Monthly Archives: July 2024

On Exploration

On Exploration – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words on two books about exploration that I’ve read this summer: Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea, and Michael Palin’s Erebus. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some words on two books about exploration that I’ve read this summer: Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea, and Michael Palin’s Erebus.

I may well be one of a few millennials who regularly watch CBS Sunday Morning. I remember finding it a comforting and calming way to start Sunday when I was little, and now that they publish the stories from each week’s broadcast on YouTube, I tend to watch the program there. So, in April I was excited to see a storyabout Captain Cook was airing on the program. It was an interview with Hampton Sides, an award winning non-fiction writer whose new book The Wide Wide Sea tells the story of Cook’s third and final voyage into the Pacific which left England just days after the thirteen of Britain’s American colonies declared their independence, only returning home again four years later. On this voyage, Cook’s ships the HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery became the first European ships to reach the Hawaiian Islands, where Cook would meet his own demise in February 1779.

I’ve been fascinated by Cook’s voyages for a long time now; his was one of the great explorers whose names I’ve known since childhood. The notion of exploration is intrinsic to our American culture, as a settler society, and Cook’s third voyage was the last time that any of our countrymen participated on a British voyage of exploration as British subjects. Sides makes note that Dr. Benjamin Franklin lobbied his colleagues to provide Cook’s expedition special immunity, and if needed to provide them with safe passage as they conducted their business for the betterment of the scientific knowledge of all humanity. Cook’s voyages have a troubling legacy as they were the forebearers of the later colonists, merchants, and missionaries whose ships soon plied the waters of the Pacific from Arctic to Antarctic. We can learn a great deal then from Cook’s expeditions in how best to interact with other worlds, and what to avoid doing.

I started reading this book on my flight in June from San Francisco to London; I knew I wanted to bring this book with me even though it’s quite large and heavy, there was something about it that struck me as fitting for this trip. I began referring to it as the “Captain Cook Book” with the pun fully intended and when not watching Citizen Kane and The Donut King on that 11 hour flight I opened Hampton Sides’s new book and took in the story of the last full measure of one of the great explorers of the last age of exploration.

When I arrived in London, I tried to visit museums that I hadn’t walked through on my last trip in October. One of these was my old favorite, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. When I lived in the British capital in 2015 and 2016, I often would wander southeast towards Greenwich and take in the baroque architecture of the Old Royal Naval College, now the University of Greenwich, and explore the National Maritime Museum’s exhibits on the colonial and exploratory history of the British. This time, I was surprised to find the museum under renovation, and so the main entrance that faces toward the Thames was closed. Instead, I entered through the back of the building. Yet where I was left wanting more in past visits, this time I was pleasantly surprised at how the galleries were set up to tell the story of Britian’s maritime past. I acknowledged the portraits of Cook in the ground-floor Pacific gallery; yet I was more thrilled to see several uniform coats worn by Lord Nelson, including the coat he wore on his last day at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Even more so, I loved seeing relics from the British Antarctic and Arctic expeditions which included Cook’s third voyage.

The Arctic held an appeal for British navigators because they hoped they might find the fabled Northwest Passage above the top of North America, which would be a quicker route for ships to reach China and Japan without passing through the Spanish and Portuguese controlled waters of South America and the fearsome currents and winds of Cape Horn on Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of South America. Martin Frobisher’s three expeditions to the Arctic between 1576 and 1578 were among the first English voyages to the region in search of the famed passage. Frobisher is known to have brought with him the 1557 second French edition of André Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique and Thomas Hacket’s 1568 English translation of that book The New Founde Worlde, or Antartike on at least one of his Arctic voyages. This, dear reader, is the book that I’ve translated as The Singularties of France Antarctique. (More there to come).

With the Arctic and Antarctic on my mind as I finished my tour of the galleries, I wandered into the gift shop, as one does, and saw they had copies of Michael Palin’s book Erebus, a history of the HMS Erebus which sailed to within both polar circles in the 1830s and 1840s only to disappear in the Arctic ice in the mid-1840s under the command of Sir John Franklin. When this book was first published in 2018, I remember being intimidated by the subject: I knew about the Erebus and her sister-ship the HMS Terror, yet in my mind this sounded more like a history written as a horror novel than anything else, and I’m not one for horror. So, I waited until this sighting of it to buy a copy. I started reading it later that afternoon while taking the Elizabeth line from Canary Wharf back into Central London to Bond Street and was immediately engrossed in the story.

There’s something funny to me about the settings where I start reading books: they become as much a part of my experience and memory of reading those books as the stories themselves. I began reading Judith Herrin’s history of Byzantium on the DLR in mid-summer 2016, and to this day when I glance at it on my shelves or when I’ve taught about Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, I will think not only of that book but also of the DLR elevated line going into Tower Gateway station. In this instance, Palin’s Erebus is connected for me with the darkened-purple hue of the lighting in that Elizabeth line train as we rushed beneath Central London toward the West End.

Now with both books in hand, I proceeded to change my strategy for how I’d read them: I decided that as long as the course which Cook took between 1776 and 1779 mirrored the course that James Clark Ross, captain of the Erebus on its Antarctic expedition between 1839 and 1843, I would go back and forth between each book chapter-by-chapter. That lasted until about Tasmania, where the Erebus first encountered Sir John Franklin, then Lieutenant Governor of the colony, and where Cook and his men had a jolly shore leave before their monumental and historic crossing of the Pacific. What struck me most was how similar these stories felt despite the 70 year gap between their visits to Tasmania. By the time Ross and his crew arrived in Hobart in August 1840, sails were beginning to give way to steam as the main propulsion of ships, and when Erebuswas refitted for its Arctic expedition under Sir John Franklin in 1845, the ship was given an engine from a steam locomotive from the London and Greenwich Railway to help propel it forward into the polar north.

After the two books diverged in their stories I set aside Michael Palin’s Erebus for a while until I finished Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea, wanting to experience his retelling of Cook’s third voyage in its fatal fullness before reading Palin’s retelling of Franklin’s fateful and more mysterious Arctic expedition. This happened around the 16th of July, a mere six days after Hampton Sides gave a talk here in Kansas City about The Wide Wide Sea. As I switched gears from Cook to Franklin, I listened to as many podcasts as I could find about Cook’s third voyage from our local NPR interview with Hampton Sides in conjunction with his talk, to Melvyn Bragg’s episode of In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 about Captain Cook.

I then picked up Michael Palin’s book again and set off with him in the wake of the Erebus and Terror on their voyage north past the Orkneys and Greenland and into the Canadian Arctic. I came into these chapters with a different sort of prior knowledge about this expedition. On 2 September 2014, the CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian icebreaker, sent north by Parks Canada to search for the lost Erebus and Terror discovered one of the ships which a month later was confirmed to be Erebus. I remembered just before moving to London watching an episode of NOVA on PBS about the search, which after reading another article about this expedition in either National Geographic or Smithsonian earlier this year I watched again. So, now instead of a horror-themed history book, I found Palin’s chapters about the Arctic expedition to be a familiar and tragic history of an expedition gone awry.

It struck me in particular that the majority of the last section of his book is devoted to the aftermath of Erebusand Terror’s disappearance entering Baffin Bay in August 1845. Palin told the story as it was uncovered by British and American expeditions sent north to find the lost ships in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. From all that I’ve read and watched about this voyage, it is likely that we will learn more of what truly happened to Erebus, Terror, and their crews in the coming years as more evidence is found in Nunavut, the Canadian territory in whose waters the ships sank.

There is something to be said for how my fascination for exploration has informed my professional life. While I style myself a historian of Renaissance natural history, I am equally focused on exploration, for it was the explorers whose eyewitness accounts first described the animals about which I write. I’ve even considered trying out a voyage of my own just to see what an oceanic crossing by sail is like. What brings both of these books into being in my imagination is that both authors have experienced the places they’re describing and have spent copious time in the archives and libraries and talking to people connected even across the generations to those whose experiences they seek to describe. They truly bring these stories to life. They allow the reader to explore a world now fading, and perhaps even to see how close we are today to Cook, Ross, Franklin, and all their fellow explorers who lived in centuries now gone.

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The Power of Hope

The Power of Hope – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again.

During my senior year at Rockhurst, now a decade ago, the BBC released the first of two seasons of a new series of Shakespearean adaptations called The Hollow Crown. These films were realist adaptations of the Henriad plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V. This first season seized my attention and enthusiasm with a tremendous rush of emotion and energy. I wrote my undergraduate capstone in History on Richard II partially because of how these films brought these medieval kings to life for me. Shakespeare’s plays have tremendous power because they speak to common human emotions and experiences, it’s why they’ve been adapted by Akira Kurosawa from their original settings to feudal Japan, and why contemporary adaptations of these plays can work even if they can also leave something to be desired. 

Yet the greatest power that Shakespeare’s plays have is in their quotability. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers to use the English language to tell his stories, and to breathe life into his characters and settings that the most fantastical magic of The Tempest can seem just as believable as Richard II’s grief at losing his crown. For me, one of the most readily quotable lines in Richard II comes not from the deposed king but from his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who in a speech which Jeremy Irons described as one coming from a medieval Brexiteer, offered the truism “small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.” (2.1). I think of this often in many different situations. Our politics of these last 8 years have been somewhere in the middle, an 8 year on-going rain that may seem tempestuous throughout but that has merely brought together several of these sudden storms in quick succession.

For most of my life I’ve heard the argument that ordinary people like us cannot do much to change our politics, and that we are better off leaving politics to the politicians who are going to do whatever they want anyway. I’ve grown up surrounded by this apathy, yet my parents instilled in me from my earliest memories a duty to vote, to speak up, and to play my part as a citizen. I’ve been frustrated in the last year in particular hearing so many people express a distaste in our electoral system because the two candidates running for President this year were men who seemed so out of touch and disconnected from the rest of us that we felt little need to participate. For myself, by the time the Missouri Primary came around for my party, our candidate had already secured enough delegates to claim victory in the primaries, and so this was one rare election when I didn’t vote.

All of that changed on Sunday at 12:46 Central Time when our sitting President, my party’s candidate, Mr. Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection to the Presidency this November. I was out at lunch with my parents when I got the news, and my first reaction was akin to many: fear at what would come next. I was on the fence whether President Biden should drop out of the race, unsure of what the result might be; and today writing this 48 hours later I’m still afraid of what could happen.

Yet my fears have been assuaged somewhat at the sight of how much the tone of this election has changed in my party. Where so many were going to vote for the President in order to keep his opponent out of power, in the last 48 hours our new candidate, Vice President Harris, has received more than 28,000 offers from ordinary people to volunteer for the Harris campaign. In the last 48 hours the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party have raised about $250 million in donations and pledges; of those donations more than 888,000 were from ordinary people wanting to pitch in. The tone has changed, where before last month’s debate we hoped that President Biden could lead the campaign to eke out enough moderate and undecided voters to support the Democratic side and defeat his opponent, now we have a campaign that is built less on fear of the opposition and more on the hope of what our new candidate has promised to do and could do if elected President.

Hope is far stronger than fear because it offers us a chance to aspire to something greater than ourselves. The most successful President of the twentieth-century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran on a platform of hope and reform that would pull the country out of the Great Depression, and in his later campaigns defend liberal democracy from the growing tides of authoritarianism around the globe. All Democratic Presidents since Roosevelt have been judged on what FDR accomplished, and few have risen close to his level. The two that initially come to mind are Lyndon Banes Johnson, who served as President from President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 until January 1969, and our now outgoing President Biden. In spite of a staunch and illiberal opposition built around the premise that any and all legislation proposed by the Democrats must be blocked at all costs, even at the expense of the country, the Biden-Harris Administration has passed several landmark pieces of legislation which have been notable in the good they’ve done while being overshadowed by claims to the opposite from the clamoring gallery in the opposition.

Most of the Biden-Harris Administration’s major legislation occurred when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress through the end of 2022. These included in 2021: 

  • The American Rescue Plan Act, which injected $1.9 trillion into the economy to help ordinary people during the hard times of the recent pandemic.
  • The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is funding infrastructure improvements and new projects across the country. 

In 2022, Biden signed: 

  • The Inflation Reduction Act, which included elements of his failed Build Back Better Act offering significant investment in climate and energy production and a three-year extension to the Affordable Care Act.
  • The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which is the first major federal gun control law passed in the last three decades.
  • The CHIPS and Science Act which bolstered American semiconductor manufacturing.
  • The Honoring our PACT Act, which expanded health care for US veterans.
  • The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act which adds procedures to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to avoid a repeat of the stalling measures to keep President Biden’s election from being certified during the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
  • The Respect for Marriage Act which codified same-sex and interracial marriage.

And finally, in 2023, Biden signed:

  • The Fiscal Responsibility Act which restrained federal spending during fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and suspended the debt ceiling until the beginning of 2025.
  • In September 2023, he established the American Climate Corps, in a Rooseveltian manner to help facilitate the national response to the climate crisis.

What is striking about Biden’s presidency is both how much he accomplished in four years, and how little most people seem to know about it. He could not fully live up to FDR’s legacy because he lacked the majorities in Congress throughout his term that would have allowed him to continue to pass legislation. In the last month, it’s become clear that what new policies his Administration announces will be intended less as viable things to be accomplished in what remains of his term, but rather as signs of hope of what his party would do if they retain the Presidency and win back a majority in the House of Representatives.

That hope now has a face and a name in the Democratic presumptive nominee for President, Kamala Harris. The Democrats would do well to recognize that the power of hope for the things she and her Administration and the congressional party can accomplish together are far more powerful than all the fears we have of what would happen should the opposition regain the Presidency and retain its majority in the House. Hope is stronger than fear because it builds on the idea that there’s something better to be had than what we now have. I believe that hope is what will unite us together in the Democratic big tent this year to win this election. The circumstances aren’t great, President Biden’s withdrawal was far later in the race than I would have liked, and in the coming weeks I want to write here about the flaws in our electoral systems that his withdrawal lays bare.

This week though, let me leave you with what I believe to be true: the Harris campaign is in a strong place with its grassroots enthusiasm, fundraising, and organizing, and has the legislative accomplishments of the Biden-Harris Administration as a strong foundation for a successful, if unexpected, campaign. It’s up to all of us to hope that she can provide better promises than her opponents, and to act on that hope and vote in November.

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On Political Violence

On Political Violence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I feel compelled by this past weekend’s events to write about the follies of political violence. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I feel compelled by this past weekend’s events to write about the follies of political violence.

On Saturday evening, I was making dinner for a friend and I to share when I received the first notification from the Washington Post that something had happened at a rally held by former President Trump in Pennsylvania. We first heard that that something was a shooting as we were starting dessert. The evening turned from genial conversation in my family’s dining room to tuning into NBC’s coverage to learn as much as we could at that early moment. What transpired, as far as I’m aware at time of writing, is that a single shooter firing from a nearby rooftop shot at the former President, striking him in the top of his right ear in what was clearly an assassination attempt. This is the first time an American President has been shot since Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981, and so the first in my lifetime. We quickly saw the film of the former President being removed from the stage by the Secret Service, and only a little later did we see the actual shooting itself, albeit on RTÉ’s Instagram feed rather than on NBC.

Considering the level of senseless gun violence in this country, and the bellicose rhetoric of the former President and his allies, I’m not surprised that something like this happened. I remember well how the conservative press were using bull’s eye targets in their graphics on TV over the faces of Democratic elected officials whose seats they wanted to target in the 2010 Midterms, and how that contributed to the assassination attempt against Gabby Giffords, the former Representative of Arizona’s 8th congressional district. Things were toned down after that shooting thirteen years ago, but the rhetoric has increased in the years since, especially since 2015 when the 2016 Presidential primary races began.

I feel that political violence ought to be considered in the same vein as the concept of just war and the practice of capital punishment. Can we reasonably assert a right to use violence to influence the politics of a society? It has certainly been done time and time again. Just this Spring, I was engrossed in Apple TV’s recreation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln on 14 April 1865 in the series Manhunt. The Civil War is a good place to ponder these questions, when David Brooks of the New York Times interviewed Steve Bannon just before he reported to prison on charges of Contempt of Congress over his refusal to appear before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, he brought up Lincoln’s call for restoring national unity in his second inaugural address, Bannon would not accept any such arguments, fixating instead on Lincoln’s decision to engage in the civil war with the rebellious southern states, referring to our 16th President as “a military dictator” for his actions and the actions of the military during that war.

I was deeply disturbed reading Bannon’s responses to these questions, because though we may both be Irish Americans who were raised in Catholic schools, I come from Illinois and have always seen Mr. Lincoln as a hero, as longtime readers and listeners to this publication are well aware. What disturbed me most was that this moment when these words of reconciliation, which matched what I’ve read of Lincoln’s plans postwar to engage fully in reconstruction rather than retribution, that Bannon’s reaction was belligerent and unwavering. 

