News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We welcomed a son into our family this week, so I'll be taking the next three weeks off the interwebs. FPR will continue publishing new essays each day, but these emails and my weekly Water Dippers will be on hiatus until July 12. In other FPR news, the new issue of Local Culture has been printed and should be going out in the mail this coming week.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about identity, mundanity, and vaccines.
- Ben Henson muses on the underpinnings of America's urban-rural divide: "The rift isn’t just about politics. It’s about pace, and place, and respect."
- Teddy Macker looks for paths out of our relentless political polarization: "They, for the first time, saw each other’s faces. They shook hands. They gave each other cigarettes, beer, champagne. Exchanged buttons from their coats. One German gave an English soldier a haircut."
- Aaron Poochigan looks at New York's Central Park from the perspective of a famous fictional visitor: "Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old 'hero' of The Catcher in the Rye, goes to the park mentally or physically on seven separate occasions in the course of the relatively short novel."
- Jeremy Larson reviews Rod Dreher's new book and takes stock of the "enchantment" discourse: "Despite the surplus of enchantment discourse these days, the excellent parts of the book are indeed excellent."
- John Klar speaks on behalf of cows: "Mine is not a left-wing voice of animal rights idealism or return-to-the-land idyllicism. This is just plain old real science."
- Benjamin Myers teases out our conceptions of nature and works to imagine humans as part of the natural world: "In Oklahoma, the nature many of us live so close to is a different thing from the concept of 'nature' we have internalized."
I relished Will Bardenwerper's marvelous new book Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America this week. FPR readers in particular will appreciate the insider glimpse of Porcher Bill Kauffman’s attic study. But what makes this such a great book is Will's insights into how minor league baseball reveals broader trends in American politics, economics, community, and technology. The way he weaves these strands together is remarkable and compelling:
Baseball had always occupied an important part of Arron’s life. He’d been “devastated when the Muckdogs left—it was like losing part of yourself.” Like other locals, though, he’d rallied behind Robbie and the collegiate Muckdogs, relieved to at least have some form of competitive baseball preserved in the area. As a teacher with students from diverse backgrounds, he’d always valued social harmony and the institutions that helped to foster it. To Arron, Dwyer Stadium was one of those places. “I know people in the stands have different views on the world and political and social issues, but when someone turns a double place, all that goes out the window,” he said.
I’d noticed this in my own interactions, both online and in the real world. I had something of an epiphany one afternoon walking home from the Bridgeside Market, the deli a few blocks from my home where I liked to grab lunch, when I read someone’s comment “Go Fuck Yourself” in response to what I had thought had been a fairly innocuous article I posted on Twitter. Before I knew it I’d been dragged into an impassioned and blood-pressure-spiking argument with an unnamed Twitter account out there in the ether. This is insane, I thought to myself; who knows if this is even a real person. Meanwhile, in the terrestrial rather than digital world, at various times I found myself cringing at Guy Allegretto’s political observations when they parroted some of FOX News’s more outlandish stories, and also Richard Beatty when he volunteered an offhand putdown of the right that could have come straight from MSNBC. It was too much, from both directions. But the great thing about Muckdogs games was that it didn’t matter. We had a common bond that transcended the toxic tribal loyalties that our society seemed so intent on imposing. It was similar to how my military friends and I tolerated political disagreements with each other far better than we would with strangers, wince we were connected by something outside of politics. In both cases we were able to see each other as multidimensional humans and not simply avatars of a political ideology.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro