An Agenda of Gender

When I first heard of JD Vance’s failed joke about Greta Thunberg at the Munich Security Conference, I was alarmed.

No matter how far right, how bigoted, how soulless, how snake-like a MAGA politician can be, I thought, no one could sink that low. My concern was not for the already bottom-of-the-barrel reputation of Vance, but for fellow liberals and progressives who might fall for a fake quote. This has harmed us in the past when we haven’t fact-checked.

But it is not fake. Vance actually did say this to an audience of European officials:

“Trust me, I say this with all humor, if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”

No one laughed. Unless you count my laughter at the built-in excuse of “with all humor.” Very much like his dictator boss, a phrase here and there to have it both ways. Yes, I’m serious, but oh, I’m only kidding. “Trust me” indeed!

Much has been made of Vance’s thuggish dismissal of the young Swede who burst onto the world stage as an environmental activist while still a schoolgirl in 2018. Whatever anyone thinks of the attempted joke, there’s no surprise in it. As a senator from Ohio and now as US Vice-President, Vance represents a constituency that includes young men, and perhaps women as well, who fear for their testosteroned pick-up trucks, decked out with supersized tires, gun-racks, American and Confederate flags, upright exhausts, heavy smoke and all. For a few months, the name “Greta” frequently appeared on the rear of such vehicles, always with the F-word before it.

All of which defines two sides of a current issue, and we are all free to pick which one we deem the better–whether we seek what is better for our country or for ourselves, for the world or for our tribe, for our health or for our amusement, for the future or for the present.

Vance’s analogy is ridiculous on its face. No one has ever handed Thunberg the keys to any government agency or the personal data of its citizens. However, what’s being missed and needs attention is Vance’s choice of the word “scolding.”

Ironically, the jab was part of a diatribe against what he, and all MAGA Republicans, consider “free speech.” In Europe, limitations guard against against lies that give rise to conspiracy theories, that in turn give rise to hate groups. For instance, German schools teach students of the Holocaust that happened there. Meanwhile, the Republican administration to which Vance belongs wants to put a stop to teaching American students the history of Jim Crow and segregation that happened here.

To Vance, and to the MAGA Republican Party, “free” means any insults you can hurl once the air has been white-washed of any uncomfortable truth. In effect, Europe does what it can to insure that truth is a condition of free speech, a condition which Vance and his ilk disdain. The result? He was literally scolding Europe while complaining about being scolded by someone making environmental statements with all research and evidence on her side.

And what does Elon Musk have to do with scolding or with Europe? Vance’s reference can only be to the money that Musk is investing in European politics. Musk was the largest donor for America’s first dictator, and now he hopes his money will work its magic in, most notably Germany. Vance, in order to give the boss of his boss an assist, met with leaders of a neo-Nazi group now partly financed by Musk while shunning Germany’s elected leaders.

Perhaps the mention of Thunberg was to take our attention away from America’s new alliance with neo-Nazis, but the word scolding raises another question. Musk is not scolding so much as he is manipulating, something that Thunberg cannot possibly do. Same is true of America’s first dictator. So how do the dictator and vice-dictator discredit and dismiss her?

Vance would never use the word “scold” to describe any male opponent. The word is indelibly part of the Republican stereotype of women who don’t stay in place. Compare it his treatment of Kamala Harris during the campaign, including calling her “trash.” He never said that of Joe Biden or Tim Walz, or of his opponent for Ohio’s senate seat, Tim Ryan.

Trash and scold are coded words. Another is “nasty,” which the American dictator has always been sure to use and repeat when responding to or commenting on any woman he doesn’t like, most notably right off the cuff to women reporters who ask questions he’d rather not answer. Can you name one time he ever used that word to describe a man? Answer: No, there are none.

Given that context, Vance wasn’t so much attempting a joke as voicing dismissal. Greta Thunberg served as the face of what he had in mind. Any and all women who challenge MAGA authority are the targets of his very bad jokes.

Truth is, however, that he is not joking, which is cause for alarm.

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https://news.meaww.com/jd-vance-faces-backlash-for-attacking-greta-thunberg-while-defending-elon-musk-in-europe

Ask What You Can Dodge

Biggest loser of the election has yet to be mentioned.

Since then, we’ve had Veterans Day, the holidays, Martin Luther King Day, the inaugural, and the most truly American event of all, the Super Bowl.

So perhaps Presidents Day is best to finally identify and consider the foremost victim of 2024.

Not a candidate or referendum question or anything on the ballot, but an ideal, a concept, an attitude. The founders never spelled it out, but it is easy to infer from the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Washington implied it in his farewell, as would Eisenhower. Lincoln didn’t say it, but it’s in the spirit of his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses. FDR didn’t say it, but his New Deal put it in action.

Not until 1961 did JFK spell it out: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Seems safe to say, following an election in which the price at the pump outweighed the price-gouging of those who own the pumps, that Kennedy’s rallying cry for citizenship is dead.

And fitting that the president who met that call to the end of his century-long life would die days before a con artist who sells Bibles is sworn in without ever putting a hand on one.

We’re all consumers now. And nothing more.

My friends still wonder how so many voted for the Republican candidate despite the felony convictions, insults, flagrant lies, praise of dictators past and present, cruelty, crudity, hinted threats of violence, and incoherent speeches—including a weird admiration for Hannibal Lecter and worrying envy of Adolph Hitler.

The answer is glaringly obvious, but no one wants to say it. Well, at my age and with nothing left to lose, I’ll say it:

Over two-thirds of the American electorate want authoritarian rule—one that excuses their indifference to others and conceals their fear and distrust of anyone not like them.

Whoa, you may say, Trump gained just 49% of the vote! Sorry, but anyone who did not vote said, in effect, that they want government left to others.

Ask not what I can do for my country, I don’t wanna be bothered!

Trump gained 31% of eligible voters, edging Harris’ 30%. The landslide was non-voters, 38% of eligible adults. Added to Trump’s vote, by any honest measure, it is a landslide for authoritarian rule.

Doesn’t matter if non-voters consciously want it. The Constitution is premised upon an informed, educated, participating citizenry.

By definition, then, if you do not stay informed, if you do not participate, you forfeit self-rule and welcome, or at least allow, authoritarian rule.

If election day was an alarm, then Veterans Day was its snooze button.

Social media was flush with tributes to veterans who risked their lives in wars they believed necessary to protect democratic rule. I lost count of such posts made by people who avoid politics as fiercely as they’d avoid a skunk, who refuse to see or hear or read any news.

You like irony? While all veterans who began their service after January 1973 did so as volunteers, many who today sing their praises dodge any and all implied commitment of “an educated citizenry.”

The veterans they praise risked death for the USA, but they can’t even pick up a newspaper.

For all the disdain aimed at draft dodgers over the years, it is democracy dodgers who have failed America.

Worse were so-called progressives who refused to vote or voted throw-away-party due to Biden’s uneasy dealing with an Israeli leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for intentional attacks on a civilian population.

A friend’s daughter, a teacher just two years out of college, said weeks before the election that she couldn’t wait for Harris to secure a win so that we could “start attacking her and Biden regarding Israel’s genocidal war.”

With Harris we had a chance if we kept working, participating, making our case known and keeping it in front of officials we could influence.

With Trump? Ask not me. Ask any of our most revered presidents. Or simply read the US Constitution.

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Before the address: JFK asking what Robert Frost could do for the country while LBJ assists with the wind-blown pages. Photo: Associated Press.

This site includes a video of the address: https://www.sott.net/article/269048-President-John-F-Kennedys-1961-Inaugural-Address

At Least the Least I Can Do

When anyone asks why I’d make a 200-mile round-trip in the dead of winter to read for ten minutes in the Moby-Dick marathon, I throw a punch-line:

I’ve been plagiarizing Herman Melville for 45 years. It’s the least I can do.

Almost always gets a good laugh, although it surprises me how nervous some people are with their own laughter. I wonder if it may be due to how suddenly aware people are of AI and the possibility of being fooled by it. Anything I write–indeed, anything anyone writes–is now suspect.

There are some who just don’t get the joke. A newspaper reporter assigned to preview the event this year went silent over the phone at my answer to the question. Finally, as if slowly coming out of hiding: “You mean you quote without giving attribution?”

While setting him straight, I could sense a memory surface after years out of mind. Over fifty years ago, it may well have been clouded over as soon as it happened in a room filled with the smoke of marijuana. Now that the statute of limitations is well past, and now that I can find no trace of the two college friends who took part in this crime, it is time to confess.

No, not a civil or criminal case that might call for a courtroom trial, much less time in jail, but an academic crime. The kind we hear of every few years that might knock a candidate out of, say, presidential primaries, as it did a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden in 1988.

The stakes for Rick, Kitty, and me were far less. A failing grade in a class, or maybe suspension from Salem State College (now University) back in 1970 or ’71, maybe ’72, whichever came first.

Time was a blur back then. The anti-war movement was at its height on college classes, and those of us in it barely cared that we were delaying our degrees a year or two. I went in as Class of ’72, finished my last class in December ’73, and graduated with the Class of ’74.

But we attempted to complete what we could of our requirements at the end of each semester. And it was within weeks of one when I found myself with Rick and Kitty seated in the corner of a room adjacent a large kitchen where a dozen of us had been planning a demonstration on campus. Planning done, it was time to “alter our consciousness” as we said back then.

Rick, a quintessential history buff, or a “nerd” decades before the word was coined, worried over a paper he had to write for a psychology class. One of those liberal arts requirements he had no feel for.

Kitty, a child psychology major, lit up: “Wish that was my assignment. I loved that class!” She took a hit and slumped back in the chair, “I have to write a book report. Charles Dickens! Hard Times! I can’t even look at it!”

A huge fan of Dickens at the time, I lit up: “I read that during spring break. That’s a damn good read. So relevant to now!” I took a hit, “Mine is a history essay. I have to cough up something about the role of Thomas Paine in American independence.”

Rick lit up, “I could write that paper right now.” He took a hit and raised his eyebrows.

It all unfolded like a round of bidding at a card game. Though not one of us was a math major, all three of us immediately did the math. And all three of us took hits getting higher and higher on the pact we made.

Rick proved he wasn’t kidding when he handed me his, or rather my paper on Paine the very next day, footnotes and all. That prompted me to compile what I had already written of what may be Dickens’ most focused novel and turn it into essay form. Delivered to Kitty that night, it may have pushed her into dusting off a paper she had already handed in and re-writing it with different examples before handing it to Rick for his psychology class just two days after our illicit academic and high-as-kites tryst.

Three students terrified of a looming deadline, we all handed in papers a week ahead of time. And we all received As for our, or rather each other’s efforts. Kitty admitted that she toned some of my vocabulary down, such as changing “famished” to “very hungry” to “make it sound more like me.”

“And a good way to increase the word count!” I added. Rick, however, was so put off by the whole subject, that he merely checked the spelling of his name on the title page and handed it in. Read it? He didn’t even scan it.

For my part, I streamlined some of Rick’s phrasing. But only after a careful and fascinated read. That paper taught me as much about American history as any single class or chapter in a history text that I’ve ever seen.

Maybe that helped me rationalize my one slip into plagiarism over fifty years ago. That and the fact that it wasn’t as if I did nothing. I did write a paper, and it did get an A.

Or I could just chalk it up to all those hits of marijuana.

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A Breakfast I Never Forgot

My recent account of a three-day hospital stay drew numerous get-well wishes, for which I am most grateful, but it also opened a debate which took me by surprise.

