Confession as Complaint

When anyone fumes about all news sources being biased, you are not hearing a complaint but a confession: Those who make it are either unable or unwilling to distinguish between news and analysis.

Regarding newspapers, they cannot or will not tell the difference between news reports and editorial columns. Regarding cable news, every host and talking head is dismissed as a shill for one of two sides hostile to each other.

Worse, the confession seduces those who believe it or who go along with the disguise of complaint. They pride themselves on being “above it all” or “independent voters.” Their very claim to being “independent thinkers” is an excuse not to think as they equate, say, Fox News with MSNBC. So sure they are of this that they will long for the return of Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, forgetting that those were days before the existence of cable news.

Back then, network broadcasts were limited to half-hours minus eight minutes for commercials. Nightly news offered no nightly analysis. Back then, the American public was still capable of distinguishing the occasional hour-long exposes such as Who Killed Lake Erie with detailed history and cause/effect relationships .

The Peabody Award called that 1969 NBC broadcast “the reporter at his best as an educator.” It prompted an environmental effort as soon as it aired. Into the 70s, beaches were closed with chain-link fences and no tresspassing signs due to fish by the thousands washing up dead on Ohio shores for lack of oxygen. By the 90s, Cleveland’s Lakefront became a gorgeous park where people swim, fish, boat, and stroll between the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Great Lakes Science Museum on their way to restaurants and pubs in The Flats.

Comparably, Cronkite’s special, firsthand reports and analysis from Vietnam helped turn American public opinion against the war. In February, 1968, following the Tet Offensive, Cronkite told us:

It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

Less than five weeks later, Lyndon Johnson admitted, “If I lost Cronkite, I lost middle-America,” and withdrew his bid for re-election.

If broadcast today, both Cronkite’s Vietnam reporting and Who Killed Lake Erie would be subjected to confessions disguised as complaints simply for offering analysis of undeniable realities.

How would things have played out on Lake Erie or in Vietnam if another news source at the time insisted that the stories were not true, or for that matter, didn’t even exist? A news source whose appeal was telling viewers that nothing need be done, that we could keep dumping waste into our fresh waters, or that the Pentagon had it all under control if we just keep waving our flags and saying our prayers?

Answer to that question is no further from you than your television dial. While all credible news sources are reporting that the American economy is booming–higher wages, more jobs, lowest unemployment rate, record numbers of new small businesses–Fox News mentions none of it.

To Fox, inflation is the entire story–but never to be told in its entirety. No mention of the price-gouging or shrinkflation* that have created record profits for corporations whose CEOs laugh at a public so gullible that a president takes the blame–and pay no attention to all those US representatives and senators who block every move the president attempts to solve problems which they then use to bash him.

You can test that when you hear people complaining about immigration at the southern border. Just ask if they know of the bipartisan bill killed upon the order of Donald Trump by the very Republicans who co-wrote it. He feared Biden would get credit, and wanted to keep the “crisis” as a campaign issue sure to benefit him.

If yes, they listen to a credible news source, with or without accompanying analysis. If no, they depend on Fox or OANN or Infowars, none of which reported the Republican’s party-over-country switch. When Barack Obama said that Republicans “have turned the Party of Lincoln into a Cult of Personality,” he could have mentioned this stunt to illustrate the severity, and perhaps the irony, of its consequence.

For a more recent example, many viewers of the Democratic Convention were amazed by the number of Republicans who addressed the delegates–from a mayor of an Arizona border town to former Illinois US Rep. Adam Kinzinger to aides in the Trump White House. Not one was seen on Fox. No coverage, not even a mention.

Ironically, it is convention coverage which may ever so slightly justify the otherwise lame complaint that all news sources are “all the same.” While I often rely on MSNBC and NPR for coherent, logical, and historical analysis, they are no more appealing than Fox for political conventions.

Ditto CNN, ABC, and the rest. Why they keep preempting non-primetime speakers to interview various delegates is anyone’s guess. All I can manage is that the hosts felt a need to earn their money. Excuse me, but I can hear that school teacher from Des Moines answer your questions later. Right now there’s a sheriff from Flint on the stage, and he must be there for a reason deserving attention.

And so I tune into C-SPAN for conventions and similar events. I still welcome, indeed crave, the analysis, but we need to hear all there is to analyze before we analyze.

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*Shrinkflation (n.): The sale of products in slightly smaller packages without lowering the price, often in a different shape to make it less likely the consumer notices the difference. This practice took hold ten or twelve years ago and remains common. Just today in Market Basket, newly shaped bottles of Tropicana orange juice were placed onto the shelves with no change in price. I read the fine print: 46 oz. Back home, I took an empty out of my recycle bag: 52 oz.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/50-years-ago-walter-cronkite-calls-for-the-u-s-to-get-out-of-vietnam/

Indefinite Pronouns in Definite Articles

Before the internet turned reporters into “content providers” and replaced full-page spreads with singular posts, newspaper layout was a challenging form of art.

Still is for those who prefer the hard copy. On it, editors juxtapose stories with each other and around advertisements in hopes of drawing some attention to each item. Strategically, they concoct headlines to grab attention while remaining true to the content of the story. That’s no easy task with so many reports of events so dull as municipal committee meetings can be, and so editors might take more liberty than they’d like with a clever phrase, word-play, or alliteration.

Once upon a student newspaper, I did layout for The Log at Salem State College (now University). Once, with a rather dry report from an environmental group decrying the manufacturer of a newly-invented artificial turf for its pollution of rivers in Georgia that flowed south, I may have altered my consciousness to create the following:

Florida Group Not Very High on Monsanto Grass

Such a headline would still succeed today. Why, I bet that on social media, it would gain dozens of laughing emojis and thumbs-up within an hour. But for most viewers that would be all, as they would keep scrolling, convinced they already had the whole story, details be damned.

In this hi-tech/lo-brain day, with most people–even newspaper subscribers–gaining news from screens, the experience is no longer an interesting headline with the full story right there if you so choose to pursue it. Instead, it is a headline, a photo, a caption, and most of the first sentence. And before you might hit “see more,” look! There’s the next headline and photo, or, better yet, a meme!

Readers of a printed newspaper, if hooked by a headline or photo, will move their eyes down into the story. It is most telling that we refer to “readers” when speaking of the printed paper and to “viewers” when we speak of screens. On the internet, most of us always keep scrolling to view whatever comes next.

Writers, such as I, of blogs, such as this, can only counter this trend with curious headlines, fascinating photos, a riveting opening line, or half line as the opportunity may be present to tease a reader into filling in the blank by ceasing to scroll and clicking the link. On social media we can also add pithy intros.

Others, however, actually thrive on the tendency of readers to react, accept, and re-post articles based only on what they see in the news feed without ever bothering with 800 or 1,800 much less 2,800 words or more of detail. In fact, many will add a subhead–journalism’s equivalent of a tease–to impress upon scrollers a single item from the article that they then scroll past.

Unscrupulous posters, such as the Russian trolls, add subheads that exaggerate, distort, and sometimes flat-out misrepresent what the article says. With an audience that they know will keep scrolling, not only do they convince viewers of things are are not true, but they convince those viewers that there is documentation for it.

Yet more: Those viewers will then re-post the article as if it is just another meme, since, after all, their viewers will see just the headline and subhead. As with the original posting, if the headline and subhead appeal to any belief dear to the hearts of viewers, re-posting will continue. The echo-chamber that is Fox News is neither louder nor longer lasting than is Facebook, Tic-Toc, or X.

Those who manipulate the MAGA-Republicans are skilled and relentless at this. They have been wildly successful for years. With an audience that gullible, how could they not? Too bad that those who identify as progressive are too often susceptible to the same trick.

For example, two years ago, the reputable and trustworthy website Mental Floss posted an 850-word essay headlined, “The 600-Year History of the Singular ‘They’.” Sometime after, it was reprinted with permission by a site called Pocket which retained the identical headline, the same graphic, and caption for the graphic. So, too, the text is unedited. However, Pocket added a subhead:

The singular form of ‘they’ has been endorsed by writers like Jane Austen and William Shakespeare.

While the article does mention Austen, Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and W.H. Auden, it all has to do with the plural use for an indefinite singular. As when we see a car swerving down a road with no idea or image of the driver and say, “They must be drunk.” Nowhere in the article does it suggest that those five writers applied “they” to a singular person who was known.

In fact, the article’s main source, Kirby Conrod, who teaches linguistics at the University of Washington, spells this distinction out:

The very old kind of singular ‘they,’ the one that is used by Chaucer and Shakespeare and all these examples we love to pull out, if you look at all these examples of these hundreds-of-year-old singular ‘they’s, they are with like ‘each man‘ or ‘every person‘… None of them are with like ‘Bob‘ or ‘that guy.’ The new singular ‘they‘ is when we can use ‘they‘ with a single, specific person.

Putting aside for a moment the word “endorsed,” the subhead is true. However, due to the current controversy, Pocket‘s viewers are led to believe that these writers–reaching back seven centuries in Chaucer’s case–all used the plural pronoun for a known, singular person. This blurs the distinction between the historical “indefinite” usage of “they” and the current “preferred” usage.

Add the word “endorsed,” and the subhead is, at best, manipulative truth.

This trick is hardly limited to the internet. Consider Donald Trump’s whine that Kamala Harris had “promoted” being Indian before “turning Black.” We all know that she identifies as and expresses pride in being Indian (and Black), but that is no more “promotion” of her being Indian than there ever was of any parts of speech by any classical writers.

Notice, too, that in the only examples regarding Austen and the rest cited in the article, the antecedent for “they” or “them” or “their” is a singular word or term that suggests a plural, such as “each man” and “everybody.” Citing Shakespeare, the author simply names two plays–Hamlet and Comedy of Errors–rather than any specific numbers (act/scene/verse) that are readily available for all of them.

In a card game, this would be called a finesse. Something out of nothing to make us believe what is not true.

While I support all gender rights, I would urge those who promote and defend them, for their own sake, to drop this claim of alliance with classic writers of the past. If any part of a case is untrue, then the entire case is suspect and any claim based upon it is undermined.

For the sake of clarity in language, they might press for a new, neutral pronoun to avoid the confusing use of plural for singular–a confusion that will always be there whether they want it or not. Many have been suggested, including my own two years ago headlined “E Pluribus E.”*

If nothing else, all of us would do well to consider what we print and screen much as would a layout editor, always looking, for starters, to engage the largest possible audience, much of it unknown if not unknowable to us.

If there’s to be disagreement, let it come after that engagement, when the details are honestly presented and considered.

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*https://buskersdelight.home.blog/2022/08/30/e-pluribus-e/

Links to the Mental Floss and Pocket posts, followed by the graphic for both:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-600-year-history-of-the-singular-they?

To Please His Worship

Looking for a lucrative job doing what I do best–making stuff up–I’ve been waiting for someone headed for the top who would take me along in exchange for my services.

When JD Vance credited Donald Trump for the exchange of hostages and political prisoners orchestrated by Joe Biden with several countries Trump couldn’t find on a map, I knew I had my ticket to the Speech Writers Hall of Fame. Immediately, I took it upon myself to find out just what other mainstream media myths he may have been onto before his VP selection put his every utterance in the news and on social media.

By now, if you’ve paid any attention at all, you’ve heard of–perhaps have heard–his senate speeches accusing Ukrainian officials, including Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of turning American money intended for military defense against Russia into luxury yachts.

Must be rough sailing under aerial bombardment on the Black Sea. And the Beatles thought that Ukraine girls really knocked them out???

Anyway, be that as it may, most news outlets pointed out that there was no evidence of Zelenskyy cruising, fishing, surfing, scuba-diving, skinny-dipping, para-sailing, water-skiing, or anything else off the coast of Crimea, nor was there any source other than the Kremlin that now has several Republicans in both the House and Senate parroting Putin’s talking points.

But that merely shows a weakness. JD is no messenger for a message already formed. Not anymore than he is fit for analysis as he unwittingly revealed with his embittered depiction of “childless cat-ladies.” The former shows him as gullible, the second as hateful. Granted, these are precisely why Trump chose him–in addition to JD’s slavish loyalty to the guy he once called “America’s Hitler,” which is easy for Trump to overlook for the sake of bringing Vance’s crypto-billionaire donors into the fold.

However, to win rather than repel votes, JD must take a new tack–one that will please his worship more than the slurs. Enter me. I’d like to say that I alone can show him what it is, but he already stumbled onto it. All I need do is find more instances to which he can apply it.

For example, remember the raid of the compound resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden? Never happened. Democrats staged it with a body double while the mastermind of 9/11 was whisked out the back door to be flown to Mozambique from where he would still call al-Qaeda’s shots while living off federal funds sent him by Chuck and Nancy. Not to worry! American taxpayers were spared that indignity when Donald Trump himself was tipped off by his most trusted source, “some people,” and, waiting at that backdoor, jumped on the arch-terrorist who was immediately killed under that well-kept weight.

Yes, that’s in the past, but it serves to show what I can gaslight as events unfold. General issues will be a cinch. This 50-year low unemployment rate, increased wages, and record number of new businesses in Biden’s booming economy? That’s only because employers know that Trump will return to office and want their companies at full strength when prosperity lands on America at noon, January 20, 2025.

Sounds preposterous? Compare it to what Vance said of the prisoner and hostage exchange:

Why are they coming home? …because bad guys all over the world recognize Donald Trump’s about to be back in office, so they’re cleaning house. That’s a good thing, and I think it’s a testament to Donald Trump’s strength.

As an example of what I could have done for JD today, consider this line from his rally in Grand Rapids:

We’re going… to restore American manufacturing, we’re going to restore our whole country and it’s going to start right here in the state of Michigan.

Those who pay no attention will fall for this. But those who do know that this is already happening and has been since Biden took office with what he calls his “Build Back Better” program. Republicans voted against it, but it squeaked through, investments were sent all over the country, and the impact was immediate–with the very same Republicans who voted against it showing up for the ribbon-cuttings and photo-ops to take all credit.

Yo, JD! You don’t need to risk getting caught in such a glaring contradiction. Just go upper case, add some vocal emphasis, and claim that The Trump-Vance Restoration has already begun because Biden and Harris–and Chuck and Nancy, and, oh why not? Bernie and AOC–are trying to fool the public into thinking that they are you, coo-coo-cachoo, until the election is over and they can resume their mission to turn the USA into a woebegone colony of Denmark.

As a general rule, JD, the idea is to take credit for all the good that the Democrats have done. You can’t run on what Republicans have done, because they only prevent things from being done. On the few items that gain bipartisan support, such as the immigration bill, it has been Trump nixing the deal with a phone call, not because the bill wouldn’t work but because it would work–and the president in office would get the credit.

Take all credit, JD! Hire me, and I’ll make it look like you passed the Affordable Care Act even as you work to repeal it, like you wrote the Civil Rights Acts even as you try to weaken it, like you are a champion of Social Security even as you plan to terminate it, a champion of working people even as you trash unions and insult working women both blue- and white-collar.

