Why I Sing

This is the text of a sermon I gave to the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford sometime in August, 2008.  I’m posting it here because I took it off the church website.

Good morning.

Why I sing.  First, I want to deal with the pretension in the title.  I don’t think I‘m enough of a singer my motivations are particularly interesting.  Maybe  B.B. King, Tony Bennet, or Nellie Furtado should be giving this talk; they aren’t here.

Rather, I approach it from the other angle.  I think that everyone has one or two good sermons in them.  These sermons could be titled “Why I _____” (fill in the blank.)  Why I am an usher.  Why I am on the religious services committee.  Why I run the Universal Thrift Store.  Those sermons are for other people.  I sing.

I’m not sure that there is such a thing as singing talent.  Singing, to me, is a skill, like playing golf, driving a car, or writing a sermon.  Keep doing it, and you’ll get better.  And in a society of listeners, it doesn’t take very long to get better than average.

My father was a very skilled singer.  He had lessons when he was in high school and sang a lot in church and in school.  He spent the summer between high school and college traveling around the country as a member of a German Baptist men’s quartet.  While in college and Divinity School, I’ve been told that Dad was the singer around Rochester, New York for weddings and parties.  Even in the 1960’s, he still had some of the sheet music from those days, two large file drawers packed tight.  Doing some rough calculating, it would have taken about 300 hours to sing every song in those drawers.  The songs went from the sublime, like Ol’ Man River, to the ridiculous, Stout Hearted Men.

The story goes that when my father wanted to show off in his college years, he would lie down on the floor and invite the largest guy in the room to stand on his stomach.  Then he would bounce that guy up and down, using his stomach muscles.  This was from a man who never intentionally did a sit up or an ab crunch in his life.  If a person sings correctly for a while, he or she will develop physically.

Another thing that Dad developed was a strong speaking voice.  To my knowledge, he never preached using a microphone.  In fact, one time he was guest preaching and the microphone was on at its usual setting and Dad caused it to feed back from fifteen feet away.

I have another story.  When I was a teenager, Dad sang in the church choir in Youngstown, Ohio.  It was the practice in those days for the choir to sing a “choral Amen” after the closing words.  This a just a little bit of music to give the minister a head start so that he could get into position in the back of the church to greet the congregation.  The choir had four or five, mostly from the back of the hymnal, which they sang in turn.  One of them called for the bass to sing a low Eb.  Now the church was constructed in such a way that it vibrated when that note was sung loud enough.  It didn’t happen on an E or a D: just on Eb.  And the windows would shake.  For many people in the congregation, that was the high point of the whole service.  The minister could spend hours working on his sermon and twenty minutes delivering it, and Dad could overshadow him by singing one note for about a second.   As I was at an impressionable age, this made an impression on me.

Neither of my parents stressed singing as a particularly worthy thing to do.  When we went on long trips, the whole family would sing.  My father would sing the melody, and I figured out how to sing the upper harmony because it was the only choice I had.  Nobody sang lower harmony to my dad.  Then my voice changed.

In my high school, the choir and the band both rehearsed at the same time.  I was in the band.  The band got into the football games for free, and they had these cool semi-military uniforms.  Besides, they almost always went to the state finals in the band competitions, which meant I could spend a night in a hotel, throw water balloons and generally go wild.  To tell the truth, the general feeling in my school was that the choir was for sissies.

In college, like many boys at that time, I bought a guitar.  It was from a pawnshop, cost   $15 and I got a raw deal.  Over a long period of time, I learned most of the grips and strums necessary to accompany my singing.   I always had roommates, so I developed a style of singing softly and weakly, hunched around the guitar so I couldn’t get enough air if I had wanted to.

By my late twenties, I was living in San Francisco and attending services regularly at the local Unitarian Church.  The minister was David Rankin, who some of you might remember.  He used examples from this church often in his sermons.  One Sunday, the Minister of Music took the pulpit to invite people to join the choir.  He made singing in the choir sound like it could be fun.

So on the next Thursday, I went and found the music room.  I made my way through the mass of people who were chatting happily and introduced myself to the conductor.  He was a cheery guy, who gave me his name then asked, “What voice do you sing?”  Oh great, you mean I’ve got a choice.  He must have read something from my face, because he said, “Why don’t you go and sit in front of the big guy with the mustache.”