One friend acknowledged both sides:

Most hospitals I’ve either worked in or was a [patient] serve things to eat that do not qualify for food. Adding insult to injury is that it is most unhealthy and in some cases sickening. But there are a some I’ve encountered that were really fine. One had a daily menu of 3 specials along with their standard choices. And yes, wonderful desserts also. This was done in a gourmet style and quality. I didn’t want to leave but was glad I was able to!

The rest of the responses were all about breakfasts. Never thought I’d hear of people who live near hospitals making a habit of having breakfast there. In each case reported to me, the food is fairly good, and the prices very low. And, as I wrote, breakfast omelets were the best of what I had at Anna Jaques last week. Furthermore, the comments unlocked a recessed memory from 1977:

Hitchhiking from spring break in Arizona back to South Dakota, I took a long-distance ride out of Flagstaff with an English prof to Salt Lake City. A bit out of the way, but it took me out of a snow storm on the high Plains and put me on a city on I-80, a major east-west highway. An English prof and an English grad student. Plenty to talk about. More than that, I had an offer of a place to stay that night and “a breakfast you’ll never forget” next morning.

Didn’t take long after I awoke in the bedroom of a kid gone off to college in Boston (of all places!) to realize that this prof and his wife prized me as an excuse to go out for this breakfast. They never named the spot, and so it was from the backseat of their hippie VW bus that I watched in disbelief as we rolled into a University of Utah Hospital parking lot.

The room was windowless, and the ceiling was oddly high, which made me vaguely uncomfortable and less hungry. I never saw the menu. The wife ordered for the three of us as we were sitting down. Okay, well, the coffee was very good and I was feeling better right away. Then the plates came.

Did I start laughing right there? Probably not, but I’m laughing at the memory of it right now. Three mountains of food! Pancakes the size of hub-caps piled on each with eggs once over and bacon and sausage generously layered in them. Thick, dark maple syrup on the side. All so good I felt a certain largesse that, in those days, I always denied myself. When the couple wouldn’t let me pay, I asked them where the bus depots were, Greyhound and Trailways always within sight of each other don’t’cha know? They took me downtown where my wait for Sioux Falls was just an hour away.

Best ever? Certainly in the top twenty. A B&B in Stratford, Ontario, and another in San Luis Obispo where my daughter got married are up there, as is–or was–a spot in downtown Salem, Mass., in the early ’80s nicely named As You Like It. Helen’s in Machias, Maine, and The Drumstick in Bismarck, North Dakota, both in places where I once lived. The Early Bird not far inland in Plaistow, New Hampshire, where I rendezvous with Cousin Sheila once a month. The Athenian in Seattle, although it has since changed hands, and Mitchell’s in Chicago, though friends there don’t care for it, are also memorable, perhaps because I landed there while traveling.

No, Anna Jaques’ omelets are nowhere near the list, but if I lived within a walk away, and if the price is as low as I hear they are in Beverly and Portsmouth, I might just give my own frying pan a rest now and then. But not tomorrow morning when that skillet will be doing overtime as I attempt to replicate what I had on a drizzly March day in Salt Lake City 48 years ago.

In a hospital. In a windowless room.

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Put three eggs once-over in that shuffle, and more syrup on top, and this is what I was looking at in Utah. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/crispy-bacon-and-maple-syrup-in-a-plate–473300242090370596/

Looking for Laszlo Toth

In the supermarket today, a woman stopped me to ask how the film currently playing at the Screening Room has been doing.

This is common, but today’s inquiry came with a serious tone and an expression of worry which made me think for a moment that she was asking about my hospital stay the previous week. I had to snap out of it:

“Fairly well, I’d say, considering that it’s three and a half hours.”

Make that 3:45, with the built-in 15-minute intermission. The Brutalist is the first film I’ve ever shown with an intermission in my 27 years as a projectionist.

“Glad to hear it!” Smiling, she tapped my shoulder and went on her way.

Maybe she was concerned that such a long film might put Newburyport’s cherished, quirky little cinema out of business, but it’s more likely she was relieved to hear that people were willing to absorb that long a tail of immigration and fleeing the Holocaust.

That much can be gleaned from the ads. But few realize that “brutalist” is an architectural term for a movement that reached America soon after World War II. The style is heavy on concrete blocks and the exposure of natural, raw materials with geometric shapes rather than any decorative design. Best known example in New England is Boston City Hall.

I had forgotten it, even though I always took visitors to see an invigorating and somehow charming example during the two years I lived in North Dakota. Just south of Bismarck on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, Mary College (now the University of Mary) was a must-see. Tellingly, Mary’s website proudly describes the architecture–without the word “brutal.” As another former Bismarcker just wrote me, “I have fond memories of exploring Mary College. It always seemed as if it had been deserted.”

Yes, it’s inspiring while at the same time putting us in our place. So, too, is the film which seems to fly by more quickly than many two-hour flicks. An intoxicating soundtrack and score sure help. By the time the break arrives, it’s more like a 15-minute intrusion than intermission.

Reminds me of There Will Be Blood, in which the Daniel Day Lewis character is a composite of oil prospectors in Texas in the 19th Century, and Martin Eden, in which the title character is Jack London’s fictionalized version of himself.

Adrien Brody’s performance is as convincing as that of Day Lewis, and the character appears be a composite of two Hungarian architects from the Bauhaus School. “Laszlo Toth” surely owes his high temper to Erno Goldfinger who lived and worked in England after fleeing the Nazis in 1934. But the primary model is Marcel Breuer who fled to the USA in 1937 and whose buildings–many of them churches and synagogues–are easy to find in Pennsylvania where the film is set, as well as in Connecticut. He also designed, as I used to tell visitors to Bismarck, Mary College.

