All posts by bradbirzer

By day, I'm a father of seven and husband of one. By night, I'm an author, a biographer, and a prog rocker. Interests: Rush, progressive rock, cultural criticisms, the Rocky Mountains, individual liberty, history, hiking, and science fiction.
History, Philosophy, Politics, Republic of Letters

Edmund Burke Against the Antagonist World

Liberty Fund Edition of Reflections.

[Originally published at The Imaginative Conservative]

Should one generation ever consider itself greater than any other generation, past or future, Edmund Burke warned in his magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France, the entire fabric of a civilization might very well unravel and, ultimately, disintegrate.  Our modern ears have no right to discount Burke’s argument as simple hyperbole.  What takes centuries to build and hone, however, can take moments to undo.  We have witnessed numerous generations since Burke wrote this, and we have seen the arrogance of several, but most especially the Vatican II generation and the so-called “counter-culture” generation of the 1960s.  To this day, we suffer from the arrogance of each.  They each, in the name of toleration, progress, liberalism, and humanitarianism to submit to their teachings blindly.  As one great Canadian and Stoic man of letters argued in the early 1980s, “They shout about love, but when push comes to shove, they fight for things they’re afraid of.” 

Once a generation succeeds in separating itself from past and future, it harms not just civilization but the very dignity of man.  The individual man, unanchored, becomes, Burke noted darkly, “would become little better than the flies of summer.”

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History, Republic of Letters

I Never Met Russell Kirk

[First published at The Imaginative Conservative}

At the beginning of his Histories, Herodotus notes that a normal person enjoys 26,250 days in his or her life, no day ever exactly like another.  I’m not quite sure I want to count how many days I have left, assuming I could even know such a thing. It’s certainly very wise of the Good Lord not to let us know such things.

Still, as I think about my own days, some wisely spent, others squandered, I have only a few serious regrets.

One of my two most important—at least as it hovers over my being—is that I never actually met Dr. Russell Amos Augustine Kirk in person.  I had the opportunity several times, but I never took advantage of these.  There are lots of reasons why this happened (or, as the case really was, failed to happen), but they really all came down to the same thing—I took too much for granted while in my 20s.  I seemed invulnerable as did those I loved and admired.  As one of my other heroes, Neil Peart, once wrote, “We’re only immortal for a very short time.”  My immortality seemed rather assured as did that of those whom I respected.  Strange considering my own father died when I was only two months old.  Yet, that happened before I was conscious of the world, and the whole story of his death had much more mythical significance than real influence.

Life has a funny way of teaching us each the lessons we so painfully need to learn, and I was rather shocked in the summer of 1994 when I heard that Russell Kirk had passed away.  I was only 26, but I knew I had missed my chance to meet the great man, a man I had studied intensely for about six years at that point. 

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Art, Republic of Letters

Approaching Weathertop: Anatomy of a Scene

In his personal recollections of his mentor, hero, and friend, George Sayer remembered that J.R.R. Tolkien possessed the uncanny ability to match his facial expressions and speech patterns to and with the prevailing mood of any given conversations.  “As I saw with him and the Lewis brothers in the pub, I remember being fascinated by the expressions on his face, the way they changed to suit what he was saying,” Sayers recollected. “Often he was smiling, genial, or wore a pixy look. A few seconds later he might burst into savage scathing criticism, looking fierce and menacing. Then he might soon again become genial.”[1] It was not affectation, but sincere intensity. The very same might (and should) be claimed of his writing ability. When the mood calls for levity, Tolkien writes with levity. When the mood calls for depth, Tolkien writes with depth. When the mood calls for contemplation, Tolkien writes contemplatively. As a twentieth-century author, he was an absolute master at this.

