Everyone who intends to vote in this election has already made up his or her mind.
Those who tell polls that they are “unsure” will vote Trump but don’t want to admit it, no matter any promise of anonymity. It’s hard enough for them to rationalize the shame to themselves, so why would they take even the most remote chance of having to explain it to others?
Anyone with eyes, ears, and an IQ higher than that of pork rind know he’s dishonest and hateful, that he represents greed and paranoia, cynicism and division. They can dismiss the charge of racism, but only because that division is hidden in the mixed-race reality of a deeper division: Urban vs. Suburban & Rural. Or, as they see it, Mobs vs. Real Americans.
Or, in terms of the real choice to be made in November: Democracy vs. Authoritarianism.
Clearly, the MAGA crowd wants authoritarian rule. Already chanting “Lock Her Up!” and ravenous to see charges brought against his political opponents, including career military and foreign service personnel who testified against him, they welcome his Russian connections. Russia is what they want America to be. Putin is what they know Trump is.
The so-called “undecideds” don’t want Democrats locked up or any Russian influence or alliance. Not any more than they believe his absurdities–such as the latest, “herd mentality”–or approve his atrocities–such as children in cages and the gutting of every environmental protection regulation put before him by Republican donors.
Still, they overlook all of that for a simple reason: Authoritarian rulers have a reputation of “making the trains run on time,” as my not-too-distant ancestors said of Mussolini.* And if those are the trains you take, why care if others are derailed?
Therefore, despite the polls showing Biden ahead by eight or ten nationally–by four or five in swing states–it will be razor thin. That will necessarily protract the outcome due to the need to count mail-ins. In turn, that will create more opportunity for dirty tricks and premature cries of foul. And Trump has Bill Barr on his side, the master of “say it first and all that follows sounds like sour grapes.”
The two of them have already established a premise to claim that the election is rigged. And Trump by himself has turned “truth” into a one-word national joke.
No matter what Republicans do–including the anticipated scam of Barr’s contrived “Durham Report”–no matter what Democrats do, no matter what anyone does, the decision we face is to continue to ignore disasters and deny they exist, or to confront and begin to solve them.
That second choice involves effort and sacrifice, the second of which is about as unAmerican as it gets in the minds of the MAGA crowd–and would only stall the trains for the “unsure.”
-30-
*Too late for me to tell my grandparents and their generation, but what they earnestly believed here in the New World was not true in the Old: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/
The legendary Santa Fe Chief seems out of place for a run anywhere east of the Mississippi, let alone east of the Atlantic, but when you are preparing a Hearts of Iron video game for YouTube, the toy train you had put away in a box years ago will do–and don’t let any fact-checkers ruin a good line:
Lost in the national argument between confronting problems that threaten our existence or continuing to ignore and deny them, is news of the demise of a day-to-day, all-day, everyday item:
The Clock.
My sources, and perhaps most of you, specify it as the “analog” clock because the advent and proliferation of digital clocks have caused their demise. Indeed, analog clock is a retronym, a word or phrase coined for something long in existence but needing distinction from something new. Other examples include rotary phone, black-and-white television, and reasonable Republican.
But distinction breeds extinction, so I refuse to use a word that reminds us of the villainous usurper in hopes that, for at least the duration of my lifetime, real clocks, honest clocks will not be made extinct like the examples named above–may at least hang in there like standard transmission, acoustic guitar, and progressive Democrat.
Or hang on walls. And that’s the news from Nation Wobegon, this oversized country that time refuses to forget where all the men are impatient, all the women are up against deadlines, and all the children see only digital clocks at home, in public, on their mobile and immobile devices.
They go to school–if it’s safe, and today even if it isn’t–and what are they to make of that round circle of numbers and lines on the wall with a little black spoke that never moves, a big black spoke that barely moves, and a long, skinny red spoke that never stops?
Reports this month tell us that American schools are now doing what Great Britain has already done: Replacing all classroom clocks with digital readouts because students can’t read the time-honored real Clocks, or they are confused by them, or they spend so much time trying to decipher the hands-on rotary that it’s a distraction from class.
On the day it was posted on social media, several American teachers chimed in that, yes, this has been true for at least five years. More than one agreed that it was common for students to ask what time it was while facing a wall with a clock right in front of them. Nowhere in the report or in the comments did it say that a response such as “quarter to eleven” had to be translated into 10:45.
Nice to see several commenters raise the most basic point: Wait a minute! Aren’t schools places where things are supposed to be taught?
As for it being a distraction, it distracted me when any of my students looked up at it. In 1992 I was able to tell them that a president lost re-election because he was caught on camera during a debate checking his watch while his opponent was speaking. For college freshmen, at least back then, such a warning seemed to work.
That’s partly why, if any of my former students are reading this, they must be aghast, in shock, or laughing out of control by now. For me to present myself as a Champion of the Clock–or of any kind of time keeping–must strike them as ridiculous as a Republican claiming to be a Champion of Science.
Over 25 years they watched me walk into class, reach up to the clock and take it off the wall first thing, putting it on the desk where they couldn’t see it. Sometimes I’d drop it into the trash for dramatic effect, and then start the class as if nothing happened, as if it wasn’t there and didn’t exist, ignoring any question or expression of surprise.
On every syllabus I had a line forbidding the wearing of wristwatches during class. No time piece was to be visible at any time. “Bury them in your book bag,” as the syllabus said. I mentioned to higher-ups that clocks should be placed on the back wall but went unheeded, and I envied the stage performers at Renaissance faires who have clocks placed in trees on the periphery of the audience with side-shadings so that only they will see them.
Friends with children about to enter college would ask me to give them advice, and it was the first thing I said: Never wear or look at a watch or clock in class. If the clock is on a side wall, sit against that wall and turn your back to it. If it’s in front behind the teacher, sit in one of the front corners and turn your chair toward the center of the room.
For my students, any unease over the timelessness of the ensuing 50 or 75 minutes was dispelled by the second week. They could see that, as I walked around the room, as was my habit, I occasionally glanced at the clock, and would tell them when the end was near. Some of them called it the two-minute warning, no matter if it was one minute or five. Method to the madness.
When we discussed Civil Rights, which was every semester with Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” always on the syllabus, I always found some way to mention a line in Malcolm X’s Autobiography: He didn’t trust anyone who did not wear a watch. I’d pause, look down at the discarded clock, and pick it for a moment, shaking my head. We tend to think that comic relief sets up a serious message, but it’s often the other way around. Madness to the method.
And yet there’s a difference between comic relief and comic grief. Hard for me to imagine what I’d do in this age of cellphones and ringtones no matter how playful they are. A classroom subject to that random madness would be beyond my methods, unless aggravated assault and battery is a method. Let’s say I left just in time and leave it at that.
Time never governed me. When I was about eight, Aunt Babe gave me a Mickey Mouse watch which I wore and enjoyed for a few months until it either broke or I forgot about it. Never wore one after that, not even the one given me by a woman who apparently thought she could transform me from a guy who lives a life of improvisation into one who made “plans.” How many times did I hear that depressing word?
When I returned it, we both knew the six-month relationship was over, and I recall the moment every time I hear Linda Ronstadt sing, “we’ll both live a lot longer if you live without me.”
By now you are likely wondering why I would bemoan the disappearance of any clock, any timepiece, any sundial. A fair question given all the evidence to the contrary, but my resistance has been to the imposition of the device, not the device itself.
I gave students their two-minute warning, and I put that clock back on the wall before I left the room. I have clocks in my home and car so that I get to medical appointments, travel departures, and lunch dates early, always a book or magazine in hand. I hear people complain about having to wait while I welcome the opportunity to sit and read.
A clock makes all that possible. That’s why you never see them in shopping malls, where the very architecture is designed to make you forget time, to think only of what is in front of you, to engulf you in a world of consumption with an atmosphere of immediate gratification where appointments, departures, and dates have no place. In a world of Right Now.
Sure, that’s as true of the numerical read-outs as it is of twelve numbers in a circle, but the loss cuts deeper. The real Clock corresponds to the shape of the Earth, 24 time zones defined by 24 hours. There’s a reason that latitude and longitude are expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds.
Real Clocks, from the simple, small plastic alarms you might keep bedside to the most carefully crafted grandfather you show off in your living room, have an aesthetic, organic appeal that–in an age which regards both aesthetic and organic concerns as fringe–may be the reason for their demise.
If you can forgive an unavoidable pun, digital time-keepers are more in keeping with the times. Now that schools fashion themselves more for the comfort than the challenge of students, they may as well rid themselves of globes as too confusing and distracting–and instead use only flat maps to show names of places and their coordinate numbers. Why trouble with the curve of the Earth or the sweep of time when we can have a single, simple, all-so-certain number?
The real Clock captures the feel of our planet–which could use more feeling about now. The read-out is no more than a place on an assembly line.
Heart-breaking? Yes, because it puts yet another limit on a child’s ability to think.
-30-
Most always at ten of two or ten past ten, sometimes at twenty of five or twenty past eight, clocks have been advertised in the positions most pleasing to the eye. Name one pleasing readout on a digital clock. 9:45? 12:15? 10:01? 12:21? 5:55? This display is from: https://www.chelseaclock.com/
The Glockenspiel Tower in New Ulm, Minnesota. Let’s hope it is never replaced by a four-digit LED sign:
According to WikiPedia: “New Ulm’s glockenspiel is one of the world’s few free-standing carillonclock towers. It stands 45 feet high, and its largest Bourdon (bell) weighs 595 pounds while the total weight of the bells is two tons. The bells chime the time of day in Westminster style.”A detail. Characters on the bottom rotate as the bells ring in each hour.There’s also a reason why this annual festival has grown so rapidly in popularity in recent years: https://www.watchcityfestival.com/
The letter S may be missing from the end of the first word in the headline, but from a source that calls itself “Newsiosity,” I’ll chalk that up to whimsy:
My employers and their shipping and receiving crew laugh at my insistence on using street atlases and road maps rather than GPS or Siri to find our new customers all over New England. For all I know, they may be the same thing, Siri the voice of GPS.
Away from work, too. Older folk find it quaint. Middle-agers, including my daughter and son-in-law, think me obstinate. Younger folk simply cannot believe it; either I’m putting on an act, or I’m just plain stupid.
When the technology availed itself, I began explaining that I didn’t want routes chosen for me, that I wanted to see the curves and angles, the alternate routes, the names of two or three streets before any turn, and landmarks. I certainly did not want to make myself dependent on an electronic device.
I usually spit out that last item with emphasis verging on contempt, not for anyone who asked, but for the suggestion. Call it my way of telling them to never ask the question again. Older and middle-aged folk shrug and oblige. Younger folk say, “OK Boomer!” and let it pass.
My love of maps began when I was younger than they. I bet I was no more than ten when, at my grandmother’s house, I found a book with a title something like American History Illustrated which included dozens of maps from Colonial times through the addition of New Mexico and Arizona as the 47th and 48th states in 1912. Its geography was already out of date.
The photos were inspiring, at times provocative (Who would ever argue with Wilson?), and the editorial cartoons were entertaining, at times surprising (How could anyone not like Lincoln?), but the maps were most fascinating. When I made a list of page numbers so that I could view them one after another, in sequence from Colonial times through territorial purchases, admission of states, the Mexican War, Gold Rush, Indian treaties, and yes, Manifest Destiny, I saw American history as if it was film.
Noticing that I always pulled it from her shelf, my grandmother told me to take the book home where my father took note. At the time my parents and I made road trips every summer to see her sister and family–six cousins–in Ohio. Dad put me in charge of the road maps.
At first, I did little more than tell him how far we had to go to the next rest area or town for the sake of a restaurant or “filling station,” as we called them, but by the second year he would ask me to pick out a US or state highway–usually along the legendary Erie Canal–for a bit more scenery, a break from the endless thump-thump-thump of the New York Thruway.
One year I navigated a side trip to Cooperstown, New York, to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, another to Skaneateles, NY, to meet five more cousins, another to Youngstown, Ohio, for yet another seven. Perhaps because we were the only small family it was up to us to drop in on them. And no doubt that finding ten of those twelve cousins to be girls was a reward for my cartographic skills.
Worth noting here that road trips were relatively new to the American experience in the Fifties. An idea commissioned by President Eisenhower who didn’t take office until 1953, interstates did not exist, unless you count a the few existing state toll roads in the Northeast later designated as such. And it might have taken as long to develop items such as tires and shock absorbers to allow for the long distance drives that automakers were urging us to take:
This is dated 1956, the year before Chevrolet designed and sold perhaps the most iconic American car of the century. For years Dinah Shore had a popular TV show on which she sang the commercial, “See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call…”
In high school and college I had little occasion to use maps except for a few drives from Salem, Mass. to the anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC, and neither I nor any passenger was interested in any side excursions. But in my senior year, I took a Geology course to satisfy a requirement that most liberal arts majors took in sophomore year.
Having already read so much the literature set in the West–Twain, Steinbeck, Cather, Norris, London, Garland, etc.–may be why I took such acute interest in how the land was formed. A few weeks in, it wasn’t just a subject I studied, but one I would talk about with anyone who would listen. When it was over, I was so sure of it, that I didn’t cram for the final, and showed up with a novel I had long intended to read but kept putting off, a rage of my generation. Before the prof arrived with the blue books, among a few dozen students cramming with their texts and notebooks, I sat with my nose in a paperback.
So engrossed that I didn’t notice his arrival, or his passing out the books until he was right in front of me. I closed the book, but before I could put it down, he grabbed it to see the title and laughed:
“Is this your way of giving me the finger?”
“It’s my way to relax. I liked this class. I want this test. I’m going to ace it.”
Another laugh: “I’m sure you will.”
We were both right. As for the “finger” comment, I still wonder if it was for bringing a novel to a Geology final, or for the novel I brought: The Catcher in the Rye.
I did it again in grad school at South Dakota State, or something like it. As a graduate assistant in the English Dept., I took a Cartography course as an elective. Already working on a thesis on regional writers on the 19th Century known for local color and dialect, I wanted maps to illustrate the settings. The English Dept. chair and a few of the tenured higher-ups were not pleased.
Anyone who has taught or worked in higher education knows that territorialism rears its ugly head at such things, but as a grad-ass (yes, that was the word we used) I had yet to learn that I was expected to stay on the reservation. Turned out that Cartography 101 was the last class I took, and by the next semester, when I was safely back in Massachusetts, they had a new rule that restricted their grad-asses’ choice of electives.
Given the subject matter, you could call it a case of Territorialism vs. Territory.
Apparently the results on five pages of my thesis had nothing to do with their verdict. To this day, I take The Forgotten Realist (my thesis bound as a book) off my shelf to show visitors four of the maps–one of Indiana, another of the Ohio Valley, one the old Northwest territory, another of the mid-Atlantic states. The names of writers and their novels on each.
The fifth map? Well, let’s just say that my renditions of mountain ranges looked more like preschool than grad school. Not only that, but it was placed facing into the center of the book, rather than out, making it doubly ridiculous. Probably my mistake. Still quite proud of the four, I’ve often wondered if I missed my calling.
At the time, and I would think to this day, SDSU’s Geography Dept. was reputable enough to make it a pipeline for graduates to a federal agency in St. Louis that prepared maps for the departments of Defense, Interior, and others.
We all have our what-ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens, and mine range from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh right out of high school to the University of Texas El Paso for grad school to a hippy commune near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, for who knows what, and to Hamburg, Germany, where street-music seemed viable during ten November days, suggesting it would be lucrative in most other months. St. Louis is the only what-if I still ponder that would have been a career.
At SDSU the Cartography lab was my favorite indoor spot. The light table reminded me of the lay-out table for the student newspaper back at Salem State. You could render exact every detail no matter how small, and there is a sensation about creating such things or representing them on a piece of paper–or, as it would be today, on a screen.
Also, it was the first place I ever saw the world on a Robinson Projection, a map that curves the two poles inward and keeps the Equator centered. This lessens exaggerated land sizes near the North Pole, while erasing the subtle reduction of Africa and South America (to inflate Europe and North America) which are inherent in the standard Mercator Projections that we always see.
May not work on this screen or in an atlas on your coffee table, but on the wall of that lab, stretched to about three by five feet, it is akin to seeing the bluffs of the Mississippi River or the Dakota Badlands for the first time. It changes the way you think about land and water.
In 1980, my parents drove to South Dakota for a visit–taking US 14 rather than I-90 across Minnesota at my suggestion to see, among other things, the Glockenspiel Bell Tower and the Historical Museum in New Ulm. The Cartography lab was on the must-see list. At 60 and 55, their awe at seeing that map matched mine.
The Robinson Projection, 1963.
Since I made numerous trips between the Dakotas and New England, I took various routes. Minnesota’s map became the proverbial palm of my hand, and once, where state highway 23 veers northeast from US 14, I let my hands decide which trip I was to take.
When travelling east, Minnesota is where you must decide if you are going to take an interstate express south of the Great Lakes, a more relaxed ride across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and through Ontario’s Southwest Peninsula, or a wild ride to include a pilgrimage to the home of Bob Dylan up through Minnesota’s Iron Range and across the entire Ontario Province.
On those last two you would later decide to return to the US below or above Lake Ontario–through Niagara and Buffalo across New York, or straight down from Montreal into Vermont. I saw them all, and my daughter saw most of them when she took my old job working the maps.
Much of Rachel’s assignment was to find the small towns likely to have a public swimming pool where we could spend the hottest hours of summer days, me napping, her romping with local kids under the watchful eyes of kind, young mothers. Before all departures along the way, we’d consult the maps and agree on our next moves, all of it step by step, nothing a day in advance, which allowed us to discover unknown and unlikely sites, such as the Painted Rocks in Michigan, a ghost town in Nebraska, a lava field in Idaho, the wrought iron art-work in the center of Madison, Indiana, the wrought iron crosses in a Saskatchewan cemetery.
Serendipity became our one-word motto.
And it was the unspoken rule of my last western road trip with a friend in his 1976 VW bus from Seattle to Minneapolis in 2003. Taking the mountainous routes to enjoy the Cascades–and one meteor shower in a pitch black sky–we landed in Idaho well above I-94. Not wanting to drive due south and take a right turn due east, we checked the map and found Montana 200, among the thinnest of Rand McNally‘s lines, to take us on a diagonal direct to Missoula. Seeing the stream alongside making its way to the headwaters of the Missouri, we knew that it would be all downhill and gradual, giving the VW a reprieve from all the climbing and steep descents.
Would Siri have offered Montana 200 as a possible route? And, if so, would it–she?–have informed us of the stream and the gradual descent?
Today, in a year that few people are going anywhere, I’ve no occasion to consult maps other than to check names and spellings for what I write. Indeed, the only two events in 2020 for me have been two marathon readings of Moby-Dick–a real one in New Bedford in January before shut-down, and a virtual one this summer.
These caused me to re-read the book, start to finish, and for the first time I realized that, in addition to a narration that ranges from calm to skittish, from jolly to reverent, from whimsical to combative, what makes Ishmael so listenable, so rich, is his penchant for using geographic names for comparisons and illustrations, from the “austere Atlantic” to the “contemplative Pacific.”
His description of Nantucket, for example, tells us that so little grows there naturally, “that they import Canada thistles,… that bits of wood… are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome,” and that the islanders wear shoes, “something like Laplander snowshoes” before his near palindromic summary line, “only to show that Nantucket is no Illinois.”
Back in New Bedford, sailors just returned from a year or two at sea storm into the Spouter Inn “like an eruption of bears from Labrador,” and Father Mapple’s pulpit is “his little Quebec.” From the moment the Pequod sails, right to its disastrous end, comparisons continue from Sumatra to Finland, from Cuba to Kokovoko, an island that is “not down on any map; true places never are.”
That last remark would seem to contradict everything I am saying, except that it has taken on new meaning in 21st Century America.
No, I am not going to turn this cartographic memoir into a political pitch, but I would be remiss not to note that American cartographers today find themselves on the front lines of political reform. Who else, after all, could possibly undo the damage of highly gerrymandered districts in key electoral states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and others in time for next year when constitutionally mandated new maps are drawn based on this year’s Census?
As a corollary to Ishmael’s “true places [that] never are,” existing state maps show many of America’s congressional districts as false places that now are.
Unrigged, a book published earlier this year, tells us that those cartographers, along with citizen’s groups, already have had some success, at times testifying in courts, and always showing the results of their high tech computer work–not just what the best options are for re-districting, but how far from anything honest are so many districts drawn in 2011 following the Tea Party wave of 2010.
So let the shippers and receivers laugh, and let the rest, young and old, shrug and roll their eyes. GPS will never tell me where to go, and Siri will never tell me what to do.
To me those choices are as personal as my vote.
-30-
For just a few examples:
#11, Cleveland to Akron with little more than a highway connecting them, is clearly intended to keep urban votes out of 13, 14, and 16. #9 to keep them out of 4 & 5. #4 is as distorted as the as its representative in the US House, Jim Jordan.
Imagine going door to door asking people how often they view pornography.
Or even taking such a poll over the phone.
Aside from the many doors slammed in your face and taps clicked into your ear, chances are that most all respondents will say never. Some wags over a phone might ask what you are wearing, but they are to be discounted. By mail or online, some may venture into “rarely” or “once a month,” but you know it will be an undercount.
No matter your own response, truthful or otherwise, you don’t need me to tell you why.
Instead, let’s consider the political polls we keep hearing that have Biden leading Trump by about ten nationally, and between four and eight in the swing states.
What if numerous respondents to those polls feel the same way they would if their taste for pornography were made known?
Perhaps like the celebrated preacher who for years insisted that a marriage is “between a man and a woman” while skimming from his generous collection baskets to pay for a marriage between a man, a woman, and a pool boy or two.
I’m not talking about the obvious con-artists who support him, from Falwell to LaPierre to McConnell, nor about his base, the red-hatters, Confederate flag wavers, Swastika-wearing torch carriers, the anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-reality cynics and paranoiacs. No, because it took more than them in a few states to put him over the top in 2016, and more than that across the country to keep him there despite impeachment in 2019.
And I’m certainly not talking about those who will turn a memorial service into a political rally as happened today at the gathering in Manhattan to commemorate the 19th anniversary of 9/11 on the very site where it happened.
I’m talking about people who put up a front of “faith” and “family values” and “neighborliness” and “civic involvement” and “support for local business,” much like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, they are drawn to the veiled but unmistakable appeals to their fear of anyone not like them.
And so they fall for the imagined protection of “the beautiful suburbs” against “mobs” from “Democrat-controlled cities” illustrated with videos of violence. Against all evidence, they willingly accept this as the work of all protesters rather than the right-wing Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys who infiltrate protests for that purpose.
Most recently, when he urged his supporters to vote twice, they rationalized that he was “just joking.” Maybe their sense of humor ran out before the revelations of his insults aimed at POWs, amputees and victims of war. Ditto his deception regarding COVID. They’ve fallen silent over those.
Too bad that, in this case, silence is consent. Just as it is each time he demeans someone as sleepy, crooked, little, crazy, lyin’, shifty, wacky, low energy, etc. or calls someone a disaster, a disgrace, a horrible person, a loser, horse-face, human scum, etc. & etc.
To hear all of this during a campaign and still vote for him had to make those upright family values folks feel unclean in 2016. To hear it for nearly four years and do so again?
Maybe, but who would admit it?
This would explain why the polls were so wrong in 2016. Given the hush money paid to prostitutes and the “Pussy Grab” tape, it would have been easy to call Trump the “Pornographic Candidate.”
True, there’s no sensible comparison between a few minutes of arousal and four years of the nation’s economic, environmental, and all other policies, but the unwillingness to admit the choice has the same reason.
In November we will learn something which the polls cannot and will not predict: Will the “land of the free and the home of the brave” overdose in shame.