There’s been confusion about this. Is it a true story? Was there a Laszlo Toth? If you can accept “historical fiction” as a classification of books, then yes, this is history told as drama with dialogue filled in to make sense of what we know happened. From Shakespeare’s histories to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and BlackKklansman, it’s a time-honored form. The Brutalist‘s architectural story is certainly true. What complicates such talk of this film is that, yes, there was a Laszlo Toth.

Unfortunately, Toth was the Hungarian geologist who, after declaring that he was Jesus Christ, vandalized The Pieta with one of his little hammers in 1972. He spent two years in an asylum before disappearing into obscurity. Is this a director’s inside joke, a brutal clash of art?

There’s a parallel for this. Remember Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino? Eastwood played a character named “Walter Kowalski,” same name as a celebrated wrestler in the 1950s-early-60s who went by “Killer Kowalski,” a favorite son of Detroit, same city where Torino is set.

And then there’s the sculptor Peter Wolf Toth, likely a cousin, possibly a nephew, also from Hungary, who landed in Akron, Ohio, before traveling to every American state and Canadian province to create the Trail of the Whispering Giants. When I tracked him down in Ontario in the mid-80s, with a very tall Iroquois just beginning to emerge from a tree trunk, he seemed leery of me for a good fifteen minutes before opening up.

In retrospect, I wonder if he thought I might ask about Laszlo. More than that, I wonder what he thinks of the name’s selection for this film. Then again, the woman in the supermarket never asked about the character’s identity.

What matters is that such stories, no matter how uncomfortable, be told. And that there be places to see and hear them.

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Annunciation Priory, University of Mary, Bismarck, ND
https://www.umary.edu/about/history/our-architecture

The Brutalist: Who Is the Real László Toth?

Peter Wolf Toth and His Trail of Whispering Giants

For the Love of the Games

Two weeks ago, Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy had a piece headlined “If elected King of Sports” which sounded like the ultimate fan’s wish-list. A long-time fan of Dan, I started to click toward the text until something slammed my brakes on.

Why not write my own and then see how close I come?

Upfront I’ll admit that I am writing from the point of view of a television spectator. And that this is limited to the four sports I enjoy watching: Baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Nothing against dozens of other sports, but I see the Olympics too infrequently to have opinions of how they are played. And sports such as tennis and golf seem just fine as they are, perhaps because they are played one-on-one.

Furthermore, given that each sport has different rules on different levels, my calls for change are aimed at the pros: Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, and the Women’s National Basketball Association. Glad to name them here at the start because my first decree is for all of them:

FOR ALL: No more trades in season. It is a conflict of interest to have the best players on teams falling out of playoff contention playing against teams they might join later in the season. Worse, it is a violation of the interests of fans of those teams, especially those holding tickets for seats near the end of a season, to have the players they want to see shuffled off to another city. From the first pitch on opening day–or from the opening game’s kickoff, tap-off, dropped puck–to the crowning of a champion at season’s end, no trades.

FOR the NHL: Leave it as is. Not just that, but use it as an example…

FOR the NBA & WNBA: Delay all foul calls on the defense until they get the ball or it goes out of bounds, as refs do in the NHL. The “continuation” call is a half-assed compromise implemented 20, 25 years ago to address a glaring wrong. Great! They got half, now get the rest and expand it: Give the offense the option to decline the foul and take the ball from out of bounds in the back-court with a full 24-second clock and all defenders confined to the front court. Those agonizing foul-shooting contests that now mar the end of most close games? The very phrase, “strategic foul,” is as much a violation of the game as it is of the English language. Good riddance!

FOR the NBA alone: Home teams must wear white, or a light yellow or powder blue if those are team colors. Visiting teams must wear team colors, orange or darker most prominently. No more black uniforms unless black is a team color.

FOR the NFL: You may have noticed that I also used football as a model for how basketball might be improved. That may help soften and sell my radical plan to make the NFL reasonable again. This could take awhile:

Restore the intentional grounding rule to what it was before the merger. When a quarterback moves a few yards to the right or left and then throws a ball into the twelfth row, that–according to definitions of English words and the common sense of any honest, intelligent person–is an intentionally incomplete pass. The defense made that happen and deserves the reward: Either the quarterback takes a chance with a pass or is sacked. If he throws it at a beer vendor or a beer-drinking fan, ten yards and loss of down.

No more pass interference calls for underthrown passes. Ever wonder how many are deliberately underthrown? The receiver simply turns around and slows down, and what else can the defender do? That’s not interference. That’s a bag job. You can’t reward teams for screwing up.

Restore the rules of kickoff to 20 years ago allow for the surprise and higher percentage on-side kick. Too obvious to explain.

Extend the 4th Quarter rather than have overtime. No more coin-flips. If the game is tied at the end of regulation, the team with the ball continues play from right where it is. However, this will not be sudden death. Instead, a team wins when it goes ahead by at least five points. One field goal will not be enough, but it will force the other team to follow a touchdown with a two-point conversion.

Alternative proposal. If we are to insist on a stop-and-restart at the end of regulation, then make overtimes sudden death with the first possession going to the team that attempted the most two-point and fourth-down conversions during the game. The most important thing is to do away with coin-flips. Rewarding risk is a sporting way to do it.

FOR MLB: I hasten to say that I fully approve recent rule changes such as the ghost-runner in extra innings and the pitch clock. I do it for the record because I know that my call for getting rid of the designated hitter–and restoring the ingenious managerial strategy that has been lost due to it–will label me a neo-Luddite. Okay, so it will never go away, but then why not apply the logic behind it to another strategic moment, especially in late innings of close games?

Make the intentional walk more costly. If we are to be spared the sight of pitchers at the plate, why should we see the bat taken out of the hands of our best hitters in crucial, tense moments of a close game? Like a football coach declining a foul, let a baseball manager decline ball four on a batter to keep him at the plate. Up until ball eight when he will be awarded second base, all runners advancing two bases. For the pitcher’s sake, any foul ball after two strikes will be a third strike, so there’s risk both ways.

Limit the foul balls. After two strikes, the fourth foul ball is strike three, batter out.

Call an error an error. Again, too obvious to explain. And this, of course, has nothing to do with how the game is played, but only how it is scored. Official scorers should be assigned by MLB to games in which their hometown teams or teams to which they have any connection are not playing. They will also determine…

The winning pitcher. No more should we have a starter pitch a gem into the late innings only to have a closer blow the lead and then steal the win when the team rallies back. The official scorer should designate which pitcher gets the win according to how well the pitchers did.

Start times. One for the league itself: No more late afternoon starting times that make towering fly balls and 105-mph line drives impossible for outfielders to see in the glare of a low-hanging sun. These games are scheduled for the sake of a TV schedule, and as such, the start-time violates the integrity of the game. No more. All games start before 2:00 pm or after 7:00 pm local time. Games in domed stadiums are exempted, as they are for my last move…

Weather conditions. As is, the decision to start a game rests with the home team. After the first pitch, it rests with the umpiring crew. Result is that we are watching games played in monsoons for the sake of television contracts and sponsorships. Enough! I say put the decision to delay or postpone a game in the hands of the National Weather Service from four hours before the scheduled start.

Tropicana Field. Blow it up! Now! Put the Rays in Montreal, Nashville, San Antonio, Oakland, Buffalo, Havana, San Juan, the cornfields of Iowa, anywhere that has a vacant MLB-ready park.

Ejection of fans who reach for balls that are in play. Go heavy on the pre-game reminders and put some signage where this happens in the front rows. Just because they missed the ball doesn’t mean they did not attempt to interfere. Get them out, and set the example.

Credit Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga with a perfect game, June 2, 2010. The umpire admits he blew the call and has made this case to overturn his own ruling. The batter called safe agonized over it because he knew he was beat–though, to his immense credit, he busted it down the first-base line. And replay makes it clear. In fact, it is the play that sealed the deal for including replay in calling games the very next year. Since a change in that one call would have no consequence in the game’s outcome, let replay change it.

For All: No more TV ads featuring players on the teams playing in that game. Another conflict of interest, and I might extend it to a ban on all ads featuring anyone from that league. In other words, you may see Mahomes-Kelce-Reid in ads during a college football game, but not during any pro game, even if the KC Chiefs aren’t in it. Put another way, with all the money poured by sponsors into Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge also poured by those same sponsors into MLB games, isn’t there an incentive for MLB to want their teams–the LA Dodgers and the NY Yankees–to advance to the World Series?

Put another way: Last fall when we heard the announcers and analysts all enthuse that “This is the World Series that everybody wanted!”, did you wonder just whom they had in mind with the word “everybody”?

Like my first rule-change to stop all in-season trades, this has to do with conflict of interest–not just the actual fact of doing it, but the potential to exploit it–or, what in legal terms, it is simply called “the appearance of conflict.”

Who knows? If we started doing it in sports, there’s an outside chance we might recognize it in, say, the Supreme Court or in Cabinet appointments.

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A defunct team, a defunct logo, and a not-quite-yet defunct fan of the Past as much as the Pats.

Call Me Chicken Quesadilla

I roll my eyes at people who complain about spending time in waiting rooms.

Whether at a doctor’s office or an auto shop, awaiting a late train or waiting out unexpected rain, I’m always grateful for the chance to be still, to look out a window, to read a book or magazine, one of which I’m always sure to bring, anything to escape the never-ending demands of my own commitments, if not the necessities of my very existence.

So it was last week when I went for an annual check-up with a specialist who tends to things I’d rather not mention. As my old college pal, Fort Myers, says, “At our age, it’s all about the plumbing!”

So early was it, that I had only coffee before getting dressed and grabbing the still-unopened February issue of Harper’s to take with. Breakfast could wait, I figured.

Dr. Small is a friendly fellow probably half my age who, like me, is a fan of Herman Melville, or at least of the hyper-thinking, kaleidoscopically-talking, bumptious narrator of Moby-Dick. He has attended the marathon reading in Provincetown much like the ones in New Bedford where I read. I wore my new “Call Me Ishmael” t-shirt to give him a laugh.

Dr. Small agreed that breakfast could wait. So, too, could my employment that afternoon and the next day if not also a third day. The word “procedure” was in the air. When I asked if that could wait a couple days, Ismael walked the plank and I was face-to-face with Ahab: “This is serious!”

And I knew it. My check-up had been scheduled for March, but I was noticing a change in color by mid-January. Darker and darker. Maybe that’s why I wore the t-shirt. Ishmael is full of double-entendres. A burgundy shirt might help hide what was about to happen.

About 90 minutes later, I’m in the waiting room of the hospital’s ER. Feeling beat up, though relieved I’d been cleaned out, I was content to sit for hours with my magazine. Guess my appetite had also been vacuumed, but I needed to call an employer expecting me to show up in just three hours, and there are times when cellphones ring out disengagement rather than the usual busy signal. I couldn’t leave a message. After a dozen tries, I called the folks expecting me the next day, and asked them to get through. They agreed, but I had no way of knowing if they were successful.

Two hours or maybe a third of Harper’s later, I was on a gurney up and down the hall for a CAT scan. On the way back, rolling toward ER, I spotted people in the overflow seats out in the corridor. They had been empty when I left, so I was grateful for the early appointment until I remembered skipping breakfast. And I hear a woman’s voice calling my name, “There’s Jack! There’s Jack!” She was in the nearest seat and had a cellphone to her ear while waving frantically.

My arms weren’t doing frantic, nor was my voice doing loud, and the nurse, who knows me as “John” not “Jack,” turned the gurney through the doors closed to the public. I still do not know who the woman was, if she was looking for me or was there for her own problem.

Into a room I went where another nurse told me that things looked good, but I’d have to stay the night for the sake of seeing if they still look good in the morning. They also needed results of tests, the scan, I guess. I responded with one word: “food.” She laughed, handed me a menu, and showed me how to use the phone for room service.

Let me put the menu aside to tell you that all the tests came back in my favor. But they were still taking samples of my O-neg to be sure, and by mid-afternoon, Newburyport was hit by a serious ice storm. Dr. Small’s associate bounced into and around the room like a tennis ball while telling me I could be released, and feeling here and there asking, “Does this hurt?” “How about here?” And “Here?” No, no, and no.

But, he said bouncing back up and away, the storm would be too much for me in my weakened condition. Fine by me. I knew that PBS was airing a documentary on Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898 that night. You know, the kind of history that Republicans are erasing from public education. Might as well see it there. My only regret was taking another dubious chance with the dinner menu.

The menu, ah the menu, oh the goddamned menu!

Knowing that hospital food does not have a great reputation, on that first night I ordered meatloaf, figuring I was playing it safe. They can’t screw that up. Well, the side of green beans was good, but the rest of it was just heavy filler. The lemon meringue dessert was light filler, but the coffee was excellent.

Next morning, a ham-cheddar omelet was pretty good, while lunchtime’s grilled cheese seemed to disappear before it reached my taste buds. But the chocolate cookie dessert offered consolation, and the coffee as good as home. Dinner was so bland, I can’t recall what it was, but the green beans were good, and the chocolate cookie seemed a reward for finishing it.

Waking up after the ice storm, I decided to play safe with the same omelet. Good move! And only then did I notice on the menu that breakfast is served for all three meals. If I’m sent there again, I’ll have it for every meal because of what happened next.

A delay in paperwork they told me, but yes you will be going home. I looked at the sign on the wall: “Our goal is to always release you before 12 noon.” What was left in Harper’s wouldn’t get me past 9:30. Unless I wanted to re-read one environmental horror story after another. And I can never watch TV with any daylight in the windows. A psychological thing, I guess, very depressing.

After noon passed, I was resigned to another hospital lunch. Several nurses were at a loss to tell me the reason for the delay. Maybe Dr. Tennis Ball had bounced over the fence, down the hill, and into the Merrimack. Whatever, lunch was still their serve. Oh, why did I not backhand another omelet? Or volley ten sides of green beans?

For no reason I can recall, imagine, invent, or at this point even believe, I thought a chicken quesadilla would be a good idea. Maybe because the word itself appeared so exotic on an otherwise Father-Knows-Best, white-picket-fence menu. Neither of my parents nor any aunts and uncles would have recognized the word quesadilla, nor would I until a college spring-break took me to Tuscon.

Now I wonder if it’s the hospital’s idea of a joke. For me to ever order it again should be ruled attempted suicide. The stench of it should have been warning enough. How do any health workers let it get past them on the rolling tray from the cafeteria to any room? I held my nose, but the burned, metallic taste was worse than the barf. Where were the green beans when I needed them? I noted the sour cream and salsa on the tray and thought I could smother the taste with either. Neither worked, and after three horrific, self-punishing, self-torturing, death-defying swallows, I pushed it aside, tore open the chocolate chip cookie, shoved it in my mouth and sucked hard and long before chewing.

Coffee helped, but I was shaken in a way that was beyond a bad taste. How can anything that horrible exist? On a menu? On a hospital menu? To take my mind off it, I picked up the magazine only to find that I had read the entire issue. My mind went full-tilt-boogie into free association: Chicken quesadilla in a magazine? Yet more pages of toxic waste? Or just a lettuce to the editor? As an ad? In an app? On a map? In a halftime rap? From a barroom tap? In a maple’s sap? Caught in a trap? Cut the crap! For an opening zap:

Call me Chicken Quesadilla. Meals ago, never mind how many, with little or no salsa in my purse or sour cream in my pocket, I set out to see the culinary part of the coop, leaving behind all mundane cares of green beans and concerns of chocolate cookies…

Couple hours later, about when I befriended a harpooneer named Omelet, I was finally told to get dressed and ready to go home. I looked at the clock. It was just over 25 hours since Dr. Tennis Ball said I could leave if not for a white whale smashing the Pequod outside. That’s just about the time required for the Moby-Dick marathon–which is to say, for the Pequod to sink. To the parking lot Nurse Starbuck rolled me in a wheelchair named The Rachel from where I made my way to my tugboat and am now snug at home.

Call me anything you want. Next time, I’ll bring a novel.

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Bartleby? Confidence Man? Pierre or the Ambiguities? Billy Budd? Benito Cereno? Yes!

All Over Now, Baby Red White & Blue

Kendrick Lamar is America’s newest version of A Complete Unknown.

So hilarious to hear so many fellow white people who have been in awe of what Bob Dylan did at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 now complain of what just happened at Superbowl 2025.

Or dismiss it as so many are doing. One post on social media used the tongue-in-cheek meme “Marked Safe From,” as he put it, “whatever message was supposedly delivered…” A response landed immediately: “That’s because you were the subject, not the student.” From bullshit to bullseye!

This includes white folks my age who recall when Dylan electrified the folk world in both senses of the word, and those younger who just learned the details in the current film. Makes me wonder if Lamar thought of the analogy before casting Samuel L. Jackson in the would-be-moderator’s role of Pete Seeger. Or if he may have hummed Strike another match and start anew/ It’s all over now, Baby Blue before choosing “TV Off” as his parting shot.

Say what you will about the Halftime Show, the most compelling message was already delivered by a commercial barely halfway into the first quarter.

But only if you felt as much as heard the National Anthem before kickoff. I can’t recall the melody ever before accompanied by a subtle, steady drum roll. The piano and voice may have been a liberating jazz, but those drums kept the tune grounded in America’s conflicted history.

New Orleanian Jon Baptiste’s rendition of the Anthem was as fitting a forerunner for Lamar as John the Baptist was for his cousin who would also claim all attention with an equally radical, if peace-making, message. Between the two was a football game that soon turned into a rout and commercials that ranged from hilarious to serious, and from whimsical to earnest.

Madison Avenue has made the broadcast its own celebration, much in the way that the Oscars serves Hollywood. Most ads that air during the protracted game–from all the pregame hype (Oscars’ red carpet) through the “Halftime Show” (O’s best song nominees) to the post-game ceremony (after parties)–are premieres. Lavish and sensational, some blunt, others sentimental, they are a heavy investment for our approval.

Eight million dollars a pop according to commentator Tom Brady, himself a co-star with Snoop Dog in a public service address against hate, near the start of the game. The text is not denunciation but illustration, a white and a black guy going at each other, airing out both sides. Then a pause before the final line, the first to include the pronoun “we” so it doesn’t matter who says it: I hate that we have to make a commercial about this.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent the day after the Super Bowl picking out highlights of the commercials. This year, however, I’m taken more by a theme that evolved like a passion play with the Anthem as the opening scene and halftime as the finale.

In between was a lengthy ad that had no voice over. We do hear LL Cool J’s song “Mama Said Knock You Out,” and will later learn that it was produced by Pfizer to highlight the company’s cancer research efforts.

A camera takes us through the open door of a hospital room and to the bed of a small boy who lies there hooked up to an IV and who knows what else. He looks out the window, and is determined. No more! He unhooks himself, gets up, gets into boxing trunks, goes to the sink, splashes water on his face, gets his boxing gloves on, and out the door and down the corridor he goes, throwing punches, shuffling his feet, dodging punches, leaning in.

Nurses, doctors, other patients, hospital staff and visitors applaud and cheer him on. Out the door he goes and down a main street lined with cheering crowds on both sides. Up some stairs he goes–yes, this is a play on Rocky–and onto a landing for the entrance to a public building, arms raised as he looks out toward public buildings waving American flags. A title finally comes onto the screen:

We Will Beat Cancer!

All well and good. Unanimous approval, as we’ve already joined the cheering, applauding, smiling crowd. But what happens if we add context, if we start connecting dots?

What if you recall, just one touchdown and kickoff ago, the video that played during the National Anthem? What if you recall the camera’s pan to someone saluting our flag with ramrod posture and a stern expression who just days earlier signed an executive order to stop all funding for medical research?

Oh, have I upset you? A moment ago were you entirely with me in smiling approval of the boy’s recovery and determination? But now I’ve played a dirty trick and made you uncomfortable?

That’s what Kendrick Lamar did with the Halftime Show. Argue whether it was entertainment or not, art or not, “appropriate” (whatever that crap, cop-out of a word is) or not, it was a litmus test. To those willing to listen, he could not have been any more American, any more red, white, and blue.

To the rest, he is now a complete unknown.

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https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/ll-cool-js-hit-song-features-in-pfizers-super-bowl-ad-promoting-cancer-research-f695f0c4

Lollipops & Rainbows

A day before The Townie posted my essay on weeding, the removal of old books from local libraries, the local daily ran a front-page story on the “success” of the Newburyport Public Library’s new volunteer program.

“New” because the volunteer program was suspended in the summer of 2023 by Mayor Sean Reardon. “New” because the new gig was crafted by the newly appointed Head Librarian Kevin Bourque. Also “new” because none of volunteers at the time are with the new crop. Considering that all of them were retirees, you could say that they, too, were weeded.

Nor could any of them rejoin the renewal. That would be awkward in light of the petition to the City Council that they and a few supporters, including me, signed calling for an investigation into the manner of their dismissal. The petition was successful, although the delay in choosing an investigator allowed a City Hall official who played a key role time to find a municipal position and new home in Western Massachusetts.

Coincidence? Maybe. But is it also coincidence that the local paper heralds nothing but success just as the investigation is drawing to a close in February? Here’s a sentence that appears midway in the 850-word report:

After collecting feedback from staff as well as former volunteers, Bourque crafted a new program and policy that was approved last May by the board of directors as well as library staff.

The phrase “from staff as well as volunteers” is no doubt true because he did listen to anyone who walked through his open door at times he set, including me. And a few of the dismissed vols told me that they have spoken to him. However, in the context of this all-lollipops report, those six words create a rainbow impression that they approve of all that has happened, and that all is forgiven and forgotten.

Another item in the report appears as a glaring contradiction to anyone who has followed the NPL saga, but would go unnoticed by casual readers. A reason for dismissal was that vols were doing staff work, a breach of the union contract.

That was then. Now, Bourque openly reveals that the new vols are doing nothing but reshelving books in the stacks. How is that task not among the various items in a librarian’s job description? Call it a clear case of “Which is it?”

But that’s a rhetorical question. Starting with Reardon’s suspension, this has been a shell game to disguise the removal of people well-acquainted with local history who actually knew how to research and could help patrons find things.

Reasons given for the dismissal begin with “bullying” and “harassment,” but no one who knows any of the elderly, professional, and highly competent dismissed vols believes that for a moment. Which may be why no incident or quote was ever specified despite numerous requests for them over these past 18 months.

My own speculation is that many young people expect a raise of inflection and or a giggle at the end of every spoken sentence, as well as smiley face or heart or huggy emojis after written ones. Normal talk, people my post-menopausal age often find, sounds angry to them. A matter-of-fact question is not heard but felt as assault and battery.

To nail down a breach of the union contract, charges against the dismissed vols included money. We were told in the daily paper that they took money from patrons. In the most extreme case of a public institution “airing dirty laundry” that I’ve ever seen, the NPL website posted it prominently for five weeks. The intended impression was to make the dismissed vols appear to be exploiting their role. The truth is that some patrons gave them coins for the photocopier because the vols were familiar with machines those patrons had never used.

