We’ve Got the Verdict

When I saw the question, I scrolled down to the comments thinking I would surely find the answer.

Is it spelled gray or grey?

I’ve long thought the two were interchangeable, like flutist and flautist, but without the change in pronunciation. I was never sure, and even now my spellcheck has underlined grey and flautist in red. And there it is again!

The answer came quickly. They are both correct, but Americans commonly write gray while Canadians, Brits, Down Underers, and others prefer grey. Simple and harmless enough, and I’m grateful to know the reason even though it won’t increase my income, make me lose weight, regain my lost youth, sharpen my chess game, facilitate my musicianship, improve my German, teach me Italian, gain me Irish citizenship, or enable me to make lasagna or spinach pies.

But the mud hit within the first five comments: “Well, we have a Supreme Court justice who can’t define the word woman.”

Next: “And six others who think one man is above the law.”

Like tennis, it then went back and forth several times, completely divorced from life’s persistent question of gray vs. grey. One wag tried to break the spell by noting that the thread was now “blue vs. gray.” Buy that guy a beer! On me! Too bad, though, that historical humor was lost on the trollers, and the volley continued.

Eventually, one earnest fellow said what many were likely thinking:

Why must a simple, honest inquiry, the answer to which I’m sure many are not sure of, turn into political back & forth garbage with each side trying to antagonize & humiliate the other? Take your childish arguments elsewhere!

Since I create enough on-line controversies of my own and often confront friends when I think they go awry, I had already resolved to stay out of this. But this fellow was singing my song, not just on-line but in public. So I jumped in:

Good question, and I share the sentiment of wanting to keep things in context. That said, it has appeared to me that it is always started by one side. That, then, puts the other side in the position of responding or letting it slide. And many on that other side believe that if you don’t respond, it sticks.

If I may interrupt myself: That has always been the first reason political junkies give for Democrat John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. He did not respond to the “Swiftboat” attack ads. And it is now among the top reasons offered for Kamala Harris’ loss in November regarding relentless ads aired during sports broadcasts painting her as obsessed with sex-change operations for lifers in penitentiaries. She never countered that the policy was in place during Trump’s administration.

Now, as I was saying:

Someone then looks or listens in, and it appears that both sides deserve equal blame. Maybe both sides deserve some blame for carrying on or for the way they carry on, but if you look at who instigates this childishness (your word), I think you’ll find one side far more culpable than the other.

While writing this, I wasn’t thinking of social media, but of a Renaissance Faire where I’ve performed as a strolling flautist (or flutist) since 1499. At the end of each day I’m standing, playing, and bantering with people as they leave. Lot of jokes to leave ’em leaving laughing.

Most successful by far was, “Farewell, and thank you so much for spending your money– Oooops! Ah, ah, ah, I mean your day, your day with us! Your day, I meant to say!” Laughter loud and unanimous from all within hearing–until an uptight higher up at the faire heard it, thought it a criticism, and had it banned it from my repertoire.

That was about eight years ago, after which my best line has been “Come back next year! We’re going to put Galileo on trial!” Not as uproarious as the money joke, but it allowed me to go on, like a boxer throwing one-twos instead of a single haymaker.

Holding up my pipe: “Did you know Galileo’s father was a flutist? Or a flautist? A flautist or a flutist?”

Laughter always pauses as smiles await the punchline and someone asks: “What’s the difference?”

“Flutist or flautist? Flau or flu? Achoooo! One is a telescope with holes,” I offer while holding one end of mine to one eye and pointing the other at the sky. “That’s what gave G Junior the idea when he was a little kid grasping for daddy’s tools of trade,” pointing it directly at the face of anyone nearby.

To those in a hurry, a simple but loud final jab: “Bring some fruit, we’ve got the verdict!”

To those with whining kids: “Ya, I’d be screaming, too, if someone dragged me out of the Renaissance and took me back into the 21st Century.” Sometimes the kid stopped crying and looked back in wonder as I played a few notes.

Say all of this loud enough at the end of a day, and it’s as if laughter rides the waves of the crowd as it exits.

After the year we were shuttered due to the plague, we re-opened in 1521. In these past four seasons, I’ve heard something that didn’t exist previously. Not many, but enough to be noticed would call back: “Put Biden on trial!” and “Try Kah-Mah-Lah,” and a few more in that vein.

Not once was the name Trump or that of any other Republican imposed.

We need to make this distinction. And we need to point it out when others don’t make it. This is not at all to say that the Democrats are perfect. Far from it, and their fear of offending each other keeps them far from it. As does the straitjacket they force upon humor and spontaneity. Worst of all, their pathetic attempts at moderation in the face of outright crimes such as Israel’s war on Gaza keeps them farther from it yet.

Yet they are open to dialogue, which the other side is not. The other side has done all it can for over 40 years to gut Social Security while Democrats have protected it. Ditto the environment. Ditto civil rights. Any failure to make this distinction reinforces the superficial view that “they are all the same” which leads many to wallow in cynicism and dismiss “them” or “Congress” as “all the same.” The resulting damage makes me wonder if it is done out of carelessness or if it is deliberate–calculated along with so much else to undermine Americans’ faith in anything regarding self-governance.

Arguably the most American drama ever written, Death of a Salesman insists that “Attention must be paid.” To do that, distinctions must be made.

Including my own. Am I a gray flutist or a grey flautist? The color may be interchangeable, but the noun depends on how much I get paid.

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*Galileo explains his findings to two cardinals*. Painting by Jean-León Huens (1921-1982).

Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club

Reactions to the convicted-felon-elect’s noise about annexing Canada, claiming Panama, and buying Greenland have been surprisingly few. Most have been humorous, as if it’s all a joke.

My daughter and son-in-law, my employers, my next door neighbors, and the kids of my college and high school friends are all of a generation that can afford a laugh. And all their kids, two of them grand to me, are too young to get such a joke–much less the implied menace if taken literally.

My reaction features a flashback, a scene some 25 years ago at this very table. Here I sat with two college friends, both former roommates, and my daughter, then a Vassar undergrad. Bill, rest his soul, was wearing a shirt he had since the days when we marched on Washington and Boston, and sat-in at Salem State, with an emblem on the pocket:

When Rachel inevitably asked “What’s that?” both Bill and and I waved our hands at her, “No, no! You don’t want to know!”*

But Buddy knew better, and insisted, “Yes, you should know.” Bill and I relented, and Buddy gave her a valuable history lesson, one that anyone our age will recall, though there has always been bitter disagreement about the details. Briefly put for younger readers, the Gulf of Tonkin is where, according to Pres. Lyndon Johnson, North Vietnam forces attacked an American ship. This became the premise for the deployment of American troops in Vietnam.

Bill and I started adding details and historical comparisons. The Gulf of Tonkin was to us what W’s “weapons of mass destruction” would soon become to Rachel’s generation. A hoax.

America’s tradition of contrived scenes to generate enthusiasm for a war reaches as far back as 1847 when Pres. James Polk decried “American blood on American soil” to gain support for a war on Mexico. Truth is that he sent troops into disputed territory who shot first, provoking a response. Some American–or rather a luckless Irish immigrant pressed into service straight from the docks in New York and Baltimore–was bound to get hit.

The fraud was so transparent that a young officer fresh out of West Point would call it “that wicked war” in his memoirs years later. U.S. Grant realized the land-grab for what it was while he was there, and he regretted being too timid to raise that serious an objection at the start of his career. To this day, it is the only American war that does not have a single monument, memorial, or plaque in Washington DC.

Fifty years later, “Remember the Maine!” served as a battle-cry to justify Pres. William McKinley’s attack on Cuba. The USS Maine exploded in Havana’s harbor for reasons no one knew at the time, but which in time appeared more and more to be the result of a malfunction. McKinley supporters and expansionists such as Teddy Roosevelt didn’t wait for time. They jumped to the conclusion for which they longed. Before long, the slogan was expanded to “Remember the Maine and to Hell with Spain!” And American military action was expanded to the Philippines.

Some historians make the case that FDR deliberately let our guard down in the South Pacific figuring that Japan would bomb some small outpost, say Guam or the Marshall Islands. Just enough to serve as a pretext to retaliate. Not settling for low-hanging fruit, the Japanese blitzed the big kahuna of Hawaii, and Pearl Harbor was far more than mere pretext. If those historians are correct, then FDR’s strategy was that of Polk and McKinley–and later of LBJ and W. Bush–provoke confrontation, use it as a pretext, coin a slogan to rally support. By wiping out Pearl Harbor and killing 2,400 Americans, the Japanese handed FDR his pretext and guaranteed American support. The call, “A Day of Infamy,” though true, was redundant.

Whether or not FDR should be included, this picture forms the background for the geographical juggling act we’ve been treated to of late. Laugh at your own peril.

Canadian officials dismissed it as “tough guy talk” the way that Melania dismissed the convicted-sex-offender-elect’s boasts of P-grabbing as nothing more than “locker room talk.” An invasion of Canada is so hard to imagine that they may be able to laugh it off.

As for Greenland and Panama, however, the designs are not so far-fetched. Greenland is quite apart from Denmark to which it belongs, and it extends into the Arctic which is what American and Russian oil companies prize.

https://time.com/5653894/trump-greenland-history/

Panama? The Canal once belonged to the USA. We built it, and there’s a photo of Teddy Roosevelt operating a steam shovel to prove it.

https://panamaadvisoryinternationalgroup.com/blog/president-theodore-roosevelt-visits-panama-nov-14-1906/

All that’s needed is a pretext to take. The convict-elect calls them both necessary for national security. Oh, how far America has come! Seventy years ago, Pres. Eisenhower was successful giving that reason for building interstate highways on which jets can find a runway on any 25-mile stretch. Will it work to claim a giant melting iceberg? Or a canal that no longer operates at full capacity year-round because climate change has lowered the levels of lake water needed for the higher locks?

For military action, it’ll take something more, a direct threat that will fool enough of us to think it’ll be worth putting several thousand young men and women in harm’s way.

On that night long ago, I suspect Rachel got more than she bargained for, but I saw that she was wide-eyed through it all. And I do believe she’ll recall it when some odd, surprising news is reported from Central America or the Arctic Circle made to sound like a threat to the USA.

If only more of us were so prepared.

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*I always thought the emblem was a joke someone had made up and put on clothing for the hell of it. That’s what Bill thought when he spotted the shirt in a thrift store. Turns out we were right about the joke, but wrong about the joker: Someone in the Navy on one of the American ships in the Tonkin Gulf coined the name, and it quickly stuck. That sailor or another designed the patch, and many wore it:

I have no picture of Bill in the shirt, so I found this. Bill’s shirt was Army fatigue, with a collar and buttons, drab olive green, short-sleeve (or cut-off) with the four- or five-inch patch on the pocket.

Irony I Can Iron

Among the Christmas gifts sent me this year is a slightly off-white T-shirt issued to volunteers of the Florida Park Service.

