To Friend Or Unfriend

Yesterday I awoke to a tweet:

Good morning [emoji of a smiling sun] Lies are not “differences of opinion.” Have a great day!

Such was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s wake-up-call that awaited me the morning after I re-engaged in a social media debate that has been going on–online, in print, and in person–for at least as long as the advent of the Tea Party a decade ago. Triggering my re-engagement was a meme quoting Thomas Jefferson who “never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as a cause for withdrawing from a friend.”

No, me either, but this debate is not about any difference of opinion. It is about the insistence that opinions are facts.

In fact, it is often an insistence that what is true is false, and what is false is true. Covid-19 is a hoax. The Loser won by a landslide. It is also the deliberate distortions knowingly perpetrated as fact. A tape of Nancy Pelosi slowed down to make her sound drunk. Jon Ossoff’s nose enlarged in photos by his Republican opponent to remind Georgia voters that he is Jewish. All of the above and more were circulated even after the fraud was known.

It’s the self-induced dementia of claiming that the survivors of a school shooting are “crisis actors.” It’s foaming at the mouth when someone cries, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” but head-nodding that same someone saying “We love you” to those whose own videos show them looting the US Capitol Building.

It’s the rage over an athlete kneeling during the National Anthem that goes silent when a pole with an American flag is used to beat a policeman at a door of Congress. It’s turning a blind eye to a mob waving Confederate flags, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and wearing anti-Semite t-shirts. It’s insisting that terrorism is justified.

As AOC summed up in her tweet, these are not “differences of opinion.” They are lies.

More than that, they are lies that have been parlayed into an attempt to turn America into the Fourth Reich. Still clinging to the belief that “nothing can be compared to Hitler and the Nazis”? Please, how many more “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts do you need to see on looters in The Capitol Building? How many more poles with American flags do you need to see slammed into the stomachs of police and the windows of Congress?

Keep in mind: Those are just the latest blasts from what a Senate Intelligence report over a year ago called “a firehose of falsehood.” Rather than withstand that blast, I have hit “unfriend” at least a dozen times these last four years.

Given what we have seen of The Loser since he first descended the escalator in his Tower of Babble in 2015, anyone wearing a certain red hat might as well be wearing a dunce cap. They and anyone expressing any support for The Loser are not worth talking to, listening to, or making eye-content with.

I’m more than willing to remain friends with, have coffee or beer with, and conversations with people who have different opinions about what should be done about the environment, how history and civics should be taught in schools, what constitutes free speech, whether the death penalty should exist, and just how far the Second Amendment goes. Hell, I’m still calling for the abolition of the automatic transmission, the designated hitter, and the cellphone.

But all such talk must aim at informing each other, increasing understanding of the opposing view, and if we are lucky, consensus, perhaps solution. I’ll share a pitcher of ideas. I will not stand before a firehose.

As one who aims to inform and be informed, I refuse to waste time with lies. Therefore, I make no time for liars, a designation that includes those who accept and repeat lies. I recommend that others–as noble as their persistent efforts may seem–do the same.

Think of it as giving yourself a far better chance to enjoy a “Great Day.”

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https://forward.com/news/451581/jon-ossoff-jewish-nose-david-perdue-antisemitic/

*“Differences of opinion”* from George Orwell’s 1984.

A Servant’s Heart

Did you hear Arnold Schwarzenegger compare January 6 to Kristallnacht? If there is any validity to that comparison, and there may be IMO, we are far from out of danger.

Yes, I had heard it by the time my friend’s question and worried interpretation arrived. Or thought I did until another friend sent a link to the YouTube video in its nearly eight-minute entirety. By that time, it was already getting ample play and commentary on cable-news, and I saw a clip of a few minutes twice, which made me think that was all of it.

Turns out it was barely the first half, but it was enough to justify the high praise the former Republican Governor of California was gaining from ranking Democrats and Republicans alike–and more than enough to explain the goosebumps and tears that filled the screens of social media.

I was already calling it the closest that television has ever come to FDR’s Fireside Chats when Americans, shaken by the Great Depression hard followed by World War II, huddled around static radios, hands never far from the dial–just as mine, and I’ll bet many of yours, have never been far from the remote this past week.

