In and Out of Time

‘Tis the season when many of my friends and allies go up in flames over a misunderstanding that I attribute to the modern habit of scrolling through headlines and photos with no attention to any details that explain them.

Quick reactions are then posted on social media and gain immediate agreement from people who are hearing it for the first time. The case I have in mind surfaces only in December. Some years it might cough up a little smoke, but it is more often dormant. Last erupted in 2018 and it is high on the Richter Scale this week.

When I notified one poster of the mistake, she seemed to agree but did not retract the post which continued to gain agreement and generate outrage. Many condemned the national magazine targeted by the post, some comments calling it another reason to distrust what’s ridiculed as mainstream media.

I hear the Kremlin pays well for such work.

Be that as it may, here’s a column I had in the local paper on Presidents Day, 2019, which I have tweaked here and there to bring it up to date. The term “Individual-1” was the designation for Donald Trump in the Mueller Report:

Nativity of a Nation

Six years ago this week, when the editor of Time appeared on the Today Show to announce 2018’s “Person of the Year,” he explained the runner-up by saying that American presidents always contend.

Would have been more useful to explain why the president at the time, the runner-up, was not the choice.

Since the designation began 97 years ago, presidents (eight times as presidents-elect) have been named 23 times—eight of them twice, FDR thrice.*

If we allow for 1944, nine years before General Dwight David Eisenhower entered politics, the tallies increase to 24 and nine.

Only three presidents not selected since 1927 include Calvin Coolidge, whose business-of-America-is-business sent us headlong into the Great Depression, and the ultimate personification of the Peter Principle, Herbert Hoover, who took the blame.

If Time restricted the choice to a single individual, our current nightmare actually told the truth when he claimed to be the only logical choice in 2018.

More in narcissistic character, he thought it an award of approval. But that’s a mistake many make, year after year, no matter how often Time reminds us that it’s the person having the most impact—”for better or worse.”

How else could past recipients include Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin (twice), Ayatollah Khomeini, and—though not at all murderous, surely more insidious—Newt Gingrich?

Instead, Time dodged a certain wave of revulsion in 2018 by naming, as it had seven times in the past 16 years, a group:

Journalists reporting on the world’s most repressive totalitarian dictatorships. All while Individual-1 allied America with dictators who wanted to—and in at least one case did—kill them.

Another option was co-recipients: 1972 with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; 1983 with Ronald Reagan and short-lived Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. As a model for 2018, they had 1998 with Bill Clinton and Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

Months before Attorney General Bill Barr whitewashed a damning indictment into “complete exoneration,” how did Time forego the surreal juxtaposition in 2018 of interminable tantrumps with the sphinxlike, no nonsense efficiency of Robert Mueller?

As for a group, Individual-1’s supporters had more impact than journalists who stood up to him and his blood-soaked allies.

Think of the photos: Countless contorted-faced, clenched-fisted white folk yelling from Time’s cover, signs and T-shirts laced with Confederate flags, iron crosses, swastikas, some superimposed on—and, oh by the way, defacing—American flags.

T-shirts saying “Thank You, Russia!” or showing a noose and a tree with the word “journalist” would reinforce the point. Curt Schilling might wear one while railing at the locked (to him) door of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Another T-shirt they wear like the proverbial badge of honor is Hillary Clinton’s “Deplorables,” which Time could have dubbed them, a la 2018’s “Guardians” and 2017’s “Silence Breakers” (later #MeToo). Or what Individual-1 called them the night of their neo-Nazi rally in Virginia: “Very Fine People.”

Taking a cue from an always reliable sign of the times, Time might have coined “Toxividuals,” morphing his designation in the Mueller Report with the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, “toxic”—a selection that captured America, 2018.

Whatever the name selected or photos used, focus on the supporters of this third president of the Confederate States of America–after Jefferson Davis and Andrew Johnson–would have confronted readers with something not just in the White House, but permeating America from coast to coast.

Not a mistake to be corrected by an election or an investigation, but a modern-day mash-up of the early 20^th Century Brown Shirts, the mid-19^th Century Know Nothings, and the Flat Earth Society for centuries out of mind.

And what could be more fascinating than interviews with people who believe that coal is “clean,” that barbed wire is “beautiful,” that Finland “rakes its forests,” that teargas is “very safe” in the eyes and lungs of children, that windmills cause cancer, that Democrats control the weather and sent hurricanes Helene and Milton through red states of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina?

For a December issue, they could pose with their Nativity creches—Arabs and refugees removed, Mary and Joseph stamped “Return to Sender” in the outgoing mail, Baby Jesus kept in a private contractor’s jar by the door.

As the wags on social media say, only the jackass and sheep remain.

Third president never selected was Gerald Ford, best remembered for his pardon of Nixon: “Our long national nightmare is over.”

Too bad Ford has left us. Time would surely pick him four years from now if he could win the presidency and say it again. And most Americans, approvingly or grudgingly, would call it an “honor.”

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*American presidents selected since the 1927 inception of Time‘s Person of the Year (called Man of the Year or Woman of the Year until 1999):

FDR 3 (32, 34, 41)

Truman 2 (45, 48)

Eisenhower 2 (44 as a general leading the allied forces in Europe, 59)

JFK 1961

LBJ 2 (64, 67)

Nixon 2 (71, 72 w/Henry Kissinger)

Carter 1976

Reagan 2 (80, 83 w/USSR Premier Uri Andropov)

Bush the Elder 1990

Clinton 2 (92, 98 w/Special Prosecutor Ken Starr)

Bush the Younger 2 (00, 04)

Obama 2 (08, 12)

Trump 2 (16, 24)

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/time-person-of-the-year/

Coincidence or Algorithmism?

On Sunday, I attended an event and heard the main speaker call dedicated activist groups “small but mighty.”