“Volunteer” appears on the pocket above the FPS emblem which also boasts of “Environmental Protection.”

From where I live, a minute’s walk from the entrance to a National Park, all the way to the Mouth of the Merrimack less than two miles north, Plum Islanders may have heard my screaming laugh as soon as I saw it.

Back before, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 1981, this shirt would have been agreeable to all. Back then we were a country that valued National Parks and knew the necessity of Environmental Protection.

After a decade in which a Republican president initiated the Environmental Protection Agency–with an impassioned statement of need in his 1970 State of the Union Address–and a Democratic president focused his Dept. of Energy on solar power, the 80s arrived under the banner of “You can have it all!”

But we couldn’t have electric cars. GM was making one that was viable, gaining glowing reviews from those who drove them, including one Tom Hanks. GM hedged the bet fully to its advantage by only leasing, never selling. Then, when Reagan won the White House, the oil and automotive companies that put their money on him knew that he would lift restrictions on the gas-guzzlers that raked far more profit. In effect, according to Who Killed the Electric Car (2006), GM killed its own creation. Off the roads they came to be destroyed.*

When the 90s began, the first President Bush bemoaned the restrictions put upon his donors looking for waterfront property to develop. It was Vice-President Dan Quayle who suggested redefining the word “wetlands” in the federal regs, and up went the mansions and resorts that now cry for federal help. Beware those you dismiss as dummies!

Many of those who knew better were unwittingly complicit. Remember how environmentalist Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes? Leading environmental groups in the state looking to stop and undo development in and near the Everglades thought Gore, seeking swing votes, was too compromising for their cause and endorsed Ralph Nadar. We can only wonder how many of Nadar’s 97,421 votes would have offset 537.

Obama may have coined his “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good” when he read that in Michael Grunwald’s The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise (2006). But Pogo would have nailed it: We have met the dummies and they are us.

Conflicting cries have filled the halls of Congress ever since. In 2012, North Carolina’s state legislature put a gag order on the word “erosion” while discussing any legislation relevant to coastal development. Other southern states have followed suit, sometimes banning the term “climate change”–no matter that several of them, including North Carolina, are as we speak receiving federal assistance due to the flooding caused by hurricanes now propelled by climate change.

Among them, of course, was the “Sunshine State.” Sunshine State! Now that’s irony! “Hot ice,” as The Bard called it, but I express…

With a governor who has done all he can to position himself as the American Superhero against all things “woke,” Florida’s legislature is considering a bill to develop state parks, and to get their claws into federal parks to do the same. Gov. Ron DeSantis talks about adding resorts and golf courses even as he awaits federal relief for hurricanes that are increasingly damaging and dangerous year by year–and pay no attention to his open contempt for federal agencies such as the National Oceanic & Aeronautics Administration and, don’t’cha know, the EPA.

And so here I am with irony I can iron.

Fort Myers tells me that she found it in a thrift shop. Herself a volunteer for good causes, such as reproductive rights, gender rights, and voting rights–none of them an easy task in FLA, as we once called it–she claims she got me the shirt because she heard me say I cherish Ts with pockets.

Well, maybe. But she had to know that she was sending me the laugh of the year. Not that 2024 will be remembered for its laughs no matter how much Tim Walz talked about the need for it–or how much Kamala Harris did it–but the very juxtaposition of the name “Florida” with any hint of environmentalism is a howling contradiction of terms.

Reminds of when I was living in a state that put signs on the main highways for incoming visitors:

Welcome to North Dakota

Mountain Removal Project Now Complete

While that was clearly a joke from the start, this shirt–this soft, comfortable, pocketed, 99% cotton shirt–is now a joke only by circumstance. Given the hostility of Florida’s governor and most other state officials, there’s a chance that this shirt may be deemed an expression of “wokeness.”

Consider what we have heard from that insane asylum masquerading as a state–from hanging chads to a boy “saved by dolphins,” from standing your ground to banning Black History–a foundational part of American history–in schools and books in libraries. Just last September, DeSantis called for the investigation of thousands of signers–including my friend–of a petition to amend the state’s constitution to protect the right to abortion. Some had state police dispatched to their homes for questioning.**

In April, he signed a bill banning local governments from requiring heat and water breaks for outdoor workers. Record heat? What record? What heat? Worth noting that it was aimed at Miami-Dade County which proposed the requirement in response to increasingly hot summers. Local rule? What local? What rule? All while he auditions for a future run for the White House.

Considering all of that, I should apologize to my fellow islanders who were alarmed by my spontaneous burst of laughter. They should be alarmed, but I should not have laughed.

This shirt may no longer be legal in Florida.

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**https://newrepublic.com/post/185704/florida-police-state-abortion-ballot-initiative

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/257067.The_Swamp

Seasoned by the Season

Every two months or so, a friend and I rendezvous along the southern Maine coast.

We always meet for some combination of lunch and a hike, or breakfast and an art exhibit, maybe a dinner-theater, and early this year as volunteers at the finish line of a marathon where we dished out slices of pizza, cheese or pepperoni, to people who had worked up a serious appetite. Will never forget the sight of my friend piling up empty pizza boxes behind us for as high as she could reach.

Saturday we met in Ogunquit, a quaint haven for artists that lives up to its Abenaki name, “beautiful place by the sea.” We meet here more often than not because it is just about halfway between Portland where she is and Plum Island where I am. Since 2002, I’ve made deliveries here, and even when I haven’t, I’ve driven through on US-1 on my way from York to Kennebunkport. But it has always been early morning, too early to stop for lunch at Nikanos, a Greek restaurant with spanakopita, pastitsio, and gyros wraps that I otherwise stop for whenever I can.

