The interview as a work of art

For two reasons, his interview was out of the ordinary. First, it was obvious before we even began to record that he'd actually read the book. I'm sure that if I were a radio guy, I wouldn't take the time to read every book I was reviewing on air; after all, there are certain obligatory questions you wouldn't even have to write out to remember: 

"Where did you get the idea for these stories?"

"What's your writing schedule look like?"

"Do you write on a notepad in a coffee shop or hammer away on a computer?"

"How old were you when you knew you wanted to write?"

Etc.

I don't doubt for a moment that one could do a fairly thorough job of interviewing a writer or two, or three or six or eighteen, with the very same list on the very same single sheet of paper.

The second reason this interview wasn't ordinary was that he had a chunk of the book in his hand, a chunk of a story on a couple of sheets of paper because he wanted me to read a long passage he'd chosen himself. I don't remember doing an interview with someone who actually wanted me to read. When first he brought up the idea, I thought he was kidding. 

He wasn't. I did. I read the passage he'd chosen.

And then it was over. "That ought to do it," he said, or something similar. I was surprised, not because it hadn't taken all that long--I knew he had more copy than he needed--but because he hadn't asked those standard questions, not one, not once. 

I'd read a long passage from one of the stories, and he nodded approvingly when it was over, even indicated he was moved--and honestly I think he was.  

The interview he created was broadcast this week. He took what he'd recorded and sculpted it into a work of art, really. He added the whoosh of passing cars and an endearing rendition of the kind of Genevan Psalm that rises from the story; and what the interview became, what it is--this news feature about a new book by a local writer--is just plain beautiful.

I know--I'm hardly objective. But listen yourself. It's about eight minutes long even though the music continues to play. 

Tell me I'm wrong, but I think it's just plain beautiful.

Here it is.  His name? Mark Munger, from KWIT, Sioux City, IA.

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Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee II

The Ghost Dance, a ritual of what Ian Frazier calls “the first American religion,” is only one of many causes which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, but for people of faith it merits a closer look.

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area, like the one in front of us now—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into ecstacy.

Now look back down into the valley, and imagine three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu of every denomination or political persuasion shudder. To them, it seemed madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Sioux, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

_____________________

Tomorrow:  What it looked like, here at Wounded Knee

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Geometry assignment; March 3

We began our unit on circles today with an introduction to some new terms as well as a review of some calculations that the students have seen before in previous math classes.  Radius, circumference, area, diameter, center, secant, tangent, chord, and point of tangency were all discussed and demonstrated.  Working with congruent and similar circles and concentric circles were also aspects of this unit that students were introduced to.

Homework:  circle calculation worksheet #1-9 all;  section 9-1;  page 330;  classroom exercises #1-10 all

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Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (viii)

On that first visit to Dordt College, I took Fred to the Dordt College chapel, which was being built just then. Construction crews were still all around, and the dust on the stage was a half-inch thick. Everywhere you looked there was canvas drop cloths, but the place was closed up and warm, cavern-like and spacious, a work-in-progress.

Down the center aisle we walked together, this huge man looking up and around, as if the unfinished ceiling was lined with stars. Together we stood, center stage, looking out over open stretches where eventually the pews would sit, and he was astonished, almost speechless.

“If you would have told me, when I was growing up,” he said, more reverentially than I could have guessed, “—if you would have told me that someday my people would have a beautiful place like this, right here in Siouxland, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

It was the “my people” that struck me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Through the years, I heard him, time and time again, refer to his ethnic and religious roots in very, very loving ways. 

"You won't find a bad preacher in my novels," Fred told me once upon a time. "They were good to me," he said. "They were the only ones around with libraries, and they'd lend me their books." I never did a study, but the chiselers and the crooks and the hypocrites in the Siouxland novels aren't preachers.

That night, the novelist Frederick Manfred came to the Schaap’s house for dinner, for the first time, the first of many. For several years after, I took van loads of students up to his house, just as I had gone when I was an undergraduate myself.

Fred was never happier than when he could entertain. My students found him and his passions astonishing.

Nothing pleased Fred Manfred more than similar kinds of visits to his alma mater, Calvin College, especially in the last decade of his life. He would talk about those trips for weeks ahead of time and weeks afterward. He felt lionized at Calvin, and the joy was almost too great for him to bear.

His Calvin pedigree was precious to him. He loved to tell the story of how, once when he was living in St. Paul, he’d attended a lecture at the University and asked a question of the speaker, an academic whose name or topic I don’t remember at all.

The man had immediately pointed. “You went to Calvin College. I can always tell questions that come from Calvin College alums. They ask questions nobody else asks.”

The unique shape of those Calvin questions he would have attributed, I’m sure, to Prof. Harry Jellema, the legendary professor of philosophy, a man he lionized himself.

He cherished his Calvin education, and was equally proud of the fact that he done very poorly in his freshman English class, failed it in fact, because he hadn’t written to the standards of course or the instructor, but then, neither was he particularly interested.

The Manfred oeuvre includes tales from his Calvin years. The best way to read those stories is in the trilogy Wanderlust, a fictionalized memoir (he called the form a “rume”) that includes more than his college experience. Those stories were published separately in three volumes: The Primitive (1949), The Brother (1950), and The Giant (1951). He is not a quick read.

His work flow went like this: start the morning up by reading through everything he’d written the day before, editing inflexibly, then go on for four hours or so, that’s all. He was more than happy to trumpet his skills as an editor, but then, even rebellious Calvinists can be woefully short-sighted. Almost everything he wrote was a tome.

Frederick Manfred, like another Calvin College novelist alum, Peter De Vries, was likely as much reviled as beloved by those who didn’t leave his and their ethnic and religious roots. Undoubtedly, the break he made from those he called himself “his people,” left scars. On the other hand, when Feik Feikema became Frederick Manfred, he also carried with him the longings of what was then, certainly, a clannish people for the kind of high profiled place Manfred gained in American culture, an aspiration to be truly and successfully “an American.” Lord Grizzily was much admired; for its success, Manfred was nominated for—and just about won—the Pulitzer. In his own way and in his own time, Feike Feikema “made it,” and many of his people were proud of him because of the way he step-laddered out of the ethnic ghetto.

But he came along at a time when leaving the tribe behind was neither simple nor sympathetic. Life among the Dutch Reformed, mid-20th century, was stifling to some, comforting to many—a significant force, an tribal identity one couldn’t leave without some heartache. We’re not talking simply about wooden shoes or tulips or scripture texts in the language of the old country, embroidered and framed and hung from a nail in the parlor; Frederick Manfred had those hangings, and he loved his heritage—no question. But that heritage has an undeniable faith component that Mr. Abma wondered about, as did others, even those within the clan who very much admired the novels Feik was writing.

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Geometry assignment; Feb. 10

We went over our radical expressions quiz to start the period today.  We then continued to review similar triangles and working with the geometric mean.

We will begin our work with right triangles and the Pythagorean Theorem tomorrow.

Assignment:  Geometric mean worksheet with similar triangles;  #1-12 all, evens on back

(I think during one of the periods, I said to do the odds on the back.  2nd period can choose to do even or odds, as I believe I forgot to mention which ones to do on the back.)

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Sunday Morning Meds--Snickers

“. . .but the Lord laughs at the wicked, 

for he knows their day is coming.”

Psalm 37

I don’t remember things like this happening when I was younger, but more and more these days it seems that the victims of violent crime are given opportunity in court, once the verdict is set, to let loose at the guilty.  It’s not an exercise I enjoy watching.  No matter how totally despicable and evil the crimes, the frequently emotional diatribes of the victims don’t offer much joy.  Venting may feel good, but most often, it’s not pretty because vengeance in the human spirit, no matter how understandable, is almost always unbecoming.  Furthermore, it's his--God's--not ours, right?      

Maybe if it was my daughter or grandson who was murdered, I would see it differently.  Maybe if I’d suffered as some have, I’d want to take a few shots myself.

