Many of us compare this 45^th president of the United States—actually the third president of the Confederate States after Jefferson Davis and the impeached Andrew Johnson*—to dictators.

His open affinity for—and obvious envy of—Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as authoritarian rulers in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, and the Philippines, invites such comparisons.

Many of us have compared him to the fascist leaders of the 20^th Century, including the one we say cannot be compared to anyone today.

In spite of what I’m about to say, I still believe that he models himself on Mussolini.  The stylish mugging at his rallies—sudden turns to either side, chin in the air, a severe, sculpted expression—is so close to that of Il Duce that it qualifies as plagiarism.

Though they are useful, all such comparisons miss the point.

Such is the lesson of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (2019) by Tim Bouverie, a breathtaking moment by moment account of Britain’s response—more often lack of it—to the rise of the Nazis.

A review?  I’ll leave that to what you can find on-line.**  Instead, here’s a useful analogy, a commentary—mine, not Bouverie’s—on a divided America today based on a fractured Europe in the 1930s.

Rather than any single dictator, it’s a relationship that emerges from Appeasement as a point of comparison:

Trump is Neville Chamberlain to Putin’s Adolf Hitler. Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, the Crimea Sudetenland. Turkey and Syria some mix of Austria and Poland. Kurds as Jews. Helsinki as Munich.

The realization is hair-raising because it is gradual, appearing to the reader like a photo in a darkroom when slowly taken from the solution.

Hard to believe now, but “appeasement” was a positive word until Hitler stormed into Czechoslovakia—after which many Brits bemoaned the severe divide between appeasers and resisters.

Many husbands and wives stopped speaking to each other.  Sons were thrown out of houses.  Crowds booed and hissed at the mere mention of names from other side.

Immediately after the Munich “Agreement,” Chamberlain’s supporters celebrated him for saving them from war.  He was frequently called “the chosen one,” and at times “sacrilegiously” compared to Christ.

Even as it all (soon) unravelled, he persisted in his habit of appointing only yes-men to high positions, keeping the competent ones out. His Marie Yovanovitch was Anthony Eden.

All while the British press was near unanimous calling for Churchill as “the only Englishman Hitler feared.”

Among Appeasement’s most harrowing echoes—following Munich and two other summits before it—are instances of British Intelligence warning Chamberlain of what Hitler was about to do, only to have him trust Hitler instead.

Hitler’s translator, Paul Schmidt, would later tell the Nuremberg court that der Fuhrer would be laughing at and ridiculing Chamberlain with top brass and with Eva Braun as soon as “the umbrella man” was out the door.

As Trump has held the UN and NATO in open contempt, Chamberlain hated the League of Nations.  Also, as a former mayor of Birmingham (Britain’s 2^nd largest city), he was schooled in business transactions, making him inclined to think of dictators as businessmen playing hardball but still open to honest deals.

Missing from the analogy is an American Churchill.  Winston was from Neville’s Conservative Party, so there was no need for anyone then to ask, as so many of us ask today, when they would finally stand up to him and put country over party.

Indeed, when the sirens started sounding, Chamberlain’s last appeal was not for a stand against Germany, but for Conservatives to unite behind him.  Hard to read that without hearing Trump taunt the House to impeach so he can hasten to the friendly Senate–or “my turf,” as he calls it.

He has made similar taunts regarding the Supreme Court, betraying a belief that his appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh make it his Court.

But the question remains:  Where is America’s Churchill?

If it will take Republican breaking ranks to end America’s current appeasement of dictators, perhaps the real question is:

Where have you gone, John McCain?  A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

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*Did I say third president of the Confederate States? That’s a correction of a column earlier this year in which I called him the second president of the CSA:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/garvey-s-view-leave-the-seat-at-degrees/article_11532e8e-3adc-5932-a665-c64d5d9109e2.html

And that followed one on the eve of his poorly attended but well-financed inauguration–by which one billionaire bought an ambassadorship to the European Union–that you can find via the Daily News search engine under the sardonic headline, “Here’s to you, Jefferson Davis!”

Since then, another book published just this year, describes the 17th president of the USA, Andrew Johnson, our first impeached president, as crude, bellicose, vain, megalomaniacal, impulsive, dimwitted, cruel, vindictive, and worse. So maybe Trump does have a mirror image in a previous century.

Read it yourself. It’s quite the page turner:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/23/the-impeachers-review-andrew-johnson-trump-impeachment

**Here’s one for starters:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/551557/appeasement-by-tim-bouverie/

For those of us who breezily say or knowingly nod our heads when others say that history repeats itself:

The dictators are too often regarded as though they are entirely inhuman. I believe this idea to be quite erroneous. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, January 1938.

I fear… [Chamberlain] believes that he is a man with a mission to come to terms with the dictators. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, January 1938.

The PM is being advised in this folly by Horace Wilson who knows nothing about foreign affairs. He, the PM, is… moved by some vanity over his own ventures with Hitler and Muss. Oliver Harvey, Eden’s Private Secretary, January 1938.

(T)he PM preferred to turn down the help of a democracy [America] in order that he might pursue his flirtations with the dictators untrammeled. Parliamentary Secretary Jim Thomas, January 1938.

This is not the time for fine party feelings, but to save your country. Sir Timothy Eden, letter to brother Anthony, May 1938.

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Quotations from Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (2019) by Tim Bouverie.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tim-bouverie/appeasement/

As most everyone else I know, including all 13 adults at the Thanksgiving table with me, I refrained from any political talk and had a fine time listening to their accounts of family and travel, adding my accounts of grandkids in California and a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s Berkshire home.

Well, I’ve been plagiarizing him for 45 years, so it was the least I could do.  Plus, I did no little Christmas shopping in his gift shop.

Still, I now see these folks just once a year, and they all live well inland in what we here in Massachusetts call “MetroWest.”  Knowing that I live on a glorified sandbar that has long been in a losing argument with the Atlantic Ocean, they ask every year about erosion.

Less than ten years ago, they would hear of Plum Island in the nightly news, losing cottages to a roaring surf, and I’d patiently, if nervously, remind them that I live on the marsh side and I’m up on a hill.

“The Beatles wrote a song about me,” I’d quip, hoping to end the line of questioning, and those my age would laugh while their kids and kids-in-law would look quizzically at each other.

“OK, Boomer!” I thought one might say, but none did.

First heard that expression barely a week ago, and it hit like a barrage.  Full segments on two NPR shows that day, soon followed by numerous references on social media and cable news.

My immediate association occurred some 24 years before it was coined.  After busking downtown Newburyport, I stumbled into a nearly empty coffeeshop one late afternoon.  A couple tables away five teenagers, two who worked there, talked excitedly about the imminent return of friends from Los Angeles.

I was not eavesdropping, but young voices carry, and geographical names grab my attention.  When I heard one say “Oklahoma,” and another ask, “Where is that?” followed by silence, I thought I could help and called over:

“It’s about halfway across the country, just above Texas.  Your friends are halfway home.”

What happened next is seared in my memory:  All five gave me blank stares, not one said a word.  Three seconds, maybe four, and then they looked at each other and resumed their talk.

Like I wasn’t even there, like I didn’t exist.  OK, Boomer!

“OK,” as you likely know, is the postal designation for Oklahoma, and it was just eight months earlier that a federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed.  Yes, it did amaze me that any American teenager wouldn’t know where any American state would be, especially that state in the year 1995, but I didn’t press the matter.

Strange to think that those five are now in their early forties, or about the age of half the folks I dined with this Thanksgiving.  When, in some other harmless context, one of the latter cast a joking “OK, Boomers!” at their parents, aunts, uncles, and me, we all laughed, and I didn’t spoil it with any reminder of any Boom! in Oklahoma.

However, I did describe Louisiana when asked about erosion, and I drove home wondering if I might parlay LA (the state, not the city) into something that may be of use to anyone trying to convince skeptics that climate change is real.

To this post, I’ve added two maps—or outlines of maps—that should be self-explanatory to anyone reading this.  However, like the five kids in that Newburyport coffeeshop 24 years ago, some may look at them with blank stares.

Without using the words “Louisiana” or “map,” I suggest that you show the outline on the right first, asking what it is.

If he or she doesn’t know, show the one on the left, and ask the same question.

Would love to hear any results you are willing to share, and I admit that I’m looking to turn it into a column.  My hunch is that, if they don’t know the first but do know the second, this could jar their perception of climate change.

If they don’t know either, that’s a damning commentary on American education.

Either way, it’s something we can no longer avoid for the sake of quiet peace at the dinner table.

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https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/boot-no-more-a-wetter-map-of-louisiana

Just gained a reminder (thanks Seattle!) that all the mentions of “2 + 2 = 4” during the impeachment hearings may have sounded like nothing more than another way of saying “connect the dots.”

I wonder if the younger Democrats using the expression realized that it serves as a correcting reference to a slogan adopted by the Soviet Union in 1931 and highlighted in George Orwell’s 1984 as an example of authoritarian thought control which depends on making people believe in (or at least outwardly accept) absurdities.

Perhaps the most cited, if not sighted, example of control-by-absurdity is Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor’s New Clothes, but we need not look back to 20th or 19th century writers for examples of something in which the USA is now saturated.

From the electoral landslide (California doesn’t count) and the record-setting inaugural crowd (never mind those photos) to the windmills that cause cancer and the Sharpiecaine that threatened Alabama, to Finland raking forests to Greenland up for sale, to George Washington capturing JFK, LAX, and Heathrow, right up to last night’s declarations of a War on Thanksgiving, we may have reached the point where we might as well change our name:

The United States of Absurdity.

You may recall unpresidential advisor Kellyanne Conway just weeks following the transition of the White House into Kremlin West using the phrase, “alternative facts.” You may also recall reports that in the days following, 1984 was flying off the shelves of bookstores and that the book was being reprinted–something that happened a year earlier to It Can’t Happen Here, a 1936 novel foreshadowing the absurdities of the Trump campaign–and, yes, Russia was listening.

But until now I did not notice, nor do I recall any mention of just how rooted the word “alternative” is in authoritarian rule, or in the role absurdity plays in it. On the 1931 Soviet poster, the Russian translates as:

 “Arithmetic of an alternative plan: 2+2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5.”

As Orwell put it in 1984:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

I doubt that Conway or Trump or anyone in Kremlin West knows this. But I’ll bet every ruble I can find that Vladimir Putin does.

My wallet contains over a dozen “get-the-tenth-cup-free” cards for coffeeshops as far as Plymouth, Sturbridge, Meredith, Kennebunkport.

I favor them not just because they are independent, but because their coffee invariably tastes better.

At times I race up the Maine Coast, down to Cape Cod, around Winnipesaukee, along the Mohawk Trail, or deep into the heart of Connecticut with no choice but a quick stop.

Never settling for Dunkin’, I look for Starbucks, not because it is upscale, but because coffee there—though not as flavorful as Kiskadee, Dockside, Kaffmandu, Brewed Awakenings, Commune—is strong and satisfying.

Since I never pay more than $2.18, why do I keep hearing that Starbucks is $7 per cup?

For years I’ve rolled my eyes at deliberate distortions used to stereotype anyone who presumes to have any taste by those who insist on—and are comfortable only with—lowest common denominators (LCDs).

Now comes a social-media meme prompted by Starbucks possibly offering beer and wine: “Apparently it’s getting difficult to sell sober people a $12 cup of coffee.”

If that joker can inflate to deflate, this joker can conflate to retaliate:  This is the same complaint that PBS is all non-stop fundraising.

Truth is that during fundraisers, all the shows go on.  Less than 15 minutes per hour are spent soliciting.

Commercial television and radio, meanwhile, typically devote eight minutes of half-hour shows, including news, to advertisements.

Considering that they do it 365 days a year while public stations do it ten or twelve, we may as well compare a pitcher’s mound to Pikes Peak.

Moreover, PBS fundraisers tell us how information is gathered, how sources are obtained, and how editorial decisions are made.

Here’s what commercials tell us:

That Wells Fargo, AIG, Chase, and other wrecking balls against the economy in 2007 are wonderful, conscientious citizens now working in America’s best interest.

Ditto BP, Volkswagen, Exxon/Mobil, and other environmental criminals.

That video games immersed in violence and mayhem are “rated M for mature” where “greatness awaits.”

That “amazing” and “awesome” are now nouns reduced to descriptions such as “quick and easy.”

That Walmart is “community,” that Applebee’s is “neighborhood,” that Chevy is “family.”

Budweiser’s Renaissance ads define LCDs.  When the effeminate visiting king requests mead rather than the party’s “Dilly Dilly” choice, he and his queen are comically dismissed as the voiceover intones:

“For the many.  Not the few.”

As an added dig at elitists who might prefer an IPA or stout, the king is named “Pamplemousse,” French for “grapefruit.”

Commercials mirror another walk of modern American life steeped in distortions and stereotypes that target audiences.

Still mystified by John McCain’s VP selection in 2008?  Allowing for the allure of LCDs, Sarah Palin made perfect sense as an appeal to voters who preferred George Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

Didn’t work for McCain.  But it works like cream and sugar, tweet by tweet, for someone who has made—or litigated—a living off LCDs, particularly the ultimate LCD, reality television.

“Send her back!” is “You’re fired!” politicized.  Treating public reaction as mere television ratings, he can claim that “many people like it”—the gateway LCD.

This summer, CNN may have out-LCDed them all by promoting the Democratic debates like prize fights on ESPN2 or showdowns on Survivor.

 Sometimes I think America has become a non-stop limbo contest.  Due to this constant dance, many of “the many” now accept no end of absurdities:

Obama born in Kenya.  Muslims cheering 9/11 from New Jersey’s shore.  Windmills causing cancer.  George Washington capturing Cape Canaveral.  Betsy Devos.  William Barr.  Rudy Giuliani.  Fox News.

Followed by atrocities:  Children in cages.  Betrayal of Kurdish allies.

And obscenities:  A baby returned to an El Paso hospital for a photo-op because all those still being treated for wounds from a rapid-fire AK-47 refused to meet the man who “put a target on our backs.”

A president and first lady flashing huge grins and thumbs up while brandishing an orphaned baby as giddily as they might wave a plate of tasty tacos.

As with the preference for colored hot water over coffee with any strength or taste, the question for Trump supporters remains:

At what price?

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This was scheduled for the Newburyport Daily News back in January, but just days after I submitted it, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his intention to run for president.  Not wanting it to appear as an endorsement, I pulled the plug.

Schultz disappeared from view as suddenly as he appeared, but one item after another demanded more immediate attention. No one misses him, as there are plenty of “moderate” Democrats who emphasize bi-partisanship, often using the warm and fuzzy phrase, “reach across the aisle.”

Really?  If the division between the two parties in DC is an “aisle,” then let’s rename the Great Lakes the Modest Puddles.

Might as well be. In his rally in Michigan following AG Barr’s attempt to conceal the Mueller Report, Donald Trump boasted of fully supporting the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative just weeks after slashing it from the federal budget. He also boasted of being the first president to support it in 30 years, no matter that Barack Obama supported it through all eight of his.

Be that as it may, I had quite an argument with myself about this piece because it’s hardly an endorsement of Starbucks, but rather an admission that it is, in contemporary terms, my default choice when no independent coffee shop is within on-the-clock reach on my delivery routes.

The only real choice of most highway intersections is Starbucks vs. Dunkin’, and it’s not that Dunk’s coffee is bad, but that it is made so weak.  Yes, I know that’s a matter of taste, and that those who favor Dunk’s complain that Starbucks is too strong.

I’d say “bitterly complain,” but I don’t want anyone to hit the groan button.

From the Newburyport Daily News, Nov. 10, 2016, and from Keep Newburyport Weird (2018):

Last Night

Oh, look, it’s Harriet Tubman!

She lived across the street when I was a little boy growing up in Akron.  Every Saturday she rolled her big old cart over and called me from outside.

I’d take the cart and a list from Miss T to Quaker Mill’s general store, over a mile each way.

The shopkeeper filled it with as many fat sacks and heavy jugs as it could hold.  Sent me on my way with a cold bottle of sarsaparilla and his regards for Miss T.

No money was exchanged until I got back.  Miss T always gave me a dollar coin.

Sounds cheap now, but back then it was a bonanza, probably more than this piece of paper you just handed me…

Today

Such is the yarn I sometimes spin over the Screening Room ticket counter when handed a $20 bill.

Channeling Huck Finn or maybe Mockingbird’s Scout, I scratch my head, fidget, and try to sound Cotton Belt even though Akron is the heart of the Rust Belt.

To the heart of America, I spin it because the most telling event in 2016 is not a “Whitelash” winning the White House.

It has nothing to do with Democratic primaries rigged against those seeking a New Deal or the blind, mindless loyalty of a party willing to settle for the same deal.

Nor is it what befell St. Paul, Baton Rouge, Baltimore, or Dallas.

For my—and your—money it is the announcement back in April that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

Improbable as it seemed before last week, a woman will appear on our paper currency before any woman becomes president.

Scheduled for 2020, the year of the next presidential election, this guarantees that Republicans will again endlessly whine about “political correctness,” this time waving a handy visual aid most everyone sees daily.

That Jackson will remain on the twenty’s back will be taken as more of an insult than if he were removed entirely.

A military hero playing second fiddle to a conductor of the Underground Railroad, the most profound and prolonged violation of property rights and states’ rights in American history?

Ouch!

They will never mention the Trail of Tears, the forced march of Indian tribes from the South to Oklahoma Territory that “Sharp Knife,” as the Indians called him, oversaw in violation of treaties signed by George Washington.

Thousands died, no matter the Supreme Court ruling that upheld those treaties.

“Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” sneered Sharp Knife.

A sneer aimed to this day at Dakota’s tribes taking a stand as courageous and as urgent for America’s future as any ever taken in any desert or jungle elsewhere in the world.

 Uncannily, Jackson on the flip side will be just as telling as Tubman on the front.

No one will ever confuse a general known for decisive military victories with a real estate developer infamous for serial bankruptcies turned reality show con-man.

Their supporters are another story.

James Madison, observing Jackson’s political rise during his own long retirement, fretted over the general’s “uncouth manners and egomaniacal personality… and his crude, rude followers.”

Wife Dolley was more explicit:

“I’m afraid the license the people take with the tongues & pens will blast the good of the country & display all sorts of evil traits of character that can mark a selfish & savage race.”

Or, as the 1828 campaign slogan put it:  “Adams who can write?  Or Jackson who can fight?”

What would the Madisons say now?

Or say about supporters on the other side who preferred not to know of their own candidate’s Wall Street connections, her foundation’s acceptance of foreign money?

Last Night

… I once asked Miss T how she could eat and drink all that stuff.  She just smiled and rolled it away.  My folks and the nice man at Quaker Oats all said it was better that I did not know.

Seems today to be the rule to live by:  Better that we do not know.      

Anyway, that’s $14 out of 20.  Here’s one for 15 and—  Oh, look! It’s Daniel Day-Lewis!

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Running two days following the election of you-know-who to you-know-what, this is the forerunner of the column that ran yesterday (16/10/19) prompted, in turn, by the film about to be released Nov. 1 when it will open at the Screening Room.

The pic is a still from the film, with actress Cynthia Erivo in the title role.

One note on the above text: Harriet Tubman delivered an address to the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron where a plaque on the door of the hall includes her name. When one of my Akron cousins told me of it, I misunderstood, and made it her home. Not until checking some facts for today’s column did I realize the mistake. I’d send a correction to the Daily News, or at least correct it here, but the whole passage is a yarn anyway. And it’s not as if I had her boarding a plane with George Washington, raking a forest in Finland, contracting cancer from a windmill. or forecasting the weather with a black Sharpie.

Here’s today’s column:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/garvey-s-view-who-s-in-your-wallet/article_ca469988-4315-5a89-8e7a-0756e1830ce9.html

And a brief note on that: An earlier version appeared here as a blog in April under the headline, “A $20 bet on a $20 bill in 2020.” I wanted to somehow put my street address in it, but I doubted my editor would allow that, if he believed it: 20 Jackson Way.