Get Your Kicks on Detour 66

Once upon a nation, it was possible to hitchhike without making everyone think you were attempting suicide or looking for a chance to commit murder.

Enough of us did it that the subject emerges among so many other reminiscences as we get on in years. During these weeks of shut down, social media has increased our living in the past, and I’m noticing that you can divide veteran long-distance hitchhikers into two categories:

Those who thumbed US Route 66 and those who did not.

That’s because anyone in the former category will say so right away, always. And rightly so. What other road has had a television series and film named for it? Or is celebrated in a song recorded by 125 different artists?

For the most part, the legendary part, 66 was a southwest route. (Thanks or no thanks to Interstate-40 for putting it in the past tense.) My hitchhiking years were mostly while I lived in the Dakotas, so my trips were always along northern highways to both coasts, with a couple of treks up and down the west coast, never south of San Francisco.

With one exception. That was a spring break at South Dakota State when I took a ride with two friends moving to Tucson and then hitched back, crossing 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona, without so much as noticing.

In 2003, I delivered a car to LA and crossed northern New Mexico and Arizona on I-40, taking note of signs for sections of 66 now set aside as historic sites, so the only time I was actually ever on that road was back in St. Louis with my teenage daughter visiting friends in 1995.

All of which puts me in the latter group, but I paid my respects twelve years ago with a courtesy call to the eastern terminus of 66 as it departs from Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. There’s a photo of me with my back to America’s most celebrated highway looking up at the camera at the top of the front steps to the Windy City’s Museum of Art. Once taken, we had to walk a block for another photo in which the sign would be legible.

Moreover, five years ago, I flew into Los Angeles, the western terminus of 66, where my daughter treated me to the Gene Autry National Center of the American West as it featured an exhibit called Route 66: The Road and the Romance all about the history of cars and travel, motels and roadside diners, music and literature, and—unavoidably but insightfully—race relations.

Due to the Great Depression followed hard by the Dust Bowl, Route 66 was a month’s trip for 3.5 million people who left the plains in the “Dirty Thirties” to find work harvesting fruit and vegetables in Southern California.

Numerous artifacts, including newspaper accounts, photographs, John Steinbeck’s handwritten Grapes of Wrath, and no end of signs all bring this largest sudden migration in American history to life. The signs—from OK 66 to Burma Shave’s serials, from ads with Native American stereotypes to those segregating “Okies” and African Americans—are the stuff of Woody Guthrie’s songs, accompanied by his guitar, also on display.

Years after Black Sunday, the very day Guthrie ad-libbed “So long, it’s been good to know you” as dust piled high enough to block farmhouse windows, an early rock-and-roller named Bobby Troup wrote “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” The exhibit offers all 125 versions—from Chuck Berry’s immortal charge to Yo La Tengo’s quaint singsong—in a small, page-flipping, button-pushing, made-for-tables-in-diners jukebox that I might have explained to my 36-year-old daughter.

Reluctantly I resist the headphones only because I would not resist joining the Rolling Stones or Nat King Cole in chorus. Instead, I look under glass down a long table at the 120-foot scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 66 having been the route of his return trip. Though we see just 12 feet of the single-spaced, no-margin, no-paragraph-break typing, a small touch-screen projects an enlarged image on the wall to view it all.

Kerouac would not have needed the Green Book, open under a glass display near his. My reaction was such that my daughter asked if I was alright, and for most of three years before the Oscar-winning film with that title, I stunned friends who had never heard of it. Whether or not filling stations appeared in the Green Book, they likely sold gas in twin—regular and high test—clear glass tanks we saw on top of ten-foot pumps at 11- and 12-cents per gallon.

Disneyland thrived on those prices by being on the receiving end of the pre-interstate-highway highway that swept Americans from Chicago and St. Louis to their Southern California vacations—at a time when the most popular TV commercial thrilled, “See the USA in your Chevrolet!” Brothers Walt and Roy Disney saw it coming, which is why, six decades later, heiress and documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney, Roy’s granddaughter, appears before congressional committees and writes opinion columns defending the Estate Tax against Republican efforts to repeal it.

Unlike the GOP, she recognizes the difference between what her family built and what federal and state governments built to make the Disney dream come true.

When the interstates replaced the US highways, other businesses catering to fast-paced travel thrived as soon as they appeared. Lost in transition were so many towns and villages along what William Least Heat-Moon immortalized in his 1986 best-seller, Blue Highways. That loss was the basis of an animated film made under the working title Route 66 but released with the title Cars in 2006, as well-represented as Disney in the exhibit. My daughter watched ruefully, rocking two-month-old Lachlan’s stroller, as five- and six-year-olds ran toward the large portrait of the rusty old truck: “Mater! Mater!”

