“Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America”

“This is a story,” says Sacramento-based social-justice writer Sasha Abramsky, “about the forces tearing at America’s twenty-first-century fabric. It is about a country that, pushed to the emotional and political limits by Trump, by COVID, and by the endless misinformation and echo chambers of social media, has found itself on the edge of a precipice, with political violence normalized and with wild conspiracy theories too often framing public discussions.”

Abramsky, a correspondent for The Nation, wonders whether the “corrosive forces” of “the nativism and the xenophobia, the distrust of sexual and cultural and racial minorities” will “burn out in the face of growing public unease—and even repugnance—at all that is lost when extremists seize the helm.” 

He's convinced that “it is in local communities throughout America, in ordinary places such as Sequim, Washington, and Shasta County, California, that this challenge will be met….” Both areas are explored in depth in “Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America” ($30 in hardcover from Bold Type Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

He begins with the COVID crisis in Sequim (“pronounced ‘Squim’”) “a town of 8,000 residents on the Olympic Peninsula,” which becomes a center of anti-vax sentiment--to the consternation of public health officer Dr. Allison Berry, “scared of white supremacists and misogynists who want me dead.”

In Shasta County, “public health officer Karen Ramstrom, along with her supporters in county government, were facing a similar set of terrors.” The stresses of the pandemic, Abramsky notes, forced people to the extremes. If health officials erred in inconsistent masking mandates, some of those who were infuriated found a home in a Republican Party “larded with violent rhetoric.”

Some Shasta County supervisors also pushed back on California’s open-carry gun ban and its mandated machine vote counts. “By 2023,” Abramsky writes, “there was an omnipresent background hum of extremism and a growing presence both of disinformation and of paranoia in everyday life.” Yet by the end of 2023 Abramsky finds hopeful signs both in Sequim and Shasta County. 

It’s a complex and nuanced story, a plea for a measured response when “chaos comes calling.”

“Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts”

British author Oliver Burkeman (oliverburkeman.com) invites readers dogged by perfectionism and proliferating to-dos to join him on a mind retreat. Enter “Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts” ($27 in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; also for Amazon Kindle).

Each week’s theme (“Being Finite”; “Taking Action”; “Letting Go”; and “Showing Up”) explores what he calls “imperfectionism,” a realization that “the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality.”

Instead, accepting our limitations “is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.”

Burkeman draws on insights from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual writers of various traditions to open a door to what theorist Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance,” the world’s “capacity to touch, move and absorb us” when we recognize we are not, and can’t ever be, in total control of it.

He suggests some practical considerations, always recognizing they are not absolutes; we do indeed need to exert some control over our environment and sometimes must to do that pressing to-do. But if you can, he writes, “treat your to-do list as a menu”: “It’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plough through, but as options you get to pick.”

And this for people-pleasers: “It’s a fool’s errand … to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.” Be careful about worrying that others are thinking bad things about you; likely they’re not thinking of you at all. Novelist Leila Sales writes that “when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”

“This, here and now, is real life. This is it.” Choose from the day’s menu, and go for it, even if imperfectly.

“Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation On Race And The Meanings And Myths Of ‘Latino’”

“Like ‘mutant,’ ‘Vulcan,’ or ‘Wookiee,’” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar, “’Latino’ and ‘Latinx’ and ‘Hispanic’ are the made-up words of storytellers describing a group of people engaged in an adventure. Latino people are brown, Black, white, and Indigenous, and they are European, Asian, and African. Some of us speak excellent Spanish, but many more of us do not.” 

Still, there are historical ties: “This diverse group of people is joined together by shared roots in the upheavals and the crises set in motion by the building of the United States into a global superpower, and, further back in time, by the Spanish Crown’s attempt to build an empire in the Western Hemisphere.”

Tobar (hectortobar.com) is a Professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine and the author of “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation On Race And The Meanings And Myths Of ‘Latino’” ($18.99 in paperback from Picador; also for Amazon Kindle), the 2024-2025 “Book In Common.”

Book discussions are scheduled throughout the academic year at Chico State (www.csuchico.edu/bic), Butte College, and in the community. The website notes that “Latinx students make up 37% of Chico State’s student body and over 30% of Butte College’s students identify as Latinx. Both of our campuses are Hispanic Serving Institutions” with the emphasis on “servingness.”

Tobar’s compelling prose blends the complexities of history, and his students’ experiences, with his own narrative including visits to his ancestral homeland, Guatemala, where he was conceived, and Los Angeles, where he was born, and where in 1967 a white supremacist moved next door. Later, James Earl Ray would become Martin Luther King Jr’s assassin.

Paradoxically, “The people now known as Latino seem to be perpetually on the brink of being the next group assimilated into whiteness (following the Jews, Italians, and other groups), only to be racialized as a dark other.” Though “race” is a biological myth, “We know race shapes how people see us, that it is a category into which our bodies and our histories are supposed to belong.” 

For Tobar, the question “Who am I?” would take an entire book to answer. This is that book.

“Don’t Pity The Desperate”

Anna B. Moore (annabmoore.com), who teaches writing and literature at Chico State, dedicates her debut novel “To teenagers: glorious, brilliant, devastating. We fail you. We forget. I’m sorry.”

It’s the 1980s and high school junior Myra, drug of choice alcohol, on Elavil for depression, secretly and compulsively pulling out her hair, is put into a rehab center by her father, Keen. It’s called OPP, “Our Primary Purpose,” located in Iowa City, Iowa with its program based on the “Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book.” 

“Don’t Pity The Desperate” ($17.95 in paperback from Unsolicited Press) searingly and with keen observation enters deeply into Myra’s consciousness on her sixty day journey at OPP (that’s when the insurance runs out). The brutal honesty demanded of those in group sessions called Community fracture her self-understanding.

“Why had so many awful things happened to all of them? Myra did not feel like a kid, an adolescent, a young person. None of them did. They felt bruised, marred, wise with age, as if they had been living through the hardest parts of their lives.” As Counselor Rachel says: “Addicts’ lives can go three ways … Jail, insanity, or death.”

Moore takes readers into the unspoken world that shapes Myra’s response to OPP’s rules, especially “No Contact if counselors discovered your relationship with another patient or if they thought your friendship was destructive.” She is separated from Charlie, the boy she thinks loves her and who violates his “No Sex” contract. 

Though Myra gets drunk on a day pass home, is called to account as no way to deal with the death of her mother in a car accident, she is also asked to choose a Higher Power to aid in her recovery. Myra begins to “fake it till she makes it,” praying “for love to help her: to take away her obsessions, her worry, her fear.”

But this is not a story of easy redemption; far from it. In a teenage world of speed, cocaine, heroin, beer, glue, downers and Jim Beam, sobriety comes an hour at a time. Would the Higher Power help? 

Just know this: At one point Myra hugs a counselor; her name, it turns out, is Grace.

Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Send review requests to dbarnett99@me.com. Columns archived at https://barnetto.substack.com

“Vintage Birds: A Guidebook And Matching Game”

“Watching a woodpecker drum on a tree,” writes Chico ornithologist Roger Lederer, “or a flock of waterfowl cackling overhead, we can immerse ourselves in the present moment. … For over fifty years I have led birdwatching walks, and I still revel in seeing the excitement in the eyes of amateurs and professionals … when they spot or hear a bird doing something they have not seen or heard it doing before. It happens on every trip.”

Enter nineteenth-century artists John and Elizabeth Gould. From 1830-1881 the Goulds, and other artists, published “3,100 unique images … many being the first illustrations of previously unknown species.” The Goulds focused on birds of Britain, Europe, Australia, Asia, New Guinea, even the Himalayas, rivaling in artistry the work of American John James Audubon.

Lederer has gathered twenty-five of the most stunning images from the Goulds’ publications into “Vintage Birds: A Guidebook And Matching Game” ($29.95, boxed, including the guidebook and fifty cards, from Hardie Grant Books). The game is simple; cards are spread out on a flat surface, face down, and players take turns turning over a pair, hoping to find and remember the matches, each with one of the vintage illustrations.

The guidebook introduces the Goulds, discusses “what makes a bird?” (including what to feed them), provides rules to the game, and then, in glorious full color, tells the story of each of the birds, mostly from territories outside North America. The images on the cards match chapters in the guidebook and Lederer envisions players saying something about each bird image revealed.

The male plumage of Pink Cockatoo from Central Australia “is soft-textured white and salmon-colored with white, red, and yellow erectile crest and orangish underwings.” The Eurasian Hoopoe’s “common name is derived from its ‘oop, oop, oop’ call” as is its scientific name, Upupa epops.

The Snowy Owl nests “on the treeless tundra above the Arctic Circle … the heaviest of all North American owls” weighing up to 6.5 pounds. The male Lesser Florican on the Indian subcontinent may jump almost ten feet six hundred times a day to attract a female (who “responds by whistling”).

Readers will whistle as well at these extraordinary vintage birds.

“The Fran Lebowitz Reader”

Raconteur Fran Lebowitz notes that “success didn’t spoil me, I’ve always been insufferable.” Perhaps best known for her first books, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies,” the New York-based wisecracking sarcasm-machine was the subject of a 2021 Netflix limited documentary series, “Pretend It’s A City,” directed by Martin Scorsese.

Both books, which skewer all things New York but don’t stop there, are brought together in “The Fran Lebowitz Reader” ($18 in paperback from Vintage; also for Amazon Kindle and in audiobook format read by the author).

“The first pieces in this volume,” she notes, “were written in my early twenties—the last, in my early thirties.” In the 1970s and 80s, when the book’s dozens of short chapters were written, the internet wasn’t a thing and phones still had cords. The discerning reader will note that what was then considered fair game for a humorist may not be politically correct today—but, come to think of it, Lebowitz would wear that charge with distinction.

Groups of people are not for her. “… my two greatest needs and desires—smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge—are basically solitary pursuits.”

She’s not totally anti-social. “My favorite way to wake up,” she writes, “is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.”

Lebowitz is a dispenser of advice and observation, called for or not.

“So you want to be the Pope? … Women interested in this job should be warned of the almost insurmountable odds against them.” “Sleep is a genetic rather than an acquired trait. If your parents were sleepers, chances are that you will be too. … Sleep is death without the responsibility.” “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”

Lebowitz “off the cuff” will be appearing at Chico State’s Laxson Auditorium on Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. Ticket prices range from $55-$69; Chico State students and those under age 17, $17. Details at chicoperformances.com.

“Tías And Primas: On Knowing And Loving The Women Who Raise Us”

“I come from women,” writes Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, “who protected any sense of dignity they had left with elbow grease and determination. This world prioritizes the men in their lives more than them at every turn. What all this translates to is that the women I love were often very judgmental.”

An immigrant to the U.S., Nicaraguan-born, the author “was raised in Latine neighborhoods until I moved away from Miami to Nashville, Tennessee … to attend Vanderbilt University and pursue my master of divinity degree…. My childhood household was very traditional and conservative, based on a patriarchal family structure in which men lead and women follow…. I am a non-white, non-Black Latina and identify as brown.”

Her new book is a compelling meditation on “Tías And Primas: On Knowing And Loving The Women Who Raise Us” ($30 in hardcover from Seal Press, also for Amazon Kindle, to be published September 10)—but not just aunts and cousins; there are matriarchs and best friends as well, all presented in the book as an “amalgamation of many people to create these specific archetypes,” sensitively illustrated by Josie Del Castillo.

These include Latinas who are pushed to be perfect, widowed and divorced aunts, the cousin who doesn’t like other women, the queer aunt, the aunt who is “scandalous,” and more. “I am writing this to rip these tías and primas from the clutches of sexism, homophobia, fatphobia, colonization, stigmatization of mental illnesses, male gaze, and rape culture.”

And “I write,” she says, “to help others feel seen…. I am all of the women in this book, in one way or another. They represent my inner fears, my deepest struggles, my best qualities, and my demons…. As I heal, I find myself writing about the women in my life. May it do for you whatever it needs to do.”

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez will be speaking on “Self Preservation for First Generation College Students” Thursday, September 19 at 11:00 am at the Butte College Black Box Theater (ARTS 160). The talk is free and open to the public. For more information contact Amy Antongiovanni (Antongiovanniam@butte.edu) and see butte.edu/diversity.