Selected Writings
Pathology of Privilege: Trump as Once and Future King
By Brenda Peterson
“The Destiny of Man is to unite, not divide.”
— The Once and Future King, T.H. White
I’d never met an entitled, rich kid until third grade when my family moved from the West Coast to Boston. We didn’t know we were poor, a family of four kids in a rundown Revere Beach apartment. Like Fisher Kings, we ate lobster from the nearby fish factory because we couldn’t afford hamburgers. Our playmates were the Puerto Rican kids whose patriarch was a professional wrestler — WWE, the original reality show. Sometimes we skipped school to ride a rollicking subway into the big city.
It was on one of those egalitarian trains that a boy in private school uniform shoved me aside like a rag doll to claim my pole.
“Outta my way!” he shouted.
I was no stranger to bullies and pushed him right back. I surrendered the pole because my parents had taught me that rudeness, like boredom, was a sign of a small mind.
But what the boy said next was not only small-minded, it was shocking. “You’re nothing,” he sneered.
Nothing? I suddenly saw myself through his eyes: white anklets slipping down over my worn Keds, cheap cotton pedal-pushers with a patch or two, fingernails chipped from beachcombing, and curly hair with the family cut — a bowl over my head as my father snipped away with kitchen scissors. I didn’t yet fully understand the limits of caste or class system, but I knew enough to recognize that I was, as my favorite Dickens novel Oliver Twist had taught me, a commoner, maybe even a peasant. Could I ever hold up my cup and ask for more?
“Just because that bully has money,” my Southern-bred mother reassured me, “doesn’t mean he’s got any manners — or real talent. He’ll have to make his way, like anybody else. It’s all about what you make of yourself — and do for others.”.
But it’s also about what is given to us, I would realize years later when I was a twenty-something staffer at The New Yorker magazine. In those quirky, classy halls, I met more rich kids, some financed by trust funds. They were not arrogant — especially if old money had mentored them to care about those less fortunate. Some of them were remarkably generous and “woke,” as some say now. Their ancestors had founded hospitals, research institutes, libraries, and international wildlife sanctuaries. At this prestigious magazine, we were the very few young, devoted servants of our elderly superiors — editors who saw everyone under thirty as apprentices. Our wait to rise in the literary stratosphere would be long.
When an editor complimented me on a new silk blouse, I gushed, “I saved for six weeks and bought it on sale at Lord and Taylor.”
Stunned, the editor held her manicured hand to her bosom. “You don’t mean to say that you . . . live off your salary!”
Who didn’t live off their salaries? Who didn’t have to work for a living? To fathom this class system, I always turned to my best friend, a benevolent heiress, whose father would later lose his family’s fortune when he fell prey to Alzheimer’s-induced bad investments.
After explaining to me that some people were so privileged they never had to work, to budget, to lower their expectations, she mused, “But I envy you . . . whenever I wanted anything, a toy or a trip, it was just given to me. I never had to wait or wonder about it.” She paused and admitted, “It crippled my imagination.”
I was so struck by her insights I scribbled them down in my novelist’s journal. Like every other underpaid, hopeful staffer, I was still unpublished, working on my first book. And I was still a poor kid, living in New York City’s 92nd Street Y, though I wasn’t Jewish; the influential father of another friend had helped get me into that heady, intellectual dorm because I knew the Hebrew Bible better than many of the Israeli students.
Another of my thoughtful magazine co-workers continued my education in privilege. “When you’re born into wealth,” she taught me, “you don’t recognize the same limits or rules as others. You don’t have to be too curious or listen. Wealth gives the illusion that we are insulated, so we can deny — or disbelieve — what other people suffer.”
These days of such drastic income inequality, I’m reminded of those wealthy and, yes, sometimes wise friends. They first schooled me in the real lives of the 1 percent. Even though Americans criticize rigid caste systems and privilege in other countries, America has its own rich ruling class. Greed in this century is not a deadly sin — it’s a business plan.
Once again, we’ll have Trump, an entitled president, driven as much by self-centered avarice as power. Many in Congress are millionaires. The working-class, uneducated, and poor who just restored Trump to power will be those who suffer most under Trump’s tyranny. Latino men who aligned with Trump’s bro-bravado and misogyny — who refused to vote for a woman president — may soon be racially profiled and deported with their mixed-status mothers and sisters and wives. Trump cares nothing for rural people; he sees them as simply peasants under his reign. We will all bear the burdens of Trump’s tariffs passed along not to importers, but to us consumers.
Half the country who so hopefully voted to elect Kamala Harris “for the People,” now feel shoved out of the way by a bullying, self-absorbed president who inherited millions as a child, whose imagination, creativity, and curiosity are crippled by instant gratification and zero impulse control. Only a rich kid could cynically exult that he doesn’t have to pay hardly any taxes or live off a hard-earned salary, while enthralling millions of followers who do; and who have now naively made him monarch. Only a rich kid without conscience or real class decides kids without a country belong in immigrant cages. Another sad irony is that Trump’s core voters includes the least educated and often most hopeless populations. But their daily struggles are not his. Their real grief is not his grievance.
As Trump again ascends his American throne, as he taunts that he will escape any indictments or justice, we are set for an American tragedy. But as in most timeless tragedies, is it possible that some part of Trump’s soul, or his subconscious, is asking us to finally set some limits on him?
Psychologists note that when parents set limits for their children, this is also a form of containing, even holding their children within loving boundaries. We instinctively use the phrase, “hold accountable.” It is a not only about teaching limits, but also implies being held close. Trump has never been held back or contained, not by the recent Supreme Court’s immunity ruling and not by his own party; and after this 2024 election, not by the people or the DOJ. He is still unbound, unchecked. Unboundaried.
In his “Children of Crisis” series, The Privileged Ones: The Well-off and the Rich in America, Pulitzer-winning child psychiatrist and Harvard professor emeritus Dr. Robert Coles studied the impact of inherited wealth. If not raised with “the responsibilities of entitlement . . .The child has much but wants and expects more — only to feel no great gratitude, but a desire for yet more: an inheritance the world is expected to provide.” Coles calls this more pathological type of privilege, “narcissistic entitlement.”
Privilege without compassion in politics puts the self before the collective good, the personal will over any egalitarian checks and balances. Veteran reporter Bob Woodward once asked Trump, “Do you have any sense that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave . . . and I think lots of White privileged people in a cave have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain particularly Black people feel in this country?”
Trump’s unhesitating response was, “No, I don’t feel that at all.”
An elder once told me, “People born with great wealth or great beauty don’t really do their soul’s work until those blessings are gone.” Sickness, poverty, great loss, and debilitating limits — these are our most instructive life’s mentors. Because eventually, we all fall down.
Rulers rise, fall, and pass into the history they’ve earned. Even Trump will one day fall. For now, our country is experimenting with a boy-king of inherited wealth who was not raised to care about others, unless they serve his needs. A man who sees the presidency as a brand and government as a family franchise. Europe and much of world history has endured its sociopaths and dictators — is it our turn?
After re-electing Trump, what more will this king demand? Civil servants will take a litmus test for loyalty. revered generals like Milley and Kelley will face Trump’s Commander-in-Chief vengeance. America will be subjected to the minority rule and retribution of his MAGA base. Trump’s cult-like appeal has called forth a fundamentalist faith that defies all other spiritual truths, except Trump’s. Evangelicals flock to him as “The Chosen One”. Yet there are no merciful Sermons on the Mount. In Trump’s dogma, the meek never inherit the earth.
Greed in this country is not a deadly sin — it’s a business plan.
As a novelist, I always long for any corrupt, unchecked character’s comeuppance. The just and moral course correction of a compass finally set right. Trump’s shadow, like a tragic flaw, may illumine us. In Goethe’s Faust, when Mephistopheles is asked who he is, the Devil replies: “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
This election is not simply about who we have again made our president. It’s about what we’ve made of ourselves — and of our children. About the good that may prevail if we do our work to resist this once and future king. Under this mad king’s reign, we must keep hoping for the “more perfect union” our country will become when Trump, like MacBeth, is “a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.”~
Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash
Hobos at Heart
by Brenda Peterson
Photo by Antoine Beauvillian
The only thing I miss about my Southern Baptist childhood is the music—the melancholy solace of spirituals like “Wayfaring Stranger,” the earthly intimacy of “In the Garden,” the contemplative “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and the haunting shape-note singing that embraces dissonance in a way this religion’s dogma does not. In music, dissonance, like diversity, deepens the song, it is like an acoustic dark light shining on us all, no matter our color.
Many of the songs the protesters in our cities are now singing are traditional spirituals that belong to both blacks and whites. At George Floyd’s funeral, the choir sang the soaring, “My Life is in Your Hands.” Eddie Glaude, of Princeton University, covering the funeral live, almost wept as he sang on camera, “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.”
African Americans in our country are weary and worn out with waiting for white people to hear their pain, which like a song, has been passed down for too many generations. The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, in tracing the white evangelical nationalist faithful—those 81 percent who voted for Trump and still fervently stand by him—said, they must believe that “a god who does not bless white America’s fear and nostalgia is no god at all.” These powerful words were not delivered at a wake for George Floyd’s murder; this was a speech entitled, “The Racist history of Southern white evangelicalism and the rise of Donald Trump,” given in November of 2016, right after Trump’s election. Rev. Barber was responding to his evangelical “brother,” Franklin Graham, televangelist Billy Graham’s son, who is still a staunch soldier for Trump on the campaign trail. Franklin Graham heartily applauded Trump’s stroll through Lafayette Park, after the teargassing of peaceful protesters, for a photo op in front of the so-called president’s church. Trump held the Bible like a shield. But it was really being used as a weapon. A weapon of mass division.
I grimaced when I witnessed this image of a man who can’t quote a single line of scripture without a teleprompter, who held the sacred text upside down like a hefty propaganda pamphlet—Bible as blunt instrument to bludgeon any backsliding believers and voters, back into submission. Trump’s acolytes accompanying him on this sacrilegious walk were his slavish disciple, AG Barr, and a military escort in camouflage to protect the president, but not the protesters.
Many of the songs the protesters in our cities are now singing are traditional spirituals that belong to both blacks and whites.
The photo op flashed me back to my Virginia childhood and the Southern Baptist Sword Drills when young contestants held the Bible as armament— sword and shield. Sword Drills were the equivalent of quasi-military spelling bees for kids with a Bible weaponized for competition. Young contestants would stand in a straight line on stage at strict attention, as if on a firing squad, our Bibles ready. I had to memorize vast sections of scripture for the state-wide contests, cheered on by my coach.
At twelve, I was not a zealot. My family was not racist, but they were super religious. Yet I was beginning to doubt everything I’d been taught, ever since I’d been thrown out of Vacation Bible School, when the teacher made us children get down on our knees to pray for God to find her contact lens.
“God’s busy,” I’d said, refusing to bend the knee for that silly prayer. I was happily exiled from her class.
Just as years later, in high school, I would be sent to work for a summer at the Southern Baptist retreat, Glorieta, in New Mexico. It felt like a religious boot camp. As I slaved away in faux Indian costume serving hungry mobs in the cafeteria, I watched busloads of believers roll up, adorned with banners proclaiming, “George Wallace for President.”
Even as a kid, I was much more spiritual than religious. I was drawn to the beautiful verses in the Bible. The lofty King James version with its Old Testament larger-than-life prophets, the poetry of Psalms, the beatitudes of the New Testament Christ. Memorizing Bible passages, reciting them out loud like incantations, like the old spirituals, held a musical power. The Bible was not just a rhythm of righteousness, it was a rich, woven composition that needed all parts. For me, Bible study was not about answers; it was a search for a moral universe. I’d always been uncomfortable with the rigid hierarchy of this Southern Baptist doctrine that even in the turbulent Sixties, cheered on the Vietnam War; still denied churchwomen the right to vote or to be ministers or deacons; a white, evangelical movement with a history of anti-abolitionists and Jim Crow. My doubts plagued my sword drill practices.
“Attention!” my coach would command me like a biblical drill instructor.
Bible clenched at my right side, I snapped up to my full beanpole height, eyes straight ahead as if scanning for a sniper.
“Draw swords!”
With an audible smack of leather binding between my palms, I lifted the Bible to chest level and presented it for inspection—my perfectly oiled and cleaned weapon, the Word.
“And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,”
my coach shouted the scripture. “Go . . . go!”
Everything had to be calibrated—both body muscle and memory. My brain scanned to remember the scripture’s location, at the same time my fingers expertly gripped the Bible, thumbing for the verse. The instant I alighted on Ephesians 6:17, my forefinger triumphantly pointed to verse 17. I stepped forward with bold precision, enunciating each word
“Correct!” my coach nodded. “Maybe you can someday take State.”
I doubted it, just as I now doubted that my military drill with the Holy Bible was really righteous. I loved scripture, especially the most lyrical verses, but I was an increasingly mutinous mystic who chafed at the simple answers and formulas of Southern Baptist doctrine. I also was tempted to protest the endless Vietnam War and wanted to join the civil rights movement. Though we lived near Washington, D.C., our junior high was still segregated; there were few, in any, black people in our church. Civil rights protests were everywhere and would, in a few years, soon open my high school. But no peaceful protesters in our Southern Baptist church.
In 1962, the South was still two years away from the Civil Rights Act that would finally end segregation. There were growing street protests, some even led by Baptist ministers, like Martin Luther King, Jr. On his famous road to integration, the Reverend King had been arrested on trumped-up charges, such as driving without a license or attempting to desegregate public buildings. The next year, in 1963, Dr. King would deliver his transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a jubilant, racially mixed crowd of 400,00 people.
Our history class was still using a gray tome with a Confederate flag on the cover. “Virginia History” was a required course for seventh graders. It was divided into three sections: the first, which was the bulk of the book, was dotingly devoted to Virginia’s glorious Confederate period. There was a slim section entitled, “The Present,” and for the future there was a ten-page epilogue that no one, not even our teacher, ever discussed. We were relentlessly tested on every battle and engagement of the Civil War. And to my shock, there were regular test questions that even I could see were obviously racist. One question haunts me these decades later as young protesters again fill our streets calling for racial equality. The question: “Negroes are best adapted for work as: (a) minstrels (b) laborers (c) statesmen.” When I answered (c) statesmen, I was scored down because the correct answer was (a) laborers. I protested and the teacher promptly failed me for the whole test.
When my family left the South and what was practically a state religion to move to California during the wonderfully diverse Sixties, I felt liberated. In high school, I joined civil rights and anti-war protests in Berkeley and at my University of California. We believed we would change the world.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The two terms of Barack Obama gave us hope we had made a huge change. The correct answer to that Virginia History textbook question was now: (d) president, for the statesman Obama. Yet the Old South racism of white nationalists and the Religious Right prevailed in electing the most racist and authoritarian president in our history. Trump was not only a backlash; he was also a regression. The ugliest American. Our country’s racist and religious shadows, like the proverbial South, rose again. The massive and mostly peaceful protests in 2020 are infiltrated with balaclava-clad far-right agitators wielding bullhorns in my hometown of Seattle; white men sporting MAGA caps and draped in Confederate flags, some carrying real weapons, try to subvert peaceful protests. Now the most un-statesmanlike President our country has ever endured, brandishes the Bible like his personal shield while surrounded with his own military high-ranking disciples.
Dissonance, like diversity, deepens the song.
I marvel that after all these decades, there has been so little real spiritual and racial progress and equality among white evangelicals who still form a major voting block for Trump’s reelection. I mourn that my Southern homeland still clings to a Confederate flag and a White House, forgetting it was built by slave labor. I wonder if the Religious Right will ever recognize Donald Trump as a modern-day Anti-Christ who enslaves the faithful to follow him blindly in a lockstep of religion.
White evangelicals have been painfully slow to question or doubt a president who cynically uses them as another prop, a president who demands churches open during a dreadful pandemic, but forgoes Sunday church for golf; a president who leads only the “chosen” of his base and rails against liberals as heathens; who chants FOX news as scripture and brands any other news source—like other religions—as false. Trump’s “my-way-or-the-highway” dogma is terribly akin to the “I’m going to heaven and you’re not, sinner!” subtext of much of the Religious Right. It’s a frighteningly good fit. Except that the savior the Religious Right worships, resisted the temptations of power, was never a politician, was a protester of corrupt Pharisees. This “prince of peace,” was never a soldier. He was compassionate, a conscientious objector, who taught forgiveness. Christ never went to war, so why is this “dominate the battle space” and Bible-toting president such a well-trod path for his followers?
It’s only by looking deep at the quasi-military, intolerant, and brutal history of white evangelicalism, as Rev. Barber says, that we see the roots of racism revealed. In his response to Franklin Graham’s celebration of Trump’s election, Rev. Barber said Graham “thanks God for the same triumph that the white nationalists of the alt-right celebrate because Graham inherited a religion that accommodated itself to slavery in America and has morphed over and again for 150 years to fuel every backlash against progress toward racial justice in American history.”
It is a sad irony that the Religious Right, who follow a Christ who teaches, “turn the other cheek,” haven’t exercised the spiritual checks-and-balances on this lawless, sinful president. That task has finally fallen to the military. Trained to fight for a cause and all our citizens, the military is our most diverse and respected institution. Revered Generals like Mattis, McRaven, Allen, Dempsey, and many other high-ranking retired Chiefs of Staff, including former Gen. Colin Powell—those real soldiers brave enough to endure war—are finally sending this draft-dodger to a constitutional boot camp. Their new, resistant recruit must learn to obey his drill instructors. Another historic irony is that after Trump’s attempted military coup of the capital and peaceful protesters, his false post-bunker bravado by brandishing the Bible, has backfired—even among some white evangelicals.
Trump’s brutal force and biblical walk of blame unexpectedly turned into a Walk of Shame.
The New York Times cites new polls that the “president’s standing with the cornerstone of his base isn’t what it used to be. A photo op with the Bible was supposed to help fix that.” In fact, the Bible Trump awkwardly held high as if it were an object “dropped from a flying saucer,” said Eugene Robison, the Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist, was the Revised Standard Version. It is a more liberal version that is “the nemesis of evangelicals.” Trump’s brutal force and biblical walk of blame unexpectedly turned into a Walk of Shame.
Rabbis, Catholic bishops, and many interfaith leaders were appalled at Trump’s militarized Bible brigade. Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, tweeted: “POTUS using a house of worship to shut down the voices of people of color is an affront to people of faith.” The Rev. James Martin, Jesuit priest and author, said: “Let me be clear. This is revolting. The Bible is not a prop. A church is not a photo op. Religion is not a political tool. And God is not a plaything.” The televangelist, Pat Robertson, whose 700 club is cherished by many on the Religious Right, chided Trump: “You just don’t do that, Mr. President . . . We’re one race. And we need to love each other.” Even Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Religious Liberty and Ethics Convention, said he was “brokenhearted and alarmed,” adding that “Americans should listen to what the Bible says about the preciousness of human life, the sins of racism and injustice and the need for safety and calm and justice in the civil arena.”
As many faith leaders are sending Trump to spiritual boot camp with these admonitions, there is still a devoted evangelical voting block this president is counting on for his reelection. White evangelicals make up only 15 percent of the American population, yet their political power, like the antiquated electoral college, could still dominate the popular vote. Even after Trump’s Bible-op backfired among many faith leaders, a new Public Religion Research Institute poll found that “white evangelicals are not slipping in their support for Trump: A remarkable 62 percent of them view him favorably, basically unchanged since last month.” Will the Religious Right’s Christian soldiers march on “as for war” for Trump?
Will the Religious Right ever also march to protest racism?
The Southern Baptist song I never liked was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It frightened me. Will the Religious Right ever realize they are being used by Trump, a false prophet who has never delivered a soulful and ecumenical Sermon on the Mount to bless the meek? Or, will they close ranks and elect him again, crowning him their “king of kings,” their chosen one. Why haven’t they joined their fellow African American evangelical brethren?
An honest, poignant “Call to Conscience to White, Christian Women,” by The Rev. Jennifer Butler, CEO of Faith in Public Life, who was the chair of President Obama’s advisory council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership, reminds us that two-thirds of white women voted for Trump in 2016 and two-thirds of those were white, evangelical women who chose Trump, “despite his extensive record of overt bigotry. Meanwhile, 95 percent of black women and two-thirds of Latina women voted against him.” She pleads, “these discrepancies should cut us to the quick and cause us to examine our hearts and souls. Time and time again, why do white women disconnect from women of color?”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Long ago I left the church. But a memory of interracial harmony still haunts and inspires me. In my twenties, I was living in Manhattan and working at The New Yorker magazine when a devout Southern Baptist relative visited the city. True believer, she managed to locate in the Yellow Pages the only listing for a Southern Baptist Church. It was not a Southern Baptist Convention church. It was a lively African American evangelical church in the heart of Harlem.
City-savvy after five years in New York, I warned my relative, “We might be taking our lives in our hands. We won’t be welcomed up there.”
She ignored me and warmly greeted the flabbergasted, but genteel deacon, who amiably swept us through the sanctuary door. “We welcome all souls,” he said and waltzed us down the aisle.
We were the only white faces in a sea of singing black people. My relative didn’t bother with the hymnal. She knew all the songs and joined in with her robust soprano. A church pianist herself, she especially admired the organist, whose music swelled over the crowd in billowing bass waves. As the organist swung into “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” my relative begun tapping her feet as if she, too, were thumping the pedals of her own piano.
“She’s just swell,” she said. “I wish they’d let me swing like that in our church.”
I was too terrified to smile and kept scanning the pews for any signs that we might be unwanted, uninvited, in danger. But other worshippers just nodded, encouraging us as we sang with them one of my favorite hymns, “I Love to Tell the Story.”
The tall, lithe preacher took the podium and delivered a rousing sermon that included quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Buddhists mantras, Bible verses, and concluded with a Langston Hughes poem:
“America never was America to me”
After church, we were mobbed by benevolent churchwomen, who had somehow found out from the elderly deacon who first greeted us, that we were from the South. They invited us to their after-service social. My relative satisfied her sweet tooth and complimented the coffee, which was strong and creamy, spiced with chicory, just the way she liked it. She would later say that few Southern Baptist Convention churches came close to the grace and musical heaven of that Harlem Sunday. For years, they sent her church bulletins and they also kept me on their mailing list. I never went back, though I considered it, just to sing.
