After 21 years as a projectionist at Newburyport’s small, 99-seat downtown cinema, it finally occurred to me that there was no reason why anyone should wait to use one restroom while the other was vacant.

If only they would remember to turn out the lights.

While the Screening Room’s two doors do not say “Men” and “Women,” they do show photographs of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Back in 1982 when the two founders moved into 82 State Street, they may have gained that idea from Plum Island’s Beachcoma where the doors say “Outboard” and “Inboard.”

Or, considering their connections to New York, from Rein’s Delicatessen where it’s “Manhattan” and “Queens”—but not until you have passed the sign for their shared corridor: “Flushing.”

For Screening Room patrons too young to recognize names from the Eisenhower years, Bogart is the one with the cigarette.

For those of you too young to remember cigarettes, never mind.  Better you don’t know.

That all of this hit me during a run of the feature film about Ruth Bader Ginsberg—not to be confused with the documentary, RBG, which we ran months earlier—was pure coincidence.

When I began telling audiences that the two rooms—both of them one-at-a-time—were no longer differentiated “on the basis of sex,” I claimed to have gained the idea from “a recent film you may have seen here”:

The Wife.

Worried that patrons might throw things at me, though I knew popcorn wouldn’t hurt, nevertheless, I persisted:

“We ask that, whichever room you use and regardless of which photograph you identify with, you leave the seat at a 45-degree angle.”

For the geometrically challenged, I made the angular motion with my hands, and I still don’t know whether to laugh or cry over a few who tapped into mobile phones to see what I meant.

One night, after a week of saying “Leave the seat at 45 degrees,” I paused, and my genuine wonder was aloud: “That is a headline waiting to happen!”

Whether they laughed at the joke or at me, I started asking audiences for help:

“If you know any good bathroom jokes, any good scatological humor, write your phone number on the back of a $20 bill and leave it on the counter as you leave.

“Put it on a $50 bill, and your anonymity will be granted.”

No one took me up on the offer, anonymous or not, but I gained a few  suggestions, including this:

The number 45 has taken on a meaning in recent years that lends itself to the need to flush.

Caught me off guard.  Why?  I have argued since the eve of his inauguration that Donald Trump is not the 45^th president of the United States, but the 2^nd president of the Confederate States.

Check the local paper’s archives:  From “Here’s to you, Jefferson Davis!” Jan. 19, 2017, to “Nativity of a Nation,” Feb. 20, 2019. (Links below.)

Admittedly no joke, but the number two—like volume two of the Mueller Report—conveys a far more immediate need to flush.

Before you dismiss this as idle whimsy or too much an incremental stretch of an excremental metaphor, please consider:

Was not the 2018 midterm election a flush of a Republican-dominated House for the sake of numerous issues, most notably access to health care?

Was not the 2016 presidential election, from primaries into general, a flush of establishment candidates in favor of fundamental change?

Indeed, you could make the case that in your lifetime—or mine, as post-menopausal as I am—most of our national elections have been a flush.  Or an attempt to flush.

We vote not so much for candidates as against them.

Such is the intensifying dilemma that Democrats now face:  Which candidate to choose, and if he or she drops out, as most necessarily will, what next?

As I tell patrons of the Screening Room, either door is open, either room will meet your need.

If one is occupied, use the other.  All that matters is that you relieve yourself, that you flush, that you wash your hands.

And that you turn out the lights.

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Photo is from the Screening Room’s website:

http://www.newburyportmovies.com/

And the two links cited above:

http://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/here-s-to-you-jefferson-davis/article_2e723870-a1c9-5b19-90eb-2a61d9af4ed3.html

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/garvey-s-view-nativity-of-a-nation/article_02104d1a-27ac-5ab7-8347-2b43ffc5e619.html

Anyone who ever saw Dead Poets Society will recall it, but if you are too young to remember such things as rotary phones and such folks as Buckminster Fuller, you may be surprised were you to see the trailer and the advertisements, TV and print, for the 1989 film.

Promoted as a nonstop virtuoso howl with comic genius Robin Williams at his wildest–and at the peak of his career–DPS turned out to be serious drama.   Yes, there were many laughs, but it was dead serious.  An inescapable tragedy.

Most loved it, were moved by it, and Williams–whose reputation as a tour-de-force comedian obscured his considerable gift for serious drama–was superb.

Still, some viewers felt cheated.

Maybe this was Attorney General Barr’s ploy yesterday.  Difference is that he knows that Trump’s base will not read the report, and so will not feel cheated.  It’s as if the promos are the show, and the show itself is a spoiler not to be considered, much less tolerated.  Those who do feel cheated can be dismissed as sore losers, sour grapes, whiners.

For DPS, the publicists were looking to gain attention. They promised laughter, they added tears. Trump’s publicist is looking to deflect attention. He knows no laughter and denies all tears.

A disappointed movie-goer may have complained of “bait and switch” in 1989. Today, Buckminster Fuller would tell us that the bait is the switch.

With a whitewash so reassuring, why deal with tragedy?

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https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller

In an odd but favorable way, all the hype over South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is ironic. What makes him so immediately appealing is that he himself has no hype, no hyperventilation.

None. So noticeable in its absence is it that one caller to an NPR talk show called him “soothing.”

You can’t say that about any other candidate this year.  Or in 2016.  Or 2012.  Or 2008. As far as I can tell, which is as far back as the Eisenhower years, the only other presidential candidate who fit that description was Bill Bradley in 2000.  Maybe Walter Mondale in the Year of Orwell.

Come to think of it, the last presidential candidate, successful or not, to be called “soothing” was “I-Like-Ike” Eisenhower, which is why so many older Americans now long for him.

Judging–or Buttigieging if I may slip in a tip for a pronunciation–from the early response to Mayor Pete, next year’s version of MAGA may be MACA: Make America Calm Again.

Didn’t work for Mondale or Bradley, but neither of them were following a few years of DTs (as in delirium tremens), so, yes, 2020 vision could be direct from City Hall to White House.

Some trivia:  We’ve had three presidents who had been mayors, but none who went directly from that office to the presidency:  Andrew Johnson (Greeneville, Tenn.), Grover Cleveland (Buffalo), and Calvin Coolidge (Northampton, Mass.)

The large and still growing Democratic field has two other former mayors who would fit that category:  Julian Castro (San Antonio) and, yes, Bernie Sanders (Burlington).

But let’s get back to irony:  When he was 18, which was 19 years ago, Buttigieg won an essay-contest titled “Profiles in Courage.”  The courage he chose to profile?  A then-59-year-old US Senator and former eight-year mayor whose bumper stickers and signs have been on a first name basis since the 1980s: Bernie!

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Second thing to notice is that pro-Trump memes are based on the premise that Barr’s four-page summary is, in effect, the full Mueller Report.

First thing is that most all pro-Trumpism is expressed in memes, no thought required, just copy & paste.  Or hit “share” and let some algorithm do the rest.

Reversing the order of things makes the root more apparent.  Robert Kennedy once hailed American youth for preferring “an appetite for adventure over the love of ease.” That, more than anything, is what America has reversed.

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We need no Mueller Report to tell us that it was done by memes on social media.

We may ask who, with whom, how, and why, but it’s time we stepped away from content and looked at method.

Count me among those who believe that Russia’s intent in disrupting elections in America and the European Union has been to create chaos in western democracies, confusion among allies, distrust in institutions, and cynicism toward each other.

And then present themselves to nations across Asia, Africa, South and Central America as a more dependable partner in trade and anything else to aid development.

So successful have they been with Donald Trump, Brexit, and a weakened NATO alliance, they are now contradicting their earlier work to create more chaos and confusion.

Ideology?  Irrelevant.

As always, the intent is to deepen the wedge already driven into us. Consider the new meme that appeared a day after Attorney General Barr’s initial four-page “summary” of the Mueller Report:

In it we have two pictures of Nancy Pelosi.  First caption reads: “Democrats 2017: Republicans must accept Meuller’s (sic) findings!”  Second: “Democrats 2019: We do not accept Meuller’s (again) findings!”

The typos should be a giveaway, as they are on those e-mails from unknown sources looking for donations or investments with a promise of lucrative return.

Put that aside, and consider the claim. Is there any literate person with an IQ higher than that of a lug nut who doesn’t understand that the Democrats are demanding to know Mueller’s findings?

This was Barr’s ploy. No matter that he later backed off his brief summation, he gave Trump and Trump supporters a pretext by which to claim that the entire Mueller Report is full exoneration.

We always say that repetition makes a lie seem true, but we overlook the historical evidence that merely by establishing a lie first, Team Trump can make any subsequent contradiction or complaint seem like whining, sour grapes, calls for do-overs, all from sore losers.

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and Roy Cohn, a sidekick to the infamous Sen. Joe McCarthy (as in “McCarthyism”) and once a mentor to a young Donald Trump in NYC, both said it.

And it’s the premise behind the meme’s content that Pelosi is now “contradicting” herself.

With a falsehood so transparent, and a pair of typos as glaring as a pinball machine, this one should awaken us to the method:

Make Trump supporters look flat out stupid.

Most likely it’s the Russians counting on enough of Trump’s base to fall for it, and then engage the rest of us into time-wasting arguments.  That’s the wedge.

Or it could be wiseass liberals creating these memes and tossing them out as bait for Trumpers to make fools of themselves.

Or it could be that 400-lb. guy on the couch just looking to amuse himself.

Whatever it is, we keep saying that we have to respect and listen to “the other side.” Time is past due to accept that the other side has nothing but contempt for truth and reason, for science and history—and in this case for language, regardless of their gung-ho calls for “English only!”

Consider the nonsense that has filled their airwaves, newsfeeds, and, at times, White House tweets:  Climate change is a hoax, 9/11 was an inside job, Obama was born in Kenya, the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, ditto the moon landing, vaccines are a big government conspiracy, and on and on and more on and moron.

It’s a method described in both Brave New World and 1984.  To sum it up in Orwell’s words, “paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms.”

What to do?

On the post I saw, another friend immediately added a simple comment:  “But they (Democrats) are asking to see the report.”

That’s all that’s needed.  As we learned in John Kerry’s loss in 2004, it cannot go unanswered, but anything beyond the answer is a waste of time—and a victory for those aiming to do nothing other than waste our time.

Better that we direct all efforts towards those still watching, listening, reading, and with attention spans.

We can’t lose with content, but we must redirect our method.

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Does it surprise you that, following the 2018 Election when Republicans tried desperately to cast themselves as protectors as much as Democrats of most provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the Trump Administration this week has moved to cut the whole thing?

Or that it would be part of the retaliation against anyone unwilling to accept an absurdly simple summary and still calling for the release of the full Mueller Report?

What if all this scorched earth malice is intended to have Courts or Congress eventually remove him from office?

He would immediately become martyr/hero/leader to a sizable base. We might say he already is two of those, and soon following his Attorney General’s whitewash of the Mueller Report, he was hinting at the martyr role. When he told Fox News, “No president should have to go through this… what happened to me,” you could hear the echo of his repeated claims of a rigged election, you know, the one he expected to lose to Hillary Clinton.

I honestly thought (and I wasn’t alone) that his whole candidacy wasn’t aimed at gaining the White House but at launching a TV cable station–even wrote a column on that premise that I, in a prearrangement with my editor, had scheduled for two days after the election.

That gave us time to avoid a repeat of “Dewey defeats Truman,” and it’s the only column I’ve had to kill in 36 years. Maybe I wasn’t entirely wrong. He won unexpectedly (had no speech prepared as Michael Moore and others like to point out), and so now he’s using the presidency just as he used the campaign: To launch TrumpTV.

Fox has proven that round-the-clock hate sells, and he has proven he can do it so much better. He’s already the hero, the leader, but the show needs a martyr.

Earlier tonight, my friend Leon suggested “Malice toward all, Charity toward none” should be the motto of a Trump Doctrine–a post which has prompted this blog. And wouldn’t that be ideal for a cable TV venture looking to join the ranks of Fox News, Infowars, Breitbart, et. al.

For a detailed consideration of how that might look, imagine yourself waking up on the morning of November 9, 2016, to the expected news that Hillary Clinton had been elected the 45th president of the USA. You turn to the Opinion page of your morning newspaper and find this:

Tuning into TrumpTV

Think he lost?

Think again.

Never a serious presidential bid, the Trump campaign, like Trump Airlines, Trump University, and countless Trump bankruptcies and litigations, was a scam from the moment The Donald played Deus ex Machina on that de-escalator back in June, 2015.

With no more effort than it takes to sneer “Build that Wall,” he rode a tidal wave of free publicity granted a celebrity status that the other 16 Republican contenders combined thrice over could not match.

In truth, the nomination was not a step to the White House, but a renewal of the show.

Three more months of non-stop air time.

Campaign?  More like a pilot program aired on every news outlet, always appealing to our worst instincts—cynicism, smarm, intolerance, anger, fear, paranoia, bigotry, selfishness, conspicuous consumption.

Obama missed the point.  Trump didn’t turn reality TV loose onto politics.  He turned politics into reality TV.

We liberals missed the point criticizing his “supporters” for cheering threats of violence at his rallies.

Supporters?  More like a rapt viewership—with “I’ll pay the legal fees” as much a part of the show as ridiculing a handicapped reporter.

After all, humiliation is what drives the ratings of reality TV—that, plus the fact that it is anything but “real.”

Not to say that most Americans derive pleasure in seeing anyone confronted with “You’re fired,” but as vulture capitalist Mitt Romney unwittingly revealed four years ago, the percentage is high.

With over half the vote in Republican primaries, Trump would have a hard core of 30% of Tuesday’s vote no matter how many bankruptcies he filed or how many women he defiled.

No matter how many POWs or Gold Star parents he insulted.

No matter if, in his own words, he went into “the middle of 5^th Avenue (to) shoot somebody…”

That 30% will never win an election, but it will sure sustain a television network.

In the final debate, moderator Chris Wallace gave him every opportunity to retract his pre-emptive whining about a rigged election and apologize for crude, sexist comments on an eleven-year-old tape.

His opponent—now President-Elect Wall Street—was so deplorable, that “undecideds” were still looking for reasons to vote for Trump.

He had a chance to climb from 30% toward Romney’s 47%, and then anything could happen.

But he wasn’t looking for votes.  Any hint of backing down would disappoint his core audience, weaken the show, damage the brand.

What we have just witnessed was a year-and-a-half long launch of a television network.

LCDTV would be a precise, honest name for it, but he’ll name it just as he has all else:  TrumpTV.

Silver lining?  It will suffocate Fox Noise without so much as a thank you for paving the way.

Fox outfoxed?  It at least puts up a pretense of reporting news.

TrumpTV will make no such pretense.

There will be no credible journalist to offset Fox’s Wallace.

Closest it will come to Megyn Kelly will be Trump’s fellow reality TV veteran, Sarah Palin.  Hype outsells reason.  Just ask Madison Avenue.

Wife Melania will host occasional features, ranging from heartfelt fare such as “What Michelle Said” to spoofs such as “Porn Again Christian.”

Newt will out-factor O’Reilly.

Apart from crass sentiment, sexual titillation—such as reality TV-styled beauty pageants—and “extreme sports,” TrumpTV will, like his faux-campaign, trash both parties.

Such was the bottom line lesson of Election 2016:

When Jeb Bush talked foreign policy or John Kasich offered an economic plan, the audience yawned and clicked their remotes.

Ratings are for celebrities.

President-Elect Wall Street had the same advantage over Bernie Sanders until the cameras could no longer resist his large crowds.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, her hidden agenda started leaking after they willfully ignored it—preferring, instead, to bask in the glow of her historic bid:

The first Street to become President of the United States.

Trump a loser?

Given all of Street’s baggage, the slow-drip leaks of “coincidences” between her decisions as Secretary of State and donations to her foundation—including many from foreign governments—will serve up four years of free fodder for TrumpTV.

By the only two measures that matter in 21st Century America—money and publicity—Trump didn’t just win.

He hit the jackpot.

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The photo, considered among the most iconic in American history, is from the National Archives and Records Administration.