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

Staying in their lanes: An interstate or a diagram for city government?
https://www.eastcoastroads.com/

If it’s to be a highway, you could say that we are looking for an entrance. That would be possible if those who make something public forfeit their right to confidentiality.
https://www.dreamstime.com/us-highway-exit-sign-newburyport-interstate-motorway-image122072129

Lightning’s Unlucky Strike

When the Boston Globe dubbed Mayor Sean Reardon “a regional lightning rod,” it split Newburyport history down to its roots.

In their embers glows the most electrifying of America’s founders.

Yes, in 1754, just two years after his famed key-on-kite flight, Benjamin Franklin took a scientific field trip here when “here” was still one big Newbury.

Truth is, Franklin invented many things, from bifocals to the circulating stove named for him. And thank you so, so much for those flexible male urinary catheters, Ben!

Electricity, however, had already been found. What Franklin’s kited key eventually unlocked was his most useful invention in terms of property, livestock, and lives saved:

The lightning rod.

Two decades before editing and signing a document that risked his life far more than any bolt of lightning could, he rode a coach 300 miles from Philadelphia to examine damage to a church on Market Square.

What Franklin found confirmed that lightning is, in fact, electricity. So says “The Iconic Steeple,” Rev. Rebecca Bryan’s essay posted on the First Religious Society, Unitarian Universalist website.*

Noting that the congregation outgrew the church on Market Square and, in 1801, was replaced up on Pleasant St., Bryan quotes a letter the then-president of UPenn penned months later:

“…I saw an Instance of a very great Quantity of Lightning conducted by a Wire no bigger than a common Knitting Needle… at Newbury in New England…”

(Note: Many considered the four New England colonies as unified at the time.)

“… where the Spire of the Church Steeple being 70 foot in height above the Belfry was split all to pieces… from the Bell down to the Clock…”

True to his reputation as a geyser of information and advice, Franklin runs the sentence on:

“…plac’d in the Steeple 20 foot below the Bell, there was the small Wire abovemention’d which communicated the Motion for the Clock to the Hammer striking the Hour… As far as the Wire extended, no Part of the Steeple was hurt by the Lighting…”

Franklin reimagined that wire as a lightning rod to stop buildings from being “thrown about the street in fragments.”

Applied to Reardon, “lightning rod” owes to his winter-long campaign to stop a plan for a costly new Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School.

Once upon an attention span, the adjective “regional” before “technical school” was understood to allow for uneven numbers of students from various towns, with higher proportions from lower-income places.

To balance that, the skills and services of graduates, while serving all towns for years to come, offer far more value to the richer communities expecting more investment and growth.

By putting all the weight on the first half of the equation, “cost per student,” Reardon painted the proposal as not just an inequation, but as something akin to grand larceny.

Snuffed by an 87% vote in up-scale Newburyport and by landslides over 70% in every town in the lower Merrimack Valley, only blue-collar Haverhill passed it.

Meanwhile, on social media, local liberals keep posting their love and respect for vocational education.

Be that as it may, while the Globe’s lofty new title fits Reardon’s role in stopping a project, it unwittingly exposes something he’d rather not admit.

Lightning rods do not start anything. No one expects them to, but our metaphorical Mayor Lightning Rod should have had ready an alternative for Whittier’s woes.

Instead, we read of a vague promise to “spend his political capital on revising the 1967 regional agreement to operate the school.”

Really? His track record begins with no positive action—but quite the sticky mess—regarding the library volunteer program that he stopped over a full year ago.

His record continues with his taking credit for improvements entirely planned by the city council before he became mayor—such as the Waterfront’s redesign and the Phillips Drive neighborhood and drainage project.

Worse yet, his record is punctuated with a growing list of dedicated, competent people who served Newburyport for years before being terminated, discontinued, not-renewed, or railroaded into resignation.

As befits a lightning rod, Sean Reardon’s record is all stop and no go.

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*https://www.frsuu.org/sermons/iconic-steeple/

https://at3w.com/en/blog/from-the-franklin-lightning-rod-to-ese-lightning-rod-more-than-200-years-of-innovation-in-lightning-rods/

A War By Any Other Name

Whenever I reminisce about my college days, I’m likely to mention one of the Sixties’ most defining events by a name that takes younger people and many my own age by surprise.

What most everyone refers to as “The Vietnam War,” I call, “The American War on Vietnam.” The operative word is “on.”

The difference is much like that between “slavery” and “enslavement,” a shift that has been made over these last ten or so years to rid us of the illusion that African-Americans before Emancipation were nothing but slaves. The prefix “en” puts the emphasis on what was forced upon them and implies resistance.

Because it also points toward who did the forcing, “enslaved” rather than “slave” is condemned as “woke” and ridiculed as “virtue signalling” in predictable quarters. A sore spot with white majorities in Southern states and with the MAGA crowd from coast to coast, north and south, “en” spotlights a crime against humanity that has benefitted descendants of plantation owners as well as all of those who had the privileges and advantages of Jim Crow laws and all forms of segregation, legal or otherwise, right into Sixties. That’s the 1960s, a full century after the Civil War, making Civil Rights another defining event of that most convulsive decade.

Mark Twain and others called it “America’s original sin,” something we would never overcome. With lingering effects that still prove the prophecy all too true, it’s no wonder that today’s Southern governors and state legislatures want to ban any honest, realistic assessment of the Confederacy, the Jim Crow Era, and the Civil Rights movement in school texts and classrooms. Nor is it any wonder that some are insisting that African-Americans–and by implication, their descendants–are the ones who benefitted from enslavement.

We could call the shift from “slavery” to “enslavement” a correction to the South’s persistence in calling the “Civil War”–or the “War between the States”–the War of Northern Aggression as if it had nothing to do with slavery and was entirely about states’ rights.

Such is the case with Vietnam. Following World War II, many Vietnamese saw a chance to rid themselves of French colonial rule which began in the 1880s. In the South where some still clung to colonial rule, sporadic skirmishes and protests were staged against the native collaborators. Armed rebellion for full independence erupted in the North.

North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh had once lived in America, serving as a busboy in a Boston restaurant, and was eager to establish American-style freedom in a united Vietnam. So trusting in America’s self-proclaimed role as leader of the free world, he petitioned the USA to support Vietnam’s bid for self-rule. How naive! When the French gave up, our government, with eyes on a prize that Pres. Eisenhower frankly admitted was “tin and tungsten,” willingly inherited the mess thinking arms were all the South needed.

By the time we asked what we could do for our country, it became clear that American forces would be needed. The federal government along with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress replaced “tin and tungsten” with “hearts and minds” to fool an unquestioning American public. Nor did anyone heed what Eisenhower admitted in his memoirs after leaving office:

I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that, had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the populations would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader…*

His “time of fighting” may refer to 1954 when the Geneva Convention mandated a free election in Vietnam, north and south. Knowing that Ho Chi Minh would win, the USA prevented any election from happening, violating the pact it had helped craft.

Foiled by America, Minh turned to the Soviet Union for arms, and so Vietnam became a proxy war between the US and the USSR, making it easy for American hawks, Democrat as much as Republican, to rattle the sabres of war. Communism was made synonomous with atheism, and Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a clone of Chairman Mao, another son of Satan, no matter that the Vietnamese people on both sides of the conflict wanted nothing to do with China.

And so it became “The Vietnam War,” as if colonization was not at the root of it, as if the French had nothing to do with it, as if America was innocent of any attempt at colonial exploitation. To preserve the illusion, both Democrats and Republicans treated objections to the war–whether historical, political, moral, practical, or anything else–as insults to the troops. No matter that the Pentagon Papers proved that our troops, who served in good faith, were lied to by the very politicians who accused the anti-war protesters–us–of insulting them. In effect, the war now justified itself.

There’s no denying that some Vietnamese–employees of the Saigon government and of businesses that fed it–sided with the French and then with the US. But if we consider that Vietnam was a colony, that Pres. Eisenhower estimated an 80% landslide for the other side if elections were held, and that those in the South abandoned America’s puppet government when its corruption was exposed, the term “Vietnam War” becomes more of a cover-up than a name.

