All my life I thought a deadline was when you had to have something finished.
Projects for school and work all have deadlines. Students missing them tend to fail and drop-out. Employees unable to meet them are either let-go or kept in low level positions.
Before March 12, I’d have added that public officials who fail to meet deadlines are often forced to resign—either by a governing body or due to their own sense of honor.
That was the day when Newburyport’s Daily News treated us to the banner, front-page headline, “City solicitor reappointed by Reardon.”
Ordinarily, this is not front-page news, but Newburyport City Hall is no ordinary news-maker. In the story we learn that the city council had voted 6-3 against retaining the law-firm of Murphy, Hesse, Toomey, and Lehane for another year.
However, the council vote meant nothing. Why?
As the report tells us, when Mayor Sean Reardon submitted his bid for re-appointment on Jan. 13, the city council had, as required by the City Charter, a 45-day limit to deny it.
Feb. 27 was their deadline; March 10 was their vote. Reardon could have made the announcement on Feb. 28 but may have waited in hopes of avoiding embarrassment of his staunch ally, Council President Ed Cameron, who was responsible for meeting—and then missing—the deadline.
Had the vote been in favor of renewal, all of this would have gone unnoticed.
Making matters worse, Cameron was one of the three votes to keep the firm. Hence, failure to do his job put him on the winning side of a vote he lost.
There’s a reason why all codes of ethics include a warning that goes something like, “avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
To say that Cameron’s gaffe was due to incompetence or mere carelessness would be generous.
The report offers no specific monetary reasons why Attorney Karis North of the law-firm was so objectionable to at least two of the councilors.
At-Large Councilor Connie Preston called herself “100% not OK with our lawyer needing to ask the mayor if it is OK to let us know when she erroneously opined to give our powers over staff to the mayor.”
Ward 5 Councilor Jim McCauley told the Daily News that the law-firm had “lost all credibility,” citing “some decisions here that have cost [the city] money.”
But North tells the mayor what he wants to hear, and so he pounced on Rip Van Cameron’s lapse to keep her no matter how much she has cost Newburyport.
Two weeks later, yet another front-page, banner headline tells us that “Mayor’s memo has councilor asking questions.”
According to the Daily News, Reardon sent a memo around City Hall “reminding employees not to talk to council members about day-to-day issues.”
Here’s what Sec. 2-7 of the City Charter has to say about that:
The city council may require any city officer, member of a city agency or city employee to appear before it to give any information that the city council may require in relation to the municipal services, functions, powers, or duties which are within the scope of responsibility of that person and within the jurisdiction of the city council.
The councilor questioning Reardon’s “reminder,” McCauley, reminds us that city councilors represent city residents.
But that was lost on Cameron who has forgotten that a democracy depends on an informed citizenry.
As always, Cameron’s position supports the mayor’s: As the Daily News worded it, “councilors should not get involved in personnel matters.”
Oblivious to contradiction, Reardon declares, “That’s not me trying to control anything, that’s me trying to hopefully keep city councilors in their lane.”
When it comes to information, the idea of public representatives “staying in their lane” is profoundly anti-democratic. Moreover, the memo, no matter how mildly worded or how wide the smile of delivery, serves as a gag order.
Regarding city ordinances, Reardon is selective: Pounce on one to override a council vote; ignore another to limit what the public knows.
Four musical friends, all guitarists, and I meet for coffee at Chococoa downtown every Tuesday morning. I always arrive five or ten minutes late, figuring that, at this age, it’s better late than right away.
They talk for up to two hours about chords, progressions, this diminished, that suspended, amplifiers, microphones, makes and brand-names while I munch on a lemon-ginger scope, sip black dark-roast, and pretend I know WTF they’re talking about.
At least one of them knew what this past Tuesday was, and so when I appeared, they all went to the counter as I was seated and walked back like the offensive line from a football huddle with the desired scone on a plate and a solo burning candle sticking up from it. One brought his guitar and strummed to the tune they all sang.
Despite the resulting noise, about a dozen seated patrons and a few baristas all applauded and cheered, perhaps as relieved as I that the annoyance was over. So began my 75th trip around the sun.
The afternoon was not another ambush. Rather, it was planned and I agreed to it a week ago. Again downtown, four friends who wouldn’t let me pay for the pan-seared salmon or its maple glaze, nor the side of crisp Brussels sprouts in a sweet chili glaze with blue cheese dressing, nor the crab cakes in a roasted corn salsa. Not even the IPAs to help it all go down. Gifts included a Jabberwocky certificate for books to buy, and two books with blank pages in which to lie.
Lie on the beach, that is, which I do more and more of every summer. One other gift, a volume of James Thurber for comic inspiration, will fill that bill nicely. It took me over 70 years, but I finally realize that “happy” is synonymous with “relaxed.”
Walt, who arranged this literary anti-weight-loss program, hinted at having the staff serenade me, but once was enough for this year–and for the rest of them no matter how many–and I consider it a birthday wish granted that I wasn’t so embarrassed as I had been just eight hours earlier.
As our party neared its end, three gray-haired women took the table next to us. Before long, a line of Loretta’s staff was lined up behind me striking up the tune. I turned to tell them to go away, but they were all addressing one of the gray-hairs who was beaming with delight.
