Meanderings, 27 January 2024

Kris and I will cherish the remaining days we have down here in Florida. While waiting our return, we’ll ignore any thoughts of what the weather may offer us upon our return. We have no good expectations.

Photo by John Cobb on Unsplash

In the meantime, here are some Meanderings for your Saturday (or weekend):

We didn’t spot any falling, or fallen, iguanas:

he blast of Arctic air that has plunged most of the United States into freezing temperatures may bring another strange risk to Florida: iguanas falling from the sky.

"*FALLING IGUANAS* possible this weekend in Southwest Florida as the coldest air of the season moves in Sunday morning. We have a pretty sizable iguana population from Sanibel to Cape Coral to Naples," Matt Devitt, the Chief Meteorologist at WINKNews in southwest Florida, posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday. "Locally, lows will dip into the 40s, wind chills in the 30s by sunrise."

Devitt noted that iguanas begin to fall from trees around 45 degrees and below.

Three species of iguanas are found across Florida, all of which are invasive to the state, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC). These species include the green iguana, the Mexican spinytail iguana, and the black spinytail iguana. They arrived in Florida from their native Central America via the pet trade.

In periods of intense cold, iguanas living in the trees may fall to the ground, appearing as if they have simply died and dropped to Earth. However, the iguanas are usually in a state of cold-driven torpor.

"Iguanas are cold-blooded animals, dependant on environmental heat to maintain a body temperature adequate for physiologic functioning," William Kern, a professor and reptile expert at the University of Florida, told Newsweek.

Karen’s Substack grabbed me when I read it:

I am trying to let go.

I’m not quite there yet.

I have a friend—not a close one, an acquaintance, really. He’s a fellow writer whose work I admire—a writer whose work many people admire, in fact. I don’t remember how it started, but he and I have had some dialogue over the past year or two about our faith backgrounds and our church experience in the present. The long and short of it for him is that while he was once quite churchy and devout, he is now only devout and has left organized religion entirely. To be clear: he has not left his Christian faith. To the contrary, that faith drips from every word he writes. But he doesn’t think about church. He doesn’t think about the things institutional Christianity thinks about, fights about, pontificates about, and polarizes about. He has checked out of it all.

When he first shared these things with me, I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. The checking out, I mean.

I can imagine it now.

But I’m not there yet. And I don’t want to be. I just can’t check out yet.

Aimee probes us all with this one:

Frederick Buechner turns this thought around and around a bit in his sermon on “Faith and Fiction.” A novelist and a preacher, he discusses the similarities between faith and fiction, and brings up a character in a series of his books, Bebb. Buechner comes to realize Bebb is a saint. He didn’t set out to do this with his main character, make him a saint. In fact, Buechner doesn’t believe one can accomplish sainthood this way. By building virtue. That’s how we think of it, right? Because virtue is good. So we pursue the virtues themselves: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Sounds like a well-rounded saint to me.

But Buechner says that holiness is not a human quality like virtue is. “If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them…It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with.” Bebb wasn’t, that’s for sure.

So I stop and think for a minute about the call to holiness in Scripture. What does that mean, then? When Peter says, “But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ If you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers” (1 Pet. 15-16). What does it mean to be holy in our behavior? To be consecrated to God in it?

Here’s the thing. If we are pursuing holiness by pursuing virtue itself, we are going to pursue the virtues as we see them. Yet it’s not only our behavior that is amiss, but also our seeing. And we miss the realness of virtue. “If you’re too virtuous, the chances are you think you are a saint already under your own steam, and therefore the real thing can never happen to you.” Holiness is all around us, but we have trouble seeing it. We cannot make holiness real. Holiness helps us to see the realness. In me. In you. In my oat cake with mascarpone cheese and the snow that I am crunching my feet on outside this week.

John Hawthorne takes on Nikki Haley:

Third, she said that her parents told her that you’d always run into racists but American society is not a racist society. If she believed the latter, she claimed, she couldn’t have accomplished what she has. She said that if you tell young people of color, that America is a racist country, then they won’t believe they can achieve anything.

While not as extreme as a DeSantis argument that we’re teaching children to be victims or oppressors, it’s in that general vein. Students know what they see, both in the past and in the present. Ask the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges if they think America is racist as the National Guard escorted them past hordes of angry Whites. Ask the Freedom Riders. Ask those stopped by police in Memphis or students in subpar urban schools. If anything, knowledge of the racist threads within society motivates them to strive to overcome.

Perhaps the best rebuttal to Haley’s Declaration of Independence defense is to simply point at the guy who’s dominating the Republican race. Why does Trump think that calling Nikki by a distorted version of her first name is a good thing to do?² Why does he suggest that maybe she isn’t eligible to even run for president because her parents were immigrants? Why does he diminish her achievements as UN Ambassador? Because he knows that a segment of the Republican electorate is hesitant to support a woman for president, much less a person of color. He appeals to those sensitivities because he knows how deeply they are ingrained in segments of American society (especially in two of the whitest states in the primaries).

Kareem, yes THAT Kareem, on Substack and the Nazi issue (and Kareem, if you read this, know that when the Big E took down UCLA long long ago I cried):

This question of the parameters of free speech is especially important to me because, for the past three years, I’ve been writing a newsletter on the Substack platform. Without free speech, my newsletter would not be possible. I started it as a natural evolution of my years as an activist as well as the reality of my age. To me, at its best, free speech is an exchange of researched and reasoned ideas. At its worst, it is vitriolic, ill-informed, and irrational ramblings. But the thing about free speech is that there is no requirement that you are reasonable. Which is where I come in. I started a Substack newsletter to promote reasoned discourse about the intersection of social and political issues with popular culture.

Substack describes itself as a Netflix for writers, meaning they aren’t responsible for the content, merely for providing a centralized site for writers across the political spectrum to engage in free speech. They have built a virtual open-mike stage. All we have to do is sign up and perform.

Substack has over 50,000 publications with 35 million active subscribers, including two million paid subscribers. Writers include historian Heather Cox Richardson, prize-winning writers George Saunders, Salman Rushdie, Roxane Gay, and Chuck Palahniuk, filmmaker Michael Moore, musician Patti Smith, and many respected journalists. We all face the responsibility of knowing that our celebrity supports the existence of Substack and by extension its policies.

Substack has come under scrutiny for allowing newsletters that promote hate speech, Nazis, and white supremacy. Substack responded to the criticism by issuing a statement: “I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either — we wish no one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse.” According to Substack, only six publications out of the 50,000 with a total of 29 paying subscribers have been identified by Substack as violating their terms of service, with one being taken down. Nevertheless, many Substack writers disagreed with Substack’s policy, with hundreds of newsletter writers signing a letter against their policy. Another 100 signed a letter in support of Substack. A few left the site, including high-profile Platformer, a tech newsletter.