Mr. Oscar for Mr. Nobody

When the director of Mr. Nobody Against Putin accepted the Oscar for Best Documentary last night, I expected a condemnation of Russian aggression and a call for the USA to confirm its now dubious support for Ukraine.

Instead, David Borenstein immediately spelled out the film’s lesson, and without naming any countries, it was clear that his target was close to home:

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume, we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a “nobody” is more powerful than you think.

After it was over, Borenstein did name names while speaking with reporters:

One interesting thing about working with a team of Russians throughout this process has been my desire as an American to constantly compare the situation in America to Russia. But a lot of my Russian colleagues and friends always said, “No, no, it’s not the same situation. It’s actually happening quicker in America than it’s been happening in Russia.” Trump is moving a lot quicker than Putin in his early years.

The film itself, much of it assembled videos smuggled out of Russia by a young “videographer and events coordinator” opposed to his country’s war on Ukraine, focuses on the Kremlin’s efforts to control children’s perception of that war with revised history texts and “patriotic displays.” Echoes of calls for “patriotic education” by Republican officials in DC and in state capitols across the USA are hard to miss.

Also hard to miss are the confused and frightened looks of children and their parents who are receiving contradictory news from relatives and neighbors who have been sent to the front, and where many of them themselves may be dispatched. Some teachers are glad to go along and win citations for their enthusiasm, while most go through the motions, and silently pray for change–a listlessness not lost on their students.

Screening Room patrons leaving the film call it both heartwarming and heartbreaking, no doubt due to Pavel Talankin, the videographer dubbed “Mr. Nobody” at the center of the film. He does all he can to keep students engaged and hopeful until he senses a tightening noose and defects. He, too, has an Oscar, but, like Vladimir Zelenskyy telling the world, “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition,” Talankin didn’t come here seeking any award. He came here for the students of his country seeking a much stronger ally.

Overall, I’m satisfied with the Oscar choices. Can’t really pontificate on them because, unlike most years, I missed half the films nominated. Wish I had seen Sinners, nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards, but taking just four. Problem was that it was billed as a horror film, a genre for which I have no more interest than I have in roller skating.

The top awards for One Battle After Another–Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay–surprised me even as I cheered each time. Surprising because it was satire that many people took literally, and because it was as incisive and relevant to the ICED-America in which we now find ourselves. That artistic sin led several critics to dismiss the film as “liberal fantasy.”

But the second highlight of the night goes to Norwegian Director Joachim Trier. Accepting the Best International Picture Oscar for Sentimental Value, he concluded by paraphrasing James Baldwin’s observation that all adults are responsible for all children.

Would never have thought of it before the event, but that was a common theme for all of last night’s winners.

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Old Gaol, Old Golds, & Old Gail

Ever since I was a young boy, I played language like pinball. From Lawrence down to Salem, I bet I played it all.

For me, a silver ball such as “Gaol” lights every bumper and racks up the score. Why, I might flip so furiously at its possibilities that I’ll tilt the machine.

The Old English spelling remained in use until 1960 when finally overtaken by the phonetically friendly, though visually anemic “jail.”

At age nine, I never noticed. A decade later, when I was thrown into one, all the signs said, “Charles Street Jail.”

Too bad. “Jail” made me think only of bail.

With “gaol,” I’d have tripped on the psychedelic hint of “ghoul” and haunted my captors, or I’d have prolonged the sound of “goal” and declared victory over them.

Then there’s one Gail way back in the black mining hills of Dakota, called herself Nancy, though everyone knew her as Lil. Cherished memories that may yet tilt whatever is left of my septuagenarian machine.

Newburyport’s “Old Gaol” even recalls the Old Golds we smoked when we were left recumbent, close to paralyzed, and staring at the ceiling after the bells and buzzers fell silent and the bumpers dimmed.

Washing ashore in 1982, I was heartened that the Port’s numerous historical treasures include the Old Gaol.

That’s why, on Tuesday, March 10, at 7:00 pm, I’ll attend yet another Zoning Board of Appeals meeting in the Senior Center to decide its fate.

Or will they?

Since 2019, the Old Gaol has been pinballed into a bureaucratic Limbo that began when owner Charles Griffin gained variances to divide the lot for the sake of separate sales.

For that rare form of zoning relief, he agreed to place a preservation restriction on the Old Gaol buildings. The ZBA reasoned that the public would benefit from the preservation of a rare architectural treasure.

Eager to get what he wanted, Griffin has not been so eager to give what he promised. Seven years later, there is still no restriction on the Old Gaol buildings and landscape.

In Massachusetts, such applications must go first to the city, then to the state Historical Commission, and finally to the City Council.

Alas, that document was never sent. Instead, Griffin submitted revised versions in 2021 and again last year, both of which MHC rejected.

But why waste words? If language is a pinball machine we can tilt, politics is a whirl that tilts us.

That’s good news for Griffin. His long-time ally on city commissions is Kim Turner, who is now Mayor Sean Reardon’s Special Projects Manager.

Rather than enforcing its own laws, City Hall awarded him a “Certificate of Appreciation” for his interior improvements of the exact same property that, nevertheless, remains the site of his non-compliance.

Perhaps if the beleaguered folks in the City Clerk’s office had ignored laws rather than enforcing them last year, the mayor might have treated them with a modicum of respect.

Anyway, as if by invitation, Griffin is back at the same ZBA asking for a whole new variance to use the Old Gaol as, if not an Airbnb, then maybe a Bed and Breakfast or hotel.

Six weeks after Reardon’s inauguration last year, Griffin filed a new application on February 18, and a public hearing was set for March 25.

Board members discussed the matter, only to continue it to April 8, then to May 27, then to June 10, July 8, August 12, October 28, and finally to January 13 of this year.

Did I say “finally”? My bad. On January 13, it was continued.

On that unfateful evening, some 20 members of the public attended in hopes of protecting the architectural treasure, some planning to comment during the time that all civic meetings include.

When the first began speaking, the chairman apologetically interrupted to remind her of the continuance.

She could comment only on the motion, but all else had to wait for when the Zoning Board would finally, if ever, vote on Griffin’s appeal.

“Alright. But just one question.”

“Yes?”

“How many continuances does he get?”

A burst of laughter from the audience lit my bumpers and sounded my bells: If the ZBA were a pinball machine, its name would be “Continue to Continue!”

Stall until it falls your way. It’s a bureaucratic flipper that always gets a replay. I’ve never seen it fail.

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Redesigned as living and office space: Photo by Newburyport *Daily News*.

From the street: https://ppreservationist.com/the-old-gaol-in-newburyport/

There are three structures on the site: https://ppreservationist.com/the-old-gaol-in-newburyport/

A ‘Doctor’ on ‘Dr. Oz’

A friend strolls over to Applebee’s only to find a line of hungry folks waiting to be seated. Since he’s alone, he peeks in at the bar, spots an empty seat, asks “May I?” and is told, “Sure, be right with you!”

He enjoys the meal and the vibe enough that he orders apple pie with candied walnuts and ice cream to top it off. He’d surely savor that as well, except that two barstools near him are vacated and quickly filled by a couple who have a lot to say, though neither seems to be speaking to the other, much less anyone else:

[H]e was kvetching about the sports on TV, [and] she was debating out loud about whether to get a cocktail or a glass of “chard” (-onnay)…

Despite his decadent dessert, my friend finds himself losing his appetite when Chard says something about a “doctor” she “heard on The Dr. Oz Show.” My friend, a physical therapist who knows about health, how to get it and how to keep it, can’t resist offering a candid assessment of Dr. Oz, which Chard counters by praising the guy who put the fruitcake in charge of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services.

Paying his bill and getting “out of there before (he) said something that might have caused a scene,” my friend “needed some antacids by the time (he) got back home”:

The point is, this is the kind of thing we’re dealing with as far as his devotees are concerned. I can only hope that she catches a clue-by-four to the head if that so-called “SAVE Act” is passed, and she suddenly finds herself… unable to vote because of her support for (expletive deleted)!!

To me, the the very phrase, “a doctor on The Dr. Oz Show” is a punch-line that needs no set-up. Made me laugh so hard that I missed his fusion of the expressions “get a clue” and “two-by-four to the back of the head” as a method of enlightenment. A nice play on phrases, but now that we’ve shed a laugh, let’s get back to reality check, please!

The very idea of a doctor quacking it up with a renowned quack sums up what “we’re dealing with as far as his devotees are concerned.” My friend wasn’t engaged in an argument. He was on the outside of an inside joke. The question he is left with, and leaves us with, is yet another version of how any ostensibly intelligent person can possibly believe the gaggle of loony tunes in this (expletive deleted) Administration.

They don’t believe it. They get off on it.

The inside joke was teasingly on display during last week’s Hate of the Union Address. Behind the (expletive deleted) were his top two enablers who made no effort to keep a straight face. Not that they couldn’t, but that they were there behind him in the frame of the camera to visually if not literally rub our faces in farce and fraud.

