Who are our heroes?

Yesterday On Friday, former Arizona Republican State Senator Russell Pearce posted on Facebook a criticism of the victims of the Aurora shooting (no longer available on his FB page, but available here.) In that post he essentially blamed the massacre on no one's having the foresight to carry a loaded weapon into a theater for a midnight showing and being prepared at an instant's notice to shoot a man covered in armor and packing an assault weapon:

Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this "bad" man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man. Lives were lost because of a bad man, not because he had a weapon, but because noone was prepared to stop it. Had they been prepared to save their lives or lives of others, lives would have been saved. All that was needed is one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done.

Lives were lost not because the gunman had semi-automatic weapons but because no one was prepared to stop him?!! Judging from other comments I've read, Pearce is not alone in blaming the massacre not just on the fully-armored man carrying an assault weapon that can shoot up to 100 rounds but also on the people in a dark theater who failed to stop the murderer.

I find comments such as these offensive on so many levels. First, they show an appalling inability to sympathize with victims. Sure, Pearce goes on after his rant to say that his "prayers are with all of those suffering this senseless act," but that's after he's called every one of the victims--and especially the men--a coward. The comments also reveal a willingness to pass judgment with insufficient knowledge: Pearce "understands" that the murderer "had to stop and reload." But hours later, surviving victims' recollection of events suggest that the murderer might have started firing the shotgun first, then the assault rifle (which jammed) and then the Glock semi-automatic pistol with its 40-shot capacity. In addition, the shooter was dressed in black in a dark theater, was heavily armored, and had confused the crowd with canisters of what might have been tear gas. But facts do not matter to the rigid ideologue--only his stupefying world view.

And then there is the sexism. The brave are always men, a few good men, or, according to Pearce, "one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise."

Most appalling of all, however, is how these comments totally disregard the bravery that was exhibited in those horrifying moments. President Barack Obama publicly highlighted one of those brave acts: that of twenty-one year-old Stephanie Davies, who saved the life of her nineteen-year-old friend, Allie Young. When James Holmes threw the canisters of tear gas into the theater near their seats, Allie Young stood up, as if to warn people. She was immediately shot in the neck and fell down. Her friend Stephanie dropped down beside her friend Allie, pulled her out of the aisle, and kept pressure on Allie's wound, while using her other hand to call 911 on her cellphone. And Stephanie refused to leave her friend's side while the gunman continued his rampage.

Other people shielded their friends and loved ones from bullets, and, yes, several of these were men. Some lost their lives being the brave men that Russell Pearce lamented were not present in that theater: Matthew R. McQuinn, Alexander Teves, Jonathan T. Blunk. And I'm sure there were other acts of quiet and desperate bravery that will never receive public attention.

These are our heroes: ordinary men and women acting extraordinarily in moments of terror.

The President best summed up that heroism: "As tragic as the circumstances of what we've seen today are, as heartbreaking as it is for the families, it's worth us spending most of our time reflecting on young Americans like Allie and Stephanie because they represent what's best in us, and they assure us that out of this darkness a brighter day is going to come."

That's an attitude I can embrace.

Ready and Loaded for Bear

This past week I was deep in the heart of East Texas, traveling between Nacogdoches and Austin, and I didn't listen to any news while I was on the road. Not until I turned on NPR near Baton Rouge on the way home Friday evening did I hear about the shooting in the theater in Aurora, Colorado. I no longer get television reception at my house, either, so I'm isolated from the 24-hour, hyped-up news cycle of cable and network news. I read all my news (and watch my movies and television dramas) online, so whatever I read has had some time to be filtered, to be evaluated and checked.  And when I do watch a news video online, I have usually accessed it through a link provided by a journalist who has also provided context and additional detail to the original story. Thus, I miss the endless speculations that fill the air immediately after a tragedy. 

But I have now read most of the online news stories of the major newspapers that have covered as many details currently available about James Holmes and the victims of his horrific attack, and I've also read commentary of several journalists who have raised the issue of gun control and of the powerful hold that the National Rifle Association has on politics in this country. Should we all be, as the NRA seems to think, always ready and loaded for bear?

I'm not opposed to gun ownership. I grew up in the country, and every man (and some women) I knew owned at least a shotgun. I never fired a gun, myself, but I've loaded a shotgun and been prepared to fire. (Thank God there was really no bogeyman outside that door in Denham Springs, Louisiana, those many years ago!) I'm not opposed to hunting for food (and I'm happy that we have public lands where hunters with no access to hunting grounds of their own can hunt in season). I'm not much of a meat-eater these days, but I've eaten venison many times in the past, and when I was a child, I ate squirrel that my father shot in the woods of Old River, Texas. He still uses those guns to protect his corn from the wild hogs that can devastate a garden overnight in East Texas--though the guns aren't much use unless one is prepared to stand vigil all night for nights on end, in hopes of catching the wily creatures.

And so, I am willing to entertain the idea that the NRA and its myriad spokespersons (many just private citizens in love with their guns) put forth: that we should always be ready and loaded for bear, that if only someone in that theater or classroom or campus or courtroom had a gun, that person could put a stop to a madman with an assault weapon. Is this claim feasible? Should every teacher in every classroom pack heat on the off-chance that some mental case is going to burst in and start mowing down students? Of course, who would be the first to be targeted? Derangement does not preclude craftiness and high intelligence.

And what about the gunman who is loaded for T-rex instead of bear? James Holmes entered a dark theater dressed in black, covered in body armor, armed with a semi-automatic AR-15, a Glock handgun, a 12-gauge Remington Model shotgun, and canisters of smoke or gas.
 

What kind of society expects its citizens to be loaded for bear? What kind of society would that be? I just traveled hundreds of miles on interstate and state highways and was threatened repeatedly by angry people in cars in a hurry to get nowhere worth killing people to get there. (And I was driving the speed limit or just a tic or two below.) Those aggressive people are already using their cars as weapons. Imagine if they had a gun handy, too.
 

No, I'm appalled by the idea that there should always be someone (me? you? all of us?) in our public spaces ready to take down a potential mass murderer--it's an idea that has totally given up on a civilized society.
 

Ta-Nehisi Coates best describes the thoughts that have been rolling around in my own brain the past two days:

It's worth considering the wisdom of waging a shoot-out in a crowded theater with a mad-man in body-armor. More than that, we should consider the import of the argument's implication--a fully, and heavily, armed citizenry. If we all are going to agree to be armed, surely I don't want my arms to be inferior to the arms of my potential adversaries--a category including virtually any other citizen. The Aurora shooter was evidently in full body-armor. I need to upgrade to hand-grenades. And so we arrive at a kind of personal arms race,

And we arrive at a world with minimal trust in the state's ability to deploy violence on our behalf--a distrust of the authorities whom we pay to protect us, a cynicism which says those authorities are beyond reform, and that only through this personal arms race, can a person sleep at night. 

And too we are left with the deeply held belief that, somehow, we can always outgun those who would do us harm, or at least our end can come at the place of our choosing.  Now we are cousined to immortality. Now we are chin-level with our various Gods. 

It's worth considering what we mean by a safer society, and whether it can be secured through a cold war of all against all. It's worth asking if the world really needs more George Zimmermans. ["The Dream of Maximum Guns," posted 21 July 2012.]

Reading Novels of the Domestic Drama

Because I've been doing so much handwork in the past few months, my novel reading has suffered. Instead, when I wasn't gardening or--more lately--involved in family activities associated with our daughter's living with us for the summer, I would sit down in front of my television with the latest handwork project and access Netflix in order to watch something that wouldn't be so engrossing as to interfere with the needle work. And so I have watched all of the old Adam Dagleish mysteries from the 1990s, adaptations of the P.D. James mystery novels; most episodes of the sci-fi series Stargate Atlantis; all of the British Rosemary and Thyme mysteries; and now, abandoning myself to the nostalgia of childhood, the Mission: Impossible episodes of the 1960s and 1970s.  Occasionally, I think that I should listen to language tapes instead when I'm doing handwork, for then I would be learning something, but the boyish face of Colonel Shepherd of Stargate Atlantis or Roy Marsden's melancholy Adam Dagleish or the lovely English gardens highlighted in Rosemary and Thyme make me abandon my more intellectual aspirations. Could I stitch as well while repeating Spanish phrases?

This week, however, putting handwork aside, I indulged in a novel by one of my favorite contemporary British novelists, Joanna Trollope, who ranks up there with my other favorite British novelists, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, and Penelope Lively. I gulped down the novel in one day, immersed in the human experience that Trollope creates so believably in her novels. Novels written by women authors that deal with domesticity and human relationships underwhelm many people. Charlotte Bronte said of Jane Austen's fiction: "There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound." Mark Twain had this to say: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig [Jane Austen] up and beat her over the head with her own shin-bone."

But I love a finely written novel that delineates the human heart in all its strength and weaknesses without resorting to violence or over-dramatization. I love novelists who realize that we reveal ourselves more thoroughly in everyday experiences, when we least think we're on display to the world.

Anthony Trollope, a distant relative of Joanna Trollope's, had this to say about Jane Austen:

Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with uncommon accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good;.--and certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly, I know of no novelist who has beaten her.

Anthony Trollope, if living today, would perhaps write something similar about the novels of Joanna Trollope, which are often called "domestic dramas" because they deal with the everyday drama of marriage, lovers, divorce, children, aging parents, aging lovers. Another term that has been used to describe these kinds of novels is "Aga saga." According to Wikipedia the "Aga saga is a sub-genre of the family saga of literature. The genre is named for the AGA cooker, a type of stored-heat oven that came to be popular in medium to large country houses in the UK after its introduction in 1929. It refers primarily to fictional family sagas dealing with British middle-class country or village life." Obviously, the phrase has a condescending ring to it.

Joanna Trollope describes in an interview some of the criticism of her writing:

“I am often criticised for being rather accessible. . . . And my reply to that is I think Mozart and the Parthenon are quite accessible, too, though perhaps in another league. . . . There was one review that said 'you could read this book in a day’, as if that was a bad thing. I mean these books to be easy to read, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t thought-provoking.

But, as Fay Weldon says, "She can be as subtle as Austen, as sharp as Bronte. Trollope’s brilliant."

In The Men and the Girls, the Joanna Trollope novel that I finished today, two couples that are the main characters are men and women with a wide gap between their ages; the men are in their late fifties or early sixties, their younger partners in their thirties and forties. The novel deals with the issues this discrepancy in age causes. At the beginning of the novel, an accident causes a young woman to re-examine her life, and she is convinced she must leave the much older man with whom she and her young daughter have been happily living for eight years. In a conversation before she leaves, the man, very kindly, asks," Are you afraid you'll have to look after me?"

The young woman eventually responds, "I'm afraid of you," to which the man wisely replies: "You're afraid of yourself...You see in me what you will become and you're afraid of that."

Who among us hasn't had that fear as we observed those older than us? I see that fear in my daughter's eyes, as she grapples with deciding on college courses and emphasis of studies that may affect the choices she can make later in life. At work, she has seen what bureaucracy can do to a person, how it can wear one down, destroying ambition, dampening enthusiasm, encouraging mediocrity. At home, she sees the disappointments and sorrows I and her father have dealt with, and while we have survived, we bear the scars of those battles, a cynicism or melancholy that we cannot entirely escape, despite our best intentions. This is a difference between fifty-four and twenty.

Toward the end of the novel, one of the characters in Trollope's novel The Men and the Girls, a young wife to a television star who is past his prime, lies in bed thinking:

She...had lain awake for a long time thinking...that there were few things she could think of at that moment that were as desolate as plain old disappointment . . . [N]obody ever gives disappointment the credit of being a prime force behind wayward behavior. But it is. Disappointment is what's the matter with most of us...

It's that kind of insight I so appreciate in the novels of Joanna Trollope, that, and the believable characters that come to life in her novels.

The Republican Nominee Depresses Me, Too

Matt Taibbi, in comparing Mitt Romney's address to the NAACP and later to a "friendlier audience" in Montana:

So now this is the message: I tried to reason with the blacks, I really did, but it turns out they just want a free lunch.

How’s that for bridging the racial divide? Time to wake up the Nobel committee in Oslo!

As far as free lunches go, we of course just witnessed the biggest government handout in history, one that Romney himself endorsed. Four and a half trillion dollars in bailout money already disbursed, trillions more still at risk in guarantees and loans, sixteen trillion dollars in emergency lending from the Federal Reserve, two trillion in quantitative easing, etc. etc. All of this money went to Romney’s pals in the Wall Street banks that for years helped Romney take over companies with mountains of borrowed cash. Now, after these banks crashed, executives at those same firms used those public funds to pay themselves massive salaries, which is exactly the opposite of “helping those who need help,” if you’re keeping score.

That set of facts alone made the “free stuff” speech shockingly offensive. But the problem isn’t just that Romney’s wrong, and a hypocrite, and cynically furthering dangerous and irresponsible stereotypes in order to advance some harebrained electoral ploy involving white conservative voters. What makes it gross is the way he did it.

Romney can’t even be mean with any honesty. Even when he’s pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences. But Mitt Romney has to think his way to the lowest common denominator, which is somehow so much worse. [Matt Taibbi, "Romney's 'Free Stuff' Speech is a New Low," 13 July 2012]

Absence and Presence

Three weeks have passed since my last post. No, I haven't been on vacation in some exotic location. Our daughter has been staying with us for the summer, working locally before she returns to university in another state, and we have spent some time visiting, cooking, going to the local farmers' market, driving occasionally to New Orleans to pick up (and to deliver) one or another of her friends at the airport or the Megabus drop-off. We've grilled on the patio, tried out new (to us) restaurants in towns nearby, gardened, and harvested our vegetables. Just as the tomatoes slowed down in production, the peas, okra, and bell peppers increased production--and the July rains began as well. Our days have been full of ordinary activities illumined by the presence of our daughter, who loves to cook and to experiment with ingredients, and the superabundance of the fresh herbs in my garden have turned ordinary recipes into culinary masterpieces.

So while I have been absent from my blog, I have been present elsewhere, in an ordinary life filled with simple activities transformed by an appreciation of these fleeting moments we have shared. Summer will end, but we've caught hold of its green garment and have held fast while we can.

And we have all started new projects. I am trying my hand at hand quilting, beginning with a baby quilt of my own design but inspired by a photograph taken by a friend. In this project, I will do some traditional quilting, which I haven't done since my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat made me a log-cabin quilt in time for my wedding in 1978. My grandmother made a quilt for every grandchild, and some of us helped her hand-stitch those quilts. I put in many hours helping her stitch my quilt as well as some of the quilts she made my cousins and siblings, but I've never assembled a traditional quilt by myself though I have created folk art quilts in which I used nontraditional techniques for connecting squares of appliquéd material.

current project--small quilt top (Indigo bunting in a tree)

Even in my "traditional" quilting, however, I'm using less traditional techniques. This is not a pieced quilt; the top is one piece of cotton material on which I've appliquéd a design that I have cut, free-hand, out of felt. I've been thinking of how I will quilt this piece; I might choose a flannel back, and I'll quilt around the design first, what's called echo quilting. I plan to hand-stitch several series of echo lines around the appliquéd felt and then emphasize the background pattern in the remaining spaces with random stitches that will follow some of the lines of color in the cotton quilt top material. That's the plan, anyway. Using my friend's photograph as inspiration, I drew a pattern, but I have freely improvised as I cut out, arranged, and appliquéd the felt.

the quilt top design

Making this quilt is a learning experience for me; I hope to improve and to increase the complexity of my designs.

The other big project underway here is the building of a garden shed; my husband and daughter are hammering together the foundation now, and just minutes ago, I took this photo of their progress:

foundation for a garden shed

My job will be to paint the garden shed when it's completed. I'm leaning toward painting the shed green (a spring green) and blue (maybe turquoise), but I have some time to make up my mind.

Meanwhile, I wander the yard in search of pollinators and snap photos of those creatures that visit the mountain mint, zinnias, and other flowers in my garden. July rain has incited a frenzy of growth in my basil; I'll have to begin gathering up much larger quantities of it to dry for use during the winter.

Genovese, lettuce-leaf, and purple opal basil

These are just a few simple pleasures of a summer spent making things and growing things in southeast Louisiana. By August, I'll be longing for the cooler and drier weather of October, but now I'm enjoying being present in the moment.

bee on one of my zinnia flowers

little waspy thing on our mountain mint