-30-
This comes from Cartoonstock by way of fellow blogger Ron Clutz who used it in 2017 to introduce a most enlightening piece on America’s failure to address climate change despite most Americans favoring environmental measures that would: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/another-climate-push-poll/
Unless you have remained within the four walls of your home or the fences and shrubs that might surround it these past six months, you have noticed that there are far more bicycles on the road than ever before.
By May, Harper’s was able to report that bicycles ranked with toilet paper, hand sanitizer, alcohol, and a few items I’d rather not mention on a top-seller list in this pandemic economy.
No need to give the reason for a surge in bike sales, but the result deserves some attention.
As a resident of Plum Island, a summer vacation and weekend getaway destination for many along Massachusetts’ north coast, I am necessarily often on the one and only road that links us to the mainland.
On maps and I suppose on apps, it’s called it a “turnpike,” but that’s as misleading as it is absurd. We think of turnpikes as wide, but this is a causeway, something that is never wide because before you pave it, you must put the ground under it. In this case, two miles worth.
Hence, our lifeline to civilization is but two lanes, one in each direction, with narrower lanes for bicycles and joggers on each side. Admittedly, I have never measured the width, but I can tell you that Stick-It, my modest-sized Nissan Versa, when centered in one lane, has barely two feet on each side.
Bicycle lanes would appear to leave about a foot on each side of a centered cycle, but most ride closer to the right, doing everyone a favor.
So far so good, but it may be that these rookie cyclists–not all or most, not even very many, but enough of them–do not think that rules of the road apply to their new, much smaller and slower, environmental-friendly ride.
Or perhaps they do, but only when riding solo. The problem so noticeable now on weekends is that they sometimes ride two abreast. Since there must be space between the bikes, the one on the left claims a good three feet of the car lane.
No one needs me to draw a picture or give measurements for this, but it may help if cyclists would consider it from the vantage point of someone behind the wheel of a car approaching them from behind at the road’s 40-mph speed-limit. To help solve this problem, you might pass this on to the cyclists you know, especially the novices:
A driver on such a road has three choices:
1) Veer left, surprising an on-coming car.
2) Hit the brakes, surprising a motorist behind you.
3) Thread the needle, hoping that the bike stays straight or leans right.
My choice? So far, I have been the beneficiary of more white-knuckle luck than I want to press.
Common sense says that the risk of damage and injury in head-on or rear-end collisions is far greater than that of side-swiping a bike. Unless the act of riding two abreast is a suicide attempt, it should be easy to convince people not to do it.
If texting can wait until a driver is out of a car, conversations can wait until a cyclist is off the road.
Then again, I could be criticizing the wrong person. People finding themselves in relationships they want to end may be asking their unwanted partners to go biking. All they need do is have plenty to say along the way, and keep that partner to the left.
-30-
And the Sgt. Donald Wilkinson Bridge where everything narrows. Photo courtesy of Newburyport Daily News.
Professional golfer Greg Norman never killed anyone, at least not that I’ve heard, but his meltdown in the 1996 Master’s, blowing a six-stroke lead in the final round, is among the epic chokes in sports history.
Right up there with the New York Yankees blowing a 3-0 game edge over the Boston Red Sox with a one-run lead going into the ninth of Game Four in the 2004 American League Playoffs.
My mention of the Yankees failure here is gratuitous, gleefully brought up only because I’m a lifelong Red Sox fan and enjoy the misery of anyone who roots for the Bronx Blunders.
Norman, however, comes to mind whenever I hear a reference to choking in golf, as the nation has this week in a clip of an interview the Republican president did with Fox “News”–a clip that has already been replayed more times than Red Sox Dave Roberts stealing second-base in the bottom of the ninth of Game Four has been played in 16 years.
While many pounced on the quote as soon as it aired, I had to pause. A comparison is not an equation, and I have to trust that readers appreciate the difference. Much of the writing I do is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, and I find that the clearest way to do that more often than not, is to make a comparison–often a comparison between two distinct things or people.
For example, just yesterday my blog headlined, “Putting on the Con,” included this:
The aftermath of Kenosha is to conflation what the Sistine Chapel is to interior decoration. And Donald Trump is its Michelangelo.
Conflation? That’s an equation often disguised as a comparison. More often it is done with generalizations, stereotypes, and simple juxtaposition, taking about distinct things at the same time to give the impression that they are the same.
Sometimes it’s done with a single word. Yesterday, I wrote that we do it to ourselves every time we condemn “congress” without making any distinction between the two houses or the two parties. Today, I offer “newspaper” with a list of twelve claims just posted by one:
Trump said on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” wearing “dark uniforms” had been headed to the Republican National Convention to do “big damage.” The claim is similar to a baseless conspiracy theory that spread online over the summer, well before the convention.
He has declined to condemn the killings of two protesters in Kenosha, Wis. He instead defended the 17-year-old charged in the shootings — a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse — saying he was acting in self-defense.
Trump also promoted a Twitter post that called Rittenhouse “a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”
He compared the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha to missing “a three-foot putt” in a golf tournament.
He claimed that “people that you’ve never heard of” and “people that are in the dark shadows” are controlling Joe Biden.
He claimed Democrats were trying to “destroy” suburbs with “low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.” He added that Cory Booker — one of the highest-profile Black Democrats — would be “in charge of it.”
He predicted that the stock market would crash if Biden won.
He said that Biden, at the Democratic National Convention, “didn’t even discuss law enforcement, the police. Those words weren’t mentioned.” In fact, Biden held a discussion at the convention on policing, with a police chief.
Trump claimed that he “took control of” the situation in Kenosha by sending in the National Guard. In fact, Wisconsin’s governor, not the president, sent the National Guard.
He said that protests against police brutality were actually a secret “coup attempt” by anarchists “trying to take down the President.”
As soon as I saw this Sistine ceiling of conflation, I wanted to post it. Then it occurred to me that some would notice its source, the New York Times, and immediately dismiss it as fake.
Even if they read it, they would not acknowledge that all twelve items are straight fact. Quotes that are in print, events that have happened. Try to convince them otherwise, we get nowhere and we wonder why.