The frequent smirks of VP Vance and House Speaker Johnson were the reactions of those who are in on a joke. They know it was all lies, but truth, fact, and reality have nothing to do with it. As Clara Barton said of Southern propaganda in the decade before the Civil War, all they want are stimulants. There’s no attempt to inform. In fact, information just gets in their way. What they want is to excite, inflame, detonate. If you’re in the background, and in on the joke, what better way to enhance the stimulant than to smirk?

It’s not that we are dealing with people who are wrong. It’s that we are dealing with people who are high–and who have neither hope nor intention of sobering up.

I know very well how hard it is to resist responding to people who parrot Fox Noise, but I’ve made it a rule to hold my tongue unless others are present on the chance that they may be open to evidence and reason. Just the fact that Chard indicated–openly and out loud–that she watches The Dr. Oz Show would have been enough to convince me that she wasn’t worth delaying the next mouthful of lemon meringue pie. (I don’t much care for walnuts.)

Better to let those people stew in their own regurgitated food for ignorance. Otherwise, you’ll be reaching for antacids no matter how good your spinach pie and Greek salad.

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Dinner is served! The men in charge of American health.
https://newswav.com/article/rfk-jr-shares-bizarre-pic-with-lizard-russell-brand-and-shirtless-dr-oz-A2502_m3FFEo

History Pulled Taut

Among the first films I saw at the Screening Room where I now show them was 1984’s playfully pointed The Brother from Another Planet, one of the earliest written and directed by John Sayles, by then already acclaimed in art-house cinema circles for Return of the Secaucus Seven.

I had missed that 1979 gem, but when I got caught up in the Boomer hoopla of 1983’s The Big Chill, Screening Room faithful let me know in no uncertain terms that it was a sanitized version of Secaucus Seven. They were right.

Sayles would continue riding high in the world of independent film with film after film of compelling stories, irresistible characters, and dialogue at once natural and purposeful. The list is surprisingly long even to a Sayles fan, so many more than the best known: Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and Lone Star (1996).

There’s a reason why these and every other film of his are beyond entertaining and informative. As a projectionist I was able to see them several times. (Not only do I not pay to see films, I get paid to see them.) Every viewing was always just as satisfying, and on one busman’s holiday, it was doubly so. That was during a cross-country trip with my daughter, then 16. We stayed a night in Lawrence, Kansas, for dinner and a movie at the Free State Cinema & Brew Pub. If that combo wasn’t luck enough, Roan Inish was on the screen. Next day we were talking about it half way to Colorado.

Can’t just be us. In 1997, the West Newton Cinema, an art-house with six screens including one with perhaps 35 seats, played Men with Guns for at least six months. At the end of the run, their entry in the Boston Globe‘s schedule announced that it would be the final week. I had monitored that weekly page for 15 years and cannot recall any other film gaining such a notice.

Two years later, Limbo would nearly match it. Some irony here. Limbo ends not with a fade to black, but to white. As the one-word title suggests, there is no certain outcome. When viewers left the theater, they stopped at the base of the projection booth, asking if I knew what happened next. A former projectionist at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, N.Y., now co-owner of the Screening Room, tells me that people left angry when it played there.

That may have turned the tide on Sayles’ films, although it’s far more likely that “market forces”–a euphemism for greed that seeks the lowest common denominator–caused funding for independent films, particularly those made by writers and directors committed to honest exposes of history, to shrink. A brief succession of films–Sunshine State (2002), Casa de los Babys (2003), and Silver City (2004)–continued to do well in art-house cinemas such as ours, but as Sayles recently said in a public appearance, at least on of his screenplays is still on the shelf.

All along, Sayles was also writing novels. He appeared at Newburyport’s Jabberwocky Bookshop last month to read from and talk about his latest of nine novels, Crucible. The event was billed as “a conversation” with local author, Andre Dubus III, who noted that, for all Sayles’ attention to people who have been slighted and wronged by the twists and turns of American history, he is “never didactic.” Quite a compliment for a novel that might pass as a fictionalized chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

As cinematic as his films, Crucible is an epic spanning nearly 500 pages, 16 years, a couple dozen characters, and six settings from Michigan to Brazil. To unify all of that is the Ford Motor Company, ads for which divide the novel’s seven sections while denoting the passage of time–from the Crash of 1929, through the last years of Prohibition, into the New Deal, up against one of the most consequential strikes of America’s Labor Movement, accompanied by race riots, past a mural by Diego Rivera, into labor unions, and headlong toward World War II, churning out tanks where once they made cars.

The characters are distinct and as recognizable as those we see today: a Polish family, a Jewish family, a Black family, an AFL, a CIO, members of the Detroit press, Henry Ford himself with his gun-happy henchman and his affable son Edsel, as ill-fated as the car that would bear his name. You can see the crowded neighborhoods, feel the humidity of the rainforest, hear the drills in the factory; touch the steering wheel of a Model T, smell the golabki in the kitchen.

There’s also a family named Rogan who would be dispatched from the pine forests on Michigan’s lily-white Upper Peninsula into the Amazon Jungle to grow rubber trees when the “Sage of Dearborn,” tired of paying Goodyear and Firestone for tires, thought he could make his own. In his talk, Sayles estimated that “Fordlandia” was about the size of Connecticut, but in the book he gives far more space to Kerry Rogan who we watch grow up in Brazil with her puppy-love, Flavio, each of them teaching the other their native language.

May sound like too much, but the pages may be three-fourths dialogue. The result is as fast-paced as Hemingway, though the casual, witty narrator, the jokes, the historical content, and the innovative format make Hemingway’s friend, John Dos Passos, a closer comparison. While Dos Passos employed a “Camera’s Eye” between chapters of Manhattan Transfer and his USA trilogy, Sayles’ narrator is a camera. Here’s an exchange between a young Jewish woman [Rosa] and a Polish couple [Kaz and Molly] who rescue her from a riot after her boyfriend shoved her into their car because he wanted to join the fight. Unable to drive safely into her neighborhood, they take her home for the night:

“Your father won’t be worried?” she asks.

“Not really,” says Rosa, amazed at how much cooler this house is compared to their apartment in Hastings. “I told him I’d be staying with Rick overnight.”

“And Rick is–?”

“The soldier you saw me have a fight with.”

“Ah.”

Rosa forgets, sometimes, that she is in the minority in many ways, social mores being one of them. Kaz looks amused, but Molly–

“Do you have a date set?”

“Ah—-? Oh, no marriage plans.”

Molly tucks a sheet under the sofa cushions, pulling it taut.

Crucible weaves the stories of these and over a dozen other characters into a final section that, without dictating just what their future holds, gives us the direction they are heading. Rosa will be rid of Rick. Kaz and Molly’s handicapped daughter, Sonia, will have a productive life. Mavis is far less fortunate at the morgue looking for her 14-year-old son. Flavio is a rare teenager who can speak fluent English in a third-world country. Norma wants to be a nurse whether she gets paid or not. And her daughter Kerry is on a flight back to Michigan to attend a teacher’s college:

“You are going home now?” asks the nice Brazilian lady beside her.

Kerry’s answer to that question would make a Ford owner’s manual worth slogging through. Thankfully, Sayles put it at the end of a novel rich with such moments. Much like his films.

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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000626/

War Between States II

The naming of states in Tuesday night’s Hate of the Union rant continues to nag.

Today, Doc Oz announced million$ in Medicaid to be withheld from Minnesota. Last time states were attacked by an internal force, it was immediately recognized as a Civil War. At the time, states vs. states. This time, the internal force may reach north and west with sizable minorities in the bluest states, and control of several Great Plains and Rust Belt states. But it has a solid geographical base of states once called the Confederacy.

Over a century and a half later, they may not be the same people, but they profess the same ideology that gave us slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, segregation, “separate but equal,” George Wallace, Lester Maddox, fire hoses, ax handles, and “strange fruit.” You can say that a few of those have no comparison to anything in the USA today. But you cannot say that of the black masks that have replaced white hoods while raiding Northern and Western cities to apprehend innocent people they call “illegal aliens,” the updated phrase for “fugitive slaves.” Nor can you say it of Republican bills in numerous states and in the US Congress to purge rolls of registered voters.

We keep saying that many of ICE’s individual actions make no sense. For instance, last night’s seizure of a student at Columbia University with no criminal record. Until we reject the absurd pretense of “law enforcement” and recognize what this actually is, we will continue to be baffled. Consider it in the same context as the Reign of Terror across the South from the end of Reconstruction well into the 1930s, and everything ICE has done–including murder, including taking five-year-olds in bunny hats from their parents, including the jokes about the number of bullet holes one could pump into a day-care teacher–makes perfect, if perverse, sense.

Problem is that we are well past the start of Civil War II, and only one side knows it, understands it, talks like it, acts like, and has the advantage of it. All while the other side clings to the belief that it can’t happen here.

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https://ballotpedia.org/Gubernatorial_and_legislative_party_control_of_state_government

Call It ‘Hate of the Union’

Five quick points to make about last night’s address. In no particular order:

1) A strong indication–if not an outright announcement–of a plan to replace the income tax with tariff revenue. Sort of thing the MAGA crowd–and I fear others–will fall for.