Another comparison would be to Barack Obama’s appearance in the Charleston church following the shooting that killed nine members of the congregation. While it was later aired nationwide, Obama was addressing the victim’s friends, family, and fellow worshippers. While it was intended to reassure and heal, it was hardly a political address–especially when he broke into “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound…”

Schwarzenegger’s address was Amazing Grace. No, he didn’t sing (thank God!), but, like Obama in Charleston, he did reassure and offer hope. Moreover, either he or his advisors were wise to frame him in the trappings of leadership–sitting at a resolute desk with the American and California flags behind him and on his sleeves. In a word, he both appeared and sounded presidential–when we need it most.

At first I did not trust my reaction only because I never liked him, not on the screen, not in any governor’s mansion. I recall a similar reaction to Jesse Ventura in last year’s public service announcement with two other former governors of Minnesota urging the state’s voters not to be intimidated by Republican efforts to suppress early voting. However, for that I was simply grateful, if not somewhat amused.

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.

Wanting to hear the address once more when I sat down to write this, I clicked a link sent by another friend. It confirmed all the above thoughts, but it went on, and as soon as it was over, I replayed the second half to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.

His emphasis on “a servant’s heart,” a phrase–a value, a way of life–that he took to heart during childhood in Austria, reminds us of the American concept of public service. While he aimed it as a contrast to the legislators who incited and sided with the mob, he offered it to the rest of us as an echo of JFK’s “Ask what you can do.” It was both Amazing Grace and America the Beautiful.

But the Terminator-turned-Governor-and-now-Statesman also gave us something more like Battle Hymn of the Republic when he brandished Conan’s sword to tell us we must be tempered and vigilant. To return to my first friend’s worry over lasting danger, yes it will linger and flare from time to time.

In that sense, Schwarzenegger’s address to the nation was not so much an American medley of song as an echo of of our literature, as if he was telling Sinclair Lewis 85 years after the fact that, yes, it can happen here.

Before he finished, Schwarzenegger insisted that it could not, based on his assumption that America–or enough of it–would answer his call. I for one, was glad to see him blow apart the self-inflicted lobotomy to which so many still adhere: That “nothing can be compared to Hitler and the Nazis.”

Now that someone who has experienced both has made the comparison, now that we have all seen the smashing of windows during the American Kristallnacht, now that we have seen the “Camp Auschwitz” and “6MWE” t-shirts on “the very fine people” waving his beloved Confederate flag, there can be no more denying what we face, no more unwillingness to call it by its name.

So, yes, Seattle, we are far from out of danger, but thanks to an action hero with a servant’s heart, we have taken the first step toward political sobriety.

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Screenshot, with another insightful account at: https://www.scarymommy.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-denounces-capitol-rioters/

You Better Wait a Minute

Not long after hitting send on my contributions to the Senate campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, thank-yous from both appeared on my screen, and I was glad to know the donations were received.

An hour later I received updates from both, as well as another note of thanks from the heroic, real-life Wonder Woman, Stacey Abrams. Glad to be on her list. No way to find out, but I’d bet double the amount I sent to Georgia that, had that runoff election been a month earlier, Abrams would have been Time‘s 2020 “Person of the Year.”

That was late on an early-December night and I was soon in bed. Next morning, before I got out of bed, I reached for my iPad and went, as always, right to email. Another pair of updates from Jon and the Reverend. Boy, those guys are good! I thought.

After breakfast, I sat down to my laptop to work on a blog, before which I checked email again. More updates. Wow, they are on it!

As happens with most blogs, that one kept me on my seat into the early afternoon when my stomach assumes a role that begins as a question mark and develops quickly into exclamation point. Before I log out and head to the fridge, I take another look at the inbox. Exclamation points were in the subject lines of Ossoff, Warnock, and Abrams.

If I were to list every email I received from that blessed Georgian trinity, I would be interrupted by announcements of their reelection campaigns and requests for donations before I finished. 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.

How many? I’d say one each from Ossoff and Warnock every three hours and about twice a day from Abrams. Before long I was joking about wanting to proofread and polish the messages, and send them back hoping to land a job as a speechwriter. But just after Christmas, my mood started to change.

When I complained to one friend about the bombardment, he reminded me that such emails have an “unsubscribe” option, required by federal law. Sure, I’ve used that before, but only for advertisers and for a local group I truly loathe. These are two guys I wanted to put in the US Senate. I could no more cut my electrical ties to them than toss out a stash of my own writings that I’ll never read again. Like those dust-covered notebooks, the emails from Georgia serve as reminders that I was part of something larger than myself–even though I never read them the first time.

And anyway, it would all end on January 5.

End on that day it did. And all news of it was eclipsed the very next day by what happened in the city that Ossoff and Warnock would soon call home. And all other news. And all else. For a few days I was able to remind friends who made long-distance calls despairing for our country, for the future, that what happened in Georgia will not stay in Georgia and may well be our future. But when the news from DC got worse and worse, even I forgot

Today, I reached into my mailbox. Not the e-one only a click away, but the metal one at the foot of my driveway. In it, a photograph of Sen. Jon Ossoff and his wife, Dr. Alisha Kramer, with the words “Thank You” in the bottom left corner. A moment of feelings so opposed I doubt I’ll ever forget it: Gratitude for being included vs. guilt for having been annoyed.

But by the time I was back up the driveway, both gave way to the reassurance I saw in a picture of hope I held in my hand.

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This is the photo from which the postcard was cropped. Her name tag reads: “Alisha Kramer, MD, MSc, Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics.”

A State of Undeniable

My first blog following The Loser’s attempt to turn America into the Fourth Reich, “A State of Denied,” proposed that, bad as it was, there is a silver lining: Statehood for Washington DC.

Little did I know that first night of 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 on a couch could have told them what was in store for Jan. 6.

While some individual Capitol Police officers treated the armed, violent fascist mob with a kind tolerance unknown to unarmed Black men and women across America, some were heroic–one Eugene Goodman leading a mob away from the chamber they sought, one Brian Sicknick having his skull crushed by a fire-extinguisher in the hands of one of the “very fine people” as The Loser called them after Charlottesville. Later in the day, The Loser would be most reassuring, not to the murdered policeman, but to those who set murder’s stage: “We love you!”

Since it happened, most of us are either trying to define and fulfill our civic obligations in our nation’s hour of need or hoping that this is just an aberration that will run its foul course. Others are denying that it even happened, or if it did, then someone else did it, and whatabout Benghazi? Those people are called Republicans.

As they have since long before The Loser slandered the Central Park Five with lies in the 1980s–let alone lies about a Kenyan birth or all his other lies since–Republicans will continue to resist the call for DC statehood. Their challenges to last year’s election were targeted not so much at four states as four cities: Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta. Nor does it matter that DC has more people than Wyoming and Vermont. They do not want urban populations voting.

What happened last week presents a case that Republican deceit cannot conceal:

Because DC is under federal jurisdiction, those in charge believed they were more obliged to a president than to the population. Offers of assistance were refused for no better reason than “bad optics.” As many cable-news pundits have noted, a ruler’s control of domestic armed forces is a hallmark of a dictator.

So are attacks on institutions of a democratic republic, for which Washington DC is the seat.

Few if any DC residents had any of this in mind when they voted for statehood in referendums or when they screwed their “End Taxation Without Representation” license plates onto their cars and trucks. Nor did new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer likely consider it last fall when he said that DC statehood would be at the top of a Democratic Senate’s agenda.

However, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser wasted no time noting it in her first press conference the night of the failed overthrow. What happened last week screams for more than one solution, none of them any more obvious than a police force committed to the city, to all who live and work there–rather than to anyone playing to a national audience and prone to use it as a prop, much less a stage for violence.

With a Democratic Senate and White House, the solution is now within reach. To call it by the name that Mayor Bowser and other Washingtonians promote:

Hail Columbia!

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The state flag of “Columbia,” as they plan to call it. https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/12/12/new-columbia-statehood-coalition-hunting-bear-with-rock/

And from the night after Mayor Bowser’s press conference: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/01/08/washington-dc-statehood-faq/

A Song for Auntie Allie

Few people know that this day has a song named for it, and yet most everyone knows how it goes.

Caught my attention a little over 20 years ago which was just in time to let my mother know that she had her own birthday tune, “The Eighth of January.” Today she would be 96.

Might play it a second time for Cousin John who turns 70 today, about ten weeks before I do. Since I’m an only child and his only sibling is a sister eight years our senior, and since our mothers (sisters) were very close, John and I were raised as something about halfway between brothers and cousins.

We have many other first cousins in common, all of whom called my mother “Auntie Allie,” a name so musical that by middle age I became envious of them for using it while I–as a son, not a nephew–could not. Hearing John say it this week, I realized that the formality no longer means much and resolved to drop it.