I hope and pray I never find myself in that position.

It’s anthropomorphic, of course—this line in David’s psalm.  One can’t help but get the impression that a smirking God is exactly the kind of deity David would like to believe in because, after all, King David himself is snickering at the plight of the wicked.  The whole movement of this part of this psalm is to assert dramatically and unforgettably just exactly how far the righteous stand apart from the wicked: the meek get joy and bounty; the evil get hell.  That’s why God laughs.  He knows what it’s going to be like when he turns up the heat.

I love the image of God laughing, but I’m uneasy at why, in David’s description, in part because God seems, well, almost disinterested—as if the drama unfolding in front of him is theater, as if he’s even entertained by what goes on in his creation, a season-ticket holder at the pageant of this world’s ordinary life.

It’s impossible to say that God doesn’t do what David says he does in this verse, and therefore wrong to assume that this is simply poetic license.  I know enough of God to know that I don’t know it all.  Sometimes I rather like the Lakota idea of Wakan Tanka as “the Great Mystery.” 

And I am quite sure—because I’m human—that I could feel just like those murder victim’s mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, standing up there in front of the victim’s killer, wailing away.  I know I could feel exactly what David does. 

When the Allied liberators stumbled on the concentration camp at Dachau, what happened wasn’t pretty.  The skeletal prisoners—the living and the dead—were such a horrifying shock to the liberators that ordinary soldiers became cold-blooded killers.  There are reports of GIs giving prisoners their machine guns and simply allowing them to kill the hated, evil Nazi guards.  All of that—especially if you’ve seen boxcars loaded with corpses—is somehow perfectly understandable.  But was it right?

Does God giggle at evil men and women?  I honestly don’t know.  Maybe he does.

But I know that David’s giving him that human characteristic offers us—me too—some human joy.  When I conceive of the Lord God almighty acting just like me, it may well be easier to like him, but more difficult, I believe, to worship him. 

Here too, in this anthropological characterization, I wonder if we’re not finding out more about King David, God’s beloved, than we are God almighty, because I really do hope that my God doesn’t just snicker at sinners. 

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 13

We went over the homework today before taking a look at how the quadratic formula is used to solve equations.  We went through 2-3 examples together before the students got started on their homework.


Assignment:  quadratic formula worksheet  #1-7 all

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 5

We went over our quiz today in class before getting started on today's lesson.  Today's lesson focused on being able to add and subtract radical expressions.  We worked to get like radicals in the equations first, before then adding and subtracting to finish the problem.  We went through several examples in class together before getting started on the homework assignment.


Assignment:  Addition / Subtraction of radicals worksheet  #1-22 all

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Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee V

A single troop—who knows who?—tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Sioux men. Some say he was deaf. At the same moment, the medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, his shrieking exhortation continuing in the Sioux language. The soldier and Black Coyote wrestle for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle wrapped in the blanket covering one of three young men standing close together. The medicine man keeps telling his people white bullets will not harm them.

One shot. Whose was it? Did it come from Black Coyote in the struggle? No one knows for sure. But in a moment all hell broke loose, and, for less than a half hour, what follows is a fierce and bloody battle waged hand-to-hand in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of the Sioux in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the cavalry could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted later.

An old woman who used to live down our street claims that out here on the prairie we get only about ten sweet days a year. Prairie cold locks life in its frigid jaws; the heat wilts anything that grows; and always, the wind blows. In the summer, it’s capable of sand-blasting your face; in the winter, its bite is not only dangerous but deadly. But that morning, December 29, 1890, the wind stood still. When you look down now, from the promontory where the First and Second Artillery have been firing those Hotchkiss guns into the horror beneath them, imagine a cloud of dust and smoke so thick as to stop breath. In seconds, in the very middle of the fray, combatants cannot see each other, but blindness doesn’t stop the killing. Seventeen miles away, at the Pine Ridge Agency, people claimed to hear the firing.

Just exactly who fired first might never be established, but there is no question whose rifles ended the massacre. With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run away into that ravine you see just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the madness, Forsyte’s men are in no mood to take prisoners, so for several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee. What began in intolerable heat ended in cold-blooded murder.

If you’d like, perhaps you could walk down into those ravines, no more than a half mile from where we’re standing. There are no markers anywhere, like the ones at Little Big Horn, no whited stones to mark the spots where people fell. But even in their absence, ghosts linger.

That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, 25. Fifty-one wounded Sioux were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. The Sioux dead were left on the field and in the ravines, but exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Native people consider 300 a fairly just estimate.

That night, a blizzard came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin. Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that, from my vantage point, a white man at Wounded Knee, looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people—my own Dutch immigrant ancestors among them—went west for cheap land they assumed the Sioux didn’t value. After all, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the buildings, the cut sod? Millions of white people—my own ancestors among them—thought our holy book to a pagan people was a generous gift for the millions of acres those people had once roamed in freedom. My own family included, we wanted to own what they wanted to honor.

But the Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill where we’re standing. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost the war; they lost their way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

___________________ 

Tomorrow:  Aftermath

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Morning Thanks--all those who help

Once upon a time, I helped shingle a three-story house in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which meant ascending an old wooden extension ladder with a bundle of shingles on my shoulder, a ridiculous circus act. I needed one hand to keep that 90-pound bundle on my shoulder; that left only one on a ancient paint-spattered ladder that bowed like an buggy spring when me and that bundle were aboard. I lived. But I never forgot.

For maybe two weeks total, I worked for a construction crew putting a new interstate highway up the lake shore. They paid good money for every last muscle in my body. It took no brains at all to cut sod or load it on flatbeds, even fewer to lug those heavy sod balls in soft dirt up 45-degree interchange inclines.  It just about killed me, six to six every day save Sabbath. My body--I was 21 years old!--taught me what the word overtired means.

Once upon a time, years ago, my father-in-law and I drove down to Sioux City to work at flood relief. Perry Creek had come up in early summer cloudbursts that wouldn't quit. Dozens of homes went under in a muddy torrent and ravaged an old area of the city that could hardly be called "exclusive." Houses that could be saved had to be disemboweled. 

No job I ever worked at--sod balls or shingle bundles--was an butt-ugly as lugging 10-gallon buckets of muck up people's basement stairways, trip after trip after trip, and emptying those buckets outside. In one house a wall of paperbacks had caved in, and a couple hundred books were lodged in mud so thick you sometimes worried you'd be gone yourself in another ten minutes. 

I remember an old African-American woman sitting at a table while an bucket brigade of volunteers tramped up her stairs and past the open door to her kitchen, each of us heavy laden with buckets of sludge, her stairway and back hall a pig sty of slop beneath our muddy boots. 

After last night's storm, we're coming close to 15 inches of rain here in the last month, a dozen more than normal. Lots of houses have been inundated, then emptied, a lifetime of possessions transformed into trash. Even without the mud, cleaning out a soggy house means watching your life turn to garbage. 

This morning I'm thankful for the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands of volunteers who, today again, will go down into the bowels of horrible human loss and try to make life easier for those who, right now, can't see but an inch or two past their own muddy basements.

All those volunteers, today once more, will be doing good work. Ugly work, but good work, blessed work, God's own hands in a flooded, muddy world.

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Geometry assignment; March 4

We went over our chapter 8 test today before going through the lesson.  Today's lesson dealt with tangent lines and circles and how calculation problems can be solved using tangents to circles.  We walked through several examples before getting started on our homework at the end of the period.


Assignment:  Tangents to Circles worksheet

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Book Review--Origins

Here's the rub. Once upon a time--and still today--people who believe in a Christian education used evolution as a kind of shibboleth. Those of us who chose to send our kids to a Christian school could always say, "You know, if our kids went to public schools, they'd be taught that their ancestors were chimpanzees--how does that square with biblical thinking?"

End of conversation. Maybe. Creation was a mainstay, a foundational principle. That God almighty created all things was a given in what most people considered a Christian worldview. Belief in evolution was belief in Godlessness. 

And it still is.

Well, somewhat. 

The alternatives, for some, are few. Either He did or He didn't. Now if we hang two scenarios on that "either-or" dilemma, only two possibilities exist: either 6000 years ago God almighty snapped his fingers and it all started on time; or, creation is a cute little story for pre-schoolers.

Already in 1925, the theory of evolution was a lightning rod. When William Jennings Bryan, a fiery Christian populist known for his passionate oratory, entered a Tennessee courtroom, not having practiced law for more than thirty years, he was taking on nothing less than atheism itself.  On the other side stood an equally powerful heavyweight advocate--and agnostic--Clarence Darrow. For the two of them, the question of creation vs. evolution was perfectly either/or. 

That trial set a paradigm in the American mind ever since: evolution is Godless; creation is Godly.

Wouldn't it be sweet if life was that simple?

We've been reading Origins, a wonderful little compendium of the parameters of the conversation, for quite some time now, a fascinating study. One of the authors, Loren Haarsma, grew up just down the road in Orange City and is, in fact, some distant relative of my wife. His accomplice happens to be his wife, who, like Loren, is a pedigreed scientist who's made scientific research her life's work.

It's rare to find a book so generously written. That the Haarsmas have a point of view in all of this goes without question, but their largess for those who don't share their views is immensely gracious, given the passion most of us bring to the arguments.

There are land mines in the war between creation and evolution, plenty of them. The Haarsmas don't try to sidestep them. They go out of their way to find them and open them so the reader doesn't miss either the land mines themselves of the character of their composition. This little study does us all well because their mission impossible is to discuss an issue that has made people point their fingers--and wag them--ungraciously for a long, long time.

There's nothing new about the debate--except science. What has changed since that old steamy Tennessee courtroom is what we know about ourselves and our world. Today, solid scientific evidence exists about genes and chromosomes, knowledge that could barely be theorized just a few decades ago. That knowledge has enriched our sense of origins, of how humankind has developed. After all, the science of genetics tells a story, too, a story we can't simply burn or deliver to the landfill.

Orthodox Christianity has always recognized two sources of revelation--that which we discover in the Bible, the Spirit-breathed Word of God; and that which we see around us, God's own continuing revelation in creation.  "The heavens declare the glory of God," David says, because every last painting in the sky teaches us his glory. No one on the face of the earth misses that sermon.

Balancing the weight of the two can be something of a high-wire act. How can ordinary Christian believers go to the bank with a six-day creation and the fossil record or the science of genetics? Answering that question is tough stuff.

What the Haarsmas do in Origins is try to explain the strengths and weaknesses of various deeply held points of view on just exactly how God almighty created this world of ours--and His.

We live in an immensely fractured world. Even in churches, politics are often far, far more highly regarded than theology. Have no doubt, Origins could raise cain and probably does in some strongholds. 

But the Haarsmas have gone out of their way to treat just about everyone with dignity and justice. The book--it's not long and very methodical and comprehensive--is a real blessing.

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Geometry assignment; May 1

We went through another entry task today practicing the use of our various formulas.  We then spent some time taking a look at some animations of how cones are constructed from triangles and how they are related to cylinders.  The class got some new formulas for how to work with cones and then did a couple of sample problems together before getting started on the homework.

Quiz on volume and surface area of solid objects tomorrow.

Assignment:  section 12-3;  page 493;  #9-16 all, 18

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Geometry assignment; May 7

After going over the homework, we spent time working on the final section of chapter 12.  The topic for today was dealing with the ratios among similar solid objects.  The ratio between single dimensions  (height, slant height, perimeter, etc. is equal to the scale factor.  The area ratio is equal to the scale factor squared.  The volume ratio is equal to the scale factor cubed.  We did a few sample problems involving these ratios together before getting started on our homework.


Assignment:  section 12-5;  page 510-511;  classroom exercises #6-11;  written exercises #1-8, 11

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