Call anytime. I’ll be on a luxury yacht cruising the Black Sea, leaving The West behind, doing what I do best.

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https://www.pnj.com/story/opinion/2022/05/05/marlette-cartoon-hillbilly-hoax/9645685002/

Pounding Sand Castles

Hands down, Kamala Harris will win the popular vote in November.

People still fret, “Is America ready for a woman president?” They fret because they forget: Hillary Clinton won by three-million votes eight years ago.

By now you have noticed that I am talking as if the Electoral College does not exist. While it did put two popular-vote losers into the White House this quarter-century, and while I believe it may threaten democracy in 2028 and beyond, it won’t matter in November.

Overwhelming the EC will be something else that doesn’t exist, or more to the point, no longer exists: reproductive rights in all 50 states. Add that to Trump’s boasting of having Roe v. Wade overturned, add it to JD Vance’s “childless cat-lady” slur, and now add connections of Project 2025 to both of them, and you have a Pink Wave that will turn the EC into an SC–Sand Castle.

Add to that the choice of a VP who actually lived and served as a high school teacher and coach in a state before becoming a US Rep. from it and governor of it, compared to a celebrity from California, a hedgefund manager exported and bankrolled to take a Senate seat in Ohio–just as are Republican senatorial candidates in Wisconsin and Arizona, and just as were Republican candidates in Pennsylvania and Georgia in 2022–and the Pink Wave will propel a Blue Tsunami.

With progressive congressional candidates in red states–such as Rep. Marc Allred in Texas challenging Ted Cruz for a Senate seat–Harris and Walz will win not just battleground states, but states that the pundits assume will go red.

The threat of a third party? By now, RFK’s brainworm and dead bear make it impossible for anyone not on the lunatic fringe to vote for him. In other words, he will not drain from Harris but from Trump. There’s political karma in this: Before RFK Jr. proved himself a fruitcake, his biggest donor was fellow fruitcake Timothy Mellon, heir to the Andrew Mellon (as in Carnegie Mellon) fortune. Trump’s number one donor? The same Timothy Mellon.

But that’s a reason for campaign finance reform. Like the Electoral College, it screams to be addressed once we have a congress willing to work on reform–which we have a good chance of having following November.

The one and only threat to the election of Kamala Harris will be the refusal of state legislatures to certify results. Trump and other Republicans have already hinted at this, Project 2025 calls for it, and some swing states have election deniers already assigned to control vote certification.

There’s a lot that Democrats can do to prevent this scam, but while lower courts will likely rule in their favor, we all know that appeals go to the Supreme Court, or what Trump likes to call, “my judges.”

The strongest defense against this, the surest buffer for it, will be the popular vote with its breakers of pink and blue, of brown and black, of yellow, red, and plenty of white all pounding the sand of fear, paranoia, distrust, division and all the other lying, make-believe nonsense with which Republicans keep littering America’s shores.

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Salisbury Beach, just north of Plum Island on the other side of the Merrimack River, 2016. Newburyport *Daily News* Photo.

America auf Deutsch

While driving home on I-95 yesterday, I listened to a woman list details of Project 2025 on WGBH. One item startled me so much that I put a stray piece of cardboard against the steering wheel and started talking notes.

Mandatory military registration for public (but not private) school students.

Speaking was Andrea Cabral, a former sheriff of Suffolk Co. (aka Boston) and a frequent guest, at times co-host of the morning talk show I hear every Thursday. That line made the hosts gasp, and I’m not sure if I heard one exclaim “fascism” or if it just screamed itself between my ears. Today I learned that it may have been an echo from a book written exactly 100 years ago of which I’ve read more than once.

I am sure that Cabral’s next line was said as I was thinking it–that P-2025 is all for the benefit of a class whose children go to private school. Since it puts the military–along with all else–in the service of that class, it will be children of the middle and lower classes “who will serve as fodder.”

Other details fit the fascist bill. Here are those I managed to jot down while navigating a busy highway:

Criminalize pornography, defined to include any writings about gender identification, same-sex marriage, etc.
End Social Security and slash Veterans’ benefits.
No minimum wage.
Ban abortion, no exceptions, and ban contraception.
Abolition of EPA, OSHA, all regulation of business.
Dept of Health & Human Resources renamed “Dept. of Life.”
Executive right to fire all civil servants.
All elections controlled by state boards formed by executive appointment.

Though I’ve read several excerpts, I must admit that I have yet to look at the document itself. After what I heard this morning, I’m not sure my heart can take it. But I do have a friend whose review of P-2025 makes me think I might take the risk:

It ends with a chapter called “Onward.” Easy to read it as an admission that Republicans (e.g., Bush & Trump) who succeed in being elected should be assumed clueless as far as policy & governance are concerned, hence the need for an extensive (>900 pages!), detailed manual their appointees can follow. To me, this recognition of Republican incompetence is the most damning feature. Also leaves us to make the case that the Deep State conspiracy concept swings both ways.

What my friend says of “Onward” squares with what Cabral told WGBH, at least regarding Trump. The Heritage Foundation doesn’t care that he’s lately disavowing it because 1) they know he’s a liar, 2) he’ll do and say what he’s told so long as they keep him in the lap of luxury and the dance of international power, and 3) all the work will be done by cabinet and other appointments of people screened by Heritage. The Trump campaign’s alternative statement of policy, Agenda47, might as well be titled, P-2025 Lite.

Meanwhile, he’s off the campaign trail, holed up at his Florida stinkhole, babbling incoherent nonsense, boasting of things everyone knows are not true, all in a press conference that rivals RFK Jr’s conversation with Rosanne Barr for signs of dementia.* He may already be writing off the popular vote with the expectation that enough state election boards will fix the outcome–something made possible by provisions of P-2025 very likely to be previewed between the November election and the day of congressional certification in January. Trump has hinted at that, even using the word “fix” favorably at one rally.

The Heritage Foundation has been more circumspect. Alarmed by public revulsion at the dribs and drabs of P-2025 that have been revealed, it has delayed publication of the foundation president’s book, Dawn’s Early Light, until after the election rather than this fall as originally planned.** A user-friendly appetizer for P-2025, this is the book for which JD Vance wrote a foreward. Author Kevin Roberts was describing it in an interview last month when he sent shock-waves through one news cycle by calling it “America’s second revolution” that…

… will be bloodless if the left allows it.

The threat of violence to overthrow a constitutional federal republic has a precedent. So does Project-2025. And so does the prospect of a convicted felon becoming a nation’s leader, although the first one did spend nine months in jail in 1924 and wrote a book while there.

As Cabral summed up her review: “Project-2025 is the American Mein Kampf.”

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*If you ever wonder just how badly America needs campaign finance reform, know this: RFK Jr’s foremost donor is Timothy Mellon, heir to the the fortune of Andrew Mellon. Trump’s foremost donor? Timothy Mellon.

** https://www.amazon.com/Dawns-Early-Light-Burning-Washington/dp/0063353504

And the Times, They are a’Weird

When Coach Tim Walz added “weird” to the Democratic vocabulary, he nailed the weird Bonespur and his equally weird Project 2025 frontman running-mate to their own ridicule.

‘Bout time our side started hitting back. The Michelle Obama rule, “When they go low, we go high,” was all very nice, but our political reality is anything but nice. In keeping with the Minnesota governor’s quick wit, the DNC is issuing lawn signs to reflect the change:

When they go wird, we go Walz!

Why the DNC chose to misspell it may or may not be weird, but I can’t think of a presidential campaign in which a single word landed with so much force. And I took notes on Kennedy vs. Nixon. Or a single VP selection who entered the race with such an immediate impact–and one without a national profile no less. Spiro Agnew, an unknown Maryland governor in 1968, just added to the malice already set by Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

A quick wit and a life-long commitment to public service–including soldier and educator both in the classroom and on the athletic field, hence the name, Coach–will do that for you.

And I must thank Walz for what he has done for me. Since his acceptance speech in Philadelphia, I’ve had a modest run on my 2018 book, Keep Newburyport Weird, more copies in the past three days than in the last three years. Why, it is outselling Once Upon an Attention Span, the book I published earlier this year.

In a way, that might be embarrasing, but hey, I’m still working on Beach Bum Elegy.

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Rather than a description which could never do it justice, here’s a video of his 18-minute speech:

No Country for an Eisenhower Boy

No doubt because I was raised in the Eisenhower years, I adhere to common sense rules for day-to-day life.

Why, I bet I heard “Look both ways” a hundred times before I was old enough to cross a street without one hand in a parental hand that led the way.

I’m reminded of this virtually every time I drive on High Street in Newburyport where some inhabitants don’t look at all, simply expecting cars and trucks to stop. Some don’t even break stride, and the presence of a cross-walk is at best coincidental.

Perhaps they think that High is just a single lane on which drivers will approach with tunnel vision and no need for time to turn a head from the other side where the driver first looked. Or they mistake High St. for Unicorn Lane, more accommodating to pedestrians than cars, and assume that the speed limit is nine miles per hour.

Before I turned teen I understood the rule to mean making eye contact with drivers even when you had the benefit of a crosswalk or were at an intersection with a stop sign. Forget that! Now, many are fixated on cellphones held before them like drivers who pay more attention to a screen on their dashboard than to the world outside their windshield.

We legislate against distracted driving while we look the other way from the equally hazardous and fatal reality of distracted walking.

Related to that is “Watch your step.” By now you’ve certainly heard reports of hospitals flooded with people who have tripped over curbs, tree roots, potholes and whatnot while their eyes were downward cast on a device played by thumbs that were tweeting, twiddling, diddling, doodling, twerking and twating.

There’s a farm stand in Woburn with a welcome sign that reminds customers that “this is a working farm” with hoses along the ground and buckets here and there that could trip them. I’d been delivering there for years without noticing it, so when I first saw it, I said to a co-owner:

“Let me guess: Someone tripped and hit you with an insurance claim.”

She rolled her eyes and answered with a wry smile. She, too, is from the Eisenhower years, which may be why we indulged in shared nostalgia: “Used to be we’d get up, brush ourselves off, maybe scolded ourselves for our carelessness and hoped more than anything that no one was looking,” she laughed.

I gave the update: “Now it’s sit up, look around and ask, ‘Who can I sue?'”

Such examples are not merely the result of personal carelessness. They are embedded into law. In fact, there is a lawfirm advertising on cable TV for clients who may have personal injury claims. In the voice over, while showing one of those two-foot yellow signs placed to warn of a wet floor, a woman tells us that, if you fall, the business may still be liable despite the warning.

Liable if you do, liable if you don’t. Can’t help but think that all those yellow placards and signs such as the one in Woburn may as well quote Dante: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”

So, too, will a motorist be liable for any injury sustained by a pedestrian or cyclist in any mishap, not just if the vehicles hit them, but if they hit the vehicle. Nor does it matter if the pedestrian was not in a cross-walk or ignored a “Don’t Walk” sign while the motorist has a green light, such as we often seen at State and Pleasant in the heart of downtown Newburyport.

Or if the bicycle was on the wrong side of the street or racing the wrong way down a one-way street as they often do on State Street. And good luck to motorists looking right trying to enter State from the left, each of those streets with severely limited sight-lines, while cyclists are flying in, illegally, from the left.

Lest I sound anti-pedestrian or anti-cyclist, I hasten to add that motorists themselves have become the worst culprits.

Once upon common sense, it was easy to cross most streets just by waiting for cars to go by. Now, however, many drivers will apply their brakes as soon as they see you standing there. That would be fine if not for the surprise it often presents for drivers behind them.

At times, I’ve walked on an angle but still well to the side toward on-coming traffic to quicken (and shorten) my crossing behind one or two or three cars. In the past, that kept everyone moving with no need to slow down, much less stop. Today, it sets off a Pavlovian reflex in the first driver to hit the brakes, and a chain reaction if anyone is following. The well-intended pedestrian, then, finds that car blocking the direct path.

Consider now that the basic premise of traffic safety is to eliminate abruptness. This is why we have a yellow light between green and red, why we have right turn on red, why we have signs that say “Merge” and “Yield” in places we might otherwise stop.

It’s also why we have rotaries–or traffic circles or roundabouts–although that’s a bad example in Newburyport where US Route One enters the city from the south into a rotary that was long ago turned into a “business circle.” With a donut shop, a pizza shop, a sub shop, a rental car agency, a printer, a laundromat, a cafe, and who-knows-what-else on its perimeter, it may well qualify for one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

And so it is that, while looking left to keep yourself flowing smoothly into any traffic as all rotaries intend, you must also glance right to make sure no vehicles are leaving the parking lots of said businesses. Not only that, but you cannot count on the car for which you just slowed down to continue to the next exit. No. It may well cut straight across your path for the sake of a roast beef sandwich, a slice of pepperoni and cheese, or an “everything” bagel, and it will need to slow, possibly stop in front of you if there’s any car in that lot awaiting its turn to help make the Newburyport rotary a not so distant cousin of the late and lamented Salisbury Beach Dodgems.

‘Tis no country for an Eisenhower boy. We’ve gone from “look both ways” to a choice between “look every which way at the same time” or “don’t look at all.” That’s a step I’d rather not watch.

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As it appeared when I was three. Hard to tell if the Dodgems–aka “Bumper Cars”–are inside the building or are the cars we see crowded outside.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/555068722793666915/

Bad Dad Jokes & Six Bad Words

At a rehearsal for the witch trial reenactments this fall, six of us got to talking about October dates. Taking note of the director’s and actors’ mentions of “Indigenous People’s Day,” I waited for an opening.

Trying to sound apologetic: “Um, I need to tell you that, as a member of a Renaissance faire, I am contractually obligated to call it ‘Columbus Day’.”

What I thought would be an explosion of laughter was a implosion of shock.

You could hear the brakes screech on five brains when responses burst into the room as if through a windshield: “What?” “Really?” “They can do that?”

This time I really was apologetic, without trying, profusely so, almost begging them to recognize my attempt at a joke. Call it a bad joke. Call it a dad joke. I’m twenty years older than the director, and older than any two of the other four actors combined.

Earlier in the rehearsal, we were going through the paces of a new scene. This is called “blocking” where we position ourselves on stage (“hitting our marks”) as we read the lines. The new scene is quite ambitious with enough movement by four of us–on the stage and down to the front of the stage and back–that I’d say it qualifies as choreography.

To go from on stage to before stage in Salem’s Old Town Hall, there are three permanent steps built into the left side near enough to the wall that can be used for balance. The right has a portable set of three steps close to four-feet wide tucked between the stage and a railing for the flight of stairs down to the front door. That railing is within easy reach.

Oh, the memories! Last part I had in a play was on this very stage some 50 years ago, a children’s play based on a Hans Christian Andersen story in which I was type-cast as a wild and wacky wizard who in one scene was thrown off-stage by an impatient king. In my 20s and much thinner, I actually went over that rail and down the stairwell crashing with a loud noise and a howl.