I recognized the reference thanks to a diminutive villager and singer at King Richard’s Faire who often wore the shirt at cast-call before she climbed into Renaissance garb.

Made without mention of Shakespeare, “small but mighty” came near the end of the event, and so while rising to leave, I turned to two nearby friends, a married couple, and let them know. But I couldn’t name the play and guessed, Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like it. “Has to be one of the comedies.”

On Monday, my newsfeed included an ad for literary t-shirts. First and foremost was:

https://tshirthodoca.com/product/and-though-she-be-but-little-she-is-fierce-shakespeare/

Has my brain been tapped? Unnerving though it was, I laughed at the ask-and-you-shall-receive immediacy–and the exact re-wording–of what I hope is pure coincidence and passed it on to the couple. I’ve heard of opening Pandora’s Box, but I opened a Litmus Test: She worried that “someone is listening in.” His reply could not have been more cheerful: “The web heard you wondering which play it was from, and kindly gave you the answer!”

Yes, the line is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy that may qualify as the Bard’s weirdest play, spoken by Helena in act 3, scene 2, referring to her friend Hermia. When I added that, the reply was this: “Our daughter named her cat Hermia, and she was little but fierce.”

Before and after that exchange, I was drafting a column for Martin Luther King Day for the local paper. Yes, six weeks early, but I had an idea prompted by a question posed to the speaker on Sunday. Already drafting it in my head on the drive home, but up against a deadline for another project that night, I had to draft it next day.

In it, I describe and quote a sermon King delivered in Lima, Ohio. When I had a complete draft, I went clicking for emails and messages which included a friend request from a friend of a friend as often happens on social media. As always, I checked a profile before approving, and there it was: “From Lima, Ohio.”

Is it possible that the name of a place in my unpublished and unseen-by-anyone-but-me Word file was caught by an algorithm and connected via social media to a woman from that place, prompting her to send a friend request?

Nor could my remark while leaving a church be anywhere near the internet. And yet…

And yet it feels so much like other “coincidences” that should be suspected. I’m an avid, lifelong cribbage player, so it was only a matter of time before I mentioned the game in an email not long ago with my most frequent opponent. Next day I was looking at this:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1341/crib-wars

No fan of gimmicks, she was appalled, as was I. She even sounded a bit miffed that I dared send it. But I inflict it on you to make a point: As soon as I mention it, it’s known to cyber-advertisers. Unlike this week’s surprises, I had put it in an email, so I hardly noticed or cared. First noticed this 15 years ago when I reviewed a Jethro Tull concert opened by Procol Harum. I was already a member of a Tull fan group and seeing ads for their merch, but the next day I began seeing ads for Procol Harum.

I can only wonder if it was due to my enthusiasm for them, the only opening act to gain a call for an encore in the 30-plus Tull concerts I’ve attended since 1971. Interesting to note that, in the column, I made made bare mention of The Rolling Stones and The Who but received no ads for them.

And now I’m bombarded with ads for nativity scenes. When drafting my Christmas column last week about displays of refugees seeking shelter on the lawns and in the homes that fly the flag of a candidate promising mass deportations of refugees seeking shelter, I wanted to know where the figurines are manufactured.

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

For that, I get ads offering them at bargain rates. Call it comic relief. The algorithms have no sense of satire. They’d try selling guns to a nun if the nun wrote “gun” more than once in an email.

What’s new–and what’s worrying–is that I’m now receiving ads and possibly friend requests that appear too specific to be coincidental. We’ll see what this account you are now reading might draw. If I start seeing ads for services providing encrypted text or web secrecy, I’ll ask the algorithms to let you know.

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A Return to Music

Maybe I’ve been waiting for this day.

Or this weekend that began Friday night with the annual holiday celebration at the Custom House Maritime Museum. The speeches were encouraging, greetings and introductions were cheerful, the buffet satisfying, the Ipswich Ale delicious. And the music was delightful, ranging from The Newburyport Ukulele Group playing carols upstairs to the Sea Dogs, an a cappella quintet belting out sea shanties downstairs. At times I wondered if I had walked into a folk festival.

Also singing were members of the Newburyport Choral Society. All of it very joyous, especially with a conductor who turned to laugh at us following “o’er the fields we go.” Maybe it was the ale, but while others laughed and sang, I was choking on nostalgia. With the exception of “Jingle Bells” and “Winter Wonderland,” every song they sang was in my holiday season repertoire as a busker a short distance away in Market Square.

Not only that, but Christmas carols were what taught me to play. Lacking the patience to repeat scales and arpeggios, I noticed as soon as I picked up the instrument that carols are close to scales. In fact, the opening of “Joy to the World” is a scale descending, while “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “We Three Kings” bounce half way up and down scales. Others serve the same repetitive purpose of developing what musicians call “chops” while giving a novice the satisfaction of playing recognizable songs.

That happened in Salem in the early 70s. By the time I first played Newburyport in 1982, my repertoire was mostly Celtic and Baroque, with carols reserved for December and often played with fingerless gloves. To play them any other time of year would be bad manners.

Took a while for the Chamber of Commerce to realize that busking is not panhandling, but before long they left me alone, and I thank the city’s police for gaining me that time. (In Salem it was the other way around, but that’s another story.) Since then the city and its tourists have been generous–all the way to 2019 when I last busked.

Paying jigs and reels–and vivaces and allegros–on a wind instrument can be an athletic event, and by 2019 I was no longer an athlete, if I ever was. Still, I always thought I would do it to the end. Quoting Ian Anderson, I told anyone who asked, “Death may beckon, but retirement does not.”

Little did I know that there was a third possibility for the final curtain. Covid closed my show. It was impossible to play while wearing a mask.