For decades now the cries of “no compromise!” have rang out in our politics. I remember a friend in high school telling me that there are no moderates, only conservatives and liberals, and you are a friend to one side and an enemy to the other. I was shocked then too to hear such rhetoric from a friend because at that time we were on opposite sides. Political violence occurs because we allow ourselves to be riled up into a frenzy to the point that we believe it is justifiable to act violently against our neighbors, our countrymen and women, our fellow humans. I have a very hard time with the concept of a just war that is taught by my Church, though again in the context of the Union aims during the Civil War, I can readily see how preserving the Union and ending slavery were justified. I believe a just war needs a strong moral bedrock for it to be justifiable. We cannot run out crying “Deus vult! God wills it!” and proclaim any old brawl a just war.

The first time I was challenged to consider these questions was also in high school, about a year before that conversation mentioned in the last paragraph. In my sophomore year, I took a combined honors world history and world literature course, taught by two teachers in their first year. Our literature teacher assigned us to read Eli Wiesel’s novel Dawn, in which the main character, Elisha, is a Holocaust survivor who’s moved to the British Mandate of Palestine and joined the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group fighting to drive the British from the region to establish a Jewish state. The book covers the early morning hours when Elisha is preparing to execute a captured British officer, who is to be shot at dawn. My assignment was to write an essay of my own saying how I would have acted, would I have carried out the execution or would I have let the captive man live?

The essay I submitted was one of the rare essays I ever earned an F on. I wrote that to take a life is not in our rights but should be left to God alone, so I would not know how to make that decision. At sixteen, I tried to find a middle way, to fall back on my faith as a means of avoiding making such a tough decision. Today though I would choose to reprieve the captive, to let him live. When I visited the remains of the Dachau camp in the Munich suburbs in January 2020, I was struck by the thought that everyone involved, the captors and the captives, the murderers and the victims, were all at their core humans, and at one point in their lives they were all innocent, helpless, and defenseless as infants. Since then I’ve noticed more of this in people I pass on the street, where just as I still in some ways imagine myself as I was when I first recognized my own consciousness as a very young child, so too I can readily imagine others in those perhaps purer moments of life before we are weighed down by our anger and fears and pain, by our suffering and sorrow and grief.

So often, political violence is unnecessary and unwarranted; a choice made by someone on their own, an inflection point in history when the decisions of the individual can change the whole world for the worse. In more pop-culture questions about history, one will often hear people ask, “If you could go back in time and could stop Hitler or Stalin, would you kill them?” I for one prefer the way Hitler was handled on Doctor Who, when in the episode titled “Let’s Kill Hitler,” the man merely ended up being shoved into a closet.We will likely not know much more of the motives of the man who shot the former President on Saturday evening for some time, and the best thing we can do is let the investigation continue in its own pace. I do not wish death on anyone, that is a horrible thing to do. Even if the acts of some are so heinous that they may seem to be due such an extreme and ultimate punishment, I challenge you to consider what condemning or killing them would do? What benefit does it hold? And how would it change you?

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Utopia Lost

Utopia Lost – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I have a short story for you that I wrote three years ago after the death of a dear friend. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I have a short story for you that I wrote three years ago after the death of a dear friend.

How does one convince a civilization to accept it’s moved beyond the known and into an entirely unknown and new age? How does one convince oneself of this terrifying and very real fact? It takes loss, grief, and sorrow for humanity to recognize and embrace change, world wars, revolutions, or sudden bouts of violence to remind us that time continues ever onward. Yet for me, one guy living in this world moving along, strong, pulsing like the tempo in the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, it takes something even more personal for me to admit one act in my life is ending, and that after a turbulent period of intermission that another will shortly begin. It often takes moving out of my skin, out of the comforts of my upper middle-class normality, my tree-lined block in my beautiful neighborhood in the heart of my city, out into places I’d never really desired to visit. And yet, after she died, I found the need to flee far from home, like Gilgamesh seeking a cure for death itself in the lands beyond the water.

