A Casino in a Red-light District

Back in February, I mistakenly thought I was face to face with an unexpected expense of $790 and felt demoralized.

Yes, I used that word to describe myself and my thoroughly first-world problem. You may have noticed it in my recent vignette about doing taxes, but forgot about it when I reported my discovery of the error and delight at the end of the trouble.

Truth is, about halfway into writing that, and while keeping an eye on notifications, I learned that I now live in a country that voted NO on a UN resolution to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine.

I froze. Not sure how much time went by before I could put my fingers back on this keyboard. I’ll guess at least a minute, but I couldn’t return to my narrative before I started to click around and check the news. As many said on social media, it comes as no surprise, and yet it is still stunning.

Very much like that day last summer when the Supreme Court ruled that a president has unlimited immunity while in office. Next day I happened to be in a meeting with a former city councilor, a fellow Mayday demonstrator arrested in DC back in 1971 though I didn’t know him until 2016. Can’t recall his exact words, but I’ll never forget the shock on his face.

We agreed that we no longer lived in a country where, as we grew up believing, no one is above the law.

This might have been our response in late January, 2010, when the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision. In retrospect, that was as much of a breach of America’s foundation as presidential immunity, and you could make the case that the 2010 descent toward oligarchy made the 2024 decision, effectively in favor of autocracy, possible.

We knew it was wrong, and we protested, but it didn’t have near the effect that is hitting us now, perhaps because Barack Obama was just a year into his presidency. We must have assumed that he and a Democratic Senate would find ways to offset the idea that, as Mitt Romney boasted, “corporations are people.” We should have heeded the late proponent of campaign finance reform, New Hampshire’s own Doris “Granny D” Haddock:

If money is speech, then bribery is legal.

Last month, Citizens United was in full bloom at the inauguration. Seated in the VIP seats aside the incoming president were not congressional leaders and public servants as has always been the case, but the CEOs of the largest tech-companies and donors to his campaign. In effect, America was looking at a new ruling class, a plutocracy.

This month, one of them was given the authority to fire as many federal employees as he could. Before long he was able to dismantle agencies that oversaw his own business interests. In effect, a kleptocracy.

Meanwhile, the most absurd and unqualified people were appointed to cabinet positions while highly qualified–and entirely non-partisan–career public servants were purged from all departments. In effect, a kakistocracy.

Worst hit by incompetents in the highest positions are the Defense and Justice departments, including the FBI and CIA. If they are willing to ignore Constitutional checks and balances from Congress and the courts–which appears to be the very reason they were chosen–then we have tyranny.

There’s also an attempt to privatize the National Parks and gut the IRS, two agencies that generate more revenue than they cost, both by far. But we are running out of “-ocracies” and need to start coining new names. How about “stupidocracy.”

Now add attempts to privatize the US Postal Service and end birthright citizenship, both of which are written into the US Constitution, and we might as well resign ourselves to living in a “fuckoffracy.”

From dismantled to demoralized. If today’s news is stunning because it puts an end to everything America has stood for on the world stage since FDR joined us to European allies against fascism, then the pardon of all J6 rioters did the same for what we valued at home.

Just as the immunity ruling erased one civic article of faith, the blanket pardon of 1,600 rioters–many of them convicted of assaulting police officers, and with overwhelming evidence–erased a few more. In America, as of January 20 this year: Crime does pay. Might does make right. Violence and threats of violence are acceptable political tactics. In effect, anarchy.

And just like that, America–now allied and casting votes with Russia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and other anti-democratic members of the UN–has transformed itself from a “Shining City on a Hill” to a casino in a red-light district.

Far am I from being the first person to notice how America in five short weeks has transformed into so many forms of government that we have disdained ever since declaring our independence from a monarchy: oligarchy, autocracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, tyranny, anarchy.

As one friend on social media wanted to know, is there one word that combines all of these? And so I thought of one that makes a $790 loss seem laughable. Call US a demoralocracy.

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UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 19, 2000: Granny D meets Jan Crosby as hubby David looks on at the National Rally For Campaign Finance Reform Rally on the West Front of the Capitol. (Photo By Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images)

From left, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), campaign finance reform activist Doris Haddock, known as “Granny D,” Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) leave Capitol Hill March 19, 2001 in Washington, DC as they walk to the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee for a press conference on campaign finance reform. The Senate will begin debate on campaign finance reform on Monday. (Photo by Alex Wong/Newsmakers)

https://www.humanmedia.org/product/granny-d/

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A Tax on All My Habits

Finally sat down to do my taxes the other night. Usually they are done first weekend of February, but some forms were delayed. With six sources of income, it can be tricky.

The one that kept me waiting the longest, and by far the one with the largest amount, was for Social Security. Seems rather ironic considering it’s a federal law that requires that all forms be mailed by the end of January.

Moreover, you don’t have to be a fan of Bernie Sanders–though I sure am–to feel the burn of Social Security being taxed. FDR’s New Deal made it tax-free from conception to birth, and it remained so for about fifty years until Pres. Ronald Reagan started taxing it to offset his tax-cuts for corporations.

Lately, I’ve been telling people that, had I another chance at life, I’d be a cartographer, but at times I long to have been a psychologist able to figure out how any nation of presumably free people keep electing leaders who screw them–and idolize those who screw them the most.

Ah, but here I am, a wreck of a senior enjoying four-day weekends, with two quarter-time jobs, two seasonal musical gigs, and a pittance of royalties good for a few tanks of gas in 2024. Should mention that those two seasonal gigs, unfortunately, occur in the same season, claiming ten of those four-day weekends and turning September and October into a non-stop full-court press.

However, on one of those weekends and a few other days last year, I was told to stay home due to excess smoke in the air from wildfires not far from downtown Salem. So the numbers on one form were noticeably less than last year, and I am now among those who can claim economic loss due to climate change, albeit far less than most who do.

That form happened to be the fifth to arrive, leaving me awaiting just one more. Finally, remembering how much was done on-line during the COVID shut-down for those subsidy deposits, I went to the IRS website. As always, I went through the “forgot password” and “enter code” and “reset…” rigmarole, and there I was looking at “my account.” A few more clicks, and there was the statement with a most welcome instruction across the bottom:

“Do not send this form with return.”

All I had to do was copy the numbers on it, and plug them into my 1040-SR along with those of five other forms. This, of course, calls for scrap paper and lists which have always served me well. Yes, I’m as adverse to calculators as I am to GPS and cellphones. No digital slavery for me!

Anyway, I’ve always been good with numbers, as patrons at the local cinema’s concession stand keep telling me. So laughable! That’s mere addition and counting back change, but I resist the temptation to tell them that Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry were my best subjects in high school, or that I entered college as a math major.

A desire to express myself during those Vietnam War-torn years turned me into an English major before the start of the second semester, but I’ll admit that my immediate placement into Calculus hastened the decision.

No need for any of that the other night. Just add or subtract, sometimes multiply or divide. All of it basic arithmetic I might have done in third grade. At times, the forms ask for nothing more complicated than picking the larger or smaller of two items.

As I do every year, I breezed right through it–only to be shocked by the result.

In recent years, I’ve always had a modest refund from the feds, around $200 or so. The other night I landed on a $790 payment. I went back through the forms, the instructions, a worksheet, and my scrap-paper, and found no error. I did it a third time. I studied applicable instructions and went looking for specific definitions of terms. Came up $790 every time. That’s about a thousand dollar swing even though nothing much changed from last year.

Ordinarily, I go immediately to the state form and complete it. But the other night, the Massachusetts’ booklet remained unopened, the form untouched, as I went to bed thoroughly demoralized.

Next morning, I resolved not to simply go over it again, but to start from scratch. A clean form and scrap-paper I had, but there was just one worksheet in my booklet already filled in with ink. I started converting those numbers onto a blank page. And there it was, as glaring as could be, I suppose, to someone who doesn’t take his own talent for granted.

For one of those “pick the smaller number” lines, I had looked up to see 1,360 above 8,066. Problem was that, 1) I did not use commas, and 2) I had carelessly aligned the 8 underneath the 3, making it appear smaller than 13. The resulting mistake was a whopping $6,706 which, when corrected, brought my payment down to but $120.

Those of you who live within a ten-mile radius may have overheard my sigh of relief. But I was already reaching for the state forms, always so much more agreeable for their inclusion of withholdings for Social Security and Medicare. Massachusetts will refund me about $350, four times what I got last year, so I’m coming out ahead and am quite satisfied.

Moreover, I can’t help but be bemused by the recent firing of 6,700 IRS employees. Very close to one for each dollar of my mistake. I trust there’s no cause/effect relationship there. If we’re to be honest, that move is to prevent the IRS from collecting billions from the rich, increasing the threat to Social Security, and not just its end-of-year forms.