We were going to meet at a chowder house in nearby Wells. She had a gift certificate, and we each fancy ourselves chowder connoisseurs. At the last minute, I thought to check something, and my hunch was right: Closed for the season. And so I recalled and quickly called Nikanos. Lucky me.

Lucky us when we took seats at the bar of a full and lively place. About every fifteen minutes, a fellow rang a bell to announce a sing-a-long. My friend chimed in with gusto, and after Santa names “Cupid” in Rudolph’s song, I chipped in by re-naming another reindeer “Stupid.” I also had “another beer” when everyone else raised “a cup of cheer” in “Holly Jolly,” but I just laughed all along the way of the rest.

My friend wondered if a stanza of “Jingle Bells” had been skipped, and I begged her not to risk encouraging the guy to prolong the torture. But she enjoyed it, and, in truth, the meal was so tasty that I wasn’t groaning or rolling my eyes. I had no idea why the spanakopita tasted better than the best I’ve had, but she noted that it wasn’t simply spinach and feta, but “earthy tastes” that “come through.” She guessed allspice, cardamom, “maybe thyme.” I managed to not fall off the chair at the thought that I know someone who could do that.

When we left, we walked into a crowded town center with police cruisers blocking the road that goes off US-1 toward Perkins Cove. People lined the streets, and we soon realized that, without knowing it, we had walked into a parade. She was all for it, her camera was out, her fist waving in the air, “Woo Hoo!” as loud as the sirens. “Remax Realtors, you rock!” Now I was rolling my eyes and groaning. All I wanted was a cup of coffee and a warm place to sit, but…

But here were the fire-engines, sirens so loud that parents were pressing the ears of their children as if they wanted to fit them into suitcases. And then, in no particular order I could discern: the floats, the classic cars, bikers with dogs wearing shades strapped to their backs, clowns and Santa and the Grinch cutting capers, the local high school marching band decking the street in sounds of jolly, a hot air balloon with a fellow who bellowed flames into the air–we were grateful for the warmth.

In the middle of it was a float for the Ogunquit Playhouse, for longer than I can remember a very popular and successful summer venue for musical comedy. At the top and at the back of it was an actor in character, dressed as Charles Dickens. On two of our previous meetings in Ogunquit, he performed one-man shows as Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe in Clay Hill Farm’s dinner-theater. But I call him “Your Majesty” because he is also King Richard at the Renaissance faire where I perform every fall.

I asked my friend to get his picture–because that’s what we neo-Luddites do when we want pictures taken by technology that we disdain and ridicule. Having noted the irony more than once long ago, she simply answered that she had him on video.

“That’s beyond me.”

“I can make a photo out of it.”

“Good, thanks. Can you make it horizontal?”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

She knew because I’ve said it at least four times during various meetings, including reviews of Clay Hill Farm’s dinner-theater and a walk along Ogunquit’s Marginal Way. One of her horizontal pics has me at New England’s most incongruous tourist attraction, The Desert of Maine, not far north of Portland, in the seat of a 1927 Ford, a primitive station wagon with an open-air wooden body (coincidentally posted with a recent blog). All my adult life, parades have been no more appealing to me than sing-a-longs, but how I wish I could have driven that old, old Ford on US-1 Saturday.

As a mere spectator, I’m grateful that I didn’t know of the parade ahead of time. Had I known, I’d have avoided Ogunquit. A few nice brew pubs just up the road in Wells and Kennebunkport.

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All photos by Carla Valentine:

A pic of hot air shooting up into my account suggests at least two metaphors, one of which is most unflattering. But here it is, and it did warm spectators as it drifted slowly past.

Apparently, the Grinch doesn’t know what to make of a doge riding piggy-back on Santa who rides a Rudolph with two tires and its red light in the rear.

Charles Dickens or maybe Bob Cratchit formerly Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe and possibly Ben Franklin and Mark Twain (though I haven’t yet seen those last two myself) on the Ogunquit Playhouse float with Kirk Simpson in the role as he flashes back to his role as King Richard XI when he recognizes a royal subject from the shire some 150 miles south and five centuries away from here.

Always Merry with Baby Jerry

Something curious about nativity scenes in and in front of homes that still fly Trump flags.

Do the Marys and Josephs have green cards? If not, may the figurines be rounded up and deported to Guatemala or Haiti or wherever they may have been mass produced?

And shouldn’t the anchor baby have an American name? How about “Jerry”? Same two first letters…

And if those “wisemen” are so wise, why the useless gifts?

Frankincense and myrrh? What? They think Baby Jerry has body odor? That’s not wise, that’s woke! Time to tell them, “You’re fired!”

Instead, let’s have Elon Musk bring his new Trash Can Cybertruck with a booster seat so Baby Jerry can drive. RFK Jr. can lug in roadkill from the New Jersey Pike, fur to keep the infant warm, and a carcass to spin on a spit over Musk’s truck when it bursts into flames.

Better sedate the barnyard animals so a bloody cadaver doesn’t spook them. I hear that a worm in the brain works wonders for the willfully oblivious.

Also un-American are camels. Let’s lose the Dead Sea vibe, and get Rocky Mountain high. Saddle up some horses, put ten-gallon hats on the wisemen, and add wisewomen like Kristi Noem and Marjorie Taylor Greene with miniature AK-47s so Baby Jerry can start exercising his 2nd Amendment right.

This is America. Good guys must have guns.

The gold? Now that’s as American as it gets! But shouldn’t the bearer of that brick be in the image of the American Messiah?

Color him orange, put him in lifts so that he always leans unnaturally forward, top him with an absurd blonde toupee, and dress him in a dark suit with an overly long red tie.

Could even mechanize his hands to zigzag as if playing an accordion—or shuffling overturned cups for willing suckers to guess which one conceals the prize.

Enough!

Sorry, but such was my reverie over chowder in the Maine Diner last week after spotting a bumper sticker that demanded a double-take:

“Trump – Pence.”

Almost got back in the van and drove down to Egg & I. Did I really want to eat anywhere near someone who would yet pair the hangman with the one he would let hang?

If Donald Trump has proven one thing, it’s that, in his America, there is no such thing as contradiction.

Also erased are traditional American ideals. No matter what history teachers tell their students, or parents their kids, might does make right.

The Supreme Court has ruled that one man certainly is above the law.

Republicans in Congress who, at a would-be dictator’s beck and call, now vote against bipartisan bills that they themselves crafted are living–if cowering–evidence that the last two lines of the National Anthem are laughable.

And just a glance at the resumes of a few cabinet nominees, ambassadors, and advisors will dispel any remaining notion that America is not for sale.

Textbooks will be edited, as they already are in Florida and Texas and states in between. Slavery will be taught as a jobs-training program with no mention of whips and leg-irons.

Manifest Destiny will be continued to be taught as “development” of land for “best use”—but now without mention of broken treaties or the massacre of buffalo herds, much less of unarmed villages.

Confederate flags will fly alongside Old Glory, as they have at rallies all across the country since the first MAGA rallies in 2015.

Swastikas may need another year or three before they are openly welcome by a political party that has already espoused their methods and much of their cause.

The Bible will be a text in public schools, as it now is in Oklahoma. But the stories of the Golden Calf and the Tower of Babel will be glossed over due to glaring similarities to 21st Century America. Can’t risk letting the kids catch on.

All while we keep singing that we somehow remain “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

So why not scenes of refugees fleeing for the sake of their child’s life? Why shouldn’t they adorn living rooms and lawns of the same devout Christians who just last month voted for round-ups, family separation, and mass deportations?

You like irony? Most all the immigrants from south of the USA are Catholics carrying rosary beads, and some bring miniature Marys and Josephs and Christ childs of their own.

But, hey, the lights are so colorful, the price of eggs is coming down (or maybe not), and in America we insist on being merry and saying “Merry Christmas.” Or else!

Oh, Father high in heaven, forgive me if I take a knee.

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Actually, this appears in front of the United Methodist Church in Claremont, California. Now it is a meme on social media.
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/27/do-right-wing-evangelicals-really-want-a-christian-nation-hell-no/

Keep ‘Mas’ in Christmas

Maybe somewhat quiet this year due to so much other heavy weather, but the “War on Christmas” rages on.

Not the war that Fox & those who put the “mental” in Fundamental fabricate year after year, nor is it waged against the first syllable in the word, the name, the “reason for the season” as some like to remind us.

In fact, the so-called War on Christmas is a diversion from the real war. Whether we accept or reject the religious claim, the fictitious war hits us with such blizzard force every year that we surrender to the factual war without knowing it.

We surrender even though the unwarranted pressure of that war drives us to all levels of frustration, distraction, anxiety, exhaustion, and at times violence.

It’s as if we are boxer Roberto Duran in the Superdome ring in 1980, putting his hands up and saying, “No mas! No mas!”

Except that he actually did fight eight rounds before he knew he was beat. In Spanish, he was saying “no more, no more.”

We, on the other hand, put up no resistance whatsoever—unless you count procrastination which everyone admits is lame. “Mas” would give us eleven more days, yet we act as if there never was any “mas” to begin with.

Yes, I’m talking about the second syllable, the other syllable in “Christmas.”

Since Olde English “mas,” or “feast,” evolved into “mass,” most take it to mean a religious service. Today’s services may clock under an hour, but thanks to the leisurely pace of camels in the Year Zero, the feast of Christ’s Nativity is twelve days.

Dec. 25 is the beginning, not the whole. Jan. 6 is just as much “Christmas” as the day we call by that name, and so is every day in between.

This is why Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, why we sing “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and why many trees remain in place for that time.

This is why Jan. 6 is a holy day marking the arrival of the Three Kings.

Some 35 years ago a Catholic priest proposed in a Boston Globe op-ed column that the holiday be divided in order to keep religious intention free of material indulgence.

Since the unholy American trinity of Advertise, Buy, and Sell has a lock on Dec. 25, he suggested that religious observance be the end of the 12-day “mas,” The Epiphany—a name that by itself focuses on faith and the good will to sustain that faith.

Just keeping the word “Christmas” and holiday decoration out of ads for imbecilic movies (“Opens Christmas!”), violent video games (“Rated M for Mature”), and sexual performance enhancing drugs (“Come play with me”) would help our sanity.

But to free ourselves from pressures of buying and sending gifts and cards on deadline, we need an epiphany of our own.

If the family called “holy” by those who observe Christmas as a religious holiday can wait twelve days for gifts, why can’t we?

And cards. In fact, you might say that cards are so much less of a commitment than gifts that we should have another five weeks, maybe combine them with Valentines for a sly way to hedge romantic bets while saving on postage.

But that’s a detail to be settled once we solve the main problem: The fabricated pressure created by an unnecessarily shortened shopping season.

Is it any surprise that this begins with days having such names such as “Black Friday” and “Small Business Saturday,” or that each day of it would have a repetitive soundtrack to drive us up a Wall of Hurry Up?

Long ago I made it the first rule of my life that whenever I hear the word “hurry,” the answer is “no.”

This has served me well, and I would have been spared a few disasters had I adopted it sooner. Yet, despite that, even I have fallen unwitting victim to “no mas” Christmas only to share the pressures and anxieties most Americans have every mid-to-late-December.

Admittedly, my own epiphany here is too late to do anyone any good this year, but we have not just twelve days but twelve months to put the “mas” back in Christmas next year.

And you know how good we all are at getting things done ahead of time.

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Postscript: This 2014 Newburyport (Mass.) Daily News column is slightly updated from the collection, Keep Newburyport Weird. Not until I dusted it off did I realize the added significance of the date, January 6. Looks like I have two weeks to tell you what I think of that.

The site that posted this graphic is “no longer available.” A prisoner of war perhaps?

To Where We Once Belonged

Any chance the new Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, is adapted from a college course? Doubtful, but I did ask the same question four years ago about the eight-hour Beatles documentary, Get Back. Why not try again?

Back then I heard that Suffolk University in Boston offers a Beatles course, and I already knew that one Prof. Richard F. Thomas tuned up his Harvard seminar for a witty and most enlightening book titled Why Bob Dylan Matters.

Tangled up in the controversial choice of Dylan for the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, Thomas plays the Memphis blues quite well.

From me to you, none of this comes as a surprise. For years, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan have appeared in the course listings of colleges from coast to coast. Nor is it surprising that a magical mystery tour would be offered at a law school. At all colleges, no matter the money-that’s-what-I-want major, all bachelors’ and masters’ degrees still require some can’t-buy-me-love credits.

I don’t want to spoil the party, but the surprise is the course name. In my life as a college writing instructor, the constant reminder for every student was to be specific.

Tell that to the prof who titled the course, “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Must be a relief for him or her following professional she-said-she-said workshops offered by the Newburyport Bar Association such as “Grey Divorce: Special Issues in Middle Age Misery.”

Do you want to know a secret? I’m envious.

For years I chafed at concocting required syllabi, something always in the way of an organic, got-to-get-this-into-your-life, 16-week experience. Wish I taught at Suffolk where a song title-turned-course title would allow me to plug in any Beatles song to any day on the schedule with any number of honey pies, glass onions, and blackbirds across the universe:

“And Your Bird Can Sing” before Thanksgiving, “Here Comes the Sun” before spring break, “Taxman” for mid-April.

Not only that, but the very name would allow me to satirize the whole nowhere man notion that there should be a syllabus for any course open to creativity. Baby, can students drive a car with their eyes glued to your pre-fab plan? Or would they be getting better all the time looking through you at a long and winding road?

My Beatles course would have eight days a week, with “Tripperday” placed between Saturday and Sunday to give students an extra 24 hours for valuable research while partying with Lucy in the Sky, Polythene Pam, Bungalow Bill, and all the lonely people.

All while allowing more time for this boy’s professional development by—now that it’s legal—getting high with a little help from Sgt. Pepper, Dr. Robert, Father McKenzie, Mr. Kite, The Walrus, and Rocky, my old roommate back at South Dakota State.

Or to flirt with Sexy Sadie, Eleanor Rigby, and Lovely Rita, maybe woo Lady Madonna or Penny Lane. (Is she related to Lois?)

All that would justify a syllabus printed sideways to further aggravate fools on the ivory hill who fail to realize what goes on in the hearts of artists. As John Lennon let it be: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Oh, is there anything more deserving of spoof and goof than the syllabus in what should be the strawberry fields and yellow submarines of liberal arts? Give me a once-a-week, three-hour seminar, and I’d even label the 15-minute break on the helter-skelter document with “Through the Bathroom Window.”

Now that I’ve followed the sun into yesterday, I can only say I want a revolution in how the arts are taught and pass ideas to those far closer to just seventeen, you know what I mean.

Courses such as:

          “Over Troubled Water,” architecture.

          “Say a Little Prayer,” divinity.

          “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” business management.

          “Get It While You Can,” economics.

          “Followers of Fashion,” marketing.

          “Sympathy for the Devil,” history.

          “Fooled A-ga-ga-gain,” political science.

          “Eve of Destruction,” meteorology.

          “Thick as a Brick,” freshman classes that really are (but which no one wants to admit are) remedial.

My examples betray my age? Get back! All things must pass.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDbzB0jRH_8

Oh Director! My Director!

I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.

I feel like all of us at King Richard’s Faire have been kicked in the gut, but I don’t want to assume anything, so I’ll speak for myself.

If you haven’t heard, Kitsy Olson has been dismissed. You might say, well, it is new ownership, and so they have the right, and they should call the shots. I wonder if they know what they are shooting.

Of course they have the right to dismiss and replace any current directors. Perhaps the new owners are a young, energetic cadre, all of them artistically inclined, and one wants the position of Entertainment Director. This is understandable, even admirable, and unquestionably legal, but none of those makes it right.

What’s right is that King Richard’s Faire has been wildly and increasingly successful in the 24 seasons I’ve been part of it. In recent years we have had the town of Carver running school buses as shuttles from the high school parking lot a mile up 58 during the last four or five weekends. We’ve had the Carver police at times begging–or was it ordering?–us to declare the faire sold out to prevent more cars from coming our way.

What’s right is that we have gained glowing reviews from print and broadcast media outlets all over New England. We have countless patrons who treasure the faire as part of their lives, who attend nearly every weekend year after year, some of them every day. With many, some of us are now on a first-name basis. Couples get married here and return to celebrate their anniversaries. Relatives of our patrons plan trips here in the fall so that they can join their families at King Richard’s.

What’s right is that the entertainment–in its variety, its energy, its timing and positioning around the realm, its offerings of surprise, amazement, and hilarity, always hilarity–has done this. Let me be quick to praise the merchants all over the realm and the gamers in their vibrant, if sometimes muddy lane. All of them have played an equal role, and they do it by their own natural knack for entertaining. Even our security guards make people laugh. Everyone from the royal court to the 14-year-old kid in chain mail carrying the banner for Joker’s Press at the end of each faire day’s parade is part of what keeps bringing patrons through the gate.

Speaking of The Gate, though I cannot claim to speak for others who work the faire, I can claim a unique view on the effect it has on patrons. As some of you know, I spend up to 90 minutes before closing each day outside the gate, facing patrons when they leave. The smiles I see, the laughter I hear, the dancing I pipe for, the praise of that day at the faire directed toward me are closer to unanimous than any reasonable person would think possible. “Come back next year,” I’ll begin to say. “Oh, we’ll be back,” they keep saying, sometimes adding “next week” or “next month.”

Only complaints are mostly the cries of toddlers who want to turn around and go back in.

Thanks to its riches of entertainment, the faire cannot be more successful than it already is, and you cannot name anyone who should receive more credit for that than Kitsy Olson.

Apparently, or at least to date, there has been no reopening of the position or any invitation to re-apply. My guess is that she was given the well-worn, null-and-void-of-any-and-all-thought, bureaucrapspeak, “We are going in a different direction.”

To go in any other direction from where this Entertainment Director has brought us–since before my audition in 1999–will be a wrong turn.

Unless there are appeals from more than one of us–perhaps less seething than I cannot help but be–this will be a done deal. Perhaps it already is, but even at that, don’t we owe it to Kitsy to make it known–right now–to the new powers-that-be what she has done for this faire?

If it was worth their buying, what do they think made it worth the price they paid?

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From the website of Stanislaus State University where she teaches in the Drama Dept.https://www.csustan.edu/people/ms-kitsy-olson

Driving in the Dark Ages

Today I was dispatched to a new customer in a very small town just over the border in New Hampshire.

Familiar with so many twists and turns of the roads of Rockingham County and thinking that Main Street had to be the only numbered highway that ran through that town, as is usually the case, I neglected to look at a map before driving there.

Yes, a map. For all I know, the van I drive likely has GPS, but I’m strictly lo-tech. I have been known to refer to myself as the last adult in America not latched to a ball-and-chain everyone else calls a cellphone. It’s not that I can’t figure it out, it’s just that I find the very idea of using GPS an admission of feeblemindedness.

Call me a cartographer. I choose the route myself.

When I arrived at the numbered highway, I saw right away that it was not Main Street. But I also saw a small strip mall that included a coffeeshop, and I was due. In I went with my map and the invoice to show a barista just what I needed to find.

But it was too busy to tie up a barista. Instead, I went to one of the few empty tables, put down my coffee and scone, and put the question out for several people sitting nearby to hear. Within moments, at least three were tapping into their cellphones, as if competing to be the one to provide the answer.

Turns out that it’s a brand new place these local folks had not yet heard of. And so they were asking me what it was, what was I delivering, and, as always in my case, Do you have any free samples? Also turns out that I was nearly seven miles off target because, when I was told where to go, I somehow missed the word “East” in front of the town’s name, and they are two separate towns.

When one of the women at the next table unraveled this, I held up my road map: “I’m from the Dark Ages.” Laughter all around, some of it from folks looking up from laptops.

Directions were so clear that I finished the trip without squinting at any signs. And my eyes were opened wide when I found myself across the street from a restaurant where my cousin and I occasionally rendezvous.

Note to self: Ask not how to get there. Ask what else is there.

When the day was done, I stopped at the Newbury Public Library to make some photocopies to send a few columns and blogs to a good friend who is the last adult in America not to have a computer of any kind. No email. No internet.

When copying and pasting my on-line writings to a Word document, I had to delete the ads. Something I’ve never noticed on my laptop here at home: The ads were for MAGA hats. Here’s the complete text:

Join the movement and make a bold statement for the future.

Imported and not made in the USA.

If an algorithm lined me up with that, then it was programmed to insult me. I’d use GPS before wearing one of those. I’d yak on a cellphone in public before being seen in public in the company of anyone wearing that dunce-cap.

Offense in these cases is but momentary. Before long I was laughing my way out the door until I noticed something by the door I had never before seen: A “self-checkout” stand.

The laughter ceased, and I was stunned. One of the very few rules I live by is that I never set foot in stores that have self-checkout. Once upon a common cause, I was a regular customer at CVS and would get groceries at Stop & Shop if I happened to be driving past it on the way home. I haven’t been in either–in any of their locations from here to Plymouth, Mass. where I spend serious time every fall–for at least ten years, or for as long as it has been since they installed self-checkouts.

But a library? Noticing a handwritten sign on the top of it, about shoulder high, I approached it:

Hi! My name is Janet

Occurs to me that many people would hear that first story and think I should learn the lesson, get a cell, and use GPS. Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut explaining why he preferred going to the post office for a single stamped envelope rather than having a supply at home.

Would the folks in the coffeeshop had that task that they clearly enjoyed, brief as it was? Would they have had any exchange with each other? Would a dozen people have had a good laugh at my Dark Ages joke? Would the new customer and, oh by the way, my employer have gained any attention? And did I enjoy it as much as Vonnegut his exchanges with the postal clerk, the woman next in line, the kid walking a dog he met along the way?

