Docs and musings

Heval Kelli, a Kurdish Syrian Muslim refugee living in Clarkston, just outside the Perimeter from here, exudes the kind of human empathy you can see in his very being. He listens quietly and attentively, and in responding to what even the most troubled or inarticulate person says, he seems to have just the right words. We saw this in the documentary “Refuge,” which five of us watched in a nearly empty Plaza theater Wednesday afternoon, the matinee (after we were turned away from the sold-out premiere on Sunday).

The man’s empathy, half saint-like, half bemused with irony, has three layers, I think. One is his experience as a refugee. His father was tortured. He spent his youth in a refugee camp. By the sheerest random luck, he got to America a few days after 9/11, and was sent to Clarkston, now called the most ethnically diverse square mile in America because of its welcoming structures for refugees from places like Syria and Somalia. A second layer is his quiet religious practice as a Muslim. He prays in the traditional way five times a day, and performs the duties of compassion and peace from the Koran. And finally, there’s the overlay of being an Emory cardiologist. He is trained well by the institution and Hippocratic oath to pay close attention to illness of body and soul in others, both meanings of the word “heart.”

We grow cynical about doctors, who seem to pursue specialties that separate them from the whole person, specialties that pay a lot more than general practice. But when I see Dr. Kelli, “call me Heval,” in the film, I think of Libby’s visit to a Hispanic cardiologist at Emory’s hospital on North Decatur Road, and my visit to a native Indian periodontist yesterday, Dr. Ash. They both exuded the same feeling of compassion as Dr. Kelli, which I now associate with a special gratitude and patriotism I sense in American immigrants who have achieved the height of success in the healing arts. Dr. Ash put his hand on my shoulder as he came from behind while I sat pitched back the dentist’s chair, and touched me the same way when he left. When I complained about my recent experience trying to get some reimbursement or explanation for the $1,042 I paid for getting a crown at this same big dentistry office, he agreed with me wholeheardedly about the shame of the U.S. not having universal healthcare. Even his native India, he said, has a more humane healthcare system. There are several doctors in his extended family, and all are for universal healthcare, he said. And he is horrified at the prevalence of guns here . .  He seemed to say without words, about guns: “Don’t get me started.”

Heval was an obvious protagonist for the two University of Virginia alumnae who decided to make this documentary, “Refuge,” after they were shocked by the Unite the Right rally in their beloved Charlottesville in 2017. There’s a scene in the movie where Heval welcomes a Republican Primary candidate for governor who arrives in Clarkston, by some miscalculation, on his “Deportation Bus” tour of Georgia. Heval offers him some good baklava, which Williams samples with the forced courtesy of the campaign trail. (Williams ended up with less than 5% of the primary vote, while Kemp, running ads of him hunting illegals with a shotgun, went on to barely beat Stacey Abrams that year.)

The heart of the documentary is about Heval’s relationship with another man, the extreme version of the type who would vote for a Williams or a Kemp. Chris Buckley is an Army veteran living in Lafayette, in the northwest corner of Georgia near the Tennessee and Alabama state lines. The relationship makes a powerful case for an answer to “hate groups” like those at the Charlottesville rally. The film shows the effectiveness of getting those who resent the Other to know one of them well. Chris, a heavily tattooed son of an abusive father, came back from traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan with an addiction to pain meds that evolved into a crystal meth habit that was tearing him away from a wife and son. He found his way clear of drugs with a 12-step program. But it goes further. A counselor with “Parents for Peace” introduces him to Heval, on the notion that a 12-step program to overcome a ritualized hatred of Muslims (Chris had joined the local Klan) required a relationship with a Muslim. It worked, creating a road show out of Heval and Chris with their message, and this powerful documentary under the Katie Couric brand. (Couric, who briefly replaced Dan Rather as anchor of CBS Evening News, also went to UVa.)