It was a stunt. During rehearsals I was able to practice going over the rail and, well out of audience-sight, grabbing the bottom of two spokes to pause the fall and land easily–until the last show when one spoke snapped and made the trip down in my hand, but that’s another bloody story.

Today I could no more go over that rail than I could pull it apart with my bare hands and snap all the pieces in half. This week, after a few runs with the two side paths for our circular on-off-and-in-front-of movement, we thought we’d try a variation. The portable steps were moved to the center of the stage facing the audience with nothing to put a hand on.

You can likely guess where I’m going here, or, in this case, where I couldn’t go there. It was all working quite smoothly until it was my turn to get off the stage. I went to the edge, began to say my line, looked down, and froze.

This was far from the first time these six words were in my head, spoken–at times yelled–just to myself. I didn’t want to say them right away because I did not want to draw pity. For that matter, I didn’t want to say them at all, but the time had come. I had no choice:

Trying to sound funny, I looked up, right at the director just 15 feet away: “I am too old for this.”

As with my attempt at politically correct humor–now there’s a contradiction in terms!–no one laughed. This time, in lieu of shock, the sympathy that I hoped to avoid was unanimous, and it was palpable.

After one of those pauses when even the atheists pray that someone else will speak first, the director thanked me for my honesty. She then got up, walked to the steps, looked down, and announced to the company: “This is a bad idea.”

Whether I was let off the hook just for my own sake hardly mattered. The others soon chimed in that, not only was it risky, but it obstructed the smooth, circular motion that went from side to side.

Back the steps went stage right, and just like that, it was as if my late-life crisis never happened. Still, I couldn’t help but worry that my sense of humor had passed its expiration date. As fate would have it, I had a last chance just before the session ended.

We were entertaining ideas for the arrest scene which opens the play outside the hall when we villagers, including one manic piper, draw and work a crowd. Bridget Bishop, the accused witch, resists, argues, and runs from the constable into the crowd while the rest of us corral her. Today someone proposed that she sit down on the bricks.

The director enthused: “Like in the Sixties! Protestors sat down so they could not be picked up.”

I held my tongue and again awaited an opening: “Um, about the Sixties: I was there…” Must have been the Cheshire Cat smile that got the first laugh.

“And I was picked up more than once.” Another chuckle. “They always did it with a cop on each side and had a fairly easy time packing us into their wagons.” This gained smiles of appreciation that I’ve seen on young faces many times hearing about anti-war demonstrations. But I needed a punchline:

“And, yes, I was so much thinner then…”

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The stage upstairs in the Old Town Hall, Salem, Mass. This pic, taken ten years ago, or nine years before I joined the troupe, shows the railing that separates the stage from the stairwell. Look closely and you can detect the first step of the portable three behind that last chair. Just out of view would be the blank space left by the spoke I broke which was not replaced until about ten years ago.
https://onceuponawheat.com/visit-salem-witch-trial-sites-part-b/

Where a Nickel Is Worth Fort Knox

As the front-page headline put it, the City Council moves “closer” to an investigation of the Newburyport Public Library.

Last Monday, an 11-0 vote assigned a committee to determine an investigation’s scope. It meets this coming Monday, July 22, 5:30 pm, open to the public in City Hall.

As one of the petition signees, I’m advised to refrain from describing individuals during several meetings I attended.*

Nor do I speak for the volunteers banned from the library and publicly charged with abusive behavior by library staff.

Though it’s no secret that the unanimous vote delighted all of us, there is a catch.

Some councilors say that, because this involves city personnel, any findings must be kept confidential.

Whether in keeping with a union contract and/or with city bylaws, that defies common sense: The word “reputation” is, by definition, public.

Reputations were smeared 13 months ago without a shred of evidence ever produced, nor a whisper of retraction since. Unless that is publicly corrected, the smear remains.

With irony that screams Catch-22, it was those who drafted, edited, signed, approved, and sent the 950-word document to the Daily News and posted it on the NPL website who made all of this public.

There may even be a legal term for it: “Interposition.”

Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech pairs it with “nullification” to describe how Southern state legislatures dodged Civil Rights in the 1950s and 60s.

Anyone who remembers an American History class worthy of the name knows what nullification is: A state’s refusal to observe a federal law.

Decades before the Civil War, South Carolina Sen. John Calhoun threatened it so often, that Herman Melville, in his 1849 novel, Mardi, could satirize him with an easily recognizable character named “Nullie.”

We heard shouts of nullification coming from Florida and Texas during the Obama years. Today, Project 2025 is full of it.

“Interposition,” similarly, describes state laws created to make federally legislated rights inaccessible. For instance, the infamous literacy tests.

Sure, everyone can show up to vote, no discrimination here. But first, you must pass this test.

Whites would be asked to read from a slip of paper: “Mary had a little lamb.” Very good, you may vote.

Blacks were asked to translate paragraphs of Greek or Latin. They were dumbstruck. Sorry, you fail.

To deny any charge of discrimination, Southern officials could truthfully say of reading and translating: Both are “literacy.”

To those who have followed the library controversy since last year, the echo is deafening.

Among all the charges of abuse, a single line ominously stated that the vols “accept money from patrons.”

