Murder by Another Name

Americans from here to Honolulu heard of ICE’s recent murder of an innocent man in Biddeford, Maine, an immigrant well on the path to citizenship who worked, supported a family, and paid taxes, the virtues of citizenship that we hold highest.

As always, ICE quickly accused him of trying to run them down with his car. As always, videos showed that to be a lie.

Then, ICE hid behind the excuse of “mistaken identity,” which reeks of denial of their foremost concern which, from the start, has been to fill quotas. Accuracy be damned. Just keep repeating the words murderers, rapists, criminals, and drug dealers, and enough of the American public will think that your target can’t be big enough.

And with so many of them on the loose, there’s bound to be some “honest” mistakes. Or should “mistakes” be the word put in quotes?

Just 60 miles north of us, Biddeford was the scene of protests and vigils that Newburyporters have joined. So, too, has an ICE detention center in nearby Scarborough, Maine. As anyone from here to Honolulu might guess, the murder–by an agent with a history of domestic abuse and threats of violence–was a hot topic of conversation, newspaper opinion pages, barroom and coffeeshop conversation in this Massachusetts seaport city two state borders away.

Meanwhile, a very different story regarding the Dept. of Homeland Security broke in Gloucester, Mass., out on the tip of Cape Ann, well north of Boston, but south of us by just half the driving distance of Biddeford, and half that as the gull glides.

Doubtful that anyone other than those who monitor DHS has heard of it, as I find over and again that people right here in Newburyport are both surprised and shocked when I tell them. If not for two friends from Rockport, the town adjacent Gloucester, telling me, I’d have missed it.

Father Benjamin Okwy Madu, a native Nigerian, arrived in the American melting pot in his 20s, newly ordained by the Catholic Church and eventually assigned to two churches in Gloucester and a third in Rockport. He was known simply as “Father Ben.”

Not just by his congregations, but by residents of assisted living and rehab centers which he frequented, and by patients in Salem Hospital where he served as chaplain. By all accounts he was tireless, always present, encouraging, and cheerful or consoling as the occasion warranted.

In a word, he was beloved by Catholics in a city heavy with a population of Portuguese descent. For years, all was well with the Catholic congregations of Rockport and Gloucester.

Until a few months ago when Father Ben received notice from the DHS that, after thirty years in this self-proclaimed “greatest country in the world,” his visa would not be renewed.

Of course, he appealed. So did Massachusetts’ governor, lieutenant governor, two US senators, the US Rep from the Sixth District, and the state legislators who represent Cape Ann, all of whom were flooded with letters, emails, and phone calls on Father Ben’s behalf. In addition to the unanimous testimony to his value to his community, petitions from the pols no doubt mentioned the persecution–murders and kidnappings–of Catholic priests in Nigeria.

DHS did not bend. Instead, it set a deadline: July 3. On July 2, Father Ben was found dead in a church rectory. He was 54.

Suicide? All the elements are there, including an impassioned letter of farewell and gratitude to his parishioners. Stress? Ditto. But there’s no need to choose. In this case, either one is murder by another name.

Yes, it made local news through the weekend in which “the land of the free and the home of the brave” celebrated 250 years of “liberty,” but the story, as they say in newsrooms, “had no legs”–possibly because we were at the time so busy waving flags and celebrating what a just, generous, and glorious nation we are.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/public-safety-and-emergencies/general/massachusetts-devastated-after-priest-dies-as-he-s-forced-to-leave-us-over-visa-issue/ar-AA28goT1

A Credit that Fools Only Fools

Celebrating Newburyport as a place where old folk thrive, a new film has wowed Screening Room audiences.

A Force for Good welcomes us to hear a dozen local seniors sketch their arrival–or childhood–here, and what they’ve since done related to civic life. Emphasis is on the city and all that is here to engage retired people with time to give, skills to share, company and conversation to offer.

Newburyport has a lot. In the museums, the schools, the Firehouse, Anna Jacques and elsewhere are opportunities to volunteer. Elderly volunteers in the library’s once-vibrant, now-stagnant Archival Center seem to have found places to remain active after they were “terminated” for no honest reason.

City Hall’s blunders aside, much of what the city offers happens at the Senior Center: arts, crafts, games, talks, workshops, assistance with tax forms and other paperwork, and more. A nice building with a few large rooms open to all kinds of civic events for people of all ages, all of it easily accessible.

Every now and then, a van will pull up to the door, and off go a gaggle of geezers on a field trip. (Hold your heat! I am one, so I can use that word.)

So it’s both predictable and natural that the Senior Center helped make A Force for Good possible, and the center is well-credited when the thank-yous roll.

On the very week the film aired at the Screening Room, a letter from the Senior Center’s Ann Freeman appeared in the Daily News. Like the film’s end-credits, it, too, was a litany of thank-yous to countless people, both individuals and groups, with and for whom she had worked until her position was, to use a euphemism that fools only fools, “not renewed.”

By title and assignment, Freeman was the “Council on Aging Outreach Specialist,” and her job description might be summed up by saying that she offered assistance and encouragement to everyone who went to her, and they were plenty, all of them aged and aging.

By all accounts she was energetic, upbeat, and committed to do all she could for men and women who are often frustrated by the time they seek help and expect nothing more than more frustration. All bear witness to how often she put people at ease and helped them solve problems.

So why the farewell?

Just weeks before A Force for Change played at the Screening Room, Mayor Sean Reardon cut her position from the city’s budget. One might assume that this is a cost savings measure, a cover-all reason impossible to argue with.

Impossible until you add the context of the rest of the budget, specifically the $3.5 million to be poured into the Frog Pond. While some attention to the pond is necessary and expensive, preparation for recreational boating is only one of those two things, and it sure ain’t necessary.

Please try to picture “recreational” boats on a body of water so small. On the Plum Island marsh, recreational boats are what we see cruising the channel. On the Frog Pond? They’d be like golf-carts on a miniature course.

Like the DC reflecting pool fiasco, this is a vanity project. More to the point, if that one line item is any more than 1/60th of the $3.5m package, then it by itself tops the annual salary of an Outreach Specialist.

Ah, no matter. Few people ever look at a city budget. Fewer yet bother with line items. And even less will hear the testimony of ten seniors at one City Hall meeting fervently asking to keep Ann Freeman where she does so much impossibly good work.

But many see films, and when it’s local with familiar faces on the big screen, most stay for the end credits. Judging by the smiles of viewers as they left the hall, few if any noticed that a film rooted in Newburyport’s Senior Center extended thanks to the very man who “not renewed” the center’s beloved staff member.

Yet another photo-op with a huge font in place of Mayor Reardon’s ever-blissful smile.

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Nothing but Cheap Camouflage

Still laughing at the absurd claim that the Town of Newbury wants to ban American flags? Beware the Pacific Legal Foundation!

The anti-environment, anti-consumer protection, anti-occupational safety national powerhouse was already here in 2015. That’s when the same handful of self-styled patriots cried for public help after an angry Atlantic damaged their waterfront homes.

They hoped to rebuild on the same sites compromised by erosion, only to meet resistance from geologists, ecologists, oceanographers, and state officials. For comic relief, I offered a Daily News column headlined, “Welcome to Dumb Island!” (Nov. 5, 2015)

My neighbors laughed for weeks, quoting phrases when we crossed island or mainland paths. Clearly, the name was for those looking for the state to not just offset their loss, but to make it possible for them to take the same risk.

Get a load of the opening line of PLF’s rebuttal:

“Gentle readers of The Daily News surely agree that it was at least impolite for a writer in this space to label all of his neighbors on Plum Island ‘dumb’.” (Nov. 30)

I guess “gentle readers” would be impolite to point out the gross distortion of the word “all.”

Such an exaggeration may appear right out of the playbook of Fox “News,” but PLF was formed at least a decade before Fox by California Reaganites who seemed to think of themselves as an ACLU for corporations.

At first they focussed on the newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety & Health Administration, if not striking down regulations, at least buying time for pollution and hazardous workplaces until their clients found less detectable scams.

Eventually, they defended Big Tobacco against restrictions in advertising and Surgeon General’s warnings. Their tactics gained as much press as their suits. From my “Dumb” column:

Following their well-financed smear campaign against a leader of California’s main anti-smoking organization…, even the most public environmentalists are reluctant to take them on.

Some hapless college prof, as I recall, whose disgrace had nothing to do with either lung cancer or legal chicanery. As a college instructor myself, I had been warned.

Nowhere did these white collar thugs answer my implication that character assassination is PLF’s MO. Instead, they turned it on me, a street-musician (true, and hardly a secret) who “accosted” people for money downtown.

At best, this is an assumption possibly shared by folks who rarely go downtown. At length, it is false. Apart from signs on an open case or hat, street-musicians never verbally ask for donations, much less accost anyone. Any exceptions to this (called “passive hat” in the trade) do not last long.

PLF may be conflating us with acrobats, jugglers, and magicians who perform half-hour shows, and then ask for donations from a gathered and applauding crowd (“active hat”).

On the street, “hat” is an unwritten rule, but it does appear (active, passive, or no) on contracts issued by Renaissance faires

So disappointing! If only they unearthed my detention by the Secret Service in 1976, they could have painted me as a would-be assassin with an armed backpack stalking Jimmy Carter during the Oregon primary.

Leave out that it was a 15-minute interview, and imply that the backpack contained two pistols and a Communist Manifesto cleverly disguised as two wooden flutes and a Rand McNally Road Atlas.

Happy to give them another chance, I see that their initial online statement is headed by a photo that, just as on the Fox “News” site, shows a flag attached to a house, and therefore nowhere near the area restricted for the sake of plovers’ nests.

Perhaps the photo was slapped onto the site to cover any mention of what happened here in 2009. As local observer Jack Rybicki reports:

(T)hese property owners were the beneficiary of federal funds to replace sand that had washed out to sea in order to save 28 homes…

For that favor, they all signed documents obligating them to adhere to the town’s “beach management plan relative to the protection of endangered species.”

But here they are 17 years later, whining as if they never signed anything, using American flags as nothing but cheap camouflage for their own laughable absurdity.

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Other outlets of right-wing paranoia couldn’t resist this rich helping of red meat. Here’s *The Epoch Times*, a publication best known for impersonating the Bible with such claims as vaccines causing sterility. For their readers, that might be wishful thinking.
This shot could be anywhere on the beach, most likely not near the contested area, but if he has his hand over his heart, he must be sincere, right?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/plum-island-residents-warned-against-flying-american-flags-ahead-of-july-4-post-6055629

This is Fox’s photo which appears on its site and ran with the story picked up by countless news outlets coast-to-coast. Here on Plum Island, and anywhere nearby, we all see immediately that this pic is from the street-side of the house, with the ocean and beach behind it. Therefore, no way it is part of the contested area. But Fox knows that all of its subscribers beyond, say, 50 miles, have no way of knowing that. This is from the site of a South Dakota radio station:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/plum-island-residents-warned-against-flying-american-flags-ahead-of-july-4-post-6055629

Privileged Communications

A senior citizen adverse to crowds, I avoid day-trips into Boston. I choose not to join the traffic in the streets or crowds in the subways.

But I could not resist a reading of a play-in-progress titled Privileged Communications, and I’ve longed to see The Embrace since it was unveiled on the Common in 2022.

https://thebostonsun.com/2023/01/19/the-embrace-memorial-unveiled-on-the-common-ahead-of-mlk-day/#google_vignette

Drove to Wonderland in Revere, last stop of the Blue Line, parked my Nissan in the lot, and looked up at a sign that said “PayByPhone.” I have no cellphone, another stress-preventing measure of the life I choose to live.

But the website was easy to remember, so I figured I’d tend to it online the next day.

Unable to find an email address or a phone number, I tapped into a “chat” with a bot cleverly named “Parker” that began by noting that I am “in North America.” It referred me to a phone number on the Wonderland sign. Unwilling to drive back, I asked the bot for it, only to then read:

PayByPhone does not offer a service to pay for parking retroactively or provide phone numbers for past parking sessions. Payments need to be made in real time to avoid any issues.

I thanked the bot for its mindless AI response, adding that it would serve as a document to prove I made a prompt effort to pay the fee.

But I now wonder: If we are so diligent in seeing that no one suffers discrimination due to their race, sex, faith, or gender preference, why does a de facto discrimination against those of us who choose to live free of ring-tones, algorithms, robots, trolls, memes, tracking devices, and AI go unnoticed?

If we can build ramps for those in wheelchairs, how can we not provide a simple phone number to those more inclined to make and take calls on a landline at home rather than on a mobile device under the summer sun in an unshaded parking lot?

At the commuter rail stop here in Newburyport, I found PayByPhone’s number on parking lot signs. An automated voice, which I could not get past, did not ask for my car’s registration. Instead, it asked me to “set up an account.”

Ah, yes, why not spend a good 15 minutes to type in name, address, DOB, SSN, and whatever else they need before asking you to create, confirm, and then use a password?

Why not? Because I don’t want an account. I just want to settle a one-time fee.

Bracing myself for word from the MBTA, I resolved that I would pay the fee for the seven hours my car sat at Wonderland, but not a cent for any fine. And I prepared to tell them that in a letter addressed to the Massachusetts Barbary Tribute Authority.

Would “Parker” have known the difference? Would it know American history? Would it relocate me into North Africa?

For two weeks I was ready to battle hi-tech “policy and procedure” with simple arithmetic and common sense. So eager was I to make the case that, after two weeks, I considered going back on-line and taunting the bot.

But my attention turned elsewhere, and seven weeks passed before a bill arrived in the box at the end of my driveway. So much for hi-tech.

And so much for any fine. An $8.00 balance is about what I would have paid. I saw mention of a $1.00 surcharge, but didn’t challenge it. So much for my Jeffersonian resolve.

Still, what does this do to others who, like me and many other seniors, choose to “live simply”? Do they worry for a week or two? Do they scrap their plans and drive off?

Many toll roads and bridges have signs telling us that, if we lack E-ZPass, we will be sent a bill. So easy they put it in upper case, EZ. And yet, for the parking lots, we are supposed to “set up an account.”

As for me, I went to see “Privileged Communications.” Little did I know I’d have to endure them.

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https://www.boston.com/news/wickedpedia/2023/05/31/how-did-wonderland-station-get-name/

With or Without the ‘Oxy’

Last week I went to the Fox “News” site to see how badly it distorted a story here on Plum Island. That, I guess, put me on the list for their so-called newsletter and promos including one just arrived for, as the subject line announced: “FOX News IQ Test.”

All I can think is that Fox has found some way to punish anyone who has an IQ.

Never, I thought, would I see anything more oxymoronic–with or without the “oxy”–than “Fox News IQ Challenge.” That belief exploded the very next day when, from my seat on an incumbent bike in the gym, I spotted a headline on the CNN crawl: “Trump to attend dignified transfer.”

Fox and IQ? Trump and dignified? Is this hot ice, or am I just having a Midsummer Nightmare?

That very night CNN would report that the Pentagon’s website reduced the number of fatalities–those being transferred–in his illegal war from 18 to 14. Reason? According to a Pentagon now run by an IQ-challenged Fox host, four service members died “after” Trump declared a cease-fire.

More like an unending nightmare.

When Lincoln was first elected in 1860, many young men in northern cities who supported him did not trust Southerners to allow the inauguration to happen. They converged on DC, and police, though glad to have their implied support, kept a wary eye on them. There were no incidents.

These groups–some would say “gangs”–called themselves the “Wide-Awakes,” likely a rebuke to the pro-slavery, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic Know-Nothings.

Well, they couldn’t call themselves the “Know-It-Alls,” now could they?

Eight-score years later, gangs converged on DC not to ensure, but to stop the transfer of power. They went and still go by various names, and they condemn those who oppose them as “woke,” a malphemism for “awake.”

They also proclaimed a “Revolution,” but if being awake or aware is now a bad thing, wouldn’t “Devolution” be the word they’re looking for?

Malphemisms are a go-to Republican trick. The longest lasting example may be “abortion on demand,” but for immediate impact, I’d pick Sarah Palin’s characterization of Obamacare’s provision regarding the terminally ill for family and doctor consultations as “Death Panels.”

The term “Obamacare” itself was intended to make the Affordable Care Act sound bad, the definition of malphemism, but Obama himself embraced it, and the Democrats ran with it.

In case you’re ever playing Trivial Pursuit and asked what Obamacare has in common with Know-Nothings…

Another example of an insult welcomed as a name by the insulted is Mitch McConnell–speaking of the terminally ill, some would say already terminated. All those years as Senate leader he gleefully let proposed legislation die on his desk. Hundreds of them, so many that Democrats started calling him “The Grim Reaper.” He loved it, he boasted of it, and now he is face to face with it.

Or does he think he’s looking into a mirror?

My friend Binghampton asks if Mitch is on eternity leave. He may be onto something. Mitch does have a history of taking advantage of death. Following that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he effectively nullified the Constitutional right of a president to have a nominee for the Supreme Court considered by the Senate for approval.

Now, Grim Mitch is being used to prevent the Governor of Kentucky from exercising his right to appoint a replacement for an incapacitated member of the state’s congressional delegation.

The good news is that, as a cadaver (already or soon-to-be), Mitch is now among the least harmful of Senate Republicans. Unwanted: Dead or Alive.

Americans this weekend are flocking to cinemas to see the new adaptation of The Odyssey, about a Greek war hero (Odysseus, aka Ulysses) of long ago who can’t find his way home. Wouldn’t we be better off if we paid more attention to America’s own war hero prophetically named for the ancient Greek?

In 1875, near the end of his second term as our president, Ulysses S. Grant* told an audience of Union veterans:

If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.

Both sides are all over America’s enormous map. With or without that map, Revolution or Devolution, Death Panels or Eternity Leaves, malphemisms or euphemisms, oxys or prophesies, awake or woke, dead or alive, will we ever start connecting the dots that would lead to our way home?

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*His actual name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. His family addressed him as Ulysses from the start. To enter West Point, he needed the recommendation of his Illinois district’s US Rep who knew him only as Ulysses Grant. The application called for a middle name, and so the Rep, facing a deadline in faraway DC with neither phone nor internet, guessed and wrote in Ulysses’ mother’s family name, “Simpson,” a common practice on the western frontier. A biographer says Grant simply didn’t bother to change it, but I wonder if the young cadet was eager to have USG replace HUG as his initials.

No idea where this pic was taken, but if you want more like it: https://lazyspleen.blogspot.com/2012/12/just-for-fun-10-contradictory-road-signs.html

Putting the THE in THE Past

Not sure if this counts as “living in the past,” but I seem to be more and more in touch with my Salem State College (now University) friends the further I get from graduation.

In my case, I suppose the trend is more pronounced because I disappeared soon after the walk. First to Maine’s Canadian border for a few months, and then for a full Prodigal Son stint on the Dakota Prairie. Not just places where I knew no one, but where no one I knew would go.

That’s 53 years, so you’d think there’d be considerably less of us around. And you would be right. Come to think of it, that may well be why those of us still above ground are re-connecting.

Never gave this any thought until one who has been living on the West Coast several years, much of it in Southern California, wrote a blog reminiscing about a road we often took from Salem to Mt. Monadnock. His title: “the 114.”

He can keep it in lower-case all he wants, but I can’t help but chuckle at the use of the “the” in front of a route number. On the contemplative Pacific so long, he’s forgotten we don’t do that back here on the austere Atlantic.

My daughter, formerly of Southern Cal for most of her life, theorizes that in the early days, roads and trails all had Spanish names beginning with “El,” and so when the automobile and pavement arrived, the “El” went with the newly assigned numero. Sounds logical. Call it “Caught in Translation.”

Or, we could compare it to THE Ohio State University, a football and basketball powerhouse where everyone seems contractually obligated to not just use but emphasize the definite article as if it was the most significant of the four words in the name. (An OSU grad tells me it stems from an administrative feud with OU, but no one can figure out why.)

Be that as it may, all I can tell you is that, in 2012 on the front seat of an LAX shuttle bus with my daughter’s father-in-law, I went into a tirade about it, belting out “the” as often as possible as if it were a sledge-hammer. I had a fair portion of my daughter’s wedding party in stitches, as well as the guy behind the wheel who begged me to stop so he could drive.

Can’t recall their roads other than THE 5 and THE 405, so here’s a brief example prompted by my friend’s blog:

We took THE 114, Salem to Lawrence where we picked up either THE 110 or (more likely) THE 113 (or did we hasten the trip on THE 495?) to THE 119 in Groton and then on to THE Monadnock, a native word which means, “that which stands alone.” THE End!

Every Saturday of late I take THE 1A about 11 miles south to Ipswich where I join a No Kings rally, as they are called from coast to coast.

With the exception of my eight weekends in a Renaissance faire and little else, I’ve done this for most of the 17 months it has been held, joining about 130 folks each time. Among them, now and then, is another SSC classmate/activist and an SSC prof whose class, “Literature of Revolution,” I took in freshman year, spring semester, 1969.

The first was arrested with me at an anti-war demonstration 55 years ago and thrown into the same police wagon on THE Pennsylvania Avenue. The second, when she first saw me in Ipswich, smiled and exclaimed, “I can’t believe we’re doing this same shit!”

The first lives in Florida much of the year, but comes north in the summer to play cribbage with me. When I’m unavailable, she visits her kids and grandkids. The second, after having turned me, a Math major at the time, away from a cushy life as an accountant into this wreckage that I now am–THE fate that befalls most folks who pursue life in THE arts–says she is “proud” of me.

In recent weeks, yet another of my activist friends found me here on Plum Island. He enjoyed THE view so much that he surveyed my surroundings and has started work ridding them of a bittersweet vine threatening to kill, among other things, a pine tree.

Another activist, who volunteers in THE wildlife reserve in the summer, stops her white SUV if she sees me sitting out front, and call out hello. And a fellow from my German class looked me up and arrived on a hot day with two Italian subs. He was able to translate anything I said into German. For my part, I know only a dozen words auf Deutsch, but I used all twenty of them. “Danke for DER sub! Haben sie napkins?”

Two friends now married from THE Log, the student newspaper, passed through Newburyport and called from downtown where they treated me to lunch at THE Grog. I thought I was back in Bertini’s–or downstairs in Scarborough Fair.

And then there’s Chaz, a fellow flautist and former roommate, the only SSCer with whom I’ve been in touch all along, who arrives here twice or thrice a year. We listen to the same albums that we played over and over in our third-floor walk-up in the poor part of town, one of which is titled, “Living in THE Past.”

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Eggs Nostalgia

On the scale of misdemeanors, this has to be as harmless as it gets, but it’s still worth a word, perhaps a meal if you have the ingredients, and something to savor when you’ve had your fill.

Now that I sit to write of it, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it. I’m in a supermarket at least once, often twice a week. I may not get much, but I take my time. That’s no doubt because, despite going in with a list, I keep an open eye and stop to consider items that catch it.

That makes me prone to change my mind about something I already have in my cart, which results in one of the very few temptations into petty evil that I have been able to resist all my life. In fact, and perhaps as atonement for many other petty crimes I do commit, I will take a box or jar or bag someone else has left with the bananas in a far corner of the store and return it myself to a shelf five aisles away.

Recently, I was pushing my cart down the aisle of paper towels, napkins, and toilet paper bulging from shelves on both sides. I was done shopping and was in the aisle only because it was empty and would quickly get me from the back of the store to the cash registers.

Ahead of me I spotted a blank space on one shelf about eye-high. How could I not look in? I hit the brakes. I was looking at a jar of salsa. Oh, the memories!

This Merrimack Valley boy from the Eisenhower years didn’t know what salsa was until he found his taste buds in a Mexican restaurant in downtown Minneapolis of all places. I was in my mid-twenties, and it took me another thirty years to discover it wasn’t just for snacks. That’s when I stopped at the Shawsheen Luncheonette in Andover for breakfast.

With a snug and most colorful interior, and with advice both whimsical and provoctive–The biggest danger to our future is apathy–served on small frames on the walls as food for thought, Shawsheen’s menu offers “Eggs Fiesta.”

Not the first time I ordered something just so I could say a name out loud. When it was “Beer-Battered Fish & Chips” at a Cambridge brew-pub long ago, I blasted those Bs like fists into a punching bag, and my embarrassed daughter hid under the table. But with fiesta, one can only smile.

Hash browns, topped with eggs as you like them (once-over for me), then topped with salsa, and toast (rye) on the side, it more than lived up to its name. Shawsheen became as frequent a stop as my ever-changing routes allowed, and I’d say I was there about once a month until about ten years ago. Always ordered before the menu arrived, but I’d take it to read for entertainment purposes only.

Maybe a year later, I wondered if I could try it at home. Hash-browns seem out of my culinary reach, but I guessed that the frozen potato patties might satisy as a substitute. They did. Eggs from a farm-stand always do, and I found a medium salsa, the same brand that I held in my hand in the scene that begins this flavorful story.

For a few years, it was what we would now call my “go-to” breakfast. Then came the Covid quarantine, and I indulged in labor-intensive potato pancakes. Since then, I’ve gone from lazy-boy cereal to sweet-tooth cantalope and cottage cheese to apple-cheddar omelets to Greek omelets to anything-about-to-expire-in-the-fridge omelets. Salsa was gone from the fridge and off my shopping list almost as soon as the toilet paper crisis left America in a mess.

Six years later, there it was surrounded by toilet paper in a space all its own. And then there it was in my hand. And then in my cart. Veered over to the aisle of cereal and returned the Cheerios, turned into the dairy section and found the frozen patties before going to check-out.

Eggs? No! Only at the farmstand.

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Confessions of Prof Pun King

Back in the 90s when everything wrong with the world was blamed on something called “political correctness,” I’d pick a day early every semester to rush with alarm into my college freshman classes about a minute late and ask my students:

“Did you hear what happened at the University of Minnesota?”

Immediately riveted, every one of them always stared at me in silence. I spoke as if out of breath: “The faculty has voted to ban the Bible from the university library!”

A collective gasp was nearly as loud as my voice. A few would utter things like “Not again!” Or, “Where does it end?” Or the full version of WTF with exclamation points that scraped the chalkboard.

I began walking back toward the door I had left open: “They can no longer accept that, for all the space given to St. Paul, there’s never any mention of Minneapolis.”

By the third time I pulled this stunt, I learned to close the door behind me so that the reaction would not disrupt other classes along the corridor. I didn’t need to lean into it to hear the mix of laughter and confusion with bait-and-switch rage.

In 2005, Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay team announced that they would be shortening their name, Devil Rays, to simply, Rays. I happened to read this in the Chicago Tribune as I left the windy city via Amtrak to return home.

Stopped in Cleveland where one of my Akron cousins retrieved me from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With her were two friends, a couple I had never met. The husband proved a most affable fellow who could talk sports past sudden death overtimes, and when the two women went off to find a restroom in the Great Lakes Brew Pub, I mentioned the news from St. Petersburg.

As soon as I said the words “dropped the word ‘Devil’,” his smile dropped into an expression you might make when a doctor tells you, “It is not benign.” Verbatim, I recall only the opening curse: “Goddamn political correctness!” And then the damn dam burst.

I started to interrupt him. He did not know, as I did, that new owners were taking advantage of the one word, “Rays,” to serve as a double-entendre. This allowed them to use rays of the sun as a logo on new uniforms and merch while retaining a devil ray–or sting ray for that matter–logo for what MLB calls “alternative” or “throwback” unis. There is an outline patch of one on the shoulder of all their jerseys.

But I held my tongue. To this day I regret letting him go on and on with unwarranted nonsense, but my not-better angel got the better of me. I wanted to hear him out.

Before it was over, I heard how the all-too-well-known-yet-never-specified “they” are once again spoiling everyone’s fun and excitement. “Why, our new minor league team was going to be the Akron Blast,” he said as if reacting to the cancellation of a fireworks display.

Akron is the home of Goodyear, a leader in the aerospace industry–and also the home of Astronaut Judith Resnik who perished in the Challenger disaster. My new friend wasn’t sure if it was the Resnik family, or neighbors looking to spare them further trauma, who prevailed on the team to find another name.

“So, instead, we are stuck with the ‘Aeros’.”*

Twenty years of teaching taught me how to absorb such complaints without flinching: “Did anyone propose calling them the ‘Akronauts’?”

He laughed at my use of the collective noun by which he and every resident of the city is called: “Now that’s interesting! I think I like that better than ‘Blast’.”

Nor did I flinch at that, but by this time I was afraid to tell him the true story of the Tampa Bay name change. No matter, as I was bailed out by the return of the two women. To this day I do not know if he knows that what he condemned as “political correctness” was a business decision.

Make of those two stories–one triggered deliberately, the other inadvertent–what you want. I offer them as cautionary tales against the immediate willingness to believe anything that reinforces our own prejudice, anything that appears to be more of what we already condemn as wrong. Most worrisome is the crock of vehemence that can boil over before a teaspoon of detail can be put in the mix.

Moreover, we should consider that those stories are from two and three decades ago. Before the internet, before texting, before social media and flash crowds. Today such claims are constant, and we get “threads,” or unlimited numbers of people reacting to the initial claim, many of them ignoring the previous reactions. Hence, any attempt to correct the initial claim will be effectively run-over and then left unnoticed, no matter how many are added.

If there’s any useful benefit from them–or what today is called a “takeaway”–it’s that the dynamic can be put in reverse to serve as a lesson. It’s called “punking.” All you need is a willingness to tell a momentary lie, watch the reaction, then set it straight. At least there’s a chance that anyone listening learns to resist temptations to jump to conclusions.

As for my Akronaut friend, I still regret not doing him that favor.

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*Before the 2014 season, the Aeros changed their name to the Akron RubberDucks, a nod to Akron’s claim to be the “Rubber Capital of the World,” a nickname–pun? double-entendre?–that my cousins and their friends drove for no end of Goodyear and Firestone mileage while they were in high school.

No longer contractually required to keep a straight face, Prof. Pun King laughs at pretty much everything.
Photo by Walt Thompson.

Red Meat Patriots

In these times that try our tempers, I thought I was doing everyone a favor by putting away the ax I so often grind and, instead, cracking jokes at the idiocies that dominate American news.

Right on cue, a few–a very few–Red Meat Patriots here on Plum Island publicly accused the Town of Newbury of trying to outlaw American flag displays over the 4th of July weekend.

Call it a joke that wrote itself. If this was a paying gig, I might send my Red Meat neighbors a royalty. And if they can get what I wrote onto the Fox News website as readily as they did their absurd claim, I’ll split Fox‘s payment 50/50.

Meanwhile, another cadre of Red Meaters hurled the same accusation against Provincetown out on the tip of Cape Cod–93 miles from us as the crow flies, 151 as the Jaguar drives.

These RMPs are everywhere. Also this weekend, another band in New York City accused Mayor Mamdani of “personally wrapping” one of NYC’s subways in the design of the Iranian flag. That brain-dead claim immediately went off the rails mostly because everyone in the city knew of the tribute to FIFA–48 subways each painted as the flag of one of the 48 nations competing for soccer’s World Cup.

And, speaking of jokes that write themselves, partly because it is impossible to picture one person, mayor or not, “personally wrapping” a train in anything. If anyone made a claim like that back in the Sixties, Donovan would have written a song about getting stoned in the dining car.

Very likely it was the same band of NYC RMPs who accused Mamdani of “coming to get” residents’ thermostats. During a brutal heat wave here on the east coast, that dud was bound to gain some traction before sober, adult, intelligent, rational, honest people started to speak up.