John and I will celebrate turning 70 with a “Punctuated Equilibrium” and a pitcher (or two) of ale at the Flatbread Pizza Co. in Amesbury. Much like ten years ago, we will pick a date in mid-February. We were so much more energetic at 60 when we trained into Boston to watch the Paul Pierce-led Celtics defeat the New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets (soon to be Swamp Dragons) in the TD (formerly Boston) Garden.

Before the game we treated ourselves to fried clams and chowder at the Union Street Oyster House. Had we been there two centuries earlier, we may have heard fiddlers play the tune that commemorated Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British in 1814–the same song we sang as kids after Johnny Horton penned lyrics and delivered it as a rock & roll rallying cry in 1959 re-titled “The Battle of New Orleans.”

Many Americans think that battle ended the War of 1812. Actually, a truce had already been signed in Ghent, but news travelled slowly, and 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.

Some may dismiss the event as too pathetic, ill-conceived, and doomed from the start to compare to a war. Many of the same people went hoarse four years ago yelling “Benghazi, Benghazi!” over and over and over again and again. Republicans in the House and Senate held endless hearings on it, every one as futile as the one before it.

Four Americans died in Benghazi. Five died in the Capitol Building on Wednesday.

Two days later we are hearing many reports of a second impeachment and the invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove a president who for weeks clearly and loudly incited the attack. John asked if I ever thought we’d see a president “go insane” in office. My immediate thought was of the 1994 film, The Madness of King George, but that was purely loopy behavior that made the film a comedy. I then thought of King Lear, but that was Shakespeare’s imagination, what should have served as a warning against narcissists in high positions. And anyway, neither was a president or anywhere near our lifetimes, as long as our 70 years have been.

“Well,” I managed after a pause, “Nixon was drinking heavily and talking to portraits on the wall before he left.”

“Did Nixon call for an attack on the Capitol?”

Many are already saying that January 6, 2021, will be remembered as a Day of Infamy. That ranks it with the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11. While many more lives were lost in Hawaii in 1941 and Manhattan in 2001 than in DC, it’s the psychological impact of the target–the center of representative democracy–that makes it nothing less than infamous. Furthermore, the call for it from inside the White House renders it not just infamous, but treasonous.

Without asking that anyone share my personal interest, I’d love to see the first step of resolution today in honor of “Auntie Allie.”

We already have a song for it.

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http://www.songlyrics.com/johnny-horton/battle-of-new-orleans-lyrics/

Animal Farm, USA

On the surface, you would think it a children’s story set in the woods with all animal characters, intended for the 10 to 14 age range, and you would not be wrong.

But read the first few pages–long enough to meet a dozen or so eccentric characters ranging from the always reassuring and widely-revered Owl to a conniving rat named Sniff–and you will find yourself in a maze of intrigue that commands adult attention while stoking youthful curiosity.

If George Orwell’s Animal Farm was a fable for what went wrong in Europe a century ago, David Allan Evans’ newly published fable, The Maze, captures what ails the USA today.

No matter how young or old you think you or your kids or grandkids are, neither you nor they can help but be captivated by Evans’ cast: Claws, a good-natured, athletic squirrel; the kindly Grandma and Grandpa Possum; the studious, problem-solving Butterfly; Stub, a hapless mole; Wing, an activist hawk; Number Three, a non-conformist rat; Dr. Four, a quack psychologist; Spider, an imaginative designer; Snake, a loud, crude, but cooperative ally of Wing and Butterfly; and most enigmatic of all, Frog, whose “yes/no” and “fair and unfair” answers to every question are valued by those willing to consider all sides of complex matters.

My guess is that Frog is Evans’ stand-in. A former poet laureate of South Dakota, author of five volumes of poetry, and literature teacher at South Dakota State for 38 years, his friends and his readers–and perhaps he himself–might think that role belongs to Wing, the high-flying poet of The Woods who describes the craft and offers advice to Claws, a poet-wannabe.

No doubt Wing’s poetic advice is that of Evans, but The Maze is prose, a fable designed to make readers think long thoughts reaching far beyond the singular, striking images of poetry. His own poem, “The Pole-Vaulter” (from Train Windows, 1976), should rank among the most universal metaphors in literature with the unforgettable line, “I am committed to beginnings/ Or to nothing.”

The Maze transforms that line from personal declaration into an educational tool when Number Three explains his competitive success: “[S]tarts are everything. Good beginnings create momentum. Maze Momentum, I call it.” Later in the fable, Claws will re-enact that moment of decision when considering a long, life-risking leap between trees.

This is why Frog seems much more in tune with the narrator than Wing. Much like Aesop’s Fables— or like Rocky and Bullwinkle for a more recent comparison–there’s a complexity to The Maze that might alarm those who insist on certainty, the self-appointed thought-police, the guardians of political correctness, the keepers of what’s “appropriate.” Sniff’s “Kingdom of Sharing” is not what they would want or assume. Instead, it’s a target of satire reminiscent of the “Sharon and Karen” skits in the final years of A Prairie Home Companion.

Most compelling about The Maze is something that might excite young readers while giving us older folk pause. It unfolds gradually: a muscular challenge to the simple division we often make between Community and Individuality. Can the ever-present tension between the two be reconciled?

When you finish, you dive back in looking to see how early and middle scenes forecast the final vote. Could be any of the 37 chapters, as they all offer clues. Just what did Grandpa Possum hope to hear from his grandkids when he told that story? Even the off-stage characters play key (if mysterious) roles: What did Crow know? Just what kind of “enemy” was Fox?

Though mostly playful, The Maze has serious bite. Evans’ satire of our modern American maze is as undeniable as it is hilarious, and we are free to identify today’s trap doors and who has access to them.

Other satirical passages are sobering. A chapter titled “What Is a Sniff?” includes a “catalogue essay” that could easily be the text for an ad by the Lincoln Project with merely a change of name and very little anthropocentric adjustment. As Wing tells Butterfly in the book’s Coda: “I’m convinced that facts and the truth can never compete with belief.”

On the surface, that’s a sour note to end on, but The Maze is realistic. More urgently, it is a call for vigilance that will not be lost on young readers–which is, after all, what has made a classic of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

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https://www.austinmacauley.com/us/book/maze

David Allan Evans taught at South Dakota State University, 1968-2006, where I got to know him during my grad student years there, 1980-82. We were both part of an informal group of English profs & majors called the Giles Fletcher the Younger Society that met Friday afternoons in Jim’s Tap, located in beautiful downtown Brookings, South Dakota.

Though I never had him for a class, I once covered a session of his Poetry 301 (202?) when he had to attend a conference out of town. As I recall, the class was a survey of American poets, and he timed it so that I would hold the session on Robert Frost. All he said was that he noted how enthusiastically I spoke of Frost in Jim’s Tap. Wasn’t until I was in the class reading lines from “Stopping by Woods” that I realized he set this up so that these sophomores and juniors from the Great Plains would hear Frost with the New England accent he undoubtedly had.

Their faces lit up, and then they laughed when I repeated lines with exaggerated R sounds. Quite a difference between “My little hoss must think it quee-ah to stop without a fahmhouse nee-ah” and whatever was lost or found in translation.

Monday Night Patriotism

There’s a saying in football that the most popular player on a losing team is the back-up quarterback. The New England Patriots are about to end a season without a winning record for the first time this century. The high-profile veteran QB they brought in last offseason was such an immediate failure that, after just four games, a friend wrote:

“Okay, enough of Superman! Can we give the ball to Stidham?”

Today, a day after the Patriots elimination from the playoffs for the first time since the Bush/Cheney years, Coach Belichick said he’s not inclined to bench Superman in favor of Jarrett Stidham, a fourth-round 2019 draft choice from Auburn who was been impressive in the games that Superman missed due to Kryptonite-resistant Covid-19 mid-season.

Got me to thinking: Here’s a team with nothing left to lose and two games left to play. Intriguingly, the two opponents include one of the best and one of the very, very worst teams in the NFL, the dynamic Buffalo Bills and the wear-a-bag-over-your-head-if-you’re-a-fan New York Jets.

But intrigue has never been among the groceries Belichick buys for his kitchen. Nor is anything out of the ordinary ever since he started resting on his laurels. Instead of learning more about what the new guy can do, we are going to watch a player in the sudden death overtime of his career keep trying to do what he hasn’t been able to do all this sad and sorry year.

Whether you approve or disapprove of Belichick’s reported MAGA political leanings in recent years, you must admit that he is ending this season with the perfect Republican metaphor for ending the most disastrous presidency in American history, as well as the year 2020:

Stick with a proven loser, and give no thought to the years about to come.

