Random Observations

The impeachment trial feels a lot like a worship service in which the preacher says things everyone expects to hear from the pulpit and no one expects any of what they hear actually to change them.

Regarding whether the charges against our current president “rise to the level of impeachment”: shouldn’t the phrase be, “fall to the level of impeachment”? Impeachment is about as low as you can go, isn’t? (Yes, “rise” is probably legalize.)

Speaking of legalize: Alan Dershowitz’s argument yesterday for why a president cannot be impeached simply does not pass constitutional muster, not to mention the requirements of Logic 101. I fear that Ruth Dodd, who taught me high school civics (remember civics?), is surely rolling over in her grave.

I am really, really, REALLY tired of being accused of hating our current president. I would not enjoy having a beer with him, and think his policies threaten disaster for our country and the world, so I have to admit to liking him very little. But that’s as far as I will go. I thank you for respecting my boundaries.

Just read that the Secretary of Commerce thinks the coronavirus—not to be confused with the beer—could be good for our economy. Let’s hear it for uncontrollable viruses! Yea! And raise a glass to the stock market!

“Strong winds blow over new section of U.S. border wall with Mexico”: I will huff and I will puff and I will blow your house down, as the old story goes.

Our current president decried climate "prophets of doom" in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where sustainability was the main theme. A good many of scripture’s prophets of doom proved to be right. Such folks may be worth a listen, don’t you think?

Our local paper often headlines that a “dead body” has been found somewhere. Isn’t it enough just to call it a “body” unless, perhaps, you are referring to “the world’s greatest deliberative body”?

Ghost Ranch, Ghosts and Gold, and getting it done.

After more that a decade, I have finally finished the manuscript of my short book about Ghost Ranch, the Presbyterian Education and Retreat Center just north of Abiquiu, New Mexico. Ten years is probably some kind of record for a book of around 6,500 words, hardly enough to be called a book were I not planning to include pictures. My “excuse” is that I have allowed many interruptions along the way, and furthermore, I had no idea I was writing a book for the first few of years of the ten.

Anyway, Ghosts and Gold: My Story of Ghost Ranch, is now in the design stage, and I hope to self-publish it by mid-year. That, and sell the house we’ve lived in for 30 years and move to a new one in a retirement village. Talk about looming interruptions.

I have loved this project because I love Ghost Ranch. But it needs to be finished, to be shoved off the edge of my desk, in part because what I really enjoy writing (besides this blog) are short stories and I need to make room in my life for more of them. Once Ghosts and Gold is out there (“dropped” as seems to be the term today), I can get back to short stories...after (INTERRUPTION ALERT!) we get settled in our new house.

I know you who are Presbyterians and who have at least heard of Ghost Ranch will want to be among the first purchasers of my book. I also know those of you who have no idea what I am talking about are now so curious that you will soon follow with your purchases of it. Thank you all in advance.

And so, I’ve made my first foray into marketing Ghosts and Gold, something all authors are constantly told them must be very good it if they wish to be (financially) successful. It won’t be my last marketing attempt, but I will try to avoid becoming annoying. Fact is, I don’t think of myself as one who does well at self-promotion, so the marketing phase of Ghosts and Gold will no doubt be often and easily interrupted.

(By the way, I, Keith Dean Myers, am not to be confused with very successful author Walter Dean Myers...unless, of course, such confusion results in a sale of my book.)

One important lesson I have learned in my work on this book is something all not-yet-discovered authors surely face: no one (well, except maybe your spouse/partner, maybe) is as interested in your damn book as you are. So you just have to keep slogging along until it’s done. At least then people can find out what they were not interested in for all these many years, but now they will have to pay for it.

How’s that for marketing?

A Czech’s caution to our New World

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s most famous work is his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” He wrote it while living and working in the New York City (and vacationing in Iowa!) during the last decade of the 19th century.

Many hear in Dvorak’s 9th his wonder and awe at this “new” world, as well as his longing for his “old” homeland. Some suggest that Dvorak displays in this work an unusual-for-that-time awareness of the music of both Native Americans and African Americans.

I listened to the New York Philharmonic/Bernstein performance of the New World Symphony yesterday afternoon while walking the track at our gym. I drove there pondering America today in the light of the possibility of major war in the Middle East, and the often-unhelpful role our nation has played in that region for decades. (“It’s complicated,” as we often must conclude, and who am I to sort it all out?(

In any case, here is what I heard Dvorak saying about us in that symphony. Whether he intended to say it or not, it is what spoke to me as I walked:

Movement 1: America can make, create, fabricate, and dominate anything we put our minds to, and we will fight and dance through any obstacle along our way.

Movement 2 (the famous Largo/Goin’ Home movement): But I miss my homeland...or maybe I miss the agrarian life that seemed both simpler and slower, oriented more to growing things than to creating them.

Movement 3: Let’s dance furiously, forgetting the past and charging to the future...enough of longing and nostalgia!

Movement 4: The New World’s empire is heralded, replacing the empires of the Old World. America is No. 1, and the main minor theme transitions into a bright major in the last few bars...until a long, quiet chord ends it all.

It’s that final chord that always gets to me. Why doesn’t the New World Symphony end with a bang? It deserves a loud, dramatic, final statement in place of the slowing dying and decaying whisper it receives from its composer.

Long-time Cleveland Orchestra commentator Klaus Roy posed the final chord matter this way in the liner notes on our hometown band’s 1959 recording of the New World: “… Dvorak must have realized, as he wrote the words ‘From the New World' across the title page just before the first performance, that he was implying a tragic side to the vitality of this country, an atmosphere not to be explained away by ‘homesickness’ on his part.”

Is Antonin Dvorak, proud Czech that he forever remained, expressing second thoughts about his celebration of this New World? Is he, whose homeland has been subject to empire for centuries, uncomfortable with the prospect of American dominance of the world? Does he consider how white America has subjected the people of color who share this continent with it, and wonder if we would ultimately sacrifice our ideals in pursuit of wealth and power?

I think Dvorak composed that final chord for us Americans. He put it there so that, before we stand up and cheer our New World, we spend a quiet moment reflecting on who we are, on how we are seen by others, and on what we want to be remembered for in history.

That last chord invites us to think before we shout, to reflect before we react, to ask before we answer...practices tragically lacking in our New World, and almost everywhere, in these tumultuous times.