Clearly, in the context of the full indictment, this insinuates some degree of grift. The rebuttal—that this “money” was nothing more than coins for photocopiers—went uncontested.

The charge was neither a mistake nor a misunderstanding. The insinuation was calculated and deliberate.

Moreover, it remained posted among the 950 words of dirty laundry on the NPL website for at least another three weeks.

In Newburyport, a nickel is worth Fort Knox. In manipulative truth, both are “money.”

Granted, the South’s interposition is not a perfect analogy. This city’s personnel policy existed long before last year.

Nevertheless, it now obstructs eight volunteers and a professional archivist railroaded into retirement from clearing their reputations.

Like any other policy, it can be waived. In this case, on the grounds that the culprits will be free to do it again.

Or on the grounds of pure common sense: Anyone making such charges public must forfeit any right to confidentiality.

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*This disclaimer is due to this being a column in the local paper. My previous blog, “Newburyport is No 95,” does include such descriptions.

https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/the-most-valuable-nickels-4153272

Newburyport is no 95

Took a year and a month, but we have prevailed upon the City Council to call for an independent investigation of just who did just what.

“We” are a group of former volunteers then banished by the mayor from the Archival Center of the Newburyport Public Library and their supporters. I am in the latter category and among those who signed the petition for said investigation.

My new friends–I never knew any of them until I was invited to a strategy meeting this February–are delighted that the eleven-member City Council voted last Monday, July 8, unanimously for an independent investigation.

Though we welcome that development, we now face a catch:

As one councilor put it in an email to one of our number, “the results will not be allowed to be made public.”

City Solicitor Karis North made that case in a speech for which “Pretzel Logic” would be a complimentary description.*

For good reason. By definition, “reputation” means something that is public.

Councilors Afroz Khan** and Connie Preston*** were incredulous with questions trying to make sense of the glaring contradiction. Councilor Heath Granas**** could have been channeling Yossarian in the classic Sixties novel and film when the title is first explained.

Yes, we are now face-to-face with “Catch-22.”

In a case about to enter its 14th month, no evidence to prove the charges has ever been produced. Worse, when the deliberate insinuation of opportunistic grifting—”accept money from patrons”—proved to be no more than coins for photocopiers, it was still included on a dirty laundry post on the NPL website for another month.

For these reasons, I predict a public statement exonerating the vols, but concealing just who did just what.

Says the councilor quoted above, the findings “would essentially be kept confidential because it involves personnel.”

Sounds reasonable until you consider that those who did the smearing are themselves the ones who made the whole mess public. Kinda like apologizing to people whose house was burned down, but not daring to expose the arsonists.

Call it the result of a stunted vision of local government.

We heard it expressed by Council President Ed Cameron when he cautioned that the council was limited to “what’s within in our lane.”*

Probably a careless use of recently-minted hip slang, and kudos to Councilor Jim McCauley for emphatically denouncing it.**

Still, it implies an ill-fitting analogy:

To say there’s one lane means at least two, suggesting a highway. Sure, some in a city move slow, some fast, some stop in a breakdown lane and await assistance.

But a highway exists for motor vehicles, often with just one person in each, none having anything to do with any others. Even a busload is an island onto itself.

Newburyport is not Interstate-95. It is Ward Five.

And Ward Four, Three, Two, One, all made of neighborhoods where people meet and befriend each other, hold parties, play games, and assist each other in time of need.

What happened to the NPL volunteers is analogous to vandalism.

Imagine the family across the street away on vacation. Out your window one morning you see their home spray-painted with hateful slurs. Do you stay in the lane of your living room and do nothing? Or do you call police ASAP?

Or you hear anguished screams, look out a window at a distraught family just returned to see a noose hanging from a tree and “KKK” on their door. Do stay on your Tempur-Pedic lane or race across the street to offer comfort?

Maybe at midnight you hear commotion and see vandals in the act. They run when you rush out yelling, but you recognize one who lives down the street. Do you tell the cops who it is or do you keep the identity “confidential because it involves [neighborhood] personnel”?

And that’s just the vols. Longtime archivist Sharon Spieldenner was stripped of a successful career at least five, likely ten or twelve years ahead of an honorable retirement. That’s analogous to a house burned to the ground.

Based on documents we obtained via a public records request, we are confident that any honest investigation will show who poured the gasoline and who lit the flame.

If results are withheld, the investigation will at least reveal the lie of any City Hall claim to transparency and accountability.

Unless, of course, councilors exit the highway to spend time in the neighborhoods that entrusted them behind the wheel. We hope to see this at the next General government Committee Meeting at 5:30 pm, Monday, July 22, open to the public.

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All of the following time-markers are for a video of the May 28 meeting of the City Council’s General Government Committee:

https://search.app/NqLjJuzdWuNbCfG46

*North: 38:00-41:12, 44:25-45:15, 49:40-51:30, and in an exchange with Granas between 100:00 and 105:00

**Khan: starting at 106:45

***Preston: starting at 45:30

****Granas: starting at 59:50

*Cameron: 27:20-40

**McCauley: 51:50-52:05