Mary: Thank you, wise men, for the gifts. The frankincense and myrrh are great, and the gold, well, I mean, the gold is almost too much, if we’re being honest, but obviously we appreciate it.
Little Drummer Boy: What about me? I’m here, too. I brought my drum.
Mary: I see that.
Little Drummer Boy: Yeah. So…should I start now?
Mary: Start?
Little Drummer Boy: Yeah, I thought I’d just bang out a little something for our new Lord and Savior here.
Mary: Oh, that’s…thoughtful, but the baby is sleeping. So this maybe isn’t the best time for you to play.
Little Drummer Boy: …oh, sure. I get it.
Mary: It’s a nice idea, and maybe later, if he wakes up.
Little Drummer Boy: Yeah, definitely. No problem. Just kinda disappointing is all. I walked pretty far to get here.
Mary: I know it, and it means the world to us that you’d show up.
Little Drummer Boy: And I was kind of embarrassed, ‘cause these guys had such sweet gifts, but then I was like, “No way, man. You have the greatest gift of all: the gift of music.” But, I get it, it’s not a great time….
Mary: Well, maybe if you played very, very softly, that might be okay.
Little Drummer Boy: Oh hell yeah! Don’t worry! I’m gonna play my best for him! Can you give me a beat?
Mary: …a beat?
Little Drummer Boy: Yeah, just kinda count me in.
Mary: Aren’t you a drummer?
Little Drummer Boy: Totally, and I’m going to wail on this taut goat skin for the King of Kings, if you’ll just give me a one-and-a-two-and-a-here-we-go.
Mary: You know what? It’s pretty late, and I’m tired, so maybe we’ll just wait for another time.
Little Drummer Boy: I get it, you’re shy. No problem. I’ll just ask the ox and lamb to keep time.
Mary: I’m starting to regret this.
Little Drummer Boy: Prepare to get your divine face drummed off, li'l Son of Man!
I’m excited to have a little essay at WBUR’s Cognoscentipage about the potential loss of magnolia blossoms in Boston and how we should factor beauty and joy into our discussions about climate change.
Scrooge: You’ll find I’ve changed from the miser I was. I’ve brought a feast for you and your family!
Cratchit: Thank you, sir!
Scrooge: And gifts for your wonderful children and your lovely wife!
Cratchit: Sir, you’re too kind!
Scrooge: And I’m raising your salary!
Cratchit: I don’t know what to say, sir!
Scrooge: And I’m going to pay for Tiny Tim’s medical care! We’ll make the boy well yet!
Cratchit: Oh, sir! Your generosity is overwhelming!
Scrooge: He shall have the finest emetics and laxatives money can buy!
Cratchit: …do you think that will cure the lameness in his leg, sir?
Scrooge: If it doesn’t, Cratchit, then we’ll hire the best bloodletters in all of England to bleed the ill humours out of your boy, I promise ye that!
Cratchit: It’s a fine offer, sir, but I’m not sure–
Scrooge: And the poultices, Cratchit! You won’t believe the poultices we’ll have applied to your boy! The more malodorous the better! Tiny Tim shall reek of good health! All of Camdentown will suffer from the stench of his recovery!
Cratchit: It’s all a bit much, Mr. Scrooge. Perhaps if we–
Scrooge: And if that doesn’t work, I know a man who’s excellent with a skull drill! He’ll trepan Tiny Tim into fine form, you have my word on it, Cratchit!
This story may not seem that bad, but I’ve felt terrible about it for years, although the reasons have evolved.
I was a junior in high school at the back-to-school dance. I was shy, awkward. I was in band and worked on the literary journal and was in drama club. You’ve seen the character in teen movies.
I’ll add, unsurprisingly, that I was a virgin at 16, which I don’t think was uncommon. I was perhaps more virginal than some: never had a girlfriend, never really kissed or been kissed, outside of a couple quick pecks during a game at band camp (yes, band camp).
A friend and I were hanging at the edge of the dancefloor, evaluating our peers, evaluating ourselves. There was a senior girl we both knew, though not well, who had, to use an outdated term, “blossomed” the year before. I don’t remember the specifics of this girl’s transformation. Maybe she’d had her braces removed. Maybe she’d gotten rid of her bangs, which were not as popular in 2001 as now. Maybe she went to a different store and bought different clothes and wore them in a different way. Whatever it was, this girl had emerged from our own clique undeniably hot. Now she was dancing, and we were watching.
Of course none of this—how the girl chose to dress or do her hair or her makeup, how she chose to present herself to the world, how she chose to dance—had anything to do with me and my friend. But it felt like it did. Because why put effort into your appearance if not to invite attention? Why be attractive if not to attract?
My friend and I were having this discussion in not quite these words. It struck us as bullshit that one must “play games” to “win” sex. Wouldn’t it be better for all involved if an interested man could approach an interesting woman and say, “I’m interested in having sex with you”? If you admire someone else’s appearance, their body, their face, their look, their vibe, then why not just say so and do away with pretense? If one is drawn to a piece of art or music or literature, one doesn’t mince words or become timid with the language. No, one declares boldly, “This moves me. This is pleasing to me.”
Yes, we were comparing a person to a work of art, which is a way of comparing a person to an object, which is a way of objectifying a person. We were upset that we had to appreciate another human as a person rather than as a thing put on this earth to be of use to us or, if not, ignored. We were that self-involved, that dumb. That unable to fathom that other people are very familiar mysteries, like us in ways we don’t notice, unlike us in ways we can’t be bothered to imagine.
Confident in our rationalizations, we decided now was the time to shift the paradigm. We would usher in an age of more direct and easy discourse and hopefully, thereby, intercourse.
We approached the girl. We leaned in so we could be heard over the music. She paused in her dancing to listen.
“I just want you to know,” I said, “how much I admire your body.”
I was deliberate with my language. I didn’t want to tell the girl I admired her, or that she was attractive. I wanted to leave her out of the whole thing as much as possible. This wasn’t about her; this was about her body. Because if this was about her, then it was also about me. But I was too shy to even ask a girl out, so this couldn’t be about me and her; it had to be about her body, and my body, and a desire I hoped we could share in as uncomplicated a manner as possible.
My friend put things a bit more bluntly, but it was only different in tone, not substance. The girl stared at us. I could see she was shocked. And why wouldn’t she be? What had been for us the result of an evolving discussion, a thoughtfully (though stupidly) laid out strategy, had been for her an unexpected, uninvited intrusion on her evening, her space, herself. She gave a wordless gasp, then turned and walked away, retreating to the cafeteria downstairs.
My friend and I regrouped, reevaluated. Clearly there had been an unforeseen flaw in our plan, and now some unintended consequences. The intended consequence had been, I suppose, this girl deciding that she would have sex with one or both of us, if not immediately then in the near future. The unforeseen flaw had been our failure to consider the possibility that our desire had no place in this girl’s life; that she had absolutely no interest in us or in what we thought of her; that she especially did not want to be told by two young men barely involved in her life that they considered her body desirable, completely divorced from the person who there indwelled.
I went downstairs to the cafeteria to find her. She was at a table talking with some mutual friends. I sat diagonally across from her and stayed sheepish and silent, exchanging eye contact with her in an attempt to convey my regret until I felt like she had, through some knowing smile or nod or other gesture, bestowed a degree of forgiveness on me.
(But I never actually apologized. I never actually said any words to her about what I’d done. So, if by chance she reads this: I’m sorry. I’ve been sorry, although I didn’t know for a long time what I should be sorry for.)
I think back to that night regularly, when we collectively discuss how terrible men can be to women. When rape is in the news, or when women are harassed on the street or online, or when a presidential candidate brags about sexually assaulting women. Men feel entitled to women’s attention and their bodies. I don’t know how or where it starts, but it gets to each of us. I was raised by a mother who was the breadwinner, by a father who was a stay-at-home dad who never treated my mother with anything less than loving respect, but I was still influenced strongly enough by the culture, by the little vibrating wavelengths of misogyny, that I saw no issue with approaching a girl and telling her that I appreciated her body like a beautiful object, separate from anything she had to contribute as a person to the world.
