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?
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*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:
When the library closed in March, I started taking long neglected books off my shelf, many of them gifts never read or so much as opened. When my mother gave me The Lives of John Lennon in 1988, I wondered how any American woman would want her 37-year-old son to make time for a 700-page doorstop, but I now thank her for a most engrossing few weeks this past spring—albeit 20 years too late for her to hear it.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of Lennon’s assassination and will, no doubt, occasion many tributes and observances. He deserves all the gratitude and praise he has ever received and will continue to receive for his music both with and apart from Paul McCartney’s collaboration. Off-stage and out of recording studios, however, “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” rings ironic.
No point in relaying decades-old fault found with the fellow who gave us “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and “I Want You”–and I know that upwards of three dozen other songs could top his list–but the book continues to nag me. At least a decade before Lennon died, young people began a movement–of which I was a part and he was a leader–part of which was to demand truths rather than accept myths about history and the people who made it.
That movement, at least as strong among generations younger than our own, has intensified in recent years. Had #MeToo emerged fifty years sooner than it did, Lennon would have never taken Ed Sullivan’s stage. The movement to “Gimme Some Truth,” to borrow a Lennon song title, peaked when statues of Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee started coming down. All that was attributed to “political correctness,” a charge that would not stick if those of us they blame for “taking [their] history away” stopped being selective about who is and who is not exposed.
In a phrase: We can’t have it both ways.
Or, to put a twist on a popular advertising slogan: What happened in Hamburg did not entirely stay in Hamburg. Years later, at least two Hamburg incidents continued to haunt Lennon. As he confided to Jesse Ed Davis, a superb guitarist who helped make much of Lennon’s late solo work all shine on, the author of “Instant Karma” knew it was his “karmic destiny” to suffer a violent death.
Somehow the details and descriptions of his musical genius, the collaboration with Paul, and the influences of American black musicians, make the first 500 pages riveting enough to offset Lennon’s personal flaws. How Ringo replaced Pete Best on drums is as telling about adolescent psychology and Beatlemania as it is about the music industry and the Beatles. But once Lennon fades into his final years as Yoko’s ticket to ride, the final 200 pages, save for a few brief awakenings for some memorable tracks on his last albums, are hard to take–or to Imagine.
To be fair, please know that a few people quoted in the book have denied or retracted their statements and have claimed to be misrepresented, McCartney denouncing it as “pure rubbish.” More than one publication, including Rolling Stone, condemned author Albert Goldman for using sources both unnamed and with axes to grind.
Still, that leaves numerous sources who are named, numerous events which did happen with no known cause or reported effect, and many surprising musical connections and disconnections that were never fully explained. Since The Lives of John Lennon answers so many of these questions, its uncontested passages are worth attention–along with the Rolling Stone piece and others that defended Lennon against Goldman’s portrait.
But not on this day of remembrance. Instead, I will specify only Goldman’s most credible–and I would say welcome–answer to the question most frequently and hotly debated regarding history’s greatest rock and roll band, John in particular:
No, Yoko did not “break up the Beatles.” The group was already torn apart by conflicting musical directions as well as personal disputes. However, as a study in self-promotion, paranoia, and manipulation of others, Yoko Ono made sure they’d never come together for any reunion.
Lives becomes a dual-bio from the moment Yoko makes her first appearance about halfway in. One might guess that Lennon’s attraction to the avant-garde artiste was due to her bizarre behavior and manner that it tempered his otherwise irrepressible rage. At least at first, and after that intermittently until his last year, in which he was content.
Strangest of all were Yoko’s travel arrangements based on psychic readings that said that you must approach a destination by a certain direction. And so, a trip from say, Mexico City to New York might take John, Yoko, and Sean through airports in cities such as Hong Kong, New Delhi, Istanbul, Frankfurt, and London so they would arrive from the east. Yes, it was that extreme.
Considering that Yoko is still kicking at 87, it is amazing that she is not Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation.
Be the ballad of John and Yoko as it may, Lennon’s music is an unrivalled soundtrack for working class heroes across the universe, and deserves all the air time we can give it in a world that keeps us
…doped with religion, and sex, and T.V. And you think you’re so clever and classless and free But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be A working class hero is something to be
There’s room at the top they are telling you still But first you must learn how to smile as you kill If you want to be like the folks on the hill
Of course, my mother would not have known any of this (least of all the F-bomb), only that her son was a devout Beatles fan as a teenager who became an English teacher and liked to read. The Lives of John Lennon is one of at least a dozen first-edition hardcovers she gave me, and the only one left unread, due only to its length–and read this year only due to the plague-enforced shut-down.
Knowingly or not, she did me the favor of dispelling illusions while at the same time showing me how music I thought–and still think–so good got to be that good. As Paul might say, “Let It Be.” As John might add, “I Feel Fine.”
Whenever I hear the line, “Run government like a business,” without a knowing laugh or dripping sarcasm, I wonder how long ago the speaker was programmed to talk like a robot–and to think not at all–no matter the subject.
Anyone past the age of reason should have learned the lesson no later than 2006 when a West Virginia coal mine exploded, killing 29 miners. Not long after the “accident,” we learned that Massey Coal Co. was not held to regulations that bureaucrats in the Occupational Safety & Health Administration willingly overlooked.
Anyone too young in 2006 should have learned the lesson in 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon well ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 oilers. Again it was a private company cutting corners while a federal agency with its corners already cut wondered how the “accident” happened.
For those who for whatever reason don’t think that what happens underground or underwater much matters, there was–and still is–the Flint, Michigan, water crisis that began in 2014 when a state official noted the savings to be had by switching the city’s supply from treated Detroit water to the Flint River which flowed through industrial zones that anyone with common sense would have known were toxic.
The result included twelve deaths and hundreds of pregnancies lost to stillbirths. But don’t waste any time waiting for the Right-to-Lifers to object because they, for the most part, are the same people who will insist that any city, any state, and the country as a whole should be run like a business.
And let’s not fall for the word accident when what’s deliberately done makes the result not just probable, but inevitable. Considering that a few thousand parents in Flint continue to fret over the lasting neurological damage to young children, we might wonder about this concern for business.
How, in America, did the bottom-line become the only line?
Years before it became Southern New Hampshire University, a small, two-year business school known as New Hampshire College asked me if I would teach a course called “Business in American Literature.”
Took me by surprise. At the time they offered no literature electives that I recall, nor would any of their students–mostly adults looking to climb a corporate ladder they were already a rung or two up–be all that interested in Steinbeck’s grapes unless they were fermented and aged.
In retrospect, this may have been one of NHC’s earliest moves to press itself into SNHU since a full four-year degree would require liberal arts electives. I was one of just three writing instructors, all of us adjunct, and, as the dean told me, “the one we thought most likely to make something out of nothing.”
By that she meant that they didn’t know of any such course at other schools, though I suspect they looked no further than the state’s premier school, the University of New Hampshire, where the division between liberal arts and business is akin to that between church and state. With several comparisons of my class to Dead Poets Society, my student evaluations over five years gave me a reputation for improvisation, making me the logical choice. I was the yeast she hoped would make the experiment palatable to the thirst of business majors.