I introduced myself the other men sitting near me and took a piece of sheet music as it was passed around.  Then the conductor rapped on his music stand with his baton.

“Okay, lets read through this music one time.”

I panicked.  Read!  What do you mean read!  I can’t read!  This was a huge mistake! I’m going to make a fool of myself!  There were only three reasons that I didn’t bolt from the room right then: the tenors, the altos, and the sopranos.  Everybody in the choir was between the door and me.

So the conductor started waving his arms and cacophony struck.  If music is the organization of melody, harmony and rhythm, there was no music in that room.  I played my role in the confusion, trying quietly to follow the notes and failing miserably.

Finally, the conductor stopped waving his arms.  “That was pretty good for the first time through.  We’re getting better.  Let’s try it again.”

The second time was better, marginally.  For one thing, the big guy with the mustache started getting some confidence, and sometimes he was singing the same thing as the piano.  By the fourth time through, I was gaining some confidence and adding my quavering folk singer’s voice to the bass section’s sound.

That first song established the rhythm of the rehearsal.  We went through 7 or 8 pieces of music, repeating each many times, improving a little each time.  Throughout the rehearsal, I gained more and more confidence as I realized that no one was listening to me.

After the rehearsal was over, the conductor asked me, “Well, what do you think.”

“It was fun.”

“We’ll have more fun at 9:00 on Sunday in the choir loft.  Drop by.”

Then big guy with the mustache invited me to join the choir for a beer at Tommy’s Joynt a block away.  I was in the choir.

It turns out that there are people who can pick up a sheet of music, and read it and sing it.  There are also people who can pick up 500 pounds or run for 20 miles without collapsing.  All three are rare skills.

As time went on, I started having fun singing.  But I was still one of the softest voices in the choir.  There was a bunch of people who were a foot shorter than I was and who weighed 50 pounds less who could effortlessly drown me out so that I couldn’t even hear myself.

One day, I asked the conductor what was wrong with me.  He said, “Let’s try something.”  He then sat down at the piano and had me sing various vowel sounds at various pitches.  Suddenly, he interrupted me.

“There, did you hear that?”

“What?’

“That last note you sang was twice as loud as the others.”

“It was?”

“Yes, you used your natural resonance on that note. I’m sorry.  I should have known better and gone with that sound first.  But if you sing like that you’ll never have any trouble being heard.”

So we repeated some exercises to fix this new way of singing in my head and in my muscles and then went for a beer. That was when I became a singer.  The entire session had taken 5 minutes.

Shortly after that, it was suggested that I probably should sit in the back row.  In essence, I became the big guy with the mustache who taught other people the part.

I really got into singing.  At one point, I was in two choirs, had a weekly music lesson, and was in an opera workshop.  I was singing six nights a week.  For fun, I would go down the Roundup, a bar on the corner, and sing country and western songs.

That was in San Francisco.  Since then, I lived in Tucson for eight years, Newburyport, Mass for ten, and here in New Bedford for another 10.  Every time I go to a new church, I can reasonably sure that someone will invite me to join the choir.  I’ve accepted every reasonable invitation.  I’ve also sung in barbershop choruses, at blues jams, and at folk music open mics.  I’ll take just about any opportunity to sing.

I really enjoy in this church’s folk choir.  With most choirs, a singer’s job is pretty simple: Figure out what the director wants and give it to him.  No less and certainly no more.  And people don’t become directors because they are shy and undemanding.   With this choir, every singer has responsibility for the end result.  We create our own harmonies and our own arrangements.  Mostly, I sing the bass part, but often sing the melody.  I’ve even sung an upper harmony part or two when the song needs it.

Singing for me is multi-tasking taken to the extreme.  I’m checking to make sure that I’m doing all the technical things right: back straight, chest up, breathing from diaphragm, opening mouth wide.  Next, I’m listening to the accompaniment; am I on pitch, am I someplace near the rhythm.  Then, I’m paying attention to the other singers; are we singing together, presenting some sort of coherent sound?  Are we jelling?  Then I’m interacting with the congregation, getting constant feedback.  Are they transported?  Are they interested?  Are they comfortable?  Are they resigned?  Are they awake?  And finally, I’m concentrating on the words.  I’ve learned that if I don’t pay attention to the words, no one else will and I might as well be playing a kazoo.

And, if everything goes well, a strange and wonderful thing happens.  I forget who I am.  I overwhelm that sound track that’s always going in my brain.  The one that says,” I’m Ted Schade, I’m at church, I’m a little hot and sweaty, I wonder what kind of cookies they’ll have at coffee hour, my knee itches.”   I take a short vacation from myself.  It’s the exact opposite of meditating.  With meditating, you try to empty your mind.  When singing, I try to fill my mind to overflowing.  When I finish singing well, I really have no sense of time passing and have to make a conscious effort to get back into the world.

In this talk, I’ve tried to do two contradictory things.  I’ve invoked the magic of music and I’ve attempted to demystify it.

I do think that music is magical.  A person’s voice box vibrates, which causes the air to vibrate, which causes a person’s eardrum to vibrate which can cause that person to feel the whole range of emotions that person is capable of.  But singing is also a skill, a skill that almost everyone has.  Babies will sing to themselves long before they learn to speak or read or even to go to the bathroom.  Personally, I find it worth the effort, physically, spiritually, emotionally and intellectually.  And it’s not bad for the ego, either.

Houzro

This is the text of the sermon that I gave at the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford on August 16, 2009.  It was heard by about 20 people, about average for summer services.

WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Welcome to the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford.  As a congregation, we try to ignore those arbitrary barriers that our culture has traditionally erected to keep people apart.  If you are here and are interested in liberal religion, you are welcome.

FIRST READING

“When the dung beetle moves, know that something has moved it.  And know that it movement affect the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle’s stiff wing beds the will of the Wind People, and know that all this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cottonwood.”  That had always been the point of the lesson. Interdependency of nature.  Every cause has its effect.  Every action its reaction.  A reason for everything.  In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony.  Thus one leaned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause.  And this one learned, gradually and methodically; if one was lucky, to always “go in beauty”, to always look for the pattern, and to find it.”

SECOND READING
“The way it works with Navajos, witchcraft is the reversal to the Navajo Way.  The way the Holy People taught us, the goal of life was houzro.  No word for it in English.  Sort of a combination of beauty/harmony, being in tune, going with the flow, feeling peaceful, all wrapped in a single concept, basically.”

SERMON
Hi.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, today I’m going to talk about certain aspects of the Navajo way of life.
Let me say right at the outset that I’m not a scholar, and I haven’t spent a lot of time in libraries learning about the Navajo tribe.  My knowledge is not exhaustive and it may not even be always correct.  What I know, I have gained from conversations with Navajo friends and acquaintances in Tucson, Arizona and from reading the mystery stories of Tony Hillerman.  But my purpose today is not to turn all of you into Navajo experts in fifteen minutes.  Rather, my aim is to introduce a couple of concepts from the Navajo way of looking at things, compare and contrast them to the Unitarian Universalist perspective and see if we can learn something.

Many people consider that the Navajos don’t have a religion.  They don’t hold regular worship services.  There are no rituals analogous to baptism, christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, or funerals in the Navajo way.  They don’t believe in a single God, the afterlife, Heaven or Hell.

But, it depends upon how you define things.  If you define religion as the worship of God, then maybe the Navajos don’t have a religion.

But I define religion a bit more broadly.  Religion is the way we deal with the unknown and the unknowable.  Where did come from?  Where am I going? What am I doing here?  What is the nature of life?  These are some of the religious questions.  They can’t be answered by research.  They can’t be answered definitively.  Some religions try to define the answers.  Some will even try to force others to accept these answers.  But at some point in life, just about every person will need to answer the unanswerable for him or herself.  If you like, life is a multiple-choice test and I want to have as many choices as I can get.

So.  Now to the Navajos.  Most of us have learned about the Navajos and the other Native American nations from TV, the movies, novels and other forms of fiction.  These sources often depict Navajo life as simple, close to nature.  The Navajos may live close to nature, but theirs is not a simple culture.  There is a whole web of taboos and customs woven together into a rather strict structure for the good life.