Here’s why: Newspapers have numerous roles. Foremost is reporting, but there’s entertainment, advertising, weather, sports, public notices such as deeds and obituaries, and editorial opinion and analysis. Perhaps it began slowly with Vietnam or Watergate, but today we are in the grip of the worst conflation of all:
The inability or unwillingness of many Americans–not just conservatives–to distinguish between the roles of a newspaper, nor of news sources, nor indeed of the “media.” So, once they find a paper’s editorial positions objectionable, so too the straight reports.
Taken to the extreme, as most everything is these days, it means someone can ridicule a pandemic as a hoax in March and then claim to have acted early, boldly, and effectively against the “deadly, invisible enemy” in April. You can almost hear Frank Sinatra riding high, only to be shot down.
If you think you can still get through to them, you have more faith in humanity than I.
But I do keep at it in hopes that skeptics who remain uncommitted to any side or position might take another look at what they tend to dismiss out of hand. Two distinct houses instead of one “congress.” Two distinct parties instead of “politicians.”
And right now: Two distinct functions of journalism rather than “the media.”
It’s as basic as putting a putter on the sports page rather than in obituaries–even at times when he may not know the difference himself.
-30-
Challenge: Find a single word in the list of twelve that can be construed as “biased.” Before you pick “baseless” in the first entry, notice that it describes an item not in the list itself and is easily proved in a separate, relevant report.
Greg Norman falls to the ground after missing his shot for an eagle on the 15th hole during final round play of the 1996 Masters at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., Sunday , April 14, 1996. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
Over the years at King Richard’s Faire–which would be opening this coming weekend–I got a lot of mileage out of pestering people from Connecticut.
Not far over their border, we drew many, and the ones wearing UConn hats or shirts were easy marks.
“Ah! From Connecticut, I see!”
“That’s right!”
“The state that contradicts itself! No wonder they call you the Nut-meg State!”
“Huh?”
“Which is it? Connect? Or Cut? You can’t do both!”
Most responses were laughter, often combined with the epiphany of realizing something ever-in-front-of you but never noticed.
These encounters were just outside the front gate as people entered, my assignment being to give patrons something to laugh at as they waited in ticket lines. Usually I was in motion piping jigs, but in later years I employed wisecracking banter as a concession to my well-worn lungs.
Call it an unlikely combination of Harpo Marx and Don Rickles, a far more stunning contradiction than any state name, but I could always resort to the pipe if the banter seemed to offend.
Put another way, I became quite skilled at reading faces and taking hints. Those who most enjoyed it got the full treatment:
“Is your first name Oxy?”
“What?”
“A contradiction in terms.”
“An Oxy?”
“That’s just the first name.”
Usually they would ask for the second name or the rest of it, and I would trust they would have some faint memory of a weird word they heard at least once back–sometimes way back–in high school. Taking advantage of a Shakespearean outfit that might make them think me a scholar, I’d stand in front of and look right at them:
“We merry olde English gentlemen call such contradictions an oxymoron.” (Pause.) “Ah! Another light bulb I see!”
Often I was lucky enough that someone walking in with the mark started calling him or her an oxymoron so that I didn’t have to. If so, it was easy to turn the tables:
“Don’t listen to them! Anyone gives you grief, just tell ’em!”
“Tell them what?”
“Tell ’em ‘I put the I in Connecticut!'”
“Alright!”
Over my shoulder, walking away: “Then again, you may want to lose that moronic shirt.”
Similar gimmicks worked for other states, cities, sports teams, colleges, you wear it, I ridicule it, and after working those queues for twenty years, I should have seen the name Wisconsin, far off though it is, enough to notice the redundancy:
Con and Sin.
Instead, I settled for the familiar references to “cheese-heads,” no doubt because most of the shirts and hats from the Badger State do not say “Wisconsin” but “Green Bay Packers,” or simply “G.”
However, as any American old enough to vote must know, the name Wisconsin went to the top of the national marquee last week. And considering that it is a swing state that could well decide who wins in November, it’s beginning to look like an unlimited engagement.
My three-mile walk today was an unavoidable meditation on what has happened there, an odd place for my mind to occupy while my feet splashed in the North Atlantic. By the time I returned I was thinking of it as “Wisconflation.”
Many protest. A few join them with bad intent. Buildings burn. A gunman goes on a spree. Cameras roll.
Next day an entire political party, a couple news outlets, and social media trolls will convince their marks that someone called “they” burned the buildings. Just look at the video.
This is Conflation. Often done with a simple pronoun, “they,” it combines distinct items to make us think those items one and the same. With an undefined “they,” protest is synonymous with looting. When anyone expresses support for the protesters, the opposition will call it support for “them,” turning it into support for looters.
This is the warped logic by which a presidential candidate is accused of being against religion, against suburbs, against family, against children, against schools, against cows, against happiness, against humor, against goodness, and “bad for God” to quote the most moronic statement ever made by an American president, no oxy about it.
Republicans have been doing this for years, all the time. Nor do they limit it to ugly events they can accompany with frightening video. Biden is conflated into Bernie and AOC. Democrats into Communists. Unions into terrorists. Immigrants into rapists and murderers.
According to them, Biden has called to “defund the police,” even though he hasn’t. He has not condemned violence, even though he has. He supports abortions in the ninth month, even though he doesn’t. The Democrats left “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance at their convention, even though they didn’t.
We do it to ourselves when we condemn “congress” without making any distinction between the two houses, much less the two parties. And we barely, if at all, notice when the most cautious, reputable, professional public figures–Dr. Fauci for example–have bizarre statements hung on them by way of conflation.
How does what happened in Wisconsin constitute conflation? Who’s the con? Where’s the sin? And is its swing state status purely coincidental?
Are we really to believe that the police felt threatened by a man walking away from them, getting into a car with three children? If not, then we have to find another reason. Add the frequency–since the same question applies to the George Floyd case and many others–and the excuse of “isolated incidents” by “a few bad apples” is no longer tenable. It is conflation.
The aftermath of Kenosha is to conflation what the Sistine Chapel is to interior decoration. And Donald Trump is its Michelangelo. Are you listening, Portland? wasn’t just to fan the flames of racism, but to reprise Are you listening, Russia? for those who relish his flames. More conflation.
In Kenosha, as in Minneapolis and elsewhere, the spark that ignites is not reaction by police. It is targeting by police. They may not leave the precinct looking to kill African-Americans, but they sure know that the consequence is less, if at all. Add to that a president, a political party and all its echo chambers fanning the resulting flames, and they could almost claim to be following orders. They are certainly doing a leader’s perceived bidding.
Absurd? Then why is a Fox News host lauding the gunman? Why does a presidential advisor say that the more burning and looting, the better it is for the president politically? And why does he himself tweet an open threat of a caravan of his supporters heading into Portland filled with “GREAT PATRIOTS!” following a disavowal of any responsibility for the result? Or claiming “self-defense” for a gunman whose mother drove him and his weapon over a state line?
Wrong? Bad? No. These are not the bad policies, wrong moves, or misstatements of an Obama or Bush or Clinton or Reagan with reasons that you can understand even though you don’t agree with them. This is cruelty for the sake of cruelty, a la children in cages. Lawlessness for the sake of lawlessness, a la turning the White House into a political prop. Cruelty and lawlessness are the point.
Sorry to take you from the Renaissance into the Dark Ages, but here we are. This is Evil. Its appeal is to the fearful, the paranoid, the racist, the gullible, the selfish, and the cynical. The worse and more widespread the violence gets, the better an authoritarian ruler and his enablers will do in November.
And they know it, which is why they conflate it.
-30-
Conflation six decades ago from the Birmingham (Alabama) News. The handwriting around the cartoon, addressed to Dr. King, reads as follows: “How can you, a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, be such a deceitful hypocrite? You’re not fooling anyone but yourself in your nauseating talk about non-violence. You demand a program to overcome poverty and ‘flow in’ untold amounts in your high living and running all over the globe to feed your own egotism.”By wild coincidence Harper’s August issue–which went to press in mid-September–carried a cover story all about Kenosha, examining Donald Trump’s appeal in the Rust Belt. If you believe the early polls showing Biden with ten point leads over Trump in Wisconsin and other states with depressed economies, this essay is cause for grave alarm. And it was all researched and written before last week’s shooting.
On Tuesday I went in for my check-up, a date that I had marked on my calendar months ago and was fully aware of when the call came to remind me.
When the heat and humidity arrived in June and stayed well into this month, I quit my daily three-mile walks into the Plum Island Reserve and, thinking it a right of old age, simply put a chair out under a tree.
Rationalization runs rampant in retirement. At this top of a modest hill I could always count on a breeze, pleasingly cool from the ocean, and still enough when off the marsh. Good books to read, and a blog to keep writing to tell others of them–or of current events that I perhaps have time to observe and consider more than most others.
All the while I was noticing my clothing getting tighter, and the chair increasingly difficult to get up from.
When I went to see the doctor, I was braced to see a number on that scale about ten pounds higher than six months ago, which was ten pounds higher than the previous time. Something about how they always put you on that damn scale first thing. Whether that’s poetry or cruelty could make for a long whimsical debate.
Fat chance! In more ways than one. My morale plummeted as the number rocketed to 15 beyond that ten. Good news is that all else is well–if you can consider, say, a town on the banks of the Monongahela as being well while the overflowing dam a half-mile upriver is about to burst.
By the time I left, I wish I had skipped it. All the way home I dwelled on my foreseeable future without potato pancakes covered in sour cream every morning, burgers every other night, knockwurst on the nights between, and cheese and crackers whenever I want, all of it washed down by three or four bottles of New Hampshire’s Finest Kind India Pale Ale.
Truth is, all that walking merely allowed me to break even. As former Boston Celtic basketball coach K.C. Jones once bemoaned of a player with a weight problem: “He works hard in practice, as hard as anyone. But then he goes home and eats three chickens.”
Yes, my doctor read me the riot act, but he did so in a maddeningly matter-of-fact way that recalled (without his having to say so) how he has been telling me to do this for three years. And so on Wednesday I resumed the walk.
Four days later, I’m stiff, I’m sore, but I’m relieved that I have logged my formerly accustomed three miles each day. Milder weather helps, as do low tides offering stretches of flat, firm sand for as far as I go. It’s as if I never stopped. Now, as before, my only problem is getting started, like a car with a faulty ignition.
As if to jump myself, I start by going to my mailbox at the foot of my driveway. Yesterday it was empty, but I continued to the beach since I had myself in gear. In more ways than one, since I was in rain gear.
If I had a cellphone I might have called the doctor to brag of my commitment to finally take his good advice, but my walks are no time for distractions. I’m there to either think something through–whatever I happen to be writing or planning to write–or to empty my head of what I just finished writing.
Yesterday it was the latter, following the week’s series of commentaries on the four-day fear-fest cast as a political (or was it religious?) convention. I’ve absorbed and processed so much of that since the pandemic–keeping me home and near this keyboard–that I am in as much need to resist news as resist my appetite.
By the time I returned, drenched, I was thinking only of family and friends around the country and in Newburyport I might call this weekend for long-overdue re-acquaintances. Before turning up the driveway, I went to the mailbox and pulled a single envelope. Before opening it, I wondered: Is it poetry or cruelty that puts a steep hill at the end of a long walk?
The notice was from my doctor’s office, a reminder of my appointment–four days ago.
-30-
This is from March, 2006. More pounds lighter than I care to admit, aside a mailbox since wiped out by a snow plow. Too bad, as I rather liked the artwork, a cut up bumper sticker for a candidate with my last name running for governor that I found in a coffeeshop in New Paltz, New York. The word “Libertarian” gave me eight of the nine letters for my daughter’s name; “Go” in “Governor,” though in badly faded red, went with “Party” while two of those remaining were shaped into that ninth letter; and Lady Liberty appears ready to lower the lid. Look closely and you can get an idea of the angle of that driveway behind me. Thanks again to visitor Michael Boer who offers more pics from his New England trip at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261
Ever wonder why it is that words for colors are used for race?
Today the usage is unquestioned. No matter which side we are on or what color we are, we all accept that Black Lives Matter is a movement, White Nationalism an ideology, and Washington Redskins a professional football team looking for a new name.
Still, the question has nagged me for some 25 years after attending a seminar on race relations at Northeastern University.
On the panel, a rabbi held up a blank piece of paper and said with emphasis, “This is white.” He then put it next to his well-tanned forearm, “You call this white?” No one answered.
Next, he held up his yarmulke: “This is black.” He then glanced at the African-American professor seated next to him who anticipated what the rabbi was up to and held out his forearm next to the yarmulke.
Rather than asking the obvious, he let the epiphany sink in, no doubt knowing that many of us would recreate the demonstration and tell of it for years to come, as I do now.
But we do call that arm black, and we of European heritage do call ourselves white no matter how successfully we work on tans. So I regarded the lesson as a mere academic exercise until I stumbled upon an answer while reading a 2017 book titled The Dawn of Detroit.
As the title promises, author Tiya Miles reaches back into the first forays of French trappers all around the Great Lakes and the settlements in what was called New France stretching from Canada to Louisiana Territory. On the waters connecting lakes Huron and Erie, “Detroit” is French for “the straights.”
Settlers from the English colonies started moving in when the French still held it, mostly in what was then our frontier, commonly called “the Northwest,'” and today is Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.* They coexisted peacefully with the French, and traded with most of the native tribes.
In 1754, the two empires went to war. Here in North America, the English called it the French and Indian War because most, though not all, tribes sided with the French who were better known to them. In 1764, France gave up and ceded the territory to England. The population, French and English, barely noticed. Tribes resumed trade. Life went on.
Until 1776. When the fellows in Philadelphia declared independence, they tapped a successful general of that war to lead the one about to begin. George Washington knew that the new country would need to secure its western territories–which, though they were not colonies about to become states, were apportioned to several of them.
Washington tapped another veteran of that war, George Rogers Clark, to lead that effort. Familiar with the territory, Clark knew that he would need to appeal to both French and English settlers, turning comfortable co-existence into united defiance.
And he would need to stir them up. Since different tribes had fought against either the French or English in recent memory, Clark knew he could use them as a wedge. Also, some of the English settlers had domestic slaves, and so he was able to play an old colonial trick: Tell them that the other side would turn their slaves against them.
All Clark needed was language to drive the point home: us versus them. At some point, the 24-year-old Virginian may have heard of the hope expressed by Benjamin Franklin in his PennsylvaniaGazette 20 years earlier that the colonies could negotiate with the tribes so that “the lovely White and Red” could thrive together. Not likely, as Franklin’s peaceful usage never took hold.
Whether Clark heard it or not, his military intent began the common use of color to denote race. “White” became synonymous with “America.”
Until then, natives were never called “red,” but most often by the name of their tribe–Ottawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Ojibwa, Iroquois, Shawnee, etc. When speaking of tribes generally, even the founders sustained Columbus’ mistake and called them “Indians.” Slaves were usually referred to as “African” and sometimes by the name of the African nation from whence they came. “Black” and “Negro” were rarely used.
None of which mattered to a military propagandist looking to emphasize the rallying cry of “White.” And so “Red” and “Black” became threats, something not to be trusted, to be regarded as other.**
Decades later, it was natural for the word “Yellow” in California and “Brown” in the Southwest to join what we today call a “Rainbow”–never mind that only two of the five colors are in a rainbow.
Over the years I’ve recalled the rabbi at Northeastern and imagined him adding an apple, a banana, and the grocery bag they come in to his memorable demonstration. They might as well have been present in the Naturalization ceremony staged in the White House during the Republican convention. “Like a box of Crayola,” as one African-American commentator said of the few immigrants selected for citizenship and used as props.
Today I wonder if the rabbi at Northeastern knew of George Rogers Clark. Can’t imagine that anyone in the White House does.
-30-
*My friends in Seattle and Portland might laugh at the idea of Ohio and Michigan being called “the Northwest,” but Oregon Territory and the Pacific Ocean were not on the new nation’s radar until 1805 when George Rogers Clark’s much younger brother, William, showed up with Meriwether Lewis and a fearless 16-year-old Lemhi Shoshone scout named Sacagawea.
**While William has cities, schools, public buildings and parks all over the country named for him, George has his fair share in what the federalists called the Northwest. Late into the 19th Century he was celebrated for his victory over the British at Vincennes along the banks of the Wabash in southwest Indiana. Unfortunately, it occasioned no presidential campaign slogan such as “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” that helped put General William Henry Harrison into the White House in 1841 and appeared in history textbooks well into the 20th Century–or any fiddle tune such “January 8,” which later was put into words, renamed “Battle of New Orleans” and is sung to this day.
BREAKING NEWS: The new, upcoming film company Kompromat has announced plans to turn this week’s Republican Convention into a blockbuster movie titled In Donald We Trust.
In an attempt to appeal to a more informed audience, Kompromat is giving the film a more honest, straightforward subtitle: How an NYC Crime Family Turned the White House into Kremlin West But Disguised It As American Vatican.
The original working title, Garbage for the Gullible, was scrapped when director Vladimir Putin complained that it gave away the plot.
Posters will show the president wrapped in a flag and waving a crucifix. No word yet on casting, though the First Lady’s appearance in a Soviet Union costume has led to speculation that some of the principals will play themselves.
Putin, whose last film, Cry Me a Crimea, was an international hit, is once again doing the casting himself. William Barr, fresh off his acclaimed doctoring of the Mueller Report, is editing the script and vows that it will be rated G for Gullible.
-30-
Greers Ferry, Arkansas. A Getty image from 2013 seen in: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/religious-patriotism-_n_3545537Turns out that Sinclair Lewis never said or wrote this, but it does represent the warning of his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which appeared in new 80th anniversary editions during the presidential campaign which so vividly and frighteningly recalled its contents. I offer it because I used it in my short blog–without attribution, though it’s out there already, perhaps in public domain–and to call attention to as penetrating description of America today as you will find written today:
Mouth of the River 