2) The claim that Memphis, New Orleans & DC are safe & clean while never mentioning Minneapolis, followed by naming California, Massachusetts, & Maine as next up. State names, but we know he means cities. LA Olympics, 2028 will serve as a pretext. Sue Collins will gain praise and credit for Maine (a lot of Somalis in Lewiston) being spared in an attempt to keep her seat Republican. Mass (i.e. Boston & Cambridge) hardly needs a pretext, as the MAGA crowd hates us more than anyone.

3) Not a single mention of Epstein, even though it was well-known that survivors were in the gallery. If you don’t make him look good or if he can’t attach himself to your success–say an Olympic gold medal–while you smile at and cheer along with him, you do not exist.

4) Most glaring was the way he smeared Somalis. As ugly as the charge that Haitian immigrants eat dogs and cats, the most malignant claim in his thoroughly malignant 2024 campaign. Anyone who hears that and still say that nothing today can be compared to the movement that swept Germany in the 1930s is looking for an excuse not to think, nothing more, nothing less, nothing other.

5) The constant smirking of VP Vance and House Speaker Johnson were the reactions of those who are in on a joke. They know it was all lies, but truth, fact, and reality have nothing to do with it. As Clara Barton said of Southern propaganda in the decade before the Civil War, all they want are stimulants. There’s no attempt to inform. In fact, information just gets in their way. What they want is to excite, inflame, detonate.

No wonder the ringleader’s top two assistants didn’t keep a straight face. Not that they couldn’t, but that they were there behind him in the frame of the camera to literally rub our faces in the farce and fraud by adding to the stimulant. What better to do that than smirk?

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Postscript: Turns out they did reveal what they really thought:

https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2025/03/jd-vance-and-mike-johnson-caught-on-hot-mic-before-trump-speech/

A Storm of Nostalgia

After so many winters of slight reminders, a reasonable facsimile of the legendary Blizzard of ’78 has finally buried New England.

In recent years we may have wondered if we would ever see a real winter again. We have to go all the way back to Snowpocalypse of 2015 for any serious challenge to 1978, but that was an accumulation of four blizzards in 17 days.

So many reports of power outages, downed trees, snow drifts blocking roads as soon as plows can clear them, even a few plows spinning into ditches, something of which I never heard, along with claims from Rhode Island that the accumulation tops that of ’78, setting the Ocean State’s all time record for a single storm–all of that was waiting for me before I logged in this morning.

Which had to wait before power on Plum Island was restored. I knew it was out only because I was up late enough, reading until I became drowsy, to have the light turn itself out. Mid-sentence, too, how rude! Having just watched Jon Stewart, I knew it was just past midnight. I looked out my window facing northwest over the marsh toward our one and only road to the mainland and saw a line of yellow and red lights flashing about a half mile away. Utility vehicles. They were already on it, so all I needed to do was get under as many covers as I have.

When I awoke before 8:00, quite early for me, I was surprised and a bit concerned that the power was still out. But I was grateful that I had ground enough Colombian yesterday that I needed no grinder this morning. I took the cup and French press to bed, put on two shirts, and got back under the covers, found the syllable where I was interrupted and settled in. Twenty pages later, I heard the heater kick in, and noticed that the light behind my bed was on. It was 9:15.

Nine hours may be the longest power outage I’ve ever experienced in my 42 years on this wind-swept, wave-beaten North Atlantic sandbar. But if I managed to sleep through eight of them, it really shouldn’t count. At best, a minor inconvenience compared to what friends and family south of Boston are still living through, wondering if they have enough oil for their generators, or when they might find someone able to remove the downed pine tree blocking the driveway, or if insurance will cover the smashed taillight on the Toyota. With next-door neighbors, a couple of my daughter’s generation, clearing our shared driveway, as well as clearing my car’s windows with their brooms, I might even feel a tad guilty for having it relatively easy.

But I did suffer one unnerving bit of news. Not at all personally, but– Psychologically? Philosophically? Whatever it’s called, it was demoralizing to hear that the Boston Globe did not publish a print edition today. Yes, I know that we are hurtling headlong down a hands-free highway that is all on-line, but I still hope to travel the back-roads of newspapers with all of their scenic views and serendipity to my final rest stop.

That’s no doubt why I drive this Lenovo slowly. However, I now hasten to offer a memory stirred by the Globe‘s decision to sit this one out. One that allows me to relive better days and revel in nostalgia.

