Greetings, Friends.

"We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else.

”Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made. Put the interest of the community first. Love your neighbors – not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.

”Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household – which thrive by care and generosity – and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.

”Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well."

~Wendell Berry

“The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1989, 16-22. Originally part of a commencement address given to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, 1989.

Hello, Friends.

An observation: even critics of the current president, or should I say, those who detest him, act like him.

It is a time of grief for all things good. We can still find these things, good is all around us, but it’s vulnerable to destruction because what is actually in the ascendant is killing and taking. We kill nature and beauty to create money, but money does not create beauty or nature in return—all money has the power to do is manipulate what is real, which of course, is beauty and nature, not money.

We distract ourselves from this fact by saying we can own nature and beauty. Oh, Lord. If I hear one more word about property rights, I might slap a bitch and leave a mark for eternity. The Kali Yuga is real, and it lives in my back yard, even if by law I am not allowed to call it mine, although I pay far more attention to what goes on there than does the “owner”.

I’m feeling quite low about these things today because I have failed to make a difference, to protect something I love dearly, and I can only feel helpless as a result.

The field behind my home, the 18 acres teeming with life, is about to be paved—PAVED! All 18 acres—for an RV park with dinky, stupid aquatic attractions. The ones in power are all excited, and one even congratulated the developer for “figuring out something to do with that piece of land.” She might as well just called it a piece of ass for all the demeaning way she sees these 18 acres of beauty.

I’ve tried in vain to talk sense to the Powers The Be about the meadowlarks who will all be killed when the asphalt is poured over their nests that are tucked away in the tufts of bluegrass that is already a threatened species. The killdeer, too.

There also is a den of coyotes that I love to watch play when they come out from the little grove alongside the creek that will now have to absorb the water from the detention pond that is being built to take the run off from the asphalt that will surround the 141 RVs. Yes, 141 RVs, because apparently that is how many people have no capacity to imagine anything else to do with their time and energy but to sit in a metal box next to other metal boxes with a faux lazy river surrounding them. (Yes, of course we have real rivers they could also visit.)

But we all need a dream, and everyone is entitled to dream big. Especially in a time of the Prosperity Gospel, which is big in these parts.

The family of deer, the foxes and their kits, the red tailed hawks, the murder of crows, the frogs that click and croak at dusk, the life, the life, the life. All to be destroyed because someone wants to make money, blind to the value in the treasure they hold. But I am not allowed to have an opinion about it because I don’t own it.

And while I know from having spent three years observing the land every day, much of the day, because I look out the window often, or work from my deck where I can observe the life around me, that this land is going to flood, with all that asphalt, the fact that there will be a detention pond means it got green lighted by the Codes department. I told them wait and see, it will flood, but oh, well.

Meanwhile, because it will be like watching someone murder my best friend in slow motion, replete with back-up beep beep at levels that would outpace the noise torture used at Gitmo, I have been seeking a new place to live. And that is how I know that people talk out their assholes when they criticize the president while demanding as much money as they can pressure people to give them.

There used to be plenty of homes to rent, and that is all I am willing and able to do right now as I rebuild my life from the mess I made of it by getting married in my 50s. But all the homes are now owned by liberal Coasties, Prosperity Gospelites, and local lawyers, who bought them up, painted them, and called that a renovation, and now the prices have doubled, there are massive fees for pets, and first, last, and current rent is due with other fees.

Do not tell me that supply and demand is a real equation. It is not. Greed is all there is. Greed and killing for more greed. I am in a panic that not only will I have to move, again, but that I might have to move to another city because I can’t afford my own. My friends are telling me to get a roommate, especially since I nearly died and would have done had I not had a friend show up at the right time back in May when my heart was stopping. But I resent being forced into the failure of cohabitation for the sake of finances at my age, so I will not do it.

I saw a Fowler’s toad last evening when I took the dog out for her last pee before bedtime. I was so startled to see it just sitting calmly under the street light. My mind cycled quickly through the reasons I was so startled by it. Then I realized it was because it was the first time I had seen one in 20 years.

Then I stood there looking at it, slightly agitated by its appearance, because was it really that long since I’d seen one at the monastery where I used to take my son for weeks at a time so we could live on the farm with the monks and help them with their chores? I racked my brain. I know I have heard toads croaking in the cattails surrounding the pond left over from when this neighborhood used to be a cattle farm, but, why was he out where he was vulnerable to being smooshed by a pick up truck?

It just made me feel so sad to see him, a lone survivor, but likely not for long. And to think it'd been two decades since I’d seen a toad. As a child, I was that weird girl who tried to catch them with her bare hands. Frogs, turtles, toads, snakes—I was fascinated by all of them. I wanted to play with them, observe them, be around them, and I did all these things all the time. Now their appearance is a mysterious and upsetting surprise.

Once back inside, I went to sit on the deck and listen to the croaking in the night. The toad’s brethren were down in the creek, giving it their full-throated all. Maybe he’d gone back there himself (itself). I just felt so sad. So bereft. And after all the health issues—my cardiologist told me this week he was surprised and delighted to report how well I was doing, considering that he’d had serious concerns I wouldn’t make it—and the dissociation I’ve had from all of it, I finally shed a few tears. Not weeping, just bitter tears. What is the point of living in this world when I can do nothing to protect or care for what I love within it?

All I can think to do is call bullshit on the people who natter, natter, natter about how much they hate this president and then live out the same reality he exemplifies.

Before the encounter with the toad, earlier in the day, I’d attended the memorial service for a friend, Black Bear. He died at the start of this year, but for a host of reasons, many of which are unknown to me, the celebration of his life wasn’t until this weekend.

Let me tell you why I counted him as a friend, even though we didn’t spend much time together. First, we bonded over our love of animals. Then birds. Then American Indian art. He was a teacher and a potter. I have a small collection of works by American Indian artists and am interested in all things American West that aren’t Taylor Sheridan’s version of it.

But then, at some point, Black Bear started punching me. Literally punching me every time he saw me. It was always in my upper arm that he’d hit me. Hard. It was so annoying. But I knew if I told him to stop, it wouldn’t matter, so I just started punching him back in his arm. Hard. We hit each other all the time.

I got to the point where I looked forward to seeing him, because I knew he would punch me and I would get to punch him. It was so satisfying to hit someone. Because there are so many reasons to punch the fuck out of all the stupid faces that want to pave this planet. Black Bear, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, saw that I felt that way and let me let him have it, even though of course he wasn’t one of the stupid ones. He was one of the smart ones. He knew my rage. We never talked about it, he just knew I felt it. He knew it. He gave me a way to express it.

And I should say, one of Bear’s most well-known creations was a painting of the current president taking a dump. We all poop, Bear said. Yes, we do, and we all count our money, money, money.

Another friend, a gardener and one who is simpatico to the notion that we are collectively sleepwalking through a moment of money’s mass enchantment of our hearts and minds, had said to me on Friday that we live in a culture of death, and we kill to make money, then kill again to make still more money. He was there at Bear’s celebration of life, too. Standing at the buffet, I thought about that conversation. It made me want to punch a hole in the wall behind me. A hole where truth should be.

Thank you, Bear. May you rest in peace. I hope you are punching someone, hard. I will have to find another way to express my abject rage at the pavers and the grifters, but I am grateful you saw what is really inside of me and that you made sure to leave your mark for eternity.

Peace,

Whitney

Greetings,

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What are the psychological underpinnings of our current political era? Why have we allowed democracy to recede, emotion to rise, and authoritarian leaders divide and control us with help from the media?

And what needs to happen for the tide to reverse?

Join me and my guest, psychiatrist Allen Dyer, MD, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, as we walk through his latest book, Madness and the Political Divide, published by Routledge.

I have known Dr. Dyer for over a decade, as we shared overlapping circles when I was a mental health policy reporter and he was still teaching at GWU. I interviewed Dr. Dyer in 2019 to reflect on the first Trump campaign that sparked a divide among mental health professionals, particularly psychiatrists, some of whom thought it was their duty to warn against what they claimed to be Trump’s destructive narcissism, and those who warned against diagnosing candidates without actually taking a clinical history. The debate was centered on what came to be called The Goldwater Rule, which Dr. Dyer helped to write in 1973, when he was a member of the Ethics Committee at the American Psychiatric Association.

The Goldwater Rule was in response to how psychiatrists attributed all sorts of neurosis and serious mental illnesses to former presidential candidate, Republican Barry Goldwater, who had run for office a decade before the rule was devised.

I really enjoyed re-listening to the first interview (linked below) with Dr. Dyer. It was a good conversation to take the pulse of how the mental health of our leaders is debated by the professionals. I found listening to the two together was instructive: like reading a personal journal then and now, only it’s the journal charting the changes in America’s relationship to Trump, and our acceptance of authoritarianism.