On Sunday, the Museum of Old Newbury hosted a duet from Gloucester called O’Carolan Etc., named for “the last of the great Celtic bards,” as the late and lamented Brian O’Donovan called him. Turlough O’Carolan was a blind harpist who traveled Ireland non-stop it seems and wrote songs for all his hosts and for whatever amused him along the way. He was prolific with compositions that fuse traditional Celtic with Italian Baroque brought to Dublin by Francesco Geminiani.*

Call it Gaelic & Garlic. Ethnically speaking, I, too, am 50/50 Irish-Italian, which is likely why I came under O’Carolan’s spell in the mid-70s. Not only have I lost count of how many of his tunes I play, I’ve lost count of how many made me think they were written for me three centuries ahead of time. That’s a comment I’ve heard from other flautists, fiddlers, and mandoliners.

While I haven’t played a carol or busked at all in six years, I’m still belting out O’Carolan at King Richard’s Faire and in Salem’s Haunted Happenings every fall. Some are in my wheelhouse, allowing me to improvise and segue into other songs. At faire, I play a few with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers in wild and wacky tempos. Others aim straight for the tear duct. For others I need the sheets, calling for a caution that can be parlayed into elegance.

And there’s at least a dozen O’Carolan songs that I tried but could not deliver in any convincing way, and so gave up. That, despite a few being among my favorites. One of these met my ear when I approached the room where Celtic Etc. was playing. When they finished, I said “Nice!” When they looked up, I named the tune, “Planxty Hewlett.”**

Those of us who play O’Carolan are taken by surprise by people who know the titles. I briefly described my connection to the music so they would be quick to play another. I hoped they might ask for a request, which would have been “O’Carolan’s Draught,” a sweet, graceful song with swagger that began every busk of mine since the Clinton Administration. Instead, the guitarist turned to the fiddler and said, “O’Carolan’s Draught.”

The room was not set up for a concert. No one was seated save for the musicians, and most people were stopping in for ten or fifteen before wandering into adjacent rooms where the music carried. I went to a wall opposite the duo and faced the window. Not to look at any traffic on High Street, but so no one would see me fighting back tears. The carols two nights earlier no doubt weakened any defense I might have conjured, but I managed to be silent, and no one was nearby.

Before long I was able to face the players and smile approval at their uptempo romps, laughing all the way along their bouncing triplets and octave jumps, all so lucid and smooth. When they finished, I thanked them for something more than the music played and the nostalgia offered.

Buskers can never be certain of a date until the date arrives, as weather always has the final say, but it will happen by the end of March that I will be out of retirement playing on Newburyport’s Inn Street Mall.

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*My first book, Pay the Piper!, includes a biographical sketch of Turlough O’Carolan.

**”Planxty” is a word apparently coined by O’Carolan to mean “in honor of” or “hail.”

Yours for just $950: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/newburyport-piper-barbara-busenbark.html

Hollywood’s Holiday

While we prepare for the holidays, Hollywood, as always will release the big-budget, star-studded films that open with Oscar-buzz.

For years you have surely noticed how many open on Christmas Day and wondered why theaters would target a day associated with family gatherings. The logic is rather simple. The industry figures that most of those families gather on Christmas Eve for dinner and song and good cheer, followed by breakfast and opening of presents on the morning of the day itself, and then there’s lunch. The logic holds that, after lunch on the 25th, people are now getting tired of each other, but it’s Christmas and they want to stay together without having to listen and respond to each other. Plus, there’s a lot of good food and drink remaining to put on that dinner table. What could fill that void better than a movie?

This year it’s a biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, that figures to meet that need by opening on Christmas Day.

From another angle, it’s saving the best for last. Or, more to the point, making Hollywood’s best efforts fresh in our minds by qualifying for a year’s Oscars in the final week of that year. This also guarantees that most of their audiences will see these films in the first two months of the next year, which takes us right to the time of the Oscar awards ceremony.

If you ever wondered why you and so many others haven’t been able to see most of the nominees before the list is announced, or even before the winner is picked, this is why.

With apologies for that, it is also why I do see most of them before a ceremony. Some, especially the hyped-up block-busters based on spectacle and fantasy, such as Wicked and Gladiator, are films that I avoid. Easy to do because they are never on the Screening Room’s menu. As for the rest, let’s just say that I’m no fan of special effects, car chases, explosives, or slackers. In a category all its own are films with F-bombs punctuating every phrase in every sentence. No, I’m not a prude, but in this case I have to say, “Fuck that!”

Last month, the Screening Room ran Anora about a sex-worker who may or may not have gotten married in one of those Las Vegas “chapels.” More accurate title would have been Annoyingra. While in the lobby that first night, I was thinking that if you took out the obscenities and the screaming, you’d have a silent film which might be called Somewhat Less But Still Annoyingra. Unable to kill the sound–which would have improved the film but prompted an audience rebellion–I, for the first time ever since becoming an SR projectionist in 1998, actually considered calling in sick. But I must admit that audiences, including men and women my age and older, praised it.

Last year, all ten nominees for Best Picture played the Screening Room. I saw them all, most of them more than once, and told anyone who would listen that all ten were worthy of the award.

Nominations are at least a month away, but I’m quite certain I have seen at least four films that will be on the list for the top award. All four are worthy. My last blog reviewed A Real Pain. Only reason I reviewed that but not Lee or Conclave or Small Things Like These is that I wasn’t able to view them until the end of their Screening Room run. Here’s three short reviews:

Academy members may pick Small Things because the story is told more visually than in dialogue, and because it is two stories. In the foreground we have a man paralyzed by his conscience and struggling to act, while in the background we see and hear scenes from Ireland’s infamous Magadeline Laundries that turned “fallen women” into slaves for three centuries ending just 30 years ago. At times, we overhear the horror even when it’s out of view, a device that made last year’s German film, The Zone of Interest, a contender.

Conclave, a thriller from start to finish, fast-paced despite its contemplative setting, will gain the votes of Academy members who favor plot twists, MacGuffins, and superb ensemble acting. Ralph Fiennes will likely gain a nomination for Best Actor, as will Cillian Murphy for Small Things and Keiran Culkin for Real Pain. That’s already a heady line-up, and we have yet to see Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Also recommending Conclave are its parallels to the political, social, and cultural turmoil now erupting around the globe.

My favorite to date is Lee. This was Kate Winslet’s project from the start, and she finished it with a tour de force performance that ranks with the best of Frances McDormand. Really a dual performance portraying the very real Lee Miller as an older woman in the late ’70s and as a young American photo-journalist who broke gender barriers in Berlin 1944-45. Her scenes under bombardment and in the line of fire are memorable enough, but what sticks more than any are her feuds with editors who, while they want to get the story out, do not want to risk upsetting their readers too much.

Lee (Winslet) grabs her graphic photos of victims at a concentration camp: “And what about them! What about upsetting them!”

This week I heard that echoed in Real Pain when Benji cries, “Why does everyone have to be happy all the time?” The same statement describes the dilemmas faced by the coal merchant (Murphy) in Small Things and by cardinals Lawrence (Fiennes) and Bellini (Tucci) in Conclave. Whether mere coincidence or not, it’s spot on that these leading contenders for Oscars all pit the call of conscience against the love of ease. Each of these four films mirrors us, insisting that we answer a question:

For the sake of what is right, for the sake of truth, are we willing to upset the comfortable? Are we willing to upset ourselves?

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Kate Winslet as Lee Miller: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5112584/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_1_nm_6_in_0_q_lee

Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11563598/

21st Century ‘Odd Couple’

Every now and then I watch a movie that I had resolved to avoid. Such is the life of a projectionist who, at times, is too burned out to write or read as I often do.

Maybe it’s my age, but the poster and the ads for A Real Pain led me to interpret the title as a warning label. Nor was I at all curious about Keiran Culkin’s transition from child-actor into roles calling for F-bombs or a film directed by Jessie Eisenberg, the actor who played the annoying Mark Zuckerberg and starred in the even-more-annoying Zombieland.

But into the theater I went after putting the money away and locking the door. Within ten minutes there were at least ten times when Benji’s (Culkin’s) F-bombs might have sent me back out, but I love cinematography that turns a place into a character. Add a soundtrack that was all Chopin ranging from contemplative to thrilling, and I couldn’t leave the guided “Holocaust Tour” that brought Warsaw’s history to life.

Benji is the title character, relentless in his slapstick jokes and upsetting, verging on torturous complaints. Like his cousin Dave (Eisenberg) and others on the tour, I was tolerating him in the opening scenes. That includes a zany photo session Benji stages with the monument for the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 when Jews resisted the Nazis. “Isn’t that disrespectful,” Dave nervously suggests, but their fellow tourists join in one-by-one, breaking out of shells in which they appear to have been for the first time since long before the tour began.

Part of me wanted to walk out as soon as that scene began, but like the retired couple from Shaker Heights, the recent divorcee from LA, the theological student from Winnipeg, and the British tour guide himself, I began appreciating Benji’s antics and diatribes. And it’s right about there you realize you are watching and hearing an examination of the dueling roles of honesty and politeness–and between exuberance and inhibition–in personal relationships.

Writer Eisenberg (yes, he also did the script) shows admirable attention to detail, as when we hear “Shaker Heights” without any mention of Cleveland or Ohio. As much as the next bronze placard the tour members will pause to read on a sidewalk, the name evokes a memory for Americans of a certain age: Shaker Heights was the home of one of the Israeli athletes killed at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

A Real Pain never imposes horror on us, but juxtaposes it with day to day life. Anyone who saw last year’s Oscar-nominated The Zone of Interest will be reminded of the Nazi officer’s family living just over Auschwitz’ wall. Real Pain‘s scene of the tour’s visit to a gas chamber begins with a walk across flat, barren land with Warsaw far back on the horizon. Suggests the tour guide, “Imagine what it would have been like to live just three miles away while this was in operation.” Inside of “this,” we see a corrosive blue stain on the walls and ceilings, as well as a cage stuffed from floor to ceiling with shoes.

Benji is conflicted to the point of contradiction, and with Cousin Dave the film might be titled “21st Century Odd Couple.” Benji can improvise a comedy at a memorial of a tragedy, but he goes to pieces in the train taking them to the next stop. He disappears when the others blithely plan their next day. Dave finds him seated in another car. Cries Benji, “Why does everybody have to be so happy?” It’s a scene that that could have played in other award-winning road-trip buddy films from Thelma & Louise to Little Miss Sunshine and from Rainman to Nebraska.

Echos of past films and literature are rich. Before it’s over, you might wonder if you’ve just seen a modern take on The Canterbury Tales crossed with The Diary of Ann Frank and a protagonist that joins the ranks of Ishmael, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, and Dean Moriarty as all-American misfits.

Had I known that ahead of time, I’d have been as eager to see A Real Pain as I now am to see A Complete Unknown.

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https://www.britannica.com/event/Warsaw-Uprising

The tour walks into a camp: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21823606/

45 Will Look Like a Park Ranger

Simon and Garfunkel nailed it over 50 years ago: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Since the election, we’ve endured a day-by-day litany of wackos, cranks, and sex-offenders nominated (by a wacko, crank sex-offender) for cabinet positions. During commercial breaks, ACLU television ads begin with a maudlin rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” and I want to hit the mute button. How do you overcome something that has just made a comeback from having been overcome? “Overcome” is in the past, folks. Overcame R US.

Face it: Over half the electorate will believe anything that reinforces what they want to believe. So if the guy and party and news source that fan their flames say it’s a landslide, it’s a landslide.

In truth, it was a landslide. Not for one side, but for non-voters, 38% of eligible voters compared to 31% and 30% for the two major party candidates.

Here’s how my friend Helen Highwater, editor of the Saint Volcano Fallout, a monthly mag that covers the Pacific Northwest, put it:

Voters did not simply vote for Trump. Millions (compared to 2020) simply stayed away. The war in Gaza, I think, drove voters away from Harris, away from voting at all, despite the math that made their absence a factor in electing Grump (deliberate sic). Discussion of this topic, in today’s vocabulary, has been “canceled,” due to its confused association with charges of anti-Semitism. In other words, this topic is too fraught with complications for public discussion.

Harris also apparently confused Dem-leaning voters by traveling with Liz Cheney. Could Harris have let Cheney endorse her without the appearance of an embrace?

Change Gaza, Harris, and anti-Semitism to Vietnam, Humphrey, and Communism and she is describing 1968. Back then, though, Republican VP candidate and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew seemed the only clown, and a mean one at that. Now it’s from the top down: DT, JDV, RFK, Musk, Gaetz, Gabbard, Noem, Stephanik, Oz, and who knows what flame-throwers are yet to come?

She’s not alone in emphasizing the tour with Cheney as a bad move. Jon Stewart did the same on the Daily Show, which led me to regard it as the logical culmination of the Democratic Party’s bent on out-Republicaning the Republicans that began with the rise of the Clintons, plural, in 1992.

When I sent that to her, she responded:

Some Senate Rs are daring to pose questions about these jokers, but I can’t picture them denying whatever Grump (again) wants. I dread that will include RFK Jr for HHS. The next 4 years will make 45 look like a park ranger, as 47 proceeds with divine retribution, baby.

What she dreaded became true before I read the email. I offered possible explanations: 1) Rs in change of Sen & House might simply go on recess and let all DT’s fruitcakes take over, uncontested & unchecked. 2) Let congress stop the fruitcakes, then send up the serious, tactical flame-throwers. And 3) Many Ds & wanna-be moderate Rs (Murkowski, Collins, perhaps Thune) will think they can only vote against one, so they’ll nail one (Gaetz or Gabbard, possibly both) and the rest will skate. (Since that missive, Gaetz made it a bit easier for them by his withdrawal.)

As for the rest, I added, even if they screw up their attempt to end all public services and privatize everything, I don’t see how the environment will survive four years of a kakistocracy bent on serving themselves and their corporate donors. I told her of the brush fires here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts and how three of my days in Salem’s witch-trial reenactments were canceled:

So I can now put a price tag on what climate change has cost me. All while we are about to see the erasure of the EPA & NOAA, as well as a US/Russian assault on the Arctic under the banner of Drill, Baby, Drill!

Prediction: Trump will broker peace between Zelenskyy and Putin. Ukraine will keep all its land, but will stay out of NATO, with Russian citizens living in Ukraine symbolically having some rights guaranteed for Putin to save face. DT will be hailed as a miracle peacemaker, and Ukraine will be relieved and happy. Putin? He’ll start sending ships with drills into the Arctic which will be made entirely open to him.

Access to the Arctic was the primary reason for Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was mostly aimed at Hillary Clinton because any Republican would have opened it to Exxon-Mobil, and Exxon-Mobil already had a partnership with Rosneft. With Trump they struck it rich. This is why, for his first Secretary of State, Trump “selected” Rex Tillerson even though he didn’t know him. Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, well-known to the oligarchs in Russia, a place once described by John McCain as “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

The time between the peace accord for Ukraine and Russian drilling in the Arctic will be enough that the American public won’t make the connection, will refuse to believe there is a connection, or in most cases just won’t care.

Highwater joked that what’s left by a melted Arctic might be named for her, and then she drilled into the method behind the madness:

I’ve been thinking the election explanation is more haze than belief… DT emits haze, continually contradicting himself from moment to moment.

And his followers either do not notice or do not care. Worse, they do it themselves. Case in point: Fox “News” hosts praising Kennedy’s talk of America having a more healthy diet were the same people ridiculing Michelle Obama’s initiative for nutritious school lunches.

Now that he has won, and has raised his loyalty requirements, will he leave all gov biz to his underlings and go back to his golf clubs? How long with these loyal underlings last? If Rubio is fool enough to leave the Senate for Foggy Bottom, how long can he last?

Probably irrelevant if they can follow Project 2025’s plan to wreck the federal state. Drowning it in a bathtub has been the aim for decades.

Yes, that was 45’s intent when elected eight years ago, but he was too blundering, careless, and ignorant of how DC works. Today, 47 knows his way around and is too motivated by revenge to let anything slide. Take a look at the company he keeps, his cabinet picks, his advisors, his preferred foreign allies, and Highwater’s crack that 47 will make 45 look like a park ranger seems imminent.

Then again, I would have said “zoo keeper.” It is, after all, all happening here.

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Here I am again, bemused by the fact that blogs featuring useless, pointless, and irrelevant photos of me get ten to twenty times the response on social media as do blogs with pictures of the actual subject. However, the message on this shirt–numerous copies of which shirt in various sizes comprised my entire Christmas shopping list a few years ago–is an honest reaction to my expectations for the next four years, so here I am.
Photo by Herman Melville.

Dodging a Draft of 2024

For much of my adult life, I’ve been told I’m stuck in the past.

Most friends and casual acquaintances intend that as a compliment, but even when it isn’t, I agree. This past year, on top of all the time I spent in the 16th Century Renaissance and in 17th Century witch-trials, I’ve been stuck in 1968.

