The obvious issues with banning Maus from schools are not what we need to be talking about. Decrying Nazis or censorship is easy since it does not require self-reflection. We know where we stand there. We need to talk about the misogyny that is inherent, and largely unchallenged, in the school board’s reasoning.

Maus I and II have a lot of horrifying images. They depict a series of conversations author Art Spiegelman had with his parents about their experience in Auschwitz. Jews (represented as mice) are gassed, hung, shot, rounded up, and displaced. None of this was deemed too much for schoolchildren.

If we take the school board at face value, they were focused on a single panel that depicted Spiegelman’s mother, as a mouse, being found after she committed suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. This was not an erotic scene. The author was depicting his mother, dead at her own hands.

All of the violence was ok. The problem for the school board was that there was a nude mouse representing a woman in a bathtub. There was no issue with the fact that she was dead. There was no issue with the fact that she was driven to suicide. There was no need to protect schoolchildren from that. The issue was that she was a nude mouse in a bathtub. A stand-in for what one might imagine would be a nude woman.

The firm ground on which the school board is standing is that they expect us to accept as granted that a woman without clothing is more damaging to children than all the horrors of a concentration camp. We can’t continue to let that assumption go unchallanged.

/As a coda, I want to thank my excellent high-school English teacher, Ms. Orbison, for understanding that the best way to tend to my education was to present material that I found challenging rather than to protect me from the world. It was in her class that I first ran into Maus.

Dr. King’s day is coming up. In years past, I would post quotes of Dr. King, but I’m no longer interested in his legacy delivered in bite-sized pieces. As one of the great orators of our time, he is full of safe, accessible quotes.

No Dr. King quote could capture his work with sanitation workers demanding simple human dignity, his call to faith from the Birmingham Jail, or his call to action from everything he did.

No quote of his could convey the reality that while we’ve given him a federal holiday, we’re still fighting for equal access to the ballot box.

He was the martyr that gave Congress the shocked motivation to pass the Civil Rights act. 58 years later, Congressional Democrats hope his memory can push voting protections through the filibuster. We’re still fighting for equal access.

Today, we lost Clyde Bellecourt, the Thunder Before the Storm. He was one of the greats. A co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and organizer of the Wounded Knee occupation, he founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to address police violence against Native Americans. AIM spans the US and Canada and has made great strides, yet 54 years later, the Minneapolis Police Department is the poster child for violence against minorities. We’re still fighting police violence.

You are going to see a lot of memes this weekend. The memes will show Dr. King or Clyde Bellecourt either in a heroic pose in front of a crowd or a pensive pose in soft lighting. It’s safer that way, they can be presented as the scholars speaking wisdom from the past, rather than the leaders of fights that are still very much with us today.

The Split Rock Lighthouse was built in 1910, in response to a 1905 storm that sank or damaged 29 ships on Lake Superior. the lens is a marvel of engineering. A third-order Fresnel, the complexity of its design meant it had to be purchased and imported from France.

The lens pedestal sat on a cushion of liquid mercury, allowing tons of glass and metal almost frictionless motion. The rotation of the lens was based on a clockwork that only needed to be wound every two hours by the lighthouse keepers.

The lighthouse is a miracle of architecture, engineering, optics, and (if you count the foghorn) acoustics. It was designed, built, implemented, and lit within 5 years, including the time it took to source specialized material from halfway across the world.

Rember this whenever someone tells you that government can’t work. It can work when it’s allowed to.

This last month, I learned that you can’t go home again because home is not a place you can go to. Home is something you build with your loved ones. It’s a peace of mind, not a piece of geography.

My wife, son, and I stayed with my parents for three weeks. The need for social distancing meant that we saw very few other people, while the realities of the pandemic meant we could do so while still working from home. According to my employer, home is not a piece of geography, but the end of a VPN from my office. That can be Sitka as easily as it is Eagle River.

So, I spent three weeks with my wife in the town that raised me, watching my son discover the geography I discovered 40 years ago. And for those three weeks, for the first time since College, Sitka was home again. The piece of geography was finally connected to my peace of mind.