One scene that struck me powerfully was Heval first driving through Lafayette, Ga., in his late-model black Mercedes-Benz. He is shocked by the poverty, the hovels and trailers, the despair that makes such communities the ruined gardens of opioid addiction or make Trump’s gilt-edge delusions so appealing. I feel the heartbreak of this landscape. I have seen it in Rockbridge County, Va., and in Pickens County, Ga., so close to the bountiful nature and communities I have loved. From a purely compassionate vantage, without the politics or sociology, this glimpse of rural poverty, where mostly white Appalachian folks dwell in a forgotten or stereotyped America, floods me with love and sympathy. Yes, these folks are resentful. Why wouldn’t they be? I also understand a very different resentfulness – the bitter resentment of a young Black Lives Matters activist or some white allies who empathize with that Black experience. But to the forgotten or demeaned Appalachian folks, it must be appalling that the “resentment” of young BLM protestors is presented sympathetically by the “liberal media” while the culture calls their resentment “hate” and “racist.”

I shouldn’t judge like this. Heval doesn’t seem to judge. He merely utters the sounds of sorrow and shock, a compassionate refugee driving through a land like his own war-ravaged homeland, astonished that Americans could forget these children of their land and history.

Changing names honoring Confederate generals and removing memorials, apart from a few practical challenges, is relatively easy. Monuments can be moved into museums, and names on street signs can be changed. (At W&L, the four-ton statue of Lee napping in battle dress with sword at hand is too much to move, but Lee Chapel was renamed University Chapel.)

But to get rid of the world’s largest Confederate monument at Stone Mountain? That’s hard to imagine. How much dynamite would it take, and what about the optics? “Erasing history” would come to mind unbidden. . .

For full story, go to Salvation South.

Moving in silent desperation
Keeping an eye on the Holy Land
A hypothetical destination
Say, who is this walking man?

The baritone of James Taylor bewitches with a melody that long ago wormed into my brain for keeps. It sleeps, then can’t you just feel the moonshine? It awakens, silent except in my head, a deep emotion of fall in the mountains on a gravel road. That’s James Taylor, like an older brother I never met.

Now that we’ve settled into this condo, Libby lets me know that the sleek little Audio-Technico turntable she bought can also be used with the speaker system I’ve used for streaming Pandora and NPR. Out of the vinyl records we’ve saved, but haven’t played in an eternity, I pull out James Taylor’s 1974 “Walking Man.” It’s perfect, better than I remembered.

Every song on this album is a gem, the work of a craftsman at a good time in his long career, making these 10 songs that were not “hits” but perfect in their own way. Not only that. These are also poems. I declare that as one who has studied poetry, meter-scanned Virgil, and knows the bad from the decent and deep. These are fine and deep and mean a lot to me.

Take those first lines. “Silent desperation” is a riff on Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation,” of course, but maybe so is Holy Land, which Thoreau notes was the root of “saunter,” a le Sainte Terre, in his  essay on walking.

Who is this walking man? He’s the ghost spirit of American restlessness, Billy the Kid, whom Conrad Aiken associated with the solitary self-exile from the Puritan commonwealth, William Blackstone of Rhode Island, in a long poem, “The Kid.” It’s also a recurring figure in James Taylor songs, the country road wanderer abandoning home and farm, a bit of himself on heroin or in therapy between Stockbridge and Boston. Or sometimes it’s his father, imagined as a n’er-do-well who left home. “Pappy’s come to rambling on/ Stumbling around drunk/ Down on the farm.”

In fact, Dr. Isaac Montrose Taylor was the dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School. I recently went back to Carolina (not just in my mind) and walked Morgan Creek Trail, a city park along the creek where the Taylor boys used to play. The highway bridge over Morgan Creek has been named The James Taylor Bridge. The house where the boys grew up, worth well over a million now, is gated and behind a bamboo stand in a wooded neighborhood of modernist houses.

Country songs usually split open an adage or cliché for double entendre, “I’ve got friends in low places.” James Taylor does that a lot in the “Walking Man” album, but tightly and dinging with inner assonance.

Most everybody’s got seeds to sow
It ain’t always easy for a weed to grow, no
So he don’t hoe the row for no one
Oh for sure one’s always missing
And something’s never quite right
Ah, but who would want to listen to him
Kissing his existence good night.

His rhyme schemes are well-tooled, not just couplets or A-B, A-B, but sometimes A-B-C, A-B-C as in “Me and My Guitar.” “I hear horns/ I hear voices/ I hear strings/ Seems I was born/ with too many choices/ Now what am I going to do with all these extra things.” Even using the simple Shakespearean form of A-B, A-B, loosely, he upends the story of Odysseus being recognized by his dog’s sense of smell. From “Hello Old Friend,” about returning to the Taylor compound on Martha’s Vineyard:

Little dog David I must look like a fool
I should’ve remembered you’d be forgetting my smell, well
Give me a week or two to recapture my cool
I’ve got stories to tell
About how I snatched the devil’s catch
And outran the hounds of hell.

