Needed: The Courage to Tell the Truth

Marlin Stuzman, R-IN

Despite assurances from several Republicans that they’ve spoken at length with Senator Mitch McConnell, hospitalized five weeks ago, we have yet to hear a single public word from the eighty-four-year-old Kentuckian himself. Governor Andy Beshear did the proper thing this week by sending the senator a letter requesting a candid accounting of his health.

Kentuckians, and indeed the nation, are entitled to such transparency from those they elect to high office. This is not a partisan demand but a democratic one.

I find myself in rare agreement with Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, whose unusually candid remarks distinguish him from the practiced evasions of so much contemporary politics:

“You know, just the things that I’ve heard and seen from some friends is that he’s obviously not doing well, but don’t know if he’s alive or has passed away. His constituents deserve answers where he is at,” Stutzman said.

“I think that the governor of Kentucky has every right to ask after three weeks that no one has said anything. As a Republican, I think we need to hold our own party accountable. And so, the fact that we haven’t heard anything really from Senator McConnell is very discouraging and concerning,” Stuzman added.

Politics, by its partisan nature, so often assumes the countenance of Machiavelli, cloaking its embarrassments in the respectable garments of euphemism and doublespeak until concealment itself becomes a civic virtue.

Stutzman’s plainspoken willingness to question his own party is refreshing not because it is extraordinary in principle, but because it has become extraordinary in practice.

Democrats are hardly immune to the same temptation. For months they brushed aside mounting evidence that Maine’s Graham Platner was unfit for public office, choosing loyalty over candor until the testimony of a liberal woman made further denial impossible. One is left to wonder how differently events might have unfolded had the whistleblower been a conservative.

Such questions are uncomfortable precisely because they expose a habit shared by both parties: the instinct to protect power first and truth afterward.

—RJ

Habits, History, and Rebirth Through Reading

Thus far, my plan to read 50–60 books a year, based on a new approach to how and what I read, has become one of the most fufilling disciplines of my life. I’ve just completed Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, an award-winning biography based on newly discovered manuscripts that shatter long-held fallacies regarding Gauguin. It’s my twenty-third book this year, with six months still to go.

It’s not numbers per se that interest me, but the cultivation of reading as a daily habit, as natural as brushing one’s teeth. I was inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which demonstrates how small, repeated behaviors, faithfully practiced, become almost automatic.

I’m reminded of B.F. Skinner. I was immersed in behaviorism in an intensive graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota, where I wrote a paper on teaching oneself a new language. Years later, I learned Spanish by applying those very principles.

My new read is Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, a scholarly masterpiece, riveting in its exploration of “unconformity”—the violent rupture where geological strata meet across immense reaches of time: earth’s history, from life’s primitive transition from water to land some 400 million years ago, prodigious in unconformity, cyclic cooling and warming, and sudden, often violent morphings into alien landscapes redolent of ever more evolved flora and fauna; reverberations of random catastrophe, the dominion of the temporal yielding at last the first vertebrates.

So too the human record bears its own unconformities: the clash of values, old and new, secular and religious, progressive and conservative; the collisions of mores, civilizations, and cultures.

I am fascinated, learning so many new things. That is why I relish reading, for with each challenging book I am reborn.

Resplendent Brilliance: A Birthday Tribute to Peter Singer

Today is renowned ethicist Peter Singer’s birthday, and I wish him everything well, both now and in the future. No one has shaped my values more than Peter, consistently monitoring the ethical dilemmas of contemporary life with courage, sensitivity, candor, and clarity—attributes resplendent in the intellectual brilliance of some fifty books treating animal suffering, poverty, mortality, the environment, affluence, and the plight of developing nations.

As a dedicated environmentalist, I wouldn’t be a vegetarian were it not for Singer: “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet—for the sake of hamburgers” (Animal Liberation).

Across the years, I’ve made transparent my profound admiration for utilitarian John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is a must-read. In Singer, we have his worthy successor, reinvigorating the intrinsic value of philosophy rooted in the factual and empirical, while putting to the test the prejudicial assumptions that deter our collective happiness.

In a time of ubiquitous existential despair, he reminds us that humans possess a latent altruism that can respond and make for a better world; one more equitable, lived with empathy and tolerance.

And Singer walks the talk. Upon graduating university, he began donating 10% of his income to charity. Today, that’s mushroomed to an astonishing 33% of his income, directed entirely to high-impact charities. On winning the coveted Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2021, he gave its $1 million award entirely to charity.

Singer has restored philosophy as an axiom of the purposeful life, writing that “philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

The happiest of birthdays to you, Peter, and many more!