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https://nypost.com/2019/08/09/jarrett-stidhams-debut-reminiscent-of-patriots-last-tom-brady-heir/

Fahrenheit 2020

Every winter I am treated to what I call White-Outs, such as the one I awoke to Thursday, when my wrap-around windows overlook a road and marsh covered with snow that also weighs on the shrubs on the north side, all under an overcast sky with flakes still falling in a ferocious waltz of wild wind.

Meanwhile, a white whale Christmas tree ornament–a gift from the co-founder of the local Melville Society who wrote a book she wanted to call A Wild and Ferocious Waltz only to have the title nixed by a nervous, priggish publisher and now shamelessly plagiarized by me right here and now–hangs in the small window directly opposite the door, making it the first thing anyone will see upon entering. Against a backdrop of a pine tree under cover of snow, you can’t immediately tell if it is in- or outside, but it will be there year round. That it faces directly out, no doubt, cannot be purely coincidental.

But I put Melville aside now that I’m finally to have my turn at The Splendid and the Vile, fresh from the Newburyport Public Library where I put it on hold back when apples were just turning red. Considering I was 68th in the queue, I can’t complain. Having just finished Erik Larson’s previous book, Dead Wake, about the sinking of the Lusitania, I find it well-timed.

What on Earth about 2020 can be called “well-timed”? Since it is about the German air-raids over London, 1940-41, I will be spared yet another sinking ship. Before the Lusitania, it was Ahab’s Pequod, before that the Titanic in all its comparisons to America 2020–which isn’t yet out of the ice field, by the way.

Be that as it may, I settled in early last night, television and radio off, iPad out of reach, hot toddy well within reach, and opened to the first of 500 pages starring Winston Churchill during the Blitz. Only to be stopped at the top of page one where the title of the book’s prologue launched me into a flight of fancy:

“Bleak Expectations.”

For all the American and English novels I’ve read or wanted to read, I’ve never seen two well-known titles morphed into one, both from Charles Dickens: Bleak House and Great Expectations. Both, like Splendid, are set entirely in England and mostly in London. But more: The paradoxical combination fits the famous opening of yet another Dicken’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

And so my flight took off: If this opens a book about England, 1940?, how might open a book about America, 2020?

Uncle Tom’s Main Street

Catch 22 in the Rye

Slaughterhouse Wrath

I Know Why Cold Blood Sings

Their Eyes Are Watching the Chosen

For Whom the Grapes Toll

The Invisible Man in the White City

Death Comes for the Mocking Bird

The Fury and the Shrugged

Rabbit on the Road

Beloved Purple

You are welcome to take a connecting flight or parachute into any of the above. Now that I list them, I wonder if they might serve as chapter titles for each of our on-going crises from pandemic, to economic collapse, to a still-contested election and efforts to destroy democracy and establish totalitarian rule.

Add just one more, and we have one for each month. If it’s on race-relations, let it be Go Tell It on Beale Street to match Larson’s combination of two titles from one writer, in this case James Baldwin, with a bank shot for the third: The Fire Next Time.

If so, what would the title of such an American-year-in-review book be?

Again, I welcome all suggestions, but I’ll start the bidding with Fahrenheit 2020. Yes, that’s out of the bounds of two book titles, but Raymond Bradbury’s 451 has twice been adapted as a film title. And the screen-writer/director of both Fahrenheit 9/11 and Fahrenheit 11/9 would be the ideal candidate to make it happen. Not that Michael Moore ever does, but he’d have no lack of White-Outs to help serve up this hot-tempered year.

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Taken during a three-week–long White-Out remembered as “Snowpocalypse,” from the middle of February into March, 2015. I call the windows in the front room “wrap-around” because the sides of that room are mostly glass that reaches all the way to both corners. If you are wondering about that 59 atop one corner, I’d like to say it’s my age, but it’s actually my address according to the town and utility companies. However, since there’s no access on Sunset Blvd., my mailbox is at the foot of a driveway up and off to the right, #20 on a street that the town named just for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/books/review/the-splendid-and-the-vile-erik-larson.html

Keep ‘Mas’ in Christmas

You know what’s good about The Loser trying to subvert an election, sabotage an incoming administration, destroy our faith in American government, ignore Russian hacking, serve a Russian dictator, and ignore a deadly pandemic while hospitals are as stuffed as New York City subways at rush hour with ambulances running like shuttles?

We don’t have to listen to Fox and the Fundies whine about a “War on Christmas.”

