Put the Penguin in the Pool

As if to defy all the current news here in Conform-or-Else America, penguins are enjoying quite a Renaissance lately.

Cartoon penguins were on many signs sported coast-to-coast in the estimated 1,400 Hands Off rallies last weekend. Indeed, they were among the highlights, reminding us of the laughter needed to confront President Mob Boss and his authoritarian rule.

Americans have seen this since 1940 when Charlie Chaplin’s Fuhrer waddled a bit like a penguin in The Great Dictator.

My daughter was about eight when she imagined and wrote a most memorable story titled “Chilly the Penguin.” She set it in Antarctica, but it was heart-warming nonetheless. With crayons, she drew Chilly and his family and a few human fans who helped them out of some existential dilemma involving melting ice as I recall.

If she did that today in Florida—and in many other places in these Unraveled States of America—her teacher would be investigated, the books that informed her removed from the school, and the school itself threatened with defunding.

No matter that the phrase “climate change” was nowhere on her pages, much less “global warming.” What did matter? Laughter. Laughter and compassion. It was hilarious, and penguins delivered the lesson to children in the earliest years of schooling without burdening them with any heavy terms.

Nothing heavy in the promos for The Penguin Lessons. The new film has so delighted Screening Room audiences here in Newburyport that it will run for a rarely-granted third week. Riding a wave of success across the country, it’s as hilarious and feel-good as advertised, but the setting and several scenes will take you by surprise if the ads are all you see and hear of it.

With Argentina’s 1976 authoritarian coup as a backdrop, Penguin Lessons mirrors scenes we now see in America’s nightly news: random arrests made for no other reason than what is said and thought; innocent, working people taken off the streets, out of schools, away from jobs; children as young as eight taken out of third-grade classes and put in prisons.

Patrons leaving each show smile as they remark on the comedy. And then they cringe with words such as “timely” and “relevant” and “all too real” at the tragedy of seeing people “disappeared.”

Rio de Janeiro 1976? Or Sackets Harbor, New York, 2025? In the shadow of Christ the Redeemer from atop a rock? Or in the claims of an Attorney General always with a crucifix hanging from her neck?

And what of the oil spill? South American playas? Or beaches along the Gulf of British Petroleum?

No penguins in Louisiana or Texas to gain our sympathy, but pelicans did well. Before too long, a few were given baths, much like Juan Salvador’s in Lessons, shown in TV ads—ads aired by BP to convince us how environmentally conscious the company is, what “responsible citizens” they are.

Might that be where President Gaslight got the MO of creating a crisis and then taking credit for solving it, no matter the irreparable damage left with us?

Despite penguins being so far south of USA’s borders, they have enjoyed ample attention on both big and small screens, both animated and real, documentary and feature films, most notably with the enormous success of March of the Penguins in 2005 narrated by Morgan Freeman. How many Disney penguins did that begat? How many more in DreamWorks’ Penguins of Madagascar? Children love them; Pittsburgh’s pro hockey team is named for them; and on his 2003 solo album, Rupi’s Dance, Ian Anderson sings of “A Raft of Penguins” on a frozen sea:

Tenuous but clinging, the missing link
Joins us, closer than we might think.*

Darwin aside, penguins captured the American imagination back in the mid-19th Century when explorers and whalers started plying the South Seas, and descriptions started appearing on the pages of popular magazines. Relying on magazine illustrations, Edgar Allan Poe admired their “beautiful plumage” and their “stately carriage.” Herman Melville saw them first-hand and could not resist word-play at their expense, calling “the members at their sides… neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin… On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops.”

Perhaps President Science Schmience took literally the author best known for—and much more straightforward at—describing whales, and thinks nothing of punishing the cute but ungainly creature. Too bad he never paid attention to the newspapers’ comic strips. That’s where Opus T. Penguin and his friends rivaled the social commentary and satire of Doonesbury’s cast of characters from 2003 to 2008, easily making Opus America’s longest running celebrity penguin—even though Bloom County had a relatively short-run for a newspaper strip.

Often it was just for laughs, but creator Berkeley Breathed’s satire was pure when applied. And who cares if it was lucky coincidence or a stroke of genius that he could avoid all preconceived notions of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and every variation of European-Americans by casting an Antarctic-American in the lead role?

Not that the same should have been expected from, say, Bugs Bunny or Wile E. Coyote. And I am convinced that if rabbits such as those who run around my old Shoebox here on Plum Island at dawn and dusk, or coyotes such as the one I just watched race down the marsh, had been tariffed by President Price Tag, they, too, would be celebrated.

As the English teacher declares in the final scene of Lessons:

Sometimes you have to put the penguin in the pool.

And as a student notes, that’s “a metaphor, sir”—at which the headmaster quips, “not a very good one.” Good or not, it’s curious considering that the collective noun for penguins is raft.

If we all live in a pool, does a raft of penguins stay afloat? Or do we seek another answer blowin’ in the wind? With a hard rain to fall? And had we better start swimming so we don’t sink like a stone?

The times have changed back. Why not sing and play the tunes that defy those who will impose on us a Conform-or-Else America? Like penguins, such songs have a history of capturing our imagination.

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*”A Raft of Penguins”

From Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838):

Some seal of the fur and hair species are still to be found on Kerguelen’s Island, and sea elephants abound. The feathered tribes are discovered in great numbers. Penguins are very plenty, and of these there are four different kinds. The royal penguin, so called from its size and beautiful plumage, is the largest. The upper part of the body is usually gray, sometimes of a lilach tint; the under portion of the purest white imaginable. The head is of a glossy and most brilliant black, the feet also. The chief beauty of the plumage, however, consists in two broad stripes of a gold colour, which pass along from the head to the breast. The bill is long, and either pink or bright scarlet. These birds walk erect, with a stately carriage. They carry their heads high, with their wings drooping like two arms, and, as their tails project from their body in a line with the legs, the resemblance to a human figure is very striking, and would be apt to deceive the spectator at a casual glance or in the gloom of the evening. The royal penguins which we met with on Kerguelen’s Land were rather larger than a goose. The other kinds are the macaroni, the jackass, and the rookery penguin. These are much smaller, less beautiful in plumage, and different in other respects.

From “Sketch Third” of Herman Melville’s Las Encantadas (aka The Galapagos, 1854):

(describing the lowest level of Rodondo, “the aviary of the Ocean,” an island on which one ascends “from shelf to shelf”)

What outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical, they stand all around the rock like sculpted caryatides, supporting the next range of eaves above. Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen; their bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin; as an edible, pertaining to neither Carnival nor Lent; without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered by man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claim to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased sea-story of Rodondo.

To prove that you can find anything on the internet:
https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21427308/secret-base-media-club-herman-melville-hates-penguins

https://www.instructables.com/Opus-the-Penguin/

Welcome New Subscribers

Yes, Mouth of the River welcomes about 200 new subscribers referred by my Rhode Island friend, the indefatigable Glee Violette who for a few years now has served her countless readers day after every day with news and analysis comparable to that of Heather Cox Richardson.

For proof of that, see her Substack blog with her latest entry, “Fiddling While America Burns,” here: https://gleeviolette.substack.com/

Might wonder if Nero would have instead played golf had the game been invented before he took up the fiddle. Would he hold his own tournaments and declare himself the winner? And then brag about it while those nearby smile and applaud? Was he so vain, he probably thought Emperor’s New Clothes was about him? It has done so well in the ratings over all these years!

We all know damn well that the sad, sorry, sordid, selfish, shallow, self-aggrandizing, sick, sinister, salacious, scamming, swindling, sleazy, seedy, shameless, shameful, simple-minded, stupid, stained, sniveling, stupefying, sexist, slobbish, shady, scandalous, spiteful, stunted, soulless excuse for a human being now in the White House would never attempt to play music. For starters, his hands are too small.

But before any further conjecture regarding the ancient Roman or the neo-Nazi, I need first to address the 200-plus and still counting Substack readers Glee has kindly sent my way:

When notices of your subscriptions started to arrive, I was finding email addresses to let you know that I had discontinued Substack posts in favor of Word Press. I’ll estimate that I pasted that copied note some two dozen times on Sunday before the dam broke and I awoke to nearly 200 more notifications on Monday.

Rather than trying to re-direct all of that, I have resumed putting Mouth of the River on Substack, starting with my most recent blog, an account of Saturday’s Hands Off demonstrations with “War on Thought” in the headline.

You have your choice: All my blogs will continue to be posted on on Word Press, which will then be posted on Facebook. Blogs irrelevant to readers far from Newburyport, Plum Island, and places nearby will be withheld from Substack, but the rest will be posted along with occasional blasts from the past, memoirs and satires, critical reviews and whimsical slices of life, vignettes and musings that test the stand of time.

Both platforms are free, but Substack includes a way to make contributions if you think I need another cup of coffee, a bowl of clam chowder, or a Cadillac Escalade, any one of which will be greatly appreciated, but only one of which will be depreciated when I start ripping through the gears. Do those things come in standard?

Whichever platform you prefer, I’m grateful for your interest.

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Photo: Keith Sullivan, Newburyport Daily News

To Win a War on Thought

Best sign of the day: Flippers Up!

And that’s saying something, especially with They’re eating the Checks! They’re eating the Balances! hovering over it.

Somehow I had missed the news of tariffs slapped on islands inhabited by penguins and very little else or other. I knew the sign was a play on Canada’s Elbows Up!, a hockey term meaning that the players are ready for a fight–and now a neighbor’s national response to unprovoked, undeserved, brainless taunts from the ridiculous excuse for a human being that 70 gullible Americans made president of the USA. And, yes, “gullible” is by far the kindest adjective of the dozens that rush to mind.

By the time I made my way across the highway to ask, the woman with Flippers Up! was gone. Before I heard of the penguins, someone near the spot guessed that it meant that America is now “under water.” I rather like that theory, and now credit the woman with a double-entendre.

Call it a triple-entendre if we include the two-hour downpour in Peterborough, N.H. where I chose to attend one of the thousands of Hands Off! demonstrations in places from here to Alaska and Hawaii, ranging from every large city to towns as small as Plaistow, N.H.