Take, for instance, the house.  A traditional Navajo will live in a Hogan.  There are strict rules as to the size and shape, although the materials can vary according to the landscape.  But the doorway of the Hogan must be pointing due east facing the rising sun.  The traditional Navajo man will greet the dawn with prayers and with a pinch of corn pollen.  He gets the pollen from his medicine pouch, which he keeps with him always, tied to a deerskin thong which is tied around his waist and then hangs under his clothes close to his genitals.  I don’t know what women do with their medicine pouch.

All Navajos belong to clans.  There are something like 60 clans, some large and powerful, some small and facing extinction.  Every member of a clan is considered to be a relative of every other member of the clan.  Since there is a very strong incest taboo and some of these clans can have thousands of members, sometimes this can lead problems in finding a suitable mate.  Imagine the problems if just about everyone you knew were a relative.

When meeting someone for the first time, a Navajo will tell his or her place in the tribe, giving his born of (or mother’s) clan and his born to (or father’s) clan.

All of this is interesting, but not particularly germane.  Such clan distinctions are important to a sedentary culture.  The USA in the 20th and 21st century is not sedentary.
My father lived in different seven states; my mother lived in eight.  So far, I myself have lived in 7 states and my brother has lived in 8 states.  My sister is the black sheep of the family; she’s only lived in three.   The chances that any of us will unknowingly meet a relative are pretty slim.  And my guess is that the same holds true for many of you.

I mention these few aspects of Navajo life to point out the lengths that the Navajo Way goes to preserve houzro or harmony.  By the way, since the Navajo Religion is a spoken one, there is often a problem with spelling and pronounciation.  I have no assurance that I am spelling the word houzro correctly, but I don’t worry about that since you can’t see my text.  I don’t know how to pronounce it either.

Starting the day with a prayer centers one.  Using corn pollen in that prayer affirms life in a region where life is pretty sparse.  The web of rules about clans and incest guarantees that the tribe will not be genetically weakened.

In first reading, we learned about the Navajo approach to the world.  We learned of the belief that everything is connected, that every cause has an effect, that every effect has a cause.  In Anglo society, this is called chaos theory and is considered speculative; a theory that hasn’t been proved, but could lead to interesting developments. But in the Navajo way, this belief comes as result of other beliefs and leads logically to other beliefs.

As an aside, this belief is real convenient for the mystery writer.  One of the questions a writer has to answer is “why bother?”  In the story, the detective goes through a whole bunch of adventures, meets a bunch of unsavory characters, and usually confronts danger.  The reader is justified in asking the question: “Why doesn’t this guy just say ‘to hell with this’, clock out and go home, have a nice dinner and watch TV?”  This question must be answered in some way in every story.  Tony Hillerman answers it by saying it is part of the detective’s system of beliefs – his religion, if you will.

In the second reading, we got the basic definition of houzro:  The belief that the goal of life was harmony – to be at peace with yourself, your community, and the world.  Taken with the first reading, it becomes clear that houzro is all encompassing.  It’s not just the feeling you get after you’ve had a good meal, or read a good book, or have been complemented extravagantly.  But it is a condition of life, temporary but which can be sustained for years, even decades, and is ended only by some definite, definable reason.

The essence of houzro is cooperation, as opposed to competition.  It is the state you achieve when you follow the Golden Rule, and treat others as you wish to be treated.  Of course, all of these concepts and actions lead to other concepts and actions.  For instance, some teachers who are new to the Navajo reservation have to learn not to ask questions of their class.  No one will ever answer.  No good Navajo student would ever make his classmates look bad.  There are limits to even this rule.  Jacoby Ellsbury, the Red Sox center fielder is a Navajo.  He has 52 stolen bases so far this year, so he evidently has no trouble with making the opposing pitchers and catchers look bad.  But maybe he needs an Enemy Way sung at the end of the season.

Navajos believe in evil.  There are two sources of evil: witches  (or skin walkers) and ghosts.
Here’s a reading from Tony Hillerman’s Children of Darkness:

“You get to be a witch by violating the basic taboos – killing a relative, incest, so forth.  And you get certain powers.  You can turn yourself into a dog or a wolf.  You can fly.  And you have the power to make people sick.  That’s the opposite of the good power the Holy People gave us – to cure people by getting them back into houzro.  Back into beauty. So, to make a long story short, a witch wouldn’t have to have a motive for blowing up an oil well.  It’s a bad thing to do, blowing people up.  That’s all the motive a skin walker needs.”
So a witch is pure evil.  The Navajos believe that the only way to free oneself of a witch’s power is to kill it.

Ghosts are separate.  Here’s a quote from Hillerman’s Listening Woman:

Among the traditional Dinee (or Navajo), the death of a fellow human being was the ultimate evil.  He recognized no life after death.  That which was natural in him, and therefore good, simply ceased.  That which was unnatural, and therefore evil, wandered through the darkness as a ghost, disturbing nature and causing sickness.

And this from The People of Darkness:

…Everything about the white man’s burial customs seemed odd to Chee.  The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses.  Death robbed the body of its value.  Even its identity was lost with the departing chindi.  What the ghost left behind was something to be disposed of with a minimum risk of contamination to the living.  The names of the dead were left unspoken, certainly not carved in stone.

So like the rest of us, the Navajo fear the unknown.  When possible, the family will take steps that a dying person will expire outside, so that his ghost can escape and be free.  If a person dies inside a Hogan, a large hole is made in the North Wall of the Hogan so that the ghost can escape and no Navajo will ever enter that Hogan again, for fear of getting ghost sickness.

A Navajo stays in houzro by living the good life, by staying within the bounds of Navajo tradition.  If one does lose this harmony, there are always ceremonies.  At one point, there were over 60 different ceremonies or sings.  These are dying out, partially because of the encroachment of the dominant culture, and partially because the training is so rigorous.  The Blessing Way, for instance, takes nine days.  There are numerous chants and sand paintings and everything has to be word perfect and grain of sand perfect or the ceremony won’t work.  One doesn’t learn to be a hatayii or singer in his or her spare time.

When a traditional Navajo joins the Armed Forces, he should have a Blessing Way sung for him before he leaves to keep him in harmony, and an Enemy Way sung for him when he returns to bring him back into houzro.

So that’s a couple of pages of the Cliff Notes version of Navajo religion.  Let’s apply it.

Is the dominant culture of the United States in houzro?  It’s a big country; it depends upon where you look.  Certainly, if you listen political radio, you’d have to conclude that we are out of houzro.  A person whose job it is to be outraged 3 hours a day, five days a week can’t be in harmony.  Neither can the people who listen to him or her.

Our whole economic system is based on competition.  In school, we are taught the importance of winning.  We are taught that the goal of life is to gain power or money, and the way to gain these is by winning, by showing other people up, either in the marketplace or in voting booth.

But I think in our daily life, we do try to achieve houzro, whether we have ever heard of the term.  We have to compete for jobs, but usually we never see or even think about other candidates.  And when we get the job, we try to cooperate with our fellow workers.  Indeed, if we are too competitive and try to show up our coworkers we are seen to be “disruptive” and the boss may have to conduct a ceremony to bring you back into harmony.  These ceremonies aren’t like the Blessing Way or the Enemy Way. They are usually called “counseling”, or “a bawling out”, or even a “come to Jesus meeting”.  Of course, if such a ceremony takes 9 days, the boss will probably engage in an entirely different ceremony.

But we generally try to get along with our neighbors, in-laws, fellow church members.  If we see evil, we generally try to stay away from it.  If we can’t stay away, we call 911 and let someone else handle it.  So we generally tend toward houzro subconsciously, even though it is not a goal.

Finally, I want to read you another passage, this one is from “The Dark Wind”.
“Someone who violated basic rules of behavior and harmed you was, by Navajo definition “out of control.”  The “Dark Wind” had entered him and destroyed his judgment.  One avoided such persons, and worried about them, and was pleased if they were cured of this temporary insanity and returned again to houzro.  But to Chee’s Navajo mind, the idea of punishing them would be as insane as the original act.”
Obviously, if the United States followed the Navajo Way, we would have a very different criminal justice system.  We wouldn’t lead the world in number of people in jail per capita, we wouldn’t spend as much tax money, and we would have fewer lawyers.
I’m not at all sure that we wouldn’t also have less crime.

That’s all I got.  The Navajo religion is a beautiful one, and certainly not simple.  I didn’t even condense the religion to fit the time period.  I just pulled out a couple of ideas that suited my purpose.  The creation stories, for instance, are wonderful, very extensive, and instructive.  They make Genesis seem like a short children’s story.
I hope I gave you something to think about.  Are you in houzro?  Are you in harmony with the universe?  If not, how can we as a congregation help?

Listen Up!

I feel a story coming on.

If you count church and community choirs, blues jams, and the occasional gigs, I’ve probably performed with over 1000 musicians.  So far, the best of the bunch is a guy whose parents called Dennis.

Dennis was a musical prodigy in elementary school, and  the musical director of his brother’s very popular soul band in high school.  After high school, he went to New York and became a working rock and roll musician.  He was successful  for about 15 years.  You have heard his guitar work on many records over the years, he had a bunch of gold records in other people’s names, and one in his.

His guitar playing got him hired a lot; his personality got him fired a lot.  Politely stated, he was a spoiled brat.  Finally, he threw one tantrum too many and came home to Eastern Mass.

He got a gig in a bar in his home town hosting an Open Mic on Thursday Night.  I heard about him through the grapevine and went and played three or four times.  At my request, he played with me.

Believe me, I never sounded as good as when Dennis played with me.  The supportive vibe and the musical solos were more intoxicating than anything the bar served.

One night, we played Willie Nelson’s “Night Life”.  Its  a simple 8 bar blues, but I learned a rather complicated arrangement that had a bunch of jazz chords.  I didn’t go over it with Dennis: he would have been insulted.  I played the rhythm part and he played lead.   When it came time for his solo, he took off on a flight of fancy that was incredible.  I stopped to listen.  And forgot where I was in the song.  I was lost, but Dennis heard the problem, quickly changed his solo, played my chord for a beat or two and put me back on track.  I doubt if anyone in the audience even knew we had a problem.

After the set, I apologized and thanked him for helping me out.  He told me not to think about it and said that that was what real musicians do.

At some point playing or singing music moves from being about playing and more about listening; more about what you hear than what you try to do.

Betrayal – John Lescroart

There are four reasons that I really like the whodunits of John Lescroart.  He sets all of his books in San Francisco.  I lived there for ten years and am familiar with most of his locations, and in this case at least, familiarity breeds content.  But it’s more than that.  San Francisco has a well-deserved reputation for being the home of larger than life characters and institutions that makes for a vibrant backdrop for the action.

Lescroart also sets a big table.  He has a large number of recurring characters.  At the center of the cast are Abe Glitzky and Dismas Hardy, who were partners when they were cops in San Francisco while  in their twenties.  Hardy has gone through a series of tragedies and other learning experiences and has become a defense attorney.  Glitzky has stayed with the police and has risen in the ranks.  So far, the highest rank he’s achieved is Assistant Chief of Police.  In addition, both of them have families, other friends and business associates.  These other characters generally get introduced in one book, stay around for two or three others, having a major role in at least book, then retire to the sidelines to be used when the author needs them.  Lescroart has created almost his own world and made this a real series rather than a bunch of books with the same protagonist.

Third, Lescroart pays attention to the real world.  In this book, he writes about the defense contractors in Iraq.  In other books, he has covered the “health care”, industry, child kidnapping by their parents, misconduct in the “energy” industry, misuse of the grand jury process by prosecutors, and others.

Finally, these books are solidly in the noir tradition.  Concepts like fact and truth, justice and morals and law become squirmy things, twisting around each other in interesting patterns.

Betrayal is divided into four parts. The first section takes place in and around Baghdad, Iraq in 2003.  It is portrayed as a place where a person with a military background, lots of contacts and no scruples can get away with just about anything and be well rewarded in the process.  There is a scene where the head of a defense contract firm and his top lieutenant are talking strategy while killing a bottle of single malt whiskey and tossing around a shrink-wrapped packet containing 500 $100 bills.  The second part takes place in a suburb of San Francisco where the  moral quagmire of  the Iraq war has  spread its influence.  Someone gets killed, and a man involved in the whole scene gets arrested.  The third  covers the trial of the arrested man.  The fourth section finally gets the regular cast of characters involved and the case gets solved.

This book might disappoint Lescroart’s regular readers.  The pace slows to a crawl in the third section.  While there is a lot of legal strategy and tactics  involved in the trial, the reader won’t care much because the author has already told him the outcome.

Other than that, Betrayal has all of the elements I have come to expect from Lescroart.  The pace is good.  The writing is good without being self-indulgent.  The characters are strong, some even memorable.  There are a lot of plot twists.  Lescroart is a master at hiding clues.  The story deals with moral questions in ways that are both timely and timeless.

RIP Miriam Makeba

I just learned that Miriam Makeba died last November 10. If I ran the Information Industry, obituaries would have run on every front page, and led off every newscast. She was truly one of the world’s most important people of the last half of the Twentieth Century. As a singer, musician and symbol for freedom and peace, she had no equal. Wikipedia has a good article, and YouTube has some great performances.

More Evidence that I’m stupid

Today, I went to http://www.maps.com/games/africa.html.  There was a simple game.  There was an outline map of a section of Africa and a list of the names of the countries.  All you had to do was drag the name to the correct country.  I flunked all three sections.  My final score was 190 out of 450.

Like most people, most of my impressions about Africa stems from Tarzan movies. The author of the Tarzan books, Edgar Rice Bourroughs, never went to Africa.

If the USA is going to try rule the world, it’s going to have trouble if its people can’t find the countries in the world.

Bootlegger’s Daughter

Boolegger’s Daughter

Margaret Maron

Mysterious Press, New York

1992

264 pages

This is the first novel in a series.  Margaret Maron had already published eight whodunits when she started this series set in her childhood home of North  Carolina.

Structurally, this is a “cold case” story.  The detective, Deborah Knott, is an attorney in her home of Colleton County,  North Carolina.  She is approached by Gayle Whitehead.  Deborah had been her babysitter many years before.  Gayle’s mother had been killed when Gayle was three month’s old, and Gayle wants Deborah to look into the case.  Deborah agrees.

At the same time,  she decides to run for a county judgeship, basically because the racist nature of the county court system.

The classic detective is a loner.  Deborah Knott is definitely not.  She is the twelfth child, and only daughter of the county’s most notorious bootlegger.  She is junior partner in a small legal practice with two of her relatives.  She lives with an aunt and uncle.  Loneliness for her isn’t a danger,  it’s an accomplishment

So Deborah investigates the murder while running for office.  Each endeavor informs the other.  She gets clues at campaign events, and she picks up endorsements in the course of her investigation.  And she finds, as  “cold case” stories, that things aren’t as they seem to be, and never were.

This is a very good whodunit.  The two endeavors allow for a broad spectrum of scenes and a variety of activities.

Maron is a good writer.  Here she paints a scene of an abandoned gristmill.

“These day, Virginia creeper and honeysuckle fight it out in the dooryard with blackberry brambles and poison ivy.  Hunters and anglers may shelter beneath its rusty tin roof from unexpected thunderstorms, teenage lovers may park in the overgrown lane on warm moonlit nights, but for years the mill has sat alone out there in the woods, tenanted by the coons and foxes that den beneath its stone walls.”

That’s pretty clean and evocative for two sentences.

But.

I wish that just once, a female mystery writer would leave out the scene where the heroine does something stupid, is placed in mortal danger, and is rescued by some man.  It’s trite and not convincing.

These days,  Margaret Maron can start a new Deborah Knott novel confident that it will get on the best seller lists and at least be considered for awards.  This book is one of the reasons why.

Nightly news

I stopped paying attention to the major network’s nightly news some time during the during the Vietnam war and have watched it only sporadically ever since. I’m watching it semi – regularly these days, but I don’t really know why.

I’ve noticed something that amuses me. Most of the commercials for all three network shows are from the pharmaceutical industry and every show has at least one story on the health care industries. And many, but not all, of these stories are “feel good” stories that put the industries in a good light.

