In which Clarence Thomas has it in for progressivism.

"Hmm," I thought a few minutes ago. "It's Sunday. I owe everybody a blog post. What should I write about? I could write about Pagans and Earth Day if I'd gone to the event I was aiming for yesterday, but instead I slept in...

"Maybe I could rant about the annoying trend of long, long Facebook posts that people are resorting to because Facebook will throttle the reach of any post with an off-Facebook link in it. Except I think a lot of folks saw my Facebook post about it yesterday. Why beat a dead horse?

"Wait. When was the last time I did a current events post?" <checks post history> "Holy cats, not since March 1st? And that was only a glancing blow! And there's so much there to talk about -- the Iran war that Trump has declared he won too many times to count, Trump's whining about his ballroom, Trump and Vance picking a fight with the pope over Catholic doctrine, of all things...

"I know! I'll write about Clarence Thomas!"

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Why yes, those scales are tilted to the right.
quarta | Deposit Photos

You may have missed it, what with all the usual noise coming from the general direction of the White House. But this week, Justice Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. He started out talking about the Declaration of Independence, this being the 250th anniversary of its signing and all. But then he went off on this weird diatribe about how progressivism is going to doom the United States to failure. No, really. The New Republic quoted him: 

Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration's principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. "As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure," the justice warned. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

"Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life," Thomas continued. "It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever."

Wilson is not the most famous president to be associated with progressivism; that would be Teddy Roosevelt. But Wilson was an academic, which automatically makes him a target of those who love the poorly educated. Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, stronger antitrust laws, and a ban on child labor -- none of which made him popular with the rich. 

Wilson was president during the nation's first Gilded Age, when rich industrialists were remaking the country to suit themselves. (As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observes, we are in the nation's second Gilded Age today. It wasn't a good thing for the working class then, and it isn't today, either.)

Thomas went on to draw a line from progressive policies in Germany, which Wilson supposedly based American progressivism on, to -- wait for it -- the rise of Hitler. It gets wackier from there; I recommend the New Republic article I linked to above, if you're interested. 

What interested me more than Justice Thomas's rewriting of history was that at the beginning of his speech, he greeted one of the attendees: Harlan Crow. Yup, that Harlan Crow: the GOP megadonor who has showered Thomas and his wife with vacations and gifts, including buying from Thomas in 2014 the house where Thomas's mother lived in Savannah, GA, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to renovate the property -- a transaction that Thomas somehow forgot to list on his mandatory financial disclosure form.

People are prone to telling themselves all sorts of myths to justify their actions and to maintain their lifestyles. In that respect, the rich are no different.

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These moments of self-serving blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Tax the rich, already!

In which I go for Baroque.

Sorry. I had to.

I know some of y'all already thought I was weird because I like opera. It gets worse: I love early music, from the very earliest monophonic stuff like Gregorian chant to the Baroque composers Bach and Handel. And yesterday I got a chance to expand my experience in that playground by attending a concert here in Santa Fe featuring songs from Spanish Baroque composers. 

First, let's set the time frame. If you've ever heard anything by Bach or any part of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, you're already familiar with the biggest musical names of the period. The Baroque period ran from 1600 to 1760, give or take, or about the time when North America was being settled by Europeans. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, to give you another benchmark. Here in New Mexico, settlers had begun to come up the Camino Real from Mexico City and make a new life for themselves on the Spanish (later Mexican) frontier; the Pueblo Revolt, when the local Native Americans had enough of Spanish rule and kicked them all the way back to El Paso, happened in 1680, smack dab in the middle of this period.

Back in Spain, Diego Velázquez painted this in Madrid in 1656: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The painting is called Las Meninas o La familia de Felipe IV. ("Meninas" are ladies-in-waiting.) It's a little tattered around the edges because it's actually a 3D "postcard" that I picked up when I was at the Prado in Madrid: you flip it over, fold it along the creases, and look through the little portholes to get the 3D effect. The little blond girl at the center is the Infanta Margaret Theresa, who was five years old at the time. The artist depicts himself at his easel on the left; the mirror on the back wall shows the images of the Infanta's parents, King Philip IV and his queen, Mariana of Austria; and in the doorway on the right stands the queen's chamberlain, to whom the artist may have been related. In short, it's a fun painting with a lot going on.

Which is a pretty good description of Baroque music, too. Just listen to one of Bach's fugues. (Start the video at 2:47 if you want to skip the tocatta at the start.)

Anyway, this concert featured songs by a bunch of composers I'd never heard of before. One of them is Sebastian de Murcia. This piece wasn't on yesterday's program, but it gives you a flavor for the sound, anyway. (The instrument being played in the video is a Baroque guitar. It's smaller and fancier than a modern acoustic guitar and has nine strings instead of six. I found a guy on YouTube who gives more information on the Baroque guitar. If you're as nerdy as I am about ancient music, you may find it as fascinating as I did.)

If we were playing the "which historical era would you want to live in" game, the Baroque would be pretty high on my list. Anyone want to join me?

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These moments of ornate blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Think magic is impossible? Maybe we've just been taught to believe that.

Happy whichever spring holiday you celebrate! The redbud tree is not as showy as I'd hoped it would be -- just a few blossoms are adorning its trunk. But it had a tough maiden year in my garden, and I'm hoping for more blooms next year. At least it's leafing out. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Other flowers are doing better, including these volunteer violets (the little johnny-jump-up kind, not the African kind). Volunteers are my favorite flowers.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

My daffodils are done for the year, and so are my grape hyacinths. I'm debating whether to put real money into plants this spring; I still don't know whether my deck will be dismantled this year to fix the bad framing job the roofers did in rebuilding it, and if that happens, I'll basically lose whatever's planted in the beds. Might just stick with volunteers this year.

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Anyway, for most Christians, today is Easter, a sacred day on their liturgical calendar. One of my Christian friends shared a post on Facebook about how Jesus would be treated if he showed up in America today. The original poster basically said that it wouldn't end well, because so many purported Christians would object to the things he actually is said to have believed and done. I think that's true. Regular Americans today who try to embody Jesus's teachings -- healing the sick, ordering the moneychangers out of the temple, exchanging swords for plowshares, and so on -- are often not treated well, to put it mildly. And Christian nationalists have zero use for the idea of welcoming strangers and treating them as actual human beings.

I'm not Christian, as I've said, and while I see where the original poster is coming from -- and even agree with him -- I see an even more basic problem: We, as a society, have lost our belief in magic.

If any holy person or prophet of any religion arrived in today's world, I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn't believe them. Wouldn't believe they were who they said they were. Would call them a crackpot. Would call the cops on them. Would have them committed as mentally ill.

But what if they proved who they said they were by performing miracles? It might get them committed faster. Or we'd dismiss it as a trick, or Photoshop, or A.I. Because by and large, we've had our belief in miracles -- in magic -- beaten out of us. Magic and/or miracles might have happened in olden times, but not any more. Certainly not today.

The Church has only itself to blame. It bought adherents at a cost, and one of the things it did to win believers was to decapitate magic. It did that by declaring anything not officially sanctioned by the Church the work of the devil.

People are moving away from the Church these days, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Because the Church trained us to mistrust our own senses, and that mistrust has become ingrained in Western culture. Oh, we don't say magic is of the devil anymore, or rather most of us don't, but we still feel uneasy when we see it working. Now we're more likely to say that a thing is impossible. Or it's a trick. Or there has to be an explanation; we just haven't figured it out yet.

Think of all the movies that have turned on this plot point. Here's one: God returns, right? Maybe as George Burns. And nobody believes him except a grocery store manager played by John Denver, and the guy's life gets a whole lot more complicated as a result.

You laugh. I mean, I sure did when I saw the movie. But I laughed partly because God's reception was so plausible. 

I'm not saying we should all give every scammer and con artist we run across the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying maybe materialism doesn't have the answer to everything. 

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To be clear, I do believe in science. But I also think there are some things that are real, but science dismisses them out of hand.

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These moments of bloggy magic have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!

Why it's important to get tile samples.

It's spring (it must be -- I finally remembered to swap the winter front door wreath with the spring one), and this old woman's fancy has turned to finishing the bathroom remodel.

Some people celebrate warmer weather by buying seeds and bedding plants; I celebrate by dreaming about ripping out my combo bathtub/shower and replacing it with just a shower. Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that I finished remodeling half of the bathroom (two-thirds, if you count the laundry closet makeover) last September. When I posted about it back then, I included copious photos; if you scroll down in that post to the pic of the vessel sink, you can see the tub/shower alcove in the mirror. The tiles are a tired beige. The grab bars are positioned weirdly and look like they belong in a nursing home. I'm pretty sure the tub had an apron front, but somebody covered it with a four-inch-deep extension in a tile that doesn't quite match the original tile color and that blocks the laundry door from opening all the way. Presumably the extension's purpose was to provide a wider seat for someone getting in and out of the tub. But then somebody later added glass shower doors, and the bottom track for the doors ruined the wider seat.

In a perfect world, I'd have a newly-tiled shower with a minimal threshold, a bench, and a nicho for shampoo and stuff. (In a perfectly perfect world, I'd make it a steam shower, but there is literally nowhere to put the steam unit.And then there's the installation cost and maintance and haha nope.) 

I could have one of those prefab acrylic things installed over the old shower tile. But I want a bench, and I can't add one until the tub is gone. And how, I ask you, would prefab acrylic shower walls look in the same room as my fabulous bespoke vanity? They would look stupid. It would look like I'd given up. And I am not giving up!

So I'm entertaining myself by haunting websites and ordering tile samples. The samples do pile up, but they're cheap as vices go, and supposedly you can do crafty things with them. And they are essential for planning a remodeling project over time. 

Take, for example, my kitchen countertops. When I first started looking online, I fell head-over-heels in love with a solid-surface product from Formica called Bottle Glass Quartz. (It's not actual quartz. That's just the name.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

But no one would even sell me a sample, let alone make me kitchen countertops out of it. Okay, that's not strictly true; one local place said they would make me kitchen counters, but the price would have been astronomical. I realize now that most dealers were hesitant because they'd have to order a whole slab, and who else would want such busy countertops in a so-not-neutral? They'd be stuck with the remnant forever. So I sucked it up and ordered a different solid surface pattern from Lowe's.

Then last week, I was looking on websites for tile samples, and lo and behold, one place not only carried Formica Bottle Glass Quartz, but they had samples! I'm no longer in the market for countertops, but I ordered a sample for old times' sake.

Boy, did I dodge a bullet. Here's the sample of the love of my life, along with one of the Terrazzo Sea Glass I settled for: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The stuff I was dying to get would have been too gray and too dark for my windowless kitchen. The pattern I settled for brightens up the room and goes great with my oak cabinets.

The moral of the story: Don't fall in love with tile - or a countertop - until you see the sample.

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To be clear, I think grab bars in a shower are a splendid idea; I just don't like the nursing-home vibe of the ones in there now. So I ordered nicer ones this weekend.

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I did, in fact, find the perfect tile for my shower walls in this latest batch of samples. Somewhat unbelievably, the color matches my bespoke vanity. However, this is about the eighth perfect shower tile I've found over the years, which is another reason I just need to get the project done already.

And then I can figure out what to do with all those tile samples...

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* Nicho is the Spanish word for niche, and a common term around these parts, especially for folks who lean Southwesterny in their decor. 

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These moments of bloggy design fatigue have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!