It is memories of singing ensemble, blacks and whites belonging together, like those keys on a piano in the Stevie Wonder song, “Ebony and Ivory” that inspire me most. As we protest now for racial justice and equality, will the song finally come true? Will the tragic murder of George Floyd, an “ordinary brother,” as Reverend Al Sharpton sang out so movingly in his eulogy in Houston, at last become the “cornerstone of a movement that’s going to change the whole wide world?”
What gives me hope now are the young evangelicals, some of them protesting now on the streets. My niece in Virginia sends me a link that her governor is removing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The Marine Corps announces they will no longer allow its troops to display the battle flag of the Confederacy. In nearby Washington, D.C., the mayor renames the street Trump marched down with his daughter (carrying a Bible in her expensive purse), “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” Another young evangelical friend posts Facebook quotes protesting the immigrant children held in cages and urges his followers to help immigrants become citizens. Another Christian friend sings in a choir performing a song called “Harriet Tubman,” about the heroic slave who worked on the Underground Railroad. The refrain:
Come on up
I’ve got a lifeline
Spirituals and protest songs and elegies being sung for yet another African American killed, to mourn generations of bigotry—these songs belong to everybody, whether we sing them in the streets, the churches, or the voting lines. Protesters today sing the same songs we did in the Sixties and at Selma. “We Shall Overcome,” “Amazing Grace,” and “This Little Light of Mine.” Can we all now learn to sing and mourn and finally celebrate together, seeking the blend that is the true spirit of our beautifully dissonant, diverse country?
DEAR READERS,
Since I'm at work on a new novel, RAILROAD GIRL that takes place on a train, many have asked to see again my New York Times travel piece, "HOBOS at HEART," celebrating the romance and nostalgia of riding the rails.
Midnight, mid-continent, streaking across Kansas in a honeymoon sleeper, my parents made me. My mother had recently retired at 21 from her wartime years as a telegrapher on the Wabash Cannonball. In the tossup between her railroading and marriage to a young forester, my father won. But not for long.
Though he took my mother away from her first steamy, steel love, he couldn't take trains from her blood. Riding the rails runs in our family like a dominant gene. Some families pass along sharpshooter eyes or stolid legs like roots -- but my sisters, brother and I inherit a hobo waywardness.
In fact, our uncle was a hobo. My earliest memory of my mother's brother, Clark, was dropping him at a railroad crossing in the middle of a California desert. He knelt by the tracks as if in prayer. After a long while he leapt up, slung his knapsack and bedroll over his shoulder and sprinted off. But where was the train? Uncle Clark counted aloud as he ran, shouting with what we children instantly recognized -- though it was rare in adults -- as sheer joy.
Suddenly the ground thundered and, as if called, a train caught up with Uncle Clark. It slowed only a little, but not enough to catch, even for my uncle, strong and sleek as he was. Undaunted, he let out a piercing whistle. Out of the black square shadow of one boxcar shot a long arm. In a flash my uncle grabbed it and was hoisted inside the wide door. We never saw the other hobo, we only heard them laughing at the show they'd given us townies.
Not too long after that, my parents yielded to their four children's clamor to take a cross-country train ride from California to St. Louis for the usual summer stint with our Ozarkian kin. The first night in our roomette, my 3-year-old sister frog-kicked my father out of the top berth and knocked mother silly. Unperturbed by the hubbub above, my other sister, baby brother and I played Parcheesi in the bottom berth. I remember most the horizons that gently curved both earth and steel tracks as we rolled along. The world was wide and open -- and so were we. We even endured my father's lectures on the changing flora and fauna.
"This used to be buffalo country," he'd say sadly as empty South Dakota prairie swept by. We imagined shaggy ghosts grazing in the sweet grass. Our family still takes trains cross-continent in this era of faxes and flight. Trains are a trance state that make planes seem high-pitched, a hysteria. The human heart is slow. How, in the space of several hours, can we really adjust to opposing sides of a continent? Or comprehend leave-taking, longing, loss, or even love?
Uncle Clark, who now works for Social Security, still vacations near narrow-gauge railroads and every Sunday he reads the paper down at the Kansas City depot, counting trains and chatting with Cannonball conductors. My sister Paula, her three girls, and I now consider the Silver Meteor line, which runs up and down the Eastern Seaboard between Miami and New York City, as our home away from home.
This past summer, Paula planned her greatest train trip to date -- traveling from West Palm Beach cross-country to San Francisco, then up to Seattle, along the Canadian border, back down to Florida. When my family heard about my sister's train adventure, we all signed up to join her on various jogs. Mother boarded and rode from D.C. to Philadelphia; and I flew to San Francisco to take the Coast Starlight Superliner back to Seattle.
When I met my sister, her three girls and their Colombian nanny in San Francisco, they had accumulated another friend, Madeleine, with her 8-year-old son, and 19 bags. "It's like traveling with the Shah of Iran," I complained as porters boarded us. We had booked two sleeper compartments in the same car. Over the next 22 hours we stretched ourselves, amoeba-like, between Vista-Dome, dining car and compartments.
As the Coast Starlight steamed out of San Francisco, we cozily settled ourselves into the dining car. "Our sleeper car is a regular soap opera," Paula happily reported. "See that couple over there? They've been riding since Atlanta -- and the honeymoon is definitely over!
"Over the days everyone becomes a kind of gypsy family living in one long house."
She went on to fill us in on the details of our traveling companions. There was a Swiss family whose son had attached himself to our troop because his parents were preoccupied with a murderous, never-ending Monopoly game. Then there was the old lady in sleeper C of our same car who monopolized our steward because she believed first-class meant servants. Later I visited this intriguing, if demanding, woman and heard her tales of having survived both the 1906 and the 1989 San Francisco earthquakes.
Seems railroading was in her blood, too. Her father was a conductor on the train out of Sparks, Nev. Once he'd worked the legendary Hiawatha line that ran through the Pacific Northwest.
That first night the dining car was divine. As the adults lingered over wine and peach pie, we sent the kids sprawling into the Vista-Dome where they watched the movie "The Bear" on a big-screened TV. My nieces counted shooting stars like so many sparks thrown from the train. When we all finally retired to our tidy bunks, we were experts at the polite, lurching side step and shuffle of narrow aisles. Looking into each roomette as we slowly passed, I saw a man leaning over his needlepoint, an old couple nodding on one another's shoulders as they held hands, fast asleep; I peeked into another sleeper and eyed an entire family riveted on their bleeping Game Boys and a teen-age couple who might as well have been in the back seat at the drive-in. So much life right alongside mine.
As we all bunked down for the rock-a-bye night, I figured we were somewhere lost between redwoods and northern California seacoast -- wild land with only a few lights here and there. But inside this train was an intimacy, a tenderness as simple as sharing sleep. In our room's four bunks, we all hooked ourselves up to various headsets -- everything from country-Western to my own "Les Miserables" tape, to my niece's "Sesame Street" songs. Lying happily in my berth, I gazed out the window at mountains silhouetted by a slight moon and gloried in the knowledge that this was how I chose to enter the world -- by train.
Next morning during a breakfast of buttermilk hotcakes and sausage, we stared down chasms over coffee and hardly blinked as ancient Oregon forests surrounded us. Fog swirled as if the land were still asleep. We were about 5,000 feet outside the small town of Chemult, Ore., when the mists cleared to reveal a mysterious dark Odell Lake. The conductor told us in his leisurely travelogue that it was 300 feet deep. Staring down from the trestle tracks as the Starlight Coast streaked across windswept water, my niece insisted, "No, it's lots deeper. Something else lives there . . ." She looked at us, her expression at once wide-eyed and wise, "and it's not like us."
"Ohhh, I don't know," my sister told her. "After a month on a train, what else is like us?"
She was right. I knew it, even after my mere 16-some hours. We were all changed. It wasn't the travel; it was the movement. Maybe it was the stirring in our genes, our blood -- all my mother's mesmerizing miles, all my uncle's hobo longings, all our own accumulated memories of just rocking along going somewhere, but not fast.
The way we travel reveals the way we live. I like delayed gratification; I like a lingering hand, a lulling voice, a close and deliberate dance.
Already my sister and I are planning next summer's train trip. We rack up cross-country conference calls discussing the pros and cons of the Zephyr vs. the Empire Builder. All winter we'll sort out which novels, clothes, games, and companions are just right for "the slow-motion adventure," as Paula calls our train rides. "Sometimes . . ." she muses, as we talk long-distance, "I think it takes almost as long to pack for a train trip as it does to take one."
We both laugh leisurely and fall silent. We've forgotten that there's a phone meter ticking away, we've forgotten all about expensive air waves and the blank heavens above. We're thinking about buffalo ghosts in the Badlands and a lake so deep there's nothing human about it. We might as well be lounging on our berths while something as slow and vast as a country drifts by us. Even cross-continent, we're on the same track, remembering all the sleepers that carried us, the steel that still vibrates in our blood, the great body that cradles us with long curves, with tunnels dark as dreams, with an unbroken embrace of earth.
Backward Christian Soldiers
By Brenda Peterson
Photo by Joshua Earle
Ecological Civilization: Animal Allies by Brenda Peterson
TIKKUN magazine, March 6, 2019, originally published in ORION magazine
“My imaginary friend really lived. . . once,” the Latina teenage girl began, head bent, her fingers twisting her long, black hair.
She stood in the circle of other adolescents gathered in my Seattle Arts and Lectures storytelling class.
Here were kids from all over the city—every color and class, all strangers one to another. Over the next two weeks we would become a fierce tribe, telling our own and our tribe’s story. Our first assignment was to introduce our imaginary friends from childhood. This shy fourteen-year- old girl, Sarah, had struck me on the first day because she always sat next to me, as if under my wing, and though her freckles and stylish clothes suggested she was a popular girl, her demeanor showed the detachment of someone deeply preoccupied. She never met my eye, nor did she join in the first few days of storytelling when the ten boys and four girls were regaling one another with favorite superheroes.
So far, their story lines portrayed the earth as an environmental wasteland, a ruined shell hardly shelter to anything animal or human. After three days of stories set on an earth besieged by climate change, environmental evacuees, and barren of nature, I made a rule: No more characters or animals could die this first week. I asked if someone might imagine a living world, one that survives even our species. It was on this third day of group storytelling that Sarah jumped into the circle and told her story: “
“My imaginary friend is called Angel now because she’s in heaven, but her real name was Katie,” Sarah began. “She was my best friend from fourth to tenth grade. She had freckles like me and brown hair and more boyfriends—sometimes five at a time—because Katie said, ‘I like to be confused!’ She was a real sister too and we used to say we’d be friends for life. .. .”
Sarah stopped, gave me a furtive glance and then gulped in a great breath of air like someone drowning, about to go down. Her eyes fixed inward, her voice dropped to a monotone.
“Then one day last year in L.A, Katie and I were walking home from school and a red sports car came up behind us. Someone yelled,‘Hey, Katie!’ She turned . . . and he blew her head off. A bullet grazed my skull, too, and I blacked out. When I woke up, Katie was gone, dead forever.” Sarah stopped, stared down at her feet and murmured in that same terrible monotone, “Cops never found her murderer, case is closed.”
The kids shifted and took a deep breath, although Sarah herself was barely breathing at all. I did not know what to do with her story; she had offered it to a group of kids she had known but three days. It explained her self-imposed exile during lunch hours and while waiting for the bus.
All I knew was that she’d brought this most important story of her life into the circle of storytellers and it could not be ignored as if she were a case to be closed. This story lived in her, would define and shape her young life. Because she had given it to us, we needed to witness and receive—and perhaps tell it back to her in the ancient tradition of tribal call and response.
“Listen,” I told the group,“We’re going to talk story the way they used to long ago when people sat around at night in circles just like this one. That was a time when we still listened to animals and trees and didn’t think ourselves so alone in this world. Now we’re going to carry out jungle justice and find Katie’s killer. We’ll call him to stand trial before our tribe. All right? Who wants to begin the story?”
All the superheroes joined this quest. Nero the White Wolf asked to be a scout. Unicorn, with her truth-saying horn, was declared judge. Another character joined the hunt: Fish, whose translucent belly was a shining “soul mirror” that could reveal one’s true nature.
A fierce commander of this hunt was Rat, whose army of computerized comrades could read brain waves and call down lightning lasers as weapons. Rat began the questioning and performed the early detective work. We determined that the murderer was a man named Carlos, a drug lord who used local gangs to deal cocaine. At a party Carlos had misinterpreted Katie’s videotaping her friends dancing as witnessing a big drug deal. For that, Rat said, “This dude decides Katie’s to go down. So yo, man, he offs her without a second thought.”
Bad dude, indeed, this Carlos. And who was going to play Carlos now that all the tribe knew his crime? I took on the role. As I told my story, I felt my face hardening into a contempt that carried me far away from these young pursuers, deep into the Amazon jungle where Rat and his computer armies couldn’t follow, where all their space-age equipment had to be shed until there was only hand-to-hand simple fate.
In the Amazon, the kids changed without effort, in an easy shape-shifting to their animal selves. Suddenly there were no more superheroes with intergalactic weapons— there was instead Jaguar and Snake, Fish, and Pink Dolphin. We were now a tribe of animals, pawing, running, invisible in our jungle, eyes shining and seeing in the night. Carlos canoed the mighty river, laughing, because he did not know he had animals tracking him.
All through the story, I’d kept my eye on Sarah. The flat affect and detachment I’d first seen in her was the deadness Sarah carried, the violence that had hollowed out her inside, the friend who haunted her imagination. But now her face was alive, responding to each animal’s report of tracking Carlos. She hung on the words, looking suddenly very young, like a small girl eagerly awaiting her turn to enter the circling jump rope.
“Hey, I’m getting away from you!” I said, snarling as I imagined Carlos would. I paddled my canoe and gave a harsh laugh, “I’ll escape, easy!”
“No!” Sarah shouted. “Let me tell it!”
“Tell it!” her tribe shouted.
“Well, Carlos only thinks he’s escaping,” Sarah smiled, waving her hands. “He’s escaped from so many he’s harmed before. But I call out ‘FISH!’ And Fish comes. He swims alongside the canoe and grows bigger, bigger until at last, Carlos turns and sees this HUGE river monster swimming right alongside him. That mean man is afraid because suddenly Fish turns his belly up to Carlos’s face. Fish forces him to look into the soul mirror. Carlos sees everyone he’s ever killed and all the people who loved them and got left behind.
“Carlos sees Katie and me and what he’s done to us. He sees everything and he knows his soul is black. And he really doesn’t want to die now because he knows then he’ll stare into his soul mirror forever. But Fish makes him keep looking until Carlos starts screaming he’s sorry, he’s so sorry. Then…” Sarah shouted, “Fish eats him!”
The animals roared and cawed and congratulated Sarah for calling Fish to mirror a murderer’s soul before taking jungle justice.
Class had ended, but no one wanted to leave. We wanted to stay in our jungle, stay within our animals—and so we did. I asked the kids to close their eyes and call their animals to accompany them home. I told them that some South American tribes believe that when you are born, an animal is born with you. This animal protects and lives alongside you even if it’s far away in an Amazon jungle—it came into the world at the same time you did. And your animal dies with you to guide you back into the spirit world.
The kids decided to go home and make animal masks, returning the next day wearing the faces of their chosen animal. When they came into class the next day it was as if we never left the Amazon. Someone dimmed the lights. There were drawings everywhere of jaguars and chimps and snakes. Elaborate animal masks had replaced the super heroes who began this tribal journey. We sat behind our masks in a circle with the lights low and there was an acute, alert energy running between us, as eyes met behind animal faces.
I realized that I, who grew up in the forest wild, who first memorized the earth with my hands, have every reason to feel this familiar animal resonance. But many of these teenagers, especially minorities, have barely been in the woods; in fact, many inner city kids are afraid of nature. They would not willingly sign up for an Outward Bound program or backpacking trek; they don’t think about recycling in a world they believe already ruined and in their imaginations abandoned for intergalactic, nomad futures.
These kids are not environmentalists who worry about saving nature. And yet, when imagining an Amazon forest too thick for weapons to penetrate, too primitive for their superhero battles, they return instinctively to their animal selves. These are animals they have only seen in zoos or on television. Yet there is a profound identification, an ease of inhabiting another species that portends great hope for our own species survival. Not because nature is “out there” to be saved or sanctioned, but because nature is in them. The ancient, green world has never left us though we have long ago left the forest.
