A 2023 Update

I no longer write blog posts. I’m too damn old to do everything.

I am, however, still alive and working.

What prompts this update is my recent departure from Twitter (on December 12, 2022, I deleted an account I’d had for 13 years and ten months. It broke my heart—I loved Twitter—but it’s important to stick with what matters and I did not want to empower or enrich the current owner of Twitter. I am now using Bluesky.

Which meant I needed to update this site. (Delete bird; insert blue sky.)

So. Here I am. Updating.

To wit: I spend much of my time writing a new book and revising an old one (In Meat We Trust, currently out of print).

As to The New Thing (it has no title yet):

For what I will only describe as a painful number of years, I’ve wrestled and bashed and often hated a project that has morphed three times. I finally figured out what I’m doing this year, but as always, this stuff takes tiiiiiiiime.

The new book is about “alcohol.” As an idea; as a bit of human culture.

It thinks about how humans in the Minnesota River valley responded to alcohol over the course of several centuries.

The book opens in the 1650s with the people who ruled the valley, and region, for centuries: The Dakota. Part One is the tale of their encounter with a new wakan/spirit—brandy—and people with pale faces, from the French in the sixteenth century to the Americans in the early nineteenth.

Part Two is set on a terraced, wooded bluff on the right bank of the Minnesota River, on a site loved and worked by centuries of Dakota. Today it is identified as New Ulm.

There, in 1860, a German immigrant family built a brewhouse. In 2023, the Schell/Marti family is still brewing in the same brewhouse on their ridge near the river. (Amazing, people, amazing!)

Don’t ask me when I will finish it, because I don’t know.

However: given where I am now, I expect it will see daylight in 2024. I’ve written huge chunks of it, but some of those chunks required what amounted to a master’s degree worth of research and study. And one big chunk requires dealing with 19th century German newspapers. And I don’t read German. (Thank you, Google translate.)

So. That’s what I’m doing right now, December 22, 2022.

Matters Existential

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to Notes at bottom

For the past six or so years, those who know me have eye-rolled at my response to the age of trump: I was being hysterical! Melodramatic! My husband, an otherwise rational person, said “oh, honey, nothing’s going to happen. The republic isn’t gonna fall.”(1)

My fear began the moment Hillary Clinton announced her run, I prayed, in my way, for a rational Republican candidate. Because there was no universe in which Hillary, whom I admire, was gonna get elected. None.

____________________

donald trump was my worst. fucking. nightmare.

I’m an historian and I could see that darkness had descended upon us.(2) The nation lay in the hands of a skilled, immoral grifter who gave not a single fuck about the republic, the constitution, governance. All he wanted was access to the goods. Any way he could get them, legal or otherwise.

I was right.

Thanks to the hearings, now we know at least part of “what happened.” (And just think! This is ONLY about January 6! Think of all the other low-hanging fruit the don and his leeches snatched.)

Now to the point:

This upcoming election? The one in November? It matters. If the Republicans take the House and Senate in November, we. are. toast.

____________________

Let me explain.

dt fears indictment, courts. Loss of any kind. Prison? not for don. A sitting president cannot be indicted. it is imperative that he regain office asap.

Here’s the plan:

his people take the House and Senate. They immediately oust Biden/Harris. Either they appoint dt or, more likely, they appoint an avowed loyalist. He/she runs the joint for a year, while setting up a “win” for dt in November 2024.

He wins; he suspends the constitution. Game over. Let the plunder and pillage begin.

____________________

You scoff. You’re rolling your eyes, yeah lady, what drugs are you on?

Best not scoff. These hearings have demonstrated, in searing, factual detail, that he came within hours of stealing the last election. It all came down to a handful of guys in the Justice Department.(3)

They win Congress, and that’s all he needs to regain the throne. They will immediately oust Biden/Harris. They’ll then either install dt (guided, no doubt, by something “original” to the constitution), or an avowed loyalist will hold court until the election of 2024. Meanwhile, he and they cement their ability to rig elections.

Sure, cabinet secretaries will resign. No problem! The senate will approve nominees loyal only to don. People willing to turn, say, the armed forces against Americans. People willing to fuck with vote counts. People willing to obey.

You think saying good-bye to abortion, the right to privacy, Miranda, and the unfettered freedom to own and use guns is bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

________________________

The election of 2022 is existential. We must keep republicans from taking congress.

I’m a registered independent.(4) I’ve got zero use for either “party.”

And I care much less about “policy” than I do about the freedom to have policy debates.

For me, freedom is spiritual. Every day I am grateful that I enjoy freedom of thought, action, choice, a vote. It is the most profound part of me. I am who I am because I am free.

Please vote.

Thanks for reading.

_______________

NOTES:

1. I’m an historian. I live with the historian’s curse, which is to be hyper-aware of context, the long view, the big picture. There were plenty of people in Germany making the same kind of noise. People laughed at them, too.

2. Long ago in a different universe, I taught at a small university. History, of course. One time around 1997 or ‘98, I remember saying, in the context of “rights” that I feared we were pushing the individual over the whole. I told the class I wasn’t sure if the center would hold; if the Constitution could accommodate so many competing demands for rights,” almost always at the expense of another group. I said we’d probably know in about 20 years. Sigh.

3: That was the reason for the violence. Late Sunday, January 3, he ran out of options for overturning vote counts. His last option was Wednesday, January 6, when pence would read the electoral results. He had 48 hours. He needed every fucking weapon he could get his hands on. (By the way? It’s now clear, lest you think I am again hysterical: he began lining up the proud boys in December. December.)

4: Except when I change parties to vote in a primary, as I did this month. I live in Iowa and wanted to vote in the D primary for a surprisingly strong candidate running against chuck grassley in Iowa. I’m a lifetime Iowan (5th gen). Michael Franken is the first serious opponent grassley has ever faced. Even moderate Republicans (the handful left) are outraged. Send Franken $5. grassley’s seat can be flipped.

And no, I didn’t proofread this.

Don't Be One Of Those People

Imagine walking into a business to meet your spouse, partner, mom, dad, sister, brother, etc. and find that he/she is lying on the floor and instead of hi honey, he/she is lying on the floor and there's a pool of blood and she isn’t moving and doesn’t look normal her eyes didn't light up when you walked in something is wrong wrong and. 

There are five people in the room. One is giggling and staring at him, at you. Three are resolute in their willingness to look anywhere but at your beloved. At the human being sprawled on the floor. The fifth is talking on the phone as if nothing is amiss.

While your spouse, partner, mom, dad, sister, brother, etc. lies in a pool of blood and you crouch down next to him and say I’m here honey I’m here I’m here.

And there are five people in the room gawking and giggling and phoning and you have no idea what has happened and you say honey I’m here I’m here and you have no idea what's happened and no one is speaking and he tries to speak and. 

And then you say “Did anyone call an ambulance?” Because — he was lying there alone and people are gawking and giggling and I ask: 

“Did anyone call an ambulance?”

And you whisper reassurance and hold his hand, hoping he can hear you because his eyes are so blank and he was lying there. Alone.

And hours later, after you learn what happened and he’s okay and your own heart is skipping beats from joy and you realize, again, that love is always pain and you knew it would be from the moment you met him three decades earlier. You knew back then there would be a moment when he wouldn't be there and back then you thought “Oh, I can’t do this I can’t love him because eventually one of us will leave, one of us will die, I won’t be able to stand the pain.”

But you did do it and now it's thirty years later and is he dying what is happening? and he was alone on the floor, clothes smudged with blood blood smeared on the floor a deep red pool of blood near his head and then hours later in the hospital it's all okay. This time wasn't the end.

Thank you every human ever and everywhere who has dedicated themselves to helping humanity. Thank you for medicine. For science. For doctors and ambulances and nurses and machines that help the heart beat.

"Thank you" is so . . . little. Had this happened in a place with no immediate, fast, expert medical treatment, he’d be dead and I’d be a widow and unable to write this because I’d have drowned in grief.

And hours later you think:

We all understand the micro level: “Oh my god my wife, sister, child, husband is lying on the floor in a pool of blood.” 

But the macro level matters, too: “Oh, my god, there’s a human being lying in the floor in a pool of blood and what I can do to help?” 

Why did no one help him? Why did no one offer comfort?

Don’t be one of those five people not holding the hand of the person on the floor. Not trying to comfort him. 

I used to be one of those people. 

But that was then. 

Now I will always get down on the floor and take the person’s hand and speak softly into her ear and say “It’s okay. I’m with you. I’m here.”