Last week I learned that it takes some effort to tell people I’m going to a demonstration without putting the hyphenated “anti-war” in front of it. Even now that I’m four years past my sixties, I’m still living in The Sixties.

Nor did it help that I couldn’t say where I would be joining the coast-to-coast protest called for April 5. Friends in Peterborough, a quartet called Grove Street had a concert in nearby Temple that night, so that put Boston out of the way.

When first called, Hands Off targeted state capitals, so I may have taken the train to Massachusetts’ state house, but Concord, N.H. is in easy reach and not too much of a detour on the way to Peterborough. Then I heard that Amesbury, Mass., right across the Merrimack as I started west was holding one.

Amesbury it would be, with many Newburyport friends, acquaintances, and perhaps city officials displeased by my recent critiques of City Hall. Would rather avoid those in the latter category, the “Think Globally, Ignore Locally” crowd, and I got my chance when Peterborough called again to tell me there would be a Hands Off rally there.

Catch, however, was if I could get myself out of bed, dressed and out the door in time for an 85-mile drive. Through winter and into spring, I hardly know what morning is. As a projectionist in a cinema, I usually have breakfast when most everyone else has lunch. And I write into wee hours.

By Friday I was telling anyone who asked, if I can leave Plum Island by 9:45, see you in Peterborough. If not, hello Amesbury. According to videos, photographs, and commentaries with which they were posted, they were both attended by about 300 people sporting umbrellas as well as signs.

Other reports reached me in the brief time I had with my laptop between standing in the rain and setting up chairs as a roadie for Grove Street: Plaistow claimed 200 while the small city of Salem, Mass., saw 1,000, and the big town of Marshfield, Mass., 500. My cousin in Bethel, Conn., joined 600 protesters in nearby Sandy Hook rather than the 100 in her tiny town’s square.

Yes, that Sandy Hook, scene of an ungodly crime that some of the newly installed White House advisors and donors to Republican congressional campaigns deny ever happened.

Of all the above mentioned rallies, only Peterborough was not held in a town or city center. Instead, we were a full mile south of the center of what playwright Thornton Wilder dubbed Our Town in 1938. Instead of a relatively enclosed space where traffic is bound to move slowly, we were on all four corners with lines of umbrellas and signs reaching in all four directions of a major Southern New Hampshire crossroads–US 202 running north and south, with NH 101 rolling east and west–also crossed by Grove Street, the actual, fairly well-populated street, not the band.

Traffic was fast through the green lights, but yellow was long enough to give everyone plenty of time to beat or stop for red without slamming brakes. Horns blasted approval for all of two hours on cars and trucks whether still or in motion. Fans of America’s present self-destruction were so few–just four by my count–that they were greeted with spontaneous laughter, and I don’t think any returned.

However, when we 300 drenched souls started breaking up, I noticed a black pick-up with oversized tires start slowing at a distance from a red light. It was still slowly rolling toward the few stopped cars before it when the light turned green. As the cars began to move, the truck gunned its engines. When each car before it turned left, the truck pealed out, the engine loud, racing through the intersection onto Grove Street, speed limit 30, if that.

Though there were no stickers on the back of the truck, it led me to speculate: What the MAGA movement hates so much has less to do with any kind of ideology than with how it is formed. Hate, including racism, is not formed. It is a reaction, as much as their knee-jerk reactions to issues as soon as one is mentioned. Their opinion of us is not a result of our stands on immigration or National Parks or Social Security, or even guns and reproductive rights.

They hate us for the mere fact that we think of such things.

When those who oppose you express themselves with nothing more articulate than a foot on a gas petal, you are not up against an ideology. You are in a War on Thought.

The concert served as a welcome relief, a rewarding calm after the battering duel storms of democracy-under-threat and rain clouds overhead.

Grove Street offered a selection from the music of Rockport, Mass., composer (and friend) Tom Febonio. While it was familiar to me, it was well-received and at times loudly cheered by the southern New Hampshire audience.

Early in the 80-minute set, guitarist Eric Blackmer addressed us with thanks for turning out in weather that had worsened into the night and a hope that the music would provide relief from the doings of the day and the undoings of the last few months. Somehow he conveyed that message without any specific political detail, although that was easily seen in his knowing grin and an echoing muffled chuckle from the crowd.

But he did specify a civic need for live music and gatherings. Can’t recall if he used the word community orsocial or neighborly or perhaps democratic, but it was clear he meant all of the above when he proclaimed:

There’s no virtuality about it!

Like the concert in the Temple Town Hall, every protest rally is real. We hear a recording, but we are part of a concert. No matter how many memes we post to reinforce it, thought can be dismissed, even ridiculed as virtual. To win this war against thought, thought must be translated into action.

As I recall The Sixties, the action was as musical as it was political.

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Hands Off rally on the green in Newtown, Conn., a short distance from Sandy Hook. Photo by Janice Garvey.

Putting the ‘Dead’ in ‘Deadline’

Imagine yourself a resident at 105 State Street on Jan. 31. That’s when you and the other tenants of the 14-unit brick Federalist building wake up to find a notice from your landlord:

The building in which you live… is going to be closed and the expected closing date is April 1, 2025. The entire building will be shut down and reconfigured by a developer. All tenancy-at-will agreements will end on 3/31/25.

Scrambling for new digs, you are too distracted to look into legalities, but a neighbor questions Director of Planning and Development Andy Port via email on Feb. 9.

At issue: Article Eight, Sec. 5-253 of the City Charter covering condominium conversions and calling for a notice “of not less than two years” for tenants. Advantage Property Management (APM) gave you just two months.

Next day, Port responds. He has put the question to both the mayor and City Solicitor Karis North. But not until Feb. 21 does he add that the matter is being considered.

Your eviction is so sudden and your time to move so stunted, that the handling—or, rather, the non-handling—of this in City Hall would have either demoralized or infuriated you.

Mayor Sean Reardon and North both know of the eviction no later than Feb. 10. Despite a calendar clicking quickly toward an April Fool’s deadline, not until Feb. 21 does Port send this:

I have done what I can to this point by sharing relevant/helpful info with the Mayor/Administration and the City’s legal counsel…

The email is timestamped 11:19 am. At 12:02 pm, responding to a request for clarification, Port adds:

I was not suggesting that the Mayor or other officials can/would choose not to enforce a City Ordinance…

Despite that, three full weeks of the two months have passed, and still no effort on your behalf from City Hall to look into an apparent violation of the City Charter.

You note the contradiction: The city’s long quest for affordable housing has been prominent in the news, especially reports of City Hall promoting the possibility of 30 new such units at the Brown School. All while letting yours and 13 others slip away in a relative instant.

Not until March 5—more than halfway into your ordeal—does the mayor send an email to Port, to the neighbor, and to Madeline Nash, co-chair of Newburyport’s Affordable Housing Trust:

Thanks for sending this along. We sent a letter to the owner this week requesting more information regarding the sale and also referencing the ordinance.

Reardon is thanking Port for sending information that Port, according to his own email, had sent 23 days earlier. Moreover, on just that week of March 5, City Hall “sent a letter to the owner” with no more than 26 days remaining until your deadline to find a new home.

Considering the ordinance’s cut and dry stipulation of two years, just what “legal counsel” or “more information” is needed?

Answer: None.

It was all pretext for delay. By mid-March, you and the others have made other arrangements, sacrificial goats to Reardon’s apparent desire to avoid conflict with one of the city’s more prominent property owners—which, by definition, is a moneyed interest in city politics.

On March 11, you are either embittered or bemused by a story with a banner headline on the Daily News’ front page:

City solicitor reappointed by Reardon

You might start wondering why the paper never reported the inattention to your deadline called for by the City Charter when you learn how Reardon pounced on another deadline established by the same charter. Just minutes after the City Council voted 6-3 against retaining North as City Solicitor, Reardon said not so fast.

Perhaps the mayor should have said “not so slow.” He submitted his bid for North’s reappointment on Jan.13. That opened a 45-day window for the council to act, with Feb. 27 as their deadline. Inexplicably, Council President Ed Cameron, Reardon’s staunch ally and one of the three North supporters, waited until March 10 to hold the vote.

While wide awake to consequences of missing your own deadline at 105 State, you shake your head at the luck of Rip Van Cameron: Failure to do his job put him on the winning side of a vote he lost.

If you’ve been following the controversy just a few doors down across the street at the public library, the echoes of Rip Van’s glacially-paced handling of an investigation called for by a council vote back in July must be deafening.

And if you were able to kick back and relax in your recliner rather than frantically preparing to move, you might wax whimsical over the contradictions of headlines, deadlines, and riddles. You might even think that if Reardon, Cameron, and North ever join forces to form their own law firm, their slogan will have to be:

We put the Dead in Deadline!

For Reardon, time might as well be just another city ordinance: There when convenient, non-existent when not.

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Just a block up the street from the Screening Room and downtown Newburyport. Photo by Billy Wilson.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/billy_wilson/52546577412

Delight at the End of the Trouble

Ever since 1499 when I joined King Richard’s Faire as a strolling minstrel, our 10-month off-seasons have been as quiet as Lake Wobegon, although I suppose the “little town that time forgot” might seem modern compared to a Renaissance festival.

Not this year. Just halfway into our lull we learn that Carvershire, our beloved, shaded glen has been claimed for some other use, and we are moving a mile or so down Route 58 to a new location.

You can read the details in various news sources, or see and hear them on at least one Boston TV station, offered by any search engine. For those who do not already know what the new location has been since time-out-of-mind, the word “engine” is a clue–and no longer will we rennies laugh at the sound of a distant choo-choo.

From theme-park to theme-park we go, turning it into our own. At the front gate in the morning, I’d often greet groups of people approaching from the parking lot: “Welcome to the Edaville Railro– Oh, wait! That’s those other guys!” Best laugh line I had except for one in the same spot, facing the other way as they left the faire: “Thank you for spending you mon– Oh, no! No! I mean day! Your day! Thank you for spending your day, your day with us!”

One Edaville track curved around the backside of Carvershire before turning away and back through a cranberry bog to whence it came. We couldn’t see it, but the sound was unmistakable. “A baby dragon in the woods,” I’d tell patrons who did not attempt, as did I, to keep a straight face. As for the small aircraft sometimes heard over head: “Behold! Another flying machine from the great DaVinci!” It’s fairly–and certainly fairely–easy to turn laughter into cheers.

So the faire will open in 1525 from Labor Day weekend through what you folk of the future call October 19th. Since King Richard’s Faire is still on the Julian calendar, and since the Julian calendar went out of print over four centuries ago, we are never sure of the dates, only that we show up on the weekends.

Yes, we have performed and played and juggled in the glade every year save one since 1482 when Columbus was still slicing bologna in his brother Bartholomew’s delicatessen–in Lisbon, not in Venice, truth be told. Exception was 1520 when we were shuttered due to the Bubonic Plague, after which time we still have a cart with physicians wearing those alarming crow’s beaks that makes the rounds picking up a cadaver or two here and there.

Some say that the new locale features paved walkways. If so, that’s welcome news to those who occasionally tripped over Carvershire’s rugged terrain. Yes, there’s more authenticity in the bare ground, but I sure as hell will not miss the tree roots.

Then again, I will surely pine for the canopy of branches overhead unless the grounds crew can work some magic to shade the new site. Wouldn’t put it past them. Since I’ve been piping for King Richard’s realm, the most wondrous feats of all have been the days we have been able to perform that have followed days of deluge. Add those days together, days when opening just should not have been possible, and our grounds crew has saved at least two full seasons of that faire.

Many of the faire’s merchants worked a comparable miracle this past week, managing to move their shops and stands and signs out of Carvershire on but days notice. Many other faire friends were there to assist, bringing trucks and tools, all to allow all of us some degree of familiarity for seasons to come.

Speaking of seasons, yes, I’ll back for at least one more. Never before have I made a public announcement like this, but the off-season was already murmuring with change of personnel before we were hit with a short-notice eviction. And Yours Unruly was loud with complaint until cooler heads prevailed upon me to play in King Richard’s realm–wherever it may be and in whatever appearance–into the future with all of Edaville’s amenities.

No longer can I cling to 1499, the last year of the 15th Century.

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Movin’ On.” Photo by Paul Shaughnessy, 1508.

Ear Candy for All Ages

If we look at the bright side of life here in Soviet America, we might find encouragement in the resurgence of literary parables and satires of authoritarian rule.

Launched like a rocket in 2017 when Mar-an-Ego’s first spokesliar, Jelly-Ban Wrongway, called Ego’s version of inaugural events “alternative facts” despite all photographic evidence to the contrary.

Days later there were reports from coast to coast of George Orwell’s 1984 flying off bookstore shelves. Within a week, a new edition of the 72-year-old novel was printed.

Soon after, Republicans ramped up their attack on Roe v. Wade in anticipation of an Ego appointment to the Supreme Court. Feminists responded by drawing comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1958 dystopian novel, igniting another stampede into America’s bookstores.

From the beginning, Ego drew many comparisons to Captain Ahab who sank his ship in pursuit of the whale that tore off his leg, all for the sake of revenge. And that was four years before Ego coined the name “Revenge Tour” for his campaign.

Eventually, classic titles gaining re-circulation in conversation, in the news, in classrooms and libraries were enough to fill the syllabus of a graduate seminar: Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Road, The Hunger Games, stories from Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, and more.

Another that I surely would have promoted is James Thurber’s The Wonderful O (1957) which might qualify as a cross between Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien, though the closest comparisons may be The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Wizard of Oz.

A children’s story with no end of loopy language and word play, Wonderful O bites with political satire sure to amuse any parent or grandparent reading aloud. Never heard of it until I unwrapped a birthday gift two weeks ago.

While the premise is simple, the result is as textured and colorful as a Disney animation. And the pace of the narrative gives it a magical ride. As a likely nod to 1984, Thurber begins the tale with a familiar, yet often ominous sound:

Somewhere a ponderous tower clock slowly dropped a dozen strokes into the gloom. Storm clouds rode low along the horizon, and no moon showed.

The rhythmic and rhyming O sounds hint at the book’s premise: An attempt by power hungry leaders to stunt thought and dialogue among the people by debasing language. In 1984, this was called “Newspeak,” achieved by dumbing down vocabulary. Thurber takes the next step with characters, Littlejack and Black, who attempt to ban one letter from all speech and writing:

And so, language and the spoken word diminished as people were forced to speak without the use of O in any word. No longer could the people say Heigh-Ho, Yoohoo, Yo-ho-ho, or even plain Hello…

“We can’t tell shot from shoot, or hot from hoot,” the blacksmith said, in secret meeting with his fellows.

“We can’t tell rot from root, or owed from wed,” the banker said.

From scene to scene, we see and hear the result of this purge applied to various endeavors: gardening, music, farming, science, games, law, and more. Thurber sustains the rhyme and rhythm with a mesmerizing pace right to the end, as when Andreus and Andrea (the good guys) thwart Littlejack and Black by invoking heroes and heroines of legend and lore who begin…

… streaming out of song and story, each phantom flaunting like a flag his own special glory: Lancelot and Ivanhoe, Athos, Porthos, Cyrano, Roland, Rob Roy, Romeo; Donalbane of Burnham Wood, Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood; the moody Doones of ‘Lorna Doone,’ Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; out of near and ancient tomes, Banquo’s ghost and Sherlock Holmes; Lochinvar, Lothario, Horatius, and Horatio; and there were other figures too, darker, coming from the blue, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Billy Bones, Quasimodo, Conrad’s Jones, Ichabod and Captain Hook–names enough to fill a book.

Add an ending as all-to-real as surprising, and it’s as easy to see as to hear why Harper’s called it the “loveliest and liveliest of parables.” As Ransom Riggs, author of the endearing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, offers in her introduction to a 2017 re-issue, it’s…

… a commentary on world affairs a half century ago, but which feels absolutely (and sadly) relevant today. While balancing all that… it accomplishes feat after feat of linguistic acrobatics–not quite poetry, not quite prose, O is ear candy.

Yes, re-issued in 2017, same year that 1984 was the “Newspeak” of the nation. And given me the very week that Mar-an-Ego’s Littlejacks and Blacks banned 294 words from federal government websites.

Life in Soviet America is so full of coincidence!

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Make America Sick Again

Ever wonder why you never hear about Vitamin A?

With the first letter of the alphabet, it is conspicuous in its absence. The rest–B, C, D, & E–are all sold and bought and taken without limit. Especially C, a glass of which goes bottoms up with every breakfast I wolf down.

Whether you ever purchase those small containers of vitamins and other supplements in the supermarket or drugstore, or you have the discipline to eat right and can take your intake for granted, chances are that you’ve never seen V-A on a shelf or heard it recommended.

That’s because it isn’t on the shelf and is rarely recommended. I’m no doctor, but from what I gather, most of us gain all the V-A we need with a normal diet. Since it stays in the body, only those suffering from serious illnesses and from malnutrition have it prescribed. Otherwise, it can be harmful.

Being no doctor, unfortunately, did not stop RFK Jr. from worming his way to become secretary of the federal Dept. of Health & Human Services (HHS). Kennedy was one of the more prominent barkers of the anti-vaxx movement that no doubt increased America’s death toll during the Covid pandemic. Like the other crackpots, he condemned all vaccines, including those for measles and polio. No matter that vaccines in the 1950s put a virtual end to both.

Must say “virtual” here because such things never go away. The reason we kept taking vaccines through the Sixties and Seventies and to this day is to keep ourselves free of them.

Enter the anti-vaxxers. For over a month, we’ve heard of a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico. Americans not yet deaf to reason also heard that the new HHS secretary was urging children to take V-A.

Vaccines? If you want, I suppose, but the Trump Administration discourages them while pushing Vitamin A.

Result was as quick as it was alarming: A measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico now has kids arriving at hospitals with liver damage due to doses of Vitamin A.

Well, the MAGA crowd has been loud and clear about wanting a return to the America that they fully enjoyed before the advent of Civil Rights. How can they object to a return to polio and measles if both ran rampant in the time of segregation they crave?

This is what happens when you see only size and ignore detail. I asked a friend now retired after a long career as a medical researcher at a west coast university what he thought of the return of measles:

RFK Jr today laments that HHS has 9 different Human Resource departments! As if that is a sure sign of inefficiency. Suppose he succeeds in reducing HHS staff from 80,000 to 60,000, while eliminating eight of those departments. Disaster.

Just one example of how “they” fail to see whole landscapes by browsing through an atlas looking for ways to save big bucks.

Eliminate all those blue highways! We don’t need them! We have the freeways!

Nice analogy! But it would be more accurate had he said “interstates” instead of “freeways,” as interstates weren’t built until Eisenhower called for them in the years after vaccines put an end (or so we thought) to polio and measles.

But that’s a moot point considering that, under MAGA rule, America is on a dead end.

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https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/rfk-jrs-measles-treatment-leaves-34952161

A City of Laws a la Mode

All my life I thought a deadline was when you had to have something finished.

Projects for school and work all have deadlines. Students missing them tend to fail and drop-out. Employees unable to meet them are either let-go or kept in low level positions.

Before March 12, I’d have added that public officials who fail to meet deadlines are often forced to resign—either by a governing body or due to their own sense of honor.

That was the day when Newburyport’s Daily News treated us to the banner, front-page headline, “City solicitor reappointed by Reardon.”

Ordinarily, this is not front-page news, but Newburyport City Hall is no ordinary news-maker. In the story we learn that the city council had voted 6-3 against retaining the law-firm of Murphy, Hesse, Toomey, and Lehane for another year.

However, the council vote meant nothing. Why?

As the report tells us, when Mayor Sean Reardon submitted his bid for re-appointment on Jan. 13, the city council had, as required by the City Charter, a 45-day limit to deny it.

Feb. 27 was their deadline; March 10 was their vote. Reardon could have made the announcement on Feb. 28 but may have waited in hopes of avoiding embarrassment of his staunch ally, Council President Ed Cameron, who was responsible for meeting—and then missing—the deadline.

Had the vote been in favor of renewal, all of this would have gone unnoticed.

Making matters worse, Cameron was one of the three votes to keep the firm. Hence, failure to do his job put him on the winning side of a vote he lost.

There’s a reason why all codes of ethics include a warning that goes something like, “avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

To say that Cameron’s gaffe was due to incompetence or mere carelessness would be generous.

The report offers no specific monetary reasons why Attorney Karis North of the law-firm was so objectionable to at least two of the councilors.

At-Large Councilor Connie Preston called herself “100% not OK with our lawyer needing to ask the mayor if it is OK to let us know when she erroneously opined to give our powers over staff to the mayor.”

Ward 5 Councilor Jim McCauley told the Daily News that the law-firm had “lost all credibility,” citing “some decisions here that have cost [the city] money.”

But North tells the mayor what he wants to hear, and so he pounced on Rip Van Cameron’s lapse to keep her no matter how much she has cost Newburyport.

Two weeks later, yet another front-page, banner headline tells us that “Mayor’s memo has councilor asking questions.”

According to the Daily News, Reardon sent a memo around City Hall “reminding employees not to talk to council members about day-to-day issues.”

Here’s what Sec. 2-7 of the City Charter has to say about that:

The city council may require any city officer, member of a city agency or city employee to appear before it to give any information that the city council may require in relation to the municipal services, functions, powers, or duties which are within the scope of responsibility of that person and within the jurisdiction of the city council.

The councilor questioning Reardon’s “reminder,” McCauley, reminds us that city councilors represent city residents.

But that was lost on Cameron who has forgotten that a democracy depends on an informed citizenry.

As always, Cameron’s position supports the mayor’s: As the Daily News worded it, “councilors should not get involved in personnel matters.”

Oblivious to contradiction, Reardon declares, “That’s not me trying to control anything, that’s me trying to hopefully keep city councilors in their lane.”

When it comes to information, the idea of public representatives “staying in their lane” is profoundly anti-democratic. Moreover, the memo, no matter how mildly worded or how wide the smile of delivery, serves as a gag order.

Regarding city ordinances, Reardon is selective: Pounce on one to override a council vote; ignore another to limit what the public knows.

Deadlines? Only when he can exploit them.

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Portrait of Newburyport City Hall by George Darcy of the Newburyport Art Association, 65 Water Street. Judging from the rainbow crosswalk, I’ll estimate that this was drawn in 2022, give or take one year.
https://newburyportart.org/naa-events/2023-spot-peggy-poppe-george-darcy

My Moveable Feast

Four musical friends, all guitarists, and I meet for coffee at Chococoa downtown every Tuesday morning. I always arrive five or ten minutes late, figuring that, at this age, it’s better late than right away.

They talk for up to two hours about chords, progressions, this diminished, that suspended, amplifiers, microphones, makes and brand-names while I munch on a lemon-ginger scope, sip black dark-roast, and pretend I know WTF they’re talking about.

At least one of them knew what this past Tuesday was, and so when I appeared, they all went to the counter as I was seated and walked back like the offensive line from a football huddle with the desired scone on a plate and a solo burning candle sticking up from it. One brought his guitar and strummed to the tune they all sang.

Despite the resulting noise, about a dozen seated patrons and a few baristas all applauded and cheered, perhaps as relieved as I that the annoyance was over. So began my 75th trip around the sun.

The afternoon was not another ambush. Rather, it was planned and I agreed to it a week ago. Again downtown, four friends who wouldn’t let me pay for the pan-seared salmon or its maple glaze, nor the side of crisp Brussels sprouts in a sweet chili glaze with blue cheese dressing, nor the crab cakes in a roasted corn salsa. Not even the IPAs to help it all go down. Gifts included a Jabberwocky certificate for books to buy, and two books with blank pages in which to lie.

Lie on the beach, that is, which I do more and more of every summer. One other gift, a volume of James Thurber for comic inspiration, will fill that bill nicely. It took me over 70 years, but I finally realize that “happy” is synonymous with “relaxed.”

Walt, who arranged this literary anti-weight-loss program, hinted at having the staff serenade me, but once was enough for this year–and for the rest of them no matter how many–and I consider it a birthday wish granted that I wasn’t so embarrassed as I had been just eight hours earlier.

As our party neared its end, three gray-haired women took the table next to us. Before long, a line of Loretta’s staff was lined up behind me striking up the tune. I turned to tell them to go away, but they were all addressing one of the gray-hairs who was beaming with delight.

When the staff finished the song and the hub-bub subsided, I called over: “This is my birthday, too!”

“Really!”

“Yes,” and then feeling a need to prove it, “We share this day with Grover Cleveland, Wilson Pickett, John Updike–“

“Queen Latifah!”

“Yes, she was next on my list.” In truth, I was just about to name Rimsky-Korsakov, but we’ve all had enough Russian interference in our golden years.

Asking if they had ever been to a Renaissance faire, I told them that we rennies have our own birthday serenade: “May I sing it for you?” No one ever says no to this. The woman was aglow. A few of the staff returned to hear it, and I projected enough to be heard all the way to the walls:

This is your birthday song

It isn’t very long–

And then instantly turned back to my four friends, “Okay, enough of that. You were saying?”

Always gets a healthy laugh at an open air festival, but it has some added reverb to it in a restaurant. Don’t really know for certain. I’ll ask my guitarist friends this coming Tuesday. I’m sure they know what “reverb” means.

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Turning 74 in a sweater my mother gave me well before I turned 50 and likely ten years before that. Photo by Walt Thompson who, judging from staff in the background arms akimbo, must have taken it while I faced and serenaded the woman sitting just ten feet away.

Pink House Fate as Symptom

Out my window, looking northwest toward the center of Newburyport, I once could see one of New England’s most frequently photographed, sketched, and artistically rendered buildings. Canvas devoted to it over the years would cover it many times.

Aside our one and only road to the mainland and all by itself on the flat marsh, the Pink House was built in 1925 under circumstances debated to this day. Some call it an example of “spite architecture.” When a judge ruled in a divorce case, the story goes, he ordered that the husband provide the wife with a home. Spitefully, as the story also goes, he put it near nothing and no one, fully exposed to coastal elements including high tides that would sometimes surround it, and out of reach of the electric grid and running (fresh) water at the time.

True or not, as Rochelle Joseph of Support the Pink House, Inc., claimed while recording a farewell tribute video during a farewell vigil the night before what we expected to be the final day, the story attracted international attention. Other tributes told of the resulting increased tourism. Various local groups have long included photos of the Pink House in their brochures.*

Joseph also asked anyone listening to look across the marsh aside the house. This is a technique well-known to visual artists that the rest of us never notice: The very singularity of a house on that spot enhances the natural setting surrounding it, much like a barn or tractor to one side of a photo will help accentuate rows of crops that fill it.**

Yes, a farewell to the “Pink Lady” as it is also called. The place has been abandoned since at least 2005, and as I recall, it wasn’t until 2010 or so that we started hearing of the National Fish & Wildlife Service’s desire to demolish it. Somehow, it is on NFWS land–even though it’s a few acres by itself, set over a mile apart from the Plum Island Reserve, which is what NFWS is here to manage.

Several initial attempts to demolish it were rebuffed by tireless efforts of Support the Pink House, delaying it for several years before running out of options. Demolition began and was completed two days after the vigil.

The distance from my window to the house is slightly over a mile as the Canada geese fly, so I was unable to see the gathering or their cars–unless you count the flashing blue lights of a police cruiser assigned to slow approaching vehicles for the sake of the gathering and to make sure that the two-lane road was not bottle-necked.

I hoped to attend, but an about-to-turn-74-year-old body has veto power over any desire of heart or purpose of mind. And so I watched Joseph’s video in real time, along with the responses expressing regret that came from as far as Ireland, and from people who summer here–from Maine, New York, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, enough of them to fill every US house and senate seat if they were so spread out.

Must admit that I have not been anywhere near the vanguard of Support the Pink House. Ten, twelve years ago I had a few satirical columns in the Daily News aimed at those wanting to take it down, which I hope were helpful to the cause. In recent years, I attended a few meetings and signed a few petitions. All of it a far cry from my involvement with the Newburyport Public Library’s dismantling of its own, world-acclaimed Archival Center.

No doubt for that reason, one comment on Joseph’s video piqued my interest:

What is happening to the Pink House is symptomatic of what is happening to our country.

From the censorship inflicted in recent years on schools in southern states to the planned termination of the US Dept. of Education, and from the library on the mainland to a landmark on the marsh, it is the erasure of history, of memory. But why?

For an answer, NFWS offers a plan for a parking area with an observation tower. Sounds so much more functional than an abandoned house, right? Now consider that NFWS already has seven parking areas and two observation towers in the Reserve. Isn’t that a reason to keep the one and only artistic treasure and unique tourist attract right where it is? No? How about if we consider that NFWS has a six-mile stretch of road on Plum Island where it can add things without displacing–or destroying–anything else?

If that’s not enough to keep the Pink House where it is, then yes, the unstated, unacknowledged reason is to erase the past. And the resistance to it, as happened to those who advocated keeping NPL’s Archival Center in tact, turned the powers-that-be against those who resisted.

Consider this exchange in the comments to Joseph’s video:

It feels like they are demolishing it due to a grudge they have against people who love this… Because their reasoning doesn’t make sense.

I’ve felt that way since the start- I feel like it’s not about the house for them, it’s all about the power. Just awful.

I do have a few dozen friends who can tell you that this describes NPL’s Archival Center, but I doubt you need anyone to tell you those two lines can be easily applied to any discussion of Project 2025‘s plans to slash funds and personnel for public services.

Yes, it is “what is happening to our country,” and so from my window right here on Plum Island, I stared into a fog bank in which yet another piece of the USA was put asunder. It was as if Mother Nature herself felt a need to hide the act.

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*It’s reputation is enough to draw Boston media to the farewell. Here’s what appeared in the nightly news:

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/supporters-rally-in-support-of-plum-islands-pink-house-ahead-of-demolition/3652489/

**In 1956, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean starred in a film titled Giant set on the Texas plains. There are numerous scenes with the mansion in the distance, the only thing standing on the table-top land. The director and cinematographer employed the technique Joseph describes. About five years ago, Honda filmed a commercial along that road that may well have been inspired by scenes in that film, with the car in the foreground cruising down the road left to right while the Pink House moves front right to left in the background.