In a day when Looking out for Number One and The Art of the Deal topped the best-seller list, and before those who wrote them sunk further into the brain-dead muck of Reality-TV, I was leary:
“This is to be about literary treatments of business, right?”
My wine-making dean: “Yes.”
“So the readings will be from writers like, say, John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis, right?”
“That’s what we want.”
“No Lee Iacocca or Donald Trump, right?”
“Right.”
“All right! Count me in!”
Throughout my 25 years teaching, there was no task, no requirement that I dreaded, detested, and ridiculed more than the syllabus. Always of the belief that a class must be dynamic, spontaneous, and relevant to the day-to-day world in real time, the idea of pinning down what we do from day to day for 16 weeks is like putting snowshoes on a soccer team.
No, they won’t fall over, but neither will they get anywhere.
“Business in American Literature” was the exception. For a schedule, all I had to do was put the readings in order, easier to do for a once-a-week evening class. There’s no lack of rich, memorable material: Novels from Mark Twain’s Gilded Age* to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities; plays from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross; short stories from Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Deer in the Works.”
A poem always served as a refreshing interlude in the middle of the three-hour sessions. Robert Frost’s “Departmental” gained knowing laughs, and I got a lot of mileage out of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station.”
Any English teacher reading this who would like to know more about the selections and how it all worked out can get in touch and will be welcome to all I can recall. For now, let’s just say that I soon thought to structure the course as history. Seemed to me that NHC’s students–young adults already in the business world–would appreciate the straightforward chronology, might expect it.
Little did I know that the college list of course offerings told them nothing about the class other than the name. What they expected was Lee Iacocca and–when he was still just a bad joke, harmless outside NYC and Atlantic City–Donald Trump.
Having already taught for ten years, I had well mastered the art of keeping a straight face no matter how funny, poignant, flattering, insulting, tragic, or shocking anything said by a student may be. Never did I need it more than that opening day.
One student had already blurted that most demoralizing line–How are we going to use this in our jobs?–when I turned the tide by contending that business is part of history, that literature is a record of history, and all three on one American map form one American subject.
It was classic something-out-of-nothing, a snow job, fast-talk from a guy caught entirely off-guard. But it sounded professional, with an appeal to their patriotism (inadvertent, I swear), and I could see light bulbs going on around the room in eyes that just then fixed on me–one of those moments every teacher craves.
From there, it was rather easy to let all the aforementioned authors and a few others convince them that, contrary to what they hear from most everywhere else, the bottom line is not the only line.
How did it go? When it was over, the student evaluations were flush with gratitude for the exposure to worlds and ways of thinking they didn’t know existed. Ironically, they said nothing about improvisation, even though that first class may have been the best improvisational performance of my life.
Ah, the Clinton years! Hard to imagine that such a conversion would be possible today.
We’ve become so single-minded–and so bottom-lined–that our schools from K to Ph.D are more prone to erase Steinbecks and Vonneguts from circulation. Arts classes are frills. Budgets are tight. Do the math.
Meanwhile, the real-estate scam artist went on to become a reality-TV star, which was his eventual ticket to the White House. He avenged exclusion from my class by opening his own university. No Steinbeck’s grapes there. Just the sour grapes of defrauded students whose tuition was all bottom line. Ah, pay ’em off, shut ’em up. Maybe they’ll go to New Hampshire College and listen to the crazy guy reenacting a scene from “Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street.”
Ostensibly, Trump’s qualification was his business record, no matter how flawed it proved under any examination, even before the New York Times got to his foreign-bank infused tax statements. But I say that his popularity is due to something else:
He makes everything simple.
That’s why he says everything in absolutes. And why he constantly repeats the same words and phrases, often in succession. Adverbs abound. Superlatives are on steroids. His sentences are incomplete because there’s no thought to complete, yet the repetition runs them on. Everything on the surface, nothing in depth.
He convinced as many of us as he needed that he was a success at business, and would run America just that way. No more “political correctness.” Too complicated, too deep. “America First!” Now that’s easy, simple. While the rest of us wondered how to bridge divides such as left vs. right, black vs. white, rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural, Trump identified the divide he could exploit and ride all the way to the White House: Superficial vs. in depth.
And he did it as he would a business deal, his eye on nothing other than the bottom line.
For an example to illustrate the difference between surface and depth, what could be better than the Titanic? On the surface of our history texts is little more than the bottom line: The ship hit an iceberg and sank, killing many. In depth–or before it went to the depths–the Titanic’s story has a sinister cast: The ship maintained its speed despite radio warnings that it was entering an ice field and had to slow down.
Why? Because time was money. The quicker the Titanic reached America, the sooner it could reload and return to Britain, which increases profits, and the better the captain’s ratings, which increases pay. That’s running something like a business, and it’s void of any concern for public safety.
That’s also why our history texts and all the references made by advertisers and television writers stop at the surface. None of them want to cross the line of revealing that there’s anything wrong with business. And so, unless you read detailed history or watched the three-hour film and noted the scenes of a panicking crew and a captain screaming Full speed ahead!!!, the in-depth truth of the Titanic in 1912 is as sunk as the ship itself.
Historians place it somewhere down there between the “annexation” of Hawaii in 1893 and the “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, not to mention government (always at the beck and call of business) crackdowns on labor strikes of factories and coal mines all over America in all the years between.
Business decisions every one.
Among the most quoted lines of all American presidents is a declaration by Calvin Coolidge, whose national reputation was secured when, as Governor of Massachusetts, he cracked down on a strike by the Boston Police:
“The business of America is business.”
At a time when America was plagued by strikes, a strike-breaker was a good fit for the ticket of a party looking to restore “normalcy.” And his famous line could not have made his commitment to American business any clearer. Despite that, newspaper writers–including this one–have been using an abbreviated version of the quote ever since the first reports of it in 1925. Here’s the full sentence:
“After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”
Take out the qualifying “chief,” and all other concerns are erased. Business is no longer the vocalist fronting a band or the lead guitarist playing with the support of drums, bass, winds, a keyboard. Business is a soloist, the only one on stage. Only business matters.
Made simple, the quote becomes “The bottom line is the only line” in patriotic disguise.
Today we are so immersed in patriotic disguise that we no longer recognize it. American flags fly alongside Confederate flags and Swastikas, and we are distracted by the contradiction, or the hypocrisy, or the desecration. All so true that we miss the point of the camouflage.
We worry that, though Trump may go, Trumpism will remain. The worry is over cynicism and doubt he has sown in the electoral process, in science, in education, in the media, in public service, in anything that has to do with holding a community together and with public life.
While all of that is also true, it also misses the point.
Covid-19 was Donald Trump’s iceberg. He ignored the science and the crew so he wouldn’t be slowed by masks or shutdowns. His eye was on the stock market and his intent was Full speed ahead!
Comparisons to dictators of the past–and his affinity for those of the present–focus on his tough-guy schtick, but beneath that surface he is the American version of the guy who ran Italy like a corporation, who made everything simple, and has since been remembered, at times fondly, for “making the trains run on time.”
Yet another business decision. Another bottom line.
At this writing 280,000 Americans have drowned in this pandemic. Lifeboats all across the country are filled to capacity. Lifeboats or hospitals? Life-preservers or intubators? Bodies are washing up on shores or stacked in refrigerated trucks? Can the lifeboats run on time? Do they have time?
Families in Flint, in West Virginia, and on the Gulf Coast may well consider those questions rhetorical.
It’s what happens when you run a country like a business.
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Type “covid food line images” into a search engine and the line may be as long as this one in Michigan, or as thick as the ones in Texas, or as extended as the ones in Florida. Photo posted by The Seattle Times to accompany an Associated Press report.
*Mark Twain’s first novel, The Gilded Age, was co-written with Charles Dudley Warner. Neighbors in Hartford, Conn., they were having dinner with their wives when they began mocking the sentimental fiction of women writers. One of those women authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was another neighbor who had a habit of walking around the hood talking to herself long before cell-phones gave us the excuse to do that. With or without added ridicule of Stowe, the talk annoyed Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Warner to the point of challenging their husbands to write something better. For reasons unknown but which may be surmised, stories about jumping frogs did not count. There, at the table that evening, the two men began tossing ideas back and forth, Twain about his reporting days in DC and childhood in Missouri, Warner about his dealings in NYC and Philadelphia. Before long, The Gilded Age was in print, an immediate sensation, and an eventual landmark when writers and editors up and down the Northeast Corridor adopted the title to name the American era of 1876 to 1912.
Whenever I hear the complaint that someone–anyone–is “all over the map,” I wonder if that someone is a sports fan.
Years ago, long before the phrase became a term of dismissal, I included a session early in the semester of my American literature classes that connected the names of professional sports teams to literature–and history and culture–all over the American map.
Teenage curiosity piqued because the names were familiar while their meanings were superficial at best. More often that not, the names of sports teams help define and describe the cities and regions where they play: Its history: Knicks in New York, 76ers in Philadelphia. Its promise: Trail Blazers in Oregon, 49ers in San Francisco. Its ethnicity: Vikings in Minnesota, Celtics in Boston. Its culture: Seahawks in Seattle, Blues in St. Louis. Its nature: Diamondbacks in Arizona, Pelicans in New Orleans. Its weather: Thunder in Oklahoma, Lightning in Florida. Its appetites: Brewers in Milwaukee, Packers up the road in Green Bay (assuming that it’s cheese they are packing).
Many Rust Belt teams were formed in factories and named for occupations: Pistons in Fort Wayne before moving to Detroit, Steelers in western Pennsylvania. Decades earlier, in 1869, a group of Cincinnati lawyers formed the first professional team in any sport, the Resolutes who soon became the Red Stockings. By 1919 when they beat the Chicago “Black Sox” in a rigged World Series, they were the Reds, and around 1950, frightened by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare,” they lengthened it to Redlegs. Some years after McCarthy’s implosion, they reverted back to Reds–which is fortunate considering that the 1975 World Series would have been played by two teams with, in effect, the same name.*
Chicago’s stock market named two of the city’s teams, the Bears and Bulls, while a financial innovation in the 1950s named a team in the upstart AFL that was eventually absorbed by the NFL. Before credit cards were known, a nation-wide chain of motels issued a card to business travellers to make it easy for them to go from city to city and put it all on one tab. The term they used was “charge card,” but a small plastic rectangle made for a lame logo, and the Denver Broncos already had a horse in the eight-team league. Hence, the lightning bolt for the San Diego-turned-Los Angeles Chargers.
Logos can embrace a city, as does the crown worn by the Kansas City Royals echoing that trademarked by KC-based Hallmark Cards long before the Royals arrived. And then there’s the hockey team named for a Disney film, The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
So, yes, I am all over the map and proudly plead guilty to the charge every time. Most memorably when, during the contrived controversy regarding Elizabeth Warren’s ethnicity, I described the settlement of Oklahoma. Having worked with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for two years, I knew that records were poorly kept before FDR. Since Warren’s grandparents were there before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, all records were lost, if ever kept–but were not at all missed by people who always relied on oral tradition. To reinforce the point, I added that the name Oklahoma is Choctaw for “Red People,” and that the Choctaw were among several tribes driven out of the states that would later comprise Dixie.
Perhaps I should never have mentioned that I was living in North Dakota while dealing with the BIA, forcing my critic to look north and south as well as east to west. Concepts such as latitude and longitude would be lost on people who have no more use for maps than the thick arrow which tells them, “You are here!” Or a GPS that spells everything out in right and left.
Could be wrong, but I wonder if it’s only in America that you can be accused of being “all over the map” for describing a map.
Sports fans can’t help but be guilty as charged. No matter your hometeam, and no matter what you think of the name–in my case the history of Patriots or the neutrality of Red Sox–your opponents, your closest rivals come from elsewhere. And elsewhere is all over the map.
Some of those elsewheres defy the map. How are the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC East? How are the Miami Dolphins not in the AFC South? Before expansion and realignment of divisions, both teams had rivalries that the NFL wanted to preserve. Call it the Grandfather Clause–or compare it to the PR finesse of the Vikings (the real ones, not Minnesota’s) hoping to attract settlers to an oversized iceberg while discouraging too much settlement on a relative paradise of hot springs by giving Greenland and Iceland each other’s accurate name.
Relocations have caused misimpressions–some would say deceptions–that are over the border of absurd, although most teams can’t help but pay attention.
When the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas, all they had to do was drop the word “North” and make the logo look like a sheriff’s badge. Somehow, no one questioned the very idea of hockey in Texas anymore than in California–or in the Florida Everglades where the Panthers play in an arena that’s part of a development that wiped out a huge chunk of a natural habitat for panthers.
Other changes, while less ironic, are more involved. A month after the Quebec Nordiques announced their move to Colorado, I happened to be driving across the state where, in some roadside diner, I picked up a stray copy of the Denver Post. The team had taken a quarter of a page to poll readers for the choice of a name. The eight choices included Avalanche, which they became, as well as Black Bears and Miners. After that, my memory fails except for the one that jumped out at me: Wranglers.
Would have been a nice match with the city’s football Broncos. But more to the point: In one word we have Colorado history–and the people, red and white, who made it. But it was so much more suited for baseball–especially the motions of infielders, the turn of a double play at second-base–that, had I been a Post columnist, I’d have proposed that the Rockies adopt it.
Instead, I was crossing Utah a day later noticing the occasional bumper-sticker in support of the Utah Jazz, one of pro sports’ two most glaring contradictions in terms. They were originally the New Orleans Jazz and didn’t dare change their name to suit their new home. Salt Lake Choir Boys? Utah Missionaries? Then again, the archangel atop Mormon Tabernacle is playing trumpet.
Just as absurd is the name celebrated in my eventual destination. As one of pro sports’ most successful franchises, the Los Angeles Lakers have stickers, shirts, and hats found all over the city, but just try finding a lake. Like most of Southern California’s coast, Los Angeles is caught between an ocean and some Sierra range. There’s no room for lakes. Unlike the Nordiques but like the Jazz, the Lakers retained a name well-suited to the geography of Land of Lakes Minnesota and even to the city of Minneapolis with its Lake Harriet, perhaps the largest lake there is within the bounds of any American city.
Since Salt Lake is aside our largest non-Great lake, and since LA has long had a thriving jazz scene, shouldn’t the teams trade names?
Fans would never stand for that. The resistance to such change was evident for years in the face of pressure on Washington’s pro football team to drop the name Redskins. The name was finally dropped this year when, following a surge in protests for racial justice, sponsors said they would no longer advertise during broadcasts or in the stadium–retailers would no longer sell anything with the name or logo.
Biggest surprise may have been that the team chose no new name, calling themselves “The Washington Football Team” with W as its logo. Which leaves us wondering what, if anything, it will be called next year, and if the new name–unlike Redskins–will have anything to do with the city’s history or character. Founders, Framers, Resolutes, Presidents, if you still believe in self government. Bureaucrats, Lobbyists, Inside Traders, Filibusters, if you swim in cynicism and fly with conspiracy theories.**
Some still speculate that Cleveland’s baseball team may follow suit and drop the name “Indians,” but that name was never under such attack as “Redskins.” Most of us can still distinguish between a common term and a slur, and know that it’s Cleveland’s “Chief Yahoo,” both as logo and mascot, that has to go. Not only is it a slur, but it’s as irrelevant to the city as the name of its basketball team, the Cavaliers, which arrived unchanged from Virginia where there actually were Cavaliers and a Cavalier culture.
Spend any time in Cleveland, and it’s amazing that neither team has jumped at the chance to become the Rockers with the opportunity for an electric guitar logo and all kinds of rock-and-roll paraphernalia. With the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, a huge tourist draw, right there on Lake Erie, the possibilities for tourist packages are endless.
My students thought Cleveland the best stop in my “all over the map” class, though they may not have entirely believed my description of a glass pyramid that “would be worth a tour even if it was empty.” That’s why I saved it for last.
Except for an option for an essay assignment: Choose and compare the names of five professional sports teams and evaluate them according to how well they represent their city or region. Many chose that assignment, and their enjoyment of the subject always showed–a quality that can’t help but improve the writing.
Had I to do it over again, I’d make it minor league baseball teams to take advantage of the names and logos many adopted just years after I left the profession: The Lehigh Valley IronPigs, the Modesto Nuts, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, the Pensacola Blue Wahoos, the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Albuquerque Isotopes, the New Orleans Baby Cakes, the Batavia Muckdogs, and many others that would defy my ability to keep a straight face.
Just what is it that is now all over the map?
–30–
*Strangely, there’s no mention of the 1950s name change or of the 1919 scandal on the Cincinnati Reds official websites. Still, any sports fan will delight in the highlights of the team’s 150-year history, sanitized though it is: https://www.mlb.com/reds/history/timeline
To be fair, the scandal was orchestrated by gamblers and White Sox players, a story told in a 1988 must-see-for-sports-fans film, Eight Men Out: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095082/fullcredits
In another case of sanitization, it was noticeable during a Washington’s primetime game last week that the broadcast’s flashbacks into the team’s history–a common feature in all games–showed all their past greats, dating all the way back to legendary Quarterback Sammy Baugh in the FDR-Truman years, in the current no-name jerseys and W helmets. With “Est. 1932” aside “Football Team” on the uniform, it makes me wonder if this is permanent–that, in effect, it will always appear as a throwback uniform.
**Soon following the announcement that the name “Redskins” would be no more, reports were that the team had purchased a domain name and trademark for “Washington Sentinels.” Perhaps, but that was the name of Keanu Reeves’ 2000 film, The Replacements, which makes it sadly ironic if not unlikely: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0191397/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
There’s also the bizarre 1994 story of the New Jersey Nets considering changing their name to Swamp Dragons. Upon first hearing of it, NBA Commissioner David Stern did not mince words: “This is the stupidest f—ing idea I ever heard!” But he softened and others who ridiculed the idea came around until it almost happened–only to be ditched when one of the seven co-owners got cold feet. Instead, they moved across two rivers in 2012 and became the Brooklyn Nets:
This ingenious map was composed nine years ago when the Washington Football Team still had the logo that appears here sandwiched between those of the Baltimore Orioles and the Carolina Hurricanes–and when the Raiders were still in Oakland. I recommend this cartographer’s whimsical work, and find it hilarious that he wonders why fans of teams such as the Chicago White Sox and Golden State Warriors complain at their exclusion after he himself says that he deliberately excluded them.
What attracted me to this map more than other possibilities–though NBA, NFL, and College Football “Hate Maps” were tempting–is the use of college logos to fill in states without pro teams. Prominent at top-center are the Jackrabbits of my alma mater, South Dakota State University. On their jerseys, the name is abbreviated to “Jacks” which I like even more. But more: Directly above it is the University of North Dakota which recently went from Fighting Sioux to Fighting Hawks. Long before that was at issue, UND hired me to teach a seminar in grant-writing for the fledgling community colleges on the five Indian reservations across the state. Yes, it was a single afternoon, but it was, technically, my first teaching gig–and, absurdly, I was listed as an adjunct to UND’s Economics Dept.
An English teacher, a history teacher, and a writer walk into a bank.
No joke, it actually happened in Seattle some 40 years ago when three fans of Herman Melville with an idea for a coffee-shop named for the ship in Moby-Dick applied for a loan.
When the bank balked at the name “Pequod”—too odd, too risky, and, oh by the way, it did sink–the applicants offered other names from the book. Don’t know if Ahab or Ishmael or Queequeg were mentioned and rejected, and I can’t imagine they’d have wanted Flask or Stubb, but they inevitably suggested the ship’s contemplative, coffee-loving first mate, Starbuck. The bank bit.
Though most do not know or much care about the reference, everyone knows the rest of that story. For Melville enthusiasts those green and white signs that stretch coast to coast–block by block in Manhattan, the place that Ishmael left behind and where Bartleby preferred not to–serve as reminders of a cause, a symbol of faith, a gift that keeps on giving.
As far as I know, Moby-Dick is the only American novel that is read aloud, all 25 hours’ worth, non-stop, annually. At the New Bedford Whaling Museum, it’s now in its 25th year, though next month’s will be mostly virtual. In recent years, marathon readings have been held in at least three other cities, including Pittsfield, Mass., by the Berkshire Historical Society in conjunction with Arrowhead, the nearby farm where Melville wrote it.
In New Bedford, you can look out the window and see the harbor while hearing it described in the opening chapters, often read by Massachusetts’ best known personalities in government, business, the media, and the arts. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy was an annual reader; Jared Bowen of WBGH and Sen. Ed Markey were the first of 221 readers in the 2020 rendition.
The Whaling Museum draws them from as far as California and Germany. That’s no mean feat for a Massachusetts town during the first weekend in January.
