Ranking the U.S. State Flags: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I’ve always been intrigued by symbols and the things they convey. I’m also fascinated by flag designs — and what are flags but really big symbols of ideas that organizations, communities, and nations want to wordlessly convey?

There’s actually a field dedicated to the study of flags: vexillology. That word is a hybrid of the Greek suffix -logia, meaning “study,” and the Latin word vexillum, which refers to a type of military standard carried in the ranks of the Roman military: Think of a banner hanging from a horizontal post.

There’s even an organization dedicated to the study of flags: The North American Vexillological Association, or NAVA. And yeah, the people in this group are every bit as nerdy as I am about this stuff. One of their members has even put together a list of guidelines for what constitutes good flag design, and I think they’re pretty good rules of thumb, especially in light of how many flags violate some or all of these rules and, well, don’t look very good. Here they are:

1. Keep it simple. Could a child draw the flag without any trouble? Then you probably have a good design.  

 

2. Use meaningful symbols. Quite simply, make sure your flag clearly relates to what it’s intended to represent.  

 

3. Use only two or three colors. In general, pick standard colors and make sure they contrast in a pleasing way. 

 

4. No letters, numbers, or seals. It’s a flag, not a billboard. 

 

5. Be distinct or be related. Don’t copy other designs, but also don’t hesitate to suggest connections if there are any.

These make intuitive sense to me. As middle-aged straight white dudes go, I seem to have an eye for good design. It’s long been the running joke in our family that I’m the one in the house with an eye for colors and patterns and symmetry. I’ll bet I could scratch out a living as an interior designer if push ever came to shove.

This eye for design extends, I think, to flags. I love a well-designed flag — the way the colors work together, the way the symbols express meaning without saying a word, and so on. And I’ve always been interested in how flags can stir up such powerful emotions in so many people. Think of how Americans revere the Stars and Stripes, sometimes to the point of near worship. Or, conversely, think of the visceral reaction people have to the Nazi flag. Aesthetically speaking, it’s actually not an offensive flag, but it’s the hatred and violence associated with it that makes a lot of people understandably recoil in its sight. Jung did extensive work into examining the power that symbols possess for humans; they seem to tap into something very deep and instinctual within us by bypassing words and the logical mind. And I think the strong emotions flags stir up in people suggest that Jung was correct in his observations. 

Personally, I’m quite fond of the symbolism of the Cascadia flag. It’s meant to signify a bioregion that encompasses the northwestern United States and parts of Canada, united not by political borders but by natural boundaries like mountain ranges and waterways. It’s a tricolor flag, with its white stripe symbolizing clouds and snow-capped peaks, green symbolizing the lush grasses and abundant trees, and blue symbolizing the clear skies and sparkling bodies of water. Overlapping all of them is the silhouette of a Douglas fir, representing the power, steadfastness, and resilience of nature. I’ve loved the Doug flag, as it’s called, from the moment I saw it, and I fly one from our porch every day.

I also took the initiative to design a flag for a micronation. If you’re unfamiliar, micronations are sort of vanity secession projects, whereby people declare independence from the nation or state they’re living in. They’re usually done tongue in cheek, just for fun or for a way to make a political statement, though there have been some actual separatist micronation movements over the years. Anyway, my flag looks like this:

Similar to the Cascadia flag, I intended for the green to symbolize the natural world and the “green” ecological movement; and the blue to symbolize the sky and the water, but also individual liberty (commonly associated with blue) and the heavens above (in a mystical sense). The white disc is the moon, a traditional symbol of the sacred feminine, which has always been an important part of my spiritual life. Finally, the diagonal line represents both the hill directly behind our house and the hills that surround our valley in general. But it’s also a nod to the family of anarchist flags, all of which feature a diagonal line that splits them into two colors: black for anarchism, and the second color for whatever particular “flavor” of anarchism we’re talking about. And to be clear, yes, I am sympathetic to anarchism, and no, anarchism probably isn’t quite what you think it is. More on that another time.

Anyway, with Independence Day coming up, one of those days when Americans love to wave their Stars and Stripes, I thought it would be a fun time to take a look at some flags that don’t always get a lot of love, standing as they do in the perpetual shadow of Old Glory: our 50 state flags. I’ll admit that, from a design point of view, a whole lot of them are ugly. But there are some gems, too, that I think will make the exercise an enjoyable one. We were talking in our house about working up a homeschooling assignment that involved the 50 state flags, and that’s what initially prompted me to take a closer look at them.

So let’s jump in.

50. Minnesota

Minnesota’s flag suffers from the same problem that more than half of America’s state flags do. It’s what vexillologists disparagingly call a “seal on a bedsheet” — in other words, a state seal or coat of arms on a solid-colored background. If flags should be recognizable from a distance, putting a state seal on a flag defeats that purpose, since these seals usually have very fine details that you can’t see unless you’re right on top of the flag. Moreover, when so many states have taken the same approach to their flags, with seals on backgrounds that are mostly solid blue, you end up with one state flag that looks indistinguishable from another.

This flag happens to be a lighter shade of blue than many of the other seal-on-a-bedsheet state flags, so at least it stands out slightly in that regard. But what puts it at the bottom of the list for me is that it’s just way too cluttered. Your eye has no idea where to go. The dots circling the outer ring of the seal are an unnecessary adornment, and then the little stars that protrude out from the dots, forming the points of a larger unseen star, confuse matters even further. That blue ring inside the dots contains a floral motif that further messes up the view, and it doesn’t help that the seal itself is far too busy. I see a sunrise, mountains, trees, plains, water, an Indian on horseback, and a farmer tilling the ground. That’s just too much.

As far as the NAVA’s suggestion of two to three colors goes? I see a minimum of six here: green, blue, white, orange, red, and brown.

From a distance, the whole thing in the center of the flag actually looks like either a life preserver or a bowl of soup. Just zoom out on the picture to see what I mean. Not good.

And then there’s the writing, which unfortunately affects the majority of state flags. There’s a motto, the name of the state, and no less than three dates — 1819, 1858, and 1893.

The thing that designs like this get wrong is a failure to understand that a flag is not a sign. It’s meant to be a collection of symbols that communicate something about the place it represents, something that has the potential to convey meaning to even someone who knows nothing about that place. And Minnesota’s flag tells me absolutely nothing about Minnesota. Scores of state flags include pictures of natural landscapes, farming, commerce, and the like on their seals. After a while, they all start to blur together and look the same. Minnesota’s flag, accordingly, just gets lost in a sea of sameness.

So how could Minnesota try to stand out? Here’s one idea: Given the state’s Scandinavian heritage, it could easily riff on the Nordic crosses seen on the flags of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.

For better or worse, though, that’s not likely to happen. The Minnesota legislature is considering a replacement for the state flag, so that’s good news. The potential problematic news, from a design perspective, is that any proposed new flag has to represent the state’s “diverse cultural communities,” while “symbols, emblems, or likenesses that represent only a single community” will be prohibited. That the legislature doesn’t appear to want any kind of single unifying symbol to bring the people of the state together sets up any design committee with the monumental, and potentially impossible, task of jamming in so many elements that the state could well end up with just as big of a cluttered mess as it has now. The hideous-looking pride flag, on which everyone in seeming perpetuity gets to add yet another dizzying stripe or a clashing color, comes immediately to mind.

49. Nebraska

All you need to know about the awfulness of this flag design is that it once flew upside-down over the state capitol for 10 days and no one noticed. It’s literally just the state seal, two-toned — yellow and white — on a blue background. The design is indistinguishable from a distance (and not much better close up) and obviously conveys nothing unique about the state. The seal depicts a man hammering an anvil, a frontier cabin by the water, bundles of wheat, a steamboat, and a train in the shadow of distant mountains. That could just as easily be a scene of Minnesota, or practically any other state.

48. Kansas

The Kansas flag reminds me of one of those old Geocities pages where the person who put it together centered every element and called it good enough. At the top you have a sunflower. Under it, there’s another state seal, once again depicting mountains, farmland, and water — but this time, you also get a few covered wagons and a couple of Indians chasing down some bison. And under the seal, in a blocky all-caps typeface, is the word KANSAS.

Remember, you want to avoid putting words on flags. In this case, if you have to shout the name of your state on your flag, that’s a pretty good indication that your design has failed to tell anyone anything about your state. The identity of your state should go without saying — literally — solely from the symbols you employ.

For example, Kansas is known for its sunflowers, so why not simply put a sunflower on the flag? That’s what the state banner does, and it conveys more about the character of Kansas than the state flag ever will.

The Kansas state banner, according to Wikipedia.

47. Montana

Same thing as with Kansas: We get the state name in all caps, and a state seal that could be depicting a landscape from practically anywhere in the nation. It only edges out Kansas because at least Montana didn’t try to squeeze in a third prominent design element, like a cow or something.

46. Wisconsin

Not only does Wisconsin’s flag shout the state’s name, but it also shouts the date the state was admitted to the union. I placed it above Montana only because the use of the coat of arms instead of the state seal at least gives us something besides another vague landscape scene to look at — but there are still far too many design elements happening, none of which could ever be seen clearly at a distance. 

It is kind of cool that there’s a badger hanging out on top of the coat of arms, though. Maybe the badger should be the only thing on the flag. Barring that, how about a wedge of cheese or a mug of beer? (Just kidding, but barely.)

45. Idaho

The flag of my state is just bad. Not only does it feature another way-too-busy state seal, but it displays the name of the state twice. And the seal itself isn’t content to give us one landscape scene — it offers us a second one, in a shield at the center of the image.

The one redeeming quality is that the woman in the seal, representing liberty and justice, holds aloft a Phrygian cap, an ancient symbol of liberty that was strongly associated with both the American and French revolutions. The cap appears on a few other state flags, and in those cases it’s pretty much the only redeeming quality too.

Surely Idaho can improve on this flag. I realize that most people associate Idaho with potatoes, but if we ever got a flag redesign, I’d like to think we could do better than going from a nondescript state seal to a lowly spud. There must be a happy medium somewhere.

44. Illinois

There’s a lot of federal imagery here, on what is Illinois’ state seal. But that’s not the problem so much as how shockingly amateurish the entire design is. It seriously looks like a child drew it.

43. Delaware

Delaware is really only known for three things: giving us Joe Biden, functioning as a tax haven for businesses, and being the first state to ratify the Constitution. So I suppose it’s not surprising that it would want to boast the date of its ratification on its flag, even if it’s not really the place to do so.

The drab colors are supposed to mimic George Washington’s uniform, which I guess is a noble gesture, but I’m not so sure they make the best flag colors. Within the coat of arms (yes, another one), the farmer and the soldier appear to be looking rather confusedly at each other, while an ear of corn and a sheaf of wheat float on a shield between them. But I can’t help noticing the blue, white, and green stripes below that. It’s as if someone took the Cascadia flag and replaced the Douglas fir with a cow. I sort of like that, in a humorous way. But who associates cows with Delaware?

42. New Jersey

It’s partly the color scheme that lands this one so low. Is the field beige? Yellow? Either way, it’s not pleasant to look at. The flag does score a few points for the Phrygian cap being held aloft by the woman on the left, and the inclusion of the horse’s head is weird and random enough to make you wonder whether this is supposed to be the emblem of a state, a family crest, or a sign that the knight is the favorite piece among New Jersey chess players. 

Other than that, why put three plows on the shield? Just one would have gotten the agricultural message across just fine.

41. New York

There’s something strangely endearing about the aggressively imperialist vibe this flag throws off. I think it’s mainly the eagle menacingly perched atop the globe, suggestive of America’s seemingly insatiable desire to rule and control the world. But even the prominent placement of the two robed women standing regally on either side of the shield makes this feel like an image you could have seen in ancient Rome. Meanwhile, we have another Phrygian cap, which is a plus, held by a woman who also has her foot on a crown, symbolic of throwing off the British monarchy.

So, essentially, you have a flag whose images represent American liberty, independence, and victory over tyranny, while simultaneously expressing a national desire to go out and dominate the planet, just like the empire we freed ourselves from.

Only in New York.      

40. Pennsylvania

As the seals-on-bedsheets go, the horses at least make this flag visually distinct from the rest. The shield between the horses, though, depicts just more interchangeable images of agriculture and seafaring. And the eagle seems altogether unnecessary. One wonders why Pennsylvania wouldn’t put the instantly recognizable keystone on its flag, instead of a coat of arms that tells you nothing about the state’s character.

Something like this. (Not my design, though.)

39. West Virginia

The blue border makes it look like someone tried to frame the flag, which is kind of odd. We get yet another uninteresting coat of arms here, though the Phrygian cap lying atop two crossed rifles is a unique touch. But overall, the flag is too busy and the details are too small. The whole thing sort of reminds me of the kind of drawing you’d find on a cigar band.

38. Virginia

Virginia’s flag wins points simply for being so badass: Virtue, personified and bare-breasted, holding a sword and spear, stands atop the vanquished dead body of a king, his crown cast aside. Below them both is the motto “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” or “thus ever to tyrants.” The design isn’t all that hot, but the sentiment captures everything great about both the American Revolution and the ideals of the spirit of liberty the nation was founded upon.

37. Vermont

There’s not much difference between the flags of Vermont and Maine, listed next. Here we get another coat of arms, and the simplicity of this one is a bit of a welcome change. Remove the deer head, the cow, and the wheat bales, and you’d be left with a nice, uncluttered image of a single pine tree standing tall and proud against a mountainous backdrop — kind of like the Cascadia flag. All the same, it really doesn’t convey anything special about the state.

An alternative flag associated with Vermont is that of the Green Mountain Boys, currently used by the Vermont National Guard and also tied to a group that wants to see Vermont secede from the United States and return to being its own country, as it was from 1777 to 1791. It’s not actually known what the Green Mountain Boys’ flag looked like, aside from the canton of stars that still exists from an original flag. The re-creation is therefore a fanciful best guess, but it sure looks better than Vermont’s current flag. If the state ever wanted to revisit its flag design, it could do far worse than to adopt the Green Mountain Boys’ flag.

Not sure why the stars are so haphazardly sized and distributed.

36. Maine

When you think of Maine, you probably think of remote, cold forests. At least I do. So having an evergreen — with a moose resting under it, no less — front and center in the coat of arms at least makes a little bit of sense here.

The farmer and the seafarer are kind of pointless and non-specific to Maine, but they sort of work as part of the overall design, which is very much of its time — the flag was adopted in 1909, and it looks like it. Just look at the old-timey typeface used for the word “Maine” on the woodcut-style blue banner. Between that and the jaunty placement of the word “Dirigo” (Latin for “I lead”) on the red ribbon up top, just below the shining star, it almost looks like a label design you might see on something like an old box of borax or a sardine can. Or maybe it just makes me think of Barilla pasta. Dirigo elbow macaroni, BOGO today at your Caribou IGA!

35. Michigan

I admit to being a bit of a homer for this flag, even as objectively awful as it is. Being a Michigan native, I grew up seeing this flag everywhere. Like the Pennsylvania flag, it stands out a bit from the rest of the Bedsheet Bunch with the use of animals flanking the inner shield. 

The elk and the moose look like they’re rearing up to check out the eagle, and the white double banner raised in a curve looks like a toothy smile from a distance. It’s a completely goofy design, with too many things to look at — and there is way too much text on it. Three different Latin phrases, to be exact.

There’s no movement in Michigan to change the state flag, but I did find a design proposal someone had made online to make the flag look like this:

The two stars represent Michigan’s two peninsulas, and the five stripes represent the five Great Lakes, four of which touch Michigan. I think it’s a brilliant design, even though nothing will probably ever come of it.

34. New Hampshire

The one thing this state-seal flag has going for it is that I would be able to tell from a distance that there’s a boat on it. It’s not crowded with a bunch of extraneous images. I would also know that the boat image is probably connected with the harbor at Portsmouth, which it indeed is. It’s still not a great flag, but it’s better than a lot of its bedsheet peers.

33. Kentucky

It’s another state seal, but at least it’s not so busy. It’s simple and to the point: A pioneer and a statesman shake hands amid the motto “United we stand, divided we fall.” Not great, but not awful.

32. Connecticut

The design element here is pretty distinct, which is a positive. The shield puts me in the mind of the old U.S. highway signs, and the grapevines offer a rare splash of purple, a color you’ll almost never see on a flag. 

See what I mean?

The only odd thing is that from a distance, the alignment of the grapevines sort of looks like a face — two eyes and a kind of meh-shaped mouth. Zoom out and you’ll see it. You don’t want “meh” on your flag. Easy fix, though: Use one grapevine instead of three, and make it bigger. 

Because why not?

31. Massachusetts

Points for originality and comparative simplicity, but I’m not sure it tells me much about the state. The shield depicts an Indian, arrow pointed down in an apparent gesture of peace or surrender, as he stands next to a single star. Above his head, a disembodied arm wielding a sword appears out of nowhere, seemingly ready to strike — but strike whom, exactly? The hapless Indian? What did he do, other than lose his land?

Maybe it’s because the image is on a white background, but it seems as if there’s a lot of wasted space on this flag. I’m not a fan.

30. South Dakota

I don’t hate this flag, in spite of some really ugly design choices, including a monochrome state seal whose details are nearly impossible to make out unless you’re right on top of it. It also prominently features the state nickname — something better left for license plates than flags, really — and, like Idaho, it names the state twice. 

But there’s a decent flag lurking in here, under the design mistakes. In particular, there’s something appealing about the sunburst that rings the seal, and the lighter shade of blue helps it stand in contrast to a lot of bedsheets on this list.

Maybe it’s the fact that it reminds me of the flag of Palau, one of my favorite country flags. I’m not sure.

Of course, it would make far more sense for South Dakota to simply start over and design a flag based on the faces on Mount Rushmore. If that’s what everyone knows you for, then run with it.

29. Missouri

It’s basically the Dutch tricolor with the Missouri state seal in the center. There’s way too much crammed into the seal to be able to see any of the details from even a reasonable distance. Take all of that out and leave the outer ring of stars, and you’d actually have a nice-looking and fairly distinct flag.

Something like this, perhaps.

28. Hawaii

Vexillologists seem to be enamored of this flag. I don’t see the appeal. If a flag is meant to symbolically convey the spirit of the thing it represents, then how does a flag that looks either like a test pattern or Ernie’s shirt from Sesame Street communicate anything whatsoever about an island paradise?

You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

First off, there’s absolutely no reason to have the Union Jack in the canton, as Hawaii was never part of the British empire. It’s only there because King Kamehameha held pro-British sentiments during his reign. And notice, too, that the colors of the Ernie-shirt stripes don’t even line up with the corresponding colors of the Union Jack. 

It’s all a big, disjointed mess.

The eight stripes are said to represent the eight main islands in the Hawaiian archipelago. At a bare minimum, the flag would be improved by removing the canton and just using the stripes. It would still be an unappealing flag, but at least it would be less unappealing than it is now. But it’s so easy to imagine something far better — some kind of attractive visual symbol that would evoke sunshine or ocean waves, for instance. The flag of Kiribati provides a good example of what could be done here. Hawaii could take its eight stripes and turn them into ocean waves!

27. Nevada

The silver star represents the Silver State, and the garland is made of sagebrush, the state flower. The arched banner above the star reads “Battle Born,” signifying Nevada’s entry into the union during the height of the Civil War. Despite the lettering, it’s a great, rugged, Western design. I only wonder why it’s stuck up in the canton, leaving the rest of the flag completely blank. If it were enlarged and centered to make it more prominent, the flag would rank much higher on this list.

26. Washington

It’s kind of sad that a flag wins points just for not being blue. But part of the appeal of the flag of the Evergreen State is indeed that it’s, well, green.

Still, let’s be honest: The state could do a lot better than just putting George Washington’s face on there. Not only does the combination of his face and the color scheme make the flag vaguely resemble a dollar bill, but our first president never even set foot in the state.

My love of the Cascadia flag stems in large part from its connection to the Northwest and its striking symbolic imagery that captures the natural beauty of this part of the country. Washington, which is part of Cascadia, is a beautiful state. I lived there for nine years. Why not try to capture that beauty in its flag, rather than just putting a dead president on there and calling it a day?

Bradley Lockhart, a resident of the city of Bellingham, is trying to do just that. He designed an attractive flag for his city that’s become quite popular there, and now he’s taken his creativity one step further in proposing a new state flag that, like the Cascadia flag, incorporates blue, green, and white for the sky, waterways, grass, trees, and snow-capped mountains. But instead of placing a Douglas fir front and center as the Cascadia flag does, Lockhart used stylized images of mountain peaks that flatten out as the design moves from left to right, emblematic of the flatlands that characterize Washington’s terrain once you cross the Cascade Range. It’s a simple yet brilliant design. I can only hope someone in Olympia is paying attention.

Looks good to me!

25. North Dakota

Even though the design on this flag is nearly identical to the Great Seal of the United States, and therefore says next to nothing about North Dakota itself, it has a somewhat appealing look that evokes the Americana of the time period it was designed in — 1911, to be exact. To its credit, North Dakota at least tried something different and used something other than its own state seal, as so many states have done.

24. Louisiana

This is quite an interesting flag. Pelicans have been associated with Louisiana from the time it was a territory. On the flag you’ll see three drops of blood on the pelican feeding her young, symbolic of a legend that says a mother pelican will draw blood from herself to give to her offspring in the absence of other food. The legend is said to suggest both sacrifice for the greater good and the bloodshed of Christ for humanity. (Bear in mind that Louisiana is a heavily Catholic place.)

It's also said that the pelican is posed on the flag to mimic the shape of the fleur-de-lis. So this flag is overall very Louisiana-centric. That’s nice to see.

23. Oregon

Yes, this flag, with its abundance of lettering and numbering and its inclusion of a monochrome state seal, breaks a lot of rules for good flag design. But I like it in spite of its shortcomings. There’s something about the old-time, rustic feel of the typeface that’s appealing, along with the graceful arching of the “STATE OF OREGON” lettering.

But the other thing I like about it is that the flag has a different design on the reverse — the only U.S. state flag to do so. On the back, there’s just a little old beaver, hanging out and minding its own business.

If Oregon’s flag were just the beaver in its bucktoothed simplicity, it would be one of the best state flags in the United States.

But even this would be a pleasant compromise:

22. Florida

This is basically Alabama’s flag with Florida’s state seal in the center. It seems that the flag originally consisted of just the seal on a white sheet. Then Floridians approved the addition of the St. Andrew’s Cross, possibly in a nod to the Cross of Burgundy that would have flown over Florida when it was under Spanish rule.

The Burgundy Cross.

 As flag designs go, there are many worse ones out there, but the seal needs to go. A change to the design in 1985 actually made the seal look busier and more cluttered than it was before — in short, it was not an improvement. 

The pre-1985 state flag, with a less cluttered seal.

Of course, if you take away the seal, it’s just Alabama’s flag.

All things considered, I think Florida needs to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. Surely Floridians can look around their scenic state and come up with something that symbolizes its uniqueness and beauty. Heck, strike a deal with Disney and put some mouse ears on there.

21. Arkansas

It’s an OK flag. The prominent diamond shape symbolizes Arkansas’ status as America’s largest source of diamonds.

Other than that, it’s hard to ignore that there are a heck of a lot of stars on this flag. The 25 white stars in the blue border signify Arkansas’ status as the 25th state to join the union, and the four larger stars in the white field represent the four nations that have ruled over the state: France, Spain, the United States, and the Confederacy. Not sure you really want to draw attention to the whole Confederacy thing, but I suppose from a historical point of view, it is what it is.

In any event, dropping the name from the flag would improve it immensely.

20. North Carolina

The simplicity of the single red, white, and blue bars makes this design attractive. But it loses points for all the wordiness on the hoist side. Two dates and a big “N” and “C” — none of that really needs to be there. Of course, if you take those away, it’s just the Texas flag with the red and white flipped around. Overall, not a bad flag at all.

19. Oklahoma

I really like the American Indian imagery here. The olive branch crossing the peace pipe symbolizes the union of the native and European people. It is, of course, a bit of a convenient lie to suggest that the Indians wanted the union with the white invaders in the first place, and we all know that the natives got the short end of the stick. But putting politics aside and speaking just from a design point of view, it’s nicely done. Taking off the name of the state — which would just mean reverting to the flag as it looked up till 1941 — would improve it tremendously.

The old, wordless flag. Much better.

18. California

In many ways, this is a good flag design. It’s simple and uncluttered, it has specific and identifiable imagery, and it can be seen clearly from a distance. What’s peculiar about it is that the design is taken from a flag created during a 19th-century revolt against Mexican rule that lasted all of three weeks. In other words, it represents a blip in California’s history.

Also, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think of bears when I think of California. I think of the Gold Rush, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Death Valley, and Spike, Snoopy’s mustachioed brother, talking to cactuses down in Needles. Putting a giant redwood on a golden background, for example, would say far more about California than a bear does.

Of course, the red star and the word “Republic” conjure up uncomfortable images of all the authoritarian “people’s republics” that have long been a menace to human liberty. Given the way California’s going, maybe some of the symbolism on its flag is just a little bit too appropriate.

17. Georgia

Georgia’s state flags, to put it mildly, have been problematic for a long time. In 1956, state legislators succeeded in getting the Confederate battle flag placed on the design when it had never been there before, in a clear nod to their desire for continued racial segregation following the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Under increasing pressure, the state finally changed the flag in 2001, but it was a design disaster, with a mustard-yellow version of the state seal on a blue background, and a banner underneath it displaying five historical flags — including the controversial one the new flag had just replaced.

Yeah, that's just ugly.

Finally, Georgia came up with something a little more visually appealing in 2003. Its current flag has a mostly clean design, with one white stripe sandwiched between two red ones, and a blue canton featuring the state seal inside a ring of 13 stars. The seal doesn’t need to be there; it’s an indecipherable blob from a distance. Take that away, and you have a really nice-looking flag design.

The only problem is, if you take away the seal, you’re left with this…

…which is the national flag of the Confederate States of America.

That’s right. Georgia finally got rid of the Confederate battle flag, only to replace it with the Confederate national flag.

Politics aside, it’s a nice design. But it seems Georgia just can’t let go of its past.

16. Colorado

This one is usually a favorite of flag enthusiasts. It’s not bad, but I’m not a fan of the big “C,” and even less of a fan of the yellow ball (representing Colorado’s abundant sunshine) stuffed inside the negative space of the “C.” Maybe it says something about when I came of age, but all I can see when I look at this is Pac-Man swallowing a dot.

Waka-waka-waka!

For some reason, it also throws off vibes of a corporate logo from a bygone time. I could see that big “C” with blue and white pinstripes on a baseball jersey from the ’70s, for example.

I think it would at least look a little cleaner if the yellow ball disappeared.

Like this.

 15. Indiana

A torch of liberty and a circle of 19 stars, representing Indiana’s order of induction into the union. Simple, if not altogether striking. 

Growing up just north of the Indiana state line, I’m quite familiar with this flag, and I always thought it could use a little more contrast. The gold and the dark blue tend to blend together a bit. Either a lighter yellow or a lighter blue would help accentuate the design immensely, I think.

14. Iowa

Like North Dakota’s flag, the eagle design gives a nod to federal imagery more than it does to the state itself — yet I can’t help liking the fundamental turn-of-the-20th-century American-ness of it. The ribbon dangling from the eagle’s beak has a heck of a lot of words on it, but purely on an aesthetic level, it’s a striking design. It looks so nice that it almost doesn’t matter that you couldn’t make out the text from a distance. I also like the typeface chosen for the word “Iowa.” In short, it’s an attractive flag despite all the words on it.

The vertical tricolor also gives it a fresh uniqueness among American state flags. It’s basically the French flag, only with the white bar larger than the blue and red ones. That may or may not be a nod to Iowa’s past as part of the Louisiana Territory. Regardless, it’s a well-executed design.

13. Rhode Island

The clean simplicity of the design makes this a very attractive flag. The anchor tells us that Rhode Island is a coastal state, but it appears to have a deeper meaning as well. Combined with the word “Hope,” it’s said to refer to a passage in the Bible’s Letter to the Hebrews, which states, “Hope we have as an anchor of the soul.”

The only downside of the design is that the gold against white makes the whole thing look a little washed out.

12. South Carolina

This attractive design has its origins in the American Revolution. The crescent moon was taken from an insignia on the caps of South Carolina’s soldiers. It became known as the Moultrie flag, in honor of its creator, Col. William Moultree, who fought in a victorious defense of Sullivan’s Island against the British. The palmetto tree was added in 1861, also in a nod to the defense of the island, whose palmettos acted as a protective buffer against British cannon fire.

The flag did become a symbol of the Confederate cause for a while. But without any inflammatory imagery, that association faded over time, and today it’s rightfully seen as a simple and effective flag design for the state it represents.

11. Wyoming

Why does the state seal need to be there? It looks either like someone tried to postmark the bison or the USDA stamped it Grade A. Take that away, and you have a terrific flag that, in a single image, communicates the spirit of the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. Even with the regrettable seal, though, it’s still a great flag.

10. Alabama

As with Florida’s flag, the red St. Andrew’s Cross is probably symbolic of past Spanish rule, when the Cross of Burgundy would have flown over at least southern Alabama. Some have suggested that the design is a veiled nod to the Confederate Stars-and-Bars, though there doesn’t appear to be any solid evidence backing that claim.

9. Utah

I’m cheating a little bit here, as Utah’s brand-new state flag doesn’t come into official use until March 2024. But since it’s only a matter of time until it replaces the old flag, and considering it’s such a massive upgrade, I thought it was only fair to include it.

The old flag was yet another blue bedsheet, emblazoned with the state seal. It’s heavy with federal imagery, though with a shield in the center that reads “Industry” and features a beehive — long a symbol associated with team-minded hard work and progress in Utah. (It also has a strong association with the Mormons.)

The official Utah flag... for now.

That distinctive beehive survived, and rightly so, into the design of the new flag. Even more appropriately, the hive now sits on a hexagon, the shape of the cells in a honeycomb. The red at the bottom of the new flag is said to represent the state’s red canyon rock and, more cryptically, “perseverance.” (Sweating blood, maybe?) The blue skies and white mountain peaks are self-explanatory. It’s a really nice-looking design. Distinct, but not too busy. I’ve read a few complaints that the whole thing looks more like a corporate logo than it does a flag, and I guess I can appreciate that point of view. If Utah had an NHL team, I could easily imagine this design on the jerseys. I still like it, though.

Anyway, if people across the nation end up liking what Utah did with its flag, moving away from the bland sameness of all those seals on bedsheets, maybe it will encourage more states to give their flags a fresh look.

8. Mississippi

Remember how we talked about Georgia, and its seeming inability to break from the Confederate imagery of its past? Mississippi had the same problem, but it finally managed to do better.

From 1894 to 2020, Mississippi’s flag sported the Confederate battle flag in the canton. That design became problematic enough over time that the state legislature was finally able to rally sufficient support to begin work on a new flag. The result is what we have today — a fresh and attractive design, with a white magnolia, the state flower, front and center. The gold stripes act as a tasteful barrier between the red and blue vertical panels, and the ring of stars adds a nice accent to the flower. Even the text is kept to a minimum — you might not even notice the subtle “In God We Trust” at the bottom of the ring unless you were looking for it.

You did well, Mississippi. You did well.

7. Alaska

You’ve probably heard the story of how a young boy, an orphaned Alaska Native, designed the flag that would become not just the symbol of his state but also one of the most beloved and iconic of all American state flags.

The Big Dipper is part of the larger constellation Ursa Major, symbolic of the bears native to Alaska. And the Big Dipper is a visual aid for locating Polaris, the North Star — itself symbolic of America’s northernmost state.

Alaska couldn’t have asked for a better flag to capture its identity.

6. Arizona

Such a bright and vibrant design! The red and yellow stripes that double as sunbeams are a nod to Arizona’s Spanish influence; the Spanish flag is red and yellow. The copper color of the star symbolizes the state’s copper production. And the blue has been described both as symbolizing liberty and the waters of the Colorado River. The star and the rays also manage to communicate the relentless desert heat that’s so strongly associated with Arizona. 

I do think the copper clashes a little bit with the red and yellow, but that’s a minor quibble, and it doesn’t take away from the fact that this flag is a tremendous success in the way it communicates so much about a place using so few elements.

5. Ohio

Ohio’s flag is more like a pennant. Its unique shape alone makes it stand out from the crowd, and in a good way. Its red, white, and blue color scheme, complete with stars and stripes, makes it look like a stylized version of the American flag without simply being an uninspired copy of it. The 17 stars represent the order of Ohio’s induction into the union, and the circle they surround is meant both to represent the buckeye, a symbol of Ohio and its people, and a letter “O.” You wouldn’t even realize it’s supposed to be a letter because of the way it naturally blends into the design. Unlike the “C” on the Colorado flag that’s a bit on the nose and draws attention to itself, Ohio’s “O” is tastefully subtle.

Ohio’s flag always makes me think of all the patriotic bunting you see at baseball games and around the Fourth of July. It’s festive, attractive, one of a kind, and distinctly American.

4. Maryland

Maryland’s flag breaks all the rules of what constitutes a good flag design. But I suppose that just proves that rules are meant to be broken. This flag is so unusual, so internally clashing, so disorientingly garish, that it somehow actually manages to circle around from bad to good. It’s one of those things you just can’t look away from. There’s nothing else remotely like it, and it seems most Marylanders love it.

Half of the flag looks like a melting checkerboard, and the other half looks like a heraldic cross (which is actually what it is) that wouldn’t look out of place in a Renaissance festival. But these aren’t just random images. They come from the shield in the state’s coat of arms, and they in turn symbolize the reunion of the people of the state who had split over the Civil War. The checkerboard pattern, depicting Lord Baltimore’s coat of arms, became the symbol of pro-Union Marylanders; while the crosses, representing the Crossland family of Lord Baltimore’s mother, were adopted as a Confederate symbol.

Maryland’s flag is the exact opposite, in a very good way, of the boring sea of state seals on blue bedsheets that make up so many U.S. state flags. It’s aggressively weird and undeniably iconic, and that’s exactly what I love about it.

3. Tennessee

Tennessee’s flag demonstrates that simple is good. The three stars signify the three main regions of the state, and the blue circle that embraces them symbolizes their unity. The blue bar at the end of the red field is there for a practical reason: to delineate the end of the flag as it’s flying, which is precisely something that a good flag designer would think to do.

This is how you make a great flag.

2. Texas

Do you know anyone who doesn’t like this flag? I don’t. Once the symbol of a sovereign nation, the Lone Star Flag persists as a bold symbol of Texan independence, ingenuity, unity, and pride. It’s iconic and quintessentially American. Clean, direct, assertive, patriotic, and straightforward. It's fantastic in every way.

1. New Mexico

Almost everyone picks New Mexico as having the best of the 50 American state flags, and for good reason. It checks every box for what makes a successful flag design. It’s simple yet meaningful. Its colors, like those of the Arizona flag, evoke both the state’s Spanish heritage and its earthy, rocky, sun-baked landscapes. Even the simple design at the center of the flag itself, the sun symbol of the Zia Indians, adds to the warm Southwestern theme. Just looking at this flag, you can imagine the desert heat with the sun blazing overhead.

If there’s anything at all regrettable about this flag, it’s that the sun symbol, sacred to the Zia people, was used without their permission. One can only hope that the power and simple beauty of the design will prompt admirers to remember the many trials and sacrifices of the Zia, as well as of all the indigenous people of the Americas, and to reflect on how the sacred sun symbol points us toward an appreciation of the cycles of life and our connection to the natural world.

Magnificent flag, New Mexico.

Let your freak flag fly     

And that’s it! Thanks for reading, and I welcome your comments. 

The Art of Not Minding What Happens

I’ve had an itch lately to collect some intellectual loose ends and cobble them together into a post. Writing is cathartic for me, and I haven’t posted anything here for several months.

At the same time, I’ve been looking back through my 10-plus years of posts and feeling as if I’ve mostly wasted my time putting together persuasive arguments in relation to political events and religious belief. I don’t know why I ever thought I could change anyone’s mind about anything at all, or why I even thought I should try. I suppose that if nothing else, I’ll leave behind a written legacy where I can say from beyond the grave where I stood on the matters of the day. (That is, if someone at Google doesn’t one day decide to take a Kafkaesque hatchet to my blog, for violating some imaginary commandment of wokeness.)

Let me just say at the outset that I think we stand on the verge of cultural collapse, and that it won’t be long until Western civilization irreparably folds in on itself. I think the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of an irrational, illiberal, divisive, degenerate, authoritarian ideology — actually, I’m just going to call it out for the fanatical religious cult that it is — that thrives on power and has plenty of it to spare, given that it’s captured every significant cultural institution, from academia and entertainment to governing bodies to multinational corporations fixated on their ESG scores. When “tolerance” has come to mean “affirm my views or else,” when upside-down discrimination is praised as progress, and when acknowledging biological sex can make you lose your livelihood, meaning that we don’t even have a shared sense of reality anymore, then let’s face it — we’ve reached a point of no return. The lunatics are truly running the asylum. 

In short, the culture wars have been fought and won, even to the point that the federal alphabet agencies have been politically weaponized against the American people to suppress views that counter the ruling elites’ narratives, which is why Donald Trump may end up behind bars while Hillary Clinton walks free. But at this point, what are you going to do about any of it, short of full-scale revolution?

If you think you can vote your way out of the situation, remember that the establishment — with abundant help from lesser-evil voters who’ll tell you, as they do in every election cycle, that this election is too important to vote your conscience — will derail any candidate that would meaningfully challenge the system. In my lifetime, I’ve seen it happen to Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie Sanders, and the same will soon happen to the likes of Cornel West and RFK Jr. The sooner that conservatives, populists, traditionalists, liberty lovers, and independent-minded people of all stripes come to terms with the fact that they are now the counterculture, the sooner they can focus on things like building parallel economies and intentional communities, so that those who want to drop out have a place to go when things inevitably fall apart. Sitting around and endlessly bitching about how awful the Woke Contagion is won’t solve anything, nor will a retrenchment into reactionary politics. No one needs another four years of Trump.

I understand that I’m just shouting into the wind here. No one listens to me. And honestly, that’s fine. I’ve done my part. Before this blog, I was sounding off on other forums. Before that, I was agitating professors and classmates with college essays and classroom debates. Heck, my activism — if you can call it that — goes back as far as the mid- to late 1980s, when I mustered up the courage to argue with a couple of my high school teachers about things like the colonization of Indian lands and the stupidity of war. By the time the first Gulf War rolled around, when I was just shy of 20 years old, it really sank in just how differently I viewed the world, as I felt completely alienated from the unthinking, unreflective, bloodthirsty, flag-waving, yellow-ribbon groupthink tribalism that kicked into full gear virtually overnight. 

Like Milgram’s test subjects, the vast majority of the population did exactly as it was told, and I was left scratching my head and wondering why people were like this. Then they went and did it again during COVID. And it leaves me with so many questions. Why are the masses so easily propagandized, so easily swayed, so gullible, so thoughtlessly obedient to authority? What happened to critical independent thought? Are people just that incurious? Do they think authority figures will never lie to them? Are they afraid of being ostracized from their tribes for daring to say the emperor has no clothes? Do they not want to end up exiled like Snowden, jailed like Assange, or nailed to a cross like Christ for daring to speak up? I wish I had the answers to these questions, because if I did, humanity would be much less of a mystery to me. 

It doesn’t help that I instinctively recoil at the first sight of groupthink. To me, it always suggests that people are letting others do their thinking for them. For example, I dread seeing June come around every year because I know how sick I’m going to be of having rainbows relentlessly shoved in my face. And that has nothing to do with being some kind of whateverphobe someone might decide that I am. To the contrary, I couldn't care less what kind of consensual relationships adults enter into; it's none of my concern. (Trans-ideology is another story completely, and a topic for another day.) No, my issue is that I don't like having someone else’s views pushed on me, even if it's something I might agree with on principle. I recoil at the ideological aggressiveness of Pride Month (so much of which is at this point, sadly, corporate exploitation of a social cause) for exactly the same reason I recoiled at all the COVID mandates and related hysteria, and for the same reason I don’t like having the American flag and the associated glorification of militarism pushed on me every Memorial Day and Veterans Day. The same goes for having to witness performative acts of contrition, like sports teams that take a collective knee, or seeing people swallow Western hegemonic propaganda when they virtue-signal with a Ukrainian flag. It’s just gross. All of it. We’re supposed to be a pluralistic society. Keep your beliefs, let others have theirs, and don’t demand that other people agree with you.

When you get down to it, we’re a weird little species on this backwater planet of ours. Our brains seem to have evolved faster than we could keep up with the changes, and the changes consequently seem to have overwhelmed us. At our core, we’re still very primitive, fearful, and irrational animals. We like to think we’re sophisticated, inventive, and intelligent, but strip away the cities, cars, computers, and three-piece suits, and psychologically you still find a bunch of grunting cavemen, waving our clubs at perceived threats and keeping at bay anyone who might threaten the unity and stability of the tribe.

Attachment to our tribes obviously puts humans at odds with each other, yet we seem to be doubling down on our allegiances to inherently divisive identities these days, rather than coming together over the things we might find we hold in common — like, I don’t know, just being human.

I’ll concede that it’s impossible to eschew all forms of identity and still be able to function in the world. But I think it’s also important to understand that those identities are not what we actually are, and to use them simply as tools for navigating the world, rather than as things that give your life purpose and meaning. You are not those identities, any more than you are your thoughts or feelings. They’re all ephemeral and ultimately illusory, and that’s why identities can never bring you lasting contentment. That goes doubly for trying to identify as things that you objectively are not and never will be. You can try to bend reality to your will, or you can find peace with reality as it is. One offers an avenue toward inner harmony; the other never can and never will.

Now, don’t read that and jump to conclusions about who I am. I’m not here to shill for conservative politics; 10 years’ worth of blog posts should be evidence enough of that. While I find some common ground with conservatives — distributism, the economic and social philosophy that most closely reflects my own, is more or less socially conservative and economically liberal — the problem I have with them is that they claim to reject identity politics, but they really don’t. Nationalism, religion, flag-waving patriotism — these are all identities, too. What conservatives really want is not an end to identity politics, but for their identities to prevail in the culture wars. In the end, they’re just another grunting tribe waving their clubs around at the enemy.

As long as we do this, we will never find peace. We will always be pitted against each other in some way, as our egos continue to tell us that there’s an enemy to be destroyed and that our viewpoints have to prevail.

Stop and think about how futile this is. The things you get enraged about on a daily basis — what difference do you think any of it is going to make a year, a decade, a century, 10,000 years from now? I’m not arguing for apathy so much as for perspective. Carl Sagan once waxed poetic on the hollow vanity of fighting, hating, shedding blood so that you might gain temporary control of a tiny sliver of one insignificant planet out of trillions in the universe. If you have a cause that you’re passionate about, then by all means go out and be an advocate for it — just know that your opinion is not the only valid one, that you may or not prevail in your fight, and that your accomplishments, like you yourself, will essentially be forgotten within a few short generations. Centuries from now, there will be no Republicans or Democrats, no Americans or Russians. Millennia from now, there may not even be any humans. But the planet will persist, long after we’re gone. How important do we really think we are?

In short: Perspective is important, and humility is a good virtue to cultivate.

I accordingly try to be mindful of the transitory nature of our being and choose my identities sparingly, making sure never to confuse those identities with who I really am. I’m a Caucasian male in his early 50s — those are the identities I have no control over, despite claims by certain segments of contemporary society that these immutable characteristics are somehow malleable, like a costume we can put on and take off as we wish. I’m also a husband, a dad, an editor, an amateur philosopher, a cricket fan, a bike rider, a music lover, an avid reader, a coffee addict, an anarchist sympathizer, an advocate for free expression, free movement, free thought, and free minds. I’m an American by accident of birth and an Idahoan by choice. I support the American Solidarity Party and the Cascadia movement, the latter because if we destroy the planet, nothing else matters — but for the record, I will never wave my Cascadia flag in anybody’s face. And I financially support the G.K. Chesterton Society, the J.R.R. Tolkien Society, and the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. That’s more or less it. I wonder, if you take stock of your own life, how many identities you have, which ones you cling most strongly to, and why. For me, the ones that matter most are being a husband and a dad. I chose to be both of those things, and they give me an intimate connection to something outside myself — to two other human beings on this planet. The rest of my identities, well, if I had to give them up, I’d be sad, but I’d go on. Because I understand that those things are not me.

OK, you say, I keep talking about the things that aren’t me. So if I am not my identities, what, then, am I?

Well, I think the Zen master Bodhidharma had it right when he stood before the emperor of China. “Who stands here before me?” the emperor demanded. Bodhidharma replied, “I have no idea.”

I used to get confused by Zen logic. Actually, sometimes I still do, because of the way Zen attempts to get us out of our habitual ways of thinking about and seeing the world. It’s hard to break ourselves out of our own conditioning. But I think it’s pretty obvious that what Bodhidharma was telling the emperor was that he had emptied himself of all concepts and ideas, such that there was no “Bodhidharma” to speak of. In other words, the things we think of as being “me” are ultimately illusory.

So why would you hold on to things that have no permanent, lasting substance? Doing so will just cause you to suffer when the ephemeral whatever-it-is inevitably goes away.

If you’re thinking I sound like a Buddhist, please let me disabuse you of that idea right here and now. I did dip my toe back into my old Buddhist studies earlier this year, but at this point on my life journey, I have no desire to “be” anything in particular, let alone a Buddhist. I think I have a better understanding at this point in my life of what the Buddha was getting at with his teachings on non-self, karma, and rebirth; in the past, my struggles with certain Buddhist concepts like those caused me to eventually throw in the towel on Buddhism after about 15 years of study and semi-immersion. From there I ended up wandering into the Quaker tradition, a contemplative path within the Christian tradition, and from Quakerism back into the Catholicism of my youth.

Upon my return, I found the rituals, the traditions, and particularly the Mariology of Catholicism to be familiar and comforting. But anyone can look through the archives of this blog over the past several years to see my struggles with taking the tradition on wholeheartedly. Heck, I couldn’t do that when I was a kid pestering my parents about theological questions, so why did I ever think I could make peace with the whole thing now?

It's taken me years, and while I don’t pretend to have gone through any kind of painful deconstruction process of the kind that ex-evangelicals often have to endure, I can vouch for the fact that it’s not easy to let go of an identity that’s been with you for your entire life. And to me, it’s just another good example of why getting too attached to your identities is detrimental to your mental well-being. We end up pouring our passions and investing our lives into transitory things that ultimately are not us and can never give us lasting direction or satisfaction.

The truth of the matter is that God either exists or not, and our religious opinions on the matter have no bearing on it. The truth is that we may go on in some other form after this life or we may not. (When the student asked the master what happens when we die, the master wisely said, “How should I know? I’m not dead.”) The truth is that the Hindus have a fascinating idea about how we’re all pieces of the Absolute, like little radios transmitting divine consciousness through our physical being — but again, there’s no evidence that this is actually the way it is. It’s just an opinion. Something is either true or it isn’t, and all too often we confuse our opinions for facts and, again, end up inflicting misery on both ourselves and others as a result. Just look at all the people who insist that they know a Middle Eastern deity will send them to eternal torture for not following his rules, and how they then try to force that belief on others. Claiming that to be an incontrovertible truth is as absurd as claiming that women can become men just by saying so. Belief is not fact, and despite the protestations of the postmodernists, facts do exist, whether we like the facts or not.

The Heart Sutra, a teaching of Mahayana Buddhism, is one of those things that imparts unvarnished facts about the nature of reality. Some may find its teaching hard to swallow, but it is what it is. Here, again, I’m not shilling for Buddhism or any other religious viewpoint — and the wonderful thing about the Heart Sutra is that it doesn’t do that, either. It doesn’t try to sell you on some unprovable theology. It simply shows you that this is how it is — take it or leave it.

