Our Journey Continues…

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – After suffering through a brutally hot global warming day on Tuesday, making our way back to the top of the mountain in the morning before noon to escape it somewhat, there’s a cool breeze up here on Wednesday morning at exactly 1,700 feet above sea level and almost exactly 1,000 miles north of Mobile, Alabama.

With a little help from the fresh, locally grown watermelon, strawberries, black berries and peaches, and some grape tomatoes, jalapeño peppers and green bell peppers I picked myself along with some red potatoes grown on the same organic vegetable farm, I now feel refreshed and thinking clearly enough to write about the latest political crisis gripping our country (in a minute).

Having a strong cell phone-internet connection up here helps so I can read the New York Times and Washington Post, and of course write and publish my own stories. There’s a cell phone tower on top of what used to be a fire watch tower at the highest point in the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland, the easternmost mountain ridge of what people call the Blue Ridge Mountains. I wrote about finding this a few years back when we found the peak at 1,900 feet.

Camping and Cycling Around the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland

So with a Golden Age senior pass in Maryland, you can get a campsite Sunday through Thursday nights for about $15 a night. The price goes up on the weekends and holidays to about $32 a night, and the Golden Age pass doesn’t work then. It’s actually hard to find a site with an electric hookup on the weekends in Maryland state parks anyway, since some people apparently pay for a site they like for the entire summer and then only show up every now and then to camp. The state should probably take some action to penalize campers who pay for a site and then don’t show up. It deprives other campers traveling through the area of a place to stay here.

But this year, I’ve made a deal with a local farmer to camp in the shade on the weekends, and help with some work around the farm as needed. This past weekend, I helped scare away a doe and a fawn that were feeding on newly planted broccoli. I’m learning much about farm life and the economy of farming here as well. The farmer managed to shoot one fawn in the field. He shoots ground hogs all the time for digging up and eating his crops. He doesn’t shoot the cotton-tailed rabbits, however, thinking he might get hungry one day and need something to eat. That’s life on a farm, and one reason rural farmers own guns.

My own grandfather on my dad’s side was a farmer and a carpenter in St. Clair County, Alabama. He owned a Remington pump action .22, and a .16-gauge shotgun, a 1910 Columbia. I still have the shotgun, but not the .22. I traded my dad’s Remington 1100 .12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun, and a Japanese rifle from World War II sent home by my dad’s brother who died on Okinawa, for a Marlin .30-.30 lever action short rifle. It fulfilled my TV fantasy of one day living in the American West. I wanted a Colt six shooter to go with it, but that opportunity has never knocked.

Of course you don’t need a high powered, automatic assault rifle to get rid of destructive varmints (unless they are politicians, of course : ). The animal rights activists who advocate for never killing any “sentient being” have never had to make a living growing vegetables or anything else. Hey, he’s not using chemicals. He figured out a long time ago how to mix up his own soil with organic fertilizer, saw dust and compost. Give him a break.

Trump Assassination Attempt

So now that I’ve had more time to read the news, I’m still in shock over this attempted assassination of Donald Trump while speaking in Pennsylvania, not far up the road from here. I saw all the conspiracy theories going around as memes on social media, but opted to remain out of it until some facts could be reported. All I said at the time on my Facebook page was this: “A Sign of the Times: We should not be trying to solve our political problems with violence. That is all…”

The New York Times ended up doing an entire story about that.

The Gunshots Rang Out. Then the Conspiracy Theories Erupted Online.

Details are still sketchy, but to sum up what we know, the guy, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was a registered Republican who had suffered bullying in his life and obviously become disillusioned with Trump. No one is reporting this yet, but it has to be true. He then tried to take matters into his own hands by borrowing his dad’s AR-15 and climbing on top of a building and taking eight shots at Trump, a building that should have been secured by the Secret Service but wasn’t. These are the facts. It may have looked staged on CNN. But there’s not a shred of evidence to back this up. I guess it made for great TeeVee, however, and I’m sure ratings shot up.

Of course the fact that Trump played golf the next morning and failed to call or visit the families of those who were shot, or the firefighter who was killed, at his political rally, says a lot about the character of the man. Voters must decide if this man has the character and class to be elected president again. You know where we stand.

Whether it helps Trump get elected or hurts in the end we will see. The Times‘ pollsters still say Joe Biden has a chance in November, all while many Democrats have called for him to step aside due his less than stellar performance in the ring with Trump on CNN.

“The best thing going for Mr. Biden is that he’s not Donald Trump,” one Times analyst wrote this week. “Even in the face of the historic events of the last few weeks, that fact remains. And that’s why, despite everything, I don’t think anyone should feel certain that the presidential election is all but a foregone conclusion.”

What Polls Tell Us About Biden’s Chances

In the latest polls, Trump is up three points in Pennsylvania, while President Biden is up by only three points in Virginia and Minnesota. Because of a growing body of polls that show Biden leading by only small margins in Virginia and Minnesota, two states he won easily in 2020, they’ve added those two states to the electoral college scenarios.

Election 2024 Polls: Biden vs. Trump

Lord A-Mighty What Will Become of Us Arguing Beasts

The Faustian Bargain of J.D. Vance

Now that Trump has chosen Hillbilly flame thrower J.D. Vance as his running mate at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week, much attention has turned to him. He’s scheduled to speak at the convention Wednesday night.

The most interesting thing I’ve seen written about Vance came from Ed Simon, author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain and the editor in chief of Belt Magazine, which covers the Rust Belt and Appalachia. He also teaches in the English department of Carnegie Mellon University.

J.D. Vance Keeps Selling His Soul. He’s Got Plenty of Buyers.

Now you know I do not believe in god or the devil, or heaven and hell for that matter. I’ve seen heaven on Earth quite a few times in my life. And I’ve traveled through hell a few times too.

But the idea of a “Faustian bargain” makes for a great literary device and a way to capture the soul of someone who seems to convert from being a reasonable, educated person into a greedy, money-grubbing, power hungry beast, seemingly over night.

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires”… “a world of profit and delight … of power …”

“That brand of striving, so strong that it compels Faustus to sell what is most essential to him, must lie somewhere in the makeup of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio,” Simon writes, “who on Monday was offered and accepted the invitation to be Donald Trump’s running mate. What he has renounced in the process is in the public record for all to see.”

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Vance wrote that Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

After Monday’s announcement, of course, Vance distanced himself from those comments. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, “but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word,” Simon says.

“Certainly, all politicians are ambitious — and many of them are cynical,” he continues. “But there is something particularly noxious about Mr. Vance’s posturing, which exceeds the run-of-the-mill Machiavellian self-interestedness that characterizes politics. The Faustian contract seems to have already been drawn up and signed.”

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause.

“That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.”

For many tastemakers, Vance’s reputation as a thoughtful intellectual had been secured with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

An account of his journey from a hardscrabble childhood in Middletown, Ohio, to his graduation from Yale Law School, “Hillbilly Elegy” was often portrayed by critics and interpreted by readers as an explanation of rural Appalachia’s embrace of Trumpism. Praised from the Upper West Side to New Haven, Capitol Hill to Cambridge, Vance was posited as an Appalachia-whisperer, the sort of respectable conservative worth listening to.

“Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform,” Simon charges. “It’s hard to imagine that without Hillbilly Elegy, which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Mr. Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president. His book and film contracts have proven Faustian in the sense that they may place him a heartbeat from the Oval Office.”

Of course Vance is more a product of the Upper West Side and New Haven, Capitol Hill and Cambridge, than of the Appalachian hollers. “Hillbilly Elegy” owed much of its critical and commercial success to how it flattered its audience about their own meritocratic superiority over the people whom Vance was supposedly championing, and reaffirming some of the most pernicious stereotypes about the residents of Appalachia.

“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives,” Vance wrote. In his telling, those who fell into poverty, unemployment or substance abuse hadn’t dreamed big enough.

Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author. As Jody DiPerna of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism put it, Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.”

“Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold,” Simon says.

The lesson for Vance from the story of Faust, if he were interested in any lesson that didn’t just make him richer and more powerful, is what the legend warns about the embrace of irrational forces and powers, the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil.

In his book on Faust, he said, “I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain. That is perhaps what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you.

“Mephistopheles certainly understood that the house always wins, however … the Faustian contract always appeals to the worst in the person signing on the dotted line.”

When Trump Signed Over His Soul

Trump signed his contract back in his days of playing around with professional wrestling, when the Dark Lord must have whispered something in his ear, perhaps the one in which he just took a shot that came an inch from taking his head off and his life. Was the Grim Reaper sending a warning? Is Trump’s time almost up?

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience,” Trump said back then.

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

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