News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I got up to fish for steelhead in the Lake Erie tributaries this week. It's been a dry year, so this week had some of the first good fishing days, which meant the creeks were packed with fishermen. By doing some walking, I managed to find some relatively empty stretches where I could enjoy the beauty of the day, and it's always a thrill to hook one of these fish.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about local sports, being homeless, and the reading wars.
- Dennis Uhlman follows James A. Garfield's example, at least in spirit, and hosts a chili cook-off in his neighborhood: "I am not sure if Garfield ever made chili for his supporters. The men and women who descended on his property were there to meet a future president. What Garfield understood, however, is that home is the best place to begin a movement."
- Art Kusserow describes some old correspondence he found and the lives these letters recall: "Holding the letters was a delicate experience, noting the brittle nature of the paper, being careful not to let them tear at the aged folds, and yet the blue ink, obviously done with a fountain pen, was as clear as if it had been written yesterday."
- Jacob Adkins revisits Moana the week that its sequel releases and commends the movie's portrayal of tradition: "Rather than forging a new identity, she returns to old paths. Moana is not following her inner voice. She is listening to the echoes of her ancestors."
- Alex Sosler takes stock of his community in the wake of Hurricane Helene and concludes that shopping local has become not merely a good idea, but an obligation: "I’ve heard it said that grief hits hardest about two months after a tragedy. After the people who’ve come to help leave, after the meal trains stop, after resources dry out, the loneliness sets in. It’s when you feel forgotten."
- Matt Stewart warns that there are only pyrrhic victories when we fight our cultural and political battles online: "The Very Online Right might be riding high now, but I anticipate that the election jackpot of the moment will not last and that this victory will soon look more like Las Vegas at noon, beaten down and tawdry under the merciless exposure of the midday western sun."
G.K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn is about many things: cultural conflict, the regulatory state, bad poetry, the goodness of rum and cheese. In particular, the novel is a response--in fiction--to the Macaroni Scandal in which British politicians profited from insider trading but were acquitted while Chesterton's brother was found guilty of criminal libel for trying to expose them. What struck me as I was wrapping up the novel recently is Chesterton’s account of an unforeseeable catalyst that releases a pent-up, populist frustration with misguided, corrupt elite rule. The phrase I’ve marked in bold below is pretty much perfect:
That storm-spirit, or eagle of liberty, which is the sudden soul in a crowd, had descended upon London after a foreign tour of some centuries in which it had commonly alighted upon other capitals. It is always impossible to define the instant and the turn of mood which makes the whole difference between danger being worse than endurance and endurance being worse than danger. The actual outbreak generally has a symbolic or artistic, or, what some would call whimsical cause. Somebody fires off a pistol or appears in an unpopular uniform, or refers in a loud voice to a scandal that is never mentioned in the newspapers; somebody takes off his hat, or somebody doesn’t take off his hat; and a city is sacked before midnight. When the ever-swelling army of revolt smashed a whole street full of the shops of Mr. Crooke, the chemist, and then went on to Parliament, the Tower of London and the road to the sea, the sociologists hiding in their coal-cellars could think (in that clarifying darkness) of many material and spiritual explanations of such a storm in human souls; but of none that explained it quite enough. Doubtless there was a great deal of sheer drunkenness when the urns and goblets of Æsculapius were reclaimed as belonging to Bacchus: and many who went roaring down that road were merely stored with rich wines and liqueurs which are more comfortably and quietly digested at a City banquet or a West End restaurant. But many of these had been blind drunk twenty times without a thought of rebellion; you could not stretch the material explanation to cover a corner of the case. Much more general was a savage sense of the meanness of Crooke’s wealthy patrons, in keeping a door open for themselves which they had wantonly shut on less happy people. But no explanation can explain it; and no man can say when it will come.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro