Payton brothers: Ernest (d. 2017), Frank (d. 2023), and now George (R.I.P.).
He was the first Salvationist who spoke to me when I visited the Ithaca Corps almost twenty years ago. What a greeting! – warm, inquisitive, utterly genuine. It was the best or second-best first impression ever made on me. (The other was Frank’s, two or three minutes later. You need to meet my brother, George said.)
I spent many good hours with George and his family, but the first moment may have been the most important one. What a gift, to be able to greet strangers in church.
I guess it’s all right, now, to disclose that Ana, David, Ada, George, and Russell (the dog) have sold their house in Texas and will move to South Bend this weekend. So, we siblings – John-Paul, David, Mary, and Stephen – and our respective households, as well as our parents, will all have settled in the same metro area (two adjacent cities) for the first time since 2000 (the previous millennium). Odd to think that South Bend/Mishawaka, and not, say, Quito, Esmeraldas, Guayaquil, or even Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, should have proved our stubbornest anchor. It’s not as if our ancestors hailed from this part of the state. My dad’s dad grew up closer to Lafayette; my dad’s mom, closer to Fort Wayne. They never lived together in the South Bend area. (Neither of my mom’s parents was a Hoosier.) My parents got together as students in Chicagoland. They became missionaries, moved to Ecuador, had their children, and spent furloughs in Illinois (twice) and Missouri. They – we – never all lived together in Indiana.
But, soon, we shall.
I’ve lived some fifteen years, off and on, in the state. Hoosiers still seem strange to me. Not as horrifying as Missourians – whom I think I actually understand better – but less relatable than, say, Upstate New Yorkers, and not nearly as endearing as Minnesotans or Wisconsinites.
I look at the institutions and positions that confer prestige here, and think, that doesn’t appeal to me at all. But then, I might think that anywhere.
I look at what people here do for enjoyment, and think, that doesn’t appeal to me, either. That’s worse.
I think how, last year, a chicken trapped itself in our yard, and the officer who removed it told me it was a gamecock. This weekend we had friends – Michiganders I’d known in Quito – in the yard. We heard roosters crowing, and I thought, I may not approve of cockfighting, but my heart is warmed to know it’s practiced in the neighborhood where I now live.
A satisfactory little vacation in Austin. I’ve done what I said I’d do, except I haven’t ridden the bus.
I’m about to finish reading my second book.
David took me to a good Colombian restaurant in East Austin, the seedy-but-gentrifying part of town. He lives in a much-nicer-but-also-gentrifying part of town. I gather there are other neighborhoods that leave his in the dust.
My legs are sore because yesterday I hiked through a stony, scrubby forest. I’m no birdwatcher, but I was delighted when a roadrunner crossed my path. It was an idyllic morning – except that the freeway traffic near the forest was very loud.
Back where Ana & David live, we did a little tour of the Halloween decorations.
Ada, my neice, is a chatterbox. She is keen to describe all the neighborhood calaveras (skulls). She tells us about Ellison, her imaginary older sister.
George, my nephew, likes to be read to and to dribble the soccer ball around the house.
We watched Ecuador play awfully against Bolivia. To our intense relief, Ecuador scored the winning goal in the last minute. Afterward, David and I listed four or five players whom we never want to see again. The commentator was a nice man from South Africa or maybe New Zealand who clearly knew little about South American soccer or soccer in general. By the end of the game, even he was remarking on how poor these players were, and David and I were warming up to him.
The other notable result was that Venezuela rescued a point in Brazil thanks to a late bicycle-kick goal. The Brazilians were very angry.
A dead racoon lay in the middle of our street, in front of our house. Someone put a traffic cone next to it to alert passing cars. The racoon remained there for many hours.
No city official collected the racoon.
Our next-door neighbors – jovial young men – held a memorial service for the racoon and buried it in their back yard. I applaud the sentiment but worry. Scent of racoon attracts more racoon.
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It’s chilly in the house. Our brand-new furnace provided heat for two days. Then it quit.
Not that I’ll be affected much. Repairs have been comissioned, and meanwhile I’ll fly to Texas to visit David, Ana, Ada, George, and Russell (the dog). The forecast there is for temperatures in the 70s and 80s, F.
Ana & David have jobs, and Ada and George go to day-care, so I’ll have time to myself. I intend to walk, ride the bus, eat, and read – things I used to do when I was a bachelor. I’ve pared down my cargo to these texts:
The Bible
Daphne Du Maurier, Don’t Look Now: Stories (I’ll probably just read one or two longish ones)
R. M. Dworkin, ed., The Philosophy of Law (probably just one or two articles)
Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Strangers (unless I finish it tonight)
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious
Ronald Hugh Morrieson, The Scarecrow
I’ll use the Internet to continue reading Macbeth.
So, in addition to Scripture: texts of criminality, deviance, and buried desire. My usual seasonal fare.
Ecuador and Bolivia will play in La Paz on Thursday. David and I will watch that game together.
We aren’t very sick anymore. I have to blow my nose a lot, but that’s the extent of it.
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Last night, we saw a mouse in our basement. Get it, Jasper!, we said.
A little later, we saw our champion mouser trotting along, his mouth full, a bit of brown fuzz dangling out of it. Karin followed after Jasper with an empty potato-salad container. He tried to escape into one of his hidey-holes to play with his prize, but Karin caught him and he grudgingly released the limp thing.
It was a plastic toy. The bit of fuzz was a dust bunny. We didn’t see the mouse again.
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This, at last, is shaping up to be the August when I read all of Light in August.
This year, I read at least two books by each of these authors:
Henning Mankell (Faceless Killers; The Dogs of Riga)
Joe Queenan (One for the Books; Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon)
Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis 1 and 2)
Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; Pop. 1280)
Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes; Mr. Fortune’s Maggot)
A few of these books, I’m still working on, but I’ll’ve finished them by January 1.
Also, I enjoyed these authors:
H. W. Brands (I finished Dreams of El Dorado)
Ben Macintyre (I finished The Spy and the Traitor)
They both write popular histories/biographies. I can’t commend them enough: almost every page is rewarding.
I’m not including such deserving authors as Beatrix Potter and Margaret Wise Brown. Not because I didn’t read enough of their books or because those books are for children or are too short, but because I didn’t read them for my own sake. I also read lots of Mother Goose.
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Rooney’s Conversations with Friends may have been my favorite read of the year. That, or Roughing It, which is hilarious but doesn’t have the same narrative urgency as Conversations with Friends, even though some chapters of Roughing It are life-or-death. (Being a coming-of-age tale, Conversations only feels like it is life-or-death.) The lesson of Roughing It is this. The people of the United States are compulsive liars; also, they love to believe lies. It becomes less strange, upon reading Twain, that Donald Trump should have been elected President. The predilection for outlandish untruth has been around for a long time. Twain lampoons the lying while himself resorting to embellishment. I suppose that as a satirist, that is his right.
Chapter I of Pudd’nhead Wilson has this epigraph: “Tell the truth or trump – but get the trick.”
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Otherwise, this hasn’t been a year for getting through the classics. I did finish reading the Purgatorio. I am eager to read the Paradiso so that I can move on to the Decameron, which I became perversely eager for after I saw The Little Hours.
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On to the domestic front. I obtained a new stepfather-in-law. A nephew and a niece were born to me. My son Daniel was born in February. He’s now been outside his mother longer than he was inside her (unless each of us, in his or her earliest stage of development, is a pre-fertilized egg). For a couple of months Daniel seemed not to have a personality. Now he is an enterprising, zestful, strong-willed young man. Samuel likes him but constantly knocks him down or pushes him away, usually due to some property dispute. Daniel has learned to push back. I’m disturbed and pleased. Every night, I pray for my sons to love each other and get along; but I also want them to fight for the good, and being able to fight for the good entails being able to fight.
Ziva is the same as always: desirous of being stroked, she wakes me in the night. Jasper seemed ill – he lost many lbs. – but today the veterinarian confirmed that it’s because of the dieting we’ve been forcing him to do (he’s at his ideal weight for the first time since he took to stealing Ziva’s kitten food). Karin & I have continued our march through British TV. This has been the year of the Hobbit-like actor Ken Stott, who appears in the police procedurals Crime and, with Caroline Catz, The Vice; and of Catz’s sadly truncated Murder in Suburbia, in which two unmarried, lovelorn policewomen investigate crimes by “Karens” (“Grangerites,” in South Bend parlance). So, nothing too profound.
Of course, we all watched the World Cup.
We also explored our new neighborhood. I regularly visited the local library branch. I’d check out books and print out journal articles (up to 33 B&W pp./day, gratis). This library branch has a reputation for patron misbehavior – I learned this when I interviewed for a job there a few years ago – but I haven’t observed a single episode. This really is a tranquil part of town in which to live.
A warm welcome to George, my nephew, born yesterday to Ana & David. My mom is in Texas with them. She looks after little Ada and the dog, Russell, while Ana, David, and George are in the hospital.
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A synopsis (not by me) of Rats in the Ranks.
Each year, as part of the democratic process all over Australia, local councillors meet to elect a mayor to lead their council for the next year. Rats in the Ranks tells the story of this process in the Leichhardt council area of Sydney in 1994. Every September, the Leichhardt council meets to elect one of their twelve members as the Mayor and another for Deputy Mayor for the following year. The election is rarely a straightforward affair.
In 1994, the current mayor, Larry Hand, was popular with the local citizens, but they don’t vote for the mayor, the councillors do – and after three years of Larry, some of them were after his job.
In Rats in the Ranks, filmmakers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson trace the story of the struggle for the mayoralty. They had extraordinary access to the councillors who were willing for the story to be filmed in the lead up to the election.
Arms are twisted, favours are called in, people are double-crossed, damaging stories are leaked to the media and deals are done. But right up to the vote, no one knows how the numbers will stick and who will walk away from the election as mayor.
missed out on a nomination in the “best documentary” category and most other categories at the 1996 [Australian Film Institute] Awards. …
The film’s failure to make it past a pre-selection jury into general membership voting became part of a larger ongoing controversy about the AFI Awards, and eventually led to a change to the AFI’s voting system. This was the year that the AFI Awards reached the level of contempt usually reserved for the Academy Awards.
(The last sentence is a bonus, I guess.)
The documentary is basically C.P. Snow’s The Masters, with this difference: the scheming Cambridge dons of that novel are conscientious and gentle souls next to the professional politicians of Rats in the Ranks. In what follows, I’ll not reveal the outcome of the election, but I shall describe some of its participants. My opinions of these people changed as I viewed the movie. Here I’ll present my final character assessments. I thought hard about whether I could cheer for anyone to win the election, and, in the end, I decided I could; but you might reach a different verdict. I recommend you watch the movie and then read this review.
The accents and slang aren’t always easy to follow. I watched with the captions turned on. Here is a YouTube upload; the movie also can be streamed through Kanopy.
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There is a councilor in Rats in the Ranks who may as well be Satan. (In some scenes, he even wears a cape.)
There is another councilor who is “Satan’s” dupe – in effect, his lackey – even though she belongs to the opposing party. She spends more time with the Satan figure than with her fellow party members. After her meetings with them, she runs over to tell “Satan” everything.
In good bureaucratic fashion, this lackey has a lackey.
Meanwhile, other members of her party conspire to defeat the Satan figure by means fair or foul. (Mostly fair means, but the foul cannot be overlooked.) So, there is a potentially fatal division within that party. This makes for some outrageous caucus meetings. These scenes would be ghastly if they weren’t so entertaining.
It’s fascinating to hear such good talkers make tactical blunders, lose all sight of values, etc.
What’s most disturbing is how little the populace matters in all of this. The residents vote for their councilors, but not for their mayor; which might not matter so much, except for two things.
First, the mayor has considerably more formal and effective power than the other councilors have. (Not even the deputy mayor comes close.)
And second, the councilors choose the mayor on the basis of their personal ambitions and resentments. They give lip-service to their parties’ and constituents’ interests; but, at the end of the day, those interests don’t determine their choices.
How can these people live with themselves? How can they sleep at night?, the Satan figure asks about his fellow councilors – though he himself would betray any of them, should the winds change.
Interestingly, the Satan figure is a very good public official. (At least, he convinces me that he is a good public official.) He gets things done. He listens to the citizens. When they disagree with him, he patiently and candidly explains to them why his way is better. Were I to live in Leichhardt, and were it in my power to vote in this election, I’d be tempted to vote for this candidate.
I also was favorably impressed by his main challenger. He, too, has the makings of a good public official. He is the schlubbiest of all these schlubs (or the second-schlubbiest, after the lackey’s lackey); but he has moments of reasonableness and forthrightness.
Indeed, he may be too forthright to be a very successful politician. The Satan figure runs rings around him, gamesmanship-wise.
The two men can’t stand one another. Perhaps this is because of a class difference. Or perhaps they recognize each other as genuine threats. Or perhaps they sincerely disagree about how to govern.
Another politician, who refuses to appear onscreen, makes a crucial intervention. He is Anthony Albanese; as of May of 2022, he has been serving as the Prime Minister of Australia.
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The other day, I said to Karin: Isn’t it funny that I, who find politics so distasteful, should have written a dissertation about political matters. But the word “political” describes two different inquiries. One inquiry is about how a polis should be run, and the other is about how the polis is run (which boils down to a lot of scheming, backstabbing, etc.). If the gulf between should and is is too great, it’s natural to be interested in one inquiry but not the other.
This movie shows a representative democracy whose representatives aren’t chosen with regard for how it’s best to run the polis. And yet the polis is run competently enough. This suggests that we may as well choose our representatives out of a hat, as some of the more trusting politicians in this movie are inclined to do; or by having each desiring person take a turn, as some of the more self-important and envious politicians insist upon.
… because Jasper has been harboring fleas. We believe they came into the house via some clothes we inherited from Rick (Rick’s dog, George, recently had fleas).
Ziva has never been bathed. We’re going to postpone that ordeal until we’re sure she has fleas.
No such luck for Jasper, who, last night, suffered his first bath since early kittenhood. He moaned and tried to claw his way out. On the whole, though, he was rather brave. He came out smelling of peppermint and cloves.
Unfortunately, he had fleas again this morning.
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We’ve tried, on several occasions, to vote; but at every polling place, the queue has wrapped around the block. We don’t want to stand out in the cold for a long time with our baby, and the paucity of weekend voting hours makes it hard for us to go stand in line one after the other.
That leaves two options: (1) trying to vote during business hours this week, and (2) voting on Election Day, when more polling stations will be open. Both options are complicated by Karin’s having to manage her workplace – the regular manager will be recovering from surgery – and by my having to care for Samuel.
In the 1964 election, 61.05 percent of voters cast their ballots for Lyndon Johnson – the largest majority a president has ever enjoyed. Yet, at the same time, because turnout was so low, Johnson was in fact elected by less than 38 percent of all voting-eligible Americans. We call Reagan’s 1984 victory a “landslide,” but less than a third of voting-age Americans actually voted for him. Less than a quarter of eligible Americans voted to reelect Bill Clinton in 1996. In all elections, a minority of the voting-eligible population imposes a president on the majority.
Whether or not you endorse compulsory voting (Brennan doesn’t), it’s hard not to conclude that many of the non-voting majority choose not to vote because they are significantly hindered from voting. Set aside legal disqualifications for criminals, non-citizens, puertorriqueños, those without I.D., etc. The logistical obstacles can still be formidable.
This sort of problem can be grasped in theory; but, as with the stifling of access to health care, transport, and other basic goods, it acquires a more sinister character when it is experienced.
Karin’s stepdad, Rick, died today. He was fifty-five. His body housed many illnesses: among them, pneumonia; we’re not sure which one killed him. When we saw him a few weeks ago, he looked frail, shriveled up. He needs to go to the doctor, we said. But with typical stubbornness he refused to go to the doctor. Karin’s mom told us he seemed tired of living: he would barely eat, and he’d talk about dying. Last weekend, he collapsed and lost consciousness. The medics almost took him to the hospital, but he awoke in time to dismiss them.
The following Monday, he went back to his job. Then he stopped working.
He was employed as a chef. Some weeks, he’d work ninety hours. His body was always sore.
A gruff, irreligious man, he was reconciled with God some two weeks ago, Karin’s mom said. It was the first time she’d seen him at peace.
Karin & I are very sad. We would’ve especially liked for Samuel to know him longer. He was very kind to his grandchildren. He put up with a great deal of nonsense from the rest of his family. He had a piquant, rather absurdist sense of humor. He was an ardent Vikings fan; the Vikings, of course, never won any Super Bowls, and I don’t think Rick ever won anything, either. That’s all right: a wise man once noted that ours is a religion for losers.
Rick left it late, but I think that at the end, he was prepared – he had the requisite humility. He was small enough, as another wise man once put it, to crawl through the eye of a needle.
Here he is with his dog, George, whom he lovingly called the “Swine.”
