Palm Sunday (Wayne Ferrebee, 2024) watercolor on paper
It is Good Friday. Usually Ferrebeekeeper posts a beautiful crucifixion painting from the astonishing canon of classical Christian art to celebrate this solemn holiday. These days though, it seems that Jesus is being crucified more-than-sufficiently by his own followers (whose inability to understand the great rabbi’s message of compassion or even to read his actual words has become the defining feature of contemporary Christianity). Therefore I have made my own little painting of Christ for Holy Week this year. It is not an image of Christ dying (or performing any of the various supernatural antics which are the frequent focus of Christian cult iconography). Instead I have portrayed Jesus riding a little white jenny into Jerusalem as he pores over a book.
The donkey is an underappreciated sacred animal in Judeo-Christian scripture. In the Bible, asses are mentioned more than 130 times (complete with specialized Hebrew equestrian vocabulary about color, age, use, and gender) and feature in some of the defining moments of scripture. Sampson uses the jawbone of an ass as his weapon. Balaam’s ass is one of the Bible’s three talking animals (and arguably the only one which is not a divinity in animal form). The (now extinct) wild ass was a symbol of grace and beauty. Throughout the scriptures, donkeys are always doing the hard work of ploughing, farming, irrigating, carrying, and even fighting (the Persian cavalry rides asses). Finally & most importantly (to Christians anyway; Balaamites might decide otherwise), Holy Week and the Passion begin when Jesus rides a white donkey into Jerusalem as described in Matthew (which, according to textual scholars, is the original gospel written by someone who was maybe a contemporary of Jesus). Here is the relevant text from the King James Bible:
21 And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, 2 Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. 3 And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. 4 All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, 5 Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. 6 And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, 7 And brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. 8 And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9 And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. 10 And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? 11 And the multitude said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. 12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, 13 And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. 14 And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them. 15 And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the son of David; they were sore displeased, 16 And said unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?
Although Jesus was putatively crucified by the Romans for pretending to the throne of Judea, careful readers will note that his death was mainly orchestrated by the Pharisees for interfering with their money-making operations (events set forth in this very passage we just read!).
The Jesus in my little painting seems to be steeling himself for harrowing the temple by checking out some relevant passages in his own sacred book (his writer’s proof copy of the Bible looks suspiciously like the same little white Bible my parents have had forever). The excesses of his followers as they throw fronds everywhere do not seem particularly connected to the son of man as he rides to the temple and to his doom (careful readers of Matthew might also be struck by how fickle, mutable, and downright frightening the multitudes can be in the story of Christ).
Of course, if this doesn’t appeal to you and you are taken back by my somewhat leading prose (and somewhat abstract image of Jesus) there is another possible interpretation of this Palm Sunday painting. The whole painting is only the size of my palm since I painted it in the tiny sketchbook which I carry with me. Sacred images and scriptural passages can have multiple interpretations, some of which are more right than others. Maybe it’s worth carefully looking at the actual book itself (without someone telling you what to think) just like Jesus is doing here!
An artist’s enthusiastic vision of the fully mature Mahattan Healing Forest (from SUGi)
Spring is starting to spring everywhere (even if January and February of 2024 were astonishingly mild in New York, it was still, ya know, winter) and, as April and May approach, a whole bunch of flower and bloom posts are in the offing here at Ferrebeekeeper! Thank goodness! Sometimes it is necessary to take a break from the broken realms of politics and culture to go outside and appreciate the greenery. Pursuant to which, today we have an uplifting post about an amazing plan by SUGi (an organization which supports urban forests) to plant a pocket forest here in New York City. This may seems like a post about a small native garden, but I believe the micro-forest is much larger and more important than its name might initially suggest.
The “Manhattan Healing Forest” is scheduled to be constructed/planted on Roosevelt Island in April. For non-New Yorkers, Roosevelt Island is a 150 acre island in the East River which was used throughout the 19th century as a forbidden institutional island of hospitals, prisons, and sanitariums, but which is now a more conventional residential community (even though it is only arms-length from the dense skyscrapers of Midtown). The forest will consist of more than a thousand native plants carefully arranged in accordance with the the renowned “Miyawaki Method” (named for the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki) which focuses on sustainability, ecological mutualism, and native planting. The method involves a holistic “bottom-up” planting strategy: first the land is stripped to the foundation and then an entire humus layer of compost and mulch is installed all at once. Upon this rich mulch, native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers are planted close together at the same time–which fosters rapid growth (since the native plants grow in symbiosis with each other and with the local insects, fungi, actinomycetes, and other lifeforms). Thanks to mutualism (and the benefits of being in the proper ecological niche) Miyawaki-style forests can reach full maturity in mere decades.
As you can see in the thrilling aerial photo above, the forest will indeed be tiny (there is the footprint, outlined in bold white). At 250 square meters (2700 square feet) it is only the size of a small back yard. However the effects of these little wildlife refuges are bigger than their square footage: such miniature wildernesses provide an opportunity for birds, insects and other animals to maintain a footprint even in the densest city. Humans benefit as well: the rooted greenery help prevent erosion and soak up rainfall while capturing carbon and otherwise filtering the air (in addition to providing a respite from hectic city life for locals). According to SUGi’s founder, some of the 40 species of flora planned for the Manhattan forest “include white oak, Virginia strawberry, butternut, New York fern and eastern white pine” .
The SUGi micro forest is designed to anchor the roots of the island against extreme weather and to provide a place of tranquil refuge to thoughtful humans However, more importantly, it is part of a hidden worldwide archipelago of ecological refugia across the world. SUGi’s little native growth forests compliment the wilderness areas, cemeteries, parks, gardens, yards, and even vacant lots which are part of the urban landscape. By stitching together these tiny safe spaces, living things can maintain a toehold in what first seems to be a wasteland of concrete, glass, and asphalt.
Humans are the architects of the urban world–we could build our cities into glorious wonderlands of self-reinforcing life. Yet generally the rancid developers, cruel traffic engineers (who hate all living things with boundless antipathy), & crooked politicians who hog the blueprints of urban planning can only envision lifeless concrete worlds hostile to ecology and inimical to lifeforms other than mean bald guys in SUVs. Lately though, there is a pervasive sense that the selfish “humans-only” model of city-building is not just failing other lifeforms, it is failing humans too. Like a coconut landing on a beach after a volcano eruption, the mini-forest is a foothold for disrupted ecosystems to reestablish itself.
Throughout the decades I have lived in New York City, I think I have been to Roosevelt Island once (when I got off the subway at the wrong stop by accident). Maybe it is time to head out there again and see the city from a new standpoint (both literally and ecologically).
Say, has anyone noticed that the Supreme Court is clogged with corrupt high magistrates who were appointed by popular-vote losing presidents or granted stolen court seats through Senatorial conspiracy and skullduggery? A lot of commentators from all sides of the media are remarking that the crazy pro-autocracy, pro-tyrant, pro-monopoly rulings from this compromised court require a political solution (unless we want to be ruled forever by unelected high priests in black robes who answer only to billionaires). But what would such a solution look like?
Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow Enjoy Deciding Your Future over some Cigars with some Conservative Lawyers (painting by Sharif Tarabay)
Americans other than Ted Cruz all believe in self-government, but today’s compromised Republic is pulling the constitution in weird terrible (totalitarian) directions and making a mockery of the original ideas of government by the people for the people. The Senate is hopeless: reprobates from bunch of mostly empty states filled with dust, nightmares, rusting mines, and white supremacists have power to derail any needed legislation or reform. The House is where the people’s business should really be decided, however it has been compromised by decades of anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian trench warfare (which is to say gerrymandering and voter interference have produced a strange anti-democratic & unrepresentative lower house, too). The electoral college means the president can lose the popular election by millions (…or tens of millions?) of votes. Yikes!
A reformed Supreme Court could help us transcend this democratic back-sliding!
Institutionalists and centrists favor term limits, however not only would this not solve any of our immediate problems, it would also probably not address any long-term problems. Thus we come to the solution most favored by progressives and reformers: Court packing! The Constitution never specifies how many Supreme Court Justices there should be. We could change the number and Joe Biden could ram through a super majority while we still have the Senate (you’re leaving the Senate soon anyway Joe Manchin, make sure Justice has to deal with some real justice).
The problem with court-packing is that it would lead to retaliation. If the Democrats packed the court with highly intelligent progressive justices of great probity, then, the next chance they got, the Republicans would fill it up with crooks and Clarence Thomases (although, frankly, we already have such a court, and could hardly do any worse). With such a back-and-forth dynamic, the court could soon become a huge body of political hacks and apparatchiks who ignore the letter of the law for whatever is favored by their backers and payers (although, again, it seems like we already have that). What could stop such a court-packing race?
My proposed solution solves this problem and likewise solves the wider problem of democratic back-sliding. It also gives Americans new dignity, new authority, and even a little bit of money! It is a guaranteed hit with every single American (except for nine). Every American citizen over the age of 18 should automatically become a Supreme Court Associate justice. We, the people, as justices of the Supreme Court, can “try cases” (which has already become the Washington jargon for “administer the nation”) through an Athens style direct vote by whomever wants to show up.
Obviously there will have to be some adjustments. The current salary for a Supreme Court Associate Justice is a not-inconsiderable $300k per year. With around 250 million justices, we would have to reduce remuneration to a more reasonable honorarium of say $13.00 per justice per year available as a $13.00 tax credit (assuming you remember to check the “I am a Supreme Court Justice” box buried somewhere in TurboTax). The court would no longer have offices and security details and clerks (and infinite lavish benefits) but would instead be issued a stylish laminated “official Supreme Court Justice” card (which I also imagine would be honored by Blimpie or Subways for a 10% “Supreme Lunch” discount on their budget mayonnaise sandwiches). We could probably also put some stylish gilding and holograms on this card to make court service more appealing to lazy or recalcitrant justices (of whom there will always be a hundred million or so). Likewise the Supreme Court building would need to be relocated/replaced. Presumably we could put some blind naked lady statues on Commanders Field and use that until a suitable new Supreme Court stadium/office is built by the Federal Government.
Welcome to the People’s Supreme Court (formerly Fedex Stadium) please be aware that some of your fellow Supreme Court Justices play contact football on Sundays!
One wouldn’t expect every American citizen to have a sophisticated lawyerish understanding of precedents, precise legal language, witness testimony, and that kind of stuff. Fortunately, this wouldn’t matter since these days Clarence Thomas and some of those other right-wing nutjobs don’t bother with such niceties anyway. They just take money to do what their patrons say. So, as an incentive bonus, all of the new justices would serve with this same set of ethics rules! If Harlan Crow gives you 20 million dollars to vote on the constitutional underpinnings of building “Crow House Casino” atop Arlington Cemetery or whatever, feel free to just take the money and do whatever you want (just like Clarence Thomas!). Admittedly Harlan Crow might find it harder to individually suck up to and bribe 250 million of his fellow justices, but that is his problem (and a huge point in favor of this new Court as opposed to the extremely corruptible nine person version we are now suffering through).
“Uhh, would you maybe consider the merits of ‘Crow House’ for an additional 10% discount on the small lunch combo?”
By this point maybe you have stopped laughing and are saying: “Golly! I could use 13 dollars and I already have a black robe left over from my Darth Maul costume last Halloween! Also, I would like to personally run the nation and I could not possibly do a worse job than the current idiots and reprobates (not you, Ketanji Brown Jackson, although maybe you can have my 13 dollars to help us with the language of this new universal reproductive freedom decision). This actual democracy stuff sounds like a GREAT idea!”
Well, maybe your angry feelings not such a joke either! (in fact none of this is a joke, I am coldly furious about the corrupt Court and the broken republic and I am now willing to consider just about anything to expedite some desperately needed Constitutional reforms). If you also feel this way, then send this very article to your friends. Just copy this link and paste it in everything. Just do it! Or, if you don’t want to help make me self-promote myself into some sort of cut-rate Dean Swift, then write a white-hot letter to your national elected representatives.
Incredibly, the completely crazy and dangerous idea that we could all be Supreme Court Justices is less crazy and dangerous than what we currently have! Couldn’t we fix some of these problems before all of our eagles and marble buildings and high ideals implode under a wave of anti-democratic corruption? You actually have the power to agitate and fix this, whether you are a Supreme Court Justice or not. Start writing and complaining (and explaining). Also, whatever happens, you will always be Supreme in my book (even if Harlan Crow and Donald Trump say otherwise).
“All political lives… end in failure.” Mitch McConnell has won everything over the years. He has combined the ancient flaws left over from the Constitution’s creation with various non-democratic features of the Senate to always get what he wants (successfully ratcheting power towards monopolistic business titans and unelected Heritage-foundation judges who are pledged to circumvent the law for life—even as an ever-growing slice of the electorate opposes him). Yet, in the final analysis, Donald Trump has coopted all of McConnell’s anti-democratic tools for his (Trump’s) own self-aggrandizement and tossed McConnell and his priorities right under the bus.
It is grimly funny to watch Trump waltz into Congress and say that the only thing that matters is that Russia be allowed to annex Ukraine, the rest of Europe and eventually the United States (for Trump’s true agenda is now evident: the complete destruction of the United States and the death of every one of its citizens, save one), and see “Republican” legislators (these days the “R” really stands for Russia) line up to embrace this nihilistic self-destructive “policy” of abandoning our allies and then our nation to Vladimir Putin. In the end, McConnell will be remembered (if anyone is left alive to write the history honestly) as the person who broke the American political process to such a degree that it could not respond coherently to Russian infection and takeover.
This is the true dual legacy of the man who will be remembered as one of the biggest villains in American history: success enabling kleptocrats to loot the state; absolute failure helping America fight off a terrible external enemy which has corrupted our political process and is killing us from the inside.
One wonders who will succeed him as majority leader to take up Trump’s plans for national self annihilation: J. D. Vance, Tommy Tuberville, Chuck Grassley, Tim Scott…Lindsay Graham? They are all strong candidates (in terms of absolute moral weakness), but they will never have McConnell’s unique flair for manipulating dull institutional rules into tools for destroying the nation.
For some time it has been evident to anyone with a brain that MAGA, the “grassroots” Christofascist political movement presently destroying the USA like a metastasizing cancer, is a Russian intelligence operation. This week’s not-very-stunning revelation that the most venomous MAGA second-stringers like James Comer, Jim Jordan, and Chuck Grassley are acting directly on information and directions from Russian Intelligence does not seem to have much moved the needle of public opinion (not yet, anyway). Comer’s absolute complicity with Russia’s aims apparently hasn’t even merited particular mention in the big corporate media like the New York Times (I think the fact that Comer acts in the manner that Russian intelligence officials plan for him to act is a small notice on page B8, just below an article on whether it is better to buy Calabrian versus Tuscan villas). I suppose this makes sense: it is incontrovertible that the only man Donald Trump serves other than himself is Vladimir Putin. If MAGA’s beloved cult leader has always been an open traitor (and pays no political price for this), then it makes sense that all his sub-lieutenants, cronies, bootlickers, and apparatchiks would follow the same script…and eventually so would the great mass of true MAGA supporters.
This is completely infuriating to me. I grew up in blood red rural Ohio in the nineteen-eighties and the one item of universal faith among my childhood peers was the wickedness of Russia vis-a-vis the great Manichean moral questions of the Cold War. Why are so many of those same schoolmates now bowing down and proclaiming that they love (the xenophobic, bigoted, unfree nightmare that is) Putin’s Russia more than the frayed but still real democracy we live in?
Now we have a pretty obvious reason why Jim Jordan, James Comer, Mike Johnson (and Donald Trump) serve Russia. Such men are losers. They are credibly accused of beating and raping women, fraud, stealing money, hushing up institutional sexual abuse, and other anti-social behavior which would get anyone other than untouchable political leaders thrown in jail. They have to turn our nation into a fascist failed state because only in such a dystopia would such men be tolerated walking around outside of prison (to say nothing of running everything!). Their post-democracy plan is “the Thirty” (which we will talk about in next week’s post about why all sorts of American “elites” would support Donald Trump even though it is obvious to them that he is a deadly Hitler-style populist strongman).
However the true question of this moment is not why morally compromised oligarchs and political quacks support MAGA. The important question of the past decade is why my old scoutmaster, and my parents’ next door neighbor, and other kindly & excellent people from my youth have decided to directly support Putin via vile MAGA fascists? Why do veterans and farmers and lay ministers and fading football stars and, uh, Kid Rock support anti-American criminals like Trump and Jordan even when it is obvious that these and suchlike MAGA grifters actively support America’s enemies and look down on their own followers as dupes and patsies? Why do “real” Americans love Trumpler, even when it is obvious he hates them both generally and specifically? It makes me mad that so many fellow citizens (and friends and family!) are being lied to and manipulated in a manner that the Washington Post can never quite seem to grasp (no matter how many illiterates they interview at truckstops) but which Hannah Arendt (or Goebbels) or anyone who lived through the nineteen thirties would instantly recognize.
Liberal, humanistic, and free-thinking writers tend to identify the hatred of MAGA with the time-honored hatreds of racism and zenophobia. This “Basket of Deplorable” analysis has more than a grain of truth… but also alienates broad swathes of the population who could perhaps be persuaded towards other finer moral standards (most people alter and amend their values and conduct into rough comportment with that of their peers). To truly grasp MAGA (beyond the fact that Putin and crooked monopolists pay for it because it is useful to them) we must look towards an ancient and terrible family truth.
