Meanderings, 26 October 2024

I want you, especially those in the Nashville area, to know that you are invited to join Tommy Phillips and me in a panel discussion about Invisible Jesus in Nashville, October 29 6-8pm CT at Otter Creek Church in Brentwood, TN. Preson Phillips band will open for us, then we will both make a short statement, then we will have a panel discussion… and then some time for questions and chatting with folks. I’m looking forward to the time.’

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Thank you, Jaden:

CHICAGO — Triple negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of the disease and more difficult to treat. A young Chicago student has hopes of becoming a doctor and dreams of finding the way to halt this disease.

And Jaden Blankenship is already on his way.

“I was always someone who was kind of passionate about science and really wanted to answer questions that are really hard to answer,” he said. “And cancer is one of those questions. It’s a puzzle you don’t really know what you are solving.”

 The puzzle, in this case, is triple-negative breast cancer. And the researcher hoping to piece together a potential treatment is a high school senior.

“Triple negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive cancers out there and particularly effects black and Latinx women,” Blankenship said.

Two years ago, Blankenship, a student at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, was matched with a mentor, Richard Minshall, PhD, through UIC’s Cancer Health Equities Summer Scholars Program. Minshall is a professor of anesthesiology and pharmacology at the university’s College of Medicine. The program has given the 17-year-old an opportunity to not just explore existing research, but to advance it.

There is no one like G.K. Chesterton. The single-most quotable writer ever, and this essayist has some choice words about GKC:

I discovered GKC back in the mid-1990s. I was working for a green activist group in London and spending my spare time writing poetry and wandering around protest camps and old churches. Inside my young and confused soul was a push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views. At any rate, the world told me they were conflicting. In this world, if you got involved in politics in any way, you had to be ‘left’ or ‘right.’ If you were ‘left’ you didn’t like capitalism and inequality and patriotism and war. Instead, you liked progress and equality and wealth redistribution and this new thing called ‘the environment.’ If you were ‘right’ you didn’t like equality or wealth redistribution, and you didn’t much like this ‘environment’ unless you could sell it. But you did like patriotism, capitalism, individual liberty, the Queen and something called ‘tradition.’

All of this was confusing to me, because I liked patriotism, the environment, individual liberty, tradition (well, some of it), and the idea of redistributing wealth and power, but I didn’t like war, progress, capitalism or inequality. I didn’t know what I thought about the Queen, or indeed the State, but I hated corporations and I mostly thought people should be left alone - or at least, that I should. The Machine was already bearing down on me, though I was a long way from naming it. I also had a nagging sense that the world I could see around me was only a part of something much bigger that I couldn’t pin down, and neither of the teams seemed to have much time for that idea. What was a young Romantic to do?

Then, one day, I picked up a copy of Chesterton’s novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and was intrigued. On finishing it, I went looking for The Man Who Was Thursday, and then got myself a book of his poems. When I came across The Secret People, his epic, prophetic take on the story of England, I was hooked. Discovering that he had written non-fiction too, I dug into some of that, and soon discovered distributism, the political theory he had developed with his friend Hilaire Belloc, to offer an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. According to Chesterton, this amounted to guaranteeing ‘three acres and a cow’ to everyone who wanted it. This man, it seemed, reflected the paradoxes of my own worldview - only he didn’t think they were paradoxes. Instead, he had a way of writing about them which made them seem the most natural thing in the world.

On fascism, Hitler, and Trump, Chris Gehrz weighs in, and I apologize for such a lengthy clip from Gehrz, but what he says has weight for me.

Unlike his current running mate, I didn’t enter the 2016 election thinking that Donald Trump might “prove useful” to anyone as president of the United States — nor that he was this country’s version of history’s most infamous dictator. Here’s one of the things that I wrote (publicly) about Trump in the same year that Vance (privately) made the comment quoted above:

Probably to a fault, my training as a 20th century European historian who spends a lot of time teaching about the Holocaust leaves me averse to any attempt to interject Hitler into American political debate.

After all, the last thing I wanted to do was become the mirror image of Eric Metaxas, who’s still repeating his 2016 claim that conservative resistance to Trump’s political opponents is akin to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler. After the author of a much-criticized biography of the German martyr declared the 2024 election yet another “Bonhoeffer moment,” Bonhoeffer’s descendants recently took the unusual step of publicly condemning Metaxas and other for trivializing and abusing his legacy — while Bonhoeffer scholars warned against drawing “inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany.”

Analogies serve the purpose of politicians and pundits because they streamline complexity, explaining the complicated present in terms of a simplified past that seems to make instant sense. But because history is the study of things that change over time, of complex events that are contingent on distinct causes operating within particular contexts, historians tend to be leery of such facile comparisons. And so this European historian tries to resist the temptation to interpret the American present in light of the German past.

But my resistance weakens when I can read the once-and-perhaps-future American president suggest the Nazi analogy himself. When the man JD Vance once feared would become “America’s Hitler” is credibly reported as speaking favorably or enviously about the actual Hitler, even historians might start to think that history can rhyme, if not repeat. …

[In] 2017 [Gehrz wrote]: “…to insist that ‘it can’t happen here’ — with ‘it’ standing in for a dismaying array of troubling scenarios that don’t begin to approach the evil of the Shoah — is to indulge in the hubris of American exceptionalism. Such thinking implicitly denies the reality of sin and elevates a human system from the level of an inevitably flawed ‘experiment in liberty’ to that of a divine order. In the hands of this president or some other leader, it’s entirely possible that our political system could devolve into something closer to fascism than democracy…

“To the joy of supporters fed up with the status quo and the horror of opponents across the political spectrum, Donald Trump is breaking with American political traditions large and small. While some historians would interpret his presidency as part of an older pattern of crises, we should also consider the possibility that other countries’ histories can help us understand this moment in our own national story.

“I can’t help feeling foolish whenever my mind turns to the German experience under Hitler, or even to the Italian one under Mussolini (which some have found to be the more apt analogy). But it would be even more foolish for those of us who study National Socialism and other forms of European fascism to turn a blind eye to ‘unpleasant parallels’ when they present themselves. An American president who calls for ‘total allegiance’ to a nation and acts to exclude newcomers from that community, who promotes unilateralism and autarky in order to restore a supposed loss of national greatness, who evinces a casual disdain for truth and a petty intolerance of criticism, who curries the favor of white nationalists and trusts their counsel, who seeks to place his nation’s hopes not in the deliberate functioning of a constitutional system but in the rash actions of a single powerful egomaniac… such a leader is inviting these historical analogies.”

2024: I really wish I could say that anything has happened since 2017 to disinvite such comparisons. But horrified as I was in the first weeks of his presidency, what we’d see in its last weeks never occurred to me. I never thought Trump would think so little of either objective truth or “the deliberate functioning of a constitutional system” that he would steadfastly promulgate what Hitler would have called a “big lie” as the basis for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But by continually insisting that the election of Joe Biden was the actual “big lie,” Trump not only precipitated the January 6th attacks, but steadily eroded trust in some of the very structures that keep American democracy from sliding into Weimar-like chaos: a civil service that administers elections in a non-partisan manner, an independent judiciary that upholds the rule of law without prejudice, and a free press that reports rigorously and fairly.

What term from U.S. history are we supposed to use to describe so illiberal and anti-democratic a leader? Of course “Nazi” or even “fascist” isn’t a perfect fit for Trump; this isn’t interwar Europe. But what else can we do but look to other histories, where we can find politics and politicians that don’t fit our traditional spectrum but speak by analogy to our present crisis?

Asked in his NYT interview if Donald Trump was a fascist, John Kelly said, “he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.” Former JCS chief Mark Milley was even more blunt when Bob Woodward asked him about Trump: “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” All the more dangerous because constitutionalists like Kelly and Milley won’t be invited into Trump’s inner circle a second time.

But since this is a mostly a post about how historians relate the past to the present, let me give the last word to the leading American historian of European fascism. After January 6th, Robert O. Paxton famously abandoned his earlier reluctance to describe Trump in these terms. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton told the Times the other day, but he agreed that fascism in America is “bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms… It’s the real thing. It really is.”

And from Christina George, on chocolates:

Last year, I hosted a chocolate-tasting lab for a large group of honors students. I provided them with several types of chocolate, and together we went through a slow process of reaction, evaluation, and comparison. Their specimens for consideration included: Hershey’s milk chocolate, a very fine 72% dark chocolate, an increasingly bitter 80% dark chocolate, and a dark chocolate infused with chili pepper. I expected this experience would change their lives, as I assumed many of them had likely not experienced the wonders of beautiful, dark, European chocolate. At the end of the lab, we voted to determine the most preferred chocolate. The majority winner? Hershey’s.

Later that day, I resigned.

(I kid, mostly.)

Another poll, and I just have to do this one:

Lily Goodfellow’s story and her stories:

A sports reporter with Down syndrome is changing the game because of her work from the sidelines.

Lily Goodfellow spends her days sharing other people’s stories; their plays, stats and dreams. But it’s her own story, that is changing the playing field. 

She started Special Olympics when she was 4-years-old and by fourteen she had amassed a wall full of medals for soccer, track, swimming, basketball.

To Lily, nothing is insurmountable, including her dream to go from the field to the sidelines as a sports broadcaster.

She will be the first student with a disability to earn a media literacy and journalism certificate from the College of DuPage.

She honed her skills as on air and writing as a weekly columnist for the student newspaper.