Another Sunday of Church and Writing and Reading

 I went to Fishers for church. It left me with a peaceful feeling. If that is the Holy Spirit, then it is a good thing.

I got back here around 1:30. I finished the laundry and ate lunch and called KH. Then I went to work on “Road Tripping.” I spent most of the day working on that. I did take a walk down to McClure's.

Two other posts - for the next two days - were written, too.

There were also submissions. “Between Death and Dying” went to Grub Street Literary Magazine. I fiddled with the opening of “Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing” (I found a screw-up from yesterday's revisions!), and sent it off to Santa Clara Review and EMERALD CITY.

 What the GOP Gets Wrong About the Puritans

During the first Republican presidential primary debate, on August 23, former Vice President Mike Pence spoke of founders of the nation conquering the American “wilderness.” It was one of many mentions of American history: Candidates also name-checked the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. Toward the end of the evening, Pence stressed the wilderness theme: “If we renew our faith in one another and renew our faith in Him, who has ever guided this nation since we arrived on these wilderness shores, I know the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”

Historical references are so ubiquitous in presidential debates and stump speeches that they can seem superficial. This year’s Republican candidates seem especially committed to the idea that the past matters, perhaps because of battles over history and ethnic studies curricula spreading in some states.  If, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis opined, “We cannot be graduating students that don’t have any foundation in what it means to be American,” then perhaps we also need to pay closer attention to what kind of American identity candidates are finding in history.

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Despite the loss of life, the Indigenous community survived. Yet because Christians did not inhabit these places, Bradford and the other Puritans saw them as part of the “wilderness” that needed to be conquered. Later in the same book, Bradford celebrates the destruction of a Pequot village, which left 400 to 700 dead in a single night. The Puritans rounded up survivors and sold them into slavery.

In his references to wilderness, Pence left unspoken the irony of representing a party bent on restricting access to newcomers while praising the idea that the nation emerged only because newcomers ran roughshod over those who already lived in North America.  In his version of early American history, Europeans were the only important actors, so his view of the nation’s history concentrates on them alone.

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Though they are battling to govern in the future, the Republican candidates seem obsessed by how we understand the past. Those who cite the legacies of President Reagan and the conquest of wilderness want to emulate what they see as the heroic steps the Puritans took to establish a nation. Yet they seem blind to the complexity of the actual past, in which Europeans pursuing one vision of the future displaced and attacked Indigenous peoples who had their own plans for what was to come. If the Puritans are to serve as inspiration, it seems time to reckon with their actual ideas and actions.

WION News and Le Monde -  check them out and see how the rest of the world lives!

How Hollywood writers triumphed over AI – and why it matters (from The Guardian)

Under the new terms, studios “cannot use AI to write scripts or to edit scripts that have already been written by a writer”, Conover says. The contract also prevents studios from treating AI-generated content as “source material”, like a novel or a stage play, that screenwriters could be assigned to adapt for a lower fee and less credit than a fully original script.

I should my mouth off a bit more, but I am tired, and my eyes do not want to focus. I am off to read about Shakespeare.

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