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.”
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.
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.
-30-
This is the photo from which the postcard was cropped. Her name tag reads: “Alisha Kramer, MD, MSc, Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics.”
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:
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.”
By the time I became a grandparent, I was content to turn out the lights and turn in well before countdowns began on New Year’s Eve. Once upon a risk-taking time, however, I celebrated the arrival of a new year by packing all I could into a ’69 Dodge Dart on my way to ring in a new life. We all do it at least once in our lives. Nothing unusual–until you consider that I drove 400 miles straight north in the second week of winter to a place I had never been:
The very top of the state of Maine.
But I did have a job. Hired sight-unseen by the St. John Valley Times, “The Largest Paid Circulation Paper North of Bangor” according to the masthead. I figured they were desperate for staff, a hunch that would soon prove an understatement. Ostensibly, I signed on as a reporter, although the emphasis on having a dependable automobile should have tipped me off to my actual all-purpose role. No matter. All I wanted was entry into the world of journalism, and, giving it my best, a few years in the tundra would land me on a paper in Portland or Bangor, stepping stones to The Boston Globe.
Like many English and journalism majors in the mid-70s, I was chasing Woodward and Bernstein.
Rather than into a national capital buried in intrigue, I drove into a river valley buried in snow with tiny villages few and far between. On the northernmost 50 miles of US 1, which actually spread from east to west as you drive toward the terminus, are but three towns at 25-mile intervals: Van Buren, Madawaska, and Fort Kent–each with a bridge to New Brunswick, Canada.
In any weather, the river can be hypnotic, and when the snow is gone, you are struck mostly by the endless potato fields between the road and the pine forests along the St. John. But on that day, driving into a world of flat white land under formless gray sky, steeples cast a spell. No matter how small the villages between the towns on both sides of the river, they all had churches. In the three towns, none with a population over 4,000, there were several.
Maybe I was hired because they assumed I was Catholic.
Staying the night with friends just north of Portland allowed me to roll into Madawaska–the native word for porcupine–mid-afternoon Jan. 1, 1975, in time to let my new editor and employer know that I was on schedule and could start tomorrow. Well before needing to find dinner, I checked into a downtown hotel across the street where I let myself believe I had my eye on everything. In return for advertising, the paper had arranged for me to stay there one week before I relocated the rest of the way down US1 to Fort Kent where I would be on my own. Picking a restaurant from my window was, as we called it back then, a rush.
Next morning I was introduced to everyone on the staff, all of them women except for the publisher, the editor-in-chief, sports editor, and printer–and all seven of them in advertising. A lively bunch, so welcoming that I overlooked something that should have alarmed me: Other than sports and editorials, I was the paper’s only writer.
Overlooked everything that first week. Too much fun learning new ropes. Foremost was not just how to operate a sophisticated camera, but how to unload the film and develop it in the darkroom. I still have a selfie I took 35 years before the word selfie was coined. The old camera-with-timer-on-tripod trick. Never having owned a camera or taken a photo that I recall, I was now obligated to have one at hand at all times “because you never know when there’s going to be a car crash in front of you.”
The editor who said that lived by such adages. And by absolutes. There was to be no disagreement with him, as I learned the first day when he asked what I had been reading of late. “Jack Kerouac,” I laughed, thinking he would appreciate the coincidence of my French-Canadian answer in the bi-lingual St. John Valley.
“Oh not him! He’s an assault on the senses!” He took a swig of Coca-Cola, then added, “‘Nuff said!”
That was the first of a hundred times I heard that summary exclamation. To be fair, the job of editor is defined by deadlines more than anything else, and so anyone doing it is forced to cut things short. But I’ve known many editors, and he’s the only one I’ve ever met who actually believed that matters were settled once he stopped talking about them. In conversation, whether in the office or over the phone, it veered from comical to maddening, but to see the two words tacked on to the end of the paper’s editorials was to want to put a bag over my head.
He also lived, it seemed, by those bottles of Coke always at the ready in his side pocket. During any conversation, he would steal a sip at a time, screwing the cap off and on every few minutes. Well before the end of January, I couldn’t help but notice the emphasis with which he took it from and returned it to the pocket of a jacket he never removed, always in sync with whatever absolute edict he pronounced at the time. Like a pistol: drawn, aimed, fired, and shoved back into the holster. ‘Nuff said!
Before I left the familiar for the unknown, people–ranging from my father to my college profs, from the editor of the weekly Salem Gazette who published my first paid freelance work to friends who read it–were full of advice for me. They all told me to keep my head down, don’t try to change things anytime soon, ambition can wait–must wait–until “you get yourself established first.”