From a couple in Maryland and a boat builder in Michigan, I learned of readings in Philadelphia and Chicago which they attended. A Newburyporter, new to me, tapped my arm and handed me her card as she left with her teenage son following her turn in the wee hours. A week later, the Newburyport Melville Society held its first meeting in an independent coffee-shop well removed from Market Square where Starbuck’s opened in 1996.
Back then I was already wondering how many coffee-shops this small seacoast tourist city could stand, but before long I realized how ideally located it was for musicians who busk Market Square day and night and those who sit on the benches that ring the square to listen to us.*
As I say, the gift that keeps on giving.
Or is it the prophecy that keeps coming true?
Within months of Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, magazine essayists began comparing him to Ahab, America to the Pequod; him to Melville’s Confidence Man; the country to the overthrown ship in Benito Cereno. Even Bartleby’s “prefer not to” has been alternately cited as a possible rallying cry for those of us wanting to resist, and as a psychological explanation for why many were not impressed by the Mueller Report.
Many newspaper columns compared his narcissism to Ahab’s monomania, including mine comparing his boast of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue to Ahab’s enraged “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”**
A common theme of this Melville Resurrection is that he kept warning us. Most of his works, including all four of the aforementioned, were written in the 1850s when America self-propelled headlong toward Civil War. The Pequod carries all races; Confidence Man flows from North into South; Cereno‘s slaves are not in the state of oppression they suffer in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but in revolt. As one essayist summed up, “This is Melville telling America to wake up.”***
Melvillians have always attributed his going silent in the 1860s to depression resulting from the critical and popular failure of Moby-Dick and the dark novels that followed–when he made the move from popular travel writer to someone who, in the parlance of today, speaks truth to power. Upon further review, could it be that, after watching a Civil War followed by a Union victory undone by assassination and a corrupt Reconstruction, Melville surrendered to a feeling of futility?
Was it his failure to sell, or our failure to heed?
Yes, he privately published volumes of poetry during his later years, and the manuscript for Billy Budd was found in his desk after his death in 1891, but his farewell to America couldn’t be more clear. It’s on his tombstone in a New York City cemetery: A blank scroll.
Melville may be the only writer that has a chain store of any kind named for his literary creation, but Edgar Allen Poe is the only one to have a professional sports team named for one of his.
For you non-sports fans, that would be the Baltimore Ravens, a football team that stomped onto Poe’s grounds in 1996. A case could be made for the New York Knicks who first took the court in 1946, but the name Knickerbocker was there back when the colony was still New Amsterdam, long before Washington Irving turned it into a book of tales. And for Irving there are no end of shops, eateries, parks, and other amusements with names such as “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van (This or That).”
Both of those stories have enjoyed frequent recitations over two centuries, but chances are that Poe’s “The Raven” is recited more than either, and likely more often than any other poem, including Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” and “Stopping by Woods.”
From names on nationally known franchises to annual readings and recitations, what else do Melville and Poe have in common?
Such was my assignment for the local Melville Society when I was urged to read Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pymof Nantucket (1838). As horrifying as it is in some parts and tangential in others, I couldn’t put it down. The seagull at the back of the nodding Dutch sailor in the approaching ship the stranded Pym thinks will save him is a far more vivid memory than Samuel Coleridge’s weighty albatross. More to the point, it unfolds for the reader much like the inevitable unveiling of the figurehead on the bow of Benito Cereno‘s slave ship. That horror, and other parallels of suspense are so strong, Pym could have been a model for Cereno, and it foreshadows much of Melville’s work that came 15-20 years later, starting with the opening line, “My name is….”
No, the narrator does not have the whimsy or combativeness of “Call me” Ishmael, but he is energetic, first person, and far more a participant in–often a driver of–the action. And those tangents describing boats, storms, islands are as detailed as Ishmael’s, though falling short of his philosophizing. Of course, Pym was a serial pushed by cliff-hanging description and narrative. In novel form, Melville was free to do anything, among which was inventing the op-ed form, perhaps without realizing it.***
My comparison of the two may be inflated by just having read, in order, Moby Dick, Confidence Man, The Piazza Tales (inc. Cereno & The Encantadas), several magazine pieces that sound much like Mark Twain a decade before Sam Clemens took the name, and Israel Potter.
Plot twists of Potter, another serial, are as much like Pym as is the mystery of Cereno, but it’s The Encantadas that seems most drawn from it with descriptions of the Galapagos as fine as Pym‘s of Antarctica. On the way there, Poe describes penguins with such admiration, that I wonder if Melville’s ridicule of them might have been a friendly, spoofing response to a writer he did admire.****
Poe was dead before Moby-Dick and all of the aforementioned works, but the notes to Confidence Man and Potter include several references to him. All of which makes one wonder why, in the minds of lit teachers and majors, Melville is so indelibly linked to Nathaniel Hawthorne rather than Poe, and, given the Salem boy’s Halloweenish bent, shouldn’t they be considered a trio?
No matter the answer to that, the question itself leads to a most serendipitous discovery:
Melville’s Piazza Tales collection was his White Album.
Just as the Beatles offered friendly spoofs of their contemporaries–“Rocky Racoon” for Bob Dylan, “Back in the USSR” for the Beach Boys, others for The Band, Donovan, and Eric Clapton–Melville paid homage and had some fun with Hawthorne (“The Bell Tower”), Thoreau and Emerson (“The Piazza”), and two for Poe. With “Lightning Rod Man,” Melville may have been channeling Washington Irving, though it was more likely a generic spoof of magazine humorists who were the most popular entertainers of the time–which explains why literary critics unanimously ignore it.
As an exception to prove the rule, the remaining Piazza tale, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” like Moby-Dick, is unanimously regarded as one-of-kind, most always named after Moby-Dick as his greatest work and among the highest achievements of world literature. If Melville preferred not to, he preferred that Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau did.
Melville did not confine spoofs to his Piazza collection. Among his most popular magazine pieces at the time, “The Tartarus of Maids,” sounds much like Charles Dickens, an Englishman in America following the paired “The Paradise of Bachelors” narrated by an American abroad in London. Israel Potter, set on–and on both sides of–the Atlantic, big city and countryside, bars and barns, sounds and feels so much like Henry Fielding’s Barry Lyndon that you can hear The Chieftains playing the soundtrack.
An American founding father, a naval hero of the Revolutionary War, and the King of England walk into our living rooms. No joke, it actually happened when Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and the object of America’s wrath appeared on the pages of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1854.
The series’ protagonist, call him Israel, had considerable face time with the first, became an indispensable aide to the second, but had just an accidental encounter with George III, a bumbling, impulsive fellow as Herman Melville described him.
*The proximity of Starbuck’s to Market Square in Newburyport made possible a whimsical busking column that was too late for my book about busking, but included in Keep Newburyport Weird. Since the 26-chapter Pay the Piper! ends with the phrase To be continued…, “When the Tipped Turns Tipper” appears with three other busking columns in a section called “Piper on the Square (Or, ‘Chapter 27’).” Regrettably, The Newburyport Current, the weekly newspaper in which it appeared no longer includes guest columns over three years old in its on-line archive.
**Fortunately, the column including a Trump/Ahab comparison appeared in Newburyport’s Daily News:
***Several mid and late chapters of Moby-Dick are in classic op-ed form: grab attention, state and/or describe the case, propose an improvement, anticipate and answer objections, concede benefits of the opposition to show why your case is an improvement, end with a kicker–a memorable turn of phrase to sum up the case. Best example is Chapter 62, “The Dart,” with a kicker that can be applied to many other walks of life:
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
****Regarding penguins: Melville’s “neither fish, nor flesh, nor fowl” quote appears in my recent “Penguins on My Phone” blog. For comparison I snapped a pic of Poe’s paragraph (see below). Unfortunately, I returned the Library of America volume to the local library before jotting down its opening and closing lines. Please know that the start just mentions an abundance of fish…”on Kerguelen’s Island.” And the last sentence mentions the three “other kinds…. and the rookerie,” saying simply that they are not so large or attractive as the royal penguin which Poe seems to revere as much as that damned raven which hogs all the attention he gets evermore and more of.
Staying home for the holidays got me to thinking, and then talking to those close to me:
What’s another toy, another t-shirt compared to the difference those two races for Georgia’s US Senate seats will make? We can exchange gifts when we next see each other months from now or next holiday season. Right now no one needs gifts.
Children?
Especially children.
Right now my two grandchildren and their generation need investment. That’s why, rather than any presents for me, I ask that any expense be sent to Georgia–and why I am calculating a holiday budget, including travel, to split 50/50 for contributions to the campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
At least one young mom approves.
Just how long will that toy last? How long will that t-shirt fit? In seven weeks, after all holidays are over, the voters of one state will determine whether the grip of a political party bent on obstruction–of affordable health care, environmental protection, occupational safety, economic justice–lasts another decade.
We worry about fringe groups starting Civil War II, but the war is already long-running. The first shots were fired by Newt Gingrich with his “Contract with America” in 1994; secession was declared by Mitch McConnell and ranking congressional Republicans on the night of Obama’s inauguration in 2009; troops were mobilized by the Tea Party in Town Halls of 2010; and terrorists from Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City to Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisc., have been striking from 1995 to the present.
If you think that’s far-fetched, please explain to me why else Rittenhouse–a teenager illegally in possession of an AR-15 who shot three protesters, killing two, in Kenosha–was praised by the Republican president and later bailed out by one of the president’s major donors.
All to the accommodating silence of congressional Republicans.
The context of a Second Civil War makes clear why John McCain and Mitt Romney went from leaders to pariahs in their own party: Both conceded a presidential election, an act no more tolerable to the Neo-Confederacy than a concession to Lincoln in 1860.
Georgia’s Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, represent the opportunity to free the US Senate from the grip of obstruction and, in the long run, end this war. They represent the future.
Anyone who has worried about America’s future these past four–or twelve, or 26, or 160 years–may want to weigh the temporary delight of a toy against the condition of a world today’s children will inherit when it comes time for them to put away childish things.
They don’t need mere tokens of affection. They need investment in their future.
Ads for the two Republicans in the Georgia runoffs stress the national implications of a Democrat-controlled Senate. As expected, the scare-word, socialism, and the Democrats’ own Kamakazi-phrase, defund the police, are prominent in menacing tone and large font.*
New is the addition of Statehood for the District of Columbia.
New, but no surprise. Republican lawyers–with the nervous accommodation of many Republican state legislators and the spineless silence of Republicans in the US Senate and House–are still trying to nullify urban votes in four states in the election just passed. Republicans spent much of this year trying to prevent those votes from being cast in the first place.
Many call this racist, and for good reason. Of the four cities they are now targeting, Detroit is just under 80% African- American, Atlanta just over 50%, Philadelphia and Milwaukee about 33% each.
Still, the charge of racism misses the point. The white populations of those cities use the same public transportation and infrastructure as do black. So do most suburbanites who owe their livelihoods to the economy provided by cities, but who would rather not pay the tax required by them.
This is why the status of Washington DC is suddenly featured in the constant bombardment of ads in Georgia. Not to prevent it from having Electoral College votes every four years. DC already has them. But to prevent representation in the US Senate and House. That’s why DC has the only license plate in the country to sport a slogan of bitter protest:
Taxation Without Representation.
The prospect of DC statehood is especially worrisome for Republicans. Should Democrats win both of Georgia’s seats on January 5, a Democratic majority leader could bring DC statehood to a vote. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who will likely fill that role, has already said it is on the agenda. Should the Democrats win Georgia and hold firm on DC against inevitable Republican obstruction, Vice President Kamala Harris would cast the deciding vote.
By 2024, the District’s two new senators and one new representative would surely be Democratic, as its three electoral votes have always been since the 23rd Amendment was passed in 1961.
Republicans will argue that no single city should have equal standing with a state, and they will ignore the mathematics–as they are doing right now in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania–of DC’s population being larger than that of Wyoming and Vermont.
Democrats will unwittingly oblige Republicans by calling their resistance “racist.” Yes, DC is 46% black with another 11% Hispanic, but enough of them are Republicans to allow the party to deny the claim. This is why they often say, with a grain of just enough truth, that the charge of racist is itself racist.
What Republicans cannot deny is their attack on cities–on people of all colors and creeds who ride those subways and buses, who cross those bridges, who picnic in those parks, and who pay taxes on all those amenities that also serve commuters from suburbs who are not in the urban tax base.
The attack we have been witnessing these last five weeks on four swing states are more precisely attacks on Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee–much like the attacks earlier this year on Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and New York City, not to mention the attacks last year on El Paso, Boston, Newark, and Chicago. On the surface, thanks to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, they have already failed in their immediate purpose.
However, when we are done laughing at this nationwide “clownshow,” and when we recompose ourselves after the sight of Rudy “Ghouliani” holding court between a crematorium and a dildo shop, we need to pay attention to the long game:
Republicans, no matter how laughably futile their lawsuits, may well be succeeding in a purpose that will serve them well in a longer game: To cripple the in-coming Biden administration and create a backlash in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
To do that, it is mandatory that they poison public opinion on the issue of statehood for Washington, DC.
*My mention of “Defund the Police” is to the slogan, not the concept. In fact, it’s to the choice of a single word. Had the American public an attention span for “reallocating resources in the community” as a way to decrease crime, “defund” might have been understood as intended and would not have galvanized opposition. As anyone who has spent any time on social media knows, most likes & comments are for a link’s headline & photo with no regard for anything in the article. To many, defund = anarchy, and that was all they heard or cared to hear.
While there are numerous causes of an effect so large as the results of national elections, I’m convinced that the ill-advised adoption of that slogan cost Democrats the US Senate, a few House seats, and denied them any gains in state legislatures. But more: Had Biden not renounced that slogan immediately, or had he tried to mince words, panicking whites would have swallowed their disdain and fatigue and re-elected Donald Trump.
For clarity’s sake, whenever I’m asked to spell my last name I follow the letter V with “as in Vermont.”
Once upon a literate time, in keeping with my lifestyle during the Ford and Carter years, I offered “as in Vagabond.” By the time Clinton took over, too many whats and hunhs made that difficult. By the time Clinton left, some thought I was joking about Viagra, perhaps casting myself as Bond, James Bond.
So, I adopted Vermont, not knowing and not wanting to know if anyone listening knows the American map–or gets it thanks to an association with Ben & Jerry’s or with Bernie Sanders.
Never did I stop for any of the other five letters of my name, although a New England R is cause for both humor and confusion, often both, anywhere west of the Hudson. West of the Mississippi where I lived eight years, it is R with a vengeance to the New England ear.
Wish I thought to save the envelopes and packages addressed to Gahvey, Gaffy, Gauvey, Govey, and a few others. In retrospect, I should have been adding “as in Rhode Island,” but I can almost hear my South Dakota State students asking, “Where’s that?”
When you reach the age of Medicare, or in any other way increase your use of health services, your last name and date of birth become as common in your speech as “that said” and “under the bus” on cable news.
The pandemic has increased the need for this by putting many appointments over the phone. Last time I arrived at my dentist’s, her receptionist greeted me by name and quickly added, “as in Vermont!”
That was six days after the election–or the specific day called Election Day–two days after the presidential race had been decided, but control of the US Senate was narrowed down to a single state. Also followed a week when TV promos for the PGA’s Masters Tournament played to the tune of “Georgia on My Mind,” and a warm weekend when “Midnight Train” and “Rainy Night” wafted out the open windows of more than a few of the cars lined up before my home awaiting entry to the Plum Island Reserve.
Don’t know what radio station my dentist likes to play. The songs and voices are all well familiar to me, but their titles and names are not old enough for someone living so far in the cultural past. Still, there will always be one I can turn into a joke, as the time The Kinks were finishing “Tired of Waiting” just as she walked into the room where I had just been prepped for some torture I gladly cannot recall.
Last week, I barely waited at all before she sat down to fill a cavity. Halfway in, when the drill was paused for a rinse, I heard a few unmistakable bars behind me:
Georgia, oh Georgia No, no, no, no, no peace I find…
Not a good idea to talk under the influence of Novacane with a suction tube hung over you lower incisors, but I couldn’t help myself: “Heee thaaa sonnn, dohkah?”
I know she’s a Democrat, and I suspect she was waiting for wisecrack: “Yeahhhhhhs?”
“Joja o my my! Ih Joja o yo my, dohkah?”
“Oh, yes! For sure! Now open wide and turn toward me.”
From the dentist, I crossed two parking lots to the supermarket. Before I picked up one picture of the man who appeared on TV to endorse Hubert Humphrey while he was on big screens everywhere as Cool Hand Luke, another filling drilled my ear:
Hoverin’ by my suitcase Tryin’ to find a warm place to spend the night Heavy rain’s fallin’ Seems I hear your voice callin’ “it’s all right”
A rainy night in Georgia...
Coincidentally, I was in the aisle with spices and “baking needs” and impulsively grabbed a bag of pecans, a hot weather staple to include in a blue cheese salad which I never make this time of year. Guess I thought I’d throw it in my standard bowls of romaine, cucumber, yellow pepper, and grape tomatoes for good luck.
Two girls wearing Market Basket jackets appeared next to me to stock the spices, and I started to ask if they had anything from Georgia, but caught myself. One noticed, and cheerfully asked, “Looking for something?”
Taking a guess at what might thrive in Savannah’s gardens and never go stale in my kitchen: “Yes, rosemary. I couldn’t find it.”
The other answered with no hesitation: “No rosemary and no thyme due to COVID.”
“Ah! Glad you told me, thanks.”
“Anything else here you need?”
“Well, not time! COVID has given me all the time in the world.”
They looked at each other, rolled their eyes, shared a groan, and politely laughed before turning back to the shelves. I resumed shopping, buying three staples with pictures of the guy who played Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, and, for the first time ever, peaches.
A week later, I walked in again, this time to hear:
Oh, oh, he’s leavin’ (leavin’) On that midnight train to Georgia (Leavin’ on the midnight train) Yeah, said he’s goin’ back to find (Goin’ back to find) Ooh, a simpler place in time
Reminded me to pick up a of the guy who played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Also made me laugh out loud, and I was thankful that those two girls weren’t around to hear it as yet more evidence to have me committed. Occurred to me that, if this were busking season, I might learn to play the fave fiddle tune, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” After a second loud laugh, I straightened up, got what I needed, and hustled out of there.
When I arrived home, I noticed on my calendar a reminder to make a doctor’s appointment and made the call. The woman on the other end asked me to spell my last name, and without any thought or calculation, I began:
“G, as in Georgia…”
-30-
Minnesota Fats & Fast Eddie Felson, The Hustler, 1961. Fats, for younger readers, is Jackie Gleason who made a TV appearance in a telethon for Richard Nixon on election eve, 1968, the very night Paul Newman appeared on another network with Hubert Humphrey.Georgia Music Map for sale via https://www.pinterest.com/pin/283797214004111204/
Summer returned to New England today and I sat all day out front of the Shoebox overlooking the marsh toward the mainland in shorts & sandals, watching a line of SUVs (with a compact car or pickup here & there) inch toward the gate to the Plum Island Reserve.
A woman yells out her window, “Great Day!”
“Sure is, and the forecast says another four.”
“Four more days!”
“At the start of four years!”
Another: “What a seat you have to enjoy this!”
“All week, summer’s back.”
“I know what I’ll be doing!”
“And you know what I‘ll be doing.”
Another: “We’re rid of the snow!”
“That’s not all we’re rid of!”
“Yes!!!”
Another: “Are you J- G-?”
“Depends on what you have in mind.”
“Just like in your blog!”
Yes, I celebrate the victory with everyone who drives by, but I do expect all kinds of absurdity and ugliness to come from the White House these next two months. And I fear that after Jan. 20 the spirit of appeasement will suffocate all the raised hopes, as happened when Obama took office.
That’s why I hold out hope for Jan. 5 in Georgia, without which the Progressive agenda is dead. If gaining control of the Senate by winning both run-offs sounds like too-long-a-shot for Democrats, consider this:
Both will be on one ballot, and the name Trump will not be on it–which means that his fringe base won’t pay any attention. The concept of a legislature is too complex for those who crave authoritarian certainty. Yes, the life-long Republicans will show en mass, but the newly enfranchised, younger voters who voted for Biden/Harris might be enough to offset them. With a president- and VP-elect, and an ex-president and first lady making the rounds, it could happen.
As of now, minutes before Biden’s first speech as president-elect, more foreign leaders have congratulated Biden than have Republican senators. Tweet from Mayor of Paris: “Welcome back, America!”
To hell with Republicans! To hell with enablers of a hate-monger, with people who think fact-checking is a form of censorship, who are more attentive to Dow Jones than to Covid-19! God damn them all!
So, though I worry for the plight of the Green New Deal, for universal health care, for any semblance of economic equality, and though I know that, rather than content with any victory, I’ll be on the side agitating for reform after Jan. 20, today I choose to celebrate this necessary first step to Make America America Again.
As the son of a political junkie, I had always anticipated this day as much as my own birthday until I realized that there were too many of the latter.
Speaking of presidential contests, this will be my 18th, so, judging by the time it took to tire of birthdays, I should be keeping close, enthusiastic tabs on them well into the 22nd Century when my grandson’s great-granddaughter will announce her candidacy in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, our 52nd state.
Must admit I can’t recall them all. I was younger than Lachlan when Eisenhower was elected and re-elected. In 1960, it may have been the first night I was ever allowed to stay up past bedtime, though I was in bed long before it was decided for JFK–much to the delight of my Catholic elementary school and heavily Catholic neighborhood.
May be the only presidential election for which I had mixed feelings. My dad, though pro-Kennedy, thought well of Nixon–which may be why I went trick-or-treating a few nights before dressed in a black suit and wingtips, made up to look like Tricky Dick, shaking my face each time I asked for chocolates.
In 1964, I was 13 years old.
Tempted to plead the Fifth on 1968 when I was among many college students, traumatized by the assassination of RFK into disdain and indifference. In Salem, we treated the night as if it was just another Halloween. Too young to vote, I was too old not to notice how close that vote was.
My most memorable Election Day was 1972 when my father came so close to winning a Boston Herald contest by predicting that Nixon would win everything except DC, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. That last was his lone mistake, although it’s worth noting that Rhode Island was the only state that year that was not a landslide.
Dad’s choices should have told me in advance how the nation would go, but Massachusetts was so heavily in favor of George McGovern it was easy for at least four of us to think that he had a chance. At Salem State that day we listened to an encouraging pay-attention, stay-involved, keep-aware speech by Daniel Ellsberg, he of the Pentagon Papers. To give you an idea of my own involvement, I was the one who drove to Cambridge to pick him up for the ride to Salem.
His glum reticence in the back seat of my Dodge Dart should have told me how the day would really go.
That evening, two friends and I loaded the Dart with cold cuts, cheese, rolls, pickles, potato salad, beer, and another item that I can’t now recall but which always appeared from Bill’s pockets on a moment’s notice. Arriving at another friend’s Marblehead apartment, we tuned in the news as early as 7:00 pm only to find out, immediately, that the landslide had been called.
Not really sure how we then spent the evening, but the sandwiches were good and we all survived with a little help from the pockets of a friend.
That was when it became law to withhold results from eastern states until west coast polls closed, which insured that the night would not end quickly in 1976. For that, the same three friends plus five others gathered in a larger apartment in Salem all hoping that this unknown ever-smiling face from Georgia–trumpeted as the real deal by our hero, Hunter Thompson–would defeat the guy who pardoned Nixon.
So close was the electoral count that, around midnight, my friends started nodding off. A few left while others remained slumped in chairs like soldiers felled in battle. By 1:00, about when the team of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather reported that only Wisconsin and Ohio remained up for grabs (with some kind of asterisk on Hawai’i), there were just two of us who heard it. Luckily for me, it was my friend with the pockets.
Jimmy Carter had to win both, adding a tension that helped keep us awake until just before 4:00 when he was declared the winner. My friend and I debated whether we should awaken the others. Always of the belief that no one should ever be robbed of sleep unless the house–or tent or whatever–is on fire, I said no, but he reached into a pocket and said something that included the word “celebrate.” And so we both started shaking the collapsed sacks of flesh and bone all around us.
Election nights in 1980, 84, 88, 92 and 96 I spent at home, or at least I cannot recall any gathering. I was also at home for the night in 2000 when, over the phone to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., I told my daughter that Ohio would determine the election. My guess is that she, the daughter and granddaughter of political junkies, watched through the night and was relieved when Ohio was called for Gore–only to be alarmed an hour later when the networks retracted the call, something I’d never heard of before.
Ohio’s discrepancies were overshadowed by Florida which extended the decision halfway into December, and where a foremost matter of contention was something called “hanging chads,” something no-one had ever heard of before.
Except for movie theater projectionists. Not to get lost in shop-talk here, but before the advent of digital technology, film was lined on both sides with oval holes that fit a projector’s sprockets. Every film arrived at the theater in five to seven reels that needed to be spliced together, ditto the three coming attractions we attached to the front, plus a blank leader and something on the end to prevent an abrupt start or finish. Since the splicing was done with a thin, transparent tape that had no oval holes, such holes needed to be punched out. The ovals would remain in the splicing machine. They were called chads.
This I would do most every Thursday for about two months before the chads would accumulate in the machine and prevent new ones from being spliced out. Instead, the chads would hang onto the film. If left hanging, they could upset the projector.
While most everyone laughed at the term, in ridicule or exasperation, projectionists knew exactly what had happened, an irony stamped in iron: Al Gore did not lose Dade and Broward counties because he got too few votes. He lost because he got too many.
With those working the polls made aware of the problem, I was confident that John Kerry would win in 2004–until the morning of Election Day. With the day off, I resolved to walk the three miles one-way off the island, across the marsh, over the bridge, past the airport, down the oak-lined lane, and to the firehouse I go. As soon as I stepped outside, the gunmetal sky seemed ominous, as if telling me I had been wrong all along. Another warning struck halfway back when my right knee began to bark as I reached the airport. When the pain sharpened well before the bridge, I leaned on a guardrail, turned around and put out my thumb. Hitching is so easy between an island and mainland, at least here, that I call it the Plum Island Shuttle Service–and wait for the listener to assemble the acronym.
Soon I was at my door, courtesy of a neighbor just returning from the polls, chiding me for not having simply waited for any number of people I’d have known. She provided brief doomsday relief, although I was by this time braced for the worst–and accepted it until the Conyers Report, What Went Wrong in Ohio appeared weeks later.*
In 2008 and 12, I thoroughly enjoyed Obama’s elections at home, but in 2016 I was showing a film at the Screening Room where the new technology had eliminated not only film and any need for splicing, but freed me from reel changes, leaving me to check my iPad for updates on social media.
On that night, a Newburyport friend was following it from her hospital bed in Beverly Hospital, and at about 8:00, or about halfway into the film, started posting concern for discouraging reports. As soon as I read her second post, I felt as if I was back on the Plum Island Causeway twelve years earlier to the day. Rather than an inflammation in the knee, it was a kick in the gut. When I got home, despite knowing the outcome, I tuned in and stayed tuned in as if hoping that something would be uncovered to reverse the inevitable, that a young Walter Cronkite would appear to tell us it was all a bad joke, and my friend would show up with pockets full of celebration.
Turns out it was a bad joke that has lasted four years. But as the son–and as it turns out, the father–of a political junkie, I have anticipated this day for the entire time. While I now dread my own birthdays, something like that is my hope for this day and what I believe we will learn tonight even if technicalities are litigated toward and past Thanksgiving as happened in 2000.
America stopped being America four years ago. Let today be our rebirth.
Mouth of the River 