In the previous interview recorded in 2019, I was certainly less hyped up, lol. This time around, I was running down a mugshot and about to tear off to the arraignment of a defendant in a double homicide in Lexington, an hour away. I must have had too much coffee, too.

Here’s our interview from 10 years ago:

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When I was ten years old I somehow ended up in a summer camp for creative writing held at Magsig Middle School in Centerville, Ohio. My mother probably signed me up in order to avoid having me around while school was out, although, I remember the sense of caché the teacher who was running the camp cast over the fact of our group’s admission.

I had a yellow journal that I wrote poems in. That’s all I wrote back then. Poems that often were written in shapes. There was a butterfly poem shaped as a butterfly. There was a rainbow poem in the shape of a rainbow. And today, I was thinking about the poem I had written in the shape of a big, fat question mark. The title of the poem, of course, was Why?.

It came to mind because I caught myself asking questions of the world while knowing full well that I will likely never know the answers.

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Another day, another shooter.

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Greetings, Friends.

Sorry I skipped out on you last week. Anyone want to guess why…? Yes! Another migraine. But here we are. A lot has hap…

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Greetings.

This is from The Intercept. It’s a video that if you are a Stephen Colbert fan, you might have already seen, but still, maybe stay with me so you can hear what’s wrong with this other than the obvious.

In coastal Alabama, there is a 62 year-old-woman who has been voted Alabaman of the Year after being apprehended (and tackled) for wearing a penis costume to the most recent No Kings rally in her ‘Bama town. That’s the fun part for her. The not-so-fun part is that she is facing trial later this month for her choice in apparel. But the even less-funny part for her is that her First Amendment rights were negated by a hometown boy offended by the site of a giant dick. The woman was also carrying a sign that read: “No Dick Tators”.

You can watch the video (the audio kicks in after a few seconds), which starts out kind of funny, and if the woman weren’t yelling about how much pain she is in from being pushed to the ground, hand cuffed, and then smashed into the cruiser while still wearing her penis suit, it becomes even funnier after it takes three cops to finally realize they can’t squash a massive member into the backseat of a patrol car. Eventually, one of them takes her cuffs off and helps her step out of her costume.

This interests me on a professional level. For one, when I was considering adding a crime beat to the news outlet I run, I enrolled in the local police academy so I would know what I was talking about. There is a citizens’ track at the academy, which puts regular joes like me through all the same training as the cadets, excepting fire arms training. (Yes, I even got to drive a cruiser in a car chase, and that is when I learned that under duress, I drive like Granny). The only other difference is that it’s only three months versus the cadet training averaging 6 months. Still, I did learn how to apprehend a criminal, and also learned what it was like to be apprehended.

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Greetings, Friends.

If you could get through to them, I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that Jesus did not found America. Probably, these are the same people who are Christian Zionists. It’s okay. I don’t blame them. Because religion is synonymous with politics in America, it’s easy to be confused about history and who did what.

The truth is, men founded America, and not expressly according to Christian values so much as by their inner values which were predicated on a belief in Deism, a system of belief that doesn’t think god has much interest in interfering with us.

Still, our founders also seem to have accepted some enlightened principals that were akin to the mystic principles of Christianity prior to its co-option by the Romans who, after 450 AD, finally said sod it, if we can’t beat the Christianity out of these numbskulls, we’ll package and export it as our own product, creating the first international corporate monopoly. Of course, if your product is crap, it won’t sell, but this thing had some staying power.

Still, it’s unwise to underestimate the power of packaging, and now we have Christianity that is not just a religion but an American lifestyle brand with adherents who like to signal just how saved they are.

There are the mandatory gold crosses the size of telephone poles hanging from the necks of blonde babes who know things, and men’s tattoos of ornate crosses that may or may not mean the bearer of said tattoo is a Nazi, or that he actually knows how to achieve anything useful. Ever the expansionists, the brand managers in this Christian house of fashion are recruiting new influencers: Jews for Jesus. It’s so retro. Their tag line is “Bring Jesus back!”

The original Christian Jews were not the brain child of these Christian Zionists. No, they were the ones who, back in the 1970s and 80’s, stood politely near where you were about to board your plane, asking if you would like a pamphlet about how Jews missed the point of what Jesus of Nazareth was trying to tell them. (And you thought only Hare Krishnas used to hang out at airports, tucking daisies in your lapel.)

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Greetings, Friends!

Thank you for being here. So many new subscribers, and so many old friends. I am so blessed by you all. Thanks for the notes from several of you a…

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Greetings, Friends.

This website is now under construction, and things are not going well. After speaking with a consultant about merging al…

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