–RJ

The America I Remember

Mort Kūnstler, Washington Crossing the Delaware

I didn’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday yesterday. How could I, with Trump still at the helm of a listing ship? Our country is so deeply fractured that I lack confidence our ship of state can ever be restored to an even keel again.

While the mid-terms loom, a new, more radical faction seems to be taking hold, offering simple remedies, under the aegis of expanded government, to complex problems that may well prove incendiary to America’s best interests.

History is being distorted—accompanied by the rise of a heated rhetoric, the past filtered through a modern lens, as if we can sanitize our heritage by consigning to oblivion our flawed heroes who nonetheless made America possible.

To contend, as some now do, that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery is a profound untruth. In 1776, Great Britain had no intention of dismantling the institution. While Royal Governor Lord Dunmore famously offered freedom to slaves who fled rebel masters to fight for the Crown, his proclamation was a cynical tactic of war, not a moral crusade; Dunmore himself owned a hundred slaves whom he exempted from his proclamation, and Britain did not outlaw slavery in its empire until 1833. The colonists revolted over representation and imperial overreach, not a defense of bondage.

Far from protecting slavery, the radical ideals unleashed by the Revolution ignited the Western world’s very first widespread abolitionist movement, a moral arc that would ultimately culminate in a bloody Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

History taught from the periphery, filtered through rigid ideology or simplified into monolithic narratives, is intrinsically dangerous. It rests on a priori assumptions and is too often promulgated with dogmatism. True understanding requires nuance, humility, and courage.

Intolerance and intimidation increasingly menace our daily life. It’s a different America from the one I grew up with—dynamic, prosperous, a nation deserving of its patriotism.

And why not?

At the end of WWII, a victorious America was the sole nuclear power. It possessed an army of 14 million, an air force of 50,000 planes, and the largest naval force in history with nearly 7,000 ships, including 99 aircraft carriers.

Yet, alone among the global empires of history, America walked away from total dominion and chose peace over subjugation.

This is the America I remember and want back again.

—RJ

Saving What Remains

Every now and then, I find myself captivated by a book I stumbled upon by pure serendipity. So much of life is like that, isn’t it?—a lifelong friend suddenly made, an unexpected alpine view, a chance conversation on a plane.

I am currently reading Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (2019), a memoir of healing from a traumatic childhood on a remote ranch in the Colorado mountains.

Her writing is electric, sumptuous with vivid metaphor, jolting the reader into an awareness of nature’s turning wheel and inherent vulnerability. She explores the solace of animals, the loyalty of friends who show up in times of need, the sharp contrasts between urban and rural life—all of it intuitive, and all of it beautiful

It is so superbly written that, should I ever need an exit from insomnia, I would choose its audio version to placate the night, inducing deep slumber as swiftly as anesthesia on a patient lying on a surgeon’s table.

What moves me even more than her narrative of healing from life’s traumas on a remote Colorado ranch is Houston’s passionate love for our wounded earth, currently suffering the consequences of human disregard in the pursuit of profit and self-indulgence.

I am imbibing this book not just cerebrally, but emotionally, as it adumbrates my own passion for saving what remains. I cannot fathom a world bequeathed to our children and grandchildren that is absent of seals, humpback whales, polar bears, and salmon-filled streams—a world where the last untouched forests have given way to roads, lumberjacks, and pipelines.

Houston’s book carries a profound urgency, reminding us how little time remains to get our priorities right:

“Something is definitely wrong….The closer one got to the North and South poles, the more dramatic and obvious the effects of climate change. I didn’t want to live in a world without polar bears. I wasn’t sure an ocean without whales in it was any kind of ocean at all. My entire life I had watched, heartbroken, as individual pieces of wilderness that mattered to me got destroyed or developed, but I had believed, for reasons I am not clear on now (propaganda? denial? naïveté?), that the earth contained vast tracts of land humans had not pushed into. Now, I understood this thing we called technology had advanced to a point where no place on the planet was safe from our penchant for destruction. I found myself glad we had never colonized the moon.”

Houston writes here of her 2015 journey as a journalist encountering British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. No roads. No lumberjacks. No liquefied natural gas pipelines.

Five months later, an agreement protecting the rainforest’s fate was reached between the provincial government, the First Nations, and the logging industry, shielding 85 percent of the forest from felling.

Yet, only a few months after that, an inattentive tugboat driver fell asleep at the helm, running his ship and its towed barge aground, releasing more than 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the pristine waters of the Great Bear’s Seaforth Channel.

I relish this book for its affirmation of nature’s grandeur, mystery, and moods, and for its acknowledgement that our fellow animals are possessed of unique personalities, emotions, and an astonishing intelligence. Elephants mourn their dead. Chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors. And yes, they can suffer—and often do, largely at human hands.

