The Great Humbling S6E2: Remember, Remember!

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,Gunpowder, treason and plot.I see no reasonWhy gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot.

This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament.

While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices, starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?”

And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation:

We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are.

(from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’)

Shownotes

* The last(?) interview with John Berger, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

* “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.”

* Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’.

* Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project.

* There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak.

* American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka.

* Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow.

* Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski.

* The Plant Pamphlets by Mark Watson.

* Read Charlotte Du Cann’s Introduction to the book.

* Dougald’s letter from three days after the 2016 US election: ‘When the Maps Run Out’.

* R. G. Miga’s ‘Hunter’s Ghost: On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness’

* “Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start.”

* Also from R. G. Miga, this note: “why do people still despise the Democratic Party—every single Democratic presidential candidate for the past eight years, including the old white guy—more than a meandering country club owner with Borderline Personality Disorder? If the Democratic Party still can’t acknowledge its own weaknesses and make a positive case for its policies, rather than constantly leaning on moral superiority—it’s doomed, with or without Trump.’”

* Jamie Kelsey Fry and James Robertson talking about Citizens Assemblies.

* Vanessa Chamberlin’s vision asks us: “What if we step towards the cracks?”

* Adam Wilson’s latest post: “What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?”

* Ed brings us to a close by referencing William Stafford’s poem, ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Other’.

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