When the staff finished the song and the hub-bub subsided, I called over: “This is my birthday, too!”
“Really!”
“Yes,” and then feeling a need to prove it, “We share this day with Grover Cleveland, Wilson Pickett, John Updike–“
“Queen Latifah!”
“Yes, she was next on my list.” In truth, I was just about to name Rimsky-Korsakov, but we’ve all had enough Russian interference in our golden years.
Asking if they had ever been to a Renaissance faire, I told them that we rennies have our own birthday serenade: “May I sing it for you?” No one ever says no to this. The woman was aglow. A few of the staff returned to hear it, and I projected enough to be heard all the way to the walls:
This is your birthday song
It isn’t very long–
And then instantly turned back to my four friends, “Okay, enough of that. You were saying?”
Always gets a healthy laugh at an open air festival, but it has some added reverb to it in a restaurant. Don’t really know for certain. I’ll ask my guitarist friends this coming Tuesday. I’m sure they know what “reverb” means.
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Turning 74 in a sweater my mother gave me well before I turned 50 and likely ten years before that. Photo by Walt Thompson who, judging from staff in the background arms akimbo, must have taken it while I faced and serenaded the woman sitting just ten feet away.
Out my window, looking northwest toward the center of Newburyport, I once could see one of New England’s most frequently photographed, sketched, and artistically rendered buildings. Canvas devoted to it over the years would cover it many times.
Aside our one and only road to the mainland and all by itself on the flat marsh, the Pink House was built in 1925 under circumstances debated to this day. Some call it an example of “spite architecture.” When a judge ruled in a divorce case, the story goes, he ordered that the husband provide the wife with a home. Spitefully, as the story also goes, he put it near nothing and no one, fully exposed to coastal elements including high tides that would sometimes surround it, and out of reach of the electric grid and running (fresh) water at the time.
True or not, as Rochelle Joseph of Support the Pink House, Inc., claimed while recording a farewell tribute video during a farewell vigil the night before what we expected to be the final day, the story attracted international attention. Other tributes told of the resulting increased tourism. Various local groups have long included photos of the Pink House in their brochures.*
Joseph also asked anyone listening to look across the marsh aside the house. This is a technique well-known to visual artists that the rest of us never notice: The very singularity of a house on that spot enhances the natural setting surrounding it, much like a barn or tractor to one side of a photo will help accentuate rows of crops that fill it.**
Yes, a farewell to the “Pink Lady” as it is also called. The place has been abandoned since at least 2005, and as I recall, it wasn’t until 2010 or so that we started hearing of the National Fish & Wildlife Service’s desire to demolish it. Somehow, it is on NFWS land–even though it’s a few acres by itself, set over a mile apart from the Plum Island Reserve, which is what NFWS is here to manage.
Several initial attempts to demolish it were rebuffed by tireless efforts of Support the Pink House, delaying it for several years before running out of options. Demolition began and was completed two days after the vigil.
The distance from my window to the house is slightly over a mile as the Canada geese fly, so I was unable to see the gathering or their cars–unless you count the flashing blue lights of a police cruiser assigned to slow approaching vehicles for the sake of the gathering and to make sure that the two-lane road was not bottle-necked.
I hoped to attend, but an about-to-turn-74-year-old body has veto power over any desire of heart or purpose of mind. And so I watched Joseph’s video in real time, along with the responses expressing regret that came from as far as Ireland, and from people who summer here–from Maine, New York, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, enough of them to fill every US house and senate seat if they were so spread out.
Must admit that I have not been anywhere near the vanguard of Support the Pink House. Ten, twelve years ago I had a few satirical columns in the Daily News aimed at those wanting to take it down, which I hope were helpful to the cause. In recent years, I attended a few meetings and signed a few petitions. All of it a far cry from my involvement with the Newburyport Public Library’s dismantling of its own, world-acclaimed Archival Center.
No doubt for that reason, one comment on Joseph’s video piqued my interest:
What is happening to the Pink House is symptomatic of what is happening to our country.
From the censorship inflicted in recent years on schools in southern states to the planned termination of the US Dept. of Education, and from the library on the mainland to a landmark on the marsh, it is the erasure of history, of memory. But why?
For an answer, NFWS offers a plan for a parking area with an observation tower. Sounds so much more functional than an abandoned house, right? Now consider that NFWS already has seven parking areas and two observation towers in the Reserve. Isn’t that a reason to keep the one and only artistic treasure and unique tourist attract right where it is? No? How about if we consider that NFWS has a six-mile stretch of road on Plum Island where it can add things without displacing–or destroying–anything else?
If that’s not enough to keep the Pink House where it is, then yes, the unstated, unacknowledged reason is to erase the past. And the resistance to it, as happened to those who advocated keeping NPL’s Archival Center in tact, turned the powers-that-be against those who resisted.
Consider this exchange in the comments to Joseph’s video:
It feels like they are demolishing it due to a grudge they have against people who love this… Because their reasoning doesn’t make sense.
I’ve felt that way since the start- I feel like it’s not about the house for them, it’s all about the power. Just awful.
