As a reason to deny statehood for Washington, DC, a Republican congressman argues that the District has no car dealerships.
Most Americans do not know that General Motors was founded by George Washington years before he captured British Airports here in the Colonies and renamed them for his fellow generals, Pontiac LaGuardia, Cadillac JFK, and Buick Logan. Indeed, it was a fleet of Oldsmobiles that made each seizure possible.
Moreover, Chevrolets were counted on to deliver the Sharpies used to redirect hurricanes away from our vulnerable coasts into the middle of paper maps where they could do little damage. GMC trucks came to the rescue of hard-working, tax-paying families from neighborhoods where new windmills were starting to propel the spread of cancer.
This is why the founders included car dealerships as a condition of statehood.
They also reasoned that a state must itself produce the materials that make cars, which is why the Republicans are also citing DC’s lack of mines. This, in turn, explains why the six New England states have just one Republican senator, but it leaves us wondering how they (we) became states in the first place.
To cite the most quoted and trusted source of Fox News, some people say that whole clauses of our Constitution have been erased and deleted over the years by liberals who want to turn America into some kind of socialist Scandinavian scam rather than the Jim Crow Reality Show the founders intended with their 3/5ths rule, the Electoral College, and the minority rule allowed by the composition of the US Senate.
Not only was there a right to bear arms, but a right to put bare arms on armrests, a clear indication that cars are essential to statehood.
This cancel culture also attacked free enterprise. For instance, the well-known Fifties’ slogan, “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” originally called for us to “Save the USA,” but liberals made the change so that “normal Americans,” as Republicans are now calling those who vote for them, don’t think we have to do anything.
Oldsmobiles may have been cancelled, but the rest of the GM fleet is going strong, including at least one of several dealerships within the city limits of, um, ah, what!, are-you-sure?, can-it-be?, ooops-yes-it-is:
Washington DC!
Which raises two questions, one them obvious: Was the Republican congressman too lazy to check his idiot claim, is he simply an idiot, or was he lying outright?
The other question would be obvious if not for the Jim Crow Reality Show that few of us want to admit is being staged before our very eyes: Is this nonsense intended as nonsense? Republicans cannot reason with facts because there are none that justify suppressing minority votes–which is as much the motivation for denial of DC statehood as for all the draconian measures just signed into state law by the governor of Georgia, with Iowa, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and others soon to follow suit.
The answer is yes. How else to explain the mockery they make of DC statehood–just as they made of the Coronavirus, with the Affordable Care Act, and with plenty in between–including two appointments to the Supreme Court. Their hope is not that anyone believe them, but that enough of us accept the nonsense as an excuse not to act, and perhaps enough of us laugh and refuse to take it seriously, leaving their minority in control.
Now that the presidential election is behind us, they may get their way. All it will take is for enough of us who thought we just saved the USA to be now content to merely see it. Jim Crow is already asking us to call.
If March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, spring’s first day is a loon whose call announces the change of costume.
Here on Plum Island it is easy to miss a call that blends so easily into the squawks of duck and geese or can be lost in the cackles of gulls. Like an aging lion, I lumber out my door with a down vest rather than a burly coat–but with a thick sweatshirt over the shirts beneath.
This week, by the time I’ve walked a quarter mile on my 2.5 mi. round-trip, that’s too much. As a result, I’m already adept at taking one arm out of the vest and sweatshirt, stuffing my hat and shades into a vest pocket, pulling the sweatshirt over my head, getting the free arm back into the vest, which I then take off the other arm, which I then remove from the sweatshirt before putting it back into the vest, after which the hat and shades go back on my head. All without breaking stride.
Reminds me of a companion in a previous life who could reach into the sides of her sleeveless blouse and, with a snap or two, a few shakes, and a juggle or two, take her hand back out brandishing a bra she would then stuff with no little emphasis in her straw handbag. “Hell with that!” she would curse, all of it without breaking stride.
Tempting to say that her deft maneuver inspired mine years later, but at the time it inspired something else entirely. That was back when I put the “cad” in decadent, but I’m way past that now, having just hit 70. Meet the new decade. Same as the old decade. Am I still decadent? Or do I now just put a dent in it?
Maybe that’s why I’m not so contemptuous of my overshirt as she was of her underwire. Rather than a curse and a shove, I simply ditch it behind some shrubs along the reserve road, a trick I learned reading about Lewis & Clark and other western expeditions stashing their caches along the Missouri and elsewhere, things they would not need until the return trip.
Today I sat so long on the bench at my turn-around point that I wondered if I was risking too much time for the shirt to be seen and taken. My only precaution is that I always wear my forest green shirt so it will be less noticeable. As I enjoyed conversations with Alan who often rolls by–“You bring your own seat so it’s easier to social-distance!” I kid him–and Pat, who called me “a baby” when I said I just turned 70, I reassured myself that I have three other sweatshirts.
About four years ago, I swore I would never tell my doctor that I took those breaks. But last month I admitted it, only to troll for a cheap laugh, asking if it would de-feet the purpose. Though I was blunt with the pronunciation, he ignored the pun. “Oh, no, that’s fine! Enough that you go a mile at a time. You do it twice! That’s great!” So tempting to take that as an excuse to cut my distance in half, but then I would miss the bench.
Back home, I have my standard light lunch of a banana, a honey crisp apple, a couple handfuls of almonds, and a few bites of Muenster cheese before setting a chair outside and spending another two or more hours overlooking the marsh, much the same view I had on the bench 1.25 miles to the south. Today it began with a French press of Kenyan, roasted March 8–according to the package which specifies the Nyeri region at an elevation of 1700 meters, or about two football fields short of Mt. Washington–and sent to me for my birthday, whole bean to grind right here.
No wonder I’m so high at sea level!