If I were a suspicious person, I would think that the health care industries are buying favorable publicity as their prices continue to rise at more than twice the rate of inflation, as they have ever since World War II.

Media Watchers

Every day, I try to check in with the two major media watching websites:Newsbusters.org and Mediamatters.org. Newsbusters is run by the Media Research Group and maintains that the informational media outlets are biased against the Right. Media Matters argues that they are biased against the Right.

Of course, both sites are cripple-shooting. There are so many newspapers, radio stations and tv stations, each producing info on a daily deadline that anyone who took the time could produce anecdotes that show that “the media” is biased against just about every person, country, state, and interest group.

I think the main difference between the two sites is who they think their audience is. Newsbusters assumes that its audience agrees with it. Therefore, it can quip about “phony global warming stories” without justifying the claim.

Media Matters assumes that its audience disagrees with it. Therefore, the bloggers do their homework, and back up every claim. This week, it looked into the claim that the Obama Inauguration cost 4 times as much as Bush’s 2005 inauguration. It pointed out the apples to oranges comparison: Bush inauguration figures don’t include security costs, while the Obama figures do include them. If you compare the private money raised for the two inaugurations, the figures are quite close. Obama spent a little more, but may have even spent less when the figure is adjusted for inflation. Of course, Newsbusters just complains how the media is under reporting the expense of the Obama inauguration.

With this difference in audience, Newsbusters is easily the more readable and entertaining of the sites. Media Matters too often reads like a collection of college term papers.

How curious that when Media Matters hits the news, it is usually characterized as smears and propaganda, and when Newsbusters hits the news, it is cited as a legitimate source.

Conservative of the Year?

Human Events, an established conservative magazine that was founded during World War II, has named Governor Sarah Palin as its Conservative of the Year 2008.   Why? From the day after her nomination, it was obvious that she was bringing a knitting needle to the gunfight that is national politics.  Initially, she couldn’t keep from making mistakes: she could see Russia from her porch, she sold a Boeing 737 on EBay and made a profit, she turned down the Bridge to Nowhere.  Didn’t she think that someone would check? Wassila, her home town,  is hundreds of miles from Russia.  The plane was put on EBay as a matter of procedure, didn’t sell and was subsequently sold to a campaign contributor at a substantial loss.  A governor certainly doesn’t have veto power over Senatorial earmarks.  Sen Steven withdrew the earmark on the Bridge but kept the money for other projects in Alaska. As the campaign wore on, things got sillier.  She didn’t know the Bush doctrine.  She thought Africa was a country.  The Campaign spent enough money on her wardrobe to outfit everybody in Wassila.

Conservatives came to her aid like good sodiers, but couldn’t escape the silliness.  Former Senator Fred Thompson said the country needed a Vice President who could field dress a moose, as if there were a lot of moose in the Washington area and as if the White House needed the Vice President to provide the entrees for State dinners.  Many people pointed out that that Alaska was larger than many states put together, omitting the fact that most of Alaska is owned by the Federal Government.  They pointed out that Wassila is the second largest town in Alaska, omitting the fact that it has less than 10, 000 inhabitants, unless you count the moose.

By any measure, Governor Palin was an embarrassment to the campaign, the Republican Party, and the conservative cause.

Why then, did Human Events name her Conservative of the Year?  According to Ann Coulter, who wrote the article announcing the award it was: “for her genius at annoying all the right people.   The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar was… me.”

First, I’ve been a liberal for at least 50 years and it seems to me that annoying a liberal is not much of an accomplishment.  We are continually wilting our collars sweat.  Second, aren’t we a little off the point?  Politics is the business of developing policies to make this country better and then getting the power to put those policies into effect by convincing the voters of the wisdom of those policies.  Irking the opposition is completely off the point.

By naming Sarah Palin as its Conservative of the Year 2008, Human Events has made itself useless in the national debate over our future.  The only way it can become useful again is to refocus on facts and ideas.   Right now, it’s just the National Enquirer with less news and more attitude.

Coulter ends her article by advising Palin to concentrate on being a good Governor and by reading Shlafely, Sowell, and Reagan.  Strangely enough, I agree.  But I would add that reading liberals would be a good idea for anyone.  Real education comes from debating with those with whom you dissagree.