Out-Orwelling Orwell

A neighbor tells me that a house near her has a “Trump 2020” banner draped over its porch, but no matter how slowly I drive by in either direction, I can’t find it. Not that I’m complaining, as I always agree that garbage should be kept out of sight, but I’m always curious, so I asked.

She tells me that it’s visible from her bathroom window. Ah! Toilet bowl reading! Shakespearean actors give us Measure for Measure, Trump supporters give us crap for crap.

Got me to thinking that this is the first American president to have his name on flags flown from homes, businesses, motor vehicles, and, as we just saw this weekend here at the Mouth of the Merrimack River, boats.

As one of very few people I bet you can find who has read biographies of James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, Rutherford Hayes, Grover Cleveland, and numerous biographies and histories of every president since the Great Depression, I have an idea of how past presidents would have regarded this.

In reverse chronology: Each of them from Obama back to Reagan would have been amused and embarrassed; Carter and Ford would have been embarrassed and confused; Nixon, LBJ & JFK would have laughed while asking, WTF? Eisenhower would have been flat out annoyed, Truman angry, and FDR would have laughed his wheelchair out from under himself.

I’ll make no attempt to psycho-decipher the reactions of the paranoid Hoover, the glum Coolidge, the airheaded Harding, the cerebral Wilson or anyone further back–except to say that advertising a century ago was for the most part confined to the pages of newspapers and magazines.

If you ever read The Rise of Silas Lapham, or even its Cliff Notes summation for a high school assignment, you’ll recall that painting advertisements on roadside or harborside rocks was terribly frowned upon a century before the highways of the Dakotas and the Carolinas were lined, border-to-border, with billboards.

Which is to say that today’s Cult of Personality was unthinkable–the more so the further back we go. Even the name of populist war-hero Andrew Jackson, while praised in public song, was never raised on private property.

If the US Constitution is anything, it is a warning against, a condemnation of, an admonishment aimed at the Cult of Personality. Of course, the framers–counting three presidents among them–were concerned with monarchs, one in particular, and so the word “personality” does not appear in its place. However, the Cult of Personality is undeniably on the wrong side of the bedrock American principle: Nobody is above the law.

But we have seen it before. If not up close and personally, then in histories of past dictators and in press coverage of present dictators with which our peculiar, ethically-challenged president prefers to ally himself.

Why marvel that he is chummy with Russia’s Putin and hostile to Canada’s Trudeau when those flags and banners on roadways and in neighborhoods scream that he has more in common with Stalin and Mao than with Lincoln or Taft?

Had Madison, Jefferson, and the older Adams foreseen the Cult of Personality that swept America in 2016 and threatens to embed itself into the foreseeable future, our First Amendment may well have included a definition of “speech.” Something that people have to actually think and say or write on their own, not a meme which we mindlessly repost, and certainly not a mere name that we run up a pole or fly from the back of a pick-up.

Instead, the mindless reposting will continue, led by this announcement regarding a platform on the eve of their convention: “RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” (Full text below.)

From rubber stamp to carte blanche: Trump trumps truth; Republicans out-Orwell Orwell.

Starting today, we will see and hear the re-embossment of one man’s name across the nation. Breaking with the tradition of a nominee appearing only to accept on the final night, he will speak all four nights. All four of his adult children will speak, and so will his wife. And on at least one occasion from the White House, never before used as a campaign prop.

Early in his presidency, one of his advisors shocked many of us when she offered that the administration’s contradiction of news reports was due to “alternative facts.” Within weeks, bookstores were selling out of George Orwell’s 1984, and the publisher ran a new edition. Americans wanted to know what was to come.

Those flags and banners may flaunt the name of a disastrous president and an equally disastrous year, but, basking in the Cult of Personality, they may as well hail:

Big Brother 1984.

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My many thanks, and not for the first time, to the Denver Post for the best editorial cartoons. These and several more are from 2016, but they are just as true, and when this Cult-of-Personality-Fest is over, a new batch is sure to be just as spot on: https://www.denverpost.com/2016/07/22/cartoons-of-the-day-2016-republican-national-convention/

Also from 2016, a Getty Image from the Convention in Cleveland where his campaign higher-ups met with the Russian ambassador who, by pure coincidence, was staying in a nearby downtown hotel all four days:

And just what dystopian novel does this image bring to mind?

In full:

RESOLUTION REGARDING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM
WHEREAS, The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size
and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on
gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts;
WHEREAS, The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform,
in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new
platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement;
WHEREAS, All platforms are snapshots of the historical contexts in which they are born, and
parties abide by their policy priorities, rather than their political rhetoric;
WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have
undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald
Trump and his Administration;
WHEREAS, The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not
adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed
policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased
reporting of facts; and
WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the
policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the
Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the
President’s America-first agenda;
RESOVLVED (sic), That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a
new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in
accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for
President Trump and his Administration; and
RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including
any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.

Pelosi’s Betrayal

I give up.

Sorry to throw cod-liver oil into the creamy four-night chowder that yet nourishes the hopes of so many, but when a member of the family vomits on the table, we need clean it up.

And if she does it deliberately, she must not be re-seated.

When Nancy Pelosi endorsed Rep. Joe Kennedy in his challenge to unseat Sen. Ed Markey here in Massachusetts, some of you in the other 49 states may not have noticed–may have even relished the idea of a Kennedy restoring the family legacy in the US Senate.

But to most all progressives here in Massachusetts, and progressives who pay attention to our federal government all twelve months of every year rather than a few months every fourth year, that endorsement was a profound act of betrayal.

For example, when it was made, I was engaged in a (let’s say) “debate” with a social media group called Berniecrats. As I did four years ago following Hillary’s nomination, and as I started doing again a year ago when the Democratic debates began, I made the case that, following Sanders’ support of the party’s eventual nominee, a group named for him should follow his lead.

Rather simple logic, no? I make the same case with friends and family who at times–as I once did myself–seem ready to let the perfect be an unwitting excuse to erase any chance at good.

Simple on the surface, but it depends on an understanding that, though our preferred candidates will not lead the party, they and we are valued in the party, that we will be heard, that we will not be undercut or jettisoned as expendable or inconvenient.

Particularly in this election, when our nominee runs against a president whose dire proclamations this year echo his claim in 2016, “I alone can fix it,” the Democratic Party must present itself as a team.

And wasn’t that the beauty of those four nights? From a children’s National Anthem to a National Geographic Roll Call, both of them delivered in, from, by, and for all 57 states and territories; from Stephen Curry’s shoulder shimmy to Gabby Giffords’ French horn; from Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ wisecracks to both Obamas’ sobering appeals–

All about team.

Imagine making that case, as I was, to the most hard-core Bernie-or-Bust skeptics, only to hear that the Democratic Party’s congressional leader has undercut a Democratic incumbent with one of the three most progressive voting records and–as co-author of the Green New Deal–the most progressive environmental record in the US Senate.

Good news is that, of the 130 and counting responses (including likes & dislikes) I’ve received, almost 35% are favorable, much higher than I expected. (Don’t know quite what to make of a few saying only “OK Boomer!”)*

Bad news is that Pelosi’s endorsement makes a liar out of me–and that this blog will be sent to Berniecrats with my apologies.

Embarrassment too. Just two years ago, I was confronting US Rep. Seth Moulton, my own congressman, for trying to take the speakership away from her–back when protecting incumbents from primary challengers was her rule.**

Since Pelosi says nothing of Markey, much less his record, the question remains: Why?

Two surface possibilities: Since Kennedy is now a representative in her caucus, he will be beholding to her should he ascend–and equally beholding to her if he remains where he is. Moreover, she can feign that the endorsement has only to do with the candidate she now works with and reflects not at all on the other.

Second is petty, but no more so than the endorsement itself: Revenge. If young Kennedy wins that seat, it will be out of reach of Moulton, who has shown no lack of ambition in his early career.

Beneath the surface, this could well be a slap at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Markey’s co-author of Green New Deal. The tension between the Speaker and the upstart freshman has already revealed itself more than once.

AOC has cut a most deft, no-nonsense TV ad for Markey that promotes a legislative push toward environmental efforts that are beyond what Pelosi wants to attempt. Hence, Kennedy is a proxy in the Democrats’ internal battle, centrists vs. progressives.

Further beneath the surface: Markey served 37 years in House and was often out of party step, most notably following the 2004 election when he was just one of 31 Democratic Reps who, on the strength of the Conyers Report, voted against seating Ohio’s electors. Ohio Democrats all knew the state was rigged, county by county. Prior to the election, they were begging the DNC to step in.

But when it was over, top Democratic honchos feared the controversy of a challenge–which, if successful, would have been enough to make John Kerry president.*** Even Kerry, like Al Gore before him, feared controversy. Markey did not.

And AOC does not. Other progressives do not. That’s why Pelosi waited until after AOC’s nomination of Bernie Sanders on one night to make her endorsement of Kennedy the next day–taking no chance that AOC would do anything but present the the progressive case without confronting the centrists.

When it was over, I wrote to a friend: “Seemed to me that AOC was cast–and wanted to be cast–as a calm, self-controlled, rising proponent of the progressive wing. I credit the DNC for not trying to hide the party’s two distinct wings but in some ways highlighting their coexistence… What I thought I heard from her [AOC] is that after Jan 20 things will not be done for convenience sake.”

Today, I believe little of what I myself have said–not “team,” not “coexistence,” and certainly not any nourishing “chowder.”

Except that yes, America desperately needs Biden and Harris to replace the current national depravity that is this Republican administration.

Here’s hoping that, beginning at precisely noon on January 20, 2021, progressives will allow nothing be done for convenience sake.

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AOC & Ed Markey announcing Green New Deal, February, 2019. GETTY IMAGES

*A public appeal to fellow Sanders supporters last fall prior to the first debate:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/garveys-view-from-either-or-to-neither-nor/article_69138faa-e02f-5d71-a06a-ab47ab2eeb2e.html

**Amesbury Town Hall, November 2018:

Rep. Seth Moulton addressing a Town Hall meeting in Amesbury, November 2018. That’s me, dead center, looking like I’m napping, but I was wide awake, one of dozens who filled the hall to confront our representative for leading an effort to displace Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker. Yes, me defending Pelosi, and it’s too late to deny it after the Newburyport Daily news gave it this photographic proof.

***Regarding Ohio, 2004:

https://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2005/06/what-went-wrong-ohio-conyers-report-2004-presidential-election

Protect Our Meat!

Sometimes I wonder if the two foremost freedoms in America today are the freedom to be crude and the freedom to be stupid.

So I wrote aloud in response to the rapid rise of the Tea Party in 2009, prompted by the appearance of a defaced $5 bill in the till where I worked, and perplexed by both. Yes, the line drew loud objections–and as much quiet approval–when it appeared in the local paper on President’s Day that year.