If there’s no one there at IRS to cash my check, can I call it consolation?

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You could call music a form of mathematics, and you could say that the music stand behind me holds a balance sheet of sorts, and that the open case below it is a cash register, and that the cylindrical object in my hands is a calculator also of sorts. People made deposits which I would later invest, much of it in food and drink on the way home. Ironically, the IRS never heard of this, something that I rationalized by buying Megabucks tickets with the same numbers for every drawing since 1984. Many call lotteries a tax for people who are very bad at math, but I considered it a tax on busking.
Photo courtesy of Salem News, 2014.

Mapping Red, White & Blueland

Had I my life to live all over again, I’d have been a map-maker–only to be made obsolete by GPS.

That’s not entirely true. Road maps would have taken me to retirement when I could have turned my attention to state maps of congressional districts to undo the gerrymandering that clearly favors one party over the other in several of them–and which favors extremist candidates over moderates across the country. Those include Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, a grouping that should sound familiar to anyone paying attention.

I surely would not have made any name changes called for by a president who is really a dictator, supported by a political party that is really a cult of personality, elected by citizens who are really consumers, which in this context is really a euphemism for gullible suckers.

Though we might associate it with murderous dictators such as Stalin and Mao, even the term “Cult of Personality,” understates the perversion of patriotism that we see daily with our own eyes. Never before him have we seen the name of an American politician on flags that fly alongside Old Glory from homes and pickup trucks, some flags with his name and/or face often superimposed on Old Glory–a violation of the US Flag Code that is unnoticed, tolerated, and practiced by the same people who went berserk when African-American football players knelt in silent protest during the National Anthem.

Very much akin to the display of nativity scenes of refugees in December in front of homes of those who enthusiastically voted for mass deportations in November. Their patriotism is as fraudulent as their faith.

You’ve already heard of the decree to re-name the Gulf of Mexico, a name that has been on maps since the Renaissance, something else that the Republican Party apparently wants to repeal. And Denali, a mountain in Alaska so named by a native tribe centuries before President McKinley or, for that matter, the United States of America was born.

But you may not have heard that US House Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga) has introduced a bill called “The Red, White & Blueland Act of 2025” to rename–and re-color–Greenland once our “Negotiator-in-Chief,” as Rep. Carter calls him, purchases the Arctic isle.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/red-white-and-blueland-greenland/

Denmark, however, insists that Greenland is not for sale–all while a few Danish wags with a website are hilariously proposing something that might make an American cry wishing it could come true (link in the photo caption below).

Must say, it is quite challenging to satirize things that are already 100% ridiculous on their face. And, anyway, this mouthful of a name, “Red, White & Blueland,” may be less of a cartographical concern than it is yet another expression of a kowtowing virus. Consider other bills that have been introduced:

In 2023, they moved to expunge both impeachments from the record. Last summer, likely to raise support for their own campaigns, Republican House members introduced bills to:

Rename Dulles Airport for Trump
Print $500 bills with his portrait
Name America’s coastal exclusive economic zone (known simply as “EEZ”) for him.

And since Inauguration Day to:

Put him on Mt. Rushmore
Allow him to run for a third term
Declare his birthday a national holiday

Perversely speaking, there should have been an opening for him on Mt. Rushmore since 2010 when the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United. That ruling effectively negated the reason that Theodore Roosevelt is on that monument. To leave TR there is a lie. Equal to the lie, ever since the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling last year, to say that in America, “no one is above the law.”

In light of all that, I shouldn’t be treating the current news of Greenland–or Panama, or Denali, or Canada, or the Gulf of Mexico–as geographic jokes. Certainly not the grossly inhumane suggestion to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” All of these are symptomatic of a grave and possibly terminal national disease. Other symptoms include:

Appeals to public frustrations
Wild exaggerations of those frustrations
Promising a return to an imaginary era of glory
Combining government with corporate interests
Bearing false witness (“They’re eating cats and dogs!”)
Scapegoating of minorities
Demonizing political opponents
Ridicule of the press
Distortion of science
Contempt for the arts
Whitewash of history
Suppression of universities
Control of primary and secondary education
Obsession with loyalty
Treatment of disagreement as heresy
Portraying opponents as alternately weak and strong, whichever fits the issue at hand
Machismo and weaponry
Glorification of violence
Incitements and tolerance (as in pardons) of violence on the leader’s behalf
Simplified and repetitive language to limit critical thought (Orwell’s Newspeak)
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Contradictions that go unremarked
Never admitting error or loss
Taking credit for everything positive
Casting blame for anything negative
Isolationism

As they say in the self-help groups, one of the first steps to curing yourself of something is to call it by its honest name. If the above list appeared as ingredients in a cook book, the dish would be called Fascism.