I do have a few dozen friends who can tell you that this describes NPL’s Archival Center, but I doubt you need anyone to tell you those two lines can be easily applied to any discussion of Project 2025‘s plans to slash funds and personnel for public services.
Yes, it is “what is happening to our country,” and so from my window right here on Plum Island, I stared into a fog bank in which yet another piece of the USA was put asunder. It was as if Mother Nature herself felt a need to hide the act.
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*It’s reputation is enough to draw Boston media to the farewell. Here’s what appeared in the nightly news:
**In 1956, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean starred in a film titled Giant set on the Texas plains. There are numerous scenes with the mansion in the distance, the only thing standing on the table-top land. The director and cinematographer employed the technique Joseph describes. About five years ago, Honda filmed a commercial along that road that may well have been inspired by scenes in that film, with the car in the foreground cruising down the road left to right while the Pink House moves front right to left in the background.
Yes, I’m running for mayor of Newburyport—and then some.
Last year, that was a joke intended for April Fools Day. For some reason it ran two weeks early on the Ides of March.
Of all days! I guess using the word “incompetent” five times in a single sentence to describe a sitting mayor does have a stabbing effect.
Some readers wrote asking if I had lawn signs. Well, no, but can I interest you in one of my books? My memoir about life as a street-musician perhaps?
The premature annunciation raised a second problem: I live on the Newbury side of Plum Island.
Problem? My friend Rand McNally called it a reason to run as a re-unification candidate:
“Look at the Massachusetts map,” enthused the renowned cartographer, “you can balance ‘Great Barrington’ in the southeast corner with ‘Great Newbury’ in the northeast.”
Carto-poetry! Sure beats crypto-currency, but what would it take to become a selectman in a town that could then annex a city that divorced it 261 years ago?
While exposing the still-raw memory of our more recent loss of West Newbury, just 205 years ago? Boo-hoo!
The joke soon ran its course from Turkey Hill to Frog Pond to Hellcat Swamp, and I’m now identified as “a resident of Newbury” rather than of Plum Island. No more preferred proper nouns for me.
All because some readers thought I was looking for votes instead of laughs. Did they miss the casual mention of my parole officer as my chief advisor?
Then came the call to reclaim the Panama Canal. Got me to thinking: Re-unification may well be my ticket into City Hall.
Any honest description of Newburyport City Hall these past three-plus years will bear uncanny similarity to the job description of a model.
Not a role-model to emulate, much less rely on, but a fashion model obsessed with looking good, always posing, flashing smiles, and assuming agreement that all the shiny merchandise they hawk is the best.
It’s an occupation that, by definition, favors youth and disdains age.
If you wonder where Elon Musk gained the idea to turn the US Treasury over to a team of underaged techies, you need not look far.
Newburyport CH has ridded the city of highly competent and experienced public servants in favor of young people right out of college, pliable to the will of those not much older.
That includes a mayor whose theme song could well be “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and his hand-picked bobble-head directors now on civic boards. All while the city council president mumbles the lyrics to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
That’s not a “City Hall.” That’s a “Photo Hive.”
Free of any campaign, I kept pushing for the former volunteers who served for years in the public library’s Archival Center only to be smeared and slandered by a cabal that never produced a hint of proof.
By now, the investigation may be over. But there’s an item too new to be in it that is telling:
NPL is now closed on the Saturdays of holiday weekends.
When asked about it by a patron, Head Librarian Kevin Bourque told her it was so staffers could enjoy a long weekend with their families.
Can you imagine a nurse or a cop being told that?
Put aside that no other library does this, that weekends are the only times many folks have free, and that a library is a public service that should logically be available on Saturdays.
Consider only that these are the same staffers who ran the volunteers out of the Archival Center because, they claimed, those vols were doing work that the staff considered their own.
Turns out that those jealous of work don’t want to do it.
Such is the union contract recently negotiated by the current mayor and his team in Photo Hive.
Seriously, if no one is on this year’s ballot to oppose Mayor Reardon, write me in. My first move will be to negotiate the re-unification of Newburyport, West Newbury, and Newbury.
My second move will be to identify myself as a resident of “Great Newbury.”
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At Loretta, downtown in The Port, turning 74, March 18, 2025. Photo by Walt Thompson.
If you had asked me before today to name the most calm, dignified community in these parts, I would have answered Byfield.
The one village that remained loyal to Newbury after the Port and West Newbury bolted, Byfield is the southernmost reach of our sprawling town, which makes one wonder why our public library and the post office are located there.
Be that as it may, across the street from one of those buildings is the Byfield Community Arts Center, an elegant, if modest, 19th century structure that hosts a wide-range of events for people of all ages and practitioners of all artistic circles and stripes.
To help make the place appear a bit more inviting, the good folks there put up rainbow streamers in the two brackets over each top corner of the front door. Nice touch having one on each side for an enveloping symmetry. And art, as they say, is all about color.
Don’t know how long the streamers were up or just when the wind twisted them in such a way that they could be mistaken for flags. I did drive by to see that they were the six colors of the rainbow, and not the newer version known as the “Pride Flag” with the triangle of five colors superimposed on the original six.
