What if each American city and town observed Presidents Day by honoring the ones that best represent it?
Military towns might choose Washington, Jackson, Grant, and/or Eisenhower. College towns could pick between Wilson, former president of Princeton, and Bush the Younger, former frat boy.
Western locales might pick Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt, although Las Vegas — as an unabashed bastion of you-can-have-it-all consumption oblivious to the consequences of wasted water, electricity or anything else — would surely choose Ronald Reagan.
Although our New Hampshire neighbors might feel saddled with hapless homeboy Franklin Pierce, Newburyport might hop aboard the sailboat imagery attached to John F. Kennedy.
The Port’s thriving arts scene is surely well worthy of JFK’s “Camelot” mystique — as it is of John Quincy Adams, a flautist who lived here three years as an apprentice to Theophilius Parsons, a Port lawyer who would become chief justice of Massachusetts.
JQA may have become the Port’s runaway choice for Presidents Day had not his engagement to local lass Mary Frazier been broken off by her parents. They thought he had no prospects. Must have been that flute.
Last month, I recalled all this when the organizer of the inaugural “William Lloyd Garrison Lecture” invited me to Zoom in on the virtual event, sponsored by the public library and The Daily News.
In the bicentennial of his birth, she thought that the voice of abolitionism deserved more attention in his hometown. Her mission became the theme of the Q&A that followed “Lloyd and Moses: The Remarkable Friendship of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Tubman.”
By the time it was over, speaker Kate Larson, Tubman’s biographer whose book became the film Harriet, urged Newburyport to promote Garrison’s legacy, noting it as a necessary response to those who protest the removal of Confederate memorials.
Frankly, I find those folk perplexing: “How will we know our history?” they ask. “When was the last time you picked up a book?” I ask in return.
Mulling it over, I recalled that Newburyport has not just fallen short of promoting the North’s leading opponent of slavery, but it has actively promoted its foremost apologist for it: Caleb Cushing, Newburyport’s first mayor.
As Franklin Pierce’s attorney general, Cushing supported the infamous Fugitive Slave Law. He also formed a close friendship with fellow cabinet member Jefferson Davis, once a guest in his High Street home.
Soon after secession, Cushing was writing Davis letters to recommend Southern friends for positions in the Confederate government. As a violation of Lincoln’s prohibition of all correspondence with the rebel states, this was a war crime.
Caleb Cushing, traitor.
Years earlier, JQA warned that Cushing’s “sacrifice of principle lost him the favor of his constituents.” Contemporary Port chronicler John Lord was more blunt, calling Cushing “a man of splendid talents, but who basely prostitutes those talents.”
Despite that, to observe Newburyport’s 250th anniversary in 2014, this newspaper reported that “local historians” chose Cushing as the “most accomplished and colorful” citizen in our “long history.”
A letter of protest favoring Garrison soon appeared, after which I hypothetically compared the choice to Britain honoring Neville Chamberlain over Winston Churchill.
A Customs House staffer, one of just two historians named in the declaration, then defended Cushing’s belief in “popular sovereignty [as a] solution to slavery” — apparently unaware that, at the time, “popular sovereignty” was a popular wink-and-nod to the slaveocracy’s status quo control.
Local historians known for their books and frequent library talks remained silent.
Given that a city’s newspaper is its public record, Cushing now stands as the Port’s foremost citizen. Stands to reason, therefore, that the president most suited to Newburyport’s recognition today is his fellow traitor: Jefferson Davis.
But why settle for one? Andrew Johnson did all he could to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. Nixon perfected the Southern strategy. The recent loser’s insurrection flew the Stars and Bars.
Let South Dakota have its Rushmore of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy R.
In the interests of honesty and consistency, let Newburyport carve its own Turkey Hill of Davis, Johnson, Nixon and You-know-who.
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Bill Anderson has been a friend of mine since we sat in graduate seminars at SDSU and in downtown pubs of Brookings, South Dakota, together back in the Reagan years. Best known for his original research and books on Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Wilder family, and Little House on the Prairie, he makes occasional contributions to children’s literature: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/m-is-for-mount-rushmore-bill-anderson/1112159518
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why we marvel at the imagination and engineering skills of rocket scientists.
Despite that, we don’t know them. Though they design the crafts for trailblazing missions, it’s the astronauts who gain celebrity status. They’ve been portrayed in film by Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, and Gary Sinise. Two have become US Senators. Those who have perished in accidents have observatories and schools named for them, postage stamps to commemorate them.
My favorite, Michael Collins, stayed behind in the “mother ship” circling the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the Lunar Earth Module to go leaping, walking, golfing, and planting a flag on it. Still, he was celebrated in song by, of all bands, Jethro Tull as a symbol of sacrifice for the sake of making dreams come true:
I’m with you LEM Though it’s a shame that it had to be you The mother ship Is just a blip from your trip made for two I’m with you boys So please employ just a little extra care It’s on my mind I’m left behind when I should have been there Walking with you
Back on the ground in Houston and at Cape Canaveral, those scientists, while admired to the point of being the go-to gold standard for expressions of how intelligent we do not have to be, never become household names–even though they have been portrayed by Ed Harris and Clint Howard.
Could be worse.
Consider all the technicians who assemble and wire all the plans set forth by those scientists. All of them highly skilled mechanics who recognize in real time when the theoretical design is incompatible with physical reality, when pieces will not fit or hold together.
At NASA, these wizards can either solve the problem with an adjustment on the spot or send it back to the engineers with exact measurements for the adjustment–all with screwdrivers and wrenches still in hand. Marvel at the white-collar scientists who put us on the Moon if you must, but don’t overlook the blue-collar team that makes it possible for them to put our cameras and measuring equipment on Mars.
Next week, National Geographic is offering a close look at what they do and how they do it at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena where all of NASA’s Mars rover missions are built and managed. The two-hour documentary, Built for Mars: The Perseverance Rover, will premier Thursday, Feb. 18, 8:00 pm EST. If you miss it, keep an eye on listings for the re-run. Thankfully, NatGeo is included in most basic plans (#210 here on Plum Island).
While I haven’t seen the film, I can endorse director/writer Mark Davis. Got to know him some 35 years ago when our daughters became close friends. In a studio next door to the arts cinema where I was a projectionist for 22 years, he did considerable work for WGBH, particularly the science-oriented show, NOVA, and for the Discovery Channel as well as for NatGeo.
This includes eight documentaries on the previous Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers that the folks in Pasadena prepared for Mars. Each was critically acclaimed, including an Emmy for Five Years on Mars in 2008.
When he first told me of Built for Mars, he called it by it’s working title. Don’t know whether it was he or someone at National Geographic who changed it, but I resolved 11 months ago that a title like “Blue Collar Mars” could not go to waste.
No, I can’t review it, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to list reasons to see it.
Here’s what NatGeo says:
With rare access, BUILT FOR MARS: THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER goes behind the scenes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to follow the birth of the Perseverance Rover, whose primary mission is to accomplish a feat that’s never been done before: search for traces of life in an ancient river delta on Mars and collect samples for eventual return to Earth. To launch on time, the team working on the new rover must battle through gut-wrenching setbacks and a global pandemic. This two-hour special shines a spotlight on the essential but little-known role of the flight technicians – the mechanics, machinists, and other hands-on workers who are entrusted with the crucial job of turning the scientists’ goals and the engineers’ designs into reality, with one-of-a-kind hardware built for Mars.
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https://genius.com/Jethro-tull-for-michael-collins-jeffrey-and-me-lyricsArtist concept of a future fetch rover preparing to collect sample tubes left on the surface of Mars by the Perseverance rover. The sample tubes will be returned to Earth by the future Mars Sample Return mission. (Mandatory photo credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH)The Perseverance Rover
June 20, 2013 – Mark Davis, Producer and Director for NOVA, discussed a digitally animated piece on the Mars Curiosity Rover at “New Perspectives for Information Design and New Challenges for Data Visualization,” a segment at the 2013 Information Design and Data Visualization symposium. The symposium was presented by the College of Arts, Media and Design, the Swiss Consulate, swissnex Boston, SwissInfographics, and Northeastern Center for the Arts.
He was heading down the corridor moments before they surged from the other direction. Thanks only to a warning from Capitol Policeman Eugene Goodman, Mitt whipped a U-ee.
Among the most recognizable US senators, he would have been in the hands of rabid, rioting supporters of a man he voted to impeach one year ago–and has frequently, harshly criticized often since the campaign in 2015. Just as often, Romney has been the target of he who is so proudly named on the mob’s flags.
The Utah Republican would have been in the hands of fanatics already chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” A mob that had already constructed a scaffold on the Capitol lawn. With a noose already hanging. With the strength to withstand men pulling at its sides to test it.
Moreover, as anyone who knows American history can tell you, white-supremacists screaming the N-word are quick to lynch. In what more than one historian has called “A Reign of Terror” that lasted in the South from the end of Reconstruction to the end of Jim Crow, they strung enough African Americans from trees that they, their act, their reign were memorialized in what may be the most controversial song in American history: Abel Meeropol’s 1939 “Strange Fruit,” as sung by Billie Holiday:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Worth noting here that the song and many photographs depicting its imagery were used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to deflect criticisms of their authoritarian rule from the United States. Our own State Department under Truman and Eisenhower coined a new word for the tactic: Whataboutism. What most made it effective, they noted, was the same strategy that made Goebbels’ “big lie” possible: constant repetition.
Repetition has never been so ad nauseum as today in the Republican lawyers’ Whatabout gambit. We heard the word “fight” 238 times in one audio mash only to be subjected to a clip from the phone call to Georgia on a loop in the next one. Since Trump’s main gaslighting technique is repetition, that gave us repetition of repetition. Here’s a taste of the one-hour call during which he dominated the talk:
I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes. I’m just going by small numbers when you add them up they’re many times the 11,000. But I won that state by hundreds of thousands of votes.
Stalin would have been proud. One wonders if he would have envied the ominous musical soundtrack or thought it unnecessary.
Though the Soviet Union is no more, Whataboutism has thrived in the USA thanks to the Republican Party and its news outlets. During the Mueller Report, it was What about Benghazi? During the first impeachment, What about Hunter Biden? This time around, What about the riots last summer? All of them asked over and over again and again.
Today, Trump’s lawyers will play videos of the burning and looting in Minneapolis, following the lead of Fox News which cut away from the evidence linking the action of January 6 to Trump’s own words in real time. This is not a defense team. This is a deflection team.
Their Whataboutism might be best answered with Whatifism.
The would-be lynch mob came close to getting Pence and even closer to Romney. They would have had him if not for a cop running by to clear the corridor. What would America have done at the sight of a US senator, a former presidential candidate at the end of a noose?
What if we saw a vice-president swing like strange fruit?
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From The Atlantic.
With lyrics by Abel Meeropol under the pen name, Lewis Allen:
A friend not much older than I has devoted some of his pandemic-imposed free time to writing joke songs.
In keeping with his show-business reputation as “The Last Living Vaudevillian,” he set his first efforts to music of the FDR years, reworking lyrics already there:
“It Had to Be You” is now about the difficulty of recognizing people behind their masks in the supermarket. “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” he suggests, could be his “theme song.” Hell, it could be everyone’s theme song. Could be the new national anthem.
He’s hoping to turn the dreamy, soul-baring 1940s hit “Imagination” into a bicep-baring “Vaccination” with a lyric something like, “it’s prickly… but it keeps you from getting sickly…” Can’t wait to sing that next time I get into it with an anti-vaxxer.
Having honed such a talent all last year, my friend has gone from the genre of Randy Rainbow to that of Randy Newman with wholly original music to accompany his lyrics. He ran a couple of titles by me:
“It’s a Definite Kick in the Butt When You Find Yourself in Arrears” promises to be a “bluesy lament about debt,” and “Lately, I’m into Philately” he calls a “cool-jazz vibe” about an obsessive stamp collector.
The first had me laughing, but the second struck me dumb. Though I never collected stamps, I was always obsessive about what I put on envelopes, hoping that the receiver would notice the image of a common interest, a person we held in high regard, something we cared about–if possible related to the enclosed letter or manuscript, such as when the travelogues of cross-country trips with my daughter always sported a stamp of Jack London next to one of Rachel Carson for the second ounce.
But it wasn’t that. What stunned me was the immediate, provocative reminder of a book I had just finished.
Philip Roth’s narrator in The Plot Against America recalls his childhood when he was an ardent stamp collector. Published in 2004, it is revisionist history set in 1939-1942: Transatlantic aviation hero Charles Lindbergh emerges as a populist presidential candidate on a platform of “America First” to take the Republican nomination away from the party traditionalists and then upset FDR who was running for a third term.
If that’s not already uncanny enough, he immediately forms pacts with Hitler & Hirohito and cuts ties with allies. As Heather Cox Richardson reminded us in her Friday newsletter, the first international moves made by our recent populist were to cozy up to–and stay cozy with–Vladimir Putin and sign a massive arms deal with the Saudi prince. Soon, he would insult NATO and snub the European Union.
His slogan, “Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war,” reads like a postdated version of “I alone can do it,” and his appeals to retain white supremacy in an era of legal discrimination against African-Americans and Jews were clearly echoed by “Make America Great Again.”
Remember wondering how Blacks stumping for MAGA man could possibly think they could gain Black votes for him? Plot offers the answer in an early scene. The rabbis enlisted for the America First cause were not there to gain Jewish support, but to give Christians an excuse to support it, a way to deny anti-Semitism. The stamp collector’s smoldering older cousin called it “Kosherizing Lindbergh.” In 2016 and 2020, it could have been called “Desegregating Trump.”
That’s just the tip of the Lindbergh that turned Roth’s novel into a six-episode HBO series last year. Others include characters who console themselves that experienced staff and civil servants would make sure he doesn’t go awry, much like cable news hosts reassured us of “adults in the room” as soon as a reality TV host was elected to the presidency.
Roth’s Lindbergh flew himself around the country and gave speeches on the tarmac in flight gear, goggles pushed up on his forehead, in front of his Spirit of St. Louis. Our recent populist held rallies at airports around the country with Air Force One as his backdrop.
Though few of us ever hear of it–or would ever want to hear of it–there was a formidable fascist movement in 1930s America. At the time, the novelist Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel ominously titled It Can’t Happen Here. Seventy years later, Roth asked, What if it did happen here? Twelve years after that, it happened. Here.
And what was it that stormed the Capitol on January 6 but a formidable fascist movement?
On one level, Plot against America is a story of what it was and still is to be Jewish in America. On another level it may be about what it was and still is to be anyone living in any American city.
While reading of a Jewish neighborhood in Newark in the years from 1939 to 1942, I was always flashing back to my heavily Catholic neighborhood in Lawrence, Mass., as well as my cousins’ Akron, Ohio, neighborhood when I was in the family’s summer exchange program circa 1959 to 1962.
Dynamics of family life hit close to home. Roth’s mention of “matter-of-fact temperance practiced by industrious first-generation Americans” answers something about which I always wondered. Also the boy’s wanting to get away from family doing “what they cannot not do” (my emphasis). Don’t know how the Fifties played out in other parts of the country, but, apart from outside threats, we New England Catholics, internally, had a lot in common with New Jersey Jews.
Many Americans got their first look at other parts of the country in the 1950s. Televisions were just beginning to replace radios in American homes, and new pictorial magazines such as Life and Look were everywhere. Also, we were just getting out to see the nation for ourselves, answering the most memorable ad on both screen and in print: See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call!
Stamps were ahead of all that visual expression of national pride, which is likely why Roth’s narrator collected them. Among his most prized entries, a series of National Parks–prime destinations of our road trips twenty years later on Eisenhower’s brand new network of highways.
One of the four National Parks in the series is Yosemite, and it is that stamp that Roth’s publisher chose for the paperback edition released after Roth’s death in 2018. Not sure just when it happened, but the populist president who gave the book renewed relevance in 2017 famously mispronounced that name as “Yo, Semite.”
I was among those who half-joked that it wasn’t a mistake but a dog whistle, hinting at a threat–“Yo” meaning Look out! My friend’s “Lately… Philately” song title put that book right back in my mind. Not the content, but the cover. On it, no bigger than my thumb, is the one-cent Yosemite stamp. With a swastika superimposed on it–a recurring nightmare of a seven-year-old Jewish boy growing up in the USA. No half-joke. No joke at all.
On a far less menacing note, the first half of the book contains numerous and some richly humorous comparisons of what the young boy sees and hears to stamps in his collection. On a weekend family trip to DC, he astonishes the guide by naming the stamps upon which the monuments appear–by date and denomination.
Makes me wonder if that’s what my friend’s song does. If not, it might be a good idea for a companion piece using recent stamps delivered first class by the tune of “Please, Mr. Postman.”
Once upon a public nuisance, I wrote that cellphoners had turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of language.
At the time, most everyone was starting to either joke or complain or both about the intrusions of ringtones and half-conversations on planes, trains, and buses, in stores, restaurants, classrooms, meeting rooms, concerts and plays, churches and synagogues, weddings and funerals. And, of course, THE CELLPHONE VOICE, AS IF THE ENTIRE WORLD WAS A PHONEBOOTH.
Running a small arts cinema back then, I was at times obliged to ask cellphoners to hang up or leave the hall. Invariably, they would act surprised and apologetic. More often than not, they would excuse themselves with a simple explanation: “It’s an emergency.”
The closer a cellphoner sat to the screen, the more intrusive and therefore regrettable my task was. One such night it happened early during Dr. T & the Women, a Robert Altman film midway in which a young woman takes a call during a gym class. As soon as she puts the cell to her ear, she covers it with her other hand, looks at the gym teacher and says, “It’s an emergency.”
With no attempt at a smile or a pleasant voice, the older woman snaps back, “Well, take your emergency outside and don’t bring it back!”
When it was over, a few patrons on their way out were laughing when they asked what I thought of the scene.
Oh, that gym teacher! Most satisfying of all was that she did not say “please.”
Today it may be an emergency that “emergency” has been surpassed, not by just one but two one-word jokes. If only I could figure out which is more laughable:
Bipartisanship or Unity?
There’s no question that “reach across the aisle” is the most ridiculous expression, and has been since the stonewalling side of that aisle resolved to make Obama a one-term president within hours of his inauguration. Within months some Republican senators, including John McCain, were voting against bills that they themselves had co-sponsored.
To cover their refusal to cooperate, Republicans accused Democrats of refusing to cooperate even while Obama and the Democratic-led Senate tried to appease them with a healthcare bill watered down far short of its original promise. Two years later, when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid outmaneuvered their budget-killing tax-cuts for the wealthy, all they had to do was reach, not across the aisle, but into the White House where Vice President Joe Biden was enthusiastic to “cut a deal” that reduced the anticipated revenue from $3.4 trillion to $600 billion.
Eight years after that, as Harper’s Andrew Cockburn put it, Biden in a 2020 debate “had the effrontery to boast that he ‘got Mitch McConnell to raise taxes by $600 billion’.” Senators Sanders, Brown, Whitehouse and others “grumbled.” On the debate stage, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett called it “a complete victory for the Tea Party… a terrible deal for Americans.”
But if you were paying attention, you know that these are but two of many stories of how Tea Partied Republican senators, still a minority, used the filibuster to enforce minority rule until they gained the majority and ran all over a minority that played by the rules–including the theft of a seat on the Supreme Court.
While I do not dispute the general rule, “Watch what they do, not what they say,” may I suggest a friendly amendment? Don’t be fooled by language that makes what they do possible.
By far, during Obama’s first two years, the phrase most employed by Republicans to describe bills proposed by a Democratic congress was an accusation: They are ramming this down our throats, or down the throats of the American people.
From healthcare to cabinet appointments to international treaties to innocuous procedural votes, it didn’t matter that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 59-41. The filibuster served the Republicans as a technicality that effectively enabled and disguised minority rule. Down our throats was the slogan that demonized any and everything proposed by Democrats.
In keeping with the mood and tenor set by the Tea Party, down our throats conveyed the anger and hate that Republicans sought to stoke. They did it so relentlessly and convincingly for so long that, in 2017, anger and hate won the White House.
If the recent Republican attempts to overturn the election and their blind-eye to insurrection were not enough to make their calls for bipartisanship and unity laughable, perhaps their complaints of down our throats will be. After all, we have no comparison for the former, but we can compare what Republicans are saying now to what they were saying between 2009 and 2017.
Once again after a four-year hiatus, we are hearing down our throats in the objections to what the newly-elected president and thin-as-can-be senate majority might do.
Most often Republicans are using it to defend the filibuster–implying that it is Constitutional. No so. The word appears nowhere in the Constitution, and filibusters do not exist in the House. Southern senators concocted it in the 1830s to suffocate legislation regarding slavery and later segregation–“a Jim Crow relic” as Barack Obama recently called it.
In effect, the filibuster is today being forced down our throats as deliberately and undemocratically as the rapid three-week confirmation of Amy Comey Barrett to the Supreme Court just four years after the ten-month obstruction of Merrick Garland–all by the same Republican senators.
How many examples do we need? How much time can we give them? Haven’t we already reached the point where we know that their calls for bipartisanship and unity are jokes? That their claims to acting in good faith are lies? Are we no more savvy or bright than gullible Charlie preparing yet again to kick a football teed up by a never-cooperative Lucy?
The idea that Biden is, at this writing, meeting with ten Republican senators regarding the stimulus package suggests that this is not a rhetorical question. That it needs be asked at all is demoralizing.
If only Susan Collins walked into the Oval Office carrying a football, it might be worth the laugh.
On the other hand, it’s encouraging that Pres. Biden issued so many executive orders so soon. And on substantive issues at that–with the bonus of eliciting Ted Cruz’s inane objection that the Paris Climate Accords were all for the benefit of residents of Paris. If that laugh wasn’t enough, he went on to say that it excluded Pittsburgh, a city whose voters he tried to disenfranchise just weeks before.
True, executive orders offer an easy target for the charge of down our throats–never mind that Trump signed more in his single term (220) than either Obama (147 & 129) or Clinton (200 & 164) in theirs.
You know what else is true? The Republicans are going to make that charge no matter what Democrats do. No matter which Democrats are involved, they will be accused of socialism. No matter what the proposals are, no matter their terms, their costs, their scope, Republicans will pummel every one of them with repeated accusations of government overreach, big government, class warfare, tax-the-rich, nanny state, welfare state, giveaways, political correctness, cancel culture, virtue signaling, and everything else in their Pavlovian glossary, all of them down the throats of the American people.
So why not “go big” as so many Democrats are saying? Even the up-to-now always-cautious Sen. Schumer is saying “go bold,” and he is now Majority Leader.
Many are comparing the crises at the start of Biden’s presidency to those facing Lincoln in 1861 and FDR in 1933. Consider their predecessors: Did James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian who stressed appeasement for the South, save the Union? No. Did Herbert Hoover, a technocrat with an eye only for the bottom line, save us from the Great Depression? No. They made things worse. It was Lincoln who went bold, FDR who went big.
Let the Republicans whine about it being down their throats and don’t even waste time answering the charge. If Democrats can’t end the filibuster, then they must side-step it with the ornate technical procedure called “reconciliation.” Pack the Supreme Court. Overturn Citizens United. Pass their stimulus package, no compromise. Pass the Green New Deal, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, universal health care, $15/hr minimum wage, a higher tax rate on all income over $400,000. Get rid of the Electoral College.
Everything depends on what public perception will be going into the 2022 election. Whether we want to admit it or not, say it out loud or not, America is a country that will blame the firefighters and praise the arsonists if only the arsonists offer simple explanations, truth be damned. Democrats say government can work while Republicans say it can’t, so by screwing it up, Republicans can claim to be right and reap the rewards at the next election. Even though they themselves screw it up, they create the perception that the fault is that of “our friends on the other side of the aisle”. This has been going on since Newt Gingrich cooked up his “Contract with America”–more accurately remembered as “Contract on America.”
By late-spring next year, if things are stalled, the public will blame Democrats. No matter if the real fault is Republican obstruction. Long for “unity” and “bipartisanship” if you feel so obliged, but call me Ishmael who kept answering such deceit with: No more!
At first there will be shock which Republicans will trumpet to alarm “moderates”–who would more accurately be called “inattentives” but that’s another rant–and Democrats’ poll numbers will go down for a couple months. But improvements will start to be realized and perception will change.
Unless it changes before, say, May of next year, Biden and the Democrats will be like firefighters blamed for arson only because some flames still rage. The alarm has been ringing for four years. The Democrats must move Now and let the public render a verdict Nov. 2022.
In a letter to a friend two centuries ago, America’s first great writer said that he aimed to make readers laugh so hard that their heads would be thrown back and their mouths would be wide open. That was when, Washington Irving reasoned, he would be able to throw in a pill–his point, his purpose.
Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King liked to use one of Irving’s scenes–Rip Van Winkle’s surprise at change when he returned to his village–to pop in a pill of his own. Recreating with pantomime and mugging the old man stumbling down the mountain trail with his long beard, bug-eyed at changes he saw, King had his congregations roaring with laughter before he paused and then bellowed as only he could: “Old Rip slept through a revolution!”
Down their throats.
Much like fake news–first used to describe simplified lies and distortions on social media before it became anything the right did not like, including truth itself–down our throats has a double meaning, one of which, though unpleasant, is medicinal and necessary.
Calls for bipartisanship and unity, on the other hand, are sugar-coatings. In a time gone by, a time as recent as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan, they carried promise and often proved constructive. Today they carry nothing. Pure sugar for a hyper-activated nation that can stand no more.
If Republicans want to be bipartisan and show unity, they need to start facing reality and accepting truth–starting with expelling those who advocated insurrection from their ranks and denouncing crackpot conspiracy theories. If, without that, Democrats once again bend over backwards to appease them, it will be a self-induced emergency.
A year ago this week, a woman met me in a downtown coffeeshop, visibly upset: She had just learned that June had passed away.
I started to interrupt. Instead, I covered my mouth.
“She always asked about my kids,” she managed, a reference to her two teenagers, before adding that their last conversation was commiseration over CVS’s newly-installed self-checkouts.
That also happened to be my last conversation with the cashier who hinted, as she occasionally did over the years regarding other city subjects, that I write about it.
She got one such wish six years ago when I posted “Strutting the Port Astray” on social media, an account of how the Newburyport Board of Health, with the blessing of City Hall, banished the Merrimack Valley Feline Rescue Society’s annual (since 1996), community-spirited “Strut for Strays” from The Mall and High Street.
The woman before me mentioned June’s devotion to cats and her volunteer work at rescue centers. No surprise there, as June loved to talk, offering as much about herself as she could draw from you about you.
Always knew she was popular, but the outpouring of well-wishes on social media was stunning, a unanimous portrait of someone always with a smile, a joke, a greeting, a good-natured caution, a wisecrack, encouragement, sympathy, nostalgia for everyone who walked into CVS.
Of all the tributes, the one that best captures June came from the customer who informed her in 2012 that the Red Sox had fired Manager Bobby Valentine.
June twirled out from behind the counter and danced before the registers.
As one mutual friend later put it, noting the irony of social distancing as she yelled across the Plum Island Refuge road, June “thrived on face to face.”
Before doing it for years at CVS, she did it for years at Dick’s Variety on Plum Island. Both were crossroads where she met virtually everyone.
On Plum Island she would sometimes land outside my place on summer evenings, chatting up my mother with reminiscences of life in the Eisenhower years or trading notes on favorite dishes.
She never stopped talking and rarely stopped laughing. My cousin John was amazed, my friends astonished, my pre-teen daughter enchanted, my father (a nonstop talker himself) dumbstruck. They listened even as June turned listening into an athletic event.
Usually, I’d stay by the grill, spatula in hand whether the burgers needed me or not, rolling my eyes. But she was on a mission when I last saw her facing the prospect of being replaced by a machine, and I heard a voice that I doubt many, if any, ever heard.
She began by reminding me, “You’re Irish!”—something dear to her as her pilgrimages to the ancestral home of Dingle with her three sisters proved—and then grilled me in a rather sharp voice, addressing me by my last name as if it carried some obligation to right whatever wrong was put before me.
In this case—as with this city’s mindless, petty, ridiculous, anti-human Board of Health edicts in 2014 and 2015—she was right. No degree of automated ease will ever offset the erasure of personal exchanges, greetings, pleasantries, laughter.
What CVS on Pond Street and Stop & Shop in Amesbury have done, however well-intentioned, is an affront to any place that prides itself on community spirit.
An illusion of “convenience” is no substitute for kindness, consideration, and good-natured spontaneity.
Most important of all, as a year of plague has highlighted, the folks behind those counters and in those aisles are living proof that in any community worthy of respect—in any country worthy of a flag—the bottom line is not the only line.
That was the verdict of last year’s presidential election.
That was June’s life.
All of which made my new friend’s closing question last year an understatement: “Who would want a machine rather than someone that friendly and helpful?”
I bit into the back of my hand.
She did not know June’s last name. She had no way of knowing that she was telling me about my cousin.
As soon as we hear the word bureaucrat, we usually feel the speaker’s disdain for the subject and often feel it ourselves.
Who hasn’t more than once been caught in the clogged flow charts of local, state, or federal government agencies in which the only person you can reach–after who knows how long in phone menu hell–has to answer to someone higher, who then must gain approval from someone higher yet?
And those are just the first rungs of a hierarchical ladder on which the boss on top has no better view of you than a man repairing your roof has of the mouse hiding from your cat.
No matter how justified our frustration, these agencies will shield their decisions–more so their indecisions–with the claim of “policy and procedure.” And they will grease that skid by using the word appropriate as often as possible.
Who can argue? It’s their skid, after all, and the grease is all-purpose. Just what does “appropriate” mean? If it meant fair, reasonable, equitable, necessary, relevant, or ethical, wouldn’t they use those words? No, because those all have specific meanings. Those can be measured. Appropriate, having no such specific meaning, is entirely subjective. It means what they want, and they want us out of their hair.
We then give up and condemn the whole process as “red tape,” a term which, much like bureaucrat, conveys immediate disdain.
For all the heated controversies of the last four years, we missed the simple linguistic trick that gave rise to a movement for authoritarian rule in America, that nearly made it happen, and that may have another chance before long.
Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace may have started it in 1968 when he ran for president inveighing against “pointy headed bureaucrats.” By the time Ronald Reagan left office, bureaucrats became liberals–a word slurred so often that, in 1996, Sen. Bob Dole thought he could win the White House by using it three times in every sentence. That he was born and raised in Liberal, Kansas, added something vaguely Freudian to the charge.
But it takes a trickster to get away with a trick, someone practiced in the art of the raw deal and making something as contrived as reality TV seem all to real. Someone able and willing to inflate the most simple fact (economic injustice) into grand-scale fiction (great again) that would be accepted as real. Rather than “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” we would be redirected by the repeated charge of fake news by the man who pulled the strings.
Somewhere between the foot of the escalator in June 2015 and the top of the Capitol steps in January 2017, “bureaucrat” and “liberal” became career politician and deep state.
Method to the malice was well-established. In 2009, Republicans seized on a provision for “end of life counseling” in the Affordable Care Act, contriving the term death panels to condemn it. The ACA itself they renamed Obamacare thinking they had already sufficiently demonized the then-president. But most Americans saw through the first lie, and when Barack Obama himself jokingly used the intended slur, it became the favored name.
Republicans had better luck turning “Estate Tax” into Death Tax since it’s a microscopic few of us who have estates subject to it–a class flush with Republican donors–but all of us will die someday. More often they simply add a word to make something neutral seem bad, as with big government, and let repetition do its trick. Often, the pejorative adjectives (extreme, hardline) are used interchangeably to discredit neutral nouns (environmentalist, feminist).
Among their most subtle distortions is abortion on demand. Because abortion commands our attention as the subject of contention, on demand escapes critical notice while adding a sinister ring. We don’t talk about colonoscopies on demand or tooth extractions on demand or oil changes for our cars on demand because access to them isn’t questioned. Object if you will on religious grounds–in this country founded on the principle to keep government free of religion–but do not distort reproductive rights’ call for access as something it is not.
On they other hand, they have employed the word accessible as their alternative for affordable when promoting their non-existent healthcare plan. On the surface it sounds so good, so fair, so, so appropriate. Below the surface, as Bernie Sanders quipped, “Everyone has access to a Lamborghini. How many of us can afford one?”
Apart from religion or politics, the power of language itself is most apparent in the abortion debate these past fifty years. In polls asking if we support an unrestricted right to abortion, most of us say no. When the question is reframed as a woman’s freedom to choose, most say yes. For or against the cause, the chosen slogans are hard to argue: Pro-Life. Pro-Choice.
By far, the Republicans’ most successful mind-blinders over the years are the terms political correctness and government overreach.
The first has credence because, frankly, well-intentioned liberals have gone overboard in the attempt to spare every imaginable American from every unimaginable insult and slight. When I left teaching in 2002, I wondered if administrators and deans knew the difference between the relationship of student to teacher and that of customer to clerk. From what I’ve heard and read since, I now wonder if they know the difference between a college and a nursing home.
My favorite PC foible, though, was the downtown Newburyport restaurant back in the Eighties that started calling their waiters and waitresses Waitrons. Well, it was the heyday of Star Trek and Star Wars. Wish I had stolen one of those menus asking diners to do the same.
Unfortunately, those faux pas are all that’s needed to grind an imaginary complaint such as political correctness into public consciousness where it becomes an excuse for racist and sexist jokes, ridicule of anyone the speaker does not like, and absurd assertions of victimhood over a loss of primacy. How else to explain a “War on Christmas” in which the only shots fired were the names Hanukkah and Kwanzaa bidding for equal time? How else to explain a presidential candidate ridiculing a handicapped reporter and going on to win the election? With that most glaring act of political incorrectness, not only did he not lose votes, he gained them.
Government overreach is simply big government used for specific purposes. Most recently, and most dangerously, Republican governors, legislators, and state officials continue to use it as an objection to face masks and social distancing. Those of us who live in states where officials believe in science still hear it from Republicans in Washington, and we read it in the comments sections of newspapers and threads of social media where government overreach means anything that they do not like–much like fakenews.
Newer loaded terms such as virtue signaling and cancel culture are variations on the older ones.
Cancel has that sinister sound, close to cancer, while limiting attention to a subject of contention–say, a Confederate statue–and avoiding any consideration of what’s being proposed–say, teaching the legacy of slavery, such as Jim Crow, in public schools. Quite an irony that the word cancel is so readily slapped onto efforts that seek to add to our history, but irony has never been America’s strong suit. It’s not irony when someone protests, “How will we know our history?” only to be offended when asked, “When was the last time you read a book?” It’s tragedy.
Virtue signaling may be the most sinister of all, as it turns what the world has always agreed is an admirable, desired quality into an unpatriotic defect. Forerunner for this was when Republican senators pounced on the word empathy which Obama used in his nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court in 2010. Kagan was able to convince them in the hearings that personal sentiment would never overrule written law, but the linguistic damage was done. Empathy is now unAmerican. And now, so too, is virtue.
As Orwell warned, “if thought corrupts language, then language can corrupt thought.”
Neither empathy nor virtue come to mind when we hear bureaucrat or deep state, but the consequence of distorted language is the same. By accepting the demonization of a single word or term that describes people, we become susceptible to accusations against all of those people. We may have an occasional grievance against a clerk at City Hall, but do we then believe that everyone who works for the city is against us?
On a national scale. this is what Republicans have done with their progression from bureaucrat to liberal to career politician to deep state. And this is why these last four years have seen the gutting of all federal agencies, a deliberate removal of public servants dedicated to their public roles rather than to a political party or a cult of personality–of experienced cabinet officials and foreign diplomats who would not bow to the million-dollar incompetents installed for their loyalty and campaign donations to a single person.
Sometime before Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovitch, Sally Yates, and others testified regarding the “perfect” phone call, an acquaintance of mine said he liked Trump because “He doesn’t hesitate to fire people for not doing their jobs.” In truth, they were fired precisely because they did do their jobs.
Somehow, enough of them were too deep to be reached, and lucky for us. As Heather Cox Richardson noted of the lackeys installed by Trump: “These are not people who would be serious players in a nonpartisan, merit-based bureaucracy, but they came within a hair’s breadth of enabling Trump to overturn the election. What stopped them was bureaucrats loyal not to Trump, but to our laws.”
In other words, it was the so-called deep state–career public officers both Democrat and Republican, both liberal and conservative–that kept America from becoming an authoritarian state.
Republican invocations of Martin Luther King yesterday, though infuriating and insulting, were not at all surprising.
Surprise should have ended when Republicans let slide the ridicule of the handicapped reporter–or, at the latest, the “very fine people” in Charlottesville. What is truly surprising no matter how often we see it is how they keep a straight face. As a teacher for 25 years and a Renaissance faire performer for nearly as long, I am well-schooled in that most practical, deceptive art. But Republicans’ ability to do it while attaching an icon of Civil Rights to the monstrosity of voter suppression makes me perversely envious of an ability to do something I’d never want to do.
That’s just one of my recurring thoughts in the two weeks that have passed since the Republican Party aided and abetted The Loser’s most dramatic attempt to turn America into the Fourth Reich. During this time, I have been tuning into news as soon as I awake to know what happens ASAP.
Quite a departure for me. For years I have kept both television and radio off until after dinner, after dark, and even then a good football or baseball game is more to my liking–not to mention more suited to the needs of someone who spends much of the day on a laptop trying to make sense of current events, their historical roots, and what they might mean for the future.
This recent dependence on television ended yesterday even though the Republican Horror Picture Show warps on.
It ended when, yet again, I heard the two owners of a local furniture company screaming: “Martin Luther King Day Blowout Sale!!!” Perhaps I’ve tolerated it that long as just another 30-seconds of commercial noise that we all “tune out”–or think we tune out–but the holiday is intended to observe King’s legacy. The word “blowout” doesn’t just mock a legacy of peace, justice, and reconciliation, it reminds us of the act that ended it.
What we need are reminders of what necessitated it. As he once declared, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
We think of the two-month Republican effort to overturn the vote as targeting four states, but it was more specifically aimed at four cities. Many of the 121 Republican representatives and seven Republican senators who cast votes for the cause of insurrection had already expressed contempt for “urban” populations during the impeachment hearings last year. Ironically, it is the Electoral College they were trying to suppress on Jan. 6 that they have counted on to protect them from, as many of them put it, “urban coastal liberals.” And who lives in cities?
It served them well in 2000; in 2020 not at all.
But the irony doesn’t end there. To disrupt a constitutional process intended, according to the Federalist Papers, to protect America from mob rule, they themselves formed a mob. And for those of us for whom no amount of irony is ever enough, they did it under Confederate flags. And who was enslaved under that banner?
And we wonder why African-Americans might not have wanted to join in a chorus of “what so proudly we hail” in recent years? Or why many of them can’t help but say “we told you so” in recent weeks?
January 6 was a last-gasp effort to deny the Black vote. Martin Luther King Day recognizes the struggle to gain that vote.
Let it be just one of 365 days this and every year when we tell advertisers that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are not cartoon car salesmen. That the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore are not props for insurance companies. That, per the United States Flag Code, the Stars and Stripes should never be used for commercial purposes. And that Martin Luther King did not make the bed on which the “My Pillow guy” can lay out a proposal for martial law.
But let it also be a day we realize that ceremonial straight faces do not cover twisted voting records. That the “thoughts and prayers” lip-service to Civil Rights no longer masks the wink-and-nod politics of civil wrongs.
And let us never again “become silent about things that matter.” Let honesty ring. Let us ring.
Something about the crowd I ran with at Salem State College (now University) that makes us prone to long-distance phone calls in times of joyous national celebration and grave national alarm.
Seems like I’ve spent more time on my landline in the nine days since America’s Bastille Day than I have in the 19 years since 9/11. That occasioned far more calls than anything since Barack Obama’s 2008 victory–which outdid the number that reached me in South Dakota in 1980 when John Lennon was gunned down in Manhattan.
Luckily, we are prone to absurdist humor. When my friend in Peterborough called, he began by asking if I could find him 11,000 votes to make him Governor of New Hampshire. When Fort Myers called, she opened with, “Jesus, Mary, and Fred!”
All of us protested the Vietnam War in the streets of DC more than once, and all of us were there for the largest demonstration of all, Mayday 1971. What a difference 50 years makes! Our goal was to sit in the Capitol’s streets and block traffic until police approached. We would then bolt to another intersection and do the same. Eventually police caught us, five or ten at a time, and took us to a practice football field outside RFK Stadium. Fort Myers and I were frisked up against the wall of the American Information Agency before landing in a wagon with about ten other demonstrators, two of whom we recognized from demonstrations back in Boston. Small world.
Years later we would learn that National Public Radio’s long-running nightly news program made its debut that very day, a Monday, and that the Mayday Protest was its lead story. Seems logical that NPR might broadcast from AIA’s building, and that the show’s anchor may have offered an eye-witness report from out the window. If so, given our arrests in the late afternoon, Fort Myers and I may well have been the very first people described, the Adam and Eve of All Things Considered.
Well, I warned you of absurdity. But in DC 50 years ago, we were as serious as committed to a plan to get arrested and have our arrests weigh on the conscience of our fellow Americans. Yes, the cat and mouse tactic made it chaotic. At one intersection, I was standing aside a sit-in when I felt a bump aside my knee and lost my balance. It wasn’t hard, and I easily broke my fall. When I looked up, a hand was extended to help me up with a profuse apology. It was the cop who hit me while trying to bring his motor-scooter to a stop.
A few bad apples no doubt threw some punches, and I did see one hot-head yank a wiper off a windshield. But by far it was very much in the spirit of Civil Disobedience following the recent example of the Civil Rights Movement, as peaceful as purposeful because peace was the purpose. No question that we spoke with an enthusiasm infused with the audacity of Abbie Hoffman, but we wore the resolve of Martin Luther King.
Call it the fierce urgency of Then.
All my recent phone calls are not in comparison but in contrast. Breaking into buildings and smashing windows were never considered. Taking hostages and hanging elected officials were never imagined. We had no noose. We had no grenades, no pipe-bombs, no guns, and no flag poles to be used as battering rams. We didn’t know what zip-ties were.
In the weeks of planning for Mayday, we never suppressed votes. Not even in the districts that went heavily for Nixon–unlike the Republican Party last year targeting African-American votes in their attempt to throw an election, many of them voting to do so even after the Jan. 6 siege. Today, we marvel that MLK’s “fierce urgency of now” is still Now.
Unlike a political party looking to suppress votes or a mob triggered by a ringleader, we held votes. In DC on the eve of the action, each group was asked to send one delegate to a meeting where we were all camped in West Potomac Park, not far from Lincoln’s gaze, well within hearing of King’s echo. SSC–about 25 of us, enough to qualify–sent me. Don’t know how many other such reunions took place during Mayday, but the University of Pittsburgh sent the shortstop from one of my rival Little League baseball teams. After all.
Violence was denounced from the start. So were yelling, swearing, and arguing with police. The only question was: Stay seated until you were arrested, or move to another location until you got caught. SSC was unanimous for plan A, but, when outvoted, we accepted plan B with the guarantees of no violence. Especially this one: There was to be no resistance to arrest. Civil Disobedience. Recalling it 50 years later, I hear every word of that night’s meeting in the voice of Martin Luther King.
The recent calls, however, are less about 1971 than about last week. And the sharpest contrast involves, unlikely though it would seem, fire extinguishers. We never noticed them. Last week’s terrorists weaponized them.
In DC fifty years ago, the police realized that our wrath was not directed at them and that we posed no threat to them. We may have made them very busy, but non-resistance made their arrests easier. Nor was it lost on us that they were mostly African-American, and may have shared our beliefs while still doing their jobs. More to the point, they understood and appreciated Civil Disobedience as an honorable public act.
What was honorable about the mob last week?
Something that has bemused Peterborough and Fort Myers and the rest of us are the efforts of cable news and NPR reporters to avoid the word “protesters” while describing the terrorists, rioters, insurrectionists, fascists, cultists, white supremacists, cynics, paranoiacs, yahoos, fruitcakes, neo-Nazis, would-be assassins, and–if I had to pick a single word–losers who ransacked The Capitol.
We appreciate the efforts of journalists to distinguish whatever they are from us–and from protesters throughout time and place from America to South Africa, Eastern Europe, Hong Kong, Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere. But we also recall something that no journalist has yet mentioned:
Last week was null and void of music.
I’ve heard that there are “hate-metal” bands who scream for violence as they bang away on drums and electric guitars wired to amplifiers cranked to the max. But they don’t appear at political actions. If they are there at all, it is not to produce what they call “music.” At The Loser’s rallies, the only music was recorded–and more often than not, those who performed it filed suit against his campaign to cease and desist.
Mayday 1971 was a week-long event that began with a concert on the DC Mall. The Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, Charles Mingus, Phil Ochs, Mother Earth, NRBQ, Mitch Ryder, and a hot DC band called Claude Jones all played on Day One. There was also a band called Elephant’s Memory playing for a generation who now jokes that anyone who can remember the Sixties wasn’t there. Bands that arrived in buses with other demonstrators rocked Georgetown and other campuses each night before we crashed on dormitory floors. Songs rose spontaneously from our marches and various sit-ins.
This was true of all our demonstrations to some extent. This is why the music of the antiwar movement is its own genre.
Much like the Civil Rights movement which had gospel as its soundtrack. And where musicians were always present, including “Queen of Gospel” Mahalia Jackson who stood to the side of Martin Luther King in front of the Lincoln Memorial and kept calling “Tell them about the dream!” every time he paused for breath. Inevitably, and to the profound benefit of history, he pushed his scripted speech aside and launched into the speech Jackson heard him give in Detroit a month earlier.
With tributes to Pete Seeger who played for both movements, so our phone calls go. And so they will go through this Martin Luther King Holiday weekend. As American activists have reminded us from 1775 to this day and tomorrow, being a citizen is a job. From that job, we cannot take a day off to honor a man who never stopped working.
Such is the fierce urgency of Then and Now.
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Kind thanks to Lawrence Roberts, author of Mayday 1971, published just last year. When I posted a question hoping to find anyone who might recall who played at that concert, I recalled just three names. Somehow the query found him, and within a half hour he sent the full card. It was also the first I heard of his book, which is now on its way to me. While I cannot recommend a book I haven’t yet read, I surely recommend his website with a gallery that includes photos of the practice football field where we were detained for the day and the inside of the Washington Coliseum where we were held overnight:
From the Mayday 1971 Gallery: West Potomac Park, first weekend of the Mayday protests. That’s the Jefferson Memorial at the top across the basin. Photo by Joseph Silverman, Washington Post
A long distance call from a woman I haven’t seen in years was a welcome break from the daily trauma of life at this end–if it is the end–of a national nightmare.
Never got to know her well while she lived nearby, and she was always adverse to politics which should have made her adverse to this political junkie to begin with. But we shared a love of history and an obsession to read and write about it, so the phone calls and emails with shared files went back and forth.
She has her Lord Timothy Dexter; I have my William Lloyd Garrison. But we are on the same page with John Quincy Adams, and we once raised our glasses to all three in the town they each at some time called home.
But the 19th Century, rich as it was, could not keep these Grating 2020s entirely off the phone. Before we hung up, she asked what I thought of this world that neither Dexter nor Garrison nor JQ Adams would recognize.
The date was January 5 when I told her I was optimistic that the two Democrats appeared about to win in Georgia, and that a Democratic senate would begin to undo the damage of the last four years.
What happened next defies description. She seemed to agree, or hoped that I was right, but she worried over “socialism” and “cancel culture.” I long ago gave up trying to reason with people who fall for these and other Republican canards, and in this case I simply quoted a meme I keep seeing:
Socialism is when the fire department comes to put out the fire in your house. Capitalism is when the insurance company rejects the claim.
While she agreed that we’ll be better off when rid of a toxic president, she worried about the president-elect looking and sounding weak. I was grateful to hear two lines I could agree with before getting off the line–more so for the chance to tell her that Biden sounded much more forceful campaigning in Georgia that weekend.
Next day was January 6.
For my friend to whom journals are like flour to a baker, or wax to a candlestick maker, here’s what I really think:
Jan. 7, 4:20 pm — Silver lining may be statehood for DC. Mayor made the case in presser today as soon as she laid out the jurisdictional straightjacket in which the Feds have the city. Schumer was including it prominently while campaigning for Ds in the campaign, especially during the ramrod installation of Barrett on the SC–which prompted me to write a blog about it Nov. 22.
5:30 pm — Many American flags with The Loser’s face superimposed on them at yesterday’s attempted coup, also with Confederate symbols. They are sold online on sites with names such as rednecknation and tenthamendment, have been for at least four years. Putting anything on the flag is desecration. Also flags with his name stamped on them–one of which was run up a pole to replace a Stars & Stripes they took down. Those of you who still communicate with The Loser’s supporters might want to point this out–especially when they complain about athletes kneeling during the National Anthem to call attention to a national epidemic of unarmed African-Americans being murdered with impunity by cops who wear American flag decals on their sleeves.
6:00 pm — Buried under the news from Georgia which was immediately buried under news from DC was that no charges would be filed against the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police who shot and killed an unarmed African American in August. In the back. In front of his children. On video. This weekend the NFL will have its first round of playoffs, six games, one in DC on Saturday night. I’m rooting for the teams that kneel.
Jan. 8, evening — Posted a blog titled “A Song for Auntie Allie,” an odd name to call my mother, but my cousins practically sang that name, so why can’t I? The tune was originally called “The Eighth of January,” her birthday, but is better known today as “The Battle of New Orleans.” Many Americans think that battle ended the War of 1812. Actually, former Newburyporter John Quincy Adams had already signed the Treaty of Ghent on our behalf, but news from Switzerland travelled slowly. More to the point, military heroism has infinitely more appeal than signed documents. No matter the technology or lack thereof, it was ever since impossible to think of another such battle in the Lower 48. Until this week it was just as impossible to imagine a replay of another event during what historians call “The American Revolution Part Two”: The storming of The Capitol.
Jan. 9, 11:45 am — At the end of a week when The Loser incited his dimwit supporters into violence that killed one policeman and injured others, today is National Law Enforcement Day. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “some animals are more equal than others.” In The Loser’s America, some blue lives matter no more than do black.
5:00 pm — Told my daughter that she and my son-in-law will never have to withstand any more of my jokes about their getting married on Bastille Day.
Jan. 10, 6:00 pm — For the first time ever, I’d like to hear from any or all of the dozens if not hundreds of people who ever badgered me about the 1960s and how bad and wrong we were back then. Would love to hear how the 1860s are working out for them.
Jan. 11, morning — Posted a second blog on statehood for DC, “A State of Undeniable.” Little did I know when I wrote the first, “A State of Denied,” of what might happen: The apparent complicity of the higher ups of the Capitol Police who ignored dire and urgent warnings from numerous other law enforcement agencies and newspapers. Considering that the mob was organized and was blunt about its intentions on social media, most any proverbial fat guy with a bag of potato chips on a couch could have told them what was in store for Jan. 6.
Afternoon — Posted a blog on my experience as a political donor, “You Better Wait a Minute.” If I catalogued every email I received from that blessed Georgian trinity–Ossoff, Warnock, and Abrams–after hitting send for those contributions, I would be still be writing it. Indeed, most of the emails they sent during the four weeks right up to the eve of the election on January 5 asked for another contribution.
Jan. 12, noon — Posted a blog on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eight-minute address to the nation, “A Servant’s Heart.” Apart from the surprise, Schwarzenegger’s account of growing up “in the ruins” of the Third Reich moved me much like Gabby Giffords’ rendition of “America the Beautiful” on French Horn at the virtual Democratic Convention last summer. It could well have been Schwarzenegger’s soundtrack.
Impeachment Day, January 13
11:15, am — So far this morning, the Republican Reps aren’t defending The Loser at all. Instead, they are playing the “let’s-not-divide-the-Country” card. Time to “Move on.”
11:30, am — Did one of them just imply that Democrats are offended by The Loser’s “masculinity”? A comparison to Teddy Roosevelt? The Loser has done more than any other president to appear macho. Specifically, his facial expressions, mannerisms, and hand gestures, all in imitation of Mussolini. Wouldn’t at all surprise me if he practiced the chin-up, narrowed-eyes, severe pose in front of mirrors–something that Hitler did according to more than one biographer. If you Google pics of Mussolini you’ll see it immediately. As for Teddy R: He has the image due to what he actually, honestly did, as is true of Grant and Eisenhower and others. But none of them ever put on airs. For The Loser it is all an act.
1:45 pm — “Gym” Jordan’s strategy: Use the word “cancel” (as in “cancel culture”) as often as possible, and refer to Jan. 20 as a “peaceful transfer of power” as if Jan. 6 never happened.
1:50 pm — Can’t decide which is more nauseating: Republicans saying “let’s work together” or “God bless America.” Nevada is asking, “The country needs to take God out of the chambers!!” If they did, they’d be doing God a favor. As Roger Williams said (paraphrased): When you mix politics and religion, you get politics. North Carolina chips in: “My favorite is, There’s only a week left.”
1:55 pm — Disadvantage to having Republicans wear masks is that they no longer have to keep straight faces. They keep calling for unity and healing, and they are oh, so concerned that impeachment will distract Biden from dealing with Covid-19. They have gone far on the premise that the American public has a weak memory and short attention span. They are now betting that we have no memory or attention span at all. They think we are morons, and judging from the November election, they are about 47% right.
2:00 pm — Look on Matt Gaetz’s face makes me wonder if his mother is also his aunt or sister. Nevada posts pics that show Gaetz & Gym Jordan side by side with Beavis and Butt-Head.
2:30 pm — Saying that it would “further divide the nation” is like saying that a bucket of water tossed into the river in Louisville will cause a flood in St. Louis. Oh, for a plate of fish & chips at Dressel’s in Central West!
5:00 pm — Four Republicans did not vote. Even if they had to stay home, say in quarantine, they could have arranged a proxy vote. They were avoiding going on record, something we could see more of in the Senate. Rhode Island is indignant: “Despicable cowards!” Oh, for sure, but let’s say that ten R senators do it. That would bring the needed vote to convict down from 67 to 60, which is well within reach. Those 10 will also be cowards, but from a purely (impurely?) practical point of view, those four non-votes are a good sign.
5:15 pm — Democrats spent all day decrying the repetition of the Big Lie about a “rigged” election while Republicans kept repeating the big lies of last summer’s protests being entirely violent and the Democrats endorsing the violence. It’s a variation on Whataboutism, but would be more accurately recognized as conflation. Instead of asking, What about Antifa?, they simply talk about last summer’s massive Black Lives Matter protests and the violence committed by a few as if they were one and the same. That’sconflation. But it also involves some deflation by leaving out evidence of photos and videos of white looters who clearly used the protests as a chance to discredit them. Not to mention inflation when they claim that Democrats never condemned, even condoned and called for violence. That, of course, is better known as an outright lie, but like the first two flations, it involves a lot of air. And that’s where and how the repetition does its dirty work.
10:10 pm — Fourth is hyperinflation: A variation on “guilt by association,” this is taking the worst, the most extreme example of those you oppose and applying it to all of them, to all they say and all they do. Biden immediately disavowed the “Defund the Police” slogan, but Republicans keep saying he endorsed it. Some university administration, fearing disapproval, cancels a scheduled speaker’s appearance. Some of the statues that came down should have stayed up. Such things happen and they are regrettable. But they are not the MO of all or most or very many or more than very few of us who think that health care should be affordable and our air and water should not be polluted.
Midnight — Given the damage they do to self-governance, the Four Flations combine as one force we could call unflation. That word may be uncomfortably suggestive of flatulence, but it fits a climate in which there’s not much difference between political talk and passed gas.
My fellow history buff is with us on health care, the environment, and other fundamental issues. Like me, she depends on libraries and the US Post Office, both of which have long been on Republican hit lists as “socialist” in design–one of which was openly handicapped last summer in an attempt to suppress the vote. But she hears the Four Flations. And she keeps hearing them–conflation, deflation, inflation, hyperinflation–over and over and over again and again and again.
Like many, she is left unflated. Like all of us, she is caught in an ill wind.
In that call, she never said she believes in “cancel culture” or that “socialism” is now the law of the land, but that she worries about them. This is true of countless conversations I have had–online, in print, and in person–since the advent of the Tea Party eleven years ago.
All of this is made possible by repetition, repetition, repetition. Truth can be stated once and explained. That should convince any reasonable person. The Flations must be repeated and insisted upon. It may be inevitable that they convince those who crave quick, simple answers. But their real success is sowing doubt in those who don’t ask enough questions.
Considering the mounting crises awaiting the in-coming president, America is in dire and immediate need of another New Deal. To prohibit or cripple it with unwarranted doubt will be to extend our national nightmare.
Mouth of the River 