Chanting the Heart Sutra is part of the Shingon Buddhist lay service. I used to belong to a Shingon temple; out of all the flavors of Buddhism I tried, I was drawn to the esoteric mysticism and the symbolic rituals of this particular Japanese tradition. Earlier this year, I dug out my old service book and started chanting the prayers and mantras in Japanese, letting it see where it would take me, without expectation. What I found was both a reminder of why I don’t particularly want to identify as a Buddhist, even though I like many of its teachings, and a newfound appreciation for the deep wisdom of the Heart Sutra.

An article I bumped into a while back examined the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, he of the Krishnamurti Foundation and the consummate anti-guru, from the perspective of Buddhist teaching. Handpicked to be the vehicle for Maitreya, the prophesied second coming of the Buddha, Krishnamurti disbanded the religious society that was formed around him and declared that “truth is a pathless land.” No one can show you the way, because as soon as you follow someone else, you end up following the other person’s dogma, the other person’s opinion, and you never get to see the truth for yourself — only the truth someone else wants you to see. The Buddha made essentially the same point, urging his followers to test out his ideas for themselves rather than taking them as the truth just because he spoke them. He saw his teachings as a raft that could get you to the other shore, after which time it was pointless to continue carrying the raft around. But, inevitably, his teachings became codified into a religion, borrowing heavily from Hindu cosmology.

Teachings like the Heart Sutra came along later, centuries after the Buddha’s death, and reminded seekers that the religious dogma was not the truth, just as Krishnamurti in our time would remind us of the same thing. The article I read drew a convincing comparison between the sutra and Krishnamurti’s message, and for me that helped some things fall into place. Crucial for me was how it reframed, in my mind, Krishnamurti’s secret to his own happiness: In his own words, “I don’t mind what happens.” Now, that’s not the same as saying you don’t care what happens. It just means you stop imposing your will and your expectations on things. You don’t attach yourself to outcomes and accept what is, with as much equanimity as you can muster. As my daughter’s gymnastics instructor once said to her class, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.” Who knew a gym teacher could say something so philosophically profound?

I won’t expound on the ideas contained in the Heart Sutra here because I’m not trying to sell you anything, and let’s be honest: You wouldn’t seek out the sutra or examine its meaning anyway. I know that because I didn’t. I had to come to it on my own time and my own terms. In any event, the whole point — the revelation for me, if you can call something so blatantly obvious a revelation — is that there truly is no path to follow. Things are whatever they are, regardless of what we might want them to be. And that’s OK. But it means you have to give up your attachment to outcomes. None of us really has much control over anything anyway, when you get down to it. We constantly want to impose our will on what is, usually with results that disappoint us and only serve to deepen our suffering.

I suppose this is how I’ve come to deal not so much with political and religious ideas as with my perpetually deteriorating health. No doctor is ever going to get to the bottom of what’s wrong with me. I used to ask, “Why me?” Why do I have to feel like a prisoner in a malfunctioning body, and why can’t someone figure out the problem so I don’t have to live most of my days in misery? But I was only compounding my suffering by wanting reality to be something other than what it was. And so I took my “Why me” and shifted to “Why not me?” Why should I be immune from suffering when no one else is? What makes me think I’m so special? My ego wanted to impose its will on the way things are, which is the same thing we all do, with the same disappointing results every time. Some things we can change, and those are the things I’m focusing on with my health. But most things are out of our control, and we can either want them to be different or we can accept the reality of the situation and find peace with it.

When I was younger, I used to feel guilty that God didn’t heal me. I felt as if I must be doing something wrong that caused him to hold back his healing gift from me. Then I got angry at him for being a supposedly loving God while letting so many innocent people suffer. Then, at some point, I accepted that I was wasting my time trying to bend reality to my will. It wasn’t God’s fault at all, because God was just a concept I’d been conditioned to believe in. I confused a religious tenet for just seeing things as they are, without bias or expectation.

That’s the mindset I’m working on cultivating right now. I still get depressed over my health, especially when I think about the things I want to do and can’t. I want to go to Washington to visit the Shinto shrine that’s going to be permanently closing soon, but I can’t. I have good memories of that place. My daughter wants to come along, and my wife, who has her own health challenges, wants to stay home. If I had a health crisis along the way, I’d panic — more for the fact that my kiddo would have no way home because we don’t have a second functioning car and my wife probably couldn’t make the drive to get us anyway.

It sucks to be in this situation, and I feel horrible for my daughter, who gets excited to go on these little trips when I mention them, only to ultimately be stuck at home because my body is failing me in so many ways. It’s not fair to her, and some days it all sends me into a deep spiral of despair. I let the tears fall when no one is looking. I have to push on and stay strong, even when I don’t want to. She needs her dad, and our family needs my income. So I just do my best to hold it together most days, even when I feel like I’m falling apart, and even if it means I have to give up things that would give my kid some much-needed enjoyment. I can’t tell you how much I hate it.

But, again, why should I be special? Why should I think that I’m immune from the same kind of suffering every other human being experiences? I can want things to be different, or I can accept them as they are.

In the end, which alternative is going to create less suffering? The question answers itself.

As hard of a lesson as it can be, you have to not mind what happens.

In Praise of Jon Anderson and "Close to the Edge"

I know how ridiculous it sounds to say a singer in a rock band has been one of my greatest spiritual influences. But then the English progressive-rock band Yes is no ordinary band, and its founding singer and lyricist, Jon Anderson, has been an inspiration not just to me but to scores of fans who have found comfort and insight in his dense and probing lyrics.

Though his words may often seem incomprehensible, even nonsensical, at first glance, the deeper you go into them, the more you find a common thread running through his most intriguing and thought-provoking lyrical explorations. That thread spins ever outward and upward, looking past the confines of our egoic limitations in search of union with something greater than ourselves. Curiosity, yearning, and an almost childlike sense of wonder consistently wend their way through his words. Jon decided early on in his career not to write about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, because he figured everyone else was already doing that and others did it better than he could anyway. I’d say the world is a little bit richer for his decision to take a different path.

I started thinking about Jon’s influence on my spiritual outlook when I recently got the itch to put together a compilation of my favorite Yes songs. I’ve been a fan ever since “Owner of a Lonely Heart” tickled my 12-year-old eardrums. From there I waded into the band’s back catalog, and I promptly fell in love with the uncompromising musical explorations that marked their best works. No one made music like Yes did, not even their prog-rock peers. The top-notch musicianship was consistently employed in service of the song, rather than in things like long, indulgent solos or displays of dexterity for their own sake — the things that critics have always accused prog-rockers of doing as a matter of course. Sure, Yes had some misses along the way, but on the whole, no one could craft extended pieces of music the way they did, with their beautiful melodies, their seamless flow, their internal musical logic.

For me, what made it all work were two things: Chris Squire’s unparalleled approach to bass guitar and his choirboy harmony vocals, and Jon’s angelic countertenor voice soaring over the arrangements, his mystical lyrics putting the finishing touch on a musical universe that the band created and inhabited all by itself. Even in the decades that have passed since the height of Yes’s fame and influence, their sound has been often imitated but never duplicated — not even, it has to be said, by the band itself in the years since.

So when I was putting together my recent Yes music mix, I forced myself to think about what tunes I’d want with me if I could only ever listen to a limited number of their songs again. And that prompted me to think about what would be at the very top of the list.

For years, the answer would have been “The Gates of Delirium,” the 22-minute extravaganza that took up the entirety of the first side of their 1974 Relayer album. The song has an extraordinary energy that leaves you emotionally spent by the end. In what is something of a musical adaptation of War and Peace, the song begins with a buildup to conflict, with all its attendant rationalizations, and then descends into a maelstrom of battle. A victory march emerges from the chaos, and then the dust settles as the survivors grapple with the aftermath of the evil that’s been wrought. Eventually, the clouds part, the sun shines down anew on the earth, and Jon leads us through a heart-rending ballad that looks ahead with optimism toward a better and brighter future for mankind. No matter how many hundreds of times I’ve heard the piece, the closing E on the Mellotron that brings everything to a resolution has never failed to send chills down my spine and leave me covered in goose bumps. It often brings tears to my eyes. To me, this is exactly what a good piece of music should do to you. It should reach deep inside you and leave you transformed in some indelible way.

“Heart of the Sunrise” is up there, too. I have yet to hear a rock song that does an equally tremendous job of making such seamless transitions between such musically disparate sections. The whole thing shouldn’t work, and yet there it is. There’s an incredible ebb and flow to the piece that feels perfectly organic, not forced or contrived in any way, with some fascinating musical counterpoint along the way, along with the kind of memorable melodies and harmonies and riffs and motifs that mark all of Yes’s greatest works.

“Awaken” is a spiritual masterpiece, no less than a long-form rock ‘n’ roll hymn. But musically, it just doesn’t hit me the way some of Yes’s other pieces do. That’s just my subjective experience, not a slight on the absolute genius of the song itself.       

“The Revealing Science of God” is a song from an album I used to dislike. I still agree with Rick Wakeman, Yes’s keyboardist at the time, that there was a bit of padding involved with the making of the double album Tales From Topographic Oceans to fit the music to the template of one song per side of vinyl. But I’ve softened my stance over the years and now hear the ambition and creativity of the music above all else. What once sounded like meandering to my ears now feels more like a record whose creators deliberately chose to take their time telling a story and unfolding the narrative. You can rush to your destination, or you can leisurely look out the window and gaze at the passing scenery. “The Revealing Science of God” is firmly in the latter camp, as is the rest of Topographic, and that’s a legitimate artistic choice. To top it off, some of Yes’s most sublime musical moments are contained within this particular song. The opening chant, for one, never ceases to mesmerize me. It’s essentially Yes’s “In the beginning” story, recounting the evolution of humanity from our primitive beginnings to the moment of our “dawn of love” that sends us on a quest for “the freedom of life everlasting.” Amazing stuff.    

But after all of these reflections on the music of what has been my favorite band for close to 40 years as I write this, I came to the conclusion that if I had to pick just one Yes song to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be the 18-minute title cut from their 1972 album Close to the Edge.

I think the other songs I mentioned have just as great of an emotional impact on me as this one does, but “Close to the Edge” was a synthesis of everything Yes were aiming for in the early years of their career. It’s the moment when all the pieces finally fell into place. And in doing so, the song set a new standard for what listeners could expect from Yes’s music. It remains the creative pinnacle of their sizable repertoire and is arguably the greatest artistic achievement of the entire prog-rock genre.

And no small amount of its success comes down to the creative vision of Jon Anderson, who, himself being a musician of limited skill, would convey to his very talented and capable bandmates what he heard in his head. They’d bring the music to life while Jon focused on the lyrics. 

And boy, were these lyrics something special. In three short years, Jon had progressed from writing an innocent love song about a special lady who stirred the sweetness in with a spoon to taking on a masterwork of existential wonder, spurred on by his reading of Hermann Hesse’s classic spiritual work Siddhartha. If you ask me, the Beatles were the only other rock band that managed to so drastically evolve their musical vocabulary in such a short amount of time.

I have to admit that I hadn’t read Siddhartha when I first heard “Close to the Edge.” By some great act of serendipity, I discovered the book a few years later, discarded, of all places, in a trash dump on my grandfather’s property. I took the book home and finished it in a day or two. And I could immediately see the connection to Jon’s lyrics. The book tells the story of a man on a spiritual quest. He looks for answers in other people but finds that they can’t give him what he’s looking for, not even when the protagonist encounters the Buddha himself. In the end, he sits down by the banks of a river and finally reaches his moment of clarity.

When you understand that, you also understand why “the river” is such an important part of Jon’s lyrics in “Close to the Edge,” and why the song begins and ends with the sounds of running water and birds singing and chirping all around. Jon is a staunch believer that, in spiritual terms, all rivers flow into the same ocean — which is to say that all religions, despite their individual dogmas that lead to endless sectarian squabbles, are, in the end, searching for the same Ultimate Truth. But you could just as easily look at Jon’s lyrics and say that one finds God, or whatever you wish to call the Truth, through harmonizing with nature. That’s a legitimate interpretation too.

The wonderful thing, to me, about Jon’s lyrics is how they lend themselves to multiple meanings. He’s said in the past that he never desired to be direct and blunt with his lyrics, and he’s also admitted to using words purely for how they sounded. But even so, that spiritual thread is always there, undeniably, giving you something to hold on to as you let your mind explore the many symbolic possibilities that lie within the richness of the words. And what might not make sense on first listen often reveals itself within the context of the whole song. It may take multiple listens, but eventually things start to click. Even Jon has admitted that some of his lyrics didn’t unfold their full meaning to him until months or years after the fact.    

In a spiritual context, it makes perfect sense to me to take this lyrical approach. “God” is far beyond our feeble human ability to fully comprehend anyway, so why not talk about the spiritual in broad impressionistic brushstrokes that prompt the listener to dig for a meaning? You can similarly do a surface reading of the Bible and interpret it all on a literal level, or can you delve under the surface and see if there’s something else, something deeper and possibly more profound, that the writers were trying to tell us. Sometimes the Truth is hidden in plain sight; you just have to know where to look, and how to look.

I’m not going to go line by line through the song. I used to run a Yes album-review website where I devoted a lot of space to dissecting Jon’s lyrics. Been there, done that, and in hindsight I think I was probably missing the point by trying to nail down a definitive meaning. As I said, you have to really experience the words in their overall context to appreciate what they’re expressing. And anyway, it’s not so much about a key line here and there, but about the greater message.

Still, there are a few lines that have always hit me particularly hard, like “I crucified my hate and held the word within my hand.” That’s some powerful imagery. Or “The time between the notes relates the color to the scenes,” which to me means that we encounter God in the silence, the “time between the notes,” and that that encounter subsequently imbues our lives with the presence, the brilliant “color,” of divinity.

Then there are lines whose full import is inseparable from the music that accompanies it. For instance, “I get up, I get down” is a lyric that’s central to the portion of the song with the same name. (“Close to the Edge” is divided into four interconnected movements, similar to the construction of a classical piece.) But you don’t feel the weight of what seems to be a succinct observation of the peaks and valleys of life until you hear that transcendent pipe-organ solo that serves as its culmination. When I was still discovering Yes’s back catalog, one album at a time, I knew I was on to something special. But when I put on “Close to the Edge” for the first time and Rick’s solo came rumbling out of my bedroom speakers, well, it was at that moment that I knew Yes was going to be my favorite band for the rest of my life.

I watch a lot of music-reaction channels on YouTube because I get a vicarious thrill out of seeing other people experience for the first time the music that’s long been the soundtrack of my life. And more than once I’ve seen YouTubers wiping tears from their eyes when they get to the pipe organ in “Close to the Edge.” This music has the ability to cut through the hardest of hearts and the most jaded of cynics. It’s impossible not to have an emotional reaction to it, in my opinion. You might love it or hate it, but either way it’ll leave its mark. For me, that peak moment of “I Get Up I Get Down” was like having a religious experience. I’m not kidding. Some people have those peak moments in church, some in meditation, some staring at a blank wall in a zendo. For me it happened listening to a couple of English hippies on a song that was released when I was but a mere 1-year-old. Who knew I’d have my mind blown about a dozen years down the road?   

I think the opening of the song, after we leave the tranquility of the riverside, is probably the hardest part to digest. On the surface, it sounds like chaos. A jumble of unrestrained anxious energy. But it’s punctuated with a couple of brief wordless vocals from Jon that grab your attention before you’re thrown back into the whirlwind. To me, this section represents the frenetic pace of modern life. It’s discordant. It’s confusing. It moves fast, leaving you unable to know where to look, where to find a modicum of calm and sanity amid the chaos. But those little vocal interjections act as a reminder that the clarity, peace, and transcendence of the spiritual are always there, even in the most hectic and frantic of times, and we risk passing them by if we don’t learn how to slow down and take a breath.

That’s just what the music does, too, eventually leading us into a major key with a slower tempo. Now we can breathe. 

A few minutes later, Jon begins to impart his cosmic sermon, and we keep on twisting and turning through a panoply of moods, letting the band take us on a journey of ever-shifting keys, tempos, and melodies, punctuated by a little bit of jazz here, courtesy of guitarist Steve Howe, some classical stylings there, courtesy of Wakeman, and a heavy dose of funk throughout from Squire. (As my daughter would say, that bass guitar slaps.) Pinning it all down is drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford, whose inimitable approach to percussion has never, as far as I’m concerned, been duplicated in the rock genre.

Part of the power of the message of “Close to the Edge,” for me, is that it comes to us in the midst of our hectic everyday lives. That’s what makes that tense opening section an indispensable ingredient of the song. It meets us where we are and only then points us toward the divine. Some religious people — we’ve all encountered them — live with their heads in the clouds, so busy trying to get to the next world that they forget to live in this one. Yet this is our spiritual training ground. This is where we learn lessons and grow. That’s not possible in the static perfection of the spiritual realm. This is where the action is. Right here, right now.

Jon once said that the final verse of the song came to him in a dream. This dream was about “passing on from this world to another world, yet feeling so fantastic about it that death never frightened me ever since.” That meaning becomes clear when we see the narrator of the song taking in a panoramic view of the valley below, after encountering a man who “pointed, revealing all the human race.” The narrator’s reaction? “I shook my head and smiled a whisper knowing all about the place.” It’s his moment of enlightenment. The song began with Jon telling us that “a seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace, and rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace.” He has explained that this line, to him, means that “your higher self will eventually bring you out of your dark world.” In contemporary terms, you discover that “the kingdom of God is within you,” that there was never anywhere to look but within yourself. And that’s where the story of “Close to the Edge” ends, as the music fades away and we find ourselves sitting peacefully back by the river. It all comes full circle, as life does.

I credit Jon Anderson with giving me the courage to look beyond the limiting confines of the religious tradition I was born into. It’s not easy to admit that you need to expand your horizons to find the Truth, especially if you find yourself under pressure from friends and family to conform to their way of seeing things. But I’ve never been one to passively accept other people’s truths. I have to do things on my own terms, until I find the answers that satisfy my intellect and resonate with my spirit. I sense that Jon’s spiritual journey has been similar, and that’s a big part of the reason his lyrical ruminations have struck such a strong chord with me over the years. In a way, he’s been my guru. I’ve read hundreds of books covering dozens of religious and spiritual traditions, but when I put a book back on the shelf, the music of Jon Anderson and Yes remains, rolling ever on through my mind, taking me to fantastical uncharted territories that I never would have visited without them as my tour guide.       

As I get older and my health challenges persist, maybe there’s also some part of me that yearns to find the peace with death that Jon discovered in his dream. Maybe that’s part of why the song hits me in a way that perhaps it didn’t when I was 13 years old and death was a far-off abstraction, a thing for the old and sick, of which I was neither. Even Jon is an old man now, and I know I’m going to be absolutely devastated the day he leaves this earthly realm. Long story short, you reach a point in life where you have to confront your mortality. We’re all going to die. How do you come to terms with that unavoidable reality? Well, it’s a work in progress for me. But with Jon’s help, I think I’ll eventually get there.

The first step in that process is to know that through all the health challenges, money challenges, and other various challenges that keep insisting on making themselves known to me, the Truth remains and will always remain. You can call that Truth whatever you want. Brahman, the Tao, nirvana, God, whatever. To me it’s all the same thing. You can argue about how they all have different meanings, but to me that’s just dogma and conditioning talking.

Jon has said that the phrase “Close to the Edge” means being “close to the edge of realization,” “the realization of why you’re here, why you live.” And part of that realization, I believe, is to see, with clarity, who we really are, and then to come to terms with the implications of that discovery. It’s a deeply profound thing that can’t be put into words.

I think even Jon Anderson understands that. But he nevertheless did a pretty good job of pointing me in the direction I needed to go.

Thanks, Jon.

No, Frank Pavone Was Not Defrocked for Being Pro-Life

Wikipedia

I scarcely knew who Frank Pavone was before the news broke that the longtime Catholic priest and pro-life activist has been defrocked. I've heard his name, and I knew he was a Trumper. But what disturbed me more than his laicization were the instant assumptions from his supporters and other traditional and conservative Catholics that he was stripped of the priesthood simply for being pro-life. To a lot of Catholics, judging by the reactions to the news, Pavone's punishment is further proof that Pope Francis is deliberately trying to undermine the very values and teachings that make the Catholic church Catholic.

Here are the facts, the best I can work them out -- and the facts are what we should be looking at, not our feelings or allegiances.   

Pavone is the national director of Priests for Life. His group has been very vocal in its opposition to abortion. For Catholics, opposition to abortion is not unusual, nor is it a controversial position. If you're Catholic, you support the protection of human life from conception until natural death.  

What got Pavone got in trouble, it seems, was the manner in which he carried out his advocacy. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, for example, Pavone placed an aborted baby on an altar and posted a video of it to Facebook, while suggesting that anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton would be voting for those whose politics led to the abortion of that same dead child.

Following that incident, Pavone's bishop, Patrick J. Zurek of the Diocese of Amarillo, denounced Pavone's stunt, calling the action "against the dignity of human life" and "a desecration of the altar."

Pavone and Zurek have a contentious history. In 2011, Zurek told Pavone to accept a pastoral assignment within the diocese and give up his extracurricular work. Pavone refused, so Zurek suspended him. Zurek had concerns about financial mismanagement within the Priests for Life organization, but more than that, Zurek wrote at the time, Pavone's "fame has caused him to see priestly obedience as an inconvenience to his unique status." 

Pavone didn't stop there. In 2020, he became the co-chairman of Donald Trump's pro-life coalition and continued to rankle his superiors who wanted him to curtail his political activism. Canon law prohibits priests from taking an active role in political parties unless they receive permission from their bishop.

He ultimately stepped down from his position in the Trump campaign, but he continued to use social media to advocate for Trump. His Twitter profile shows him standing side-by-side with Trump and wearing the red "Make America Great Again" hat that's so tightly identified with Trumpism.

In particular, he used his platform on Twitter to call Joe Biden a "goddamn loser" and claimed that Democrats "can't say a goddamn thing in support of their loser candidate without using the word Trump." 

"What the hell do you have to say for yourselves, losers?" he taunted.

To top it all off, he said that he would refuse absolution to anyone in confession who admitted to voting for Democrats. Again, Bishop Zurek had to write a statement, this time denouncing Pavone's words and actions as being "not consistent with Catholic Church Teaching." 

I hope it's become quite clear at this point why Pavone was stripped of the priesthood. It's not because the church leadership is out to get him. It's because he's proved time and again to be a loose cannon. As the letter from the papal nuncio announcing Pavone's laicization explained, Pavone has demonstrated "persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop" and engaged in "blasphemous communications on social media." That's the issue, not his pro-life advocacy.

The blasphemy charge relates to his taking the name of God in vain in his Twitter posts. In directly violating of one of the Ten Commandments, Pavone committed a mortal sin -- the kind of sin that dooms your soul to hell, and for which the faithful go to confession in the first place, so that they may be absolved.

Which brings us to Pavone's threat to refuse absolution to anyone who voted for a Democrat. Put simply, he's not supposed to do that. If someone shows up to confession and expresses genuine contrition for his or her sins, then the priest is supposed to absolve that person, issue a penance, and send the person on his or her way, with a fresh start and a caution to sin no more. To refuse that fresh start because Pavone didn't like the way someone voted is an abuse of his office, not to mention plainly uncharitable and wildly self-righteous. That's the way the woke behave, never allowing anyone to repent, forever condemning them for their ideological "sins." And lest we forget, holding absolution hostage was one of the things that triggered the Protestant Reformation.

Nor was Bishop Zurek wrong in admonishing Pavone for placing an aborted baby on an altar. Not only does Catholic canon law forbid the use of altars for anything but worship only, but Pavone unquestionably used the body of a dead human being as a political prop to get out the vote for his preferred presidential candidate. Pavone was guilty of both exploitation and desecration. "We believe that no one who is pro-life can exploit a human body for any reason," Zurek wrote at the time of the incident, "especially the body of a fetus."  

Look, I'm as pro-life as Pavone is, and I don't even necessarily disagree with him in principle on shocking people into an awareness of what it is they support with their views and their actions. As the great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer is reported to have said, "Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight." Just think about it: If people witnessed executions, they may not be so eager to support capital punishment. If people saw the carnage on the battlefield, perhaps they'd be less willing to cheer on the empire's bloody war machine (or at least they might wonder why they cheer on Ukraine while ignoring the plight of, say, the people of Yemen). Heck, if people saw animals being slaughtered, there would probably be a lot more vegetarians in the world. Go ahead and show consumers the working conditions in the sweatshops that keep capitalism profitable. And yes, show them that the result of an abortion is actually the taking of a human life, not just the removal of an amorphous clump of cells. 

But there's a time and a place, and a consecrated altar is not an appropriate medium on which to display a dead body to make a political point -- all the more so if you're a priest. If you want to be a political activist first and foremost, then go be a political activist. If you want to couch your activism within the framework of Catholic theology and social teaching, that's fine too, because at least you have your priorities straight, inasmuch as everything you do as a priest is supposed to be directed toward saving souls. You can't serve two masters -- in this case, the sacred and the mundane, or God and Caesar, if you like. One has to take precedence, and if you're a priest, you'd better be sure which one comes out on top. 

There's also a certain way to comport yourself when you're a priest. First, you have to be obedient to your bishop. That's not negotiable. And given that Pavone has burned bridges with more than one member of the church hierarchy, it's safe to say that obedience to his superiors is not his strong suit. Even staunchly pro-life Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York cut ties with Pavone when the priest refused to accept ecclesiastical financial oversight of Priests for Life. I'm not big on obedience for its own sake, but if I were a Catholic priest, I would understand that what my boss says, goes. It comes with the job description. If you have a problem with that, then, again, you should probably find another line of work. 

In tandem with obedience comes humility, which is a trait that Trump and Pavone both appear to lack. 

We've already addressed Pavone's combative (and blasphemous) language in his tweets. Michael Voris behaves similarly, and although it was never explicitly stated at the time, the Archdiocese of Detroit was no doubt reacting to Voris' acerbic and decidedly uncharitable demeanor when it asked him to stop using the word "Catholic" in the name of his media outlet. Now known as Church Militant, it was at the time called RealCatholicTV. 

But even now that he's been defrocked, which should have prompted at least a fleeting moment of reflection, Pavone remains defiant. For one thing, he still refers to himself as "Father," as if his priestly faculties haven't been stripped away. In an open letter to his supporters, he asks the pope to reconsider his laicization while accusing people in the church hierarchy of lying about him and abusing their authority over him. And in a video following the Vatican's decision on his priesthood, he continued to use belligerent language, referring to his critics as "the dumbest in the world." Sound like a certain politician you know? And more importantly, does it sound like something you'd expect a priestly servant of God to say? 

Pavone is trying to play the martyr, claiming that church authorities are singling him out for his abortion advocacy. In doing so, he ignores the plainly obvious fact that the church is pro-life on abortion, and that many other Catholic clergy advocate for an end to abortion. They just manage to do it without being offensive and insubordinate. 

The man clearly has learned nothing from his predicament. Like the politician he idolizes, he seems utterly incapable of self-reflection or contrition. 

Many of Pavone's defenders claim the church is exercising a double standard in its punishment. They've been quick to point out, for example, that Fr. James Martin has suffered no ecclesiastical punishment for his LGBT advocacy. But Fr. Martin has not, to my knowledge, ever disobeyed his bishop, nor does anything he promotes oppose Catholic teaching on homosexuality. The only thing he's really calling for, as far as I can see, is a little bit more compassion and openness toward people who, if the scientific research holds up, have no control over whom they're attracted to. We all know of the fundamentalist Christian tendency to focus on homosexuality to the exclusion of almost all other social and moral issues. Fr. Martin just seems to want to create an environment where gays and lesbians don't feel singled out. 

We could also have a discussion about folks like Thomas Merton, the Berrigan Brothers, Dorothy Day, and Sr. Helen Prejean, and their advocacy and activism against war, capital punishment, and exploitation of the poor. All of these Catholics have brought forth different aspects of what it means to be pro-life. Pavone's pro-life focus just happens to be abortion. In a sense, they're all fighting the same fight, upholding the Catholic belief in the dignity of life. I don't doubt that Pavone is just as genuinely passionate about his pro-life cause as they are, and were, about theirs. I do, however, wish that the militantly anti-abortion folks would show just as much passion about other humanitarian issues. Here where I live, our deacon invited us to pick up a Christmas card from the church narthex and send it to the folks in the county jail, as a reminder that one of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy in the Catholic church is to visit the imprisoned. Jesus implores us to do as much in Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew. So why do we not show as much of a dedication to all of "the least of these" as we do to the unborn? Where is the equivalent concern for, say, the poor and the refugee? Maybe that's yet another thing for Pavone to reflect upon.

Heck, we could go on all day about the German church that's in near-schism at this point, or the way the church shuffled around abusive priests for years instead of punishing them, or its comparatively soft treatment (so far) of Fr. Marko Rupnik, accused of the systematic sexual exploitation of several nuns. But the point remains that even if the church is inconsistent and falls short in other cases, in Pavone's cases it did exactly what it ought to have done.

All I'm calling for is some intellectual honesty when dealing with situations like this. Whether anyone likes Pavone and his views is secondary to whether he did something to warrant punishment from the Vatican. If you would condemn acts of disobedience and sacrilege from the "other side" of the political fence, then you have to condemn those things when "your side" does them. If you have no problem with Pavone's MAGA hat, would you feel the same if you saw a priest campaign for a Democrat or wave a rainbow flag? If not, why not? Jesus didn't have nice things to say about hypocrites. 

I'm not a tremendous fan of the current papacy, and I've made that known in the past on this very blog. I especially don't like the way Pope Francis has taken a hard line against traditionalists, in particular Catholics who attend the Latin Mass. But it's people like Pavone who make the Vatican want to clamp down on traditionalists in the first place. Peter Kreeft once astutely pointed out that while leftists have soft heads to go along with their soft hearts, conservatives tend to have both hard heads and hearts. And that's why traditionalists can sometimes look a whole lot like the same Pharisees that Jesus so roundly condemned, stuck as they were in their rigidness, their lack of charity, their resistance to change, and their attachment to the letter of the law without regard for the spirit of the law. That goes a long way toward explaining why Pavone is the way he is. It's not really something to be proud of. 

As Kreeft observes, Christians are called to combine soft hearts with hard heads, to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Pavone falls short of that call, as do many. The way of Christ doesn't look like the modern Democratic Party or like Trumpism, and we miss the mark when we try to cram Christ into either one. Our job is to conform ourselves to him, not him to our contemporary political views. Pavone is not unusual in failing to figure that out. 

I have my eye on pursuing holy orders in 2023. I would be ordained as a priest with apostolic succession, albeit through a line that the Catholic church doesn't recognize. In the meantime, I enjoy attending Catholic Mass, and I don't intend to go out of my way to announce my priesthood to the churches I visit. But I have no doubt that if word of my ordination reached the bishop of our diocese, I'd run a good risk of being excommunicated. And I would accept that sentence if it were handed down, as I would be knowingly running afoul of church law. The problem with Frank Pavone is he wants it both ways. He wants to be able to disobey his superiors while carrying on being a priest. Sorry, Frank, but you're just not that special. If you don't like the rules, don't be surprised when your rogue behavior leaves you standing out in the cold. 

Dystopia Is Here. The Time to Speak Up Is Now.

I had to check out of politics at the height of COVID hysteria. It was destroying my mental health to watch the mass irrational behavior and slavish groupthink. Challenge the narrative on masks, mortality rates, vaccines, alternative meds, or the redefinition of herd immunity, and you’d get “fact-checked” into silence and mobbed by panicked people asking why you want to kill their grandma. Society devolved into a mass psychosis that we haven’t really recovered from, and the reasons it happened are, I believe, threefold. First, people are tribal and don’t want to go against the grain. Second, people obey authority figures to often dangerous and destructive ends, as Milgram famously proved. And, as much as I hate to say it, most folks just aren’t very good at independent critical thought.

I’ve been thinking about this as I watch the news about the Twitter Files unfolding. I hate to be an I-told-you-so kind of person, but everything I’ve always said about social media and Big Tech was 100% correct. They were shadow-banning and silencing people based on political opinions they disliked and justified it by calling the targeted content “hate” or a TOS violation when they knew it was neither. They were using “fact-checks” not to actually correct misinformation but to silence information that ran counter to the institutional narrative, so that they could promote their own propagandistic misinformation and pass it off as the truth. We even know now that Twitter was in bed with the alphabet agencies and actively worked with them to suppress not just certain viewpoints but actual news stories – like the Hunter Biden laptop. Twitter suspended the New York Post for breaking the story, while the feds all piled on to tell us the story was “Russian disinfo,” when they knew full well it was nothing of the sort. They just knew the story had the potential to harm Joe Biden’s election chances. If we could stop saying that “private companies can do whatever they want,” especially now that we know how deeply enmeshed Big Tech is with promoting government narratives, that would be awesome.

As the Twitter Files continue to roll out, we’re now seeing that Twitter prioritized the censorship of conservative and populist viewpoints even above taking down posts involving child trafficking. We aren’t just dealing with woke ideologues here; these are genuinely evil people. Can you imagine the rot that would be uncovered if someone like Elon Musk took over Facebook and revealed what goes on behind the scenes? There’s a reason that those in power want you to think of Musk as a hateful Nazi: It deflects the public’s attention from what he’s busy exposing.

The problem – and it’s a massive problem – is that this isn’t just a Big Tech phenomenon. People of the same ideological persuasion have captured every major institution of power, leaving their agenda unchecked. Everything from science to higher education has been taken over by authoritarians who place ideology above truth and will marginalize or silence you if you challenge them.

But what can you do about it? Vote Republican? We see how that worked out. Republicans are a train wreck. They sit back and complain and think that will be enough, while the woke left steamrolls right over them, deepening their own institutional capture. You’d think that after the Republicans got their asses handed to them in the midterms, when control of Congress was ripe for the taking in the face of rampant inflation and woke intolerance, they’d realize that playing defense doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to play offense once in a while. You’ve got to push back.

I say things like this and get called a right-winger, when all I really long for is decency and tolerance. Not the fake tolerance of those who suppress viewpoints they dislike, but an actual pluralistic society based on the ideals of classical liberalism, where we observe equal protection under the law and the majority protects the rights of the minority, rather than subordinating the majority to the minority and trying to pass off upside-down discrimination as progress.

Republicans pay lip service to the same, but they’re of one mind with establishment Democrats when it comes to protecting the privileges of moneyed interests over the common man. No one stands up for the poor and working class. The Democrats gang up on their populists (Bernie) or make their party ideology so intolerable that the populists leave (Tulsi). The Republicans have, well, Trump, and the less said about him, the better. I think DeSantis would make a great president inasmuch as he knows how to play offense against the woke, but I don’t know how well he’d stand up for everyday working Americans, and I highly doubt he’d do anything to even try to downsize our tools of empire and its sickening $850 billion military budget.

All I know is that somebody has to stand up and say this isn’t right. All of it. The woke are successful at shutting down their opposition not only because they hold so much institutional power, but also by playing on people’s sympathies, causing opponents to self-censor and back down. They make it seem like they’re defending the underdog, which makes their agenda all the more insidious. You might be told that you just hate gay people, for example, in order to obfuscate the truth of what’s really going on and to shut down genuine criticism. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t care less what consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes, and I really doubt that most reasonable people do. It’s the woke who have politicized immutable characteristics and played on people’s emotions to shut down dissent. After all, there’s a world of difference between a genuine bigot who says “I hate gays” and a reasonable person who might say, “You know, maybe it’s not such a great idea to have sexualized drag queens reading to kids in public libraries, or to encourage children to go on puberty blockers and maim their bodies, or to allow men to infiltrate women’s sports and personal spaces.”  

Kirk Cameron has a new kids’ book out that talks about the fruits of the spirit, and according to his publisher, at least 50 libraries have declined requests to let him speak on his book tour, usually citing their commitment to “diversity” and “equity.” And yet they throw their doors open wide for drag-queen story hours. We’ve gotten to this point because the woke left has conditioned enough of the public to think that the slightest modicum of criticism of their agenda is tantamount to bigotry. They go on about diversity and tolerance, when in truth they’re the most intolerant of all when it comes to allowing alternative points of view to be heard.

People might think these are petty criticisms, but what’s essentially happening all around us is death by a thousand cuts. We’re the frog sitting in a pot of slowly heating water until one day we end up boiling to death.

And again, this is not just about woke intolerance. It’s also about how the corporatocracy is crushing the poor and working class. The woke are in allegiance with them, so in a sense it’s one and the same monster we’re fighting. Conservatives and libertarians still seem to be stuck on the idea that it’s only government overreach we have to resist. But corporations hold enormous power and wealth, and the Twitter revelations should remind us of how deep in collusion the government and corporate powers in our world really are. 

You know who else married government power to corporate power and favored certain groups of society over others? They controlled Germany 75-odd years ago, and they weren’t very nice people.

Just because I’m a college grad who doesn’t do manual labor doesn’t mean I can’t stand in economic solidarity with the poor and working class. I grew up as one of them and continue to live in their midst and admire their hard work and resolve. And at the same time, just because I have a degree and some moderate smarts doesn’t mean I’ve become a pointy-headed elite who’s handed my brain over to the irrational authoritarianism of the woke left. But I feel like someone stranded between the increasingly rigid viewpoints of two political parties, neither of whom seems either willing or capable of doing the right thing for the people, and few of whom seem to see the world the way I do. The American Solidarity Party comes closest to mirroring my views. In Europe I’d fall in with the Christian democrats (small “d”). But here, I feel adrift. I always have, but the feeling has grown much more acute in the past few years. Worst of all, I despair over the future my daughter will have to live in.

The only thing that will change our course is for people to speak their truth. They have to stop self-censoring and being pushed around and bullied. They have to say no. The events that have unfolded since 2020 don’t give me much hope that they will. But if the tide doesn’t turn, and soon, I fear there’s going to be a point of no return.

There’s no time to waste. Dystopia isn’t on the way. It’s already here.

Advent 2022: The Secret Ingredient of the Christmas Story

It’s inevitable this time of year to hear critics proclaiming that “Christmas is a pagan holiday.” The obvious clue that this is not so is in the name of the holiday itself, literally “Christ’s Mass.” Early Christians did appropriate pagan customs, symbols, dates, and traditions, but not because the Christians themselves were, or wanted to be, pagans. Their aim was to persuade the pagans to become Christians, by trying to convince them that they didn’t have to give up all that much to follow a different god. The Christians in Ireland went so far as to take the beloved Celtic goddess Brigid and turn her into St. Brigid of Kildare, a miracle-working abbess who by an amazing coincidence possessed many of the same characteristics as the earlier deity.

At the other end of the spectrum are evangelical-leaning folks who are aware of the pagan overtones of many Christian traditions and forgo them, such that, say, “Easter” becomes “Resurrection Sunday,” to avoid any connection with the Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess Eostre, who may or may not have given Easter its name, and who may or may not have ever even existed as an object of worship. All we have on the matter is the eighth-century word of the Venerable Bede, whose idea was picked up by Jacob Grimm, he of the Brothers Grimm, and turned into legend. If only the Western church had chosen to use the word “Pascha” for Easter, as the Eastern Orthodox do, there would surely be much less controversy and consternation. If you suspect that the word “Pascha” has a connection to the Jewish Passover, you’d be correct.

The evangelical folks will also tell you that “Jesus is the reason for the season” and will implore us to “keep Christ in Christmas.” To this view I’m sympathetic. Christianity and Western civilization are, after all, inextricably joined, and there’s no point in denying it. I cringe every year to hear the incessant “holiday holiday holiday” from corporations whose bank accounts swell in November and December thanks to gifts being purchased by the 90% or so of the population that celebrates Christmas, not some amorphous, vague, and nameless winter “holiday.” Healthy pluralistic societies honor and protect the majority traditions that act as a cultural glue while respecting minority traditions and observances. What they don’t do is subordinate or otherwise suppress the majority traditions in an attempt to be “inclusive.” That’s a surefire recipe for cultural disintegration. More than that, it’s always bemused me that we never avoid saying “Easter” when it usually falls close to Passover, a major Jewish holiday by any reckoning, but we presumably avoid saying “Christmas” because of its proximity to other end-of-year celebrations, like Hanukkah, which is a comparatively minor Jewish celebration and has only been turned into a kind of Jewish Christmas by those who, for whatever reason, wish to promote a false equivalence.

Of course, keeping Christ in Christmas entails more than just saying “Merry Christmas” to the cashier at Macy’s. Jesus reached out to the poor, the marginalized, the outcasts. He loved his enemies and turned the other cheek. He prayed for his persecutors. And he called out the religious hypocrites who proclaimed their own holiness and lorded their supposed righteousness over the people, while in reality they were, in Christ’s own words, nothing but whitewashed tombs. Are we willing to walk the same path as Christ? Are we willing to be the Good Samaritan, the forgiving father of the Prodigal Son, the one who helps the “least of these”? Because that’s how you keep Christ in Christmas.

I try my best to do that, because even though I’m something like an eclectic Taoist Catholic who’s never gone strictly by the book and probably never will, it’s the Sermon-on-the-Mount goodness of Christ’s message that keeps me at least nominally in the fold. I was raised Catholic and find comfort and peace in the church’s rituals and traditions, the rhythms of the liturgical season, the undying message of love and hope, and the church’s unwavering pursuit of those timeless Platonic ideals of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Am I a “believer” in the story of Jesus in the most literal sense? Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by “believe.” I strive to live my life as if it were all true – not in a Pascal’s-Wager, hedging-my-bets-to-stay-out-of-hell kind of way, and not in a way of subjugating my critical mind to fictional absurdities, but because I see the benefit, both to myself and the world I live in, of adopting the philosophy that underpins the belief, whether the story is literally true or not.

“To make something special, you just have to believe it’s special.” So goes a line from the film Kung Fu Panda. I find it hard to disagree. Literal truth, philosophical truth, and spiritual truth are not all necessarily synonymous. It’s how you apply the truths you hold dear that ultimately make the difference.    

To that end, I have no doubt that a dogmatic by-the-book Christian would be uncomfortable with the spiritual decor in our house, at Christmas and otherwise. My nativity scenes and Advent wreath coexist peacefully with our pagan statuary and our Wheel of the Year plaque, which will soon turn from Samhain to Yule. We'll probably enjoy a little bûche de Noël, or even burn an actual Yule log in the fire pit, as we observe the solstice and cheer on the Oak King's annual defeat of the Holly King as the days start to get longer and we slowly emerge from darkness into light.

I suppose a bit of explanation is in order. My wife has an affinity for Taoist and pagan spirituality, and I myself walked the pagan path for a while before (sort of) coming full circle on my long spiritual journey. And I still admire the way those ancient primitive traditions bring us into closer harmony with the natural world and the rhythms of the changing seasons. But perhaps even more than that, I’m drawn to the way they elevate the nurturing gentleness and compassion, the yin, of the Sacred Feminine, which is lacking in the all-male Trinity and is something we dearly need more of in our violent and angry world, burning with the heat of yang male aggression.

Don’t tell the priest at the Latin Mass I attend, but I see Mary, Sophia, and the Holy Spirit, the indwelling Comforter, all as aspects of the feminine “half” of the Divine. Even beyond that, I regard them as accessible symbols of the Great Mother, the Tao, the infinite fruitful womb from which the ten thousand things arise, the natural order of the universe itself, that which guides and cares for all who follow her gentle ways, who find her in the natural world, and who honor and love her by living in harmony with her.

I’m not one of those all-religions-are-the-same people. That’s not my point, and it’s simply not true to say that Buddhism is Shinto is Islam is Christianity. My point is more that once you know the rules, you can break them, inasmuch as you can identify common threads and synthesize them into a worldview that magnifies the best of all the traditions you happen to observe and honor. I’ve been a student of religion for most of my adult life, and my explorations and wanderings have left me with a concept of God that has more to do with a sort of impersonal creative force, a universal mind or consciousness, the natural order, thought itself, or even a kind of elemental love. It’s something like the Hindu concept of Brahman, or, indeed, the Chinese concept of the Tao, rather than a perpetually enraged deity who casts into eternal torment anyone who slips up and breaks the rules. If God is really love, as the apostle John says, then God can’t be that God. It doesn’t compute.

And I think that’s one of the things Jesus came to tell us – that the Father desires mercy over sacrifice, that he wants reconciliation and forgiveness, that he wants us to focus less on exacting adherence to lists of rules, like the Pharisees did, and more on extending our hand to those in need, like the Good Samaritan did.

That’s what the Eastern Orthodox call theosis. You become more like God by becoming more like the man who, according to Christian theology, literally was God – in other words, what God would look like if God were Man. “God became Man so that Man could become like God,” said St. Athanasius. That notion probably sounds blasphemous to contemporary Western Christian ears, especially those outside the ancient Catholic and Orthodox traditions, where the theological notion of total depravity holds stronger sway. But I think Jordan Peterson made an excellent observation when, in commenting on Orthodox theology, he saw the point of being a Christian as “picking up your cross and stumbling up the damn hill,” in imitation of Christ.

That’s the same point Athanasius was making. If Christ was both fully human and fully divine, then by grafting ourselves on to Christ, by imitating his ways and following in his footsteps, by picking up our cross and following him, we can learn to infuse our flawed and broken humanity with the goodness of divinity. No, we’re probably not going to reach Christ-like heights of goodness in this life. Saints are saints, after all, because their exceptional lives are, well, the exception and not the rule. But at least we’re not consigned to being no more than Luther’s snow-covered dunghills, our inherent filth only ever covered and concealed by the purity of Christ. That’s a view that, whether it intends to or not, proclaims that Christ, the Son of God, lacks the ability to seep into our being and transform us on the inside. That, to me, seems far more blasphemous than anything Athanasius wrote down in the formative years of Christianity. God, after all, declared his creation good, and woe to those who call good evil, and evil good. It's all right there in the scriptures for anyone to see.

To me, the beauty of the Christmas story is that it gives us a light to illuminate the way toward theosis. It holds the potential to lift us up, to change our lives, to make this world a better place for the ones we will eventually leave behind. In imitation of Mary, we have to be the ones who demonstrate the faith to trust in the divine plan and to birth Christ anew into a world in dire need of his love, mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation, and selfless sacrifice.

Too often, we reduce Christianity to a kind of quid pro quo: accepting Jesus as your savior so you can go to heaven when you die. That’s an awfully low bar, and it ultimately does little to transform the world around us, or ourselves. This, I think, is why Jesus said to the Pharisees that “the kingdom of God is within you.” It’s not something that can be observed, “nor will people say ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is,’” Jesus told them. It’s already here. Right here, right now. You just have to find it within yourself, and Christ came to Earth to show us how to do that, to unlock the secret, to show us the Way, his Way, that lay latent within us. In the words of Po, again from Kung Fu Panda: “There is no secret ingredient. It’s just you.”

Along the same lines, I don’t think it’s a mere coincidence that the Chinese word “Tao” translates as “the Way.” The first Christians called themselves followers of the Way. So what, really, is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”? It’s the imitation of Christ, which is reflected in the natural order of the universe, and in the pursuit of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Therein lies what Christ called the Father. Therein lies love.

So my hope, even though it may be a fool’s hope, is that we might someday transcend our petty little turf wars, stop erecting walls, and embrace the inherent goodness of the stories that have for centuries united our culture. So what if Christianity appropriated pagan symbols and customs? So what if your neighbor’s idea of the Christmas story is a little bit different from yours? Christmas isn’t about dogma on one hand, or about throwing out the baby Jesus with the bathwater on the other. It’s not even about being pagan versus Christian. It’s about embracing the spirit of the law over the letter of the law, and following the Sermon-on-the-Mount example that was given to us as our moral, ethical, and indeed spiritual heritage. There may arguably be a time for “either-or” decisions in our lives. But Christmas transcends all that. It’s a holiday with a “both-and” spirit, a time that unites us in humility and hope, with a Way laid out before us, illuminated by the light of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

That’s not something to cast aside lightly. In fact, it’s the best Christmas gift we could ever hope for.