During the Blizzard of ’78, clips of the Globe along with others from the Boston Herald, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, the Haverhill Gazette, the Salem Evening News, and a full pull-out section of the Manchester Union Leader were sent to me in Bismarck, North Dakota. That’s right, I missed it, but never have I received so much mail, most of it requiring extra postage, some in packages.

A grant-writer for the United Tribes of North Dakota, I found myself in occasional contact with the Bismarck Tribune, and befriended several of its reporters. Not long after my Prodigal Son return to Massachusetts, one was hired as editor of the Grand Forks (ND) Herald and one by one hired the rest to join him in that vibrant college town on the Minnesota border not far south of Winnipeg. In 1997, the Red River flooded, ruining downtown with electrical short circuits that burned down the Herald building. But they put together a paper, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press produced it for them. Their effort won them the Pulitzer for community service.

Granted that 29 years later, the Globe‘s audience has access to the Globe‘s website, as well as more websites than they could click for as long as they could handle their caffeine. While my friends in Grand Forks were providing something that would not have been there at all, the Globe knows that what it did not print was still available to most.

Most? I thought the whole idea of diversity, equity, and especially inclusion was for all.

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My friends won the Pulitzer and all I got was this T-shirt. On the left of the blue line atop the paper’s name, are the date, April 21, 1997, and the price, which for this issue was changed to “Free.”
The three headlines you probably cannot read are: “Another day of lost battles, and embers of hope,” “A heart destroyed,” and “Mayor inspires GF as dad, 92, evacuates farm.”

The back. First word is “Through.” Last word is “Delivers.”

America’s Case of the Clap

Surrounded by whitened windows through which I can barely see the shrubs where the wrens and the bluejays play just five feet away, I might be grateful that I have no choice but to focus on a subject I’d rather ignore.

The tell-tale beep-beep-beep of a utility vehicle penetrates the howl of wind, which I take as a warning that my power could quit on any given keystroke, so I better say what I have to say as quickly as I can.

The subject: The State of the Union Address is scheduled for tomorrow night. As far back as John Kennedy when I first became aware of the nature of participatory governance, I’ve regarded this annual event the way Catholics regard holy days of obligation.

Never mattered what I thought of the president giving it. In fact, it seemed more important to keep track of what Reagan and the Bushes would claim than what Carter or Clinton would explain. As the trial lawyer for the Chicago 7, William Kunstler, told us back in the Nixon years: “We need to keep abreast of evil.”

Many Democratic senators and representatives say they are going to boycott, but you can bet they’ll be pouring through summaries Wednesday morning. Many progressives, liberals, and friends who still consider themselves conservative–but are alienated by the MAGA-Republican Party’s nihilism and corruption–say the same, and I don’t blame them.

If anything, I envy them, but for me it’s an addiction. At least if I’m going to continue writing political commentaries, and are not those commentaries among the commentaries they’ll seek on Wednesday?

All that said, none of this means that I am obligated to provide one. For starters, I would never attempt a summary of a full speech, especially one made by a barking, babbling, incoherent, cruel, scrambled-brained, endlessly repetitive, fitfully flippant fool. My self-assignment is always to find an item that may otherwise go unnoticed, and at times that has not been in the speech, but in how it was received.

Spin the clock back 34 years, and my State of the Union report was a call to ban the applause made by members of one party after every statement made by a president of their party. This not only significantly prolongs the speech, but robs it of continuity and coherence. Of course, that will be doing this anti-literate sleaze a favor, but it taxes the listener’s patience, and in 1992 it near knocked George H.W. Bush down for an eight-count.

Parroting the Republican lie about universal health care, Bush mentioned a Canadian suffering for weeks while awaiting an operation, and then ended the sentence. And right on miscue, enough Republicans were on automatic pilot that loud cheers filled the hall. Bush, to his credit (although to his disadvantage), was not on automatic pilot, Visibly confused, he stepped back from the microphone and furrowed his brow as laughter overcame the cheers. Then, as if remembering where he was, he chuckled and continued speaking.

Too bad the local newspaper’s electronic archives do not reach that far back, but the column is included in my collection, Once Upon an Attention Span, under the headline, “Suffering a Case of the Clap.”

As for tomorrow, this clown’s severe case of non-stop verbal diarrhea combined with the slavish worship of a political party-turned-personality cult, the State of the Union should be ripe with such moments. (Ripe in both senses of the word.)

Wait, you may say, wondering what happened to my claim in the opening line that I “have no choice but to focus on a subject I’d rather ignore”?

Picky, picky! What you missed is that I never ruled out changing the subject to something on which I’d have no choice but to focus. So there it is, along with one of the blue jays that’s frequented that shrub outside my window all winter, perhaps looking at the picture of another on a Christmas card sent by Cousin Janice a couple years ago.

The utility vehicle? The beeping stopped not long after I mentioned it, right about when someone posted on Facebook that one of the utility poles along the Plum Island Causeway, the one and only link we have to the mainland, was bent about 45-degr——-

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-to-deliver-state-of-the-union-address-why-10-things-to-know/ar-AA1WFFzH

Penny Deposit, No Return

By this time every year, my taxes are done and in the mail, if only so I can forget about them ASAP.

Whether I’ll need to write and send a check–one about ten years back was just over $1,600–or I’ll expect a check doesn’t matter. I just want it done and in the mail, with my own copies buried back in some drawer. And so it happens on the first weekend of this month, usually complete by sundown, Saturday.

But here we are about to enter February’s third weekend, and I am sitting with an assortment of six W-2s and 1099s, for which my chaotic life calls, ready to record on federal and state forms that remain blank. Problem is: I need seven.

You may be wondering just how impossibly wealthy I am if I can boast of seven sources of income. In truth, I have eight, but the New Hampshire Dept. of Corrections apparently takes care of any money that a convict owes you. All I know is that NHDC has never sent me a tax statement since they started bleeding the wayward cousin who stiffed me for $2,000 back in 2000. Apparently, she only pays when she’s back in chronic custody, so I get a check for $70 literally about once in a blue moon.

Of the statements that I do have is one for royalties from Amazon which sells my three books on demand, and which, as I understand it, lets people view a few pages for as little as two cents. Pay the Piper!, my memoir of life as a street-musician, is now, gulp, twelve years old, and even the most recent, Once Upon an Attention Span, is four, so sales have faded, and the statement is just over $11.

Another statement arrived unexpectedly. This summer I took advantage of an offer of $300 to open a checking account in a bank nearby after my bank of 25 years merged with another and shut down the local branch. Never occurred to me that the $300 would be taxed, and this will be the first time I can recall putting anything but zero on a 1040 line for interest.

Add that $311 to the combined $6K of two seasonal musical gigs, and you can begin to see why I have so many. Of those remaining, both part-time, one ended in July and the other is but a day a week. Combine those totals, which I am not going to divulge, to those on the aforementioned $6,311, and it is still less than the amount on the missing form.

Shouldn’t take too much reading between the lines here to figure out that, despite the number of these endeavors, the time they require is minimal. Yes, although it is my misfortune to have those two musical gigs, as fortunate as they are, happen at the same time of year. Put it this way, my life is a nine-month vacation interrupted just one day (Wednesday) each week. In September and October, I am full-court press, and in November I am basket case.

By now you have no doubt figured out that the one delinquent form is, of all things, my “Social Security Benefit Statement.” Worth noting here is that many Americans do not realize that Social Security allotments are taxed. And for good reason. Logic should tell us that, if the federal government has determined a sum you should have, why allot more than that sum, and then withhold a portion–in turn, causing the recipient through an annual course of mathematical hoops and hurdles to determine how much more the government should send out or have sent back?

As envisioned during Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, logic ruled. It was all done in one step, and it worked very well until the 1980s when Pres. Ronald Reagan initiated the bill to tax it. As I recall, “added revenue” was the stated reason, but as always with Republicans, it was part of an overall scheme to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans who tend to contribute to Republican campaigns. This is what they call “Trickle Down Economics,” but by now only the most gullible among us believes that it is anything other than “trickle up,” or maybe “tinkle down.”

Call it political poetry: the same US Treasury that requires me to submit its form back to it, withholds it, preventing me from meeting its own requirement. Don’t the folks there know they are supposed to withhold only the money as an estimate to offset a fair share determined by April 15? And that both refunds and bills are issued when the paperwork is done?

Instead of half a weekend doing forms, I’ve spent half this past week on-line and on the phone trying to get through to an actual person. Instead, I get new passwords that get me to a window asking for a “passcode.” No idea what they are, where they are, and certainly unable to fathom why they are, I give up. The phone menus are impenetrable, referring me back to the site, which refers me back to the same phone numbers.

So aggravating that I went to bed last night resolved to email a request for assistance to the office of my US Congressman, Seth Moulton. Oh, how I hate to bother those good people with such a mundane matter when they are trying to hold the GOP (Guardians of Pedophiles) to account. But congressional offices seem to be the only federal offices of any kind where you can connect to a fellow human being without suffering the interminable, insulting, and paralyzing algorithms of AI.

