We Saw a Black Bear
"There are basically two schools of thought..."
AS FAR AS I KNOW, this was Bert’s first bear-smelling. A week ago, we were having dinner on the deck that looks out over the back yard and the hay fields. Bert is not much of a barker and now that he’s getting close to six he’s not as excitable as he once was. But he was on alert in an unusual way. He started growling a little and walking briskly from one side of the deck to the other, looking for whatever it was he smelled. He made some low woof-woof sounds. This went on for a few minutes. I assumed a groundhog or a skunk may have passed by, down below.
Then I saw a black dog out in the distant field, also barking, and we heard its person calling after it. We got up to see what the black dog was doing. That’s when I looked down at our yard and saw the bear. Surprisingly large, at such close range. Such a thick inky-dark glossy coat. Alice got a glimpse and made a sort of primal-fear shuddering sound. Bert saw it, too, and now he was barking excitedly. I started to clap my hands loudly. The bear ambled over the broken-down lower deck that we haven’t got around to fixing, and fortunately didn’t step on the part with rotted wood. It was farther off in the grass when it paused and looked back at us. For just an instant it felt like our eyes met and something was communicated. It didn’t feel hostile or threatening. The bear’s glance made me feel idiotic for clapping. Why was I so quick to harass this creature? I imagined it wanted to tell me: “I’m just a bear doing bear-things. Chill out, human.”
We always try to give animals human thoughts. More likely, it was looking back to see where we were, and if we were in pursuit. The moment passed, and the animal was off to the next yard, an overgrown lot full of weeds and sumac.1 A few days later, a workman I know told me he sees bears more often around houses, usually passing between buildings or along the shadow-lines behind structures, than he does out in the woodsy area where he lives. They are looking for extra food this time of year, of course, and can smell that leftover piece of steak or sausage you put in your garbage can from a mile away.
Question: What kind of bear is best?
That’s a ridiculous question.
False. Black bear.
That’s debatable. There are basically two schools of thought. . . 2
Truth and Consequences
The networks showed reruns the other night when Prez Joe Biden went to Philadelphia to make a prime-time speech about the state of democracy in the USA. The Washington Post saw this as “an unusual moment in the long relationship between the White House and the nation’s most powerful broadcasters.”
It didn’t seem unusual to me. Big commercial television interests are always leery of events that seem “partisan.” And it was unquestionably a partisan move for the leader of one party to warn that the other party has become so extreme and cultish that democracy itself is in danger. CNN carried the speech live, though, and afterward on the CNN discussion my ol’ friend and veteran political observer John Harwood dropped this little truth-bomb:
The core point he made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true. Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us, as journalists, to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not “honest disagreements.” The Republican Party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well.
CNN happens to have a new president, a muscle-head who believes, I guess, his mission is to make the network appear “fair and balanced,” or maybe just more anodyne and inoffensive. At any rate, the next day Harwood announced that he had worked his last day at CNN; it was reported he had two years left on his contract.
I watched Biden’s speech on Friday via C-SPAN. I wouldn’t take issue with anything he said about the threat Trumpism represents, or that he felt the need to say it. We are many, many years into the transmogrification of the Republican Party into a monstrous force far outside what used to be the mainstream of American politics. But, to my ear, Biden’s speech consisted mostly of the usual bromides that are directed to the imaginary American who believes the USA is the greatest democracy on earth because we have a Constitution that gave “we the people” the power to control our government.
It’s strange that a president can’t speak about democracy as if he were talking to adults. He could never explain how ill-served we are by a Constitution that was devised in the late 1700s for a society that is nothing like ours. He wouldn’t want to admit that “we the people” lost most of our power a long time ago—partly because we’ve always had stooges on the Supreme Court who insist that corporations are also “the people.” Biden’s only plea was that we rise up to vote against “MAGA Republicanism.” I’m all for it! But that’s all he had. He outlined no steps the Democratic Party might take to democratize the Supreme Court, or to democratize (or abolish!) the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College, or to neutralize the kind of gerrymandering that allows Republicans in so many states to hold artificial majorities without majority support of the voters. . .
Fair warning, readers: I composed 4,000 words along these lines last month for an upcoming salvo in the soon-to-be-released Baffler magazine. It’s about the role the Democratic Party has played in the deterioration of American democracy. By the time I had it done I felt like, “OK, that at least introduces the topic.” Nevertheless, I will return soon with the usual promotions for any readers willing to bear with my somewhat dark reflections.
Across the Divide
We learned last week of the death of Barbara Ehrenreich at 81. She was a contributor to The Baffler, and author of more than a dozen books, and the founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
When I heard this news it made me recall the time my mother came across Barbara’s work. My mother was raised Catholic, became “Catholic charismatic” in her middle years, and ultimately considered herself a born-again Christian. Barbara was a democratic socialist and a feminist. Her father had been a Montana miner and an atheist. “I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons,” she wrote in Living with a Wild God.
Barbara’s book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America came out in 2001. She had gone undercover to work several low-wage jobs as a way to understand the lives of the working poor. And at some point Nickle and Dimed fell into my mother’s hands. I don’t think I gave it to her; I had long since quit trying to convert my evangelical mother to any point of view. But my mother was a reader—never of political “tracts,” which bored her, but of books that were written by someone who seemed to be on an authentic search. She was living at this time in a Texas trailer park and was occasionally visiting women in prison to hold Bible readings and discussion. She spoke appreciatively of Nickle and Dimed. She recognized the truth in it.
That gets at why so many political writers admired Barbara’s work. She could write her own truth and find readers from all over—not just those who are part of what she famously called the “professional-managerial class.” For a democratic socialist/feminist/atheist to produce work that could speak to a politics-averse born-again Christian in Texas is a true achievement. Every time we lose such a writer, a vital sign of democracy flickers.
Barbara’s author page on her publisher’s web site carries this statement: “As a journalist, I search for the truth. But as a moral person, I am also obliged to do something about it.” If my mother had ever heard such a declaration, she would have exclaimed “Amen!”
Extra Frames
On a happier note, I wish to announce that after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, three original members of the Above Average Bowlers’ League (AABL) got together last weekend at Spare Time Lanes in Northampton, and shook off the rust. We rolled three games, all of us below average, of course, but we walked out of that establishment satisfied that nobody got hurt. I reminded my old friends and Sunday morning AABLers, Al & Kathryn, that as of this August it has been five years since our much-lamented Lanes & Games Lanes (and Games) was closed. When I wrote about that for the Boston Globe Magazine, one of the newspaper’s talented videographers, Scott LaPierre, sat with me and let me wax nostalgically about what the place meant to us. The video is no longer linked to the story, but I discovered that it still lives on the Globe’s YouTube channel! Check it out here if you want a trip down memory lanes.
My cellphone was recharging at the time and was not at hand. Another big moment in my life that went undocumented on social media.
Jim impersonates Dwight Schrute on “The Office.” Classic scene.
Glad to hear that some members of a.a.b.l. tried out the Northampton Lanes. I would like more detailed information on how they stacked up against the late lamented Lanes and Games.
It is a fitting tribute!