Posted this in a Facebook thread and it’s a theme I mention from time to time, but for posterity:
Due Process is Where You Go to See if What They Said is So
Incarnating the Inchoate to Kill It

“The Scapegoat” by William Holman Hunt (1854)
I posted this over on social media, but it seemed worth preserving in some form:
I’m suddenly fascinated with the concept of the scapegoat. There seems to be a psychological need to incarnate the inchoate and kill it.
I’d never given it a ton of thought. It seemed like a quaint religious ceremony. And, of course, it’s a metaphor we use for imposing undeserved blame on others.
But the metaphor and the religious ceremony almost certainly come from the same impulse – likely to satisfy the need to feel like you’re acting against forces which are harming you but are otherwise too remote or abstract to fight in a tangible way.
So, you pile up the anxieties, formless ideas, and unreachable offenses onto somebody or something that you can hurt and you make them sacrificial in the hopes that your life will improve as a result. If I had to guess, it’s probably something to do with soothing one’s fight or flight instinct.
2024
I originally posted this on Facebook. But why not put this brief retrospective on a site I own?
Going through my pictures for the year. I have to say, it was a pretty good one:
- IU basketball games,
- met Gene Keady at a local restaurant,
- went to Paris,
- WLSEF fundraisers,
- my niece’s wedding in Dallas,
- saw the eclipse & William Shatner in Bloomington,
- crawfish boil,
- 35th high school class reunion,
- 4th of July party,
- family gathering in Euclid, OH,
- went to Lisbon & Lagos, Portugal,
- went to four IU football games & three soccer games,
- helped with a school board campaign,
- ran the Purdue Half, and
- celebrated Christmas in Hilton Head.
There have been some challenges & losses, but overall, it was quite a year. Hope everyone has a healthy, joyful 2025.
“The Trades,” Education, and Patriarchy
Sorry about the title. This post isn’t going to live up to it. A friend of mine made an observation about education discourse that prompted a few thoughts I wanted to jot down. In recent years, there has been a fair amount of discourse talking up “the trades”* as a good alternative to college. The tone of the discourse often has at least the undercurrent of college being an inferior choice.
(*As I understand it, “the trades” refers to a job that requires some amount of skilled manual labor. But there’s probably an additional component because I’m not confident that all skilled manual labor is what people mean when they use the term. But, in any case, plumber, electrician, carpenter, and welder are examples.)
This isn’t an inherently bad take. College isn’t for everyone, it’s expensive, trade work can be lucrative, and it’s valuable work in its own right. On any number of occasions, I’ve mentioned the “No Time to Lose” report from the National Conference of State Legislatures on building a world class educational system. One of the features of such systems is a path for career and technical education. Singapore and Switzerland are cited as places with strong CTE programs.
But the Discourse isn’t really about that. With respect to one exchange where the opinion-haver said that we do a poor job of educating kids with “exceptional spatial abilities” and need programs for “those who think with their hands,” my friend observed that the solution for such kids was always focused on things like shop class and never art class or home economics.
Being a man and not especially well attuned to feminist thought, that blind spot had not stood out to me. But, now that she mentions it, of course this whole discussion has a strongly gendered component. It’s of a piece with what Real Men do and don’t do. “Real Men shower after work, not before.” Eggheads aren’t manly. Everything must be gendered and, it goes without saying, the masculine must be valued more than the feminine.
The people who say that all work has (or should have) dignity and the trades are valuable are, of course, correct. But, when the commentary goes beyond that and sneers at other kinds of work, something else is going on. Look at what kinds of work they are devaluing in the process to determine what the subtext is. And, as often as not, it seems as if there’s an effort to prioritize a certain kind of masculinity.
The Eclipse
I’ve been thinking about one of my step-brothers a fair amount in the past couple of days. He passed away several years ago. I can’t say we were especially close; certainly not when we were older. Mostly, I think he’s a proxy for me to think about myself when I was a specific age – probably 7 or 8 years old. The first instance had to do with a question about the first radio song you remembered. For me, it wasn’t the first, but when I was eight, he lived in a small town in western Colorado. He got a transistor radio, and it seemed like that thing only picked up one music station. And that station had “Le Freak” by Chic and “My Life” by Billy Joel on heavy rotation.
My father and his second wife initially lived on a farm in rural Wayne County, Indiana and then on a property with a fair amount of land in rural western Colorado. The second wife’s kids were of a similar age and genders: older girls and a youngest son. When my sisters and I would go visit my father, we’d pretty naturally split off by age and gender. Michael was a little more than a year older than me; and we would spend a lot of time together. And at that age, all things space were very, very cool.
It was the mid-to-late 70s. The height of Space Age fever had passed, but it was still very much a thing. Out in the country, things in the sky loomed larger. We’d sleep out at night, and in 1978, there weren’t many satellites. We’d get excited seeing one blink against the sky. I’m sure we mislabeled more than a few airplanes. There was a meteor shower that looms large in my imagination. My guess is that this was the Perseid shower in the summer of 1979, but I couldn’t say for sure. In my memory, a huge meteor flashed overhead, traveling more or less directly over the lane leading to the house. (I have doubts about the quality of my memory – the orientation of the visual is a little too perfect for real life.) After that, the night sky had frequent meteor flashes. The night sky in western Colorado really has to be seen to be believed.
