Yesterday a friend and I visited the Warren G. Harding Presidential Sites in Marion, OH - mainly because it was about halfway between the two of us. Harding is not one of our most illustrious presidents. Although he was popular during his time in office (he died in 1923 before finishing his first term), corruption and multiple extra-marital affairs were later revealed that tarnished his reputation. The historical information at the site is clearly trying to rehabilitate him: there is more information in the exhibits about the family pets than the scandals.

What was most interesting to me was that Harding’s home was in a regular neighborhood with nearby houses. It was nice but not particularly large or grand. The ten members of our tour group had to squeeze around each other upstairs. It looked like it could be any of the houses in my own small-town midwestern neighborhood.

This struck me, I believe, for two reasons. First, because in modern times we associate wealth with US presidents. The Hardings were not poor, to be sure. They were, according to the tour guide, upper middle class. They traveled around the world. To give you a sense of comparison, he ranks 37 of 46 on this listing of US presidents by wealth. All of the presidents in my lifetime have been multimillionaires. The last time we had a president who was not a millionaire (adjusted for inflation) was Harry Truman. Whatever they may say, US presidents have not been, by and large, “just like us.”

The second reason I was struck by the size and location of his home was that he, like three Ohioan presidents before him, ran a “front-porch campaign” for president, that is, voters and delegations of voters came to him and he gave speeches from the front porch of his house. Crowds of up to five or even ten thousand people would gather in his (not large!) front yard. The Republican National Committee headquarters moved into the house next door to him. One of the reasons we have such good records of those front door speeches is that his next door neighbor sat on her front porch and made notes at all of the events. She published them as a newspaper column called “The Girl Next Door.”

Harding doesn’t deserve to be held up as a model for … well, anything really, but visiting the site did remind me of how much the United States presidency has changed over the past century.

June 25-26, 2014, was a two-day window in which same-sex marriage was legal in Indiana. (More on the history here.) On June 25, the United States District Court struck down Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriage. Licenses began to be issued that day and continued to be issued the next day. On June 27, the Seventh Circuit court brought the licensing to a halt while the case was appealed by the State of Indiana. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on October 6, 2014, which legalized same-sex marriage in Indiana. The Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage for the entire country came a few months later in June 2015.

Our local public radio station has produced a podcast episode telling the stories of couples who were married in that two-day window. The final story is of a couple from my hometown, which the narrator correctly describes as not the most progressive town in the country.

I remember those two days. We all knew that then-governor Mike Pence would appeal the decision and likely get a temporary stay. But the fact that it had happened in Indiana was truly exciting. On my drive home from work on June 25th, I came across a gay pride flag flying from the top of some apartments in my hometown of Bedford. In Bedford! I was amazed - and took this picture to capture the moment.

Dan Olson’s video “Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs” is an excellent critique of crypto generally and NFTs in particular. It is well worth its two-hour runtime. The crypto economy, he argues, is just replacing a bad system with a worse one. NFTs represent another step toward the financialization of everything.

What I really appreciate about the video, though, is the context in which he places the crypto phenomenon. The true believers, he says, are those who saw the enormous clusterfuck of the Great Recession and turned against the financial system - not in order to liberate people from the power of finance but in order to take Wall Street’s power for themselves. To “be the boot.” History feels like it is narrowing and the crypto evangelists intend to grab what they can while they can.

He concludes:

Our systems are breaking or broken, straining under neglect or sabotage, and our leaders seem, at best, complacent, willing to coast out the collapse. We need something better. But a system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that distills all interaction into transaction, that determines the value of something by how sellable it is and whether or not it can be gambled on as a fractional token sold by a micro-auction - that’s not it.

The Black Belt was a region in the American South known for its rich, black soil. It was home to many cotton plantations and, consequently, enslaved black people. During the Great Migration, large numbers of black people moved out of the South into northern cities, taking the blues and other cultural creations with them. Not all moved, though. Alabama Blackbelt Blues is a documentary by Alabama Public Television on the continuing blues tradition in Alabama’s portion of the Black Belt. (Watch the trailer here.)

If you like the blues, you’ll like this documentary - simple as that. It’s given me a whole list of singers and musicians to listen to. And, unsurprisingly, the names of John and Alan Lomax come up regularly as collectors and preservers of this music. I plan to explore their collections more thoroughly soon.

Listen: “Trouble So Hard” by Vera Hall

Once (2007) causes me such exquisite emotional pain that I have to put a few years between each viewing.

🎵 Sister Rosetta Tharpe - “God Leads Us Along” 🎵

I’m on a sixteen day streak with Day One. I’ve never been able to maintain a daily journaling habit but Day One is helping me do that. I had never heard of it before I saw several people on Micro.Blog talking about it, so thanks y’all.

I’ve finished all of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

This is an excellent video on how Amazon can afford to offer free shipping to Prime members. Basically, it hides the cost of shipping by raising prices across the internet. And that, folks, is monopoly power.