Yes, there is a War on Christmas, but it’s not at all the war they want us to fear and fight, not at all the war The Loser promised to fight and win back in 2016 when he became president courtesy of the War on Democracy known as the Electoral College.

Nor is it waged against the first syllable in “Christmas,” the “reason for the season” as some like to remind us.

In fact, the so-called War on Christmas heralded by Fox, the Fundies, and The Loser is a diversion from the real war. Whether we accept or reject the religious claim, the fictitious war had been hitting us with such blizzard force every year that we surrender to the factual war without realizing that there is a factual war.

We surrender even though the unwarranted pressure of that war drives us to all levels of frustration, distraction, anxiety, exhaustion, and at times violence.

It’s as if we are boxer Roberto Duran in the Superdome ring in 1980, putting his hands up and saying, “No mas! No mas!”

Except that he actually did fight eight rounds before he knew he was beat. In Spanish, he was saying “no more, no more.”

We, on the other hand, put up no resistance whatsoever—unless you count procrastination which everyone admits is lame. “Mas” would give us eleven more days, yet we act as if there never was any “mas” to begin with.

Yes, I’m talking about the second syllable in “Christmas.”

Since Olde English “mas,” or “feast,” evolved into “mass,” most take it to mean a religious service. Today’s services may clock under an hour, but thanks to the leisurely pace of camels in the Year Zero, the feast of Christ’s Nativity is twelve days.

Dec. 25 is the beginning, not the whole. Jan. 6 is just as much “Christmas” as the day we call by that name, and so is every day in between.

This is why Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, why we sing “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and why many trees remain in place for that time.

This is why Jan. 6 is a holy day marking the arrival of the Three Kings.

Some 25 years ago a Catholic priest proposed in a Boston Globe op-ed column that the holiday be divided in order to keep religious intention free of material indulgence. Since the unholy American trinity of Advertise, Buy, and Sell has a lock on Dec. 25, he suggested that religious observance be the end of the 12-day “mas,” The Epiphany—a name that by itself focuses on faith and the good will to sustain that faith.

Just keeping the word “Christmas” and holiday decoration out of ads for imbecilic movies (“Opens Christmas!”), violent video games (“Rated M for Mature”), and sexual performance enhancing drugs (“Come play with me”) would help our sanity.

But to free ourselves from pressures of buying and sending gifts and cards on deadline, we need an epiphany of our own. If the family called “holy” by those who observe Christmas as a religious holiday can wait twelve days for gifts, why can’t we?

And cards. In fact, you might say that cards are so much less of a commitment than gifts that we should have another five weeks, maybe combine them with Valentines for a sly way to hedge romantic bets while saving on postage.

But that’s a detail to be settled once we solve the main problem: The fabricated pressure created by an unnecessarily shortened shopping season. Is it any surprise that the start of this would have names such as “Black Friday” and “Cyber Week,” or that each day of it would have a repetitive soundtrack to drive us up a Wall of Hurry Up?

Long ago I made it the first rule of my life that whenever I hear the word “hurry,” the answer is “no.”

This has served me well, and I would have been spared a few disasters had I adopted it sooner. Yet, despite that, even I have fallen unwitting victim to “no mas” Christmas only to share the pressures and anxieties most Americans have every mid-to-late-December.

Admittedly, my own epiphany here is too late to do anyone any good this year, but we have not just twelve days but twelve months to put the “mas” back in Christmas next year.

And you know how good we all are at getting things done ahead of time.

-30-

Another gem from Mike Luckovitch of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Sympathy for Devils

Years ago, on the way home from a trip to Chicago, I stopped for a weekend in the Rust Belt to visit a few folks I hadn’t seen in years and to meet a few others for the first time.

One fellow in the latter category threw a good-natured taunt at me as soon as he heard my Boston accent. The Red Sox had just won a second World Series in four years and he was envious. I responded by expressing condolences for his floundering Rust Belt team. I thought about rubbing it in by mentioning the Patriots, but I was surrounded by Rust Belt fans, so I did my best to be diplomatic.

Later in the day, he found himself left alone in my company by the pool when his wife and other mutual friends had to attend to something inside. Dawned on me that I learned something from a stray newspaper I picked up on Amtrak after leaving Chicago that would gain his interest.

Sports, far more often than not, are icebreakers for American men. Like the weather, they are subjects we can offer and accept as readily as we avoid religion and politics. Better than the weather, they allow us to be competitive without any contradictions of each other’s beliefs or values. If we are fans of rival teams, we trash talk, which may sound menacing and which often offends the sharing-caring crowd, but which is really, to borrow a sharing-caring term, male bonding.

And so I told him that Tampa Bay’s baseball team was dropping the word “Devil” from Devil Rays to become the Tampa Bay Rays. He interrupted before I could say another word:

“God damned political correctness! When is it going to end? They can’t leave anything alone….”

I thought to stop him but, instead, checked myself to see how far he’d take it. He went on in that vein for a few minutes, much of which was about a minor league baseball team arriving in a city nearby that wanted to call itself “The Blast” for the city’s involvement in the aerospace industry. Turned out the city was also the hometown of one of the ill-fated Challenger’s astronauts, and her family asked that they desist. According to my new friend, the city was the victim of political correctness when it had to accept a name he thought lame.

When he came to a full stop, I took two deep breaths before answering: “According to the report, there were no protests, no pressure at all from anyone. The owners wanted to change the team’s image. So the team’s PR people came up with the idea for a new logo: Rays of the sun. That lets them keep the fish as a second logo (if that is a fish) along with keeping the tank in centerfield as an attraction.”*

He looked at me as if I had shot him in the stomach. I felt bad, so I kept talking as a way to put the mistake behind us: “It’s a double-entendre. It’s the sun, it’s the fish. Maybe a triple-entendre if you count stingrays and who knows what other rays are in the Everglades…”

I went on in that vein before he finally spoke: “Well, political correctness is still ruining everything…” And on in that vein.

All this came back to me following a Thanksgiving Day call to the same folks. They put me on speaker phone as we shared updates on numerous mutual friends both here in New England and there in the Rust Belt. Toward the end of it, perhaps as a concession to Mr. Sympathy-for-the-Devils, I mentioned that “another thing doing very well in ______” was their football team.

Not sure if he was close to the phone and spoke softly or away from it and had to raise his voice, but what he said was as pointed as it was distinct: “I refuse to pay any attention to that anti-American league anymore!”

I took a deep breath, then another, then said, “Well, that’s all the news I have,” something that, thanks to the pandemic and my de facto retirement, I could have said as soon as they answered the phone. But we had covered how well the kids and grandkids were doing despite confinement, and how not well we were doing at flattening our own curves because of confinement, and so we signed off without incident.

Interesting, though, to realize that in 2020, a number that has always been shorthand for seeing things clearly, sports along with all else has become a divisive subject.

In the minds of those who ever expressed sympathy for the Devil Rays–or the Washington Redskins, or the Washington Bullets, or any of the many high school and college teams that have dropped mascots and changed names–NFL players who have knelt in protest during the National Anthem are now devils for whom there’s to be no sympathy.

Just as there’s no sympathy for those killed by trigger-happy police, no matter if they are unarmed, sometimes in the act of surrendering, sometimes asleep in their own bed.

They may call the NFL–and, for that matter, the NBA, the WNBA, MLB, and other sports leagues–unpatriotic, and no doubt they believe it. They are often called “super-patriots,” a term that is alternately complimentary and derisive, but a term that always misses the point. Superficial-patriots would be far more accurate to describe those who make no objection to–indeed, no comment at all about–public acts that are profoundly unpatriotic and have consequences far beyond the symbolism of a flag and a song. Attempts to:

Suppress votes
Obstruct US mail
Overturn an election
Politicize the Justice Department
Replace career military officers with loyalist lackeys in the Pentagon
Use the White House and other federal property as political props
Intimidate poll workers with demonstrations brandishing guns and nooses outside their homes
Pressure state legislatures to ignore state elections and appoint loyalists to the Electoral College
Litigate the results of state elections
Threaten health officials calling for mask mandates and temporary bans on public gatherings
Obstruct an incoming administration
Deny a peaceful transfer of power

Beneath the surface, the crime of an entire professional sports league–from the quarterback who started it to the commissioner who lets it happen–has been to ask many of its fans to do what they least want to do.

When your patriotic sympathy is with devils, what could be more unAmerican than to think?

-30-

*This conversation occurred years before I heard the terms “branding” and “rebranding.” Whatever they called it, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series (but lost) in their first year with the new name. “Tank” refers to a large tank of saltwater with devil rays swimming in it between the centerfield fence and the stands behind it. Here’s a look at how they have kept the fish in the shortened name, a jersey with both logos, and the new sunshine jersey they wear most often: