Defiant Jazz

The Game | Directions | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Hey cousins. Did I ever tell you how I left the Christian church? Maybe I'll do that today. But first: the news.

The world's richest man took to Joe Rogan's podcast and called Social Security "the world's biggest Ponzi scheme" the other day. This is like your neighborhood bully telling you he likes your bike—if, that is, the neighborhood bully were the world's richest man and your bike was our hope for a stable future. If you work, you've paid into Social Security your whole career. The world's richest man and his Republican Party want to steal all that money from you and give it to themselves and their wealthy friends so they can enjoy the view while they burn the world down. The cost to lives and liberty will be staggering, but people with 7 yachts will now be able to afford an 8th, and the thieves will allow white christian bigots to erase trans people from society and own women and racial minorities as property, and other outcomes that have comforted white conservative christians and other kinds of fascists throughout history.

Also last week, the U.S. president and his little bearded Grima Wormtongue of a vice president invited the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to the Oval office, to ambush him with whines about his gratitude to them. Now, what the U.S. president has done for Zelenskyy to earn his gratitude is this: he tried to shake him down some years ago, holding U.S. aid contingent to Zelenskyy's compliance in a conspiracy to tamper with the 2020 U.S. election—an act for which the U.S. president received his first of two (so far, I hope) impeachments. Zelenskyy, meanwhile, is in a third year of a war of aggression being waged against his people by an international thug named Vlad Putin, who was no doubt emboldened by the U.S. president's willingness to withhold aid to Ukraine. Zelenskyy received this dressing down from his inferiors because, in the political struggle between dictatorship and democracy, the U.S. president very much wants the U.S. to be on the side of dictators and bullies, and Zelenskyy is currently opposing a dictator for acting like a bully on the world stage. It was an abdication of the U.S.'s leadership, a betrayal of our most longstanding alliances, and a shameful display of unlovely emotion by a bunch of hateful greedy grasping men in possession of no greater moral sense than that of an infant cobra.

Many other things of this nature happened last week, too. And Republicans and members of other crime rings and racist hate groups mostly think it's wonderful.

I think anyone paying attention by now realizes that members of the Republican party are not only the biggest pieces of skubalon you can possibly imagine, but they are also thieves and murderers on the level of mafia thugs. But we're people of awareness, you and I, so we already know that what we're experiencing is the natural outcome of the foundational cultural ideology of the United States—a capitalist billionaire scam that seeks to enslave and murder human beings for the enrichment of a few people, whose superiority is enforced by racial and other social bigotries. The proofs of this come so fast these days they'll overwhelm us if we try to take it all in.

So that's enough of that.

This is a series of essays about demolishing the billionaire scam in our own hearts and minds and out in the world—demolishing it and replacing it with something good and sustainable and true instead of evil and ruinous and false. There are links at the top of the page if you want to read the rest of the essays. We've talked about looking at the worst so we can imagine the best. And we've talked about imagining the best so we can understand the new, just, sustainable, humane culture we're trying to build in place of the failed, unjust, unsustainable, inhumane culture we're trying to demolish, which we thought of as a sort of multigenerational task, like building a cathedral, or to an arduous journey where the end is not yet in sight.

And that leads me into thinking about how to take that journey. The short answer is: one step at a time. This leads me to wondering what most helps us take the next step, and the next one, and the next, and the next.

So now I want to tell you about how I left the Christian church, and the story of the woman who wants a child.

Please forgive this brief interruption.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you donate and subscribe to independent sources of information instead. This week I'm suggesting you support your nearest alt weekly. As Radley Balko says, "alt weeklies have a storied history of breaking big stories long before daily newspapers catch on (and then report and take credit for them). They’ve also been proving grounds for excellent journalists who may have not had the connections to break into the profession."

We now return you to the essay in progress.

If you've been reading me a while, you'll know that, like many people, I was raised in evangelical christianity, and if you've read my book Very Fine People (Available Wherever You Get Books), you've learned that I wasn't just a christian kid, I was a missionary kid christian, which is sort of heavenly platinum status in christian communities. I'm born into it and seeped in it, is my point; a christian of christians, an evangelical of evangelicals. I know the Bible pretty durn good, I guess. By this I mean I have significant parts of it memorized, and I even knew to use the word skubalon and send some of you off to search engines to look the word up and discover the biblical context of it and understand the sly allusions I'm making that only my other fellow bible people might otherwise have caught, so that you will understand what a very clever boy I am.

