The nature of metallic nets

Maybe the nature in this post’s title can justify the inclusion of today’s two pictures in a blog ostensibly devoted to photographing nature. Even if it can’t, headstrong me went ahead and included them.

On a sunny March 10th we drove the 90 miles down to San Antonio’s Phil Hardberger Park and checked out the year-old Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge over Wurzbach Parkway. (You’ve seen two jimsonweed pictures from that jaunt.) After leaving the park we stopped for lunch at the nearby Green Vegetarian Cuisine. Some of the restaurant’s outdoor furniture was made of metal, with tabletops and chair seats being net-like. The abstractions produced by those horizontal grids and their shadows on the concrete below proved irresistible, so as an appetizer while waiting for the meals we’d ordered to arrive I went to work with my iPhone. Its camera’s very short focal length proved an advantage for these kinds of pictures, simultaneously focusing things at different distances from the lens.

 

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In Woke Racism, professor John McWhorter makes the case that what he names in the title of his book constitutes a new religion, complete with dogma, sin, priests, proselytizing, and the expulsion of heretics. McWhorter believes that we can no more argue with the followers of that religion about the beliefs they take on faith than you can with the devout believers of any other religion about its doctrine.

So what to do about the reality that many blacks in America lag behind members of other ethnic groups? McWhorter offers three proposals (which I happen to have been proposing for decades now—yay me!):

• Fight to end the war on drugs.
• Make sure kids not from book-lined homes are taught to read with phonics.
• Advocate vocational training for poor people and battle the idea that “real” people go to college.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman