1. Leah Sottile's work as a freelance journalist, podcaster, and book writer is always nearby in my life. I subscribe to her Substack newsletter, The Truth Does Not Change According to Our Ability to Stomach It, where I've been reading her recent posts about the trial and guilty conviction of Lori Vallow Daybell, one of the subjects of Sottile's book, When the Moon Turns to Blood.
Reading Sottile's writing and listening to her podcasts, takes me back to when the plays and poems of William Shakespeare dominated my work as a graduate student and an instructor and occupied much of my thinking. I realized, at some point, that, to me, the more one of Shakespeare's plays unfolded about a character, say Beatrice or Macbeth or King Lear or Rosalind, the more baffling they became to me.
I used to think that the more I knew about, say one of Shakespeare's characters, the more I would understand. But, as I spent more time with these characters, their contradictions, their unpredictability, their complexity, the less I could draw coherent or absolute conclusions about them.
Leah Sottile's work focuses largely on extremists in the western USA.
She narrated two seasons worth of podcasts on the Bundy family and others who share the Bundy family's view of the world.
Her podcast investigating Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City inevitably led her to digging into the standoff at Ruby Ridge, the destruction of the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, TX, the Aryan Nations compound near Hayden, Idaho, among other organizations and events in the realm of what scholar Kathleen Belew refers to as the White Power Movement.
Sottile's writing about Chad Daybell and his wife Lori Vallow Daybell investigates people associated with, or having been excommunicated from, the Church of Latter Day Saints whose lives center around prophecies about end times and near death experiences, around visions of epic conflicts between spirits of evil and good.
The more I find out and learn about the Bundys, David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh, and other adherents to white power or those, like the Daybells, preoccupied with end times, the less I understand.
Similarly, I just finished reading Leah Sottlie's interview with K. Rambo, the editor of Portland, OR's weekly street newspaper, Street Roots. The interview focused on homelessness and poverty in Portland. Before studying journalism at Linn-Benton Community and Iowa State University in his late 20s, Rambo was homeless when he was younger -- his teenage years until his late 20s. He and his staff of professional journalists write about issues of justice and equity in Portland from the point of view of those living on the streets.
If you'd like to check it out, go to https://www.streetroots.org/
Reading this interview and having served breakfast to people in need on Saturdays at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, my response was much the same as when I study King Lear and read and listen to Leah Sottile: the more I read about the many dimensions and complexities of homelessness and poverty, the less I understand.
For now, I'll leave it at that.
I've been exploring points of views and perspective that are not my own and that I'm unpersuaded by. I have had some success comprehending what informs these perspectives and the ways different people act on these worldviews.
I don't know that I will ever understand them.
I'm occupying a space that lies somewhere between comprehension and bafflement.
2. These matters I'm exploring are sobering, very serious, but there's more to my life day to day than getting outside of my own views of things and learning more about other prevalent world views in the USA.
For example, Debbie and I returned the podcast, This is Jeopardy this evening. We didn't quite make it all the way through the second episode because we fell into conversation about our experiences growing up with game shows. When I was much younger, had their been game show host cards, like baseball cards, I would have bought and collected them, and looked for other collectors to look at each others' cards and possibly trade them.
I thought a lot tonight about some of the game show hosts I spent hours watching, especially in the summers and mostly before I started college.
I imagined having cards of Hugh Downs, Wink Martindale, Art Fleming, Peter Marshall, Jack Barry, Jack Narz, Bill Cullen, Monte Hall, Stubby Kaye, Alex Trebek, Tom Kennedy, Joe Garigiola, Garry Moore, Bud Collyer, Gene Rayburn, Dick Clark, Bert Convy, Bob Barker, Bobby Van, Richard Dawson, Chuck Woolery, Pat Sajak, Allen Ludden, Jim Perry, Bob Eubanks, Jim Lange, and others. In my game show host dream world my Whitworth roommate, Rich Brock, and I spend hours avoiding our studies and, instead, pore over our cards, remembering great episodes of the game shows and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
3. I had fun time in the kitchen today, too. At Debbie's request, I took out a couple handfuls of frozen shrimp, cooked them in butter and garlic, and then, in a pot of boiling water, cooked a container of cheese raviolis. The shrimp and ravioli went together really well. We both added grated hard cheese to our bowls and Debbie added cherry tomatoes and chili flakes to hers.
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