Too bad I did not major in geography and have a career as a cartographer. Maps to rid us of gerrymandering might offer the beginning of a cure. And we know that there will be no GPS to help with that.

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https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5294315/greenland-trump-red-white-blueland-denmark-california?

https://andreasmoser.blog/2011/02/01/upside-down/

By Inclination If Not Practice

Many friends from my Dakota days, bless them, know that I am, as one recently put it, “an amateur cartographer by inclination if not practice.”

Perhaps those of you who have been reading this cartographically named “Mouth of the River” blog for any length of time have noticed scattered blogs over these past six years on the subject of geography. As well as many more about history that include maps as featured images.

As a graduate student at South Dakota State University, I took an undergrad cartography course at 2/3rds credit for the sake of adding my own maps to a thesis titled The Forgotten Realist about Edward Eggleston, a contemporary of Mark Twain, best known for The Hoosier Schoolmaster, a serial novel in the 1870s which still circulated in the children’s section of libraries back in the 1950s.

Maps of Indiana, the Ohio River Valley, and the Great Lakes were well-done enough to impress the English Dept., but not enough to dissuade them from adopting a new rule at semester’s end restricting grad students from taking undergrad courses. They wanted us taking nothing but their courses. Must admit that my map of the USA was so embarrassingly bad that it ought to be ripped out of every copy, though I just can’t bring myself to do it to my own.

Must admit as well that I had also taken a music class at the same 2/3rds rate, which helped tip the scales for the minor-keyed English profs who thought it flat-out heresy to be answered with sharp rebuke. I was safely back in Massachusetts by then. It was called “the Garvey Rule.”

Also got myself in some salt water twelve years ago when the North Atlantic started whacking Plum Island with serious erosion. Never occurred to me that the owners of homes that were knocked down, compromised, or left vulnerable were already planning to rebuild and reinforce right on the very spots reclaimed by the Atlantic.

My second column about it began thus:

Not long ago, I told you that Plum Island is not an island but a barrier beach.

Geography 101 will tell you as much, but my penchant for verbosity—a polite word for BS—led me to add the phrase, “glorified sandbar,” a remark that did not exactly endear me to some of my neighbors.

Where to hide from people offended by what they read?

Hello Public Library!

Rolled my sleeping bag in the history aisles where no one ever goes and started looking for something else to plagiarize when a book about the Hudson River—or so I thought—grabbed my attention.

I’ll attach a link to the full column down below, but that passage and the next offer a useful background for what has happened in recent weeks. My reaction to the book’s intro:

… I was surprised to learn that the Lower Hudson, the 150 miles from Albany through the Palisades to NYC, is technically not a river but a fjord—“a long and broad tidal estuary.”

That’s why it is so direct, with slight angular bends rather than the constant twists and curves of rivers. Salt water reaches over 70 miles inland.

All because a glacier cut it wide and deep—which made Henry Hudson think he could sail his Half Moon up there and find China.

Instead, he found Poughkeepsie.

No idea how he could tell the difference. Thought it looked a lot like Barbados myself, but maybe that’s just on account of the crowd my daughter ran with.

Headline that I submitted for that column was “Pounding PI Sand Up an NY Fjord,” but the editor softened it. And the book is titled simply The Hudson, a History, although it’s so incisive with history and ecology and so much in between, it ought to be titled, Up Yours, Albany!

This memory was refreshed by a recent day trip to the Hudson Valley on which a friend and I joked that we should have brought our state flag to wave as we declared New York State re-named “New Massachusetts.” Instead, about halfway between Albany and quaint Saugerties, we stopped at the New Baltimore Rest Area for the same coffee now selling alongside I-95 and I-495.

That, of course, hints at why my cartographic leanings have become so prominent since, oh, say, January 20 of this year. But that’s not my inclination, that’s my practice. And this is still the weekend.

