Friday Flora Farewell Edition

Today’s pic is of a Clarkia, unknown spp., up at the graveyard near our house.  There’s some good spring wildflowers on the walk there, camas, trillium, rue, calichortus, and such, but spring is pretty well over—so appropriate to have a Clarkia, commonly known as “Farewell to Spring.”  This is the smallest Clarkia I’ve ever seen.

I protest

There was a sign at one of the many, many marches and protests against our current regime that read something like “It’s so bad that even the introverts are here.”  Well, that was me this last weekend.  I am not fond of crowds.  I am especially not fond of crowds of people that have strong feelings, and all agree.  I am also extremely reluctant to loudly express my own political opinions.  But, things were so bad that I was there.  

What has taken me by surprise in this era is just how comfortable racism has become.  It used to be something to be kept private, maybe the object of some uncomfortable shame.  Now we have a racist president, a racist administration, and people are letting their racist flags (literally) fly.  Things are being said by our leaders that are immoral; things are being done by them that would be crimes if we were sane.  So we have the racist Attorney General instituting a policy that amounts to torture of children, and the racist president legitimizing this by calling humans “animals” and using words that make it clear that these people are not to be treated as human.  

So, it’s bad enough that this introvert woke up early so he could finish the milking and chores, scrawl up a cardboard sign, and drive to town to join about 200 other people along Roseburg’s main drag, where we waved signs around at the passing crowds and tried to be seen and heard, to maybe prick the conscience of our neighbors.  

Roseburg is Trump country.  It’s very white, it’s tied to an extractive industry that is past its peak, it has a lot of unemployed labor that has fond memories of when things were really good, it has a lot of guns, and it went for Trump by two to one in 2016.  Roseburg itself boasts some 20,000 residents.  So it was heartening to see that somewhere between 0.5 and 1% of Roseburg was also upset enough to be there.  A lot of people driving by honked and waved enthusiastically (and, yes, there were two older white men who made rude gestures).   There are apparently things this president can do that are bad enough that they don’t get much support, even here.  

Did the protest really do anything?  Did I, with my sign, have an effect?  Why was I there?  

To be sure, I felt personally threatened and insulted.  People were, and still are, being tortured in my name, and I sure as hell don’t agree with that, and until the situation stops, I think every American citizen should be reminded, daily, rudely if need be, that children are being tortured in their name.  But I felt something beyond that.  My sign, which was really not well designed for getting the attention of a passing motorist, read

America took in

“swarming vermin,”

“Scarcely above apes”

“Unlikely to assimilate,” and

“Probably loyal to a hostile foreign power”...

And made THIS American.

Why not make more Americans?

One of the other folks there asked me about my sign, and to my surprise, I got kind of choked up.  Although the language is all from the current racists objecting to immigrants, the sign was all about my grandparents and great-grandparents.  My dad’s father was a refugee from pogroms in the Ukraine; he and his family were described as swarming vermin and much worse.  He married a woman who was the daughter of Scotch-Irish and possibly First Nations ancestry.  The Irish were routinely characterized as apes, and First Nations as something worse.  On my mom’s side, her mother’s family was from Germany.  Many Germans in the late 1800s were fleeing wars, political instability, (or conscription), and many held on to their language; in some places, schools were taught in German, and people complained that they were unlikely to assimilate.  Came the Great War, and my great-grandfather was hounded out of his job and died shortly thereafter.  Somehow, these terrible threats to America produced...an American.  So, when I hear people using this language about the desperate people who cross our southern border, I feel it deeply and personally. 

But, again, did it do anything?  Will anybody’s mind change?  At the rally, we asked each other these questions.  One answer we all agreed upon was that we all felt better knowing that, in this place that is so deeply enamored of the racist president, there were other people who were also not OK with things.  Many of the passing motorists reminded us of this; and maybe, some voted for Trump but felt that the torture of children was too much to swallow.

Or, maybe not.  The Real Doctor has a colleague, a surgeon, so at least formally not a dimwit.  He voted for Trump in 2016, rationalizing that Clinton was “just as bad.”  Now, many surgeons are bad at admitting human flaws such as making mistakes, so perhaps that is the reason that his support for the president seems to have solidified.  I’d rather believe this than believe that he has embraced racism.  At any rate, when the Real Doctor asked him, obliquely, about events on the southern border, he suggested that the images in the news were probably those of actors.  I suppose that it is more comforting to believe that, however far-fetched it may be, than to believe that you voted for torturing children.

Wednesday Words, uncomfortable echoes edition

Ok, so if you’re a Jew, then certain words or phrases can make you a little uncomfortable.  And when these words get used, in an offhand, unconscious way, especially by or about government types, then it gets worse.  So, just from the last week:

The president* talks about a class of people “infesting” the country.

A radio reporter talks about the head of the Department of Homeland Security “making the trains run on time.”

The president* wants a new branch of the armed forces, which will be “separate but equal.”

Update, OK, I am now in shock.  The Department of Homeland Security has issued a press release headlined with Fourteen Words beginning “We Must Secure...”. They’re not even trying to hide it any more.

Seriously, SCOTUS?

I am upset, but not entirely surprised, by the decisions that came out of the Supreme Court today.  To paraphrase a saying about Jewish law, where there is a judicial will, there is a legal way.  A majority of the Supreme Court is A-OK with the Republican slide towards fascism, so they will find a legal way, however crudely and illogically and inconsistently argued, to make it happen.  And so we have an executive order that is completely inspired by religious bigotry being declared constitutionally acceptable—because the third revision had scrupulously neutral language—and using the overruling of Korematsu as justification!

When this presidency started, I was alarmed at the regulatory/executive and judicial mischief that it promised.  What I was not prepared for, and what gives me increasing agony, is the deep and blatant racism and bigotry that it has made publicly acceptable.

Play, memory

I am good at sight-reading music.  You can plop a relatively simple piece of sheet music in front of me, and I can stumble through it at the piano.  (Mind, I am not great at sight-reading; I can’t do like Saint-Saens, and sit down and play from the score of a Wagner opera that I’ve never heard before).  This ability has stood me in good stead for most of my life, allowing me to fake my way through lessons I should have practiced harder for, and letting me accompany far more worthy musicians than myself.  But, I have found that it has shaped my musical abilities in ways that I don’t entirely like.

When I was a youth, my piano teachers didn’t particularly press me to memorize music.  I made a few efforts, because it was a thing people did, but I found it to be far more work than I was willing to put in.  When I did try to memorize, it was largely kinetic; my memory was a series of motions, and it would have to be uninterrupted.  If I were derailed, I would have to go back to the beginning and start over.  Perhaps “kinetic” isn’t the word—perhaps “ballistic” is more accurate, in that I would launch and from that point on the trajectory of things was set.  At any rate, my ability to memorize was never developed.

Now, in my 50’s, I am trying to learn to memorize music.  Partly it is a desire to keep stretching out my brain, maybe spurred by watching my parents succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.  Partly, it’s that I have a harder time reading music without my glasses on.  But there I am, struggling with memory.

My approach is somewhat different from what I formerly tried.  I am trying to pay more attention to the music, and why this note follows that note.  I try to shake myself out of a kinetic memory, by playing the same notes using different fingering, and by starting at different points in the music.  I try to pay greater attention to the landmarks, and how the composer gets from one place to another.  I see myself, as if I am walking through a landscape.  At the first, I can only see the most obvious features—a pass, a huge tree, a river—and I can’t see the trails from one to the other.  Learning the music is learning the trail from one landmark to another.  At first, I stumble around, sometimes on the trail, sometimes lost in the weeds, but as I get better, I can stay on the trail; as I learn and memorize the trail, I find myself paying less attention to the trail, and more attention to the landscape as a whole and the beautiful flowers and features that fill it.  Now, while I play far less music than I used to, I feel that I am playing far more musically than I did while reading music.  

The experience is similar to a mindfulness practice.  I have become much more aware of what’s going on inside of the music; I am able to pay attention to the things that need attention, and more critically see what I need to work on.  I am seeing longer lines, rather than isolated notes.  While I am nowhere near a great musician, I think I am better—and while I don’t feel that regret is a useful emotion, I do wish that I had spent more of my time properly memorizing music back when I could move my fingers to play Chopin etudes and such.  But, I won’t complain.  I am learning the Bach Partitas.  Learning and memorizing and polishing a page of music takes me a month, and it’s good.  

What’s my pre-Cambrian rabbit? What’s YOUR pre-Cambrian rabbit?

I try to be honest with myself in how I think about things.  It is hard to be aware of one’s blind spots, and it is tiring to be suspicious of ideas that make one feel better.  I may have picked up the habit of self-skepticism from an early exposure to Karl Popper, or a lot of training by curmudgeonly old-school molecular geneticists, but however I got it, I’m stuck with it.  Popper taught us all about falsifiability, and my post-doc advisor taught me to have an adversarial relationship with my own ideas, but my favorite formulation is from the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane.  

Evolution is a big, big concept, with ramifications that permeate the entire world of biology, geology, and astronomy, and more.  But, to be honest about how one thinks, one must be aware that it’s still only an idea, a view of the world that may be wrong.  Haldane was (according to the story) asked what would cause him to change his mind about evolution as an explanation for life on earth.  “A fossil rabbit in the pre-Cambrian” was his reply.  Pre-Cambrian rocks are over 500 million years old.  There are pre-Cambrian fossils, but only of simple invertebrates and mysterious life forms long extinct.  But, significantly, there are fossils; if there were rabbits 500 million years ago, they could have been fossilized, so it is in principle possible that Haldane’s reliance upon evolution could have been shaken.  

Any responsible thinker should have a pre-Cambrian rabbit for their beliefs.  The people who study climate change, if they were honest, would reconsider everything if it were found that carbon dioxide did not in fact help to trap heat, and that hundreds of years of data were in fact due to an easily overlooked artifact.  Cancer researchers, if they were honest, would re-evaluate a lot of their beliefs if the apparent connection between smoking and lung cancer were shown to be the result of some chemical in the packaging of cigarette boxes.  Furthermore, for an honest thinker, it’s not a matter of simply recognizing falsifying evidence when it appears.  Rather, like Haldane, the honest thinker must be aware enough of their thinking that they can imagine and define things that would falsify their beliefs before encountering them.  

The news recently has really been getting me down.  I have become convinced of a theory that our president is a racist, and that his presidency will be severely detrimental to this country.  This theory is based on observation of facts and informed by historical parallels.  But, while it is consistent with all facts, it is a theory.  It is, and must be, falsifiable.  The president could decide to fire his Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller and General Kelly and all the other people who have pushed him in the direction of racism, and renounce many of the claims he’s made; despite rigorous fact-checking, many of the claims he’s made about immigrants could be shown to be true (somehow); he could actually do things to promote racial harmony—these would all be possible but unlikely.  They would falsify my theory, and elevate my mood.  

But, I have noticed something more disturbing in the mirror world inhabited by those whose sympathies lie with the president.  For them (and those who insist that anthropogenic climate change, vaccines, and evolution are bunk), there simply is no pre-Cambrian rabbit.  There is no possible fact or observation that will change their position, and whether this is bad faith or just simple-mindedness, it makes rational argument impossible.  When a Trump supporter at one of his tinpot “Triumph of the Will” rallies was asked about some of the images and recordings of children torn from their parents, they admitted that they were disturbing, but ultimately opined that they were probably faked.  I’ve also heard dodges about how Trump is accomplishing great (but unspecified) things and how everybody is out to get him; and, finally, fake news, fake news, fake news.  Even the most reliable, scrupulously reported pre-Cambrian rabbit is fake.  

I don’t know a way beyond this impasse to civil discourse, although I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve Facebook memes or using InfoWars as a reliable source.  Perhaps any real attempt at discussion must be made one-on-one.  Before attempting conversation, we have to tell each other about our pre-Cambrian rabbits.  Acknowledging that our beliefs are falsifiable is the opposite of a sign of weakness; rather, it is a sign of honesty, like duelists of old showing each other that they are only using the prescribed weapons.  Also, if you showed me a rabbit skull and told me it came from, say, the Laurentian Shield, I’d want to see some acceptable proof—and, like the rabbit itself, proof that I would be willing name as acceptable before it is produced.  

I really doubt that a fossilized rabbit will ever be discovered in pre-Cambrian rocks.  But, to be absolutely sure, I would be thrilled and excited to hear that a truly, completely verified rabbit fossil had been found in the basement sediments of the Grand Canyon.  It would show me that I was working under an erroneous view of the world, and it would be fascinating to try to understand this newly illuminated world.  And, while I would love to be wrong, I think that rabbit is more likely than finding that our president is not a racist.

Not a midlife crisis

So this was the thought that traipsed through my head as I was clipping one of our bucks a couple of weeks ago.  It was completely, 100% free of any negativity.  It was mostly bemusement; I have no regrets about spending a couple of decades in the sciences, and I while I miss some of what I was doing, I like what I’m doing now—so any regrets are offset by some very good cheese and the exhausting pleasures of farm life.  Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris; I’ll always have a unique understanding of the world as it really works.

I think what may have prompted this rumination on my part was my brother E, who is having his own  late midlife crisis, and is worried that if he changes direction to avert personal destruction, he will be wasting thirty years worth of work.  I don’t see it his way, and I have tried hard to persuade him.  I worry that he will destroy himself through attachment to such folly.  I used my own example, which he chose to ignore.

So I carry on with my life as a farmer.  Today was just another day on the farm. In addition to the usual spring business of feeding kids and milking and cleaning and cheesemaking, I did some mowing in my pastures to try to keep up with the grass where the animals could not.  And, before I hit the bed, I still have to give the kids their evening feed.  It’s late spring, the working day is eighteen hours long.  I’ll be tired.  But, to be sure (as the Real Doctor points out), my experience is uniquely rich because I see farm life through the eyes of a research scientist and educator.

It’s not what I trained for and did for a while, but it’s good.  The kids are a hoot.  The young doe that was having conniptions about getting milked is calming down.  The leftover curds from today’s cheese, a Colby, were delicious, and I thanks to my background, I know some ways I can make it better.  It was a warm, sunny day, and the blue dicks have started blooming.  My pastures are not as good as they will be, but they are better than they were, and despite the weather being uncooperative this year, they should feed the animals through summer—and, I have some insights from my training that will help things be better in the future.  Before I started milking in the evening, the sun on the neighboring hills was amazing; after I finished, the stars and Venus and Jupiter were dazzling.  I did not have the real pleasure of learning a new metabolic pathway and savoring its evolutionary implications.  Nor was I present as a student finally achieved an illuminating clarity about redox potential.   However, I received many, and sufficient, other rewards.

And, I know that at some point (hopefully many years from now), I won’t be a farmer.  What I am doing now won’t be wasted. What I’ll be doing then will be different—and I will see whatever it may be with the unique eyes of a former microbiologist AND former farmer.