Comparisons of this year’s election, both before and after the results, to previous American presidential elections are easy to find. Favorites so far have been 1960 and 2000. Some have compared it to the most notorious transfer of power in Europe just under a century ago. As just did happen here, what happened in Germany, 1933, was preceded by a failed coup d’etat and the eventual rise to power of a convicted felon who led that attempt, who turned minorities into scapegoats and convinced the public not to believe a lugenpresse (lying press). For an American comparison, I’m impressed by the current (December) issue of Harper’s which makes a compelling case for 1856 as a forerunner of what we have just experienced.*

Still, my choice is 1968. Like Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden abdicated. Like Richard Nixon, Donald Trump had been elected to a national office, and then voted out. Just as Nixon boasted of “a secret plan to end the war,” Trump claimed–and still claims–he can end Russia’s war on Ukraine. Like Spiro Agnew, JD Vance was–and is–a rabid attack-dog. Like Edmund Muskie, Tim Walz was a breath of fresh air. Like Hubert Humphrey, Kamala Harris walked a fine line trying to reconcile her role in the current administration with establishing plans for her own. And just as the war in Vietnam fractured the Democrats then, the war in Gaza, the cause of campus protests from coast to coast, split them now.

Another similarity may be viewed as a sharp difference. Unlike Israel’s war on Gaza, American troops fought in Vietnam, and most of them had been drafted. After reading and hearing the history of Southeast Asia–French colonization, Ho Chi Minh’s appeal to the US to support independence, the tin and tungsten coveted by US corporations which outweighed that democratic appeal, Eisenhower’s admission that Ho Chi Minh would have won a national, north and south, election–many of us avoided the draft.

And so the slur “draft dodgers” named a target of Republicans as much as the slur “illegal aliens” has been in recent years.

Technically, I was not a dodger. With a student deferment when Nixon turned the draft into a lottery, I drew a high number that guaranteed I’d never be called, and my 2S was reclassified as 1F. But I did send one card back to the draft board in Lawrence with an invitation to “come and get me” before rolling the other into a joint to smoke with a friend and a few hippies at the Newport Jazz Festival. So I wasn’t dodging, I was doing the opposite. I was targeting. I never heard from the draft board, perhaps because my uncle was on it. And that joint was rough, but I think we all got high on the idea.

While there’s nothing like that these days, we do have dodgers. Democracy Dodgers, eligible voters who did not vote, who do not keep themselves informed of civic affairs in a nation that is constitutionally founded on public awareness and participation. In effect, they have forfeited self-governance.

Ironically, they are very loud on Veterans Day and Memorial Day when they pay tribute to those who risk their lives for the USA and our right to self-governance. Their heroes pick up guns for the country, but they can’t even pick up a newspaper. No wonder it’s so easy to convince them that newspapers are all lies.

In these three weeks since the election, many of my liberal friends and allies talk about “reaching out” to Democracy Dodgers, and the need for “kindness” in so doing. They talk in this vein even as the MAGA crowd laughs in their faces and calls all of us weak, which is what they really mean by “woke.” Meanwhile, MAGA also cheers on hatemongers eager to put decorated veterans, dedicated public servants, life-long scientists, city mayors, state governors, members of congress, journalists, health professionals, educators, librarians, anyone who opposes them on trial and in jail–at times insisting on “execution” and “death,” words Trump has used regarding outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

But Democracy Dodgers are oblivious to all of this. Nor do they want to know it, nor will they know it if we limit ourselves to the mild methods of “reaching out” and packaging our appeals in “kindness” rather than taking stands in the uncomfortable necessity of confrontation. These calls for kindness are the liberal equivalent of the conservatives’ vapid “thoughts and prayers.”

The new film Conclave turns on a scene where the conflicted, cautious cardinal in charge of the process to elect a new pope interrupts the most progressive and vocal cardinal’s urgent warnings not to let the Church “go back to the past.” He sighs, “This is not a war…” The liberal snaps back, “But it is a war! And you have to decide!”

Audiences leave the Screening Room visibly moved by the film, many of them making comments such as, “the parallels are impossible to miss.” That scene, that one exchange, is the reason why the parallels exist, and the most relevant of all to America today.

This country has just experienced a Second Civil War. One side has won it while the other side still doesn’t know it happened. But there’s a third side, bigger than each of the others, that let it happen. Some 38% of eligible voters compared to Trump’s 31% and Harris’ 30% who dodged Democracy.

In 1968, the press pointed to a “Generation Gap.” As bad as the division was, most Americans paid attention, at least enough to make democracy work. Nixon won re-election by a landslide in 1972, but his crimes and his paranoia caught up to him in his second term. It took unrelenting protests, heated and confrontational, though interim president Gerald Ford was calm, and the winner in 1976 was peaceful as you please. Jimmy Carter pardoned draft dodgers, and though some grumbled, it was hardly high on the list of reasons why he lost his bid for re-election in 1980.

Prospects for such a resolution this time are not promising. Trump’s crimes and paranoia have already caught up to him, but cases have been dismissed, dropped, at best suspended. Between now and 2026, there’s a chance for Democrats to reclaim both the Senate and the House. But fewer Americans pay attention to mid-terms than to presidential elections. And my side thinks we can wake them up by “reaching out” with “kindness”? A century ago, that would have been called “appeasement.”

Maybe I’m stuck in 1968 because the odds back then were so much better.

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*”The First Punch” by Matthew Karp writing for Harper’s describes a campaign that was:

… frenetic and bewildering, marked by… unholy alliances, bizarre and unbelievable charges that were nevertheless widely believed, dramatic events soon overtaken by yet more dramatic events and then forgotten, apocalyptic rhetoric, and a good deal of vigorous brow-furrowing…

Among those dramatic events was the unprecedented discarding of an incumbent, Franklin Pierce, by his own party, the Democrats who, instead, nominated Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, a northerner who would appease the Slavocracy–and who would be described a century later by fellow Pennsylvanian John Updike as one who:

… projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence.