Alaska is full of artifacts from our recent past, but few are so starkly absurd as the official name of No Name Creek.

Of course, the creek has a name, has had one for a long time. However, the placeholder name is the one on the maps, and therefore the one in the big typeface.

The Lord has Risen!

Every Easter reveals something new to me about my faith. This year, my thoughts keep going to Judas Iscariot.

The role of Judas has always caused me some trouble. He had his role to play. Matthew made it clear that it was part of God’s plan foretold by the prophets, and John 13:27-28 has Jesus almost giving Judas his blessing, saying, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” Why, then, do things go so horribly badly for Judas after the deed is done when he is acting within God’s plan?* Many theologians far better versed than I have made the argument that IF Judas is damned, it’s not for his betrayal, which was part of God’s plan. It was for what happened afterward. There are more issues than just the betrayal.

I think that it’s important to reflect on how Jesus was betrayed. Jesus told Judas to do what he needed to do. He stilled the swords of his followers when they tried to keep him from being captured. He led himself into the arms of the Romans. Yet he had time to ask of Judas, “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” Luke 22:48

The betrayal had to happen, but it did not have to happen with a kiss. I think it’s this corruption of an act of love that may have changed things for Judas. It was that corruption that set Judas apart from what he was meant to do.

The actions of Thursday set the chain that lead to Sunday, but Christ was still in control. Christ could have shown Jesus to literally anyone in the world, so it’s significant to look at who Christ appeared to. He did not appear to his most vocal followers. They were hiding and distancing themselves from the Christ, fearing the law.

Jesus revealed himself to two women who were not looking for a miracle or payment but were looking to respect the man, Jesus. They did not fear being associated with him. They brought oils to anoint his body. An act of human decency and kindness made bold by their willingness to perform it for an enemy of the State.

It was to them that Christ showed the miracle. They were rewarded far beyond the disciples who would trade on their public closeness to Jesus.

This has been a tough week to watch the news. Politicians continue to trade on their alleged closeness to Christ while corrupting his message of love. And to my friends, many of whom have been poorly treated by the Christian Church, I can only say this:

It’s not to politicians the Christ revealed himself. It’s not to his disciples or to the people who publicly identified with him when the politics of doing so were good.

It was to two women who risked what little they had to be kind to a friend that the Christ revealed the miracle. Many use my religion to harm you, my friends, but not a single person has the authority to use my faith to do so.

He has risen, indeed.

Hallelujah

I learned American History from a textbook, but I learned what really happened by word of mouth:

At the Interpretive Center at Totem Park, I learned about the fights between the Russians and Tlingit, but in a kitchen with a November gale keeping us kids indoors, I learned about the Kake wars between the Tlingit and the US Navy.

I learned about Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in civics classes, but In a back room of my church, I learned about the Pullman Porters covertly connecting POC nationwide while the FBI was shutting down labor newspapers.

I saw the Rodney King riots on every cable news program. It was around a campfire with a bunch of Wobblies that I learned about the MOVE bombing, where the City of Philadelphia bombed a house to dislocate MOVE activists and ended up burning down 65 houses in the process.

It was not until the age of the internet that I learned about the burning of the Douglass Indian Village (now part of Juneau) in 1962 to make way for a harbor. It’s this last piece that gives me hope. Not only is the Douglas Indian Village story online, but so is the MOVE bombing, the organizing work of the Pullman Porters, and the Kake Wars in Southeast Alaska.

The long memory is the most radical idea in America. The ability for us to look at the official history, and ask “What else should we know?” As more of this history is collected and made available, it becomes an easier question to answer by the day, even if it is often terrible.

For years, we have shut down newspapers for telling unpopular parts of history. The House Un-American Activities Committee make it de facto government policy to economically destroy people who would tell those unpopular parts of history. That’s all changing.

For once, we are looking to a time when our stories are NOT being canceled. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

On this day, Alaska celebrates the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, passed before Statehood. I’m proud of this act and of the civil rights and protections enshrined in our Constitution more than ten years later.

Lest we get too complacent, less than 20 years later, Douglass Indian Village was raised to make way for a new harbor. Its inhabitants were in fish camp, their material possessions raized along with their homes.