As we told our Amazon stories over the next week, the rainforest thrived in that sterile classroom. Lights low, surrounded by serpents, the jaguar clan, the elephants, I’d as often hear growls, hisses, and howls as words.
They may be young, but kids’ memories and alliances with the animals are very old. By telling their own animal stories they are practicing ecology at its most profound and healing level. Story as ecology—it’s so simple, something we’ve forgotten. In our environmental wars the emphasis has been on saving species, not becoming them. It is our own spiritual relationship to animals that must evolve. Any change begins with imagining ourselves in a new way.
But children, like some adults, know that the real world stretches farther than what we can see. That’s why they shift easily between visions of our tribal past and our future worlds. The limits of the adult world are there for these teenagers, but they still have a foot in the vast inner magic of childhood. It is this magical connection I called upon when I asked the kids on the last day of our class to perform the Dance of the Animals.
Slowly, in rhythm to the deep, bell-like beat of my Northwest Native drum, each animal entered the circle and soon the dance sounded like this: Boom, step, twirl, and slither and stalk and snarl and chirp and caw, caw. Glide, glow, growl, and whistle and howl and shriek and trill and hiss, hiss. We danced as the humid, lush jungle filled the room.
In that story stretching between us and the Amazon, we connected with those animals and their spirits. In return, we were complete— with animals as soul mirrors. We remembered who we were, by allowing the animals inside us to survive.
Children’s imagination is a primal force, just as strong as lobbying efforts and boycotts and endangered species acts. When children claim another species as not only their imaginary friends, but also as the animal within them— an ally—doesn’t that change the outer world?
The dance is not over as long as we have our animal partners. When the kids left our last class, they still fiercely wore their masks. I was told that even on the bus they stayed deep in their animal character. I like to imagine those strong, young animals out there now in this wider jungle. I believe that Rat will survive the inner-city gangs; that Chimp will find his characteristic comedy even as his parents deal with divorce; I hope that Unicorn will always remember her mystical truth-telling horn.
And as for Sarah, she joined the Jaguar clan, elected as the first girl-leader over much boy- growling. As Sarah left our jungle, she reminded me, “Like jaguar . . . . I can still see in the dark.”
Howling with Wolves
by Brenda Peterson
Photo by Annie Marie Musselman
IN THE 1990s, the internationally acclaimed French classical pianist Hélène Grimaud had an encounter with a captive she-wolf. “The wolf was life itself,” she wrote in her memoir, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves. “[It was] more biting than the frost. Life itself, with an incredible intensity.”
In 1996, Grimaud cofounded the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in New Salem, New York, which since 2003 has helped to breed Mexican and red wolves and release them into the wild. Some of WCC’s most popular educational events are “Howl for Pups of All Ages” and “Howl for Adults,” during which people can blend their voices with wolves’ calls.
“Why do wolves answer our human howls?” I ask Grimaud during a recent phone conversation.
She speaks in thoughtful bursts and riffs, as if following some musical score in her mind that is scrawled over with notes on wolf science. “Perhaps wolves are generously nondiscriminating,” she says wryly. “One of the things that makes working with any wild animal so interesting and humbling is that you have to interact with them on their terms. Often they are quite forgiving of our bumbling attempts to connect in a proper and dignified way, in wolf terms. It could just be that the wolves interpret humans howling as an invasive threat from another pack. So the wolves want to advertise that this territory is already occupied.”
Do wolves ever just sing to make music, as we do?
“One of the most intriguing elements of wolf howling is what scientists call social glue,” Grimaud explains, adding, “This spreading of good feeling like humans singing around a campfire, feeling closer to one another—it’s that same idea: you howl or harmonize and so reaffirm your social bonds with one another. That’s not surprising. Any pack animal really depends upon the others to survive.”
Certainly, humans are social pack animals. We are also profoundly moved by music, especially by making music together. That’s why the word harmony relates both to music and to relations between people and groups of people. When we hear human music, we physically attune to that vibration; when we sing together, we blend our voices, matching thirds and fifths and sometimes deliberate, clashing dissonance. We try to fit and find our part in the greater chorus.
Wolves actually harmonize their voices with ours. “Have you noticed,” Grimaud asks me, “that when a human—who is less naturally gifted in that wolf language—joins in a howl and his pitch lands on the same note, the wolves will alter their pitch to prolong the harmonization? It’s very interesting. If you end up on the same pitch as a wolf, he will scale up or down, modulating his voice with yours.”
Does this mean that animals also seek to blend with or are attracted to our music?
“When you practice your piano,” I ask Grimaud, “do the wolves join in your music by howling along?”
During the seasons when Grimaud lived next to the WCC in upstate New York, she didn’t notice any exact correlation between the wolves’ howling and her piano. “Their howling was random, coincidental with my playing,” she says with a laugh. “But there was one foster wolf pup who seemed to react to violin music when she heard my recordings. She’d come out of her den and raise her head and howl along to the violin strings. There definitely seemed to be a relationship there.”
“If you were going to compose a concerto for a wolf audience,” I ask Grimaud, “would it be a love song, a requiem?”
I am thinking about the elegy a composer might create for the Judas wolves, those solitary survivors of lethal hunts who are repeatedly radio-tagged and then targeted again to betray the location of their next family for a kill. Imagine surviving so much loss.
“I’ve never been asked that question before,” she says. Grimaud is silent for a while, then adds pensively, “Probably I’d choose music with a sense of longing. That’s always what I think when I hear wolves howling. Endless longing.”