State of the Discussion

I used to make pilgrimages to Glacier National Park but no more: climate change and crowds. I used to go to Yukon Territory but no more: climate change. I got married in front of the Tree of Life on the coast out at Kalaloch and my husband and I have gone there annually for over 20 years. This winter will be our last trip. The Tree of Life has fallen over--victim of climate change. Most of the bluff cabins have been torn down because of bluff failure, also climate change. I am planning a pilgrimage to Escalante in Utah. I've been going there for the hiking since the 1970s but this will be my last trip. Too crowded. Zion and Bryce get over a million visitors each summer and the spill over is reaching the Boulder area. When I first went there, the trails were barely developed, the roads were gravel and there was barely anything in the way of tourism. Now the area is being promoted by the state and the wonder and adventure is gone.

"I ain't got no home in this world anymore."

One more response to Ezra Klein's response to the response that was given to his Charlie Kirk eulogy.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/

But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.”

What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding.

Worth a read and a bit of rumination.

CaseyL: it's hard to convey intonation in text! They said "home is wherever WE are", i.e. surely as long as your parents are here, it's home. And that's not right, as my sibs and I know all too well. My upbringing had many privileges, and wonderful, character-forming experiences, but it did not give a certain kind of security and stability which I see in friends who never changed country, and often lived in the same house their entire childhood. My parents, apart from (I suppose) being people of their generation, were both born and brought up in the same country until well into adulthood, so I guess they had no concept of the kind of deracination which can result from the loss of e.g. a culture, pets, etc etc.

GftNC - Home is not "wherever we are," though being able to feel at home wherever you are is a gift.

I have lived in Seattle since the mid-1970s (aside from a few years interregnum when I had to go back to Florida), and have been in my current house for nearly 30 years. I agree with you whole-heartedly that the thought of moving is fairly horrifying.

OTOH, if I ever do have to relocate, I hope I have the grit and spirit to make an adventure out of it.

I wish you did belong here, hsh!

I was dragged around a lot as a child (4 countries), homes changed and parents said "but darling, surely home is wherever we are?" (for clever and worldly people they were remarkably clueless about children's psychology), so I have now lived in the same apartment in London for 47 years - longer than almost anybody I know has lived anywhere. I lived in LA for a year in the 90s, but kept my apartment and it was always "home". Even when I married, I split my time fairly equally between the North Country and my London pad, and since my husband died eight years ago I have been permanently in London. The idea of moving is fairly horrifying to me. I wish I were more flexible, but I have just turned 70, so maybe that's that.

As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.

Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.

Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.

But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.

My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.

But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.

All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.

My childhood home is still "home", as I still have many friends in the area and zoning laws as well as environmental preserves have kept development from completely overwhelming the place. Still a lot more McMansions than we had growing up, but the basic complexion is recognizable.

I've lived in other places, but the Northeast is my preferred world. Dunno if it's the weather or the landscape or the culture or what. Lived on the Pacific coast for a bit - which was beautiful. But it wasn't *my* ocean. I can't explain it.

On the other hand, I know more than a few George "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet" Baileys who never looked back and for whom home is where they chose to make it.

So, I dunno. I think "home" is an idea - a place of comfort and familiarity - much more than a point on a map. But I can see how people might be attached to a specific patch of ground, especially if it's been in the same hands for generations. I've always wondered how the perceptions on that differ in, say, Western Europe.

I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California. Would it still be "Israel"? Ship of Theseus and all that. I'm pretty sure substances were involved and are at least partially responsible for my lack of recollection.

Since we're on the subject of homes, I'm glad ObWi has found a new one!

I wonder if I'm a born nomad, because I have no sense of an ancestral "home." I've lived in different parts of the country and liked or disliked them for what I found there, not for any larger ethnic or familial attachments.

The yearning for a "true homeland" has been at the foundation of many wars, pogroms, dispossessions, and conquests - either by an entity out to capture the homeland, or the former inhabitants thereof trying to reclaim it.

In dramas where conflict is central to the plot, there is often a scene where the main character loses a loved one - a sibling, usually - to that conflict. And thereafter the main character burns with a special rage for vengeance. I've always considered this either bad plotting, a form of "fridging" or - if it does happen in real life - sheer lunacy. It's a WAR, you nitwit; one that you and your loved one willingly signed up to fight, or even instigated yourselves. People die in wars. Maybe if you didn't want to risk your loved one, you shouldn't have pushed for this battle, eh?

I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland. Maybe the way you lost it was horrific and unjust, but inflicting similar or worse damage on the people currently occupying it (who may not even be the same ones who drove your ancestors off) will only set up another cycle of dispossession-revenge-war. If it were as clearcut as getting rid of the usurpers and replacing them, that would be one thing. But it is seldom that clearcut.

The I/P horror is non clearcut beyond description, with claim to the same bit of land going back generations on one side, centuries on the other, possibly millenia on both sides. At what point do ancestral claims cease to be arguable? One generation? Ten? A thousand? At what point do past atrocities justify, or cease to justify, current and future ones?

Someone once said, "'Home' is where you bury your bone." I've always liked that.

Home is where you make it. Wherever you find yourself, you can bury your bone there.

The think I noticed was that the rhetoric of retribution was about evenly split between End Times dogwhistles and QAnon dogwhistles. Either way, it's pretty clear that I, being an academic, am on the wrong side of the friend/enemy distinction.

I think the potential for some sort of campaign of retribution is very high, and California campuses have to be near the top of that list. I especially worry for my friends and colleagues at UCLA, but I think we all need to be wary.

Well, these are people who have been absolutely hammered with eliminationist propaganda for a generation now. If you can accept the premise the rest flows naturally, despite the lack of names. Anecdotal violence is pumped up to provide examples of the violent left, and that is sufficient for these warriors for Truth and Good. They love the righteous feeling, but will that be enough to pull the trigger when the moment arrives? We will all find out together, because this kind of worldview never stays controlled, only unleashed.

Funnily enough, I only posted that last Klein/Shapiro piece for the preamble about the reaction to Klein's last piece! I didn't even read the Shapiro stuff - I barely knew of his existence until he was interviewed by Andrew Neil, one of our best known rightwing journalists (and ex-editor of the Sunday Times), fearsome and respected enough that BoJo refused to be interviewed by him the last time he ran, and saw Shapiro (obviously completely unaware of who Neil was and his background) responding to his proper questioning by calling him a leftwinger! Andrew Neil merely chuckled and moved on. But it was such an astonishing exhibition of ignorance and arrogance (Shapiro hadn't even bothered to look up who was interviewing him), and such an example of the tendency of these people immediately and brainlessly to label anyone who disagrees with them "leftwing", that I lost any interest in ever hearing anything else from him again. However, I suppose this phenomenon is now so widespread in the US that journalists can't just decide to boycott any politician or commentator who displays it.

i have some minor WP coding experience: i've written a couple of plugins that i use on my own site, and i've tweaked the PHP for some theming things I couldn't get from plugins.

if there's anything specific you need, i could possibly help. or possibly not - WP is large and ever-changing.

I accidentally skipped over a part to go to the dialogue where Klein notes that he had taped his coversation with Shapiro before Kirk's death, so it was wrong for me to link the two.

That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that "the right" saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.

It's the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.

Yes, a preview button would be great if not too troublesome to set up. Otherwise, it's taking me time to get used to the new layout, but no doubt it will get easier with more use.

The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.

WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.