The Whigs, in their dying breath as a presence in American politics, nominated a former president, crank and bigot Millard Fillmore–hence Harper’s comparison to 2024. The difference is that Fillmore didn’t win, mostly because a brand new party emerged to make its first presidential nomination, a hero of western exploration and exploits, “Pathfinder” John Fremont.

Personalities aside, the main point of the Harper’s article is that the election was held in a deeply divided country plummeting headlong toward civil war.

Money to Mask His Mess

While waiting for Hannibal Lecter to be named the next head of the Food and Drug Administration, I return my attention to Newburyport in hopes of having my lifelong faith in democracy and belief in reality restored.

First item I see is that the City Council might consider a $22,250 pay raise for the mayor, with an added increase of $2,100 for “annual expenses.”

I say let him have it. With that much dough, Sean Reardon can reimburse Newburyport what he has cost it.

Start with the $10K settlement for ripping down flyers placed by Citizens for Responsible Education on the library’s community bulletin board.

Must admit I’d have enjoyed doing that myself, but I’m as decrepit as the 2021 opponent Reardon implied was too old—stuck with the outdated notion that you counter speech you don’t like with speech of your own.

Now add another $12K for an investigation of the public library’s treatment of its volunteers and the head of its Archival Center.

Any competent executive would have inquired in-house, and an instigator or three would have been revealed. The matter would have been resolved with due process for both sides. Nothing would have gone public.

Reardon? He publicly dismissed the vols, in effect declaring, “guilty as soon as charged.”

By any honest measure, this was a coverup from the start. But perhaps our mayor was acting with all good intentions, hoping only to protect anyone on the payroll, naively assuming they were all blameless.

After the recent national election, I envy Reardon’s innocence. The glaring fact is that the accusations were beyond wild—and made against elderly people well-known as mild.

Hence, while making all vols appear guilty, Reardon inadvertently made all the librarians appear suspicious.

Finally, we—I’m among the petition’s signers—have an investigation.

City Council President Ed Cameron sat on it for months. He also single-handedly picked the investigator, free of public comment or discussion, perhaps emulating the mayor for any chance the job comes open.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s chief-of-staff, cited repeatedly by the defamed volunteers in pursuit of the investigation, has resigned to take a job in Western Mass.

But let’s not think for a moment that the resignation of a City Hall official, immediately followed by the long-delayed start of an investigation, and then the hastened, secretive choice of an investigator is anything but coincidence.

Recently, on the Local Pulse radio show, Reardon expressed doubt that anything significant would be revealed—echoing Cameron’s preemptive cop-out that “investigation” was “too strong a word.”

In his innocence, perhaps Reardon meant that the findings won’t cost the city anything.

No one expects that the volunteers will gain any monetary consolation, but given that the head of the Archival Center was forced out of a job, there’s still a chance of a settlement.

Moreover, considering the ages of all involved, Newburyport may yet get whacked by an age discrimination suit.

Still, those prices are no more knowable than the loss that looms if the council approves the mayor’s proposed waiver—partial but generous—of a developer’s water and sewer betterment fee to turn K-Mart into what one local wag has dubbed “Reardonville.”

So, let’s stick with the blunders already paid: $10K + $12K = $22K.

With the $22,250, Reardon can pay off his incompetence in as little time as it has taken him to run up the tab—and have enough left over for a bowl of chowder and a beer at Sea Level Oyster Bar.

Plus, he can campaign for re-election by boasting of the reimbursement in his campaign—as well as claim that he must be re-elected so he can continue making payments as gleefully as he keeps blundering.

And if young turks such as Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard are rejected in DC, they’ll fit right here in City Hall—as if his Machiavellian chief-of-staff never left.

But not Hannibal Lecter. He’s too old.

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Here I am at the foot of my driveway on Plum Island about to mail my contribution to the mainland for the Newburyport mayor’s blunder fund. Photo by Michael Boer (circa 2006):
https://onewe.wordpress.com/

A Feta-Feta Feast

When the cold season rolls in, I start making a casserole I call “Feta Feta Feast” for two of its ingredients. My recipe also calls for fresh basil which, as I picked the leaves off stems last night, has raised a question.

The basil I like comes in those small, thin plastic containers that hang refrigerated in the produce section for three or four dollars apiece. (Please spare me the advice to grow my own. I have neither the patience nor the mind for it.) Last night I took more note of the long, thick, and necessarily curved stems than I have always tossed into the bushes out my window here on the wilds of Plum Island.

By no measure a good cook, I’ve been making a half dozen dishes over and over for at least 40 years, living alone as I do, and so I can make visitors think that I’m a gourmet chef. Even repeat visitors are so fooled so long as they show up just twice or thrice a year. In truth, I only know the few tricks I’ve repeatedly played since Ronald Reagan popularized jelly beans and Walter Mondale asked, “Where’s the beef?”

Call me an idiot savant who excels at something but is really stupid when it comes to all else–as helpless as the college freshman in his first apartment 56 years ago where his girlfriend threw a book of recipes at him and demanded he find something he could make. (Within weeks I became famous for my banana bread and kept making it until the time I tried rye flour. It made for a very good door stop.) Anyway, that’s why I fear asking a question that might be as laughingly obvious as the ones on social media that end with “asking for a friend.” No, I admit, this is for me:

Should I be saving these basil stems? And if so, how might I use them?

