A Dyke A Broad #59 --The Burgundy Edition
Notes & photos from rural France, my grandmother's apple crisp, plus thoughts on the Rittenhouse & Arbery verdicts, and more.
Hello from rural France!
This week I’ve been hanging out at a friends’ house in a tiny rural hamlet near the Morvan region of Burgundy. Its blend of ancient mountains, straggly forests, penny-pinching farms, and limestone caves reminds me so much of some regions of Kentucky that I feel painfully at home. Especially since the visit coincided with the American holiday of Thanksgiving, the kick-off to the smarmiest, most family-centric season of the year, in which my continued survival (and yours) is not guaranteed.
I marked it anyway with food. I roasted Brussel sprouts in the toaster oven, halving the big ones, and then tossed them in a vinaigrette I made by frying up a little bacon with onion, then adding a bunch of vinegar at the end.
Sweet potatoes were boiled with ginger and cinnamon, and then mashed with butter and the crème fraîche I found in the fridge. And of course I made apple crisp.
Apple crisp was my grandmother’s specialty. She used to fetch her fruit from relatives in the country where big news one year was that they finally had an indoor toilet. Other times she’d go to an orchard near town where she’d buy them by the bushel, come home and make a thick, jammy apple butter, or a big pan of apple crisp. This involved a lot of coring and peeling while sitting at her white speckled formica table. When I was little, I’d ask for a bite, and she’d say that it would be too tart, “These are cooking apples. You won’t like it at all.” And when I’d insist, she’d wait until I had a big, tangy bite in my mouth, then ask if I was enjoying the worms. I’d shriek of course, with disgust and delight.
I got my own apples this time by bravely venturing into my friends’ cellar where, post-backyard harvest, they’d been laid out in rows like a globular little army. They were a little worse for the wear with a worm here, a worm there, but still ready for action. So back in the kitchen, this time on a bright yellow formica table, I peeled and peeled, smeared juice and worm guts on my hands, my face, too, probably, because that’s what happens in the country. And bit by bit, these things that used to hang on trees in the backyard like leaves like opossums or moths turned miraculously into food.
Recipe, Apple Crisp
Peel, deworm, core, and chop a bunch of apples. Toss them with a couple tablespoons flour, a little cinnamon and sugar, before putting them in a buttered pan big enough to hold them with some room left over for the topping. Dot the apples with a few pinches of butter. Or if you want to make it like my grandmother—the cheapest margarine you can find.
To make your topping, mix one part flour, to about two parts of oatmeal, or cranberry muesli if that’s what you have on hand. Add some sugar (brown sugar if you have it), chopped nuts of some kind, and a big knob of butter ripped or chopped into bits. Rub the fat half-heartedly into the flour, oatmeal, sugar mixture, leaving some chunks largely untouched.
Sprinkle this evenly over the apples until you have a layer of a centimeter or so.
Bake that in the oven set to a medium heat until the top gets brown and crisp, and some juices bubble in the bottom.
Serve warm with a dollop of something dairy like crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream.
Eat too much trying to recapture the innocence of youth. Save the rest for breakfast.
In other news…
One thing, (one! ha!) that has troubled me since 2000—when I started paying attention to the mechanics of social change—is how comfortable American “progressives” are with sneering at basic elements of democracy including the rule of law and free speech—only excepting the brief show of concern for such things under Trump.
It’s almost as if no one understands that democracy is the building block of social change. Where would The Gays be, for instance, without the right to assemble and to speak? And where would we be if basic laws changed with every administration? Screwed. The worm turns. The value of the rule of law is that people in power change every four years, but laws don’t get tossed out automatically, and that they are (ideally) applied in the same way to everyone. All the time. And when they aren’t, well, we have the constitution-given right to take to the streets and run our mouths off. And if we don’t like the laws themselves, and think they are unjust, there is a process to change them. What we don’t want is government by feeling. Or moral outrage. I remember very well what it’s like to be the butt of it.
Which is why I really appreciated Helen Lewis’ piece pulling together both the non-guilty Rittenhouse verdict, and the murder convictions of the three men involved in the death of Ahmaud Arbery identifying the common themes of racism and U.S. gun laws central to them both. She has a particularly clearsighted view as an outsider, a Brit.
Both cases returned, in my view, the correct verdicts—Rittenhouse had a strong self-defence claim under Wisconsin’s laws, which isn’t the same as saying what he did was smart, or that he is a hero. The Arbery verdict is especially welcome, since all but one of the jury were white, a deliberate choice by the defence. But both cases reveal something more deeply rotten in the American justice system. Who wrote the laws under which these men were operating, or felt they were operating? Who do those laws protect? And who enforces those laws?
When it comes to the Rittenhouse case, my thoughts also align with Claire Potter who talks about some failures in the media coverage, but also the importance of seeing Rittenhouse as an individual.
I have been mulling one question since the verdict was handed down in Kenosha: when did Kyle Rittenhouse cease being a person and become an avatar? On the right, Rittenhouse has become a symbol of righteous, white masculinity; on the left, he became the embodiment of organized white supremacy. Of course, both of these things are, in a larger sense, true if what you are talking about is media representation.
But if you are talking about a real person, a person of no accomplishments who is insignificant except to his family, the man he wounded, and the families of the men he murdered, these assertions bear no relation to reality. Unfortunately, the project of making controversial figures into avatars—figures who embody a set of ideas or concepts that are larger than themselves—is now so seamless and automatic that we are now stuck in a set of repetitive conversations about someone who doesn’t really exist, that have little to do with the facts of the case.
Why is it important to see Rittenhouse as an individual when he did do something monstrous? In my own opinion, it’s because how we think so easily becomes a habit. I’ve noticed that reducing people like Rittenhouse to monsters, or, on the other hand, elevating George Floyd or Mathew Shepherd into mere victims, symbols, saints, we become more likely to see everyone that way. Especially groups of people who are no longer 1 human+1 human+1 human=group, but are suddenly just generic blobs which we can easily dehumanize, manipulate to fit our narratives. It means we forget how to think.
On Paper
One of my favorite things to do in someone else’s house is to poke around their bookshelves. The treasure this time? Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times. (Which also includes women.) I need more time to digest her essay on Rosa Luxemburg which sums up some of her thoughts on social change which I think speak to our current moment. Especially what she has to say about revolution and activism and what layers of bureaucracy do to both.
Maybe next time… if I don’t get distracted. But don’t hold your breath.
Almost ironically, the essay on Isak Dinesen mentions how she hated being labeled a writer, or anything else. Arendt says Dinesen believed “…the chief trap in life is one’s own identity.” What a radical idea in 2021, soon to be 2022.
Courtesy of Caroline Criado Perez…
yet another reminder that sex differences are real and have an impact far beyond who can pop a baby. This time, it’s how A popular COVID-19 drug might not help women, new study shows. Does anybody care? Not so much.
And, irony of the week…
Police ( male) fire teargas and smoke bombs at women marching to end violence against women.
According to rights groups in Turkey, 345 women have been killed so far this year.
At least 10 women and girls are killed every day in Mexico, according to Amnesty International.
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,
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