I am what I read.

The Rock Hill Herald, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Le Monde start off my day. I love journalism because it makes me feel part of something bigger than my puny self. I look forward to The New Yorker and National Geographic because I find them even more mind-expanding.

My longest mental conversations occur via books. I take my time in figuring out what to read: if it is not a well-reviewed worthy book, I keep looking. My looking yields a list of potential reads that I order upon further consideration.

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell is a collection of nonfiction and fiction pieces by the person considered to the finest journalist ever to work for The New Yorker. Mitchell was from rural Eastern North Carolina and recorded the most vivid people who populated the greatest city in the world from just after WW I to the turn of the century. I still can’t get the sketches about the Mohawk ironworkers who wielded the steel for New York’s sky scrappers out of my mind. Mitchell felt the pulse of the center of the universe by recording the experience of ordinary people.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) by Jonathan Haidt is an objective, data-driven argument against the use of smart phones, especially by children. His argument against phones is schools catching on.

The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels (2024) by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans looks at the over 150,00 Americans who die unclaimed each year; the 1,500 or so who die in LA in particular. I have known people who died alone to be discovered and unclaimed, except by York County, SC.

Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (2024) by Antonia Hylton tells the story of the African-American prison laborers who were forced to build their own asylum near Crownsville, Maryland. SC’s Bull Street was no picnic; segregated asylums were similar to plantations: total white, racist control.

Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy (2024) by Craig Whitlock is set where most of our Naval fleet is: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines. A dogged Washington Post reporter uncovered billions of dollars worth of bribes to Admirals and Commanders. I am still trying to trust the Navy again.

James (2024) is a novel by Percival Everett that lies on the back of the great American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Backwoods Huck Finn’s first person narration gives way to Jim’s, who has learned to read and speak standard English on the sly in Judge Thatcher’s study. His viewpoint expands the view of slavery and African-American characters and is a worthy parallel volume to the work that still tells the truth about our nation’s dark soul by using an innocent boy to reveal what our frontier was really like in the mid-1800s.

Built from Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street (2023) by Victor Luckerson tells the story of one of the United States great racial massacres where whites used the National Guard and airplanes to burn down block after block of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood in 1921. A black man was accused of looking at a white female elevator operator as he sought a restroom. Anti-Black, Polish, Italian, Catholic, and Jewish populism fueled by populism brought the KKK to territory that had been accepting of others.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991, 2019) is a novel by Julia Alvarez that tells tells the story of how she and her two sisters assimilated into U.S. culture in three periods: 1989–1972, 1970–1960, and 1960–1956 in reverse chronological order. The first section, then, represents integrated young Dominican-American women growing up America but with a foot in the past. As the autobiographical novel ends, it recalls their earliest Dominican memories. A modern classic for all of us. We were all immigrants.

Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (2024) by Marcia Bjornerud is a combination of her life story in a rural Wisconsin town similar to my own Saluda, SC, her work as a geologist, and a cogent explanation of the science of modern geology. Her superb work teaches me that to see the world in biological way is to misunderstand that everything on Earth is rock first.

The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory (2024) by Thomas Fuller reports on the eight-man football team of Riverside School for the Deaf in California. The excitement of eight-man, high-scoring football is front and center but the glimpse into a deaf culture is an even more lasting part of this sport story.

The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History (2019) by Libby Hill is a history of the flat place along side Lake Michigan that linked the east to the midwest and became Chicago. It is a history based on the technical manipulation of the Chicago River so that trade could flow to establish one of the most important port cities in the world.

Holy Bible: Pictorial Family Bible (A.J. Holman Company) is a King James version that belonged to my mother. I read it as a small boy for the illustrations the same way I read comics, working back from the illustrations to get at the meaning of the words.

It is lying of the coffee table of my mother’s home in a photo from 1968 or 1969. The person on the far left is Nathan Powell who was inducted into the Forrest family. I can tell that it is open to the New Testament, likely the Christmas story from St. Mathew.

I read Leona’s big clunker daily for about a year a lunch. I liked its large print and my long association with the big book. It was not my favorite or personal Bible. I much preferred my skinny copy of the New Testament which I am clutching in the next photo.

My brothers Ernest (Butch) and Cally are to my right. I reckon that the extra material in my hand is from Sunday School. I liked the skinny New Testament because it was light and could be folded into a coat pocket. The red print fascinated me because I believed then that they were the actual ones spoken by my early hero Jesus..

That New Testament and my old main Bible from 1956 are still with me. They were part of my research shelf in most every classroom that I ever taught in. Teaching English for 34 years led me to a lot of scriptural references for the literature under discussion. Christian references dot both English and American literature.

My old main Bible still holds some gold stars and Bible stickers. I seem to have lost my Sunday school medals along with my Army medals.

Sunday School, Preaching, Training Union, Revivals, Royal Ambassadors for Christ, and Vacation Bible School are the main forms of worship that I engaged in. For sure I loved Royal Ambassadors (RAs) most for the chance to engage in a kind of Baptist Boy Scout organization with my peers.

I did my worshipping at Red Bank Baptist Church which lies at the end of Church Street in a small valley along side a creek just two blocks from where Main and Church meet to form Saluda, SC’s main intersection.

My recently deceased brother Butch took this photo of me a few of years ago when we visited my father Harold’s grave space which is also the grave site for my younger brother Cally. I vividly recall singing Onward Christians Soldiers while marching with my fellow Vacation Bible School classmates up the steps into the sanctuary to stand on the pulpit stage for Bible drill. I reckon I got a star or two for getting to a verse before others. (Think spelling bee meets Jeopardy.)

I came to my nearly year long reading of the Bible via a book by Tim Alberta, one of our best objective writers on Christianity and the son of a famous mega-church minister in Michigan. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (2023) was my first formal attempt to answer a riddle that still puzzles me: “How can Christians support the profane liar who is now our President?”

I gave my copy to a minister friend who is likewise puzzled. MAGA has merged with evangelical faith. John 8:44: When he lies, he speaks his native language for he is a liar and the father of lies. Trump is a father of lies. He never stops. Do Trump’s followers really believe that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky started the war when Russian invaded his country, not vice versa? Trump is now preaching that doctrine on his own social media site, Musk’s X, and Fox.

Trump’s big lies bother me most but his bearing and language cling to my imagination. In person he is as vulgar and ugly as video clips show–and audiences, many Christian, eat it up. His fans openly wear and sell apparel that disparages others in profane ways. Vice President Kamala Harris is a “hoe.” I have been to two of his rallies in person to confirm what I could not believe. He mocks those who oppose him by use of the kind of name-calling associated with seventh graders.

With the evangelical full embrace of Trump foremost in mind, I read the New Testament first. I enjoyed my first straight through complete textual reading. I like to walk through my old home town occasionally and my reading felt like walking physical street blocks that I knew. When I was young, I had many street addresses/verses committed to memory. I often smiled at what I knew by heart in my youth.

The supernatural miracles were vivid in my mind and more numerous than I remembered. I used to hold what I learned at Red Bank Baptist in my head as I watched Oral Roberts on WJBF in my youth. I remember pestering my mother about Roberts’ instant healing of blindness etc. but no substance remains. “In the name of the Holy Ghost” he would say to start a prayer and off came the polio braces of a stricken person down front that Roberts gripped with a free hand while raising the Bible with his other.

My adoption of Jesus as my first hero formed my life, which at 76 is now clear to me. I used to want to be a Lottie Moon-type missionary and go to the poor in undeveloped countries to help them. That love for Jesus gave way to my avid embrace of the most pubic Christian of the day: Reverend Martin Luther King. For real, I wanted to be him. I wanted to help heal humanity. After graduating from USC and serving in the Army, I turned down two lucrative job offers to become a teacher. Jesus was a public servant as teachers are.

Trump is not in the New Testament at all. My reading of the work–Revelations aside–confirmed what my seeing Trump and reading about him in hundreds of objective accounts had led me to know: Trump is an egotistical opposite of my first hero who suffered all of the little children to come unto him and sought always to unite, not divide.

Revelations was a good prologue to the Old Testament where I saw Trump baked into the batter. Isaiah 33:22 For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our King; he will save us. Substitute “Trump” for Lord. Trump is a strong man. In the last election he narrowly won out over a strong woman, but women are always below men in the Old Testament. The male hierarchy always seeks a strong man to vanquish non-believers and deliver vengeance.

Despite living in a post WW II era where until recently a new model for nations based on democracy emerged, the old fundamental desire for a strong man lives in the heart of voters who select candidates based on the their gut feelings, not rationale policy built upon data. Then and now a candidate must be a star and a bully boy who can beat back transgressors.

The idea of cooperative government does not exist in reading of the Old Testament. The strength to kill and destroy those outside of faith is fundamental to the record of king after king and king which is the basis of most of the books of the Old Testament.

Of course my first handle for picking up the ideas from my reading gave way to various others. Early on I became fascinated by the foreskins of penises. Like scalps and heads, they were often collected as proof of the slaying of those outside of Jewish faith. The enemy had foreskins.

So do I. I am scanning my notes to remember if shepherd boy David of the slingshot fame was sent back to collect 200 foreskins of the uncircumcised Philistines as further proof of his right to become a leader after embedding a rock in the forehead of the giant Goliath. He got those from the slain whose ancestors now inhabit parts of modern Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. King Saul was pleased and gave him his daughter ensuring his eventual rise to power.

I Samuel 18:27 Wherefore David rose and went he and his men to slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins , and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son-in-law. Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

Counting the notes sent to me by a friend who teaches adult Sunday School classes, I have about fifty pages of handwriting that are as hard to follow as the various books they were extracted from. To read the Bible as a book requires the imposition of reading goal, something like the handle on a suitcase that allows one to pick it up.

That uncircumcised handle gave way to the Mexican border or any border handle where desperate people try to escape oppression. Using American munitions and military technology, the modern day inhabitants of Israel have been exterminating Palestinians who unfortunately have angry young men turned warriors embedded within their homes and hospitals. To pay for Bibi Netanyahu’s poor border security that allowed penetration of insurgents that killed and took hostage about 1,700 Israelis living on what until recently was part of Palestine, the modern day state of Davids have killed north of 50,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children.

The constant repetition of the Jewish migration out of Egypt and into the promised land forms the bulk of the “plot” of a whole reading of the Hebrew text. The Jews were folded into the Egyptian population as a result of climate change. (Climate change is another obvious handle to grasp in reading the Hebrew story.)

Objecting to the country and culture that took them in, they revolted and migrated to what they call their holy land. The point of conflict in the narrative is eliminating the other, that is destroying nonbelievers. That conflict point loops back over and over as successful Jewish strong men rule gradually gives way to sin. The sinning sets up a new cycle of fighting.

The chief sin, almost the only sin outside of whoring, is failure to worship the one Hebrew god as per rabbinical law. Constant war and mass killing of the other forms story after story right down to one of my favorite books, the Book of Daniel. A succession of heroes curry favor by showing more obedience to the Jewish god than others and thus are lifted up as leaders. Proverbs 19: A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape.

I suppose I ended up my reading by merging it with the nightly reports of mass killing of Palestinians in the West Bank. The destruction I witness on programs like The News Hour and daily newspaper reading burns deeply into my soul as does the Ukraine coverage.

Gradually I have come to see Egypt, Syrian, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria as as modern nations whose early formation and history is one of conflict with a sect that demands adherence to their god. The Hebrews literally brought avenging angels into conflicts to kill and successfully prayed for their god to bring famine and starvation to those outside of belief.

Isaiah 37:36 Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. Isaiah is reassuring Hezekiah that their god will not tolerate Assyrian influence in the Holy Land. This is one of numerous references to the Hebrew god fighting the other in a time of migration, famine, and climate change. 185,000 lost their lives because they were outside of Hebrew faith. I fear strong man government that assumes its god is righteous for killing the enemy.

I have now and have had many Christian friends. I am thinking of Robin who is a lay preacher, newsletter writer for her church, and baker of the first order. She drops treats by and leaves us literature. Never would I want to upset her by asking a question about Christian support of what is beginning to look like the rise of a Neo-Nazi populist party. I did recently bring up Trump-Christian bonding to Jason two doors down the street but quickly sensed a tenseness entering into our friendship that I do not want to cloud. Penetrating the minds of those who already know the truth and regard questioning as heresy and a form of hostility seems pointless.

My weird mind loves rational discussion of data and opinions that seek to flip what I think I think. A good discussion or piece of writing that causes me to re-formulate my received information and opinions delights me, invigorates me. I suppose my mind has been so conditioned by science that it welcomes promising hypotheses. I used to long to be Jewish or Catholic to be member of a tribe and filled with sureness of my view but my old age and recent reading of the Bible tell me that I can not set aside thinking for blind belief.

My main operating set of beliefs align with those set forth the allies in the post-WW II world. I believe in social cooperation, mutual respect, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and free trade within limits. I believe in what MLK and Jimmy Carter dedicated their lives to. I believe in the golden rule.