And, of course, there were the space shows. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica were our favorites. We had Battlestar action figures: his was a cylon, mine was a “Colonial Warrior.” (I was jealous of his.) Which brings me to the eclipse. Yesterday, we went down to Bloomington for eclipse festivities at Memorial Stadium. William Shatner gave a spoken word performance. But that was only part of it – in general, space stuff brings out my inner eight year old. There’s a level of earnestness and wonder that tends to crust over with age. Cataracts of the soul or something.
Every so often, you can still be dazzled by the beauty of it all. A total eclipse is one of those moments. My wife and I went down to IU where our kids go to school. Cole is in the Marching Hundred which was playing in the event. Harper lives only a few blocks away, so she walked up and met us at the stadium.

Eclipse at Memorial Stadium
In addition to Shatner, astronaut and engineer, Mae Jemison spoke. One quote that stood out for me was her statement that “space exploration is based on the miraculous work of generations.” Shatner did a sort of spoken word thing, backed by an orchestra from the Jacobs School. In part, he used the eclipse to talk about our place in the cosmic scheme of things. For example, he referenced the creatures evolving over the earth’s millions of years experiencing eclipses from the shallow seas. Shatner sounded great for any age. For a man who is ninety-three years old, he sounded fantastic.
As for the moment of totality, if you didn’t experience it yourself, you’ve seen pictures that do the moment justice more than I can. Everyone experiences it differently. If nothing else, it’s something different that encourages you to take a minute or two and look around. For many, it’s much more. Maybe it’s spiritual. Maybe it’s a profound reminder that you are a very small part of a vast universe. Maybe totality is a moment of solidarity with the millions watching it with you or maybe with the generations over the millennia who have witnessed similar events with awe. At the very least, it’s not nothing. I reconnected a bit with my inner eight year old even while I was sharing a moment with my wife and kids that we’ll probably always remember.
On the way back to West Lafayette, there was some eclipse congestion. Normally, the trip takes a little less than two hours. Yesterday evening, it was more like three. Waze took us on county roads and state highways rather than the Interstates. At one point, we crossed over I-74 in a rural part of west-central Indiana, and westbound traffic was noticeably slow and backed up. Overall, not too bad for us though – an extra hour winding through the back roads was fairly pleasant on a sunny, dry Monday evening.
[Edited to add on 4/10/24]: This morning I came across a Shatner quote I’d seen before but found insightful and apropos to this post. It had to do with his experience going into space when he was 90:
Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe. I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.
I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.
This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.
The Outrage Machine and Doom

Joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand.
I’m hardly the first to observe this, but social media and our current regular media environment is doing us harm. I read two pieces related to this idea this morning. Daniel Schultz (“Pastor Dan”) has a piece on “The Editorial Board” entitled, “Doom is a Virus: it saps the will when you need it most.” Teri Kanefield has a post on her blog entitled “the Outrage Machine Strikes Again” in reference to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which nominally disqualifies oathbreaking insurrectionists from federal office.
Kanefield notes how the media environment leading up to and following the Supreme Court decision does citizens a disservice. Pundits, particularly those ostensibly given a platform because of their legal expertise, who pretend certainty and then double down when they’re wrong might make for good, profitable TV; but they don’t inform the public. She focuses on Laurence Tribe and Michael Luttig as examples. When nine Justices determined that states lacked the authority to enforce the provision barring oathbreaking insurrectionists from office, Tribe and Luttig didn’t grapple with that unanimity. The courts were simply corrupt, broken, or lacked courage. I don’t love the opinion or necessarily think it was right – certainly not the dicta that went beyond concluding that states lacked the authority to enforce the provision against federal officials. But, I also don’t think, for example, that Justice Sotamayor is corrupt, ignorant of the law, or lacking in courage. Kanefield notes that the kind of noise generated by pundits like Tribe and Luttig dilute the information stream.
As a result of our current information disruption, people who inhabit certain media ecosystems are being sprayed with a firehose of speculations, conjecture, and hype. They get confused. They don’t know what the truth is. … Sometimes when people are continually confused, they conclude that the entire system is hopelessly broken and they give up on it. This is what Russian propaganda does deliberately. Guess what happens when enough people give up on democracy or decide the truth is unknowable?
For me, this leads into Pastor Dan’s piece. He talks about how feelings of Doom sap our will when we need it most.
In the fourth century AD, the early Christian monastic Evagrius Ponticus wrote about acedia, a state of restless futility. The “Noonday Demon,” as he called it, convinced his brother monks their day was “fifty hours long” and hard work not worth the toil.
He calls this DOOM (all caps), observes that it is more common among terminally online types, and says, “DOOM is experiencing a surge on the left these days. Joe Biden continues to struggle in (as-yet unpredictive) polls.” It is tempting, he says, “to throw up our hands, declare democracy already dead in the United States, and head out for fairer pastures.” Our media environment is a powerful vector of despair.
But, Pastor Dan encourages us, we have been here before. We live in a country “founded on high-minded ideals of liberty as well as low-life practices of oppression.” Struggling with acedia prepares us for the fight. Evagrius counseled that we should:
[D]ivide ourselves in two. “One part is to encourage; the other part is to be encouraged,” he says. “Thus we are to sow seeds of a firm hope in ourselves.” DOOM may be a virus, but so is its opposite. Hope is contagious, and it spreads through giving and receiving support.
I always go back to Bruce Cockburn who said, that you “got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.” And, frankly, to an old fantasy series I read as a kid, “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” which was, in large part, a meditation on despair and how to resist it. Here is one scholarly article where the work is discussed. I’ve mentioned the scene before around here, so clearly it had resonance for me:
[P]erhaps Schopenhauer is right: “Humor is the only divine quality in man.” In the third book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, Lord Foul finally gets his poetic justice. Yet it comes not from a battle or contest of power but from a place of pure joy. Known throughout the books as “the Despiser,” the cynical destroyer and source of large-scale evil in the world, Lord Foul has chained up the giant Saltheart Foamfollower, who is at the brink of despair. Covenant tells him to laugh, to recall the power of laughter: “I want you to laugh. Take joy in it. Bring some joy into this bloody hole. Laugh!” (466). Laughter begins to well up in his soul, and the laughter purifies first himself: “as Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage and pain from his lungs. Soon something like joy, something like real mirth, appeared in his voice” (467). After the laughter purifies himself, it begins to cleanse the world. It vanquishes Lord Foul, whose life in the face of the laughter unwinds like a clock and finally vanishes. As characters like Donaldson’s Covenant and Foamfollower look into the malevolent forces that drive evil, look deep into the gaping void that evil creates about itself, they come to understand that joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand. Perhaps fantasy writers cannot do without the trope, after all. Perhaps Schopenhauer’s one glowing spark might be kindled again.
I firmly believe that we have to embrace joy. There is no other way.
Sheila Kennedy on Bureaucracy
Sheila has a good post on bureaucracy in which she responds to a David Brooks column. Brooks asserts that “growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.” That can be true. But I’d also argue that they tend to bring order out of chaos, fight entropy, channel resources more effectively, and have other salutary aspects. Remember that meme about how much some of us think of the Romans? Here’s another one for you — for centuries, the Roman bureaucracy was way more effective than the individualism of their neighbors. Entropy bats last, so even that system fell apart eventually. Bureaucracy can obviously go too far, but it’s easy to make that observation and then turn around and assert some level of inconvenience to you personally represents “too far.”
For my part, I think a lot of bureaucracy is akin to public health measures and drainage infrastructure. You only notice the inconvenience. The horrors they protect you from are forgotten and go unnoticed.
President’s Day: My idiosyncratic list of Presidents
In honor of President’s Day, this is my list, pulled from the top of my head based on a lot of half remembered history. It contains plenty of recency bias and penalizes Presidents about whom I’ve read bad stuff in the more recent past. They get penalized for my ignorance: for example JFK gets credit for his handling of the missile crisis, but I don’t happen to know much about his other accomplishments, meanwhile LBJ had plenty of flaws, but his work on civil rights and the social safety net are pretty extensive and continue to have an impact on our daily life. And I try to filter out stuff they did while not President: for example, Ike gets no credit for World War II and Grant gets no credit for the Civil War. On the other hand, I don’t do this reliably: Madison probably gets a lot of warm fuzzies from me for having written the Bill of Rights. So, here you go:
- Franklin Roosevelt
- Abraham Lincoln
- George Washington
- Theodore Roosevelt
- James Madison
- James Monroe
- James K. Polk
- Thomas Jefferson
- Dwight Eisenhower
- Lyndon Johnson
- Joe Biden
- Barack Obama
- Bill Clinton
- George H.W. Bush
- John Quincy Adams
- John Kennedy
- Jimmy Carter
- Grover Cleveland
- Herbert Hoover
- Ulysses S. Grant
- Harry Truman
- Gerald Ford
- Ronald Reagan
- William Taft
- William McKinley
- Martin Van Buren
- James Garfield
- John Adams
- Zachary Taylor
- John Tyler
- Calvin Coolidge
- Benjamin Harrison
- Chester Arthur
- Rutherford Hayes
- Andrew Jackson
- George W. Bush
- Woodrow Wilson
- Richard Nixon
- William Henry Harrison
- Millard Fillmore
- Franklin Pierce
- Warren Harding
- James Buchanan
- Andrew Johnson
- Donald Trump
Men of ambition and talent can no longer make their name by building the nation
Heather Cox Richardson has a good post on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 “Lyceum Speech.” At that time, Lincoln argued that the nation’s success contained the seeds of its destruction:
He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.
For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.
To preserve the nation, we needed to make reverence for the laws and our institutions the political religion of the nation. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
I’m reminded, as I so often am, of the quote from “a Man for All Seasons” concerning respect for the law:
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
We need to protect and preserve our institutions.
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