehow circumnavigated what I thought to be a fate as sure as the rising sun prompted me, in the very least, to wonder how a man could become a man without going through the gauntlet of boot camp and drill sergeants, orders and the ever-present possibility that one could be deployed in an instant.  But here I was, perplexed, before a man it took a good while for my mother to invite for dinner.  There were five of us kids, after all.  And who knows how Chuck might react. He enjoyed the pot roast, and we kids behaved, and soon enough, we found ourselves in a period of transition from living at home with a single widowed mother to living with mom and a man who was willing to pick up the slack and do the things men do for their families: provide, protect, and teach.  I marvel at his boldness still.  If there was baggage, mom had it in spades, yet Chuck would not be dissuaded. I will not pretend that his primary motivation was to become a stepfather.  He loved my mother; she was and remains the primary impetus for moving forward in the relationship.  That he did so knowing full well that it was, as they say, a package deal points to a different level of commitment altogether: one that is difficult not to be impressed with. The death of a loved one can certainly inspire such negative thinking, but a year or so after the death of my own father, a man came along – Chuck – and gave my family, his new family, tracks to go on – a new hope, a new way forward, a stable and prosperous future.  Simply by saying yes, he picked up the shards of a broken family and rebuilt it – a nuclear family.  With challenges.  With hiccoughs.  With trials and tests.  Just like every other family with a mom and dad and kids to clothe and feed.  One man’s noble decision gave structure to the emotionally rattled.  What would our world look like if more men stepped into the broken parts of our society, rolled up their sleeves, and set to rebuilding it?  I, for one, have a guess – an informed one, to be sure. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Stepdad I think Chuck had already asked mom to marry him, which is why they arranged a time for me and him to get to know each other better.  It was just the two of us: the newest, last man, the oldest boy. First I was to help him finish carpeting the inside of his brown Bronco, and then we were going to lift weights. I had never done either. In that order, I suppose, neither had Chuck.  But that’s what we did on the first day of this leg together, him stapling tan carpet around the Frisbee-sized speakers, later, me, bending my weakling arms to my weakling chest with K-mart weights and getting awkward pointers along the way from a man with tinted glasses and a moustache, a man who loved Steely Dan, Eric Clapton, my mother, and, not long down the road, me, who continues to puzzle over carpeting consoles – those goofy things dads do. 

The technical term is “cultural artifact.”  A cultural artifact is some item that helps to tell the story about the person who owned it, used it, relied on it, even.  It might be a tool or a garment – a keepsake or a piece of jewelry.  In point of fact, it could be anything so long as it gives context to the particular place and time a person or people group existed.  We are surrounded by cultural artifacts, which means that we are surrounded by story.  It only takes a keen observer to note the importance of said artifact and, from there, have the ability to tell its story and the stories of those it impacted. Archeologists have made a profession out of rummaging through people’s junk and piecing together their stories.  Of course, the junk heaps through which they typically sift with careful and meticulous brush strokes are hundreds if not thousands of years old.  I submit to you, dear listeners, that one does not have to be bona fide in this particular science to partake in its rituals of discovery.  For me, it was being given the liberty to wander around the houses of both sets of grandparents, the Kentucky ones and the Pennsylvania ones.  It was not snooping, mind you.  There was no sneaking around.  There was just observation.  Perusing books.  Looking at old photographs.  Paying attention to details.  Doing my best to discern the story.  Understand the story.  It was, after all, also my story, in part. The garage, in particular, held a treasure trove of tales.  There was much to learn about my grandfathers in those crowded spaces.  The cars could barely fit for all the odds and ends.  Little did I know then that it was the odds and ends that carried me farther than any old gas-guzzler could.  At least in the imagination.  At least in the discovery of something more, something previously unspoken about the men who, in my mind, could do little to no harm but who, instead, had spent a lifetime laboring to make the lives of others – me – better.  In those garages, north and south, I bore small witness to the cultural artifacts that helped to make that happen.  Perhaps you, dear listeners, have stood in similar places.  Perhaps you, too, have had a peak, have entertained a thought, have come to know something personal about the men whose photos are all that is left. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well.  My Grandparents’ Garage  Part I / Kentucky Of course, there were the usual items – the garden tools, the random boxes, a little red wagon my younger cousins grew out of –  but in the corner on a small bench sat the seasonal ornaments for my father’s grave: a wreath, plastic vases for plastic flowers, small, faded American flags. I sit in my own garage and watch my little children play, their balls, blocks, and markers mingled with my own garden tools and boxes and wonder about that unspeakable spot in my grandparents’ garage –  how it came about sadly bit by agonizing bit, my father moving back home with his stricken mommy and daddy a lifetime after he had moved out.  Part II / Pennsylvania  I built my own in the stone-walled basement in the house downtown out of a couple of uneven lengths of two-by-four and a  discarded piece of warped plywood: a workbench, just around the corner where we piled the winter wood. I had a light by necessity, but it wasn’t a workshop light I had seen in my grandparents’ garage up on the hill. Mine was a bulb, well-suited, I suppose, for a novice. While my bench held a hammer and a couple of nails, grampa’s was coated in sawdust, rusty Hills Bros. cans, screwdrivers and saws, blocks of wood and, of course, hammers, their handles bruised and taped, their claws nicked. My bench has grown since then; I  even have a toolbox, but the cologne that is oil and sawdust, metal and used machinery still belongs to him who had me hold the boards he measured, cut, pounded into place. 

The first of the month was practically a holiday.  In addition to government help, my mom would receive checks from the Navy and the Coast Guard to help provide for her children. Dad had served in both branches, and both branches honored their commitment to care for the children of the fallen.  The exact amount was never on my radar.  All I knew and all my siblings knew was that we could go to the store and filled up the cart and maybe, if we were good, go out to eat at McDonald’s.  That was our one day of living high on the hog. If Steve, the mailman, had not delivered the mail by 3:30, we kids were sent on a mission to find him, ask for our mail, and sprint back home where mom would be waiting to take the checks downtown and cash them before the banks closed at 4.  Timing was of the essence.  If we were late, if the banks closed, then we would have to go up on the hill where my grandparents lived to eat.  At gramma and grampa’s house, there was always enough, even when there wasn’t. Despite the growing number of years between those moments and now, I cannot pretend that the anxiety of potentially not having enough has left me.  I carry it with me still as I regard the wife and three children God has blessed me with – the family I am charged with providing for.  It is serious.  They absolutely depend on me.  I stand between them and going without, and it is a duty that consumes me daily.  I cannot forget.  How could I? I recall a short time after my father’s illness prompted him to return to his own parents an experience that underscored my family’s struggle in ways that affect me today.  I was told by my teacher that there was to be a party.  Each child had to bring something from home – something to pass around, share.  Like most kids who had yet to hit double digits, I informed my poor mother on the day of the party.  We were standing in the kitchen.  Her face turned pale.  I remember how she opened one cupboard after another, each one empty.  Empty.  There was nothing to grab, nothing to eat.  Until she opened one cupboard and found some pears my grandmother had canned.  “Take this,” she said, giving me the only thing she could find. I took the canned peaches to school and presented it to my teacher who told me that I had been mistaken.  The party today was for the other fourth-grade class, not mine.  Ours was the following week.  And there, in front of my entire class, holding the one item my mother could find, I burst into tears.  I bawled my eyes out.  Not because there would be no party that day.  But because I had an epiphany.  A sad realization.  I suddenly knew that we were poor.  It had all added up in a single, heart-wrenching moment. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Groceries Our small kitchen would be crowded with bulging brown paper bags –   on countertops, on cushion-less chairs, left by the open backdoor because they were too heavy and our arms too little –  these groceries, bagged promises of full tummies, purchased on the first of the month after we intercepted the mailman because the banks would close soon, and we had ketchup and an egg – mom rushing, signing, finally ordering the five of us to the running car. What jubilation, what joy, we, the sometimes desperate  ***  My youngest, Marianna, sits buckled in her car seat and looks at the groceries in front of her. “You went to the sto-ah?” she asks sweetly. I take no small moment before I say, “Yes”, then shift into first and take us where we need to go. 

https://48bconsulting.com/https://www.colorfulcrowpublishing.com/barbara-tuckerBarbara G. Tucker is proof that exquisite storytelling can and does happen far from the massive New York City publishing houses with their army of gatekeepers and yes-men and women whose focus is less on craft and more on fickle trends in the market.  Her brilliantly-written novel, Lying In, which was published by Colorful Crow Publishing in 2024, explores the hardscrabble life of Cotella, called “Telly” by most, who once aspired to be a nurse but was forced to change course due to a rare condition that caused tumors to sprout all over her body.  Even before this began to happen, Telly is described as an ugly woman, but with these “knots” all over the place, her appearance suffers even more, causing those who do not know her to recoil in disgust. Lying In takes place against the terrible backdrop of the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 – a devastating event that even penetrated the countless hollers of Virginia Appalachia, Telly’s stomping ground.  While much of this page-turner follows Telly as she goes about caring for the families of women who just gave birth – women who are lying in – the plot is anchored by a particular family, the Goinses.  Telly arrives at their small ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere to find four unwashed and hungry kids and a sick woman in the bedroom, trying to give birth.  The situation is desperate from the beginning.  The husband is absent, and Telly quickly surmises that the woman has been infected with the illness.  In a delirium, the woman spews words that, at the time, do not make sense to Telly, but shortly afterwards, she expires, making Telly the sole caretaker of the children.  From this point, Lying In becomes a tale of remarkable grittiness in the face of impossible odds.  Telly perseveres.  Telly gets up in the morning and does the same the day after that and the day after that.  She keeps moving because she has to: for herself, for the kids, mostly.  Barbara G. Tucker gifts us with a story about the depths of the human heart and the power of the human spirit, and she does this, I hasten to add, in well-crafted prose absent any gratuitous scene that less tactful authors might jump to include. Ultimately, readers might be reminded of the lepers from the Bible.  They were outcasts before Jesus cleansed them of their ailment.  Telly’s condition only worsens throughout the book, but this is arguably a clever inversion of something else that is happening – something akin to being healed.  Telly finally finds her place in the world.  She finally secures a home.  To be sure, the ending underscores that victory even more, leaving readers much to ponder about the nature of their own life journey over and around “hollers” of a different sort. This, of course, is the power of a good story.  Novels like Tucker’s act as mirrors, which makes Telly’s condition all the more meaningful.  We could even take a reading of Tucker’s novel to a new level.  Telly’s “sin,” if you will, is worn on the outside.  What would we all look like if our sins were on full display for all to see, for all to be repulsed by?  Would we remain steady in our noble pursuits, defiant in the face of all that wants to bring us down like Tucker’s protagonist?  Telly faced many disappointments and had to live with the knowledge that every time she encountered a stranger, that stranger would react a certain way.  This could easily lead to loneliness and despair.  But she kept her work gloves on, so to speak, and in doing so, made a way for herself.  What she lacked in physical attraction, she made up for in usefulness and still found love: not romantic but one only a mother could possess.  I will leave it to you, dear listeners, to decide which is the more preferred. 

God is referenced as a “he” and “him” in the Bible, so goes the argument, because men, in specific, need a male ideal to look up to.  This in no way is meant to put men above women; on the contrary, this underscores men’s unique weakness.  Without a male ideal – without that distinctly male celestial guide – men, left to themselves, would be indescribably brutal, unfathomably destructive.  Notably, women do not need God to be a she.  They are built differently, and any argument that says that men and women are interchangeable is, to put it mildly, for the birds. I begin with this framework of the masculine to indicate that a particular aggression resides within each man and that, if channeled well, is beneficial.  Channeled aggression protects.  Channeled aggression provides.  Channeled aggression strives toward the noble, the good, and the worthy.  Unchanneled aggression leads to the opposite. Brokenness. Destruction. Selfishness. Laziness.  We do not have to look very far in our society today to see men who have squandered this gift.  To be sure, parts of our culture even celebrate such wasteful behavior, calling it “liberating” and “free.” It is no such thing. Men have been called to a higher mission, yet so many falter, choosing instead the numbing effects of TV, smartphones, drugs, and booze. I humbly submit to you, dear listeners, that we are in need of a renaissance of true masculinity – a rebirth of who we have been all along. And it might start with considering how the vulnerable in our society are treated. Recently, I had each of my students stand before the class and tell us something interesting about themselves. The task was not meant to be an intense intellectual exercise. It was simply meant to acclimate the students to public speaking: controlling a narrative in an engaging and fun way.  In essence, the exercise was meant to build confidence in each student. Many students talked about some hobby.  Others talked about their family.  A young man – eighteen years old, likely – spoke about where he was from and, in particular, his father.  He did not last long.  A split second after the word father escaped his lips, he bursts into tears.  The feelings were that intense.  My impression was that there had been a deficit.  A lack.  An absence in his young life.  All leading to a breakdown in front of a roomful of strangers. The pain of abandonment is real, and let me hasten to say that the hurt and the vulnerable are many.  What would our world look like if more men stood up for these folks?  Were more intentional about including them, guiding them, letting them know that they belonged.  I have come to learn that fatherhood is not restricted to the relationship I have with my three daughters.  Oh no.  Fatherhood extends to those who need fathers.  I am not talking about crossing boundaries or giving unsolicited advice.  I am not talking about imposing on others.  I am merely talking about filling a need when it arises in an appropriate and respectful way.  Something small but something potentially meaningful.  Channeled aggression for the good of another.  We belong to one another, after all.  The wolf one shepherd misses might be the wolf another shepherd catches. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Creep  They played where our property veed awkwardly toward the row of pines, his row, Dean’s who suddenly stormed out of his house with his demand: “Not with my kids!  He can’t play with my kids!” Mom joined him in seconds. “What’s this?  What’s wrong?” “Your boy.” “Why?” “‘Cause I said so.” Dean was a short, wiry Italian who had fought in Vietnam. He kept a warning finger in the air. Mom was miffed. “Then your kids can stay in their own yard,” she shot back, then, while the other children stayed away, she moved as mothers do toward her little boy, this inexplicable threat with his inflamed cheeks and tear-soaked eyes, this five-year-old monster with his thumb in his mouth

https://48bconsulting.com/INVITING: Creators ... writers, poets, painters, builders, etc.SEEKING: Clients looking for a unique way to improve human [email protected]“Beads on a String” by Harriet Bowers recounts the raising of children and the relentless passing of time – how a house full of the happy noise of children can so abruptly become quiet, still, and lonely.  Bowers lacked a formal education, yet she and her husband of more than fifty years raised six daughters in a little house on top of York Hill in northwestern Pennsylvania, and when the kids were grown and gone, she spent her time gardening, writing, and painting in her makeshift studio.  She was an artist, a poet, yet you, dear listeners, have never heard of her because she cared little if anything about the powerful gatekeepers in places like New York and Los Angeles who, for reasons largely related to money and influence, decide unilaterally what is and what is not “art.”  Harriet Bowers, you see, was my grandmother who explored her creativity without having to answer to any of the elites who pull the levers of marketing and celebrity. There are many like my grandmother – those who refuse to bow or otherwise compromise their art to appease the latest trend – indeed, to satisfy the infamous “wish list” of some obscure and self-important agent or publisher, and beginning May 5 of 2026, I am going to begin to showcase a few. As a professor of English with over twenty-six years of experience in the classroom, I sometimes marvel at how limited we are in the selections we teach.  We might use one writer whose niche is that they are marginalized and oppressed, forgetting the fact that we are reading their work at a major institution of higher learning.  How is that being marginalized, exactly?  While I will be the first to admit that my humble podcast does not have thousands of followers, I will say that the numbers are slowly creeping up.  Perhaps there is a taste for the truly marginalized after all: those who have legitimate voices with legitimate things to say yet do not have what we now call a “platform.”  I chuckle to think of what my grandmother would think of that concept.  Regardless, consider this to be an invitation to you or anybody you know who creates – writes, paints, sculpts, draws, builds, etc.  I review what people create, and I can certainly feature that review on The Professor’s Bayonet. I also continue to plug away at promoting my consultancy, 48B.  Story is powerful, and if someone does not know their story or the story of the organization of which they are a part, then their potential will never be reached.  Story and human performance go hand-in-hand.  Our mission is to take what happens in the college classroom out into the corporate world – businesses, youth organization, professional clubs, etc. -- in order to help learners leverage the power of story to accomplish their goals. So the bar is high, but the potential yield is worthwhile.  I cherish my grandmother’s poems, and two of her paintings hang in my study to this day.  Let’s champion the underdog artist, the underdog writer.  Let’s work together to bring to light everyone’s story, especially those not endorsed by the gatekeepers, for everyone deserves for the power of story – their story – to be unlocked. As always, please like and share.  This podcast only grows with the help of loyal listeners.  Thank you! 

Napolean Bonaparte is famous for saying that a soldier would do anything for him if awarded a pretty piece of ribbon to decorate his uniform.  He was referring, of course, to medals and accommodations for valor, but I have found this to be true in other, less dangerous contexts.  One of the many rungs I clung to on my way toward manhood was made of cloth, and I can still remember the pride I took in tying it around my waist.  It was a nail apron – free from the place we bought lumber for a big project at my grandparents’ place up on York Hill.  The apron somehow signified importance.  The other kids did not get one.  Only me and my cousin, Eric.  We were somewhere in the throes of adolescence, and for whatever reason, the men we looked up to thought it fit and proper to bestow upon us an article befitting our new rank.  We were no longer told to get out of the way, go play, you’re going to get hurt.  We were now outfitted with the stuff of men or, at least, approaching manhood, and we took on our role with a seriousness that was only a dress rehearsal for the real seriousness to come.  We didn’t know it then, but we were invited to work and learn in a dangerous place where the floor was still just a piece of plywood, where electrical cords and men carrying cumbersome burdens crisscrossed in tight and dangerous spaces.  And the men we aspired to be like hollered and beckoned: affirmed the right measurements, sounded their pleasure when a piece fit, summoned anybody within earshot to bring them this tool or that.  It was good sweat, honest sweat.  And I was invited to join the efforts, not as a child but as someone who just might be trusted if given the chance. I submit to you, dear listeners, that we might adopt as a solution to so many of our current ills the following: call forth the best in people and hold them to account.  Not out of meanness or capricious spite but out of the belief that they can.  They are able to measure up.  They are capable of accomplishing lofty goals.  Thanks be to God that I had men in my life who thought this about me.  I wear my apron every day.  And when the opportunity arises, I hand one over to some young person who could use it – really use it – even when the world continues its bleating warning that it’s unsafe, it’s unbecoming.  No.  The fearfully and wonderfully made know better.  It is a message that was never to remain sheathed. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Apron I got one for free down at Carter’s Lumber –  a nail apron I fastened around my teenage waist and filled importantly with prickly handfuls of eight pennies. My cousin, Eric, had one too, and together we framed the room above the garage while our fathers, uncles, and grampa measured, cut, pounded nails themselves, hollered in the way men do when the sun is shining and there is good work to be done. And I was among them, my apron, the uniform of competent men, common visionaries with circular saws and levels, chalk lines and squares, toiling for a single purpose with humble might until gramma called us all to boilt dinner or ham, and I would hook my hammer into the apron’s cloth ties, creak down the wooden ladder, and take my place in line –  a budding man among the weathered, the weary, the worn whose calloused palms had already caressed a woman and cradled an infant’s head, whose aprons were leather, tried, and true. 

I have come to learn that each of us is given raw material to make of it what we will.  Typically, that raw material aligns with our vocation, our job.  I am a university professor, which means that my raw material is paper.  I use it to collect my thoughts, brainstorm, teach, and communicate, and my students, in turn, give me paper with their work on it for me to evaluate and assign a grade.  I am surrounded by paper: books, essays, periodicals, notes.  For others, that raw material may be wood or plastic or electrical wire or pipes or engine parts.  It may be cleaning supplies or diesel trucks.  It may be fabric or patients.  It may be digital.  It may be purely intellectual.  Raw material is the stuff we use to create, and, moreover, it is the stuff we use to provide.  My stepfather was a welder.  His raw material was metal. What we do with that raw material says much about us.  Chuck, my stepfather, stepped into what he call his instant family.  My mother was left with five children.  Without hesitation, it seems, Chuck began coming around, eating dinner, doing odd jobs around the house.  Of course, as the oldest child, I was skeptical.  I had my loyalties and could not figure why someone would be so willing to attempt to fill in some big shoes.  As a boy, of course, I could not grasp the grander scope of things.  Chuck, like most of the men in my small northwestern Pennsylvanian community, was cut out of a singular cloth.  The steel, manufacturing, and oil industries kept the town afloat.  Chuck knew intimately well what it was like to work hard, punch a timeclock, wait for the whistle: time to start, time to eat lunch, time to quit.  Soon after my mother and Chuck met, I became a paperboy, and it was critical to the working men on my route that I got the paper in before they left for the job.  They needed to see the day’s news because that would be what they would talk about during any downtime.  Theirs was a tight community, and Chuck was a part of it. I would never suggest that there was never any love between my mother and Chuck.  Of course there was.  That goes without saying.  But what I am speaking about here is the way he took on the job, so to speak, of raising five kids.  He fell into a rhythm at home as much as he fell into a rhythm at work.  It was the same elbow grease, the same ethic.  Day in and day out he turned the raw material of his vocation into a paycheck that would support a family of seven.  I saw the value of that then.  As a man in his fifties, I see the sheer nobility of it now. As the saying goes, any fool can be a father; not everybody can be a dad.  Chuck certainly became the latter, doing what he could to do what dads do: teach, provide, discipline, love.  And make skateboards. Skateboard  Chuck worked at Penn Metal then, welded arches and angles for gas and oil tanks, was good at what he did, liked it, I think. He drank Miller Lite from the bottle just about every night after work, sitting in his grease-stained clothes at the kitchen table, the Warren Times Observer folded neatly in front of him. At some time (who can remember) I mentioned a skateboard – that I wanted one. “I’ll make it,” my stepfather said. “I can do that easy.” And so he did. Days later he brought home two boards – stainless steel with a two inch plate welded at an angle on the end so I could skillfully kick it up into my hand like Marty McFly. “Steel?” I said.  “Skateboards are made out of wood. I watched him drain the last of the suds into his upturned mouth. “It took me a week’s worth of lunch hours,” he finally said before getting out his pipe and pinching into the bowl a wad of cherry tobacco. So I held up a board, examined the wheels that had been bolted irreversibly to the bottom of the deck, and said a proper thank you. Then I continued to add up the hours until, well into my thirties and with three girls of my own,  I found myself making princess dresses out of paper. 

Being a parent oftentimes means having only two hands for a four-hand problem.  That is just the nature of the job.  A parent opens their eyes and is met with a barrage of chores and responsibilities, mostly centered on preserving a stable home environment for their children.  Because this series focuses on fathers, however, allow me to be culturally “trad” (or traditional as the more hip call it) and hone in on what fathers, in my humble estimation, are better designed to do. Much of the talk these days makes little room for the natural parenting proclivities of men and women, respectively.  Of course, I would not want to generalize, but suffice it to know, dear listeners, that my daughters come to me for some reasons while they go to their mother for other reasons.  From their mother they might want relationship advice.  From me, they might want school or college advice.  From their mother they might want to be playful.  From me they might want to have a more serious conversation about making good choices.  From their mother, they might want to be fed.  From me, they might want to have something repaired. Let me be clear.  Different individuals, male and female, possess different attributes that may not conform to gender expectations.  My sister, for example, is handy with tools, and I have known plenty of guys who are excellent listeners and conversationalists.  You get my point.  But where a married couple with children is successful is when they harmonize those qualities to the benefit of their offspring.  What they cannot get from mommy, they can get from daddy and vice versa.    What we have borne witness to in our society are households where one person, usually the mother, is expected to bear both burdens.  How many times have you actually heard a single mother proclaim that she is both mom and dad.  Practically speaking, this may be so, but it was never the design.  It was not the intended outcome. Many throw up their hands and proclaim that the mom and dad in one scenario is the norm, and against this, we should all chaff.  Men, in particular, need to reclaim their position as fathers if not husbands and strive toward creating that symbiotic relationship with the mother of their children because the truth of the matter is that they have something of great value to offer.  Indeed, as the popular saying goes (a saying also found in the film Courageous by the Kendrick brothers), if fathers only did what they needed to do then we would not have half the problems in our society that we have.  Dads need to step up and be responsible even if it means feeling overwhelmed and outnumbered.  The prize is worth it.  The children desperately need it.  The noble burden was never meant to be shouldered by one. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Right-handed Mitt God love her, my mother did her best, even with the baseball mitt she bought with the money we never had. It felt stiff on my right hand, a leather lobster claw of my own. “How can I throw?” I remember asking. “I’m not a lefty.” “How do I know?  How do I know?” She met the indignation of a child with the tired exasperation of a new widow. So I practiced and went to games. I was in the stovepipe league –  the Blacks, the kids who were not destined for varsity stardom, and I used my mitt in the exile of left field, dashing for the lucky pop flies, throwing the ball to the frantic short stop, one hand doing all the work. 

As I write this, though it is nine months out, I am bracing myself for when we drop my oldest daughter off at college for her freshman year.  I know I will be sad.  Terribly so.  For eighteen years, I have been on a special mission and I am in a tailspin for how that dynamic will change. Practically daily, I take my dog, Arrow, to Simpsonwood Park, a sprawling forested land that has dirt trails and too many deer to count.  It also butts up against a long stretch of the Chattahoochee River.  Along its bank, there is a marble bench. My custom is to stand between the river and the memorial and pray.  These days my heart has been heavy.  The princess days are gone.  The weight in my chest does not abate.  They do not need me to hold their hand anymore. As a Catholic, I understand that my God is a Trinity – three in One . Who but my heavenly Father can show me the way out of this present darkness? God the Father created the universe then created humankind to inhabit it in Eden, a place where they were called to be inventive and imaginative.Perhaps this is when my daughters were conceived, were born, were held in our arms and nurtured. It was a blissful, happy time. Perhaps that was what might be called a “God the Father” season.  I was once told that my becoming a father would teach me so much about God.  Maybe this was how.  My early fatherhood was modeled in a small but significant way on God’s early fatherhood. But then comes God the Son.  God the Son met His people where they are, became incarnate and grew up to be a great teacher and, most importantly, our Savior.  Along the way, he disciplined His followers when necessary but, beyond anything else, showed them how to be in this world.  Showed them the Way until He gave everything of Himself for them. Perhaps when my daughters entered school – elementary, middle, and high school – this was my “God the Son” season.  I was with them.  We lived under the same roof.  I guided them day after day, sacrificing everything I had for them.  It was a trying time with a host of challenges, but just like Jesus, I got into the thick of things with them, so that I could show them what mattered most. But finally comes God the Holy Spirit.  Jesus Himself said that He had to leave in order for the Holy Spirit to come.  Perhaps a part of the reason was because to be a good father, one must encourage his children to become independent.  This is where they can grow in wisdom and strength.  To keep one’s children under one roof, so to speak, would hamper their development and, worse yet, deny them the opportunity to discover their purpose, God’s plan for their lives. I think that this is where I might be now: “God the Holy Spirit” season.  We cannot see the Holy Spirit in the same way that Jesus’s disciples saw Him, but God the Holy Spirit still gives advice.  It is that still small voice.  It is what moves us to go one way or another.  My daughters may be preparing to launch, but they still need their dad, albeit in the form of counsel.  As a father, I should want each of them to mature into the women God wants them to be, and for that to happen, I have to get into the car.  I have to help my daughter move into her dorm room.  I have to give her a great big hug, and I have to say goodbye.  For now.  You can always talk to me.  I am there when you need me. And pray to Our Father in Heaven, the first Father, whose heart I am able to understand a little better now. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. How We Go We run ahead of our parents as we did when we were little – my siblings, cousins, and me on some trail, familiar logging road, our parents calling from behind, “Not too far!  Stay where I can see you!” But we tested the limits, of course, ran on and on, became distant until we had our own children –  those to whom we now call as our gait slows and we become aware of our imperfect bodies, the calls of our own parents echoes we can barely hear. 

[email protected]

On those fortunate Fridays, we kids were given a mission by our mother.  We were to locate Steve, the mailman, and retrieve the check.  He usually delivered our mail after 4 pm when the banks would be closed, and we desperately needed groceries for the weekend.  If we could intercept Steve and get the government check, we would eat well.  If not, it might be hotdogs or meatless pasta again or a trip up on the hill, which is how we described where my grandparents lived.  If we were going up on the hill, we were going to visit Gramma and Grampa, and it was their firm position that there was always enough food to go around. Of course, I could not know then what my widowed mother was going through to raise five kids: what anxieties plagued her, what fears kept her from sleeping at night.  But when I became a father at an age my own father never reached, I became acutely aware that there was one person standing between my family and certain hardship: me.  My wife worked and contributed to what was brought in, by I was the main breadwinner.  It was my check that paid the rent.  The car note.  The insurance.  I took on multiple jobs, and for a spell when the girls were very little, worked at the college until 11 pm Monday through Thursday as the so-called Night Dean: an afterhours administrative role that was not really administrative at all.  I did it because it was necessary.  There was never really a choice in the matter.  I even did this on Saturday mornings while classes were in session. I learned that living hand to mouth as a child informed how I would be as a father.  I simply did not want my children to experience what I had experienced.  My mother did her very best, but it was still a one-person show.  I know, dear listeners, that there are many, many mothers like mine, and the chance that one of these mothers is yours is good, so you are quite familiar with the sheer greatness of this love because you have received it.  Only when I became a parent did I begin to understand that greatness – that unfathomable depth.  God gifted me like he gifts every man with aggression, and it was for me to harness that aggression and use it be a good provider. Like any parent, I did my best, but it was still hard not to notice the shortfalls or, at least, be sensitive to what I could not yet provide.  I accept that I was being dwarfed by a standard that was entirely self-imposed, but even so: it pained me when I could not locate my own Steves on time, could not give my children what I wanted to give them.  Up on the hill was never an option for me.  I had to slug it out in the valley. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Dewdrops Of course we never knew the five of us were called dewdrops by the grownups in the neighborhood –  the ones who had jobs, careers even, the ones who weren’t dead or single and on food stamps. It was their little joke, harmless, I suppose. We never knew until Dale Yucha who lived with both of his parents fiendishly put us in our place. “Dewdrops,” he snickered.  “My dad calls you all dewdrops.” How he delighted in delivering our shame, a wound that echoes still as my three daughters walk with their mismatched gloves from our rented, aged home to play with the neighbor kids who live in impossible houses, private bathrooms each, I’m sure. I watch my daughters through the frosty, thin window and look for the neighborhood ginger who would tell them this. 

The parade would begin at the high school and move through town – past the barbershop, the doctor’s office, a couple of banks, and the bars – then pause on the bridge over the Brokenstraw Creek.  A prayer was said, a wreath was dropped over the bridge into the water, and three shots were fired before the parade would resume, making its way up to the cemetery where there would be a speech, another prayer, and three more shots.  This was how my little hometown observed Memorial Day.  It was a solemn affair when even the children knew when to keep quiet.  The old men, wearing their caps identifying them as veterans, saluted.  American flags waved from front porches. What I did not know then was that Memorial Day was practice for what I would experience in middle age.  Allow me to explain.  At fifty-one, I find myself looking back over my life amazed at how quickly it has gone by.  Within a few short years, my wife and I will be empty-nestors, and if I am being honest, the prospect does not sit well with me in the least.  It makes me sad.  I miss the days of pigtails and dress-up, recitals and trips to the park to feed the ducks.  It is Memorial Day for me every day.  My three little girls are now three young ladies, and the feelings of pride and melancholy that swirl around in my heart are oftentimes too burdensome.  I am at a loss for what to do, how to think.  I have only those feelings and long walks in the park with my dog Arrow where I try to process it all.  Where I pray.  Where I search for direction and purpose. What does a man do after all the milestones have been achieved?  College.  Career.  Marriage.  Kids.  All checked.  What does a man do in an empty, quiet house? Memorial Day is a day of reflection, a day meant to think about U.S. military personnel who died while in the service.  It is a day to look back, but as I consider that event and the men, many of them old, who lined the streets, watching the parade go by, I wonder what God calls us to do when life seems so bleak. We are made in our Creator’s image, which means that we were made to create.  The act of creating is of God.  The act of destroying is of the enemy.  What are we meant to do, then, but to create even after war and loss, even after the obvious milestones have been achieved?  The men I knew as a kid lost buddies in their youth, watched them die on foreign battlefields.  But these same men returned home and built families, built lives, created good things for all.  Perhaps you, too, dear listeners, are in a dark place, wondering what’s next and anxious about momentums that cannot – indeed, should not – be slowed or stopped altogether.  Might I suggest that you remember what you were designed to do and Who you were designed by.  Many apexes may have been reached, but this does not negate who you are, who I am, Who the Creator God, the only true apex, was and is and ever shall be. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Memorial Day in Youngsville Bo Dean, the dog that jumped like a deer, mangled a rabbit, left it in the woods – a cacophony of blood, fur, and bones – where we found it after we returned from the parade: Memorial Day, old soldiers with guns, saluting the war dead with three loud bangs – Pow!  Pow!  Pow! We buried the rabbit, threw rocks over the pretty mound of dirt; we were noble, precise, too young to really understand 

I am grateful that I belong to a generation that got to sit and listen to stories about World War II from the mouths of those who lived it.  Grampa, my mother’s father, had already been in the army when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but my great uncles had likely joined up when another uncle, Uncle Sam, issued the call.  I remember sitting at a table with old men who called each other boys.  One was a medic in Europe.  Another saw so much action his hair turned white.  Another man was a POW.  As for Grampa, he remained stateside.  It was his eyesight.  The doctors told him that he would be a casualty the first day.  So they sent him to Louisiana where he worked German prisoners.  When Gramma brought their oldest child to the worksite, my Grampa recounted, they cried.  They all cried.  That little girl would make my grandparents cry, too, one day when the cancer proved to be just too much for her thirty-two-year-old body.  Her loss was always too painful to bring up.  His was a silent grief. But once a soldier, always a soldier.  Grampa seemed to frame his entire existence on his time in the army.  We were never allowed to wear hats at the table, for instance.  Grampa told us of the time a drill instructor snatched a hat from the head of one of the recruits and tossed it out the window.  It was also unheard of to remain seated when the national anthem was played.  One simply had to stand up and salute the flag if it was visible.  He was a part of the Greatest Generation, and I got to hear his stories.  I did not know how good I had it. As a boy, I spent many days with Grampa, cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking cordwood.  Building and repairing what needed it.  Cutting grass.  Shoveling snow.  He was a man with many friends who knew the value of hard work.  He lived through the Great Depression and the War, as he called it, and somehow, I got to sit at his feet, so to speak, and soak in his character, try to understand his experiences, study what it means to be a man of integrity and honesty.  He was not perfect, of course.  Nobody is.  But for a good many years, we shared the same time.  Our lives overlapped.  And I have come to believe now that I am much older that the time I spent with Grampa was a great gift.  In a world that seems to be increasingly spinning out of control, here was a man who was centered on what matters most: God, family, a good day’s work. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Barracks At eighty-eight he was stationed in another place: “This is better than Indiantown Gap,” he announced to my mother.  “Twelve men above and twelve men below.  I sweep, and I mop.” And Mom smiled, and Grandpa smiled, and the nurses were left unaccounted for like the pajamas that were not standard issue and the wheelchair that was; Samuel G. Bowers with a purpose though his back arched determinedly toward the ash: a summit reached, the winter looks toward spring, an old boy still mustered: “But they got black people in this barracks,” he revealed.  “Can you believe it?” he asked. And Mom smiled, and Grandpa smiled, then Mom nodded alone. 

Home ownership had always been the plan, but it was an experience I had when we were living in a little apartment that really lit the fuse.  Our three girls were little.  The youngest had just come along.  It was the beginning of the Disney princess fad, and those who know what I am talking about know exactly what that meant: dresses and crowns, DVDs and catchy songs the kids would belt out at random.  It was a happy time.  A busy time.  My wife and I were doing are very best to make things happen, but our timetable was not God’s.  Still, we worked overtime and took on second and third jobs.  Our apartment was next to the common exit: a door to the outside used by the occupants of six units, two upstairs, two downstairs, two on an even lower level.  All day long that door would slam open then slam shut.  What is more, it was right by the girls’ bedroom.  One night, when we were trying to get the girls to go to bed, the door slammed open and shut and woke up the kids.  It was then that I realized that there was only about a half of a foot between where my girls slept and the outside world.  The juxtaposition was unnerving.  I thought of their safety.  I thought of their security.  I as a father had to put more distance between my kids and the world.  It was a sobering realization.  To be sure, the event made me feel inadequate.  I wasn’t doing enough.  We needed a place of our own – something that felt more fully ours, not shared. We eventually moved out of the apartment and into a rental house where the girls shared two bedrooms.  It was a step in the right direction, and for five more years, we continued to save.  I found more work.  My wife babysat.  Finally, after so much sacrifice, we managed to purchase our own home. We were there for about seven years until we outgrew it and were able to buy something bigger.  My girls were little in that first house.  The home we live in now is their teenage house.  Just before we moved, I realized this affecting truth and wondered all the same about the shifting role that is fatherhood: the holding on and the letting go. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. 2814 Christopher Court The girls had on their puffy coats when we first brought them to the tan split-level that sat in the cul-de-sac of our dreams. The numbers were right, and so was the school, we had thought, but it was the backyard tree with the limbs the girls could reach that did it for me. This was our house, our home. And now, seven years later, I sit, grayer and surrounded by boxes, and think of Henry le Puss and Pablo Picatso buried under the rose bush and of the new house, a new home, not far but distant, still and wonder about my life and the bittersweet passage of time as my eldest comes in fitted perfectly in her mother’s skirt to ask me if she could spend Halloween with a friend, not us. Yes, I reply then watch the night descend upon the low limb  she had once griped. 

I have my Uncle Barry to thank for introducing my father to my mother.  He was a Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and one day, after making hamburgers for dinner, he decided to toss the grease outside but forgot about the screen door in the process.  The result?  He got splattered with boiling grease and had to go to the infirmary where he was attended to by a Navy corpsman, my dad.  My uncle was newly married, and his wife had a sister, Spring, my mother.  The two met and were soon married – too soon, thought many – and just as quickly, I came along.  It was 1974.  In less than ten years, my dad would be gone.  Passed away.  Deceased.  It had been his heart.  Had the affliction come just a few years later, medical science would have been able to help. Losing my father months shy of my tenth birthday left an indelible mark on me.  The truth be told, the loss shaped me in ways I am still discovering.  The permanence of death is unyielding.  A person can’t get around it.  Can’t escape how it looms over us all.  It was a lot to process for a kid.  Suffering was all around me: my brothers and sisters, my mother, my grandparents, aunt, and uncle. He was my dad, but he was also a husband and brother, friend and son.  I think back on that time now as a husband and father and shudder at how the loss of my dad was also the loss of a husband, the loss of a brother, the loss of a child.  Death is an enemy for a reason.  He who wields the scythe is indiscriminate and cruel. I was blessed to have many loving adults in my life.  In their own way, they walked with me through that dark tunnel.  Some offered words.  Others just listened.  Uncle Barry took me fishing, and in doing so, taught me how to disconnect from one reality and connect to another.  The language of trout streams is melodic, peaceful.  It was both a retreat and a way to plug into something higher.  A gift.  A beautiful respite even when it rained and the water grew muddy. Here is a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. Uncle Barry Uncle Barry understood trout in a way that was silent and sure: “They hittin’ on salted minnows today?” I’d ask as I’d ease into the Brokenstraw to get a sense of the current. “Mm hm,” he’d reply, and that was all; I’d soon hear the squeal of his line as he cast upstream, and I’d watch him guide the blue-green line downstream like a conductor before an unseen orchestra.  In wisps of cigarette smoke, Uncle Barry would make his way downstream, triangulating, strategizing, and thinking about nothing all at once, and between bait I would follow; nudged by the steady flow of water, caught in the silent and sure wonder of river and man and things unseen, tugged by the goodness of a man who showed me how to fish for trout as my own father once began before he left to die -- “Make sure your split shot’s two foot up from your bait, and try the riffles.  It’s time they’re hittin’,”  he’d yell back, and because I too wanted the symphony of a catch, I would. 

In The Professor’s Bayonet, I attempted to cut through what I perceived to be a lot of nonsense in order to offer something thoughtful to chew on.  The episodes were not long on purpose. Having arrived at episode 100, however, I am met with the cold reality that, despite my best efforts, I have been unsuccessful at growing my audience.  I have a very dedicated bunch, and to them, I am very, very grateful, yet the stark fact remains that the party is not getting any bigger.  I can only assume the interest is not there.  I humbly accept this end.  Perhaps the indifference is just that pervasive. For this reason, The Professor’s Bayonet is going to launch into a series on fatherhood.  The episodes may or may not be tethered to a work of literature, but they will certainly hone in on some aspect of being a father that I hope the audience will find edifying.  In one sense, the aim will be the same.  I continue to want to cut through all of the craziness to get to what really matters.  Much of what ails society is caused by a lack of fathers, so if I can offer some thoughts to help correct course, then I will give it a go and hope for the best.  At some point, we might return to what we did for ninety-nine episodes, or we might just hang it up and call it a day.  I am still on the fence.  It all depends on the numbers and my ability to gently blow on a tiny spark to get a flame – a flame that grows more hungry with each puff.  For now, in celebration of hitting the one-hundredth episode mark, I would like to leave you with a poem entitled “Underduck.”  It is one I wrote.  It is mine.  But it is also a poem that speaks to what we as mothers and fathers, educators and caregivers do every day.  We encourage.  We lift up.  We inspire.  We know that our best selves linger long after we are gone, for that is the nature of loving others into being.  My grandparents and parents, teachers and mentors did it for me.  And so, too, are we charged with doing it for others. I use the metaphor of a swing.  I hope you enjoy it. Underduck The bucket swing was suspended by two long ropes from the ancient tree standing sentinel in front of the small, white, red-trimmed house able to hold generations, and we all took our turn –  sisters, brothers, cousins, first and second, and up we would soar after each push, each give to our take, into the crisp blue sky criss-crossed by gentle branches and wisps of clouds, and when the mood would strike them, our elders, the providers, would give us underducks, determinedly  guiding us through the dipping arc before heaving us above their heads whereupon our little feet would float into the great expanse, our unscarred bodies lift ever so slightly out of the black, rubber womb fashioned out of an old tire. To and fro we went as the acorns fell and the squirrels gathered for the coming cold until we, too, were launched into worlds without sassafras, lives  where dogs don’t smile as much – rocketed beyond that simple plot of land by those who are now grayed or gone, those who gave us one last great shove, hopeful that we would be birthed into noble, more beautiful tomorrows with young ones of our own all pleading as we once did for underducks to will them still higher: joy beyond measure, summits only imagined. So it goes as it went – we hold our children to our hearts then thrust them forward until we can reach them no more, left to run tiredly past the upward effort, and if we are lucky, turn to admire the heights. 

If you have ever sat in a literature class, you have likely heard of this term: iambic pentameter.  It is used to describe the da-dum, da-dum, da-dum rhythm often found in poetry.  One syllable is unstressed but the syllable immediately after is stressed: Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.  Often likened to a human heartbeat, iambic pentameter appeals to even novice students of literature because the meter is that relatable.  The beat precedes the lyrics.  It is what first catches one’s attention. Consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,  And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;  And every fair from fair sometime declines,  By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;  But thy eternal summer shall not fade,  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;  Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:     So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee Many poets have dipped their quills and written with unmatched eloquence about love, and the Bard, Shakespeare, is no exception.  However, he is keenly aware of the power of iambic pentameter.  From his own heart, he sets his ideas to the beating of a heart and in so doing, draws in his readers even more closely, knowing full well that the da-dum, da-dum, da-dum rhythm has been imprinted on all of his readers since they were in utero.  That is correct, dear listeners.  Our lesson in literature begins before we ever emerge from the womb.  It is not in words or prosody but rhythm: the beating of our mother’s heart.  That is what we listen to.  That is what forms us.  To be born, then, is to graduate from that first school. But a curious thing happens upon our commencement.  We begin again.  We learn a language.  We build a vocabulary.  And, eventually, we rediscover a familiar rhythm, sitting in English class, looking at a poem we believe is so foreign to us as to be written in a different tongue. Novice educators might miss the opportunity to reintroduce iambic pentameter to their students, choosing instead to explore some esoteric concept.  Some students might be won over while others not so much.  Even the best of us had to run that gauntlet.  Educators in the know, however, will begin on common ground even if it takes some time to explain to the learners that the ground is, indeed, common.  In effect, we need to remind students that they already know the material.  The details may be new but the intended effect is not.  In the womb, we were nurtured, and if everything that came afterwards was an immense challenge, we still have that groundwork.  To return to iambic pentameter is to return to the utmost basic.  And if we can do so with hope and optimism, we can make this return into a new beginning.  Such is the power of poetry.  It is not meant for a special class of individuals who know the terminology and the biggest hitters.  It is meant for all, for all, deep, deep down, understand it.  There is nothing elite about it.  Iambic pentameter is as common as a mother’s love. 

Shel Silverstein’s vastly popular children’s book, The Giving Tree, has been a fixture in most nurseries since its publication in 1964.  Both the story and the illustrations are simple. It begins with a tree who loves a little boy who would gather her leaves, climb up her trunk, and swing from her branches.  The boy was imaginative and joyful, and, Silverstein writes, “when he was tired he would sleep in her shade.”  The boy loved the tree very much, he continues, and the tree was happy.  But the story turns as so many stories of blissful innocence turn: when time begins to drive a wedge between those wistful days of youth and the call to march forward to some unknown and, in many cases, scary future.  The boy begins to grow up and want other things.  At first, it is romance, but then it turns to money – the material – at which point the tree offers her apples for the boy to sell. That would make him some money. That will make him happy. But the boy continues to grow up, and as such, his desires change. He is now too busy to climb the branches of the tree. He wants a wife. He wants a house at which point the tree offers her branches to make that house. And the tree, Silverstein writes, is happy. But the boy continues to grow and soon becomes an old man who wants to flee from the world. He wants a boat so he can sail away. He is sad.  Life got to be too much. So the tree offers her trunk, and the boy cuts it down and makes his boat. But the tree only feigns happiness. The truth is much more stark.  She is sad and lonely. Years later, the boy eventually returns, but the tree tells him that she has nothing more to give – no more apples, no more branches, not even a trunk – but the boy only wants a quiet place to sit and rest. The story is worth summarizing because it is important to see the juxtaposition that runs throughout: the passing of time and self-sacrifice.  Time waits for no man, but if we remain stuck on that reality – become transfixed by our powerlessness in the face of aging, in ourselves and others – then we risk forfeiting the opportunity to serve and love others. he tree could have pleaded with him to stay – to do his best along with her to preserve a precious moment in time when there was seemingly nothing but bliss and joy. But the tree chose a different tack. She emptied herself to serve his needs.  She died unto herself for her beloved friend, tethering her life journey to his. This underscores the poignancy of this children’s story, read to countless infants before bedtime. The boy represents so many of us. He wants what so many of us want: nothing bad but typical. A spouse. A home. A good job. But, in the end, it wearies him to the bones. He comes to the end of the story a broken and fatigued person who wants merely to sit and rest his weary bones. A children’s story, dear listeners. A deep and profound review of a long and difficult life in a children’s story.  It might not be a stretch to consider that Silverstein was writing for both listener and reader. The book certainly makes an impact on both. Even though Silverstein had a Jewish upbringing, I have to wonder why he made the decision to have as the boy’s lifelong friend a tree.  I do not want to be guilty of imposing a worldview on this special book, but his choice is cause for wonder.  Where else do we see self-sacrifice and a tree?  I will leave my interpretation there.  Any way you take it, The Giving Tree serves as a beautiful reminder of what truly matters.  For the little one listening in a parent’s lap, it is a blueprint for how to live; for the parent him or herself, it is the best way to pay it forward.  Those blessed with the responsibility to nuture and guide others should understand in the full that everything is expected of them because that is the measure of true and everlasting love.  We are to hold nothing back.  We are to encourage and uplift.  Until we are stumps.  Places of rest.  Cradles or mangers, they are both the same thing. 