In Houston, I have found a co-conspirator on their behalf, whether the creature is a dog, a horse, a lamb, or even a chicken:

“I had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.”

Houston’s book offers both joy and sorrow, and it is well worth your time. Great books endure long after their final page is turned.

–RJ

Voter Awareness: Avoiding Authoritarian Temptations

Photo by Greg Jewett

As America increasingly turns its attention to politics with the midterms looming, there exist inherent dangers to guard ourselves against, the most prominent among them the ideologue who offers simple answers to complex problems, caters to popular sentiment, promises much, ignoring the consequences.

The foremost tragedies of twentieth-century history were wrought by the rise of autocrats—Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—advocates of total government who were intolerant of dissension and bound by the collective dictum that the end justifies the means.

As the late Sir Isaiah Berlin cautioned, “All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”

Voters today must be discriminating, wary of the “brave new worlders” who would trade the painful, magnificent burden of personal choice for the comfortable chains of an enforced, singular truth.

—RJ

THE ART OF THE RUSHED DEAL

It had seemed, for a fleeting moment, that congressional Republicans were emerging at last from their long cocoon, appearing ready to join Democrats in calling out President Trump’s profound blunder—not only in launching a 110-day war (Operation Epic Fury) heedless of its catastrophic risks, but in his subsequent appeasement of a rogue, murderous regime.

Initial Republican scrutiny was fierce, public, and remarkably direct. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana openly declared the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” thirteen American service members dead, families crushed at the pump, only for sanctions to be lifted and the bombing to stop.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was even more unsparing, capturing the core absurdity of the framework by warning that “history teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea.” For a few days, it looked as though a genuine, unified groundswell of Republican consensus had taken shape.

What sparked this rare mutiny were emerging details of the newly brokered Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), reading less like calculated diplomacy and more like a wholesale capitulation by a president eager to flee a senseless conflict.

The concessions granted to Tehran are immediate and staggering. Through instant Treasury waivers, the administration has bypassed existing sanctions, leaving Iranian freighters entirely free to ship crude oil to China, their best customer.

A fragile 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz has begun, yet the fundamental balance of power has been upended.

While negotiators commence talks on the vital issue of nuclear acquisition, the regime’s potent, increasingly long-range ballistic missile and drone capabilities receive no mention in the text. Neither do its beleaguered citizens—thousands of whom were killed by rooftop snipers last January, with many more imprisoned, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as state executions continue unabated.

Furthermore, the agreement features a deeply controversial provision to open the gates for a $300 billion reconstruction and development mechanism, effectively enriching the coffers of a regime that was bordering on total economic collapse.

Trump loudly protests that the windfall is conditional on Tehran’s behavior, promising that if they prove stubborn about their uranium stockpile, the U.S. will simply recommence its bombing. It is a hollow gamble, built on the unconscionable premise of offering a massive financial lifeline to a theocratic dictatorship.

Democrats recognize the MOU for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt by a frightened president, booed at public appearances, to walk away from a historic blunder.

They point out that trading away massive economic leverage upfront just to buy a 60-day dialogue leaves the United States in a vastly inferior strategic position than it occupied before the conflict began, back when Iran’s uranium enrichment was still capped.

For a brief window, initial Republican scrutiny gave teeth to a potential congressional resistance. Lawmakers began drafting legislation to strip the Executive Branch’s ability to issue these oil waivers, a move that would collapse the $300 billion mechanism.

Yet the glaring obstacle remains—the presidential veto. To truly stop the administration, Congress would require a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers—a hill that has suddenly become far too steep to climb.

The resistance effectively crumbled when Senator Lindsey Graham, who had previous dubbed the fund “a Marshall Plan with the Nazis still in charge,” executed his sharp turnabout. Initially vehemently opposed, the leading hawk offered a tepid endorsement of the agreement after a single closed-door briefing. Vice President JD Vance instantly weaponized Graham’s reversal, using it during a blunt White House press conference to excoriate a deeply disillusioned Israel, warning their cabinet to fall in line or risk losing their last major ally.

Once again, Trump’s immense gravitational pull has had its way, dampening conservative scrutiny and fracturing any hope of a unified legislative front.

The emperor wears no clothes, yet Capitol Hill has folded. We are left watching a presidency trade away hard-won geopolitical leverage for a temporary reprieve, like a used car salesman successfully selling the country a piece of junk.

—RJ

Caesar’s Circus: The Chilling Reality of Trump’s Iran Truce

I dare you to look at photographs of what Trump has done to the once pristine White House lawn—yesterday’s campus for a public UFC cage-match on the occasion of his turning eighty.

Meanwhile, the skeletal steel grids of his coveted ballroom, replacing the former historical East Wing, now surface above ground as he rushes to complete the project before the courts ultimately render their final verdict. The next project: his touted arch.

This morning he left the country for the annual G7 summit in Evian, France, leaving behind a polarized nation in supreme danger as he walks away from a senseless war that ultimately disrupted the economic welfare of many nations, including our own, achieving minimal returns.

Topping things off, Trump thanked Putin, whom he called before his departure like a child seeking parental approval, allegedly—with Xi Jinping as well for helping secure the present settlement by “not interfering.”

No thanks whatever for the Omani, Qatari, and Pakistani intermediaries who worked feverishly to secure this agreement. Rest assured, he’ll be reviving his campaign for the Nobel Prize.

In the negotiated ceasefire with Iran, the primary issue of Iran’s close proximity to creating a nuclear bomb has been deferred; its growing ballistic prowess, conceivably capable of striking the U.S. heartland, receives no mention.

Nevertheless, the effective U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been immediately lifted, with billions in held Iranian assets and the undoing of sanctions to follow shortly. Trump, in keeping with his mercantile lusts, foresees an economic jackpot in a close partnership with Iran.

As for the fate of millions of repressed Iranians—7,000 murdered just last January, thousands still imprisoned, hangings continuing—Trump is indifferent to their suffering, on vivid display in this dubious agreement.

There is every likelihood that Iran will continue to violate any agreement. They are already contradicting his claims of a “toll-free” passage, proving they will use the threat of closure of the Hormuz waterway to gain their ends. What then?

As for Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, suspending the lobbing of Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel—that’s just not going to happen.

In truth, this dubious agreement paves the way for a chilling reality the media has completely failed to grasp: a nuclear domino effect across the Middle East.

If a transactional, unreliable America signals it will tolerate a near-nuclear Iran for the sake of mercantile optics, do we honestly believe Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates will merely stand by? We are staring down the barrel of a terrifying regional arms race, triggered by the collapse of Western deterrence.

Worse still is the immediate, existential scenario that should send goosebumps up your torso. It is a poorly kept secret that an isolated, cornered Israel is already a potent nuclear power, with an estimated arsenal of up to 90 plutonium warheads.

Sidelined from the ceasefire negotiations and facing what it perceives as an absolute threat of extinction, what stops Israel from deciding that a preemptive first strike on a dangerous Iran is its only path to survival?

By washing his hands of the conflict, Trump hasn’t created peace; he has backed a nuclear-armed ally into a corner where dropping the Big One becomes a logical choice.

As for the G7, Macron altered the starting date to accommodate Sunday’s bash. Musn’t upset the volatile president.

European leaders must now wade through the wreckage of his current
unilateralism. Blinded previously by his February bombing of Iran, what hidden concessions lie buried?

In sum, we have an incompetent president devoid of any defined, consistent policy, ruthless to his critics, including members of his own party. Narcissistic, pecuniary, dictatorial, and omnivorously menacing, he is our Caesar.

His Brutus lies in a looming midterms Democratic sweep in both chambers, reducing his regime to a lame-duck presidency.

Still, the idea he’s in the White House for another two years—I don’t want to think about it!

–RJ

Not So Simple: A Reading of a Dickinson Poem

If you ask me to name my favorite American poet, and there are many extraordinary ones to choose from, I will unabashedly reply: Emily Dickinson.

Her recurring themes of deity, nature, and mortality have always held me captive. I grew up in an intensely Christian household, only to rebel later in life as the problem of evil weighed heavily on my mind. Dickinson was herself a rebel. In a time of vestigial Puritanism, she chose to stay home from church and frequently questioned God’s way of doing things.

Like her, I am intimately aware of death’s proximity and its universal scythe. As for her ardent love for nature—count me in.

Above all, I admire her poetry for its enigmatic essence, her finest poems lending themselves to myriad readings and leaving behind a lingering residue.

Like the Bible studies of my youth, her work invites group commentary. Like her elusive life, we probe the lines and never exhaust them.

Perhaps her most universally beloved poem is “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Unlike the vast majority of her 1,776 poems, this one resides in an apparent simplicity, which likely explains its enduring popularity:

Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Yet, the poem has its detractors. Some critics contend that its smooth surface, aside from the initial personification of hope as a bird, lacks the integrity of a truly well-crafted poem.

They argue that it contains no irony, no paradox, and no resonant dictional elements. In its hymnal quatrains, they hear a sing-song quality that invites parody. They claim it lacks metrical subtlety.

They ask: if the bird sings a song without words, shouldn’t a poem proffering hope actually articulate its basis?

The second stanza, however, belies the poem’s seeming simplicity, introducing an undermining threat to its optimism: “And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird.” In short, the stanza introduces the possibility of a duress so severe that even hope cannot transcend it. “Abash” connotes embarrassment, or even shame for having entertained hope in the first place, while “little bird” underscores an acute vulnerability.

I actually admire this stanza precisely for its ambiguity. Are there life interventions that—no matter what we oppose against them, like sandbags piled against a rising river, cannot avail?

Dickinson does not answer, nor should she. The stanza deserves praise for its integrity. Writing in a cultural context that demanded a definitive conversion experience, Dickinson may suggest that hope—or better yet, faith, does not always prevail.

The eminent late critic Helen Vendler, about whom I recently posted (Vendler ), contends that the poem’s seeming simplicity conceals an underlying riddle. The text never once specifies the word “bird”; we are left to discover it ourselves.

While hope carries a massive theological history, the poet bypasses complication with a quotidian analogy drawn from nature. St. Paul famously wrote of the three virtues that abide—or rather, transcend: faith, hope, and love. Dickinson’s analogy is demonstrative of this. Replete in New Testament overtones, this hope “endures all things,” despite life’s vicissitudes of “storm” and “gale.”

It continues, asking for nothing—not a single “crumb.” It does not need to be fed; it requires no logical rationale.

Returning to that challenging second stanza, perhaps the speaker is not acquiescing to the idea that hope will fail under trial. Instead, she may be conjecturing about what unthinkable life tribunal would be required to extinguish it.

The ambiguity remains beautifully unresolved. Is Dickinson admiring the unshakeable faith of her fellow townsfolk—a faith to which she herself could not subscribe? I have a cousin whose faith has remained utterly unaltered, no matter the circumstance, from the earliest days I have known her.

If we exclude Dickinson herself from the poem’s persona, as the most valuable exegesis does, a deeper problematic emerges: is this a poem of distant admiration or personal testimony? The closing words, “of me,” pull us back and forth between a deeply personal confession and the observations of a detached admirer.

Vendler is entirely right about the riddle here that conceals a depth wrought of subtle artistry. Even Dickinson’s dashes perform a vital cinematic role—acting like a panning camera that takes in each angle separately, before finally folding the scene into a consummate plenitude.

–RJ

Their Hearts Have Not Grown Old: The Rhythmic Wisdom of Roger Rosenblatt

 Here I am, back again, recommending another book. I think it comes down to the social creatures we are at heart. Those best portions of our memories—of travel, a good meal, an unexpected kindness—are never isolated; they are more fulfilling when shared.

I’ve been reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging. Its sequel, More Rules for Aging, comes out June 2.

Originally published a quarter-century ago, this book is a slim, deceptively simple survival manual for the twilight of life. Rather than offering earnest scientific breakthroughs or dense psychological theories on growing older, Rosenblatt delivers fifty-eight bite-sized, counterintuitive gems of wisdom rooted in a liberating truth: most of the little things we agonize over simply do not matter.

Armed with a rueful, tongue-in-cheek irony, he instructs us to stop defending our character, to run when someone says “we must do this again,” and to realize that nobody is thinking about us anyway.

Rosenblatt’s crystalline writing is breathtaking, the sagacity drawn from a vast repertoire of experience, a way of saying things that startles. Rhythmic in cadence, exhibiting sustained, aphoristic eloquence, it’s a book you’ll want to read, pen in hand.

A learned man—Harvard Ph.D., essay writer extraordinaire, journalist, playwright, and author of more than twenty books—he’s your Renaissance man. In his spare time, he is an accomplished jazz pianist who plays by ear.

Reading Rosenblatt feels as though he’s sitting at a table across from you in a quiet café, conversing like a friend you’ve known all your life and care deeply about. He makes you think, distilling options, engaging your interior life.

With grace, he helps you accept your griefs and regrets, revise your hopes, and embrace aging and ending.

A famed memoirist, he shuns nostalgia, exemplifying the sanctity of life’s daily rituals, whether making toast for a grandchild or paddling a kayak on a foggy morning.

There’s a sadness in finishing anything Rosenblatt writes—his sheer ability to extract wisdom from close observation reveals truths we too often miss. He lingers like the aftermath of a fine wine.

He once wrote of the writer’s calling, words that capture his entire spirit:

“What are we here for? We are here to write our way into the hearts of total strangers… If a piece of writing does not touch, alter, or shake the human heart, it is nothing. It is a beautifully constructed house with no one living inside” (Unless It Moves the Heart).

—RJ