“Walking Man,” the album, has one pop song cover, “Ain’t No Song,” and one Chuck Berry cover, “The Promised Land.” These may be the least poetic, though the first one succeeds because it’s a riff on songwriting (“Not even this song’s gonna tell you the way that I feel”) and the other, to me, because it encodes the Black experience in America – the Great Migration and the Freedom Ride bus that “left us all stranded in downtown Birmingham.”

The other songs I would put into three categories, three dark lodes that James Taylor mines for verbal gold.

One is depression. A girl, I assume, is sinking into acute melancholy that only the singer can enter with her, because he’s been there. Or maybe he is the one who is sinking. Maybe the depression is not another person, but his interior “love.” The experience is like love because it binds the two, or maybe just the lonely self with itself, silent and secret. “Daddy’s Baby” begins: “Daddy’s baby what’s got you thinking/ What’s got you sinking so low/ Is there something I should know/ Something new to you.” And it ends, mysteriously: “So I called my love my home.” The same sweet sadness finds its end in “Fading Away”:

Well, it’s hard to find a label
For this feeling in my bones
That this is all a make-believe
But my cards are on the table
And their ain’t nothing up my sleeve
And here I thought I was a thinking man
But I’m a shrinking man, I’m sinking man
I’m fading, fading away

The second category is the seductive nature of rock. In “Me and My Guitar” he sings, “If he can’t go to heaven/ Maybe I don’t want to go, Lord.” Where does this beguiling music come from? Africa. “See the white man sailing his ship upon the sea/ Watch the white man shackle the black man to a tree/ To the invader go the fruits of war/ He misses home and his boots are sore/ He has not got no roots no more/ He comes for your gold/ Watch out for your soul” (“Rock ‘N’ Roll is Music Now”). This fruit of war – the rebellion of the post-war baby boom – becomes even more haunting in “Migration” with its slow Vox Humana.

Mystery muse, how I hunger for an answer
Unsung song, how I long to play the changes
Hidden rhythm haven’t I always been your dancer
Sacred secrets of the meaning to my dreaming. Migration.

The mysterious “slow vibration” of migration leads to the third theme – decline and fall. This is not just the singer “Fading Away” (“the circles in my mind/ They have been winding slowly down/ . . .I’m seizing up, I’m freezing up”). It’s the great collapse of the West, of our system of extraction and exploitation breaking down. “Let It All Fall Down” is a straight-forward prayer to admit we did this to ourselves and to be as gentle as we can be as we welcome the end.

. . at least we might show the good sense
To know when we’ve been wrong
And it’s already taken too long
So we bring it to a stop
Then we take it from the top
We let it settle on down softly
Like your gently falling snow
Or let it tumble down and topple
Like the temple long ago.

In the early 1970s, I was sure I had the good sense at 21 to know when we’ve been wrong. I wanted to see the machinery stop, let it all rest. Being strapped in an airliner seat during a landing, when it reverses its engines and roars and shakes to try to slow down from 200 to 20 mph, that’s what I thought it would feel like to get back to nature. This song contained a poem that said what I was feeling then. And as Robert Frost says of true poetry, like metal on the tongue, it never loses its freshness.

“Energy” has many meanings. But there’s one way to see it as everything. Energy is Man’s discovery of fire, how civilizations ate (from hunter gathering to farming), the population-exploding Industrial Revolution, and the cause of Gulf Wars. It’s fossil fuels and solar power. It’s the photosynthesis of forests and flowers, as well as our daily energy and body temperature.

I see this big picture because I covered energy as a beat in Rhode Island in the early 80s, taking a course on it from a physics professor at Brown and reading experts like Daniel Yergin and Amory Lovins. I’m no expert, but I covered the problems of trying to build the Seabrook nuclear power plant – not just the protests but Wall Street shunning it due to problems of safety and security. I covered deregulation. It’s complicated. As I obsess now over the need for the world to deal with climate change, I admit it’s complicated and confusing, even to me.