What I’m trying to say is: I think I’m a good guy, and I still felt I deserved that girl’s attention and time, was unable to think of her in terms outside of my own selfish desire, and who knows how many other little ways I have made women’s lives worse over the years? We want to believe that there are good guys and there are bad guys, but we’re all just men, and men are empowered by the brute substance of our bodies and enabled by society to do terrible things.
That night, I felt shame: the childish shame of being caught, the dread of embarrassment. I did not feel remorse, because I didn’t understand how I had wronged that girl. I didn’t touch her, but I hurt her. It’s taken me years to understand where my words fit on a spectrum of demanding, dangerous, self-entitled masculinity. I made her life worse that night, and while I would like to hope my comments were the only and worst way a man ever made her feel like less than a full and complex human, knowing men, I have to doubt that.
We need leaders in government who appreciate the existential threat posed by climate change. We need a President who will decisively act to curb greenhouse gas emissions and work with global leaders to ensure humanity’s future on this planet.
We need Jill Stein to drop out of the Presidential race.
A Donald Trump presidency could do immediate and irreparable harm to our environment. Any American who agrees that climate change is real and a threat and that we must do something to counter its effects can’t allow Donald Trump to become President.
In that spirit, Jill Stein should suspend her campaign and urge her supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Again, Jill Stein is not going to become President. And, honestly, she’s polling so poorly that maybe her candidacy will have no practical impact on the election’s outcome.
But people probably felt that way about Ralph Nader in 2000, and (as you’ve heard over and over again ever since) we all know the unintended consequences a “spoiler” can have.
Now is not the time for protest votes. Now is the time for a broad coalition united by the conviction that we need decisive action on climate change now to unite and elect the only candidate who has a chance of winning and a plan to mitigate the harm we’re doing to our planet and save us from ourselves.
NPR’s Morning Edition hosted a round-table discussion this morning featuring four voters from Arizona responding to last night’s vice presidential debate. In the course of the discussion, a realtor from Tuscon who is voting for Trump complained that “we don’t make things anymore.”
This is a frequent gripe, and one that spans the political and ideological spectrum.
“Sure, maybe we’re still producing a lot,” you might concede. “But think about how much more we used to produce.”
But the truth is the United States is at near-record highs for manufacturing output. As this article from Market Watch explains, U.S. manufacturing output peaked in 2007, just before the Great Recession. The manufacturing sector is now only 3% behind its last peak.
So America is making more stuff than at almost any point in our country’s history. And it should be noted that these manufacturing records were set more than a decade after NAFTA, which is frequently blamed for the decline of the U.S. manufacturing economy.
Just because it isn’t true that America doesn’t make things anymore doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel true, though. If you’re old enough, you probably remember a time when many of your friends and family were employed in manufacturing. Now you look around and people are working in the service sector. They’re not building things anymore.
This is accurate. Since 2000 the U.S. has lost five million jobs in manufacturing. Only 8.7% of Americans are employed in the manufacturing sector, down from a peak of 32% in 1953.
But while some manufacturing jobs have been lost to globalization (like textile jobs), automation deserves most of the blame (or credit, if you’re into efficiency and output).
An automobile factory used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
Increasing the manufacturing output won’t do much to create jobs if we simply need many fewer people to make the same amount of stuff (or more).
The problem isn’t that we’ve lost manufacturing jobs, though. The problem, as Ben Casselman argues at FiveThirtyEight, is that we’ve lost “
a certain kind of job: well-paid, long-lasting, with opportunities for advancement.” For all the nostalgic shine we put on manufacturing jobs, they’re not inherently special. They don’t guarantee high pay or good benefits. People don’t pine for the days when their family and friends spent eight hours a day cranking out steel or underwear or refrigerators because there’s something ennobling about making steel or underwear or refrigerators. They remember those “good old days” fondly because when you spent eight hours a day making steel or underwear or refrigerators, you knew you would earn enough to provide a good life for your family; a life without fear of scarcity; a life with some opportunity for pleasure and enjoyment; a life where you felt comfortable your kids wouldn’t have to make cars or underwear or refrigerators if they didn’t want to.
So while that Trump-voting Tuscon realtor may wrongly lament that “we don’t make things anymore” and may dream of working an assembly line rather than selling houses, those of us living in the real world should accept that: a) manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back; b) that it was robots, not the Chinese, that took the jobs; and that c) we don’t necessarily want those jobs back, anyway.
What we want are good-paying jobs with benefits that allow us to live with a degree of security and comfort.
We need to value workers, whether they make steel, underwear, or refrigerators, or if they work at a daycare or a hospital or a hotel or a fast-food restaurant.
As you can see, the idea is to move mass transit above the street, thus saving it from traffic and saving traffic from it. Cars up to seven feet tall will be able to pass underneath the bus, and the bus will be able to glide over slow or stalled traffic.
Setting aside practical concerns outlined in the Vox article, this seems like a good idea. Ideally mass transit should be separated from the rest of traffic. That’s why subways were built in the first place: to allow streetcars an alternate route through heavily congested blocks and intersections. Moving the buses overhead rather than underground would seem to accomplish the same goal.
Elevated rail seems outdated in the 21st century. It seems like a relic of early 20th-century urbanity and evokes some of the worst connotations of that period: it is noisy and dirty and dark. Here in Boston, we got rid of almost all of our elevated trains following the panic of mid-century “urban renewal.”
I remember my father complaining about the elevated train that ran through Charlestown when he grew up. It was noisy. It was always dark underneath the tracks. It reeked. Everything was stained by pigeon shit. It was not a pleasant place.
Decades later he walked down Washington Street in the South End, where the elevated train used to run, and didn’t recognize the neighborhood, shocked at how charming and pretty it was, qualities he couldn’t appreciate before the train came down in the late ‘80s.
I recognize that elevated trains have their drawbacks. They do create perpetual shadow at street level. They rumble and they are noisy (the key is to just get the trains running so often that you won’t even notice).
But surely we can find solutions to some of these problems. If they make the street level unpleasant, then maybe cities could find ways to build elevated walkways and gardens along with the trains (think of New York’s High Line, but with a train still running). If they are noisy, then maybe the trains could be replaced with electric buses, like Boston’s Silver Line (which is itself a poor replacement for the Washington Street Elevated because it runs at grade, with no way to avoid street traffic). No system will be perfect, and compromises will be made. But compromise is the essence of urbanity.
I understand how it seemed desirable to remove elevated trains in the late 20th century, when American cities were shrinking and cities were trying to make themselves appealing to people raised in the car-centric ease of the suburbs. But American cities have turned a corner. People are moving back, populations are growing, and cities are once again struggling with the fundamental problem of how to accommodate as many people as possible in a limited area.
Elevated trains offer an obvious, tested solution to the problem of mass transit running on congested roadways. I hope cities don’t forget about them as they look for new answers to old questions.
This song has been stuck in my head for a couple days:
The song popped in while I was walking my dog and thinking about the killing of Alton Sterling by police in Baton Rouge. Sterling was shot outside of the Triple S Food Mart, where he regularly sold CDs, which is maybe illegal, but Sterling had the permission of the store’s owner, and the two were friends.
So the police arrive with reports of an armed man, see Alton Sterling, assume he is a threat, things escalate, and we’ve all seen or can see the horrifying results.
There are many reasons this shouldn’t have happened, and there are many things one might propose to try to prevent this from happening in the future. I keep coming back to this idea, though: Alton Sterling was a person in the neighborhood; the police were not people in your neighborhood.
Baton Rouge–like most American cities–is starkly segregated. Take a look at this map, where green denotes black residents and blue denotes white residents:
There’s a pretty clear dividing line at Florida Boulevard, with the city to the south predominantly white and the city to the north predominantly black.
The SS Food Mart, where Alton Sterling conducted business regularly and where he died, is just over a mile north of Florida Boulevard. The officers who killed him where white. Looking at the map, it’s a safe assumption that they did not live north of Florida Boulevard (if they lived in Baton Rouge at all).
This is important. If the officers who killed Alton Sterling had been from the neighborhood where they killed Alton Sterling, I can’t believe Sterling would be dead. Because the officers would have known Sterling. They would have seen him in the parking lot in front of the SS Food Mart every week selling CDs. Maybe they would have written him up, told him he couldn’t sell his CDs in a parking lot without a permit, even with the owner’s permission, or let him off with a warning. They would have driven by and seen Sterling and maybe asked themselves, “Should we write up Alton? Nah, not today.”
They would have known each other. Or if they didn’t exactly know each other, they would have known enough of how the neighborhood worked that they could have recognized someone trying to make a living, harmlessly even if illegally.
I can’t imagine that night playing out the same way if those cops had been people in the neighborhood.
So on a practical level, maybe cities should reconsider their residency requirements for municipal employment, or enforce them more strictly if they already have rules on the books. Make sure that the people policing communities understand those communities and are invested in them.
More broadly, we have to fix how and where we live. America is so segregated, more now than at the beginning of the last century. And it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t just the result of millions of people making individual decisions to self sort. It was done by design, and if you don’t think that, then you should listen to this This American Life episode or read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.
The takeaway: in the ‘30s, in an effort to grow the middle class, the federal government started backing housing loans so home buyers could get loans on more favorable terms. The federal government understood home ownership was perhaps the best way for people to build and maintain wealth and saw home ownership as a bulwark against the possibility of another Great Depression. In order to qualify for these government-backed loans, though, homes had to be located in neighborhoods that the government deemed desirable and secure, and this explicitly excluded black neighborhoods and integrated neighborhoods and any neighborhood the government decided wasn’t white enough. So new white home buyers bought in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, and new black home buyers could only buy in integrated or black neighborhoods, and white homeowners in integrated neighborhoods were incentivized to sell before their property values plummeted.
“Around 1930, most black Americans [lived] in neighborhoods that are about 30% black,” Nancy Updike reports in This American Life. “By the ‘60s, the neighborhoods of African Americans in the industrial Northeast are 74% percent black and higher.”
While policy has evolved to try to remedy this situation, this is the legacy we live with: redlining, white flight, de facto segregation.
Still, walking my dog around the parks in my neighborhood, or going down the street for breakfast with my wife, I see people of many different racial and ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and we’re all living in the same public realm, going to the same parks, eating at the same breakfast place, all waiting impatiently together for the subway.
This matters to me, and I think it should matter to us all. Even if you don’t know everyone in your neighborhood, you understand them to some degree. You recognize them and you live with each other’s patterns of behavior. You know what is regular and what is irregular. And if the only people in your neighborhood are people like you, then only people who look and act like you are recognizable.
Someone who might otherwise be a neighbor going about his life, trying to provide for his family, becomes a dangerous criminal. Someone you might nod at and say hello to when you both go to the same store for coffee becomes a threat to be neutralized.
We need to think about the people in our neighborhood, the people that we meet each day.
This is me straining for objective correlative, trying to make the natural world fit the mood of the day, aided by confirmation bias, my brain choosing to forget all those Fridays before Easter when there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.
“Il n’y a pas un seul nuage dans le ciel.” This was a phrase my father learned in high school French class. He would say it with an exaggerated French accent, gesturing emphatically at the sky, where there would be not a single cloud.
This year Good Friday is also my father’s birthday. He would have been 62, if he hadn’t died at 60.
It is widely believed that Jesus died at 33. He died on Good Friday. The Friday is good because good used to mean holy. The Friday is holy because Jesus died for our sins.
If you believe that.
We know next to nothing of the historical Jesus. Scholars generally agree that he was baptized by John the Baptist, and that he was crucified in Jerusalem during the prefecture of Pontius Pilate. Everything else is embellishment, hearsay, and faith.
