On this 12th Day of Christmas

For as long and loud as its frontman’s bellow was a week before Christmas Day, Project 2025’s main point was quietly slipped in at the very end.

Two weeks before the invasion of Venezuela, there was nothing anywhere close to a national emergency for which such prime time addresses are called. Many pundits dismissed it as a campaign speech, a list of all the usual talking points, all of it false.

They are mostly correct, but they missed the last-second dog-whistle intended to rile up the MAGA base.

Before we get to that, let’s recognize that one of the claims, though exaggerated, has a grain of truth to it: The 2010 Affordable Care Act–”Unaffordable” in his phrase–was intended to benefit insurance companies.

As usual, he immediately twisted that exaggeration into a firehose of lies obvious to anyone over 30 with a memory by calling it “a Democratic scheme” because insurance companies “own the Democratic Party.”

When Democrats began crafting a plan for national health care, many pushed for universal coverage, a single-payer system such as those which exist in all other countries with high standards of living and that rank high in every poll taken to measure quality of life.

Worth noting here that, of 132 countries, the USA ranks 38th, between Hungary and Barbados in one such poll taken by World Data. Another, World Population Review, lists only the top eleven, and we are not on it. Because they make health care a priority, it’s a safe bet that we are not even close.

When Republicans screamed of socialism, Democrats hoped to compromise by expanding Medicare. Republicans did not budge, and they repeated horror stories of “government-run” medicine and hospital care.

Before long, some Americans were repeating tales of “death panels” and of women waiting eleven months to deliver babies. Nor was there any convincing them that medicine and care would still be run by hospitals and health professionals. Government involvement would be limited to coverage.

Nor would they hear that, of all the countries that have adopted universal health care, not one has repealed it. That includes Norway where it began in 1912 and other countries where it began in the aftermath of World War II. Few political candidates, even those far-right, attack it. Those who do, lose.

But America runs on scare-tactics, and Democrats retreated yet again, this time to a plan based on one devised here in Massachusetts under Republican Gov. Mitt Romney.

To the contrary of the frontman’s 18-minute shout, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who steered profits to insurance companies with the Affordable Care Act to which enough of them finally agreed.

After regaining control of the House in 2011, Republicans tried to demonize the plan as “Obamacare” and have since tried to repeal the bill dozens of times. They refer to their own polling results–never mentioning that, in southern states, 70% are in favor when the question says “Affordable care Act” while 70% are against when it says “Obamacare.”

“Repeal and Replace” became their slogan even though they offer no replacement. Excuses for this range from his laughable “concept of a plan” during the campaign last year to the insulting lunacy of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) telling reporters last week:

“The challenge Republicans have always had is trying to unify behind a single proposal. We’ve just got too many good ideas.”

Republicans have no more plans or ideas than fish have 401Ks. All they have is a wrecking ball called Project 2025 which calls for White Christian Nationalism–the glue for all else it contains.

With 2025 coming to a close, it was perversely fitting that he sang the praises for the Project’s “accomplishments.”

Though amused, pundits were perplexed by his unrelenting loud and rapid pace, as fact-checkers hustled to show every claim as fraudulent as the crosses worn by his henchwomen like camouflage around their necks.

They thought it was over when he finally paused and took a breath. They missed, and so failed account for his last two words:

“Merry Christmas.”

We know that this wish has long been a hot-button issue, red meat for his base. They demand it be made exclusively. Hence, it now serves as a battle cry against humanitarian calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

With all other faiths left unacknowledged, the entire speech may well have been nothing but camouflage for the pursuit of uniformity, privilege, and exclusion.

We also know of Project 2025‘s goal to erase all traces of DEI. Oh, how the upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday must irk them!

Don’t be surprised if Republicans propose to replace it with this 12th day of Christmas to honor the MAGA movement’s attack on the capitol five years ago, blending their perverted patriotism with The Epiphany to impose Christianity on the USA.

And as names continue to change on buildings and on maps, don’t be surprised if you awaken one day to a new national slogan:

E Pluribus Conformitas.

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There’s a signature in the top left corner, apparently in Arabic, that I can’t decipher. The friend who sent it tells me it has been around some 10, 12 years at least.

From Calendar to Clock

Ever notice how the calendar and clock correspond?

Midnight-2 am: More dark than light, January’s weeks are the wee hours of the year, a time to sleep, or at least stay under blankets and comforters, comforted against the year’s lows.

2-4 am: Come February, and good luck avoiding people sincerely surprised that the days are getting longer and wanting to tell you about it. But feel good about the night shift seeing the days start sooner. Still so cold, however, that even the groundhog appears for but a peep.

4-6 am: Enter March and a lion may roar for a few days here and there, but on our calendar o’clock a rooster welcomes spring, the dawn of every year.

6-8 am: We keep hearing that April showers bring May flowers, but it’s really the mud that does it. April’s warmth, much like the oncoming warmth of a rising sun, melts winter’s frost. The original poem, “April mud makes May bud,” didn’t quite make it with the critics. Hence, showers and flowers.

8-10 am: May is akin to mid-morning following coffee breaks. Researchers call this the most stressful time of the workday, an odd match for what we call the most romantic month. From heart attacks to hearts broken? Maybe, but those same researchers call it the most productive time of day. And we all know what romance can produce.

Lesson: Fish off the company dock if you must, but watch what you interface.

10-noon: Dinnertime corresponds to June, the start of many annual vacations. Schools go out on recess. A time for photo-ops. Even Newburyport City Hall smiles as often as possible, always outdoors with the Chamber of Commerce. Every sentence they head-nod includes—as June only need imply—the phrase “moving forward.”

Noon-2 pm: July is the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t month. Tourists observe Yankee Homecoming in town while locals take refuge here on Plum Island. So, too, in early afternoons do office workers kick back to the pleasantries of answering mail and making phone calls. Restaurants decelerate into low gears after so much high-speed action to refuel the rest of us. We remember the second syllable in “hello.”

2-4 pm: “Dog days of August”? What else can we say about late afternoon? Go through the motions of work, but can’t wait to go home. Helen Highwater, a most reliable Newburyport denizen, tells me of a plan to spruce up the month with “Annie Oakley Day,” an attempt to reconcile feminists and gun-enthusiasts, which, successful or not, could bring a whole new meaning to “Happy Hour.”

4-6 pm: September is the month when neighbors tend to reconvene, especially their children and teenagers in schools, much like the hours when we arrive home and sit down to evening meals. We humor the kids in the fiction that they would rather stay on vacation, just as we kid ourselves with the phrase “Indian Summer.”

6-8 pm: October is an annual sunset, as colorful as a western horizon over a salt marsh, rich in all shades of red, orange, yellow, purple. Apple pickers hit the rungs and fill the bins. At home it’s time for sweets. Downtown restaurants can stuff—in another sense of the word—their thimble-sized desserts. Give us McIntosh, or… Check, please!

8-10 pm: In Moby Dick, Ishmael refers to “a dark, drizzly November in my soul” to explain that he cannot remain in civilized society. He must go to sea—or at least to the Thirsty Whale. English tradition calls it “the blood month,” the time to store food for winter. In either case, striking out or hunkering down, November corresponds to the end of one day’s activity and preparation for the next.

Some go to bed, others to bars. Children say prayers at points on the clock that would find Thanksgiving on a calendar.

10-midnight: December, then, is a long day’s destination. Candles and fireplaces offer natural light for natural reflection, and we exchange gifts that sum up a year past and anticipate a year about to be.

Finally, on the 31st, we stay up till midnight, sincerely surprised by another chance at renewal—the only day in 365 when we realize that calendar and clock are one.

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Taken by my next door neighbor, this photo faces northwest. If you could extend the horizon about a generous inch on each side, you would see where the sun sets on the Winter and Summer solstices. Dead center would be where it sets on the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes. For the fellow in the hat, the clock moves overhead, the calendar straight ahead. Photo by Kim O’Rourke.

Death of a Verb

Put aside all the political and social damage that he continues to wreak (which is, of course, impossible), and he is still guilty of destroying one of the most useful, forceful, unambiguous verbs in the English language.

Trump has trumped “trump.”

If we could imagine a deck of cards representing the 52 most glaring debasements of the English language over the past, say, twenty years, “trump” would be the highest trump in whatever game you choose.

Maybe I’m fortunate that the only card game I continue to play is cribbage, a game that has no trump, although getting skunked is reminiscent.

Other cards might come close. Those who answer cellphones in classrooms, in meetings, in theaters, and many other public places have turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of any language.

In Newburyport, another ace would be “accountability,” rendered absolutely meaningless in last year’s election as he who most often proclaimed it openly and successfully avoided it.

Ever taking tricks is one dating back at least to the early-80s when I first heard it o’er and o’er again in the halls of academe. That’s when we went from The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius to The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.

Before long, “appropriate” clouded the language of business and politics as well, like an invasive species that kills off useful plants while having no use of its own other than to presume agreement. It’s the adult version of the adolescent “cool,” making conformity with our peers seem like discerning individuality.

Once upon an attention span, we readily described subjects as necessary, relevant, ethical, practical, effective, durable, flexible, reliable, useful, pleasing, timely, sufficient, and on and on. Now, we lazily rely on this all-purpose “appropriate.” Test it for yourself: Whenever you hear the word “appropriate,” stop the speaker and ask what it means. Chances are the speaker will need just a moment to give you a clear, precise, honest word.

Be prepared, however, for the question to draw a blank, suggesting that speakers are either inflating the language or do not know what they are talking about. I’m not saying that there is anything necessarily nefarious here, just that “appropriate” is dead from overuse, and has been for 40 years.

As American economist Thomas Sowell told us, “If it means everything, it means nothing.”

Just last year, we heard the debasement of a word that has always seemed harmless, at least as far as this Truman baby can recall. In fact, the man with the most undeserved name claimed to have invented it: “grocery.” Can’t recall the Truman years, but I can tell you that, in the Eisenhower years, supermarkets were still on the horizon of what we called “grocery stores.”

He also boasted that he would “make America affordable again” in his 2024 campaign, although he now calls “affordability” a made-up word, a Democratic hoax. But that’s nothing compared to his 2016 campaign when his stump speeches included pro-longed ridicule of the word “emoluments.” He also called that a hoax, having heard it repeatedly invoked during his two impeachments.

Apparently he never saw it in print. That includes the US Constitution where “emoluments” appears several times because the founders were determined to prevent future presidents from accepting riches that might influence them. The emphasis they put on emoluments is so great that, to say you read the Constitution and then not recognize it, is akin to claiming you’ve been to Yellowstone but can’t recall any geyser.

Those passages drew loud laughter from the MAGA crowds, as Trump trumped the founders with a series of weird and exaggerated pronunciations made with twisting facial expressions–“eeee-MULL-ew-mints,” “eh-mole-U-mince.” All those folks who for years dared that we liberals “Read the Constitution!” themselves do not recognize it.

It’s as if the novel 1984 has been taken and employed as a blueprint rather than as a cautionary tale. George Orwell’s “Newspeak” serves as a precursor for today’s debased English, not just in the limited vocabulary of “Doubleplusgoodspeak,” but in naming and renaming of anything in sight. “Victory Cigarettes” and “Victory Chocolate” may very well be the models for “Big Beautiful Bill” and “Gulf of America.” The brand name, “Trump,” now being stamped on public buildings follows the lead of the ubiquitous posters of Big Brother in Orwell’s “Oceania.”

Orwell’s most quoted line sums it up: “(I)f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” We need heed the line that follows:

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

And so it is that Americans left and right, educated or not, have allowed our language to be debased. How bad is it? Walmart now claims to be “investing in American jobs” on signs that it places directly above self-checkout counters manufactured in China, and few notice. The fewer who object are dismissed as malcontents.

Could say that we were trumped before Trump hit the scene. But that does not mean that the game is lost. We still have the language and the ability to use it with honesty, precision, and clarity. In effect, we still have cards. And we have turns to bid.

Those turns are called elections where the highest bid calls trump. Might call it “the art of the deal” if only that phrase were not already debased.

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https://sva.design/projects/11458/1984-principles-of-newspeak/

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/trump-selling-99-virtual-trading-cards

Why History Repeats Itself

When I submitted a commentary on the film, Nuremberg, and the PBS series, American Revolution, to a newspaper editor as a guest column, I was careful not to include any explicit comparison of the Trump Administration to the Third Reich.

From an early draft, I deleted a line that read, “More than anything, those who still insist that ‘Nothing can be compared to Hitler and the Nazis’ need to see Nuremberg.”

After all this time of ICE acting as a Gestapo in our streets and a Dept. of Justice devoted to harassing a president’s political opponents, it’s hard to believe that anyone still thinks that, but some people live within a straitjacket of absolutes no matter how drastically times change, no matter how glaring the evidence to the contrary.

Back in the late-Sixties, I think all editors held to that standard, and in the Seventies I became one of them. In the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts, I was a college English teacher who always steered students away from the hyperbolic–and frankly lazy–comparisons.

Godwin’s Law became the first Internet meme for good reason.

Must admit that I laughed at more than one. The comparison of dress codes in one student’s high school to “Nazi persecution” appeared in a paper I was reading in U-Mass Lowell’s cafeteria. My reaction stopped conversations five tables away as students looked up.

For me the change began in 2010 when then-Rep., now-Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called Citizens United the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott in 1857. Civil Rights groups pounced, insisting, “Nothing can be compared to slavery!”

No one noticed that lawyers for the plaintiff, Citizens United, based their case on the 13th Amendment which was prompted by Dred Scott.* Nor did anyone note that all this transpired in the first week of February, designated as “Black History Month” by the very people who failed to recognize an incomparable teaching moment and, instead, suppressed it.

If that began my distrust of the “nothing can be compared” stance, 2016 completed it with the Trump campaign’s immersion in slurs, ridicule, and implied threats of violence. Much of it was straight out of the Nazi playbook. “Lying press” was mere translation of Hitler’s Lugenpress and spat out as often. Today I wonder if all those years of being drilled to believe that “nothing can be compared” greased the skids for those who took advantage of it. It’s as if they were granted immunity before committing all their crimes.

But some among us still adhere to the standard.

If you want to see just what I submitted, simply click back to “Windows Turned Mirrors,” posted on this site last week. In it, I describe a few scenes in and quote a few lines from Nuremberg. As far as I’m concerned, it needs no added comparison, as the similarities are impossible to miss.

But the editor felt “uncomfortable running any column or letter that compares Trump to Hitler even in the slightest.”

I appealed by asking that he consider a few points:

1) Nuremberg is currently playing in cinemas across the country, and will be for some time and is likely to gain several Oscar nominations.
2) I describe two scenes in the film, which is based largely on the writings of the psychiatrist played by Malek Rami, without mention of any current events.
3) I mention the reaction of Screening Room patrons without mentioning what any said while leaving, thereby avoiding any mention of current events.
4) I mention the archival footage showing headlines from German publications in the 1930s, and juxtapose them with prominent statements made by public officials in the USA this year and in 2010. Juxtaposition is not a comparison but an invitation to allow the reader to compare.
5) Nuremberg is topical. It’s the juxtaposition of it to the present that makes it so.

In signing off, I also mentioned that a comparison is not an equation. The reply came, not from any thinking person, but from AI:

Hi John – You spent a lot of timing (sic) typing a response which i (sic) appreciate. I will not run a column which compares the current administration to the Nazi party in any shape or form.

To be fair, “John” is my formal first name, and it does appear on my email account, but I’ve been writing for that paper for about as long as that editor has been alive under the byline “Jack.”

As for the attention to the time–or the “timing”–I spent typing, it might as well be AI. There’s no more thought in it than there is in the stance that “nothing can be compared to…”

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*Two years later, in his presidential bid, Republican Mitt Romney turned the same connection into a campaign slogan: “Corporations are people!”

https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/elon-musk-gives-nazi-salute-during-his-trump-inauguration-speech/

Windows Turned Mirrors

Hammered by Pure Wind

As much as I love irony, sometimes it goes too far.

Despite that, I attended “The Rise of Authoritarianism,” a forum held in Newburyport just two days after the re-election of a mayor and city council president who have effectively erased checks and balances from local government.

Of course, the Greater Newburyport Bar Association’s guest-speakers focused on a national political party that has forfeited checks and balances in favor of an authoritarian federal government.

That was among the dozen or so “markers” that one of the panelists listed as characteristics of what Americans readily call authoritarian–or dictatorial, or fascist–in other countries, but are reluctant to admit are possible, much less true at home.

Much of what the legal experts said confirmed what the eighty or so of us in the old Superior Courthouse knew, connecting legal dots for us lay citizens in an otherwise confusing big picture.

Available to anyone interested is the full video, an excellent primer for those who seek details beneath the surface of events. Demanding attention here is a surprise that left me wondering where and why I was:

A 90-minute forum on authoritarianism made not a single reference to George Orwell.

Didn’t occur to me until time expired on a Q&A session that was all too short. And ever since, I have been formulating in my head what I might have said.

Truth be told, I do this for most everything I write, and much of it while driving, as if speaking. No doubt I appear to those in cars aside me to be lecturing if not damning the driver in front of me.

While the panel did well to dissect the legal machinery of the Trump administration, they never applied the grease that sustains its relentless pace:

Repetitive language.

This makes Orwell conspicuous in his absence. Wish I had interrupted the panelist who called the bombings of boats off Venezuela’s coast “murder.” Not to disagree, but to add:

We hear the word “invasion” repeated over and again to justify the bombs. We never hear that those boats would have to refuel some 25 times to reach the Florida Keys, which would expose “invasion” as the lie it is.

Some tricks of MAGA-speak, as Orwell said of Newspeak, are glaringly hideous and comical, such as “Big Beautiful Bill” and “Gulf of America.”

But they serve to make words like “invasion” plausible. The hammer of constant repetition drives the nails home. “Crisis” and “emergency” justify a military presence in our cities. “Waste and fraud” allow for slashing funds allocated for the public good.

Orwell emphasized euphemism as an authoritarian tool. Twenty years after he wrote 1984, the Johnson and Nixon administrations used one of his examples, “pacification of villages,” to cover up the fact of bombing them into oblivion.

Today we are bombarded with malphemisms, making something good sound bad. Once upon an attention span, most Americans considered awareness a civic obligation. MAGA-speak abbreviates the word and spits it out with contempt.

Right-wing cranks are now elected governors in southern states for declaring a “war on woke.”

Malphemisms are not new. For years, anti-choice activists have constantly decried “abortion on demand.” Do we buy cars “on demand”? Do they buy guns “on demand”? Does payment constitute “demand”?

No, no, and no, but the phrase sure makes accessibility sound menacing. Plus, as Orwell wrote, it “gives an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

In 1984–the year, not the book–the Republican Party issued a pamphlet with instructions for all their candidates on the use of words. Among them:

Always use “extremist” or “hard-liner” in combination with “feminist” and “environmentalist.”

Through the 80s and 90s, I was one of countless college teachers who marveled at how often students would say, “I am not a feminist, but–” or “I am not an environmentalist, but–” before making a feminist or environmentalist statement in class.

In the 1988 presidential campaign, most everyone noticed George H.W. Bush’s use of “card-carrying” in front of “member of the ACLU” to describe his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Most lawyers are members, and most groups issue cards. With a classic case of something out of nothing, Bush was harkening back to the McCarthy era when Americans kept hearing the phrase, “card-carrying member of the Communist Party.”

No one, however, noticed a far more subliminal trick used by the Bush campaign. The mid-80s were extremely hard times for farmers on the prairies. Severe drought caused numerous foreclosures which led to a suicide rate that made front-page national news. Dukakis’ agricultural advisor–from Iowa as I recall–gave him a list of nine crops to recommend that farmers put in rotation.

Among them was Belgian endive. The Bush campaign pounced, ridiculing it as “exotic” and insinuating that it was the only one proposed. Others on the list were better known, but “Belgian” is a foreign name all by itself, and back then it was often followed by “Congo,” which insinuates something else, something in common with the infamous Willie Horton ads. The Dukakis campaign never challenged it, and not until the election was over did we read reports of the Reagan-Bush Dept. of Agriculture issuing a block grant to farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula to grow a new crop: Belgian endive.

In 1996, irony wrote itself when Republican presidential nominee, US Sen. Robert Dole apparently thought he could win the White House by repeating the word “liberal” as often as possible. Resulting speeches and interviews were so awkward that it was a wonder how reporters and interviewers kept straight faces. The kicker was that he also boasted of his American heartland upbringing in the small Great Plains town of Liberal, Kansas.

Irony haunts me.

My last column (also adapted and posted as a blog) noted the phrase “background noise” repeatedly used by the mayor’s supporters to dodge his wretched record on personnel matters. No matter that some of those personnel still work in City Hall, and that others are filing lawsuits against the city.

His supporters complained that all of us detractors were “re-litigating the past,” a horrible sounding phrase to malphemize “holding to account.” Before it was over, euphemism prevailed with a letter-to-the-editor headlined, “Vote for joy and optimism.”

And pay no attention to the toxic work environment of which City Hall staff are risking their jobs to inform us–or to the lawsuits from those who have already lost them.

Instead, we were treated to one constantly repeated phrase that allowed the mayor’s supporters to avoid the record on which he supposedly ran: “Move forward.”

Worked so well that it easily qualifies as Newburyport’s version of Republicans’ “thoughts and prayers.”

George Orwell would call this beyond ironic, but George Carlin would have a field day.

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Intended as a cautionary tale, MAGA has turned Orwell’s novel into a blueprint for authoritarian rule. Back after Bonespur’s first inauguration, the book was flying off bookstore shelves, and the publisher hustled another edition into print when Kellyanne Conway casually mentioned “alternative facts.” Many of us thought, great, the public is catching on, but apparently many customers wanted the blueprint. Maybe that’s why Walt, in Newburyport, had it turned into a wooden spoon–“to stir things up.”

Over the Love of Ease

Months ago, an ad slipped through my filters with a subject line I could in no way resist:

Say Goodbye to Spoons.

As soon as I clicked in, the next line made me wonderland what oz I had mistakenly dropped in my morning coffee:

Meet ThermoStorm.

Turned out to be an ad for a new “automatic mixing mug” that will “revolutionize your daily routine,” sparing you the ordeal of having to stir your own coffee or protein drinks.

Did it occur to the manufacturer or the marketing team that protein drinks are typically gulped down by people who also exercise and, if I may go out on a limb, are not looking to avoid swirling a wrist for a few seconds?

My first reaction was that this, indeed, signals the end of western civilization. But I said and still say that of the cellphone. Three decades ago, I said it of personal computers. Five decades ago, I said it of disco. And, had I been born about when my father learned to drive, I’d have said it of the automatic transmission.

Oh, I’m fully aware that I’m outnumbered on all those counts. In fact, I caved on computers 25 years ago, and today cannot imagine life without my Lenovo. But, much to the dismay of my worrying daughter, I’m still the only adult she knows without a cellphone. Also, my Nissan’s name is “Stick-It,” and I still think anyone who dances to disco should be required by law to wear a dunce cap.

Having grown up in an era that gave us dishwashers, clothes washers, clothes driers, pop-up toasters, fast food, and TV dinners, I can tell you that America’s headlong race toward perpetual convenience began in tandem with its obsessive pursuit of lower costs. Must admit that I can hardly condemn it anymore than I can my own upbringing.

One incident, though, when I was no more than six seems to have foreshadowed my lifelong dissent: Every morning my mother had toast, already buttered, on the table by the time I arrived. Toast with butter I always liked, but on this one morning, the butter was exceptionally sweet and rich, and I let her know it. She answered by showing me a package of a brand other than what she usually bought. I looked at the kneeling Indian woman in the foreground of a vast horizon strange to my young Merrimack Valley eyes and read: “Land O Lakes.” Not sure of the exact wording, but I do recall waving the small box over my head and the excitement of insisting that she always “get this one.”

In retrospect, it may have been the first time I tasted actual butter. What we had been calling “butter” was likely the cheaper and easier-to-spread substitute popularized in the Fifties called “margarine.” About 25 years later, desperate for a cup of coffee while driving across North Dakota, I would stop at a Dairy Queen where, when I asked for cream, was directed to a bowl of packets on the counter. “Non-dairy creamers” the labels said. The powder in those packets were–to many back then and perhaps now–“cream,” just as margarine was “butter.”

Ever since, I have called that chain “Non-Dairy Queen,” and I often repeat what I have since heard from more than one gourmet chef: “Margarine is one molecule away from plastic.”

Today, with inflation so high, it’s hard to fault anyone for doubling the ratio of Hamburger Helper to lower that of beef in the family meatloaf. But it is heartening that our 20th Century faith in the superiority of “factory-made” and “store-bought” has faded in favor of today’s renewed appreciation of the homemade and homegrown.

Alas, our obsession with convenience remains. You can invoke the First or Second amendment, you can sing “land of the free,” and you can recite “with liberty and justice for all” all you want, but convenience has long been America’s guiding principle.

Freedom runs at best a distant second. We have enough proof of that in recent years, from the repeal of Roe v. Wade to the current intimidating presence of ICE in our cities. There’s a perverse poetry in a word that immediately suggests “freeze” for law enforcement which the MAGA movement no doubt enjoys. If ICE existed in any other country in the world, we’d call it “the Gestapo.”

We favor convenience stores–another product of the American Fifties and Sixties–even as we lament the loss of the mom-and-pops they replace. We are now so used to doors that open themselves that we are surprised by doors that remain closed–and sometimes wait a bit for them as if they might change their mind. So used to lights that shut themselves off that we leave lights on even when they are coordinated with fans that keep running. What awaits us when we have a few more years of toilets that flush themselves and cars that drive themselves?

Has our craving for convenience undermined our ability–indeed, our willingness–to govern ourselves?

Yes, I came of age in the Sixties listening to those who preached a gospel of participatory democracy, civic involvement, and paying attention. Among them was Robert Kennedy who likely would have been elected president in 1968 by offering challenges rather than promises:

The answer is to rely on youth — not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.

That was then. Last year, we saw a presidential election in which over 37% of the electorate did not vote.

This year, after many of those folks woke up to the consequences, numbers were up in states that held elections with national ramifications. From other states came reports of voters calling to complain that polls were closed, only to be told that there was no local or statewide election. They were that eager to vote in some way, in any way, against Trump & MAGA.

Are we beginning to rebound? Last year, Democrats said that the presidential election was a choice between democracy and oligarchy. Said it myself, and I don’t disagree now, but we may do better to talk about coming elections as choices between the consequences of convenience and the rewards of effort.

There has to be something more appealing about stirring things up yourself than in having them stirred for you.

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MLK’s Method vs. Madness

Martin Luther King got a lot of mileage out of comparisons.

Urging churches and synagogues to act like headlights toward justice rather than taillights for public opinion, he compared them to cars.

Explaining his role in the civil rights movement, he compared himself to a drum major.

But he knew the march was slow when, regarding civil rights movements around the globe, he compared the “jet-like speed” of other countries to the “horse and buggy pace” of ours.

Nor was the irony—a comparison gone awry—lost on him in an era when TV ads implored us night after night to “See the USA in your Chevrolet!”

Contrasts, too. What is a contrast but an inverted comparison? To borrow one of King’s favorite words, contrasts can be irrefutable, as in his most quoted line that matches “color of their skin” against “content of their character.”

King once compared the American public to Rip Van Winkle. Don’t know about video, but audio reveals a hilarious stand-up comic.

Frequent reactions of the congregation—a church in Lima, Ohio—tell you he is mugging Rip’s yawning, snoring, startled awakening, head-scratching, and dropping jaw.

Catching King’s attention in literature’s first attempt at American mythology was the poster of King George on a tree as Rip enters the woods. It’s George Washington when he leaves.

Waiting for laughter to subside, he bellows as only he could: “Ol’ Rip slept through a revolution!” Congregation roars, cheers mixed with laughter. They were awake, and they had a guy who could awaken others to the injustices they faced.

Speaking comparatively, today’s America hit the snooze button. And yes, it was a landslide when you add the sleeping non-voters to the ones who took the knock-out pill.

But that’s a story already covered and debated. Time to consider method over madness.

First noticed it 15 years ago, and it all came back last month when the first question at the 5th Annual William Lloyd Garrison Lecture was preceded by a disclaimer: “not comparing them…”

The questioner then asked if the imminent round-ups and mass deportations might call for resistance similar to that provoked by the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson paused before answering: “It’s not the same but it’s parallel.”

She, author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, then fully agreed with the premise and offered suggestions.

Her riveting, char-broiled speech seasoned with surprising comic relief had a lot to do with the Fugitive Slave Act, and the question prompted a discussion of today’s parallels impossible to miss.

But she, too, avoided the word “comparison.”

Spin the clock back to January 21, 2010. Supreme Court hands down Citizens United. Days later, then-Rep., now-Sen. Ed Markey calls it “the worst decision since Dred Scott.” For over a week, local civil rights leaders keep pouncing on him with loud indignation:

“Nothing can be compared to slavery!”

No one in the media or in political circles backs him up, other than to call it innocent overstatement and suggest he apologize.

Did they not know that Citizens United’s lawyers twisted the 13th Amendment granting citizenship to newly freed people into a case for granting effective citizenship to corporations?

The 13th Amendment was intended to, among other things, strike down Dred Scott, which directly ties it to Citizens United.

Adding to the irony, it’s the start of Black History Month, but no one thinks to seize this connection of present to past as a teachable moment.

Instead, they quash it, and we still have people fearful of making connections of what we live with today to the worst of what we’ve read of yesterday.

Comparisons are not equations. They are a method of thought just as are descriptions, satire, and cause/effect relationships. To avoid them is to limit our ability to think.

Case in point: All these years we’ve also refused comparisons of anything in the present to the Nazis.

Swastikas flying at MAGA rallies, followed by open admiration of Adolph Hitler these past few years has barely changed that. It should have changed as soon as 2015 with the ridicule of women and the handicapped, with the slurs and slander of Hispanics, with the demonization of the press, with the contempt for science, with absurd claims about crowd sizes, forest fires, windmills, hurricanes, with “very fine people.”

Last year we heard “poisoning the blood” and “They’re eating pets!” What are we waiting for? “Seig Heil”?

Makes me wonder if the implicit ban on comparisons paved the way for what may already be an equation.

Comparatively speaking, we cannot truly honor a drum major without the instruments necessary to play his tune.

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The Stone of Hope in Washington DC, inspiration by a line from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” The memorial opened to the public on August 22, 2011.
https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm

A detail of *The Embrace*, a memorial added to Boston Common two years ago honoring Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King.
https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/in-boston-the-embrace-honors-the-legacy-and-love-of-martin-luther-king-jr-and-coretta-scott-king_o

We’ve Got the Verdict

When I saw the question, I scrolled down to the comments thinking I would surely find the answer.

Is it spelled gray or grey?

I’ve long thought the two were interchangeable, like flutist and flautist, but without the change in pronunciation. I was never sure, and even now my spellcheck has underlined grey and flautist in red. And there it is again!

The answer came quickly. They are both correct, but Americans commonly write gray while Canadians, Brits, Down Underers, and others prefer grey. Simple and harmless enough, and I’m grateful to know the reason even though it won’t increase my income, make me lose weight, regain my lost youth, sharpen my chess game, facilitate my musicianship, improve my German, teach me Italian, gain me Irish citizenship, or enable me to make lasagna or spinach pies.

But the mud hit within the first five comments: “Well, we have a Supreme Court justice who can’t define the word woman.”

Next: “And six others who think one man is above the law.”

Like tennis, it then went back and forth several times, completely divorced from life’s persistent question of gray vs. grey. One wag tried to break the spell by noting that the thread was now “blue vs. gray.” Buy that guy a beer! On me! Too bad, though, that historical humor was lost on the trollers, and the volley continued.

Eventually, one earnest fellow said what many were likely thinking:

Why must a simple, honest inquiry, the answer to which I’m sure many are not sure of, turn into political back & forth garbage with each side trying to antagonize & humiliate the other? Take your childish arguments elsewhere!

Since I create enough on-line controversies of my own and often confront friends when I think they go awry, I had already resolved to stay out of this. But this fellow was singing my song, not just on-line but in public. So I jumped in:

Good question, and I share the sentiment of wanting to keep things in context. That said, it has appeared to me that it is always started by one side. That, then, puts the other side in the position of responding or letting it slide. And many on that other side believe that if you don’t respond, it sticks.

If I may interrupt myself: That has always been the first reason political junkies give for Democrat John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. He did not respond to the “Swiftboat” attack ads. And it is now among the top reasons offered for Kamala Harris’ loss in November regarding relentless ads aired during sports broadcasts painting her as obsessed with sex-change operations for lifers in penitentiaries. She never countered that the policy was in place during Trump’s administration.

Now, as I was saying:

Someone then looks or listens in, and it appears that both sides deserve equal blame. Maybe both sides deserve some blame for carrying on or for the way they carry on, but if you look at who instigates this childishness (your word), I think you’ll find one side far more culpable than the other.

While writing this, I wasn’t thinking of social media, but of a Renaissance Faire where I’ve performed as a strolling flautist (or flutist) since 1499. At the end of each day I’m standing, playing, and bantering with people as they leave. Lot of jokes to leave ’em leaving laughing.

Most successful by far was, “Farewell, and thank you so much for spending your money– Oooops! Ah, ah, ah, I mean your day, your day with us! Your day, I meant to say!” Laughter loud and unanimous from all within hearing–until an uptight higher up at the faire heard it, thought it a criticism, and had it banned it from my repertoire.

That was about eight years ago, after which my best line has been “Come back next year! We’re going to put Galileo on trial!” Not as uproarious as the money joke, but it allowed me to go on, like a boxer throwing one-twos instead of a single haymaker.

Holding up my pipe: “Did you know Galileo’s father was a flutist? Or a flautist? A flautist or a flutist?”

Laughter always pauses as smiles await the punchline and someone asks: “What’s the difference?”

“Flutist or flautist? Flau or flu? Achoooo! One is a telescope with holes,” I offer while holding one end of mine to one eye and pointing the other at the sky. “That’s what gave G Junior the idea when he was a little kid grasping for daddy’s tools of trade,” pointing it directly at the face of anyone nearby.

To those in a hurry, a simple but loud final jab: “Bring some fruit, we’ve got the verdict!”

To those with whining kids: “Ya, I’d be screaming, too, if someone dragged me out of the Renaissance and took me back into the 21st Century.” Sometimes the kid stopped crying and looked back in wonder as I played a few notes.

Say all of this loud enough at the end of a day, and it’s as if laughter rides the waves of the crowd as it exits.

After the year we were shuttered due to the plague, we re-opened in 1521. In these past four seasons, I’ve heard something that didn’t exist previously. Not many, but enough to be noticed would call back: “Put Biden on trial!” and “Try Kah-Mah-Lah,” and a few more in that vein.

Not once was the name Trump or that of any other Republican imposed.

We need to make this distinction. And we need to point it out when others don’t make it. This is not at all to say that the Democrats are perfect. Far from it, and their fear of offending each other keeps them far from it. As does the straitjacket they force upon humor and spontaneity. Worst of all, their pathetic attempts at moderation in the face of outright crimes such as Israel’s war on Gaza keeps them farther from it yet.

Yet they are open to dialogue, which the other side is not. The other side has done all it can for over 40 years to gut Social Security while Democrats have protected it. Ditto the environment. Ditto civil rights. Any failure to make this distinction reinforces the superficial view that “they are all the same” which leads many to wallow in cynicism and dismiss “them” or “Congress” as “all the same.” The resulting damage makes me wonder if it is done out of carelessness or if it is deliberate–calculated along with so much else to undermine Americans’ faith in anything regarding self-governance.

Arguably the most American drama ever written, Death of a Salesman insists that “Attention must be paid.” To do that, distinctions must be made.

Including my own. Am I a gray flutist or a grey flautist? The color may be interchangeable, but the noun depends on how much I get paid.

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*Galileo explains his findings to two cardinals*. Painting by Jean-León Huens (1921-1982).

Keep ‘Mas’ in Christmas

Maybe somewhat quiet this year due to so much other heavy weather, but the “War on Christmas” rages on.

Not the war that Fox & those who put the “mental” in Fundamental fabricate year after year, nor is it waged against the first syllable in the word, the name, the “reason for the season” as some like to remind us.

In fact, the so-called War on Christmas is a diversion from the real war. Whether we accept or reject the religious claim, the fictitious war hits us with such blizzard force every year that we surrender to the factual war without knowing it.

We surrender even though the unwarranted pressure of that war drives us to all levels of frustration, distraction, anxiety, exhaustion, and at times violence.

It’s as if we are boxer Roberto Duran in the Superdome ring in 1980, putting his hands up and saying, “No mas! No mas!”

Except that he actually did fight eight rounds before he knew he was beat. In Spanish, he was saying “no more, no more.”

We, on the other hand, put up no resistance whatsoever—unless you count procrastination which everyone admits is lame. “Mas” would give us eleven more days, yet we act as if there never was any “mas” to begin with.

Yes, I’m talking about the second syllable, the other syllable in “Christmas.”

Since Olde English “mas,” or “feast,” evolved into “mass,” most take it to mean a religious service. Today’s services may clock under an hour, but thanks to the leisurely pace of camels in the Year Zero, the feast of Christ’s Nativity is twelve days.

Dec. 25 is the beginning, not the whole. Jan. 6 is just as much “Christmas” as the day we call by that name, and so is every day in between.

This is why Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, why we sing “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and why many trees remain in place for that time.

This is why Jan. 6 is a holy day marking the arrival of the Three Kings.

Some 35 years ago a Catholic priest proposed in a Boston Globe op-ed column that the holiday be divided in order to keep religious intention free of material indulgence.

Since the unholy American trinity of Advertise, Buy, and Sell has a lock on Dec. 25, he suggested that religious observance be the end of the 12-day “mas,” The Epiphany—a name that by itself focuses on faith and the good will to sustain that faith.

Just keeping the word “Christmas” and holiday decoration out of ads for imbecilic movies (“Opens Christmas!”), violent video games (“Rated M for Mature”), and sexual performance enhancing drugs (“Come play with me”) would help our sanity.

But to free ourselves from pressures of buying and sending gifts and cards on deadline, we need an epiphany of our own.

If the family called “holy” by those who observe Christmas as a religious holiday can wait twelve days for gifts, why can’t we?

And cards. In fact, you might say that cards are so much less of a commitment than gifts that we should have another five weeks, maybe combine them with Valentines for a sly way to hedge romantic bets while saving on postage.

But that’s a detail to be settled once we solve the main problem: The fabricated pressure created by an unnecessarily shortened shopping season.

Is it any surprise that this begins with days having such names such as “Black Friday” and “Small Business Saturday,” or that each day of it would have a repetitive soundtrack to drive us up a Wall of Hurry Up?

Long ago I made it the first rule of my life that whenever I hear the word “hurry,” the answer is “no.”

This has served me well, and I would have been spared a few disasters had I adopted it sooner. Yet, despite that, even I have fallen unwitting victim to “no mas” Christmas only to share the pressures and anxieties most Americans have every mid-to-late-December.

Admittedly, my own epiphany here is too late to do anyone any good this year, but we have not just twelve days but twelve months to put the “mas” back in Christmas next year.

And you know how good we all are at getting things done ahead of time.

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Postscript: This 2014 Newburyport (Mass.) Daily News column is slightly updated from the collection, Keep Newburyport Weird. Not until I dusted it off did I realize the added significance of the date, January 6. Looks like I have two weeks to tell you what I think of that.

The site that posted this graphic is “no longer available.” A prisoner of war perhaps?

Indefinite Pronouns in Definite Articles

Before the internet turned reporters into “content providers” and replaced full-page spreads with singular posts, newspaper layout was a challenging form of art.

Still is for those who prefer the hard copy. On it, editors juxtapose stories with each other and around advertisements in hopes of drawing some attention to each item. Strategically, they concoct headlines to grab attention while remaining true to the content of the story. That’s no easy task with so many reports of events so dull as municipal committee meetings can be, and so editors might take more liberty than they’d like with a clever phrase, word-play, or alliteration.

Once upon a student newspaper, I did layout for The Log at Salem State College (now University). Once, with a rather dry report from an environmental group decrying the manufacturer of a newly-invented artificial turf for its pollution of rivers in Georgia that flowed south, I may have altered my consciousness to create the following:

Florida Group Not Very High on Monsanto Grass

Such a headline would still succeed today. Why, I bet that on social media, it would gain dozens of laughing emojis and thumbs-up within an hour. But for most viewers that would be all, as they would keep scrolling, convinced they already had the whole story, details be damned.

In this hi-tech/lo-brain day, with most people–even newspaper subscribers–gaining news from screens, the experience is no longer an interesting headline with the full story right there if you so choose to pursue it. Instead, it is a headline, a photo, a caption, and most of the first sentence. And before you might hit “see more,” look! There’s the next headline and photo, or, better yet, a meme!

Readers of a printed newspaper, if hooked by a headline or photo, will move their eyes down into the story. It is most telling that we refer to “readers” when speaking of the printed paper and to “viewers” when we speak of screens. On the internet, most of us always keep scrolling to view whatever comes next.

Writers, such as I, of blogs, such as this, can only counter this trend with curious headlines, fascinating photos, a riveting opening line, or half line as the opportunity may be present to tease a reader into filling in the blank by ceasing to scroll and clicking the link. On social media we can also add pithy intros.

Others, however, actually thrive on the tendency of readers to react, accept, and re-post articles based only on what they see in the news feed without ever bothering with 800 or 1,800 much less 2,800 words or more of detail. In fact, many will add a subhead–journalism’s equivalent of a tease–to impress upon scrollers a single item from the article that they then scroll past.

Unscrupulous posters, such as the Russian trolls, add subheads that exaggerate, distort, and sometimes flat-out misrepresent what the article says. With an audience that they know will keep scrolling, not only do they convince viewers of things are are not true, but they convince those viewers that there is documentation for it.

Yet more: Those viewers will then re-post the article as if it is just another meme, since, after all, their viewers will see just the headline and subhead. As with the original posting, if the headline and subhead appeal to any belief dear to the hearts of viewers, re-posting will continue. The echo-chamber that is Fox News is neither louder nor longer lasting than is Facebook, Tic-Toc, or X.

Those who manipulate the MAGA-Republicans are skilled and relentless at this. They have been wildly successful for years. With an audience that gullible, how could they not? Too bad that those who identify as progressive are too often susceptible to the same trick.

For example, two years ago, the reputable and trustworthy website Mental Floss posted an 850-word essay headlined, “The 600-Year History of the Singular ‘They’.” Sometime after, it was reprinted with permission by a site called Pocket which retained the identical headline, the same graphic, and caption for the graphic. So, too, the text is unedited. However, Pocket added a subhead:

The singular form of ‘they’ has been endorsed by writers like Jane Austen and William Shakespeare.

While the article does mention Austen, Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and W.H. Auden, it all has to do with the plural use for an indefinite singular. As when we see a car swerving down a road with no idea or image of the driver and say, “They must be drunk.” Nowhere in the article does it suggest that those five writers applied “they” to a singular person who was known.

In fact, the article’s main source, Kirby Conrod, who teaches linguistics at the University of Washington, spells this distinction out:

The very old kind of singular ‘they,’ the one that is used by Chaucer and Shakespeare and all these examples we love to pull out, if you look at all these examples of these hundreds-of-year-old singular ‘they’s, they are with like ‘each man‘ or ‘every person‘… None of them are with like ‘Bob‘ or ‘that guy.’ The new singular ‘they‘ is when we can use ‘they‘ with a single, specific person.

Putting aside for a moment the word “endorsed,” the subhead is true. However, due to the current controversy, Pocket‘s viewers are led to believe that these writers–reaching back seven centuries in Chaucer’s case–all used the plural pronoun for a known, singular person. This blurs the distinction between the historical “indefinite” usage of “they” and the current “preferred” usage.

Add the word “endorsed,” and the subhead is, at best, manipulative truth.

This trick is hardly limited to the internet. Consider Donald Trump’s whine that Kamala Harris had “promoted” being Indian before “turning Black.” We all know that she identifies as and expresses pride in being Indian (and Black), but that is no more “promotion” of her being Indian than there ever was of any parts of speech by any classical writers.

Notice, too, that in the only examples regarding Austen and the rest cited in the article, the antecedent for “they” or “them” or “their” is a singular word or term that suggests a plural, such as “each man” and “everybody.” Citing Shakespeare, the author simply names two plays–Hamlet and Comedy of Errors–rather than any specific numbers (act/scene/verse) that are readily available for all of them.

In a card game, this would be called a finesse. Something out of nothing to make us believe what is not true.

While I support all gender rights, I would urge those who promote and defend them, for their own sake, to drop this claim of alliance with classic writers of the past. If any part of a case is untrue, then the entire case is suspect and any claim based upon it is undermined.

For the sake of clarity in language, they might press for a new, neutral pronoun to avoid the confusing use of plural for singular–a confusion that will always be there whether they want it or not. Many have been suggested, including my own two years ago headlined “E Pluribus E.”*

If nothing else, all of us would do well to consider what we print and screen much as would a layout editor, always looking, for starters, to engage the largest possible audience, much of it unknown if not unknowable to us.

If there’s to be disagreement, let it come after that engagement, when the details are honestly presented and considered.

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*https://buskersdelight.home.blog/2022/08/30/e-pluribus-e/

Links to the Mental Floss and Pocket posts, followed by the graphic for both:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-600-year-history-of-the-singular-they?