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My Hudson River column, April 2013:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/archive/2013/04/24/sitting-in-off-plum-island/39785754007/

As you likely know, the standard maps that have been placed on classroom walls for years have been criticized for distorting shapes and sizes. This is a consequence of having to project a round surface on a flat paper. Try pressing the peel down on a table top next time you have an orange, and you’ll get the idea. Furthermore, because there is so much more land in the northern hemisphere than in the south, Gerardus Mercator moved his 1569 projection so that the center is north of the Equator, further exaggeration sizes to the north over the south. I’ve always preferred the 1963 Robinson Projection that lessens the distortion with curved corners and moves the Equator back down to where it should be.

In 2016, a Japanese designer offered an alternative which beats Robinson for size and shape, but at the expense of positioning. Not bad, but I think the moral of the story is, if you want the unaltered truth, get a globe.

Hajime Narukawa won Japan’s prestigious Good Design Award for developing the AuthaGraph World Map, a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents and oceans.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/accurate-map-authagraph

Welcome to Garvey Island

Many friends are having no land’s end of fun spoofing the ridiculous dictatorial decree to rename the body of water framed by Florida on one side and the Yucatan Peninsula down below.

The cowardly compliance of Google Maps and, more recently, of the Axios news agency, has given them more reason to ridicule the move with imaginary moves of their own.

Some are truly funny. “The Gulf of This-Won’t-Lower-The-Cost-Of-Eggs” is a yoke of a joke, peppered and scrambled with political satire. And “Gulf of Loco Gringo” is seasoned with the hilarity of possibly offending rabid Republicans not because of what it means, but because it is in Spanish and they don’t know what it means. Press one for latitude!

So many revisions of The Gulf of Mexico, to use the name “assigned at birth,” people are now renaming other bodies of water. To protect Canada against the American dictator’s brainless threats, one renamed the Great Lakes, starting with Superior as “The Gulf of Molson, Eh?” Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has called for Lake Michigan to be renamed “Lake Illinois.” And some Brits want the Atlantic to be known as “The English Ocean.”

Closer to home, a local wag called for Massachusetts Bay to be renamed the “Gulf of Newburyport.” This is one of those cases where laughing with someone turns into laughing at them. Those posting it don’t even seem to notice that Newburyport is nowhere to be found on their own map. The bay, no matter what we call it, is defined by Cape Ann on the north. It doesn’t touch Newburyport, or even Plum Island–which I think should be renamed Garvey Island, but that’s another yoke for another omelet.

Possibly this wayward cartographer meant The Gulf of Maine. Few people realize it, but this chunk of the North Atlantic that fits itself between Cape Ann to the south and Fundy Bay up north is named for the state that has most of its coastline. To rename it for Newburyport–or even for New Hampshire–would be as mathematically senseless as it is cartographically absurd.

The Bay of Fundy, by the way, separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia, soon to be renamed respectively, though without any respect from us, “North Maine” and “East Maine” (with Newfoundland soon to be Far-east Maine, Prince Edward Island to be King Donald Island, and Labrador, Boston Terrier). The bay itself will be renamed “Musk Sea.”

Oh, Canada! Ah, Canada! Look out, Canada! Let’s fill it out, shall we? From west to east: The Yukon will be USAkon; British Columbia will be American Columbia; Alberta, Northwest Montana; Saskatchewan, Northeast Montana; Manitoba, Dakota Heights; Ontario, Lakefront Properties; Quebec; American France (with a ban on the French language). Across the top, Nunavut will be Allofit, and the Hudson Bay will be renamed Trump Faucet.

Enough! No matter how inane the American dictator sounds–or appears to be enacting a Three Stooges skit, as he did in 2019 with his idiotically Sharpied map of Hurricane Dorian–we laugh at our own peril.

The edict to rename the Gulf–and also to restore the name “McKinley” to Mount Denali in Alaska–exists as an executive order. No matter what anyone does to comply or resist, that order can and will serve as a pretext for Republican governors and state legislatures to screen all history, geography, and literature textbooks used in public schools. Do you think they are going to limit their censorship to a few names on the North American map?

By the way, the word “Alaska,” in the same language that gives us “Denali” (the tall one), translates as “that which the sea breaks against.” A bit too involved for the MAGA crowd, I’d say, plus it’s a foreign word. How about changing the state’s name to “Pound,” something they can not only understand but will make them snicker?

“Restore” McKinley? Textbook manufacturers who fall in line with the cowards at Google Maps and Axios stand to make a huge haul. They will secure it by “restoring” the lie of “benevolent institution” and “very well treated by plantation owners” to abbreviated passages on slavery. Furthermore, they will paint the American labor movement as a passing fad of immigrants under the spell of Bolshevism, if they mention it at all. As the first American dictator calls it, “Patriotic Education.”

Why not? For those now willing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the word patriotism is nothing more than a euphemism for “willful ignorance.”

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A map draw by Newburyporter Lucinda Cathcart for my book, *Keep Newburyport Weird*. The nine-mile long, pencil-shaped barrier beach attached to the mainland just under the Mouth of the Merrimack is navigable at high tide, and therefore qualifies as an island. As you can see, the name Plum Island has already been removed in preparation of the new name if I can ever figure out how to superimpose text without the whole image going dark. Then again, maybe going dark is the point of this name-change idiocy.

Garvey Island

As seen on Facebook. To have the name “Boston” so prominent right next to it makes it even more absurd.

Far from Home Schooling

A long time fan of the actress Julianne Moore, I’m stunned to learn that her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, has been banned from schools run by the US Department of Defense for the children of enlisted men and women in America’s armed services.

Of course, I soon remembered that our new Commander in Chief is America’s first dictator, a reckless buffoon whose supporters are so gullible, so paranoid, so intolerant of those who don’t resemble them in appearance, thought, and action, that the idea of a mixed-colored face and day-glow hair must seem a dire threat.

Or it may have been another edict from the dictator himself, afraid that the color strawberry might upstage orange. Or one of his lackeys reacted to the name of the actress and thought that Boogie Nights, Far from Heaven, and The Big Lebowski were about to be screened for third-graders.

Maybe the lackey heard that her current role is in Spanish Director Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door. The Screening Room is already showing the trailer and, though I don’t know for sure, it does appear that Moore’s character is involved in, as the promos put it, “a strangely sweet situation” with the character played by Tilda Swinton. Can’t risk that, whatever that is.

To be honest, it did surprise me to learn that Moore had written a children’s book. But I myself play happy little jigs and maudlin versions of “Greensleeves” at a Renaissance faire when not calling for the heads of Newburyport’s mayor and city council president in the local paper, so it’s not that much of a stretch.

Ironically, as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, Moore graduated from the American High School in Frankfurt, Germany, run by DoD. Now, she’s left wondering why “kids like me… will not have access to a book written by someone whose life experience is so similar to their own.”

Let’s pick our way through the book’s synopsis to see if we can find clues why it has been banned by a government bound by a Constitutional right of all citizens to free speech:

If you have freckles, you can try these things:

Ah, right away we have an inducement for children to act without first consulting their parents!

1) Make them go away. Unless scrubbing doesn’t work.

And now she’s giving what amounts to medical advice! She’s not a doctor, nor has she played one in any film I’ve seen. And I’m a projectionist, mind you! Let’s get RFK Jr. to worm his way in here and make an official medical ruling!

2) Cover them up. Unless your mom yells at you for using a marker.

See! I told you! She’s anti-parent, anti-family! And if she wants kids to cover up freckles, what’s next, their genitals? This book is looking more and more like a gateway drug to transgender procedures!

3) Disappear.

And now she’s telling them to run away from home. Who the hell does she think she is? The Pied Piper? She blasphemes my ancestor! I’d never tell kids to disappear. Well, not all of them, but you know…

Um, where’d you go?

Oh, there you are.

Oh, now she wants to play dumb! Best leave that act to our new dictator. Ever notice how often he begins an answer to a thorny question with “I haven’t seen it” or “I don’t know her” or “Some people say” or some such dodge that allows him to make a point or float an idea without taking any responsibility for its veracity? He has mastered playing dumb. Moore can only act the part.

There’s one other thing you can do:

4) LIVE WITH THEM!

And now she’s yelling ALL CAPS at American children! Child abuse!

Because after all, the things that make you different also make you YOU.

And there it is! This is America where we only say that we value difference. In truth, it’s just another word for “diversity,” which leads to “equity” and “inclusion.” All the things that drove up the price of eggs, flooded North Carolina, burned Los Angeles, and are now making airplanes fall out of the sky!

No more of that! This is the “land of the free and the home of the brave”–free of strawberry, whatever she means by that, and home of blood red, pure white, and true blue!

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https://variety.com/2025/film/news/julianne-moore-donald-trump-bans-book-freckleface-strawberry-1236310153/

An Agenda of Gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask What You Can Dodge

Biggest loser of the election has yet to be mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re all consumers now. And nothing more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Least the Least I Can Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Breakfast I Never Forgot

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

One friend acknowledged both sides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a hospital. In a windowless room.

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