In her book From Jesus to Christ, Paula Fredriksen takes Jesus’ resurrection as fact. “If the life and career of Jesus was the necessary but insufficient cause of Christianity, the sufficient cause was the original community’s experience of his resurrection,” she writes. There is no Christianity without the resurrection, both because the resurrection is proof and vindication of Jesus’s mission and his status as the messiah, but also because the miraculous undoing of death, the complete upending of the normal course of human existence, instilled the fervor and dedication necessary to live by and spread Jesus’ gospel.
I was surprised when I read this several years ago. Fredriksen was an academic, and her book is largely an attempt to put the gospels in historical context to understand the early church and its evolving understanding of its messiah. She was not supposed to accept the resurrection as fact.
“She says that the resurrection must have happened, because how else does Christianity happen,” I said to my father.
“Well, yeah,” he said, because obviously. Because he and my mother had taken me to a Catholic church every Sunday, and they had sent me to Catholic school for twelve years, and the fact of the resurrection should not be so surprising to me.
But that’s faith, and that’s something I am lacking.
Bart Ehrman resolves this particular conflict between faith and reason in his book How Jesus Became God by explaining the reality of the resurrection as a response to intense grief. The disciples, traumatized by the sudden and violent death of Jesus, imagined they had been visited by their dead teacher and friend. People regularly dream of dead loved ones. Combine the realistic experience of dreams with a religious conviction fueled by an apocalyptic expectation, and it’s possible to imagine the disciples waking from dreams of their dead teacher and friend, convinced that Jesus was again among the living, if in a different form.
So then Jesus becomes a hallucination of sorrow and loss. The disciples’ brains trying to reconcile their trauma.
The night before he died, Jesus and his disciples ate together. Passover. At least bread and wine. Jesus told them, “Do this in memory of me.” They did.
My father said heaven was Wild Turkey bourbon and Camel cigarettes. I don’t smoke. Neither did he for his last twenty years, and he didn’t drink for his last twenty-five or so. Still.
On my father’s birthday, I drink Wild Turkey in memory of him.
If you believe in the gospels, then Good Friday is the day Jesus made heaven possible for us all by offering himself as sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. God became man, men killed God, and God forgave man.
If you don’t believe, then Good Friday is the day a group of apocalyptic fanatics watched their leader and close friend brutally executed in a provincial capital of the Roman Empire.
“Hey, so I heard you were hanging out with Goldman Sachs?”
“Oh, yeah, they gave me a stupid amount of money to give some speeches.”
“Really? That seems kinda weird, doesn’t it?”
“Um, I don’t know. I mean, not really? Like, they invite a lot of people to give speeches.”
“Yeah, but, like, why’d they give you so much money?”
“I don’t know. ‘Cause they have, like, a bajillion dollars. They’ve paid other people more, but, whatever.”
“So, what, now you’ll just do whatever Goldman Sachs wants?”
“Wait, what? Why are you saying that? No, it was just a few speeches.”
“Why are you acting so messed up? It’s like, you just love Goldman Sachs now.”
“How am I acting messed up? What have I done?”
“It’s like I can’t even trust you anymore. Just show me the transcripts, and I’ll believe you.”
“Why am I gonna show you the transcripts? I told you, it was just some speeches, I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, then why not just show me the transcripts to prove it?”
“Because you should trust me. I mean, if I were going around being all, 'Hey guys, Goldman Sachs is the best! Let’s let them and everyone on Wall Street do whatever they want,’ then, yeah, maybe I could understand why you’d want to see the transcripts. But, like, I’m not doing that, at all.”
“But how am I supposed to trust you if you’re not being honest?”
“I am being honest. You’re just not believing me. And, for real, you’re acting kinda paranoid.”
“HOW AM I NOT SUPPOSED TO BE PARANOID WHEN YOU’RE JUST GOING AROUND GIVING SPEECHES AND THEN YOU WON’T EVEN SHOW ME THE TRANSCRIPTS?!”
“Okay, you need to calm down. You’re freaking me out.”