So with some relief, I read an Ezra Klein column in the Times dividing the big picture into three parts, like Caesar did Gaul. He calls these three “goals society can have for its energy usage.”

The first is to use less. You can recycle, go vegetarian, and bike-ride to work. Or like me, you might drift into lifestyle changes based on tax credits (we bought an electric Nissan Leaf), and less income (with my retirement, we sold our big old house and moved into a condo).

The second type of energy goal, in Klein’s big picture, is doing the same things we do, but with less fossil fuel. De-carbonization. Wind, solar, maybe even small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). That’s the goal of Biden’s successes and the latest climate summit in Egypt. The change is huge, but what we do with the energy is maintain the status quo.

And for the third and last energy goal. . .meet the Jetsons. It’s about entirely new sci-fi sources of “clean and abundant energy” that would supposedly open up whole new ways of living, the way coal, gas and oil improved everything (except maybe what we lost in our humanity).

A little understanding about energy seems pretty important, and generally lacking. For a little understanding, I have come to some basic principles about energy. One is that there’s no free lunch. Batteries in our Leaf are heavy as hell and take the extraction of all kinds of dirty chemicals from faraway places. And it’s hardly burning less fossil fuel if the power is from coal- or gas-burning power plants.

Decarbonization is incremental, always with downside costs. But let’s do it.

Another principle is that, paradoxically, energy isn’t everything. It’s “necessary but not sufficient” in defining human life, the great mystery that includes language, religion, meaning, insanity, love, baseball and so on.

And now I have one more simple principle. Of the three “energy aims” Klein outlines, none of the three is bad, unless it sees the other two as bad.  “Abundant, clean energy” would actually be a terrible thing because of human nature, but impossible because of the laws of physics. We need all three goals – using less, decarbonizing and big breakthroughs – and a better grasp of what we’re up against.

Common Good Governing began in 2017 with a dream. That is, literally, “a dream,” a bad dream that Lester Levine woke up with about a week after Trump won the Election of 2016. It was also just after Levine’s first grandchild was born. Having a grandson put Levine in a dark mood of worry about the future of America. Trump’s election was, as for other intellectuals, a shock and dismay for him. Levine, a retired professional in organizational change (“I’m a behaviorist,” specializing in how social signals change people’s collective behavior) thought about that dream. It must have something to do with how Americans vote, and about the future world that his grandson would inherit.

In the dream, he was in a foreign land that had just overthrown decades of dictatorship. In the vacuum that followed, the people were desperately looking for a democratic system that might protect them from the next dictator to emerge. They studied democratic systems around the world, going back to the Greeks, and found the most interesting to be America’s. The principles of the Founding Fathers seemed to be good: freedom of expression, the rule of law not men, an ideal of individual rights and fairness. And the system seemed resilient and sustainable, surviving and strengthening through partisan battles and a Civil War. But then, they discovered, something went wrong. Around the year 2000, the nation became increasingly divided by its party loyalties. It seemed the system was breaking down, as it did for other humane systems in the past. Then he woke up.

Sitting with me at an outdoor Caribou Coffee table in Chapel Hill in the gloom of a late gray afternoon in December, Levine described how his quiet little movement developed from there. He learned that an organization had been started in 1948 that seemed to want what he wanted – elected representatives who worked for good governing (“Goo-Goos” was the dismissive name for such reformers in the Progressive Era) instead of hack politicians. The National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC) was started by Eleanor Roosevelt and some Democratic allies. Today, with an office in Washington DC, it makes available detailed analysis of voting behavior to promote election of progressive Democratic candidates. Levine drew on parts of this organization’s mission, but not the part favoring “progressive Democratic” candidates. He wanted an approach that favored pragmatic problem-solving candidates. Of course they were likely to belong to a party, and probably the Democratic Party. But Levine was looking for values and principles higher than party.