And so it was that, as soon as I downed the last bite of eggs fiesta and poured myself another French press, I was on this Lenovo letting my rep’s staff know the agony and frustration of an old man wanting only to perform his civic duty of paying taxes–or at least making sure I’ve paid my fair share. And, as I am often prone to do, I started with such detail that I just kept going. And now here I am inflicting it on you.

Apologies for this ordeal, but I may make it up to you with some comic relief:

Royalties from Amazon are directly deposited into my checking account, and so I learn of them on about the 17th or 18th of each month when my bank statement arrives. When my books first appeared, I might see entries for $120, and then it would gradually decrease a few months, to maybe $40 in the fifth month and then disappear. Most months would then not have it, while others had a small amount, including one for just seven cents. I’ve been joking about it ever since.

A few days ago, I pulled a bank statement from my mailbox, opened it right there in broad daylight at the foot of my driveway, and laughed as hard as I’ve ever laughed. Amazon deposited a royalty of one cent.

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Battle of the Bads

With comparisons to the Gestapo and an MO that recalls America’s infamous Fugitive Slave Act of the 1850s, the US Enforcement Immigration and Customs (ICE) is the cruelest feature of an administration in which cruelty is a top requirement for every job.

Apart from the military, ICE is the deadliest federal agency–although this week’s termination of the ability to restrict carbon emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will in time prove more lethal than two dead in Minnesota.

Here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts, we’ve seen very little of ICE, despite no end of lower-case ice, but this month we have been rocked by two ICE-related news items.

First, word circulated that Todd Lyons, the Acting Director of ICE, lives in West Newbury, a sleepy, leafy little town with no more of a center than a small grocery store and a pizza joint, barely eight miles from the coast where I now write.

Second, just days ago we learned that New Hampshire Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed an agreement with ICE to permit the conversion of a warehouse in Merrimack N.H. into an ICE detention center with the capacity for 500 beds.

Residents of Merrimack and neighboring towns and cities knew that something was cooking and have been gathering by the hundreds at the site to hold vigils. They were shocked to learn that Ayotte had signed the agreement weeks earlier but never announced it. That’s very much in character for her. She campaigns without using the word “Republican,” omitting it from her signs and pamphlets, pretending that it’s not there, and disassociating herself from Trump as much as possible–just as most all New England Republicans do.

If that’s not duplicity enough, Ayotte is already dissing the plan despite the fact that she just signed off on it. According to the Associated Press:

Tensions boiled to the surface after interim ICE Director Todd Lyons testified Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security ‘has worked with Gov. Ayotte’ and provided her with an economic impact summary.

Always playing it both ways, Ayotte seized the chance to create an impression of opposing the move, claiming that Lyon’s claim was “simply not true” and that there was no summary sent until he had already testified. She also claimed that the document boasted of revenues to be gained by state sales and income taxes. New Hampshire has neither tax. Said Ayotte, as quoted by the AP:

Director Lyons’ comments today are another example of the troubling pattern of issues with this process… Officials from the Department of Homeland Security continue to provide zero details of their plans for Merrimack, never mind providing any reports or surveys.

Merrimack is barely 25 miles north of Lowell, Mass., about a dozen south of Manchester NH, and maybe 45 straight west from the coast. Before long, I’m sure to attend a vigil there, perhaps in a rendezvous with my musician friends in Peterborough NH, another 45 miles to the west.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been invited to join vigils outside of Todd Lyons’ residence in West Newbury. This has become the subject of debate among locals who attend the weekend rallies along main drags in Newburyport, Ipswich, and other towns nearby. Some feel that a protest shouldn’t be brought to anyone’s door, no matter how culpable they may be. What of the family, of neighbors?

Others ask what of the families of innocent people murdered by an agency under his direction? What of neighborhoods that have been living in terror for weeks and counting due to his decisions? Why should an administrator of and apologist for murder and terror have a safe space? Should their families be spared from candles in the night lit to shed light on their crimes?

I’m honestly torn. On the one hand, I cannot bring myself to protest at anyone’s residence. What if I offend some group with a column in the local paper? Plenty of opportunity for them to confront me in the press or in a public meeting. Outside my window? What good does that do?

On the other hand, I do not fault those who do hold signs outside Lyons’ home. Not only do I appreciate their rationale for doing it, but I respect their effort to act. As misdirected as I think it is, to stand outside that home, or the home of any member of Trump’s Reign of Hate–with signs, with chants, with flags, with the willingness to see wrong and try to right it–is preferable to doing nothing.

There’s one place I would go, however. Why, I’d be the first to buy a ticket, paying full price to sit up front. If the flap between Lyons and Ayotte should flare out of control, they might arrange a cage fight. I’d bring a sign:

A pox on both you louses!

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