The narrative repeated by officialdom got established before the facts were in, and went on to play a causal role in the subsequent history.

While he is talking about early versions of the “cash for clunkers” programs, I love how casually this enormous line gets dropped into Crawford’s book. And it’s followed very closely by another subtle-but-massively-true statement:

When the factual picture is messy in this way, but on the other hand, there is a public consensus that something must be done , there develops a great thirst for answers. Speaking simplistically offers a kind of cognitive relief. This is what politicians specialize in.

It’s worth noting that this satisfaction-in-simplicity is something we can all very easily “specialize in.”

Fresco Café by Bozeman Creek

Currently Reading: Why We Drive by Matthew Crawford 📚

I’m a couple chapters in, and so far it’s everything I hoped it would be, and more. I’m pausing after just about every paragraph to let the goosebumps settle. Crawford’s is a sorely needed mind.

Futurism is a genre of mythmaking that seeks to generate a feeling of inevitability around some desired outcome, a picture that is offered as though it were a prediction.

Outside smiles

Bonhoeffer:

There, where we trust, we have learned to place our lives in the hands of others; contrary to all the ambiguities in which our acts and lives must exist, we have learned to trust without reserve. We now know that one can truly live and work only in such trust, which is always a venture but one gladly affirmed. We know that to sow and to nourish mistrust is one of the most reprehensible things and that, instead, trust is to be strengthened and advanced wherever possible.

Dreaming of walks, of smells, of gopher holes and dog parks—oh, all that unmarked territory, waiting, waiting…

Blood moon? Or smoky sunrise?

Finished Reading: Repair by C. K. Williams 📚

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,

nothing that we'd ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for,

but something to which we've never adequately given credence,

which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,

that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

Consider this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer an addendum to my post about Psalm 11:

We may not and do not desire to act like offended critics or opportunists. Case by case and in each moment, as victors or vanquished, we desire to be those who are coresponsible for the shaping of history. The one who allows nothing that happens to deprive him of his coresponsibility for the course of history, knowing that it is God who placed it upon him, will find a fruitful relation to the events of history, beyond fruitless criticism and equally fruitless opportunism. Talk of going down heroically in the face of unavoidable defeat is basically quite nonheroic because it does not dare look into the future. The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living.

Stopped by Idaho Falls on the way to Salt Lake over the weekend. The downtown by Snake River is as pretty as ever