Also began with the new issue of Harper’s essay headlined “The Business of Scenery.” Though it is about the larger National Parks–Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Zion–I saw it on a small-scale on the road just below me. First day of spring, and already there are lines waiting their turn to enter the gate of the Wildlife Reserve less than a football field away. Should I ponder the word “idle” or is that an idle thought? A conservative estimate would be that four of every five vehicles are SUVs looking, as the National Park Service once urged, to “find your park.”
Harper’s essay points out that the NPS has been far more committed to recreational use than to preservation over the years, and that, under the administration of a failed real estate agent, it was more willing to accommodate developers than migratory paths, to sell it off than to set it aside. With a newly confirmed Native American as Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, this should change, though one wonders about the resentment and resistance it will meet. For now, it is not “find your park” but “find your place to park.”
Now that I’m in de facto retirement, this promises to be how every fair-weather day will go for me. When it’s hotter, I’ll walk the beach barefoot at low-tide, and on some days, I’ll walk the flat, firm sand going south and then cross to the road so I can enjoy a bench before returning north. I’ll be sitting out later each day, sipping coffee or quaffing ale, writing this or reading that.
And I’ll have an eye on both the scenery and the business of it, observations that will no doubt find their way into this Mouth of the River blog here at the mouth of the Merrimack River.
This photo was taken by Robin Lubbock/of WBUR in August, 2018. Facing south, it shows the southern end of the inhabited section of Plum Island, where a rock barrier was constructed, starting in 2013, between many of the houses and the ocean. My place is about where the last visible structure sits along the marsh, the tip seeming to touch the channel. That pile of rocks on the surf is called a “groin” (of all the words they could come up with), a formation intended to keep the sand in place. The island has three more going north–five if you count the much larger jetty at the mouth of the river. The horizon in the background of this photo is my view from both the bench in the reserve and from my home.
Primavera (Spring) by Sandro Botticelli circa 1480.
My ge-ge-generation has been so rife with half-century celebrations these past few years that we may well deserve the ridicule of “Okay Boomer!”
Thankfully, no one dismissed the recent 50th anniversaries of events still felt by all generations–the assassinations of ’68, the Moon landing of ’69, and Vietnam throughout the entire decade.
But we were the ones twisting and shouting for the Fab Four’s debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in February, 1964. On one night, what we thought of as “counterculture” shifted from the Beats to the Beatles.
In the Fifties, they “saw the best minds of (their) generation destroyed by madness.” In the Sixties, we figured “We can work it out.”
Boomer culture peaked at Woodstock, an anniversary well-noted less than two years ago, and our politics climaxed with the Mayday demonstrations, an anniversary less than two months away. As I write, The Trial of the Chicago 7, the high point of the antiwar movement, is nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture.
So much for what you already know. Time to dive deep below the surface: Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the release of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung.
Tull’s fourth studio album was not the most influential album of the era, or even of the “prog-rock” genre. For that, you can find chapters of books that make a convincing case for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and other candidates, including a surprising claim for Carole King’s Tapestry.
Nor would Tull’s first “concept album”–as much as frontman Ian Anderson denies the term–be the most innovative, following as it does The Who’s rock-opera, Tommy, by two years–though it did precede The Who’s startling use of synthesizers in Who’s Next in October, 1971.
About mid-way into those seven months, I caught the Aqualung tour at the Hampton Beach Casino on New Hampshire’s coast, an open air venue with a refreshing sea breeze countering the hot summer night. Opening the show was an as-yet unheard of band named Yes that everyone liked enough to call for an encore–something that, as far as I know, never happened at a Tull concert again until 2010 when they toured with Procol Harum.
With no fanfare other than the gradual killing of the lights, Anderson took the stage with a wooden stool and an acoustic guitar, strumming and singing the opening notes of “My God” until the band kicked in full force behind him and he kicked the stool to the side. It was all theatrics after that–the one-legged stand, the kicks, the flute-as-baton–and all of us left, in the vernacular of the day, “blown away.”
What we didn’t know was that, after the place was full and the doors were closed, about two thousand people outside rioted to gain entry. We heard none of it, nor was there any sign of it after the last notes of “Locomotive Breath” which would remain their encore for another 45 years. All we knew was that the Casino was closed to rock-and-roll concerts. It would not re-open to rockers for five years.
“Blown away” was a mild term to describe the show’s impact on me. I had never picked up a musical instrument, so there was nothing that I wanted to emulate, as sensational as it was. Rather, it was the character sketches (“Aqualung” and “Cross-Eyed Mary”) in scenes both all-too-real, whimsical (“Mother Goose” and “Cheap Day Return”) and dreamy (“Wond’ring Aloud” and “Slipstream”) with laughter as a musical instrument (“Up to Me”) mixed with defiance (“Hymn 43” and “Locomotive Breath”) laced with a commentary on, of all things, the distinction between God and organized religion (“Wind Up” and “My God”).
That included the connection between organized religion and war, most directly in a blood-in-the-face track curiously titled “Hymn 43” which begins:
Our Father high in heaven, smile down upon your son Who’s busy with his money games – his women and his gun Oh Jesus save me!
Wasn’t until 35 years later I realized that the number 43 would not have been pulled from a hat, and given the album’s religious themes and cover art, including the fonts, I might find it in the Bible. Proverbs do not reach 43, so I went to Psalms and found this:
Vindicate me, O God, And plead my cause against an ungodly nation; Oh, deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man!
By that time I was already calling George Bernard Shaw’s 1916 play, Major Barbara, the first draft of the “military-industrial-complex” passage in President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address. Turns out that my 45-year connection falls well within the dots of Psalm 43 and “Hymn 43.”
But that gets way ahead of myself in 1971 when, just a month after the concert, I told a friend, quite capable on both piano and guitar, of this showman flautist and the onstage excitement of the Aqualung concert. By the time we had roomed together for a college semester, he was a flautist, and I was someone who had little to do at jam sessions–until someone showed up with a soprano recorder.
Call it a gateway drug. Through the mid-70s I was often a vagabond, living for a week or two at a time in places like Nelson, British Columbia, or Mt. Angel, Oregon, wherever my thumb took me that might have a harvest I could join upon arrival. Or a job of which the next driver might know, such as the one in a Salem, Oregon, day-care center where the older boys needed a male role model, i.e. someone who could take them outside and throw a football in a spiral.
You meet a lot of musicians this way, you jam with them, and you hear their stories. While the guitar was always the foremost instrument of choice, followed by fiddles and banjos, flutes and penny-whistles were never lacking. While that didn’t surprise me, I was amazed at how many wind-players said they picked up the instrument after hearing Jethro Tull. Not most of them. All of them.
One that I did not meet on the road was Tony Snow who would become George W. Bush’s press secretary in 2006 only to resign in 2007 due to a battle with cancer that he lost a year later at age 53. Though a conservative, Snow was a happy-go-lucky guy who would play Tull’s “Bouree” at press club conventions–not just the part Bach wrote, but Anderson’s jazz improv that went with it.
Never knew whether to be amused or embarrassed by a Bush staffer being a fellow Tull Skull. The point is that we are so many and so varied, much like the Dead Heads, who may outnumber us here in the USA but whose loyalty over the years we have matched. Who holds the record for the most concerts (14) by any artist in the old and hallowed Boston Garden? Grateful Dead? Wrong! Jethro Tull!
Which brings us to the nagging question: Why is Jethro Tull not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
In 2008, I put that question right to the top. Early that year, I visited the Rock Hall and thought to write a newspaper column about it. Occurred to me that I might use my press affiliation as an excuse to email the Hall’s president. Out of habit, I added my phone number at the end of it. Two hours later he was in my ear.
May have taken longer than that to get him out of my ear. You’ve heard the expression, “can’t get a word in edgewise”? I couldn’t get a word in sledge-hammerwise.
After profuse thanks for the fact that I was going to write a “mostly” positive piece, he launched into “the Tull question”–a phrase that tells you it’s a sore point among the folks in Cleveland. He laid down the three criteria for induction: 1) a following, not necessarily a commercial sensation, but devoted fans around the world; 2) innovation; 3) influence.
He readily admitted that Tull met the first two without awaiting my agreement before harping on the third. To sum it up: What other band has ever replicated Tull’s instrumentation? Other than a “Stairway to Heaven” here or a “White Bird” there, who else has made a flute so prominent?
I tried pointing out that this should be considered a consequence of outdoing themselves as innovators. Something so innovative, that no one attempted it other than the song here or there. There was also the innovation of Thick as a Brick, a single 44-minute song, in effect, the first rock symphony, also never attempted except by Tull themselves a year later with A Passion Play that added saxophone to the prog-rock repertoire.
Before I could hint at Springsteen’s E Street Band–a stretch, I know–he sympathized with me, only to say, “but for now, that’s the way it is.”
Wish I knew then what I learned when finishing the column. Occurred to me to compare what he said to the Hall’s own description of an inducted group that might be compared to Tull. For a group that hit the scene about when Tull did, I chose The Kinks for their satire and social commentary. Opening line in the Hall’s profile: “For their longevity alone, The Kinks belong in the Rock Hall.”
The Kinks disbanded in 1997. Tull toured until 2017.
I added that bit of info when I sent him a link to the column weeks later. Ignoring my implied jab, he sent back a quick thanks and, told me that, next time I’m through Ohio, a visit to the Hall was on him. Only now, while writing this, do I learn that the Kink’s profile has been shortened and no longer includes that line. Did I do that?
Listening between the lines, I felt bad for the Rock Hall president. I was convinced he agreed with me, but due to his job was obligated to defend the indefensible. The non-stop talk and repetition was not to inform but to deflect and wear down–as anyone who paid attention to America’s political scene between Jan. 20, 2017, and this past Jan. 20 knows all too well. Moreover, most every Tull fan knows that Anderson had at least one bitter battle with Jan Wenner of Rolling Stone, a Hall founder, also that Anderson has a seemingly uncontrolled knack for wisecracks taken as insults. Audiences reveled in his introductions of “the band that put the electric guitar back in its place,” but the claim, taken literally, could not have helped Tull gain admission into a building shaped like an electric guitar.
For all that, Hall honchos can’t offer “we don’t like the guy” as a reason not to honor the band as they do ABBA and the Dave Clark Five. Seriously? Seriously. So they grasp at a straw. In this case, the band’s very uniqueness is held against them.
None of that made my column. It was enough for me to gloat that, at the end of my visit in Cleveland, “Aqualung” boomed over the gift shop where I found most all of Tull’s albums for sale in the CD racks.
Ironically, the opening, title track, “Aqualung,” has no flute in it. Yet more ironically, it does feature what guitar trade magazine polls always rank as one of the 25 greatest guitar solos of all time. In a legend tailored for a Hall of Fame, Tull shared a recording studio with Led Zeppelin, and guitarist Martin Barre was good friends with Led lead Jimmy Page. When he told Page about the solo and the session for the title track, Page let himself into the control room to cheer Barre on. Whether Barre’s incentive was the cheering or a friendly rivalry, it was done on one take.
Another claim to fame that the Hall can in no way deny is the title track’s iconic six-note opening. As a rock opening, it ranks with the single chord that jumpstarts The Beatle’s “Hard Day’s Night.” As an announcement, it is to rock and roll what the four-note “knock of opportunity” opening of Beethoven’s Fifth is to classical.
Given the album’s main theme, the six-notes that Tull Skulls can’t help but hear whenever someone begins a sentence with “Sitting on a….” are more like hard-knocks of opportunity. Hard to believe now, but in 1971, homelessness was off the radar of mainstream news. And it was just beginning to emerge when Tull returned to it in 1995 in a track titled “Beside Myself” on their Roots to Branches album. Similarly, their 1970s albums, Storm Watch and Heavy Horses, predicted environmental and agricultural issues that inform Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and Greta Thunberg’s “Person of the Year” thirty and forty years later, respectively.
Anderson, who in an interview published just days ago continues to scoff at the idea of Aqualung as a concept album, may not want to hear that it is, in fact, the mother of a string of Tull concept albums that have addressed issues that now fill the agendas of United Nations committees and the line items of international accords.
The album’s relevance was never more apparent than in 2004 following the re-election of George Bush as the wars in the Middle East were in full flame. When a radio station suggested a 35th anniversary re-do of the album, Tull included all eleven songs on its tour. Safely back in the Hampton Beach Casino, much of it seemed intended for the ears of Bush and British PM Tony Blair. Those there for “just” the music were delighted by the sultry accordion-bass-flute-percussion riff added to “Mother Goose,” the wild, bouncing Celtic rendition of “Hymn 43,” and the amplified laughing dance of “Up to Me.”
Let him hide behind the entertainment ruse, and never mind the Rock Hall’s thick brick in their wall of denial. Enshrined or not, liked or not, wanted or not, Aqualung will always have a prominent place in the music and culture of those who, through no fault of our own, have “no way to slow down.”
Even as, in these twilight years, we “start away uneasy, taking time, the only way” we know.
Can’t help but notice that my birthday gifts and greetings are arriving early this year, and can’t help but wonder if friends and family are thinking I might not make it to the day and want to make sure I know they were thinking of me before I stop wondering or thinking at all.
What are they thinking? I’m still in my Sixties.
Because I was born the day after a holiday–or at least one celebrated by my father’s family and a huge chunk of New England–I’ve received greetings a day early all my life. Several of my cousins treat it as a two-day event and send a St. Patrick’s Day card with “and Happy Birthday” scribbled onto it. All but two are younger than I, and those two too young to remember that, had I been born a day sooner, my name would be Patrick–or Patricia, since those were the days when no-one knew what was coming down the pike until you rolled off the exit.
“Pat” would have been fine by me so long as my parents were not overcome by a devilish turn to make my middle name Irwin or Itzhak, as fine as those names are. Then again, I might yet enjoy a devilish combination of Ned Francis instead of John Francis to go with my surname.
Initials aside, when anyone asks for my birthday, I tell them I was born on “Hangover Day,” one of the few alcoholic/ethnic jokes you can get away with because the only people who would be offended by it wouldn’t get it. And I have stacks of dual-purpose cards sent over the years wishing me such things as “a Hoppy St. Patty’s” and “a Sudsational Birthday!” For me, the term “green card” has a very different meaning than for everyone else.
This year’s early returns are showing more variety. On one day, I opened the first envelope to Monet’s Impression, Rising Sun, a sensuous, subtle riot of red and gray shades that I could live and die in. Before I could do either, I opened the second to an old cartoon mouse limping along in his pj’s. Imagine scrolling down a restaurant menu and seeing “Lobster Newberg” followed immediately by “Baloney Sandwich” and you’ll have an idea of my LOL reaction aside my mailbox that afternoon.
This is not to slight the baloney card. Not at all, as it has given me the best laugh to date. On the outside, the mouse saying “Ouch! My back!” “Ouch! My shoulder!” “Ouch! My knee!” etc. etc. Inside: “Another Birthday? We feel your pain.” Cute, but the real punchline was what they (likely she who will hit 70 in December) added: “Happy 70th! (Or is that an oxymoron?)”
No, it’s not an oxymoron, but I’d just as soon not rush it. Then again, I did nothing to stop two Newburyport friends from talking me into an early birthday treat of fried clams, onion rings, and Guinness Stout at the Starboard Galley last week. He’s one of those friends I’ve kept reminding that I’m still in my Sixties, but she has another five weeks to go, so I pretended to be polite and did not rub it in.
Once back home, that mailbox opened up to two too-good-to-be-true 3/4 lb. bags of whole bean coffee, one from Honduras, the other from Kenya. No baloney there! My friend’s note said only “Happy 70th,” but it could keep me awake well into my Eighties–as I begin to savor it while still in my Sixties.
Now that we are safely a full week into the month of March, I have a confession:
Long ago I resolved that if I heard anyone say “the days are getting longer” before the end of February, I would sucker punch, deck, pounce on, and continue to pummel him or her until he or she or anyone else could stop me. Or until I became hungry and went to make a sandwich.
Every New Year’s since, it has been added to all my usual, obligatory, laughable resolutions–losing weight, exercising more, learning German, reading War & Peace, trying to reason with people who fall for simple-minded crap like “Make America great again” and “cancel culture”–that disappear as soon as the next morning’s hangover wears off.
Maybe I’m guilty of selective hearing–as many ex-girlfriends, employers, co-workers, neighbors, students, editors, readers, musicians, artistic directors, a few cousins, two of my parole officers, and at least one state representative have claimed–but it remains a punch I’ve never had occasion to throw.
To be honest, I’m glad I’ve never had to follow through and hit or hurt anyone, especially myself. Still, I remained resolved. Until now.
In addition to punishing someone for stating the painfully, aggravatingly obvious, I had an ulterior motive: To be taken to court where my defense would be that I was doing the world a favor by punishing someone for stating something painfully, aggravatingly, maddeningly, intolerably, unforgivably, excruciatingly, gratingly, insipidly, agonizingly, and so on and so forth obvious.
Yes, I’m fully aware that small talk is the lubricant for big talk, the first gear that takes us to the full throttle of thought and action. James Madison, for instance, would have never written the First Amendment had he not first said “Hello Tom!” and “What’s up, Alex?” to his collaborators and asked about Jefferson’s inventions and crops, Hamilton’s Broadway blockbuster and bad luck with a pistol.
And then there is the First Amendment itself which guarantees everyone’s right to say something stupid. After two books, 500 newspaper columns, and 200 blogs, I’ve had way more of my share of 1A protection for stupidity alone.
For example, I have claimed that the nearest state highway to Plum Island is numbered 1A because I live here. Now, I’m old, but not that old, so the claim is as stupid as it is false. The point is that I can say it on the chance someone might laugh.
Worst that can happen is that they’ll roll their eyes–like when I say that my street, Jackson Way, is named for me but will be changed, thanks to the November election, to Tubman Way. Not true, but there’s some truth to it, so it is worth a laugh and not just an eye-roll.
That was the problem with watching someone look out a window on Groundhog Day or Valentine’s Day and announce, “Oh, look, the days are getting longer!” as if its a miracle on par with a Massachusetts driver using a directional signal. No only is there no laughter, but it forces agreement. Don’t know about you, but I have a hard time saying yes while rolling my eyes. Like taking a turn with my knees on the bottom of the steering wheel while eating a burrito and drinking a beer. What directional signal?
But I relent! No more does anyone have anything to fear from me if he or she remarks aloud on a February sunset as if it’s the second coming of Benjamin Franklin. In fact, I’m joining the ranks of those who state the obvious. Not only that, but I want to recruit you–yes, you with the two eyes and one nose!–to do the same.
This is something that the November election actually did change, and its aftermath has made that more and more, well, obvious. To wit: The denial that Biden won, the denial that it was a fair and clean election, the denial that the pandemic exists or that masks and distancing are necessary, the denial that the rioters were, in fact, Trump supporters, followed by the downplaying of it as not all that serious an event by Republican senators no more honest than emails from Nigeria or robocalls from the FBI and IRS.
No telling what it will take to counter all that, but it appears that the only way to begin is to state the obvious.
So I’m sorry for ever having thought that I might jump someone for such an innocent observation. With luck and pluck, I now resolve to redeem my repentant self by reiterating repeatedly, relentlessly, redundantly, and, most satisfyingly of all, obnoxiously the obvious to the obtuse, the oblivious, and the uber-observant.
Well, it’s been a quiet winter on Plum Island, my retreat from the mania of the mainland where all the Port’s coffee shops are being evicted by landlords hungry for higher rent paid by yet more chain restaurants and jewelry stores.
Only a matter of time before downtown has a second Starbucks—or will it be “a” Peet’s?
And where planners are putting traffic lights on a traffic circle, which is about as sensible as putting a cross-walk on an interstate highway.
Like interstates, albeit slower, rotaries exist for the sake of continuous motion. That’s why interstates have ramps at slight angles that go some distance before a driver sees a stop sign.
Once upon common sense, that logic applied to the exits off of rotaries. A traffic light as close as Parker St.—rather than a reasonable distance up State St., say at the strip mall’s entrance—will make it abrupt.
Abrupt on any road means danger. It’s the reason we have yellow lights between red and green.
But if you’re looking for common sense in Port Newbury, better try the cemeteries out on Storey Ave.—before you wind up there without knowing it.
No matter. Port Newbury is now a place where pedestrians and cyclists can cross any where they want, ignore every rule that has ever been, not bother to look both ways, or even one way, and any resulting accident is the fault of the unlucky driver who hits them.
Won’t surprise me if, before long, a collision between a cyclist and a pedestrian is blamed on the owner of the nearest parked car.
Only question would be whether police venture into the nearest businesses and knock on the doors of nearby homes to find the sucker, or if they simply leave a ticket on the windshield.
And don’t be fooled by the word “accident.” When rules for safety are allowed to lapse, such collisions are not accidental. They are inevitable.
Then again, if I were to hit a jaywalker, it would be an accident. That’s only because, when I see the ones with eyes glued to screens, I actually want to run them down. Getting more and more difficult to resist that temptation. At my age, “life sentence” is less and less of a disincentive.
But that’s all happening at the zoo that still calls itself a city on the other side of the salt marsh. I’m on a sandbar where I can keep an eye on it, enjoying self-imposed exile by taking long daily walks into a coastal wildlife reserve on the migratory path of many birds.
Last month we had peregrine falcons, snowy owls, short-eared owls, Cooper’s hawks, and surprisingly attractive duck called northern pintail.
Luckily for me, duck land in the marsh just fifty feet from the bench where I like to sit. That’s also where the road has a pull-over lane so that photographers can safely position tripods and take pictures.
Right there you see the difference between Plum Island and Port Newbury.
Here we have an extra lane to keep cars moving. Port planners would just as soon let parked cars create a bottleneck, figuring that, as soon as drivers get out, they become pedestrians with the right to make the entire world stop on a dime.
But I regress.
My presence on that bench makes visitors think I might be a birder, so they’ll ask a simple question such as, “Do owls land here?”
When I say yes, they think I’m a consultant for Sibley’s Field Guide and start asking things way beyond my pay grade. When the pay is little or nothing, it’s fun to make stuff up.
And so I’m having a grand time here on Plum Island where all the roads are for driving, all the pedestrians look both ways, and all the birds, every one of them, are above average.
Two decades ago I quit a profession. Fond memories, yes, but no regrets. In retrospect, I was suited for the age when students would ask questions and speculate as a class when presented with a new subject.
For this era of everyone reflexively tapping a hand-held screen to find and take some algorithm’s immediate word for it, I am decidedly unfit. Speculation ranging from serious to comic in pursuit of consensus was for me. So was the rough and tumble of debate. We were all in it together.
Mobile devices changed all that. Unwilling to join in the descent into E UnumPluribus, I left.
There are moments, however, when I wish I could still assign papers. That claim will shock English teachers who unanimously say grading papers is the worst part of the job. I share their howling laughter, but what I sometimes crave is a chance to read student papers on an assignment that always drew the best from them:
“Define (a chosen word or phrase) according to current usage.” Put another way, What does ____ mean today?
My book, Pay the Piper!, includes a chapter on one of those classes when controversies over free speech were always at the top of the news, local and national. In that example, what the reports all had in common was someone in the aggrieved party–a musical group, high school students, bikers, protesters–making an adamant, irrefutable claim:
This is America!
Suffice to say here that, given five essay options, many students chose to define “America” according to how the name was being invoked. Most all began with what it “really means,” all its good intentions, E Pluribus Unum, but none could avoid its intent in context, an all-purpose permit: Anything goes.
Last week, when the young woman took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Convention to “remind” the crowded hall to put masks on–“if you could please work on that”–she was roundly booed off the stage. Even the intervention of CPAC’s nervously smiling executive director could not save her. Among the boos was a single word shouted repeatedly by the crowd:
Freedom!
Most commentaries regarding the CPAC conference–including my own, “Rated B for Biblical”–focused on the ridiculous, Golden Calfish statue of Donald Trump and every speaker’s sustained denial of truth. Over and over, they claimed that Trump won, that the pandemic is over, and that Jan.6 did not happen.
We should have saved all those words and let the one-word chant yell for itself. As a prompt for an essay, I’d tell my students to consider how the word has always been used, how we value it, what we say about it. These were the sessions I most enjoyed, relying on questions as much as possible and having their answers uncover the goods. At some point, one of them would undoubtedly state the most quoted of all lines that contains the word:
Freedom isn’t free.
“And how is that line used? What’s behind it?” They would all have heard it, have an idea, and at least one would say it aloud, a tribute to veterans and those now serving in the military. “For what?” For their sacrifice. “All gave some…” I’d tail off; some gave all, they would finish.
Might not be that fluid and condensed–never was–but stretched out in a fifty minute class, we would air all the necessary points–always did. At the end of the class, I’d connect “freedom” with “sacrifice” and ask how it applies to the refusal to wear masks or social-distance. The timing was calculated so that the class ended without an answer. Some might call out an answer, perhaps make a joke. We look like we’re gagged!
Possibly a student would call out what I had in mind: There is no sacrifice. “Freedom” means not giving a shit about other people.
Ya, sometimes we talked like that, but my strategy at the close of these sessions was to not talk at all, to let them wonder. And to let that wonder pour into essays where I would read it. Ya, I miss that. Now that democracy itself has joined the environment on the eve of destruction, I may need it.
As consolation and as a ray of hope, I’m glad to hear of an awakened and involved younger generation. If they are going to be accused of being tools of “cancel culture,” let them cancel the destruction that we, Pluribus Unum, now face.
Would love to read their school essays, but, hey, I’m just another word for nothing left to lose.
Trying to make sense of the Golden Calf trampling the Second Commandment en route the Tower of Babel to forecast the Promised Land for his faithful and Apocalypse Now for the rest of us, I had an odd, unlikely memory.
Not long ago a commercial for a new video game began airing during football games that summed up the last four years in its last two lines:
There is no truth! There’s only those who you choose to believe!
In a previous life, the English teacher in me would have red-penned an M to the end of “who,” but life in America today affords no such quibbling. When you’ve already hit the iceberg, deck chairs are in the way no matter where you put them.
Like many other ads, this one was fraught with explosions, high-speed chases, rapid gunfire, punches, kicks, and a loud, breathless voiceover–all of which go quite well with football games as defined by George Will: “sporadic violence punctuated by committee meetings.”
Could that be the driving force behind Trumpism? Did it take a star of reality TV–the most ironic term in the history of language–to realize that an enormous swath of the American population was bored beyond reason with representative government because it seemed like endless committee meetings?
Was the solution to punctuate politics with violence?
Consider the evidence: From “I’ll pay the legal fees” to “stand by and stand back” and from the “very fine people” in Charlottesville to the “patriots… we love” who stormed the Capitol, the threat of violence is implied if not ordered. Campaign ads with a Republican candidate brandishing an assault rifle next to the faces of four congresswomen of color make the threat as overt as covert. Automatic weapons hanging from background walls in Zoomed meetings state it as clearly as pious invocations of “Second Amendment remedies.”
If the word “pious” in connection to gun rights seems a stretch, you haven’t seen the “Guts, Guns, & God” signs that dot the landscape of red states and line the walls at conventions of right-wing groups. As a variant, one of their most popular t-shirts declares them to be “Pro-Life, Pro-God, Pro-Gun.” As a consequence, they find it perfectly acceptable for their guy to clear a street of protesters with tear-gas so that he can pose in front of a church holding a Bible over his head.
Did it matter to them that the Bible was upside down? Or that the pastor of the church renounced him? No more than a referee’s bad call when it favors their team. No more than the fate of those they see voted off “the island” or scolded, “You’re fired!” No more than the carnage left behind by their avatars on Cold War.
“Cold War” is a timely name for a video game that proclaims “no truth.” What we call the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a character drawn to look like Ronald Reagan appears in the ad to remind us of it. However, whether the game’s designers anticipated it or not, the game hit the shelves just when historians and journalists started using the terms “Cold Civil War” and “Domestic Cold War” to describe America’s current political climate.
And we all knew what happened to truth as soon as Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” turned Orwell’s 1984 into a best-seller 70 years after it first appeared.
Cold War is “rated M for mature.” I use quotes because I find it impossible to say that with a straight face. Do mature people immerse themselves in make-believe violence? Do they play video games? Someone could ask those questions about my penchant for watching football, but in football, truth is not judged by the color of the jerseys, but by the content of the play.
Cold War‘s premise is survival, its pressure non-stop, both of which give the game a proportion for which we have a word. Jets and helicopters fall from the sky, buildings crumble, mountains erupt, people fall into pits and disintegrate. Better rate it B for Biblical.
Don’t know if the ad ran during coverage of the CPAC Convention, but it would have been a perfect match for the Biblical proportions of a Golden Calf rolling over the Second Commandment into the Tower of Babel to offer a Promised Land to his followers and damn his disbelievers to Hell. Apocalypse may not be Now, but 2022 and 2024 are not far off.
And, no, it does not matter that he holds the Bible upside down.
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The Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4-6): Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. See also Romans 1:18–32 where Paul warns of human tendencies not toward atheism but toward idolatry.
No one ever notices this anymore, but an article of clothing made to look like the American flag is a violation of the United States Flag Code. However, having it appear with, of all things, a magic wand may be the ultimate desecration–not because it’s in any way evil, but because it is flat out silly. The wand and the sandals make me wonder if the sculptor intended it as a joke–a way to make fools of everyone at the CPAC Convention. It happened four years ago at CPAC when pranksters stood before the entry and handed out postcard-sized red, white, and blue flags with The Loser’s name for everyone to wave. Attendees, not recognizing the Russian national flag, thought it a show of patriotism and waved them while in their seats awaiting the convention’s opening. The display went on over an hour before someone caught on and collected them.
A belt buckle pictured on eBay. The slogan has appeared on signs, t-shirts, hats, and bumper stickers since at least 1972 when I first drove south across the Mason-Dixon line. Often, the word “glory” is added, and in recent years it appeared in campaign version, “God, Guns, and Trump.”
You’d think that reviewers from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune would be reluctant to compare any writer today to Mark Twain, but when that writer is unlike anyone since Twain, they have to reach back a century.
It helps that for some sixty years Garrison Keillor has written in every form Twain employed, starting with news reports, sprawling through short stories and novels, and sprinkled with poems. Thanks to the advance of time after Twain’s actual–not just premature–death, Keillor added a radio show that aired four decades and a screenplay that legendary director Robert Altman turned into a film.
Also helps that both wrote of small towns where they grew up, Keillor near the headwaters of the Mississippi, Twain at its center. And perhaps that Gary Edward Keillor and Samuel Langhorne Clemens both adopted pen-names, at least when we consider that “mark twain” was a riverboat term signaling that the river was deep enough for passage.
What Clemens did with his byline, Keillor did with his signature line, the equally reassuring opening of his monologues that anchored his weekly variety show, A Prairie Home Companion: “Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown…”
For all that, the only comparison that really matters is that they both made us laugh.
That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life is both Keillor’s autobiography and memoir of Prairie Home. Fans of the show will recognize the setting, the people, and the incidents of his childhood as the source of his “News from Lake Wobegon.” Familiar with his voice, they will hear the H in rhubarb as if listening to the show while getting all the background as it unfolds.
New to them will be an amazing series of what-ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens that steered Keillor from all of the likely careers a country boy growing up in the Eisenhower years might have pursued and, instead, toward one on the verge of extinction:
I was a middle child and left to my own devices and became secretive, devious, never confided in anyone. As a city kid, I would have adopted a gang and become socialized, but instead I was a loner, had very little adult supervision. Mother was busy with the little kids. I could leave the house unnoticed, sit by the river or ride my bike among the cornfields and potato farms, ride for miles into the city past warehouses and factories, penny arcades and cocktail lounges, independent at the age of ten. Nobody told me that the city was too dangerous to ride around on a bike, so thanks to ignorance, I was fearless.
When we read that these forays into Minneapolis were to peruse books in the public library or watch the presses roll at the Minneapolis Tribune, it all falls into place. He would keep doing it when, following the drowning of a 17-year-old cousin, his mother sent him to learn to swim at the Minneapolis YMCA. When they have a picnic by the river, she asks him to show what he learned, and he walks in just deep enough so he could stand and mime swimming on the surface. Visual tricks, you might think, are lost on radio, but Keillor played the medium like a fiddle for the imagination. Prairie Home played in keys of such description.
Like Prairie Home, the book is a variety show. And you could call the middle of its 34 chapters an intermission between coming of age and taking the stage. Many characters appear in both, and if Keillor’s massive family–six siblings and 18 aunts, not counting those by marriage–seem familiar for their resemblance to Lake Wobegonians, the sketches of most all of the show’s frequent performers and crew are surprising treats.
Portraits of Chet Atkins, Studs Terkel, and sound effects man Tom Keith serve as tributes to the recently deceased while serving also to reveal Keillor’s obsessive working style and his eye and ear for the unlikely. He knew when to leave the ailing Atkins in the company of family, regretted not ever getting to fully know Keith, got Terkel to open up about his service in WWII–and then surprised everyone at the memorial by revealing it.
He surprised this devoted listener–since the late-70’s in South Dakota where I caught the show on Minnesota Public Radio before it went national–with the revelation that he refused to register for the draft at the time America began sending troops to Vietnam with a letter to Selective Service stating his objection. Through the 70’s and 80’s and into the 90’s, he believed that any show could be his last, that FBI agents may be waiting for him offstage.
Keeping him onstage was an unsung hero named Bill Kling who ran the Minnesota station that took a chance on Prairie Home--and who eventually was the driving force that created MPR. Keillor may not be kidding when he says he’d have remained a parking lot attendant all his life if not for Kling shielding the fledgling show from nervous donors–the quip is in the final scene of Altman’s film.
Passages of his first two marriages are uncomfortable, but his account of the harassment charge after he retired is both welcome and credible. No question that #MeToo did a lot of good by ridding various professions of some monstrous characters. But there’s also no question that, in cases such as that of Keillor and Al Franken, we went from “Innocent until proven guilty” to “Guilty as soon as charged.” Nor is there any question that employers, worried for their image in a time when image is worth more than fact, felt compelled to act immediately rather than take any time to find fact.
Hence, Minnesota Public Radio, with Kling long gone, cut ties with Keillor rather than stand behind him. And so it was that the man who “removed the lectern” he felt too often present between NPR and its audience, saw it bolted back in place.
That brief chapter near the book’s end is one of just two political statements. Before it is a stunning J’accuse reaction to the appearance of Mayor Rudy Giuliani at Ground Zero during 9/11. Keillor was living in NYC at the time and knew of the reports of defective police radios that Giuliani ignored. The firemen running into the buildings could have been warned of what police in helicopters already saw.
Through the W. Bush and Obama years, Keillor included a few political barbs in his opening monologues, and one or two of the comic skits would satirize events of the week. Tim Russell did pitch-perfect impersonations of Bush and Obama, and Sue Scott matched him with Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. They were even funnier as Willie Nelson and Edith Piaf.
But these are gone from That Time of Year. Instead, the entire book is laced with snatches of dialogue from the comic skits, poems both heartfelt and humorous, lyrics from song parodies:
Hello darkness, my old friend
I have gone to bed again
Because a virus came in to me
And I’m feeling tired and gloomy
And my head hurts and I’m achy and I’m hot
And full of snot
I hear the sound of sickness
Samples from his last book, Living with Limericks, with openings such as, “A young fellow from Pocatello” and “A young Baptist lady from Aspen.”
Songs he wrote for cities where PHC toured:
John Waters, Pimlico
Little houses in a row
Mencken, Tyler, Mr. Poe
Oyster buffet on the Bay
Crabs fried or sauteed
Fifty different combinations
In the city of crustaceans,
Baltimore.
Sonnets, his own and updated, whimsical adaptations of Shakespeare’s, including the 73rd at the end his of book. The Bard begins “That time of year…,” giving the book its title, but Keillor turns the stoic reckoning with mortality into whimsical reflection:
In me thou see’st a formerly swift mind
Once given to riposte and repartee
Now he resorts to googling to find
The word for confusion that begins with D
If it sounds all too bizarre for any writer we might take seriously, you haven’t read poems of Mark Twain such as “Those Annual Bills” and “A Sweltering Day in Australia,” or his short story, “Journalism in Tennessee,” which you should not dare read in any public place.
I’ll offer the same advice for That Time of Year. As Keillor said when one reviewer accused him of “shameless pandering”:
I was not out to deepen or broaden. I was a man at play.
First Commune, now Plum Island Coffee Roasters. And I’m still reeling from the loss of Greta’s Great Grains.
Barely twenty years ago my daughter and I walked down Pleasant St. and were surprised to see the newly-opened Caffe Di Siena. Rachel was reminded of her favorite haunt near her dorm at Vassar: “Oh, I like this!”
She inherited a love of coffee from me, though I take it black: “Just what Newburyport needs,” I quipped, “another coffeeshop! Better go in now because it won’t be here when you return for Christmas break.”
We were still fans of Middle Street Foods back then, and we each had friends we joined at Fowles and Abraham’s Bagels.
Starbuck’s was already at State & Liberty, but not for us. We thought it more reminiscent of Boston’s financial district or an interchange on I-84 than a leafy off-campus neighborhood.
Siena soon disproved my skepticism. Back then I was still busking Inn Street. After two hours on a wind instrument, it took an hour of sitting still before I could fasten a seat belt, much less drive a car.
Something about alpha beta similar to the experience of long-distance runners that I never understood. Frankly, it reminded me of bowls of hashish experienced in the Sixties that I often happily withstood, but that’s another story.
Siena proved the right place to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere with the largest cup of their strongest blend. I asked for “a bucket” for perhaps longer than they could stand the same joke.
Whether they laughed with me or at me didn’t matter as I settled into my state of bliss in a chair by the window. One joke they never heard: I should have been paying them rent.
When it became Commune, I barely noticed. Took a year before the new owner, Bruce Vogel, prevailed upon me to say it correctly.
“It’s a verb,” he offered helpfully.
“You’re a verb!” I thought in my muddled state of consciousness, but I just smiled.
Sounds like a dig, but the man has been as active as any Newburyporter in fundraisers, community projects, civic groups, and in politics as an at-large City Councilor. Like verbs in a sentence, such folk make a city hum.
A shame to know that Commune is now in the past tense where it joined a long list of Port participles left dangling on the outside of an increasingly chain-linked enterprise that still calls itself a city.
The closing of PICR is just another zip up the body bag of Newburyport’s civic life. Only those who take part will show up to pay their respects to yet another mom-and-pop replaced by just another link in the chain.
Most will continue to celebrate the Port for its scenic beauty, its quaintness, the romance of red brick under the glow of period street lamps. “Love where I live!” and “Happy Newburyport!” they proclaim.
In the ensuing outcry, the divide between those who live in the city and those who live only on its surface is glaring:
Those who want PICR to stay talk about a vibrant civic life. Those who defend the landlord’s decision speak only of contracts and lease agreements. Bowls of water and free biscuits for patrons’ dogs outside the door do not appear on bottom lines.
Though entirely in the first group, I find them more frustrating than the latter. Much like my neighbors on Plum Island who built on sand and now expect a city or state to protect them from erosion—or the Texas “individualists” who called climate change “a hoax” now begging for federal relief from its effects.
To be blunt: I’m exhausted by people who never question capitalism complaining when capitalist indifference—to a community, to the environment, to all else—screws them. And screws them fully within capitalism’s cutthroat lack of bounds.
They may disdain the word, but it’s a small measure of socialism that they beg for rescue.
May PICR’s patrons get their wish. Conversations thrive in coffeeshops, and no vibrant city can ever have too many of those.
I only wish that, for once, they would realize exactly what that wish is.
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From TripAdvisor which never mentions that the place with the name Plum Island Coffee Roasters is not on Plum Island, but a fair distance up the river in Newburyport.
A side view of the patio with the Merrimack River in the background. From a blog called “Shell Chic’d” by one Emily of Boston who describes it as her “New England travel & lifestyle diary.” Other pics of her visit to Newburyport appear on this page, including the one below of PICR’s menu: http://shellchicd.com/2014/06/30/a-day-by-the-sea-newburyport
Mouth of the River 