She may have been as rueful when a fetching woman my age sidled up as I viewed a painting of ox-pulled wagons, asking, “Who do you think was the artist?” Conversation with her about anything, let alone a very young Jackson Pollock painting under the starry night of Vincent Van Gogh, I’d welcome, but this was monologue.

Glad to hear most of it, but eventually, seizing a long-awaited pause for breath, I motioned to my daughter: “My wife and I traveled along 66 in Missouri years ago-” No matter. The woman cut right back in, leaving us no choice but to smilingly slip away. Around a corner I apologized for the “my wife” crack, adding, “That woman didn’t even flinch!”

My daughter was equally unfazed: “Dad, this is Los Angeles.”

A fantastical city made possible in no small part by the rock and rolling Route 66.

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Giving a Busker’s Finger

If this pandemic had shut us down any year before this, I’d be asking where and how a street-musician files for unemployment, and does the postal service deliver stimulus checks into guitar cases, hats, and baskets such as mine.

But age caught up to me near the end of the 2018 season at King Richard’s Faire in the form of inflammation in the joint of my left ring finger. Last fall, it worsened. If I was barely able to hold a cup or a steering wheel, how could I pretend to hold and manipulate any wind instrument. It was one reason I grudgingly retired as a renfaire performer. My aching feet were two others.

Instead of driving back into the 16th Century last fall, I drove to Anna Jaques Hospital where I gave the finger to two radiologists who took X-rays and asked about my habits. Well, I’ll be! Or B-flat! They say that I should have kept playing, that the body has its self-lubricating properties, and that by retiring, I made the inflammation worse.

As if to bear them out, the X-rays came back negative. But no regrets. My two feet would have outvoted my one finger no matter which finger I gave them.

Ah, the feet, um, the feet, yes, the feet. Friends have suggested that I bring a chair and make myself more comfortable in performance, and a few shopkeepers along my circuit–Newburyport, Salem, Lexington, and Portsmouth–offered to provide chairs. They meant well. I resolved long ago that if I ever considered sitting down, I would retire at that moment.

Of course, I have also defiantly proclaimed that, while death may beckon, retirement does not. Until my left hand gave me the finger.

Sure, I sit down in jam sessions–in fact, I’ve been in more than one where it was considered bad manners to remain standing–but out on the street I want to become part of the place, and the street is a place always moving. A flapping elbow, a pumping knee, a stomping foot, a few steps front and back or side to side fill the music with as much emotion as motion, and in a wide open space you can add commotion to amuse passersby when they least expect it.

And it pays well. Whether or not it would go into the calculation of stimulus and unemployment checks that buskers will never receive, I know there have been many days when my take was more for the dance than for the song.

Which is why either foot would have outvoted a recovered finger. Apparently the cure was nothing more anatomical or medicinal than an old tennis ball I kept grabbing all winter long. Guess you could say I gave my finger the finger when I added a new and one-time-only tagline to my guest column in the local paper in December–that had nothing to do with busking or music, though it mentioned the renfaire:

Jack Garvey was a strolling piper at King Richard’s Faire, 1999-2018, and a downtown busker, 1982-2019.

Didn’t even use the R-word. And that may be why no one commented on it, or perhaps readers thought the past tense stopped at the comma. Or, since it was still 2019, they didn’t notice that the tagline was a parody of a tombstone.

Grim? Maybe, but I had a good run.

Or so I thought until an email arrived from an elderly fellow from a town nearby who, unwilling to walk around in supermarkets while his wife shopped, started picking his banjo outside the car to pass the time. Before long, other shoppers started walking toward him and putting, as he prefers to say, “pictures of Mr. Washington and Mr. Lincoln” in his banjo case.

That led him to an internet search of busking which soon brought him to my book, Pay the Piper! The name “Newburyport” took the credit card out of his wallet and sent the number to Amazon, and as he got into it, he read it as a how-to.

Before long I began receiving what I guess you’d call progress reports during our surprisingly mild winter. One store manager offered him a chair, but another–at the same store–told him he couldn’t play on private property. That may have been the 58th time I’ve given legal advice.

He may have been better off out in the lot than outside the door. Among the cars, he often saw children dancing while parents loaded the trunk, and the parents were often thankful, sometimes driving their cars to him for the sake of giving a tip.

But it was his insistence on reporting those pictures in his case that got to me. Not just George and Abe, but Alexander, Andrew, and a couple of Ulysses.