Thermostats! Now that’s a new one. In one of my first attempts to stop ax-grinding and start joke-cutting, I rattled off a list of things that RMPs have accused liberals of “coming to take away.”

Guns, of course, top the list, going all the way back to the Reagan years, and have been top priority of Red Meat people ever since–with Bibles soon to follow and maintaining a respectable second place.

In fact, it may have been the election of an environmentally-friendly President with a health-conscious First Lady that prompted RMPs to diversify their outrageous outrage.

Could be mistaken, but the “coming to take your fill-in-the-blank away” lunacy really accelerated in 2008: SUVs, S’mores, leaf-blowers, air conditioners, tan suits, “Merry Christmas,” and lately hamburgers, thermostats, and, of all things, the American flag itself.

What we perceive as the problem with “red meat,” RMPs use to their advantage. Just as the metaphor intends, the very sight of it held outside the cage drives the lion into a rage. There need be no explanation, justification, nor condition. The lion won’t hear it, and to RMPs, it merely adds to the rage. Worst of all, the effect is immediate.

We use the word “demonize” to describe what Fox News and other right-wing outlets have done hour after hour, almost minute by minute, for 30 years to politicians, news sources, non-white countries, liberal legislation, and blue states. Bill Clinton called it “creating caricatures” so they can then “avoid any issue by attacking the caricature.”

Accurate and useful both are, but they don’t account for the immediate effect of the mere mention of a single name–Obama, Warren, The New York Times, NPR, Boston, Seattle, Somalia, Haiti, Affirmative Action, and lately a few non-specific words such as diversity and inclusion.

As soon as Fox viewers hear just one name, they will stop you with dismissal that allows for no further word. Pocahontas! DEI hire! Oh, that bastion of objectivity!

Red meat, at its core, is an excuse not to think–which makes it irresistible to those who do not want to think. It’s as if, instead of talking to a person, you are waving red meat in front of Pavlov’s dog.

Ahhh! Just joking.

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https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-three-stooges-in-civil-war-confederate-uniforms-holding-news-photo/515508472

Make America Dumb Again

Is it my imagination, or do many of the same people who refuse to hear any political talk also say we must learn from history?

And am I in the minority thinking that many historical subjects are so linked to the present that political consideration is unavoidable?

While I’ll be the first to admit that social media cannot be regarded as a college classroom any more than, say, someone’s dining room or patio, a baseball game or a Renaissance faire, it is a place where people frequently say–or unwittingly admit–that they do not want to “hear about” things.

“Hear about” is a euphemism for “know,” just as “woke” is a malphemism for “aware.” American history, after all, has a full chapter on a national movement that proudly called themselves the “Know-Nothings.” And you thought MAGA arrived on a de-escalator just eleven years ago?

If the very site–or page on a site–is dedicated to a historical or literary subject, then the objection might as well come from a sprinter wearing high-heeled shoes to a track meet.

So it was, on a page devoted to Moby-Dick, that someone compared Ahab to a certain political figure who is on our front page news daily and our TV screens nightly.

Predictably and understandably, several commenters objected to the injection of politics onto a page devoted to a literary work published 175 years ago. As a story set on the high seas, Moby-Dick first appeared to me as a college student 50 years ago as a non-political work. And then I read the scholarly essays written about it.

Most agree that Ahab is modeled on John Calhoun, the South Carolinian US Rep and Senator (also a cabinet member and VP), who was the Slavocracy’s most vociferous and volatile champion for three decades until his death in 1850, a year before Moby-Dick appeared in print. Melville had already painted a brief satirical sketch of him three books earlier near the end of Mardi, with a character named “Nulli,” as in nullification, a rebellious political move that Calhoun often threatened.

Add that to the harmony that Melville reports between characters white, black, yellow, red, and brown on board the Pequod–the name of a New England tribe nearly exterminated in colonial times–as well as in Typee, Omoo, Mardi, “Benito Cereno,” and perhaps others, and Moby-Dick is a forceful statement on race relations–a microcosm of the American macrospasm. What color was the whale?

There’s no question that the main theme of the book is what an obsession with revenge will do, not just to those who have it, but those who join the excitement. In 2024, we saw the first successful presidential campaign in American history openly motivated by revenge. We even saw a “Revenge Tour”–which might be the name of Melville’s book had Starbuck rather than Ishmael survived to tell the story.

If the foremost measure of literary worth is how well a work stands the test of time, then its relevance to our present-day lives–be it political, social, or anything else–should be more than welcome in our conversations about it. Those who are adverse to that, of course, have the right to leave the room or remain silent, just as most of us do when hearing things that do not interest us.

Regarding literature, the “no politics” comments are unwittingly revealing of those making them. And it is not flattering.

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