The war that lasted into the early Seventies may have happened in Southeast Asia, but the forces that prolonged it for all of its 20 years were on the other side of the world. France knew enough to get out quickly. America thought it knew better and so went to war on Vietnam.

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*https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/ike1.html

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/ho-chi-minh-46.php

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Vietnam-Veterans-Memorial

Tiptoe through the Truth

Friends of mine worry that too much attention to the clown risks the rise and rule of his circus.

They send links to essays published by sources that fashion themselves as progressive, as far left as you can go on the political spectrum. Imagine a Bernie Sanders unwilling to side with a Joe Biden for the sake of having a White House willing to work with him or any other progressives at all–which is to say a Bernie Sanders null and void of any sense of practicality–and you get the idea.

They make insightful and necessary points, and in a perfect world I might join them. One of the most constructive of the writers my friends recommend may be trying to atone for a presidential candidacy that prevented an environmentalist from gaining the White House in 2000. That made it possible for the corporate wrecking ball of the Bush/Cheney Administration to deregulate us into economic collapse eight years later.

Yes, that would be Ralph Nader whose newsletter, “In the Public Interest,” is well worth a subscription. His June 21 is a fine example, especially with a whimsical headline that delivers his point with an all-caps jolt:

Are the Heedless Dems Giving Trumpty Dumpty a Path to Become America’s FÜHRER?*

Won’t expect any Democrats to ever forgive the guy who sank Al Gore 24 years ago, but they’d do well to take quiet heed in their campaigns this year: Less attention to Trump. While I wouldn’t drop the threat of authoritarian rule completely, I would make other issues more prominent, starting with reproductive rights. As for the economy, Yale prof, Rev. William Barber, a frequent guest on MSNBC whose book, White Poverty, Nader recommends at the end, would be an ideal advisor and member of the administration in its second term.

Of course, if Biden loses in November, none of this is possible, and we do get authoritarian rule, something to which Consortium News may be blind. Yes, it offers a full range of perspectives, much of which is nowhere else to be found, and yes, the late Daniel Ellsburg was among its founders. However, a recent entry takes Nader’s point and, rather than applying it to the future with advice, plunges it into the past for a wash in so-what, nothing-new cynicism. Despite its straightforward, provocative headline, the result is so far off the rails, one might wonder if it is deliberately blind:

Anti-Trump Anxiety Ignores History**

Progressive historian Howard Zinn said that American history has been sanitized not so much by lies, but by emphasis and omission. With most of its offerings, CN would make Zinn proud, and it is as well worth a subscription as Nader’s newsletter. But this piece could serve as a textbook example of what Zinn warned against. Today it is more recognizable as “spin” and “cherry-picking,” and there’s no denying the essayist has good points throughout. He could have gone so much further: Adams’ Sedition Act, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln’s violations of States’ Rights as if no greater good was served by the Civil War.

But what is his overall point? That we’ve been through this before, many times, so let’s not worry about it? It’s a well-worn stunt: Make a charge that others are doing something by doing it yourself. As if the distortion itself works as camouflage. In this case, he ignores history to charge liberals with ignoring history.

Most telling is his treatment of the Mueller Report. Instead of describing the report, he falls for and regurgitates AG Bill Barr’s whitewashed distortion of it. Nor is there any mention of the Trump Campaign’s insistence on weakening sanctions against Russia regarding Crimea, their only requested change in the Republican platform at the 2016 convention. Nor is there mention of the Helsinki Summit, or of Trump’s promise this month to gut all oil regulation in return for billion dollar campaign contributions from the industry. Government for sale has always been behind closed doors. Now it’s an open campaign pledge, and CN wants us to think that’s no big deal.

Nor is there any mention of the collaborative designs that Russia has had with multinational corporations that fund Republicans to drill, baby, drill the Arctic. Where did Rex Tillerson come from? Paul Manafort? Good luck finding those names in Consortium News.

You’ll have better luck finding Dorothy Thompson. No, not her name, but her picture with husband Sinclair Lewis. In the caption she is identified only as “his wife.” She was already an accomplished foreign correspondent when they met, and so she kept her last name. Most telling that the article, as sprawling with historical detail as it is, makes no mention of her. She was dispatched to Berlin to report on the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and wrote harrowing reports of what she saw. In 1934, following an interview with Adolph Hitler, she became the first American journalist expelled from Germany when the flattery he expected proved scathing. Back in America, she and her husband were alarmed by the similarities, and the result was his rapidly written novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

By omitting her from the narrative, CN‘s writer can assess the ideology sardonically treated in the novel, while hiding the granular detail of similarity between the American and German populations. Only to have a layout editor put the hidden object out in plain sight!***

What’s different today? Why are journalists like Rachel Maddow and Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez freaking out? The CN writer actually acknowledges the reason early on when he mentions death threats. Of course, he makes them seem limited to the names of those in leading roles: prosecutors Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, and Jack Smith: Justice Juan Merchan. But no, they are pervasive, coast-to-coast, aimed at election officials, teachers, health workers. In some places they target just about anyone who does not Sieg an American Heil.

Instead, from paragraph six through ten, he hides behind the same ridiculous canards we heard in January 2017: “There will be adults in the room.” And, “There are guardrails.” Makes one wonder if the writer ever heard of January 6 and is oblivious to Trump’s boastful promise to pardon all involved.

We “ignore history”? The suggestion that American democracy is not facing a lethal threat ignores reality. Can’t help but wonder if the writer was paid in rubles or if CN, in this case no better than one of those Russian troll farms, converts them into dollars or euros or pounds.

Certainly does appear that he was paid by the word.

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*https://mailchi.mp/nader/joe-biden-pushing-america-deeper-into-the-russianukrainian-war-zbrfbxve1a-139738?e=4b7f41370f

**https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/20/anti-trump-anxiety-ignores-history/

Dorothy Thompson and her husband. Photo: Wikipedia via *Consortium News*.

***For more about Thompson:

American Journalist Dorothy Thompson Underestimates Hitler

Jack’s Apple-Cheddar Kick

Every now and then, heavy handed as I am, I break one of the yokes while preparing my standard breakfast of two eggs once over. Years ago, I started countering this by putting a small bowl on the counter, cracking the shells on it, and then pouring the egg into it. From there it went into a small frying pan with butter just starting to smoke.

Now, anytime a yoke is broke, I kill the smoke and, no joke, turn Humpty Dumpty into omelet.

Often it depends on what’s in the fridge, and I can pretty much always count on feta cheese and Kalamata olives. It varies, but I do have a new favorite.

Years ago, 2008 to be exact, I wandered into Lou Mitchell’s legendary restaurant on an early morning soon after Amtrak landed me in downtown Chicago and just two years after it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. First time I was ever given a “donut hole” by a woman in 19th century kitchen garb greeting us at the door and picking them out of a wiry bucket with a pair of tongs.

Quite tasty, but we craved far more than donuts. At the very top of the menu, highlighted as a specialty, was their apple-cheddar omelet. As many apples as this New England veteran of four harvests has picked, I had never heard of nor thought possible an apple mixed with eggs. I had to have it.

Another pecularity: Though all other breakfast entries offered a wide choice of bread, the menu made clear that only anadama went with the apple-cheddar omelet. No substitutions. My addiction to rye toast yielded to my curiosity.

To say that the omelet–and the bread–did not disappoint would be at once a wild understatement and yet misleading. Tasting it all day while seeing the sites on one of the city’s architectural boat tours, it was tempting to break the rule of not going to the same place twice. For me it was just three days. So many restaurants, so little time!

Disappoinment began when I returned home, back then making delivery rounds four days a week and needing as many restaurants. Apple omelets were nowhere to be found, nor did it occur to me that I’d ever be able to make one myself.

A year or two passed before a new customer was put on my Wednesday route south of Boston and I happened by an enormous sign–Omelet Factory–over a modest, stand-alone white building in Pembroke, Mass. Already full, I made note and a week later I was seated with a menu listing 140 omelets. About halfway in, there it was, apple-cheddar.

“And what kind of toast would you like?”

“Anadama.”

The look on her face! “Sorry, we–“

“Rye! Dark rye and toast it twice. Burn it!”

For a few years, I was close to a weekly customer, and before long one of two waitresses would approach me and ask, “Apple-cheddar?”

“Yes, thanks!”

“With crispy rye?”

“Burn it!”

Then came a day when, after seating myself and waiting for a waitress to emerge from the kitchen, I noticed a brand new, very colorful menu on the vacant table next to me, and thought I’d peruse it. All entries had descriptions, and the Portuguese omelet sounded more than tempting. Maybe next time. I kept looking to see what it said of apple-cheddar, and to my horror saw that it was gone.

I spoke before the waitress could: “No more apple-cheddar???”

“We’ll make it for you.”

“It’s not listed.”

“No, we didn’t list it because it takes longer to make, so only those who know of it will order it.”

The other waitress, sensing what I was asking, wandered over, overheard, and added: “Only you will order it!”

First waitress, playing along: “We make it just for you!”

And they did for a few more years until the pandemic kept me home and, upon my return, I was no longer dispatched on the southern route. By this time, however, I had been making my own breakfasts every day for 18 months, and my culinary skills could not help but improve. Mostly because I had figured out that I could find recipes for just about anything on-line. After I tired of 18 straight mornings of potato pancakes with applesauce and sour cream, it finally occurred to me to punch apple-cheddar omelet into a search engine.

There’s a lot from which to choose, and nearly every strain of apple and type of cheese will appear in at least one. One recipe includes kale, which I’ll leave to anyone other than me to try. After a few dozen attempts with slight tweaks along the way, I am ready to offer a recipe and instructions of my own. So thrilled am I with the result, that I am compelled to replace the mundane label, “omelet,” with a name that describes the feeling and mood any diner is bound to enjoy after finishing one (which, by the way, I just did).

More than that, a name that pays tribute to where it all began 16 years ago at Lou Mitchell’s Restaurant located within a couple blocks of the eastern terminus of US Route 66, America’s most celebrated highway:

Jack’s Apple-Cheddar Kick (aka JACK)

(Serves one. Double all amounts for two, triple for three, etc.)

Start with two frying pans, preferably small, a small bowl, and a generous half-cup of your favorite cheddar, grated.
In one pan, melt butter in a moderate flame while slicing half of a honey-crisp apple on the side of a grater.
When the butter is melted, saute the sliced apple.
In the other pan, melt more butter full flame while beating two large eggs and a splash of milk in the small bowl.
Let the butter begin to smoke before pouring the egg into it. Take a moment to enjoy the sizzle. Keep the flame full until you have topped the egg with the sauteed apple and grated cheddar.
Turn flame to moderate-low and add garlic powder and grated black pepper to taste (I recommend generous amounts). No salt unless you’ve already taken a bite and think you need it.
Cover for a minute before folding. Cover for another minute before serving.

Goes very well with either anadama or rye toast.

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You can vary the strain of apple or type of cheese according to your preferences. Here’s one with brie that doesn’t pick an apple (see what I did there?):
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/applebrie-omelet-recipe-foodcom–353814114448161624/

Sign at top: “Selected No. 1 Breakfast & Lunch Place in America.” B&W sign: “We Do Our Own Quality Baking.” Sign on lampost: “Illinois – US 66,” giving it a claim referencing a nickname that first appeared in John Steinbeck’s *Grapes of Wrath*, “First stop on the Mother Road.”
https://www.tripadvisor.ie/Restaurant_Review-g35805-d427842-Reviews-Lou_Mitchell_s-Chicago_Illinois.html

Bistro-by-the-Sea. Drawing by Angela Anderson looking northwest from her window next door.

From Red Line to Deadline

When we refer to political arguments these days, we usually mean heated, teeth-grinding, wheel-spinning, mud-flying debates between what is alternately labelled left v. right, blue v. red, liberal v. conservative.

Results are as worthless as the debates themselves, nor is there any lipstick to put on that pig. Truth is, all that wasted time might be better spent if we leftists, liberals, blue-staters, and progressive Democrats engaged instead with those who claim to be “done with” the two-party system and say they will vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.

There’s a continent of common ground, as I found out yesterday in this exchange in the world of social media, starting with a friend’s post:

Dear friends who rely on Fox News, just a friendly reminder that Fox paid out $750 million for misinformation and stated under oath that Fox is not a “news” provider, simply entertainment!

Actually it was $787.5 million Fox paid Dominion Voting Systems following the 2020 election, but what’s $37+ mil to an entertainment company funded by corporate sponsors and favorable to Republicans in Congress–at times in the White House–and on the Supreme Court to undo and prevent all attempts at regulation of those sponsors’ industries.

First comment came from a woman about my age:

Same is true of MSNBC.

Attached was a link to a blog about a suit filed by One America News Network (OANN) against MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wherein the judge ruled that Maddow is known to present analysis that is by definition open to debate, and that MSNBC viewers know that they can weigh it. The link, especially with a contorted headline for the benefit of those who never read for details, equated that with the wholly made-up, fact-free accusations of Fox, OANN, Alex Jones, and other right-wing fountains of fear and paranoia.*

I interjected:

The difference is that OANN, like the Trump family and the Republican Party, *is* linked to the Kremlin, so (Maddow’s) connection may be inexact and/or hyperbolic, but it is in fact real. What Fox and others… have used in their courtroom defenses is a claim that they are primarily entertainment rather than news, which is why they settle out of court, paying heavy fines for making up stories out of whole cloth (such as “rigged voting machines”). What Maddow’s and MSNBC’s audience understands is that that we are listening to and considering analysis that may or may not be always a 100% right. Very much unlike FOX and OANN which is pretty much 100% bullshit.

She answered:

The “lesser evil” party is a figment of the imagination. For all the fear-mongering over having Trump as President, things rolled along pretty much as usual. But Fox and MSNBC don’t make much money if they can’t convince the country to split into two camps, so they may pull it off yet again. We should say no to both parties and find a way out of this never-ending mess we’re in.

Tempting to ask in which non-North American country she was living from 2017 through 2020. Maybe she knows some of the tourists who visited The Capitol on January 6, 2021. Whatever, the hint at a wish for a third party–though she did not use the term–seemed something to work with:

The swastikas and Confederate flags are not figments of imagination. They are real. The chuminess with dictators is not a figment of imagination. It is real. Repeal of Roe was not imagined, it happened. Tax cuts for the rich have been all the work of one party, as is protecting record corporate profits while the public blames “inflation” and punishes the other party despite it being the one that would put the brakes on it.

The Democrats are flawed, I’ll grant you that, but there’s the possibility of working within (the party)–as progressives as left as Bernie Sanders will attest. That’s the only way out of the “never-ending mess,” as you call it. Any hint of claiming “they’re all the same” to me is a admission of laziness, an unwillingness to look at the full picture, to pay any more than superficial attention to exactly who does exactly what.

That hit a nerve:

Hmmm…last time I checked, the current US administration is chummy with dictators, unless you don’t think el-Sisi and Mohammed bin Salman qualify for the title. And in the case of Putin, I think it’s criminal that our government is not trying to lead mediation to bring an end to all the Ukrainian deaths. Biden has not spoken to him AT ALL! How can we be ok with that?

Lazy me is constantly reading, trying to piece together what is happening in the world. (Without Fox or MSNBC—that to me is lazy!) I’m too old to do what I just did, which was to travel to DC to be part of the “red line” that Biden said he would enforce against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and yet refuses to do. I was inspired by all the Gen Z young people there who know that the two parties are a lost cause. I hope I live to see their vision come true.

Her reference to a mass demonstration held just two weeks ago offers common ground, but first things first:

Quite a first paragraph there. It begins by slamming Biden for being “chummy” with dictators and ends by calling for negotiations with Putin. Do you even notice the contradiction? Yes, Biden has been photographed in meetings with a few unsavory heads of state, but that’s political necessity, and never was there any hint of the adoration and envy Trump has expressed for them. But, hey, if you’re intent on making everything simple, then, yes, a nickel is worth Fort Knox.

But it’s the last half of the paragraph that is most revealing. If the USA was invaded militarily, would you want us to fight back, or would you prefer a president who would try “to lead mediation to bring an end to all the… deaths.” Put another way: Does the name Neville Chamberlain ring a bell?

As for two parties: It’s what we have now, and it’s all we have to work with at least through November. I favor a 3rd, maybe a 4th party, but they cannot win or be at all viable until we adopt Ranked Choice Voting.**

She signed off:

Jack, have a good evening.

Just as well. There will be no Ranked Choice this November, at least not in the presidential race. And all effort must aim at November if Americans are to keep the White House free of authoritarian control and make Congress and the Supreme Court less susceptible to it.

My new friend–frenemy?–may not believe it, but it’s the only shot we have to see the “vision” of “all the Gen Z young people” she saw on the “Red Line” in DC come true.

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*https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddows-viewers?

**Here’s the most recent of three columns I have devoted to the subject:
https://buskersdelight.home.blog/2023/03/15/ranked-choice-oscars/

https://www.newsweek.com/pro-palestinian-protesters-surround-white-house-red-line-banner-1910122

Quotations of Convict Trump

Back in the Sixties, there was a small faction of the anti-war movement that swore by a pocket-sized book with a solid, stop-sign-red cover stamped only with the undecorated yet still imposing small-font title:

Quotations of Chairman Mao.

They were on the fringe, to put it mildly, as most of us were of the opinion The Beatles expressed in “Revolution”:

But if you’re carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow

A college friend told me just two years ago that she still hasn’t forgiven John Lennon for writing that lyric, and, to be fair, some of Mao’s quotes were relevant to our cause to stop the American War on Vietnam. After all, who can argue with this:

In times of difficulty we must not lose sight of our achievements, must see the bright future and must pluck up our courage.

However, as you can guess, most were deal-breakers, such as:

All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.

A communist icon world renown, China’s dictator ruled with a cult of personality, much like we have seen develop here in the USA since 2015. His face appeared on posters everywhere, and he demanded and received complete loyalty from The Party, which, in turn, insisted on total obedience from the people who were supposed to believe all that Mao said, no matter how outrageous or ridiculous.

Sound familiar? Don’t let the differences fool you: Chaos has eroded America’s collective ability to think as thoroughly as conformity zapped China’s. The Chinese Communist insistence that individuals give themselves up for the whole is ying to the yang of Republican dogma that America has no right more sacred than that of individuals not to give a shit about other people.

And what other American politician has ever had his name fly on flags flown from homes, boats, pickup trucks? Or his face superimposed on American flags flown by people who foam at the mouth at the thought of an athlete kneeling in silence during the National Anthem?

Yes, they are opposing extremes, but both are extremes and, therefore, far removed from the balance sought by Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and their coalition, the ideals expressed by students in Tiananmen Square, or the chance for safe and decent homes by the tired, poor, and hungry arriving at the Rio Grande.

Only difference that matters, only thing missing from the Republican attempt to clamp down on the American population as completely as the Communist vice-grip on China is a book akin to Quotations of Chairman Mao.

Therefore, I propose a slim, pocket-sized volume titled, Quotations of Convict Trump.

In keeping with his Golden Calf persona and Tower(s) of Babel empire, the cover would be not red, but gold. Since his followers and he himself now compare him to Jesus Christ, bookstores could place it in their “Religion” sections between his signed Bibles (right-side up) and (I’m not making this up) CHRISTRUMP: Persecution of a Man.* For an opening page:

I do very well with the evangelicals. I love the evangelicals. And I have more people saying they pray for me ― I can’t even believe it. They are so committed, and they are so believing. They say, ‘Sir, you’re going to be OK. I pray for you every night.’ I mean, everybody, almost ― I can’t say everybody, but almost everybody that sees me, they say it.

Marketing? Novelist Stephen King has already offered the most fitting blurb:

This is like listening to your senile uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink.

Might even market it as “The Gospel According to Don.” The MAGA crowd will regard it on par with the Bible and the US Constitution. As with those two books, they won’t attempt to read it, but they’ll wave it in the air and insist that it justifies all of their paranoia, prejudice, and fear.

Liberals will buy it for laughs. How many of us are prone to buying “joke” presents for friends and relatives on holidays, birthdays, and reunions? What better joke for a fellow liberal could there be? And an ideal book to read aloud, delirium by delirium, to keep your liberal guests howling with laughter:

I don’t think science knows… When trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months, they become very dry. They become really like a matchstick … you know, there’s no more water pouring through and they become very, very — they just explode. They can explode.

Imagine the sales when governors of Florida and Texas and other deep red states call for its use as a science text in public high schools:

This is a tough hurricane. One of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water.

Or for economics texts that refute any and all “woke” environmentalism:

I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it [sic] better than anybody I know. It’s [sic] very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured — tremendous, if you’re into this, tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So [a] tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything — you talk about the “carbon footprint” — fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?

Right!

And as anyone who has been at all awake these past nine years knows, his speeches and his texts could easily fill numerous pocket-sized books.** Any ten of us could pick a selection the length of Mao’s little red book without repeating a single gaslit line.

Except for one line from a rally in Nevada on June 9. This would be just right for the last page of any and every edition of Quotations from Convict Trump:

I don’t care about you. I just want your vote. I don’t care.

Maybe he confused his wife’s jacket for the teleprompter:

https://www.glamour.com/story/heres-the-latest-explanation-for-melania-trumps-infamous-i-really-dont-care-do-u-jacket

You know we have a world, right?

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*https://www.amazon.com/CHRISTRUMP-Persecution-Christopher-John-MOLLUSO/dp/B0D3WNKRTB

**One book or more might be devoted to full passages of incoherent dementia from his speeches and interviews. Any such book should have a different title, such as Riffs of Convict Trump or Unhinged & Unleashed. Or it might have a title that cautions the “woke” crowd against making any assumptions about the many people who believe, applaud, and cheer when they hear any of this. An instructive title such as, Don’t Forget to Respect Their Intelligence.

Here’s the one about Jaws and the Energizer Bunny just a week ago:

So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question, and [the guy who makes boats in South Carolina] said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT —very smart. He goes, I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’

By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, ‘Do you notice that, a lot of sharks?’ he asked. I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said there’s no problem with sharks. ‘They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now.’ It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks.

So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.

And my favorite from a few years ago at a rally in Montana where he claimed that his rallies drew larger crowds than Elton John concerts:

I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record.

Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records.

Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.

Right!

https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/mao-zhu-xi-yu-lu-quotations-from-chairman-mao-zedong-first-edition/

Jumping to Confusions

Behind a BMW this morning at a light,

I myself lit up at the sight

Of a decal, a bird aside the plate,

Erect as a blue-jay looking for its mate.

Just two colors, maroon to match the car,

And a white outline to see from afar,

“How clever!” I marvelled at the world.

When a wind in the leaves casting shadows did start,

The outline fell apart,

So I strained to see what was now holding sway.

White, what little there was, was now a pale gray.

A bird, most likely a gull, dropped a load from the sky

That had looked like the dropper itself to my eye.

“How ironic!” I mused at the world.

When the light turned green, the shaped shifted once more,

And my next view proved frustratingly poor.

I was sure that the car, free of shit,

Had been hit.

Just a touch, very slight,

Or it bumped another Beemer wearing white.

“How mundane,” I muttered at the world.

Turning off the shaded street, it now rolled in sunlight.

Nothing at all was there to see

Where bird, poop, and bump did be.

Just the dark, rich red,

As if just bled,

It wore from hood to taillight.

“How worldly!” I laughed at myself.

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