So much for the veracity of NPL staff. Added to all of that, Bourque’s recent, unwitting admission regarding shelving seems like old news.

What’s new is the claim, or at least the impression, that the dismissed vols had a say in Bourque’s redesigned volunteer program. It should not take John Kerry to come here and tell us of the consequence of not answering false claims. And some of us still wonder if Kamala Harris missed the Swiftboat by never answering the repeated charge that she advocated sex-change operations for penitentiary inmates.

Don’t mean to tax your patience with yet another critique of a public library, but false information and insinuations that go unanswered stick. For that I reason, I write this not out of choice, but of obligation.

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Photo from *The Townie*, an on-line “public square for the passionate voices of Greater Newburyport.” Here’s a link to another *Townie* essay critical of NPL–this one about the “cultural homogenization and the sidelining of local knowledge” since Reardon’s banishment of the Archival Center’s volunteers.
https://www.townienbpt.com/education/2024/11/12/the-newburyport-public-library-can-do-more-to-promote-our-communitys-diverse-past

A Return to Manifest Destiny

Anyone have William McKinley on a bingo card for the Inaugural Address?

When I closed my eyes and listened not for content but sound, it was easy to think I was hearing a defective robot reading endless instructions for day-to-day life in a penitentiary. Blame that on my country’s transformation from democracy to oligarchy and the realization that everything I grew up believing about America is no longer true.

Crime does pay. Might does make right. Public offices are openly for sale. Threats and menace are free speech. Ethics are for suckers. One man is above the law. And we continue to stand at attention and put hands over hearts while singing an anthem that, if honest, would end with “the land of the gullible and the home of the indifferent.”

The impenitent felon’s cement-mixer drone nearly put me to sleep as I lamented the loss, but the name McKinley hit my ears like an explosion of a steamship’s over-worked boiler while afloat in Havana Harbor.

Ask historians about our 25th president, and they’ll immediately tell you that he oversaw America’s transformation into an imperial power in 1898. His declaration of war on Spain began with our invasion of Cuba and was quickly followed by a take-over of the Philippines and the annexation of Hawai’i. Some will add that he claimed to be torn by the decision and, alone on his way to bed one night, knelt on the floor and prayed for guidance. God, McKinley announced the next day, told him to send in the troops.*

Trump omits such details, telling us only that McKinley “was a great businessman” who “made this country a lot of money.” Nor does he mention that McKinley needed a pretext to invade Cuba and start his war. Just last month, in a blog headlined by a more recent American pretext for war, “Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club,” I happened to quote the slogan that cites McKinley’s pretext: “Remember the Maine!”

I recall the cry from history textbooks when I was but a schoolboy. Little did I know that it was truncated from the full slogan at the time: “Remember the Maine and to Hell with Spain!” The text told us that the Spaniards blew up the USS Maine, but years later I would read historians who say that the cause was never determined. Given all evidence and circumstances, they figure, it’s more likely that the boiler blew up on its own, or that it was an inside job calculated to raise American public support for war.

When you’re done laughing at Trump’s claims regarding the Panama Canal, put them into historical context. In addition to McKinley”s “Remember,” we have Pres. Polk’s false claim of “American blood on American Soil” to start the Mexican War, LBJ’s fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident to send American troops into Vietnam, and W’s imagined “weapons of mass destruction.” If Trump wants America to re-take the Panama Canal, all he needs is what those four had: a pretext.

And just like that, his inaugural address nailed one: “China is running the Canal!”

He could have invoked–and before long he will invoke–the Monroe Doctrine. Connected to his insistence that we must “take back” the Panama Canal, this is no longer a joke. Nor is the seemingly superficial change of the name Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.” Interesting how we never heard any talk of the Canal or the Gulf or Greenland or Canada until after the election, unless they also happen to be four brand names of eggs.

Except for the resurrection of McKinley, none of this was a surprise at the inauguration. In a speech that could have been titled “Manifest Destiny Redux,” however, he surprised everyone by calling for a restoration of the name “McKinley” to Mt. Denali in Alaska. That’s the centuries-old Koyukon tribe’s name meaning “tall one” for North America’s highest peak. Given the time and the occasion, and considering the general purpose of an inaugural address, it may have sounded like a minor line item in a long wish-list.

Many Americans are still laughing at what sound like geographical fantasies, and it is easy to joke about renaming or re-classifying a body of water or a tract of land for no cartographical, geographical, or geological reason. I can still hear my father laughing at Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s bid to have Lake Champlain declared the sixth Great Lake, no matter that Dad died in 1999.

We laugh at our own peril. No matter what Rand McNally does with its atlases or what the United Nations does with its maps, a mere presidential order gives Republican governors and state legislatures a pretext to decide which textbooks and atlases can be used in public schools and which cannot. That, in turn, puts limits on what may be taught.

Add to that his white-nationalist claims also made by the MAGA crowd, that school children are now taught to “be ashamed” of their country and that white children are made to “feel guilty.” That will determine what those limits are.

Names are not on bingo cards, but they do appear in history texts and on maps. Might be a good idea to stop laughing at them and start learning what we would rather not repeat.

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*The second thing historians will say of McKinley is that he was assassinated in the first months of his second term. Shot at a Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, by a self-proclaimed anarchist, he was rushed to a hospital. He gradually improved for a week, but took a sudden, severe turn and died on the eighth day of gangrene caused by a bullet that the doctors had missed. In a building back at the Exposition directly across the street from where the shooting occurred was an exposition of a new x-ray machine far more powerful than any at the hospital. Had they brought McKinley there, that machine would have saved his life.

On Sept. 14, 1901, Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in and immediately became the first president to have Secret Service protection.