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Lincoln's Inaugural Soup
Tess B. (original recipe)
One of my earliest travel memories was being at a hotel in Chicago and eating my first grilled
cheese sandwich. It was a revelation. A more recent memory was driving a car with a trailer at 65
miles per hour on a busy million-lane highway. We were supposed to drive around Chicago but instead
we went right through it and this was not a great idea but we survived somehow.
Illinois is known for Lincoln, yes, but more recently for corrupt politicians. This feels a
little like right-wing mudslinging but anyone old enough to remember Governor Rod Blagojevich
will know the reputation is not entirely unearned. Blago spent eight years in prison for attempting
to sell Obama's vacated Senate seat. Four of the last 10 Illinois governors have spent time in prison.
I bring this up not solely to reminisce. Corruption is a big problem around the world, not
just Illinois. I was at the library again and once again I figured, anyone can do an Internet
search, but it takes commitment to show up in a library, hunt down a book, and read some or all
of it. So I went a-lookin' for a book about political corruption and we have a pretty awesome
public library but I came up empty handed. I did do an Internet search so I know books on
corruption exist, but our library doesn't stock any. The best I could find is a book on Evil
in modern thought. It doesn't exactly hit the mark but I thought it could be worth investigating.
A book about Evil could be very depressing but I think this one addresses mainly the
philosophical aspects rather than the psychological. I read a little before deciding to check
it out and the section I read was concerned with how God could be benevolent, omnipotent, and
allow Evil to exist.
I think the obvious answer is that God set things up here and then went off to create life
on other planets and we are supposed to take what we've been taught and fight emergent Evils
on Earth for God while he/she is distracted with other responsibilities. According to the
Bible, it took God a week to create the Universe we know, which goes to show he/she can't
really do infinite things at once, and even God needs a day of rest after a long week of creation.
You ask a lot of your God but if there is one thing profoundly clear it's that God is a
fan of free will (maybe Presbyterians will disagree, if they can) and he/she'd rather Evil
exist than lord over an Earth of automatons. OK, so this is getting pretty far off topic,
but the point is, your God wants us to choose Good over Evil, he/she wants us to pick God
over Satan, maybe he/she is omnipotent but it would be boring if humankind worshiped him/her
without free will, and who says God can't get bored, I mean, what is God's motivation after
all? Why even create humans?
Clearly God was bored and was inspired by the idea of the flawed/perfect dichotomy. Because
maybe we are just the smartest monkey but if there is divinity involved in us being here,
probably it is to struggle against our flaws and come to understand perfection, no one can
achieve perfection but we will be happier when we die if we perceive some version of perfection
in an otherwise flawed world. For some of us it is Love. For others it is Art, or Mother Gaia,
etc.
I believe the world is too complicated to understand directly so we use models to help
understand the world and our choices here. Different models carry different salience depending
on the circumstances, and conflicting models may be equally valid, sometimes at the same time.
Religious people may have faith in the Almighty, but for those of us with not quite as much
faith, at least not in a formal sense, I think it is hard to dispute, humanity has a dimension
of perfection while at the same time we are deeply flawed. Who is to say, you wouldn't try to
sell Obama's vacant Senate seat too, if you had been exposed to Illinois politics during the
formative years of your career.
I don't really think of corruption as Evil. I think it is mostly a symptom of bad systems
and some degree of individual weakness. I don't really believe individuals can be Evil, only
ideas and actions. But ideas and actions can certainly be Evil. (And you can certainly be a tool
of Evil.) There is an excellent song called "See No Evil" and I think this is an important skill
everyone should master. But after you learn to See No Evil it's time you learned to See
Evil, it is real.
I don't really think of corruption as Evil, but it is a problem, so I will look to the book
I checked out for answers as to why a civic-minded person would abuse the power of their position,
usually for personal profit though is it possibly more?
You may note, a lot of Evil is hidden, for at least two reasons. One reason is that Evil
is a coward, it can be defeated by Reason and a good heart and it is at least slightly
self-aware and knows enough to keep out of sight as much as feasible. You can think of Vampires,
in fact, Stephanie Meyer's version of vampire lore holds up more or less and may be familiar to
you, let's all agree that Human-Only Twilight fanfiction is Evil.
A second reason why a lot of Evil is hidden is what I like to call "Demons in Hard to
Reach Places." Maybe we clean up the obvious Evils, but if so, what remains?
Because I don't really believe people are Evil, but I do believe in Evil, and because I
don't want to be paralyzed by uncertainty, I blame Evil on Will-o'-the-Wisps. If you are
unfamiliar, you can read about them. The part I contribute to the lore is that they are
the ultimate cause, through illusion and psychic attack, of people who are corrupted into
ideas or acts of Evil. I guess Christians etc. will blame this on Satan, OK, but how does
Satan manifest on Earth? You may say, "Demons!" and you wouldn't be wrong. But if you start
to think in terms of Will-o'-the-Wisps, you will see, these ways of thinking are compatible.
Since this is Obamas's state and the Obamas's challenge, let's thoroughly exhaust this
topic! I'll read the book and learn what smarter people think, but this is my worldview.
Three tiers to the Machinery of Oppression.
The first tier is the real-world implementation of Oppression. Sadly, there are too many
examples. I like to imagine it is perpetrated by a robot army. We can resist, sometimes this
is our only recourse, but it's important to remember that the first tier derives its
organization, perhaps a degree of legitimacy, from the second tier.
The second tier is the ideas that support Oppression. It can be as complicated as the
Tax Code or as banal as bigotry. Anti-oppression ideas can be squashed through simple
censorship or more elaborate means. A lot of the battle against Oppression occurs on this
tier. But who does battle?
The third tier is the people who argue the ideas. If you look at history, this is where
a lot of Oppression goes down. Examples:
-making you run the insanity treadmill, "I don't want to be a sailor, mama"
-thwarting, monitoring, harassment, "Every time I plant a seed, he say kill it before it grow"
-isolation, imprisonment, no truth, "It's getting dark, too dark for me to see"
This was my first and I wanted to say only celebrity portrait art but does Al Gore playing
ping pong count? In any case, it is provocative! More than I remembered! It's referencing
"Knocking On Heaven's Door" ("Take this badge off of me I don't need it anymore"). But it could
have been Positively 4th Street ("You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend When I was down
you just stood there grinning You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend You just want to be
on the side that's winning"). And it comes with the warning: Do not believe excuses to be hateful!
Like the Nazis did.
-character assassination, censorship/misconstruing, marginalization, only reporting half the story,
co-opting
-emotional destruction
-assassination, silencing, disappearing
-Azkaban
Whew! Heavy, maybe, but it helps to know what we are looking at. Now let's read what
others think. I am not a philosophy major or even a casual reader of philosophy (if such
a thing exists) but I did read Sophie's World as a kid so I will give it my best.
This book was interesting but oh my goodness can I have the Stacey Abrams book back? I
want to read about gerrymandering! So... I skipped the beginning and the end. The middle posed
some interesting questions but I couldn't tell what the main point was. I do not generally
recommend this approach to reading but if you saw the book maybe you'd understand. Instead
of getting onto philosophical tangents, I will let my prior commentary stand. Contemplating
Good and Evil can be scary and upsetting so I hope I made it a little fun.
Since this challenge is inspired by the Obamas and this is their home state, a quick
relevant anecdote.
I lived in Montana during the leadup to President Obama's first election and I like to
say we almost turned Montana Purple because we lived in a college town very near to campus
and we had a giant Obama poster in our window where everyone would see it and Obama did really
well in Montana and clearly he was getting votes in college towns like ours from people like
the ones who passed our poster and believed in change you can believe in. So that is Good, but
then we moved back East and I am told the people who moved in after us put up a Confederate
flag, and that is Evil.
But for the time we lived there in Montana we spread your Good, we had friends who were
fervent supporters, we held a well-attended Election Night party, we had a cat-shaped piggy
bank we called Change Cat You Can Believe In Cat. I listened to Dreams From My Father
on a car ride across the country, couldn't say exactly which one, you tried to close the prison
at Guantanamo Bay and one day maybe it will be closed.
Soup
- 1/2 cu. frozen Green beans
- 1 3/4 cubes No-chicken bouillon
- 1 can White Beans, drained
Preparation
In a medium-large pot, warm oil. Over medium-high heat, saute the
shallot for
4 minutes. Add the parsnips, green beans, and carrots, and cook 5 minutes more,
stirring occasionally. Add water and bouillon and bring to a simmer. Mash half the white beans and add
them along with
quinoa and simmer for 20 minutes. Add asparagus, remaining white
beans, and pepper, and cook 5 minutes more.
Discussion
So I made this a long time ago (when I had asparagus) and I tried to use half the white beans
to make "White Bean Bites" in the vein of what later became Idaho's
"Chickpea Bites." However, my brilliant idea was to par-bake the bites, then finish them in the
soup. Well, after 20 minutes of simmering they had all dissolved. The soup was still good but, without
the white bean bites (the substitute for chicken in the recipe) it doesn't really live up to
Tess's vision. Making white bean bites according to the Idaho method might be the answer.
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Kansas