That was very much my rule through the initial week. Held to it so well that I kept a perfectly straight and agreeable face as I learned things that might have kept me in Massachusetts looking for a job had I known ahead of time.
Most bizarre of all was leaning that every Thursday I would pack bundles of the new edition into my Dart and dart from Madawaska past Fort Kent some 20 miles into the Allagash, and then another dozen to the hamlet of Eagle. Yes, I did freeze a bit at the thought that they hired my Dart and I only happened to be the driver that came with it, but I sure warmed up to the apple-cider donuts one of Eagle’s 400 residents always had waiting for me.
Before I could process my odd job description, I was put into action on the second day when a five-unit apartment house across the river in Edmundston–pop. 17,000, by far the largest town in the Valley–went up in flames. No car needed, as I simply walked across the bridge into Canada where customs waved me through at the sight of my press pass.
Fire-fighters, with the aid of a Canadian National Railway tanker near the scene, had it under control by the time I arrived, and no one died or was injured, although 21 residents, mostly children, were left homeless, some of them among the crowd of onlookers in the sub-zero temperature. While I heard French from all directions, a fellow of about 30 spotted me and sensed why I was looking around. He introduced himself in English, told me he was a resident who had just returned from delivering his wife and two kids to a nearby aunt. He described the explosion of the boiler in the basement, and felt especially bad for the recently widowed mother of five who just moved in. After giving me his full name to write down, pausing as I put the pen away, he added, “My friends call me ‘Ace’.” We shook hands.
According to the report I wrote back in the office, “Jean Guy Simone withstood the cold with neighbors and did not seem effected at the prospect of having to find a new home… ‘My only concern was for my family. You can buy new furniture. You can buy new clothes and other things, but you can’t buy new kids.'”
The editor loved it. My inner wiseass wanted to ask if he was ready to recommend me to the Bangor Daily News, but a call came for another fire, an unoccupied warehouse on the Maine side which I covered over-the-phone, just ahead of deadline. Next day, the two stories ran atop the front page under one banner, all-caps headline: “A WEEK OF FLAMES.”
Next day was my first as delivery boy, which I used to look around Fort Kent where they wanted me to move the next week. A college town with a small University of Maine campus, it was between semesters when apartments would be easy to find. But I hustled with a roaring appetite back to Madawaska–something about wanting to be where what I write appears in print, when it’s in print. Also relished that no one would recognize me as the one who wrote what they had just read, might even have right there on the table in front of them.
Or, so I thought. As soon as I entered, two couples, about my age (still 23) waved me over: “You’re the new guy at The Times! Please join us!” One pulled an empty chair out from the table: “Please!”
“Yes,” I said, sitting, saying my name, and extending my hand for shakes all around. As I looked directly at one of the women, I recognized her as among The Times’ staff I met on day one. “Oh! Hi!”
One of the men, while signaling a waiter: “What are you drinking?”
“Labatt!” I made sure to pronounce it as do the Canadians, to rhyme with cat. He noticed the effort that took me, and smiled before mimicking for the waiter what he expected to hear: “Labahht!”
Then he began the lesson of my life with three of the biggest grins I have ever seen leaning in around the table: “Great story about the fire! Very nice account of the families, the fire-fighters, and the CNR workers. But there’s something you need to know–“
“Something we will never tell anyone at the paper,” my co-worker interrupted.
He gave a quick nod and turned back to me: “There is no Jean Simone. You got the numbers of homeless and apartments right, but everything you heard from ‘Ace’ was made up. He’s a joker. He does that with anyone who shows up asking questions about anything. And as soon as he gets some fake name in print or on radio, he calls his friends and brags about it.”
The other woman chimed in: “When he shows up at parties or runs into us in a bar, he makes a game of matching his names to his pranks.”
My co-worker chimed in singsong: “Jean Guy Simone, Edmundston fire!”
The other woman went up an octave: “Eugene Moreau, Fraser Paper closing!”
The man who hadn’t yet spoken: “The logging truck pile-up was his best.”
The woman: “Dennis Dejardins!”
The man: “Yes!”
The Labatt arrived just in time. My co-worker may have thought that I was going to down it all in one gulp when she grabbed my forearm: “It’s okay, it’s all in fun!” The other woman nodded agreement before she continued, “And it was a nice report. That last line made me cry.”
That last line followed Ace’s priceless quote regarding priceless kids:
“As he said it, children coming apparently from a building across the street were bringing pots of hot coffee and styrofoam cups to the Edmundston firemen, most of whom had frost from the water hanging precariously from brow and brim.”
Good thing I didn’t have time to send it to Bangor. Instead, the next day began, as all others would, with me scouring the Bangor Daily News for any story related to Aroostook County or to the Allagash, the wilderness and waterway, including a series of rapids, that reach deep into Maine’s interior. My assignment was to re-write Bangor’s stories for The Times, often changing the emphasis to suit the St. John Valley, always citing Bangor as a source at the end. Many of these never saw print, but they were available to fill any odd space on a page. If one was just a line or two too long, bye-bye Bangor!
It was grunt work, but the subjects–such as a new federal mandate regarding gender equality in sports on the U. Maine campuses (Title IX), and federal cutbacks to the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA)–were of more import than my local assignments that appeared under headlines such as:
Budworm bill slated Friday
Plumbers probe high prices
Grade consolidation approved
But every now and then, one would appear that made it all seem worth it:
Oil from trees?… Maybe
Consolation was covering UMFK, an acronym that offered no end of jokes for students and faculty alike, but a place progressive enough to sustain my interest.
Before I relocated to Fort Kent, I gained another lesson when I was informed that the Valley may have been shortchanged by a state program providing services for the elderly in their homes. To get the story I was to meet with two elderly gents in a downtown Madawaska diner, but I was instructed to stop at the barbershop next door first. Quite a surprise, but not nearly the surprise as what was to come.
There awaiting me was a middle-aged fellow who got up when I entered, said A plus tard (“See ya later”) to the barber, led me to the diner’s door, saying only, “They know why you’re here.” Inside, he called out Bonjour and introduced me to the two men at the corner of the counter. My guide and I took the two seats on the other side of the corner so we could face them. Bonjour! he said again. The men nodded at me as I, taking the cue, said Bonjour and launched into my first question.
When I stopped, they exchanged glances, and one nodded to the other who turned directly to my guide and answered. In French.
So my guide was my translator, but he wasn’t translating anything I said, just French to English for my sake. This went on for a round of coffees and at least one refill for me. When it was over, I turned to the translator and said “thanks,” and then to the men and said Merci. What they gave me was an incisive, detailed account with a very specific cause and effect–a bad administrative move with real-life consequence, sure to make a good story. So my gratitude was sincere, but my Merci seemed to bounce off them. They thanked the translator as if I wasn’t even there.
Had he not left with me, I might have waited for him outside. But he did follow, and, once, on the sidewalk, said: “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Well, then answer it. Why did they do that?”
“Everyone here is bilingual. But French is the first language, it’s family, community. Old people here refuse to speak English as a matter of principle.”
“But it’s an English-language newspaper.”
“That means nothing to them. Did you know that your publisher and editor are from Pittsburgh?”
“No, never occurred to me to ask.”
“Well, it nags them,” motioning back into the diner. “And now you show up from Boston.”
“Then why did they agree to talk to me?”
“They didn’t talk to you. They talked to me.” He laughed apologetically before continuing: “The one who did most of the talking is my father. He listened to you as a favor to me.”
That night, my last in Madawaska, was spent fighting with a radio dial for the sake of a hockey game between the Boston Bruins and arch-rival Montreal Canadians–my hometown team vs. this now much-closer team. A French broadcast was steady and clear. English required much fiddling with antenna and aluminum foil.
Fort Kent was just right for me at 23, a college town, young people, night life. My second-floor apartment, located between the campus and a ski slope, had nice views out the windows and was a quick walk from the town’s modest center.
By the end of the first week, I was keeping company with a spirited young lass who made me realize that I was no longer in Salem, that I had no umbilical cord to that haunted and haunting city, and I could start living in the present without thinking in the past. Unfortunately, she had a vanity license plate on her car which needed only one overnight in my driveway before people started chiding me with, “How’s Ursula?” Since everyone knows everyone else in the St. John Valley, the question found its way to the Madawaska office.
Yes, it was a good life in the dead of winter. Our favorite outdoor pastime was to walk halfway across the international bridge where there’s a plaque that marks the line. We would stand there, “one foot at home, one foot away,” or we would each take one side for an international nez voler (nose-rub), not taking any chances with freezing lips.
Indoors, the UMFK public relations people were sure to invite me to every conceivable campus event. When the academics kept asking about the reporter I replaced, a fellow they all quite liked and missed, I started to learn about the circumstances of my hiring. My reaction to discovering that I was working for a newspaper with advertisements on its front page–a journalistic sin back then, but common now–was mild embarrassment. My predecessor had quit over it.
That may seem symbolic and easily dismissed, but symbols represent something real, such as what I walked into on what may well have been the Ides of March. The Valley’s Chamber of Commerce had invited a local state rep to address them at their annual awards banquet. A young, dynamic legislator, he had just been elected Speaker of the Maine House, and there was much speculation of when–not if–he would become governor.
His message was sobering but calm. The mid-70s were years of budget cuts on every level, and he didn’t sugar-coat or mince words. Yet, he could not have been more reassuring when he spoke of investments in large scale energy projects for which the Valley was well-situated. It was his expression of opposition to the Republican governor–the classic investment vs. “retrenchment” debate–that struck me as newsworthy, close to a campaign being announced.
That, and the enormous bandage over his nose due to his car skidding off US1 on his way to Fort Kent.
My front-page story covered both what came out of his mouth and what sat on his nose in fine detail. What it did not do was list the awards chamber members gave themselves. Those appeared on an inside page, a sidebar with no added fanfare from me. The chamber was livid, and they prevailed upon the publisher to call me on the commercial carpet. All I recall from that meeting was when, after mentioning the sidebar with the full list, I protested that a newspaper “is not an advertising sheet.” He and the editor looked at each other before he turned to me:
“We are here for the advertising.”
The editor took another sip of Coke.
‘Nuff said!
I lasted about one more uncomfortable month before packing my Dart. Ursula had already left Fort Kent without a word to me or anyone I knew. Since her license plate was nowhere to be found, I didn’t take it personally.
Yes, I did stop at the Bangor Daily News on my way south. Will never forget the sight of those pneumatic tubes connecting every desk to a network along the ceiling to zap copy from desk to desk. It was like arriving at Niagara Falls after being stuck four months in shack with no running water. Of course, they told me there were no openings in that time of cut-backs, not even as the driver of one of their several post-war Nordic green trucks dispatched daily 200 miles north to the St. John Valley.
From there, I continued south but veered east to a hippie farm near the Maine coast not far from the mouth of the St. John. A few Salem friends had taken it over while teaching a class or two at another U. Maine campus in Machias. Late April was the right time to land on a farm.
Before long I went to the campus looking for a job. None to be had, but the woman in Personnel found it uncanny that a refuge from the St. John Valley Times should show up in her office. She directed me across the hall where I found my predecessor from Fort Kent ensconced in Public Relations. He was amazed at my story, not so much for the similarity as for the brevity. I was oddly consoled to hear that he, too, had been punked by Ace–35 years before punked was coined. A logging-truck accident outside Van Buren. Ace added four cars and a dozen passengers to the lone car and driver who were involved.
“Did you ever get his real name?” he asked me.
“No. Never asked. I guess I didn’t want to know.”
“Me either.”
He urged me to keep an eye on the weekly job listings in the weekly trade journal, Editor & Publisher, available in the UMM library and count on him for a reference. About one afternoon a week when a new E&P appeared, we became each other’s excuse to have a couple beers in a nearby bar.
By October I was accepted into the graduate school of journalism at a state university I had never seen, in a state I had never been, 1,700 miles to the west. Last week of October. Sight unseen. No Graduate Record Exam needed. Must have been my references.
On the Greyhound bus somewhere in Ohio, I picked up a stray copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A large front-page photo showed a body prone on the side of a highway, a policeman standing over it, his cruiser nearby. The caption called it a fatality, and practically bragged that the paper’s photographer happened to be driving that road at the time, stopped as soon as it happened, and “had his camera with him.”
Whether I read too much into that caption or not, I never entered any grad school of journalism. No matter. I was glad to have cut that cord when I rang in 1976 on the Great Plains of South Dakota.
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Saint-Basile, Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada, overlooking the St. John River with Madawaska, Maine, USA, on the opposite bank. Photo: Government of New BrunswickUS1’s southern terminus is Key West, Florida, after the final 126 miles stretched over a series of two-lane bridges that connect the keys. Prior to Fort Kent, I had been to Key West, twice, during spring breaks at Salem State, so in some psycho-geographical way, my move to the top of Maine may have been to complete some kind of trip–having come from an era when we were into all kinds of trips. In the 80s, a decade after all this happened, Ford started airing a commercial showing a hitchhiker holding a cardboard sign saying “Miami” while freezing in the snow by road-signs saying “Leaving Fort Kent” and “US1.” Brand new Mustang pulls over, door swings open, and an attractive young woman looks out and says, “Hop in!” But he stops to ask, “How far you going?” When she answers, “Fort Lauderdale,” he shrugs and says, “Ah, thanks, but I’ll wait until I find someone going all the way.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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Another gem from Mike Luckovitch of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Mouth of the River 