My No Kings Day Post

 Yes, this is wekks old. Sorry. First, I had health issues that kept me pretty lethargic for weeks. Then, I got to work on my fiction, and combined with the lethargy, I was not writing on here. Lastly, I had forgotten how to get photos from my camera to the computer and then up here.

I kept active this post from Sheila Kennedy: Why Yesterday Mattered. Read her 7 reasons to protest. She wrote:

Yesterday was the third NO KINGS protest, and at the Indiana Statehouse, turnout was huge. I don’t know how attendance will be calculated– this one went from noon to five, and people were constantly coming and going. While we were there, the crowd was huge and the signs were great (albeit tending toward the profane…). As we walked back to our apartment around 2:00 (we’re old, and we were with my oldest son who had major surgery ten days ago but insisted on going) we passed dozens of people with signs who were just heading to the protest.

The size of the crowd was especially gratifying since–unlike previous No Kings events–there were several others in and around Indianapolis that I’d assumed would peel off suburban folks who didn’t want to try to park downtown. Even more amazing, there were sixty protests in Indiana, several in very small and traditionally Red communities.

 Muncie also had a turnout larger than the first two protests. The fellow running my group sessions poo-poohed the whole thing. He said something to the effect that the real kings were the legislators who had served for 40 years. This is a college-educated man. I do not think he understands the difference between legislative and executive powers. At least, I hope that is so. It would be worse if he supports the usurpation of power by the executive. However, he did think criticism of the Supreme Court conferring immunity on the President was only an emotional response.

What I find important about No Kings is it being effectively leaderless. It is essentially democratic.

What I liked best about this latest protest was seeing more younger people. Frankly, people my age, if not older, have predominated.

 My photos:

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The West Has An Identity Crisis?

 Last night I listened to a podcast from Englesberg Ideas,  The Roots of the West's identity crisis. The podcast is described as :

Marie Kawthar Daouda, author of Not Your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, speaks to EI’s Alastair Benn about the historical illiteracy of attempts to ‘decolonise’ Western culture. Instead, she argues that the moral complexities of history must be accepted in order to develop a genuine appreciation of the Western tradition.

When was it we started railing against Dead White Men in the Literary Canon? Thirty years ago, even more? As a non-dead white man, I ought to have been more annoyed. Instead, I went looking for those who may have been excluded. I found Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and Ralph Ellison; I had already been exposed to Richard Wright and Edith Wharton. Then there were foreign writers I knew of but did not read until I had passed my fiftieth birthday: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alasdair Gray, and Milan Kundera (to give an abbreviated list). I would add these to the canon for these reasons: they could write, and their works made us take a different view of what writing could do.

But history is complex on this issue and decolonization. Writers cannot be influential if they are not read, and to be read requires publication. Obscure writers may have qualities that we should recognize, but they have created the framework for literature upon which we labor. At best, these non-canonical writers can give us the means to diverge from the canon and to criticize the canon.

Colonization was bad, but its effects are complex. I write that with cinnamon in my spice rack and tomatoes on my shelf. It is also a lesson in the narrow-mindedness of human beings - how ostensibly Christian nations broke the Golden Rule searching for profits.

sch 4/20 

 

4/20 to 4/21/2026

 I am feeling better. But still running behind on time. It doesn't help that yesterday was bits and pieces after church, and I spent my time revising “No Ordinary Word”.

Which is how I have spent most of today!

I do not think it is done. I got it down to under 3500 words (3485), but I am thinking there must be more that can be cut to get it down to 3000. 

Maybe I will get out of the words with my pain issues. 

I went up to Walmart for some things needed here; I cleaned up a little when I got back. Which meant I missed Vespers, which drags on me.

I set up some posts for later in the week. 

That has been my day.

I still need to get caught up with my “Unsupervised Release” notes. It will be long. I am procrastinating.

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MIA: Part One- Politics of Being A Loser and a Jerk

 Health issues have kept me posting of late, a lethargy that kept me from catching up with myself. It has already put me behind schedule today. Therefore, this will be short.

Sometimes I find The New Republic tiresome in its persistent urgency. Not that I disagree with them, but they overwhelm me. 

That said, Trump Has Become What He Most Despises: A Loser is a piece that caught me with its thesis that fascism needs losers. It made sense by the time I finished the essay. Then I decided to put it out here, hoping whoever is reading this blog will read the essay in full.

 A loser is often not someone who is actually left behind, nor is it someone who simply failed at something. Failure is a part of life; it can even be the first step on the path to success. Instead, a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

***

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” Trump once wrote in a 2004 book. To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Which makes me think of all this as wholly anti-American. I was raised to think competence and achievements prove character, and that character is what creates superiority. True superiority knows it comes from work, and the superior person knows anyone else can be just as good as them. No greatness without humility.

I have never been comfortable with the whininess of American conservatives. They cannot persuade us of their views, so now they want to demean the American people.

The essential American myth is found in The Great Stone Face. 

I have always thought of Trump as a man who defecates on his doorstep and expects someone else to clean up the mess. As President, he is defecating on us. The TNR essay does not undermine my opinion:

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Chuck Todd points out how this defecating on us is now working on the world stage, although Mr. Todd frames it as a matter of making us look like jerks.

 

 It is up to the American people to lead themselves out of this mess. 

Now, I need to get on with my life. More later, as soon as I can.

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Thinking About Punk Rock

 I remain a fan of The Clash. That band I came to through its first album's American edition in 1978. The Ramones came later. The Sex Pistols were a rumor that did not touch me until years and years after they imploded. What they gave me was a vision of rock that had an energy unlike what was on the radio in 1978, and that defiance of a rotten society fueled that energy.

Reading Pitchfork's review of Generation X, a band I did know of back then and have heard maybe one song, caught my attention with the following:

But in their search for some sort of coherent manifesto or righteous ideology in first-wave British punk, these critics missed the point. John Lydon only called himself an “anarchist” because it (sort of) rhymed with “Antichrist,” and the Damned were striking the same anti-everything pose as Idol on 1977’s “Politics”: “No rules, no laws, no regulations/No fascist friends, no race relations/I just want to run around/I don’t want to settle down.” Punk was an explosive reaction to peace-and-love hippiedom and the bloated rock excess that dominated the mainstream, but that doesn’t mean that it was inventing something new from out of the ether. Year Zero was a lie. Instead, punk was prelapsarian: a return to rock’n’roll’s roots, its immediate impulses, its youthful thrills. Sex Pistols and the Clash formed because they saw the Ramones at Dingwall’s and figured they could do that too; London punk coalesced around kids seeing the Pistols at the 100 Club and thinking the same. “Whenever rock and roll starts getting carried away or diluted, something always yanks it back to where it started. That’s what punk was all about,” Idol told Robin Katz in a 1978 Daily Star interview.

In that context, Generation X is a vital expression of punk’s ethos. The guitars sound metal-plated, Idol’s voice soars and sneers, and the melodies hit like bricks to the forehead. The shouty “Youth Youth Youth” is a manifesto on teenage independence built around soccer chants and power chords (“Don’t wanna spend my life savin’ up for things/I don’t wanna have what a steady job brings”). On “One Hundred Punks,” Idol takes the rush of a subculture taking over the city and distills it down to “a hundred good mates you know you can trust.”

 We need more yanking.

We should not think punk only takes loud guitars. It takes loud emotions.

 sch 4/6

Muncie Public Art

 No commentary here, just news.

Art for the People: Muncie Celebrates Eight Public Artworks 

The Muncie Arts & Culture Council invites the community to celebrate eight extraordinary public artworks with six celebrations during the Art for the People: Public Art Celebration Weekend on April 24 - 25, 2026. This historic milestone showcases place-based, forward-thinking installations that reflect who Muncie is today and who we aspire to be tomorrow. 

Made possible through a $500,000 American Rescue Plan Act investment, these artworks represent a significant shift in Muncie's approach to public art from traditional commemorative works to community-driven installations shaped by neighborhood voices. Four new artworks and two longer-standing murals will be celebrated with neighborhood events, while two previously installed works invite exploration throughout the weekend. 

Long ago, I suggested that Anderson get involved in public art to attract visitors and to build the community. It seems Muncie worked up the same idea. I have seen some of the works; it does perk up the city.

sch 4/7 

 

Imagination and Poltics

 My notes on John Plotz's Arendt Speaks of Oases (Public Books).

The thesis, as it seems to me:

Those who oppose Trump’s new ethnonationalist vision of America and its standing in the world order are increasingly realizing our shared public life, ringfenced as it is by a warped media ecosystem, is arid as a desert: a place you can’t quench your thirst and where, ultimately, you can’t breathe. We have demonstrations, we have counterpublics, we even have off-years elections signaling Republican weakness. Yet many have come to doubt the efficacy of this traditional array of standard forms of political resistance in a democracy: just look at the forms that despairing protest took in Minneapolis in January 2026. We are entering a year when many of us will have to find out what it means to live a life on the ropes, thrown back on our own resources as grounds for outward action slip and slide away. I am no fan either of meek submission nor anticipatory despair, both easily spawned by the blunt indifference to any signals we are sending. How then do we cut a new path toward meaningful and effective acts of resistance?

That question, Arendt realized seven decades ago, had to be answered not just in terms of what we do collectively, but also, crucially, what we accomplish alone. The great advocate of knowing ourselves in public is also the little-known champion of a surprising and moving defense of what we might think of as solitary solidarity. Seeing this means attending to her account of the imagination, which reassures us that what we do in the shadows may live on in the daylight.

But listening to the guys in my group sessions, there is no sense of belonging to a public, and often that politics are about elections - not power, not about living together. 

 Imagination comes into view in these paragraphs:

 In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt asks a seemingly simple question: What allows us to be imaginative enough to inhabit another’s perspective even in solitude? The key political insight for Arendt is that learning how others think and experience the world, we gain access to their thoughts in their unique and distinctive individuality; we create an intellectual space within our own thoughts to comprehend what a different response would look and even feel like.

***

Rather, “Truth and Politics” allows us to see the alternative pathway Arendt charts for seeing as others see. In praising our imaginative capacity to think ourselves into others’ shoes, Arendt sidesteps empathy, not to argue for the cold clear light of reason but to animate imagination, with its dual commitment to attachment and detachment. Imagination may stop short of love, but it is loyal to the existence of others and offers a way to conjure up their concerns even when (in fact especially when) we are spending time alone.

***

The real danger is that we grow tempted to imagine that politics could take place without representative thinking, and without imagination. “Never am I less alone than when I am by myself,” wrote the ancient stoic philosopher Cato; it’s the epigraph for Arendt’s final book, The Life of the Mind. To Arendt, that non-solitude of the thoughtful person is proof of thought’s truly dialogic, truly solidaristic nature. Without representation, we have “thoughtlessness,” the prelude to totalitarianism and other abdications of political responsibility, or ruptures of public life. But how is this solitary and solidaristic imagination to be nourished? 

I also found something here that applies to my writing: the questions that I have discussed here about the difference between first- and third-person perspectives. It seems to me that the third-person imagines the lives of others; the first-person has the chance of solipism. Or is it autofiction that runs that risk? I can see a first-person narrated who tries to imagine the life of another.

Nourishment is solitude, making me think of Thoreau and Walden.

That is where Arendt’s notion of the oasis comes into play. Representative thinking aims to offer an imaginative, cognitive expansion that offers up solidarity as an alternative to sympathy. But representative thinking turns into something quite different when paired with a surprisingly capacious metaphor for finding hope and rejuvenation while living in an ominous authoritarian or totalitarian world that she calls desert. That metaphor is the keystone of the final lecture of “The History of Political Theory,” a class given at UC Berkeley in spring 1955.

In a world from which truth is rapidly departing, Arendt sees us as tempted to hear only what we want to; which means we often choose not to check what we are told against actuality. This, she calls worldlessness. 

This seems very much like our world today wherein information is siloed. It also smacks of the days when my depression ran rampant.

However, loneliness also arises the moment we see solitude as the only alternative. The effect of that is to throw us back on our own narrow psychological resources. That sort of retreat, which she thinks of as the fallacy of “adjustment,” leaves us short of real resources to counter the BS from above... Psychology teaches head-duckers and get-alongers to conform. No wonder that it is the logical complement to another mode of thinking that also succeeds in a desert of worldlessness: totalitarianism, which thrives on its arid certainties, its violent simplifications: “totalitarian movements … are extremely well-adjusted to the conditions of the desert … false or pseudo-action suddenly bursts forth from deathlike quiet.”

That started me seeing why I am in the group session and clarifies a sense of the purposes for which it is being led.

For Arendt, though, there do remain spaces apart where solitude and the imaginative space it opens up turns from a danger into a strength. That is what makes the all-important act of judgment both a cause of suffering (because representative thinking puts us in the place of those we judge) and a source of strength. Strength because despite our capacity to imagine the world otherwise, we retain assurance in our own capacity to decide and act according to what our reason tells us.

***

Wordlessness is not worldlessness, but you can understand why the two categories might seem to run together. My own preference for her praise for “pariah politics” means that I am inclined to think Arendt sought solitude as a way out of the endlessly intrusive world that we can see modeled today in the impulse toward social mediation, toward the likes and upvoting that reassures us we are seen and approved. By that reading, the problem, and the breeding ground of totalitarian thought, the desert space that Arendt warns about, is common, social, and corrosive. This danger aligns with that warning about the way that psychology can preach adjustment so persuasively that even alone, I catch myself striving to get synchronized to what I imagine will be a successful form of common thought.

I am not in the social media world. Nor am I any longer trying to compete with others for clients and income that did have me once on Facebook and Twitter.  The stress of all that fed my depression; now I am gunshy of it. Moreover, I reread Thoreau. We are social creatures, but we are also singular persons. I am leery once again of joining common thought. I am responsible for my thoughts and the actions derived therefrom. I went wrong, trying to force myself into agreeing with too much and finding myself agreeing to what seemed like madness. Standing outside is not always insanity; madness can breed in the herd. Walden Pond was an oasis.

sch 4/6