Allen Ginsberg begins his 1956 poem “Howl” with the following words: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”  Ginsberg, along with contemporaries Jack Kerouac and William Borroughs, embraced a lifestyle that ran contrary to the stiff materialism of post-war 1950s America – a lifestyle that included sexual liberation, psychedelic drugs, and a rootlessness best characterized by Kerouac’s book, On The Road, which, rumor has it, was typed out on a roll of paper without natural break or pause – stream-of-consciousness to the extreme.  The Great Depression and World War II caused a massive shift in how one approached the task of living, and at least for the Beatniks, that approach meant all out rebellion, even if, according to a popular 1955 film of the same name, starring James Dean, that rebel did not have a cause. What the movement, in general, and “Howl,” in particular, highlights is the insanity that will inevitably crop up when the institutions and monsters borne out of the human mind become so massive that the soul can only whimper in their presence.  Consider the A-bomb, for example.  At no time in human history have our species developed and, I hasten to say, actually deployed a weapons system that can level entire cities in a split second.  Yet we did this in Japan: twice.  And then there were the fire-bombings across Nazi-occupied Europe.  In Dresden alone, so notes Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was first published in 1969, the fires were so intense that citizens rushed to the water towers, climbed in, and were inadvertently boiled alive.  Juxtapose all of this to the pristine American life networks were broadcasting across the nation – Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, and Lassie – and we get a recipe for pure lunacy.  The Beatniks chaffed at this absurd contradiction of messaging. The world was not ideal, they argued. They saw it.  They lived it. Ward Cleaver, the Beav’s father, knew it, too, though you could not see the terrible flashbacks behind the genial smile and pipe.  That was artifice.  That was fake or, as Holden Caufield reminds us in 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye, “phony.” Rest assured, dear listeners, that I am not dropping the titles of books, films, and television programs to sound impressive.  I do so to provide much needed context.  There were many voices saying the same thing, yet American popular culture marched dutifully forward, seemingly ignoring the calls for alarm along the way.  We were American, after all.  Rugged.  Individualistic. And, importantly, nothing like the Ruskies and their failing communist experiment. The madness, however, soon swelled into what became the countercultural revolution of the sixties with the riots and the protests, the draft card burnings and the assassinations. That gave way to the hedonism of the seventies, the materialism of the eighties, and the cynicism of the nineties. Are we howling or have we been rendered silent, pacified by our devices, oblivious of what simmers beneath?  To howl would require the ability or at least the willingness to step into unchartered places in order to consider the wider context.  It would require that we reacquaint ourselves with our wildness – to rediscover what Walt Whitman calls our barbaric yawp.  Is there cause for hope?  After cynicism came the absurd.  After the absurd came living as performance: Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram.  Is Ginsberg to be an echo or a call to action?  Perhaps it all depends on how many lies we can tolerate: those told to us by others, those told to us by ourselves. 

American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, first preached his sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1741.  This was the catalyst for the first Great Awakening, that time in American history when hordes of individuals flocked back to the faith, sobered up by what lawless living might lead to – in a word, damnation.  Before this sermon, the faithful were anything but.  Wilderness living, which is to say, doing what one can to hack it out in the forest, raise a family, and survive, had caused many to compromise their principles.  One could afford to live by the Christian code in the comfort of a city – observe the sabbath, tithe regularly, be a brother’s keeper – but on the frontier – and that was most of America – one had a different set of values.  The testing in the wilderness made America what it is – rugged and raw – but, according to Jonathan Edwards, at least, the experience also turned America away from what it was: a city upon a hill, a beacon of hope, an exceptional place, indeed.  The Great Awakening, then, was a massive altar call but one that did not mince words.  Edwards writes, for example, that “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”  A person cannot save him or herself, in other words.  A person’s life is that precarious.  On a whim and without notice, the Creator of the entire universe can send a wicked person to the eternal fire, and nothing can be done about it.  No plea.  No appeal.  Edwards continues, “Some make gods of their pleasures; some choose Mammon for their god; some make gods of their own supposed excellencies, or the outward advantages they have above their neighbors: some choose one thing for their god, and others another. But men can be happy in no other God but the God of Israel: he is the only fountain of happiness.”  An individual, to put it another way, cannot have it both ways.  That person cannot deify or make into an idol some hobby or pastime or earthly success and expect to be granted entry into God’s Holy kingdom.  There is but one way: Christ.  Not many paths to one destination.  This is flawed thinking, flawed living.  And Edwards holds no punches about what the consequences will be.  The Great Awakening as you, dear listeners, might have already gathered was a movement that galvanized America to the extent that it was prepared to fight for its independence.  1741, in other words, was needed for 1776 to take place.  The march toward freedom began as a religious revival. I am prompted to consider the current age when the tyranny is not some monarch across the pond but a series of ideologies that seem to champion falsehood and celebrate the perverse.  These ideologies are pervasive.  We hear them in our music and see them on the TV.  They are taught in schools and shouted from podiums.  To think critically and honestly about them is heresy; to merely raise an eyebrow is to invite ridicule. I will not articulate them here, dear listeners.  Go no further than a mandatory HR training to see what I am talking about.  I simply wonder if history is about to repeat itself.  Interest in religion is ticking back up.  More and more young people are coming back to church and even embracing orthodoxy.  Some even call it a revival.  It is an exciting time.  Is this the event we need to be able to throw off the shackles of a narrative that insists that we do not believe our own ears, not trust our own eyes?  Perhaps.  But the revival will have to have teeth on it.  Hell remains real, after all, and to avoid it, we must call a lie a lie, recognizing delusions for what they are: dangerous fantasies that make the slopes more slippery than they already are. 

Published in 1968, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” begins with an infestation of crabs on a property inhabited by Pelayo and Elisenda, a couple of humble means, living on a Columbian shore.  The crabs begin to rot, and believing this rot is making his and Elisenda’s baby sick, Pelayo is tasked with disposing them in the sea; however, upon his return, he sees an old man lying face down in the mud – an old man with large and imposing wings.  The old man speaks in an unintelligible dialect, and, at first, Pelayo and his wife believe him to be a castaway; however, neighbors have a different take altogether: the old man, they insist, is an angel.  Their baby, after all, begins to get well.  Soon enough, the entire town knows, and Pelayo is forced to chain the old man up and keep him in the chicken coop.  Crowds come.  Pelayo begins to charge an entrance fee.  A priest arrives, and begins to speak to the old man in Latin.  The old man does not seem to understand, the priest quickly deduces that this is no angel.  Soon thereafter, another attraction arrives on the scene – a girl who can transform into a spider, and the crowd lessons.  Even so, Pelayo and Elisenda make enough money to build a mansion, and the child grows to school age.  At some point, the old man begins to come into the house, becoming comfortable with his hosts, until, one day, he flies off, much to his relief, and, surprisingly, Elisenda’s relief.  The temporary union was just too much. Garcia Marquez is famously known for being a pioneer in magical realism, a literary genre, as the name suggests, that seamlessly combines the mundane with the fantastical.  In his world, the magical and the real are two halves of one sphere; spotted together, there should be no call for alarm.  A man might be going about the humdrum task of mowing his lawn, only to look up, and see a dragon flitting about in the air.  His reaction would be like that of someone spotting a robin or an airplane.  There is no cause for alarm or surprise; he has seen it all before. Such is the approach taken by Garcia Marquez in a story about the sudden appearance of a winged old man in a muddy piece of property. They want to make money. Garcia Marquez is certainly pointing toward humankind’s less flattering impulses.  In the face of the miraculous, many human beings get dollar signs for eyes.  Perhaps this is why the magical does not appear to use more regularly. Perhaps the Author of the supernatural knows exactly what human beings would do with it.  Perhaps He knows our collective tendency to be crass and self-serving.  Garcia Marquez may be imparting a lesson to his readership here.  The story is less about the old man and more about our treatment of him. When I was nine-years-old, my father died.  His funeral was in Kentucky, many miles from my hometown in Pennsylvania.  We drove the long way down and ended up staying at a cheap hotel where a maid with a German accent worked.  She cleaned our room, and when she found out why me and my sister were there, she left us candy.  It was something to look forward to after the viewings.  On the day we buried him, the German maid actually came to the graveyard and put an arm around me and my sister. Days later, we called the hotel to see about a forgotten garment and to thank the German maid.  In hindsight, she was a great help and great comfort to the kids.  After my mother described her, the proprietor gave the answer you, dear listeners, have likely already guessed.  We have no one of that description who works here, ma’am.  I do not know who you are talking about. Perhaps the outcome of Garcia Marquez’s story would have been different if Pelayo and Elisenda were younger, much younger.  Innocence has a way of opening doors the experienced and worldly cannot.  It is perhaps why we are all called children of God, for it is only with those eyes, youthful eyes, that we can see the magical among us. 

William Shakespeare’s 1623 tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, is renowned for its depiction of a complex and fully developed female character in the person of one of its title figures.  Cleopatra, recalling the inexperience of her youth, exclaims, “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as I said then.”  She had been, in other words, a novice at all things pertaining to life, which might not excuse past behavior, but it certainly explains it.  We have all had our salad days, dear listeners.  Cleopatra merely calls it what it is, and in doing so, reveals a level of self-awareness that is difficult not to admire.  The accumulated years do not escape her.  She knows her finitude.  She makes no effort to avoid it. I first encountered these lines as a graduate student in a class on Shakespeare.  I recall my professor – a man likely in his fifties at the time – pausing for a moment on what it meant to be so acutely aware of the passing of time and the sheer brevity of one’s life – a puff of smoke blown away quickly by successive years.  I may or may not have grasped the gravity of what was being considered at the time, but I certainly am able to grasp it now, being a man about to turn fifty-one.  Salad days.  When the years were green and the horizons wide and intoxicating.  Even the rays of the sun were somehow different then. The Bard, through his characterization of the historic Cleopatra, was undoubtedly prompting his audience to grapple with the meaning of their own lives – the accumulating years, the many, many memories stacked one upon another – what we are supposed to do with it all if anything.  Just experience it.  Feel it.  Reminisce.  This is a surface interpretation, which still passes muster.  However, we might also consider the larger context.  Cleopatra, after all, was a powerful woman known for her beauty.  This is more than just a character nodding toward her younger days.  This is a figure of some stature acknowledging that stature is not enough.  It is never enough.  Even flowers wilt.  Cleopatra is very much aware of this fact, which gives her character a much deeper layer, indeed. Youth, naivete, and idealism all seem to be common enough bedfellows.  I had my own ideals in my salad days, and if I am to be honest, I still cringe at the naivete I so boldly put on display before the world.  My ignorance was a spectacle.  I thank God for the many graces that were extended to me then and now.  Cleopatra’s line in this play, then, should be seen as an example of owning up to the reality of youth.  Being impetuous is a part of the landscape.  More to the point, when one is young, there is just life.  When one has accumulated some years, life naturally divides itself by eras, big and small.  One’s salad days are merely one era.  To see it as such is a sure sign of maturity.  To extend it beyond its proper borders is a sign of immaturity.  Nobody likes a forty-year-old adolescent. On that note, Cleopatra would be an outlier in the current age.  The postmodern condition has Tasmanian-devil-like gone after every tradition and common understanding formerly in place, and age was no exception.  While I submit that age really is only a number, some formerly agreed upon values should not have been shown the curb.  The aged do have something of value to offer.  There really is wisdom beneath the gray hairs.  The older should be heeded.  The young should sit quietly and listen.  This does not mean to refrain from questioning.  It means to give respect where it is due and to recognize one’s own salad days for what they are, for even the queen of Egypt was humble enough to do just that. 

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his famous work, Don Quixote, in 1605 and then the second part in 1615.  Officially titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of LaManchaland, this Spanish classic would influence literature in countless ways.  It follows the story of Alonso Quijano who so voraciously consumes tales of knightly chivalry that, soon enough, he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant himself, dubbing himself Don Quixote de la Mancha before recruiting Sancho Panza to be his squire.  Cervantes writes, “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”  Sleep deprivation, yes, but also too much reading caused him to slip into another world, another persona and dash about Spain, “tilting at windmills” or, to put it another way, fighting imaginary enemies in imaginary battles.  He supplies the illusion; Panza, the Spanish word for gut, supplies the down-to-earth wit.  The pair encapsulate the fantastical and the real, perhaps representative of most if not all human beings.  This might explain the appeal.Much, of course, has already been said and written about Quijano’s slip into harmless insanity.  The real world is too much.  The world of knights, ladies, and noble missions is much more attractive.  It is this world he yearns to inhabit.  What small yearning do we all have, dear listeners? My interest is not so much to explore this facet we all likely possess but to openly wonder why, especially among the young and impressionable, it seems to be growing at an astronomical rate.  This group, especially, seems to want to throw off the shackles of banal and humdrum and assume identities that are much more interesting and much more controllable. One catalyst for this behavior is certainly the state of our world.  Much of it does not look pretty.  The questions loom large and foreboding.  What does a spirit become if all it has to look forward to is hard work and strife?  Why not cosplay some?  Another catalyst, I would argue, is the usual suspect: the smartphone.  Our lives are lived virtually so much that we are tempted to believe (and some really do) that we can create avatars in our own waking lives as much as we can create them online.  Why not step into a different gender or race or species?  It harms no one.  It pleases me.  Who are you or anybody else to say I can’t? Perhaps it would be useful to call to mind how Don Quixote was treated in the book.  He was mocked.  He certainly received a good many stares.  But on occasion, insights would poke through that revealed something about what was really going on.  Cervantes writes, “I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”  The message?  Not everyone has the presence of mind and intellectual maturity to parse out the delusional from the real.  A thing is a thing, this group might argue, because of a feeling, a hunch.  It amounts to a world built on whims and passing fancies. The great irony, here, is that, while Don Quixote read too much and went crazy, some in our current society are not reading at all and still reaching the same end point.  Ray Bradbury, well-known author of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, quipped that “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them".  It seems, dear listeners, that we have arrived at that point.  Even in college, so has been my experience, books are seen as passé, certainly not anything with which to be troubled.  Therefore it appears that illusions emerge out of two opposing states of affairs: reading too much or not reading at all.  Sancho Panza tempered Don Quixote’s world with his matter-of-fact words.  Are we so stuck in our smartphones that we can’t find the same force now? 

The Bible is filled with them: characters who enter the action and then just as suddenly depart, leaving readers to contemplate their significance in light of the greater story being told – that of God’s everlasting love and His plan to save our souls.  The average student might be tempted to gloss over these characters in their pursuit of the wider interpretation, but Catherine Lawton is no average student.  Nor is she an average writer.  Her 2004 book entitled Face to Face dials into the life of the woman in Luke’s gospel who was afflicted with a condition that made it impossible for her to stand up straight.  Luke writes: “On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” 13 Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.” Scripture quickly pivots to the synagogue leader’s indignance that Jesus healed on the sabbath, rendering the healing of the woman a happy footnote in the battle between Jewish leaders and the Messiah; however, Lawton sees fit to unpack her story because, like everybody who steps into the greatest of stories that is Holy scripture, she is a somebody.  She has a background – a past – and because of the healing ministry of Christ, a future as well.  She is, in a phrase, one of us, which endears her to us, but we also get caught up in the grand thought that miracles are not out of the question for us as well.  In the woman, we see our pain.  In her as well, we see what possibilities await. Lawton takes the craft of storytelling to a new level in this powerful fictionalized account of one woman's eighteen year affliction by a pneuma, a spirit that keeps her bowed and dejected: a pariah to everybody but a few. Once healthy, strong, and with nothing but good prospects on the horizon, a tragic event leaves Joakima, the woman, physically deformed and her life forever changed. As the years go by, Joakima's sense of alienation and hopelessness only deepens until one fateful encounter turns it all around. Lawton permits the woman’s humanity to poke through, even though we know the ending of the story from the start.  Upon hearing that Jesus is near, Lawton writes that the woman “listened to all of the excitement with mixed emotions” only to later try to summon the courage to ask Him to touch her.  The woman, in other words, did not think of herself as worthy.  In effect, her distorted posture, gaze set firmly on the ground in front of her, acts as a metaphor for the posture so many of us assume.  We are consumed by the here and now, heads bowed, our view severely limited.  And we say to ourselves, this is my lot.  There is nothing that can be done.  No change.  No release.  The affliction and I are one. But in Lawton’s dramatization of the life of the bent woman, we get a different message altogether: one of hope and connection.  To be sure, the parallels between Lawton’s story and reality as we see it in the present age are striking.  Many of us are not afflicted with an evil pneuma, but we as a society are certainly bent over, looking at our phones.  You heard me correctly, dear listeners.  I believe there is a valid comparison between one woman’s physical affliction and an entire society’s mental affliction to the extent that both cause pain and isolation.  Consider how some are positively addicted to their devices, unable even to hold a normal face-to-face conversation, sit through an interview, or engage in small talk.  Perhaps we will understand that what claims to free us actually keeps us in chains, for it is certainly not angels who keep our eyes averted. https://www.amazon.com/Face-Novel-Catherine-Lawton/dp/0967038685

Boubacar Boris Diop’s riveting account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide should give pause to anyone tempted to place too much stock in humankind’s ability to keep the peace.  Tensions between two ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutu, reached a tipping point, and for a span of around one-hundred days, members of the Tutsi tribe butchered the Hutu by the thousands.  It was, note some, as if the devil were on a rampage in the broad daylight.  The slaughter was extensive and vicious.  The machete was the weapon of choice. Diop’s book recounts the story of Cornelius Uvimana, a history teacher, who returns to Rwanda after working abroad to wrestle with the loss of his entire family to Hutu militia.  In many ways, the book is a meditation on the darkest impulses of humankind.  The Hutus regarded the Tutsis as cockroaches deserving to be wiped off the face of the earth.  They surely tried.  Bloodied bodies lay strewn about every corner of the country.  What Uvimana eventually comes to believe is that only our humanity can save us and that it his mission to bear witness to the massive atrocity that was the Tutsi genocide.  He will not let the world forget.  He would be the voice of the voiceless dead. Years ago, I assigned Murambi, The Book of Bones to an honors class and was struck by how the exchange of ideas evolved.  Yes, there were those who grieved over the events that took place between April and July of 1994 in a country located in central Africa; however, there was one student who shared with the class a startling idea.  If it is simply a matter of truth that we as a species are capable of such sudden brutality, then we should be resigned to that fact. That is who we are: ugly, nasty, cruel but undeniably human. What is more, according to this rubric, such acts of brutality can even be justified, rape included. If the objective is total annihilation, then, yes, the sexual violation of others is justified.  The Hutus were effective.  Why should they be blamed for their success? The student was clearly taking a pragmatic approach, sacrificing morality along the way. Diop’s appeal to humanity was naive. Did he not know what happened in the camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, the gulags in Soviet Russia, the killing fields in Cambodia?  Violence is a part of our collective DNA.  Why deny it?  To be sure, leaning into it could reveal more about who we are a species actually are. Aren’t we after the truth?  Isn’t that what it means to be educated? Cain killed Abel, after all. The current era is one where the very notion of there being an objective truth is coming under fire. This person has this truth; this other person has that truth. We have come to believe that we can imagine whatever we want and then speak it into existence in an instant, making unique realities along the way.  Issues arise, however, when these so-called realities clash, and they always will. Relativism is the secret sauce when it comes to conflict; indeed, it is the very thing that prevents justice from being served because everybody has their own measuring stick. What is wrong for him is right for her and on and on down the line. My honors student had his measuring stick for what was right and wrong.  The Hutus had theirs.  And both resulted in the justification of heinous behavior. The best way forward?  Clearly, justice is predicated on the rock-solid existence of objective truth.  This is the common measuring stick. This is the way to peace.  Perhaps this is how we recover our common humanity.  We do not build our society on opinion and whim, trend and passing fancy.  Our building blocks must be immutable – lofty, not base.  You see, dear listeners, my student was only partially correct.  Yes, the base instincts exist but so, too, do the noble proclivities – the righteous, the virtuous, the honorable.  We have only to calibrate our lives in such a way that we aim for one end or the other: a low opinion of humankind or a great dream of who we could become. 

I would like to begin with a basic question: Can you give me the name of your great-great-grandfather?  How about your great-great-grandmother?  The likely answer is a simple no. The names of those on whose shoulders we stand are lost to time.  And this is to say nothing about their very lives: what they did to bring in money, what dreams they had, the quirks they possessed, the countless intricacies and experiences of what makes a life a life.  Consider your own, dear listeners.  As you listen to this episode, you are endeavoring to accomplish something; you hold feelings for others; you have your fears and anxieties.  I could go on and on.  My point is that just as you are alive now, so, too, were they alive then, and while the details may be different, the very experience of life is not.  Individuals hundreds of years ago admired the dawn, fell in love, wondered what the first gray hairs meant.  You get my drift. In a recent podcast, popular Catholic priest, Father Mike Schmitz, reminded his listeners that one day, they will die.  This will be the first death.  The second death happens when the last person to utter your name dies.  After that, you will be no more.  Your great-great-grandkids will have no idea what your name was, what you did to earn money, your dreams, your quirks, and so on and so forth.  We might conclude that this is merely the way things go and be done with it.  However, I propose that a keen understanding of this reality is needed to better calibrate how we interact with others. Allow me to explain.  One person may put a lot of stock in personal reputation.  Position and titles are important.  Being highly regarded by others is paramount.  These individuals are buoyed by what others think.  It is easy to see the connection, here, to social media.  These applications thrive on outside (and even anonymous) approval.  But scripture reminds us that our lives are like a vapor or mist.  We are here, and then just like that, we are not.  The wise see the pursuit of personal reputation for what it is: vain. Another person might recognize this, and instead of pursuing approval from others, that person might more fully invest in being known by his or her Creator God, the One that person strives to spend eternity with.  People forget, in other words, but God does not.  He knows your name and mine and will not forget it.   Fair enough.  But what is the takeaway?  What do our lives look like if we do our best to be known by God?  What is more, how does that change how we interact with others?  Other vapors?  Other mists? When I was a teenager, I worked for a time for a man named Keith Meade.  He was a widower who lived in town, and he hired me to do odd jobs: mow the lawn, do some weeding, accompany him to Agway to pick up some supplies.  Another job was to clean up around the gravestones of his departed family members.  We were at the cemetery in Youngsville, my hometown.  The sky was a dark blue.  The air was crisp and clean.  Mr. Meade stood on the side of a hill and etched on the gravestones before and just beyond him was his last name.  I stood and watched him take it in.  He knew his time was coming.  I was too young to realize then that the same applied to me.  What is fifty or so years in the grand scheme of time?  Our lives overlapped.  That was significant enough. What legacy should we leave to those who will not know our names?  Perhaps Saint Joeseph gives us the answer.  We must do what we were put here to do.  We must love those around us.  And we must never forget that this life that comes with reputations and titles and positions, etc. is brief and that the life of the world to come is the permanence of heart and true familiarity with others we seek.  We may not know their names now.  We surely will know their names then. 

Clinton, Arkansas is like any small town in America.  The backdrop for Monica Potts’s memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, this far-flung part of the world is, according to Potts, where dreams go to die.  Resources are few if any, and those who live there suffer under the weight of their own ignorance or, worse, self-inflicted wounds in the form of drug and alcohol abuse, broken and/or strained personal relationships, being in and out of jails, and tragic conservatism.  The denizens of Clinton, Arkansas simply do not know what is good for them.  It is certainly not God or tradition.  Potts holds no punches there.  The author’s overt political stance on how to fix rural America is reminiscent of the “deplorable” epithet hurled at those who held different beliefs from those who are supposedly more enlightened about this, that, and the other.  In effect, what could have been a very revealing memoir about why one person from Clinton managed to do well for herself while most from that same town could never successfully launch amounts to a two-hundred and fifty page scolding of hillbilly conservatives by a vastly more informed writer who insisted on going to college out of state, away from the community that nurtured her. I am not here, dear listeners, to offer a scathing critique of a book dripping with progressive points of view.  Not all of her conclusions are unfounded, and she is right to point out that bad choices have bad consequences that can make anybody’s attempt to move forward virtually impossible.  The meth epidemic in this country is real, and like Potts, I have seen firsthand so much potential come to naught.  I could practically smell the cigarette odor and grease wafting up from the pages.  My interest lies in her posturing.  Specifically, I wonder what motivates a person to write a book that highlights the poor choices and misery of a childhood friend, Darci, while diagnosing her life with a set of progressive talking points.  Why did Darci take the route she did?  The patriarchy.  An oppressive church.  Low expectations for women.  Lack of access to birth control and abortion.  Misguided immigration laws.  It is as if the formula for this book is to first identify how Darci and others like her mess up and then prescribe as a solution something the Democratic party champions. For the record, I would have a similar reaction if it were a different political party.  Potts is simply too scripted; indeed, it seems as if she is othering her former community as a way to create more distance between them and herself. To say that Potts is looking down her nose at those who remained in Clinton might be stating the obvious.  The compare/contrast between Darci and Potts runs throughout with the former landing squarely on the bad side and the latter, squarely on the good.  Potts submits herself as the wiser among them.  She got the college education, after all.  Attended a school that her high school guidance counselors did not even have on their map.  Nobody from Clinton had ever gone to that school.  Surely, nobody ever would.  It was just too far out of reach. Perhaps it is the subtle and even not-so-subtle arrogant tone.  I started the book because I wanted to learn Potts’ perspective on the state of small towns in America.  I finished the book because I was hoping to find some redemptive notes – someplace where she pulled back on the lecturing and recognized that we all have struggles and to point the finger at how screwed up someone else is can be seen as the pot calling the kettle black.  To be sure, Potts does not seem to notice the plank in her own eye, choosing instead to make judgment call after judgment call, only pausing on occasion to openly wonder if the brokenness was somehow linked to something she did.  Even nodding toward this unlikelihood shows who the real hero of this memoir is. 

The night is darkest before dawn.  That is the saying, at least.  Just before the first faint rays of the sun arrive, the world is pitch black.  Of course, countless individuals have teased out of this reality analogies that are intended to offer perspective when things are not going well.  When circumstances are rough – really, really rough – take heart because there is about to be a reversal, perhaps even of the glorious sort.  In a broken world such as ours, I am all about hope.  We need more of it.  So many are in the terrible grips of despair.  What I would add to the analogy, however, is an element that should give us all a better sense of agency – a sense that we can actually participate in the rising of the sun and the spreading of its rays, if you will. It began with an observation I made from my bed.  The world was enveloped in darkness.  The sun had yet to make its entrance.  But from that immeasurable vastness – that great and ineffable stillness – came a chirp.  A bird began to sing. It quickly occurred to me, dear listeners, that the songbird may be the bravest of all creatures.  It is not the lion that roars in the day nor the wolf, the bear, the great whales of the sea that utter their greeting but the little bird.  So small.  Frail even.  Huddled against the cool air on the bough of a tree, singing into the deep night and against it.  Such courage in that tiny heart.  Such beautiful boldness.  An example to us all who are wrapped in the folds of our own night, existing with others who are experiencing the same or worse. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux lived from 1873 to 1897, dying that year from tuberculosis.  She was only twenty-four years old.  Called by Pope Pius X “the greatest saint of modern times,” Saint Thérèse who was also called Little Flower was known for performing small tasks with great love and sanctity.  To borrow from current parlance, she did not have a big platform.  She lived as an obscure nun in France and only, if you will pardon the pun, blossomed into popularity after her death.  The curious might wonder why Pope Pius X gave her such an accolade.  Perhaps he recognized in her a model for how the faithful should respond to oppressive darkness.  Understand that the small things really do matter and that it is our collective charge to do them with great love.  We each have a song to sing. And though it may seem to be dwarfed by such a massive and largely faceless enemy, it will be heard.  It does make a statement.  It is vital.  Years ago, when I was around fourteen years old, my dear stepfather handed me some tools and told me to frame out a room above my grandparents’ garage with my cousin, Eric.  The garage is located on some obscure hill in some obscure part of Pennsylvania.  I had never before framed out a room, and the thought itself was intimidating, but by calling me out to the task, saying, in effect, that I could do it – that I was capable of completing the job – my stepfather instilled in me a confidence that only grew and became stronger.  He wasn’t influencing crowds.  He was not leading a nation.  He was influencing me: one person.  One kid. What would the world look like if more individuals adopted the way of the Little Flower?  We are all tempted to believe the lie that greatness is all about numbers: likes and shares.  But if we were to examine our lives for a moment, we might discover that it had been the little things all along.  A small gesture.  A tiny kindness.  A little bird who regarded the great big world and its great big darkness and opened its mouth and made a sound regardless. 

I have commented on Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” in a previous episode – 51 to be precise.  The story is about how a village has a yearly lottery where one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death by the rest.  It is a tale about public execution, in other words, which, on its face, is shocking enough were it not for the fact that the vast bulk of the story is civilized.  The characters engage in a civil exchange about what they are to do.  It is all quite matter-of-fact.  They will follow a well-regulated process to make their selection.  It is only in the final line of the short story that we bear witness to their brutality.   Jackson concludes the story with “and then they were upon her,” leaving it to the imagination of her readers exactly how that act of violence looked. I explored this short story in a recent face-to-face class.  We discussed what might be the true nature of our species in how we build violence into our society and have been doing so since time immemorial. Why?Arguably, AI, ChatGPT, and other such applications are going to make this worse. Consider, dear listener, what happens when a toddler does not get his way.  He pitches a fit.We all know the answer.  The inability to articulate one’s ideas often results in violent outbursts.  With AI, we are now walking away from the opportunity to hone our ability to articulate our ideas and are, instead, deferring to what a program can produce.  Hear me on this: Our increasing lack of the ability to articulate our own ideas ourselves will result in more cases of violent outbursts.  Eighteen-year old, nineteen-year old, twenty-year old toddlers. Add to that our clear proclivity to commit violence, and then we get a recipe for the unthinkable.  Had Shirley Jackson composed “The Lottery” today, there might be a lot more to come after the line, “and then they were upon her.”  We might get the disturbing details of the public execution.  How one stone broke her jaw.  How another stone knocked her down.  How yet another stone made contact with a lifeless body.  There might be more details today because, as my students quickly pointed out, we are desensitized the violence.  We see it every day.  The shootings.  The mobs.  The military conflicts.  We have access to the images and the videos.  We are drawn to them.  And what does this say about us?     From my vantage point as an educator in an institution of higher learning, the prognosis does not look good.  Ten years ago, the struggle was to get my students to read.  Now they are not even writing.  They come to class without the reading, without notebooks, without writing utensils ... only their phones.  They never forget their phones.  And I wonder what, exactly, we are trying to accomplish. If there is some intentionality about getting individuals – mostly the young – to stop thinking for themselves, to stop even trying to form and articulate an original thought then those who are perpetuating this mission are doing a bang-up job.  Pretty soon, we might start abandoning what Jean-Jacque Rosseau called a “social contract” -- that loose set of rules and regulations we use to maintain order and preserve the peace.  The more we embrace and even celebrate that primal proclivity to commit violence, the more we might be tempted to walk away from any artifice of sophistication.  We will not care if we cannot articulate our thoughts.  It will not matter if we depend upon AI and ChatGPT to communicate for us.  Nothing but our base instincts will matter.  Meaningfulness will not be pursued, only the material, the superficial.  Friedrich Nietzshe’s notion of nihilism might be realized.  Nothing matters.  Nothing has meaning.  Only the dog-eat-dog worldview holds any sway because we are nothing but animals at heart – or worse!  Creatures who indulge in the unspeakable.  Creatures who have relinquished their ability to speak at all.  Toddlers wielding clubs, mindlessly grunting our mutual hatred. 

Tom Holland does not claim to be a believer.  He does not follow what once was called The Way, yet his sprawling history of Christianity is populated with a host of historical tidbits that could easily win nonbelievers over to the cause.  His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, begins in ancient Greece with how the emerging Western culture was, indeed, primed to receive a narrative whose focal point is the son of God on high and ends in our current era of woke in terms of how some ideas are rejected while others are zealously embraced according to a rubric that was built by Christianity yet retains none of its guideposts.  It is, in other words, to be decent – whatever that is – without Christ, without the Ten Commandments, without the turning over of the tables of the moneychangers.  It is a moral compass that only affirms and never, ever challenges.  One might even say that the age of woke is the easy and, I hasten to add, misunderstood parts of Christianity without Jesus.  Holland tells his readers how we got there: an unthinkably long sequence that began with the words of a Jewish carpenter over two-thousand years ago. Holland takes us to the bloody Roman arenas and the lions, and he also gives us a tour of the early days when purchase was gained bit by bit until Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and, in doing so, elevated the faith to an unprecedented level.  Readers also get a glimpsed of the Crusades and how Christianity was politicized in order to curry favor.  Along the way, various councils convened and properly codified Christian doctrine so that believers were, in effect, all reading from the same sheet of music.  Until the arrival of Martin Luther.  He initiated a different conversation – one that led to the Protestant Reformation – and from there, the fallout only continued to build.  Henry VIII, a contemporary of Martin Luther, had and divorced many wives.  Over a century later, the French philosopher, Voltaire, who openly disdained Christianity ignited yet another powder keg.  He, Holland writes, “viewed Christianity with a hatred that bordered on fixation.”  Voltaire endeavored to wrest from Christian intellectuals the heights of European culture.  The Enlightenment – a clear reference to Plato’s famed “Allegory of the Cave” -- was to pull the ignorant out of the dark catacombs of Christianity and into the so-called light of man’s ability to, on his own, reason and give structure and sense to the world. What Martin Luther did to the Catholic Church in questioning many of its long-held doctrines, Voltaire and his ilk questioned the faith itself, causing many to wonder about the worth of a belief system next to modern advancements.  Why look up anymore when the real work was before us? Holland can be commended for his even-handedness in detailing the history of Christianity because on the heels of the Enlightenment, the world bore witness to at least two bloody revolutions – the American and the French – after which came industrialization on a scale never before seen accompanied by a spiritual malaise that pushed many to the edge.  And then a world war.  And then a second.  Two atomic bombs.  A genocide.  I am sure, dear listeners, you could take it from here. Yet Christianity persists.  Indeed, many prominent thinkers believe we are on the cusp of a revolution – one that returns Christianity to its roots by utterly rejecting its critics.  Thanks to Christianity, we have hospitals.  Thanks to Christianity, we have universities.  Thanks to Christianity, we have a notion of human rights.  To whom do we owe thanks for the destruction we see in our world?  Marriages?  The unborn?  Civil discourse? We should judge a belief system by its fruits.  While nobody would claim that followers of Christ are without blemish, doesn't Christianity make more sense?  It has, after all, built and sustained an entire civilization never mind the many attempts to eliminate it.

Clinton Romesha’s New York Times bestselling book, Red Platoon, details the deadly and savage battle that occurred in command outpost Keating in 2009.  This remote battle station in a far-flung part of Afghanistan was overrun by Taliban fighters before most of the American soldiers were even out of bed.  Described as a toilet bowl, command outpost Keating was, geographically speaking, surrounded on all sides by mountainous terrain, ideally suited for the enemy to wage an attack. Its location did not make any sense.  The soldiers inhabiting Keating knew this.  The Taliban fighters banked on it.  An attack was inevitable.  The Taliban threw everything in their arsenal at Keating, hoping to wipe the Americans off the map. Were it not for the sheer grit and quick thinking of the Americans, their plans would surely have succeeded.  The Americans were able to regroup, strategize, gather ammunition, and eventually call in airstrikes.  The battle lasted fourteen hours.  The author of Red Platoon was awarded the Medal of Honor.  Eight American soldiers were killed.  The brotherhood that was forged during those horrible hours cannot be broken. Red Platoon is a fast read.  The account is gripping; Romesha’s minute-by-minute telling of events offers readers a glimpse into what combat is really like.  It is not Hollywood.  It is not pretty or glamorous.  It is brutal and bloody, tragic and oftentimes confusing.  What interests me, though, is who the soldiers actually fought for.  You have likely heard before how the men do not fight for a strategic position or an idea or a political stance or whatever their leaders have dreamed up in their command posts.  No, the soldiers fight for each other. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s vicious assassination, it is difficult not to see some comparisons.  Academia today is overrun by progressive ideas to the point that many students simply default to that one way of looking at the world.  Challenging the institution-approved orthodoxy will get a person canceled or, as in the case with Kirk, killed.  It does not matter, dear listeners, what you or I think about Kirk’s ideas. The Socratic method has been replaced with the mindless repetition of ideas that have been curated and endorsed by those in power.  Independent thinking is gone.  There is only one sheet of music, one point of view.  And any other will be shouted off campus. It is a battle which makes me think that what we might need is some of the grit that was on display in a dangerously remote part of Afghanistan.  Those who want free inquiry, free speech, and the type of dialogue that builds, not tears down would do well to adopt a stick-to-it-ness posture, bravely standing in the breach against those who are hellbent on silencing those they deem to be dissenters against what is clearly an ever-changing ideology that is only getting more and more radical.  Where will it end?  Is it even designed to end? We should all be mindful of falling into an us vs. them worldview.  This, I believe, would be to capitulate to a way of understanding the world that divides and creates discord.  This would only perpetuate the problem; indeed, it would be to read from the same script as the Marxists.  Our so-called Taliban, I propose, are not like the flesh and blood militants in Romesha’s book.  Our Taliban is made up of broken ideas, dangerous and warped ideas, ideas, to be sure, that bewilder and avert our gaze away from what is true and good.  Of course, someone might counter by asking the question, Who gets to decide what is true and good?  My answer?  Look at the fruit.  Some ideas are sown that become bad fruit: despair, addled thinking, broken families, staggering levels of narcissism.  Other ideas are sown that become good fruit: stability, clarity, purpose, humility.  God’s law is imprinted on every human heart, which means that we know what we know.  May we all find the grit and determination to defend it. 

The preface to Dr. Paul Kengor’s 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx includes the following assertion: “Any ideology (and, here, he is talking about communism) with a trail of rot like this is not of God but of the forces against God.  It is not of God’s creation but a fallen angel’s anti-creation.  It is not of the light but of the dark.”  The impact Karl Marx and his pernicious ideology has had on the world as we know it cannot be understated. Famously calling religion “the opium of the people,” Marx disdained the Christian Church with a passion that is difficult to fathom  To him, the Church served to dupe the poor masses – the Proletariat – into settling for the crumbs left by the upper class, the Bourgeoisie. What Marx wanted was a revolution.  The Proletariat needed to rise up against the Bourgeoisie and reclaim what was theirs all along. From there, the Proletariat would act as a temporary dictator until the new world order would naturally evolve into a classless and, notably, Godless society. What Marx likely purposefully missed, however, was the reality of human nature. Humans do not readily give up power after they have secured it. The state dominated. It was the new godhead.  And anybody who dared to deviate from the script was viciously punished. Disappeared even. This is why Stalin, for example, received such long and energetic applause during his speeches. Nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping as this might be seen as disloyalty to the party. A common thug in his youth, Stalin knew how to use brute force to get his way, which, it turns out, is quite ironic given whose ideas he used to gird his cult of personality.  Karl Marx, Kengor notes, was a “slob.”  He continues, “[Marx] was sloppy in his home life, in his desire to earn an income, in his keeping of papers, and even in his research.  He avoided the factories and farms for which he devised prodigious plans for their mass nationalization and collectivization. ... He embodied the worst stereotype of isolated academics who never deign to intermingle with the rubes they profess to represent.  The champagne socialist at Columbia University sees no need to actually sit at a kitchen table in Peoria with some farmer-bumpkin who votes Republican and clings to his God and guns.”  To be sure, it seems to be apparent that Marx was a beta male who sought to weasel power for himself any way he could.  The alphas won battles.  The alphas created great industries.  The alphas were inventive and hardworking.  Marx’s answer?  Take it.  Confiscate it.  Redistribute the wealth.  And then lie to the revolutionary powers that made it happen by saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat is only temporary. A part of me is struck by the sheer ignorance of many across college campuses in the United States who openly embrace Marxism and its fraternal twin, Socialism.  But another part of me is able to make sense of this embrace of Marxism.  Is it not easier to take than to earn? To let others do the hard work? Years ago, I was offered firewood.  A few trees had fallen in the backyard of the house of some friends.  All I had to do was cut them into chunks then split them with a go-devil.  I labored by myself all day – cut and split and generated a sizable pile – and toward the end of that day, I noticed something peculiar, something that was not a part of the agreement.  One by one, my friends started taking the split wood away, stacking it up next to their house.  I said nothing.  It was not a big deal.  But I could not help but understand Communism a bit more in that experience.  Without asking, without renegotiating the terms, they left me half the pile and two questions: What proclivities are greenlit by Marxism, and how does a right relationship with God keep these same proclivities at bay?  I certainly have my answer and the callouses on my hands to back it up. https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Karl-Marx-Communisms-Infiltration/dp/1505114446

In fear for his life, Old Testament prophet, Elijah, fled from the evil machinations of Jezebel and into the wilderness whereupon he found a solitary broom tree.  He sat beneath it and prayed for death, saying “Enough, Lord!  Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” after which he reclined and fell asleep.  He had had enough.  In his mind, his best days were behind him and what remained of his life would certainly be a hard slog. But this would not be the case. No sooner than he slipped off into a slumber did a messenger touch him – an angel – and said, “Get up and eat!”  The scripture continues, “He (Elijah) looked and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water.  After he ate and drank, he lay down again, but the angel of the Lord came back a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat or the journey will be too much for you!  He got up, ate, and drank; then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.” As with so much scripture, a person could angle into this bit in a number of ways.  What is of interest to me, dear listeners, is God’s response to what seems to be Elijah’s existential crisis.  When the Old Testament prophet wants to throw in the towel, God says no.  He has other plans.  Elijah’s story is not over. Likely many of us can relate to Elijah’s feelings of hopelessness.  We are living, after all, in what might be described as a post-postmodern world with its massive fallout of meaninglessness.  Society remains uprooted, and the scramble to make sense of our world and our lives plays out in a variety of contexts.  It is mirrored back to us in our entertainment.  It is the reason so many self-medicate or claim rightly or not some psychological disorder.  If we are lucky, we find God, but the truth remains that even the churched among us struggle.  We may have a foothold and a firm grasp, but the wind still blows hard in our faces, blurring our vision, inciting some fear. In the Catholic Church, a believer who is in danger of death can receive what is called the viaticum.  Essentially, it is a part of the Last Rites; it is the final time the believer receives the Holy Eucharist.  For you non-Catholics, that is the little wafer believers consume during Communion.  The term comes from the Latin word, “viaticum,” which means “provisions for a journey.”  Accordingly, one’s story does not end with the passing from this life to the next; it is merely beginning. Perhaps Elijah’s story is yet another example of how human perception can never measure up to God’s.  We are citizens of the 21st century, and if you are like me, you, too, live in the United States.  Craziness abounds.  So much nonsense seems to rule the day.  It is tempting to be like Elijah: run away into the wilderness, pray a prayer of defeat.  But God says no.  He has a greater plan.  And that includes what happens to us when we leave our mortal coil.  Just as Elijah was refreshed with the hearth cake and jug of water, so, too, are we made ready for a great and wonderful journey with the viaticum, ironically on the place, our deathbed, where the world claims it all ends. Perhaps this is the greatest nonsense of all: to believe that it ends there.  Perhaps the whole of our lives is the runup to something inexplicably beautiful.  Elijah could not see it then.  Maybe we are in the same boat now.  I, for one, rest in the knowledge that my life is a stream that is flowing toward a great river.  I can only hope to be ready when the waters meet, belly satisfied, eyes wide open, eager to put one foot in front of the other. 

David Herbert Lawrence, popularly known as D.H. Lawrence, famously penned a poem entitled “Self-Pity.”  Published in 1929, it reads: I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. The poem is short, but it captures so much truth about the natural world and ourselves.  What is it about human beings that we sometimes feel self-pity?  We bemoan our lot and fixate on how the universe must be conspiring against us.  Not so with a wild thing.  A bird.  A bunny.  A trout.  A deer.  Self-pity never seems to be in order. I am fascinated by this poem because Lawrence is making a comment on both human tendency and human potential.  On one hand, he acknowledges the proclivity in our species to retreat into a woe-is-me posture; however, on the other hand, he seems to be issuing a challenge to his readers to, in effect, be a wild thing.  Embrace it.  Live it out.  Shun the temptation to pity oneself and, instead, live more boldly. As I look around society today with so many inclined to claim victim status or even special status – look no further than a job application to see what boxes they ask an applicant to check at the end – I wonder if we have built up a culture of self-pity.  Another way to look at it is that, perhaps, we have leaned so far into the phenomenon of putting everybody and everything into distinct social or cultural or political silos that self-pity has become the default way of seeing oneself in the world.  I need special favor because of X.  I should have special accommodations because of Y.  The immutable characteristics about myself are no fault of my own and, therefore, I am powerless.  Deserving of some unique arrangement.  And pity.  Yours and mine. D.H. Lawrence likely wrote this well-known poem at a time when the decadence of the 1920s was at its peak: booze and sex, revelry and thumbing noses at the authorities, which, arguably also suggested that it was a time of spiritual bankruptcy.  Many were trying to fill the God-shaped hole inside with the wrong things, and the outcome was a disaster.  One might even claim that Lawrence’s challenge was to embrace what scripture says about each of us – that we were fearfully and wonderfully made.  God, in other words, made us for so much more than just parties and debauchery.  Self-pity is effectively not a part of our design.  We are stronger than we realize.  We are more capable than we realize.  Who is telling us the lie that we are not?  The answer is clear.  The evil one, of course.  Who but the devil would insist that we are weak and ill-equipped for this life?  To be sure, how would we all act differently if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that our very Creator had endowed each one of us with the grit and the tools to live life to the fullest and be content, dare I say happy? If we take the position that self-pity is actually a form of pride in that it is fundamentally inward-looking then like any other form of pride, it should be avoided.  But the question remains: how should the wild get on with the domesticated when the world is built for the latter?  Perhaps, like the bird in the poem, we must simply bide our time for another fall. 

Arthur Miller’s 1949 stage play, Death of a Salesman, resonates with me even today.  Willy Loman, the aged and sad protagonist, wants nothing more than to be liked: by his clients, by his boss, by his sons and wife.  Being liked is what gives his life meaning.  Being liked is what gives Willy Loman purpose. But time waits for no man, and after a failed business trip to Boston, Willy, at the prompting of his wife, Linda, approaches his boss to see about getting a local assignment.  The grind of traveling up and down the East coast has caught up with Willy, and he would like to get a less taxing arrangement.  Howard, his boss, agrees that Willy is tired, but instead of reassigning him, he lets him go, saying that Willy is no longer permitted to represent the company.  Willy loses his temper; the scene is painful to watch. From there, Willy Loman’s life descends into a frantic search for something to hold onto, something that will help him make sense of losing his job and getting old while simultaneously dealing with his two wayward sons, Biff and Happy, and the discovery by one of his boys of an affair Willy had in Boston some time ago. Life as he knows it is unraveling, and the safe spaces are becoming fewer and fewer.  Even his own kids turn on him, pretending not to know him in public.  He is not liked.  A man who worked his entire life to pay off a mortgage lives in a house nobody wants to visit.  Which explains the first suicide attempt.  Unsuccessful.  And the second.  A success.  Few attend his funeral.  His popularity merely a figment of his imagination. It is difficult not to feel pity for a man who tried so hard.  As his name suggests, he was the epitome of the little guy – low man – who played by the rules and, perhaps, even dared to believe that he had a reputation – that people valued him as a human being and not only as a cog in some vast money-making machine.  But the latter really was the truth.  Willy Loman was a nobody who thought he was a somebody, and he pushed his sons, especially Biff, to believe the same.  Biff used to play football.  He was poised to be a real star on the gridiron.  But in a moment of weakness, he stole a pen, foiling the entire plan.  He made nothing of himself, preferring instead to work in the open air with his shirt off. He knew his father for what he was: a man who cheats on his wife.  Biff could never subscribe to Willy’s worldview.  The damage was too great.  The facade was exposed for what it was: a facade, a pretense, a charade. This play, dear listeners, has much to teach us about social media and our addiction to likes.  We only show our best selves on whatever platform and enjoy the dopamine rush when our posts garner likes or hearts.  But, if we are to be honest, are we one in the same as Willy Loman?  We not only create worlds where everyone likes us, but we actually believe them, too.  We are victims of our own desire to belong and be liked, which means that we will carefully curate what is seen on social media and what is not.  Biff, you see, in his discovery of Willy Loman’s infidelity, finds out the truth.  And it damages him.  He becomes disillusioned with it all.  He wants to quit.  He wants to walk away.  Tear his shirt off.  Work outdoors. What does it mean, then, to live a life searching for likes?  Perhaps the answer is staring at us from the stage.  Willy Loman dies alone.  Does the quest for more and more likes result in the exact opposite of the intended purpose?  Look at the current generation, glued to their screens, subscribed to a half-dozen social media platforms.  And depressed.  Addicted.  Anxious.  Lost.  But not old.  Irony of ironies.  A despair that did not take a lifetime to reach. 

Scott Gould can be forgiven for plot structures that are a little too on the nose and convenient. The events that unfold in his book, Peace Like A River, are neatly stacked, making the story feel a bit contrived. He can also be forgiven for being a trifle too liberal with endowing each and every character with some quirk. The formula chaffs; indeed, it compromises Gould’s ultimate thesis, which, in the end, very much manages to transcend stylistic choices and blossom into a poignant and, in this day and age of father-knows-nothing, timely rallying cry for the uncompromising importance of being a dad and what that means in terms of navigating death, aging, guilt, and loss while at the same time summoning up the guts to be hopeful despite it all. Elwin confesses that he hooked up with a woman who was too young for him. This admission sets the tone for a story in which time factors heavily into relationships. For the middle-aged protagonist, this creeps up in clever ways. Thom, the mildly autistic son who was the result of said one-night stand, is described as talking like a person much older than the mere thirteen years he has accumulated on this earth. Another thirteen-year-old, Lonnie Tisdale, was a boyhood friend of Elwin, and he made a decision that seemed to shape how Elwin views the world – indeed, how he came to understand his relationship with the Old Man, his father, who had once taken him to the Black River to bathe in its mysterious waters as a way to begin to heal. There is even something to be said about the motel room he rents – number 113 – that underscores how the hourglass is an unspoken character in Gould’s just over two-hundred page novel. Elwin is not the only character who experiences romance in the book. Thom, too, finds love or, likely, infatuation with the bookish daughter of the motel’s proprietor. The parallel Gould draws between his coming-of-age through the untimely death of his friend and Thom’s coming-of-age through his first tender experience with feminine charms is appropriate given the larger trajectory of his story: a man coming from despair and aimlessness to clarity and stability. It all ultimately comes down to a small piece of property and the river that glides by it. The Black River, a place where some deaths were cheated and others not, remains central to the literary tapestry Gould weaves for this very reason. Like life, the current can go any way. It can be capricious and dangerous, refreshing and, yes, fun, but, in the end, it is, in this story, the single backdrop for Elwin’s own life journey. A chapter concludes with the death of the Old Man. A chapter begins with a reordered relationship with his son. He never had any choice but to stay. Perhaps this is the real peace on offer from the river. Peace Like A River may be too scripted in parts. The arrival and fast-friendship of Willie Nelson, the cat, to Thom would give cat owners their doubts. Gould’s vision, however, manages to break free of this and other creative choices to become a story worth reading – a tale about fathers and sons and the life that occurs between and among them. That he accomplishes this feat at all is a testament to his ability to see what really matters. It is on this final point, though, that I would like to editorialize.  The literary canon is not without its stories about father/son relationships.  To be sure, it is arguably upon this sort of story that Western culture was built.  It is in our society’s DNA, which, therefore, begs the question why father/son stories do not enjoy more visibility.  The boys need help, and I contend that books like Gould’s are in a position to do just that: create mental space to ask questions about what it means to be authentically male.  Not toxic. Not some silly caricature.  But real.  In line with God’s blueprint.

Twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously argued that there is slippage in language, resulting from the break between the signifier and the signified.  A signifier is the word we see – on a piece of paper, a billboard, a computer or smartphone screen, wherever – and the signified is what that word points to in order to give it meaning.  We see the word “cat,” for example – a signifier – and the signified would be the image we conjure up or the reality before us: a whiskered creature with soft fur, a long tail, paws, and the ability to make a sound, meow.  Or we see the word “candle” -- again, the signifier – and we envision a cylindrical object with a wick in the center of one of its flat sides that can be lit to give off light and ambiance.  This is the signified.  We have the word – the signifier – and we have what that word denotes. What might be obvious already, dear listeners, is that while I might see the word “dog” and immediately think of my beloved and incredibly needy canine companion, Arrow, someone else may see their dog or the memory of a dog or the neighbor’s dog who might not be particularly friendly.  Slippage.  The signifier and the signified are not always if rarely aligned.  One person’s cat is a cuddly, rainy-day friend.  Another person’s cat is a quick trip to the pharmacy to buy allergy medication. Where I would like to direct our collective attention is on the peculiar return of modern hieroglyphics to public discourse, if we even want to call it that.  Of course, I am talking about emojis – those cartoon-like pictures we inject into written correspondence.  Emails.  Texts.  Reviews.  Threads in discussions.   They have become an extension of our alphabet.  Different letters, if you will, that shape the tone of what we are trying to convey.  It is, I would argue, a fascinating return to what our distant ancestors did on the walls in caves and pyramids.  Pictures to capture content.  Images to communicate reality.  All very rudimentary.  A regression to how we first tried to understand ourselves and the world around us. This could mean a couple of things.  One possibility might be that the emoji phenomenon is an indication that Derrida’s so-called slippage has reached its limits.  For a species to survive, there must be common ground.  That requires shared meaning, pure and simple.  Perhaps we have reverted to the use of images to communicate precisely because they are basic.   We are starting afresh.  We are returning to the fundamentals. The other possibility is that the signifier/signified slippage has been so great that reconciliation is impossible and that the emoji phenomenon points directly to the absurdity that our species is poised to eliminate itself, not by some terrible war or disease, but by remaining alone and isolated.  We do not have the language to get along anymore, in other words.  We just have cute images, and we are happy to defer what they mean, what our intent in using them might be in order to avoid both conflict and, importantly, contact.  Birthrates in the Western world are already plummeting with many individuals in their childbearing years choosing to forego parenthood and instead adopt a dog.  Or a cat.  And what sort?  Whatever they can imagine.  They prefer the cave.  The cave is safe.  The cave provides shelter.  But now it is not the fire that illuminates their faces but the screen.  Always now the screen with its many hieroglyphs.  As for which possibility is more predominant, dear listeners, I will leave it to you to decide.  Understand, though, that Jacques Derrida was very much correct in how he linked language to the health of a society.  Words have meaning, and how we use them matters.  A cat emoji might be harmless.  And so, too, a dog emoji and a smiley face.  But we have all seen the smiling poop emoji.  What will be written about us in centuries to come?  Would any of it even be recognizable to the concerned literate of today? 

Years ago, my paternal grandfather taught me about the benefits of lying fallow. It is an agrarian term, meaning to leave alone for a period of time a piece of land typically used to grow produce. Simply put, it is the act of not sowing seed.  Let the field grow as it may. No planting. No fertilizing. No weeding.  Nothing.  The idea is to let a piece of land naturally replenish itself. Rest. Not be worked.  Be. Grandfather shared this idea with me at time in my life when I was all about doing, running from task to task, doing my best to get it all done.  It was a busy time, indeed.  I was taking classes, preparing to take more, and strategizing about how the beginning of my career would look.  I was, in a phrase, getting ready to launch, which is why Grandfather’s advice came at the right time. My work as a college professor involves leading and even joining my students in mentally wrestling with ideas, but it also involves a good deal of advising.  Many times, it is not the text that matters so much as it is why my students are studying the text at all.  Students are, of course, more than just minds; they are individuals with hopes and aspirations.  A true educator knows this to be true.  We mold the whole human being, not just the brain.  We help them to become better versions of themselves in all their facets. All of this is to say that I have had many students who do not want to be in class. They are not quite ready for the workforce, and the military was never really an option, so they enroll in college, forgetting that their experience in high school was lackluster. This explains the quiet hostility I sometimes receive from those who are in class only because they did not know what else to do with their lives.  They will show up late, if at all.  Scroll mindlessly on their cell phones.  Nod off.  Neglect to turn in any work.  And, I hasten to say, stand dumbfounded when they inevitably fail the class.  They ask, Why?  I ask, Why? right back at them.  And if they do not take careful stock of themselves, then all of that time has been wasted, and the college experience takes on a bitter flavor.  It happens every year. I have grown to sympathize with these students because I know what society demands of them.  Society wants constant action, constant success.  It is a go-go-go existence that leaves no room to take a breath and reflect.  This is where the concept of lying fallow can potentially become an absolute necessity. Before I turned the page on one chapter of my life and began writing the next, I took some down time; I allowed myself to lie fallow.  I have to wonder if this wouldn’t benefit so many of my students as well.  How would it positively impact a student for them to lie fallow for a season?  Would they be replenished?  Recharged?  Would they have a better understanding of what they are being called to be, called to do in their lives?  For me, the answer is yes.  But what would lying fallow look like for you, dear listeners?  How are we hurried?  How are we inhibited from pausing to reflect on the state of our lives, where we are going, what we might like to do? Time can be a tyrant.  We only have so much of it, so the tendency is to want to fill it with accomplishment after accomplishment.  We try to use our time wisely, but is it always the prudent thing to be active 24/7?  My grandfather did not think so.  Good farmers do not think so.  And I have come to agree with them both.  Even in scripture, we are called to observe a sabbath day.  It was never a random demand.  To be sure, it is a demand that has our best interests in mind.  We were not created to be bitter or constantly tired or perpetually harried.  We were created to be.  Human beings, not human doings. You have no doubt seen the concept before.  So identify an area where you might be stymied. And let the weeds grow.  Let the rains fall.  Do not take your plow to it. It is not yet ready. The direction you seek will come in its own good time. 

In an early episode, I shared how much the Transcendentalists impacted my decision to major in English.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in specific, captured my imagination with his erudite rallying calls to trust thyself, to never imitate others, to believe in the sacredness of your own mind.  In retrospect, I can see how this would be quite appealing to a young man full of ambition and (ahem) himself; however, it was not the Sage of Concord who first introduced me to the power of language.  That honor goes to Chuck D. of Public Enemy fame.  You heard correctly, dear listeners.  Before I studied Emerson and his contemporaries with the zeal of someone parched for wisdom and direction, I was listening to songs on cassette tapes with lyrics like “fight the power” and “Never badder than bad cause the brother is madder than mad at the fact that’s corrupt as a senator.”  Looking at the lyrics now, I am amazed that I was ever able to make sense of them all those years ago.  Perhaps Chuck D.’s delivery matters.  His passion.  His intensity.  The beat was simply there to scaffold the message. This, I believe, was my introduction to the power of literature.  Yes, the words are important, but there is something about how they come together to become more than the sum of their parts.  A good work of literature – indeed, a good song (rap, country, pop, what have you) -- has a soul, if you will, which means that a reader seeking to understand the work dissects the language, yes, but also peers into its core.  Mulls over how the words are juxtaposed.  Intuits motivation.  Appreciates diction.  And, importantly, recognizes the work as a living thing.  Public Enemy’s songs were appealing not because of their linguistic merit, per se, so much as they were appealing, at least to one kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the late eighties, because they had a spirit.  And once I grew to understand that, I could easily pivot to a study of the so-called classics to look for the same.  Chuck D. introduced me to Ralph E.  Emerson.  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And he had friends.  Thoreau.  Whitman.  Fuller.  Douglass.  Transcendentalists by name or, certainly, beneficiaries of an intellectual movement that championed individualism and self-determination.  A movement whose members labored to throw off the shackles of groupthink and mindless conformity, fighting their own power so that, as Emerson writes, we can “hitch our wagon to a star” and become all that God wants us to be. I would, therefore, make the following argument about the humanities: It will not perish.  Indeed, it cannot perish because we are all hardwired to seek out the boundless wisdom that can be found therein.  We can all recognize the spirit in something.  We certainly gravitate to different genres.  For me, rap music served as a gateway into poetry and prose.  I admit that sounds odd but whatever.  Our paths do not have to be orthodox.  Indeed, I submit to any one of you, dear listeners, who might now have the enormous responsibility of raising children, teaching, or even mentoring somebody that what you might perceive in your charges as silly or wasteful or nonsensical as possibly being part of a much grander plan that has more color, more texture than you can imagine.  I am a tenured full professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College.  Decades ago, playing and rewinding and playing again, rewinding again, on and on, I was a youth whose curiosity was piqued by the lyrical vehemence of a man whose life experience was nothing like my own: urban-dwelling and black.  But Chuck D. flipped a switch, illuminating a room that still overflows with urgent, impassioned voices. 

Want your work reviewed and featured?https://48bconsulting.com/book-reviews/Much has been said and written about John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. The tale of two bindlestiffs, Lennie and George, teaches readers about loyalty and love, sacrifice and justice while also imparting the value of parallelism and foreshadow in storytelling.  For those who would benefit from a refresher, Lennie and George are two Depression-era laborers who crisscross the countryside looking for work. The story opens with the two about to arrive at a ranch.   Lennie has been hiding a dead mouse in his pocket.  George, clearly his caretaker, demands that his dimwitted but powerful charge give it up.  George is the intelligent member of the pair while Lennie is simple and childlike.  After a small protest, Lennie concedes. Those familiar with this novella know that Lennie has always been enamored of soft things: mice, bunnies, puppies, and the hair of attractive women.  He got himself in some trouble at their previous place of employment, which makes readers attentive to how he might do the same at the ranch.  Lennie’s fate is practically sealed from the beginning.  Too dumb to stay out of trouble, he quickly enough gets into trouble with the wife of the boss’s son, breaking her neck as he gets lost in petting her head.  He flees.  The ranch-hands put tother a posse.  But George finds him first and, after distracting his large and simple-minded friend, shoots him in the head in an act of love and protection.  The debate continues still. What is interesting throughout this masterpiece is Steinbeck’s command of timing.  Before George kills his friend, Carlson, a ranch-hand who has been pestering Candy, another ranch-hand up there in years, to put his equally old dog down, finally gets his way.  Carlson says to the old man, “If you want me to, I’ll put the old devil out of his misery right now and get it over with.  Ain’t nothing left for him.  Can’t eat, can’t see, can’t even walk without hurtin’.”  to which Candy, clearly affected by the thought of losing his beloved pet replies, “Maybe tomorra.  Le’s wait till tomorra.”  Carlson is not having it, and very reluctantly, Candy gives in.  “Awright -- take ‘im,” he says before refusing to look at his dog and laying back on his bunk and staring at the ceiling. Carlson retrieves his Luger and gently leads the old dog outside.  The anticipation begins to build. Someone offers to play cards.  Someone else hears a gnawing sound coming from under the floor and suggests that it might be a rat.  Candy remains motionless.  Everybody is waiting for the gunshot.  What is, in my humble opinion, dear listeners, genius about this scene is that the time it takes to read from the moment the dog is led outside to the inevitable gunshot is, roughly, the amount of time it would really take to perform this act in real life.  Steinbeck brings the reader to that sad and charged moment in how he inserts some awkward small talk into the scene.  The reader is present with Candy and the others in those dreadful moments before Carlson pulls the trigger.  Time is leveraged in such a way as to make the killing of Candy’s dog just as painful to the reader as to Candy himself.  The event is anchored to a common passage of time -- one fictional, the other very much real – and the result delivers a gut-punch of raw emotion. Of course, this shooting foreshadows the final shooting.  Candy later laments that it should have been him who put down his dog.  George clearly recalls this detail when he makes the decision to “put down” his friend, Lennie.  Running through it all, however, is a pacing we are all familiar with – a sense of time that is not foreign to our everyday experience – and the overall result is the ability to see the characters as we see ourselves, flawed human beings doing our best every second, every minute, every hour we are gifted. 

Popular during medieval and Renaissance Europe, The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical concept that organizes the entirety of the universe, beginning with God and going down to the lowest of life forms.  It ranks every member of creation as a way to understand it and, hence, give deference where deference is due.  First, there is the Trinitarian God, and beneath Him, the various orders of angels. After that comes humankind, and then the animal kingdom with its proper order and then the plants followed by the minerals. On one hand, this cosmic hierarchy is indicative of humankind’s deep urge to organize and classify surrounding creation.  We all have a penchant for establishing order out of chaos, which, itself, is indicative of the nature that was bestowed upon us by God.  As God established order out of the formless void so, too, do we do the same in our own small but significant ways.  On the other hand, however, when we look at what humankind has done with hierarchies, in general, we see quite plainly that their use unleashes in us the baser impulses, namely to assert power over others.  We see a hierarchy, and we want to jockey toward the front or, at least, as far as we can go.  So we began to expand on the hierarchy.  No longer was it just humankind; now the hierarchy broke down to the varieties of humans. I do not want to get into an exploration of colonialism.  I have covered it here and still may cover it more down the road.  My point is that the lust for power may be humankind’s most prominent Achille’s heel.  We as a species are able to look at a thing – in this case, The Great Chain of Being – and manipulate it to the extent that it favors some and not others. We continue to this day to have conversations about inequality in our midst.  Not too long ago, the place to jockey for was decidedly male and Caucasian.  That was deemed the high point, the favored position. I submit, however, that we are currently in a far worse state of affairs.  The goal in this hierarchically-framed contest is to jockey as far to the front as possible.  Many decades ago, once again, that position was white and male.  What if the new impulse is to jockey even further than that?  Toward the angelic?  Toward God even? Consider, dear listeners, what I am proposing. The Great Chain of Being served humankind well in terms of understanding creation.  There is a ranking order.  God is at the top.  But the stain of sin prompted humankind to abuse that hierarchy – add to it classifications that benefitted some and hurt others.  But while we have largely reconciled that wrong, though, admittedly, not perfectly and not completely, the stain of sin remains, which means the Achille’s heel remains. Not vanquished as we have believed.  But morphed into an even more dangerous thirst.  Being white and male has no more appeal because it has been stamped out by an army of progressives.  Now the prize is a higher order.  No longer natural but supernatural. And what would be the result? What was the result before?  The answer is already before us.  Abuse.  Violence.  Degradation of every sort. And though believing that anybody could actually jockey toward and become the angelic or godly is the very height of delusion, this would not impede those who are convinced that they have achieved the impossible from looking down their noses at mere mortals and unleashing a torrent of ill-treatment. The days of colonization of the outsiders by the insiders are not over.  It has only evolved to the point where those in power have god-complexes – have an understanding of themselves that puts them far above the majority in The Great Chain of Being.  Therefore, some questions remain: How far will that majority let them run with their delusion?  How long before the law of tooth and claw takes over?  When will the majority refuse to be pacified by gods of their own making?  Though time will certainly tell, history is not without answer. 

I am no theologian; however, I know enough about the Old Testament to be able to say that Christ and His cross are prefigured in it on numerous occasions: in Adam and Noah, in Joseph and David, in the rod of Moses, the prophecies of Isaiah, and, more on the nose, the sacrificial lamb.  What the Old Testament anticipates, the New Testament fulfills, making followers of Christ, Christians or little Christs, an Easter people who are a part of an ancient story set in motion by a God who loves us – who wants to be with us for eternity.  It was in Mass recently that I realized that the crucifixion and, importantly, God’s love is actually expressed in the very first sentence in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.”  Where, you might be asking yourself, is the cross in this sentence?  I submit to you, dear listeners, that the answer can be found in Luke’s Gospel.  After Jesus, nailed to the cross, replies to one of the thieves that he will, indeed, “be with me (Jesus) in Paradise,” Luke writes, “It was now about noon and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon because of an eclipse of the sun.  Then the veil of the temple was torn down the middle.  Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit;’ and when he had said this he breathed his last.”  Just like the abyss, there was darkness in Jerusalem.  Darkness in the beginning.  Darkness at the cross.  But then a mighty wind swept over the waters and gave life to what was formless.  This wind?  The Holy Spirit, sure, but also the last breath of Christ.  An exhale in the beginning gave life; an exhale on the cross gave eternal life.  The parallels are profound.  God’s love for us is immeasurable. The Hebrew word for this mighty wind is ruach, but interestingly, it happens to be feminine.  Just as the Spanish word hermana means sister, abuela means grandmother, and chica means girl, ruach is grammatically feminine.  Of course, this is likely extremely significant. Before the arrival of Adam and Eve, each gender, male and female, existed.  To be sure, the two genders seem to be integral to the formation of the universe.  God the Father breathed out the feminine ruach and began to create.  So, too, Christ breathed out His last and ushered in New Creation.  Was that event on the cross also a male/female arrangement needed to bring in salvation? I have said in an earlier episode – 17 to be precise – that being made in the image of God might not necessarily mean something purely physical.  Perhaps that is the superficial interpretation.  Maybe being in His image means being creators ourselves.  As God creates, so too do we create, and the height of those efforts would be hands down the creation of human life: babies, our beloved children.  That can only be done with a male and a female.  Again, a truth that is evident in the first sentence of the Book of Genesis. Thus, knowing this is a step toward better knowing God.  Denying this, on the other hand, is an affront toward the very Creator of the universe, the One who established form, which is also to say rationality and order, out of the formless. What is it we see in our current cultural and social moment but extreme efforts to return our universe to that state of formlessness?  Where there are no rules.  Where there are no structures.  Where there is no sense, no direction, no meaning.  In that place, dear listeners, we each become our own gods, but tellingly, of worlds that are self-destructing.  Divorced from the order that God created, self-annihilation would be the only result.  Thank the Creator Himself that He shows us the way to avoid this end in the first sentence of His love story to us then tells us again when His only son issued His own ruach on the cross, completing His work as he began it. 

Inez Feltscher Stepman recently made the argument in the National Review that men should have their own space.  Before the 1990s, she writes, The Elks Club, the Virginia Military Institute and the Boy Scouts were exclusively male; however, with the fanatical push of so-called progressive ideologies, these institutions are now co-ed.  In fact, the cry to eliminate all-male spaces was vociferous, resulting in the stigmatizing of anything male, not just male only.  To be a guy, in other words, was somehow to be stained with a unique sort of sin – one that prompted some men to self-flagellate, which is to say hate themselves for being men, and others to double down.  Hence, we saw the emergence of two types of men: the Beta and the Toxically masculine.  The former reviles his masculinity and embraces the feminine while the latter inflates his masculinity to absurd and dangerous proportions. Of course, the question naturally arises, What is it to be a man?  Some individuals are adamant that gender is a construct .A man, they argue, is not so because of some physical reality: his sex.  Any person can simply opt into whatever construct they feel is best for them, genitals notwithstanding.  The whole point, the whole mission is to erase the differences between genders.  Men should not have an exclusive space because there is no longer any reason to exclude.  The barrier has come down.  The distinctions are void. This viewpoint, naturally, is not without its detractors. Enter renowned psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson.  His 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos sparked some controversy by daring to proclaim that there are, in fact, objective truths that, if held onto, can steer us away from emotional, psychological, and, yes, spiritual mayhem.  In effect, his thesis is antithetical to the Postmodern mantra that there are as many truths as there are individuals – that truth is what we make of it and nothing more.  Peterson’s boldness was embraced by many, making his book a number one bestseller; however, to others, he remains a stodgy white guy from Canada who, like every other white guy, is trying to wrest power from the so-called “other”.The debate rages even still.  Do we get to create the boundaries that define our lives, or is it really a matter of discovering the boundaries that already exist? If you have been journeying with me for any bit of time, you, dear listeners, can likely discern how I would answer this question.  I am interested in what is true, for, as the saying goes, the truth will set us free.  I am alarmed, therefore, that anybody can look around our world today and see the despondent young men – bear witness to their aimlessness, their abject loss, their lack of focus, motivation, and hope – and decide that, by virtue of their sex, they had it coming.  Who harbors this hostility?  It would be easy to name a group of like-minded thinkers who zealously champion some academically grown theory about the world, but I wonder if the zeitgeist of today has deeper roots – an epicenter that actively wants to ground all things masculine into the dust.  To return to the question, What is it to be a man?, might we now conjecture that it means to stand up for what is right and true?  If we are truly in a spiritual battle between good and evil then the enemy’s best tactic would be to take out the warriors by perverting or otherwise rejecting the traditional ways boys are formed into men.  The refrain, therefore, is the following: Let a culture of cellphones, pornography, and militant feminism mold the lads.  Fathers be quiet.  Grandfathers shut up.  The grip of the patriarchy stops here because it has always been bad. But is this true?  What does the evidence say?  The cry for manly direction is only growing.  Let us hope there are still men around to offer it. https://www.amazon.com/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/0345816021

The book, entitled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, had once been required reading at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The story amounts to a revealing dialogue between man and beast, the latter at the helm of a one-student classroom.  After giving his own origin story, Ishmael, the telepathic gorilla, turns his attention toward humankind’s origin story or, at least, one version – the sort of civilizational system that compels humankind to destroy the world in order to live in it.  Humankind, in other words, is in the grip of a story designed to tear down, not build up, and it is Mother Culture that perpetuates this story, convincing listeners that there is no other way.  Those who live by this code, Ishmael calls Takers.  They are who we might call civilized.  Those who live according to a different origin story, a different way of existing on this planet, the gorilla calls Leavers.  They are the uncivilized. A significant component of Taker culture is the belief that all of creation was made for humankind.  It is taken as a given, and we can hear it in common language. Our oceans need to be pollution free. Our forests need to be managed.  Our wildlife must be protected. Our sky should be free of smog. Taker culture claims the created world as its own because Takers believe that they are the pinnacle of evolution. As Ishmael says, “the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.” What does this mean? From the beginning, two models for how to live emerge with one, by its very design, intent on destroying the other. It is the agrarian or Taker model that restricts access to food for every other creature, Leavers included. That is a message from Mother Culture, and it is one we still enact today. The expansion of Taker culture only heightens their claim to, in effect, own the world, even going so far as to actively prevent nature from taking its course.  Say an impoverished community gets too big to be able to sustain itself.  It grows even poorer. The suffering is intense. What is the ethical thing to do? Nature might restore balance in ways that only nature can, but the Taker response would certainly be different. The Taker response would be to rush resources into that community to save it. Understanding that population grows or shrinks depending on the resources it has access to, is it really the right thing to tip the scales upward, knowing that the infrastructure could not sustain a population growth?  Is that what we want? It is here that a couple of facts about the author, Daniel Quinn, need to be said. First, he had been a postulant at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gesthemani where he wanted to be a Trappist monk, but, second, after his spiritual director prematurely ended his postulancy, Quinn entered publishing and abandoned his Catholic faith. This turn of events is no small detail when it comes to understanding the morality being presented in Ishmael.  In effect, the Leaver ethic would be to let people die; the Taker ethic would be to step in to prevent it. Quinn’s case for how some human beings built a civilizational structure that is neither good for them nor for the created order around them is compelling. Where I find his argument to be problematic, though, is his deference to natural law over charitable human interaction. Yes, we may be a part of the natural world, but as humans, aren’t we endowed with the task of looking out for one another.  We belong to each other, in other words.  How does that stand up to a model asserting that famines are nature’s way of decreasing the population and, hence, mouths to feed?  I will leave it up to you, dear listeners, to answer this question. Did Quinn’s break with faith have anything to do with his maligning of what is commonly called civilization? We can only wonder why it is a gorilla and not a man who possesses all the wisdom.  Perhaps if we pull this string, the wrapping will come undone. https://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Novel-Daniel-Quinn/dp/0553375407

The short story begins in a Florida hotel room on a stiflingly hot day.  A young woman – called “girl” throughout – is sitting in a chair.  She is wearing nothing but a white silk dressing gown and reading an article entitled “Sex is Fun—or Hell.”  The phone rings.  It is a call from New York.  The girl’s mother.  Inquiring about the trip and, importantly, the girl’s husband.  Is he acting funny?  Did he try anything odd?  Is he about to lose control?  The last concern is cut off.  The girl has had enough. J.D. Salinger’s short story, “A Perfect Day for a Bananafish,” was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, three years after the end of World War II.  While the story begins with an exchange between a mother and her daughter – a scene, I hasten to add, that is littered with sexual innuendo – the story soon shifts to what is happening just outside on the beach.  There, a young man, the girl’s husband, is having a conversation with a three-year old girl named Sybil Carpenter.  She has wandered away from her mother who is having cocktails.  The exchange is icky.  He teases her about her bathing suit and occasionally puts his hand on her ankle.  Eventually, the young man tells her about bananafish, and the two make their way into the water where she mounts a floatie and lets him guide her about. When prodded about what, exactly, is a bananafish, the young man says, “they swim into a hole where there’s lots of bananas” at which point they eat so much of them that they cannot swim out.  The girl asks what happens next.  The young man simply says they die. She exclaims, “I just saw one!” and then he kisses the arch of her foot, wades ashore, heads back up to the hotel room, and, Salinger writes, “fires a bullet through his right temple.” The young man is named Seymour Glass, and he is a veteran of the war, and I will leave it to your imagination, dear listeners, what, exactly, the little girl spies beneath the surface of the water.  It is almost certain that Salinger wants the minds of his readers to, as it were, “go there.”  But what are we to make of this chain of events that leads to a suicide? In Seymour Glass there is a curious mix of innocence and psychological damage.  The war seemed to rob him of a moral compass, causing him to cross or, at least, consider crossing a serious line with a child but also a line with himself.  Salinger’s prose describing Seymour Glass’s suicide is direct.  As ordinary as scratching an itch. Why is Salinger’s treatment of this event seemingly so nonchalant? My grandmother once shared with me a story about her brother, Alvin.  Before the war, he had jet black hair, but afterwards, it was white.  He had been at the Battle of the Bulge.  He had seen untold atrocities in combat.  When he returned from the war and a crop duster would fly over, Alvin would dive beneath the nearest vehicle.  Only my grampa could coax him out.  When he got a cancer diagnosis around the same time that he discovered his wife’s infidelities, life grew to be too much.  He would shoot himself.  Alvin, according to my grandmother, explained himself very matter-of-factly on the front porch. What causes a person to be levelheaded or unsentimental about the horrific?  Perhaps, like my great-uncle, it came down to reaching a limit.  There was no more energy to bargain, no more will to fight on.  Heaped upon him were so many bits of bad news, bad luck, experiences he could never forget that he saw only one way out.  Like the person trying to carry too much, he let everything drop.  In this case, that meant his life.  In Seymour Glass’s case, that meant the same.  Had America or the West or the world, for that matter, reached its limit after the largest war the world had ever fought?  To be sure, over seventy-five years later, have we only gotten worse, numb as we are to violence?  If so, then civilizational suicide could be around the next bend if we do nothing to, as it were, get help, correct course.