JUST ASKING: Watching the Olympics sporadically, we notice that the women beach volleyball players wear skintight two-piece Speedo-style swimsuits with micro-mini bottoms. My bride and I were wondering, is there any practical reason for this? There's an obvious aesthetic reason. But is there any aerodynamic rationale for the skimpy suits? If so, it would seem to be contradicted by the ball cap and shades all the players wear. There's a protection and comfort factor here too. Would YOU ordinarily want to be wearing a bikini if you had to throw yourself headlong onto the sand from time to time? And the women have to pause after each point to unwedge the suit from their butts.

At the same time, many women swimmers have gone to the bodysuits that come down below the knee. All in all, I believe the aesthetic reason, the hot-girls-in-bikinis factor, is the most logical explanation for these outfits. If one was really conspiratorial-minded, one might even ask why Norway has a women's beach volleyball team in the first place.

WEST JAMAICA, MOUNTAIN MAMA: Now playing: A borrowed CD, Toots and the Maytals, Time Tough: The Anthology. I knew of Toots but never spun one of his discs until today. Wow, he's good.

Toots does a cover of "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Dear God, I hadn't thought about this song in years! It fits right in with my West Virginia nostalgia theme of earlier in the week. The John Denver version came out when I was living in Charleston, I would have been six or seven, and the radio played it about twice an hour. I had the song memorized in no time, and loved to sing it as much as the radio loved to play it. It made us feel like we were from somewhere. I'm not sure John Denver had ever set foot in West Virginia when he recorded the song, but I'm pretty sure he hustled over to give some concerts and cash in on the state pride.

However, I am obliged to tell you today that Toots blows John Denver right off the island.

BUT... BUT... THEY DEMOTED TRENT LOTT!: The GOP really cracks me up with some of its outreach efforts to minorities.

Pandagon has a pithy pronouncement on the absurdity of the Alan Keyes campaign for Senate in Illinois:

It really says something about the racial consciousness of the two parties when the Democrats are running a clearly post-racial candidate who happens to be black and the Republicans, giving in to the worst of token politics, decide their best hope is to grab a black guy from across the country. Obama, thankfully, is about more than hue; Keyes' entrance into the race is about nothing but.

(I suppose it’s a mild defense of the Illinois GOP to observe they had no good options, and felt they had to get somebody with name recognition to make up for the campaign’s late start. But still, Alan Keyes?)

In “Blackwashing”, Joshua Holland reports about a black conservative group called Project 21 that was supposed to be profiled on C-SPAN recently.

But then a funny thing happened: the African-American spokesperson for Project 21 caught a flat on the way to the studio, and the group's director had to fill in. And he was white.

In other words, a single instance of car trouble seems to have wiped out the entire black presence in this “major” “black” organization. Holland goes on to discuss Ward "Segregation Need Not Be Racist" Connerly, Alan Keyes, and other black GOP sock puppets.

Along the same lines, Slate's Tim Noah offers “The GOP Minstrel Show: A white tycoon in blackface race-baits Teresa Heinz Kerry.” Admittedly, I have a teeny-tiny problem with THK calling herself African-American. But the disingenuousness of this corporate welfare queen Patrick Rooney (he needs a nickname, P-Dog or something) is stunning.

Despite the fact that all five African-American Republicans are certain to have front-row seats in New York in two weeks, don’t believe for a minute that the GOP is giving more than token attention to courting the black vote. The goal of making mischief for the Democrats is to depress the black vote. Watch out for much dirtier tactics aimed at black voters closer to Election Day.

CAMPING PICTURE #1: My little darlings.

L-R: Zuzu, Xaviera, and Yolanda.

THE HACK GAP:

http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/08/hack_gap.html

Matthew Yglesias, writing about the "hack gap" in response to what I gather was his frustration after being a guest on a right-wing talk radio show. The right has more hacks than the left -- more people who stay "on message" to an intellectually dishonest degree. I think he's right. It's what happens when one party is anti-intellectual.

WEDNESDAY'S CHILD: This Slate piece by Debra Dickerson is well worth reading. I assert strongly that I am not a racist, but without a doubt I have racist thoughts and impulses that I try to suppress, and occasionally fail to. And it sure would be a boon to civilization if we could talk about our prejudices and preconceptions more openly.

HELLO MUDDA, HELLO FODDA: The family and I are just back from a trip to West Virginia. We spent two nights camping at Bluestone State Park, near Hinton.

We spent Saturday night at the Econo Lodge in Ghent. It is located right next door to Nikki’s Adult Entertainment – perfect for me, my wife, and three young children. (Booking hotels online is a great thing, however you can get a surprise now and then.)

Sunday we hiked at Grandview Park, part of the New River Gorge National River. I have a patch of poison ivy on my right leg as a souvenir.

I’m not actually complaining; it was a good old fashioned family vacation, with just a little boredom and discomfort thrown in to heighten the adventure. The way we camp is “behind the car,” not particularly strenuous, but we did sleep in tents and brave overnight temperatures in the 40s. By mistake we wound up in the RV campground, with electric hookups that we didn't need, but it meant we had a nice big site to spread out on. As usual, we forgot to pack some stuff, including plates to eat from and the tarp that covers the top of the tent and keeps the rain out, so I had to make an emergency shopping run. There had been rain the day we got there, which ruined our poor fire-making efforts that first night (thank goodness our neighbors in Raleigh lent us their propane stove), but on Day Two we succeeded in having a fire and toasting marshmallows—a key part of the camping ritual. We swam, which was cold but tolerable. We hiked some, and my sweet wife let me take one evening hike by myself with no little girls slowing me down. We saw some nice songbirds. We saw deer at both Bluestone and Grandview; in fact, the deer are so tame they don’t really bother to run and hide when they see you.

And Saturday and Sunday turned out to be a nice family reunion. We saw my dad, my grandmother, and the aunts and uncles and cousins on my dad’s side, including the ones who live in New Mexico whom we only see every few years. The young cousins got reacquainted, and I got to take my girls to see places and do activities that I enjoyed in my childhood, which is good narcissistic fun for me.

On some future summer vacation, I want to bike and camp along the Greenbrier River Trail. I just have to tie up a couple loose ends, namely buy bikes and teach the kids how to ride them. A big part of my heart is in the Appalachians; even though I haven't lived there fulltime since I was seven years old, it nourishes me to spend time there. I enjoy the contact with nature, and I enjoy learning more of the history of a region that is still a frontier in many ways.

I might like to attempt a longish piece of writing about vacations. We have taken an interesting variety of them in the last year. Due to unusual and advantageous circumstances, we’ve gotten to take a couple of trips that would normally be out of reach, luxury-wise. At the other end of the spectrum is camping, which my wife and I took up as an economical mode of family travel, but which is a cherished lifestyle for some people. We also took a trip to Tennessee this spring that was a promotion, requiring us to sit through a sales pitch for vacation time shares. Remind me never to put myself through that again, but I was somewhat intrigued by the notion of vacation as a commodity, like gasoline or electricity, that we all need in order to fulfill the American dream. This company used a point system whereby a customer could choose either lots of cheap vacations or a few swanky ones, or some combination. But the assumption was that everybody should spend some time at a resort every year, and it’s a good idea to secure an ample supply of R&R well in advance.

I need a little practice with our new digital camera and with Blogger commands, but I’ll try to put up a picture or two later.

TODAY'S READING: The current New Yorker has this profile of Christian stand-up comic Brad Stine. There is also an interview with the writer of the article, Adam Green, in the New Yorker's Online Only section.

This is worth reading if you're interested in the Christian entertainment market as a phenomenon. If not, not. I'm not a consumer of Creed albums or Left Behind books, but too many people consume them for me to easily dismiss them. Figuring out their appeal plays amusing tricks with my categories of liberal & conservative, cool & square.

Maybe this is just the story of a guy who struggled and finally succeeded in finding a market niche. Brad Stine stopped doing gigs at comedy clubs and began doing them at Promise Keepers meetings and other Christian venues, and found that he went down better at 8 pm with Diet Pepsi drinkers than he ever did at 1 am in front of a crowd of drunks. Stine is emblematic of the way that many churches and parachurch organizations, trying to stay relevant to young people and others in our 100-plus channel mediaverse, are learning to deliver a Christian message in a non-corny package. Brad Stine is distinctive because his comedy heroes are George Carlin and Bill Hicks, but he grafts their edginess and truth-telling attitude to a much different political and spiritual orientation. God and Mammon have joined forces to bring this brand of tasty-but-wholesome culture product to an audience. Christian music and book publishing operations are state-of-the-art. The William Morris Agency (I learned from this article) has a Christian entertainment division.

But the article is rich in details, and who can say if the Lord or the devil is in them? Brad Stine is the child of divorce, of a devoutly Christian mother and a father who toiled on the fringes of show business, as a singer and carnival-sideshow performer. Brad seems both angry at his father for abandoning him and driven to fulfill Dad's dreams of showbiz success. He has consciously departed from the mainstream comedy career path, yet he resents "liberal Hollywood bias" and crows that if he gets to perform at "the stinkin' GOP convention" (which he might--his people are talking to their people) then the Tonight Show and the sitcom producers will have to take notice of him. Brad's wife is the former girlfriend of the drummer from Dokken, and she thinks the two men, the Christian comic and the heavy metal musician, are much alike in their road warrior lifestyle and creative temperament. Both Mr. and Mrs. Stine use the adjective "stinkin'" as an obvious conversational substitute for "fucking." So the line between the sacred and the secular often seems to vanish.

I still have questions. Stine is obviously downplaying religion and highlighting politics in his standup act, trying to position himself for a role in the Republican campaign this year. So how seriously are we supposed to take his convictions? I'm guardedly in favor of the church's effort to update its worship style and engage popular culture. But doesn't that put one in the camp of the liberal relativists? How can you be a Biblical fundamentalist, while being engaged in updating the Gospel for the MTV generation? Is it all part of Stine's daddy complex? Caveat emptor, dear reader, but I'm bookmarking this one.

FAILING TO PLAN = what, class?: Slate doesn’t publish a sports feature every day, but when they do, it’s usually fun reading. I may resolve to post a commentary on every “sports nut” piece they run…

Today’s, by Jeremy Derfner, is “Coach Lit: How to Succeed the Riley way. And the Coach K Way. And the Shanahan Way…”

Oh my God, this guy is so right. First, his overall mission of skewering coach lit is a worthy one. The word “leadership” appears in the name of the office I work for, so I suppose I should take the field of leadership literature seriously, but the fact that the field seems to rely heavily on the wisdom of basketball and football coaches, makes me dismiss the whole enterprise as utter bullshit. This is unfair, I know, but it seems like every leadership talk I’ve ever heard has climaxed with a Vince Lombardi quote. A man I know who teaches leadership at Duke’s Public Policy Institute, a good and smart guy, has a refrain about “making the .240 hitters into .250 hitters.” That’s a perfectly sound organizational concept, raising the performance of mediocre workers, but distilling it into a sports metaphor cheapens it for me. I’m as big a sports fan as you are likely to meet; my head is crowded with baseball trivia and the names of each NBA champion in the shot-clock era. But I’m deeply skeptical of sports as a mine of generally applicable wisdom. It’s a diversion, people--a form of entertainment. Aaron Spelling and Marty Scorsese don’t write leadership tracts; neither should basketball honchos.

And speaking of the latter, Mr. Derfner mentions Coach K (I’ve been following his career for 20 years but damn if I can spell his last name), specifically Coach K’s recent flirting with leaving Duke University and taking a big-money job with the Los Angeles Lakers. K kept Duke and the entire ACC basketball audience holding its breath for the long July 4th weekend, wondering if he would accept the L.A. job offer. That was an interesting study in human nature, I thought; so many sports reporters and fans leapt to the conclusion that K would take the Lakers’ money and run. In retrospect, we all should have known better. What Coach K has at Duke is better than money, he has demi-god status. He gets a faculty slot at Duke business school; he gets his own institute for leadership and ethics; he gets distinguished lecturer gigs at the Divinity School; he hosts the Duke Children’s Hospital radiothon. His financial package is no disgrace either; it dwarfs that of the university president (actually, President Brodhead is ranked about number 10 on the list of Duke salaries; a bunch of medical center bigwigs exceed his tax bracket as well. Supply and demand, baby.). The marketing value of the Duke basketball program to Duke University, in real terms like TV money and merchandising and the pool of prospective students, is massive. For building that program, for amassing a championship record without disgracing the academic reputation of the place, Coach K is the de facto mayor of Durham and the goddam grand wizard of college basketball. His perch at Duke confers riches, intellectual respectability, heavyweight celebrity, and something akin to sainthood.

Here is an observation that I haven’t seen elsewhere. I don’t think Coach K engineers these job offers from the NBA; he probably gets feelers every year. But he can dismiss the inquiries quietly, or he can play them to the hilt. About 12 or so years ago, when Nan Keohane was new in the Duke president’s job, she called Coach on the carpet over some matter; I think it was a summer exhibition tour of Europe that she thought was a little extravagant. K’s response basically was, I’m sorry you feel that way, Dr. Keohane, and by the way, I have the Portland Trailblazers on hold on the other line. I don’t believe for a minute he was tempted to jump to Portland; that was a power play. And to both parties’ credit, the two K’s (Krzyzewski and Keohane) developed a good working relationship. But I find it curious that this Lakers job offer coincided, pretty much to the day, with the arrival of Nan Keohane’s successor. Krzyzewski (ok, I looked it up) emerges from his dalliance with the Lakers clutching a contract extension and a powerful message to Dick Brodhead about what’s what and who’s who. I don’t fault the guy for strengthening his position; that’s his right. I just offer it as an observation on our local demi-god.

Come to think of it, the current issue of Sports Illustrated has a good profile of pro football coach Bill Belichick (only subscribers can get it online). I suspect a business exec or other leader could get some valuable lessons out of it, namely: Pay attention to detail, work hard, don’t let success go to your head. And don’t take time out to write a frickin’ leadership manual.

THE "FRONT-ROOM DEAL": After I said yesterday that I don’t read The Nation anymore, I spent some time at their website today, and read this column by Jonathan Schell.

Schell points out that at the Boston convo, much was made of John Kerry’s Vietnam service, but little was made of his post-Vietnam antiwar activism, from whence his prestige in the Democratic Party originates. There’s a disconnect between rank-and-file Democrats’ strong opposition to the Iraq war, and the convention’s strategic decision not to state that opposition directly: "[T]he party has made what appears to be a tactical decision to hide its faith… The Democrats are united but have concealed the cause that unites them." Schell worries that the strategy could backfire in one of two ways. One is that "[i]f strong and wrong is really the winning formula, Bush may be the public’s choice." The second is that a President Kerry may be cornered by his tough Commander-in-Chief persona, and find himself unable to change course in Iraq.

This is carping from the progressive base of the party. Happily, little of this carping was evident in Boston. But we’re going to hear some during the fall campaign, and we’ll hear a lot of it if Kerry takes office next year.

I don’t share Schell’s worry about the campaign strategy. I think it's the right one. The GOP is eager to accuse Kerry of planning to cut and run on Iraq, so he has to guard against that charge. And while I opposed the invasion, since it happened I believe we have an obligation, both moral and pragmatic, to stabilize Iraq. I’m sure Kerry acknowledges Colin Powell’s "Pottery Barn rule:" We broke Iraq, now we own it, at least for a short while. I don’t have many answers for how the U.S. should extricate itself from Iraq, but I think about a couple of things: One, we probably need more troops on the ground, not fewer, for a short time. Two, simply internationalizing the peacekeeping force—taking the Stars and Stripes off, putting the UN logo on--will take a lot of the pressure off. Both these things seem to be part of Kerry’s plan, and the second one only a Kerry Administration can accomplish, since Bush is so vilified and discredited abroad.

Of course, Kerry is being deliberately vague about the details, and I may be guilty of wishful thinking and interpreting Kerry’s vagueness to my own liking. And I think Schell gets at an important truth: Many Democrats feel bound to campaign one way and govern another. That's an untenable situation, long-term.

This piece by Tom Engelhardt of the Nation Institute is well-done too. I ripped off the title of this post from him. I mean, one could dismiss it as more hand-wringing from the hardcore left, but I don’t. I’m cautiously optimistic about Kerry’s chances for victory in November, but 2005 holds plenty of challenges, for Kerry and the Democrats as a whole.

YOUNGEST LIVING SOCIALIST TELLS ALL: The Kerry-Edwards nuptials in Boston were a rollicking good time. The whole extended family came and made nice for the sake of the happy couple. It's a shame the honeymoon can't last forever...

Jeanne d’Arc at Body and Soul points us to this column by Naomi Klein, published in the both the Guardian and The Nation. The damn thing has me tied up in knots. Ms. Klein’s thang is economic justice and anti-globalism. I sense that her politics and mine agree about 98%, and that this is a case where I get way too emotional about the 2% deviation, but consarn it, this piece irks me.

Klein’s basic thesis is that Bush hating is a surface phenomenon. Bush and his gang are crude, unenlightened, perhaps a little quirky. But on principle, Kerry and Bush are equally atrocious. Leftists err by making Dubya the personification of all their problems, when Kerry is just as complicit in the drug war, free trade, divvying up the spoils of war in Iraq, and other immoral U.S. policies. Klein never mentions Ralph Nader directly, but it’s the old Ralph refrain that both major candidates are equally compromised by special interests:

"The main difference will be that as Kerry pursues these brutal policies, he
will come off as intelligent, sane and blissfully dull. That's why I've joined
the Anybody But Bush camp: only with a bore such as Kerry at the helm will we
finally be able to put an end to the presidential pathologising and focus on the
issues again."

Yes, what we need is a nice boring president who will not blind us to the reality of corporatist evil. Strangely, Klein seems to regard the "innocuous" Clinton years (I swear to God, she characterized Bill Clinton as innocuous) as a golden age, despite the fact that NAFTA passed during Clinton's tenure. Republicans, Democrats: all swine. It's just that the Bush administration is loaded with "odd personalities" who drive us to distraction:

"[T]he zealots in Bush's White House are neither insane nor stupid nor
particularly shady. Rather, they openly serve the interests of the corporations
that put them in office with bloody-minded efficiency. Their boldness stems not
from the fact that they are a new breed of zealot but that the old breed finds
itself in a newly unconstrained political climate."