That’s when I started giving my feet the finger and planning a return to the Inn Street Mall on any March weekend that weather would allow. Spring is prime time, especially in recent years when the summer months are increasingly too hot and humid. Any busker will tell you that Mothers Day is among the best of the year. And for me, Patriots Day weekend in Lexington was the best.

Oh, I was ready.

And then… Well, you know how that worked out. Instead of the athletic event that is busking as I do it, I continue taking my three-or-so-mile walks into the Plum Island Reserve, and my feet still complain. An unemployment claim from my “real” jobs combined with the stimulus and a surprise royalty from Amazon.com (I guess the quarantine has a lot more folks reading) makes any busking stimulus unnecessary.

On the other hand, my recovered finger is looking for something to do–other than sitting idle while I throw the finger next to it at an imbecile with orange hair.

Offhand, I never know which hand is “the other hand,” but with it always on hand, or maybe at hand, any writer has to hand it to the other hand for being so handy.

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Here’s the December column with the tombstone parody tagline:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/garvey-s-view-a-state-that-sounds-like-a-sneeze/article_9a2684bf-8149-5c4a-a784-3c4d9809ad4e.html

Picture above was taken by Paul Shaughnessy at King Richard’s Faire.

Roaring into the Twenties

Whether you find Joe Biden’s call for “a return to normalcy” reassuring, absurd, frustratingly timid, or flat-out offensive, you might also hear the century-old echo of a campaign slogan as successful as “Make America Great Again.”

Not that it qualifies as plagiarism–something for which Biden has been accused in the past, quite unfairly in my opinion, which is another matter–but it should be cause for alarm considering who said it and what he then wrought.

Ironically, the nation turned its jaded eyes to him after nearly two decades of progressive reforms pushed by Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson ended with participation in a foreign war, a red scare, and, oh yes, a global pandemic–all three of which were associated in the public mind with immigration.

Enter Warren Harding, a tall, handsome airhead from Ohio, with one of the most quoted lines–for both good and ill comparisons–in the history of presidential campaigns:

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.

Nitpicking newspaper editors jumped on “normalcy” as a non-word, a mistake for “normality,” but Harding doubled-down and turned it into his campaign slogan and a refrain in his stump speeches: “Return to Normalcy.”

A century later, both full quote and slogan could easily be mistaken for Biden originals, and it’s easy to understand why the most fervent Bernie Sanders supporters would recoil at both.

Moreover, thanks to Harding, “normalcy” is in every dictionary well in time for Biden, as well as in the commentaries of every pundit and in the questions of every reporter trying to make sense of the abject abnormalcy of a president who tells us that windmills cause cancer, but, hey, Clorox will make it all go away, like magic, believe me, if you drink enough of it, ain’t that right, Mike?, that’s what I hear, it’s tremendous.

What I fear is the all-or-nothing reaction that many Sanders supporters and other well-meaning people might have. For the record, I have already broached this on an Facebook page called Berniecrats, and I was roundly drummed out of the group.* Doesn’t matter to them that Sanders has already expressed support for Biden, unless something unforeseen happens between now and August.

While we do live in a world of the unforeseen, that doesn’t negate what Sanders is saying right now–any more than it negates his support for Hillary Clinton vs. Trump after the convention in 2016.

Apart from an FB group, I’ve been reluctant to confront Sanders supporters because I am one, have been for at least twenty years when he was still in the US House and emerged as the lone official in national office with a vision of government consistent with FDR and with activist Democrats–RFK, George McGovern, Fred Harris, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm–before the Clintons turned the party into Republican Light.

But Sanders, for all the idealism, is also a realist, which too many of his followers–or should I say, when-it-sounds-good followers–are not. Put it this way:

If, after the election, we still have an R president and senate, the Green New Deal will be dead on arrival. Replace either with a D and it has a chance, as will universal health care and other urgent necessities. I’m not saying they will happen, I say “a chance,” which is why Sanders, AOC, and other progressives are now endorsing Biden. After which, they’ll continue drumming popular support to pressure Congress–same method that enabled FDR to enact the New Deal.

One friend predicts that no matter who might beat Trump in November, he or she will more that anything work to put us all at ease while turning the country back over to the corporations that sell us the items to put us at ease. A recent essay on gaslighting (link below) makes the case, and yes, it is all too true.

We’ve already seen it in the briefings turned over to CEOs of huge corporations. Most haunting is the echo of 1920. Warren Harding didn’t just get out of the way of “friendly fascists,” he died when enough damage was done, and the sober, no nonsense Calvin Coolidge took the steering wheel from there right toward the ditch, getting out in time so that Herbert Hoover would take all blame for the inevitable–allowing Coolidge to remain unblemished for six decades when Ronald Reagan hailed him as a conservative hero, making his portrait most prominent in the Oval Office, and two more decades when Newt Gingrich hailed him as “America’s last true conservative president.”

One error in the gaslighting piece, actually more of an overstatement, is the writer’s insistence that Americans are people who care about each other. Yes, many do, perhaps a majority, possibly 2/3rds or 3/4ths, but I don’t see how anyone could say that about Trump supporters. And even if that’s a minority, the fact that so many others never vote or participate in any way in self-governance –or who opt-out with an all-or-nothing attitude–gives them sway. In fact, that was the subject of my last blog post (since taken down because I have submitted it as a column) aimed at the meaning of the 3rd word in MAGA:

“Great (adj): Not Having to Give a Shit.”

Coming soon to a newspaper link to be put before you, though I’m fairly certain the last word of that headline will be changed to “damn.”

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https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

Another prompt for this post comes from Naomi Klein:

*My confrontation with Berniecrats was the subject of an op-ed column last fall:

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

As for the pic above, one of Babe Ruth’s most memorable quotes was his response to a reporter who informed him that his new Yankee contract made him better paid than the president. “Well, I had a better year than he did.”

Karma Knows No Borders

Massachusetts Gov. Baker today extended mandatory shut-down from May 4 to May 18. Makes me realize that I’ve started thinking of “Massachusetts” as something “over there,” something other than where I am.

I’ve long used the word “mainland” to describe going to work or to do errands, but after almost 38 years on this glorified sandbar on a perch overlooking two miles of marsh where I can see the mainland stretched 180-degrees north-to-south, it now seems a foreign country. Especially during these weeks when I get in my car no more than once every five days.

Seven years ago a friend snapped it from a seat on Alaska Airlines. No, he wasn’t headed for the Arctic, but back to Seattle, 3,000 miles due west of Logan Airport. And, no, the plane was not hijacked by the Quebec Liberation Front, but was following a rhumb line, the shortest distance on a curved surface. When it happens to be long distance going east-west, it will appear on a flat map as a not-at-all flattened curve.

Which brings us back to the quarantine. Perhaps the photo makes it easier to believe that I find social-distancing easy, so easy I can’t help but feel guilty. Not sure how it appears on anyone else’s screen, but according to mine, if you were to superimpose an American flag over it, I live right about in the middle of the stars, and the walks I take on the flat-as-Kansas refuge road aside the marsh are most of the way toward the lower right corner of the stars, about a mile and a half in one direction.*

As are most of you judging by your social media posts and occasional phone calls, I have spent more time in the kitchen cooking this month of April than I may have spent in all of 2019. So even though I have that road to myself on some days, I think of my walks as flattening another curve. Not that I’m terribly successful at it, but that’s another story.

The island is 8.5 miles long and never wider than a football field–okay a Canadian football field with an endzone or two–when you measure from the northern tip right where the Merrimack River meets the Atlantic to the southern tip before it turns in from the Ocean to the Ipswich River. On Wikipedia and in other sources you will be told that Plum Island stretches 11 miles, which may be geologically correct, but it seems to me that when someone asks that question, they are thinking and visualizing ocean-front.

Sorry for the real-estate term there, but by now you don’t buy now, or you could soon say bye-bye to anything you buy or build. Seven years ago a few cottages were wiped away in tidal destruction not a Canadian football field from where I sit. And just weeks ago, erosion on that northern tip destroyed two more homes. Other than that, we seem to have been in a lull since 2013, but we know that could change any time that a hurricane decides to hug the shore after crossing Mason-Dixon and take a left turn, al la Sandy into Staten Island. The reminders still come when a high tide, a full moon, melting snow from New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and a Nor’easter decide to party in the mouth of the Merrimack all at once.

We could party, too, and many of us do. Or we can focus on long delayed, procrastinated projects. A series of blizzards in 2014 gave me my first book, Pay the Piper! I should have thanked them in my acknowledgements page. And COVID-19 by the same token has given me my third, Once Upon an Attention Span, just sent off to my publishers, but others have paid too great a price to direct any gratitude there.

Especially since we ourselves are whistling past what a civil engineer, if not one of Herman Melville’s narrators, might call a watery grave. That’s because our one and only road to the mainland–absurdly called a turnpike when you can see that it’s a causeway**–has been going underwater with increasing frequency each winter of late.

And we know the sea levels are rising. And we know that it will never have a vaccine. Only one question remains:

Will I need a passport to rejoin you on the mainland? Or will the facemask be enough?

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To find just where in–or just where off the shore of–New England I am, float your boat down the river that runs what appears to be a geographical parody of the surveyors’ state border, turn south into the estuary just before the ocean, go under our one and only bridge, sip some wine or quaff some beer, look up and wave at the fool on the hill next to the fourth-to-last small white cottage with the mustard trim before the reserve gate sitting with his feet up, reading some book or magazine, and who–because he hasn’t touched a razor since the Ides of March–now looks a bit like Ernest Hemingway.

About the similarity of the border and the river: Back when the colonies were drawn, the Massachusetts Bay honchos made sure they had both sides of the Merrimack, and there was nothing that the New Somersetshire wimps could do about it. Nor did it matter when they made their name more pronounceable. But karma knows no borders. At the time, no one lived in the wilderness past Lowell, and so at that point, they let the border run as a straight line. As any cartographer will tell you, a straight line on a map means that nobody gave a shit. When folks started moving inland, sure enough, they found that the river had a 90-degree bend, and it all came from New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

Photo by Michael Boer of Seattle, thanks to him once again. You can find additional Plum Island shots, though more down-to-earth on his blog if you start clicking here:

*The rectangles in the top left quadrants of flags are called cantons.

** Turnpike or causeway, island or sandbar. Geography and cartography are full of such conundrums, the best known of which has to be Iceland and Greenland. Did you know that the Hudson River is a fjord? I make that case in Once Upon an Attention Span, coming eventually to a website near you.

Not Having to Give a Shit

There’s no such thing as contradiction. Truth is garbage. Logic is a joke. Ethics are for losers. All that matters is what his base believes.

How else are we to interpret protests against stay-at-home orders in the face of a plague’s rising death count?

“My Life, My Choice!” and “Freedom Trumps Safety & Communism!” proclaim their signs.

While none of his Duck Dynasty flock have started wolfing down Clorox or ramming ultraviolet light up their rectums—yet—they did storm statehouses following hints of incitement from Dr. Quack.

While many of my friends avoid his daily appearances with his enablers, I have listened for patterns that otherwise go unnoticed. Or if noticed, are reflexively dismissed as so absurd they deserve no attention. May be true for you, but to his followers, these are dog-whistles, and they are very loud.

For example, his dismissal of opposition to his cutting funding for the World Health Organization as “political correctness.” This is so far from truth that it is non-sequitur, which makes it hard to argue.

But the phrase triggers his base, and so they add the WHO to their growing list of things to be destroyed along with environmental regulations, multiculturalism, affirmative action, nutritional requirements for school lunches, liberals, Teletubbies.

Reason that this works as a dog-whistle is that the rest of us get caught in the contradictory condemnation of the WHO for supporting China after he himself initially praised both China and the WHO—not to mention the insanity of cutting ties with worldwide health experts when we most need them.

There is no last month, there is no next month. There is no ten years from now, no matter how often anyone parrots the phrase “down the road.” That’s just a place to kick the can. There is only Now.

Yesterday is not where anything seems so far away. It is fake news.

Next night he tweeted an exhortation for his followers to “LIBERATE” (all caps) three states, adding for those in Virginia, “save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

Admittedly, I have never held a gun, but two friends assure me that it is not possible to shoot a virus. But even if it was, the virus has no more to do with the right to bear arms than does SpongeBob SquarePants.

None of which matters to those triggered by any mention of regulating any weapon or delaying any purchase of that weapon by anyone with enough cash. Hence, some of this week’s rallies are attended by men brandishing firearms.

Those are just two of many triggers, and like many, they have triggers within them.

Notice the word “great” in front of “2^nd Amendment.” Taken literally, it goes without saying. Just as it would be describing the 1^st Amendment, the 5^th Commandment, the Washington Monument, Moby-Dick, Harriet Tubman, the Grand Canyon, the architecture of downtown Chicago, Ellis Island, Mark Twain, Rachel Carson, Duke Ellington, Vermont maple syrup, Maryland crabs, those five great big lakes bordering those great big blue-collar states…

You get the idea. The word has no specific meaning, can be applied to anything, and is impossible to argue. It’s function, as any salesman can tell you, is to signal a bond. In this case, a bond with those who hear the dog-whistle.

From Dr. Quack to Duck Dynasty.

This is why he honks the word “great” repeatedly. Along with other generic words that serve the same purpose:

Tremendous, fantastic, incredible, beautiful, perfect for what he likes. Disgraceful, disgusting, horrible, nasty, scum for what he doesn’t.

The constant repetition, as any salesman knows, is to make you think that you have heard them, that they are familiar, and that what they convey is normal. This is why we often hear the paradoxical line that, if you keep repeating a lie, it becomes true.

Also, as Orwell warned, “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

That “booming economy, the greatest in the history of the world” he repeatedly claims to have created? It began in 2009 when Obama replaced Bush and charts with a steady rise every year since.

At times his honking is so painfully moronic—and oh, by the way, dangerous—that he then hides behind a claim of “sarcasm.” That’s yet another dog-whistle. Anyone else would say “joking,” but sarcasm has more appeal to those steeped in cynicism with ridicule and contempt for anyone actually believes in E Pluribus Unum rather than Every Man for Himself.

Which brings us back to where it all began: A campaign slogan as vague as all the speeches, tweets, interviews, and briefings that have followed:

Make America Great Again.

We know what is meant by Make, and we know what America is. Again simply points us back in time, though we may not agree with turning back or to which time—and we inevitably find that, for Dr. Quack, there is no time other than Now.

That leaves Great, that general, vague word on so many red hats worn by those who are now gathering at state houses. By that example, as with so many others, Great means not having to give a shit about anything or anyone other than yourself.

Which raises the question, what does United mean? And for that matter, what does America mean?

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The Darwin meme above is courtesy of Today in Science History:

https://todayinsci.com/D/Darwin_Charles/DarwinCharles-MisrepresentationQuote500px.htm

In context, the Orwell quote is bipartisan and then some:

No Place to Hang Our Hats

On Sunday, an old college friend posted a tribute to “Worcester’s Finest” on what would have been the 31st anniversary of his passing. Reminded me of a eulogy I wrote and which, coincidentally, I had just retrieved from my pre-electronic files to include in a collection. While retyping I added a few obvious parenthetical reminders that, where I say “twenty,” you should read “fifty.”

But I needed no adjustment at all to find a place for this in a book to be titled, Once Upon an Attention Span: Celebrations of Life in the United States of Amnesia.

May, 1989:

Twenty years ago, we had no end of slogans, none so memorable or incisive as this gem:

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

That’s how the Sixties were: For or against. The issue that so divided communities, schools, churches, families, is still misnamed. We persist in calling it the Vietnam War, buying lies from offices in Washington, myths from studios in New York and Hollywood, but in Southeast Asia where the truth of the war was, the truth of memory is.

That’s why they call it the “American War.”

Few Americans saw it that way, and so it came as a shock when Abbie Hoffman declared, “It’s time to bring the war home.” Shock, of course, has its value. That you must admit if you spend so much as six seconds considering America’s most successful publications, movies, television shows.

Hoffman, for all his skill with one-liners and turns of phrase, knew how to extend our ever-shrinking attention span. When asked about his motives at the Chicago trial (following protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention), the chronic clown dropped the characteristic humor for a straight, sober, and sharp retort:

“Destroy the country? The country is destroying itself. Our job is to survive.”

Survive, alas, he lately refused to do. Some cannot accept the suicide ruling no matter how many personal reasons: his health, his mother’s health, the failure of his last book, the failure of the Democrats to elect a president.

Abbie Hoffman pulling for Democrats? That will surprise only those who consider the Chicago demonstrations an outright expression of anarchy. In fact, it was the first and foremost reaction to the assassination that effectively nullified the ’68 election. Had Robert Kennedy been in the hall, few demonstrators would have been in the streets.

If Hoffman was a suicide—which later became highly questionable when his brother, Jack, made public a coroner’s report—it was not due to any problems of health, finance, or electoral politics, but to the increasing futility he must have felt as he toured college campuses these past two years.

He was very much alive in 1987 when he went to trial with 14 others—including Amy Carter, daughter of the former president—for protesting CIA recruitment at the University of Massachusetts. Listen to his closing argument and you cannot deny his faith in the ability and will of young people to resurrect this fallen nation from its lust for money and its love of ease.

With deliberate echoes of Robert Kennedy and Thomas Paine, the clown turned serious:

“Democracy is not (just) something you believe in, or a place to hang you hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls apart… When our country is right, keep it right; but when it is wrong, right those wrongs… Young people, don’t give up hope. If you participate, the future is yours”

He may have won acquittal, but what he found after Amherst condemned him more than any jury or judge ever could. For a man who pinned all his hopes on American youth, it was devastating to see our campuses become, in his all-too-Hoffmanesque phrase, “hotbeds of rest.”

Many of us read this as the comeback of the clown, the one-liners, but it was, inimitably, his admission: “It is finished.”

