Pre-Script or Post-Script?

History, National Politics 1 Minute

On Friday I posted a blog headlined “Labor’s Love’s Lost” about how and why America’s Labor Movement is absent from history textbooks used in our public schools. In part it was a memoir of growing up in Lawrence, Mass., scene of one of America’s most consequential labor strikes–including the birth of Bread & Roses–in 1912.

Mill owners rallied opponents to the strike with the slogan “For God and Country” that appeared on banners in their parade–and again 50 years later in a commemorative parade in which I marched as a 7th grader holding rosary beads in a devout religious display.  “Labor’s Love’s Lost” describes both. The slogan was also used by Sen. Joe McCarthy and his supporters during the Red Scare of the early Fifties.  On Friday, I used it to introduce the blog on social media.

This weekend, QAnon held a convention in Texas during which Donald Trump’s lawyer said that he could be re-instated as president by August. Before it was over, Michael Flynn, a former Trump advisor and a Trump-pardoned convicted felon, called for a coup to make that happen. The QAnon banner onstage behind them read:

“For God and Country.”

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Labor’s Love’s Lost
https://thepatriotvoice.brushfire.com/for-god–country-patriot-roundup/497874

The “WWG1WGA” on the hat refers to a QMoron slogan: “Where We Go One, We Go All.” By changing the wording (and making it stupidly wordy), they must have thought no one would realize that they are plagiarizing the Three Musketeers.

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Jack Garvey (1951 - ) was born and raised in Lawrence, Mass., before attending Salem State College (now University} where his BA was delayed three semesters by The Log (the student newspaper), the anti-war movement, and other counter-culture activities. Unwilling to serve the Fort Kent, Maine, Chamber of Commerce as a reporter for the St. John Valley Times, he disappeared west of the Mississippi River, turning up as a graduate student and teacher of freshman composition at South Dakota State University, as a grant-writer for the United Tribes of North Dakota, as a vagabond on the West Coast who paused a few weeks to pick cherries and train hops in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and as a busker in Denver's historic Larimer Square. Returning to Massachusetts after about seven years--the same time that the Prodigal Son returned to a fatted calf--Garvey landed north of Boston to resume busking in the coastal tourist towns of Newburyport and Salem while teaching as an adjunct instructor at most every college within a 90-minute drive. A year later, in 1983, he began writing guest columns for the Newburyport Daily News and the weekly Newburyport Current. In 1999 he joined King Richard's Renaissance Faire in Carver, Mass., where he has performed every fall as a strolling minstrel to this day. Last fall he also performed in Cry Innocent, a re-enactment of a witch trial in Salem. He still writes for the Daily News, and he has since included Lexington, Mass., to his busking circuit. He has compiled three books: Pay the Piper! A Street-Performer's Public Life in America's Privatized Times (2014), Keep Newburyport Weird: An Atlas of Downtown Rhyme and Surfside Reason (2018), and Once Upon an Attention Span: An All-Purpose Pub for the United States of Amnesia (2024).

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