Worth noting here that Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), and a few stories in his Welcome to the Monkey House collection (1968), predict the consequences of automation. As well as noting that automation was something that many people feared in those days when it loomed as a threat to the middle class. Today, it is resisted only by unions, which themselves are becoming a thing of the past despite the glaring need for them.

Who’s in the Dark Ages now, Techie?

As for the second story, you might say, Well, what’s wrong with self-checkout? Many people want convenience. The immediate response is always that self-checkout eliminates jobs, but it goes beyond financial opportunity for X number of workers, as vital as that is. It also eliminates personal exchanges, greetings and jokes, suggestions and compliments, questions and gratitude.

Maybe I should be grateful that I happened to land at a coffeeshop with a barista and customers rather than a vending machine. And grateful that I had to go to the library’s front desk to pay for photocopies rather than sticking coins into Janet.

Hate to break it to you, but that’s the kind of gratitude that says you don’t give a shit at just how sterile the world is turning all around you.

Either that, or the way to communicate in today’s word is with statements, bold or not, written on our hats and t-shirts, free speech we pay for, made somewhere other than the USA.

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I doubt that this 1927 jalopy has GPS, but it does have a Harpo Marx horn. Photo by Carla Valentine.

Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat

In the summer of the year I turned nine, the name “Patrice Lumumba” came from a faraway place that had nothing to do with anything my friends or I cared about. But it was fun to say, and say it we did.

The year was 1960, and news on the networks and front pages of newspapers made the name unavoidable. Safe to say that all of us–parents too–heard Lumumba always described as a communist, and that was all we needed to know. He was a bad guy, and so we did not care at all when he was executed after just six months as the first Prime Minister of a Congo Republic he helped free from colonial rule.

Nor did we hear much jazz unless you count Desi Arnaz’ Cuban rhumba on I Love Lucy. But the word itself was intriguing: That’s a jazzy shirt you got on! Or, His brother jazzed up his car. Or, describing a stylish play on a basketball court: That was jazz, man! As if it, too, came from a faraway place but with an allure that had everything to do with what we hoped for.

Add those two subjects, and you get:

History with a Pulse

The new documentary, Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat, doesn’t simply explain both, it combines them. Call it history told in jazz, or American music played by global politics, there is no other film I know of that is anything like it.*

The rise and fall of Lumumba in the Congo serves as a foreground story, but the film covers–and the music plays–colonial struggles around the globe as well as the odd controversy in NYC between the United Nations and Harlem when the young new ruler of a newly independent Cuba made a trip across town to chat with Malcolm X.

When Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe on a UN table, you might wonder if he’s adding percussion to Duke Ellington’s Orchestra–even though you’ve already heard him on tape saying he can’t stand jazz.

Something else we never knew in 1960: The American wire services–Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters–agreed that photos of anyone deemed a communist by the American State Dept. would always show them scowling in anger, preferably with a stabbing finger. That list included Martin Luther King as well as Malcolm X, Castro, and Khrushchev. Reminds me of the stereotype of jazz held by those who think it’s all dissonance and unapproachable. In Soundtrack, they all show the full range of, well, the soundtrack.

A photo of a broadly smiling Lumumba, waving at the camera from the backseat of a car? American papers would have been quicker to publish pornography in 1960.

Also prominent are Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Thelonious Monk and others that toured Africa–and that the Eisenhower Admin tried to use to gain intelligence. While Khrushchev, Castro, Malcolm X, Lumumba and others railed against colonialism, the US “abstained” when it came to a UN vote. You hear the railing in the music. As for the abstention, Dizzy will make you dizzy.

Dennis Ade Peter, writing for an on-line magazine, OkayAfrica, nails it:

Lumumba’s murder is central to [Director Johan] Grimonprez’s documentary film, but it’s much more than that. Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat is a sprawling, masterful interweave of colonial cruelty, western callousness towards Africa, the singular power of music as an amplifier, the unparalleled strength and unspeakable suffering of women when everything goes awry, and the lasting, definitive impact of a failed revolution. It’s a gripping historical treatise with a distinct pulse.

Lumumba and his movement ridded Congo of the Belgians, but the mining interests and the rich uranium deposits remained. And while America’s kindly Pres. Eisenhower was publicly proclaiming Congo’s right to independence, what he was saying in private was more in tune with the Belgian mining company as well as American arms manufacturers who needed the Congo’s uranium. Much of which would be dropped on another colony seeking independence–Vietnam.

The film ends with Lumumba’s death, and so it spares us the mysterious death on UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold nine months later in a plane shot down over nearby then-Rhodesia, now Zambia. But it reminds us that, like jazz, the corporate demand for uranium plays on. Why else would it flash an array of colorful mobile devices for an instant among so much black and white archival footage?

As for colonialism, it was just twelve years ago that Newt Gingrich ran for president accusing Barack Obama of being “anti-colonial.” Call it his version of “Make America Great Again.” It was as if the Declaration of Independence came from a faraway place that had nothing to do with We the People.

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*My first rule of writing a film review: Name other films that are somewhat like it. I can’t, although some feature films have soundtracks that describe the setting as much as does the camera. In the film I recently reviewed, A Real Pain, Chopin plays Poland. But the film that first comes to mind is Nebraska, a delightfully quirky but moving art-house hit in 2013, accompanied by a Tejano soundtrack, a fusion of Mexican and Eastern European sounds that began on the Plains over a century ago.