Baby, You Can’t Drive Any Car

Far more than anything else, Americans bemoan bad drivers.

Granted, phone menus have been gaining ground in these AI “assisted” (i.e. debased) times. Still, those who call customer service or technical support are way outnumbered by motorists.

After all, those calls often work quite well, and we give glowing reviews on the surveys that follow, as annoying as they can be. Meanwhile, heated complaints against bad drivers come from people who are themselves bad drivers.

Such as a friend who griped on and on about the blaring horn of a car behind her when a red light changed to green: “I was pouring coffee from my thermos into my cup, and the thermos cap was on the cupholder.”

“So the light was green for a few seconds?”

When she didn’t answer, I told her I’d have also hit the horn, as I do for drivers who, stopped for a light, are looking down. Whatever the distraction, it makes you oblivious to where you actually are.

“Well, people need to be patient!”

“And drivers need to understand that their first obligation is to other drivers, and not serving themselves breakfast when waiting for a light to change.”

I’m now reminded of this after publicly criticizing the placement of the new sign on the road to Plum Island, the memorial for the late and lamented Pink House.

Please note the words, “placement of.” The sign itself is worthy of the former scenic treasure and the breathtaking landscape on which it sits. Both elegant and forceful.

And quite legible from a distance, as it was clearly intended–except that, rather than facing traffic as most signs do, it is parallel and very close to the road. Drivers do not see it. On social media, one wag called it, “the rubberneck installation technique.”

Leaders of the years-long effort to save the Pink House, however, found my complaint “sad.” I had “turned a positive into a negative.” There I was talking about a specific object (the sign) and a specific act (its placement), and they turn it into the vague simplicity of “positive” (both) and “negative” (anything critical about either) that could apply to anything. This is Orwell’s Newspeak: Debased language leads to debased thought.

Truth is, I was always a supporter of the Pink House. From 2016 to 2018, I devoted three columns in this paper to the cause. The decal was on the back of my old Nissan. Would they rather I put their sticker on the car’s side?

Relevant to rules-of-the-road, one reaction to my critique was unwittingly revealing: “Anyone can slow down to look at anything on any road and do it safely.”

The triple use of “any” will make any libertarian smile, but the one describing “road” should be a red flag to the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Anyone out there want to be behind a driver liable to apply the brakes at any time? On a two-lane, 40-mph road often crowded on warm days?

Doesn’t have to be for a sudden stop. What if curiosity gets the better of the driver who turns more and more to not just see, but read the sign while keeping the car in motion? Anyone want to be in an on-coming car? Or pedaling a bicycle?

Such is the risk unless someone comes to their senses and turns the sign sideways or at an angle. Could be on a single stand. Raising it eight feet would allow it to face traffic while hanging safely over the bike lane.

Meanwhile, there’s something else here worth consideration: What if driver’s exams included written responses to questions about obligations a driver has to other drivers?

When do you turn on directionals? What factors do you consider at the moment a light turns yellow? What do you do to slow down on a road where drivers do not expect it? Or to pull over?

Such a test could be educational in itself, as the act of writing leads the applicant to think through sequences and conditions–such as the distance of a car following you. That would produce better drivers.

Moreover, if it didn’t prevent some from thinking that anything goes, it would at least discourage them from advocating such things in public forums. And if they went ahead and wrote it on a test, the license would be denied.

Nothing to lose here–nothing except bad drivers.

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The Pink House Memorial sign as seen from the passenger seat of a car going 40 mph going toward and within two car-lengths of it.
Photo by Angela Anderson.

Witness to the Spirit of ’76

Last Friday I awoke to the fully unexpected news that a friend, Jim McCauley, just 62, had died.

A former Newburyport city councillor, his passing was top of the front page for the next issue of the Daily News, filled with tributes from other city officials, including his political opponents. Among those is the mayor who narrowly survived McCauley’s attempt to unseat him last fall.

Over a year earlier, as readers of the Daily News or of Mouth of the River may recall, I announced my own write-in candidacy for the city’s highest office. Write-in because I’m not a resident of the Port but of a sandbar belonging to a neighboring town.

Yes, it was an April Fools’ prank. Who else promises to make his parole officer his chief of staff? But it was also an effort to coax a viable challenger into what was starting to look like an uncontested race. Soon after that, I met McCauley for the first time at a mutual friend’s and started pestering him to run. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know him, only that I had seen and heard him in action in City Council meetings, including the first when I didn’t even know his name.

This weekend, I described that first impression as my own tribute. It appeared in today’s issue of the Daily News:

McCauley threw open the windows

If I could pick a single moment when I felt witness to “the Spirit of ‘76” in action, it was two years ago at a council meeting in Newburyport City Hall.

The subject was whether the council should investigate an on-going library controversy, and the council president cautioned that it was not “within the council’s purview” and emphasized the need to “stay in our lane.”

The mood of the room was somewhere between in agreement and a willingness to go along this path of least resistance. The room itself felt sleepy, the air barely enough to breathe.

Then came the voice. Not loud, but firm. Not angry, but well-measured. “I take exception to the idea of lanes,” then-councillor Jim McCauley began. He then made a case that could have been distilled from any of America’s founding documents:

All councilors represent people who live in Newburyport. The library is of, by, and for the people of Newburyport. We are not just able, but obliged to consider this.

That’s paraphrase only because the sensation of windows being thrown open was too much to keep taking notes. In seconds the room’s vibe went from the suffocation of policy and procedure to the inspiration of truth spoken to power–in the very halls of power.

Two years later, I re-live that moment now that Jim McCauley has passed away. Because he was an inspirational force in a time when inspiration is not often welcome, if even recognized, it’s easy to say he will be missed.

Much better would it be to say that he’ll serve as a model for others who we elect to public office.

Several months passed after I first met McCauley and urged him to run for mayor before he announced his candidacy. That took me off the hook, and I was able to turn my withdrawal from the race (as if I was actually in it) into an endorsement of him. We still didn’t know each other well, although that gradually changed as we both showed up at a Friday afternoon salon at a not-so-undisclosed location on State Street.

Subjects of conversation and debate included everything, but Newburyport issues topped the list, and MCauley knew them all in detail. He usually offered possibilities for solving or avoiding problems, and he didn’t hesitate to admit when something just would not be solved or avoided due to the, let’s say, inclinations and limitations of personnel involved. His refrain for that was: “Sometimes you just gotta laugh.”

Last saw him at my own birthday party upstairs at The Grog two months ago. We laughed a lot. About a lot of things.

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At the head of the table, chatting it up with Walt Thompson as his wife, Liz, assist in the distribution of the “Whale Cake.” Carol Thompson, Walt’s wife, is in the foreground. Photo by Sharon Spieldenner.

Jim McCauley. Photo: Kevin Sullivan, Newburyport Daily News

To Remember Everything

At the end of this week, you’ll have four chances to catch Translations, one of the legendary Irish playwright Brian Friel’s most cherished works, in a setting so intimate that even those in the back rows will consider themselves in the room with the folks of Balle Baeg in 1833.

Such is the Chelsea Theater Works on the triangle in the heart of that suburb at the foot of the Tobin Bridge and within sight of it. And where The Longwood Players bring the play to life by “explor[ing] it anew in its many layers of eloquence and despair,” to quote Director Rose Carlson.

To that, I’ll add laughter, which came often–as it always does in anything Irish–no matter how deep the despair of a people about to be forced from their homes. As Maire (Via Gould) fumes, “These people are not happy unless they are miserable!”

The mix of comedy and tragedy makes Translations a play that actors and directors crave. So said the actor playing Bridget (Melinda Kalanzis) when she told me it was about to open. Sources I have since found tell me that this has been true since its 1980 American premier in NYC with Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea in the cast.

Best known for Dancing at Lughnasa due to a 1998 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Friel (1929-2015) is often called “Ireland’s Anton Chekhov” and credited as “the universally accented voice of Ireland.” All of which is true but can be misleading. Translations has a lot to say about what happens when any people, anywhere, at any time are forced into cutural conformity, including the loss of their language.

Turns out the room is a “hedge school,” one of an underground network throughout Ireland, a place where Hugh (Anthony Mullin) still teaches Gaelic despite the British overlords’ edicts that all subjects speak English. To dramatize this, the audience is quickly made aware that the local characters are actually speaking Gaelic. It’s the same suspension of belief that playgoers hear in 2007’s Once, a play set in Dublin with a family of Czech immigrants speaking in their own tongue.

The only link between the two is Owen, Hugh’s son now employed by the Brits as a translator to serve the military occupation. Played by an energetic Raj Mukesh Bhuva, this is the torn character we find in all narratives about people being uprooted and as Hugh puts it, “imprisoned in a landscape of fact.” Owen is of the people, but he is with a force bent on changing them. He’s of the land, but he’s employed to service the bulldozer to put it asunder.

He’s the farmer’s son who accepts the job of driving the corporate tractor that introduces Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath; for Translations, he may as well be the title character.

Then again, it’s impossible to name a lead character in a truly ensemble work. In addition to those I’ve mentioned, the entire cast is high energy that ranges from riveting to sobering, from funny to heartbreaking. There’s Manus (Matt Feldman), Sarah (Dasha Artemchuk), Jimmy Jack (Mark Hessler), and Doalty (David Kleinman), all with scenes and lines that make the play memorable.

Perhaps because the two Brits, Captain Lancy and Lt. Yolland (hilariously rendered by Carlos Fruzetti and Gabriel Pagan-Gonzalez respectively), are the only two English-only speakers, it is quite easy to distinguish between the two languages spoken as one. So easy that it highlights a late scene when Maire and Yolland draw close to each other making their affection known and landing on the same word–without themselves realizing it.

A word that tells us just when we need the lessons and laughter of Translations: Always.

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Info and tickets: http://www.longwoodplayers.org/join-us-for-our-spring-show-translations

‘Mom Fights the Bad Guys’

Impossible to know what is most shocking about Nobody’s Girl.

A father’s sexual contact with his pre-teen daughter? Sharing the girl with his drinking buddy? A knowing mother always with a beer can in hand but never a word of objection?

Those are just the opening chapters growing up in the boonies inland from Florida’s Gold Coast where she would find employment as a 17-year-old handing out towels at Mar-a-Lago’s spa. Before long she was spotted and recruited by an elegant, motherly woman with a British accent to work for a neighbor nearby. Mar-a-Lago’s owner gave her a reference, wished her well.

Back in the boonies she found herself a complete misfit, and so she got in with other misfits. Drugs, alcohol, casual sex, petty theft, reform school. And yet, even at her worst, her best bursts forth:

At thirteen, I would walk a mile for a fistfight. I particularly liked confronting bullies, which is probably part of the reason I befriended a boy named Jose. He didn’t call himself gay, because that wasn’t a word we used then. But he liked boys “that way,” and he refused to hide it, so he was always getting picked on.

Any reader easily perceives how the world of Mar-a-Lago and Jeffery Epstein’s equally plush, gilded mansion would seem like paradise to a 17-year-old survivor of a sordid past. And the pay, in addition to all the material comforts it bought, was as good as Novocain.

That’s how Virginia Roberts Guiffre sets the table for Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, published just last year. On the plates is medicine, no matter how hard to take. At the very least, victims of Epstein and his ever-present accompliss, Ghislaine Maxwell, and other sexual predators will know that they are not alone–that escape and a fruitful, if not entirely peaceful, life, are possible. And at best, the book will encourage others to come forward and join those seeking to bring Epstein’s “clients” and “associates” to account.

Guiffre weaves her married-with-children life after two years with Epstein throughout the book. Sent by Maxwell and Epstein to Thailand to study a technique of massage and to recruit down-and-out young girls she might find, she meets an Australian fellow who immediately falls for her. Robbie, as he is portrayed to the end of the book, is a beyond considerate dynamo who make her laugh, and so it all happens quickly. They marry while still in Thailand before he returns to and she, in effect, defects to the Land Down Under.

Before long, back in the Up and Over, police and journalists started getting tips about Epstein, often with references to “Jenna.” They tracked her down, and from what seemed such a protective distance, she went on the record. Epstein’s world began to unravel, albeit all-too-slowly thanks to bureaucrats all too willing to believe those who can afford never ending lawsuits over those who can’t, especially those “with a past.”

Epstein may be dead, but his chilling effect retains its grip. For example, King Charles visited America last week and gave a speech that progressives, liberals, and Democrats of all stripes applauded, especially his defense of NATO and call for environmental protection. However, he declined a request to meet with Epstein survivors. He did include a vague line about justice for victims of international trafficking, but no mention of the scandal that has forced the resignations of British (but not American) officials.

Nobody’s Girl tells us that Guiffre was interviewed by ABC when she decided to go public in 2015. Because she named Prince Andrew, ABC’s lawyers contacted the royal family for comment. There’s no record of what was said except for inside sources claiming not only that the family denied everything, but they threatened a lawsuit. One source claimed that ABC caved because it feared losing access to the high-flying celebrity couple of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

ABC killed the story, but the book sheds light on King Charles’ caution.

After so many details and names, times and dates, Guiffre draws toward her conclusion with a paragraph that begins with inspiration:

As I turned thirty-eight, I realized that I’d spent the second half of my life recovering from the first. I was nineteen when I met Robbie and set off to make a new life with him. I’d now lived almost precisely nineteen more years, and I was still fighting for justice.

And ends in heartbreak:

I’d come a long way, but had yet to feel anywhere near whole. I wondered if that feeling would ever come.

In her closing chapters, it sounded possible. Guiffre was among the survivors who testified in congressional hearings and spoke in rallies on the steps of the Capitol calling for a full release of the Epstein files. She was also happily assisting her daughter with making a manga demon slayer costume for Halloween and telling her sons that “Mom fights the bad guys.”

But she also admits lapses into severe depression, disorienting drugs, and two suicide attempts. There’s also a breakup with her husband mentioned only in the “Collaborator’s Note” that serves as the book’s preface/intro. Without any hint of it in Guiffre’s own narrative, a reader must wonder how much of that turmoil was her own imagination.

Still, all of what is in Guiffre’s own words is entirely credible. Tragically, her moments of doubt at the end of Nobody’s Girl, proved prophetic: Before it was in print, another suicide attempt, this time successful.

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Playing a Doctor on TV

Here in “the Boston market,” as America’s corporate owners refer to parts of the country, we are now seeing a TV ad supporting the candidacy of US Rep. Seth Moulton in his bid to unseat Sen. Ed Markey, a progressive who has supported the Green New Deal, access to health care, voting rights, and a reasonable tax code.

As a constituent of and past voter for both Democrats, I receive their newsletters, including one from Moulton this morning which prompted the following reply:

Your TV ad with the doctor ridiculing Sen. Markey for being old is the most disgraceful, deceitful, distasteful ad I’ve ever seen. To give you an idea of how many ads that includes, I recall “I Like Ike!” Might as well be aimed at my entire generation. I wouldn’t vote for you if you ran against Jeffrey Epstein’s corpse. Not now, not ever, not for anything. Get my name off your mailing list.

When I posted that on Facebook, a comment soon arrived:

I know that if you remember the ‘I Like Ike’ ad then you remember the Willie Horton ad too. Moulton’s ad must have been really awful!

The year was 1988 when the Democrats nominated Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis for president. Willie Horton was a convict doing time for murder when some ill-considered weekend furlough program set him free. The result was another rape and murder. The George Bush (Senior) campaign’s ad made it seem like Dukakis himself singled out Horton for release, unlocked the prison door, held it open, and chirped “Happy weekend” as Horton danced away.

Years later, facts emerged that the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune distorted the case, giving the Bush campaign its premise to stoke racial anxiety and fear among white voters. For its effort at the time, the ET--my hometown paper, a paper I delivered when Ike was still golfing if not governing, and the first in which I ever published anything, an anti-war, anti-draft letter when I was still but 17!–won a Pulitzer Prize. That did not deter–may have actually encouraged–Ann Coulter from proclaiming about ten years back that Bush’s ad was “the greatest campaign ad in political history.”

I immediately reponded:

Thanks for the reminder. Now that I think of it, the Horton ad was in many respects worse. But I’ll stick with my call if only because, that attack, as distorted as it was, called attention to things that happened. Moulton’s ad is a slur against Markey for being old, and by logical extension against anyone for being old. Still, thanks for adding this!

Though I stood by my initial claim, the comment made me reconsider the Moulton ad. Before long I started to wonder how many others–not just my age, but of any generation who respect elderly people–would be just as repulsed. That led me to wonder if the ad may be the work of Markey supporters banking on reverse psychology.

Soon arrived an email from the Markey campaign, seeking donations. As you’d expect based on what I said above, I’ve recieved several of these in recent months, each of them outlining the senator’s position on issues as they arise, always with details to explain cause and effect and with options for what might be done next.

This morning’s mailing called for the removal of the cartoon character called Kash Patel from the FBI, but most consider pending legislation on all things threatened by an autocratic White-and-now-Gold House and a Congress paralyzed by Republicans who refuse to act: health care, the environment, voting rights, a reasonable corporate tax…

My doubt is dispelled. The Markey team has its eye on the prize. Team Moulton prizes itself.

I’ll let you know if I get a reply…

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Click of the mouse to the Newburyport *Daily News* for this pic of Moulton addressing a town hall meeting in Amesbury a few years ago. You might notice a familiar face right in the middle of it.

A Sign That’s Outta Sight

Here’s the first reaction to a social media post of the new sign on the Plum Island Turnpike, or “Causeway” if you prefer honest and accurate words:

What a joke…guess that’s where all your $ for donations went to saving that decrepit pink trash heap, congratulations, you got this dumb sign.

By my own measure, I suppose the narrow-minded assessment is at least partially correct: The sign is “dumb” because it doesn’t speak, not even if you go to the horrible, unconstitutional trouble of pressing one for English. And “decrepit” is a given when talking about a century old structure abandoned half a century ago.

Where the commenter veers over the bike lane, down the slope, and into the marsh, however, is by calling it a “trash heap.”

Could counter that assholessment with “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but why be superficial? Like most cliches and canned adages, it misses a much deeper meaning. And like most slurs, the comment reveals nothing about the intended subject, but everything about the person making it.

The Pink House, for many of its 100 years, certainly for its last few decades, was cherished by countless artists and photographers. As a resident of Plum Island since 1982, I’ve seen the license plates on vehicles pulled over by painters behind easels recreating the two-story house on canvas, or by photographers taking shots at various angles. They came from all over the US and Canada.

The old boathouse on Bearskin Neck in Rockport may be Massachusetts’ “Motif Number One,” but the Pink House here on the Newbury marsh was as close to a runner up as any. Too late now, but I wonder if the Honda Motor Company, had it been asked when it filmed the TV commercial, might have coughed up funds to save the Pink House–racing one way in the background while a Civic raced the other in the foreground–from demolition.

A comparison to Rockport is what makes the “trash heap” slur so unwittingly revealing of the man who made it. Would he also dismiss Rockport’s boathouse as “trash”? It is by definition “decrepit,” useless except for photos and paintings…

He does come closer to truth when he calls it a “joke.” Unfortunately, he applies it to the sign that is more than attractive, both elegant and forceful at the same time. Had he applied it to the placement of the sign, I’d have no choice but to agree with him.

In case you don’t know, or in case you’ve driven to Plum Island these past few days and wonder why you haven’t seen it, the sign has been placed parallel and very close to the road. Turned out that I myself had already driven past three or four times each way without ever seeing it. After seeing the picture, I went looking, and barely spotted it while driving by. I was as dumbfounded by the placement of the sign as I was awed by its picture.

Once home, I immediately zapped a message to a woman at the forefront of the effort to save the Pink House from demolition:

Very nice memorial, but why in the name of basic logic is it parallel to the road rather than facing traffic? Does someone want to limit the views to the few pedestrians & joggers on that long road? Even cyclists, keeping their eyes on a narrow bike lane, are likely to be going too fast to notice.

When she informed me that it “had to be placed on Town of Newbury land so that it would not be removed by FWS” (National Fish & Wildlife Service), I asked if the town’s strip was so narrow, the sign could not be turned sideways, or put higher up on a single stand.

She then referred me to the Town of Newbury whose call it was to accept and display the gift. On the Plum Island side of the bridge is a much larger “Welcome to…” sign, turned sideways so that people can actually see it. But I know not where the boundaries are between the town and the FWS, not any more than I apparently know of boundaries between bureaucratic decisions and common sense.

Knowing well the untiring effort over several years of so many people dedicated to the cause of saving the Pink House, I can understand the tendency to say that this is all quite nice and feel good about it, but something is wrong here. I’m not saying that it’s nefarious, but there has been, to use the kindest term I can think of, a serious lapse in judgement.

On a road with a 40 mph speed limit, whether we call it “turnpike” or “causeway,” if a sign does not face traffic, it may as well not be there. That’s why our troll is not entirely wrong when he calls it “a joke.”

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Thick as a Brick & Mortar

When I heard very late one night that Martin Barre, Jethro Tull’s lead guitarist, had written a memoir, it took no more than that night’s sleep, a cup of coffee, and a short drive to the mainland before I was ordering a copy in Jabberwocky Bookshop.

This was this past November when A Trick of Memory was released in the United Kingdom where Tull first formed in 1967. Barre, son of a jazz musician in Birmingham, England’s second largest city, joined the group a year later and, after frontman/flautist Ian Anderson, was Tull’s only mainstay until it disbanded in 2014.

Reasons remain under wraps, which is why I, a veteran of about two dozen Tull concerts in seven states since 1970, am eager to see what Barre has to say, include it in a review, and post it on Jethro Tull fan pages on social media.

Paul, Jabberwocky’s mainstay clerk, put my order in, consulted a distributor’s website, and told me it was due to land in the USA at the end of January. They always call when a book arrives, but when the calendar turned to February, I went in to check. Some delay. A very small printing house. Later in the month, I was told. Since I’m at a coffeeshop right next door every Tuesday morning, I kept checking in.

By this time, I met Steve, another, newer clerk at Jabberwocky who recognized the name Martin Barre and lit up. A fellow Tull-Skull! He started tapping a laptop and was as disappointed as I that no news was to be had. But he did add one more copy to the order.

March came in like a lion but apparently left A Trick of Memory to a dodo bird who may yet need a few more months to touch down anywhere in North America. Friends started telling me I could get it within days if I clicked into eBay or Amazon, but I never renounced my citizenship in the United States of America for consumership in the Lazy States of Convenience. If it doesn’t come from brick and mortar, I don’t want it. If it’s available locally, from an independent business, I’ll always buy from people I can see and talk to.

A week into April, I wondered if I might learn something about the impasse on Martin Barre’s or Jethro Tull’s websites. Nothing. However, a cutesy notice for a Spanish distillery offering “Aqualung Scotch” and “Thick as a Brick Brandy” caught my attention. Yesterday morning, I was in Jabberwocky to tell Paul:

Their specialty is putting custom labels on bottles of vodka or gin or whatever you want. You could get ‘Paul’s Rum’ with your picture wearing an eye-patch and a parrot sitting on your shoulder!

His polite laughter did not hide his puzzlement: Why are you telling me this?

The homepage had a bright-colored notice across the top saying something like: Sales to the United States have been suspended due to the tariffs. We are working to negotiate lower prices.

Paul lit up: “That would explain what’s happening with this book.”

I asked if he noticed it with other books from Europe and the UK, and he said no, but also said that he wouldn’t notice it unless someone had an order in. Then I made the mistake of telling him something that he neither needed nor wanted to hear: “Meanwhile, copies of the book are being sold on eBay and by Amazon, undercutting you.”

His expression made me regret my lame attempt at sympathy as soon as it was out of my mouth: “That’s all Amazon does: Undercut small business.”

“And now they have help. Keep my order in! I won’t go to them.”

As I made my way home, the word “help” stuck in my mind like a key in an old lock. I turned it. All this time, I thought, as most others thought, that the tariffs were a tough-guy illusion to rile the base who could be counted on to somehow believe that the increased prices in American stores would be Biden’s fault.

Yes, it was that, but it was–and still is–more. The tariffs are help. From a corrupt autocrat to his billionaire donors to help their mega-corporations squeeze every dollar, every cent, every pound-of-flesh they can from the independent, local, neighborhood, and mom-and-pop small businesses we pretend to so proudly hail.

Call it a trick of democracy when run as big business here in the Lazy States of Convenience.

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Tweets from Our Own Golden Calf

Often I wonder if America has any memory at all.

Reaction to yesterday’s tweet from the man who 30% of American adults voted to be our president–and whom another 39% tacitly approved by not bothering to vote at all–was based more on the significance of the date than on its content.

Oh, there’s no question that Easter Sunday is an odd time to threaten a country of 82 million people with Back-to-the-Stone-Age annihilation, to do it with an F-bomb, and end it with “Praise be to Allah.” But it sure begs the question of just when is the right time.

With a Secretary of Defense–who calls himself “Secretary of War”–openly calling for a Christian crusade in the Middle East and claiming, “God wills it,” it’s readily understandable how religious meanings are eclipsing political realities. That’s as true of those of us who oppose as of those who support or passively allow authoritarian rule.

Still pouring in, the shocked reaction to the Mob Boss’s Easter Tweet reminds me of a few weeks back when the former FBI Director who led the investigation into Russia’s influence in Mob Boss’s 2016 campaign, Robert Mueller, passed away. Even some Republicans–who still support him nevertheless–admitted they were “aghast” and “disgusted” by the tweet on his doubly Orwellian-named “Truth Social”:

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!

For all of the religious reminders that we should not speak ill of the deceased, especially so soon after that last breath when families and loved ones are still in the deepest of grief. Off course, patience is not Mob Boss’s long suit; in fact, it seems entirely absent from the deck, which is clearly not even close to full.

And so the smear of Mueller–decorated veteran and life-long public servant–just comes and goes, much like that of John McCain, entirely wrapped in the warped amorality of a man whose main drive now appears to be creating monuments to himself.

Lost in the smear of Mueller is political reality: When Mueller finished his investigation in 2019, it was first submitted, by law, to Mob Boss’s Att’y General, William Barr. Before public release, Barr issued a two-page summary that, he claimed, was “complete exoneration” of Mob Boss.

Days later, those who read the report saw that Barr’s summary was a bold white-wash. The report’s conclusions were damning. Yes, the Kremlin did install an American president.

But it was too late. As Orwell warned, those who speak first and loudest often win the day. Plus it was what most Americans wanted to hear, and most importantly, it was so much easier than the 476 pages that built so much evidence for what came only at the end. Mueller played by the rules of not casting a definitive verdict; Barr bent the rules by making it seem as though no verdict meant no conclusions. It was as if the word “exoneration” all by itself meant we could “put it all behind us” and “turn the page.”

Fast forward seven years almost to this day, and we should have noticed that Mob Boss forgot is own lie. If the Mueller Report was “complete exoneration,” that why be “glad he’s dead” and accuse him of “hurt[ing] innocent people”? In effect, Mob Boss’s Mueller tweet was an Act of Confession that we mistook for nothing more than his characteristic bad taste.

For all of the concern we on the left of America’s dial express about the separation of church and state, we need to see these religious expressions–from Hegseth’s crusades to Leavitt’s cross necklaces–for the camouflage that they are. If a couple of wild tweets recently aren’t enough to make you suspect, please consider the architectural plans for Mob Boss’s presidential library:

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/trump-unveils-plans-presidential-library-including-gifted-air-131589343

Is that not an American Golden Calf? How about the exterior, 55 stories overlooking Miami:

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768094/trump-presidential-library-renderings-miami

Is it not an American Tower of Babel? Or have we completely forgotten even the most basic cautionary tales handed down to us through centuries of history we are supposed to know so it “won’t repeat itself”?

Do we have any memory at all?

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To Make US Face Ourselves

Late one night after a weekend way out of town and not wanting to make dinner when I arrived home, I drove my voracious appetite into the 401 Tavern in Hampton, NH, and took a seat at the bar.

Happened to be the last of two seats on a corner, and so I sat next to a woman whose husband and another elderly couple were on the three stools perpendicular to us. They were all in their eighties, and very pleasantly welcomed me into their conversation.

Before long I was wolfing down a burger, and they resumed getting to know each other. When the man nearest me mentioned that he was a retired police chief, the other asked, “Portsmouth?”

“No. Burlington, Vermont.”

I swallowed and waited for a pause in the conversation: “Were you chief of police when Bernie Sanders was mayor?”

Under much darker-colored hair, the smile that immediately beamed back at me appears on page 456 of a new book, Bernie for Burlington, with an equally beaming Mayor Sanders and an in-character Crime Dog McGruff as they appeared in 1987.

It is one of many surprises of poet and English professor Dan Chaisson’s part-memoir, part-biography, part-history, and very-much-nostalgic ode to the city where he came of age during Sander’s eight years in city hall. It was the police union that put the socialist alternative to a corrupt Democratic incumbent and a weak rogue Democratic challenger in office. More specifically, it was the police union that did it with a unanimous vote.

Where were the Republicans, you ask? They were quite content to support the incumbent and make their efforts elsewhere in the state. And they dominated the state, including elections for the US congress throughout the 70s in which Sanders ran a distant, but improving third.

Before Chaisson gets to that, he gives us a look at Bernie’s childhood in the Bronx. Source for this is older brother Larry Sanders who describes a father who could have been the model for Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Mom was equally hard-luck, but the brothers made do without complaint. Instead, they explore, including free pamphlets in a store named Vermont in Manhattan aimed at drawing tourists to the Green Mountain State.

At least Larry makes no complaint. Chaisson deliberately did not interview Bernie for the book, though they are pictured together, arm in arm and smiling, at a family picnic in 2024. Bernie and his wife Jane were said to be “aware” of the project and “intrigued” by it. Sources are numerous without them, including campaign workers, political rivals, neighborhood activists, historians, business leaders, and political allies, most notably his successor as mayor, Peter Clavelle. If you subscribe to the theory that your legacy is measured by the person who replaces you, then all you need to know is that Clavelle and Sanders were the co-founders of Vermont’s Progressive Party.

Other notables include Howard Dean, sometimes ally sometimes opponent, and Peter Freyne, a court-jester columnist for The Vermont Vanguard Press who predicted Sander’s rise: “Don’t be surprised to see Ol’ Bernardo draw a lot of votes from folks who just want to flip the bird at the status quo in Montpelier.”

Freyne also had the scoop of “the notorious smear shop” of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone “to attack… Eagle Scout Patrick Leahy,” Vermont’s long-time US senator in a campaign for re-election–three decades before the two felons helped fix America’s 2016 election.

Following Sanders’ upbringing in Brooklyn and a couple of semesters in Chicago, Chaisson give us a history of the hippie movement into northern New England, college-aged kids dropping out and looking for abandoned farms they would turn into communes. Sanders was in but not of that wave, as inspired by the renowned Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neil, he of Summerhill School fame, as any. To the contrary, he was impatient with the “tuning out” part, but he never gave up, and the grass roots grew. Unable to win a seat in the Vermont state legislature or in the US Congress, Bernie, as calculating as any natural politician, jumped at his chance in Burlington.

My Newburyport friends may do well to get Bernie for Burlington just to study the ins-and-outs of the waterfront issue, which beyond all else was what turned residents against the Democratic mayor. Writes Chaisson:

Sanders’ first Burlington apartment on Front Street was adjacent to Battery Park on the Old North End. Few physical settings in the United States present such a contrast between agonizing urban problems and almost unreal natural vistas. Bernie’s small, rented worker’s cottage, his first home in the city, sat on the seam between the two Burlingtons. His challenge was to make the city take its eyes off the sunsets and face itself.

Mission accomplished with the help of a cultural undercurrent the book captures in fine detail, such as new and trendy businesses downtown, some of which Chaisson worked at as a teenager. And around the state, such as Bread and Puppet Theater, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Phish, and Goddard College:

Between fish farms in the mountains and cauldron of soup at the Fresh Ground Coffee House, a relay ran. Goddard and the Fresh Ground, sixty miles apart, were the transmitting stations for radical ideas about power and subjugation. Sanders, no fan of fish farms or gourmet coffee, and “ruthlessly sarcastic” about (anarchist-environmentalist Murray) Bookchin’s wild-eyed pronouncements, nevertheless participated in the busy traffic moving between the two points, one artery in the larger organism evolving into a new Vermont.

Both those passages hint at more of the surprises this book has for those of us who supported Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. He never got high marks from environmentalists because of his full commitments to unions. He was at harsh odds with the University of Vermont because the state–that “status quo in Montpelier”–paid no Burlington taxes. And he rode in the cruiser with Chief Kevin Scully during the crackdown on UV students.

As Scully told me a few years ago at the 401 in Hampton, in paraphrase: Bernie was great to work with. We didn’t always agree, but he always listened, and I know had some influence. Just as he had over me. He always explained things, and was always very clear.

To make 520 pages well worth the time and effort, that last line is true of Chaisson’s book.

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https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dan-chiasson/bernie-for-burlington/

Putting the ‘Ace’ in Space

As a projectionist in a small arts-cinema with but a single screen, I’ve considered myself lucky all these years that I haven’t had to show or overhear or be in any way exposed to blockbuster films heavy with special FX.

That, of course, rules out most any film set in space, though I have always looked forward to documentaries regarding the Moon or Mars on PBS, some of them written and directed by Newburyport’s own Mark Davis.

As for the explosions, the high-speed chases, the hell-fire and deafening noise, I have no more appetite for them than I have for tofu and sushi. Do the cineplexes hand out barf-bags when they sell you a ticket?

Now comes Project Hail Mary, free of violence and minimal with blasts and booms, but necessarily loaded with FX necessary for a film set in space. For over a week I held to my own rule, but I also heard no end of patrons praise it as they left. Two words I kept hearing: “hilarious” and “heartbreaking.” That’s a combination I find impossible to resist.

Project Hail Mary begins mid-story. Ryland Grace regains consciousness well on his way to a destination from which he is to learn something that will save the world from a virus that will kill us all in 30 years. The two astronauts flying the craft are both dead. If that’s not enough of a problem, he has the immediate obstacle to overcome: He has never been on a spacecraft, and he was put on this one against his will, already unconscious.

As he will later recall yelling at the commander back on Earth who put him on the flight, “I put the ‘not’ in ‘astronaut’.”

No, Ryan Gossling (following his stellar Ken in Barbie) plays a high school science teacher who caught the attention of an international space agency due to a paper he wrote for journal that contained too many inconvenient truths for his own country to leave unpunished. But he’s an easy-going, carefree guy who mines the vein of entertainment in the classrooms of Grover Cleveland Middle School.

As he has to teach himself how to fly the craft already “Neptunish” away, he recalls bits and pieces of how he got there in flashbacks. Before too long in what is a long but fast-paced film, he finds himself aside another spacecraft that is launching objects about the size and shape of car mufflers at him. Gossling’s wondering aloud about whether he’s about to receive an intergalactic gift or a bomb was Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” cast as comedy and set to science fiction.

My expectation was that Project Hail Mary would harken back to 2001, but there are few hints of any Hal vs. Dave conflict. Instead, Capt. Grace meets Rocky, a creature about the size of a young goat who appears to be a cross between a crab and a monkey, or maybe a giant turtle with extra legs. Turns out, Rocky is also an advanced, sought-after scientist sent from another direction from Eridia, a planet also threatened by the same virus. Rocky and Grace soon figure out how to communicate and form a team.

More than an update of 2001, this film is the hopeful counterpoint to Don’t Look Up‘s sardonic doom and gloom. Rather than a very few people knowing the threat outnumbered by a world that wants to ignore them, Project Hail Mary is all about answering the call–which necessitates the ultimate sacrifice.

Subject matter here is quite serious–especially in a time when government agencies deny and defy science on behalf moneyed interests than will not hear any mention of inconvenient truth. But the film is flush with laugh lines, including a few sight gags, such as Capt. Grace appearing in one scene in a t-shirt reading, “I Had Potential.”

Also, this is yet another vibrant, often hilarious performance by Ryan Gossling with a solid, at times heart-breaking turn from Sandra Huller (following her Best Actress Oscar nomination for Anatomy of a Fall). And then there’s Rocky, an alien with a humane spirit as infectious as a Beatles’ song, specifically, “Two of Us”:

…wearing raincoats,
Standing solo in the sun.
You and me chasing paper,
Getting nowhere, on our way back home.

We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home

We’re going home...

Do Rocky and Grace make it home? Near the end of the film when Rocky asks if he has “a mate,” Grace sighs: “I had one, but she said I had my head in the clouds, that I live in another world.”

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