Grandma Pierson (a cosmopolitan artist and sophisticated tastemaker and the person in the family who was most like me) used to say “you become what you hate”. Then when she got old and sick and was stuck in a nursing home, she started watching Fox News (as reference for people of some happier future: FOX is an international media conglomerate which attacks and undermines democracy on behalf of crooked oligarchs and corporate monopolies). Soon she was talking all crazy about “those people” in Los Angeles and New York and how they were persecuting poor martyred President Trump. And so Grandma, who spent her life traveling the world, thinking freely, and helping Grandpa as he fought Russia spent her dotage clutching her pearls and rooting for grifters who want to abolish NATO. Gah!
You become what you hate.
This explains how democratic Israel became a jackboot apartheid state (sigh…we’ll talk about that in a later post, too). It explains how Russia became a mafia state with no connections to the failed promises of communism–but with all of the same old murderous totalitarian flaws of Lenin and Stalin. It explains a great deal about the world at a micro and macro levels (but you have to look at how people behave and what they do–not at the labels they give themselves).
You become what you hate.
When I was growing up, I would sit at my little plastic desk in Waterford Elementary and wonder why Russians hated freedom so much (it was the eighties and all schoolkids thought like that unless they were sophisticates from Exeter or something). Why were they so wicked? Such thoughts led to a horrible epiphany: that Soviets obviously thought of themselves as righteous heroes and thought of Americans as venial money-grubbers out to ruin the world with crony capitalism and insider deals. When I tried to talk about the real ramifications of that idea, it didn’t go as planned. I don’t think the communism per se was what was most hateful about the Soviet Union (though don’t get me wrong: I love my material things and don’t want to share them with others). The crazy authoritarianism, surveillance, cronyism, corruption, coercion, torture, state murder etc. etc. etc. which the Soviet Union utilized to implement communism were the real problems! Now, as an adult, I find that these qualities seem to be the true heart of MAGA appeal (They aren’t even hiding this at all at CPAC, or whatever that GOP totalitarian fan fest is called).
It is understandable that people are frightened by future shock, globalization, and neoliberalism (“neoliberalism” is a somewhat misleading euphemism for… corporate consolidation and monopolistic privatization schemes–which are exactly what Trump believes in–for those who can afford to pay). However backing Putin-style strongmen is a knee-jerk response (or maybe just a jerk response) which will only bear poisoned fruit and will neither turn back the clock to the social/moral norms of yesteryear, nor will it restore rural or rustbelt economies. Looking beyond the (Potemkinesque) luxury developments of Moscow to the rest of Russia (which Tucker Carlson didn’t get around to as Putin led him around on a leash) reveals a country where nobody would want to live.
I feel like my head will explode watching fraudulent failed businessmen and obvious Putin bootlickers run around attacking the military and the constitution every day for the sole advantage of our national enemies. If I could take a transcript of this era (with names redacted) back to 5th grade, it is easy to imagine today’s MAGA stalwarts back then condemning such banana republic-style crimes and pulling out there hair at the extent to which we are following a script written by adversaries.
Meanwhile, among the great and good, we have been busy hating Donald Trump (I wish I could say I don’t despise that coistrel with my whole heart…but such a statement would be an outright lie–which sounds pretty Trumpy already). These days Ezra Klein and Robert Kuttner spend all day every day attacking Biden and praising Trumpian political methodologies (guys, do you even remotely recognize how stupid & crazy all of your front-page articles about replacing Biden with Oprah Winfrey by means of secret deals at a crooked convention sound?). defenestrations and self-woundings and Even the very best of liberal commentators have lost the plot and talk about illiberal ends like locking our fellow countrymen up or sending them to extra-judicial camps like Guantanamo (even though that is indeed where Comer, Jordan, and Flynn all belong).
The poison of fascism is truly a poison (which the brave despise as a cowardly weapon all-too-likely to harm unexpected victims). It distorts and manipulates everyone and everything in a corrupted political body; not just the initial victims who knowingly imbibe (like poor Grandma when she got sick and scared) but even people on guard against it or fighting it. For example, instead of writing about beautiful Gothic art and Chinese porcelain, I now spend my days writing furious jeremiads against cretinous turncoats like James Comer whose name won’t even make sense to anyone 5 years from now (or 10, if we are stupendously unlucky).
And yet with such a methodology we now have a world where Ezra Klein and Robert Kuttner spend all day attacking Biden while giving Trump a free pass. Klein and Kuttner are (historically) liberal political journalists who are addressing our democratic emergency era by attacking Biden. Good work, idiots! [I am not linking to their stupid articles because they are stupid articles, but if you have looked at the Washington Post, or Vox, or the American Prospect you will find these allegedly pro-Democratic writers earnestly tearing Biden down for Trump’s advantage.]