He began putting together CommonGoodGoverning (CGG). He avoided the internet, so you can’t Google it. (We began our talk over hot tea as a couple of over-70 geezers kvetching about how kids are being damaged by their social media trance; Levine’s now-7-year-old grandson is a particularly bitter case for him.) CGG has a PowerPoint (he calls it “our deck”) he’ll send you by email on request, and a newsletter he emails monthly to 1,610 interested subscribers. It’s the most non-aggressive political email I’ve ever seen, never asking for donations and happy to be unsubscribed-to. “Hopeful American Democracy Fixers,” he writes in each newsletter from the top. “If you don’t want any more monthly updates, just hit reply and say ‘no more.’” One of the striking tactics of CGG is how it operates below the radar.  Levine asked me not to use his name if I wrote something for a publication. (I don’t consider this measly blog a meaningful publication). Why? “I don’t have time” to be bothered by the attention. His secret goal is for CGG to be discovered in six or eight years when a few unlikely candidates explain their surprising wins to a Washington Post reporter by mentioning the support they got from CommonGoodGoverning. But he won’t seek that publicity.

Here’s what CGG has done for every two-year election, starting in 2018. First, it looked for fresh candidates running for open seats who met its criteria. According to the PowerPoint deck, they must be:

• Anchored by principles that a majority of American voters agree on, not issues, policies or ideologies
• Focused on problems that a majority of American voters, Republicans, Democrats and Independents, are concerned about (e.g. healthcare costs, veteran services, immigration, responding to climate change, etc.)
• Seeking to replace politicians with public servants/servant leaders

CGG then narrowed the number of these candidates down to a few dozen, who were approached with offers to help (not endorse or donate to). Those who responded were interviewed and chosen for support.

Two years ago, Levine called me up when he read an op-ed I had in the Roanoke Times about my experience teaching for a term at a North Carolina community college. (I was a tenured associate professor at a top liberal arts college in Virginia on leave for the fall). I was intrigued by his project. This year, I volunteered to help. Here’s what CGG volunteers do:

• Research on voter opportunities specific to their district
• Research on “truthful” opposition research
• Active brainstorming on specific campaign challenges
  • Ongoing sharing of lessons learned from past/current campaigns

They don’t donate money, and they don’t leave home. Levine said members of CGG from outside the Chapel Hill area have never come to meet him as I did, at least not since the pandemic.

My assignment for the ’22 campaign was to find minority “potential influencers” in certain small towns and counties. I sent the information to Levine to send to the campaigns for four of their seven chosen candidates for the general election. This was to operationalize Levine’s behaviorist theory that peer-to-peer networking is the most powerful way to win votes. Being a former journalist, I enjoyed the assignment, using the internet to compile names and contacts (emails or phone numbers) of up to a dozen locals (chairs of library boards, arts councils, Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and such) in targeted areas of four congressional districts: Colorado’s 3^rd, Arizona’s 2^nd, Iowa’s 2^nd and New Jersey’s 2^nd. This, after I had failed to be any help for CGG’s candidate Katie Dean, a working-class auto-repair owner in western North Carolina who lost the Democratic primary to a more liberal candidate. I also liked this other candidate, but as a Brown- and Harvard-educated minister in a same-sex marriage, Jasmine Beach-Farrara predictably lost to the Republican in Mark Meadow’s conservative district by 9.5 percentage points.

This year, CGG had fewer candidates than in the two previous elections. For the primary, it had a different group of seven candidates. All but one of those lost (including two Republicans). For the general election, all seven CGG candidates lost, some by a mile. But one came very close, and I was glad it was the one I helped on the western slope of the Rockies in Colorado. Gun-toting Republican Lauren Boebert of Rifle, Colorado, squeaked by with about a 500-vote margin.

In his after-action newsletter, Levin blamed gerrymandering and the fact that four of the seven CGG candidates were running against incumbents this year, the first time CGG had backed challengers to incumbents. That was discouraging, but he signed off as always on his newsletter, “Onward.”

Common Good Governing has already helped elect six members of Congress. Four of them joined a bipartisan Problem-Solvers Caucus that is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, co-chaired by a Democrat and a Republican.  

This goo-goo approach may seem naïve or over-matched by the grim options of mass violence or mass cynicism. But with a narrow Republican takeover in the House, and an equally narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, it’s a serious alternative to a serious problem. George Packer put it this way in his article in the Atlantic last December, “Are We Doomed?”

There is a third scenario, though, beyond mass violence or mass cynicism: a civic movement to save democracy. In an age of extreme polarization, it would take the form of a broad alliance of the left and the center-right. This democratic coalition would have to imagine America’s political suicide without distractions or illusions. And it would have to take precedence over everything else in politics.