This is just dunderheaded--truly a distinction without a difference. Did the political climate unconstrain itself? Hardly. The Republicans have been working for a generation to undermine the values of reason, civility and fair play in Washington.

"Some argue that Bush’s extremism actually has a progressive effect because it
unites the world against the US empire."

Geez, do some argue that? On my planet, people observe that Bush appoints ringers to the federal bench, ignores education and research, and runs up crushing deficits. Every single day, Bush’s extremism does a little more damage, damage that will be felt long after he has left office.

But to Naomi, anti-Bush animus merely clouds men’s minds until they fail to "understand modern empire not as the purview of a single nation, no matter how powerful, but a global system of interlocking states, international institutions and corporations…"

Frankly, that global system sounds fucking GREAT to me right now. Let those states and corporations interlock, if it will prevent Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz from taking over the world.

It isn’t a hot news flash that John Kerry is not progressives’ dream candidate. I’m probably a little naïve in hoping that some of Kerry’s campaign rhetoric is just for show and that he’ll change course promptly upon taking office (I’m thinking mostly of his support for Israel’s right to build a security fence in the West Bank). But that’s not half as naïve as not seeing a large difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in the way they do business. The GOP of Bush and Delay ignores the law, ignores the rules of civil discourse, ignores facts, when those things collide with their Manichean worldview. There is no national emergency they won't exploit for partisan advantage. They're downright Orwellian in their anti-democratic instincts and corruption of language.

As is widely recognized, progressives will need to work to keep their agenda in front of a President Kerry. But Chrissakes, the difference for progressives between a Kerry and a Bush administration, is the difference between a difficult uphill chance, and NO chance.

I got annoyed, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, watching The Chris Matthews Show. Matthews devoted several minutes to the notion that the Clintons lead an ultra-left faction of the party that secretly wants Kerry to tank in '04, to clear the way for Hillary in '08. This is a total right-wing strawman, I tell myself—utterly ridiculous. Look how the party is uniting behind Kerry. Then along comes Naomi Klein and fuels that insulting innuendo.

Really, Klein gives the game away in her first graf with the line "standard-issue Bush-bashing schlock, on sale at Wal-Mart, made in Malaysia." Wal-Mart reference = gratuitous snobbery. I know about Klein’s anti-globalist, anti-sweatshop bona fides; so add a side order of sanctimony to the gratuitous snobbery.

(I’m not a regular reader of The Nation anymore, but I intend to pick up the next few issues and look for the letters to the editor about this one. Hopefully Klein will write a rebuttal as well [rubbing hands gleefully] . Silly as The Nation can be, getting all het up about Alger Hiss or some other controversy that only a dwindling handful of nonagenarian ex-union organizers living in Greenwich Village gives a shit about anymore, you still have to love the flame wars in the Letters section—erudite, sourced, devastatingly polite, fundamentally vicious.)

JIM CROW’S STRANGE AND RECENT CAREER: I want to recommend a really wonderful book, Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson. If you're interested in the civil rights movement, you ought to read it. If you're interested in the craft of writing and teaching history, you ought to read it.

The centerpiece of the book is the murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970, a case with some affinities with the infamous Emmett Till case. In other words, it was all over a black man making a suggestive remark (maybe) to a white woman, and her male relatives taking revenge. (The author recites a short but definitive treatise about the white-male sexual insecurity that underlies a LOT of the ideology of white supremacy.) The killers are connected to the local Ku Klux Klan, who post armed guards at their house; although their identities are known and they haven’t gone into hiding, the police do not take them into custody for 36 hours. In the trial, the defendants and their family testify that they (and only they) saw Henry Marrow wield a knife. That shaky testimony gives the all-white jury an opening to acquit, on grounds of self-defense.

Tyson lived through a lot of the events in the book (a childhood friend of Tyson’s was the killer’s youngest son, who tells him that “Daddy and them shot ‘em a nigger”), and he reflects on how the experience influenced him to become a historian, and the differences in dealing with the events as an academic vs. as a memoirist (the book is some of both). I enjoyed his personal recollections, partly because they rang familiar to me. I know some of the places he describes (I’ve spent some time in Oxford, albeit long after the events of the book) and although I’m four or five younger than he, my grade school years in Virginia had hints of the racial tensions Tyson experienced in North Carolina.

Like most Americans, at least white ones, I tend to assume that the production of history is something that happens naturally, like water flowing downhill. Tyson makes the reader understand that that’s not the case. He meets with resistance and even threats from the Oxford police when they learn of his interest in studying the Marrow case—and the project starts out only as an undergraduate term paper. Even more chilling, to me, is the fact that the powers that be in that little town have hidden or destroyed newspaper archives and court records pertaining to the case. (Tyson suspects the involvement of Billy Watkins, the prosecutor, who went on to be a force in the state Democratic Party.) When Tyson finishes his masters’ thesis examining the Marrow case, he hand-delivers a bound copy to the Oxford public library. Some time later he goes back to see that someone has torn key pages out of it.

Tyson is very deliberate about portraying the powder-keg atmosphere of the small-town South of the early 70s. White liberals make ourselves feel better by making a plaster saint out of Martin Luther King Jr. and by characterizing the civil rights movement as nonviolent and sweetly persuasive. Tyson gives the lie to this narrative, and shows time and again how violence or the threat of it was decisive in the white establishment giving in to black demands. One important backdrop to the Henry Marrow case was that Oxford was close to Camp Butner, a World War II army base where many black soldiers were posted. Camp Butner had revealed cracks in the Jim Crow façade: black troops stubbornly resisted segregation, and there were too many of them for it to be enforced effectively. In the postwar years, many of the most effective people in the movement were black military veterans. These men had tasted a life of discipline and respect. They had also been able to measure their performance directly against that of white soldiers, and they had not come up short. So they were confident and uncompromising, and in Oxford in the days after Henry Marrow’s death they made full use of their martial training (including nighttime firebombing raids and diversionary tactics). One of the best passages in the book recounts a protest march from Oxford to Raleigh. The leader of the march is the state director of the SCLC, Dr. King’s organization, and he invokes Dr. King’s rhetoric of nonviolence. Meanwhile, a substantial number of marchers are carrying concealed handguns, ready to return fire in case of a Klan ambush.

One last thing I like is the portrait of Tim Tyson’s father, Vernon Tyson, a liberal white minister trying to preach racial justice to congregations deeply committed to, indeed implicated in, the status quo. Vernon Tyson is a character of humor, love, occasional anger, great courage, and imperfect judgment. The book delineates Vernon’s precarious position of trying to offer prophetic leadership, yet maintain the trust and consent of the people he’s leading. He was often unsuccessful (he was forced out of his ministry in Oxford), but the book brings to life vivid episodes where Vernon found support in the community and discovered people willing, at personal cost, to reach across the color line.

There are no saints in the book; as Tyson writes, nobody has room to sit back and congratulate himself. Anyway -- thumbs way up.

HARD TO KILL!: Well, maybe it was a heart attack, but it's better today.

A DEATH FORETOLD? TUNE IN TOMORROW: Goodness knows, I don't want to alarm any of my hypothetical readers, or engage in cheap blog sensationalism. However: I'm bothered today by a persistent ache in my sternum area. Sometimes the ache radiates down one arm or the other.

Looking back on the last few days and what events could have precipitated my current woes, I'm focusing on the three nights I spent over the long weekend sleeping on a fold-out sofa. You know the kind, with the metal supporting bar that hits you right about chest level? That bed did a number on my neck and the upper back area between my shoulder blades. And even though I slept in my own bed last night, the ache kept me from sleeping well. The pain worsens a little if I bend forward a certain way... this is probably a musculo-skeletal kind of thing. Yes, very probably.

However, looking back on the little I've absorbed about cardiac health from the pages of Parade and Reader's Digest and other reputable print sources, I'm thinking I could be having a heart attack.

What a hassle THAT would be, huh? I can think of several reasons to put THAT thought out of my mind real quick. I recently turned 40, which is made me about 10 times more of a hypochondriac than I used to be. I don't think I've designated a primary-care provider with my health carrier. so I could get stuck with a bitch of a bill. Also, a friend is counting on me to pick him up at the airport tonight. So today would be a really bad day to undergo time-consuming (even if life-saving) treatment measures.

Still... I'm troubled.

If any medical professionals are reading and have any pertinent information / life lessons / orders for 50 amps of epi, stat! -- please post in Comments.

FEEL THE PILLOW WHERE YOUR BABY USED TO LAY: We woke up one morning and found Ray Charles was gone. He was a titan of American music, a true pioneer, blazing through boundaries among styles and genres, redrawing the map for the artists who followed him.

His music married emotional abandon with precision, an honest and searching heart with soaring ambition and a formidable will. In the studio and in his career moves, Brother Ray knew what he wanted and generally got his way. He held the upper hand in most of his relationships: with women, with fellow musicians, with business managers and record labels. He lived life on his terms.

He had a sappy side—one has to admit this about an artist who recorded a version of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” But many of Charles’s best songs are bracingly unsentimental and concrete. The lyrics are about love won and lost, of course, but also about work, and about money (“Busted,” “Greenbacks,” “Blackjack”), and the interrelatedness of these elements. Love is not mystical or magical, it simply offers shelter against life’s hardships. Doing right by your mate means making her comfortable. You got no money, you just ain’t no good, complains Margie Hendrix of the Raelettes. Love is a bargain; it’s not a job for Cupid’s arrow; it’s a matter for negotiation and give and take. Come back, baby / Let’s talk it over one more time.

Charles sometimes confounded the expectations of liberal whites and movement blacks in the ‘60s and ‘70s, avoiding bold statements about race, choosing the “wrong” anthems to sing, “America the Beautiful” instead of “We Shall Overcome” (not to denigrate his powerful rendering of “America the Beautiful”). His perspective was well-earned, as a black man raised in the Jim Crow South who fled its regime at a young age. And taking a contrarian stance was perfectly in character for Charles. But he was not immune to black political yearnings, merely attuned to the downside risk, the threat of a white backlash obliterating black gains. The advance of freedom is not inevitable, nor orderly. This sense of forboding permeates Charles’s 1961 recording of the Percy Mayfield composition “The Danger Zone.” He sounds a note poised between hope and worry:

My love for the world is like always
For the world is a part of me
That’s why I’m so afraid of the progress that’s been made
Toward eternity

Charles hit his stride in 1954, the year of Elvis Presley and Sun Records, and Brown v. Board of Ed., and Willie Mays’s great catch in the Polo Grounds. In a couple of hastily arranged recording sessions squeezed into his tour schedule—one in Atlanta, one in Miami—Charles recorded a series of songs, his own compositions, that flirt with sappiness, but transcend it on the strength of intensity, suppleness, and skill. This is my favorite “moment” in his career. In these songs Charles’s singing is a wonder; every whine and crack in his voice is purposeful. His band operates like a fine-tuned luxury automobile, supplying propulsion and grace in whatever combination the song needs. “Come Back Baby” is fascinating for its shift in tone and address: the singer first pleads to his lover, then preaches to his listeners about all he would do to win her back, then in the end speaks to the woman defiantly, warning her not to take him for granted. “I Got a Woman” clips along joyfully—the luxury car is at highway cruising speed here—as Charles alternates stanzas of praise and gratitude with sly, confidential boasts about how good he has it at home.

The down-tempo number “A Fool for You” conjures up a slow solitary walk, and a man’s imaginary conversation with the object of his heartache. She has broken it off, she has a new man, but he can’t accept his fate. The band shifts gears; the cadence is more urgent. Another shift in address as the singer seeks communion with his audience: Did you ever wake up in the morning / Just about the break of day / Reach over and feel the pillow / Where your baby used to lay. It’s a universal lament. We seem to be witnessing a slow-motion nervous breakdown. In the end we’re left with a simple yet unanswerable question: I want to know what makes me be a fool for you.

PISTONS IN FIVE?: The Detroit Pistons have got the Los Angeles Lakers on the ropes, three games to one, in the NBA Finals. They’ll probably deliver the coup de grace tonight. Fine with me; I’m not much of a Pistons rooter, but I’m a longtime Lakers detractor. (I sometimes feel like a fraud as a sports fan because my rooting interest is often negative-—I’m pulling for somebody to lose—-but that’s a story for another day.) But regardless of that, the series is an interesting spectacle.

Shaquille O’Neal is the most unstoppable force in basketball. He gets 30+ points and 20+ rebounds at whim. But he has a couple of Achilles’ heels (a mental block about shooting free throws, for one), the Lakers can never find him at crucial moments of the game, and it’s always his much smaller, much less talented Detroit counterparts making the big plays in the final minutes.

It’s a recurring theme in the history of basketball: Nobody loves Goliath. First Wilt Chamberlain, then Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, now Shaquille O’Neal-—each one struggled with his status as the biggest, most dominant center in the game. That status brings a heavy physical toll, game after game, from being double-teamed and cheap-shotted by overmatched opponents. It also carries unreasonably high expectations, a lack of appreciation (i.e., his success is genetically preordained), and just plain boredom: How many times do I have to prove that these Lilliputians can’t stop me?

Wilt repeatedly and rather neurotically remodeled his game in response to criticism. (You say I shoot too much? Okay, how about I resolve to be the league’s leading passer and virtually refuse to shoot?) Kareem, although he maintained his cold logical efficiency, suffered a mid-career doldrums when, he once commented, he just showed up at the gym to shoot a few skyhooks. Kareem got a kick in the pants when Magic Johnson joined his team, and the two of them modulated their egos and shared the load of stardom.. They had a long and profitable run together.

When Shaquille got together with Kobe Bryant, they got their championship rings, eventually, but it has never a harmonious union. Neither is a very generous teammate. Shaq struggles with the free-throw shooting bugaboo, with his weight, with foot and leg and abdominal injuries. Kobe obviously has his personal problems these days, but they don't mitigate the fact (you might even say they underline the fact) that he's a prima donna, a lone ranger, brilliant but undisciplined. Kobe craves the spotlight, so much so that he may willingly leave the Lakers for a crummy team where there'll be no question who The Man is.

When Gary Payton and Karl Malone signed with the Lakers, leaving money on the table for a chance to cap their long careers with a title ring, it was clearly a now-or-never strategy. That, plus Kobe’s legal jeopardy, plus Kobe’s and Phil Jackson’s looming free agency, plus the continuing Shaq/Kobe rivalry: it’s just too much drama. The strain began to show in Game 4, with the Lakers bitching at the refs and at each other late in the game. And Malone and Payton have nothing left physically.

Detroit over L.A. would be the biggest, maybe the only, Finals upset in a long, long time. Also, it’s a real rarity for the team without the best single player to win. The Lakers have four Hall of Famers on their team; the Pistons probably don’t have any.

But Detroit deserves lots of credit. They’re balanced; they can hurt their opponents in a lot of different ways. The Pistons were so shrewdly put together. Obviously I haven’t been paying enough attention until recently, but I see lots of reasons why they shouldn’t be all that good. It rather astonished me to watch Ben Wallace shoot a wide-open 12-footer, and airball it, as I think, He’s their best player. Darko Milicic, the third player drafted in 2003, should be a contributing player as a rookie; instead, he’s glued to the bench. Chauncey Billups and Rasheed Wallace always seemed to have talent, but several teams failed to get it out of them before they landed in Detroit. Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince are both skinny and “soft” by current NBA standards. Detroit acquired Ben Wallace as part of a trade for Grant Hill; few suspected at the time that Detroit got the better end of that deal. But that’s the name of the game in all the pro team sports nowadays: identifying undervalued commodities. And whaddaya know, it’s still a team sport after all. The Pistons match up well against the Lakers, they work hard, they accept leadership, and they don’t seem to care who gets the credit, as long as they win.

A LATE POST ABOUT THE LATE RON: So Ronald Reagan died, and while I dithered, absurdly, over whether and what to post, the commentariat turned inside out and back again, with Reagan hagiographies, then the anti-hagiographic backlash, then the anti-backlash backlash, etc.

Writers’ use of the Reagan legacy is contaminated by the emotional heat of the present election season. I liked what Frank Rich had to say about Reagan and Bush Jr. What follows here are some superficial but honest personal recollections of Ronald Reagan.

My high school broadcast Reagan’s first inaugural speech over the intercom system. I was sitting in calculus class, immediately in front of the teacher, Mrs. McNally. She was a large presence (literally and figuratively) in this school, dreaded by students but bolstered by seniority. Mrs. McNally was unpleasant, unkind, unreasonable, and given to playing mind games with her young charges: she’d be merely stern and cold some days, but shrill and hectoring on others. I can say nothing in her favor, except that years later I realized I’d learned quite a lot of math in her classes.

Teaching was on hold until Reagan finished speaking, when McNally said, her cigarette-ravaged voice full of pride, “Well, I don’t think I can follow that.”

So McNally, my inscrutible arbitrary martinet of a math teacher, was a Reaganite! Can’t follow that? Oh, give it a shot, I said to myself, with a big inward smirk and roll of the eyes—-and from that day forward, that teacher, whom I had allowed to make me miserable for two years, never cost me a minute’s worry, never laid a psychic glove on me.

A couple of months later, I was at home one day lounging on the living room couch. (Was I sick? Was it spring break? Not sure.) The phone rang, my mother answered it, and a moment later cried out, “Oh my God, is he dead?” She sounded so shocked, for a long moment I was sure my father or my brother had been in a terrible accident. In fact, President Reagan had been shot. I haven’t heard any pundit remark in the last week, in explaining Reagan’s popularity, how much sympathy and good will he gained simply for surviving Hinckley’s assassination attempt. The political killings of the ‘60s were still fairly fresh in people’s minds, and there had been John Lennon’s murder just a few months earlier. For Ronnie to have a brush with violent death, but recover, and give us a wink and a quip while he did it—-people were simply grateful for that.

Flash forward to fall 1984. I was a college senior, eligible to vote for President for the first time. On the night of the last Reagan-Mondale debate, the dean of students reserved one of the union lounges for a debate-watching party, and invited a handful of students whom he liked and knew to be of liberal leanings-—a minority subset of the campus population. I was there. The handwriting was on the wall that Reagan would win going away, unless he utterly collapsed in this night’s debate (and he had stumbled badly in an earlier one). So we drank soft drinks and ate potato chips and milled about, and occasionally heckled Reagan’s image on the big screen. But he wasn’t collapsing; he gave a sound Reaganesque performance. After awhile I sat down in the back of the room and filled out my absentee ballot for Walter Mondale, full of my 20-year-old’s smug certitude, congratulating myself on my symbolic gesture, confident that my man would lose.

Memory is such a tricky thing. It’s difficult to reconstruct what we thought or felt 25 years ago, “bracketing out” what we know of the intervening years. I rather respect the conclusion of the liberal blogger Apartment 11D that, through the lens of happy high school and college years, her view of Ronald Reagan is a rather fond one. I can’t say the same, though. I became aware of Reagan in ’76, when he challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, and my 12-year-old’s conception was that next to Ford, Reagan was flashy and smooth-talking but vaguely untrustworthy. I never quite took the man seriously, never took him at face value.

Of course, I have plenty of fond memories from the Reagan years, set against the haze of happy complacency that I associate with the man. One of my regrets from college is that I passed up a chance to ride to Washington and take part in a US-Out-of-Central-America march. Because I think it would have been a hell of a fun road trip, and because as it is I have no sense of participating in the social and political ferment of the era. But at the time, on that sleepy campus, it just didn’t seem urgent to me.

Peter Manseau has an excellent recent essay about the apocalyptic dread that he associates with Reagan. The sentiments he describes ring plausible to me, and I certainly felt Reagan was inflammatory and reckless in some of his anti-Soviet rhetoric—-yet I didn’t really fear nuclear war. It was the complacent haze, I guess. To the extent I thought about the issue, I reasoned that somebody would have to be the first to push the button, and nobody would. Our leaders (including the Soviets) were often silly and misguided, but not crazy or evil.

I do, however, remember my friend Steve R. wondering out loud over beers one night if we were going to war with Libya. The government (Carter, actually, I believe) had reinstituted mandatory draft registration, and being sent on some damn-fool military excursion seemed well within the realm of possibility. Not that I would die, just that the country and I might waste a couple of valuable years.

During that Mondale campaign I had a copy of a book titled Reagan’s Reign of Error. It was the 1984 counterpart to Bushisms, a collection of Reagan gems like trees causing pollution, the man collecting welfare under 27 different names, and the rest, with the compilers citing each Reagan quote then reporting the facts of each case, always quite different than what Reagan stated or implied. My roommate and I would read bits of it aloud to each other. Why can’t every American read this stuff? Nobody would vote for that clown! Mine was the only copy of the book I ever remember seeing.

Here’s what Reagan meant to me: The haze. A large gap between appearance and reality. The birth of a cynic. The habit (pathetic) of cherishing my private political wisdom in the face of mass electoral delusion.

KEEPING COOL: Are you like me? Do you ever go two days at work getting practically nothing done because you got sucked into an intense online debate? (Ah, you all can probably compose a post in less than an hour.)

Let’s see if I can make this long story short: The National Council of Churches issued a pastoral letter urging the U.S. to change its Iraq policy: specifically, to hand off authority to the United Nations. Not huge news, frankly. This letter was sent to Mark Kleiman, who made a peevishly dismissive response on his blog. Kleiman’s blog post started small conflagrations in two or three other blog locales, notably The Village Gate / The Right Christians, where I stuck my two cents in.

The upshot has been some harsh words and bruised feelings. The founding father of The Village Gate is the Rev. Allen Brill, whom I have liked, admired, and identified with in his effort to project a progressive Christian voice. Allen feels, and I share the feeling, that he’s beset from two sides. On one hand, right-wing Christians have hijacked Scripture and tradition for nefarious purposes, and have tainted the image of the church in the American body politic. On the other hand, secular progressives are often ignorant about, indifferent and sometimes hostile to the concerns of religionists who are trying to work in concert with them.

Reaching out to the secular left is the need Allen feels most acutely. When a lefty blogger directly or indirectly rebukes him, like Kleiman did this week and Atrios did a while back, Allen has been hurt and, frankly, has lost his cool on occasion.

So Allen’s hurt, Kleiman’s pissed, Patrick Nielsen Hayden is pissed. Me, I guess I got a little pissed myself over at the Village Gate. I won’t rehash what I posted there.

Over the last six years, the Web has rekindled my interest in writing. I’m grateful for this. But there’s a pitfall for me: the adrenaline rush of the flame war. Some of the posts I’ve written that were, not the best, but the most satisfying and cathartic, were written in righteous anger.

This blog is part of my ongoing project to find my subject matter and my voice as a writer. Earlier this spring I started and abandoned a whole series of blog essays. I abandoned them because I realized what I was doing was running around the Internet with a chip on my shoulder, looking for things to take offense at. That’s no way to be healthy or happy, or a good writer.

Religion is a subject I have to be wary of. I’m interested in it, maybe even passionate about it, but I have the chip on my shoulder about it. I don’t want my voice to be one of victimhood or fake wounded honor.

I don't think Allen's hurt was fake. The acre of subject matter he farms is well-defined, unlike my acre. In this Council of Churches blogstorm, Mark Kleiman was in the wrong, basically-—he made a gratuitously rude and ill-informed post. But Allen fanned the flames and got singed by the blowback. In the process, a pretty good thing he had going got damaged.

QUEER THEOR(I)ZING FROM A STRAIGHT GUY: I posted in a discussion of homophobia over at http://www.therightchristians.org and I'm so darn pleased with myself that I'm going to reprint it here.

I agree with rafalah that "for many christians homosexuality makes an easy target because it is a 'sin' that they personally don't struggle with. Any supressed guilt and shame that surrounds their own sexuality can be funneled outward to a "Thank God I'm Not Struggling with THAT sin" finger pointing. In other words, it is just too easy to condem something they don't feel."

Maybe it's just me, but I read a lot into the fact that liberals use the term "gay and lesbian" and conservatives most often use the term "homosexual."

Conservatives are focused on the plumbing: on the specific bedroom practices of gay men and women. The Latinate term keeps the focus on the sexual, and also puts people at a clinical distance about a topic that makes them feel squeamish.

In some cases, people are in denial or fear of their own feelings of same-sex attraction. But not across the board: even for many "confirmed" straights, sexuality is both a) intense and b) intimate, even secretive.

[EDIT: I perhaps should have included here a statement, or confession: while I like to think of myself as straight-but-not-narrow, I am still uptight or insecure enough to feel a momentary shock when I read or learn of somebody whose sexual preferences are a lot different than mine. Aren't most people capable of being shocked this way? The question is, do you control that feeling of shock, or do you indulge it and let it carry you away?]

Nobody has mentioned the "gay recruitment" phobia -- that gay parents / teachers / ministers are going to recruit children into the evil gay lifestyle. Conservatives don't want to allow marriage to be added to the gay "travel brochure" and add to the recruitment incentive. Two observations:

1. There's an irrational horror (for some people) of having a child or other family member adopt a style of sexual intimacy that is very different than one's own.

2. This is a kind of cowardice. Gay people who are open about their "minority" sexual status are by definition brave, and somewhat threatening to the large segment of people who are timid about sexual matters, who perhaps are unclear about their own sexual selves, who in particular hate the idea of talking about sex with their own children.

THE DIVINE MISS PARTON: I promised a Dolly Parton post a coupla weeks ago. Sorry for the delay. The washing machine ate my post. Seriously. Notes on a piece of paper folded up in my pants pocket and forgotten…

A few weeks ago I caught a little bit of the debut episode of the Jessica Simpson / Nick Lachey variety show. However “of the moment” Ms. Simpson is, she draws quite a bit on ‘70s nostalgia. Cher is obviously a touchstone; the whole husband-and-wife variety show schtick is a conscious ripoff of Sonny & Cher. Also, the show dusted off the old duet “Islands in the Stream,” with the almost lifelike Kenny Rogers reprising the baritone part, and Jessica in the Dolly Parton role of Perky Blonde with Ample Cleavage.

Ah, the multi-media, only-one-name-necessary pop diva. Nowadays, it’s Britney, Beyonce, and J-Lo. In my youth, we had Cher and Barbra and Bette—and, come to think of it, Dolly. Add it up: Recording artist, songwriter, movie star, TV producer (evidence of her business acumen), author (two books). The lady is a multiple threat. These days, while Dolly may not turn up in the pages of People magazine very often anymore, she has moved back to her roots, signing with the respected small label Rounder Records, and making a couple of spare but critically well-regarded bluegrass and gospel tinged albums. She racked up a Grammy award for one of them.

(Pun intended.)

I had been thinking about Dolly Parton anyway (more than I had in years) since the family and I took a trip last month to the Great Smoky Mountains, including a visit to Dollywood, the theme park to which Dolly lends her name.

Dollywood is no tribute to Dolly’s artistry, believe me, but business-wise it sure seems to be a going concern. Long lines and traffic jams? Check. Obscene prices for admission and junk food and crummy souvenirs? Check. But as a pure fun factory Dollywood delivers the goods. My kids don’t know Parton from Salvador when it comes to Dollies, but they all had a fine time. My oldest dragged me onto the Tennessee Tornado, and it is as stomach-churning a roller coaster as any I can remember. (Daddy don’t enjoy coasters like he once did.)

As your white-trash-culture correspondent, though, I kept an eye open for signs of Dolly’s imprint, and they’re not hard to find. First off, there’s an attraction called Chasing Rainbows, “a state-of-the-art interactive museum collection that chronicles Dolly’s rise to fame.” There’s little touches like “the park’s most-visited restaurant Aunt Granny's (named for the nickname by which Dolly's nieces and nephews call her).”

It shouldn’t surprise me by now, but it still does, to go out in public in red-state America and see so many people wearing their religion on their T-shirt. There was a lot of this at Dollywood; the fact that it was Easter week probably added to it. In certain ways, the park signals its church-friendliness: there’s a gospel music exhibit in the park, and the Dollywood mission statement refers to “Christian values and ethics.”

And how often have you said to yourself, “What this amusement park really needs is a house of worship right in the middle of it”? Well, I have good news: Dollywood has got the Robert F. Thomas Chapel, named for the doctor who delivered Dolly at birth. More good news: there is no height restriction to enter the chapel.

Everywhere, you see “authenticity” pushed to the limit and beyond. There’s a train ride, the Dollywood Express, that takes you on a short loop back into the woods behind the park, a five mile trip. The “conductor” makes a point to tell his riders that this is a working narrow-gauge steam engine, actually used in the construction of the Alaska Highway. Nice, but then the train carries you on this groaner of a trip “back in time” and shows you some pseudo-historical trackside displays: the fake hillbilly shack, the fake moonshine still, the little fake fiberglass animals.

There were a handful of live music performances in the park that day, and the one I took most notice of was a band whose name I forget, but they were described as “Celt-a-billy.” It was one guy playing bagpipes, pretty much straight Scottish style, but he was backed by three or four guys playing bass drums and pounding out a huge rock-and-roll backbeat. It was Clannad meets the Broadway musical “Stomp.” Odd. But not all bad. And they had a crowd cheering like crazy for them.

Maybe just to qualify the white-trash joke I made above, I feel compelled to mention that not every person I saw at Dollywood was white. 95%, but not 100%. I never realized before how popular and wide-reaching east Tennessee is as a vacation spot. I believe I read somewhere that Great Smoky Mountain is the most visited US National Park. Judging by the license plates and t-shirts I saw, Dollywood draws folks from Georgia to Illinois. There were loads of people from Ohio (a pretty easy journey down I-75).

As a hillbilly-American myself, I saw a lot in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg that brought me down: roadside litter and out-of-control development marring the natural beauty, the godawful tourist schlock, the dinner theaters featuring sub-“Hee Haw” style comedy revues. Dollywood is not the sole driver of tourism in the Smokies, but it seems the biggest single driver. Maybe Dolly Parton should have to answer for the orgy of Tennessee kitsch. But I can’t condemn her. Every town in Appalachia is struggling to make a living, after all. And Dolly is authentically kitschy, if such a thing is possible. Going back to her Porter Wagoner days, she’s always been the way she is.

It’s a little late now to do my Johnny Cash tribute, but when Johnny died, I thought, is there anybody out there who didn’t like this man? The eulogies came from every direction. Liberal and conservative, urban and rural, casual fan and aficionado—everybody had a reason for loving him. For breadth of appeal, Dolly Parton is almost his match. She knows who she is and is proud of it. She crossed over, but she maintained her integrity. I can see why Jessica Simpson might want to tap into some of that good-old-girl mojo.