One can see Tolkien’s skill in the approach to Weathertop, chapter 11 of book one of The Fellowship of the Ring, “A Knife in the Dark.” Having slowly fled the social and near fatal disasters of Bree, September 30, the four hobbits, Bill the Pony, and Strider the Ranger make their way east of the village, en route to the Elvish safe haven of Rivendell. They won’t arrive in Rivendell until late on October 20, but they have no idea of just how long it will take. Dispirited, the party moves anxiously and uneasily, not sure who in the village had betrayed them to the demonic black riders. The same riders—at least four of them—attack Frodo and his party on the evening of October 6.

On October 4, after an agonizing journey through insect-ridden marshes, Frodo and his party spot Weathertop for the first time. Strider advises a roundabout route, thus approaching Weathertop from the north, a path better hidden from the spies of the enemies. On October 5, the hobbits feel refreshed after a good night’s sleep. “There was a frost in the air, and the sky was a pale clear blue,” Tolkien writes.[2] As the party nears Weathertop, they find themselves on “an undulating ridge, often rising almost to a thousand feet, and here and there falling again to low clefts or passes.” The last looks and leads into the east, seemingly endless in vista, and the party views “what looked to be the remains of green-grown walls and dikes, and in the clefts there stood the ruins of old works of stone.”

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Art, Music

The (accidental) Christian Humanism of Steven Wilson

The Meaning of a Life: Steven Wilson’s Hand.Cannot.Erase.

An Incarnational Whole

One of the greatest things in this whirligig of a world—however fraught with a string of perilous and gut-wrenching disasters—is the mystery of the human person.  And, until God so decides to end this existence, every person is a new reflection of the Infinite.  From the Catholic Humanist perspective, every human is an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom.  Each person, born in a particular place and time, comes only once, a life to burn as brightly or not, for one’s self or for another, in the time allotted to each of us.  “Dark and inscrutable are the ways in which we come into the world,” the grand Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, understood.  Fewer truths have ever been spoken in such perfect formation of the English language. 

Yet, speaking on the mystery of the person and personhood, Pope John Paul II put it even more beautifully in the penultimate month of 1996.

The mystery of the Incarnation has given a tremendous impetus to man’s thought and artistic genius. Precisely by reflecting on the union of the two natures, human and divine, in the person of the Incarnate Word, Christian thinkers have come to explain the concept of person as the unique and unrepeatable centre of freedom and responsibility, whose inalienable dignity must be recognized. This concept of the person has proved to be the cornerstone of any genuinely human civilization.

As someone who has had the privilege of teaching history and writing biography the entirety of his professional career, I hope and pray that John Paul II’s words and ideas each across everything I teach, think, and write.  As such, I am always looking at and for new ways to understand the dignity of each individual person, however tragically flawed.

Nearly six years ago, such a statement and manifestation of dignity arrived in the most unusual of ways: in the form of a rock concept album by the rather devoutly atheistic, seemingly always grumpy, and unbelievably talented English musician, Steven Wilson.  His album, a sixty-seven minute story about a lost soul, came out on February 27, 2015.  In terms of lyrics and music, Wilson’s work is extraordinary by the standards of any genre.  What should intrigue us most, however, is the subject matter and how Wilson fills it out.  The subject matter is the uniqueness of each human person, and he focuses on the life of one lost soul.

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Art, Music

Best Prog of 2020, Part II

A few days ago, I attempted to create a “best of 2020” purely from memory.  My oldest daughter was driving the Honda, and I was enjoying the thrill of the quickly-moving Illinois landscape out the passenger’s window.  Honestly, at age 53, I should know better than to rely only on my memory, though, as a historian, I actually still have a pretty good one.  But, no longer great.  Just pretty good.  Even as I was typing the list in the car, I knew I’d forget all kinds of great albums, but I tried it anyway.  Pride and ego are funny things. 

Anyway. 

That list still stands (a few posts back), but I want to add some brilliant albums that I inadvertently failed to remember at the moment of writing.