Sometimes I’m tempted to say the same, but I can still laugh at those who condemn the radical, rambunctious Sixties as if these dog-and-dinnerbell Eighties (or this 21^st Century) are any improvement.

He was right the first time: My job is to survive. In these Dark Ages of dwindling attention spans, may I teach the turn of phrase as well as he did for me twenty (now fifty) years ago when he defined democracy in its most exact, urgent terms:

“If you are not part of the solution, you are not just part of the problem, you are the problem.”

Twenty years later I parade and demonstrate in front of students who—with all good intentions and with few exceptions—enter college thinking that education has little to do with solutions to social and environmental problems, but everything to do with securing individual wealth.

Small wonder to me, in this month after Hoffman’s death, that many of their parents—talkin’ ‘bout my generation who should know better—feel so obligated to deny his influence on those of us still hoping to be part of solutions to America’s growing problems.

How ironic that any of us should think that he committed suicide as America keeps killing itself with complacencies far more lethal than all the phenobarbital he could possibly swallow.

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The photo shows Hoffman arriving at the University of Oklahoma, 1969.

Cooking Woes & Pancake Rhymes

Determined to make and enjoy pancakes—an excuse to wolf down dark amber maple syrup—during this prolonged house arrest, I went to the supermarket with flour at the top of my list only to find the shelves completely wiped out.

Undeterred, I went to the gourmet section where I buy Bob’s Red Mill rolled oats and flaxseed. Yes, I found flour. Almond flour, coconut flour, sorghum flour, millet, brown rice, white rice and a few other exotic strains I did not dare buy for experimentation.

But there were three remaining bags of “all purpose gluten free” flour that I just assumed would substitute as readily as honey for sugar. Before I left the aisle, I noticed a woman’s disappointment at the empty shelves and directed her to the two remaining bags. “You saved my day!” she said.

Next morning, I blissfully went ahead and made a batch not thinking that any adjustment was needed. The result was more like crepes that the fluffy cakes I craved, not too bad a taste but tough to chew.

That’s when I emailed my daughter who has been cooking gluten free for a few years. She soon set me straight by telling me that some “chemistry” was needed. My heart sank at the sight of that word, but a few IPAs softened the shock enough for me to consult Bob’s Red Mill website.

All I needed was to add a small amount of Xanthan Gum to the flour—which, of course, I do not have.

Since the shutdown started, I’ve been stocking up enough to let four or five days pass between trips to the supermarket—any other errands, what few there are, wait for those days—and by the time I returned, Bob’s Red Mill’s own shelves were as empty as those for King Arthur, Gold Medal, Pillsbury, et al. When I noticed the sticker price for XG, I wasn’t all that sorry, though I was sorry to hear that BRM is the only brand that MB carries.

Not to get lost in my improvisational menu here, but I bought that flour along with a quart of buttermilk, something I’ve never bought in my life, to make buttermilk pancakes, something I never made. That was part of a plan to make Buttermilk Meatloaf, a recipe I happened to spot while looking up one for Beef Stroganoff—two dishes I’ve never attempted.

Not wanting the remaining buttermilk to go to waste, I thought of potato pancakes, thinking that the odd “chemistry” of pommes de terre might offset the GF of the flour. When you make a batch, the batter on day two always has a gray film on top of it. Harmless. You can just as well stir it in or skim it off. Some cooks prevent it by sprinkling lemon juice on top before refrigeration. Perhaps that was the chemistry I needed. At any rate, it was certainly worth a gamble.

The recipe is from a cookbook my daughter and I found in the giftshop of an Amish village in central Ohio some 30 years ago, a page so well-worn that I add amounts of honey and salt by memory. No applesauce (which the Amish prefer) on hand, but a container of sour cream used for the stroganoff.

Delicious! Might have another helping for lunch, maybe even dinner, so I can make another batch before that buttermilk expires.

Please don’t construe this as bragging. It was blind luck, like a reflexive catch by a pitcher of a screaming line drive that makes his infielders chide him: “Look what I found!”

Had it not been for my daughter’s use of the word “chemistry,” I would never have remembered that unsightly gray film. Nor would it have occurred to me that potatoes could make any difference.

My only regret is misleading that woman in the supermarket. What are the chances she was making potato pancakes?

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PS: Meatloaf was delicious, but the prep was labor intensive, with endless ingredients in tiny amounts in a list that verged on sadistic. Stroganoff was OK right off the stove, better with increased seasoning the second night. Call it going from C to B. Hope to Ace it tonight with yet more seasoning and a tablespoon of that serendipitous flour.

https://www.bobsredmill.com/shop.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjw1Iv0BRDaARIsAGTWD1tprTyfqOPxfDKJ6eRrbJxkJE4NCNmWcebQuZ8_IH2V7kyhIc4_aHUaAtwtEALw_wcB

Say You Want a Devolution?

Difference between briefings by New York Gov. Cuomo and the Republican president is as stark as that between Nationals-Dodgers playoff games and the five-inning mercy rules contests in your local Pee Wee League.

Only one understands there’s no whining in public service.

Maybe because Cuomo at mid-day always precedes the Republican at twilight, or simply because a president (presumably) outranks a governor, I’m starting to rethink the theory of evolution. At some point we did not notice–June 2015? Nov. 2016? Jan. 2017?–we peaked, and we are now on the steep descent of a not-at-all flattened curve.

Wish I could ask Charles Darwin if he ever thought his famous theory would be put in reverse. He may have foreseen America’s Republican president, the Republican senate, and all those who keep voting for them when he wrote:

“Great is the power of steady misinterpretation…”

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Glad to report that the second half of that sentence offers hope. It appears in Origin of the Species, and you can read it here in full context:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/quotes/darwin-misrepresentation-2008.html

Illustration above is the cover of Punch‘s almanac for 1882, published shortly before Darwin’s death, placing him in the evolution from chaos to Victorian gentleman with the title Man Is But A Worm.

Beware the Ides of Maprilay

While sorting through boxes filled in my college years and unopened since, I found a short story I wrote 50 years ago at Salem State titled, “December 31,” based on the premise of bandleader Guy Lombardo’s passing.

For half a century, spanning from radio into television, Lombardo hosted the New Year’s broadcast into which every American household was tuned. For one night out of the year, he was Ed Sullivan in the days before cable-TV made Ed Sullivans and Walter Cronkites impossible.

His fictional passing—apologies for knocking him off seven years before he actually checked out—according to my teenage imagination, left us “no conception, and as a result, no programs about ringing in the New Year. Celebrations were cancelled, Times Square was empty.”

And so, 23 years before Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, we were stuck on New Year’s Eve. By the end of my juvenile fiction, “Some people were so sick of the futility of ‘December 31,’ they started calling it the 154^th of December; others, the 123^rd of Remember.”

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https://www.amazon.com/Auld-Lang-Syne-Lombardo-Canadians/dp/B005A9JOEY

Reflections for Days of Plague

Like many of you, I’m spending hours at a time cleaning out, sorting through, re-organizing (or organizing for the first time), and throwing away papers, documents, pamphlets, and photos that have sat hidden and unseen for time out of mind.

Further incentive for this years if not decades overdue project comes from a Salem State friend I haven’t seen in 45 years who, not wanting her SSC (now U) memorabilia to go to waste, found out that SSU (formerly C) has an archivist who says that, yes, students these days are interested in what happened on campus in the turbulent years from 1967 through 1973.

Or, at least some faculty at SSU are assigning research projects regarding student protests at SSC in that halcyon era.

This comes as welcome relief. As a frequent writer and sometimes editor with The Log, the student paper, I have a trove of material to contribute that I would never have the heart to part with–except to give it a home where it may prove of academic use, if not inadvertent enlightenment or odd entertainment.

But there’s another collection that I cannot simply consign to recycle: Ten “Reflections for the Day” that appeared on The Boston Globe‘s comics pages to which I was addicted for years before I realized that my iPad would work with free WiFi in coffee shops where I always found and read the Globe. Fortunately, I can type these out in a half-hour or two, depending on how these IPAs go down. In that way, they’ll be memorialized here on this blog where they may serve others as inadvertent this or odd that without taking up space in my thinning files.

In no particular order:

“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day.” Albert Camus.

“Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.” Marshall McLuhan.

“A howling wilderness never howls. The howling is done chiefly by the imagination of the traveler.” Henry David Thoreau.

“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.” Angela Davis.

“Music is sustenance, it is not a condiment.” Maria Schneider.

“A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.” Miguel De Cervantes.

“Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them.” Meg Wolitzer.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.” William Faulkner.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker.

“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.” Jonathan Swift.

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Image atop this blog is Picasso’s Don Quixote, 1955 (based on a 1947 sketch, courtesy of Wikipedia.

If that last quote from Jonathan Swift (or Dean Swift as Irish historians call him to remind us of his position in the Anglican Church) sounds familiar, it’s because in the 1960s it was turned into the title of a novel by New Orleanian John Kennedy Toole–but not published until 1980, eleven years after Toole’s suicide.