On the Monday after Yankee Homecoming—and after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso—you could have suffered whiplash reading newspaper headlines at Market Basket’s checkout counters:

“Massacre in the aisles,” “This is what we’ve become,” “Great day for a parade.”

Yes, pure coincidence, but whichever you tune in or tune out, the very fact that it’s a newspaper—in order, Boston Herald, Boston Globe, N-port Daily News—assumes a literate audience.

America was conceived in literacy.  The First Amendment’s “freedom of the press,” tells us it’s essential to self-governance.

Born and raised in it:  Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s Declaration, Lincoln’s Proclamation, FDR’s Four Freedoms, JFK’s Inauguration, King’s Dream.

With those came warnings:  Melville’s Whale, Stowe’s Cabin, Twain’s Raft, Sinclair’s Jungle, Steinbeck’s Grapes, Carson’s Spring, Baldwin’s Fire.

And claims: Monroe’s Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, Bread and Roses, One Giant Leap.

Once upon an attention span, most all of the above were taught in American high schools.

Conservatives might want to replace some of them with others:  Harding’s Normal, Coolidge’s Business, Rand’s Atlas, Goldwater’s Defense, Reagan’s Morning, maybe even Trump’s Carnage.

 Whichever.  Any list places literacy among the qualities that once made America great.

Once?  Sorry for the past tense, but consider the Mueller Report.  Not what’s in it, but the fact that most will not read it—accepting, instead, a two-page whitewash that would turn the Wizard of Oz green with envy.

As anyone familiar with any section of the report can tell you, Atty. Gen. Barr’s every utterance on the matter can be summed up as, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

No matter that the man is hogging the stage, goading the audience, demonizing the press, and wrapped in both American and Confederate flags.

We could call that last item schizophrenic.  Or, if we honestly believe in “learning from history,” we might heed Unexampled Courage, a new book by a South Carolina judge about the court case that led to Harry Truman’s executive order to de-segregate the US armed forces—and eventually to Brown v. Board of Education.

Paraphrasing The Mind of the South, a classic 1941 study, Richard Gergel notes “personal generosity and courteousness” in the Jim Crow South combined with “a darker side of intolerance, an incapacity of analysis, exaggerated individualism,” and “a tendency toward unreality.”

All of which made Southern whites “unusually receptive to racial demagogues of the most brutal sort.”

We often hear and use the word “insane” to describe the non-stop avalanche of cruel and unusual tweets, statements, and actions from an administration that undermines our own intelligence, gags our scientists, guts public education.

We are so shocked by outrages on the Rio Grande—one side by “invading caravans,” the other by children in privatized detention centers—that we hardly notice numerous repeals of financial, environmental, occupational safety, and health measures.

As appalling as it is, we can understand how someone doesn’t give a damn about endangered species.

But how to explain indifference to the announcement from Trump’s neutered EPA this July that it will not ban a pesticide found to cause disabilities in children?

Yet another defeat for science and another victory for Agribusiness—and pay no attention to so many family farms busted by tweeted tariffs.  No, Dorothy, we never left Kansas.  We monetized it.

Insane?  This is something much worse.  Insane means we have taken leave of our senses, but Trump’s America doesn’t just leave its senses—Lady Liberty’s Torch, Teddy’s Anti-Trust Stick, Eleanor’s Pro-Labor Voice, Eisenhower’s Farewell—it turns around and rips them to shreds.

Insane?  More like anti-sane.

America, though far from illiterate, is no longer a literate nation.  No matter what is or is not in it, the Mueller Report is unmistakably, emphatically conclusive about one thing:

America is now anti-literate.

Today’s supermarket headlines may as well be as non-sequitur as the commercials that punctuate the evening news reports of mass shootings and environmental disasters with smiling babes and hunks on tropical beaches waving bottles of Bud Light in the air.

Why bother with demanding, judgmental tablets when the Golden Calf is so inviting, the music all up-tempo?

Why read when we can dance?

-30-

Ever notice that the rallying cry of one side and the agonized lament of the other have something in common?

“Make America Great Again” and “What has America become?” both yearn for some unspecified time we need to reclaim.

The white picket fences of “Father Knows Best?” The boom and purpose of FDR’s New Deal?

No and no, as progressives remind us that Jim Crow was still law in the 1950s, and congressional Republicans openly, gleefully chip away at the New Deal, with Social Security very much in their sights.

Although political and cultural considerations afford no consensus of just when — much less why — America ceased being great, something else might take you in that direction: Your car.

You stop behind someone at a red light. The light changes, but that car stands still. Four seconds, five, maybe six. You are patient, but finally you hit the horn.

Forget the distracted driver and consider, instead, people on the sidewalks. They look up, they object, they make it known who’s to blame for the intrusion, who they think is the misfit in their otherwise peaceful world. You!

Today, I experienced this while listening to yet another radio commentator beg that most persistent question, “What has America become?”

By the time that car finally moved, I was brainstorming answers: Self-absorbed slackers like that driver? People like me who needlessly wait before hitting a needed horn?

Again, no and no, because both combined are far outnumbered by those on the sidewalks, those who complain about intrusion with no knowledge of — and, worse, no care for — any reason or need, any context.

From the outrage aimed at someone kneeling during the national anthem to the shrug at news of children in cages, this is what America has become.

Just when we changed may be impossible to know, but we can measure the difference since America’s birth.

Most would pick the signing of the Declaration as that moment, but for a moment of conception, how about Paul Revere’s ride?

Racing full tilt from Charleston to Lexington in the dead of night, Revere woke up men who stepped out their doors and fired rifles into the air.

That brought militias to town greens — as well as a few horsemen who yelled their own ways to Salem, Newburyport, Andover, Dracut, in between, elsewhere, and beyond where other men would fire shots to summon more militias.

Called an “alarm,” it was all prearranged.

That was then. Now, we have a decorated veteran, a career public servant in the administrations of both parties delivering a 450-page report telling us that the Russians are not just coming, but are already here.

Rather than joining the alarm, one party openly dismissed him — some with ridicule and hostility — while the other cowered in the face of controversy, disappointed that Robert Mueller did not fire all the shots and ride all the connecting routes himself.

Revere rode in a nascent nation that heeded alarms; Mueller wrote in a nation that can’t be bothered.

On May 29 of this year, the difference could not have been more glaring. Hours after Mueller gave the press conference saying that his report should “speak for itself,” tornadoes touched down in southwest Ohio.

When a Dayton television station put on a meteorologist to issue warnings, viewers texted complaints that “The Bachelorette” had been interrupted.

Nine weeks later, a mass shooting made Dayton a microcosm of America’s macrospasm yet again.

Dayton’s claim to greatness matches that of any mid-size American city, most notably with the Wright Brothers in 1904. But Wilbur and Orville built alarms into their experimental aircraft, and they would have been killed at Kitty Hawk had they not heeded them.

Just as America would have been stillborn had Revere tried to alarm the same public that Mueller, with 10 clear counts of obstruction, could not awaken.

Since then, the reluctant party has been slapped into — and even a few Republicans have been embarrassed into — action.

Forget the irony of anonymous whistleblowers commanding more attention than the Mueller Report. Let’s just hope that people on the sidewalks heed the alarm.

It’s not a time we need to reclaim. It’s a willingness to pay attention.

-29-

Many friends and acquaintances are sick of me recommending books, but if I could erase all the others and start from scratch, it’s this 1994 detailed account of Paul Revere from the moment he saw the signal from his North End home to his arrival and capture and release (!) in Lexington:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32080.Paul_Revere_s_Ride

In addition to an account of Revere’s organization of a network that spread throughout New England and the narrative of the night, the book’s lengthy appendix includes a 17-page “Historiography,” a most surprising and illuminating description of how perceptions of Revere’s Ride have shifted through the years.

Among the several parlor games that liberal arts teachers like to play, the most common has to be what we would put on a list of required readings for high school seniors or college freshmen. My list begins with that Historiography.

The photo is John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Revere–which was also the model for the original label for Samuel Adams beer and ale. Poor Sam was not at all photogenic.

“When a man hits a target, they call him a marksman.  When I hit a target, they call it a trick.  Never did like that much.”  Annie Oakley

Proposal

America’s second-most pressing need today is for something, anything to reconcile the wide-as-can-be, red-state/blue-state divide that deafens us in anger and blinds us with distrust.

Need number one, as we all know, is for a holiday during the dog days of August to break up the long drought from the 4^th of July to Labor Day.

At the risk of sounding flip, I propose to address both, an idea that hit me while doing what I love most:

Wolfing down a hamburger.

Wild Willy’s up on US 1 in York, Maine, presents itself with Old West décor, and its slow-food burgers all have western names:  The Rio Grande, the Santa Fe, the Bandito, the Conestoga, and so on, including the one that bit back with inspiration:

 The Annie Oakley.

Laced with blue cheese and topped with Bermuda onion, lettuce, and tomato, it allows you to delude yourself into thinking it might have some health benefits.

On an excursion up the Lobster Coast a year ago tomorrow, while savoring the burger, I would hear Annie Oakley’s name on Maine Public Radio’s daily almanac.

Benefits Red

Born on August 13, 1860, in western Ohio, then America’s frontier, Phoebe Anne Moses (or “Mosey,” sources vary) began hunting at age eight so that her widowed mother and siblings had food on their table.

Game she sold to restaurants paid the mortgage on their log cabin before she became an attraction in travelling circuses and, at 25, a headliner in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

She gained international fame for splitting a playing card at 90 feet with a .22-caliber rifle and riddling both halves with holes before they hit the ground.

The National Rifle Association, which began as an educational group and in part still is, praises Oakley for having taught some 15,000 women how to shoot.

Hunting, exercise, and recreation all served as her agenda.  In her day there was no need for alarm regarding gun sales and distribution to be on anyone’s agenda.

Given a day of national appreciation for a champion of the Second Amendment, with good will and good cheer across the political spectrum, NRA members might prevail upon their leadership that 2015 is not 1890 and that tests and licenses—such as those for driving cars, of which there is no shortage—do not constitute bans.

Benefits Blue

Heroic to those who revere the conservative ideal of rugged individualism, Oakley offers an equally strong model for a foremost liberal cause.

Possibly the first woman to not just make it, but to excel in what was entirely a man’s world, she spoke in terms of practicality rather than ideology:

 “God intended women to be outside as well as men, and they do not know what they are missing when they stay cooped up in the house.”

Oakley’s walk as much as her talk illustrated what Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others were preaching in lecture halls and writing in magazines and newspapers at the time.

As a performer in arenas all across the USA she was the Jackie Robinson of the Women’s Suffrage movement, though she kept her distance from it.

And a forerunner of today’s Equal Rights movement—no matter that fellow Wild West performer Sitting Bull cutely tagged her “Watanya Cicilla,” or “Little Miss Sure Shot.”

Benefits West

Another Oakley contemporary, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, first proposed that American faith in individualism and democracy owes less to the town hall meetings of New England than to the frontier experience of the wide open West.

With that in mind, consider the individuals we honor with Presidents Day, Independence Day, and Martin Luther King Day.

All are easterners save Lincoln who is memorialized for what he did in Washington DC.  Teddy Roosevelt’s face may look out from a South Dakota mountain, but his big stick stirred the Hudson and Potomac rivers.

 Any objection to Annie Oakley Day as an “Affirmative Action hire” should, therefore, be overruled not with any demand of gender but of geography:

  Do the map!

-28-

This ran in the Newburyport Daily News four years ago today. Because the issue of guns is so polarizing, regarded in absolutes by most folks on both sides, many liberal friends thought I was blaspheming while conservatives laughed at what they seemed to regard as a good-natured joke.

To give an idea of how nervous some can be about any talk of guns, please know that when I submitted this, I wrote a whimsical tagline, as I often do. “Caffeinate Jack Garvey at hammlynn@gmail.com” for a column about coffee. “Troll JG at…” for one about Russian bots on social media. “JG’s ticket to ride is…” for one about the Beatles.

For this I offered, “Shoot Jack Garvey at…” Not a single word of the column was edited, changed, or censored in any way, and, frankly I can’t recall one since 2010 when the editor actually called me first, and convinced me to omit the offending sentence. (It was something about Jesus Halliburton and his twelve business associates flying into Philadelphia to write the Constitution before George Washington and US Grant closed the airports.)

But a tagline is apart from a column, so she figured that changing the offending “Shoot” to the innocuous “Reach” didn’t matter–not nearly so much as the chance that some readers might take it literally. And based on what I’ve seen and heard lately, she was likely right again.

The photo is from Wikipedia where it appears, oddly, with no mention of time, place, or photographer.

Yet another picture gone viral:

A young man stands among a crowd, shielding his squinting eyes with a hand against the sun.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but until we take a closer look, that snapshot is worth no more than those 17.

One more detail makes it an ideal cover for a book about 21st century America — a book titled something like: “American Selfie: Who We Are, Where We Hope to Go & Why We Won’t Get There.”

Before I add it, let’s consider photos most of us have seen — often in history texts or documentaries —worth not just thousands of words but entire books.

My favorite shows Abraham Lincoln addressing Union officers at an army encampment. Well away from the huddle, a young officer name of George Armstrong Custer appears to be in a world of his own. Twelve years later he would leave this one by way of Montana.

Others flush with American drama include:

A bulldozing Teddy Roosevelt operating a crane digging the Panama Canal.

A laughing Harry Truman holding aloft the Chicago Tribune’s banner headline “reporting” his defeat.

A somber John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket rolling by on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Numerous photos of civil-rights confrontations in Alabama and Mississippi with police aiming full-tilt fire hoses at demonstrators.

A national tide turned in favor of civil rights in 1955 when magazines reprinted photos of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s severely bludgeoned head in a casket his mother insisted be kept open for that purpose.

The lesson was not lost on Martin Luther King Jr. who then timed marches and sit-ins to make any given evening’s television news.

By 1966 civil rights demonstrations moved North and gave us images as ugly as any Carolina KKK rally, many from Chicago where racial slurs rode rocks hurled at King and his fellow marchers.

One, likely from Newark, reappeared just weeks ago with the headline, “America, 1968,” but with 1968 crossed out and 2015 placed above it on the cover of Time.

Or is it Timewarp?

Never to be outdone, Boston offered the most memorable image of the era: A flagpole — with Old Glory yet waving from it — used as a spear.

As graphically as the city’s busing crisis, it captured not just racial divides, but psychological divides across all American boards.

To those comfortable with the status quo, injustice suffered by others was of so little consequence that the foremost symbol of justice could be used as weapon to keep “others” in their place.

Such were the days of civil rights when photojournalism and television news came of age. The images were so jarring, the contradictions so glaring, that segregation could no longer exist as public policy.

But the times are a’warping. In a brazen new world of websites and cable stations with narrow target audiences, there’s little time — or tolerance — for matters that do not directly concern me, myself, and I.

Nevertheless, something comes along now and again that none of us, ourselves, or we can avoid.

In the late-90s calls for school dress codes had everyone abuzz. Educators and many parents were alarmed by the smarmy, hostile, and sometimes obscene messages on T-shirts, some by the very fact of T-shirts themselves as outer clothing in classrooms.

Many students and a few parents disagreed. Editors and photographers of community newspapers considered the controversy a gift-wrapped — and at times scantily clad — dream.

One lengthy feature in Merrimack Valley Sunday (an earlier iteration of the Current) included quotes from a 10-or-so-year-old Amesbury boy who insisted that he dressed to “express (his) individuality” and would never change for any rules.

Next to the passage he was pictured, head to toe, wearing a Detroit Pistons uniform, with star Grant Hill’s name and number 33.

So much for individuality. Ditto disdain for uniforms.

Must admit, though, that in a country where so many can name celebrities and athletes from distant cities but not public officials who represent their own towns, that boy could be the main character in any film version of “American Selfie.”

Twenty years later, he may well be squinting and shielding his eyes against the sun while the visor of his baseball cap hangs uselessly over the back of his neck.

-27-

If it were all up to me, I’d turn Kremlin West back into the White House right now by putting Bernie in it.

However, there may be upward of 135 million other people casting votes next year, so here’s a few free-for-all thoughts regarding the free-for-all events that, in today’s free-falling America, pass as “debates”:

How MSNBC did not think to require audiences to refrain from applause and cheers was beyond me — though the reason became clear the night after.

Audience reaction prompted grandstanding — emotion, frequent interruption, speaking over others — and it marred the presentation far more than the first night’s technical glitches.

Many viewers may have turned the dial — or clicked the remote if I want to bring myself into the 21st century, something Joe Biden is clearly unwilling to do.

He was the biggest loser, following Beto O’Rourke, on Night 1 as another dead man walking toward a waiting grave.

Biden’s response to Kamala Harris was a strange echo of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling just hours earlier that gerrymandering is out of their jurisdiction. Chief Justice John Roberts admitted the injustice in his majority opinion, which leaves it to the states.

In other words, the nation’s very highest agency of justice now washes its hands of any state’s injustice, leaving it to the very people who commit — and gain by — injustice to bring about justice.

In the Confederacy, the claim was “states rights,” picked up by groups such as the NRA as a mantra ever since, sometimes euphemized — as it was by Biden — as “local control.”

When Harris reminded Biden that civil rights acts exist precisely because the federal government had to intervene to end segregation, she could have been summarizing Justice Elena Kagan’s Thomas Paine-esque dissent in the gerrymandering verdict – or any number of speeches by Martin Luther King over 50 years ago calling for federal intervention.

To anyone with a memory — those of us old enough and younger folks who’ve been made aware of civil rights struggles — Biden might as well have been waving a Confederate flag.

Prior to that exchange, I was at odds with my fellow Berners who insist on “No to Joe.” And, surely, I will increase that friction by claiming that Harris, Julian Castro and Elizabeth Warren made themselves attractive candidates.

In fact, Berners are already reminding me, correctly, that those three and other candidates make themselves attractive by adopting positions taken by Sanders four years ago.

I’d add Cory Booker, but eventually some reporter — not from MSNBC apparently — will ask him to explain his votes against limiting costs for prescription drugs, and it won’t matter if he doublespeaks in English or Spanish.

Still afraid of the word “socialism”?

For all their chaos, the Democrats are beginning to prove that it’s an empty smear aimed at all of them to misrepresent, discredit and eventually wipe out FDR’s New Deal.

Keep showing that, and Sanders, running with Harris or Castro, would win. So would Harris, Castro or Warren on a ticket with Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown as VP.

Had the Clinton campaign not taken the Rust Belt for granted, Hillary would have done exactly that and now be running for re-election.

But the No-to-Joe Berners are right about Biden. If he is nominated, his running mate might as well be Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Which brings us to the night after.

Rachel Maddow, one of the free-for-all moderators, crafted much of her hourlong prime time show around highlights from each candidate, each with at least one moment that, as Maddow kept repeating, “brought down the house.”

So, the cheers that I thought were incessant lowlights were there to highlight the highlights:

Bennet’s “medieval wall” replacing the Statue of Liberty; Williamson’s “state-sponsored child abuse”; Hickenlooper’s “in Colorado, we call that kidnapping”; Klobuchar’s “all foam, no beer”; Ryan’s “party of the working class”; Inslee’s “people who brought us the weekend”; Yang’s “trickle up” economy; and most incisive of all, Buttigieg on Republican use of religion as a “cloak.”

Maddow is right (“Hear the audience?”), but wouldn’t it be better to hear all this without so much canned approval?

-26-

The illustration, according to Wikipedia, is from “a 13th century Belgian Manuscript illustrating the dialogue between the Jew ‘Moyses’ and the Christian ‘Petrus’. Illustration of ‘Dialogi contra Iudaeos’ written by en:Petrus Alphonsi. This is a photograph of an exhibit at the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv en:Beit Hatefutsot. (Photo taken by en:User:Sodabottle)”

About the video of the meteorologist in Tennessee who went ballistic when viewers started texting objections to his tornado warning (for those who missed it, the TV station had interrupted The Bachelorette to put him on, and viewers did not pardon the interruption):

Struck me today that this is an old story—which is why it went viral.  Literature and history offer many spot-on summations of 21^st Century America, microcosms of our national macrospasm, but none so well as Exodus 32: 1-35.  For an update, what better way to cast Moses than as a meteorologist with tablets of immediate threats (tornados) and long-term challenges (climate change)?

We already know that public resistance to the latter is an unwillingness to sacrifice material comfort and perceived pleasure.  The incident in Tennessee tells us that this resistance is more determined—and immediately dangerous—than we thought.

One adjustment:  The Israelites to whom Moses returned were not so much like Bachelorette fans caught in the show’s contrived suspense, but like the young, attractive guys and gals in its commercials, arms raised, heads nodding, hair waving, hips swinging, knees pumping, feet stomping in tune to the rock or country tunes that sell their beer, their cars, their credit cards, their mobile phones.

You might object, “But that’s not the show!”  And you’d be right.  No, they are not the show. They are the reason the show exists.  In fact, the show is their delivery system, like a cigarette for nicotine, or junk food for salt.  Like so many other shows, The Bachelorette is wrapping for a Golden Calf that America is intent on dancing around.

If our meteorologists can’t stop us, tornados will. If our scientists can’t stop us, floods and fires will.

-25-

Illustration above is from a Bible card published 1901 by the Providence Lithograph Company.

Call me Mercutio.

You may think I was killed in a swordfight in 1597 when my reckless friend Romeo jumped in and turned my gut right into the other guy’s blade.

That’s when I delivered my “plague o’ both your houses” line quoted ‘round the world ever since, often by people with no idea that I said it or why.

Just as well.  Many folks consider Romeo & Juliet the world’s most romantic love story, hardly noticing that it’s also literature’s most dire warning against vengeance.

You’d think that the death of both lovers might be a hint, but, hey, as Shakespeare himself advises in the new speculative biopic, All Is True: “Never let truth get in the way of a good story.”

So, it was staged—just like the death of Christopher Marlowe, the guy who actually wrote all those plays.

I followed Kit to Italy, working as a courier for his manuscripts back to Will in London.  In time I delivered them to a Mr. Ibsen in Oslo and a Mr. Chekov in St. Petersburg.

Eventually, most went to some wacko named Hitchcock in Hollywood, far heavier with directors’ cues, camera angles, instructions for lighting and sound, blah, blah, blah.

All that detail finally killed Kit.  A 2014 film, Only Lovers Left Alive, held that contaminated blood did it, but I’ve been on the same stuff all these years, and I’m okay.

Luckily, on location for BlacKkKlansman, one of Kit’s many posthumous scripts, I met Helen Highwater, then the athletic director at Colorado Springs High School.  She hired me as a fencing instructor.

To make the move I tapped a nest-egg from 1998 when I coached Ben Affleck to portray me in Shakespeare in Love.  Took forever to rid him of that wretched accent—it’s Merr-, not Mah-COO-chi-o—but he tipped most generously, so my patience paid off.

Landed in the USA just in time for the 2016 election, and who with any inclination to settle a family feud could resist that?

Just as I was neither Montague nor Capulet, but merely a friend of the sorry sop who thought he could enjoy bi-partisan love, I was neither Democrat nor Republican when I was hired to organize for Bernie Sanders.

When Sanders stormed Colorado’s primary like a Rocky Mountain avalanche, the DNC took notice of my work.  After the convention, they sent me to Michigan.

Imagine my amazement when they gave me life-size cardboard cut-outs of their candidate to stand in lieu of her before rallies.  We Berners thought she was pre-packaged.  Turns out she was the packaging.

Director Michael Moore—met him in 2003 when I delivered Kit’s Fahrenheit 9/11 script—asked to film me, so, yes, that’s me carrying a horizontal Hillary Clinton into downtown Battle Creek in Fahrenheit 11/9.

All ends, well or not, but here’s an insight that only someone as far outside 21^st Century America as Elizabethan England could gain—by splitting the difference of both time and place.

Comes from 1776, another script I delivered to one of Kit’s several American front-men:

A musical, it takes liberties with the birth of liberty, but as one character penned it, certain truths are self-evident—among them that Democracy depends on an “informed citizenry.”

This is the Dumbo on the stage:  Americans do not want to be informed.

Not Democrats about connections to Wall Street, not Republicans about connections to Russia, and not upwards of half of qualified voters about anything that might upset rather than entertain them, that requires an attention span, that doesn’t directly, immediately impact them.

We hear from one tribe who refuse to read the Mueller Report but swear it’s all lies, never read the Bible but swear it’s all true, can’t recognize passages from the Constitution but swear they know it to the letter.

Meanwhile, the other tribe waits for a “smoking gun” they are too scared to pick up—even though Mueller handed them ten—for fear of upsetting “moderates” who would rather catch every scripted moment of The Bachelorette than heed a tornado warning.

Only one conclusion I can draw, but I don’t want to quote myself.

-24-

The photo above is of Orson Welles playing me in 1933. Wikipedia says it is uncredited, but I took it for Radio and Television Mirror, Vol. 13, No. 1, page 30.

Speaking of Welles, he’s one of many luminaries over the years–including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud–who believed that Shakespeare was a frontman for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Others have made cases for Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, the latter chosen here because he best fits this yarn.

In 2003, PBS made a case for Marlowe in a Frontline titled “Much Ado About Something”:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muchado/

Frankly I was amazed at how they nailed it. Granted, his espionage, sourcery, and heresy were well-known, but how did they ever get the dope on his counterfeiting, duelling, boozing, and brawling? I thought what happened in Canterbury stayed in Canterbury.

Truth is, though, that the controversy has left me unsure of who my father is, which may account for my cheeky sense of humor which, as one critic observed, “can at times be facetious or even coarse, much to his friends’ annoyance. Moreover, he is moody and given to sudden outbursts of temper…” Hey, pal, how about you get bumped off in the third act of a five-act play, and we’ll see if that’s as you like it!

With “tents” in place of “houses,” the Daily News’ headline is the quote as it appears in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays, so I’m told. Often we see and hear it as “A pox” or “A curse,” and since I was dying while saying it, I suppose it could have been misunderstood. This winter I went to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles to verify it, but staff would not let me turn the page of their under-glass copy. My 1575 birth certificate is in Italian and so worn out, they couldn’t be certain of what’s my line.

And, yes, I do know that Ben Affleck is listed not as Mercutio, but as Neil Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love. Alleyn was the Globe Theater actor who first played me, so I “telescoped” them, a trick I gleaned from Marlowe’s–oops, I mean Shakespeare’s histories and which I taught Spike Lee when he directed Denzel in Malcolm X. There’s a hilarious exchange in Love between Shakespeare and Alleyn along with a producer played by Geoffrey Rush that you will find here, along with more pics if you care to click around:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138097/characters/nm0000255?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t38

My father was a life-long and long-suffering Red Sox fan, born too late for Babe Ruth and gone too soon for Big Papi.

Here’s hoping that in the great beyond he shares my enjoyment of four World Series championships and takes this year’s flop better than he did in 1999.

By now you might be wondering what that affable opening has to do with the ominous headline above.

The answer offers a surprising lesson I should have learned some fifteen years ago when fans at Fenway Park began chanting “Yankees Suck!”

At first, I thought it one-time idiocy, maybe a passing fad, surely something that any self-respecting sports franchise would nip in the bud.

Not so, and don’t you know it continues to this day when Red Sox fans outnumber hometown fans in Toronto, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, as far away as Denver and San Diego, and even Chicago’s south side.

As I told a student wearing the t-shirt—in private, after class—it “says nothing about the Yankees, but says something about you.  And it’s not flattering.”

A wiseass who related quite well to me and vice versa, he laughed as he walked away, chiding me for being a Yankee fan.

Didn’t know it at the time, but it was my introduction to what might be called “Either/Orism.”

Today we decry it as “polarization,” a word that, while true, misses process by focusing on result.

Regarding the 2020 elections, Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute warns that the Russian trolls’ process is already up and running to “secure the base… and divide the opposition.”

Yes, they are polarizing one of the poles.

That led me to question fellow members of “Berniecrats” about their declarations of “Bernie or Bust” and resolutions to write him in if he does not gain the Democratic nomination.

Make that former fellow Berniecrats, although Sanders still gets my primary vote.

Sanders has the most complete vision since FDR for bringing the middle-class back into economic successes increasingly reserved for the rich these past 40 years.

Projecting that vision abroad makes Sanders the best bet against totalitarian leaders who have thrived on having one in the White House.

Warren with detailed plans, including Inslee’s environmental proposals, comes close.  Yang’s plan to counter the influence of corporate money with “Democracy Dollars” may be the most visionary and incisive idea aimed at reconciling self-governance with free markets laid out since 1932, maybe since 1789. 

Others have ideas that shine, and all are free of a handicap that will sink Sanders as soon as the primaries begin, if it hasn’t already:

A base of supporters who have nothing but ridicule and contempt for the other candidates, save Warren and Gabbard.  Can you name any other of the 20+ candidates whose supporters vilify the others?

On social media it is so bad you’d think Biden and Buttigieg are reincarnations of Archie Bunker and Alfred E. Neuman.

Could Trump have plagiarized that last insult?  As Watts warns, the Russians have Americans doing their “hard work for them.”

Naively thinking I might reason with Berniecrats, I posted a question:

“Would you be willing to go before a group in Flint, Mich., or Parkland, Fla., and say that there’s no difference between the two parties?”

Two days, 140 responses, and 12 shares later, I was just thankful that most of the answers were a single, punctuated word:  “Yes!”

Only three answers mentioned the Republican run-government-like-a-business water crisis that still poisons the people of Flint, and just one mentioned the Republican thoughts-and-prayers answer to gun violence.

Might as well have tried to reason with Sox fans chanting “Yankees Suck,” and—as with those fans—I am stuck with the embarrassment of having anything in common with them.

My father surely never heard any such chant aimed at DiMaggio, Berra, or Mantle, but today’s Berniecrats would remind him of those—including his 17-year-old namesake—who saw no difference between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in 1968.

As he tried to tell me then, and as he occasionally reminded me to the end of the 20^th Century:  When belief is either/or, thought is neither/nor.

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John Francis Garvey, Sr. passed away 20 years ago this week at 79.  Junior is still kicking at hammlynn@gmail.com.

For more of Clint Watts’ analysis, see: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-kremlins-strategy-for-the-2020-us-election-secure-the-base-split-the-opposition

For more about the thinking, such as it is, of Berniecrats and related sites, you can view them on Facebook and other social media. If I had to pick a single post to sum them up, it would be one–like many others–that you might as well find on a pro-Trump site. Here it is:

Friendly reminder for everyone: Russiagate was fake and Obama was a traitor to the working class.

NPR headlines say that Mueller “spoke out” this morning.  I heard it all, and there was nothing “out” about it, no more than anything new. Of course, DT Trumpeted the single phrase “insufficient evidence”–and did it immediately, an Orwellian tactic that Barr used as soon as he received the full report–while pretending that all else is not there. Throughout, he sounded quite nervous, and he dodged questions by saying, in effect, that he had no further answers.

What about his own letter of complaint to Barr for misrepresenting–or at least oversimplifying? And what of DT’s claims that it’s full exoneration? The House Dems must make him answer at least that much.

After listening to it—as well as commentary—on radio, the impression is that Republicans have more reason to deny the treason, and turn the accusation against House investigations.

Then come the TV clips and coverage.  Did MSNBC’s Chuck Todd hear the same press conference I did?  He and the Democrats he interviewed think that Mueller was as damning as could be.  Listening to them makes me think impeachment is not just more probable, but inevitable.  Some key House Democrats who have been resisting the move to impeach are now saying that Mueller has left them no choice.

While everyone else speculates just when and how Speaker Pelosi will acknowledge that the Mueller report is “a referral” and meet the challenge, I’m caught in a time warp.  For starters, on radio Mueller sounded quite nervous, at times agitated.  On TV he appeared and sounded as calm and deliberate as his reputation.

There was another landmark event in American politics that I’m old enough to recall that gave radio listeners one impression and TV viewers one quite different.  I’m not saying that there’s an analogy to be drawn, but as was true in 1961 of positions taken by both Kennedy and Nixon, the public needs to learn all the details.

Those details are neither on radio nor on TV but, as Mueller emphasized more than once today, in his 400+ page report. The medium that matters most is print no matter how dismissively Republicans–including Mitch McConnell–continue to boast of not reading it.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This was an Associated Press Wirephoto following the first debate in Chicago, Sept. 26, 1960.