Two albums this year get the spiritual successor to Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock award.  First up is Tim Bowness’s extraordinary nuanced (so glorious), Late Night Laments, an album full of meaningful lyrics and sonic soundscapes that boggle the imagination. Bowness, unfortunately, gets overshadowed by his sometime writing partner, Steven Wilson, but, frankly, the two artists are equally extraordinary. 

Following Bowness’s lead was the more recently-released Loma album, Don’t Shy Away.  Again, incredible textures mixed with intriguing lyrics.  Clearly, the band has spent a lot of good quality time listening to Talk Talk. Regardless, I owe Stephen Humphries (of the Christian Science Monitor) a huge thanks for introducing the band to me.

Nick D’Virgilio’s Invisible in an album full of surprises and full of soul.  There’s conviction behind every word and every note. I wasn’t sure what to expect before the album arrived, but I fell in love with it on the first listen. D’Virgilio is also rock’s greatest living drummer, so I was especially pleased to be reminded that the guy is just incredibly talented in all kinds of ways.

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Art, Music

My Conflicted Relationship with Progressive Music (Prog)

By Mark Sullivan

My earliest memory is standing on my tiptoes putting Let it Be by The Beatles on my parent’s stereo. I must have been only four or five years old, and I don’t know why my parents let their pre-schooler touch their records. I wouldn’t have.

“I dig a pygmy, by Charles Hawtry on the deaf-aids. Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats.” Then the acoustic guitar, the bass drum, John and Paul singing in unison, and I’m in my happy place – laying on the floor listening to music. Looking up at the ceiling and lost in my imagination. Not much has changed in 45 years. 

Besides The Beatles, my parent’s record collection consisted of 1970s staples such as Linda Rondstadt, Neil Diamond (laugh if you’d like), Emmy Lou Harris, Glen Campbell, Loretta Lynn, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Wes Montgomery, Herbie Mann, and The Moody Blues. I listened to all of those albums except Every Good Boy Deserves Favor by The Moody Blues. The cover freaked me out and planted the seeds of suspicion about Progressive Music (Prog).

Probably as a teenager I tried to listen to it. I imagine that I picked up the needle at “Desolation, creation.” It still sounds stupid, but if I would have stayed with it and listened to “The Story in Your Eyes,” things may have been different. 

However, I wasn’t aware of Prog as a thing or deliberately avoiding it until I encountered the anti-Prog bible, The Worst Rock n’ Roll Records of All Time: A Fan’s Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell in a used bookstore sometime in my early 20s. That book was everything a young music snob like me could want, take downs of stupid lyrics and bloated Prog bands on every page. I learned that you could always be cool by ripping on Prog.

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History

Wounded Knee at 130

One hundred thirty years ago today, the United States military engaged—for the last time—the American Indians.  The conflict, often known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, should appropriately be called the tragedy or massacre of Wounded Knee, for it was nothing short of a travesty. The last actual battle of the Indian Wars was that at Skeleton Canyon against Geronimo and his forces, four years earlier, in 1886.

Beginning in October of 1890, tensions between a significant group of Sioux Indians and the U.S. Government reached toward the tipping point in South Dakota.  Many of the Sioux had begun to adopt a nativist religion, recently imported from Nevada, called the “Ghost Dance.”  The dance, a complicated movement that hoped for the end of the world with the intermixing of the living and the dead, had been founded by Jack “Wovoka” Wilson, a Paiute Indian.  In his famous messiah letter, he had written:

“When you get home you must make a dance to continue five days. Dance four successive nights, and the last night keep up the dance until the morning of the fifth day, when all must bathe in the river and then disperse to their homes. You must all do in the same way.

“I, Jack Wilson, love you all, and my heart is full of gladness for the gifts you have brought me. When you get home I shall give you a good cloud [rain?] which will make you feel good. I give you a good spirit and give you all good paint. I want you to come again in three months, some from each tribe there [the Indian Territory].

There will be a good deal of snow this year and some rain. In the fall there will be such a rain as I have never given you before.

Grandfather [a universal title of reverence among Indians and here meaning the messiah] says, when your friends die you must not cry. You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life. This young man has a good father and mother. [Possibly this refers to Casper Edson, the young Arapaho who wrote down this message of Wovoka for the delegation].

Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are still alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring. When the time comes there will be no more sickness and everyone will be young again.

Do not refuse to work for the whites and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them. When the earth shakes [at the coming of the new world] do not be afraid. It will not hurt you.

I want you to dance every six weeks. Make a feast at the dance and have food that everybody may eat. Then bathe in the water. That is all. You will receive good words again from me some time. Do not tell lies.”

Many of the American Indians of the Southwest had a deathly fear of ghosts, and Wilson’s faith failed to catch on there.  But it spread rapidly on the northern Great Plains, especially among the Sioux. The Sioux, of course, had not only been recently defeated as a people, but they had lost their entire way of life—the buffalo hunt—and the U.S. had brutally confined and imprisoned them on strictly (and unjustly) governed reservations.  Among the most corrupt was the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  Here, the people not only adopted the Ghost Dance, but they added to its tenets, claiming that a “ghost shirt” would protect the wearer from bullets and other weapons of the whites.

In its attempt to control and attenuate the Ghost Dance, the U.S. military decided to arrest two of the most prominent Sioux leaders, Sitting Bull and Big Foot.  Ironically, neither man had thought much of the Ghost Dance movement, seeing it as contrary to the Sioux vision of life.  The arrest of Sitting Bull went horribly wrong, resulting in the great man’s death in his underwear.  During the subsequent arrest of Big Foot (who was deathly ill with pneumonia), the U.S. Army (the Seventh Cavalry, once led by George Armstrong Custer) demanded all the arms of the Ghost Dancers.  During the disarming, a Sioux fired a shot, and a medicine man threw dirt in the air (the signal for the end of the earth). A firefight broke out, and the U.S. military killed—very quickly—anywhere from 150 to 200 Sioux. Many of the wounded Sioux remained on the field—without aid—through harsh, freezing weather. When photographers arrived in the scene, they found the field littered with grotesque frozen warriors. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers died.

The importance of Wounded Knee cannot be exaggerated.  It was a horrible end to a horrible series of Indian Wars (most unjust and brutal) that had begun almost immediately following the Civil War. That the massacre occurred in 1890, the same year as the “closing of the American frontier,” at least as Frederick Jackson Turner understood it, has not been lost on historians. Further, the actions of the U.S. Army at the time proved many of the republican fears of a standing army as originally expressed during the Founding and Jacksonian periods. The fight with the American Indians also undid the Jeffersonian legacy of the “empire of liberty” in which the American Indians were to be treated as future citizens of the republic, as best and most brilliantly expressed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

For those interested in the tragedy of Wounded Knee, see Jerome A. Greene’s most recent book, “All Guns Fired at One Time”: Native Voices of Wounded Knee, 1890, published in October 2020 by the South Dakota Historical Society Press (sdhspress.com).

Republic of Letters

A Year of Prog: A Reflection on 2020

1 Comment

I’m typing this as my oldest daughter is driving the CRV across I80 in Illinois. Sadly, I must recognize as I fly at terrifyingly lovely speeds across the state, my title is more a wish than a fulfillment. Much of what follows is merely what is stuck in my brain, and I don’t have my CDs in front of me.

Though a vaccine is coming, COVID is still taking its toll on the world. Never before in peacetime have Americans so willingly complied with rules and regulations and group proddings and peer pressure. Perhaps all of the conformism was necessary for health reasons, but it was still conformism.

Despite all of this, though, and despite all the unrest and tragedies of 2020, progressive rock remained. It remained as a reminder of what is good, true, and beautiful in this world, and it remained as a reality of creativity and non-conformity. Granted, prog musicians couldn’t play live (not really), but they could develop, hone, make, assemble, and innovate. Innovate they did!

Because of the limitations of my situation, I might very well forget a CD, and the following order is as they come into my brain, not as they are ranked in my heart and soul. That is, unless I state something like “yeah, this was my favorite.”

First, Dave Bandanna, Robin Armstrong, a whole host of excellent musicians, and I released a cd under the band and title, The Bardic Depths, on Robin’s label, Gravity Dream. While I recognize it’s outrageously obnoxious for me to rank my own music, it would be equally disingenuous of me to ignore it. I had intimate knowledge on this one, and I’m incredibly proud of what we produced. While I won’t go so far as to rank my CD in actual ranking terms, I will state, I loved the whole process and the end result. Here’s hoping you did as well.

Leaving aside The Bardic Depths. . .

Lunatic Soul, THROUGH SHADED WOODS. Holy schnikees, what a great and compelling listen. While there’s a folky feel to the album, there’s something immediately and permanently captivating about the album as a whole. To get the album right, you just have to imagine mid-period Jethro Tull playing Riverside’s WASTELAND.

Grumblewood. Admittedly, as I sit here in the speeding car, I can’t for the life of me remember the title of the album. I can see it in my mind’s eye, though. Brown and woodsy looking! The album—which is also folk prog—sounds quite a bit like a relatively updated early-Jethro Tull and Blodwyn Pig. The textures of the music are simply gorgeous.

Big Big Train, EMPIRE. Come on, what would a year-end list look like without a BBT entry! Plus, throw in SUMMER’S LEASE as well as the music BBT has released through its Passenger’s Club, and it’s been a verifiable utopia for us music lovers throughout 2020. BBT seems incapable of a misstep, and has been on such a course since 2009. Even the diminishment of the band’s size only makes the future all the more intriguing. As I’ve written before, Ave, Spawton!

Gazpacho, FIREWORKER. Gnostic rock! Does any band come up with more intriguing gothic themes of mystery and universal mayhem than does Gazpacho? This album, especially, feels as though the band has tapped into a Lovecraftian mystery cult. The music, though, is fluid and lush.

Sanguine Hum, A TRACE OF MEMORY. This might very well be the band’s best album, and given their catalogue, this is no where near slight praise. From the opening to the final note, the listener is captivated and immersed in a melacholic, nuanced, and beautiful world.

Glass Hammer, DREAMING CITY. As with BBT above, what list could possibly exist without at least one GH entry! The band never ceases to grow, to develop, and, yes, to progress. While this album is quite a bit heavier than any previous release, the story is a driving one, and the music captures the lyrical themes rather perfectly. The band also just released A MATTER OF TIME—reworkings of older songs. I’ve not had a chance to immerse myself in this album, but I plan to do so when I take back over the wheel of the car.

I have more albums to list, and I will come back to these informal rankings shortly. For now, let me also write: 2020 would never have been as good without the beautiful writings of two of the best reviewers in the prog world: Stephen Humphries and Jerry Ewing. I thank the Good Lord for each of them.

Republic of Letters

COVID, Woke Science—and Death – American Greatness

More ominously, we still have no idea whether far more have died due to the lockdowns than to the virus itself—given the quarantines have caused greater familial, spousal, and substance abuse, suicides, impoverishment, missed surgeries and medical procedures, educational deprivation, and long-term psychological damage. Amid this void of knowledge, state and local officials have often claimed expertise and implemented Draconian measures that may well have made things far worse.
— Read on amgreatness.com/2020/12/20/covid-woke-science-and-death/

Republic of Letters

COVID, Woke Science—and Death – American Greatness

More ominously, we still have no idea whether far more have died due to the lockdowns than to the virus itself—given the quarantines have caused greater familial, spousal, and substance abuse, suicides, impoverishment, missed surgeries and medical procedures, educational deprivation, and long-term psychological damage. Amid this void of knowledge, state and local officials have often claimed expertise and implemented Draconian measures that may well have made things far worse.
— Read on amgreatness.com/2020/12/20/covid-woke-science-and-death/