First positive answer to that will qualify for a generous portion of Feta Feta Feast if we can figure out when and where I can deliver it. I will be making it through March, so no hurry on that.*

And for those of you curious about the dish, here’s the recipe with parenthetical notations of my preferred brands and amounts:

Feta Feta Feast

Fettuccine (Butoni, 8 or 9 oz pkg)

Feta Cheese, crumbled (Tendercrop, 0.4 lb)

Calamata Olives, pitted & seasoned (Delallo, 7.0 oz)

Fresh Basil, ripped up (Infinite, 1 oz)

Red Pepper, large & chopped

Garlic (two fat cloves minced)

Sweet Italian Sausage (from Tendercrop, about 2/3 lb crumbled–you may want to make this 50/50 with Chorizo, also available at Tendercrop)

Extra Virgin Olive Oil, enough for the skillet

Note: A vegetarian friend tells me that leaving out the sausage and increasing amounts of red pepper and feta cheese makes for a “mouth-watering” (her word) version.

Warning: Years ago, never mind how many, Tendercrop had run out of sweet Italian sausage before I arrived. Thought I’d experiment with ground turkey, first time I ever bought it. Was also the last time I ever bought it. Might go well with rye banana bread.

Instructions:

Boil the fettuccine and put enough olive oil in the largest skillet you have to saute the last three items until the sausage is cooked. Put the flame at low-to-moderate.
Drain the fettuccine over a large coffee mug in the sink to keep that much water.
Plop the pasta into the skillet and stir, as much as you can, into the sausage & peppers.
Flatten what’s in the skillet and top it with the basil, feta cheese, and olives.
Pour in that cup of hot water from the pasta. Stir.
If the skillet is too full to stir, pour some olive oil into the bowl you used to boil the pasta, enough to cover the bottom, and then dump the whole thing in it and stir until the green and the red and the brown and the black and the white seem evenly distributed in the yellow of pasta.
Keep on a low flame until the liquid is gone. That’s when it is done.

If you have switched to a bowl, you’ll need to stay and stir, but I usually stay at the stove anyway, dipping Annarosa’s rosemary and sea-salt rolls into the liquid and wolfing down Ipswich Ale. I have another ale for dessert which, because I sat down after the meal to jot this off, is now overdue.

As my friend Walter likes to say, “Thirst is a dangerous thing.”

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*Sorry, but the prize has already been claimed and consumed by my next door neighbor.

Those stems gotta be good for something. Soups? Omelets? Salads?
https://www.theproducemoms.com/produce/basil/

We’re All Consumers Now

Biggest loser of the November election has yet to be mentioned.

Not a candidate or referendum question or anything else on the ballot, but an ideal, a concept, an attitude. The founders never spelled it out, but it can be inferred over and again in the Declaration and in the Federalist Papers. Washington’s farewell address implied it, as did Eisenhower’s. Lincoln didn’t say it, but it’s in the spirit of his Gettysburg and inaugural addresses. FDR didn’t say it, but his New Deal put it in action. Not until 1961 did JFK declare it as soon as he took office:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Seems safe to say, following an election in which the price of eggs outweighed access to healthcare, that Kennedy’s rallying cry for citizenship is now officially null and void.

We’re all consumers now. And nothing more.

So many friends still wonder out loud how so many people could support the Republican candidate for president despite the felony convictions, the insults, the flagrant lies, the praise of dictators past and present, the cruelty, the crudity, the hints at threats of violence, and the incoherent speeches–including a weird admiration for Hannibal Lecter and a worrying envy of Adolph Hitler.

Y’all need a good slap across the face. The answer is glaringly obvious, but no one wants to say it. Well, at my age and with no risk of blowing a government appointment in the next four years, I’ll say it:

Over two-thirds of the American electorate want authoritarian rule. What can our country do for me?

Whoa, you may say, Trump gained barely 49% of the vote! Sorry, folks, but anyone who did not vote, as a protest or not, said, in effect, that they want government done for them. Ask not what I can do for my country… Trump gained 31% of eligible voters, edging Harris’ 29.8%. The landslide was non-voters, 38.1% of eligible adults. Add that to the vote gained by Trump, an open authoritarian who allies himself with authoritarians around the world, and, by any honest measure, it is a call for authoritarian rule.

Doesn’t matter if the non-voters consciously want it. The US Constitution describes in detail a participatory democracy, and an informed, educated citizenry for that participation. By definition, then, if you do not stay informed, if you do not participate, you forfeit self-rule and welcome, or at least allow, authoritarian rule.

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

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

You like irony? While all veterans who began their service after January 1973 did so as volunteers, many who today sing their praises dodge any and all implied commitment of “an educated citizenry.” The veterans they praise risked death for the USA, but they can’t even stay informed or participate in civic affairs–unless you count paying taxes, about which they bitterly complain and vote to get rid of, if they vote at all.

For all the disdain aimed at draft dodgers over the years, it is democracy dodgers who have let America fall to authoritarians.

Worse than they, and I’d say worse than those who voted for Republicans, were the progressives who refused to vote or voted throw-away-party due to the Biden-Harris Administration’s shady alliance with Netanyahu’s Israel. As Obama kept warning us, they “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

A friend’s daughter, a teacher just two years out of college, said a few weeks before the election that she couldn’t wait for Harris to secure a win so that we could “start attacking her and Biden regarding Israel’s genocidal war.” That’s exactly how I felt and why I was compiling notes for at least one column I’d write before New Year’s. That’s doing the work, that’s participation. With Harris we had a chance if we kept working, participating, making our case known and keeping it in front of officials we could influence. What we can do for our country…

Instead, the purists who want it all done for them allowed the White House and Senate to fall to the party which gives us no chance. Learning nothing, they still want it done for them. Barely a week passed before I started receiving what I was dreading: Appeals to donate to a fund for something I do believe in from people who destroyed any chance of their–and our–success.

Donations? If the request was made in person, I’d throw a nickel at their feet and demand four cents change. Nor will I waste time with a column. Maybe four years from now, but until then it’s up to the purists to deal with the rot they have wrought.

Until then, I’m still asking what I can do for this country.

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