But no matter. This week BCAC was told their pair of rainbows violated Newbury’s flag bylaw. According to its social media post:
The use of the “rainbow” and the colors within are not directed towards any political movement, or any movement for that matter. It is simply an Arts Center using colors to express art, which is created with colors.
This standard would have ruled out the Pride Flag. Honestly, had I seen that eleven-colored, incoherent eyesore, I’d be more dubious of BCAC’s use of the word “art” in its name than its choice of decoration. Furthermore, rainbows, because they represent a full color spectrum, have been a symbol of the arts for time out of mind, long before their adoption by any minority group.
Says Jack Rybicki, founder of Newbury Chatter, a social media page that closely follows all of the doings of Newbury Town Hall:
The flag concern is not a Bylaw, it’s a recently passed ‘Policy’ forwarded by Select Board Member Bill ‘Collector’ DiMaio who has venomously targeted the BCAC and is behind pushing TA Blais’ call to Dave Hill, president of the non-profit… It’s overreach and overstep by a Bully Select Board vice chair who should vacate the leadership position.
Tracy Blais is the town administrator who sent the notice to BCAC. Her edress is on BCAC’s social media post in hopes that supporters will let her know where they stand. As one of those supporters commented on the post:
It seems to me that this either was mandated by the new federal Administration or someone in town was emboldened by that Administration to complain.
“Emboldened by” is a alarming phrase. There have been many reports from all over the country of emboldened individuals and groups since the USA turned into a reality TV show in 2015. What is happening regarding flags in Byfield is relatively negligible, verging on laughable. Elsewhere? Just this week, residents of a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Cincinnati announced that they are arming and organizing themselves in response to a rally held nearby by neo-Nazis who waved swastikas and shouted racial slurs at them.
Whether or not Newbury town officials have been “emboldened” by America’s descent into fascism, the BCAC’s next door neighbor sure acts like it. On the chain-link fence that separates the two is a sign facing BCAC which shows two cartoonish characters fighting each other. For their faces are the images of a laughing Kamala Harris and a smiling Tim Walz. The caption in thick red letters across the top: “Dumb and Dumber.”
One commenter notes that the sign shows Walz grabbing Harris’ breast, but the bodies are hand-drawn and it’s hard to tell just what’s what below the enlarged heads atop two bodies that both appear to be male. Either way, it’s quite a look for the Newbury town officials: The symbol used to welcome people is unwelcome; the sign posted to ridicule people is as welcome as a playful joke.
And a joke it is. As are all signs that reveal nothing of the subjects drawn on them, but reveal and spotlight all we need to know of the people who make and display them.
For all of that, it’s hard to imagine that Newbury officials will insist on the removal of rainbow streamers in the sleepy village of Byfield. Unfortunately, the ridiculous sign next door risks turning the formerly calm and dignified center of the village into a setting for an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head.
Still, that’s well down the harmless end of the spectrum of acts “emboldened by” anything now sweeping the Unraveled States of America. Safe to say, Cincinnati can’t happen here.
Unless, of course, the feeble-minded sign is just the start of something.
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Byfield Community Arts Center. Photo by Carolyn Thomson Casey courtesy of Newbury Chatter, Jack Rybicki, moderator.
Well, it’s been a noisy week in Great Newbury, my newly reconstituted hometown.
Over in the Port on Saturday, the Invisible Patriots, thanks to the instant magic of social media, put over 300 very visible protesters on High Street to voice and display signs of displeasure with the new federal government’s betrayal of democracy, humanity, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the children we raise, the veterans and the elderly that America once held dear.
The approving horns of passing cars were almost non-stop for the two hours they endured rather fierce windchills. Mittens over his ears, Wally no sooner moaned that he should have brought a bottle of Excedrin III, than Nell snapped, “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said in 45 years!”
Wally, in character, appeared not to hear his wife of 55 years, but when she looked down the row to shout hello to Meredith, he took me aside: “That’s when she kept saying how handsome Reagan was every time she saw his dopey grin on TV.” He stepped away and started waving at passing cars. Nell, smiling, grabbed and held his free hand, doing the same.
On Sunday, the Pink House Neighbors gathered for a vigil to pay tribute to a century-old house built on the marsh about halfway between Plum Island and Rolfes Lane, which is about where Newburyport declared independence from Newbury proper in 1764. Again, a lot of honking, and I was hoping Wally would show up with his Excedrin. No luck for me.
And no luck for the Neighbors, as the demolition crew arrived in a fog bank Tuesday morning to do the dirty deed. Many of the Neighbors showed up again to see it smashed, broken, and loaded into trucks. All I can tell you is that it was still standing when I drove off the island at 9:45, although all the necessary vehicles, including police, were already there. When I returned at 12:30, only the foundation remained. Even the Neighbors had gone.
And so had the fog. So strange to recall that, while the island itself was sunny and clear, the marsh was covered. You might have thought a cloud had landed on it. Most fog banks cover the island as much or more than the marsh. Nor was there any fog on the mainland. It was as if nature itself felt obliged to hide the act, a repeal of a friendly amendment to its varied beauty by our stunted need for conformity.