Nearly twelve years later, the political party that still calls itself “Republican” is on the eve of a convention that will include a cast that could not be more unlike the good folk from across the country, all walks of life, all ages, with all hopes and commitments that we saw and heard this past week.

If the opposite of hope is cynicism, it’s no wonder that a hate-monger such as Rush Limbaugh gets their Medal of Freedom, or that a low-life such as Ted Nugent sits on the board of their favored lobbying group, the NRA. While those two are not on their schedule (at least not yet or not announced), those who are form cast very much in their mold:

Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis homeowners who gained national attention for wielding guns at protesters marching through their private neighborhood. No word yet whether they will be pointing guns at the cameras.
Nicholas Sandmann, the the MAGA-clad high-schooler who was clearly taunting a Native America elder drumming with members of various tribes on the DC mall—but later, under the influence of some opportunistic lawyer, cashed in on a suit that showed how he and his classmates were themselves being taunted by another group.

No word yet whether someone giving you the finger on your left permits you the flip the bird at some entirely unrelated person on your right—and condemns anyone taking a picture to pay you thousands for the public embarrassment of showing how you act in public.

Nor is there any word whether any priests, or perhaps a bishop, representing the tax-exempt Catholic high school whose students they bussed all the way from Kentucky to DC for a MAGA rally, will be on stage next week to offer a blessing or benediction.

Nor is there any word whether Jon Voigt or James Woods will be in or out of one of their past madly obsessive characters or playing the role of their present-day half-wit selves.
Nor do we know if the MyPillow and Goya guys will be able to display and pitch their products, as the ever-pitching Republican president and his always-displaying daughter have done for them.

We do have word that former president George W. Bush will not attend, the first time in American history that a living former president will not participate in his party’s convention.

Also absenting themselves: Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and most other Republican office holders up for re-election just ten weeks away.

As of August 19, there were no military leaders scheduled, perhaps because so many, most notably Colin Powell, took turns this week in the Democratic Convention.

Picking up the slack will be the anti-mask governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. No word yet whether Haley will explain her groveling shifting agreements to every-which end of her boss’s contradictions regarding foreign affairs, the pandemic, or even the convention’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t location itself.
So, too, Mike Pence and Melania, the only two wives Dr. Clorox has who do not require hush money. No word yet whether Melania’s speech writers will be able to carve anything out of Michelle Obama’s kitchen-table talk on Monday. Or if Pence will promise, as he did last week, to “protect America’s meat.”

Unconfirmed reports say that the postmaster general is going to mail in his speech and will blame Obama if it doesn’t arrive in time. Also that Betsy DeVos is going to repeat Jill Biden’s walk and talk into a classroom—but a much smaller room prepared for her five grandchildren below decks of her $14 million yacht.

Some Facebook postings claim that the voodoo doctor from Texas, who preaches that the virus is a hoax and that Democrats are lizard-people, but it’s impossible for me to believe that an entire political party can be that crude and stupid, so I wouldn’t mention it—except as a reminder that Dr. Clorox and his big-game killing son like to retweet her as “proof” that Dr. Fauci and pretty much every doctor and scientist are not to be believed.

Republicans have enough crude and stupid from the First Family alone to fill their four nights next week. With the list of speakers, more than enough.

Vanity Fair says that it is shaping up to be a “Culture War Grievance Fest,” but it could turn into what one commentator called the Republican’s 1992 Convention featuring blood-vessel swelling speeches by Patrick Buchanan, Dan & Marilyn Quayle: “A Carnival of Hate.”

As I write, we at the mouth of the Merrimack River on the northern Massachusetts coast are bracing for a “parade of boats” being staged—or, rather floated—as a demonstration against enforced distancing and mask-wearing. Promises to be full of Trump banners and flags and plenty of loud noise.

Because that’s all they have—banners, flags, loud noise. And in America 2020, that’s all they need when their idea of freedom begins with the right to be crude and stupid.

For further prophesies feel free to peruse the rest of my blog. The 2009 Presidents Day column appears under the headline “Foregone Tales & Foremost Freedoms” in my book, Keep Newburyport Weird.

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Not the fin I found, but more in keeping with the Republican Party in recent years. The one I found turned Abraham Lincoln into a gothic ghoul with shades and piercings. Next morning when I asked a bank teller to remove it from circulation, I couldn’t help myself: “There have been a lot of presidents I’d like to deface,” I told her. “Lincoln is not one of them.” More of these–none of them so defaced, but re-faced–ranging from Albert Einstein to Jimi Hendrix, from Sarah Palin to Alfred E. Newman, and many more appear at: https://piximus.net/fun/funny-5-dollar-bill-defaces

Rather Than Ready-Made

While I join most everyone I know in praise of the “round the country” roll call, my favorite moment last night was Jill Biden’s recollection of anticipation while awaiting her students in an empty high school classroom.

Like her, and like many teachers, I too liked to arrive before students started filing in. Whether I watched them enter–sometimes testing my knack for flippant greetings, if not my memory for anything they said last week–or wrote on the board did not matter. It was the feeling of the possible, of watching something build rather than having it ready-made, that she captured while walking into the room at the start of her address.

If Michelle Obama held a dinner table talk, Jill Biden held a PTA meeting.

Something melancholy about that moment the day after my grandson, age five, had his first day of school–remotely. A feeling profoundly magnified by the thought that this is true for millions of children, no matter how caring and tech-savvy their patents may be.

Easy for me to say, but may they take that first entry into a classroom, with a teacher awaiting in full anticipation, as a day not lost, but merely delayed.

Apart from that dual personal note, my favorite moments were seeing Marie Yovanovitch and Sally Yates testify yet again in defense of democracy over authoritarianism.

They did it before when they thought they were still serving a democracy only to be fired by the authoritarian regime the has snuffed it since January 2017.

For all that, they are now hopeful, as are some Republicans, pushed out and shunned by the confederacy of cynicism that was once their own party, despite–or because of–their experience in foreign affairs, including Colin Powell and Chuck Hagel.

With one of the most memorable lines of the night, John Kerry summed up American foreign policy these past three years. When the Republican president goes abroad, he cracked, it is never “a goodwill mission, but a blooper reel.”

Another memorable line was Stacy Abrams’ “in a democracy we do not elect saviors,” a direct repudiation of “I alone can fix it,” and a reminder in a year when the Democrats face severe voter suppression, that American government requires participation.

Such is the convention’s “We the People” theme.

In sharp contrast to the other side’s Cult of Personality, it was a generational public spirit that wove the testimony of Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter through that of the young mayor of Long Beach, California, who lost both parents, one a nurse, to the pandemic.

From a wheelchair-bound young man who spoke through a voice machine to folks who were with Martin Luther King and John Lewis on the silent march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge–from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who nominated Bernie Sanders with a succinct, irrefutable case for progressive goals to Bill Clinton who invoked Harry Truman to describe the deadbeat current occupant of the Oval Office:

The buck never stops there.

And how many generations do we consider at the sight of Caroline Kennedy with her son Jack? And who my age did not gasp when the tall, young man, looking a bit like and sounding very much like his grandfather, asked what we could do for our country?

Like night one, night two was in sum a question, and it’s the same question:

Oh, say, can we see?

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8641639/Caroline-Kennedy-Jack-Schlossberg-endorse-Joe-Biden.html

This AP photo accompanied a PolitiFact post that covers Yovanovitch’s ambassadorship in Ukraine, her firing, her testimony, and questions concerning Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and others: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/nov/15/5-key-moments-during-marie-yovanovitchs-impeachmen/

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is sworn in to testify to the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Nov. 15, 2019, during the second public impeachment hearing of President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie U.S. aid for Ukraine to investigations of his political opponents. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

And for Sally Yates: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/05/politics/sally-yates-testimony-capitol-hill/index.html

Sally Yates delivering a 2018 speech: https://www.businessinsider.com/sally-yates-on-trump-white-house-dnc-speech-2018-10

Putting the Vent in Convention

Presidential historian John Meacham called it the most forceful endorsement by a losing candidate he’s ever heard or read.

Long-time advisor to both Clintons, James Carville, who for years has spoken of Bernie Sanders as if he’s the second coming of Elmer Fudd, was profuse in his praise for the Vermont senator.

What moved them and many others was Sander’s direct appeal to his supporters–of whom I have always been one, dating back to his days in the US House. As solid as the Feel-the-Bern firewood stacked behind him was his claim that the progressives have made substantial gains since 2015, but without a Biden/Harris victory in November, they will be “in jeopardy.”

We can only hope it has some effect on the very loud malcontents who profess to be his supporters. For a full four years, their posts are as ugly and far-fetched as those from the MAGA crowd–defined by my editor, Helen Highwater, as “Morons Are Governing America.”

In numerous cases, “Berniecrats” posts absolve the Republicans of any complicity with Russia, at times promoting Russian talking points–as have tweets by the Republican president and public statements last week by senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. (You called it, Helen!)

Most of the post-game commentary, of course, was about Michelle Obama’s “sit you down!” talk that one pundit compared to “someone at the dinner table getting things of her chest.” What makes it an instant classic is that, while serving as an inspirational pep-talk, it doubled as a sobering reality check–“things will get worse if…” And then it tripled as a plan of action. Be prepared to wait in line for hours at the polls, bring a lunch, coordinate with neighbors, mail ballots early.

But more, it quadrupled as deadpan, yet biting satire: “It’s what it is,” was the Republican president’s own dismissal of the pandemic last week, his own words turned against him, comparing him to a lethal, national disease.

His own words taken high to shade him sinking ever low.

If I may indulge my own humor, the best single line of the night was NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo referring to Charlottesville as an incident where “the Ku Klux Klan didn’t even bother to wear their hoods.”

And my taste for juxtaposition: At about the same time that it began with one of the most heartfelt renditions of the National Anthem ever conceived, delivered by children from all of America’s states and territories, news broke that the Republicans have invited this lovely couple from St. Louis to grace their convention:

National Anthem went right to the tear duct as the legendary Scottish singer Jean Redpath would have said. As a bookend for the convention, it was matched by a rendition of the classic Sixties protest song, “For What It’s Worth,” better know by it’s opening lyric, “Something’s happening here,” followed by prophetic, pinpoint descriptions Trumpism:

Paranoia strikes deep/ Into your life it will creep/ It starts when you’re always afraid.

But also descriptions of resistance:

What a field day for the heat/ There’s a thousand people in the street/ Singing songs and carrying signs.

Perfect song to wrap it up, but the theatrics with the flowing robe struck me more as glam rock than protest. Eva Longoria as MC should have done it, she sustained the right mood. But it is gaining praise from those younger than I, and they sure outnumber me, so I’ll quit talkin’ ’bout my ge-ge-ge-generation.

Overall, they did well, and some late night commentator pointed out that selections will be posted on YouTube to be reposted, shared, and likely to reach millions who never tuned in. National Anthem and Michelle Obama will get the attention they deserve, and Amy Klobuchar’s grinning wisecracks combined with earnest appeals to E Pluribus Unum will get enough.

One who will never get enough, no matter how much she does, is the young woman whose dad died of the virus. One riveting line:

“His only pre-existing condition was his belief in Donald Trump.”

She says it with sadness, Sanders with force, Klobuchar with cheer, Cuomo with impatience, Michelle Obama with earnestness, Rep. James Clyburn with urgency, and the children sing with hope. But taken together, it is but one question:

“Oh, say, can you see?”

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Numerous renditions of “For What It’s Worth,” from Buffalo Springfield’s original recording to Billy Porter’s performance last night, can be found on YouTube. Go here for the lyrics:

https://genius.com/Buffalo-springfield-for-what-its-worth-lyrics

A Joke to Save US

A long-time friend, a former Peace Corps volunteer and recruiter, posted a challenging comment to my endorsement of Biden/Harris yesterday. When I chided some progressives–not all, not most, in fact not very many–for bitterly complaining that it’s not a more progressive ticket, he asked:

What are the rest of us actually doing to support Biden/Harris?

Later in the day, a friend here in Newburyport bemoaned the lack of civics education in schools as the reason why so many express contempt for “congress,” and make no distinction between the two branches, let alone the two parties. When I complimented her for making that distinction, she chirped that we need “Civics Police” to set them straight.

At first I thought she was joking–and perhaps she was–but before long I realized that she had provided an answer to the earlier question. Something that anyone can do, free of charge, without any heavy lifting, not even light lifting, without getting in a car or getting out of your chair if you happen to be sitting.

While that all sounds like easy whisper, there’s a historical context which gives it an urgent shout:

In the Fifties we thought there was no problem.
In the Sixties, when at least one took us by surprise, we insisted that anyone who was not part of the solution, was part of the problem.
By the Seventies we realized that those who paid no attention were not just part of the problem, but were the problem.
In the Eighties we elected a president who made enough of us believe that there was no problem.
In the Nineties we dug ourselves out of the problem that results from pretending that problems do not exist.
In the Aughts we allowed a ruling class to get rich on problem after problem at the expense of the rest of us.
In the early Teens we stanched the bleeding just enough to make us think that problems were solved or being solved.
In 2016 we couldn’t tell the difference between problems and solutions, and thanks to the anti-one-person-one-vote problem known as the Electoral College, a self-proclaimed “I alone” solution landed in the White House on the promise to make America problem-free again.

Back to the Fifties?

No, because everyone knows there’s at least one problem impossible to avoid–everyone except the most obtuse climate-deniers, pandemic-hoaxers, oblivious cynics, and gullible rubes, and open racists.

Which is why the worst problem we face between now and November 3 does not come from the president, his Republican enablers, or his Russian handlers. And although threats to the US Postal Service and the 2020 Census are huge problems that will harm self-governance for at least a decade to come, there’s a problem more immediate:

Namely, the folks who claim aloud or online–and there are many–that “congress” is the problem and we need to get rid of “all of them.” By making no distinction between the two parties–or between the two chambers–they are not just part of the problem, they make the problem possible, and then they prolong it.

Their posts, most of them memes which are re-posted with no thought required, make the general condemnation of “congress” or “them all.” They do it in conversations, arguments, small talk, joking around. They wear it on t-shirts, hats, and the bumpers of their SUVs.

Can’t do much at 60 MPH, or 20 for that matter, or even zero if their windows are rolled up, but in every other case, we need to challenge the claim every time we see or hear it. My friend’s proposal for “Civics Police” answers that call: Keep restating the distinction between what Democrats have done and what Republicans have obstructed.

Already I hear the cynical laughter of those complain of “grammar police.” A few Newburyporters may be tempted to remind me of my own satires of “popcorn police” six years ago when the city’s Board of Health clamped down on the Screening Room where, at the time, 32 years of popcorn made and sold there never made anyone sick and there was a menacing death toll of zero–and counting!

Laugh all you want, but neither of those examples threatens to warp an election as can a misconception of how government works, who is accountable for what, where the channels lead, why checks and balances exist.

The fact that we are so out of balance may be the best reason for a national ad hoc “Civics Police” as a way to restore that balance. And if we are not part of the balance, we allow the imbalance to remain.

Another objection I anticipate is that such an endeavor is too uncomfortable, unpleasant. Better to let it slide, go with the flow. I have long chafed at that passive way of life, often pointing out that when the “flow” is in a gutter, you are headed for a sewer.

And are the last four years anything but a gutter in the path of American history?

And didn’t all of us liberals, from moderate to progressive, just last month eulogize John Lewis for living and preaching the very act of speaking up?

Now’s our chance. Perhaps our last.

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This is from the Huffington Post, chosen in tribute to the HuffPo reporter at the Whitewash House yesterday who asked DT right to his face if he felt any regret about all the lying and deceit he has aimed at the American people. DT went blank for a moment, turned, looked, and pointed at another reporter: “Next!”

The Nasty Dodge

If Kamala Harris is nasty, she’s in good company.

She’s also the latest public incarnation of that slur’s peculiar history which I first noticed 30 years ago when I took my daughter to see a German film titled, The Nasty Girl.

Soon after, when I told friends and family that the auf Deutsch title, Das Schreckliche Madchen, translates more closely as “The Terrible Girl,” they seem reassured that I hadn’t taken my just-turned-teen to an R-rated show.

At the time, however, the made-for-export title made them worry over a film that might be too much for her, but I figured that, based on a true story, it had an important message. In other words, a vintage “Screening Room film,” as many of our patrons like to say.

Or, as Sonja, a teen who wanted to enter a high school writing contest with an essay about what her hometown did during World War II, explains: “You have to know where things come from to know where they’re going.”

And so I had Rachel watch a young woman she was bound to identify with–and admire–ask a lot of inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unwanted questions that her neighbors and city officials at first tried to dodge, and which before long drew their wrath.

The Nasty Girl‘s satire was enough for one critic to call it “a delightful comedy.” We laughed often enough, but the point was indelible. As I often reminded Rachel into her college years, and as I often told my college students, if you want to accomplish anything in any public endeavor, you have to be willing to piss people off.

Just ask Yamiche Alcindor or other female reporters who cover the Republican president. As they say, the slur has been reserved for women, but more specifically it is aimed at the questions that women ask. For Alcindor and other women in the press, that may as well be one in the same. He uses the word in place of an answer because he has no answer.

Male reporters will be called “terrible” and “horrible” as their questions are dodged, but “nasty” has a connotation specific to women which hints at the archaic ideal of “women in their place.” With a vague insinuation of loose morals, “nasty” is a sexist, personal attack leveled at the questioner.

Harris earns the slur by dint of her lines of questioning in senate committee hearings, most notably of Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr, both of whom were reduced to the lame and obviously false excuses of “I can’t recall.”

Kavanaugh caved so badly to Harris that he admitted not listening to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against him. But not to worry, his Republican cheerleaders, rather than asking any probing questions, would attack Ford as, among other things, “nasty.”

While any reasonable person will agree that the personal charge is as absurd as it is insulting, we should not overlook how it is always attached to unwanted, uncomfortable questions. Had Biden selected Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Val Demings, Tammy Duckworth, Kirsten Gillibrand, or any other congresswoman, present or past, the president’s go-to slur of “nasty” would have immediately been tweeted. Had it been Stacey Abrams, Susan Rice, or one of the governors of Michigan or New Mexico, he’d have issued other insults until they started asking questions while campaigning. And then?

For this Whitewash House, where a top advisor can openly declare that the president’s authority “will not be questioned,” it’s all about the questions, and the question mark is all they need to insult anyone who asks. If we all spoke German, they’d all be schreckliche.

In English–at least in America–women are smeared with the added stain of “Nasty.”

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The name of this 2017 film is actually “Certain Women,” but following the slur of “nasty” thrown at Hillary Clinton in the last presidential debate, the marketing team redid the poster to include the word “Nasty” in the title and Clinton’s image among the actors at film festivals in the weeks before the election.

Nothing Ado About Much

Driving across flat-as-your-floor cornfields on a backroad of a previous life, I once spotted smoke rising from the horizon before me. A minute or two later I slowed to see a dozen people laughing it up as they formed a line in front of the burning farmhouse and faced the road.

Instinctively, I continued until my car was behind a stand of cottonwood and killed the radio before stopping. My windows down, I could hear them boasting about how easily they wiped out another home.

Soon I heard sirens and awaited their arrival before getting out. I did not wait long.

A firetruck and an ambulance stopped abruptly, and a dozen fire fighters jumped into immediate action–only to be stopped by the arsonists, who all drew knives.

As the argument escalated and flames pushed through the second floor, cars and pickups began to arrive, passersby and people from nearby drawn by the sirens. Soon, the argument devolved into a physical altercation, and the arsonists aimed their knives not at the firefighters, but at the hoses.

When the fire burst through the roof, the firefighters stepped back, but the arsonists stepped toward the assembled crowd. One appeared to speak for all:

“You see! The building burns out of control! The fire department is incompetent!”

The fire chief answered: “That’s because you stopped us! You cut the hoses!”

I stepped out from behind the trees: “Not only that,” pointing at the arsonists, “they set the blaze.”

One of the onlookers, seeming to speak for the rest, ignored me while yelling at both sides in the yard before us: “All of you were here when the house burned down! That’s what we saw! You are all to blame!”

Having a satirical frame of mind and being the only eye-and-earwitness to the entire event, I couldn’t help myself. Turning to the onlookers: “But the arsonists agree with you that the firefighters are inept. You should just get rid of them and hire the arsonists to take care of future fires.”

To my amazement, a cry of agreement went up from the assembled crowd, many of whom rushed forward to shake the arsonists’ hands while the firefighters walked away and the top of the farmhouse collapsed into the billowing inferno.

—

This is the point of the story when a reader might expect the narrator to say, “I then awoke from the dream,” but for this narrator it’s day to day reality every time I hear someone complain about or see a meme ridiculing a “do-nothing Congress.”

If you do not make the distinction between what Democrats do and what Republicans undo–between the 400+ bills that a Democratic House has passed and that a Republican Senate has blocked–then you are the part of the problem that makes the problem impossible to solve.

America’s current non-stop nightmare is not a do-nothing Congress. It’s a know-nothing citizenry.

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According to Wikipedia, this is from US government files and labeled as “from the 1770s.” If you cannot quite read it, the inscription at the bottom says, “Ye FIREMEN of 1776.” Of all years!

If you want to dismiss the above scenario as preposterous, compare it to this true story from Tea Partying Tennessee ten years ago:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-no-spray-firefighters-let-home-burn/#.XynotihKjIU

Call Him Galileo

Ever wonder who you might have been in a previous life?

Last week I took another turn in a marathon reading of Moby-Dick while still in the afterglow of the one in New Bedford back in January. Though virtual, the effect was the same. I’m being told that I didn’t just read but played the part.

Ishmael, 1819-1891 (est.)

A century ago, I could well have been Herman Melville’s smart-ass, manic, skittish, ever curious, overly inquisitive, and (at that age of 30) ebullient narrator. Call me Ishmael grown old.

Since New Bedford, I’ve been in the habit of imagining others in another time. Friends and family can be assured that I regard them as likable shipmates–most of them.

Public figures once tended toward Shakespearean dopplegangers: LBJ as MacBeth, RFK as Hamlet, Nixon as King Lear. Starting with Reagan, they mostly appear as refugees out of The Great Gatsby, Babbitt, and Main Street.

Even Obama, for all his literary fuel, adhered more to Bonfire of the Vanities than to The Fire Next Time.

Until P-grab. Monomaniacal and authoritarian with the manipulating ability to make others adopt his obsession as their own, he’s Ahab reincarnated:

Ahab: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!

P-grab: I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK.

Paradoxically, whereas Ahab was intent on finding his white whale, P-grab does all he can to deny that it exists, or that it’s a serious threat, or that it much matters. While Ahab raced the Pequod past feeding grounds flush with whales that would have enriched the ship’s enterprise, P-grab pushes the economy every way he can, including the opening of schools, no matter the still-increasing risk of COVID-19.

No one stopped the Pequod from doom, so rather than search its decks for a savior, let’s turn to another uncannily analogous time.

Galileo, 1564-1642

While there needs be no Galileo gasping from the grave to tell us that the refusal to accept science is not new, he might tell us that America is more at the mercy of a psychological disorder than of an infectious disease.

So says my fellow Newburyport columnist, Jonathan Wells, a Starbuck if ever I met one whether he broods over coffee or not. He got me to thinking: As America watches science cast aside—at times ridiculed along with truth, logic, civility, and the rule of law—there must be a name for that disorder.

Given the success of most other countries to flatten the COVID curve, it’s apparent that America’s still-bulging failure owes to it.

It’s called the Semmelweis Reflex. First diagnosed in 1847, this is, according to the National Library of Medicine, “a powerful human behavioral tendency to stick to pre-existing beliefs and to reject fresh ideas that contradict them despite adequate evidence.”

Though Galileo, facing a nagging Inquisition from 1610 to 1633, would not have known the name, he saw the Semmelweis Reflex in the faces of–and heard it in the accusations of–the Catholic cardinals sitting before him.

Just as America has seen and heard it for months from Republican senators, representatives, and governors, most vividly last week in the House hearing in which Republicans grilled doctors as if the doctors were the disease itself.

Most riveting was Ohio Rep. Jim “Guess What!” Jordan–who would be typecast as the personification of hate in one of those medieval morality plays–trying to shout absurdities into the mouth of Dr. Anthony Fauci who, whether he likes it or not, is the “you” in America’s 2020 version of “a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

In one of the most memorable moments in the history of ridiculous-versus-sublime confrontations, Fauci waved Guess What! off as breezily as you’d brush (or crush) a gnat off your arm.

Satisfying as that moment may have been, we are still left with P-grab staying the headlong-into-destruction course of a ship in the grip of Semmelweis Reflex.

Galileo was able to bargain for house arrest by confessing to his heresy because no one was going to die. Whether the Earth was flat or round made no difference to the health of a population that didn’t care about such things. Furthermore, Galileo had no mass media that might spread his word.

But what would Galileo do now?

Dr. Fauci, 1941-present

Considering that he has endured threats to himself and his family from rabid, anonymous believers in the white whale of MAGA, Dr. Fauci has served us as well as can be expected. Though we may wish he was louder, more defiant, more accusatory, no reasonable person questions his honesty.

But we have failed him in the same way that we failed Robert Mueller. Some expect Fauci to solve the problem by himself. Others accept only what they want to hear, disregarding what they most need to hear.

If you ever laughed at, or felt anger or pity for anyone who could have opposed Galileo’s evidence 400 years ago, you may want to consider why Dr. Fauci isn’t present or remains silent at recent conferences. At times he seems to be gasping from exile to tell us what science says.

The 17th Century population of the Italian peninsula, of Europe to boot, had no media to let them know what Galileo was going through, what he was up against.

The population that sings it own praises as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” does not have that excuse.

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Cristiano Banti‘s 1857 painting *Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition*

I’m not the only one who compares P-grab to Ahab:

For more on the virtual marathon reading conducted by the good folks at Melville’s Arrowhead Farm: https://berkshirehistory.org/annual-moby-dick-marathon/

The story of what transpired between the Vatican and Galileo is long, complicated, nuanced, shocking, and surprising to those of us who hear no more of it than the simplified story that he revealed things they didn’t want revealed and so they shut him up. For a summary of it, go here: https://www.history.com/news/galileo-letter-trick-inquisition-earth-sun

For the full story, get this:

http://www.beardbooks.com/beardbooks/galileo.html

For more on the Semmelweis Reflex and a look at the Newburyport Daily News column that prompted this post, see this: https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/as-i-see-it-changing-beliefs-accepting-science/article_dbc2a2eb-cf25-5c19-a171-e5411c574c6e.html

Laughing at and waving off the Republican gnat as seen on CNN

A Butt for Mr. Heartbeat

Keeping up with news is like smoking cigarettes:

A handicap to some, recreation to others. A cause of nervousness, a way to unwind. An addiction for those who worry, a luxury for those who reflect. An annoyance to those nearby, or a pastime in good company.

Me? I rarely light up with the blow-torch Bics of page one, but with the kitchen-cranny Ohio Blues down at the bottom of page seven, or 37. For insight, it’s not what’s up front that counts.

That’s why all the front page and top-of-the-hour attention to our Reality TV president is all smokescreen. Breathe the news more deeply and you’ll choke on the environmental, occupational safety, food and drug protections, voting rights, and (just this past week) fair housing legislation that have been torched.

Unnoticed under the clouds of COVID and the election, it may well be that the Republican president’s foremost qualification for office may be the same as Bill Clinton’s: He never inhales.

For four years, lead stories have exhaled his foibles by the carton:

Cancer causing windmills, Finland raking forests, a Sharpie hurricane, a proposed water bomb to be dropped on a burning cathedral, Clorox down the hatch, UV lights up the butt, George Washington capturing LaGuardia, Logan, Dulles, JFK, LAX. Did he forget Cape Canaveral?

Last week we got “Person, woman, man, camera, TV” which prompted my friend in Fort Myers to yell, “Jesus, Mary, and Fred!” She didn’t need a phone.

Some of us laugh so hard at this that we can hardly distinguish the cellophane of page one from the ashtrays of editorial comment.

Except, of course, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes a tumble or feels a pain in her side and lands on an operating table. Then we’re off to the emergency room, re-reading the Surgeon General’s warning, checking the insurance policy–which in America is no guarantee.

As I write this, a few live-ash journalists are speculating on page eight, or maybe 28, that he might bow out of the election rather than face a loss, using health as a pretext. One glowing theory holds that a resignation will install Mike Pence in the White House and provide a pretext for postponing the election.

Very doubtful, but it is worth noting that America has had a VP these last four years–and possibly for another four, and who could become president at any time–who was writing op-ed columns less than 20 years ago saying things like:

“Smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and nine out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.”

Yes, Mr. Heartbeat is also on record saying, “condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted disease” and “Global warming is a myth. The global warming treaty is a disaster… a ‘chicken little’ attempt to raise taxes and grow centralized governmental power… the earth is actually cooler today than it was about 50 years ago.”

An odd record for someone put in charge of a national response to a pandemic, but that’s the front page stuff you hear everywhere, and it’s painfully (and now lethally) obvious that his only qualification is his willingness to begin his every pronouncement with: “Under the extraordinary, steady leadership of President Donald Trump…”

Somewhere between page nine and 39 last month, cigarettes wafted into the news when US tobacco companies became the beneficiary of yet more snuffed out restrictions on their trade in Asia. All of which gains the rubber stamp of Senate Republicans, most enthusiastically from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who represents Kentucky, the home of King Nicotine itself.

Thanks to the recessed filters of the Republican Party, it’s possible for a group calling itself “Right to Life” to approve or look the other way at such moves as they blow the smoke rings of “family values.”

As close to Heartbeat’s heart as Kentucky to Indiana, Right to Life was the lucky strike that put him on the pall mall course to become the VP candidate in 2016. The Republicans needed someone to reassure the evangelicals they were asking to overlook two divorces, hush money to call girls, open bragging of sexual conquest, glorification of sexual harassment, gratuitous vulgarity, open deceit, obscene smears–

I mean, Jesus, Mary, and Fred, they had to have something to hold up the camel’s back!

We in the press–Bic Flickers and Ohio Tippers alike–need to be more careful about these seeming jokes, the lunacy of 45, the absurdity of his slobbering, slavish, spineless, pathetic, pompous, pulseless, pusillanimous, limp, lame, grovelling, boot-licking, butt-wiping No. 2. These seeming foibles are diversions which we render successful every time because we fail to recognize the most cherished American freedom:

The right to be crude and stupid.

Though it’s no time to lighten up on COVID or the election at the top of the news, we do need to light up more attention to the pages from five to 55 where the real effects of our most debilitating national disease beg for treatment.

Election Day? Consider it Cold Turkey. Or else!

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I learned long ago that when you imply that some popular pastime or habit is in any way bad, readers want to know whether you partake in it or ever did. Here’s the story of how and why I quit smoking in 2007, turned into an analogy to the Democratic primaries in 2016:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/when-smoke-gets-in-our-eyes/article_c1f2574b-1af7-5b77-be35-5c875a478ab6.html

Nearly 40 years before writing that, I wrote this for oakwood, the literary magazine at South Dakota State University:

Camels and White Owls, my best of friends,

And though the Gods admit,

They have my lungs upon dead ends,

I know I shall not quit.

So with a butt between my lips,

Two smoke rings I shall blow,

One, a zero to the Gods,

The other is my halo.

Available at: https://10againclothing.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/licensing-for-t-shirts/

In February when Pence was put in charge of the tisk-task force, Newsweek ran an article that listed several more of his anti-science stands than I have used here:

https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pence-coronavirus-science-hiv-aids-smoking-evolution-climate-change-1489458