This year, Tuluksak lost its water supply. They were supplied with water by volunteers for 3 weeks before the State got around to an official disaster declaration.

In the debate leading up to the passage of the act, Elizabeth Peratovich stated that “No law will eliminate crimes, but at least you, as legislators, can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak of your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”

We obviously still have a long way to go.

I knew Ellen while I was wearing several hats:

As we traveled, she was a curious and insightful partner, helping me see the world through a different set of eyes.

As I produced, she was a solid member of my team, reliable and steady. She provided craft services for 400 people, even when it involved taking more abuse than she should have from our cast and crew. Even when my disorganization let her down, she came back and came through.

As a new father, she gave me tools to calm down an upset infant. She helped me understand what he did not have the language to tell me.

But I’ll miss her most as a friend. Whitty, whimsical, serious, and always willing to remain friends after she called me out on something.

Every year when we close out our fair, we do so knowing that we will not see someone at our next opening. Somehow, I never expected the person we would not see to be you, Ellen. God bless, and safe home.

A few years ago, I watched a TED Talk where Valarie Kaur asked, “What if these times are not the darkness of the tomb, but they are the darkness of the womb?” It’s a worthwhile question for the new year.

2020 did not come out of the blue. It’s is the result of 40 years of repeating Ragen’s line, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” There has been a 40-year systematic erosion of the idea that a professional government could or even should be able to see us through a crisis.

It’s lead to disasters of policy such as the Flint water crisis, still not solved and still just the tip of the iceberg when you look at our potable water infrastructure nationwide. It lead to response disasters like our ability to help after Hurricanes Katrina and Reta, with rebuilding set to take decades longer than it should.

And, it’s lead to 2020, our disastrous response to the pandemic and our misguided response to the resulting economic crisis. Forty years of dismantling monolithic pension systems and privatizing government jobs for cheaper labor, and distrust in Unions lead to a lack of financial resilience in the middle class. The rise of the gig economy in a political system that abhors regulation or umbrella programs such as single-payer health saw us enter a pandemic with health insurance an expensive luxury.

2020 is the year that all that changed. Even with the dysfunction and missed opportunities to mitigate damage, people turn to the government to be part of the solution. There is no debate about whether the government should send out pandemic relief checks; the discussion is how much, and how much longer we should extend Unemployment Benefits. Medicaid enrolment has grown by just over 9% without any serious pushback.

Our elections this year were a marvel of engagement, even against a backdrop of incredibly cynical attempts at disenfranchisement. Massive voter turnout propelled new office-holders that are renewing the idea of responsive government. After the election, Los Angelis, long a byword for ‘tough policing,’ is now a laboratory for criminal justice reform. Responding to public demands for more police oversight, Minneapolis has shifted $8 million from direct police funding to violence prevention and mental health crisis response teams.

People are engaged in government, in the idea of what government should be, in a way they have not been in a long time. Once sacred concepts of what government should (or should not) fund are open to discussion.

2020 is the darkness of the womb. Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. The Great Experiment that is America is reawakening with new levels of civic engagement. We’ve seen 40 years of progress, even as our faith in the government has eroded. The ADA, the ACA, anti-hate crime legislation, anti-sexual discrimination legislation, the fall of DOMA and DADT, all of this can give birth to a more representative government. The elections of 2020 have seen this start to become a reality.

It’s been a rough year. Not everyone in my family made it through. My old neighborhood in Minneapolis burned, and some of my favorite businesses in Anchorage closed. I still end this year with a greater sense of optimism for my country than I’ve felt in a long time. I’m used to the people feeling that the government should be better. Now, I genuinely think that people think that the government CAN be better.

2021 will bring us flowers. We planted their bulbs in 2020.

I’ve spent the most incredible moments of my life are surrounded by sound. At St. Olaf, I was a part of a 450 voice choir. At an Albanian wedding, an older group of men singing iso-polyphony ​(“Albanian Iso-Polyphony”)​ pulled me into the center of their ring. I spent a fantastic lifetime (or 20 minutes) enraptured by the sound of the 8th century BCE. Lying way too close to the main speakers at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, listening to Lorenna McKennit’s harp under a moonless sky. In the NICU, sitting with my son on my naked chest. Singing to him in time with the beeps and clicks that shook the bed.