Should clarify for those unfamiliar with Great Newbury: The Pink House had no neighbors in the real physical sense. Indeed, it’s solitary stance in a flat marsh, set far enough back from the road to give it a mystique, is what made it such a cherished subject for painters, photographers, poets, and song-writers, including the legendary local duet, Garmon & Griffunkle, who wrote “House of the Rising Sea” which begins:
There is a house on Great Salt Marsh
They call the House of Pink
Alone along Plum Island’s road
Its legend is distinct
And on in that vein for another nine stanzas. Everyone’s favorite lines, judging from the emphasis put on them when sung at local hoots and clambakes, comes near the end following a call to turn the house into an environmental educational center:
And to show the truth of climate change
We’ll re-name the House of Pink
We’ll call it House of the Rising Sea
Awash in low-tide stink*
Yes, I skipped the pivotal event that happened Monday which proved to be the last gull feather to force the Great Newbury Merger on Wednesday. Folks downtown in the Port may have thought it was the two people screaming “propaganda” and “lies” outside the small cinema to protest the showing of the Palestinian film, No Other Land, which just won the Oscar for Best Documentary of 2024. Happened on my day off, but I had been answering attacks on the cinema’s social media page which made me wonder how many films I’ve shown there since I joined in 1998. About 1,200 I’d say. How many with Jewish themes, characters, and settings? Dozens. How many Palestinian? Five at most.
Old Eddie happened to be plodding by with his cane and thought the two were selling some new fast food with “paprika and fries.” His Eastern European taste buds went off like the lights on a pinball machine, but he was disappointed when they stormed away. Not to worry, he and his Balkan buds were content to settle for a bag of popcorn.
But that was all noise signifying nothing compared to what happened in City Hall–or should I say the former City Hall–Monday night. The City Council fired the city attorney but a 6-3 vote. After nearly two years of non-stop evidence before their eyes and ears that the woman was serving the mayor’s interest regardless of what the ward and at-large representatives had to say, they finally hit delete.
Nell and Meredith were at the meeting a year ago when she advised that the results of an investigation could not be made public. More than one incredulous councilor reminded her that defamation of character was the subject of said investigation, which is by definition public. They may as well have been talking to a door knob. Nell and Meredith wondered why the lawyer wasn’t fired on the spot. Of course, they’re old enough to remember a time when she would have.
Saw them both with husbands Wally and Wilbur in Taffy’s having breakfast this morning. Didn’t have the heart to tell them that the lawyer has been re-instated because the City Council president, Rip Van Comatose, missed a deadline for notification. The mayor immediately took time out of his busy schedule of photo-ops to pounce on the technicality and re-hired her. By law, the lawyer who says that truth cannot be made public will remain the Port’s lawyer for another 12 months.
And so it was on Wednesday that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts finally intervened. Month’s ago, a group of us here in what is now the burough of Plum Island met with similar groups in West Newbury, Byfield, and Newbury proper, all alarmed by the growing menace of the Port to its neighbors. We hatched a plan to reunite as a single municipality which Newbury was in colonial times before the Port and West Newbury went their own way and Plum Island was divvied up like Franklin’s snake. Only Byfield loyally remained, but it is now equal to the others as one of Great Newbury’s five buroughs. Such was the plan we sent to Boston.
To our great and delighted surprise, our petition several months ago was soon joined by Rand McNally. The world-renowned cartographer, who used to summer here on Plum Island, pointed out that, with Great Barrington in its southwest corner, the map of Massachusetts would be pleasingly, artistically balanced by having Great Newbury in its northeast corner. Indeed, his slogan no doubt carried the day with legislators in Boston:
Carto-Poetry – It beats Crypto-Currency!
And that’s the news from Great Newbury where the river is strong, the tides are long, and the land, every acre of it, is cause for a song.
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*The complete lyrics to “House of the Rising Sea” with black dots I can’t figure out how to delete but which I hope you can ignore:
There is a house on Great Salt Marsh They call the House of Pink
Alone along Plum Island’s road
Its legend is distinct
A writer for the New York Times
She wanted to move in
But when she learned why it was built
She found a tale of sin
A marriage lay in ruins
A divorce that was a fright
The wife, she won a brand new home
But hubby built in spite
Oh, that was many years ago
Before the wires and pipes
And so it began attracting
Cameras and artist types
But no one lives there anymore
And with threat of Rising Sea
The Pink House now is targeted
For demolition soon to be
But then there is Plum Island
So rich in history Why not let the Pink House tell it,
As the House of the Rising Sea?
Oh, Newbury, tell your people, Not to let the house be done, And avoid the sin and misery That would curse us, every one
Instead, let’s add a platform
To observe the wildlife all
With plaques and charts to tell those tales And not hear the wrecking ball
And to show the truth of climate change
We’ll re-name the House of Pink
We’ll call it House of the Rising Sea
Awash in low-tide stink
There is a house on Great Salt Marsh They call the House of Pink
Alone along Plum Island’s road
Its legend is distinct
Facing southeast from the Plum Island Causeway. Plum Island is the horizon, left to center. Photo by Jim Fenton.
For those of us who never quite left The Sixties, there’s something nostalgic about so many demonstrations in so many cities from coast to coast.
Call it bittersweet as we indulge in feeling young again while protesting injustices, some of which we thought we had erased a half-century ago.
Difference is that, back then, we gathered to protest one issue at a time. On Saturday in Newburyport, signs supporting Ukraine, others for Social Security, and as many more condemning and ridiculing Elon Musk vied for the lead among other signs promoting science, education, and other human endeavors now threatened by the Republican Party and their playbook, Project 2025.
A few signs asked motorists on High St. to “Toot for Democracy,” and most drivers did. Some went by with an occasional beep-beep while others laid on the horn for as long as it took them to pass a little over 300 demonstrators who lined Newburyport’s busiest through-street. Many added thumbs-up along with hoots and howls, as would most passengers. Trump trolls were so few and far between, six at most during the two-hour event, that they drew unanimous laughter and ridicule–especially the one with the Trump cardboard cut-out leaning from the passenger side window.
If that guy happens to be reading this, I’m curious: Do you also have the blow-up doll?
The horns and cheers made for a loud two hours. For some reason, someone brought a boombox to play what was intended to be inspirational music–upbeat protest tunes such as “People Get Ready” and “Get Together,” just to name two that I’m old enough to recognize. Call me old, but in addition to being completely unnecessary, there’s something gauche about recorded music at a live event. When protesting, if we can’t say it, sing it, play it, or write it on a sign ourselves, it shouldn’t be there.
Thankfully, the warmer weather will allow any of Newburyport’s many musicians to fill that role. As for yesterday, we were bundled up in coats with warm hats pulled down over our ears. Also in gloves, which I neglected to bring, only to be bailed out by a friend who had an extra pair in his pocket.
In The Sixties, for me, they were all anti-war demonstrations, and I don’t doubt that someone reading this might say that they were all for civil-rights. True, there might have been an incident that triggered a day’s march–such as the invasion of Cambodia or the verdict in the Chicago 7 trial–but they were all pieces in the same puzzle. For us, the Vietnam War, for others Civil Rights, and soon after, Women’s Rights.
Today, each piece seems a puzzle all by itself–until we realize that they all fit tightly in the frame of Project 2025. We were encouraged to bring signs that called attention to–or ridiculed–whatever we chose. The nightly news is nightly filled with calls for chainsaw cuts to all government services with a sprinkling of attempts to re-hire those just fired. Consequences usually are unforeseen to those who refuse to look, and their unspoken motive becomes loud and clear. When a friend asked her ten-year-old son what her sign should say, he suggested directing a question to the powers that be rather than any accusation or complaint:
Why are you doing this?
The only answer they have–to eliminate fraud and waste–rings hollow now that we see the shutting down of medical services, the lay-offs of veterans, the closures of national parks, the wild increases in prices of consumer goods, and numerous other consequences of what is nothing less and nothing other than a full-scale, across the foreign and domestic board attempt to privatize the entire United States government.
All while they have not uncovered a single instance of fraud. Considering that any “waste” that isn’t fraud is a purely subjective label, then the two words are applied to anything in the way of of Project 2025‘s goal–to privatize everything.
What popular support they have owes to decades of conditioning by the Republican Party amplified by Fox News–and other peddlers of paranoia posing as news sources–that all government is bad. It really set in with Ronald Reagan’s smiling pronouncement that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In 1994, Newt Gingrich doubled down on that by replacing the smile with a scowl.
Still, for all the cuts they proposed, neither of them advocated total erasures of programs and personnel serving veterans, the elderly, the disabled, children in poverty. Furthermore, there certainly was no talk of abandoning our role as leader of the free world and aligning ourselves with dictatorships.
Now that the nation is seeing its own devolution unfold, both at home and on the world stage, the shock is setting in. And its expression is demonstrations we now see daily in cities both large and small, as well as in town hall meetings where Republican voters are now willing to say things that their elected Republican congresspeople do not want to hear. And the Republican National Committee’s response to this sudden, wide-spread public exercise of the First Amendment’s provision for the right of petition? Don’t hold meetings.
At yesterday’s rally, a friend my age–a fellow veteran of the Mayday demonstration in DC, 1971–said he worried that so few young people were present. Maybe that is why I felt nostalgic. Back then, it was all young people because the historical cause of the Vietnam War–America’s indulgence in colonialism–was so far rooted in the past, that our parents and grandparents didn’t notice it.
You can’t say that about Project 2025. A plan to turn democracy into a facade for a mega-corporation, a president into a CEO, cities into markets, citizens into consumers–all of it something brand new. This time around, it’s seen for what it is right away, so it stands to reason that the first wave of protests are filled with old folk who keenly see and feel Project 2025‘s threat to Social Security.
By the time schools break for summer vacation, with demonstrations still ongoing, the threats to the environment, education, healthcare, and most everything else will be impossible for anyone over the age of 14 to miss.
It is, after all, their future–just as in The Sixties, it was ours.
A friend of mine tells of his grandson’s choice of a saint’s name for his Confirmation, a rite of passage in the Catholic Church, administered to us at age fourteen, give or take.
The boy selected Blaise, the Catholic saint who, in the early 4th Century, made the rounds in Lesser Armenia, now part of Turkey, as a physician venerated for his healing power and protection from throat diseases. He was also a bishop who would be martyred for spreading the faith.
Blaise is an admirable choice. Tells us that the kid hopes to do good work, be of use, contribute to the health and well-being of others. No wonder that, when he watched the news with grandpa, he made comparisons of our president’s and vice-president’s treatment of Ukraine’s president to passages in Matthew, Luke, and John describing the ambush set for Jesus by the chief priests, scribes, and elders called by the high priest, Caiaphas, to consult on how “they might take Jesus by subtlety, and kill him” (Matthew 26: 3-4).
And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar…
The kid sure did his homework. Confirmation does require Bible study, and so he clearly sees the parallels today–quite unlike the Bible-thumpers who applaud cuts to cancer research, an end to the aid of surplus food to starving people across the globe, and mass deportation of immigrants seeking refuge from violence and a decent future for their children. Like the young boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, he says it aloud even though he is too young to so much as suspect that the larger target of either story–Hans Christian Andersen’s in 1837 or Soviet America’s in 2025–is not the nakedly delusional man running the show, but the numerous cowards who support and allow him to do so.
Long lapsed Catholic though I am, I recall the sacrament bestowed on my eighth-grade class and our choice of the names of saints we accepted as role models as we approached adolescence and, hopefully, adulthood.
I chose “Oliver” figuring there had to be a saint with that name, but my chosen role model at the time was the very real race car driver Ollie Silva at the Pines Speedway in Groveland where I spent many a summer Saturday night during those years. A native of nearby Haverhill, he won more often than not, and he was hugely popular, regarded as a hero no doubt largely due to his rivalry with the detested Don MacLaren of faraway Chelmsford or a place of some such ugly name. Just the sight of them–wiry Silva always smiling with his flowing jet-black hair, dark complexion, and shades; the hulking MacLaren always scowling his lily-white face under his crew-cut–suggested the timeless battle of Good vs. Evil.
Turned out there was no St. Oliver at the time. However, one Oliver Plunkett of Ireland’s County Meath was beatified in 1920, and had his case for canonization opened in 1951. So it appears, at least in retrospect, that his sainthood in 1975 was deemed inevitable, and the kind Fathers at St. Augustine Church in Lawrence, Mass., let me claim him ten years ahead of time–even though I had no idea who he was, much less what he did.
Looking at the record now, I can take some pride in having chosen–albeit unknowingly–a 17th Century Irish martyr in the cause for Irish independence, or at least for the right of Catholics to exist. Accused in what the English called “The Popish Plot,” Oliver is believed to be the last martyr executed in London.
St. Oliver spoke truth to a monarchy; I poke fun at a monomaniac. St. Oliver was murdered for talking too much; I am ignored for writing too long. Maybe I should be thankful for living in an age that is attention-span free.
Be that is it may, yes, my choice of “Oliver” as a Confirmation Name had a bit twist. And my 14-year-old self is certainly far less admirable than my friend’s grandson who not only chose an honorable name and did the research to deserve it, but who already, at his breathtakingly young age, applies it to this twisted world he now looks to untwist for his own and future generations.
But I’m not throwing myself completely under St. Blaise’s ox-cart or St. Oliver’s horse-drawn wagon. Not at all, as my obsession with race-cars was all about the battle I will fight to the day the checkered flag waves for me: Good vs. Evil.
No surprise given what all of us have witnessed since inauguration day. Moreover, since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, numerous posts on social media have compared America’s political climate to that of Germany in the 1930s.
What struck me was the echo of a headline I put on a letter to the same paper in February, 2011. The editor changed it to “Another look at hate speech,” likely for the sake of internet search engines.*
Thinking I should find it and send it to last week’s writer, I made the mistake of reading it. Here I am trying to concoct commentaries on recent events–the Oval Office ambush, The Oscars, the Hate of the Union Address–and I start time-tripping between 2011 and 1939.
But I found it relevant enough to revive it now. Here it is with italicized asides and updates:
That 1939 Feeling
To the Editor:
What if “hate speech” is a decoy?
This occurs to me after hearing a woman recall childhood friends whose parents refused to let them play with a Jewish classmate. The current anger over immigration gives her “that 1939 feeling.”
Through the 30s we were divided on whether to enter the war—and polarized when isolationists found a scapegoat for both the turmoil in Europe and depression at home.
Many history texts offer Fr. Charles Coughlin, notorious for his weekly anti-Semitic broadcasts on radio, as an aberrational villain.
And what will history say of Fox News?
But he had plenty of company, including Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell who, in 1939, began insisting that those who urged stopping Hitler “cannot be real Americans, because real Americans think of their country first.”
Just this weekend, House Speaker Michael Johnson dismissed people at town halls all around the country asking inconvenient questions of Republican officials as “paid Democrats.” His boss, of course, vilifies all opposition as “evil,” and the whole lot of Republicans continue to discount the vote of 2020 as rigged. “Radical Left Lunatics” is the term he used in his “Hate of the Union” while pointing at the Democrats’ half of the hall–and while the other half stood to applaud and cheer. As in Cardinal O’Connell’s 1939, anyone who opposes or so much as questions them does not count. As far as MAGA is concerned, we may not even exist.