Anyway, I'm not with the church anymore, and haven't been for closing in onto a decade now. (My path involved the help and example and support of people in my life that are close to me, but since this telling will represent my own perspective on the matter, I will, rather than bring them into this story uninvited, be framing what has been a more communal movement as my own personal journey.) And I can imagine some of you wondering the evangelical christian church? why did it take you so long?

It's a fair question. The answer is, christians have a beautiful story, and I actually believed it. I find I am still captivated by the story of the universe revealing itself to the strange phenomenon of human awareness within itself as sacrifice, not power; revealing itself not as domination but as love, not as distant and remote but as present in every instant; a universe that insisted that it wanted mercy rather than sacrifice, that insisted that those who have the least deserve most consideration, that to live well in the world is to abandon greed and to care for the needs of others, and that the best use of power and wealth is to give it away on behalf of those without either power or wealth, with no thought of cost, or whether these gifts are deserved. I think of it as a beautiful story—the beautiful story.

It's a pretty good story, right? Why would somebody captivated by such a story ever leave an institution that says it is dedicated to such a story? is something you might wonder, if you didn't happen to know anything about the institution I'm talking about, and the way its dogmas and strictures have been practiced. If you do know about the institution in question, then your question, again, might be what took you so long to leave?

The institution in question calls itself "the christian church," and though it is a factional entity indeed, no monolith, the fractions and factions generally recognize one another as tributaries from the same stream—it is a stream that millennia ago abandoned the beautiful story and married itself to the power of empire. Since then, it's put its beautiful story to work as an instrument of power, validating empire and colony and conquest. In my country, which is the United States, it was and is used to validate tools of empire like genocide and slavery and capitalism, and at present it is, in sum, the sustaining, energetic, enthusiastic force whose seemingly unshakeable loyalty powers the hate group and fascist American political party known as "Republican."

My adult life has been given to navigating the inconsistency between the beautiful story and the dogmas and beliefs and practices of an institution that simultaneously proclaims it and stands as the primary obstacle to it. For quite a long time, the question for me had been is there a morally consistent way for me as someone who takes the beautiful story of Christianity seriously to belong to such an organization as the christian church? And I had found what I believed for many years was a church that answered the question in the affirmative. It was a progressive-type church, you see, and for a long while it nourished my soul, and in a way it still does. I learned a lot there, and I managed to deconstruct a lot of the dogmas and doctrines that had always seemed to me to be diametrically oppositional to the beautiful story: the conservative pathological need for an eternal conscious torment of hell, the appeal to authoritarianism as a final answer to imponderable questions, the ways it negotiated its way back into permitting itself access to the perks of greed and empire and supremacy, the way these intellectual alignments lent themselves to a self-reinforcing state of permanently aggrieved moral superiority and shallow-spirited and fearful protectionism, and overweening cultural self-regard, and and so forth. It was a good church for that sort of deconstruction. I learned a lot. It's safe to say I wouldn't be the person you encounter in these essays if not for it.

There came the day it wasn't enough anymore.

The mortal wound for me took place not very long after Donald Trump got elected with unshakeable majorities of Christian votes, while running as the embodiment of the literal antithesis of the beautiful story. This was something I had in earlier years thought would have been impossible, because for years I thought that the institution in which I had been raised and within which I lived actually believed the story and would hold to it, and would of course act as a bulwark against the returning wave of white supremacy and fascism that the Republican Party represented.

By the time Trump was elected, I had been unfurnished of this delusion. The fact that the church collectively went for their deep-fried golden calf didn't surprise me in 2016—I was more naive than I am today (which suggests that in ten year I will be less naive than I am now) but I wasn't totally snowed, and I had been watching over the preceding years in a state of slowly dawning awareness. Also, the Republican Party had already been a hate group for many years prior to that, and the church had been the enthusiastic, sustaining, energizing force behind that organization, as part of its overall capture by authoritarian state power, which had offered it relevance and influence in the form of enforced cultural domination over others. So the church took the offer, and didn't even get a golden fiddle in exchange for its soul. And here, at last, we were.

I wrote a letter to the church elders, telling them that it was our moral duty to reach out to Muslim communities—who were at the time most in line for demonization and persecution from white christian conservatives—to learn from them what we could do to stand in solidarity with them, urging them to action, and offering to help the effort in any way I could. I got members of the church who I was in community with to review it and comment on it, then sign it. We waited. There came no answer.

We met with the elders, and aired our concerns. They listened very politely and said they'd get back to us. They never did.

All our talk about standing with the marginalized and oppressed people of the world, and working to make measurable change, was starting to feel very empty, very hollow.

The final straw was a sermon. The pastor in question was pretty new to the church, having replaced a guy that had decided that his own spiritual journey was leading him outside of the church. The new guy had already been setting off my alarm bells for months, delivering messages that celebrated the giver (himself) for holding to a politically neutral posture, a posture he achieved by mourning our political divide but never touching upon the causes of the division or the stakes for those most affected. It was a bunch of stuff that celebrated the idea of creating a unity of "both sides" without noting that there were "sides" other than the two groups of politically disagreeing but otherwise mostly comfortable mostly straight mostly white mostly employed people that made up the great majority of our church's population. You know the "both sides" drill. It's a very popular form of moral laziness. The new guy was also fond of making appeals to the Christian heroes of civil rights struggles of the past, while simultaneously denigrating and attempting to tamp down the righteous outrage that many of us were feeling, failing to ever notice that it was exactly this sort of outrage that had powered people in the past to the acts of bravery and resolve and action he so claimed to admire. Maybe the first warning bell from this guy was a "prayer breakfast" he arranged to address sexism in the church and the larger culture, to which only men were invited. Get the picture?

The last straw—again, a sermon—drew from the words of a real favorite of this new pastor, the great Civil Rights Movement's leader Martin Luther King Jr. King was a christian, too, you know, a pastor just like the new guy, so I guess the new guy felt a sort of kinship. The point of the new guy's sermon was a reiteration of his pet belief that it was far less important what we believed and much more important how we believed it—the point, I believe, that both sides were getting very argumentative and polarized, and that was harming our unity, and unity was the main point of being a christian, so we needed to stop focusing on what we were arguing about and just agree that god was for sure the best.

The new guy's sermon ended with a quote from a sermon King gave, in which King said that he foresaw a day when people would no longer say white power or black power, but god's power, and that we, too, should not call for the promulgation of our own political belief, but to unify around our common religious belief in the beautiful story. As usual, there was no mention, or seemingly even any awareness, of the inescapable fact that our common stated beliefs were being used to support and pursue radically different ends.

Most significantly, the new guy didn't mention at all the rest of the thrust of King's sermon, which was his last presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1967). This was a radical, impassioned (one might even say angry) and overt call for transformative social justice, containing direct calls for actual political policy like universal basic income, containing direct and calls for the absolute and total demolition of structures of white supremacy like the abuses of capital and war in Vietnam, and a calls for the church to stop supporting those structures and return to the beautiful story it claimed to believe. More than anything, the sermon was a call to be dissatisfied with how things were, and it wasn't a dissatisfaction with both sides, but a dissatisfaction with the side that was actively promoting injustice, a side which King named, again and again and again, as white supremacists and the white liberals that sought to establish a false peace with white supremacists in the name of a unity that would necessarily exclude everyone white supremacists wished to exclude. King said the phrase let us be dissatisfied thirteen times by my count, but you go read it and count for yourself.

So yes, the new guy used King's sermon about dissatisfaction to tell us to unify without any moral consideration, and told us to be not dissatisfied, but satisfied. Ain't that just the wildest shit you've ever heard?

Probably not.

Some of you reading this are probably thinking yeah no shit, what did you expect? You didn't realize this yet?

Again, I wasn't totally naive by then. I was well aware that conservative white people love to point to King's idealized vision of the future (a vision King could convey with authority because he imagined the best only after looking at the worst) as if it were something already accomplished and needed no further work or strife, without ever engaging with King's clear and vital and specific moral calls to the world of his time or applying these calls to the inescapably similar realities of our own time. But I did at last find it an unacceptable message to come from the stage of any organization that I supported with my time, resources, and presence, and I found it obnoxious and dishonest that a message so clearly designed to assuage conservative feelings would be framed as non-political. And yes, this was the moment where it crystalized for me. For others, like our recently-departed pastor perhaps, it crystalized earlier. I suppose I would observe that people don't all realize the same things at the same time.

I wrote a letter to the new guy explaining this and some other things besides. (Believe it or not, it was a long letter.) I received a reply this time. It dealt with the substance of my letter not at all. It focused mostly on the new guy's own self-exoneration and all the wonderful progressive things he believed. It informed me that this letter represented the end of the discussion, and there would be no further interactions.

And I agreed with that last point. It was the end of the conversation. That was it for me. I still took the beautiful story seriously, and still do. I still believe that there is a beautiful thing being born into the world that the story I was raised into pointed toward. I just now recognized that the christian church, as a whole, stood as an obstacle to that birth, sought to find the infant in its manger and strangle it in the cradle.

And I could have kept looking for a church that actually believed in the beautiful story more than it believed in the continuation of its own institutional structures—and I would probably have found one—but I didn't look, because I could see that people who actually believed the beautiful story were far, far, far easier to find outside the church than inside it, and moreover, outside the church, people didn't need to overcome intrinsically authoritarian doctrines and intrinsically supremacist organizational corporate structures in order to pursue the beautiful story, and didn't need to enforce their own particular institutional frameworks and verbiage about it upon others in order to pursue it.

So I didn't look for another church. I imagine it's possible to pursue the beautiful story within an organization that is largely opposed to it, but it's not necessary to do so, and in fact doing so seems to me to bolster and prolong the existence of an organization that is acting as an obstacle to bringing the beautiful story into the world, and so I decided to free myself from all that.

I found I was dissatisfied.

Now let's talk about the woman who wants a child.

Another quick interruption to scroll quickly past before you continue the essay.

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My story was long. I'll keep this one shorter : There was a woman who wants a child, but was struggling with infertility. Her best hope is the medical procedure IVF, which is very expensive. And she saw news stories that repeated in uncritical fashion Donald Trump's claim that he would make IVF free, and she didn't see or else didn't believe the far more believable stories that Donald Trump represents a coterie of creepy billionaire christian bigots who intend to control all of our lives and our bodies but most especially those of women, which they intend to do by demolishing our shared life together and shredding the Constitution and enacting christofascist dictatorial rule. These stories are far more believable, because they are entirely in line with what Trump has done and said he will do, and because the coterie of creepy billionaire christian bigots wrote their whole plan down and published it online, so confident are they that national media will repeat their obvious lies as being just as believable, if not more so, than the obvious truth. And that is sure enough exactly what the national media did.

So the woman who wants a child but could not have one (because of a past sexual assault) voted for Trump (who is an adjudicated rapist and has bragged about sexual assault). And now the more believable thing is coming to pass: our society is being fracked into oblivion so the most wealthy people can extrude the remainder they'd left behind for us back in earlier days when the pickings were easier. And no, IVF hasn't been made free, and in fact there will no doubt be laws proposed to constrain or even outlaw it, because that's what this coterie of creeps, who want to control our bodies and lives, say they want. And the woman who wanted a child is a federal employee, so she lost her job, just as Trump and his creepy coterie of bigots promised their hate group she would. And now, with her dreams of motherhood slipping away, she is starting to feel regrets, according to one of the national newspapers that is still writing stories laundering fascist lies to bamboozle morally lazy and incurious people—people like the person she used to be and to some extent still is; people like I used to be and to some extent still am.

This is a frighteningly common story: the person who didn't pay attention because they didn't have to gives their vote to a political movement that devours people and then immediately gets devoured. The face-eating leopard eats their face I'll say, so you don't have to. The media who helped fool them publishes these stories day after day after day, and honestly at this point when they do so I'm not sure they aren't bragging. And the woman's family all still support this; they don't actually seem capable of connecting their loved one's struggles to their self-regarding antihuman positions, or else they don't actually love her enough to change, any more than she herself loved her fellow human beings well enough to connect their struggles to her own support for this fascist gang of obvious nightmare people, any more than, decades ago, I failed in much the same way, any more than I am probably still failing, in ways I have not yet detected.

If you're like me, you're frustrated by these stories, sometimes even enraged by them. This is because the truth is so evident, and those involved—both the newspaper who writes the stories and the subject of the story—who know better, or should, are so unaware, or pretend unawareness so impenetrably.

Oh, I want to say. Don Trump isn't going to make your IVF free? No shit, Sheila. What was your first clue?

You're starting to feel regret now? I want to say. Now, only now, when it affects you personally? Cry me a river.

"Fuck around and find out" is the phrase. I get it. I feel it all the time. And there are people who are suffering far more than this woman is; people who are actively being erased from society right now, terrorized by authorities, grouped up and disappeared, sent to for-profit corporate gulags. It strikes me as unseemly and corrosive of me to scold them from my relatively comfortable perch, should they lack grace for somebody who put them in that horrifying position; to demand that people who are suffering most from the results of this woman's vast (perhaps deliberate) incurious moral laziness now should be the ones to extend sympathy to her before she's managed to show sympathy for anyone other than herself.

Yet, at the same time, what I want is a spiritual transformation, which begins with awareness, and this woman's awareness is now dawning. Will she leave her "church"—whether that church is just the dogmas of her own unexamined supremacy, the rapidly freezing pool of her own comfort, or an actual church, or all of them at once? Perhaps not. Many only flirt with awareness. On the other hand ... perhaps so. The future isn't written. And that's what we need, I think: for people caught in the billionaire scam of supremacy to leave their "church," both metaphorical and actual, and start down the road toward the new sustainable generative true thing that's being born. There are many churches. There are political parties, economic philosophies, friend groups, mental junk drawers full of unexamined beliefs. (And actual real churches, too. To quote Lucky Day of The Three Amigos, "in your case, your "El Guapo" is the actual El Guapo.")

The woman who wants a child: She's regretting her choice. It's a step. Just one, a tiny one. It's not far enough. It won't mean much if she fails to take the next one into empathy for others, and then another, and then another.

Yet it is a step, and it's in the right direct. I celebrate it.

But even as I celebrate, I feel dissatisfaction, because the road is so long, the destination so far, and the pace toward it often so slow.

I find myself celebrating, but dissatisfied.

There's a tension here, I feel, and a balance to the tension. It's a music melodic but still atonal, rhythmic but hard to follow. A defiant jazz, to borrow a term from a current popular entertainment called Severance that perfectly captures the current moment.

I am dissatisfied because I have set myself on a journey and I have taken many steps, and, while I can't see the end, I can see a long way down the road, far enough to know how far we are from the destination, aware that we can only get there together, and engaged at those who choose to drag us all toward mutual destruction instead.

Yet I need those to turn around from what is evil and ruinous and false toward what is good and sustainable and true, and I need them to start to walk. I need them to take one step, then another, then another, then another, and so every turn and every step seems, to me, a moment for celebration.

I ask myself: What causes the next step?

I'm told that the worst thing anyone can do for a person first entering new awareness of the truth is tell them what took you so long? How did you not see this? I can see why people would believe this. People turn away from castigation, do they not? I suppose they do.

I'm told that the thing is to simply celebrate the first budding of awareness. To say welcome in, join us, glad to have you or words to that effect. And I can understand this, too. People go where they are welcomed, do they not? I suppose they do.

There's truth to this.

But I feel the tension of defiant jazz, and I sense there's more to it than that.

There's a temptation to say it's a single perfect configuration that causes the next step, and the next. One Weird Trick that will make people see the truth and move into it. I'm not sure about that.

We are people who believe in the strength of diversity, I think, even as we honor virtue of personal rights and liberties for all people. It might be, when it comes to drawing people of nascent awareness into further awareness, a diversity of catalysts and and methods and journeys may be needed.

Think of what made me leave my church. It wasn't somebody welcoming me into the new thing. It was the fact that I actually believed the truths I had learned and couldn't handle the lies any more. It was my dissatisfaction with the new guy, pushing me out of where I was. It's not good that he was a morally and intellectually lazy leader more in love with his own place within his own institution than he was in actually pursuing the beautiful story. And yet I needed to leave my church, and he was the catalyst for that for me, and many others as well. We can celebrate that step, I think, even as we remain dissatisfied that such a catalyst exists, and hope to build a better society in which such things are not necessary, and we are not dominated by institutions led by such men. It's defiant jazz.

So, as there are many churches that need to be left, there are many catalysts, and those catalysts can often themselves be a significant problem. It's not good that the world's richest man and his pet president are firing people indiscriminately in their immodestly corrupt grasping for power and wealth at the expense of human life; it would be far better if they and all their enablers and lackeys were removed from their positions immediately and given appropriate consequences for their crimes against humanity, and it would be best if they had never been permitted to achieve that power in the first place. Yet there are many who need to leave their churches, and the leaving will need a catalyst, and for some—we might hope many—this will be the catalyst for that. We can celebrate those steps, I think, even as we remain dissatisfied that such a catalyst exists, and hope to build a better society in which such things are not necessary, in which we are no longer led by corrupt inhumane monsters, in which we no longer celebrate their worst intentions as virtues. It's a defiant jazz.

And yes, in my journey, there are some people who have celebrated and welcomed me, and this can indeed be encouraging. If you are somebody who is given to that kind of encouragement, I encourage you to continue in it. Yet there have also been many dissatisfied with me and the slowness of my pace, many who point out how far I still have to go. Some of them do so in a way that also allows me to take instruction, and in my better moments I am instructed by them. If you are one with the ability and the energy for this sort of instruction, I'd encourage you to continue it. We can celebrate my progress, I think, even as we remain dissatisfied with the shortcomings of late starters like me, and hope to see me pick up my pace as I grow in strength and endurance. And even the least gracious instruction can be a cause to celebrate, if it is taken, and results in improvement. It's a defiant jazz.

Some of those dissatisfied with my shortcomings don't express their dissatisfaction with grace, and don't even have time or energy for instruction. They have no patience for me and my shit whatsoever. You'll never guess what: they don't push me off my course, for the simple reason that I believe my course is the right one, worth pursuing for its own sake. If they did push me off my course, then you'd know that I was only pretending to be on the course in order to receive praise, and their confrontation would have been the necessary catalyst to expose the falseness of my motives to others who may have given me too much trust to navigate the dangers of their own journeys. And so it seems to me that even those who cannot extend grace as a welcoming presence might serve a vital purpose, because in this age of empowered hatred, there are many pretenders, and challenges can expose them. We can celebrate even this exposure, I think, as a pitfall detected and an obstacle avoided, even as we remain dissatisfied with the lies of performative virtue and the disguised intentions of evil people. It's a defiant jazz.

And there might even be more than one journey. I felt I had to leave my church, and I bet a lot of you did too. But others chose to stay within theirs—whether it is a friend group, a political party, a philosophy, or an actual church—to work change within an institution that has degraded itself. It's a more challenging path, and it seems to me most primed for failure and lazy compromise, but for those who commit to it, even if I pursue my own path, I stand ready to celebrate their accomplishments in turning their institutions away from the billionaire scam and toward the beautiful and sustainable new thing that's being born, and to celebrate their sabotages of their institutions that stand as an obstacle to human progress and thriving. So it seems to me that we do not need to be within a political party to celebrate when it does something admirable and good, even as we remain dissatisfied with all the ways it has aligned itself against human thriving, even as we work to dismantle its connections and compromises with supremacy and the billionaire scam. It's a defiant jazz.

What leads to the next step, and the next, and the next?

I believe the first thing is to celebrate every inch of progress toward what I think of as "the beautiful story," so we understand that the journey is worthy for its own sake, and take enjoyment in it, and in so doing become people who find our joy in who we are and where we are. I think that is more attractive than any false pandering I can do to people who are starting to think about leaving their churches. We can remember that every win is a step forward, and every step forward is a celebration. We can remember that whoever doesn't want to take part in a celebration won't be at the party, which is what I'd want from a party, anyway.

I believe the second thing is to remain dissatisfied in our celebration, so we do not rest in celebration as if the journey is complete, so that we have the determination to continue, the discernment to detect and avoid obstacles and traps, and so that we have a clear vision of the better world we're building. I think this sort of progress will better instruction to those further behind than any scolding I can do, and better encouragement for those further ahead.

There are many churches to leave, and many catalysts for leaving them, perhaps even many journeys to take toward our destination. But if we celebrate while remaining dissatisfied, there's a beautiful story for us to all discover together, not by claiming ourselves as the sole owners and practitioners and demanding all others conform to our path and pace, but by exploring its terrain, and to unify around our constantly newfound knowledge of this better world we're building by celebrating it as loudly as we can.

It's a defiant jazz. Let's dance.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. That's him in the corner, that's him in the spotlight.