afriendlyletter.comA Friendly Letter | Chuck Fager — Writer, Editor

A Friendly Letter Decades of blogging from an old pro. Quaker stuff, civil rights stuff, hopeless causes, stories, photos, you name it. Chuck Fager — Writer, Editor Search Primary Menu Skip to content Home Bio Flagship Articles Theological essays “Abortion & Civil War” Bill O’Reilly Interview Fleecing the Faithful Print Issues-A Friendly Letter – March, 1981 – May, 1985 – Archive Print Issues-A Friendly Letter – June, 1985 – December, 1989 – Archive Print-Issues-A Friendly Letter – January, 1990 – January, 1993 – Archive Index of Print Archive PDF’s Contact Chuck Search for: Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War , Arts -Visual , Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs , Current Affairs , Fire This Time , Hard-Core Quaker , Movies TV and videos , Resistance , Signs of the Times , Social Justice Cancel Cops, Cancel ALL Cop Shows, NO Exceptions. And Cancel Quakers Too? June 22, 2020 Chuck Fager Leave a comment Just read a very striking piece by E. J. Dickson in Rolling Stone. It says the “Cancel Cops Crusade,” in order to root out systemic police racism, killings & impunity, also has to take down the media images of the police. Even — especially– those of the “good cop.” Why? because the problem isn’t “bad apples” but rotten trees — in fact, a national forest of 18000 rotten orchards. To get to the core of the rot, this media dethroning, Dickson argues, has to include even the very best of the media good cops, including the clear favorite of the author and so many progressive TV viewers. That would be Officer Olivia Benson (played so persuasively by Mariska Hargitay) the main character in “Law & Order-SVU.” In this role she has fought the good fight against every kind of sex offender one could think of for 21 seasons. An anguished sidebar here: in February 2000, SVU ran an episode called “Limitations,” much of which centered on Quakers. In it they had to confront issues of forgiveness, defying the law because of conscience, and having a Quaker rape victim pay dues for her victimizer with no remedy in sight. Continue reading Cancel Cops, Cancel ALL Cop Shows, NO Exceptions. And Cancel Quakers Too? → Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War , Election 2020 , Signs of the Times , Weird & Peculiar Sunday Funnies: Trump & The Revenge of The Tik-Tok Nerds June 21, 2020 Chuck Fager 2 Comments I know about the register-for-Free-on-the-net thing for Trump rallies. I did it myself in 2016, twice. But not as a trick. I actually went to those rallies, in Fayetteville NC, one before and one after the election. I’m the wrong generation for such tech maneuvers For the first one, I printed out the ticket, and had it ready in my pocket. But nobody at the gate asked for it; the second time, I didn’t bother. I was about as far from being a Trumper as one could get. But I went to see if what the media was going nuts about was really happening. Intelligence gathering. As we now know, way too well, it was real enough. Or maybe really surreal. Continue reading Sunday Funnies: Trump & The Revenge of The Tik-Tok Nerds → Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War , Black & White & Other Colors , Current Affairs , Fire This Time , Signs of the Times Removing the Statue of John C. Calhoun will be easy. Banishing his Ghost will not. June 19, 2020 Chuck Fager 3 Comments For Juneteenth, I should be completely pleased with the news that the City Council in Charleston SC will be doing its best to dethrone a statue of John C. Calhoun. The plan was announced in connection with the fifth anniversary of the horrible mass killing of nine black worshippers at the city’s Mother Emanuel AME Church. Its projected deconstruction is part of the swell of collective revulsion after the George Floyd killing that is felling one Confederate monument after another. The removal would also defy a state law protecting such monuments. Maybe here is where my hesitation is triggered: not over civil disobedience against such a statute; but starting with the seemingly technical point that Calhoun was not a Confederate leader, or even a Civil War figure: he died in 1850, eleven years before hostilities started. (Once the war began, the rebel government sought to enshrine his iconic status by adding Calhoun’s visage to the Confederate $100 bill {at lower left}. When that didn’t work out so well, the Defenders of the Lost Cause turned to more durable monuments.) The fact that Calhoun was a pre-war actor is not a reason to leave his monument alone. But it does raise the questions of why it’s there, and why it’s so “monumental” — 115 feet high, and officially venerated since its erection in 1896. As an ode to Calhoun by a local poet, Miss E. B. Cheesborough, crowed, Float it above the city’s spires, And o’er the bay’s blue tide, Tell how he battled for the South, And battling thus—he died. . . . Continue reading Removing the Statue of John C. Calhoun will be easy. Banishing his Ghost will not. → Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War , LGBTQ & Gender , Signs of the Times , Social Justice Gorsuch, LGBTQs, & the Rightwing Freakout June 16, 2020 Chuck Fager 5 Comments From “The Bulwark,” a Never Trump blog run by Charlie Sykes, an anti-Trump/somewhat repentant/former right wing radio talk show host. Trigger warning: this post quotes numerous conservatives who are freaking out over the Supreme Court’s LGBTQ ruling, and who approve of homophobic bigotry. For those who wonder why I post such stuff, here are some of my reasons: 1. Much of the writing is snappy, vivid & interesting. 2. Also much of it is self-critical. In this it sets an example some woke folks might well follow. 3. For me, reading right wingers (in measured doses) offers a chance to bone up on arguments & materials which might one day help change a few right wing minds. (Hey— it happens, and it HAS happened a lot on these issues in recent decades.) 4. Because my guru Sun Tzu said I should. Some will remember that Sun Tzu wrote a classic pacifist book, which is required reading for all wannabe peaceniks. It’s as valuable page for page as the Bible (plus a helluva lot shorter), and called “The Art of War.” In it Sun Tzu devotes a whole chapter to the importance of spies to success in war. His point, in sum, is that to succeed in war (& other conflicts), Know Your Freekin Enemy. Continue reading Gorsuch, LGBTQs, & the Rightwing Freakout → Colleges & Education , Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs , Current Affairs , Quaker Colleges , Signs of the Times The Axe Falls at Earlham (Again): Virus & Depression taking Big toll June 15, 2020 Chuck Fager 1 Comment It’s even happening in Cambridge Massachusetts: “Harvard Offers Staff Early Retirement to Reduce Expenses,” roars a recent Bloomberg headline. “Richest U.S. school also allows voluntary cuts in work hours . . . asking employees to consider a series of voluntary measures, including early retirement, giving up vacation and reducing work hours as it faces a revenue shortfall of $1.2 billion over two academic years.” We’ll not weep for the Crimson here; if Harvard is down a billion or so, its endowment still has a $39 billion cushion. (For that matter, Yale announced in May it was cutting next year’s budget by several hundred million, and freezing salaries and hiring.) But when Harvard/Yale catches a cold, many a smaller private college gets swamped by, well, pandemic pneumonia panic. And sure enough, in this week’s news, the axe is falling, heavily, at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Forget golf and tennis, you student athletes, a May announcement said, they’re gone. Plus, president Anne Houtman said, there would be “$7.6 million in budget cuts made for the next fiscal year. As of July 1, 34 positions will be eliminated with 27 more ‘restructured through efficiencies across campus.’ The college employs about 400 people.” Houtman: “I don’t have to tell you that we are facing a perfect storm of an unprecedented nature — deficit spending for several years, ...