You become what you hate.
Indeed, I had trouble my own trouble writing this article because I had to keep rewriting it. The initial drafts were so incandescently angry that they did not confirm to my personal moral style guide and were filled with off-balanced emotional language (or, more bluntly, my own writing looked like some sort of hate speech until I rewrote it many many times). How do you talk to people whose moral compass has been swayed by fear and unreason? Reason is a complex and unwieldy tool (which I can only really utilize at my finest & sharpest moments)–whereas fear and unreason are easy answers already known to work! These sorts of doom loops are not a trap for one side or the other–they are causing us all to suffer as we attack ourselves thanks to MAGA idiots enacting Russian plans.
In order to undo MAGA we need to beat Trumputin at the ballet box in November, but we are also going to have to reach out to people who have been swindled/bamboozled/manipulated into becoming what they hate. It isn’t just MAGA at this point. Everyone’s moral compass is starting to get skewed by the fight that Putin has us fighting with each other! You become what you hate, and we are all beginning to hate each other. It is a profound opportunity for our real enemies to hurt us and take advantage of us. For this alone (to say nothing of his hundreds of other crimes) Trump deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Maybe then we can get back to respecting and honoring each other and our country. We can surmount the political deadlock which is preventing us from solving problems and compromise on some reforms which everyone (other than crooked monopolists and grifting con artist politicians) recognize that we desperately require to keep our nation’s ideals, prosperity, and place of prominence secure from our enemies foreign and domestic.
Meat, Flowers, Banking…and Slush at the Intersection of Ave D and Nostrand
Happy Mardi Gras! Sadly New York barely experiences the joyous carnival excess of Fat Tuesday (it is but one of the many tenuous pseudo-holidays of the grim gray month of February), however we did get an actual winter Nor’easter with real snow (I don’t think it has properly snowed since back before I started my blogging sabbatical!)
Therefore we are celebrating Mardi Gras and the winter weather with a few pictures of Manhattan and Brooklyn in their winter finery. For example, here (just above this paragraph) is a big slushy Grand Central Station with the MetLife building hulking behind it!
Of course these snow day pictures hardly live up to mega blizzards of the past. But the snow really is pretty and it is worth taking note of the one day of the year when everything is beautifully hidden under a monochrome coat of white (and the traffic noise is drowned out by fluffy walls of ice). photograph is the beating heart of Brooklyn’s Little Haiti neighborhood (note the cannons on that flag!) The Little Haiti part of my walk is striking in the snow because 364 days of the year, this neighborhood looks like a street in Port au Prince or something (with vendors selling tropical fruit & used shoes, cooks grilling chicken on open flame, and a wall of U.S. and Haiti flags fluttering in the sea breeze). Only on the rare snow day is it incontrovertibly revealed to be a city in the northeast.
Finally here is the back yard with the gorgeous cherry slumbering beneath a coat of white (that tree changes color a lot). I wonder how long it will be before we get another snow storm. They are getting more and more scarce as the world’s atmosphere change, although, since I still have to get around town in the slush, maybe I will worry about it more in summer.
The Chinese new year which begins on February 10, 2024 (or really “Year 4722” in the Chinese calendar) is the Year of the Wood Dragon! Although this blog has not been around for the full 4722 years, we have been around for longer than a full 12 year zodiac cycle, so you can peer back through the mists of time to the long-vanished 2012 (Year of the Water Dragon) to see what personality traits are characteristic of people born in dragon years (although in that bygone post, I forgot to mention that dragons’ lucky color is glorious golden yellow).
In the Chinese zodiac bestiary, dragons stand out as the only mythical creature out of the twelve which do not exist in nature (although it has been suggested that dragons could potentially be based on crocodiles, giant catfish, or dragonlike fossil creatures which are now extinct–all of which seem like intriguing possibilities).
Yet even if dragons don’t exist in nature, there are certainly plenty of dragons in Chinese art and culture…and there are “dragons” climbing the Chinese hills. The world-famous South Chinese stoneware (which is literally synonymous with China in English) was manufactured in “龙窑”, “lóng yáo“, which translates as “dragon kilns”. In order to reach and maintain the high temperatures (1100° to 1400 °C) necessary for the production of fine stoneware, ancient potters created multi chambered kilns which climbed backwards up the steep hills. The highest chambers maintained the highest and most stable temperatures and are where the most exquisite pieces of Chinese porcelain were (and are) fired. The top chambers were also where the smokestacks were located, so, when the kilns were operating, they looked like enormous segmented creatures climbing the picturesque wooded hills and belching smoke! lóng yáo indeed!
Long Yao/Dragon Kiln in traditional ink/watercolor painting
These kilns worked very well indeed…and they were enormous: vast numbers of porcelain vessels could be efficiently fired together at one time with a single load of fuel. Here in the year of the wood dragon it is worth remembering that all of China’s ancient porcelain was indeed belched out by a wood fed dragon! Yet what we at ferrebeekeeper are most concerned with are the fruits of these labors–the exquisite stoneware porcelain and fine ceramics of dynastic China. In this realm too, the dragon reigned supreme, as a timeless emblem of the Chinese state (except during the Yuan/Mongol dynasty, when dragons lacked the same governmental cache in the eyes of horse-oriented steppe-based overlords). It seems like 2024…err I mean “4722” is going to be a true year of struggle, strife, and change. As we fight our way through the mayhem, let’s pause to recall what is sidereal, ideal, and eternal by posting some dynastic dragon porcelain from ancient China.
To celebrate Lunar New Year, here is a first example, a glorious enamelware dragon vase from the Ming Dynasty (during the Ming era, yellow was reserved for ceramics of the imperial household). This piece is from the fascinating (and troubled) JiaJing period (1522 to 1566), so it was being fired in a dragon kiln just before Shakespeare was born. With any luck, there will be plenty more lovely dragon vessels to see here as we move onward through the year of the dragon, but for now best wishes for prosperity, happiness, and love in the new year!
Although the headlines are rightly dominated by the hair-raising/attention-seeking antics of Republican “legislators” trying to destroy democracy and mortally harm the United States, there is actually some good news today (albeit in the realm of research rather than within the acrimonious affairs of state): the National Ignition project, a laser-based inertial confinement fusion device which has been testing breakthrough nuclear fusion technology is now producing bursts of nuclear fusion which engender twice the energy which scientists put into the system.
The downside (upside?) of National Ignition Facility posts is that the images never make any sense and look like futuristic space cities
For more than a decade Ferrebeekeeper has been following the amazing (yet also frustrating) saga of the National Ignition Project. The all-important project was built with national security money, putatively as a means of modeling the conditions and temperatures of nuclear weapons. This funding story illustrates the alarming strangle-hold which fossil fuel companies still have on our government (which must sell critical blue sky energy experiments as national security experiments so as not to offend knuckle-dragging oafs). The National Igniter consists of enormous banks of super lasers and super capacitors capable of emitting a brief burst of laser energy equal to 500 trillion watts of energy! I enumerated some of the other amazing facts and stats about the project in some of those other posts, or you can head over to Wikipedia to see even more amazing numbers and science facts.
Indeed, it is also well worth reading the National Ignition Facility’s Wikipedia entry as an extremely valuable lesson concerning the political, administrative, and logistic complexity of operating this kind of experiment. Unfortunately I cannot possibly do justice to the intradepartmental/multi-institutional wrangling about funding, building, and staffing (except to opine that even the largest and most sophisticated private companies would be unable to accomplish such projects because the managers would cancel all of the expensive or confusing things and give that money to themselves as buy-backs). This doesn’t even get into the engineering and nuclear physics of the project. At any rate, the National Ignition Facility has a complex history and has nearly been canceled multiple times by cost-cutters who have deemed the project impossible–which makes the fact that it is now surpassing new benchmarks all the more impressive.
One of the last posts I wrote in the old Ferrebeekeeper blog (before embarking on a year-long sabbatical) concerned the all-important milestone which the facility reached in December of 2022 when they finally got more energy out of the reaction than they put into it. Now that they are doubling their energy returns perhaps the lazy petrol-prone lords of finance will take abother look at funding some nuclear fusion power plant projects. Even if America’s hyper-efficient market-facing companies have no use for infinite wells of pure celestial energy perhaps someone from East Asia or Europe would be interested in a huge stake of humankind’s future.
Ferrebeekeeper has been incommunicado for a long time, but unfortunate events in the larger world necessitate a return to writing. Most notably, the Republican/Fascist party has been attempting to sabotage the Ukraine resistance to territorial Russian aggression in the hopes that Russia will destroy and annex the Ukraine (presumably as a first step to Russian takeover of Europe and then of the United States). Egged on by Donald Trump and his despicable lackey, the fake Christian speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, congressional Republicans have plotted to strip Ukraine of money and war materials so that the scrappy young democracy will be destroyed as a part of Putin’s agenda to rebuild the Soviet Union and neuter (or outright destroy) democracy around the world. How did Republicans come to openly serve Vladimir Putin and regard actual American security concerns as irrelevant? (It is worth recalling that, as recently as the 1980s, Republicans stood firm against Russian aggression and believed that American presidents should serve American interests first instead of betraying our own military and allies to the Kremlin in order to help crooked oligarchs from Russia and the United States steal money).