The 13-year-old boy is offered as a prop for beating cancer–days after the same man calling for applause canceled cancer research. Another prop in law enforcement garb smiles and waves at the cheering crowd–days after the MC pardoned J6 felons convicted of beating police officers.
Those children still fighting cancer, and those officers beaten at the Capitol four years ago, none of them count. Only those who can be used as props, and look how happy they are!
In his book, The Rascal King, Jack Beatty notes that O’Connell used coded phrases—“certain expatriates” and “loud accents”—for Jews. By the end of 1939, something new began happening “in the streets of Dorchester and Mattapan as gangs of Irish Catholic boys set upon and beat up Jewish boys.”
Notice how every mention in the Hate of the Union of immigration cited “murderers, rapists, and drug dealers.” And none of them are called “refugees,” but rather “illegal aliens.” Call it rhetorical impressionism: He describes a few, but by repetition, creates the impression that it is most, if not all.
Did O’Connell order the violence? No. Did he intend it? Probably not. If that’s as far as we consider cause/effect relationships, then O’Connell is blameless.
Apply that standard to [the mass shooting in 2011 in] Tucson, and so are politicians who call for “Second Amendment remedies” for what they see as a government bent on “taking away our liberties.”
This was written weeks after the attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tuscon which turned into a mass shooting, killing six and wounding another 13, including Giffords whose head injury forced her out of Congress and into years of recovery. Haven’t heard the phrase lately, but at the time, numerous Republicans were advocating “Second Amendment remedies” for political realities ordinarily decided by elections or by due process of those who have been elected.
That’s not hate. That’s paranoia, the same paranoia exploited among Boston’s working class Irish through the Depression.
Avoid the decoy of her “reload,” and Sarah Palin’s denunciation of Michelle Obama’s call for healthy diets for children—“a nanny state run amok”—will reveal far more.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, the chilling fact of death threats tells us less than the calculated fabrication of “death panels.”
Republicans’ berserk claim that Obamacare called for “death panels,” deliberately insinuating that such things would decide when elderly and infirm people should die. In truth, the reference was to how a family prepares for the death of a loved one, taking advice from medical professionals. Classic Republican “something out of nothing.”
Until we get past the decoy of hate, and start questioning the source of paranoia, America will remain in the crosshairs of 1939.
This, folks, is something out of something. We have remained in the crosshairs, and on Jan. 20, the trigger was pulled as forcefully–and with more accuracy–as it was on Jan. 6, 2021.
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*For the record, that headline was one of perhaps five or six of the 500 or so I have written that was ever changed.
*Yes, this shirt gains many compliments when I wear it behind the cinema’s concession counter,
While doing my taxes last weekend, I worked my way into a $790 payment while expecting about a $200 refund. Went to bed tossing and turning, but found the error the next day.
Meanwhile, I had almost forgotten a two-day stay in the hospital three weeks ago, and I knew that, despite Medicare parts A & B, and despite switching from the deny-and-drop enterprise known as UnitedHealthcare to a more reputable plan, I would take a hit. And I knew it wouldn’t be cheap.
The email arrived this morning. It wasn’t the size of the balance that knocked me back in my chair. It was the balance of the number. Is there such a thing as numerical karma?
When I viewed the itemized details adding all the way up past $13K, the amount left for me to pay out of pocket seemed fair to someone who has done a fair share of public writing calling for universal healthcare and a single-payer system such as civilized nations around the world all have. In 2008, eight years before I qualified for Medicare, it was the reason for the only time I ever busked for a political candidate, adding an Obama sign to my music stand in Portsmouth, in the swing-state of New Hampshire.
Any system that allows for anyone to profit from malignant disease is itself a malignant disease.
While writing this I learn of Jeff Bezos’ directive for the Washington Post‘s editorial pages to be limited to columns that promote “personal liberties and free markets,” which are the polite terms for the libertarianism and capitalism that he means. How strange it is to recall that, in 2009 and 2010, we were so close to universal health care, or at least expanding Medicare. Today we have our fingers crossed–though we’d do better to have our fists raised–while attempts to privatize the US Postal Service and the National Parks unfold before our eyes.
And to spite our memory–if we still have one–of history. The Postal Service, along with birthright citizenship, is written into the Constitution. And the National Parks are one of two reasons that Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore–the other being his Big Stick crackdown on the Robber Barons and their monopolies, a legacy erased by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010.
Now here I am living in a country where we stand to lose all of that, and I thought to myself how quickly and gladly I’d write a check for $790 if only it could all be restored, if we could hit a reset button to November 4 and take the next day’s national IQ test all over again.
Then came this morning’s email. I swear I’m not flipping out at the idea of having to part with a few bills, as my friend in Wyoming used to put it. It’s just that, as we often hear, I should have been careful what I wished for.
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Market Square, Portsmouth, N.H., first weekend of November, 2008. Photo by Terry Weddleton
Mouth of the River 