These thoughts danced through my mind as I stood atop the rim of a canyon, a thousand miles from home, in the high deserts of the Colorado Plateau, exposed and in the open; a danse macabre moving out of place in the desert setting of a Dali or Georgia O’Keeffe painting. I was struck by the silence of the scene, the extreme quietude that reminded me of many a hymn and prayer the Jesuits and Franciscans alike offered about finding God in all things. Nature certainly is God’s canvas, just as van Gogh understood it when he painted his own vision of that Creation, and just as I, a guy trying to understand grief had heard but never fully appreciated until I saw it for myself. The starkness of the desert, the browns, greys, and dusty oranges, seemed so different from the many shades of green, the vibrant spectrum of flowers that decorate the parks and gardens of my city. Yet it was there, in that environment, so far from home, that I felt drawn to. I’d been in the desert before, in Arizona, and found it lacking in beauty, seeming to be hostile, dangerous by nature, unbefitting for someone of my origins or health. Yet this desert, as alien as it was to me, seemed gentler in a way, less severe, more textured in its variety. Here where the Yampa River flows into the Green River, on federally protected land, the wilderness seemed to sing with all its resplendent harmony. Nature cried out on the wind as if to Elijah in a whisper, in its own language, its own song. I could recognize it, but I had a hard time understanding it. I, a city guy, knew only the manicured nature of my urban homeland. I knew the landscape that had been remade in the image of the Eastern cities and their European forebearers, a landscape of verdant trees and gardens which conquered the native prairie grasses in the wake of the settlers who conquered the native peoples who had called those prairies home.

I knew my home was artificial, and so it was not fit to help me through my sorrows. When she died, laying there on the veterinarian’s table, her face was calm, at peace; she looked as though she were having the best of dreams. Long suffering from a lack of tears, even when I wanted them, I felt as if I cried enough to fill the stormy Atlantic and more. She was my dearest of friends, the one who was always first to comfort me, the one who would go on adventures with me through the parks and along the trails. She was my companion at the sidewalk cafés, her with her water bowl and a couple treats, me with my tea and a pastry or two. Neither of our lives would’ve been possible without our artificial world, we were both born in an industrial, global, civilization, created out of the migrations of countless dogs and people from throughout the globe who would carry out a few begats until we were born in our own times. Yet even then, in her long life, her sixteen years of naps and treats and play, she saw our world change again from that industrial world of our forebearers into a world of the digital, a world where ideas were spread not on paper but on screens, where her favorite toys would inevitably come not only from the local pet shop and groomers, but often from some distant warehouse, a distribution center built to cater to the needs of millions, even billions of “consumers,” as we’d become known. To them, we were just numbers, her existence was acknowledged by the fact we purchased from the dog section, but her gifts inevitably were counted among my numbers. We’d created this world where if we really wanted to, and had the means, we could ensure that we would never wont for anything again. We’d created a world where instead of settling for the same old cooking shows that she loved to watch (she knew the names of all the foods), we could now tune into cooking shows from Europe, as I learned French, hoping she might pick those food words up too. I dreamed of a reality where we would always be together, where she would be as wonderful and dear a friend to my kids in the coming decades as she has been to me. Yet time marches on, and with it we age. Unlike Gilgamesh, I knew I couldn’t stop death, like the Swedish knight, I knew even if I kept the game going, eventually Death would reach checkmate, yet in my dreams at least she was still with me, still snoring next to me every night, still leading me from one blade of grass to another around the neighborhood as she sniffed for traces of her dog friends’ adventures.

In my dreams then, I hoped I might hear a familiar pattering of her paws on the rocks leading to the canyon rim, only to turn about and see her trotting over to me, tail wagging with glee. Perhaps a part of me truly believed if I went out into the desert, I might just see her again, if only in a greater clarity in my mind’s eye, in my memories. I stood there on the canyon rim, and listened to the silence, hoping dearly she was coming, wishing she could’ve seen that sight as I was seeing it that day. I could hear her snorting, and smelled that she needed a bath, something she was often proud of, though never appreciative of when she was bathed. Yet I knew, all too well, I wouldn’t see her again until I too had crossed the water, however distant that day would be. As much as I spent our days together worrying about the world around us, and what might well be beyond what we know, she spent those same days curious about few things, simple things, but most of all she was sure about love, and its importance and meaning. I understood it in those last moments before she died as she kissed my face for a final time. It was clear to me that as much as I could speak French when in Paris or Montréal, so too I could communicate with her, by letting her do “gross” things like jump on my chest and kiss my chin, or listen to her growl and whine at me, to let her have her say. I would reply each time, telling her “I love you,” and meaning it. Even if I was leaving the house to shovel the snow in the winter, I would look her in the eyes and say, “I love you,” so that she knew it well. She was as innocent as she was mischievous, her favorite game was running around the house with the end of a roll of toilet paper in her mouth, decorating the rooms and halls with that ribbon of white. It annoyed my family to no end, but I could see she was having so much fun doing it.

The desert, a place I traditionally thought of as dead, hot, lonely, seemed full of life, and while I could not see birds fluttering around the far rim of the canyon, I knew they were there. I could feel the breeze as if it were in part propelled across the chasm by the fluttering of many little pairs of wings beyond. It was as though they were singing their own hymn to being alive, to the radiant Sun in the blue sky, to the scrub and the rocks laid down there over millions of years. This place had seen many ages even before the coming of the first humans. To it, my little artificial urban island in the seas of prairie grass must have seemed both a cute human attempt at recreating nature in humanity’s own image, and a threat to the current vitality of the wilderness itself. Far overhead, the trails of passenger jets remained the only sign of the civilization beyond the canyonland before me. Sitting in those planes, focused on evading humanity’s worst bogeyman, a specter named boredom, the passengers surely didn’t notice what wilderness was below them, and if they did look out the windows, from 30,000 feet they would well have been at a loss to truly appreciate what they were speeding over on their way to the great cities of this country and beyond.

I thought of Elijah, hearing the Voice of God in the faintest whisper of the wind, and imagined what the Divine might say to me. Quickly though, unlike other daydreamed dialogues, I found myself at a loss for imagined words and banter, unsure of how to speak for such a concept as an omnipotent and omniscient God. Maybe then that’s the real beauty of Elijah’s experience, he heard God in a whisper because we humans can’t really understand what it even means to hear such a Voice. I tried fantasizing about it even more though, doggedly not wanting to give up too easily, and found myself afraid, scared at the idea of even hearing such words, the power and presence they would command would be the same that creates realities. The idea itself was but a micro fraction of a particle of a grain of sand when compared to the consequences of the Divine. My importance was duly minute, yet without my imaginations would I really recognize any of this? Would I hold out hope that my dog recently deceased would appear to me wanting to play there on the canyon rim knowing all I know about how this reality operates? In the great cosmic totality, I began to wonder how much her life really had meant. A little eleven-pound dog, who couldn’t put on a fierce face to anyone, or serve as much of a herder. If anything, she was best at being a friend, the best of friends. 

If her life had any consequence, I realized, it was in loving everyone and everything she met, in that unblemished innocence, that unconditional affection for life itself. She served as a role model of sorts for all the rest of us, especially for me, having lived with her for so many years. Even someone as little as her could plant a seed of love and charity in the minds of others that one day could restore the Utopia that seemed lost to me at her death. I stood there as the day continued on, and through the setting of the Sun, and watched as Venus, the evening star, rose overhead, bearing behind it the curtain of darkness that is the twilight and eventual nightfall. I was soon laying on my back on the canyon rim, not caring about the dust or the bugs, just awestruck at the sights above me as one star after another appeared in the darkening sky. The ancients believed the dead could be found among the stars, though my own ancestors passed down a belief of an earthly paradise on an island of eternal youth, something which as skeptical and scientific our world becomes, I still find myself believing in. If for nothing else, that light in the darkness of even the emptiest of cloud covered nights has kept me warm company in my thoughts. From that far distant island I thought I could hear her calling, her bark and wagging tail inviting me to come, but in my own time, not too soon. Even in this most dystopian of days, I thought, tears streaming down my cheeks again like on the day she died, there is still hope to be found, utopia restored, after all behind every cloud glows the light of some distant star. I laid there looking up into the starry night, through my tears singing a song I used to sing to her, hoping, believing, knowing somewhere she was listening.

Someday, however soon or far, I knew I’d see her again, once the boatman calls upon me. Funny enough, for someone who enjoys life as much as I do, the simple belief that I will see my dearest and sweetest of friends again is enough for me to look forward to that reunion across the water on the far shore.

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An Election Year Independence Day

An Election Year Independence Day – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I’m writing to you with this week’s holiday in mind, with some of my aspirations and hopes for America. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I’m writing to you with this week’s holiday in mind, with some of my aspirations and hopes for America.

While I have colonial ancestors who settled New Haven, Connecticut and Newark, New Jersey, and who at the time of the American Revolution were living in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, I more closely associate with my recent immigrant ancestors. I’m one of those hyphenated-Americans who holds onto elements of a culture and identity that transcends the Atlantic and provides connections not only to this country but to the places where my ancestors came from. One aspect of the political philosophy of American nationalism that I don’t agree with says that you have to conform to a particular American identity when you come here. My ancestors did that, to varying degrees, and I’m more American than anything else, yet it’s all those other elements that give our Americanness its richness of character.

So, when I think of the music that embodies the soul of America, it’s music written by a fellow hyphenated-American, Aaron Copland, the dean of American classical music. When I tried my hand at musical composition in college, I wrote a four-movement trio sonata that told the story of a voyage from Ireland to America by St. Brendan and his monks in the sixth century. My addition to the fable was to have the tone of the music switch from being very Irish in the first and second movements to taking after Copland’s sound in the third and especially the fourth movement as they reached this side of the water. I’ve long wanted to write a blog post all about my admiration for Copland’s music, but thanks to the copyrights on his recordings I’m waiting for a few more decades. For now, go listen to Appalachian Spring and Rodeo after you’re done listening to, or reading, this.

Copland’s music speaks to me now in 2024 especially as we approach an election year. This is the most sacred task that we American citizens fulfill in our obligations to our republic: we do our duty by voting for whom we want to represent us on all levels of government, and on the host of ballot measures found further down-ballot. This election feels far more pivotal than any we’ve seen in my lifetime. For context, I was born exactly one month before the elder President Bush stood aside for President Clinton. While I may have disagreed with the policies of both Presidents Bush, they still seemed to be decent men. It’s hard to say that this year about one of the two candidates who flooded Thursday night’s debate on CNN with so many half-truths and outright lies that the network did nothing to check live on air. I was baffled watching it to think that the network’s executives and news directors didn’t choose to lay out better safeguards considering this is the same man whose rhetoric and refusal to admit his loss in 2020 led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

When I think of a President who I want leading our country, I think of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.I want someone who best represents the best ideals of America, someone who can speak with all of us and for all of us. I hope for someone who can work with Congress and the states to execute legislation that will lead to an overall improvement in our national well-being. I was disappointed to see the President perform so poorly during the debate on Thursday, yet of our choices this year he is the closest to embodying that ideal of the common man.

This year’s election is not politics as usual, there are deep intrinsic questions at stake over the future of our country and what sort of government we want to have. I was deeply unsettled to read the transcript of David Brooks’s recent interview with Steve Bannon, who Brooks called a Trotsky-figure for the MAGA movement. From the interview, and from the way Bannon positioned himself as a leader of that movement, he made it clear that there is no room for communication with their political opponents, who Bannon termed in a far more affrontive manner as their enemies. That is the most essential element of good government, something that all the great political philosophers recognized: we need to be able to communicate with each other and grow together as one body politick made up of a great many parts. I’ve seen the same problem on the left as on the right, a disinterest in listening and in compromising to achieve a higher ideal or a common good that will benefit everyone. Yet the greater threat is coming from the faction who’ve gained enough sway that they now control their party and their leader is again a candidate for the Presidency.

This Independence Day, Americans around the globe will celebrate the invention of our republic from an ideal written on paper during a hot and humid Philadelphia summer 248 years ago. I’ve heard it said that that was the first time that anyone thought to write down the idea that “all men are created equal.” Think about that for a moment: that was the first time that the notion of universal equality, or better universal equity, had ever been considered. The President is the President, and I respect him for serving in that office as I feel respect for the office itself. It is a monument to self-sacrifice when done well, and a trap of self-aggrandizement when the oath is taken for the wrong reasons. Yet when a sitting President leaves the office on Inauguration Day, they may still be Former President, but they are now again just another citizen who’s offered to carry that mantle in the relay until the next candidate will take it up.

The burdens of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States are greater than one person can carry on their own. The office holder ought to have us, we the people who come first in the Constitution, supporting them as long as they keep their oath, and do their duty for as long as their term lasts. It is a humbling thing to serve in such an august role. It is something that truly should not be taken lightly, or brought on by a candidate for any other reason than for service.

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