There is no question why Mike Johnson takes Russia’s side instead of standing behind the men and women who serve America’s military. Like his lord and master Donald Trump, Johnson accepts money from Russian oligarchs and agents in order to betray our national security and help carry out the Kremlin’s worldwide agenda. The real question is why all of the so-called patriots and “America First” blowhards who make up the rest of the Republican caucus are so eager to advance Putin’s interests at the expense of our friends, allies, business concerns, and ultimately at the mortal peril of our own soldiers, sailors, and servicefolk? Why do all of the other Republicans think that Russian interests come first and Ukraine, NATO, and Defense Department Concerns are less important than what Putin wants?
The answer is simple: Putin is (probably) the weathiest man in the world. To Mike Johnson (and to Trump), that makes him the most important man in the world. Long ago Republicans came to serve America’s oligarchs, the vicious take-no-prisoners con artists, insider-traders, kleptocrats, robber barons, and monopolists who rule our broken system. Such bad actors have no concern if the United States is destroyed so long as they personally profit. After the Supreme Court’s corrupt “Citizens United” (what a newspeak name!) decision made it legal for overseas powers to buy American elected officials it is no surprise that (at least) half of our leaders take money and orders from whatever (eastern) direction such things happens to come from.
So great is the habit of fealty to monied interests that Republicans have lost sight of the fact that they are meant to administer The United States of America and not merely serve whatever international oligarch is richest. The sad rug-pull of comprehensive border legislation illustrates this: Democrats were willing to give Republicans ridiculous concessions at the Mexico border in order to secure Ukraine funding and yet the Republicans turned away stating that whatever is bad for America is good for Donald Trump!
The truth of the matter is that Mike Johson despises America. When American children die of hunger or injury, he is delighted. When our allies are slaughtered by Russian tanks he is joyous. When our own soldiers are killed he is ecstatic that it is a chance to paint Biden as a “weak liberal”. He hates our friends. He hates our allies. He hates our soldiers. He hates women and minorities. He hates children. He hates you. What he loves is Vladimir Putin (and Putin’s loyal lickspittle, one fat orange Nazi named Donald Trump). With his lies and Christofascist trumpery, the traitor Mike Johnson has clearly shown that he will do whatever he has to do to ensure that America is weak and always does Russia’s bidding. Vote him out! If you see him, do not sell him food or supplies. Mike Johnson is a traitor. Everything he says or does is meant to hurt our nation and enrich a tiny coterie of cheaters, con artists, and kleptocrats.
Happy April Fool’s Day! Welcome back! (Or maybe, actually, you should be saying that to me). Regular readers will recognize that Ferrebeekeeper went on a little blogging sabbatical during the winter of 2023 and has been MIA these last 3 months. What happened? Is this blog done for? And, if not, where are we headed now?
Well…After a dozen years of blogging, my brain had run out of new content. Also, the world hardly seems to care about blogs or flounder paintings or aesthetic essays. To be honest, the constant drumbeat about how much better AIs are at making art and writing essays has filled my heart with unease and unhappiness. My blog is a devotional sacrament to the Goddess Athena. I certainly don’t make any money off of it. If making it feels like a chore, then what is the point?
But then I read some of this vaunted AI content and looked at some of this art which is so much better than human art. The computers definitely have some skills (particularly at digital art which they can churn out even faster than RISDI students popping caffeine pills), but the tone, themes, and overall gist are incoherent. Maybe Dan Claymore’s robot-run false paradise is still a long way away. Additionally, the human-created websites which are flourishing, are even more problematic. I can’t hide under my bed feeling sorry for myself while FOX, Reddit, and lying “influencers” have the final say in human affairs. So…here we are back again.
This is actually the 13th anniversary of Ferrebeekeeper (Here is the confusing and contradictory first post, in case you want to start there and read straight through the subsequent 2,256 posts between there and here). As with my very first post, this new post doesn’t say very much…but it says I will be posting more things here again. We will talk about A.I and politics then. For now, enjoy the spring day (but don’t take any wooden nickels or open any cans of spring snakes).
Ship of Fools (Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1490), oil on panel
ferrebeekeeper 