Welcome to Wild Things

Birds, photography, publishing, and politics?

ADMITTEDLY, THIS IS AN ECLECTIC MIX. But none of us are one thing, right? I have other interests as well, some of which I may discuss here. I recently wrote the introduction for a book published for a museum retrospective of a painter I admire, Linda Okazaki, and also edited an AI anthology for Microsoft. Before that it was designing a book on Alaskan dinosaurs—yes, it once was a swamp—for artist, paleo nerd, and punster Ray Troll. In advance of my summer exhibit, Outside In, I wrote a series of small essays about particular birds and my experiences in photographing them. I’m also working on essays about my early and longtime participation in organizations and publications on the Left, and my distress about the illiberalism that (again) saturates leftwing politics, especially in light of the Hamas attacks. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with a less contentious subject—unless you count the recent decision to rename them—the birds.

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BIRDS

Those Neah Bay Doves

This photograph recently won the People’s Choice Award for an exhibit at the Bainbridge Arts & Crafts gallery. And a large, framed print sold, as did two at the Outside In exhibit in the summer. Here’s the story behind the picture.

ONE END of the museum at the Butler Motel and Nature Museum in Neah Bay serves as the lobby for the motel. The yard behind the rented rooms backs into a forested wetland, part of an eight-acre parcel on the Makah reservation that was inherited by Richard Butler, a tribal member. Nancy, his wife, lovingly tends the museum, a single room in the front with mounts of a full-size black bear and cougar, an elk head, a river otter that got caught in a crab pot, and a rare lynx cub. A few glass cases display shells and smaller animals, and the lobby end has a few faded books and board games. Though in her mid-seventies, Nancy also runs the motel, washes the sheets, and regularly replenishes the array of bird feeders she’s placed in the backyard.

THE MAKAH RESERVATION lies at the most northwestern point of the lower forty-eight states and is bisected by the Wa’atch River, which spills into the Pacific on the west side. The wildlife and the Makah depend upon a bounty of fish and crustaceans from the sea. Birdwatchers love the variety of habitats, especially when migrants stop to rest on their way to and from Alaska and other points north. On a previous visit, I had seen a flock of Eurasian Collared-Doves perched in the moss-covered trees behind the motel. When I returned in the fall of 2019, I stayed at the motel and rose early to see the herons and shorebirds on the bay. At one point, in the dim morning light, I nearly ran into an immature bald eagle that was as startled as I was by the encounter. For the rest of the day, I drove slowly down the shore of the Wa’atch, where I found a Red-tailed Hawk and various ducks, and on to the beach, where there were gulls and cormorants. All day, the skies were overcast and the light dull—the typical northwestern “pewter” day that is challenging for making photographs. Near sunset, I returned, disappointed, to the motel. There, in the yard, I immediately saw a photograph—several of the doves were competing at a copper feeder set on a stump. I scrambled down to the ground as the light started to fade. Since I knew motion blur was my enemy, I cranked up the shutter speed. And just as I started shooting, the setting sun poked through the clouds behind me.

The photograph “Neah Bay Doves” has found its way into several collections, including that of a curator at the San Francisco Museums of Fine Art. Locally, it has been shown in two galleries and the hospital. A five by six-foot print will hung Outside In exhibit at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery. When I called Nancy Butler to confirm some details about the motel for this post, she told me that a birder she knew had seen a mounted photograph of doves hanging at the Port Townsend hospital and had sent her a snap from his phone. She was delighted to learn that the photograph was mine, taken at her motel four years ago.

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POLITICS

Hamas and the Left

And now for something completely different. I’ve been both perplexed and distressed by the outpouring of support for Hamas by purportedly leftwing organizations. I’m also disturbed by the broader antisemitism that’s emerged. This is not just support for the Palestinians—I think most people of conscience cannot help but feel concerned and upset over the lives lost in Gaza—but we’ve seen active cheering for a group of terrorists who have avowed little regard for Palestinian lives and none for Israelis. Their goal is to wipe out Israel and to build a caliphate under sharia law in the tradition of the Taliban and Iran, their sponsors. How can a supposedly leftwing organization support rape, murder, and kidnapping by such a group? It reminds me of the worship of violence— as long as it was launched under the veneer of “anti-imperialism”—that I observed among New Left groups in the 1970s.

I’m particularly perplexed because so many of the people I’ve worked with in liberal and leftwing circles over the years were Jewish. Have they been marginalized? And I am shocked by the more general hatred against Jews that’s emerged. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. The FBI stats on hate crimes report that last year, long before the current outpouring, anti-Jewish crimes were second only to anti-black ones.

I’ve read several good articles on the subject. Peter Juul calls it the indecent Left. NYU professor Susie Linfield writes in The Return of Progressive Atrocity about the long history of the Left overlooking, rationalizing, or actively cheering terrorism and autocratic violence.

The Western Left’s response to October 7th will, I believe, be viewed as a moment of moral corruption on a par with the defense of Stalin’s purges, Czechoslovakia’s antisemitic show trials of 1952, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s antisemitic expulsions of 1968, along with the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide (see under: Chomsky, Noam) and the adulation of China’s vicious Cultural Revolution.

Conservative NY Times columnist Bret Stephens cited Linfield’s article while arguing that the Left’s anti-Israel stance actually dooms any hope for a Palestinian state. My friend John Judis, with Ruy Tuxeira, write in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? that the ideology underlying this response is also dooming Democrats. In Liberal Patriot, Tuxeira goes further, saying it’s time to throw the intersectional Left under the bus. He believes this is a “golden opportunity” for Democrats to disavow them. I’m not so sure how golden. Most liberals would be appalled to hear some of the comments at the Oakland City Council, including the accusation that the IDF staged the massacres in Israel. Shades of Holocaust denial. Yet the council voted against condemning the Hamas atrocities. I’ve also had liberal—not hard Left—friends describe Israel’s actions as a genocide while rationalizing away what happened at the Nir Oz Kibbutz and Sukkot music festival. What accounts for such a moral failure? Perhaps Jay Caspian Kang is correct when he argues in the New Yorker that we must see the dead children—in Nir Oz and elsewhere.

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PUBLISHING

The Lush Forests of Alaska

A second edition of Alaskan Dinosaurs by artist Ray Troll and Smithsonian paleontologist Kirk Johnson is now available. (First one sold out.) Yours truly designed the book, which can be ordered here for a mere $14.95.

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