It turns out that for my entire life I’ve had significant hearing loss. On my right side, my inner ear works. My middle ear does not. All the sound that my right ear hears is conducted not through my ear bones, but my skull. In numerical terms, I’ve had about a 60 dB hearing loss in my right ear since birth. The reason my memorable auditory experiences have been full-bodied is that much of my hearing has been through my body, not my ears. It took that much sonic energy for me to hear.

Diagnosis

I was diagnosed with a total conductive hearing loss in the right ear ​(“Conductive Hearing Loss”)​. Between the eardrum and the inner ear, three bones conduct the sound from the eardrum to the inner ear, amplifying the vibrations along the way. Supprising no one who knows me, I have an unusually thick skull. One of the bones was fused to the skull at birth, stopping sound from getting to the inner ear from the eardrum. All of the sound my right inner ear has been processing came from vibrations in the skull.

Confirmation

This was stunning news. I’ve spent over a decade in choirs and been a producer for multiple radio stations. I mix sound for theater and live events and performed regularly in pubs. This is not the resume’ of someone with an undiagnosed hearing loss.  

I was incredulous about the diagnosis, even if it matched what Shannon has been saying to me for years. I accepted her word that I should have been hearing more than I was, but there is a giant leap from a minor issue with hearing to being told I have a 60 dB hearing loss in one ear. If nothing else, the fact that I can use a phone with my right ear should disqualify the diagnosis.

However, the audiologist had charts, and I’m a sucker for data, so I pressed on.

The first step was to get tested for a conductive hearing aid. The audiologist strapped the device to the side of my head, and we spent some time dialing in the parameters. Friends, you know that once in a hundred shows when there is an absolutely transparent speaker system? That’s this hearing aid. It was amazing

The audiologist put some effort into making her office quiet. When I walked in, I could hear nothing but the the two of us. When the hearing aid was on, I suddenly heard. The HVAC system and her computer fan became clear and distinct, not just from the background, but from each other. The data was correct. My phone was loud enough to conduct sound through my skull, and my ear was not working as it should.

Options

There are two options available to those of us with insurance for dealing with conductive hearing loss. The first was to get a Bone Attached Hearing Aid (BAHA) ​(“Bone Anchored Devices”)​. This is a hearing aid that connects to the skull with either a titanium post or magnet. It amplifies the sound being conducted through the skull to replace the sound that the inner ear is not receiving from the eardrum. Since I had used a version of this to confirm the diagnosis, I knew it would work. It would require minimal surgery to install a post and, medically, that was it. From there, it would only require some care in cleaning and the maintenance of a hearing aid.

The other option is an Ossicular chain reconstruction. The surgeon goes in through the ear canal, opens up the eardrum, removes the fused bone, replaces it with a titanium prosthetic, and reseals the eardrum. It’s fascinating that we can do this. It’s also a terrifying prospect for someone who hates anything anywhere near his ears, especially since the bone between the middle ear and brain is paper-thin. This was not what I wanted to do. However, once completed, there is no maintenance. If I went this route, I would not have to worry about replacing my hearing aid if I ever lost my health insurance. In this country, that’s a compelling argument. It’s the argument that won the day.

Results

There is not much for me to say about the surgery. I was under anesthesia and blissfully have no memory of it. The inner ear filled with fluid, making it as non-functional as it was before the surgery. Occasionally, an air bubble allows for everything to work correctly. While that bubble is in place, I hear things I’ve never heard. Compressors, fans, my house is much louder than I had known. Over the next few weeks, the ear will drain, and the eardrum will dry out. My hearing will get better and better. There is a moment that stands out in this process, however.

At my two-week visit post-surgery, the doctor removed the packing from my ear canal. Even with the packing in place, my hearing had improved. Without it, on the way home from his office, I qued up some choral music.

I had always just assumed that choral music was something that did not record well. My time in a massed choir was a moment not to be recaptured. The nuance of the music was lost on me, even when I was in the audience chamber. I was entirely wrong. I still don’t have the words to describe how it felt to listen to sacred choral music on the drive home. I’ll just say that I had to stop. I was crying too hard to drive.

The next album I put in was Stan Roger’s “From Freshwater.” I have listened to this album thousands of times over more than 30 years. There are lyrics I only know because I looked them up online. “Blue Dolphin, built by the Rhuland men,” a reference to the Smith & Rhuland shipyards. I’ve known the line, I’ve researched the reference, but when I heard the song on the drive home, it’s the first time in 30 years I’d understood it clearly from the album itself.

Finally, for the coup de gras, I put on an album of Albanian iso-polyphony. I’ve tried to recapture the sound of that Albanian wedding for a quarter-century. I came to the same conclusion as I had with choral music. Some things just can’t be recorded. I was just as wrong.

I feel like I’m hearing again, for the first time.

Today I am thankful for our telecommunications network. Growing up, it would take 3 or 4 tries to get a circuit off the island for a call to loved ones who expected a call on a holiday. In the holiday celebration background was Mom or Dad repeatedly dialing until finally triumphantly telling us to stop what we were doing and get on the phone.

Now, even our earthquake a few years back did not shut down communication. There was no bandwidth for calls, but texts got through, and we knew our lovers and friends were ok within a half hour.

I’m also grateful because texting shorthand and autocorrect errors have opened up new breathing room for those of us with language-related disabilities. My misspellings are not as mercilessly mocked as they were in the early days of the Internet. Phones have made real what we should have always known; an idea can be valid even they don’t get through the gate of a learned language.

COVID has taken a second family elder.  Two otherwise unrelated cases spread across different states, but they have given me an understanding of how the virus has changed the meaning of hospice.  God willing, you’ll not need to know this, but forewarned is forearmed.

Hospice during COVID means an uncle dying alone, surrounded by strangers who are unseen behind personal protective gear.

Hospice during COVID means children, who have not seen their parents for four months to protect them from the virus, saying goodbye through the reinforced glass of a hospital room door.

Hospice during COVID means a grieving wife self-quarantines from the rest of her family at home.  She may be a carrier, and the love that she holds for the living overrides her own needs.

Hospice used to be a time to gather, to comfort, to focus on quality of life.  With COVID, that becomes a luxury we can no longer afford.

We still gather, but we do so virtually.  We text, we email, we call, we zoom, we connect in every way but the one we want most.  And that’s it.

Then, in between checking on others, we read the news.  We look for signs that the virus is starting to be contained.  We look for hope that we won’t lose anyone else in such an impersonal way.  But that’s not what the news says.  The news reports a person died of COVID-19 in your city.  Your person.  The news does not give a name, but as you read the headline, your heart supplies the name in real-time.

Then, the news talks about the local mega-church opening its doors for full-capacity services.  The quotes in the article make it clear that it’s a matter of politics for the church, of not being pushed around for secular reasons.  The news then goes to the restaurants defying orders to close dining rooms, stating that the economics of take-out food alone won’t allow them to survive.  As you read the news, your heart supplies several reasons for our public spaces to shut down, several names of the PEOPLE you need to survive.  Because really, you don’t know if you can take another pandemic hospice.

There was always that guy in class with whom you’d never agree. Each brought their experiences (and sources) to the class texts. Each came up with different interpretations as to what the texts meant. Then, when class was over, you’d go your sperate ways. If you met him at the cafeteria, the discussion would be about the weather or some other innocuous subject. Then, the next day it would back to the old argument. I knew many such people. I was such a person. But, it all worked out. Even if we did not change each other’s opinions, a structure in place allowed us to learn from the experience. I’ve concluded that Social Media is that class, without a timetable or structure.

Imagine you are back in class, only there is no bell at 90 minutes that brings the discussion to an end. Imagine the professor has no educational goal in mind for the discussion but instead wants to inflame passions, so the discussion keeps going. Finally, imagine that the professor could feed each of you sources that support your worldview while hiding sources that might explain the other. The professor we are describing is Social Media.

The basic premise behind much media theory is that the medium is the message. A newspaper receives ad money benefits with in-depth articles. Every time a reader returns to the page for a second or third read, they see the ads again. A 24-hour cable news channel wants relevance so that a viewer keeps tuning back in and seeing the commercials that air every 20 minutes.

Social Media does not need content to bring you back to re-read. For ad revenue to come in, they need the page to refresh. Every time someone looks to see if there has been a response, that’s a page refresh, which means more revenue. No moderating professor is leading the discussion towards an educational outcome. The moderator is trying to prolong the debate to add to the number of times the webpage refreshes.

Here’s the kicker. The moderator feeds both sides of their own news sources that indicate that they are right.

If I met someone on the street while wearing my tinfoil hat, we could have a pleasant few moments of banter until we went our separate ways. There would be no reason that person to think any further, aside from perhaps telling a friend of the time spent with the crazy tall guy. However, if I am a Facebook friend, I can follow with my tinfoil hat ideas until, against the person’s better judgment, they respond in a way they would never do in the classroom. Then, it’s off to the races with refreshing the page to look for responses.

I don’t believe there is any wisdom or knowledge to be gained from Social Media. It’s not a way of educating anyone, it’s a way of monetizing confirmation bias. No one leaves a Social Media discussion changed or enlightened. They leave with the vague feeling that the other person simply does not understand. Perhaps they would if you just forward one more thing.

While there is a national debate on monuments and statues, it’s worth talking about more than just the Confederates. Sitka has a street named for Jeff Davis (the Union one, not the Confederate President)

Davis was the military leader of Alaska who ordered the expedition that burned the village of Kake to the ground. After leaving Alaska, he was reassigned to California, where he lead government forces against the Modoc in the Californian Indian wars. ​(Woolsey)​

We have a street named for him.

When asked how I can remain positive about our future with everything going on in the world, my answer is simple: As bad is it may seem, we’ve been through much worse, and things got better.

Throughout my life, I have stood on thresholds of history and looked at what could have been had we opened any number of doors. One such time happened this weekend when Dave Brown brought me on a tour of the former Site Summit Nike Hercules missile installation. The Nike Missile was an insane last line of defense against the Soviet Union. The idea was to take a nuclear-capable warhead and lob it into a squadron of bombers. The concussive blast would ideally knock the aircraft out of the sky before they could reach their intended targets.

Here’s the thing. The maximum range of the Nike Hercules was about 90 miles. The Anchorage missile batteries (there were three) could not target something at the mouth of Cook Inlet. In the calculus of seeing how much of the United States could survive a nuclear war, we had the plans and equipment in place to nuke ourselves, intentionally.

The essential computers on site were in a magnesium chasis. If the base were overrun defenders could lob a thermal grenade into the room, the magnesium would burn. There would be no electronics for the enemy to salvage. The site was built with the idea that it could be over-run and needed a failsafe.

Our tour guide mentioned that a veteran of the site who had taken the tour described additional orders, should the site be about to fall. They were to take out the other two missile sites and the Eagle River Bridge, denying those assets to the enemy. Once you start thinking of the site as a failsafe for the other infrastructure in the region, it’s hard to imagine that the long runways of Elmendorf and the Anchorage airport were not also on the list.

The Soviet transition from long-range bombers to ICBMs reduced the anti-air utility of static Nike installations, and most of the system was deactivated by 1969. The Alaskan systems were deactivated in 1979. Our proximity to Soviet air-space was undoubtedly a driving factor but so, perhaps, was our proximity to a potential ground invasion and the strategic assets that could change hands.

The craziest part is that in the cold, practical calculations of the Cold War, none of this is crazy. It all makes a certain amount of sense. That is the past that we survived; the door we did not open.

So, I look now at the challenges we face, which are monumental. I look at the improvements we need to make and things we need to fix, and they are indeed monumental. But I also look at where we were. The Cuban Missile Crisis saw us within hours of a war where we would consider nuking ourselves.

I remain positive about the future because we’ve been through worse, and we got better.