We are having great fun with our new You Tube Sales experiment, and it is successful. Today, we had the bright idea of having a sale to sell the dozen or so gifts and artwork that remain from the Open House, where Maria sells her work and other artists work from her studio.
This year, we decided to broaden the show, and open it up to our blog readers, most of whom live too far away to come to the Open Houses, but who want to follow them. Selling art is just one of the things that happen at the Open House, we have readings, talks, shearing and equine farrier work, spinning, sheep herding with Red and Fate, farmer talks, Ed Gulley folk art, and animal visitations.
Our videos have altered the narrative a bit, we are opening up the Open House to all of the people who share our lives with us.
Maria’s art curating has become increasingly confident and successful.The Open House is a celebration of her art and the art of other people. It is a festival of encouragement.
So we are happy to share this process with you. Our first ever Open House Clearance Sales Video. This is not the Home Shopping Channel. Red and Fate have cameo roles. Come and see.
She is selling the last tote-bag, the last vintage hanky scarf, some Tallow Balm and a few potholders. Everything else is gone. The sale will last a couple of days. If you want to buy any of it or have any questions, you can e-mail Maria at [email protected]. Have fun, we are. And good luck.
Sometimes we invite ourselves to dinner with the sheep. They seem happy to have us.
Maria is more agile than I am, she can sit right down at the table, I usually hover nearby with our camera, Red keeps an eye on things from behind, Fate runs around in circles. The sheep feel safe around us, which is nice, and eating with them is a form of communication of bonding. It is a way we have of talking to them, listening to them, getting to know them. It is a beautiful experience, a sweet one.
Food is one of the ways we establish trust and communicating, food is life for these animals, if you share the experience of eating, they will come to trust you.
__ (If you are interested in learning more about talking to animals, you can pre-order my book here.We’ll send you a tote bag along with a signed book.)
Our media is good at doing somethings, offering perspective and history is not one of them. There is a lot of talk about demagogues, fear and hatred in our country these days, I thought I would wade in a bit, given my passion for being odd, one of those people writing and thinking on the fringes of power.
I leave it to you to decide who you are going to vote for this November, I was drawn this week to think about and research the spectacular history of demagogues and democracy. I have read some surprising and fascinating things, I wanted to share them. Demagogues and democracies have been involved with each other for at least 25 centuries.
Some democracies have survived them, some have not.
The first recorded demagogue was the Greek Populist Leader Cleon, who persuaded his fellow Athenians to kill every man and woman in the city of Mytilene as punishment for a failed revolt.
Aristotle wrote of that particular demagogue: “He was the first who shouted on the public platform, who used abusive language, and who spoke with his cloak girt around him, while all the others used to speak in proper dress and manner.” The word itself comes from the Greeks, it actually means “leader of the people,” or the leader of a mob.
In modern times, the term has taken on a different meaning.
Wikipedia defines a demagogue as “a rabble-rouser or leader in a democracy who gains popularity by exploiting prejudice and ignorance among the common people, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.”
Demagogues are by no means new to democracies, since democratic cultures allow everyone to run for office and vote. Today, populist political figures on the left and the right are gaining power and popularity all over the world, a response to mass immigration and globalization, which has made many promises and shattered many lives. Very old and sometimes troubling questions about demagogues are being asked again. They are not being raised or answered on the websites or cable news channels so many people watch.
(I appreciated a recent Time Magazine piece on What History Teaches Us About Demagogues. You won’t hear about this on cable news.)
One theory offered by political scientists is that it seems the average citizen has less and less of a voice in governing, and that wealthy corporations and political elites have taken their power from them. Their leaders have failed to keep their promises. They are angry, and for demagogues, that is the perfect bait.
Loren Simmons, Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, argues that in a democratic environment, demagogues simply cannot be avoided. If you love democracy, then you must accept that demagogues are as much a part of the process as voting. They are, Simmons writes, one of the natural outcomes of a form of government that depends on elections. The most rational citizens can hope for is that a majority of the participating electorate will identity the demagogue as such and reject his or her message.
She says there is one simple test that will allow voters to identity a demagogue: “If the world leader promises to give, restore, provide, insure, or enhance a country but never asks the citizens to sacrifice, pay, serve, or simply work, then this leader is a potential demagogue.”
Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Franklin, the designers of our democracy, feared demagogues as well as the ignorant mobs they often arouse, so our system is riddled with checks and balances – three separate branches of government, all chosen in different ways at different times. Demagogues in our country face innumerable roadblocks. H.L. Mencken made a career out of ridiculing demagogues, he says they inevitably fail when popular adulation goes to their heads and they actually try to govern.
Daniel Scily, one of the founders of Democracy International, says a demagogue is first and foremost a talented and popular speaker. It is usually the narcissistically damaged entertainers who become political performers, he writes. They often win elections, but they are incapable of actually governing.
Princeton Professor of Politics Melissa Lane writes that while the term “demagogue” has come to be a synonym for a certain kind of bad leader, the pejorative association originated in part in a certain kind of elitism. In Ancient Greece, the demagogue came to be seen as someone rising to power with the support of the “common people,” who were looked down upon as the uneducated many by the elite few.
Elites have always denigrated the demagogue, she has written, as insincere. The demagogue is said to be someone who only pretends to serve the interests of the many. “Hence the thought that his or her real aim is to exploit the common people’s fear and anger to advance his or her own interests.”
It is certainly true that almost every elite in America – corporate interests, Wall Street, the entrenched political class, mainstream media, academics, educated voters – has come to see Donald Trump as a demagogue exploiting the fears of ignorant people while seeking to advance his own power and interests. Something for me to think about. It is not difficult to see why Trump supporters see a vast conspiracy against their candidate.
Dr. Rafael Pineiro, an acclaimed student of democracy teaches at the Catholic University of Uruguay. “When democracy fulfills its promises, citizens do not need to turn to demagogues for solutions; they are just the product of the really bad ones.” Citizen’s alienation and disenchantment with politics breeds demagoguery, he writes. Demagogues appear when political parties or the institutional resources of government are not capable of delivering. When politics becomes meaningless for a portion of the electorate, the opportunity for demagoguery arises.
I thought this was powerful and thought-provoking writing. And it helped me to understand what is happening, rather than just argue about it on Facebook.
I won’t vote for Mr. Trump for many reasons, but it would be a mistake to overlook the protests and rage of so many citizens, many of whom have seen democracy fail to fulfill its promises to them. They have been left behind and forgotten and misled, and they are a fertile breeding ground for demagogues, especially one more mature and disciplined than Donald Trump.
In a well-functioning democracy, writes Jason Brennan of Georgetown University, elites and the people keep each other in check. In the best scenarios, the elites restrain the worst impulses of the people and keep them from implementing dumb or dangerous polices, policies the people support only because they are poorly informed.
In return, the people keep the elites from simply running the government to their own advantage at the expense of every one else. “Many supporters of democracy decry the power of elites,” he writes, “but they should be careful what they wish for. Donald Trump is what happens when the people get what we want.”
It’s useful to think about demagogues and hear intelligent people talk about them and their history. I believe we are, in fact, seeing the rise of a demagogue in Donald Trump, I also believe his rise is a cautionary tale for us democracy lovers. His followers are angry, in many cases justly so, even if they seem ill-informed and bigoted at times. This is not something new, it is actually 25 centuries old, at least. I respect the idea that democracies need demagogues, they are part of a process that reminds us that government needs to work for all of the people, not just a few.
One problem the Greeks did not have is modern media – cable news and social media. It is a new kind of immediate transmitter of fear, anger and misinformation. Sooner or later, we will all have to face up to its fearsome destructive capabilities as well as its miraculous gifts.
Minnie, our three-legged barn cat, has taken over Maria’s Rapunzel chair, built over two years by weaving baling wire over an old disintegrating chair we found in the barn. Minnie is perhaps our sweetest animal. She lost a leg three years ago to a predator late one night, we very nearly decided to put her down. I thought we should, Maria thought we shouldn’t. Then I had the sense she wasn’t really ready to go.
Contrary to what many people claim about such surgeries, the amputation was painful for Minnie, her recovery took a very long time and I am still not certain we made the right decision. We make decisions all of the time that are good for us, but it is really moral to subject an animal to that kind of trauma and prolonged pain and suffering? It still feels selfish to me, something about what we need, not what she needed.
There is no doubt she is functioning well, and is much loved. And I think her love for Maria is evident, and a part of her love for the Rapunzel Chair.
Modern medicine and science have combined to alter the length and quality of human life. People live longer and better than they have at any other time in history, even as so many people claim things have never been worse. But these advances come at a price, as they almost always do. Aging and dying have become primarily medical experiences, measured and managed and dominated by government bureaucrats and health care professionals.
The medical community seems overwhelmed by its own options, tools and practices. They seem utterly unprepared for the awesome responsibilities they now bear.
This reality, this new and profoundly unsatisfying way of dying is largely hidden from view, as death becomes less and less familiar to most people. Americans die in hospitals and nursing homes, not in their own homes with their families. Unless we are first responders or hospice workers or nurses, we never see people die or consider how it is that they die. As recently as 1945, writes Atul Gawande author of Being Mortal., most deaths occurred in the home. By the 1980’s just 17 per cent did.
Those who did die at home were likely to die of heart attacks, strokes or violent injury, or lived in rural areas too far from hospitals that could provide help. Across the United States and much of the developed world, the experience of advanced aging and death has shifted to hospitals and nursing homes. And the rest of us don’t have to see it, watch it, or think much about it.
Working with Red in nursing homes, assisted care facilities and hospice units, I often have the sense we are entering an unseen world where overworked and underpaid staff members labor to offer the warmth and connection and concern that is too often vanishing from the lives of the people they serve.
Yesterday, walking in the woods, I encountered the most beautiful red leaf, a maple, I believe, saying it’s last goodbye, still hanging on a limb, but only by a thread. It is windy today, I imagine it will be gone by tomorrow, joining it’s brothers and sisters on the forest floor. The leave tells a story – of life and death, of time and color, it has been permitted to age and die with grace. When it begins to die, it turns a beautiful color, it offers us a last gift, a last dance, a dignified goodbye.
And then it falls, moving along the chain of life, food for the very soil on which we walk, for the trees that feed from the soil. It’s last days are glorious, dignified, beautiful. And yes, sad.
I thought, this is what being mortal is all about, this, is a lesson for me. When I age, to offer color and light to the world, to drop gracefully and without drama back into the earth, back to the cycle of life. Leaves don’t have to consider human practices – medicine, insurance, laws and bureaucrats – but I do.
